The Sky Road

2 Ancient Time

Death follows me, she thought, as she rode into the labour-camp. There was something implacable about it, like logic: it follows, it follows… The thought’s occurrence had nothing to do with logic; it appeared like a screensaver on the surface of her mind, whenever her mind went blank. It troubled her a little, as did another thought that drifted by in such moments: where are the swift cavalry?

The gate rolled shut behind her, squealing in its rusty grooves. The wind from the steppe hummed in the barbed-wire fence and whipped away the dust kicked up as she reined in the black horse. A guard hurried over; he somehow managed to make his brisk soldierly step look obsequious, even as his bearing made his dark-blue microfibre fatigues look military. He doffed a baseball cap with the Mutual Protection lettering and logo.

“ Good morning, Citizen.”

That title was already an honorific. Myra Godwin-Davidova smiled and handed him the reins.

“Good morning,” she said, swinging down from the horse. She could hear her knee-joints creak. She lifted the saddlebags and slung them over her shoulder. The weight almost made her stagger, and the guard’s arm twitched towards her; but she wasn’t going to accept any help from that quarter. “That will be all, thank you.”

“As you wish, Citizen.” The guard saluted and replaced his cap. She was still looking down at him, her riding-boots adding three inches to her five-foot-eleven height.

She patted the big mare’s rump and watched as the guard led the beast away, then set off towards the accommodation huts. As she walked she pulled off her leather gauntlets and stuffed them awkwardly into the deep pockets of her long fur coat, and tucked a stray strand of silver hair under her sable hat. Hands mottled, veins showing, nails ridged: tough claws of an old bird, still flexible, but a better indication of her true age than her harshly lined but firm face, straight back and limber stride. Her knees hurt, but she tried not to let it show, or slow her down.

The camp perimeter was about one kilometre by two. Beyond the far fence she could see straight to the horizon, above which rose the many gantries and the few remaining tall ships of the old port. It had been a proud fleet once. How long before she would have to say, all my ships are gone and all my men are dead?

As if to mock her thought, a small ship screamed overhead; she caught a glimpse of it: angular, faceted, translucent, a spectral stealth-bomber shrieking skyward from Baikonur on a jet of laser-heated steam. The trail’s after-image floated irritatingly in front of her as she turned her gaze resolutely back to earth.

One of the camp’s factories was a couple of hundred metres away, a complex of aluminium pipework and fibre-optic cabling in a queasily organic-looking mass about fifty metres wide and twenty high, through which the control cabins and walkways of the human element were beaded and threaded like the eggs and exudate of some gargantuan insect. The name of the company that owned it, Space Merchants, was spelled out on the roof in twisty neon.

As she approached the nearest workers’ housing area it struck Myra, not for the first time, that the huts were more modern and comfortable than the concrete apartment block she lived in herself. Each hut was semi-cylindrical, its rounded ends streamlined to the prevailing wind; soot-black polycarbon skin with rows of laminated-diamond windows.

This particular cluster of accommodation huts was in two rows of ten, with the rutted remains of a twenty metre-wide paved road between them. A gang of a dozen men was engaged in repairing the road; the breeze carried a waft of sweat and tar. The men were using shovels, a gas burner under a tipping-and-spreading contraption, and a coughing diesel-engined road-roller: primitive, heavy equipment. On the sidewalk a blue-suited Mutual Protection guard lounged, picking his teeth and apparently watching a show in his eyes and hearing music or commentary in his ears.

The loom of Myra’s shadow made him jump, blink and shake his head with a small shudder. He started to his feet.

“No need to get up,” Myra said unkindly. “I just want to speak to some of the men.”

“They’re on a break, Citizen,” he said, squinting up at her. “So it’s up to them, right?”

“Right,” said Myra. Physical work counted as recreation. It was the intellectual labour of design and monitoring that taxed the convicts’ nerves.

She turned to the men, who waved to her and shouted greetings and explanations: she’d have to wait the few minutes it would take for them to finish spreading and rolling some freshly poured tarmac. Not offering one to the guard, she lit a Marley and let the men take their time finishing their break. She’d always insisted that her arrivals and inspections counted as work-time for the labourers.

Her spirits lifted as the Virginia and the Morocco kicked in. The labourers had their yellow suits rolled down to the waist, and were sweating even though the temperature had just climbed above freezing. Most of them were younger—let’s face it, far younger—than herself; dark-tanned Koreans and Japanese, muscular as martial arts adepts—which, indeed, some of them were. She enjoyed watching them, the effect of smoke amplifying the underlying undertone of lust, the happy, hippy hormonal hum…

But that reminded her of Georgi, and her mood crashed again. Georgi was dead. Sometimes it seemed every man she’d ever fucked was dead; it was like she carried a disease: Niall MacCallum had died in a car crash, Jaime Gonzalez had died—what?—seventy years ago in the contra war, Jon Wilde had died in her arms on the side of the Karaganda road (on snow that turned red as his face turned white), and now Georgi Davidov had died in the consulate at Almaty, of a heart attack. (They expected her to believe thai?)

