The Sky Road

14 Final Analysis

To Almaty then, and apple-blossom on the streets, smoke in the air, and the Tian-Shan mountains beyond; so high, so close they were improbable to the eye, like the moon on the horizon. Myra almost skipped with relief to be back in Kazakhstan.

President Chingiz Suleimanyov’s office was a lot grander than Myra’s. She felt a tremor of trepidation as she walked past the soldier who held the door open for her. A ten-metre strip of red carpet over polished parquet, at the end of which was a small chair in front of a large desk. The chair was plastic. The desk was mahogany, its green leather top bare except for a gold Mont Blanc pen and a pristine, red-leather-edged blotter. Glass-paned bookcases on either side of the room converged to a wide window with a mountain view. The room’s central chandelier, unlit at the moment, looked like a landing-craft from an ancient and impressive alien civilisation making its presence known.

The President stood up as she came in, and walked around his intimidating desk. They met with a handshake. Suleimanyov was a short, well-built Kazakh with a face which he’d carefully kept at an avuncular-looking fiftyish. He was actually in his fifty-eighth year, a child of the century as he occasionally mentioned, which meant that he’d grown up after the Glorious Counter-Revolution of 1991 had passed into history. The reunification of Kazakhstan in the Fall Revolution had been his finest hour, and he always called himself a Kazakhstani, not a Kazakh: the national identification, not the ethnic. He didn’t have any of Myra’s twentieth-century leftist hang-ups. He had never had the slightest pretension to being any kind of socialist. However, he followed Soviet tradition by wearing the neatest and most conventional business-suit that dollars could buy.

“Good afternoon, Citizen Davidova,” he said, in Russian. She responded similarly, and then he waved her to her seat and resumed his own. The soldier closed the door.

“Ah, Myra my friend,” Suleimanyov said, this time in BBC World Service English, “let’s drop the formality. I’ve read your reports on your mission.” He gestured with his hands as though letting a book fall open. “What a mess. Though I must say you are looking good.”

“I’m sorry that I was not more successful, President Suleimanyov—”

“Chingiz, please. And no need to apologise.” He pinched the bridge of his nose, closing his eyes for a moment. He looked tired. “I don’t see how anyone else could have done better. Your action in leaving Great Britain was perhaps… impetuous, but even with hindsight it will probably turn out to have been for the best. What a long way down they’ve come, the English. As for the Americans—well, what can I say?” He chuckled, with a certain schadenfreude, and gazed upwards at the crystal mother-ship. “Fifteen years ago they were stamping their will on the whole planet, and now a few nuclear weapons are too hot for them to handle. In my father’s time they were willing to contemplate taking multiple nuclear hits themselves.” He looked back from his reminiscence to Myra. “Sorry,” he said, suddenly abashed, “no offence intended. I forget sometimes that you were—are—an American.”

“No offence taken,” Myra said. “I entirely agree with your assessment. What a crock of shit the place is! What a pathetic lot they are! The chance of a long life has only made them more afraid of death than ever.”

The President’s bushy eyebrows twitched. “It has not done that for you, then?”

Myra shook her head. “I can see the rationality of it—people think they have more life to lose if they have a long one to look forward to—but I think it’s a false logic. A long life of oppression or shame is worse than a short one, after all.”

She stopped, and looked at him quizzically. He smiled.

“True, we are not here to discuss philosophy,” he said. “Nevertheless, I’m happy that you think it better to die free than to live as slaves. We may get the chance some day, but let’s try to delay our heroic deaths for a bit, eh?”

“Yes indeed.” She wanted very badly to smoke, but the President was notoriously clean-living.

“Very well,” said Chingiz. “Something I did not tell you before… I arranged for other cadres with similarly relevant experience to make similar approaches to the governments of France, Turkey, Brazil and Guangdong. They have encountered a similar lack of interest. So we have to face the Sheenisov on our own. I need hardly tell you that we don’t stand much of a chance, over anything but the short term.”

“I have a suggestion,” Myra said. “If the West is unwilling to assist us, then to hell with them. Let’s cut a deal with the Sheenisov! All we want is our territorial integrity, their withdrawal from Semipalatinsk and access to the markets, trade routes and resources of the Former Union. What they want, presumably, is a passage across or to the north of Kazakhstan, as they make their way west to the Ukraine, which is the nearest soft target but still one that will take them many years, perhaps decades, to assimilate. I don’t think they’re ready to take on Muscovy or Turkey just yet. It strikes me that these aims are not incompatible.”

“Yes, yes,” Chingiz said, “the option of our switching sides has occurred to me, and to my Foreign Secretary. The difficulty is that no one has ever ‘cut a deal’ with the Sheenisov. They have no leader, or even leadership—at least, none that the world knows. They are indeed a horde, without a Great Khan like my namesake. That makes them difficult to deal with—in every sense.”

“Ah, come on,” Myra said, feeling bolder. “Even the anarchists had their Makhno. I don’t believe a leaderless horde could accomplish what they have, even in military terms. It’s applying guerilla tactics at the level of strategy and of main-force confrontation—that is novel, but it requires precise coordination. There is nothing random going on here.”

Chingiz’s lips set in a thin line for a moment. He shook his head. “A system without a centre can achieve more than we may intuitively expect, Myra.

That after all is the lesson of the twentieth century, no? It works in economics, and in nature, and to some extent in military affairs too.”

“Good point,” Myra said. She didn’t want to bring the deranged Green rumour about the General into this level of conversation. “Let’s assume they have no leadership. In order to have the co-ordination they display, they must have horizontal communication between the units, and some method of arriving at a common response… even if it’s only some social equivalent of excitation and inhibition in a neural network. In that case, any offer made to a sufficiently large unit would be spread through the rest, as would a response. It would still be worthwhile contacting them.”

“Hmm,” said Chingiz. He steepled his fingers. “And what do you propose? Walking towards them until they take notice, then talking to the first person able to understand you?”

“That’s about it.”

“It sounds dangerous, apart from anything else.”

“Actually, I propose announcing my intention beforehand, through whatever channels we have, then heading for Semipalatinsk.”

“Come, come,” said Chingiz. “Things are not that bad, not yet. You can still fly in, direct.”

“And out?”

“Oh, yes. Air-traffic control is still functioning. As are radio and television, on selected channels. It’s only computer interfaces that are being blocked—by physical cutting of landlines or by electromagnetic jamming. It’s incredibly differentiated stuff—very clever. We couldn’t do it.”

She peered at his calm face.

“What reports are we getting?”

“About life under the Sheenisov? Hah. In some respects, life goes on as normal. There are certainly no democidal activities. There are what the Sheenisov call reforms. Workplace democracy, and so forth. They are very insistent about that. Many businesses dependent on the net are failing—they either reorient to the Sheenisov internal communications system, whatever that is, or they pick up sticks and go, or they are expropriated on the grounds of abandonment.” He rubbed his hands. “Needless to say, this is giving our republic a temporary influx of people, of capital, and of comms gear and computer capacity. Some refugees are destitute, but not many.”

“Any willing to join the fight back?”

“No mass rallying to our armed forces, I must say. The usual dashnik emigre diversions—plotting, pleading, mounting sabotage expeditions, low-key terrorism. We don’t encourage it.” He rubbed a finger up and down the side of his nose. “Naturally, we try to prevent it… to the best of our ability, but our resources are quite inadequate for such a task.”

“But of course.” Myra smiled. “Could you raise me some muj? Two or three good men, not fanatics, not suicidal, but willing to take a risk and have a go if necessary. I’m still deeply reluctant to fly into Semey. Too much opportunity for an opportune mechanical failure—frankly, I’m getting a little paranoid about anything that’s computer controlled, on either side. So, if I may, I’d like to drive, with bodyguards.”

Ghingiz raised his eyebrows. “Drive all the way?”

“No, no. Fly to Karaganda, announce what I’m doing, then drive to Semey, bypassing the ISTWR.”

“Ah, yes.” He teased some of the hairs in one shaggy eyebrow back into place. “A little local difficulty there.” He sounded reproachful.

“The situation’s under control,” Myra said.

