The Star Fraction

18

The Americans Strike

They told her she had to get out, and she refused. They told her the Black Plan had been lost, the whole momentum and direction of the offensive thrown into disorder, and she nodded. They told her that the revolution was on the edge of defeat, that the regime could recover its balance and strike back at any moment, and she agreed.

She would not leave.

Van and the paramedics left, taking Moh’s body with them. Van had looked almost ashamed to ask, mumbling about ‘practical considerations’, fumbling with a pathetically irrelevant organ-donor card they’d found on him. She knew they wouldn’t give a part of this body to their worst enemies. They would dissect it with remotes in a sealed room, and when they’d learned what they could from its ravaged nerves they’d ash it.

They left the contents of his pockets: a few cards, a knife, a phone; and the helmet, the glades and the gun, tools of his trade. Van paused in the doorway and glanced from the gun to her, and back.

She shook her head fiercely. ‘I wouldn’t do it,’ she said. Perhaps missing the English ambiguity, Van left. She heard racing trucks, and a helicopter taking off. There was a fine research facility at Nairn, the Republic’s provincial capital: that was where it was headed. She might go there someday, find out if it had been the drugs that had killed him. Or the lack of drugs.

MacLennan’s words came back. She hadn’t been a good guard, a good soldier.

Not even a good scientist.

The memories that had eluded her on the hilltop came back now, clear and bitter. She remembered the war. The War of European Integration, when Germany had led a desperate bid to unite the continent under the star-circled banner, snuff out the national conflicts fuelled by US/UN meddling and create a counterweight to the New World Order.

Just a lass, not really understanding. The stifling heat of the Metro shelter had made her gasp and cry. Her mother shouted at her for walking over the bedding spread on the platforms. The three-metre-high screens curved to the subway walls showed the progress of the war.

They weren’t in this war: they were neutral; and yet British soldiers were fighting in it. Some of the channels spoke as if Britain itself were fighting. It was confusing and terrifying, especially as some people down in the shelter cheered when British soldiers appeared while others shouted with anger.

Her mother tried to explain. ‘It’s the King’s men who are in the war, love, not us. But the King’s government has a seat at the UN—’

She paused, not sure if Janis had understood. The girl nodded firmly. ‘The den of thieves and slaves,’ she said.

‘That’s right. And they’re fighting against the Germans on the side of the UN, that really means the Americans, so that when the war’s over the Americans will help the King and all his men to come back here and rule us again, or the Germans will attack us before the war’s over and then we’ll be defeated another way.’

She had been playing in one of the side corridors when she heard a roar of voices, and rushed to the subway platform to look at the screens and take in the excited words. Germany had stopped fighting. The war was over. She didn’t stop to see her parents; she didn’t see or hear them shove through through the crowds and call after her as she turned to race up the stationary escalators.

She had known only what was over, not what was beginning. She didn’t know that Berlin and Frankfurt had been incinerated in Israel’s last favour for its old protector. She didn’t know that this would be the pretext the US needed to make itself the arbiter of the planet. Nothing her parents had told her, nothing even in the political-education classes, could have prepared her for the next six days: the bombers roaming the undefended skies, the pillaging, rampaging assault of the US/UN’s illiterate conscripts and barbarian levies, the teletroopers punching through walls and crushing the defenders in steel fists, the demoralized crowds cheering peace and surrender and Restoration, turning on the radical regime that they blamed for their plight, joining in the witch-hunts and roundups and lynchings.

She didn’t know that the wind was from the east and that the rain washing away her sweat and stink was laden with fission products from the earlier obliteration of Kiev and Baku. Until her frantic mother dragged her back into the shelter she celebrated the peace.

Jordan and Cat walked hand in hand along the centre of Blackstock Road, in the middle of the crowd. They were not the only ones carrying weapons, and in other ways, too, their appearance was inconspicuous. It was a safe bet that no one here had ever seen Jordan on cable television. The people around them were Beulah City inhabitants: a very different section of the population from those who had come in at the northern border. They were machine-minders, waiters and waitresses, domestic servants, vehicle mechanics, drivers, warehousemen, storekeepers, street-cleaners, porters, nurses…Jordan had never realized before how vast and diverse was the invisible army of men and women whose labour was too cheap or too complicated to automate, but which made the kind of work he was familiar with possible.