There had been others, she reminded herself. Quite recent others. It wasn’t every man she’d ever fucked who was doomed, it was every man she’d ever loved. There was only one exception she knew of. All her men were dead, except one, and he was a killer.

Even, perhaps, Georgi’s killer. Fucking heart attack, my ass! It was one of their moves, it had to be—a move in the endgame.

A door banged open somewhere and the street suddenly swarmed with children pelting along and yelling, their languages and accents as varied as the colours of their skins. Few of the camp’s bonded labour-force were women, but many of the men had women with them; there was every inducement for the prisoners to bring their families along. It was humane, but politic as well: a man with a woman and children was unlikely to risk escape or revolt.

Surrounded by children calling to their fathers, poking fingers in the hot asphalt, crowding around the machines and loudly investigating, die gang knocked off at last, leaving the guard to mind the newly tarred road. Myra savoured his disgruntled look as she crushed the filter roach under her heel and stepped out into the centre of the untarred part of the street.

“Hi, guys.”

They all knew who she was, but the only ones among them she recognised were two members of the camp committee, Kim Nok-Yung and Shin Se-Ha. The former was a young Korean shipyard worker, stocky and tough; the latter a Japanese mathematician of slender build and watchful mien. Kim seized her hand, grinning broadly.

“Hello, Myra.”

“Good to see you, Nok-Yung. And you, Se-Ha.”

The Japanese man inclined his head. “Hi.” He insisted on taking her saddlebags. The whole gang surrounded her, flashing eyes and teeth, talking to each other and to her without much regard for mutual comprehension. They shooed away the children and led her into the nearest hut. Its doorway film brushed over her, burst in a shower of droplets with an odour of antiseptic, and reformed behind her. She blinked rapidly and shrugged out of her heavy coat, throwing it on to one of a row of hooks that grew from the curving wall.

Her first deep breath was evidence enough of how effective the filter film was at keeping out the dust. At the same time, it brought a flush to her skin as her immune system rushed to investigate whatever she’d just inhaled of the nanoware endemic to the building’s interior. She followed Kim into the dining-area, an airy space of flat-surfaced furnishings—some a warning red to indicate that they were for heating, others white for eating off. The chairs were padded black polycarbon plastic. Around the walls, racked on shelves or stacked on floors, were thousands of books: centuries’ worth of classics and bestsellers and blockbusters and textbooks, as if blown from the four winds and fetched up against these barriers. It would have been the same in any of the huts. The next most common items of clutter were musical instruments and craft equipment and products: plastic scrimshank, spaceships in bottles, elaborately carved wooden toys.

As they sat down around a table Myra felt prickly and on edge. She tugged her eyeband, a half-centimetre-wide crescent of translucent plastic, from her hair and placed it across her temples, in front of her eyes. A message drifted across her retina. “Nanoprotect56 has detected the following known surveillance molecules in the room: Dataphage, Hackendice, Reportback, Mercury, Moldavian. Do you wish to clean up?”

She blinked when the cursor stopped on the Proceed option, took a deep breath, held it until her lungs were burning, then exhaled. The faces around the table were incurious and amused.

“Cleanup in progress,” the retinal display reported. Myra took a deep breath. It felt cool this time, as well as smooth.

“So we have privacy,” one of the Koreans said, with heavy irony.

“Ah, fuck it,” Myra said. “Happens every time. You gotta assume they’re listening.” There was bound to be something else her current release of ’ware wasn’t up to catching: she imagined some tiny Turing machine ticking away, stitching sound-vibrations into a long-chain molecule in the dirt She took a recorder—larger and less advanced than the one in her mental picture—from her pocket and laid it on the table. “And I’m listening. So, what have you got for me?”

A quick exchange of glances around the table ended as usual with Kim Nok-Yung accepted as the spokesman. He rustled a paper from an inner pocket and ran a finger down the minutes; Matters Arising started with the routine first question.

“Any progress on POW recognition?”

Myra was touched by the note of hope with which he asked the question, the hundredth time no different from the first. She compressed her lips and shook her head. “Sorry, guys. Red Cross and Crescent are working on it, and Amnesty. Still no dice.”

Nok-Yung shrugged. “Oh well. Please make the standard protest.”

“Of course.”

