The Sky Road

6 Light Weapons

Long ago there had been another country, called the International. It was a country of the mind, a country of hope, and it encompassed the world. Until one day, in August 1914, its citizens went to war with each other, and the world ended. Everything died in that war, God and Country and International and Civilisation; died, and went to hell. Everybody died. The survivors thought they were alive, but they were not. After August 1914 there had been no living people in the world—only dead people on leave, the damned and the demons. The last morally responsible people in the world had been the Reichstag fraction of the German Social-Democratic Party. They had voted the credits for the Kaiser’s war, against every resolution of their past. They had known the right thing to do, and they had chosen the wrong. All subsequent history had been that of the damned, of poor devils struggling in the hell these men had pitched them into; and nobody could be judged for how they behaved in hell.

This thought, with its bleak blend of Christian and Marxist heresies, had originally been expounded to her by David Reid, one night many decades ago, when he was very drunk. It had sustained Myra through many a bad night. At other times—in the days, and the good nights—it seemed a callow undergraduate nihilism, shallow and wicked and absurd. But in the bad nights it struck her as profound and true, and, in its way, life-affirming. If you thought of people as alive and each having a life to live, you’d get so depressed at what so many had got instead, this past century and a half, that on a bad night you’d be tempted to add your own death to theirs, and thus make an undetectable increment to that already unimaginable, unthinkable number.

A number which Myra, on her bad nights, suspected she had already increased quite considerably. Not directly—if she had sinned at all, it had been a sin of omission—and nobody had ever blamed her for it, but she blamed herself. If she had sold the deterrence policy to the German imperialists when they’d needed it, torn up all her existing contracts and sorted them out later, how many people would now be alive who now were dead? On the bad nights the answer seemed to run into millions. At other times, on more sober reflection, she realised she wasn’t in that league; she wasn’t up there with the Big Three; there was almost a sort of adolescent self-dramatisation in the pretension; if she belonged in that company at all it was in the second or third rank, below the great revolutionaries but up there with the more destructive of the great imperialists, Churchill and Mountbatten and Johnson and people of that ilk.

Her shoes were kicked off under a chair, the black crepe and devore dress was across the back of the chair, the sable hat was flung in a corner, the black fur coat was on the floor, the whisky bottle was open on the table and Leonard Cohen’s black lyrics disturbed the smoky air: Manhattan, then Berlin, indeed.

Myra was having one of her bad nights.

The late-spring night outside the thin, old curtains was cold, and the central-heating radiator didn’t do much to hold back the chill. The main room of the flat felt small, almost cramped, like a student bedsit She had a kitchen, a bathroom, a bedroom; but most of what defined her life was crammed into this living-room. The shelves were lined with books, two or three rows deep, though she had the entire 2045 edition (the last) of the Library of Congress, sharing space with its Sterling search engine on a freebie disk somewhere in the clutter. Her music, her computer software and hardware, her pictures, all were piled up in similarly silted layers of technological generations, with the most recent stuff at the top or on the outside, and everything back to CDs and PCs and even, at some pre-Cambrian level, vinyl, in the strata below. She had, in her eyeband, ready access to any scene on Earth or off it, but she still had posters on the walls.

Once, these posters had consisted mainly of old advertisements for the ISTWR’s exports. But in recent years, one by one, the tacked-up shots of liftoffs and payloads, missiles and explosions had been tugged down in moments of shame and fury, to be crumpled and binned, and replaced by scenes of Kazakh nature and tradition. Mountains and meadows, horsemen and peasants, dancers in embroidered costumes—a whole oriental Switzerland of tourist attractions. Kazakhstan was not doing too badly, even today. It had moved away from its disastrous, Soviet-era polluting industries and extractive monocultures, and put its prairies to a more productive and natural use in cattle-raising. The Kazakh horsemen were back in the saddle.

Myra leaned back and stretched. It was nearly midnight. She’d had far too much to drink. Her few hours in the bar with Valentina had been followed by an hour or two of drinking on her own. She was so drunk she was lucid, “fleeing” as Dave used to call it. Or possibly she was sobering up, smoothly and gradually, and was in the state where repeated applications of the hair of the dog were postponing the inevitable hammer-blow of the hangover. But drunk or sober, with or without Reid’s antinomian justification, she had to act. She had to reach the International.

There were two Internationals (“for large values of two” as Reid had once put it, alluding to the numerous splits): the Second and the Fourth. When most people talked about the International, they meant the Second—the successor of the one that had torn itself apart in 1914, and had painfully reassembled its severed limbs in the course of three world wars, five world slumps and one successful world revolution. Even today it was massive: the Socialist International’s affiliated parties and trade unions and co-operatives and militias had an aggregate membership in the tens of millions, still.

What Myra meant, and Valentina meant, and Georgi had meant by the International was a less imposing institution, a remnant of a fragment, most of it embedded in the greater body of the Second, a splinter travelling slowly through its veins. The Fourth International’s membership was in the low thousands, scattered around the world—and, as Valentina had reminded her, off the world, thanks to its pioneering efforts at unionising the space rigs back in the 2020s. It was now almost dormant, a tenuous network of old comrades who couldn’t quite say goodbye to each other, or to the dreams of their fervent younger days.

