The Sky Road tfr-4

by Ken MacLeod

  “Hands on heads! Everybody outside! On to the track!”

  Myra put her hands on top of her head and stood up and shuffled sideways into the aisle. The steward-punk who’d murdered the guard still had her covered, and was backing out past the big fellow, whom he obviously knew. The businessman, standing up, had a curiously intent look on his face. Myra guessed instantly that he was about to make himself a hero, and in a fortuitous moment of eye contact she shook her head. His shoulders slumped slighdy, even with his hands in the air; but he complied with the shouted command and the minutely gestured suggestion, jumping out to the right and landing on the permanent way on his feet and hands, then scrambling up and running across the adjacent track to the low bank with the fence by the flooded meadow.

  Myra raised her hands and stepped over the guard’s buckled legs, edged past the barbarian and the steward and jumped out. She landed lightly, the impact jolting her pistol uncomfortably but reassuringly deeper down the side of her boot, and walked across the track and up the bank, then turned to face the train.

  People were all doing as she had done, or helping kids—silent now—down to the broken stones. The Greens strode or stood or rode up and down, yip-peeing, all the time keeping their rifles trained on the passengers. There were at least a score of the attackers on each side of the train, probably more. About a hundred people, passengers and crew, had come off the train. Somebody was still on the train and still screaming.

  Myra stood with her hands on her head and shivered. The sight of so many people with their hands up made her feel sick. The barbarians probably intended to loot the train—they must know that some at least of the passengers would be carrying concealed weapons, but they weren’t as yet even bothering to search for them. The hope that they would be spared would be enough to stop almost anyone from making an inevitably doomed attempt to fight. It might just stop them until it was too late. If the Greens intended a massacre they would do it, of that she was sure, just when least expected. The Greens would manoeuvre inconspicuously so that they were out of each other’s lines of fire, and the fusillade would come. Then a bit of rape and robbery, and a few final finishing shots to the head for the wounded if they were lucky.

  One tall man in a fur cloak and leather-strapped cotton leggings was stalking around from one group of passengers to another, peering at and talking to every young or young-looking woman. When he reached Myra he stopped on the slope just below her, rested his hand on his knee and looked up, grinning. He was clean-shaven, with long sun-bleached red hair tied back with a thong around his brow. On another thong, around his neck, hung a whistle. Beneath his fur cloak he wore a faded green T-shirt printed with the old UN Special Forces motto: SORT ’EM OUT—LET GOD KILL ’EM ALL.

  “Ah,” he said, “you must be Myra Godwin!”

  He had a London accent and a general air of enjoying himself hugely. Myra stared at him, shaken at being thus singled out. He recognised her, and she had a disquieting feeling that she’d seen him somewhere before.

  “Yes,” she said. “What’s it to you?”

  “You got any proof of that?”

  “Diplomatic passport, jacket pocket, above the seat I was in.”

  “I’ll check,” he warned, eyes narrowing.

  “Oh, and bring my fucking Glock as well. You are in deep shit, mister.”

  “We’ll see about that,” he said. He turned around and yelled at the big man who’d emptied her carriage; he was still standing in the doorway, rifle pointed upward.

  “Yo! Fix! Get this lady’s stuff out. From above her seat.”

  He didn’t take his eyes off her as the big man passed him the folded jacket and he fingered through it. One quick glance down at the opened passport, and he put the whistle to his lips and blew a loud, trilling note, twice.

  “Right, Fix, spread the word,” he said. “We got her. Tax them and leave. Let’s get outta here before the helicopters come.”

  The other man jogged off, shouting orders. In a minute, out of the corner of her eye, Myra could see the tax being organised: the people from the train had all been herded into one group, and a man with a shotgun and a woman with a sack were going around, taking money and jewellery and small pieces of kit and personal weapons. People handed their stuff over with a sickeningly eager compliance.

  “Want your jacket back?”

  Myra nodded. He tossed it, still folded, to her; held on to the holstered automatic, the passport and the uplink phone.

  “You’ll get these back later,” he said.