As they ticked their way down the list of complaints and conditions and assignments and payments, Myra noticed that the whole pattern of production in the camp had changed. The intensity of the work, and the volume of output, had gone up drastically. Twenty engines and a hundred habitat modules completed for Space Merchants in the past month! Nok-Yung and Se-Ha were subtly underlining the changes with guarded glances and shifts in tone, but they weren’t commenting explicitly.

Myra looked around the table when they reached the end of the agenda. No one had complained about the speed-up. They didn’t seem troubled; they had an air of suppressed excitement, almost glee, as they waited for her to speak. She checked over again the figures in her head, and realised with a jolt that at this rate most of the men here would work off their fines—or “debts”—in months rather than years.

Another endgame move. Myra nodded slightly and smiled. “Well, that’s it,” she said. “Don’t overwork yourselves, guys. I mean it. Make sure you get in plenty of road-mending, OK?”

The prisoners just grinned at their shared secret She reached for the saddlebags, as though just remembering something. “I’ve brought some books for you.”

The men leaned inward eagerly as she unpacked. They weren’t allowed any kind of interface with the net, and nothing that could be used to build one: no televisions or computers or readers or VR rigs, not even music decks. Nothing could stop Myra carrying in whatever she liked—the saddlebags were legally a diplomatic bag—but any electronic or molecular contraband would have been confiscated the moment she left. So hardbooks it had to be. The prisoners and their families had an unquenchable thirst for them. Myra’s every visit brought more additions to the drift.

This time she had dozens of paperbacks with tasteful Modern Art covers and grey spines, 20th Century Classics—Harold Robbins, Stephen King, Dean Koontz and so on—which she shoved across the table to the men whose names she didn’t know. For her friends Nok-Yung and Se-Ha she’d saved the best for last: hardbooks so ancient that only advanced preservation treatments kept them from crumbling to dust—

Rather like herself, she thought, as the books passed one by one from her gnarled hands: an incredibly rare, possibly unique, copy of Tucker’s edition of Stirner; the Viking Portable Nietzsche; and a battered Thinker’s Library edition of Spencer’s First Principles.

Kim Nok-Yung looked down at them reverently, then up at her. Shin Se-Ha was in some kind of trance. Nok-Yung shook his head.

“This is too much,” he said, almost angrily. “Myra, you can’t—”

“Oh yes, I can.”

“Where did you get them?” asked Se-Ha.

Myra shrugged. “From Reid, funnily enough.”

All the men were looking at her now, with sour smiles.

“From David Reid? The owner?” Kim waved his hand, indicating everything in sight.

“Yeah,” said Myra. “The very same.”

There was a moment of sober silence.

“Well,” Nok-Yung said at last, “I hope we make better use of them than he did, the bastard.”

Everybody laughed, even Myra.

“So do I,” she said.

She settled back in her chair and passed around the Marley pack and accepted the offer of coffee.

“OK, guys,” she said. “The news. Everything’s still going to hell.” She grimaced. “Same as last week. A few shifts in the fronts, that’s all. Take it from me, you ain’t missing much.”

“A few shifts in which fronts?” asked Se-Ha suspiciously.

“Ah,” said Myra. “If you must know—the northeastern front is… active.”

Another silent exchange of glances and smiles. Myra didn’t share in their pleasure, but couldn’t blame them for it. The two encroaching events that filled her most with dread were, for them, each in different ways an earnest of their early liberation.

She said her goodbyes, wondering if it was for the last time, and took her now empty bags and stalked away through the restitution-camp streets, and mounted her horse and rode out of the gate, towards the city.

Thinking about Reid, trying to think calmly and destructively about Reid, she found her mind drifting back. He had not always been such a bastard. He’d been the first person to tell her she need never die. That had been eighty-three years ago, when she was twenty-two years old. She hadn’t believed him…

Death follows me.

“You don’t have to die,” he told her.

Black hair framed his face, black eyebrows his intent, brown-eyed gaze. Dave Reid was dark and handsome but not, alas, tall. He wore a denim jacket with a tin button—a badge, as the Brits called them—pinned to its lapel. The badge was red with the black hammer-and-sickle-and-4 of the International.

“What!” Myra laughed. “I know it feels that way now, everybody our age feels like that, yeah? But it’ll come to us all, man, don’t kid yourself.”

She rolled back on her elbows on the grass and looked up at the blue spring sky. It was too bloody cold for this, but the sun was out and the ground was dry, and that was good enough for sunbathing in Scotland. The grassy slope behind the Boyd Orr Building was covered with groups and couples of students, drinking and smoking and talking. Probably missing lectures—it was already two in the afternoon.