The radical sects of the English Revolution, the Muggletonians and Gameronians and Fifth Monarchy Men, had persisted as dwindling, marginal congregations for centuries after their Kingdom had failed to come; so it would be, Myra thought, for the erstwhile partisans of the Fourth. She knew that, but still she had paid her dues.

Now it was time to get something back for her money. For a start, she could find out what her comrades had done with her country’s nukes.

Myra flew through virtual space, drunk in charge of a data-drive. New View floated before her, its image filling her eyeband’s field. The habitat was a sort of orbital commune—world socialism, in a very small world—which had been put together by the left wing of the space movement, back when such ideas seemed to matter. The graticule showed it was hundreds of metres across, a circular accretion of habitats, salvaged fuel-tanks, cannibalised spacecraft. She reached out and turned it about in her datag-loved hands, mildly amused at the chill, prickly tactile feedback, and peered at the small print of addresses on the hull until she found the name she sought.

Logan; whether forename or surname, real name or party name she didn’t know; she’d never heard the man called anything else. There it was, scribed on a hull panel from an old McDonnell Douglas SSTO heavy-lifter. She tapped it and the view zoomed in, to show a window with the man’s face peering out. It was an engagingly apt interface. Myra zapped a hailing code, and the face at the window responded.

“Oh, hi? Myra Godwin? Just a moment, please.” The fetch wavered and Logan’s real face, subtly different, seamlessly replaced it, pulling back as the window icon widened to an interior view of an actually windowless room.

The compartment was full-spectrum strip-lit, the glowing tubes like shafts of sunlight among intertwined vines and branches, cables and tubes. Logan floated in the centre of the room. His cropped white hair matched his white stubble. He wore a faded blue singlet and baggy pants. Around his brow was a toolkit headband on which a loupe and a light were mounted; a standard eyeband was shoved higher up on his forehead. He was bent around the open back of a control-panel which he had gripped between his feet and was working on with a hand laser and a set of jeweller’s screwdrivers.

He flipped the loupe up from his eye and grinned at her.

“Well, Myra, long time no see.” He still had the London accent, overlaid with a space-settler drawl. His space fraction had picked up a lot of people she and Georgi had known in Kazakhstan, tough trade-union militants blooded in the Nazbarayev years.

“Yeah, I’ve missed you too, Logan. How’s life on New View?”

Logan gestured with one hand, automatically making a compensating movement with the other. “OK. We’ve got pretty much up to complement population-wise, near a thousand last time I checked. We’re making a good living, though—got a lot of products and skills the white settlers need. And the old Mars project is chugging along.”

You’re still doing that?”

Logan turned up his thumb. “Kitting out the expedition, bit by bit. No intention of hanging around here forever—not with the white settlers staking out the Moon, anyhow. Nobody’s even got much scientific interest in Mars any more, “specially after that contamination thing came out.”

Myra nodded glumly. It had indeed come as a bit of a disappointment that Mars had an entire biosphere of busily evolving micro-organisms, of recent origin; in the 1970s the Soviets had proudly deposited a piece of paper autographed by Leonid Brezhnev on the Red Planet, which was now being very slowly terraformed by the descendants of bacteria from the General Secretary’s sweat.

“So we’re gonna go for it,” Logan went on. “Some time in the next couple of years, we’re moving it out.”

“You’re going to move New View?” Myra smiled at Logan, and at herself—each question so far had ended on a high note of astonishment.

“Minus a few hundred tons of stuff we won’t need, but basically, yes. Fill her up—well, fill up a few tanks, I mean—with Lunar polar water, buy a fusion engine from the white settlers and push off on a Hohmann orbit. We got enough old spacecraft lashed into this junk-heap to build landers, then habitats on the ground.”

“You’ve got it all worked out, I see,” said Myra. “Well, good luck to you with that.” The Mars colony scheme had been pending, Real Soon Now, on Logan’s agenda for as long as she’d known him. “However, I’ve got something a bit more urgent to ask you. These white settlers of whom you speak, they aren’t by any chance the people I once made a lot of money out of sticking on top of Protons and Energias and sending out there?”

“That’s the ones,” Logan said. “And the new lot coming out on the diamond ships, of course.” He laughed. “The colonial bourgeoisie!”

“Well, whatever you want to call them,” said Myra, “you know they’re planning to take charge, through the ReUN and the battlesats?”

“Oh, sure,” Logan said. “Everybody knows that.” He shrugged. “What can you do? And anyways, what difference is it gonna make to us?” He flourished his tiny laser. “We’re safe.”

“No, you’re not,” said Myra. She flicked her gaze upwards, checking the firewall ’ware. It was sound. “I’ve just learned—from my Defence Minister, no less—that I have a clump of city-buster nukes stashed somewhere in the clutter around you.”

“Is that a problem?” Logan asked. “Best place for them, surely.”

She had to admire his cool.

“Somehow I don’t think that was why the International asked for them to be put there.”

“Ah,” said Logan. “So you know about that.”

“Yeah,” said Myra. “Thanks a bunch for not telling me.”

Logan mumbled something entirely predictable about need-to-know. Myra cut off his ramble with an angry chop of her hand.