  She put the jacket on. It was a thin suit jacket and didn’t do much to keep out the chill.

  “What do you mean, ‘later’?” she asked.

  He laughed at her.

  Tou’re coining with us. Well let you go soon.”

  The wind just got colder.

  Myra gestured at her blood-spattered blouse and blood-soaked skirt.

  “Excuse me if I don’t believe you.”

  “War is hell, ink?” he agreed biighuy. He moved his hand as though tossing something light away. “The guard was a spy, anyway.”

  Myra said nothing.

  “OK, youse lot!” some guy on a horse was shouting. “Get back on the train and stay there. Don’t try chasing us, don’t anyone try shooting after us. “ ’Cause if you do, we’ll come back an’ kill youse all. And don’t leave the train after we’re gone, neither, or the choppers will pick you off in the fields.”

  The group filed into the train through one of the doorways. Myra could see them dispersing along the carriages.

  “That’s all you’re going to do?”

  The red-haired man nodded. “This time.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “I mean, I feel sorry for these people, but not sorry enough to kill them. And I’m not going to waste time searching the train for valuables. No point in being greedy, otherwise the trains would just stop coming through. Just enough tax to cover the op, you know.”

  “What op?”

  He stared at her. “Getting hold of you.”

  Oh, shit. She’d thought that was what he’d been driving at. She blinked rapidly, recording his image, and triggering a search protocol on her eyeband, to see if this knowledgeable bandit was known himself.

  “You did all this just to get me?” She smiled sourly, over chattering teeth. “How did you know I was on the train?”

  The man looked at her scornfully. “That wasn’t difficult,” he said. He waved a hand expansively but evasively. “We’re everywhere.”

  “Seems a bit excessive.”

  “Some things you just can’t say in a phone call,” he said idly. Then he shifted his feet and straightened up, grinning. “Besides, raiding is such fun.” He drew in a long breath of fresh air as though inhaling a drug. “It’s a lifestyle thing.”

  A slender, dark-skinned woman with curly, wavy blonde hair down to her waist rode up on a big black horse, leading a similar horse and a dun mare. She smiled at the tall man, and turned a colder smile to Myra.

  “You know how to ride?”

  In a moment everyone was mounted. Myra tugged up her bloody skirt as she settled in the saddle. The tall man waved and whistled three blasts. Suddenly the Greens were dispersing away from the train, diagonally up the scree-slope to the trees or, as those around Myra did, straight across the wet meadow. She found herself on a hell-for-leather gallop behind Fix, with the blonde-haired woman and the red-haired man on either flank. Over a hedge, down a path, into a narrow wooded dell.

  Somewhere far away, the sound of a helicopter. Then some short machine-gun bursts, though at whom they were aimed, Myra did not wish to guess.

  Myra rode silently like the others, but in the spectral company of Parvus; the AI was murmuring into her bone-conduction earclip and flashing Grolier screens up in front of her eyes. Nothing more current was available without the uplink phone. He’d provisionally identified the man who’d captured her, but it wasn’t very enlightening—the latest pictures of him were from about twelve year
s ago, and he hadn’t been a land-pirate then. He had been a net commentator, and—before that—a minor agitator in the Fall Revolution. The television clips of his rants explained why he looked vaguely familiar—she’d watched the British national democratic revolution in the time she’d been able to spare from following the Siberian Popular Front’s assault on Vladivostok.

  The dell opened to a larger valley, thickly settled. Old stone houses, geodesic domes, wattle huts, new thatched cottages, a few nanofactured carbon-shell constructions. A lot of cattle and sheep in the fields; kids running everywhere. The path became a gravel road which widened, at the centre of the main street, to a small cobbled square. In the centre, just by a verdigrised copper statue of a Tommy with a fixed bayonet, memorial to the fallen of three world wars, was an outdated but still effective anti-aircraft missile battery. No higher than the statue itself, it held a rack of a dozen metre-long rockets. Myra could read the small print of what they were tipped with: laser-fuser tactical nukes.

