“Let Roland shoot up. Trust me, drugs aren’t going to make him more or less effective here.”

Roland grinned. Skullfucker Mike clearly knew him, even if he could only sorta remember Skullfucker Mike. He went back to tying off his arm and shooting up while the younger Brit stumbled into the start of his speech.

“Yes, well. I’ve, uh, been going over the last few days of successful vehicle-based bombings on checkpoints, from Galveston and Lake Houston and all across the Dallas-Fort Worth area. In total, I’ve identified three-hundred-twenty-one bombings that appear to have been carried out as part of this overall offensive. Two-hundred-forty of those bombings involved autonomous vehicles hitting dedicated autonomous vehicle checkpoints.”

Right on queue, a projection map flickered to life on the wall behind him. Hundreds of red dots populated a map of the ­conflict-riddled regions of North/Central Texas. It looked like the pattern of attacks you’d want in order to funnel the SDF’s limited resources toward the least defensible chunks of their line. What was weird was that so many bomb-rigged autonomous vehicles had gotten through the scanners.

“So,” Roland asked, “how’d the fuckers do it? A bunch of zero-days?”

Reggie shook his head.

“That’s what I thought at first,” he said. “But these attacks actually started more than a month before this offensive. If they were relying on exploits, the SDF’s IT folks would’ve caught something by now. The most likely explanation is that the Martyrs found some way to make vehicles that aren’t autonomous seem that way.”

“Yeah,” Manny said. “The Martyrs have tried to hide drivers in ‘autonomous’ vehicles before. The SDF watches for it.”

“Which means the Martyrs have figured out something new,” said the journalist, “some way to hide a human driver that doesn’t register on conventional sensors.”

“And that way is?” Nana Yazzie asked.

Reggie’s face reddened. He grunted, swallowed, and then spoke. “I’ve got no idea. But I think I know where they’re putting these new vehicles together.”

He snapped his fingers, and the projected image changed to a map of a city called McKinney, in the Dallas suburbs. It zoomed into an aerial shot of one enormous factory building near the outskirts of the city.

“The BBC pays for access to a few independent satellites that overlook this part of North America. We also pay the SDF for limited access to some of their drone surveillance footage. From all that, I was able to trace out paths for seventy-eight of the vehicles used in these attacks. Every one of them started their journey here.”

The projection changed again, to what looked like a stock photograph of the front of a large white factory building. The Tesla logo was displayed prominently by the front door.