The Sky Road tfr-4

by Ken MacLeod

All that long afternoon, we talked about other things.

  Batdes, mostly, as I recall. The train pulled into the station at Carron Town on the dot of six. The sun was still high, the late afternoon still warm. Once again tired and jaded by our journey, Menial and I left the train with an access of energy and a surge of hunger. Menial led the way straight to The Carronade, and we settled into a dark corner of the strangely polished-smelling bar with plates of farmed trout and fresh-picked peas and new potatoes, accompanied with a shared jug of beer.

  “I can’t wait to get back to your place,” I said, “get a bit of privacy, and get my face right down into… the files.”

  She laughed. “Aye, it’ll be great to get a good look at them at last, without having to look over our shoulders.”

  But as she said it she was looking over my shoulder, as she had done every minute or so all through the meal. She had her back to the wall, I had my back to the bar. The pub was beginning to fill up with people from the project, in for a quick drink on their way home or to their lodgings. As yet I’d heard no voices I recognised.

  “You seem a wee bit on edge,” I said.

  “Aye, well, like I said on the train…”

  Tergal?”

  Tes.”

  “You’re expecting to meet him here?” I asked, remembering that we were in this bar on her—albeit welcome—suggestion.

  She opened her hands. “Maybe. Depends.”

  “On what?” I piled up our empty plates and lit a cigarette.

  “Och, on how they want to play it,” she said, sounding unaccustomedly bitter.

  “Secrets or no secrets,” I said, trying to keep my tone light, “you’re going to have to let me in on this, sooner or later. I’m getting thoroughly tired of seeing you looking worried.”

  “I don’t have to do anything!” she flared. “And you don’t have to see me looking like anything!”

  I said nothing, staring at her, shocked and annoyed but already forgiving her; she’d been under a lot of tension, for reasons I knew about and reasons I knew I didn’t.

  “Ach,” she said, gentle again, “I didn’t mean that, colha Gree. You’ve not been taught as I have, to be hard.”

  At that I had to smile; she seemed more vulnerable than hard, at that moment. Her eyes widened. I heard a footstep behind us, and then Fergal swung uninvited on to the bench beside me.

  “Hello,” Menial said, not warmly. Her glance returned to me.

  “Oh, hi,” I said. He looked at our drinks. “My round, I think.” He reached back over his shoulder and snapped his fingers; most people wouldn’t have gotten away with that, but he did. In half a minute the barmaid was laying another full jug on the table.

  “So, Menial,” he said quietly, “you got it?”

  “We did,” said Menial. “As far as I can tell. I checked through it all this morning, and it’s the whole archive.”

  “And where did you do that?” I butted in, a little indignantly.

  “Kelvin Wood,” Menial said, giving me a disarmingly unabashed grin. “In the bushes.”

  “So that’s what you were up to.”

  Menial nodded, with a flash of her eyebrows. Fergal looked at her, then at me, as though to remind us that he had more important things on his mind.

  Tine,” I said.

  “That’s good news,” Fergal said, to Menial. He laughed briefly. “To put it mildly, eh?”

  “Aye,” she said. “It is that.”

  “Anyway, Clovis,” Fergal said, “you’ll appreciate that the information you’ve helped to retrieve needs to be looked at with an expert eye. Rather urgently, in fact, considering how long it may take.”

  “Of course,” I said. “Any chance that I could take a look at it first, just glance through it?”

  He shook his head. “Sorry, Clovis. You have no idea—no offence—of how much is there. It’s an incredible quantity of not very well organised information. In the time it would take for you to make sense of any of it, we could be searching for information we know how to interpret. Every hour might count.”

  “Just a minute!” I said, dismayed and indignant. “Nobody mentioned anything about this. I want to get a look at them too, and not have them disappear into—”

  “Some tinker hideaway?” Fergal raised his eyebrows. “It won’t be like that, I assure you. You have my word that we won’t keep them long—weeks at the most—and that you’ll get to see them and search them at your leisure as soon as we’ve finished.”