“Seriously,” Dave said, in that Highland accent that carried the sound of wind on grass, of waves on shore, “if you can live into the twenty-first century, you have a damn good chance of living for ever.”

“Says who? L. Ron Hubbard?”

Dave snorted. “Arthur C. Clarke, actually.”

“Who?”

He frowned at her. “You know—scientist, futurist The man who invented the communications satellite.”

“Oh, him,” Myra said scornfully. “Sci-fi. 2001 and all that,” She saw the slight flinch of hurt in David’s face, and went on, “Oh, don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying it’s impossible. Maybe hundreds of years from now, maybe in communism. Not in our lifetimes, though. Tough shit.”

Dave shrugged and rolled another cigarette.

“We’ll see.”

“I guess. And the rate you smoke those things, you’ll be lucky to be alive in the twenty-first century. You won’t even get to first base.”

“Och, I’ll last another twenty-four years.” He sighed, blowing smoke on to the slightly warm breeze, then smiled at her mischievously. “Unless I become a martyr of the revolution, of course.”

“ ‘I have a rendezvous with death, on some disputed barricade’ ” Myra quoted. “Don’t worry. That’s another thing won’t happen in our lifetimes.”

The shadow of the tall building crept over Dave’s face. He shifted deftly, back into the sunlight.

“That’s what you think, is it?”

“Yeah, that’s what I think.” She smiled, and added, with ironic reassurance, “Our natural lifetimes, that is.”

Dave hefted a satchel stuffed with copies of revolutionary newspapers and magazines. “Then what’s the point of all this? Why don’t we just eat, drink and be merry?”

Myra swigged from a can of MacEwan’s, lowered it and looked at him over its rim. “That’s what I am doing right now, lover.”

He took her point, and reached out and stroked the curve of her cheekbone. “But still,” he persisted. “Why bother with politics if you don’t think we’re going to win?”

“Dave,” she said, “I’m not a socialist because I expect to end up running some kinda workers’ state of my own some day. I do what I do because I think it’s right. OK?”

“OK,” said Reid, smiling; but his smile was amused as well as affectionate, as though she were being naive. Irritated without quite knowing why, she turned away.

The city was called Kapitsa, and it was the capital of the International Scientific and Technical Workers’ Republic, which had no other city; indeed, apart from the camps, no other human habitation. The ISTWR was an independent enclave on the fringe of the Polygon—the badlands between Karaganda and Semipalatinsk, a waste-product of Kazakhstan’s nuclear-testing legacy. A long time ago, Kapitsa would have looked modern, with its centre of high-rise office blocks, its inner ring of automatic factories, its periphery of dusty but tree-lined streets and estates of low-rise apartment blocks, the bustling airport just outside and the busy spaceport on the horizon, from which the great ships had loudly climbed, day after day. Now it was a rustbelt, as quaintly obsolete as the Japanese car factories or the Clyde shipyards or the wheat plains of Ukraine.

Myra, however, felt somewhat cheered as the mare took her through the light traffic of the noonday streets. The apple trees were in bloom, and every wall had its fresh-looking, colourful mural of flowers or stars or ships or crowds or children or heroes or heroines. Real ancient space-age stuff, an effect enhanced by the younger—genuinely young—people enjoying the chilly sunshine in the fashionable scanty garb, which recalled the late 1960s in its jaunty futurism. She looked at girls in skinny tights and shiny, garish minidresses and found herself wondering if they were cold… probably not, the clothes were only an imitation of their nylon or PVC originals, the nanofactured fabrics veined with heat-exchangers, laced with molecular machines.

The bright clothing gave the people on the street an appearance of prosperity, but Myra was all too aware that it was superficial. The clothes were cheaper than paper, easily affordable even on Social Security. Over the past few years, with the coming of the diamond ships, the heavy-booster market had gone into free fall, and unemployment had rocketed. The dole was paid by her department out of the rent from Mutual Protection, and it couldn’t last. Nostalgia tourism—the old spaceport was now a World Heritage Site, for what that was worth—looked like the only promising source of employment.

Before she knew it, the horse had stopped, from habit, outside the modest ten-storey concrete office-block of the republic’s government on Revolution Square. Myra sat still for a moment, gazing wryly at this week’s morale-boosting poster on the official billboard: a big black-and-white blow-up of the classic Tass photo of Gagarin, grinning out from his cosmonaut helmet. She remembered the time, in her grade-school classroom on the Lower East Side, when she’d first seen this human face and had formed some synaptic connection between Gagarin’s grin and Guevara’s glare.