“Perhaps. But, on balance, I would suggest that you don’t go back there, or even bypass it by truck or jeep through the Polygon. Far more dangerous than flying.” He raised a hand, stilling her incipient protest. “I know what you mean about the computers, and flight control. I too have thought about this. You will get your bodyguards. You make your announcement, fly to Semey, then wander where you will until someone makes contact—which, as you say, someone surely will. You will pass on the proposals and await developments. Then you will fly from Semey back to Kapitsa, and either declare the conflict settled, or rally your people for their part in the common defence.” He smiled thinly. “Either way, your internal political problems will be over. Externally, however, it may turn out that the Sheenisov are not our most immediate problem…”

“Ah, yes,” said Myra. “The next move. Presumably at least one of the countries we made our offer to will start to worry about what we’re going to do with the nukes, and the option of disarming us will move up the agenda pretty damn quick.”

“Precisely,” said Chingiz. “The US-spacer nexus is the one we probably have to worry about most—as your friend in New York said, the space industrialists and settlers are understandably edgy on the subject.”

“They’re your nukes now,” Myra said. “We’ll go along with anything you say. Presumably you’d want us to stand them down and turn over the operational codes.”

Chingiz slammed his fist on his massive desk, making Myra jump.

“No!” he said. “We are not going to be pushed around. We are not going to give up our nukes without guarantees of military aid. And we are willing to threaten nuclear retaliation against any attack.”

“So you’re ready to go to the wire on this one?”

“Absolutely,” said Chingiz. “To the wire. But not beyond.”

“All right,” said Myra. “We’ll go with you. We’ll see who blinks first.”

“Thank you,” said Chingiz. His face relaxed a little. “It’s a high-risk strategy, I know. But the endgame is upon us, and I for one am not going into it defenceless.”

Myra nodded.

“The best thing you can do,” she said, “is act as though you’re ready to wash your hands of us—of the ISTWR. Denounce and disown us—privately of course, on the hotline—and urge the UN or US or whoever to negotiate directly with us. That should buy us some time.”

“Only if they believe you’re mad enough to do it.”

Myra bared her teeth. “They will.”

Sernipalatinsk, or Semey, was a pleasant enough town, whose steppe location had let it spread out so much that even its taller buildings looked low, even its narrower streets wide. There was room in those broad streets for trees whose dusty leaves had been an object of suspicious Geiger-counter monitoring on her first visit, in the late 1980s. The good old days of the Nevada-Semipalatinsk Association against nuclear testing. Of all the betrayals she’d perpetrated against her youth, this one stung the most. Marxism, Trotskyism and socialism could go hang; it was the implacable naive humanist internationalism of that protest, its irrefutable medical and statistical basis, its sheer bloody outrage rooted in biology rather than ideology, which had been her purest, fiercest flame. She had thought nuclear weapons the vilest work of man, whose very possession contaminated, and whose mere testing was murderous.

Nurup Kerbayev and Mustafa Altynsaryn, her proudly counter-revolutionary bodyguards, strolled a polite step or two behind her, beards and bandoliers bristling, Kalashnikovs slung on their shoulders. Nurup was ethnically Kazakh-Russian; Mustafa looked more Mongoloid, almost Han Chinese. With their AKs and baggy pants and scuffed boots and bulging jackets they both looked just like counterrevolutionary bandits. They also looked like Sheenisov soldiery or the local population, whom the Sheenisov had encouraged to carry arms as a deterrent to counter-revolutionary banditry.

They walked down the streets and across the squares quite unchallenged, though one or two people gave Myra a curious glance, as though recognising her from her television appearance the previous evening. Apart from the parked tanks on the street-corners, around each of which a curious crowd, mainly of children and young people, fraternised with the relaxed-looking crew, the town so far showed litde sign of being caught up in a social revolution. It was the weird fighting-machines that were alarming. They stalked and lurched about like Martian invaders; but the locals treated them with casual familiarity, like traffic or street-furniture. Perhaps, Myra thought wryly, it was the absence of searing heat-rays and writhing metal tentacles that did the trick.

As well as those combat drones, big clunky calculating-machines were being installed, indoors in shop-fronts and factories, outdoors in the squares. Gears and teeth and crystal spheres, building to frenetic orreries of some alternate solar systern, Copernican with Ptolemaic epicyles. Nanotech dripped and congealed around the brass and steel, like epoxy that never quite set. Around noon Myra and her companions watched one being winched off a flatbed truck and placed carefully in a plaza below a cosmonaut monument.

“Fucking bizarre,” said Myra, half to herself, as a Sheenisov cadre clambered on to the plinth and began an explanatory harangue in Uzbek, not one of her languages.

“With this they will replace the market,” Nurup scoffed, under his breath. “God help us all.”

A lively market in soft drinks and hot food was already forming around the strange device. Nurup and Mustafa bought her Coke and kebabs, and themselves a hotdog each. Both talked quietly to the stall-keepers. Taking the food, they sat down on a bench and ate.

“There is much discontent,” Mustafa said eagerly.

“Bazaar gossip,” Nurup said. “Stall-keepers will tell you anything. They will tell the Sheenisov they love them.”

The two men argued obliquely but intensely for a few minutes about the prospects for terrorist action against the Sheenisov.

“We’re not here for that,” Myra reminded them. She shared out cigarettes, then together they walked out of the square. Neither of the men raised any questions about her random following of the streets, until they ended up at the bank of the broad Irtysh river. Flats on the opposite bank, a riverside walk on this. A small pleasure steamer chugged downriver, ferrying a calculating-machine on its promenade deck.

Myra leaned against a railing, gazing into the river. The two men leaned against the railing, looking the other way. People passed. After a few minutes of this Mustafa asked what was going on.

“Nothing,” said Myra, not turning around. “Or maybe something. I’m assuming we’ve been followed, or watched. I’m quite prepared to wait here for at least an hour. Make yourselves comfortable.”

But they were too edgy and too alert to be comfortable. The most they did was light another of her Dunhills. Myra slipped her eyeband down and was at once struck by a sense of deja vu, as the whole scene around her hazed over, sleeted with grey flecks. After a moment she realised the source of that sense of recognition—it reminded her of how she’d first seen towns like this, back in the 90s: through their Soviet pollution haze. She blinked, moved the eyeband up and down, tried to pick up the nets. Nothing but the grey snow. Even Parvus,. summoned from memory, looked frazzled by it.

Sheenisov jamming. Shit.

She’d just given up this experiment when she heard her name called. She turned. Shin Se-Ha and Kim Nok-Yung walked side by side by the pathway, waving to her.

“It’s all right,” she told her swiftly tense bodyguards. “I know these guys.”

She shook hands, smiling, with the Korean and the Japanese; introduced them to the Kazakhstanis. Discreet compliments on her rejuvenated appearance were exchanged with her admiration for their now healthier physiques. Even their relatively humane imprisonment had marked them, weighing them down with something which their new freedom—if freedom it was—had enabled them to shrug off. They walked taller. They confronted the Kazakhstani emigres unabashed.

“So, you are Sheenisov,” said Mustafa, in a disgusted tone.

“Lay off,” said Myra. “They’re OK We have to talk.”

“Yes,” said Nok-Yung. “We have to talk.”

It was a mild day, for the time of year. Not shirtsleeve weather, but comfortable if you dressed warm, as they all had. Myra indicated a semi-circle of benches in a concreted picnic area along the bank a little. The two ex-prisoners shrugged, then nodded.

Nok-Yung and Se-Ha sat on either side of her, the two bodyguards on separate benches a few metres away. Children, snug-wrapped in quilted satin bomberjackets and padded trousers, capered about and yelled, oblivious to the adults.

“So how are you getting on, in this brave new world?” Myra asked.

“We’re fine,” said Nok-Yung, his comrade nodding emphatically. “Our families are joining us soon, and in die meantime we have much to do.”

“You both got jobs?” Myra smiled.

“There are no jobs,” Se-Ha said primly. “There is work. We have been… co-opted, and we have been sent to talk to you.”

“Well, I had guessed this was hardly a coincidence,” Myra said. “But I had not expected to see you as Sheenisov cadre already.”

“It’s an open system,” Nok-Yung said. “Interesting contributions are quickly taken up; amplified; discussed.”

