Wave a white feather. She even made herself a red poppy to wear. No one knew what it meant, and she wasn't sure herself.
Red for courage?
Red for blood?
She stopped running the Angliacom cells of the screen because, even though the news was grim, it wasn't nearly as grim as the messages in her mind. She used her drops and went to work for something to do. Paperwork, it seemed, never entirely stopped.
Then one day she awoke to realize that something had changed. A lightening. A lessening of pressure…
She clicked on Angliacom. There was no reporter — there hadn't been one for more than a week. Instead, the screen showed a still, tourist-style picture of Hellbane U up in the mountains on a perfect, sky-blue day. Across the bottom of the picture ran:
Jenny watched it five times, joy building, then dashed to the Merrie to see if anyone knew any details.
They didn't, but they were all close to delirious anyway. There would have been another wild night if anyone had been there to spark it. As it was, it was wild enough. Tom and Yas were still around, and he and Jenny played rollicking songs. They even played the anthem again, and some people sang it in tears.
Most of these people were packed and ready to flee not just Anglia, but Gaia. Now they had hope. They drank round after round of toasts to the fixers, especially to Dan Fixer, their own hero.
Jenny had not heard from Dan, but he'd not called his family either. She didn't think the blighters could knock out com-towers, so there must be some other reason.
He could, of course, be dead. It was a fact she lived with day by torturous day, consoling herself that no news was good news. Surely the families would be told, like in the old movies. Whatever the fixers were doing must make it difficult, perhaps impossible, to send any kind of message, but that would surely change now.
She slipped away, slipped home, to sit in front of the screen on max, showing ten different things. Maps on most tracking where the blighters had been stopped. The blighted area was still an appallingly huge belt around the planet, and the closest edge was only fifty miles south of Anglia.
Talking heads, but when she flipped between them none had solid information. She muted the system, setting it to alert her to mention of Dan Fixer, then fell asleep with no new information. She woke to sunshine and the screen still on. One section was flashing. Partial match.
An excited woman was mouthing silently, an exhausted man behind her, sallow-skinned and haggard. A fixer? Jenny hunted, cursing, for the clicker, finding it down the side of a cushion, and turned that section onto max and sound.
'… here at the front, as they call it. My friend here assures me I'm safe.' The stocky reporter grinned, but she looked tensed to run at a word.
For some reason she was wearing a dull green shirt and trousers that looked vaguely like the army uniforms in the old films. Jenny snorted. Fat lot of good that would do her if a blighter came along. The woman chattered on, not really saying anything because there wasn't anything to say. Behind her lay peaceful, normal countryside.
'So,' she said, turning to the man — flabby, middle-aged, grim—'you think this is the turning point of the war, Jit Fixer?'
'We're getting the upper hand.'
It was direct, but the flat tone made Jenny's heart pound. No jubilation at all.
'Can you tell Gaia how you've managed to turn the tide, Jit?'
The man's eyes shifted for just a moment. 'It's very technical,' he said, then went on about concentration of powers, of nodes and impacts and strategic distributions of forces. Was she hearing Dan's theories put into practice?
If so, Jenny couldn't follow it, and by the look of the reporter, she couldn't either. Even so, Jenny sat glued, praying for a mention of Dan, even though she knew it was unlikely. There had been — what? — more than five thousand fixers before the war.
But Dan had said he'd been the one to gather the remaining fixers. He might be important enough to get a mention. No such luck. The reporter, glassy-eyed, brought the technical ramble to an end, wished the fixer success in the fight, and returned the screen to the 'your local station.'
Jenny slumped back in the chair. That hadn't even been Angliacom. It could have been anywhere around the world.
On sudden impulse she clicked on the directory and found the numbers for Hellbane U, scrolling down to
Jenny went back to the regular screen and lay there watching the maps and charts, then a string of interviews with displaced people, community administrators, even artists sharing their thoughts about victory. No mention of Dan.
If he was dead, wouldn't she know it?
She staggered up to go to the loo, grabbed some food, then collapsed again to watch. She'd had to switch the prompt to search for Dan Fixer only, which stopped the constant flashing and replaced it with nothing. A string of fixers gave interviews, and she learned to spot them simply from their debilitated look. All the fixers, young and old, seemed to be exhausted, and it was more than physical. It was as if something vital had been sucked out of them. What a terrible struggle it must be, but now they were winning.
Slowly, Jenny began to hear something in their voices, an echo of the war films. One of them even said, 'We will never surrender,' in a flat tone almost identical to Winston Churchill.
Was that anything to do with Dan?
Then one of the fixers cried. He was a dark-skinned man, perhaps, by his accent, from one of the African settlements first affected. Partway through his technical description, tears began to well in his large, dark eyes. He blinked and kept going, but then suddenly choked. He covered his face and turned away from the camera.
The reporter — another young black man, but speaking meticulous Earth Standard English — took over, talking about the exhaustion of the noble heroes who were fighting the terrible battle.
Jenny watched, not hearing the reporter but the sobs of the man off screen, shaken by that deep and desolate grief.
Was the talk of victory lies?
Or did the fixer weep for the price the victors had to pay?
In the past weeks she'd become an expert on war. All kinds of war. Now she remembered the words of the Duke of Wellington after the bloody victory at Waterloo: 'Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.'
If Dan was alive, was he as melancholy, as soul-shocked, as the weeping fixer? Oh, to take him in her arms and comfort him. She'd have walked out of Anglia to find him if she'd had any idea where to start.
All she could do was her bit to keep the home fires burning. She had a shower, went to work, and even suctioned dust out of the idle presses. She kept part of the office screen on to Angliacom as she worked, set to alert her to any mention of Dan Fixer.
The parade of fixers stopped, however, replaced by a middle-aged woman called Helga, with gray hair and a stony, unreadable face. Helga flatly reported daily successes, giving details on areas that were cleared and safe. She did not take questions.
News readers returned. Jenny phoned Angliacom asking for news about Dan. A short time later she heard back. They'd put in a request for a report on him and received no response.
Anglia itself was perking up like a spring flower after a frost. People were pouring back in, and Jenny finally had enough work to distract her, enough that she grew impatient for her coworkers to come back.
Reporters ventured out with cameras, but apparently the fixers had ordered everyone to stay away from the front, so they could only send back pictures of peaceful countryside and occasional close-ups of heaps of clothing and ash. Even they were rare. War hadn't changed the weather, so most remains had been scattered by wind and rain.