Space and socialism. What a swindle it had all been. She shook the reins, took the mare at a slow pace around to the back, stabled it, wiped the muck from her boots and ascended the stairs. The corridors to her office—at the front of the building, as befitted a People’s Commissar for Social Policy and Prime Minister Pro Tern and (now that she came to think about it) Acting President—were filled with a susurrus of hurrying feet and fast-fading whispers. Myra glanced sharply at the groups she passed, but few seemed willing to return her look.

She closed the door of her office with a futile but soul-satisfying slam. Let the apparatchiks worry about her mood, if she had to worry about theirs. The last time she’d sniffed this evasive air in the corridors had been just before the first—and only—time she’d fallen out of power, back in 2046. Then, she’d suspected an imminent move from the Mutual Protection company and its proteges within the state apparatus: a coup d’etat Now, she suspected that Mutual Protection and its allies were into the final moves of a much wider game-plan, as wide as it could be: a coup du monde. Or coup d’etoile! She stalked to the window, shedding her coat and hat and gloves in quick, violent movements, leaned on her knuckles on the sill and scanned her surroundings in a spasm of fang-baring territoriality. No tanks or tramping feet sounded in her city’s streets, no black helicopters clattered in her country’s sky. What did she expect? There were days at least to go before anything happened—and, when it did, the opening blows would be overt in larger capitals than hers; she’d be nipped by CNN soundbites in the new order’s first seconds.

She sighed and turned away, picked up her dropped clothes and hung them carefully on the appropriate branches of a chrome-plated rack. The office was as self-consciously retro-modernist as the styles on the street, if a little more sophisticated—pine walls and floor, lobate leather layers at random on both; ornaments in steel and silver, ebony and plastic, of planetary globes and interplanetary craft. She dropped into the office chair and leaned back, letting it massage her shoulders and neck. She slid the band across her eyes, summoned a head-up display and rolled her eyes to study it. The anti-viral ’ware playing across her retinae flickered, but there was nothing untoward for it to report; here, as in all the offices, the walls had teeth. Her own software was wrapped around her, its loyalty as intimate, and as hard to subvert, as the enhanced immune-systems in her blood. It was personal, it was a personal, a unique configuration of software agents that scanned the world and Myra’s responses to the world, and built up from that interaction a shrewd assessment of her needs and interests. It looked out information for her, and it looked after her investments. It did to the world nets what her Sterling search engine did for her Library—it selected and extracted what was relevant from the vast and choppy sea of data in which most people swam or, more often, drowned.

Having a good suite of personal ’ware was slighdy more important for a modern politician than the traditional personal networks of influence and intelligence. In the decade since she’d recovered power, Myra had made sure that her networks—both kinds, virtual and actual—were strong and intertwined, strong enough to carry her if the structure of the state ever again let her down. Though even that was unlikely—her purges, though bloodless, had been as ruthless as Tito’s. No official of the ISTWR would ever again have the slightest misapprehension of where their best interests lay, and no employee or agent of Mutual Protection would fancy their chances of changing that.

She’d have to consult with the rest of Sovnarkom soon enough—a meeting was scheduled for 3 p.m.—and round up some of the scurrying underlings from the corridors to prepare for it, but she wanted to get her own snapshot of the situation first.

Myra’s personal didn’t have a personality, as far as she knew, but it had a persona: a revolutionary, a stock-market speculator, an arms dealer, a spy; a freewheeling, high-rolling, all-swindling communist-capitalist conspirator out of some Nazi nightmare. It had a name.

Tarvus,” she whispered. The retinal projectors on her eyeband summoned an image of a big man in a baggy suit and a shirt stretched across his belly like a filled sail, scudding along on gales of information. He strolled towards her, smiling, his pockets stuffed with papers, his cigarette hand waving as he prepared to tell her something. She’d never come across a recording of the original Parvus in action, but she’d given this one the appearance of one historic Trotskyist leader, and the mad-scientist mannerisms of another, whose standard speech she’d once sat through, long ago in the Student Union in Glasgow.

“Give me the big picture.”

Parvus nodded. He ran his fingers through his mop of white hair, furrowed his brow, grinned maniacally.

“Jane’s, I think.” He flicked an inch of ash, conjured a screen. Her gaze fixed on an option; she blinked, and the room vanished from her sight; again, and Earth fell away.