“Give me a fucking break,” she said, exasperated. “I can figure that out for myself. The nukes are an element of the situation, but they’re not my main concern right now. I just thought I should let you know that I know about them, for the same reason that you should’ve told me: for the sake of politeness, if nothing else. OK?”

“Well, yeah, OK,” Logan allowed, grudgingly. “So what is your main problem?”

“I was wondering,” said Myra, “if you’d grabbed them because you intended to do something about the coup. Like, you know, stop it.”

Logan laughed. “Me personally?”

“No. The International. And don’t tell me you personally are the only member it’s got up there.”

“Oh, no, not at all.” Logan stared at her, obviously puzzled. “We got plenty of comrades, I mean New View is basically ours, but it’s been a long time since the Party had an army, Myra, you know that as well as I do. We do have a military org, like, but it’s just a… a small cadre.”

“Of course I know that. But I also know what a small military cadre is for. It’s so that when you do need an army you can recruit your soldiers from other armies. You telling me the space fraction’s done no Party work on the battlesats? In all those years?”

Logan looked uncomfortable. “Not exactly, no, I’m not saying that. We have—well, naturally we have sympathisers, we get reports—”

“And so do we,” she said. “Some of them from the same comrades as you do.” She wasn’t entirely certain of this—need-to-know, again—but it would give him something to think about. “Who actually knows about the nukes?”

“Valentina Kozlova,” said Logan. “And your ex-husband, Georgi Davidov.” If Logan noticed Myra’s involuntary start at this news, he gave no sign. “And me, obviously. That’s it. The only people who know. Unless there’s been a leak.”

“Hmm,” said Myra. “Reid doesn’t seem to know about them—he knows we have nukes in space, but he thinks they’re all in Earth orbit.” She paused.

“Wait a fucking minute. If you’re the only person up here who knows about them, then the request from the Party a couple of years ago was in fact a request from you. You, personally.”

“Well, yeah,” Logan said. He didn’t seem bothered at all. “In my capacity as Party Secretary for the space fraction, that is.”

“You took it upon yourself to do that? What the fuck was on your mind?” God, she thought, there I go again with the incredulous screech. She added, in a flat, steady voice, “Besides, what gave you the right to interfere in my section, and in my section’s state?”

Logan squirmed, like someone shifting uncomfortably in an invisible chair. “I had a valid instruction to do it. From the military org.”

“Ah! So there is someone else who knows about it!”

“Not as such,” said Logan. “The military org is…” He hesitated.

“Like you said, a small cadre?” Myra prompted.

“In a manner of speaking,” said Logan. He looked as though he was steeling himself for an admission. “It’s an AI.”

Myra felt her back thump against the back of her chair—she was literally thrown by this statement. She took a deep breath.

“Let’s scroll this past us again, shall we? Tell me if I’ve got this right. Two years ago, at the Sputnik centenary, Val gets a message from you, asking for part of our stash of nukes. It’s a valid Party request, she decides I don’t need to know, and she blithely complies. And the reason this happened is because you got a request from a fucking computer?”

“An AI military expert system,” Logan said pedantically. “But yeah, that’s about the size of it.”

Myra groped blindly for a cigarette, lit it shakily. “And just how long has the Fourth International been taking military advice from an AI?” Logan did some mental arithmetic. “About forty years,” he said.

It was no big secret, Myra learned. Just one of those things she’d never needed to know. The AI had originated as an economic and logistic planning system devised by a Trotskyist software expert in the British Labour Party. This planning mechanism had been used by the United Republic of Great Britain, and inherited by its self-proclaimed successor, the underground Army of the New Republic, after Britain had been occupied, and its monarchy restored, by the Yanks in the Third World War. It had acquired significant upgrades, not all of them intended, during the twenty-year guerilla war that followed, and had played some disputed role in the British national insurrection during the Fall Revolution in 2045. Its central software routines had been smuggled into space by a refugee from the New Republic’s post-victory consolidation. It had been expanding its capacities, and its activities, ever since.

“Most people call it the General,” Logan told her. “Aces the Turing, no sweat.”

“But what’s it doing?” Myra asked. “If it’s such a shit-hot adviser, why aren’t we winning?”

“Depends what you mean by ‘we’,” Logan said. “And what you mean by ‘winning’.”

Myra had, she realised, no answer to that. Perhaps the AI adviser had picked up on the Analysis analysis, and agreed that the situation was hopeless.

Logan was looking at her with sympathetic curiosity, a sort of reversed mirror-image of the hostile bafflement she was directing at him. He must have gone native up there; he’d got used to this situation, and to this style of work, over the decades, and had forgotten the common courtesies of even their notional comradeship.

“Anyways,” he was saying, “you can ask it all that yourself.” He poked, absently, at the control-panel between his feet; looked up; said, Tutting you through.”

Before Myra could so much as open her mouth, Logan had vanished, and had been replaced by the military AI. She’d had a mental picture of it, ever since Logan had first mentioned it: something like the Jane’s software, a VR gizmo of lines and lights. At best a piece of simulant automation, like Parvus.