‘That’s why the offices were empty,’ Cat said. ‘They were the ones who were on strike!’

They were probably all Christians. They carried signs hand-lettered with biblical texts, the lines about oppression and liberty and the poor and the rich and the weak and the powerful that BC’s preachers glossed over. They sang the discomfiting, awkward hymns and psalms seldom selected for the congregations.

‘Bash out de brains of de babies of Babylon,’ Cat hummed, gleefully paraphrasing, until Jordan nudged her to stop.

The thought that there were thousands of people in Beulah City who felt suffocated under the tutelage of the Elders, cheated in their dealings with their employers by the master-servant regulations, tormented by guilt and frustration, sceptical about the interpretations of scripture foisted on them (as if the interpretations themselves were anything but the opinions of men), angered at how conveniently God was on the dominant side of every relationship…Jordan found it almost unbearably exciting.

And also shaming, because it had never occurred to him at all.

‘It feels strange to be marching along like this,’ Cat said. Jordan smiled at her shining eyes.

‘I thought you’d been on a lot of demonstrations.’

‘Oh, sure, but first I used to be selling papers, later I’d be running up and down, walking backwards with a loud-hailer, covering the side-streets with a gun.’ She laughed. ‘Come to think of it, I’ve never just been part of the masses before.’

‘Perhaps we shouldn’t be just marching along,’ Jordan worried aloud. ‘Maybe we should be doing these things.’

Cat hissed quietly. When he glanced at her she flicked her gaze from side to side. He started looking out of the corners of his eyes himself, and noticed that, every ten metres or so along the sides of the march, sharp-eyed, hard-faced kids were walking. They’d vary their pace, faster or slower than the crowd, sometimes walking backwards, craning their necks; counting heads, meeting eyes. The Reds, the kids, the cadres.

‘This is organized?’ he said. The horizon all around was joined to the sky by loose black threads. Every few seconds another distant explosion shook the air. Small-arms fire crackled on the edge of hearing. ‘Whose idea was it, walking into a war zone?’

‘It’ll work,’ Cat said. ‘The fighting’s concentrated.’

‘For now.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Cat said. Her tone belied her advice.

Past Highbury Fields, down Upper Street. As they passed on their left the large, old pillared building which the Elders used as administrative offices the songs trailed off and people started shouting. The discordant yells were suddenly swamped by all the kids, the cadres, calling out at once.

‘Settle for what? DEMOCRACY! Restore it when? NOW!’

They varied it with FREE – DOM! and EQUAL RIGHTS! After a minute it caught on, leaving some of the cadres free to argue desperately with those in the crowd who were pushing out, trying to start a charge up the steps. Jordan saw them pointing at the doorways and balconies, and noticed with a shock the black muzzles pointing back.

‘Time to move up,’ Cat said. She tugged his hand. He followed as she expertly threaded her way through the march. Her high, clear voice floated back snatches of whatever the group they happened to be moving through was singing. ‘“So is our soul set free”…’scuse me ma’am…“thus escapèd we”…come on, Jordan.’

At the end of Islington High Street (the couple of hundred metres of office blocks at the foot of Upper Street) was the southern boundary of Beulah City, known derisively from the other side of it as Angel Gate. The checkpoint barriers were down, and a score of Warriors were spaced out across the road. They held tear-gas launchers pointing upwards and had submachine-guns slung on their shoulders. Jordan, by now in the front rank, couldn’t see any of the cadres – in fact, the front rank were almost all women. Cat squeezed his hand.

The crowd stopped about forty metres short of the cops. One of them stepped forward with a loud-hailer.

‘THEECE EECE EN EELLEEGAL GETHEREENG—’

The loud-hailer had not the volume to match the shout of fury and disgust from the crowd. Jordan rolled his eyes upward. Thank you, God. They couldn’t have made a worse choice. Exiles from South Africa were popular with the Warriors, and with nobody else.

