Swoopy reached the edge of the woodline, looking out into the snow for the field where the mal-appropriated gunship was supposed to land. It was, perhaps not surprisingly, very absent. That gave a certain new weight to both the questions Chante was throwing about on the net, as well as the increasing roar of gunfire to the south. Combined, these three independent and not all that alarming things were slowly coalescing to reveal a problem.
There were plenty of good, solid, rational reasons for opting in favor of a quick dash in the helicopter or a nice and short 20 klick E&E. Seemed reasonably even - both were essentially betting that the group could get across the border before the Anglos could get the appropriate shit together to come find and kill them. Then Ite started freaking out about something with teeth. Maybe riding around in a very clearly networked helicopter when the other side was brain smoking your deckers wasn't what most people would think of as a good idea.
He pulled out an actual, no shit, honest to god physical map and started plotting options...
...which weren't bad, but weren't great.
North and west stood out as the most obvious ones. The distances were short, real short. 25 klicks to the north, 20 to the west. Good roads in each direction..two lane highways that hadn't been improved - too much border tension and not enough economic incentive - but had been maintained on both sides just in case they needed to move stuff up fast.. The north road was actually closer to 30 km when you figured in the dog legs, but the west was a straight shot. If you had transport with wheels, twenty minutes max. Probably fast enough to get to the border before someone could spin up all the really nasty stuff. Not that that stuff wasn't fast, but the humans behind it were slow, sleepy, and hopefully still trying to figure out what the hell was going on.
If they did spin up in time, anything hauling ass for the sioux border on the highway was likely to be throw a lot of red flags. Specially as it wasn't like the Joneses just needed to nip out at 3 am in a blizzard to check on their long lost injun friends. Still, the UCAS probably wouldn't just light up a civilian vehicle inside their own border without some confirmation. Right? The whole "dialogue" phase of that would buy you a last chance if it came down to it. Or maybe the last kilometer to get across the border.
On foot things looked a bit different. it'd be 3 hours west and 4 to the north on a good day - today wasn't a good day. The weather and night alone might double it, and an enemy interfering could make it into a multi day excursion, moving painfully slowly across the barren Kansas plains. No people, no cover, just moving irrigation ditch to irrigation ditch with your electronics off and air gapped clothes/blankets to beat the astral as best you could. Which was probably a losing proposition up close, but each hour would give the enemy more search area to cover and a better chance that a spirit just didn't come close enough to pick up the radiant life. If one landed right on top of you...well...problems. And if the enemy found a merry band of wanderers on the kansas plain, they had all the time in the world to solve that problem..Swoopy had no doubts that the first drones would be arriving before he could go three klicks, or someone would just vaporize him from 6,000m up. The old "eye in the sky which fires missiles" ,despite the medias portrayal of hollywood machines which were just hard enough to give your protagonist a "fair fight" in close, remained an incredibly effective and completely unanswerable way to murder some isolated dudes on the dirt.
Of the cut and run options, looked like a fast way out by car - send another as a decoy the other way if you could - was best. The terrain just didn't support modern E&E against a committed opponent.
Or there was a third way. Smash and grab a few vehicles, send them out to draw off eyes, and go to ground. Wait for the stink to blow over, find a way out in a few days.
Swoopy hand't heard anything on the net the for a good long while now, and that becmae the real decision point. If the CPT and some matrix support were still alive, a hell ofr leather race for the border could probably work. If not...well...without the matrix and astral covered, Swoopy didn't figure it'd end well for him. Then it would be time to drop the tactical gear, pop out the fake SIN, and be a pale face for a few days...