Animal Theater

Shopkeeper's Daughter

Sir Karl and Rob made it back to camp just before dawn and found everyone madly running around preparing for a rapid decampment. Sir Karl's bike was running hot and he wanted to find Bossman to take a look at it, but he knew there wouldn't be time now.

Rob stopped his bike in front of the mess and asked Connie what was up. "The buttons got Marcos." She said. "We're compromised so we're heading north."

"How the fuck'd they get Marcos? What happened?"

"He was in town for employment registration and he didn't come back. Turns out he'd flipped the bitch-switch and Deely didn't even notice until the Comandante asked where he was. We should've left camp hours ago. You guys had better go pack your gear."

Rob cursed and headed toward his tent. His rank as Subcomandante meant that he had his own private tent, but Sir Karl stayed in the bunk with four other guys. He found his stuff folded in a neat pile where the bunk-tent used to be. Sir Karl thought it would've taken just as much effort to throw it in a road case than to leave it in a pile.

He stuffed his clothes and gear into his pack, thinking he was lucky to be on the bike, his bunkmates would be in the back of a twenty year old pickup truck.

Comandante led the caravan south first, around the foothills of Bean Mountain, to a dry riverbed which they followed north into a shallow gulch. Deely raised the alarm in the early afternoon, after hours of travel in the dry desert heat. There was a nanotech cloud to the northwest and they all hunkered down under the thermal camo-tarps, hastily pulled over the three trucks and van and spiked to the sand. The six bikes came under the Comandante's tarp and their leader took the time for an informal debriefing.

"Mobile propaganda unit South 26 has been compromised by the capture of Marcos Stephens, one of our finest community assets. His operational knowledge is limited so there's no need for a major shift there, but as far as personnel and tactics this is a serious blow. Our Pick Axe network should be okay, the only transmitter he had was his bitch-switch. Once we've relocated and replaced the switches we should be in the clear. Sir Karl you're with me, everyone else dismissed. PACIFICA!"

"STAND STRONG!" They all yelled.

The Comandante motioned for him to follow and they ran over to another tarp. He told Sir Karl to get in the passenger seat of an empty truck. "Was the mission with Rob successful?" Comandante asked.

"Yes sir." He said. "We placed five decoy antennas, mostly around the south Yuma wasteland, but we got one up near the Ikea prison factory near the border. They should all be detected and destroyed within a month, and then we can expect a strike. By then we should have a third setup, so if they find the system we're on now, we can jump to the other uninterrupted."

"Good, we've got a shipment of South American hand-crank radios coming in so we've gotta keep the broadcasts going. Scotch got his hands on gigs of new music, mostly anarcho-sewerpunk, liquidbass, and some vintage stuff."

"No more annihilation sorties?"

"No, that format has been co-opted by the CNP Sound System, so we discontinued it. In fact Scotch is putting together a really funny parody of the party's sorties -he's going to play it Saturday night."

"The system should be running fine." Sir Karl said.

"Good," he said, "you've been doing important work for this unit for a long time now and I think you've earned a promotion. Everyone in the unit has a job to do, but I don't let anyone move to the rank of Subcomandante unless they've done more than is expected of them. They have to prove that they're not just functional to the unit's propaganda mission, but that they're useful to the ultimate mission, winning the war. I'm talking about soldiers. Our function is non violent, but we do occasionally need to employ violence to proceed, and we can't call in the Guerrillas every time we have to do something ancillary to our explicit mission. Do you understand?"