Another officer hastily took the mike and continued.

‘I MUST ASK YOU TO DISPERSE! RETURN TO YOUR HOMES!’

‘Go home, ya bums, go home,’ the women sang back at them. Thousands of voices behind took up the chant with enthusiasm. Jordan wondered wildly where they could have heard it before, until he remembered that one of Beulah City’s preaching stadia had once been a football ground.

‘THIS IS A NATIONAL EMERGENCY!’

‘We shall not, we shall not, we shall not be moved!’

‘The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching!’ Oh, so there were cadres up here: female cadres. That chant didn’t get taken up, probably because nobody could believe it.

Jordan heard distant, rhythmic shouting from the other side of the boundary. Behind the Warriors’ heads he saw the banners, red flags and tricolours of another demonstration passing along City Road, swinging down into Pentonville Road.

He climbed on to a telecom box and stared. The crowds were less than a hundred metres apart; he could make out faces turning to look and then turning away. The shouts he heard didn’t sound friendly. Baffled, Jordan looked back over the crowd he was with and saw it as if from the outside: a forest of weird black-lettered slogans on white sheets and placards, crosses waving here and there. Like a mob of religious nutcases. He caught the eye of a woman who seemed to know what was going on, and mimed a walkie-talkie. She shook her head and spread her hands.

‘The workers! United! Shall never be defeated!’

That one too fizzled out, and certainly couldn’t have carried across the barrier. The Warrior boomed on about REBELS and COMMUNISTS. Jordan looked down at Cat. She reached out for something that was being passed from hand to hand, and passed it up to him. A loud-hailer, as if this were what he wanted.

‘Weren’t the cadres ready for this?’ he asked. Cat shook her head.

‘Expected the Warriors to be busy somewhere else. Drop didn’t come off. Comms are going haywire.’

‘Oh, shit! There’s got to be something—’ He squatted down, one eye on the wavering crowd, and said, ‘Cat! Think! Is there some slogan or song or something that sounds religious enough for this lot but, you know, would let the others know we’re on their side?’

Cat frowned up at him and then broke into a huge smile. She held out a hand to him and he tried to haul her up, but she tugged and he jumped down. ‘Hold the hailer high,’ she said, and took the mike. ‘Don’t look back.’ She began to walk backwards, step by deliberate step, beckoning with one hand to the women at the front of the crowd. Jordan walked beside her, holding the hailing horn over his head.

‘Here goes nothing,’ she said, and switched on the mike.

‘And did those feet in ancient time…’

She paused for a moment, making a lifting gesture until the second line was taken up:

‘WALK UPON ENGLAND’S MOUNTAINS GREEN?’

The crowd began to move forward. The voices were distorted, echoing between the buildings, but the tune was unmistakable and the gathering numbers joining in drowned the amplified squawking that got closer and closer to their backs. By the time they reached the DARK SATANIC MILLS Jordan could hear other voices from behind, another multitude taking up the lines of England’s anthem, when it had been a state of the United Republic.

Then there was a bang at his back. His whole body contracted in a reflex jolt that brought his head down and his feet up off the ground. At the same moment something whooshed above him. As his feet jarred back down he saw a burst of smoke between two ranks about twenty metres from the front. People around it scattered. Some fell, but scrambled to their feet and ran, hands to their mouths. An acrid whiff reached his nostrils. For a couple of seconds his lungs felt as if he’d inhaled acid. Through a wretched, racking cough he heard more bangs. Black tumbling shapes scythed the air overhead. He saw a woman raise an arm to fend one off, stagger back as a length of planking clattered to the street. She walked on for a few paces, then sagged and was grabbed by the woman next to her. Somebody else snatched up the wood and hurled it back. Jordan glanced over his shoulder and saw that most of the missiles – smashed bits of barrier, stones, placards, cans – were falling on the Warriors from both sides, but it was the stray shots that were doing all the damage: it wasn’t the marchers who had armour. Cat kept right on singing, her voice thin and hoarse.

