by Ken MacLeod
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 di
splay,” 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.
7
The Claimant Bar
Out we went into the summer dusk. Moths sought the sun in street-lamps, baffled. The few quiet roads between the house and the Institute were crowded now, with local residents taking advantage of the slack season in bars normally jammed with students. Lads strutting their tight dark trousers, lasses swaying their big bright skirts. We must have looked a less happy couple, harried and hurrying.
A few lights burnt in the Institute, one of them the light in the corridor. As we stepped in and closed the door, the smell of pipe-smoke was stronger than before, and familiar.
“Someone’s around,” Menial whispered.
“Yes,” I replied, “it’s—”
Right on cue, an office door down the corridor opened and Anders Gantry stepped out. A small man with strong arms and a beer-barrel of a belly, hair curling grey like the smoke from his inseparable pipe. His shirt was merely grubby—his wife managed to impose fresh linen on him every week or so—but his jacket had not been cleaned in years. It smelled like it had been used to beat down fires, which it had.
He was the best historical scholar in the University, and quite possibly in the whole British Isles; and the kindest and most modest man I’d ever met.
“Ah, hello, Clovis,” he boomed. “How good to see you!” He strode up and shook hands. “And who’s your friend?”
“Menial—Dr. Anders Gantry,” I said.
He held her hand and inclined his head over her knuckles. “Charmed.” He looked at her in a vaguely puzzled way for a moment, then turned to me. “Now, colha Gree, what can I do for you?”