Her first virtual view, spun in orbit, was from Jane’s Market Forces—a publicly available, but prohibitively expensive, real-time survey of military deployments around the world. She was running the next-but-one release, currently in beta test. It had cost the republic’s frugal defence budget nothing more than the stipend to place a patriotic Kazakh postgrad in the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s equally cash-starved IT department. (That, and an untraceable credit line to his comms account.) Myra, long familiar with the conventional symbols and ideographs, took it all in at an abstract level: colour-coded, vectored graphs in a 3-D space, with other dimensions implied by subtle shadings and the timing of pulsations. That photic filigree hung like a complicated cloud-system over the relatively static histograms depicting the hardware and the warm bodies. The physical locations and quantities of personnel and materiel could provide only a basement-level understanding of the world military balance, just as the location of physical plant was only a rough cut of the state of the world market. Second by second, market and military forces shifted unpredictably, their mutual interpenetration more complex than any ideology had ever foreseen. With most of the world’s official armies revolutionary or mercenary or both, and most of the conflicts settled in unarguable simulation before they started, everyone from the bankers down through the generals to the grunts on the ground would shrug and accept the virtual verdict, and change sides, reinforce or retreat in step with their software shadows—all except the Greens, and the Reds. They fought for real, and played for keeps.

It was like the old Civilization game, Myra sometimes thought, with a new twist: Barbarism II. Nobody was going to wipe the board, nobody was going to Alpha Centauri. They were all going down together, into the dark… Just as soon as enough major players decided to contest the incontestable, and put the simulations to the audit of war.

But, for the moment, the dark was full of twisting light. And in the real world, blinked up as backdrop, one front was more than virtual, and closer than she’d like. Beyond the northern border of Kazakhstan, itself hundreds of kilometres north of the ISTWR, the Sino-Soviet Union’s ragged front-line advanced in flickers of real fire: guerilla skirmishes and sabotage on one side, half-hearted long-range shelling and futile carpet-bombing on the other.

The Sheenisov—the name was subtly derogatory, like Vietcong for NLF and Yank for United Nations—were the century’s first authentic communist threat, who really believed in their updated version of the ideology which communistans like the ISTWR parodied in post-futurist pastiche. Based in the god forsaken back-country of recusant collective farms and worker-occupied factories, stubbornly surviving decades of counter-revolution and war, armed by partisan detachments of deserters (self-styled, inevitably, “loyalists’) from the ex-Soviet Eastern and ex-PRC Northern armies, they’d held most of Mongolia and Siberia and even parts of north-west China since the Fall Revolution back in 2045, and in the years since then they’d spread across the steppe like lichen. Myra detested and admired them in equal measure.

Of more immediate, and frustrating, concern: the Sheenisov were outside the virtual world, a torn black hole in the net. Their computers were permanently offline; their cadres didn’t trade combat futures; they refused all simulated confrontation or negotiation; like the Green marginals in the West and the Khmer Vertes in the South, the Reds in the East put all to the test of practice, the critique of arms. Even Jane’s could only guess at their current disposition.

But their serrated south-western edge was clear enough, and as usual it was cutting closer to her domain than it had been the last time she’d checked. Like, this time yesterday…

She sighed and turned her attention from the communists to tracing the darker deeds of a real international conspiracy: the space movement. Somewhere in that scored darkness, reading between those lines of light, she had to find the footprints of a larger and more ragged army, impatient to assume the world.

Her first step—acknowledged by the system with startled gratitude—was to update the information on Mutual Protection’s labour-camp output. When this was integrated and plausibly projected to the company’s whole global archipelago, a first-cut reevaluation of relative military-industrial weightings sent ripples through the entire web. Just as well she was working with a personal copy, Myra thought wryly. This was information to kill for (although already, presumably, discounted by Mutual Protection itself, which must surely know she knew).

She zapped the speculative update with a flashing “urgent” tag to the People’s Commissar for Finance, and a less urgent summary to the comrade over at Defence. Then she invoked her ongoing dossier of space-movement activity, meshed in the new output figures, and sent it to all the commissars, with her own interpretation.

The “space-movement coup” had been talked about, openly, for so long that it had become unreal—as unreal as the Revolution had been, until it had finally come to pass. Myra herself had cried wolf on the coup, once before. But now she felt herself vindicated. And, again, David Reid was involved.

Her former lover had built up Mutual Protection from a security-service subsidiary of an insurance company into a global business that dealt in restitution: criminals working to compensate the damage they’d done. Originally touted as a humane, market-driven reform and replacement of the old barbaric prison systems, its extension from common criminals to political and military prisoners after the Fall Revolution had given it an appalling, unstoppable logic of runaway expansion, in much the same way as the use of prison labour in the First Five-Year Plan had done for the original GULag.

For more than a decade now, those on the losing side of small wars and increasingly minor crimes had provided the manpower for a gigantic space-settlement boom, applying whatever skills they had—or could rapidly learn—to pay off their crimedebts as quickly as possible. At the same time, the proliferation of space-movement enclaves, each of which incited a horde of beleaguering barbarians or a swarm of furious bureaucrats, had provided an endless pool of new convicts. Quite a large proportion of the prisoners, on completion of their payback time, had seized the abundant employment opportunities the space projects offered.