He was a young man in sweat-stained camos, sitting casually on a rock in a clearing in temperate woodland: lichen and birch-bark, sound of water, birdsong, leaf-shadow, a wisp of woodsmoke. It looked like he’d paused here, perhaps was considering setting up a camp. The man looked every inch the commandante—his long, wavy black hair and his black stubble and dark eyes projected something of the glamour of Guevara, the arrogance of Trotsky. He also reminded Myra, disturbingly, of Georgi—enough to make her suspect that the image she saw was keyed to her personality; that it had been precisely tuned to give her this overwhelming impression of presence, of charisma.

“Hello,” he said. “I’ve wanted to meet you for a long time, Myra.”

She opened her hands. You could have called.”

“No doubt I would have done, quite soon.” The entity smiled. “I prefer that people come to me. It avoids subsequent misunderstandings. Anyway—I understand you have two concerns: the nukes at La-grange, and the space-movement coup. Regarding the first—the nukes are still under your control. Your Defence Minister still has the access codes. I requested that the weapons themselves be moved here for security.” He shrugged, and smiled again. “They’re all yours. So are the weapons in Earth orbit—which are, of course, more immediately accessible, and usable. This brings me to your other concern—the coup. It is imminent.”

“How imminent?”

“In the next few days. They’ll ram through the vote on reorganisation of the ReUN, and the new Security Council will issue orders to seize the battlesats. They have the forces to do it.”

He paused, looking at her, or through her. “But we have the forces to stop it. I can assure you, Myra, it’s all in hand.”

She shook her head. “That isn’t what our intelligence indicates. I’ve checked, my Defence and Foreign ministries have checked. We have agents in the batdesats, as you must know—hell, some of them must be in your own military org! If such a thing exists.” She wished she had read some of those mailings.

“It most certainly does exist,” the General said firmly. “And it’s been feeding you disinformation.”

What?

The entity stood up and stepped towards her in its virtual space. It spread its hands and assumed an apologetic expression, but with a sly conspiratorial gleam in its eyes.

“Forgive me, Comrade Davidova. This was not done against you. It was done against our common enemy: Reid’s faction of the space movement.”

“How—” she began, but she saw, she saw.

“I’m telling you this now,” the General said, “because today you lost your last disloyal Commissar. Alexander Sherman has been passing on information to Reid for months. He wasn’t the first, but he was the last.”

“Who were the others?”

The General moved his hand in a smoothing gesture. T can’t tell you that without compromising current operations. That particular information is of no further use to you anyway.”

“I suppose not,” Myra concurred reluctantly. She wished she knew who the traitors were, all the same; hoped Tatanya and Michael hadn’t been among them. She’d quite liked those two…

“So you used them—and us—as a conduit for disinformation?”

The General nodded. “And for information going the other way—your updates to Jane’s have been most helpful.”

“Jeez.” Her reactions to this were interestingly complicated, she thought distantly. On the one hand she felt sore at having been used, having been lied to; on the other, she could admire the stagecraft of the deception. Above all she felt relieved that the gloomily negative assessments she’d worried over were all wrong.

Unless the situation was even worse than she’d thought—

“The situation is better than you think, by far,” said the General. “We have our people in place—the battlesats won’t be taken without a struggle, which in most cases we expect to win.”

“Most cases won’t be enough. Even one battlesat—”

“Indeed. Which is where your orbital weaponry comes in. The lasers, the EMP bursters, the smart pebbles, the hunter-killers, the kinetic-energy weapons Myra hadn’t known her arsenal was so extensive. (God, to think that stockpile had once belonged to the Pope! Well, to the Swiss Guards, anyway—quite possibly His Holiness had been discreetly left out of the loop on that one.) She shivered in her wrap, tugged it around her shoulders, lit another cigarette. She didn’t know what to say: she felt her cheeks burning under the General’s increasingly quizzical regard.

“What do you want us to do with them?” she asked at last.

Tm sure you can work that out,” he said. “I’ll be in touch.”

“But—”

He gave her a smile; heartbreaking, satanic.

“1 hope I see you again,” he said. He reached out a hand and made some fine adjustment to the air. The link went down.

Myra took off her eyeband and rubbed her eyes. Then she walked unsteadily to the kitchen and made some tea, and sat drinking it and smoking for about ten minutes, staring blankly into the virtual spaces of her mind. She supposed she should do something, or tell someone, but she couldn’t think what to do, or whom to tell.

Time enough in the morning, she decided.

Her bedroom was small, a couple of metres’ clearance on three sides of the double bed giving barely enough space for a wardrobe and dressing-table. Over the years the room had accumulated a smothering snowfall of soft furnishings, needlework and ornaments; pretty things she’d bought on impulse and never had the heart to throw out. The process was a natural selection for an embarrassingly large collection of grannyish clutter. Now and again—as now—it infuriated her in its discrepancy with the rest of her life, her style, her look. And then, on reflection, she’d figure that the incongruity of the room’s appearance was what made it a place where she could forget all care, and sleep.

In the morning it seemed like a dream.

All the more so, Myra realised as she struggled up to consciousness through the layers of sleep and hangover and tangled, sweat-clammy bedding, because she had dreamed about the General. She felt vaguely ashamed about that, embarrassed in front of her waking self; not because the dream had been erotic—though it had been—but because it had been besotted, devoted, servile, like those dreams the Brits used to have about Royalty. She sat up in the bed and pushed back the pillow, leaned back and tried to think about it rationally.