“The opposite of the nets, then,” Myra said. They laughed.

“And the opposite of the Leninist system,” Nok-Yung said earnestly. “Once you are in, you are in, there is no… apprenticeship? No candidacy, no working your way up. Past experience,” he added rather smugly, “counts.”

Myra flashed her eyebrows. No doubt the militant and the Marxist mathematician had found their niches quickly. Tm sure that’s all fascinating,” she said. “But I’m here to put a diplomatic proposal to the Sino-Soviet Union as a whole. Can I do that, just by talking to you?”

“Yes.”

“Very well.” She put it to them, straight: the deal, the crossing corridors. Let the revolutionary horde flow around Kazakhstan, like a flood around a rock, and they could swamp the rest of the world, for all she cared. (Gould and would run into the sand, she did not say, but that was what she expected.)

They listened politely, now and then asking for clarification, making notes and doodling maps on hand-held slates that—while obviously information-retrieval devices—looked as though they were made of… slate. Se-Ha stood up.

“I must consult,” he said, nodded, and walked briskly away. Nok-Yung accepted a cigarette, and leaned back luxuriantly, sprawling out with his elbows on the back of the bench. He regarded Myra through narrow eyes and curling smoke.

“Why do you resist the SSU, Myra?” he asked mildly. “It is only democracy. It is only socialism. A means—and an end, compatible at last, after all the disasters and crimes done in the name of both.” He spread his hands. “There are no secrets here, no deceptions. When you were as young as you look—” he smiled “—you would have thought this revolution, this liberation more wonderful than your wildest dreams.”

“Don’t let my mujahedin friends hear you say that!” she warned, half in jest. She glanced over at Nurup Kerbayev. He smiled back, eyes and teeth flashing like knives.

“But you’re right,” she went on. “Let’s just say… I may look young again, but I’ve had a long, long life in the meantime. I’ve come to believe in myself, and in… my country, Kazakhstan. And I will not be assimilated, and nor will we.” She waved a hand around. “These people, they may seem… happy enough to wait and see. But deep down, no—just below the surface—they are seething with suspicion. They are not your Mongolians or Siberians, who God knows had it bad enough under Stalinism but who found everything since was worse. To the Kazakhs socialism means ‘the tragedy’ of the 1930s: the forced settlement, the famine. It means the nuclear tests, the cancers, the birth defects. They don’t want to be the subjects of any more experiments. And if you want to point to the ISTWR as a counterexample—that was a special case. A self-selected minuscule minority. Our socialism was always a joke, more black humour than Red. Trotskyism in one country—what a laugh!”

What a laugh she gave. She frightened herself. One of the scampering children playing around them stopped, put his thumb in his mouth and ran away.

“We ran a benign state capitalism, nothing more,” she went on. “In your case, my friend, it was not even that. God, I feel disgusted with myself that we did it, that we ever allowed ourselves to be compradors for Reid’s goddamn private gulags.”

Nok-Yung stared at the sky for a moment. T don’t know what to say, Myra,” he said at last. “Your regret over the Mutual Protection camps is… well taken. But about the other matters—you must surely know that none of what you have been talking about, the USSR and so on, is socialism as we understand it, and as you understood it. So stop confusing the issue.”

“Oh, I’m well aware that you are different. That you may well be the genuine article: Marx and Engels, Proprietors. And you know what? I don’t care. I don’t want it, for myself or for anyone.”

“Why not?” Nok-Yung sounded more puzzled than offended.

Myra pointed across the river to the insectile shape of a fighting-machine, patrolling the water’s edge with heron-like steps.

“Because of those damn things,” she said. “And the calculating-machines.”

“What!” Nok-Yung’s eyes creased up in amusement. “Luddism is not your true ideology, Myra. I cannot believe this. These machines are one of the most marvellous achievements of the Sheenisov—a whole alternative nanotechnology, worked out quite independently of the West. You know how the machines scale down, all the way to the molecular scale, and are all mechanical and chemical and optical, with no need for electronic interfaces? That’s their—our—secret weapon, an open secret. A computer system that the enemy cannot penetrate, but that everyone can understand and access. I’ve just begun to use it, and I tell you, it has the most intuitive interface I’ve ever come across. The capitalists would kill for it. Or rather, they would kill to be able to monopolise it. But it’s free, so they can’t.”

“I know about your strange machines,” Myra said. “The CIA told me all about them.” She tapped her temple, smiling ironically. “ ‘I have detailed files.’ ”

Nok-Yung caught the allusion. “It is not The Terminator, you know! Not—what was it in the films?—Skynet. It is not… inimical.”

“Not now, perhaps. But what will it do, when it—or you-have covered the world, like a banyan tree?”

Nok-Yung spat a puff of air and smoke. “More Luddism! The machines will form a benign human environment, a second nature, within which human nature can flourish, truly, for the first time.” He leaned forward, speaking confidentially. “Let me tell you what we have done, something that no other system would have dared to do. We have nanofac-tured a virally distributed, genetically fixable version of the anti-ageing treatment. It spreads before our migrations like a benign plague. You may be already infected, yourself. A gift.”

“God, that is so irresponsible!” Myra jolted rigid. “Viruses mutate, dammit, in case you hadn’t heard!”

Nok-Yung made a planing motion with his hand. “Not this one. It has self-repair built in. It has tested stable through a million virtual generations.”

“ Virtual generations, yes! Man, you did enough design work in the camp to know what that’s worth in the real world!”

“Different system, different design philosophy,” he said, with infuriating complacency. “Our testing kits are themselves part of the real world. It’s like the difference between a working scale model and a simulation. There is simply no comparison. And the computing resources are vast, vaster even than anything the spacers have yet built.”

Myra felt her gaze sinking into the bottomless pool of his self-confidence. It was truly terrifying; it was, she realised, what she most feared for herself—to be so sure. To be absolutely certain that she was right would, as far as she was concerned, be the end of her. Doubt was her only hope, her comfort and companion since childhood, her scepticism her sole security.

Shin Se-Ha returned and sat down, affecting not to notice their frozen moment of mutual incomprehension. He looked at Myra, gravely, and shook his head.

“No deal, I’m afraid.”

Myra could scarcely believe it.

“Why ever not? The alternative is to fight your way through Kazakhstan! All you have to do instead is not fight us! What more can you ask of us?”

Se-Ha shook his head sadly. “It is not that, Myra,” he said. “It is not aggression, or animosity. It is simply the imperative of our mode of production. It will be global or it will be nothing, as your Trotsky always said. We have to keep running, or fall over, until we meet ourselves, on the other side of the world.”

He saw this wasn’t getting anywhere with her. “More concretely,” he continued, “we can’t have… unassimilated areas within the Union. It would be too much of an opportunity for our enemies. And we can’t stop for long, because that would force us to engage in internal class struggle, particularly with the small-property owners, which we do not want.” He smiled. To put it mildly! We have so far been able to avoid the whole dictatorship of the proletariat scenario by simply carrying the remaining small and large businesses along with us. The machine-based common-property economy expands, and they expand in its interstices. They can live like nits in our hair, as long as we are running. If we stopped, the itch would be intolerable. We would have to… scratch.”

“Oh, come on,” said Myra. “You can run a mixed economy indefinitely. We’ve been doing it in Kapitsa for years.”

“A mixture of state capitalism and private, yes,” said Nok-Yung, “as you’ve just reminded me. A mixture of a real non-commodity economy and a market is much more unstable. Conflicts arise very rapidly—if they’re both confined to the same economic space.”

An unstable system, that had to expand at just the right speed to stop itself falling over; not too slow, or too fast… there were plenty of natural and artificial and social analogies to that. Myra almost giggled at the thought of what would happen to them if Kazakhstan just surrendered, if the Sheenisov suddenly found themselves pushing at an open door and fell flat on their collective faces.

But that wasn’t an option. She looked around, checking that her guards were still bored and watchful, then back at the two new recruits to the Sheenisov. The absurdity of the situation struck her—she was doing diplomacy by just talking to two guys on the street. For all she knew they could be as deluded as UFO contactees, and not really ambassadors from an alien intelligence at all. Again she felt the urge to giggle—it was just another silly idea; she was feeling light-headed, flighty, as though her problem had been solved. She couldn’t see any solution. She was in deeper trouble than ever, but still she felt relieved.

