by Ken MacLeod
“It was as much of a surprise to everyone else in the government as it was to me,” she said. “We figured it was Georgi’s own bright idea, which he’d spring on us once he’d got some provisional—oh!”
Mustafa bumped into her back.
Jason waved to her, over heads.
“You never told me you were here!”
“Yeah, well… thought I’d surprise you.”
It was strange seeing his lips move, and hearing the words, beyond earshot. Like lip-reading, like telepathy.
“Who is that guy?” Nurup asked suspiciously.
“He’s OK,” said Myra. She wasn’t sure whether introducing Jason as a CIA agent would be a good idea, so she didn’t.
And then they met up, and to everyone’s surprise she and Jason met in a long embrace.
Jesus, man!”
She broke loose and turned to the militia driver.
“Thanks for coming. Room for these three guys?”
The driver nodded. “This way please.”
He led them to a service door which Myra knew she must have passed hundreds of times and never seen. Their progress was less inconspicuous—the two muj weren’t the only armed passengers, but they were the most noticeable. As the driver fiddled with the push-bar latch Myra noticed heads bob and a little buzzing camcopter swoop from the concourse’s rafters.
They hurried along a passageway of corrugated iron and unplaned, splintery joists, and emerged beside a jeep in a small bay of the car park.
“Ah, now that’s sensible transport,” Myra said as they all piled in. The Militia jeep had a light machine-gun mounted on its rollbar. Mustafa made that his post. Nurup sat in the front with the driver, rifle propped in the crook of his elbow, pointing up. Myra and Jason sat in the back, with Mustafa’s legs and the ammo belt between them. As the jeep careered out of the carpark and swerved on to the main road into town, Jason leaned over and said, loud above the noise and the slipstream, “You were saying?”
“About Georgi’s great plan, yeah. As far as we can tell he never told anyone else, not even Valentina. That was him all over—he was a bit of a Kazakhstani patriot, and he still tended to act like this whole place was his personal fief. Which it once was!”
The jeep was making good progress—most of the traffic was in the other direction, towards the airport or—judging by the amounts of luggage and household goods piled on top of cars and trucks—towards Karaganda. Her relief at seeing the evacuation already under way was dampened by flashback images of other roads, other columns of vehicles: the road to Basra, the road out of Warsaw, the perimeter of Atlanta…
But no, not here! They had their own air cover—Kazakhstan’s elite aerospace defence force would surely shield these refugees. She thought briefly of setting up a conference call with Valentina and Chingiz, but decided against it. This conversation with Jason was the most urgent she could have right now, for reasons that were more than personal.
“OK,” Jason was saying, “as to the motive, right, did anyone else approach you for some kind of similar deal, after Georgi’s death but before the coup?”
“Only the fucking space movement!” She swallowed hard. “David Reid himself, at Georgi’s funeral.”
“Jesus H. That kind of fingers them, doesn’t it?”
Myra found the question of who knew about what bugging her.
“Well, there’s a problem with that,” she said. “Whoever killed Georgi, or had him killed, must have known that that would make us suspicious of the spacers. I mean, even before you found the evidence, I had them in the frame. And it’s a bit hard to reconstruct now, you know how it is, but when I refused to give Dave any hands-off guarantees, let alone any more… active support, well, that suspicion must have been in the scales. Might even have tipped them.”
Mustafa shouted something and brought the machine-gun down and around to the rear. Myra shifted her legs smartly away from the ammo belt and twisted her head around. Five hundred metres behind them was a small, jockeying pack of cars and jeeps, in front of a cloud of dust and beneath a halo of camcopters. She clapped Mustafa’s thigh.
“Leave them alone!” she yelled.
He replied with some Uzbek profanity, but desisted, swinging the machine-gun muzzle skyward again.
“So you’re saying killing Georgi was counterproductive for the spacers?”
“Damn right!”
“OK.” Jason leaned back in the cramped seat and closed his eyes for a moment. “Cui bono? Who benefited?”