The entity, the military AI, would have had God only knew how many software generations to evolve an intimate knowledge of humanity. It had had time to become what the Japanese called an idoru, a software representation that was better than the real thing, smarter and sexier than any possible human mind or form, like those wide-eyed, faux-innocent anime brats or the simulated stars of pornography and romance. Sex wasn’t the half of it—there were other codes, other keys, in the semiotics of charm: the subtle suggestions of wisdom, the casual hints at a capacity for violence, the assumed readiness to command, the mirroring glance of empathy; all the elements that went to make up an image of a man that men would die for and women would fall for.

So, she told herself, she wasn’t such a pathetic case, after all. Happens to the best of us. As she reached for her medical kit and clicked out the tablets to fix the hangover, she caught herself smiling at the memory of the General’s smile. Annoyed with herself again, she got out of bed and padded to the kitchen in her fluffy slippers and fuzzy nightgown, and gulped cold water while the coffee percolated. She added a MoodLift tab to her ReSolve dose and her daily intake of anti-ageing supplements and knocked them back all at once. She felt better.

The time was 8 o’clock. She put her contacts in and flicked on a television tile and watched it while spooning muesli and yoghurt and listening to the murmured morning briefing from Parvus. The news, as usual, was bad, but no worse than usual. No martial music or ballet on all channels—that was enough to count as good news. After a coffee and a cigarette she felt almost human. She supposed she might as well get up and go to work.

The walk to the government building woke her up even more, boosted her mood better than any tab. The air was crisp, the morning sky unexpectedly colourful, reds and oranges and yellows shading to green at the horizon. She noticed people staring up at the sky.

Its colours were changing visibly, flowing—suddenly she realised she was looking at an aurora, thousands of miles south of where aurorae should be seen. As she stopped and looked up, open-mouthed, the sky brightened for a few seconds from some great illumination below the horizon.

She ran. She sprinted through the streets, barged through the doors, yelled at Security and bounded up the stairs. As she strode into her office her earpiece pinged, and a babble of tinny voices contended for her attention. She sat heavily on the edge of her desk and flipped down her eyeband, keyed up the news.

The tanks were rolling, all around the world.

Without taking her eyes off the newsfeeds, Myra slid across her desk and lowered herself into her chair. She rattled out commands on the armrest keypads, transforming the office’s walls into screens for an emergency command-centre. The first thing she did was secure the building; then she hit the emergency call for Sovnarkom. The thrown fetches of Andrei, Denis and Valentina sprang to attention on the screens—whether their physical bodies were in their offices, on their way in or still in bed didn’t matter, as long as their eyebands were online.

Myra glanced around their virtual presences.

“OK, comrades, this is the big one,” she said. “First, is everything clear with us?”

It was unlikely that the ISTWR’s tiny Workers’ Militia and tinier People’s Army would have joined the coup, but more unlikely things were happening before her eyes every few seconds. (A night-time amphibious landing at South Street Seaport! Tanks in Pennsylvania Avenue! Attack helicopters shelling Westminster Bridge!)

“We’re sound,” said Denis. Even his fetch looked drawn and hung-over. “So’s Kazakhstan, they’re staying out of this. Army’s on alert, of course. Baikonur cosmodrome’s well under government control. So’s the airstrip at Yubileine. Almaty’s mobilised, militia on the streets, but they’re loyal.”

You hope, Myra thought The neat thing about a military coup was that mobilisation against it could quite easily become part of it, as the lines of command writhed and broke and reconnected.

“Good, great. North-eastern front? Val, you awake?”

“Yeah, I’m with you. No moves from the Sheenisov so far.” Valentina patched in a satellite feed, updated by the second: the steppe was still.

“What about Mutual Protection here?”

“Haven’t moved from the camp—and the camp’s quiet.”

Myra relaxed a little. “Looks like our immediate surroundings are secure, then. Any word from orbit, Val?”

Valentina shook her head. “All comms are very flaky, can’t get anything coherent from the settlements, the factories, the battlesats—”

“That’s impossible!” She thought about how it might be possible. “Oh my God, die sky—”

“About ten minutes ago,” Andrei announced, from some glassy trance, “somebody nuked the Heaviside Layer. Half a dozen bursts—not much EMP, but quite enough of that and of charged particles to scramble radio signals for a good few hours.”

“So how are we getting even the news?” Myra demanded.

“Cable,” said Andrei. “Fibre-optics aren’t affected. And some stuff’s getting through by laser, obviously, like Val’s spysat downlink. Should increase as people switch, or improvise. But for the moment it’s dust in everybody’s eyes.”

“Didn’t know the space movement had orbital nukes,” Denis said. “In fact, didn’t know anybody but us had any serious nukes.”

That was a point. Nuclear disarmament had been the only universally popular, and (almost) universally successful, policy of the US/UN after the Third World War. Even Myra, at the time, had not resented or regretted the confiscation of the ISTWR’s complement, along with all the rest. Only by sheer accident had an independent stockpile survived, in the hands of a politically untouchable institution that counted its supporters in billions, its age in millennia and its policy in centuries. All other strategic nuclear weapons had been dismantled. There were thousands of batdefield tactical nukes still around, of course, but nobody’d ever worried much about them: the consequences of their use had never been shown live on television.