“There is a certain urgency to it,” Se-Ha was saying, a litde apologetically. “Green factions are experimenting with plague vectors. The spacer groups, the Outwarders, have a radically post-human vision. Between them, they threaten humanity with extinction. Our advance is in essence defensive…”

She looked sharply at him. “Tell me, Se-Ha,” she said, “just who it was you consulted, back there.”

He looked uncomfortable. “It was… a distributed decision. A consensus.”

“Bullshit!” she snapped. “Don’t give me that. I didn’t see a vote being taken in the streets around here. Did you? So there must be a leadership somewhere, a council. I want to talk to it.”

“You are talking to it,” he said, “when you talk to us. To the extent that it exists. The policy parameters have indeed been set democratically, but the implementation, the… administrative decisions, are made…” He chewed his lower lip. “It’s hard to say,” he finished lamely.

“Let me guess,” said Myra, standing up. “Expert system. AI.”

Se-Ha looked up at her, eyes dark and blank under his thin black brows. “That is possible, yes.”

Myra straightened and sighed. She was convinced, paranoically perhaps, that the mad preacher Jordan had been right: the General, the Plan, was at the bottom of all this, that it had implemented itself on the Sheenisov’s machine ecology and was in the process of taking over the world. With the best intentions, no doubt.

“God, yes, you’re right,” she said. “It’s you or the Outwarders. Both sides are like the fucking Borg. “You will be assimilated’—isn’t that what you’re telling me?”

Nok-Yung shrugged. “It’s not something sinister. We all live in the world machine. Why not live in a world machine that is on our side?”

Myra had to smile. “You want me to imagine the future,” she said, “as socialism with a human face—for ever?”

“Yes!” they both said, pleased that she’d got the point at last.

It really would be hard to end this conversation politely, but she would try.

“I’ll take your message back to President Suleimanyov,” she said. “No doubt you will await our response.”

Se-Ha and Nok-Yung stood up and shook her hand gravely.

“Goodbye,” she said.

“Goodbye,” they both said.

Se-Ha smiled mischievously. “I hope I see you again.”

They’d rented the plane, an executive jet that had seen better days, in Almaty. Just as well; Myra could not have borne to displace any passengers on the commercial flights out of Semipalatinsk, standing room only and a strict baggage allowance.

As soon as they were beyond Sheenisov airspace—and Sheenisov jamming—Parvus made a priority over-ride and poked his virtual head over the back of the seat in front of her.

“Sorry about this, Myra,” the AI murmured. “Urgent messages.”

“Patch ’em through,” she said.

The message queue consisted of calls from Suleimanyov, Valentina Kozlova and someone with an anonymous code identifier. She worked through them one by one.

As soon as she blinked on the President’s identifier, he was through, live from his office. Various aides and ministers hovered in the periphery of the shot.

“Hello,” he said. “Results?”

Myra grimaced. “They’re adamant that they won’t accept it I was as surprised as you are. In fact, I was shocked. I have a suspicion that the secret of their military and economic co-ordination is a military AI, and that it is… calling the shots.”

Chingiz took this with unexpected aplomb.

“It was worth trying,” he said. He waved his hand, downwards. “However, the Sheenisov are no longer our most immediate problem.”

“What’s happened?”

He smiled wryly. “As we expected. It’s all gone public now—everyone knows about the nukes. Our generous offers to the United States, and to other countries, have been referred up to the UN—and referred back to the Security Council, for immediate action. We are to turn over our nuclear weapons to forces under UN authority within twenty-four hours—twenty-three and a half, now—or face aerial and space attack. Specifically, on Kapitsa, which they have rightly identified as the focus of the problem. After Kapitsa, Almaty.”

Myra thought for a moment that the virtual view had gone monochrome, and that the plane had turned over. Then everything was normal again.

“If they carry through their threat against Kapitsa—well, I would hope for air support.” She smiled wanly. “But please, Chingiz. Don’t let them ruin Almaty.”

“I have no intention of letting them do that,” he said. “I suggest you return to Kapitsa. You have problems of your own. Evacuate the town, if you can. Let them hit an empty shell. We’ll send transport and cavalry.”

“Cavalry?”

“For… internal security. The stand-off around the government building is very tense.” He glanced away. “Your own Defence Minister is trying to get through to you. She can explain the situation better than I can. Goodbye for now.”

“Goodbye, Chingiz.”

Before taking the next call, Myra turned to Nurup and Mustafa.

“We’re diverting to Kapitsa,” she said. “I may be going into a very volatile situation. Street violence, at least. And possible bombing, maybe up to nuclear level. This is not what I hired you for. We can drop you off at Karaganda first, if you wish.”

The two mujahedin looked deeply offended.

“Our job is to keep you safe until you return to Almaty, or until you tell us to go,” Nurup said.

“OK,” she said. “I’m telling you to go.”

She reached for the intercom toggle. Mustafa was out of his seat in an instant, and placed a hand across the switch. His expression and tone were apologetic. “We stay,” he said. “It’s God’s will.”

And a matter of honour too, she guessed.

“Kapitsa it is, then,” she said.

The two men beamed at her as though she had done them a favour. Perhaps she had; they probably believed she’d just issued them two free passes to heaven. There were times when she envied the devout.

As the plane banked around she took the call from Valentina. This one was v-mail, recorded in one of the offices in the government building. Behind Valentina, men with Kalashnikovs lurked at windows. Bureaucrats turned desks into makeshift barricades. Somebody was operating a byte-shredder, wiping computer memories, setting up a blizzard of interference.

“Hi, Myra, hope this gets through. Jesus, did you hear that the nuke thing’s all over the media? We’ve got news collectors—warm bodies as well as remotes—coming in all the time, and the demonstrators are acting up for them so they can watch themselves being heroic on CNN. Fucking classic media feedback howl. The nuke thing has really freaked a lot of them out—in all the factions, the lefty headbangers and the pro-UN types and the fucking spa-cists. Not to mention our very own patriots. Our agents in the crowd—hell, even the reporters—are picking up talk about storming the building. We want you back as soon as you can; we’ll have a militia driver on standby at the airport.”

The message was time-stamped at 1.35 p.m., and it was now 2.50. Myra blinked up a split-screen of television news channels while taking the third call. The seatbelt light came on; the aeroplane was beginning its descent to Kapitsa. Thank God for ultra-precise radio tuning—Myra could remember when you couldn’t even take a call in level flight. The pilot’s voice was raised slightly as he argued with air-traffic control for precedence, throwing diplomatic weight and Kazakh curses about equally. Myra looked out of the window. More aircraft than usual—hastily hired jets, she guessed—were parked beside the runways. The media circus was in town.

Her anonymous caller flickered into view.

“Jason!”

The CIA agent gave her a tense smile, but warm around the eyes. “Hello, Myra. Good to see you. Wow, you look amazing. Just in time for your global stardom, huh?”

“Hah!”

“Almost as much excitement as the coup. Anyway… I’m here to tell you that we’ve got somewhere with the investigation.”

Undercarriage down, thump.

“What—oh, Georgi’s—”

“Yup. I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Myra, but—shit, we got this out of the black labs, it’s bleeding-edge stuff. We did an autopsy on a goddamn cell sample—don’t ask how we got it.”

A bump, a rocking forward, another bump, and the incline of deceleration.

“The point is, Myra, we found traces of a very specific, very subtle bit of nanotech. It’s not exactly a poison, that’s the clever thing. It builds up into a little machine, then disintegrates when it’s done its job. We found a few gear trains, but that was enough.”

The aircraft came to a halt and the seatbelt light went off. The door banged open and the steps angled down. Myra stood up and shuffled forward, behind Nurup and in front of Mustafa, still talking and listening. She waved absently to the pilot, left him a handful of gold coins as a bonus. She was thinking ahead.

“Enough for what?”

“Enough to identify it. It’s a spacer assassination weapon. A heart-stopper.”

A heart-stopper. Yes. It was that.