“Ah, shit,” said Myra, realizing, just as the jeep turned the corner into Revolution Square, and stopped. Myra grabbed the rollbar and pulled herself up. Long practice in estimating the size of demos clicked into place automatically, like eyeband software.
About ten thousand.
“Oh, Jeez,” she said.
It was not a particularly militant or angry crowd, at that moment. Tents and shelters and stalls had been set up, and many of the banners were propped against them or leaning on street furniture, or stuck in the patches of now trampled grass or beds of flowers that chequered the square. People stood or sat about, in small groups, chatting, drinking coffee, reading news off broadsheets or eyebands or han-dhelds, listening to speeches and songs, arguing with each other or with the scattered ones and twos of the Workers’ Militia. Some were dressed casually, others in their best outfits or in national costumes or street-theatre radiation overalls.
“Looks pretty dangerous,” said Jason.
She gave him an appreciative nod. “Yeah, that’s a mass demo if ever I saw one. Not to mention a big fraction of the remaining population. Shit.”
The kids back in Glasgow had been right: her small state was having a big political revolution. The two mujahedin glowered uncomprehendingly at the mingled banners of Kazakhstan, the ISTWR, the old Soviet Union, the International, the red flags and the black.
She ducked and placed a hand on Nurup’s shoulder.
“Stand up,” she ordered. “Look cheerful. Wave your rifle high above your head. Mustafa, for heaven’s sake smile, man, wave your arms and keep your hands off the LMG. No matter what, you got that?”
To the driver, “Around the inside edge of the crowd, towards the entrance. Slow and careful.”
She lifted herself up, swung her ass around and perched on the rollbar, feet on the back of Nurup’s seat. The driver engaged first gear, then second. The jeep rolled towards the corner of the front of the building. It had about fifty metres to go, then another fifty when it would have to turn right and inch along to the entrance. They went unremarked for about half a minute. Then the people stepping out of their way started calling and pointing. A moment later the pursuing reporters caught up and all chance of discretion was gone.
She could see the news of her arrival spread through the crowd like a gust of wind on a field. The camcopters circled at a safe distance, zooming in on her and on reaction shots of the people looking at her. Their only chance, she’d decided, was to look confident and triumphant She grinned and waved, meanwhile blinking up a call to Valentina.
“You can see us?”
Yeah, we’ve got you covered. We’ll open the door for you when you reach it.”
Cheers and jeers echoed off the government office’s glass and concrete walls. No organised chanting or coherent mood as yet—people were still unsure what to make of her return. She smiled desperately at every individual face that came into focus, and quite a few smiled back. The hovering camcopters had their directional mikes aimed at her, but she didn’t speak to, or for, them.
“It’s all right, folks, comrades, we’re getting it all sorted out, we’ve got a strong alliance with Kazakhstan, we’re negotiating with the UN and we’ll hold off the Sheenisov, I’ll be talking to you all soon, once I’ve had a chance to consult—”
The jeep came to a gentle halt outside the main door. Myra glanced sideways, saw a couple of militiamen holding it, ready to open, their rifles in their other hands.
“Go in
, guys, all of you, I’ll keep talking.”
They hesitated.
“Go go go!”
One by one they ran up the steps and disappeared inside. Myra stepped from the seat-back to the dash, over the windshield and on to the engine hood, then hopped backwards on to a step, keeping in view all the time. She backed up the steps, smiling and waving, and through the doors.
Jason’s arms wrapped around her from behind.
“Well done.”
She leaned against him for a moment, tilting her head back on his shoulder, then straightened up and stepped away, turning to smile.
“That was scary.” She laughed. “It’s weird being the target of a demonstration—I feel I should be out there helping to organise it.”
Jason’s eyes narrowed. “That,” he said, “might become an option.”
“Ah, fuck off, you Machiavellian spook!” She caught his hand, swept an encircling arm at Nurup and Mustafa. “Come on, guys, let’s sort out this mess.”