Two Warriors charged past him and ploughed into the front of the crowd, lashing out with long truncheons. In a moment all the people seemed to be running, in different directions. Then, as if through clearing smoke, Jordan saw that nearly everybody he could see had a hand-gun and was raising it but not bringing it to bear. Jordan dropped the hailer and turned to Cat. Her red-eyed, tear-streaked, mucus-slimed face barely registered surprise as he caught her by the shoulder and pulled her down with him. The pistol she’d given him was in his hand. He had no idea how to use it.

He saw the now ragged line of Warriors, the wreckage of the border barrier a few metres ahead across a stone-strewn gap, and other weapons brandished by the other crowd. Still, silent seconds passed. A Warrior officer waved his arms, crossing and uncrossing them above his head. Warriors who’d run into the crowds were propelled out of them. With slow and cautious steps all the Warriors retreated to the sides of the street.

Cat stood up and Jordan followed, then had to run to keep up as everybody else moved forward and the two crowds became one. There was an overwhelming, confusing moment of handshakes and hugs, of swaying and shouting, and then they all started walking forward, into Pentonville Road. The song was taken up again. BRING ME MY ARROWS OF DESIRE. Jordan looked sideways at Cat, who for some reason had chosen that moment to look at him.

The streets from Islington to Marybone, to Primrose Hill and St John’s Wood, were builded over with pillars of gold, and there Jerusalem’s pillars stood.

Janis watched the uprising on television, as she had watched the war.

The crowds were moving now, partly refugees from the fighting that had reached the suburbs, partly demonstrators taking the fight to the centre. ANR and Left Alliance agitators laboured to turn the one into the other. Along Bayswater and Whitechapel and Gray’s Inn Road they converged, and merged. Across the city, and across all the other cities that seemed to be one city as she flicked from channel to channel, the walls were coming down, the divided communities breaking through and discovering that they were one people. The front ranks of soldiers tore insignia off, surrendered rifles. The harder corps backed off, taking up new positions or vanishing into obscure doorways while the crowds ran past them.

And elsewhere, outside the cities, shown on shaky cameras from cover, from quickly detected and obliterated ’motes, other forces were beginning to move. The barb, alerted like sharks to the smell of blood.

Even from here she could see it wasn’t over, that nothing had been settled yet. But the crowds thought it was over, cheering, splashing in fountains, ransacking offices, pulling down statues and dancing in the streets.

Janis watched the crowds, her face wet, remembering herself thinking it was all over and dancing in the street, dancing in the hard rain.

This time she knew what to expect. She systematically went through the house, packing what portable and non-perishable food she found. Without sentiment she divided the contents of Moh’s baggage and hers, ending up with a single backpack whose priority content was ammo. She kept one eye on the televisions – showing squares and streets still crowded in the dusk, euphoria giving way to tension and determination – and scanned the screen of the gun, adjusting the sights to her size, committing its protocols to memory.

She looked into its deep storage, as Moh had done when he’d first checked it out. What she saw was incomprehensible, a blurred flicker of motion; definitely not, as he’d described it, passive data storage. She backed out quickly.

The phone beeped. She thumbed the receiver. Snow and lines appeared, then the machine cycled through backup systems. When the image stabilized it was of Van’s face. The quality was worse than she’d seen in years.

‘Hello, Janis. Are you all right?’

‘I’m fine. Now. For now. How are things with you?’

Van grimaced. ‘Complicated. The offensive has been aborted, but our unreliable allies in the Left Alliance have triggered a civilian uprising, which we are trying to direct. There are grave dangers, because we have not annihilated the key enemy units. They are holding off from decisive engagement, expecting UN intervention at any moment. So are we. The situation in Britain has gone right to the top of all agendas. Leave the settlement as soon as you’re ready. The first thing they’ll do is hit known ANR camps.’

‘This is an ANR camp?’

‘No, it’s an undefended civilian settlement. That’s why we evacuated it.’

‘Oh.’ Yes, that was the thing to do when you expected to be fighting the US/UN. Hurry the civilians out of civilian areas, carry the wounded out of anything with a Red Cross on it.

‘Dr Van.’

‘Yes.’

‘Can you tell me – have you found out anything yet?’