She blinked away the floating image of Jason to concentrate on her surroundings. No signs of actual incoming fire. She followed Nurup towards the terminal building, about a hundred metres away. Jason’s voice in her head continued.

“So there’s no doubt any more—it was murder. Now, there’s no proof the space movement had a hand in it, beyond supplying the weapon, but the circumstantial evidence is kind of strong.”

You could say that,” Myra agreed, making a conscious effort to unclench her jaw. Having her suspicions confirmed after all this time of indulging then dismissing them was a shock.

Fucking heart attack…

“They don’t exactly throw that sort of kit around,” she mused aloud. “Too easy to reverse-engineer, for one thing. But why would they do it?”

Through the long corridor, letting Nurup and Mustafa do the lookout. Out of the corner of her eye she could see the adjacent, outbound corridor, packed from end to end with a slow-moving queue.

“Well, the obvious motive would’ve been to stop him making the offer to the Kazakhstanis.”

“And how do you know about that?”

“Uh, that’s classified.”

Myra had to laugh.

“But how would they have known about it, I mean before—?”

“You tell me.”

They’d reached the concourse. It wasn’t quite as crowded or frantic as she’d begun to expect; most of those intent on leaving must have already left, or at least be in the exit queue. Much to her relief, no newshounds or reporters had spotted her yet, though she identified one or two by their flak-jackets and communications clutter and vaguely familiar faces. Scanning the crowd, she saw a man in the uniform of the Workers’ Militia, who caught her eye, saluted and started pushing towards her.

“It was as much of a surprise to everyone else in the government as it was to me,” she said. “We figured it was Georgi’s own bright idea, which he’d spring on us once he’d got some provisional—oh!”

Mustafa bumped into her back.

Jason waved to her, over heads.

“You never told me you were here!”

“Yeah, well… thought I’d surprise you.”

It was strange seeing his lips move, and hearing the words, beyond earshot. Like lip-reading, like telepathy.

“Who is that guy?” Nurup asked suspiciously.

“He’s OK,” said Myra. She wasn’t sure whether introducing Jason as a CIA agent would be a good idea, so she didn’t.

And then they met up, and to everyone’s surprise she and Jason met in a long embrace.

Jesus, man!”

She broke loose and turned to the militia driver.

“Thanks for coming. Room for these three guys?”

The driver nodded. “This way please.”

He led them to a service door which Myra knew she must have passed hundreds of times and never seen. Their progress was less inconspicuous—the two muj weren’t the only armed passengers, but they were the most noticeable. As the driver fiddled with the push-bar latch Myra noticed heads bob and a little buzzing camcopter swoop from the concourse’s rafters.

They hurried along a passageway of corrugated iron and unplaned, splintery joists, and emerged beside a jeep in a small bay of the car park.

“Ah, now that’s sensible transport,” Myra said as they all piled in. The Militia jeep had a light machine-gun mounted on its rollbar. Mustafa made that his post. Nurup sat in the front with the driver, rifle propped in the crook of his elbow, pointing up. Myra and Jason sat in the back, with Mustafa’s legs and the ammo belt between them. As the jeep careered out of the carpark and swerved on to the main road into town, Jason leaned over and said, loud above the noise and the slipstream, “You were saying?”

“About Georgi’s great plan, yeah. As far as we can tell he never told anyone else, not even Valentina. That was him all over—he was a bit of a Kazakhstani patriot, and he still tended to act like this whole place was his personal fief. Which it once was!”

The jeep was making good progress—most of the traffic was in the other direction, towards the airport or—judging by the amounts of luggage and household goods piled on top of cars and trucks—towards Karaganda. Her relief at seeing the evacuation already under way was dampened by flashback images of other roads, other columns of vehicles: the road to Basra, the road out of Warsaw, the perimeter of Atlanta…

But no, not here! They had their own air cover—Kazakhstan’s elite aerospace defence force would surely shield these refugees. She thought briefly of setting up a conference call with Valentina and Chingiz, but decided against it. This conversation with Jason was the most urgent she could have right now, for reasons that were more than personal.

“OK,” Jason was saying, “as to the motive, right, did anyone else approach you for some kind of similar deal, after Georgi’s death but before the coup?”

“Only the fucking space movement!” She swallowed hard. “David Reid himself, at Georgi’s funeral.”

“Jesus H. That kind of fingers them, doesn’t it?”

Myra found the question of who knew about what bugging her.

“Well, there’s a problem with that,” she said. “Whoever killed Georgi, or had him killed, must have known that that would make us suspicious of the spacers. I mean, even before you found the evidence, I had them in the frame. And it’s a bit hard to reconstruct now, you know how it is, but when I refused to give Dave any hands-off guarantees, let alone any more… active support, well, that suspicion must have been in the scales. Might even have tipped them.”

Mustafa shouted something and brought the machine-gun down and around to the rear. Myra shifted her legs smartly away from the ammo belt and twisted her head around. Five hundred metres behind them was a small, jockeying pack of cars and jeeps, in front of a cloud of dust and beneath a halo of camcopters. She clapped Mustafa’s thigh.

“Leave them alone!” she yelled.

He replied with some Uzbek profanity, but desisted, swinging the machine-gun muzzle skyward again.

“So you’re saying killing Georgi was counterproductive for the spacers?”

“Damn right!”

“OK.” Jason leaned back in the cramped seat and closed his eyes for a moment. “Cui bono? Who benefited?”

“Ah, shit,” said Myra, realizing, just as the jeep turned the corner into Revolution Square, and stopped. Myra grabbed the rollbar and pulled herself up. Long practice in estimating the size of demos clicked into place automatically, like eyeband software.

About ten thousand.

“Oh, Jeez,” she said.

It was not a particularly militant or angry crowd, at that moment. Tents and shelters and stalls had been set up, and many of the banners were propped against them or leaning on street furniture, or stuck in the patches of now trampled grass or beds of flowers that chequered the square. People stood or sat about, in small groups, chatting, drinking coffee, reading news off broadsheets or eyebands or han-dhelds, listening to speeches and songs, arguing with each other or with the scattered ones and twos of the Workers’ Militia. Some were dressed casually, others in their best outfits or in national costumes or street-theatre radiation overalls.

“Looks pretty dangerous,” said Jason.

She gave him an appreciative nod. “Yeah, that’s a mass demo if ever I saw one. Not to mention a big fraction of the remaining population. Shit.”

The kids back in Glasgow had been right: her small state was having a big political revolution. The two mujahedin glowered uncomprehendingly at the mingled banners of Kazakhstan, the ISTWR, the old Soviet Union, the International, the red flags and the black.

She ducked and placed a hand on Nurup’s shoulder.

“Stand up,” she ordered. “Look cheerful. Wave your rifle high above your head. Mustafa, for heaven’s sake smile, man, wave your arms and keep your hands off the LMG. No matter what, you got that?”

To the driver, “Around the inside edge of the crowd, towards the entrance. Slow and careful.”

She lifted herself up, swung her ass around and perched on the rollbar, feet on the back of Nurup’s seat. The driver engaged first gear, then second. The jeep rolled towards the corner of the front of the building. It had about fifty metres to go, then another fifty when it would have to turn right and inch along to the entrance. They went unremarked for about half a minute. Then the people stepping out of their way started calling and pointing. A moment later the pursuing reporters caught up and all chance of discretion was gone.

She could see the news of her arrival spread through the crowd like a gust of wind on a field. The camcopters circled at a safe distance, zooming in on her and on reaction shots of the people looking at her. Their only chance, she’d decided, was to look confident and triumphant She grinned and waved, meanwhile blinking up a call to Valentina.

“You can see us?”

Yeah, we’ve got you covered. We’ll open the door for you when you reach it.”

Cheers and jeers echoed off the government office’s glass and concrete walls. No organised chanting or coherent mood as yet—people were still unsure what to make of her return. She smiled desperately at every individual face that came into focus, and quite a few smiled back. The hovering camcopters had their directional mikes aimed at her, but she didn’t speak to, or for, them.