  People crowded around, welcoming the returning raiders. They called the red-haired man what she thought at first was “Red”, which made sense; then realised it was “Rev”, which made no sense at all. It certainly wasn’t the name her search had come up with. The kids were cheering and doing the high-stepping, highjumping Zulu war-dance called toyi-toying.

  Fix reined in his horse in front of a large stone building which had a low-ceilinged front room open to the street: a cafe. Myra followed suit, dismounted and was led through into a back room with a fire, and high leather chairs around a table. The room smelt of woodsmoke and alcohol and unwashed humanity and damp dogs.

  “Have a seat.”

  Myra sat and the two men and the woman sat down opposite her. They regarded her in silence for a moment. She decided to hazard the Grolier’s guess.

  Jordan Brown,” she said. “And you must be Cat Duvalier.” That name was in the entry’s small print as Jordan Brown’s wife.

  “Well done,” the man said, unperturbed. “Nifty little machine you’ve got there.”

  Myra flipped the eyeband back. “Yes. So tell me, Mr Brown, what it is you want.”

  “It’s Reverend Brown,” he said. “First Minister of the Last Church of the Unknowable God.” He smiled. “But please, call me Jordan.” He looked over his shoulder and shouted an order. “Beer and brandy!”

  He slung his cloak over a chair; without it, leaning over the table in his T-shirt and wild hair, he looked somewhat more intimidating. Some absence in his gaze reminded Myra of spetznatz veterans, or old Afghantsi. The Blue Beret slogan on the T-shirt just might not be ironic, she thought. A boy padded in carrying glasses and bottles.

  “All we’ve got at the moment,” the woman called Cat said. “What’ll you have?”

  “I’ll have a beer.”

  She accepted the drink without thanks, and lit a cigarette without asking permission or offering to share. Damned if she was going to act as though she was enjoying their hospitality.

  “You were saying, Reverend.”

  Jordan Brown spread his hands. Just to talk things over.”

  “You’ve gone to a lot of trouble to do that.”

  “I sure have,” he said. Tve risked the lives of my fighters, I’ve exposed one of my agents, I’ve had a man slaughtered like a pig—which he was, but that’s nothing to you—and had another train guard shot in the belly just for trying to do his job. Quite possibly, some of the passengers have already fallen to friendly fire.” He shrugged. “And I would have killed more, if I’d had to. The point is, I’ll get away with it.” He waved his hand above his head. “We all will. The helicopter was the worst the British can do against us.”

  Myra looked straight at him. “Like I care. You might not get off so lightly when this gets back to the Kazakhstani Republic.”

  Jordan nodded soberly. “No doubt I’m trampling all over diplomatic niceties. But it’s you that came to Britain to get help, not the other way round. So you’ll forgive me for not worrying too much.”

  “Hah!”

  “Anyway,’Jordan went on, Tve no wish to get into a pissing-contest. I have something more important to say to you. So. Are you willing to have a serious conversation?”

  Myra shrugged, looking around theatrically. “Why not? I don’t see any better entertainment.” She poured a brandy chaser, again without false courtesy.

  Jordan Brown leaned forward on his bare forearms, took a swig of brandy and began to speak.

  ^You’ve come to Britain to get military aid against the Sheenisov. You might even get it. What I want to tell you is two things. One, don’t do it. It won’t do you any good. You can’t fight communism with imperialism. It’s just throwing napalm on the fire.”

  Myra favoured him with a look that said she’d heard this before. “If you say so. And what else do you have to tell me? Try and make it something that’s news to me, how about that?”

  “You’re in worse trouble than you think,” Jordan said. “The entity you call the General is working for the Sheenisov.”

  Myra almost choked on her sip of brandy. She coughed fire for a moment. She felt totally disoriented.

  “What? And how the hell would you know?”

  “Strictly speaking,’Jordan Brown said, “the Sheenisov are working for it. As to how I know He held out a hand towards Cat. She leaned forward as Jordan leaned back.

  “Myra,” she said earnesdy, “I may be a barbarian now, but I used to be like you. I used to be in the International.”