Van nodded, his face looking ancient. ‘I can tell you now. The whole comm network is compromised; we have nothing to lose. This afternoon Donovan’s organization launched a massive virus attack. It was apparently targeted on the Watchmaker AIS. If any of them remain they are in isolated hardware. That was when we lost our system, what you call the Black Plan. And Dissembler.’ He shrugged. ‘They may have been destroyed at the same time. And it would seem likely that—’

‘You’re telling me he was killed by a computer virus?’ The monstrous comedy of it fought in her eyes and throat.

‘I know,’ Van said, ‘it seems grotesque. At some level I think we didn’t believe that what Kohn reported was really happening. But I’ve seen the EMGs of his synapses, and they are…unique. Even in my experience.’

A slight undertone of his voice brought the thought to mind that there were more monstrous deaths than this, worse and weirder ways to go. Janis took a deep breath.

‘I’m ready,’ she said.

She picked up the gun.

Van told her where to find directions to the nearest deep shelter, and she walked that night for kilometres along dark roads. At a hydroelectric power station she stopped and called out the passwords, and a hand came out of the darkness and guided her inside a mountain. In the morning she saw outside on the window screens, and was absurdly reassured to see that this mountain and all the other hills about it were patterned with varied shades of red-brown and yellow and faded green, like camouflage.

Later that morning she was pulled excitedly to watch a replay of an incident that had just happened. A fighter-bomber flashed along the glen, then exploded in an airburst that turned the screen white. As the explosion faded they saw the fireball rolling and tumbling and shedding wreckage for several kilometres before everything hit the ground, setting heather alight.

They replayed it lots of times, always with the same cheers. She hoped the girl in the observation post had kept her head down and her eyes shut.

She never learned how many people lived inside that mountain. Hundreds. The fighters were somewhere else; their absence made little difference to the structure of the population here – there were young men and women as well as old, and there were parents who worried about children who were with the fighters.

The screens that showed the news were at first jammed. As the communities had come together the government had extended what grip it could. It could not hide the mounting waves of demonstrations and strikes that broke against it, or the harassment of its forces by units of the ANR, now fallen back to guerilla fighting but on a far wider scale than before the offensive.

The US President announced a new levy of conscription.

The censorship and jamming stopped. There was talk of a new constitution, a revision of the Settlement. A day later there was talk about the revolution, as if it had already happened. They offered a New Kingdom.

‘I don’t go much for intuition,’ Jordan said, ‘but I’ve got a real bad feeling about this.’

It was the fourth day since the faltering offensive had been taken up and taken over by the rising crowds, and the biggest demonstration yet, overflowing Trafalgar Square. The Hanoverian troops were nowhere to be seen, but everyone knew where they were. Invisible lines were not crossed.

The sky was a red shout above the black streets. News-hawks circled overhead, their mikes and lenses and pheromone detectors out like vibrissae, alert for the rumour, the glance, the smell of fear. Jordan and Cat sat on the steps of the National Gallery, drinking coffee from styrofoam cups and muching doner kebabs. (Thirty-five marks: the petty bourgeoisie had thrown itself into the revolution in its own inimitable way.)

‘I know what you mean,’ Cat said. ‘It’s intended. The whole City of Westminster is intended to make you feel like that. Nothing but shops and offices and official buildings and statues. It all belongs to capital or the state. No, it’s more than that. It’s ornate, gross. Centuries of surplus value stored up like fat. This time I hope we level the place.’

‘Well, that’s part of it,’ Jordan said, gazing over the knots of arguing people that filled the square. ‘Not all. We seem to have all this power, the government’s on the run, but we haven’t won.’

‘Damn right we haven’t,’ Cat said. ‘That’s why we’re here. We’re gonna keep coming here until the Hanoverians come out of their bunkers and barracks with their hands up, or come out shooting.’

‘At least some of us will be shooting back.’

Cat looked at him. ‘Not for long.’ She leaned back against the stone, closed her eyes and began to sing as if to herself:

Rise up, all foes of intervention,

rise up, all those who would be free!

Don’t trust the state and its intentions

we ourselves must win our liberty!

