“How is your ol’ dad these days?”

“Unfortunately, Logan Valparaiso died back in ’42. A heart attack.”

“That’s a shame.” The officer snapped his pudgy fmgers in regret. “He sure made some great action films.”

“Dad took a lower profile in his later life,” Oscar said. “He went into real estate.” They were both lying. The films, though hugely popular, had been very bad. The later real-estate deals had been money-laundering cover for his father’s Hollywood backers: йmigrй Colombian mafiosi.

“Could you temporarily relocate those barricades for us?” Fontenot asked gently.

“I’ll let you fellas in on something,” the man said. His screens were still churning away, but the three of them were all cozy now. They were swapping net-gossip, trading little confidences. You didn’t shoot someone when you knew that his dad was a movie star. “We’re almost done with this deployment anyhow.”

Oscar lifted his brows. “Really. That’s good news.”

“I’m just running a few battlespace awareness scans… Y’know, the problem with infowar isn’t getting into the systems. It’s getting out of them without collateral damage. So if you’ll just be patient, we’ll be packing up and lifting off before you know it.”

The commander groaned in drunken nausea, and thrashed on his cot. The public relations officer hurried to his superior’s side, tenderly adjusting his rough blanket and inflatable pillow. He then returned, having snagged a bottle of the commander’s bourbon from beneath the cot. He absently decanted an inch or so into a paper cup, studying his nearest screen.

“You were saying?” Oscar prompted.

“Battlespace awareness. That’s the key to rapid deployment. We have surveillance drones over the highway, checking car licenses. We input the licenses into this database here, run credit scans and marketing profiles, pick out the people likely to make generous financial contributions without any fuss…” The officer looked up. “So you might call this an alternative, decentralized, tax-base scheme.”