They held the emergency meeting in Myra’s office whose broad window overlooked the square. Denis Gubanov had suggested using the Sovnarkom room, but Myra had dismissed the security man’s idea. No way did she want to be in a windowless room.
Everybody was sitting on or lounging against inappropriate furniture—desks and filing cabinets and comms junctions. Myra perched herself on the highest convenient surface, the top of a book-case full of unread yellowing hardcopy. She cradled her Glock in her lap. Somehow sitting in a chair seemed frivolous. Two militia guards stood watchfully at the sides of the windows, using their eyebands to sample camcopter views from the news services. Andrei Mukhartov, Valentina Kozlova and Denis Gubanov all looked sleepless and unkempt: the men unshaven, Val’s collar and tie loosened, her uniform rumpled.
Myra introduced the two mujahedin and Jason. Denis raised his eyebrows, but made no comment. Myra unobtrusively made sure that her three men were in a position to protect her—she wasn’t at all sure who, if any, of those present were leaving the room alive, whether or not the room was stormed by an angry mob. She’d once interviewed an unrepentant old Stalinist who’d been in the Budapest Party offices in October 1956…
“OK, comrades,” she began. “First things first. You know the Western powers have refused our offers. I’ve just today been on the shortest diplomatic mission ever, and I can tell you the Sheenisov aren’t interested in a deal either. So it’s only a question of time before they’re rolling down the road from Semey. But that’s just background. We have some urgent matters to discuss.
“I’m going to start with something that may not seem like the first item on the agenda, but bear with me.” She waved a hand at the window. “These people can wait. It’s about Georgi’s death. Jason Nikolaides here has told me the results of a CIA investigation—murder, using a spacer nanotech weapon. Hard to detect traces, but Jason says they’ve done it, and I believe him. What I don’t believe is that the spacist bastards did it. Whoever did it wanted two things—one, that Georgi’s offer didn’t get through to the Kazakhstanis before the coup. Two, that we wouldn’t co-operate with the space movement in the coup. Now, seeing as nobody except Georgi knew he was planning to make that offer, our range of suspects is a bit narrow. Basically, it has to be someone that Georgi would run the idea past, someone outside the government information loop—maybe in the Sovnarkom, maybe not.”
She looked down, playing with the Glock’s slide for a moment, then looked up. She’d been thinking aloud, she hadn’t had time yet to go through all the possibilities.
“Val!” she shouted. Everybody jumped. “If I thought it was you, I’d slam you against the wall till your teeth rattled to get the truth out of you. You and Georgi were both in the Party, unlike anyone else here.”
She smiled, pleased to see her colleagues off balance. “But as it happens, I trust you. Same with Andrei, who’s never been into that sort of shit anyway. Denis, now—”
The secret policeman looked up and moistened his lips.
T swear, Myra—”
Tt’s all right,” Jason interrupted. “The Company checked him out. He’s clear.” He glanced at Myra, then grinned at Denis Gubanov. “Bit of a commie son-of-a-bitch, but he’s on your side.”
“Good,” said Myra, winging it. “I’m going through this to confirm that nobody here is a suspect. That leaves only one possibility. Georgi must have shared his idea with somebody, and it can only have been the FI Mil Org. The General.”
She let them think about that while she explained to Jason, Nurup and Mustafa about the nukes and the AI.
“It has its own agenda,” she concluded, addressing everyone again. “And it’s working through the Sheenisov. It wants those nukes, very badly. So do the spacers. Whether they used each other—the information on one side, the weapon from the other—knowingly or not, Georgi’s murder was a move in that rivalry. Whoever controls these weapons has a gun at the head of everyone and everything in Earth orbit and at Lagrange—which adds up to about ninety-five percent of the human space presence. And I would remind you that, thanks to the coup and counter-coup, the General controls most of the Space Defense battlesats. Now, this has a bearing on what we do about the UN ultimatum. Which is—” she grinned ferally “—the second item on the agenda.”
“Excuse me,” said Jason, standing up. “Just who does control these nukes, at the moment?”