  “But,” I said, “how will I know they haven’t been changed—even accidentally? Because I have to be able to rely on it.”

  Merrial was looking desperately uncomfortable. She gave Fergal a quick, hot glare and leaned closer to me across the table.

  “Think about it, man,” she said quietly. “This stuff is all illicit anyway—you could not exactly cite it in footnotes, could you? You can only use it to find leads to material you can refer to. So you’ll just have to trust us—trust me—that the information won’t be tampered with.”

  “All right,” I said reluctantly.

  “Good man!” He drained his glass and stood up. “Thanks for your help.” Fergal reached out a hand across the table. Merrial was already emptying her personal clutter out of the leather bag. She tightened its thong and passed it over; Fergal had caught it while I was still gazing, puzzled, at Merrial’s actions.

  “Wait!” I said. “The paper files are still in there. You can’t take them!”

  Fergal raised his eyebrows. “Why not?”

  “These papers belong to the University.”

  I’m afraid they don’t,” said Fergal, sounding regretful. “They belong to us.”

  I looked frantically at Menial, who only gave a small, sad nod.

  “Who the fuck is this ‘us’?” I demanded, though I already suspected the answer. “Come on, I can give you photocopies if you must.”

  “Not good enough, old chap.”

  “Then give me them back.”

  “Sorry,” said Fergal. “I can’t.”

  I shifted on my feet, moved my elbow; all by reflex. Fergal’s eyes narrowed.

  “Don’t,” he said very quietly, “even think of messing with me.”

  I was actually thinking of yelling out and calling on the others in the bar, some of whom had their eye on this confrontation. But something in Fergal’s stance and glance suggested that the only outcome of such a brawl would be his escape after inflicting some severe damage on our side, starting with me. And whichever side Merrial came in on, or even if she tried to stay out of it, she was likely to get hurt.

  My honour wasn’t at stake in preventing Fergal’s departure with the papers—it would be at stake in getting them back—and for now I had no right to risk life and limb of myself or others over it.

  “Take it, tinker,” I said. “I can bide.”

  He smiled, without condescension.

  “I hope I see you again,” he said, and was out the door.

  I looked over at a few curious, tense faces at the bar, shrugged and returned to the table, where Merrial was shakily lighting one of my cigarettes.

  “Some explanation might be in order,” I said, as casually as I could manage. One of my knees was vibrating.

  Menial took a long breath and a long draw with it “Sorry,” she said. “I can’t, really.”

  “But look,” I said. “Why didn’t you just tell me to hide the files, or say we’d put them back—”

  I was getting exasperated and confused, and then the penny, finally, dropped.

  “You agree with him!” I said. “You actually agree that he has some kind of a right to those papers, and to see the files first, and that nobody else can so much as look at them without his sufferance. Including me.”

  She looked levelly back at me.

  “And you’re not going to tell me why.”

  A small shake of her head.

  “And you knew all along this could happen.”

  A smaller nod.

>   “All right,” I said. There were still two half-litres in the jug; I poured for both of us, and lit a cigarette myself, leaning forward into Menial’s smoke, almost into the tent of her hair. “All right.” The heel of my hand was rubbing beneath my eye; irritated with myself, I stopped doing that and fiddled with the cigarette instead. The sound of the laughter and conversation at the bar was like the noise of a burn over a rock, washing over and hiding our talk. We could say anything.

  “I’m really at a loss,” I said. “I can’t believe you just set me up, but unless you tell me what’s really going on—”

  “I told you,” she said. “I can’t. Can’t you trust me on that?”

  “Oh, I can trust you on that all right,” I said. “But if I don’t get those files back like I promised, nobody at the University will ever trust me again.”

  She looked as tense, as torn, as I felt.

  Tm very sorry about that,” she said. “But there’s nothing I can do about it.”

  “Come on,” I said. “There must be. Hell, if I get the files back, I can give your lot copies of all the files. Isn’t that worth more to them than just what they’ve got?”

  “You don’t understand,” Menial said. “Now that we know about the other files, we’re going to have to get them all. Like Fergal said, they’re ours.”

