There was still nothing in her line-of-sight. For the eleventh month in a row she was spending sixty-five AmFed dollars for the privilege of staring through a camera at nothing for a half hour a day. Sasha had been warned about this when she’d signed up to support the Woodlands Martyr’s Brigade. Their drone guns didn’t see much action; the front had been stable for the last year. Rumor said the number of backers who’d even gotten to fire during their turn was under a dozen. Sasha had hoped she’d be a special case.

Something moved!

Just as she thought about killing the app and going downstairs, something moved across her drone’s field of vision. It happened again, and Sasha realized that the somethings were armored soldiers, sprinting past her weapon. She locked the drone on one and, for the first time ever, selected the “Fire Approval” button. A second went by, then another, and then a red box replaced her firing reticule.

Target Declined: Friendly Fire!

“Sasha!” her mother called up, in that grating voice that meant she was almost frustrated enough to start yelling, “Get down here!”

She stared at the box for a long moment. Friendly fire. That made sense, as she belatedly realized the men had been rushing out of territory occupied by the Martyrs. Good thing they check up on us before we pull the trigger. Her heart pounded a little at the thought of killing the wrong soldier. But at the same time she noticed something odd; the men were still coming. They rushed past the drone camera in waves, ten feet apart, ducking low and hefting heavy weapons. She must have watched at least a hundred of them pass before she realized what this meant.

A new offensive. Oh God–

“Dial Alexander,” she told her deck. A comm window popped up about six inches in front of her hand, to the left of the large drone control screen that hovered above her. Anyone without a deck would’ve just seen a seventeen-year-old girl, lying on her bed and poking at the air. But Sasha saw the space in front of her as a giant screen curved around her body. She opened another window and flung it up on her right side. It was populated with links to the camera feeds of all the personalities she followed. Most of them were located somewhere in the Republic of Texas, and more than half of the feeds were dark. It was hard to tell just what was happening on the others. Sasha decided she’d get a faster update on the situation through her news aggregator. She reduced the other windows and shifted them to her periphery, then she opened a new window and waited a half-second for her curated newsfeed to populate. Her deck kept ringing Alexander while she scanned the headlines.

Reports of Explosions Across The Dallas Front

Texas: Extremists Advance into SDF, Republic Territory