“We do,” said Valentina and Myra, at the same time. Myra gave Val an especially warm smile, hoping that her apparent—and partly paranoically real—earlier suspicion hadn’t wounded their friendship beyond repair.
“It’s dual key,” Valentina explained. “Defence Minister and Prime Minister have to go into the command-center workspace at the same time.”
“And, well, it’s not hardcoded in, but right now obviously we have a treaty commitment to give the President of Kazakhstan the final say,” Myra added. “And his strategy, at the moment, is to stonewall until the last minute, to try and get some military aid concessions out of the Western powers and/or the UN against the Sheenisov.”
“So he intends to turn them over eventually?” Jason asked.
Myra hesitated. “OK,” she said at last. “This doesn’t go beyond this room, and that goes for everyone here. You guys at the window, too—military discipline, death penalty under the Freedom of Information Law if you breathe a word of it. Everybody clear?”
They all were.
“All right then—yes, he does intend for us to turn them over, eventually. What else can we do?”
“We can use the weapons,” said Denis. “In space.”
Val’s lips set in a thin line. Myra shook her head.
“Massacre,” she said. “I won’t do it, except as a last resort.”
“You’re all missing the point,” said Jason. He looked around at all of them, as though unsure whether he had a right to speak.
“Go on,” said Myra.
“OK,” said Jason, “I’m just speaking for myself here, not for the CIA or East America. I don’t know if I’ll ever get back to either of them. Anyway… the point you’re all missing is: who are you going to surrender your weapons to? Formally, no doubt, it’ll be the UN. But physically, somebody’s gonna have to dock with them, bring them in, disarm them. Space Defense, and maybe some of the space settlers, have the equipment and expertise to do that. There must be ways of getting past the software of your controls—there always are. Believe me, there are no uncrackable codes any more. Your cooperation would be useful, but it’s not essential.”
Myra lit a cigarette. “OK,” she said. “So?”
Jason paced over to the window, peered out. “Still quiet,” he said. He glanced at his watch. “We’ve been in here, what? Half an hour? Soon be time to talk to the people, Myra.”
“That’s cool,” Denis said. “We’ve got agitators out there, they’re keeping people more or less up to speed. The line is that the President is negotiating.”
“As I’m sure he is,” said Jason. “B
ut what does either side have to negotiate? Both sides have hit the bottom of the tank. You have nothing to offer, and the West has nothing to offer you. They will not save you from the Sheenisov. So if I were any of the other players—in particular, the spacers and your FI Mil Org, rogue AI or not—I’d be working very fast right now on two objectives. One is taking you guys and your wonderful dual-key command-centre out physically. The other is lining up rendezvous with the nukes in space. You can bet that while you think you’re smart, stringing them along, they are stringing you along, and they’re both going after the same things.”
He looked around again, more confident now. “This is endgame. Not just for us, but for them. One side or the other—the West-stroke-spacers-stroke-Outwarders, or the East-stroke-the-General-strokeSheenisov—is going to grab these weapons and use them, sooner rather than later.”
“But—” shouted Val, shocked. “The ablation cascade!”
“Not a problem for either of them, at the level we’re talking about. The Sheenisov’s horizons are strictly Earthbound, for the next few centuries. And their computers are invulnerable to EMP hits-they’re mechanical, not electronic. As to the spacists and the Mil Org, neither of them is dependent on going back to Earth, or on anything else getting off. And each unit of these forces probably calculates that they can cut and run for a higher orbit, or La-grange. Of course, they’d rather avoid it, but if they have to they’ll take it on the chin.
“So my advice to you all,” he concluded, “and to those people out there, is get the hell out And warn everybody that at the first sign of any messing with you, or Kazakhstan, or the nukes—you’ll blow them all to hell. Use the nukes against battlesats or detonate in place—either way you’ll set off the ablation cascade.”
“Christ,” said Myra, shaken. “That means the end of satellite guidance, global positioning, comsats, the nets, everything! It’ll be like the world going blind!”