“It’s all right, folks, comrades, we’re getting it all sorted out, we’ve got a strong alliance with Kazakhstan, we’re negotiating with the UN and we’ll hold off the Sheenisov, I’ll be talking to you all soon, once I’ve had a chance to consult—”

The jeep came to a gentle halt outside the main door. Myra glanced sideways, saw a couple of militiamen holding it, ready to open, their rifles in their other hands.

“Go in, guys, all of you, I’ll keep talking.”

They hesitated.

“Go go go!”

One by one they ran up the steps and disappeared inside. Myra stepped from the seat-back to the dash, over the windshield and on to the engine hood, then hopped backwards on to a step, keeping in view all the time. She backed up the steps, smiling and waving, and through the doors.

Jason’s arms wrapped around her from behind.

“Well done.”

She leaned against him for a moment, tilting her head back on his shoulder, then straightened up and stepped away, turning to smile.

“That was scary.” She laughed. “It’s weird being the target of a demonstration—I feel I should be out there helping to organise it.”

Jason’s eyes narrowed. “That,” he said, “might become an option.”

“Ah, fuck off, you Machiavellian spook!” She caught his hand, swept an encircling arm at Nurup and Mustafa. “Come on, guys, let’s sort out this mess.”

They held the emergency meeting in Myra’s office whose broad window overlooked the square. Denis Gubanov had suggested using the Sovnarkom room, but Myra had dismissed the security man’s idea. No way did she want to be in a windowless room.

Everybody was sitting on or lounging against inappropriate furniture—desks and filing cabinets and comms junctions. Myra perched herself on the highest convenient surface, the top of a book-case full of unread yellowing hardcopy. She cradled her Glock in her lap. Somehow sitting in a chair seemed frivolous. Two militia guards stood watchfully at the sides of the windows, using their eyebands to sample camcopter views from the news services. Andrei Mukhartov, Valentina Kozlova and Denis Gubanov all looked sleepless and unkempt: the men unshaven, Val’s collar and tie loosened, her uniform rumpled.

Myra introduced the two mujahedin and Jason. Denis raised his eyebrows, but made no comment. Myra unobtrusively made sure that her three men were in a position to protect her—she wasn’t at all sure who, if any, of those present were leaving the room alive, whether or not the room was stormed by an angry mob. She’d once interviewed an unrepentant old Stalinist who’d been in the Budapest Party offices in October 1956…

“OK, comrades,” she began. “First things first. You know the Western powers have refused our offers. I’ve just today been on the shortest diplomatic mission ever, and I can tell you the Sheenisov aren’t interested in a deal either. So it’s only a question of time before they’re rolling down the road from Semey. But that’s just background. We have some urgent matters to discuss.

“I’m going to start with something that may not seem like the first item on the agenda, but bear with me.” She waved a hand at the window. “These people can wait. It’s about Georgi’s death. Jason Nikolaides here has told me the results of a CIA investigation—murder, using a spacer nanotech weapon. Hard to detect traces, but Jason says they’ve done it, and I believe him. What I don’t believe is that the spacist bastards did it. Whoever did it wanted two things—one, that Georgi’s offer didn’t get through to the Kazakhstanis before the coup. Two, that we wouldn’t co-operate with the space movement in the coup. Now, seeing as nobody except Georgi knew he was planning to make that offer, our range of suspects is a bit narrow. Basically, it has to be someone that Georgi would run the idea past, someone outside the government information loop—maybe in the Sovnarkom, maybe not.”

She looked down, playing with the Glock’s slide for a moment, then looked up. She’d been thinking aloud, she hadn’t had time yet to go through all the possibilities.

“Val!” she shouted. Everybody jumped. “If I thought it was you, I’d slam you against the wall till your teeth rattled to get the truth out of you. You and Georgi were both in the Party, unlike anyone else here.”

She smiled, pleased to see her colleagues off balance. “But as it happens, I trust you. Same with Andrei, who’s never been into that sort of shit anyway. Denis, now—”

The secret policeman looked up and moistened his lips.

T swear, Myra—”

Tt’s all right,” Jason interrupted. “The Company checked him out. He’s clear.” He glanced at Myra, then grinned at Denis Gubanov. “Bit of a commie son-of-a-bitch, but he’s on your side.”

“Good,” said Myra, winging it. “I’m going through this to confirm that nobody here is a suspect. That leaves only one possibility. Georgi must have shared his idea with somebody, and it can only have been the FI Mil Org. The General.”

She let them think about that while she explained to Jason, Nurup and Mustafa about the nukes and the AI.

“It has its own agenda,” she concluded, addressing everyone again. “And it’s working through the Sheenisov. It wants those nukes, very badly. So do the spacers. Whether they used each other—the information on one side, the weapon from the other—knowingly or not, Georgi’s murder was a move in that rivalry. Whoever controls these weapons has a gun at the head of everyone and everything in Earth orbit and at Lagrange—which adds up to about ninety-five percent of the human space presence. And I would remind you that, thanks to the coup and counter-coup, the General controls most of the Space Defense battlesats. Now, this has a bearing on what we do about the UN ultimatum. Which is—” she grinned ferally “—the second item on the agenda.”

“Excuse me,” said Jason, standing up. “Just who does control these nukes, at the moment?”

“We do,” said Valentina and Myra, at the same time. Myra gave Val an especially warm smile, hoping that her apparent—and partly paranoically real—earlier suspicion hadn’t wounded their friendship beyond repair.

“It’s dual key,” Valentina explained. “Defence Minister and Prime Minister have to go into the command-center workspace at the same time.”

“And, well, it’s not hardcoded in, but right now obviously we have a treaty commitment to give the President of Kazakhstan the final say,” Myra added. “And his strategy, at the moment, is to stonewall until the last minute, to try and get some military aid concessions out of the Western powers and/or the UN against the Sheenisov.”

“So he intends to turn them over eventually?” Jason asked.

Myra hesitated. “OK,” she said at last. “This doesn’t go beyond this room, and that goes for everyone here. You guys at the window, too—military discipline, death penalty under the Freedom of Information Law if you breathe a word of it. Everybody clear?”

They all were.

“All right then—yes, he does intend for us to turn them over, eventually. What else can we do?”

“We can use the weapons,” said Denis. “In space.”

Val’s lips set in a thin line. Myra shook her head.

“Massacre,” she said. “I won’t do it, except as a last resort.”

“You’re all missing the point,” said Jason. He looked around at all of them, as though unsure whether he had a right to speak.

“Go on,” said Myra.

“OK,” said Jason, “I’m just speaking for myself here, not for the CIA or East America. I don’t know if I’ll ever get back to either of them. Anyway… the point you’re all missing is: who are you going to surrender your weapons to? Formally, no doubt, it’ll be the UN. But physically, somebody’s gonna have to dock with them, bring them in, disarm them. Space Defense, and maybe some of the space settlers, have the equipment and expertise to do that. There must be ways of getting past the software of your controls—there always are. Believe me, there are no uncrackable codes any more. Your cooperation would be useful, but it’s not essential.”

Myra lit a cigarette. “OK,” she said. “So?”

Jason paced over to the window, peered out. “Still quiet,” he said. He glanced at his watch. “We’ve been in here, what? Half an hour? Soon be time to talk to the people, Myra.”

“That’s cool,” Denis said. “We’ve got agitators out there, they’re keeping people more or less up to speed. The line is that the President is negotiating.”

“As I’m sure he is,” said Jason. “But what does either side have to negotiate? Both sides have hit the bottom of the tank. You have nothing to offer, and the West has nothing to offer you. They will not save you from the Sheenisov. So if I were any of the other players—in particular, the spacers and your FI Mil Org, rogue AI or not—I’d be working very fast right now on two objectives. One is taking you guys and your wonderful dual-key command-centre out physically. The other is lining up rendezvous with the nukes in space. You can bet that while you think you’re smart, stringing them along, they are stringing you along, and they’re both going after the same things.”

He looked around again, more confident now. “This is endgame. Not just for us, but for them. One side or the other—the West-stroke-spacers-stroke-Outwarders, or the East-stroke-the-General-strokeSheenisov—is going to grab these weapons and use them, sooner rather than later.”

“But—” shouted Val, shocked. “The ablation cascade!”