(The images went through her mind, again, and the names of cities: Kiev, Frankfurt, Berlin. She shook her head with a shudder, shutting them out.)

Valentina was giving her a hard stare. “They weren’t ours, were they?”

“Not as far as I know,” Myra said. “Unless you happened to turn over the access codes to somebody else, eh?”

Valentina shook her head, thin-lipped. “No. Never.”

“Right, so much for that theory,” Myra said briskly, to assure Val that she wasn’t under any suspicion. “Andrei, any ideas?”

“Excuse me,” said Andrei. “I’m still trying to get through the front door.”

“Oh, fuck!” Myra tabbed a code to let him in.

“Thanks… OK, I think the nukes were from the tWside, against the coup.”

“And where did they get them?”

“What I think is that the UN hung on to some nukes for itself, the secret stayed with some inner cadre of bureaucrats who made it through the Revolution and the purges, and they put it at the disposal of the current Secretary General.”

“Makes sense, I suppose,” said Denis. “What I’d do.”

“What’s the politics of this, Andrei?” Myra asked.

“We were so sure they’d wait for the ReUN vote—” she stopped and laughed. Trotsky himself had used just such a stratagem. “Have the coup before the vote—I wonder where they got that idea. Still, it kind of undermines the appeal to legitimacy.”

She still had one eye on the virtual screens of the cable news. “Ah, wait, something coming in—”

They sat in silence as the presenter read out a communique from a large group of small governments calling themselves the Assembly Majority Alliance. The gist of it was that the present Security Council had violated the Revised Charter of 2046 by planning to use nuclear weapons in space; and a call for immediate action to depose the conspirators and usurpers. The forces of the Alliance governments and of Mutual Protection were offered for immediate, co-ordinated action to that end. A swift resolution of the emergency was anticipated. The population was urged to remain calm and stay away from work for the day.

“God, that is so cynical,” Val said. “They must have had dozens of back-dated statements, prepared for every contingency, so they could claim to be acting to prevent whatever the Security Council decided to do.”

“Yes, yes,” Myra said. “All SOP for a coup. And a diversion, anyway. It’s in space that the real battles are being fought. Maybe right at this moment! The whole thing will be decided at the speed of light. Come on, let’s get into command mode.”

The others nodded, fell silent, turned to the screens and started pulling in all available data and throwing analysis software at it. After a minute or two they’d begun to mesh as a team in their common virtual workspace. Information flashed back and forth between their personal networks, the goveminent network, the Jane’s system, the newsfeeds, and field reports from their own troops and agents.

The big picture became as clear as the situation it revealed was chaotic. Myra clocked through most of the world’s significant capitals: Beijing, Pyongyang, Tokyo, Vladivostok, Seattle, LA, Washington DC, New York, London, Paris, New Berlin, Danzig, Moscow. All of them reported military strikes of one kind or another, but they all had the aspect of putsches—short-term grabs of public buildings or urban strongholds, which could be held more by the reluctance of the government forces to reduce them than by the strength of their occupiers. It all had a suspiciously diversionary look about it.

All of the committed technophobe governments, from the Khmer Vertes rulers of Bangkok, through the Islamic Republicans of Arabia to the White Nationalists of Dallas, had their forces on full alert and their media screaming imprecations against the enemies of God, Man or Gaia (depending on local ideological taste); but Myra judged them well aware that they were not, themselves, immediate targets—it was the more liberal governments, those who compromised between the pro-tech and anti-tech forces, which were taking the fire.

The more serious action was taking place in the imbricated global hinterland of enclaves and mini-states and company countries; along their fractal borderlines the local defence forces were massed and mobilised, in a posture that was aggressive in the Assembly Majority Alliance statelets, generally defensive in the rest. Meanwhile, in the shadowy lands beyond and behind even these anarchic polities, the forests and plains and badlands and shanty towns brisded as the Green neo-barbarians, the marginals and tribals awoke to the unlooked-for opportunities of this new day.

Jane’s Market Forces registered unexpected shifts in the balance of power; minor skirmishes could have major effects, putting troops and tactics and weapons to the test in new conditions, or in real rather than simulated combat. Not much blood was being shed, but fortunes were being made and lost, alliances and antagonisms updated; the process had its own gory fascination. Myra felt she could sit and look at it for hours.

But this was Earth, this was not where it was at. The battles here, real or virtual, were fundamentally a diversion, and she was duly being diverted. She turned her attention determinedly skyward.

With VaTs well-practised help she spun a neon orrery of near-Earth space, separating out the relevant threads from the skeins of commercial and military orbits. The planet itself appeared as a transparent globe, etched with political and geographical outlines, clouded with weather patterns, cross-hatched with confrontations, pin-pricked with flashpoints. Again its intricate patterns compelled her attention; again, she turned away.

Their own space-borne materiel—nuclear and kinetic-energy weapons—were depicted as black rods and cones, deep in the evergrowing ring of spacejunk that tracked the main orbital thoroughfares.

“Anything coming through yet from the battlesats?”