  “Oh, Jesus!” Myra exploded. “Half the fucking world is run by ex-Trots! Tell me something I don’t know, like how you heard about the FI mil org—the General.”

  “I was coming to that,” Gat said, mildly enough—but Myra could read the younger woman’s face like a computer screen, and she could see the momentary spasm of impatient rage. This barbarian lady was someone who’d got dangerously used to not being interrupted. Cat forced a smile. T still hear rumours.”

  “Rumours? That’s what you’re relying on?”

  “It seems you’ve just confirmed one,” Jordan said, dryly.

  Myra acknowledged that she had. But it seemed a situation where stonewalling would be less productive than admitting that the General existed, and trying to find out where the rumour came from. Parvus hadn’t spotted anything like that…

  “Did you pick this up off the net, or what?”

  Jordan looked at Fix and Cat, and all three of them laughed. To Myra, it sounded like a mocking laugh.

  “God, you people,” Jordan said. His tone changed as he went on, becoming an invocation, or an imprecation. “You have a screen between you and the world all the time. We have the human world, and the natural world. We have the whole world that you call marginal, the scattered society of free humanity. We have the whisper in the market, the gesture on the road, the chalked mark on the pavement. The twist of a leaf, the turning of a twig. We have the smell carried on the wind. We have the night sky and the names of all its fixed and moving and falling stars. We have our friends in all your cities and camps and armies. We have the crystal radio that receives and the spark-gap that transmits, in codes you have forgotten, on wavelengths you no longer monitor, in languages that you disdained to learn.”

  He tipped his head back and began glossolaliat-ing in Morse code, da-da-dit-di-da-dididididah… Cat and Fix cocked their heads, listening, and after a minute grinned and guffawed.

  Jordan looked a little smug at this demonstration. “See, I can joke in tongues. We have our own Internet, and our own International. Don’t bother looking for a leak from yours.”

  “Besides,” said Fix, speaking up for the first time, “we know this thing from way back. Jordan and Cat fought in the revo, and so did it. It was called the Black Plan, and it was used by—or it used—the Army of the New Republic. We’ve all encountered it, and we know where it went. To New View, your commie-cult commune in space.”

  “And we know how it thinks,” said Cat. “We can see its hand in
what the Sheenisov are doing, in their tactics and in their strategy. It’s not exactly malevolent, but it is… ambitious.”

  “So?” Myra shrugged, trying hard to stay cool, and to reassert her control over the conversation. “We—that is, my country, Kazakhstan—” there, she had said it, and the words my country, Kazakhstan could not be unsaid “—we are not relying on this thing. We take no orders from it, not since—well, it got on the wrong side of me, put it that way. I don’t say I believe you about its taking the side of the Sheenisov, but—let’s say I wouldn’t put that past it. If you’re so worried about it, why do you object to my getting help to stop it?”

  “Because,” said Jordan, emphasising each word with a chop of the hand, “it can not be stopped. Not by fighting it. If it finds itself on the losing side it will change sides, or work for both sides, and it will win. Its only real enemies are rival AIs, such as those of the space movement, and those strange ghosts of genius that some of the spacers are trying to turn into. It will defeat them, or absorb them, and then it will be content in its… singular godhood, spreading with humanity to all the worlds to come. It will look after our best interests, whether we like it or not.”

  “Hah, come on. You can’t possibly know that.”

  Jordan sat back and looked at her with an ironic expression. “Oh, yes I can, but call it an educated guess if it makes you feel better. If the British Republic were to come in on your side, I’m sure they’d be delighted to get their old planning-system back. They’d jump at any offers it made them. Or they would accept similar Greek gifts from the space movement’s AIs. So whoever wins—the Western powers, the space movement or the Sheenisov—humanity will be living inside some machine or other, for ever.”

  “Would that be so bad?”

  “No,” said Jordan. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  He jumped up. “But what the hell. You do as seems best. If you still want to ally with the British when you get to London, go right ahead. Much good it’ll do you.”

  He downed his remaining brandy and looked around at the others, then at Myra. “Come on,” he said. “I’ll take you to the road.”