  “Ours’, indeed! I was unwilling, or unready, to challenge her about the society to which that might refer. I spread my hands. “You can’t expect me to accept that without a damn good reason, which you’re not giving me.”

  “I’ve told you. I can’t. So why don’t we just forget about all this?”

  “Menial,” I pleaded, dismayed at the depths of her lack of understanding, “these files are part of my work, my whole career depends on them. So, please—”

  I reached out, touching her hair.

  Her eyes glinted.

  “Oh, fuck off.” she told me, not quite a yell but loud and emphatic enough to turn heads.

  “I’ll do that,” I replied, and rose and stalked out. I glanced back from the door, and saw only the top of her head, and the forward fall of her hair, and her hands over her face. The door swung shut behind me.

  8

  Western Approaches

  “It’s over,” Valentina was saying.

  “What’s over?” Myra asked. She shook her head, looking around her office. Val and Andrei and Denis were all there, perched on desks or window sills. The command-centre screens had vanished like a dream. Parvus hovered on the edge of her vision, looking as though about to speak.

  “The putsch,” Valentina explained.

  “Just like that?”

  Myra stared, blinking through options presented by Parvus. The personal had its own analysis, and it was busy agreeing with Valentina. The battlesats seized by the space movement were enough to guard their beleaguered enclaves and launch sites, but not to tilt the balance of world power in their favour. The Security Council nations retained their control over the ReUN, but the battlesats that had resisted the coup had done so in their own name, not that of the ReUN. They remained dangerously autonomous.

  At ground level all sorts of local balances had been tilted, almost entirely by the rapid re-evaluations of the real weight on the various sides that the bloody flurries of actual combat had induced. Disputes had been resolved or reopened, entire armies had mobilised or disbanded on the strength of the gigantic shadows thrown on the screens of analysis by the small engagements in the field.

  “God,” said Myra disgustedly. “This is so decadent.” It reminded her of the Renaissance mercenaries that Machiavelli had moaned about in the Discourses, working out who would have won if they’d fought and abiding by that decision like gentlemen, while omitting the bloody business of actual battle. “Nobody wants a real fight, they’d rather follow the sims. Talk about the pornography of violence. Wankers.”

  “It’s worse than that,” Denis said coarsely. “We’re fucked.” He threw a projection of a time-slice from Jane’s and laser-pointed the relevant areas. “Look.”

  The ISTWR’s military profile and general credibility was no longer something that cautious strategists, estimating from past actions and present rumour, rated highly. It was negligible.

  “We’ve been found out,” said Denis Gubanov. “In exactly the wrong way. They must have always reckoned with at least the possibility that we had nukes. Mutual Protection—or Reid, anyway—knew we had them. Point is, we didn’t use them, so it’s assumed we either don’t have them or don’t have the stomach to use them. We’ve gone from being Upper Volta with nukes to being Upper Volta without. And the weapons we did use didn’t work.”

  “They worked—” Valentina began, rather defensively.

  “Huh!” Myra snorted. “They worked just fine, only they didn’t destroy the targets. Yeah, I can see that doing our deterrence posture a power of good.”

  The hotline phone—a solid, old-fashioned, unambiguous red phone on Myra’s desk—began to ring. She looked at it doubtfully for a moment, then shrugged and picked it up.

  “Myra Godwin-Davidova.”

  Pause.

  “Hello, Myra. Dave here.”

  She gave him a moment of nonplussed silence.

  “Myra? It’s David Reid.”

  “Yes. Hello,” she said. “What do you want now?”

  There was a second’s delay in his reply.

  “What do you want, is more like it.” Even over the crackly laser-to-landline link, she could hear his fury. “You had the whole situation in the balance, you know that? You had the fucking casting vote, Chairman Davidova! You had the nuclear option, and you threw it away! I’d almost rather you had used your goddamn nukes against us—at least that way the Security Council would have had control, and would’ve had to take responsibility. There’d be some chance of an end to the chaos, which is all we really wanted. As it is you’ve turned what should’ve been the endgame into another fucking stalemate.”

