He paused, "It'd be better if you came up here as a guest. I could put some steaks on the grill. So, have your men retreat. At least have some pity for their mothers. Give the order to retreat."
Silence, and just when Jim was about to give up, the familiar voice of his friend came on the net, "I can't give that order, Jim."
Jim shook his head, grabbed the handset again and said, "Bill, from the bottom of my heart, I hope that you survive this... but you better leave."
Jim knew it was a lost cause when he heard his friend's resolve as he said, "I don't have a choice, Jim. I have my orders, and I will follow them."
Jim threw the handset down and said, "Fuck. Order the ATGM teams to be ready. Let their IFVs get into the bag, and then destroy them near the switching station. Order the mortars to commence bombardment as soon as they approach the kill box with no further orders. Echo Whiskey begin full spectrum jamming on all transmitters. Execute."
"Yes, sir!" his subordinates said in unison. Now that the air was filled with white static, it would be a much more old-fashioned battle. However, he had prepared by running old-style copper telephone wire to stay in contact with most of his subordinates. The bitrate would be terrible, but it was better than nothing. It would be more than Bill had to work with, but it wouldn't do to underestimate the man.
The battle of Fresno was the first major engagement in what would later be called the Unification War and one of the bloodiest. It lasted over a period of two days, and the casualties were devastating on both sides. It was considered, on the whole, a victory for the Free States, but such judgements were lost on the men who fought it, as both units suffered immense casualties, with the NUSA force being almost completely annihilated.
Both Lieutenant Colonel James Waters and Colonel William Howe were killed in action less than twenty-four hours apart and less than a hundred metres away from each other.
I sat the invitation down with my special long tweezers, frowning. Did I have a grandmother? I mean... people generally did unless they were the subject of some wild biotinker's experiments. Even before my power arrived, I didn't think babies came from storks. While I had already known that Alt-Dad's parents had both passed away, I had no memories whatsoever from NC-Taylor about Grams.
But if my mom, dad and I all had "alternates" in this new world that I lived in, then it stood to reason that my grandmother "here" was at least somewhat similar to my grandmother back in Brockton Bay. Except... I knew very little about her. Gram had been my mom's mother, an austere woman who'd never fully approved of my dad as a match for her daughter.
She lived in Back Bay, in Boston, in a very nice house, but I had almost no memories of her visiting us or us visiting her beyond once or twice. However, I knew that just as Gram didn't approve of Danny, he didn't particularly approve of her either, and I recall he called her and Grampa very controlling. They had come to Mom's funeral, but I hadn't seen them since.
Danny had let slip that Gram had been the one paying my allowance when I told him he didn't have to pay me one when our financial situation was especially bad in the months after Mom passed away. He told me that the money was meant for me, but then told me the real reason when I pressed: he didn't want to take her money directly. Danny could always be very stubborn and prideful like that. I hoped he was happier now, and hopefully, my meagre allowance savings helped NC-Taylor in her first months in Brockton Bay.
I closed my eyes and focused on my memories from before. Back Bay was a very nice part of Boston. It was part of Accord's territory, and the rumour was that he had a house there. I didn't believe it, personally. If I was a villain as fastidious as Accord was rumoured to be, then I would have had some secret base, maybe underneath a large skyscraper, like in a repurposed Endbringer shelter. That would be a real villain's base.
Still, it was always clear that Gram had money. Not every family could pay for their daughter to get a PhD in English Literature amidst the economic shakeups that parahumans and Endbringers caused. Most people would have to take a loan or suggest that their daughter study something more practical given the uncertain times they found themselves in.
Back in Brockton Bay, Mom's maiden name hadn't been Astor or Armstrong or any hyphenation of the two, though, so that was different. I did a net search with the terms "Sionainn Astor-Armstrong", "female", "rich", and "age60". Then I let my Agent, a very simple machine-learning tool that most people had integrated into their operating systems or phones, churn on the results. If I didn't get anything, then I could ask Kiwi to find her, and if Kiwi didn't find anything, I could always ask Wakako to-
Oh. That was quick.