“Not a problem for either of them, at the level we’re talking about. The Sheenisov’s horizons are strictly Earthbound, for the next few centuries. And their computers are invulnerable to EMP hits-they’re mechanical, not electronic. As to the spacists and the Mil Org, neither of them is dependent on going back to Earth, or on anything else getting off. And each unit of these forces probably calculates that they can cut and run for a higher orbit, or La-grange. Of course, they’d rather avoid it, but if they have to they’ll take it on the chin.

“So my advice to you all,” he concluded, “and to those people out there, is get the hell out And warn everybody that at the first sign of any messing with you, or Kazakhstan, or the nukes—you’ll blow them all to hell. Use the nukes against battlesats or detonate in place—either way you’ll set off the ablation cascade.”

“Christ,” said Myra, shaken. “That means the end of satellite guidance, global positioning, comsats, the nets, everything! It’ll be like the world going blind!”

“Yeah,” said Jason grimly. “And every army in the world, too. They’re so dependent on space-based comms and sims that they’ll be fucked. Except for the marginals, the Greens, the barbarians and the Sheenisov.” He laughed. “If that doesn’t scare them, nothing will.”

The guards at the window were moving from the sides to the centre, gazing out with complete lack of concern for cover. One of them turned around.

“The cavalry has arrived,” he said.

For a moment Myra thought he meant the Sheenisov. Then she realised that Chingiz had come through on his promise, and that the cavalry was their own.

The steppe at nightfall was a moving mass of vehicles and horses. As far as Myra knew, every last person in Kapitsa was moving out. She rode somewhere near the front; she tried to ride at the front, but she kept being overtaken by people in vehicles faster than her black mare. The Sovnarkom rump, and Jason and her mujahedin, rode in jeeps beside her. With her eyeband image-intensifiers at full power she could see the Kazakhstani cavalry—horse and motorised—outriding either flank of the evacuation, or migration. The scene was biblical, exodus and apocalypse in one. Banners and flags from the Revolution Square demonstration floated above the crowd, used as rallying points and mobile landmarks. The news remotes and reporters were following the process in a sort of stunned awe, not sure whether the angle was Road People (refugees, pathetic) or Kazakh Rouge (menaces, fanatic).

Something similar, though not as yet so drastic, was happening in Almaty and other towns across the greater Republic. Chingiz Suleimanyov had pitched the appeal to evacuate as the ultimate protest march, against the West’s threats and its refusal of aid against the Sheenisov. If they were to be abandoned to the communists, they had nothing to lose by fleeing in advance to a place that claimed it would be defended. The threat of this avalanching into an unstoppable migration was already spreading panic in Western Europe. Northward, in the Former Union, regional and local chiefs were conferring on their own fragmentary networks, bruiting inflammatory talk of joining in.

“Come in, come in, ya bastard,” Myra muttered. She was riding in a hallucinatory ambience of virtual images, some of them pulled down from CNN and other services, others patched up from the command-centre, whose hardware they’d stripped from the offices and jury-rigged in the back of the Sovnarkom jeep. She could see a satellite image of herself from above—she could wave, and with a second’s delay see one of the dots on the ground wave back. (The reassuring thing was that it was the wrong dot, a hologram fetch of herself and her surroundings seamlessly merged with the images from several kilometres distant.) She could see her own face, projected to visual displays around the world by the camcopter hovering a few metres in front of her.

Right now she was trying to raise Logan. A residual loyalty to her former comrades in space impelled her to warn them of the probable imminent disaster. The scanning search of the Lagrange cluster wasn’t picking up New View. At length, frustrated, she switched to a broader sweep, and to her surprise connected almost immediately.

“Jesus fuck, Myra,” Logan said, without preliminary pleasantry. “This is your biggest fuck-up since the Third World War.” He didn’t make it sound like an accusation.

“Thanks for the reminder, comrade,” Myra snarled. “I’m going against my better judgement telling you this, but I’ve fallen out with your General. That little electric fucker has had the bright idea of making his own bid for world revolution, and I don’t intend to wait around to see how it all works out in practice, thank you very much.”

Tes, I had heard,” Logan said heavily. The delay seemed longer than usual; Myra guessed because she was strung out, running on stretched time. “You called to say that?” He sounded distracted. A very pretty black girl who looked about ten years old stuck her face past his, grimacing at the camera, filling its field with her microgravity sunburst of frizzy hair. Logan shoved at her.

“Oh, push off, Ellen May,” he said, not unkindly. “Go and pester your mum, OK? Or Janis. She’ll have something for you to do, you bet.”

The girl stuck out her tongue, then flicked away like a fish.

“Kids,” Logan grinned, indulgent despite himself.

“Yeah, they’re great,” Myra said, with a pang. “What I called you for is about that, actually. If that kid’s gonna have a future, you guys better get your ass out of Lagrange.”

“We have,” said Logan, five seconds later. “We raced through our preparations after the coup. We haven’t got as much gear as we’d like, but the asteroid miners are going to swing in and join us there. We finished the burn twelve hours ago.” He looked about. “Made a real mess of stuff I didn’t have time to lash down,” he added sadly.

^You’re on your way to Mars?”

“Yes, at last.” His grin filled the screen. “Free at last!”

“What does the General think about this?”

“Ah,” said Logan. “When I found it was bidding to use your orbital nukes in the coup, I figured the same as you did. Not safe to stick around. You remember I said we’d have to leave a few hundred tons behind? Well, it’s among them, still in the clutter at Lagrange. We ditched the bugger.” His triumphant smile faded to a bleak inward gaze. “I hope.”

Ts it still in control of the Mil Org?”

“I guess so. We couldn’t do anything to it, beyond discarding the section the hardware was in. Its software is a different matter, it gets everywhere, but, hell—”

“What do you mean ‘it gets everywhere’? I’ve got a suspicion it’s downloaded to the Sheenisov’s weird Babbage engines, but—”

Logan nodded. Teah, and it’s probably copied its files to anything of yours that’s been in contact with it, like your phone, but it’s just the source code, it can’t do any harm so long as you don’t open the file—”

At that point the connection ended.

Myra took her phone from her pocket and was about to jerk its jack from her eyeband, just in case, when she realised the precaution was irrational. If the bugger was actually running on her phone they were doomed already. She thought about the time the General had appeared right in her own command-centre, and could only hope that Logan was right, and that only its source code, and not its live program, had been secreted there. And in other places…

Someday, somebody would open a file stored in the Institute at Glasgow, and find Parvus, and the General behind him. She wished that person luck. Then she remembered Menial MacClafferty, and realised she’d have to do more.

She had just finished rattling out her urgent message when she heard a dull, distant bang behind her, and turned. Through the eyeband’s night vision she saw on the horizon the expanding green glow of the first cruise missile to hit Kapitsa. It was not the last.

Hours later, in the twenty-below midnight, when most of the migration had camped around fuel-dump fires, Myra was sitting with Jason in front of a portable electric brazier, in the shelter of the dozing horse. She was simultaneously in the command-centre with the others, and with Chingiz. The UN and US had never intended to negotiate, and even the pretence had been dropped.

The Kazakhstani airforce was expending missiles, planes and lives above Almaty now. From space the command-centre was pulling down images of moves from the battlesats. Tiny, manned hunter-gatherer probes were burning off, matching orbits and velocities with the cached nukes. They had hunter-killer escorts, and they were obviously from opposed coalitions—already their exchanges of fire were being replayed on CNN, now that the Kapitsa bombardment had stopped for lack of remaining targets.

“… no choice,” Chingiz was saying. “Our first responsibility is to defend our people, the people we’ve taken on the duty to protect, even if that means killing more innocent people on the other side than would die on ours if we don’t.”

That’s talking, thought Myra, that’s the way to look at it, that’s right. Screw the greatest good of the greatest number. Or maybe not.

“That’s the end of the world,” said Valentina.

“It’s ending anyway,” Myra said. She looked up from the fire. “That’s my final analysis! We may even save lives in the long run, if we blind and cripple the forces that are getting ready for the last war.” She laughed bitterly. “In both senses of the phrase.”

An officer leaned into the visual field around Chingiz, and spoke urgently in his ear. Chingiz nodded, once, then raised his hand.