He didn’t know the song, but he recognized it with a shiver down his spine: he’d heard it as background noise on history tapes of other demonstrations, in other squares, other cities – Seoul and São Paulo, Moscow and Jo’burg and Berlin. After it the gas-shells would cough, the rifles speak, the bullets sing.

so now we face the final showdown

for the skies and the streets of Earth.

What though they start the fatal countdown?

There are better worlds in birth!

So comrades come rally

and the last fight let us—

Something had happened. A gasp, a whisper, a rumour spread through the crowd in visible shockwaves. Cat broke off singing and sat up, one hand on her ear. She turned and pressed his ear, too, against the tiny speaker. He heard the news of the century’s turning-point while leaning on her cheek with her hair across his face.

America was on strike from coast to coast.

Cat had such a look of triumph that it was as if she’d pulled the whole thing off herself. ‘We always knew this would happen!’ she said. ‘“The West shall rise again” – remember? The American workers have finally told the imperialists to shove it! Yeah, man! Yee fucking hah!’ She jumped to her feet and cupped her hands to her mouth and yelled: ‘US! UN! Remember the West shall rise again! Vive la quatrième internationale!’

A few metres away from them an old man from the Beulah City contingent burst into speech, leaning back and looking upwards at the news-hawks, his fists raised above his head. ‘“Sit thou silent, and get thee into darkness, O daughter of the Chaldeans: for thou shalt no more be called, The lady of kingdoms. Let now the astrologers, the stargazers, the monthly prognosticators, stand up, and save thee from these things that shall come upon thee!”’

He wandered off through the crowd, still shouting imprecations.

‘What’s all that about?’ Cat asked. Jordan grinned at the joy and puzzlement on her face.

‘Babylon is fallen,’ he said.

‘Does that mean we’ve won?’ Janis asked, when the dangerous driving and the firing into the air had stopped. The four men who shared with her the front seat of the truck all shouted ‘Yes!’ or ‘No!’, and then laughed. As soon as the news had come through she had been told to leave the shelter. The small convoy had picked her up (gun on the ground, one hand on her head, the other with a thumb stuck out) at the Strathcarron junction. They were heading south at a speed that forced her to look into the far distance or at the faces of her companions – anywhere but at the road.

‘That’s your answer for you,’ said the man between her and the door. Donald Patel had an accent like MacLennan’s and it seemed incongruous with his delicate dark features. ‘It means the Americans are not coming, that’s for sure. They won’t be seeing much of the rocket’s red glare over there for a while.’ More laughter.

After half an hour news came through that His Majesty’s Government had decided to continue the struggle against terrorism from exile. A new voice interrupted, announcing that the United Republic had been restored, and a provisional government established. The Hanoverian forces on the ground, bidding to negotiate an end to the conflict short of actual surrender, were politely informed this was not an option.

Janis realized, as the trucks lurched and swayed towards Glasgow and the traffic got heavier all the time, that the men’s jubilation at the victory of the Republic was not that of soldiers being demobilized. Most of the people on the road had just been mobilized. They were going to war. And she wouldn’t be waving them a cheery goodbye and catching the red-eye to Heathrow.

At Buchanan Street Bus Station the convoy stopped. They all piled out and were pointed to a huge marquee where she was stamped and registered and sworn in again, stripped and showered and tagged. She was a soldier.

The enemy was described by her unit’s political officer: ‘It’s not so much the Hanoverian remnants we have to worry about. It’s all the Free State rabble that flourished under their protection. The eco-terrorists, the cultist mini-states, the backyard separatists and sandpit socialists who betrayed the Republic the first time. The fake left who preferred having their own petty kingdoms to fighting their corner in a democracy. They all went along with the Restoration Settlement and only made noises when our people were surviving like hunted beasts. Now they’re coming out of their holes to have a go at carving a bigger chunk for themselves. They think the Republic is weaker than the Kingdom. Our job is to make them think again. They can have any way of life they want, run their communities as they see fit, but they can’t keep other folk out with guns or use guns to expand their territories. They can even keep their guns, but it’s going to be our guns on the street.’

All the species of cranks and creeps, she thought. This was her war.