Wait... what?! Gram wasn't that rich back in Brockton Bay, was she? If so, I should have asked for more allowance. Both of my bodies were silent, slumping into the nearest chair in thought as I used my full attention to read articles online.
I glanced at the note and picked it up, not bothering to use tweezers anymore. At the bottom of the note was printed a net address that I could access to RSVP. Also, wasn't it a little pretentious to spell out the acronym when it was in French? I decided I didn't know, wanting to rub my face but careful not to do so just in case there was some undetectable compound on the letter. Maybe really high-class people thought "RSVP" was uncouth.
However, instead of following the link directly in a browser, I laid back into my chair, grabbed a fibre-optic cable, inserted it into my cyberdeck and triggered a Deep Dive. The world fractalised and was replaced by my local subnet rezzing around me. "Hoot," I said as I layered proxy after proxy around my ICON and then typed in the address in a translation-routing program and clicked enter with my beak.
Instantly I started moving, blurring through the net. I slowed briefly as I passed through large regional nets and routers, flying fast to the East. The Ihara-Grubb equations created this shared Universe of the net and added a sense of direction and distance to the net that made these types of virtual reality interfaces possible. Since I was flying to the East, according to the IG equations, that meant the server I was connecting to was in the East in the real world, too.
Finally, the program dumped me in what my Menu called the Dublin citinet in front of the largest series of structures I had ever seen on the net. It looked not so much like a castle but an old-style feudal walled city, with a motte and bailey. The very air had a charge here, and it made my feathers tremble. One of the tall structures appeared to be a lighthouse inside the curtain wall, right next to the keep. However, instead of rotating around at a standard revolution rate, the lighthouse's beam randomly searched and flitted from here to there like the eye of Sauron on amphetamines.
When the beam shifted to me, I let out a high-pitched "Hoot-" and immediately disconnected, continuing speaking as reality reasserted itself, "nope, nope." I patted myself down, making sure I was all there and feeling goosebumps on my arms. That was disconcerting, even considering I had used a Haywire comm to put a larger computer in between my brain and the net just now.
A couple of quick tests showed me that nothing had gone wrong, aside from instantly being traced by whatever that lighthouse was. Traced through all of the proxies I used and terminated at my nascent clinic subnet. While it hadn't attacked me, it instantly traced and isolated the connection to my subnet's backbone connection that I had arranged for instead of mooching off the fat pipe that Clouds had like I did the last time I lived here.
It had then performed a thorough network mapping of my entire exterior-facing subnet but didn't hack the bastion node to map out the private subnet, not that there was much inside of it anyway. At least it hadn't been hacked, as far as I could tell . But maybe I should write the storage to zeroes on that bastion node and then reflash yesterday's backup, just in case.
Yes. That would be prudent. However, if it could be hacked so effortlessly, then it could be done so a second time. But that wasn't productive to think about, so I stood up and walked over to the rack of computing hardware in the corner and powered the system down. Thankfully, with fast access solid-state memory, the process was relatively quick, but I kept the backup images off the network just in case I was ever hacked, so I had to physically change out some drives.
I let out a breath and sighed. Perhaps I shouldn't have done that. No, there was no perhaps about it. I definitely shouldn't have done that. That had been scary. Maybe Militech or Arasaka or other giant Megacorp's data fortresses were on the same level or even scarier, but I wasn't stupid enough to ever digitally go to any of those places, either.
Realistically, I wasn't in danger... probably. I had been standing outside on what had been theoretically the public Dublin citinet, but at the same time, I couldn't help but feel as though there was a giant ACME-brand anvil dangling precariously above my head like the Sword of Damocles the whole short time I was there. That was me, Taylor Hebert, Super Genius.
Well, it could have been worse. I could have used my Haywire pair back in LA to route my net traffic, and if I had done so, then that eye of Sauron would have traced me back to Los Angeles, directly to my clinic there! There would be no real reason Dr Hasumi would get curious about this giant datafort minutes after Taylor got an invitation with that address on it.