“This is it,” he said. “Some of the space settlers’ diamond ships have just entered the atmosphere. They’re heading for—”

Connection lost.

Myra jumped up, and to her utter horror and amazement she saw them, jinking and jittering through the sky towards her. Their infrared radiation signature was arrogantly clear—they didn’t need to bother with shielding, unlike the stealth fighters they resembled. One moment they were dots on the horizon, the next they were discs overhead, swooping past at a thousand metres. Their laser lances slashed the vast encampment, and were countered seconds too late by futile fusillades of skyward machine-gun fire. Then they were at the other horizon, andbanking around for a second runscreams of people and beasts in the night, dying under the laser beams and the humming rain of their own misdirected, falling ordnance Earth versus the flying saucers! Way cool!

Myra shook off that mad thought and reached for the command-centre controls as though through thick mud. Valentina’s eyes shone in the firelight for a moment, and Myra saw in them a reflection of her own resolution. Then she and Valentina stooped together to their task. As Myra rattled through the codes, she waited for the laser’s hot tongue on her neck.

The diamond ships were far too fast for human control, or even for their enhanced, superhuman occupants. Their main guidance systems were realtime uplinks to the space stations, which a few good nuclear explosions could disrupt.

The sky went white, and the black discs fell like leaves.

The ablation cascade did not happen all at once. Lagrange went to eternity instantaneously, in one appalling sphere of hell-hot helium fusion, but Earth orbit was a different thing. Hours, perhaps days, would pass before the last product of human ingenuity and industry was scraped from the sky. Even so, the comsats were among the first to fail. Most, indeed, were taken out by the electromagnetic pulses alone. Riding into the first dawn of the new world, Myra knew that the little camcopter dancing a couple of metres in front of her might well be relaying the last television news most of its watchers would ever see.

Behind her, in a slow straggle that ended with the ambulances and litters of the injured and dying, the Kazakh migration spread to the horizon. The sun was rising behind them, silhouetting their scattered, tattered banners. There was only one audience, now, that was worth speaking to: the inheritors.

“Nothing is written,” she said. “The future is ours to shape. When you take the cities, spare the scientists and engineers. Whatever they may have done in the past you need them for the future. Let’s make it a better one.”

The camcopter spun around, soared, darted about wildly and dived into the ground. The horses’ hooves, the worn tyres of the vehicles, crushed it in seconds. Myra wasn’t worried; she could see her own image, with a few seconds’ delay, appearing in the corner of her eyeband where CNN still chattered away. The rest of the field was filled with bizarre hallucinations, the net’s near-death experience.

God filled the horizon, bigger than the sunrise.

I sat on the plinth of the statue of the Deliverer, and smoked a cigarette to fight my stomach’s heaves. Gradually my mind and my body returned to some kind of equilibrium. The din of the launch celebrations, the lights of the houses and pubs, became again something I could regard without disgust and hear without dismay. I stood up, and the ground was steady under my feet. I looked up, and the sky was dark and starry above my head.

I walked a few steps from the statue and turned around. The Deliverer on her horse reared above me. Menial had told me, a couple of weeks earlier, the reason why the Deliverer’s features varied on all the statues I’d ever seen. She was a myth, a multiplicity. Her hordes had never ridden from far Kazakhstan to Lisbon’s ancient shore, as the songs and stories say. They had never swept all before them. Instead, each town and city had been invaded by a horde raised closer to home, on its very own hinterland. How many hundred, how many thousand towns had met the new order in the form of a wild woman on a horse, riding in at the head of a ragtag army to proclaim that the net was thrown off, the sky was fallen, and the world was free?

It was that final message, the last ever spoken from the net and the screens, that had identified them with that singular woman, the Deliverer. I leaned forward, to read again the words chiselled on this plinth, as it is on them all, from far Kazakhstan to Lisbon’s ancient shore:

NOTHING IS WRITTEN. THE FUTURE IS OURS TO SHAPE. WHEN YOU TAKE THE CITIES, SPARE THE SCIENTISTS AND ENGINEERS. WHATEVER THEY MAY HAVE DONE IN THE PAST YOU NEED THEM FOR THE FUTURE. LET’S MAKE IT A BETTER ONE.

The last words of the old world, and the first of the new.

I thought of Menial, and took another step back, still drawing on my cigarette. She was older than I had ever imagined possible. But she was also, I realised, still as young as she’d seemed when I’d first seen her. Nothing had changed, nothing could change that lovely, eager, open personality. She was not old, she had merely… stayed young.

As I would.

What did I have to complain about?

I laughed at myself, at my own youthful folly. In the long view of history, in the promise of a long life to come, the difference in our chronological age, however great, could only be insignificant.

A step, a swish, a scent. Her warm, dry hand clasped mine.

“Are you all right, Clovis?”

I turned and looked at her, and drew her towards the plinth. We sat down.

“Menial,” I said, “I know who you are.”

“Oh,” she said. “And who am I?”

I handed her the booklet, open at the page.

She sat for a long moment looking down at it, with a slight smile and a slowly welling tear.

“Ah, fuck,” she said. “Everybody else there is long gone, as far as I know. But maybe I wouldn’t know, as they wouldn’t know about me.” She sniffed, and handed the booklet back. “So now you know. I never wanted to be what people would expect of me, if they knew.”

“But you are,” I said. “You knew about the AI, and you expected Fergal to do what he did. I saw your face when he said it, and it was like you’d just cracked a piece of white logic.”

“Or black! Aye, I knew. The Deliverer told me about it herself, just before the end. She warned me that it was a dangerous thing, though benign according to its lights. Like Fergal!”

“But why did you give it to him?”

Menial leaned back and looked up. “Because the deadly debris is up there, colha Gree. I know what happened at the Deliverance, because I lived through it. I saw the flashes. I was there when the sky fell. I knew the ship would never get through without a much better guidance system than the one I was working on—well, I knew by the time I’d finished testing it, which was not that long ago. I needed someone to find the AI under cover of seeking something else, and I needed someone who’d put it on the ship—for good reasons or bad.”

She lowered her gaze and smiled. “So here we are. And now it’s you who has to decide, mo grdidh. That ship’s success will stimulate others, from other lands as well, from the Oriental and the Austral states. Competition between companies and continents, great revolutions to come, and the sky road before us. If it’s not launched, or its new mind is ripped out and it fails, or if indeed the AI is not smart enough to save it, then it’ll be a long time before it’s tried again. And the next to try might not be as benevolent as the International Scientific Society. It could be an army, or an empire.”

She grabbed my shoulders and gazed at me. “If you walk in there and tell Druin and his boys, that’s what could still happen.”

I closed my eyes. T can see that,” I said, “but I’m more concerned about the power Fergal, or someone like him, might have.”

“Open your eyes,” Menial said.

She was looking very serious. “That thing, the AI, the planner, it can only do what people let it tell them to do. Fergal said there are no such people yet. What he should have said is, there are no such people any more. Your people, colha Gree, they are not the types to let themselves be ordered about by communists—because they have never been ordered about by anyone!”

“Ah!” I said, suddenly understanding. “Because of the Deliverance, and the Deliverer!”

Menial laughed.

“ ‘No saviours from on high deliver’,” she said wryly. “Your people delivered themselves. That’s another thing I saw, and I’ll tell you about one day. If you’re still with me.”

“Oh, yes,” I said. “I’m still with you.”

“Good,” she said. “We have a lot to do and a long time to do it in.”

She looked around pointedly. The square was jumping.

“So, colha Gree, are you going to ask me for a dance?”

“Of course,” I said. “Would you do me the honour?”

For a second before we whirled away I stared at the scene before me, fixing it in my memory. Behind the statue Mars was rising, a blue-green dot in the East. Whatever became of the ship, whether it soared to a safe orbit or was blasted to smithereens, other ships would get out there somehow, on the sky road.

Whatever the truth about the Deliverer, she will remain in my mind as she was shown on that statue, and all the other statues and murals, songs and stories: riding, at the head of her own swift cavalry, with a growing migration behind her and a decadent, vulnerable, defenceless and rich continent ahead; and, floating bravely above her head and above her army, the black flag on which nothing is written.