Mutual Protection was now the armature of a global coalition of defence companies, launch companies, space settlement programmes, political campaigns and a host of minor governments—many of them creatures of these same companies. The space-movement coalition was on the point of assembling enough forces to re-create a stable world government and to bring the former Space Defense batde-sats back under UN control. Their objective, long mooted, was to roll back the environmentalist and anti-technological opposition movements, and shift enough labour and capital into Earth orbit to create a self-sustaining space presence that could ride out any of the expected catastrophes below—of which, God knew, there were plenty to choose from.

The coup itself was expected to proceed on two levels. One was a political move to take over the rump ReUN, by the votes of all the numerous ministates that could be subverted, suborned or convinced. The other was a military move, thus legitimised, to seize the old US/UN Space Defense battlesats. That, Myra reckoned, was behind the speed-up in the labour-camps. No doubt massive subversion was going on among the orbital military personnel, but by the nature of the case there wasn’t much she could know about that.

She stared at the virtual screen for a long time, until the clenchings of her fists and the twitching grimaces of her face and the blinking-back of tears confused the ’ware so much that it shut off, and left her staring at the wall.

Sovnarkom—the Council of People’s Commissars, or, in more conventional terminology, the Cabinet—was the appropriately small government of an almost unviably small state (population 99,854, last time anyone had bothered to count, and dropping by the day). The structures of the ISTWR were an exercise in socialist camp, modelled on those of the old Soviet republics but without the leading role of the Party. The result of that strategic omission had been a democracy as genuine as that of its inspiration had been false. Or so it had seemed, in the republic’s more prosperous days.

Myra arrived early, and took the privilege of the first arrival—the chairman’s seat, at the head of the long, bare table of scarred mahogany with a clunky blast-proof secretarial device in the centre. There were another dozen seats, six along either side of the table, each with its traditional mineral water and notepaper in front of it. The room was bare, win-dowless but lit by full-spectrum plates in the ceiling. The only decoration on the white walls was a framed photograph of the long-dead nuclear physicist after whom the city was named.

Valentina Kozlova came in, her military fatigues elegant as always, her hair untidy, her hands full of hardcopy. She was in her fifties, a still-young child of the century, young enough and lucky enough to have got the anti-ageing treatments before she got old. She smiled tensely and sat down. Then Andrei Mukhartov, cropped-blond, fortyish and looking it—probably by intent—soberly conventional in a three-piece suit of electric-blue raw silk. Denis Gubanov, younger than the others, ostentatiously casual, needing a shave, looking as though he’d just come in from sounding out an informer in some sleazy spaceport bar. Alexander Sherman arrived last, giving his usual impression of having been pulled away from more urgent business. His fashionable pseudo-plastic jump-suit was doubtless just the job for his post, but Myra liked it even less than she liked him. He sat down and glanced around as though expecting the meeting to begin immediately, then pursed his lips and slid two sheets of paper across to Myra.

“More resignations, I’m afraid,” he said. “Tatyana and Michael have…”

Taken off for richer pastures,” Myra said. “I heard.” She looked at the empty spaces around the depleted table, and shrugged. “Well, according to revolutionary convention there is no such thing as an inquorate meeting, so…”

“We really must co-opt some new members!” Sherman said.

“Yes,” said Myra drily. “We really must.”

Her tone made Alexander snap back, “It’s a disgrace—we have no Commissar for Law, or the Interior, or—”

“Yes, yes,” Myra interrupted. “And half the fucking members of the Supreme Soviet have fucked off—the wrong half, as it happens, “couldn’t find a competent commissar for anything among the remainder. At the rate we’re going, we won’t have enough of an electorate to make up the numbers! So what do you suggest?”

Alexander Sherman opened his mouth, closed it, and shrugged. His mutinous look convinced Myra that he’d be the next to go—as Commissar for Industry, he had the right connections already.

“OK, comrades,” Myra said, “let’s call the meeting to order.” She took off her eyeband and laid it formally on the table, and those who hadn’t already done so followed suit. It was not quite a rule to do so, but it was the custom—a gesture of politeness as well as an assurance that everyone was paying attention—to set aside one’s personal for the duration of the meeting. Myra could never make up her mind whether it was mutual trust, or mutual suspicion, that lay behind the custom of not doing the same with one’s personal weapons. Nobody’d ever pulled a gun at a Sovnarkom meeting, but there were precedents…

“Recorder: on. Regular meeting of the Council, Friday 9 May 2059, Myra Godwin-Davidova presiding, five members present.” She looked around, then looked back at the recorder’s steel grille. “I move that we shelve the agenda and go straight to emergency session. Starting with the death of Citizen Davidov.”