Dr Hasumi got a phone call, which I answered as I put all of my tools away and stepped out of my private area. I was taking a steady stream of walk-in customers in Night City, and this time I followed many of the NC regulations and business codes. I was a legitimate pharmacy, at least, although not a legitimate clinic. This meant more taxes I had to pay, but I didn't want to rely entirely on the Tyger Claws glaring at any city inspectors in the building.
"Bob, it's rare for you to call me," I said to the Militech suit, raising my eyebrows. Normally I called him, and only when I needed to buy things. Although, to be fair, I had invited him out to drinks with Kiwi and a couple of her men once. I had only done that to put a more personal touch on our business relationship as it was somewhat expected to socialise a little bit and to trade favours around.
When I got more money from my inducer sales, I bought another two gross Sandevesitan units from him, but he refused to sell me more until I sold most of my stock retail. He correctly assumed I was just buying them to stockpile, not necessarily to sell during the current conflict. Still, I was pretty confident I would sell them eventually as I did one to three installations of this model a day now; it had become something of a speciality of my clinic.
When mercenaries, or wannabe mercenaries, asked me what they could do to increase their chances of surviving in combat, I generally suggested in this order: a reliable rifle, sub-dermal armour, nanosurgeons, and a Sandevistan, if they could handle it. The nanosurgeons were more expensive than both the subdermal armour and my entry-level Sandy combined, though, so people did not often buy them from me, which I felt was a bit of a mistake.
Most professional militaries included nanosurgeon organs in all infantry, if not in all military personnel altogether, but I had noticed that it was a somewhat uncommon purchase for mercs on the entry-level who thought they'd rather have things to help prevent them from getting shot in the first place. I thought this was stupid because you often didn't notice someone shooting you until they actually shot you. Well... the people I shot often didn't notice it, anyway.
Bob grinned and said, "Are you interested in a job? Militech needs a lot of surgeons lately, and you could write your own ticket."
I blinked. Was he trying to headhunt me? That was quaint. That meant that Bob here wasn't really aware of my other business. Perhaps he was going down the list of competent surgeons and asking? I mentally nudged my Agent to do another net search and quickly got an article from one of the local screamsheets, the giant headline reading, "IT'S WAR, THEN."
One part of me read the article while the rest talked to Bob. It seemed like the NUSA forces tried to push up into Fresno, and a battle took place. I pulled up five more articles in different outlets, foreign and domestic. Everything I read was propaganda, but the best propaganda was true or at least had elements of truth. It was what was left out that clued you into the propagandist's motives.
By reading about the same event in multiple locations, I could reasonably interpolate that the actual truth lay somewhere in the middle. I was reasonably confident that there was a battle in Fresno and that the casualties had been heavy, and Northern California still controlled the city and rail nexus.
President Kress had immediately declared war on a number of states, which was a reaction from weakness, I felt. I had really been heads down if I hadn't noticed that, though, but I really did hate the news. The fact that she had reacted so strongly, along with a number of other things, tended to make me believe that NUSA got creamed in the battle.
Perhaps I should be watching the news more carefully, but honestly, I did not really care. I didn't have a dog in this fight, nor did I care about who won. Either way, most things would stay the same. Neither side was better enough that I would have rooted for them to win the conflict, much less wanted to support them. Although, I supposed I had a slight bias in favour of the Free States side since they had been attacked first, aggressed first.
"Uh, no, thank you, Bob. I doubt you could make it worth my while. Besides, I didn't start my own practice because I wanted to eight to six it," I told him flat-out.
This, surprisingly, got him to grin and look relieved. I didn't have to wonder long as he told me why he seemed relieved, "I didn't think so, but I have been told to offer. If you had agreed, then I wouldn't get to act as your clinic's liaison, which would mean less remuneration for me!"
I narrowed my eyes, "Liaison? You are my sales rep."
"Well, yeah, about that. I am. But your practice is being drafted by the NUSA federal government in accordance with the Defence Production Act. You should be getting a national security letter explaining things shortly," he said, sounding polite and sending me some signals that he was slightly apologetic about it.