“Some,” said Val, sounding distracted. “I’m pulling in laser comms via various ground stations. Shit, this is tricky—hold it, hold it… ah!”

The battlesat locations lit up, one by one; those with which communication had been established blinked invitingly. Myra zoomed in on one of them. A classic von Braun space station, with a rotating tubular ring joined by thinner tubular spokes to an inner ring surrounding the contra-rotating spin-compensated axial tower. The living-quarters and hydroponics were around the ring, in the fake gravity of the spin; the laser-cannon and rocket-racks and particle-beam weapons and military command-centre were in the free-fall hub. The whole enormous mandala had a camp Nazi grandeur, spoiled only by the ungainly arrays of solar panels it had sprouted while its nuclear reactor had run down.

It was one of dozens in various orbits. Space Defense had enforced the Pax Americana of the US/ UN Imperium, a twenty-year Reich between the Third World War and the Fall Revolution. In that revolution the battlesats had passed into the hands of their personnel—soldiers’ Soviets in space—and, ever since, they’d sought a role to replace their lost empire. Everything from power-beam transmission to asteroid defence had been tried, to little profit. The stations survived on a trickle of subsidy—or “user fees”—from the similarly diminished UN, paid mainly to prevent the battlesats’ going rogue out of sheer desperation.

Now the forces of the coup were offering them a new empire, one a lot more justifiable and enforceable than the old.

“So what’s the score with this one?” Myra asked.

“Still loyal,” replied Val. “They just reported in to say they weren’t going with the Alliance.”

“Any way of checking that?”

“Don’t know, I’m hailing them—ah! they’re letting us in.”

“I’ll go,” said Myra, “you stay with the big picture.”

With a clunky, disorienting transition, she found herself standing in a real-time representation of the battlesat’s bridge. It was about fifteen metres across, and crowded. The interior matched the exterior’s style: banks of flashing lights among chrome and black surfaces; a cluttered overgrowth of retrofitted modern kit among a profusion of plants, like in a civilian space settlement. The layout was optimised for free-fall, with the crew-members strapped into seats and couches at unexpected angles to each other. In this section of the shaft there were actual windows, through which she could see the great wheel turn in the sunlight, and the Earth’s swirling clouds below. She blinked, and overprinted the real view with its software image.

The crew were wearing eyebands, and some of them could see Myra’s fetch in their own virtual palimpsests of the scene—but they spared her no more than a glance. Another spectral presence had all their attention.

The General sat on a window sill, surveying the bridge with narrowed eyes. He’d been saying something; his words seemed to hang in the air, resonating in the circuits of the display. He interrupted himself and turned to face her.

“Ah, Comrade Davidova—thanks for coming.”

“I wasn’t aware I’d been asked,” she said.

“Oh, you were,” the construct said. “This is, as they say, no accident.”

Myra nodded. No doubt it was indeed no accident that the first battlesat to allow her into its internal systems was the one in which the General was addressing his troops.

He waved a hand. “Welcome to a quick emergency session of the military org’s local cell.” He grinned. “Which is pretty much the command of this station.” The watching crew-members gave her longer looks now; some of them even smiled.

“We need your help,” the General told her flatly. “Nice display,” he added. “May I?”

He reached over, thumb and forefinger pinching into her translucent globe, and with frightening insouciance overrode all her protocols and relocated her virtual view of the Earth and near-Earth space into the centre of the bridge.

She stared at the spinning shapes, fuming. He shouldn’t have been able to do that—

“We still hold most of the battlesats.” A quick sharp look. “That is to say, the anti-coup forces do, whatever their other alignments. But the struggle is still in the balance. We have about a sixth of the battlesats securely on our side, the enemy likewise, and the others undecided.”

Myra was momentarily stunned. Despite what the General had said to her earlier, she’d had no idea, no expectation that the military org’s penetration of Space Defense was so thorough—it must have taken years of work. But the General gave her no time to question or congratulate.

“Here, here and here.” He stabbed a forefinger at three battlesats, whose footprints between them covered most of the planet. “These are in enemy hands. We can’t hit them from the battlesats we hold, because that would risk a spasm of retaliation. But we need to hit them fast, to warn any others who are about to go over to the enemy. Take them out.”

He ran a finger lightly around the republic’s orbital caches of smart pebbles, lasers, KE weapons.

T can’t,” Myra said. T don’t have the skills, I don’t have the automation. None of us do.”

The General snapped his fingers. “The keys, Comrade, the keys. That’s all I need. The access codes.”

“Let me consult my Defence Minister,” said Myra, and backed out hastily. It was a relief—even with the sudden, swallowed surge of cyberspace sickness that it brought on—to find herself back in her office, looking at screens.

“Val—” she began.

“I got that,” said Valentina. “Kept half an eye on you with a partial piggyback. Who is that guy?”

Myra looked sidelong at her. “Good for you,” she said. That was the head of the FI military org. An AI. Our very own electric Trotsky.”

Tuck your mother,” said Val, in Russian.

“Right. We gonna give it the codes?”

“Up to you,” said Val. You’re the PM.”

“What,” said Myra through clenched teeth, “would you advise?”

Val licked her lips. The others were either pointedly ignoring them or concentrating on their own areas.

“Well, hell. Go with the military adviser, I’d say. Give it the codes.”