No dissent. Seconds of silence passed.

“Don’t all talk at once,” she said.

Valentina Kozlova (Defence) spoke first. “Look, Myra—Comrade Chair—we’ve all spoken to you about Georgi’s death. We were all very sorry to hear of it.”

Myra nodded. “Thank you.”

“Having said that—we need to decide on our political response. Now, obviously the police in Almaty are investigating, and so far there seem to be no indications of foul play.” She shrugged. “That, of course, is hard to prove, these days. However… Georgi Yefrimovich had a great deal of responsibility—” she gestured vaguely at Andrei Mukhartov, the International Affairs Commissar “—and in the circumstances, natural causes do seem likely.”

Myra sighed. “Yes, I appreciate that. And I appreciate what all of you have said to me. Let me say for the record that personally I don’t accept that Georgi’s death was anything but an assassination.”

She faced down the resulting commotion.

“However,” she continued, “I don’t ask or expect any of you to take this as more than a suspicion. At the moment, even the question of who might benefit from it is very unclear—if Georgi was murdered, it might have been by one side or the other. Possibly some elements in the space movement saw him as an obstacle to their… diplomacy. Possibly some forces opposed to the space movement thought we’d think exactly that, and had him killed as a provocation. Or maybe, just maybe, his heart gave out. Whatever—it’s come at a bad time for us.”

Mukhartov grunted agreement.

After a moment of gloomy silence Valentina spoke again. “We’ve all studied your message,” she said. “What’s your own suggested course of action?”

“We try to stop them, of course. Damned if I want the fucking UN back on top of us, let alone one controlled by the goddam space movement and its proxies.”

Valentina leaned forward. “For my part,” she said, “I agree with your assessment. We have to be ready for the new situation in which the space movement controls the ReUN, and with it the Earth Defense battlesats. But—” she hesitated a moment, sighed almost imperceptibly, and continued “—I think that the death of Georgi, the understandable suspicions this has aroused, and the, ah, unexpected and unauthorised increase in labour-camp output may have given your response a… subjective element.” Kozlova glanced around the table. “The coming shift in the balance of power can’t be stopped by us, or by anybody. The most we’ve been able to do—thanks to Georgi’s diplomacy—has been to help keep Kazakhstan neutral, with a tilt against the takeover. Even they wouldn’t take direct action against it, though God knows Georgi tried to persuade them to. They assured us they just didn’t have the clout, and I believe them. Now you seem to be suggesting that we throw our weight, such as it is, against it. My own view is that we’d accomplish more by staying neutral. It could work to our advantage—if we accommodate ourselves to new realities in good time.”

Myra unfroze her face. “Get in on the winning side, you mean?” she suggested lightly.

Yes, exactly,” Kozlova said. She seemed encouraged by Myra’s response, or lack of response. “After all,” she ploughed on, “we ourselves are in a way part of the space movement, we go back a long way with it, and the Sheenisov are as much a threat to us as the barbarians and reactionary governments are to some other enclaves. Frankly, I think we should put out some diplomatic feelers to the other side before the crunch, which as you correctly point out is a matter of days or weeks away. And we’re not exactly in a position of strength at the moment. So there is indeed a certain urgency to our decision.”

“Interesting,” Myra murmured. “Anyone else?”

Denis Gubanov (Internal Security) broke in sharply. “The Chair spoke in her message of states being suborned and subverted. I don’t think we should let ourselves become one of them! Whatever the rhetoric, and the propaganda of inevitability, it’s obvious what’s going on. Imperialism took a severe blow with the fall of the Yanks, but the blow wasn’t fatal, worse luck. Monopoly capital always finds new political instruments, and the space movement, so-called, has proved an admirable vehicle.” He snorted, briefly. “Literally—a launch vehicle! Through it, the rich desert the Earth. Why should we help them on their way?”

“More to the point,” said Sherman (Trade and Industry), making his disdain for Denis’s rhetoric emphatically clear, “there is the question of what we will do for a living when the camps are worked out.”

“We could always—” began Kozlova, as though about to say something in jest, then glanced at Myra and shut up.

“What?”

“Nah. Forget it. The business to hand is what we do now, about the coup.”

Myra let the argument go on. There was a case, she admitted to herself, on both sides. But Valentina had been right—there was a subjective edge to Myra’s response. The space movement’s central element was Mutual Protection, and Mutual Protection’s central element was David Reid. If the space movement got its way he would be the most powerful man in the world.

No way was she going to let that bastard win.