  “I don’t see how that makes you any worse off.”

  She heard a knocking noise and realised after a moment that he was banging something on his head.

  “It’s made us all worse off! It’s like entropy, Myra, can’t you see that? Everybody’s climbed up a few flights, escalated, that’s the fucking word for it. We’re all higher up but relatively we’re no better placed, and we’ve lost energy, wasted work in the process. And you know the only people who’ll gain from that? The marginals, the fucking barb, that’s who.

  Including your local godless communists.”

  “It’s you who should have thought of that. Before you launched your bloody coup.”

  Reid took a deep breath, a long sigh down the wire.

  “Yeah, you’re right. It is my fault. Didn’t expect a counter-coup, that’s all.”

  “What counter-coup?”

  Again the odd delay.

  “Don’t play the innocent. Somebody’s taken over most of the battlesats, and it sure wasn’t my lot. Nor the UN’s, come to that.”

  “You don’t know who it was?”

  “No. So who was it? You must know.”

  Myra thought about this. Ah, hell, he’d find out anyway.

  “The Fourth International,” she told him. “Space fraction, mil org.”

  A second ticked past, then she heard Reid’s loud laugh. “Ha-ha-ha! OK, Myra, be like that. I’ll find out anyway. Meanwhile, take a look at the northeastern border, and see if it all still seems so funny. I’m well out of it—I’m on a shuttle for Lagrange. Bye.”

  He closed the connection in some manner that sounded like slamming down the receiver on an old-fashioned phone, with an impact that made her wince.

  Before she could look at the north-eastern border, Parvus stepped into frame and raised a hand. Myra gestured to the others to wait.

  “Yes?”

  The stout phantom waved his hands expansively. “Ah, Myra, I have had to move fast on your investments. I received the hot inside tip—” he laid a yellowed fing
er to his ruddy nose “—that Mutual Protection are liquidating their assets.”

  “What!” Myra had by this time got so used to “assets” being a euphemism for “nukes” that she almost ducked under the desk. Her startled gaze raced down the latest news bulletin—nothing.

  “Oh, you mean financially.”

  “Of course financially. When the last war starts I will tell you straight. No, Mutual Protection are selling up, pulling out.”

  “Pulling out from where?”

  “From here. From Kazakhstan.” He looked at her sadly, almost sympathetically. “From Earth.”

  Over the next few days it became clear that the main gainers from the brief lurch into actual violence were the marginals, who took their own advantage of the distraction—and Mutual Protection’s hasty liquidation—to expand their domains in country after country; and the Sheenisov.

  They made a push along the pass at Zaysan, to the south-east. Kazakhstani long-range bombers pounded the Sino-Soviet combat drones—devices of unsetding and diverse appearance, combinations of almost Soviet mechanical clunkiness with quasi-organic nanotech sheen. Their wrecks, or corpses, littered the roads and hillsides outside Buran. Any functioning components had a disturbing tendency to reassemble. The Kazakhstani bombing-runs stopped as supplies of bombs began to run out. Sheenisov spetsnatz teams—casting hologram feints, radar ghosts, sonic body-doubles—skirmished among the wreckage and dug in at the furthest limit of their advance. Meanwhile, a tank-borne human army, or horde, was outflanking the Altay Mountains at the northern end of the range: rolling south and west from the Katun basin, and down the road and railway from Barnaul, unopposed. By the end of the fourth day after the coup attempt they’d crossed Kazakhstan’s northern border, and paused.

  The oblys council in Semipalatinsk—evidendy softened by intimidation or subversion—invited them in, and they cheerfully accepted the invitation. They rode in like liberators, welcomed by cheering crowds, and settled down with every appearance of being there to stay.

  The red phone rang again.

  “Chingiz Suleimanyov,” the caller identified himself. The current President of Kazakhstan; his nickname of “Genghis President” was not quite fair. “I have a proposal for your government, Madame Davidova, and for you personally…”