“Will that work? Do we really have munitions up there that can down battlesats?”

“Hard to say,” said Valentina. “Ancient, never combat-tested, poorly maintained—but so are the battlesats! In theory, yes, they can overwhelm a battlesat’s defences.”

Myra was trying to think fast. It struck her that the battlesats themselves might be a diversion—old and powerful, but inflexible and vulnerable: an orbiting Maginot line. Perhaps the General was fighting the last war, and winning it, while the real battles raged elsewhere.

She hesitated, then decided.

“Give me the codes for the smart-pebble bombs,” she said. Val zapped them across; Myra tabbed back to the battlesat and passed them to the General. He was waiting for her, with puzzled impatience.

“Thank you,” he said heavily, then disappeared. Myra looked around at the now frantically active crew, gave them an awkward, cheery wave, and dropped back to her own command-centre.

That was quick.” Valentina pointed at the display. Already, some of their orbital weapons had been activated. Myra devoutly hoped that what she was seeing as a representation wasn’t appearing on the enemy’s real-time monitors. In three places a cloud of sharp objects had burst out of cover and were moving in the same orbital paths as the three enemy battlesats, but in the opposite direction. They were due to collide with the battlesats in ten, eighteen and twenty-seven minutes.

What happened next was over in less than a second—a twinkle of laser paths in the void. The action replay followed automatically, patiendy repeating the results for the slow rods and cones and nerves of the human eye.

Myra watched the battlesats’ deep-space radar beams brush the oncoming KE volleys; saw their targeting-radar lock on. Her laser-platform drones responded to that detection with needles of light, stabbing to blind the battlesats—which had, in the momentary meantime, released a cloud of chaff to block that very manoeuvre. Then the battlesats struck back, with a speed still bewildering even in slow motion. Each one projected a thousand laser pulses, flashing like a fencer’s swift sword, slicing up the KE weapons and their laser-platform escorts.

“Wow!” she said, admiring despite herself.

“Yeah, that’s some defence system,” said Valentina. “Not standard issue for a battlesat, I’ll tell you that.”

Myra zoomed the view. Each attack cloud was still there, as a much larger cloud of much smaller objects. They would bombard the battlesats, sure enough, they’d even do some damage, but it would be more like a sand-blasting than a shelling.

The time was 09.25. Forty minutes had passed since the Heaviside nukes. The disruption they’d caused was easing off; radio comms were still haywire, but more and more centres were coming back on-line via patches and work-arounds. The outcome of this first serious exchange was already being analysed. Myra cast a quick glance at Jane’s. The coup’s stock was fluctuating wildly.

“Shit—”

She was about to transfer her workspace to the battlesat again but the General beat her to it. He—or it—suddenly appeared in the command-centre, as a recognisable if not very solid figure. Andrei and Denis, by this time evidently having been brought up to speed by Val, didn’t react to the apparition with more than open-mouthed astonishment.

“Too bad,” the General said, staring sadly at the display. “These defences are portable, not fitted to the station but brought in by the conspirators.”

“Any other battlesats have them?”

A sketch of a shrug. “We don’t. Maybe they’re already being deployed among the waverers. Mutual Protection nanofactures, is my guess.”

Better than a guess, Myra reckoned.

“You want another strike?”

“No. Only one thing for it now. Nuke ’em.”

Myra glanced at Valentina. “Wait. Give us a first-cut sim, Val.”

Valentina ran down the locations of their orbital nuclear weapons and launched a simulation of an immediate strike, in the light of the new information about the battlesats’ capabilities. Stopped. Ran it again; and again; all in a few seconds, but a waste of time nonetheless. The answer was obvious. The nukes could get close enough to the battlesats to take them out—but near-Earth space was a lot more crowded than it had been when the doctrine of that deployment had first been developed. There was no way to avoid thousands of innocent casualties and quadrillions of dollars’ worth of damage to space habitats and industries.

“It’s worse than that,” Valentina pointed out. The direct effect of the explosions and the EMP would be just the beginning—there’s every possibility that the debris would set off an ablation cascade—each collision producing more debris, until in a matter of days you’d have stripped the sky.”

The ablation cascade was a known nightmare, one of the deadliest threats to space habitation, or even exploration. Myra had seen discussions and calculations to suggest that a full-scale cascade would surround the Earth with rings of debris which could make space travel unfeasibly dangerous for centuries …

The General had a look which indicated that he was weighing this in the balance. She could just see it now, that calculation—even with a cascade, it was possible that the new diamond ships could dodge and dogfight through the debris—the barrier might not be impenetrable after all, and meanwhile…

Torget it,” Myra said. “We aren’t going to use the nukes.” Her fingers were working away, codes were flashing past her eyes—she was trying to find the channel the General’s fetch had ridden in on.

Something in her tone told the General there would be no argument. Instead, he turned to the others and said, quite pleasantly, “The comrade is not thinking objectively. Are you willing to relieve her of her responsibilities?”

“No,” they told him, in gratifying unison.

“Very well.” He smiled at them, as if to say he was sorry, but it had been worth a try.

“And you can fuck right off,” said Myra. She tapped her forefinger, triumphantly, on an input-channel key, and tuned him right out.