Meeting on Fontana

[Bristol Constructions]

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Vascoguoncellos, Pantalião
Fontana Freeport, California System
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He took the little PDA, holding it up enough to watch the pictures slide past. There was nothing particularly new about them, not as far as the man could recall, save for just enough detail here, there for a new face, a different face. Some had been shots from the LPI themselves, attempts to get a good image to release to the press before someone realized they could never really get a good image and just stored all the files away before an activist hacker got into the systems, released the things out into the NeuralNet. Some of them were far-off shots some hiker had taken at a high enough vantage point, wide shots of whole installations. Others were from sympathetic LPI guards trying to get some guilt off their conscience, images stripped from brief videos of prisoners sending out requests for aid, legal or otherwise. Some of them…well, some of them Pantalião didn’t recognize at all who exactly they were from. Smuggled out images, he suspected, judging from the closeness and the poorer quality images. Things here and there that marked them out for who exactly was trying to get what.

The man sat it back down on the table, pushing it back towards Norman with his index finger. His eyes didn’t leave the man on the other side now, not at all.

“No way helping you can make the situation worse, eh?” Pantalião swallowed, tongue pressing out against one cheek briefly. “What can you do, then, other than fight the Navy, fight the LSF, fight LPI? And then, what can they do but send a message back? ‘Cease your attacks or we find however many once citizens of the Commonwealth guilty of treason’, and execute them immediately? Or send a battleship against you. Will blowing up a few Liberty Navy ships break chains on Erie?”

“I ask these things, senhor Norman, because I am a thoughtful man. I want real answers, you know. I want something that I can show to those who would actually make this decision, not us, not ah…” He motioned between them with an open hand, a hinging wrist, back-forth, back-forth, ticking away with his tongue, “not subordinates, you know. You come to us and say you can make a difference with these people, and really I want to know how except with your guns.”

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