Reid took a deep breath. ‘No, Myra. If you do get chaos, it’ll be because we haven’t won. This coup, as you call it, is the last best chance for stability. If we fail the world will go to hell in its own way. Your personal contribution to that will then be no concern of mine—I’ll be dead, or in space—but you
can
help make sure it
doesn’t
happen, and benefit yourself and your people in the process.’ He was putting all of his undeniable charm into his voice and expression as he concluded, ‘Think it over, Myra. That’s all I ask.’
‘I’ll think about it,’ she said, granting him at least this victory, for what it was worth. She looked around. ‘We’ve arrived.’
The hotel’s ornately furnished function suite was filled with people in dark clothes, standing about in small groups and conversing in low voices. Already they were beginning to relax out of their funereal solemnity, to smile and laugh a little: life goes on. Fine.
Myra and Reid walked together to the long tables on which the buffet was spread, and contrived to lose each other in the random movement of people selecting food and drinks. With a plate of savouries in one hand and a large glass of whisky in the other, Myra looked around. Over in one corner Andrei Mukhartov was deep in conversation with a lady in a black suit and a large hat; she was answering his quiet questions in a loud voice. Myra hoped this representative of the tattered Western fringe of the former
United States wasn’t talking about anything confidential. Possibly that was the point. She noticed that Valentina was standing alone, in an olive-green outfit whose black armband was rather shouted down by an astonishing amount of gold braid. Myra made a less than subtle beeline for her.
‘Ah, there you are,’ she said, as Valentina turned. She nudged her defence minister towards the nearest of the many small tables dotted around the vast floor. They sat.
‘New uniform?’ Myra asked.
Valentina’s rigid epaulettes moved up and down. ‘Never had much occasion for it before,’ she said.
‘Never knew you’d accumulated so many medals, either.’
Valentina had to laugh. ‘Yeah, it is a bit … Brezhnevian, isn’t it?’
‘All too appropriate, for us. The period of stagnation.’
Valentina devoured a canapé, not looking away from Myra. ‘Indeed. I see you had a little chat with our main inward investor.’
‘Yes. He made me an interesting offer.’ Myra looked down at her plate, picked up something with legs. ‘I do hope this stuff’s synthetic; I’d hate to think of the radiation levels if it isn’t.’
‘I think we have to rely on somebody’s business ethics on the radiation question,’ Valentina said.
‘Ah, right.’ Myra peered at the shrimp’s shell; it had an ICI trademark. Full of artificial goodness. She hauled the pale pink flesh out with her teeth. ‘Anyway, Madame Comrade People’s Commissar for Defence, my dear: our inward investor gave me to understand that he knows we’ve done a little less … outward divestment than I’d been led to believe.’
Valentina, rather to her credit, Myra thought, looked embarrassed.
‘I inherited the assets from my predecessors … and I never mentioned them because I thought you already knew, or you didn’t and you needed to have deniability.’
So it was true. The confirmation was less of a shock than Reid’s original claim had been. It would take a while for the full enormity of it all to sink in.
Myra nodded, her mouth full. Swallowed, with a shot of whisky. ‘The latter, actually. I didn’t know. I thought they’d all been seized by the Yanks after the war.’
‘Most of them were. There was one exception, though. A large portfolio of assets that made it through the crackdown, that the US/UN just couldn’t get their hands on; one contract that was always renewed. Until the Fall Revolution, of course. Then it … lapsed, and I was left holding the babies. They were sent back to us in a large consignment of large diplomatic bags, from various locations, all controlled by …’
‘You can tell me now, I take it?’
Valentina looked around, and shrugged.
‘The original ministate, with the original mercenary defence force.’
Myra had to think for a moment before she realised just which state Valentina was talking about.
‘Jesus wept!’
‘Quite possibly,’ said Valentina, ‘quite possibly he did.’
There are times when all you can do is be cynical, put up a hard front, don’t let it get to you … Myra joined in Valentina’s dark chuckle.
‘So what happened to the assets, and why is our investor concerned about them?’
‘Ah,’ said Valentina. ‘You’ll recall the Sputnik centenary a couple of years ago. We rather extravagantly launched one of our obsolete boosters to celebrate it. What I did at the time was take the opportunity to place most of our embarrassing legacy in orbit.’
‘In
Earth
orbit?’ Myra resisted an irrational impulse to pull her head down between her shoulders.
‘Some of them,’ said Valentina. ‘The ones designed specifically for orbital use, you know? They’re in high orbit, quite safe.’ She frowned, and against some inner resistance added, ‘Well, fairly safe. But the rest we sent to an even safer place: Lagrange.’
Myra had a momentary mental picture, vivid as a virtual display, of Lagrange: L5, one of the points where Earth’s gravity and the Moon’s combined to create a region of orbital stability, and which had, over half a century, accumulated a cluttered cluster of research stations, military satellites, official and unofficial space habitats, canned utopias, abandoned spacecraft, squatted modules, random junk … It was the space movement’s promised land, and with the new nanofactured ultralight laser-launched spacecraft its population was rising as fast as Kapitsa’s was falling.
‘Oh, fucking hell,’ said Myra.
‘Don’t worry,’ Valentina assured her. ‘They’re almost undetectable among all the debris.’
Myra didn’t have the heart to tell her how much she was missing the point.
‘Why the fuck did you park them
there
?’ she demanded. ‘Safe, in a way, yeah, that I can understand, but didn’t it occur to you that if it ever came out, we might find our intentions … misunderstood?’
Valentina looked even more embarrassed. ‘It was—well, it was a Party thing, Myra. A request.’
‘Oh, right. Jeez. Are you still
in
the fucking Party?’
Valentina chuckled. ‘I am the Party. The ISTWR section, at least.’
‘Now that Georgi’s gone. Shit, I’d forgotten.’
They hadn’t even put the fourth flag, the flag of the Fourth, on his coffin. Shit. Not that it mattered now. Not to Georgi, anyway. And not to
those who’d gathered to pay their respects—the only one present who’d have understood its significance was Reid.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Valentina.
‘What does the International want with—oh, fuck. I can think of any number of things it might want with them.’
Valentina nodded. ‘Some of them could be to our advantage.’
‘Hah. I’ll be the judge of that. You’ve kept the access codes to yourself?’
‘Of course!’
‘Well, that’s something.’
‘So our man’s proposing in a buy-out, is he?’ Valentina continued. ‘Could be worth considering.’
‘Yeah.’ Myra stood up, taking her glass. ‘I’m going to talk to him some more. Thanks for the update, Val.’
She refilled her glass, with vodka this time, and set out in a carefully casual ramble to where Reid stood chatting to an awestruck gaggle of low-level functionaries. Denis Gubanov and one of Reid’s greps circled unobtrusively, keeping a wary distance from the group and from each other, each at a Lagrange point of his own. She couldn’t hear the conversation. On her way, she was intercepted by Alexander Sherman. The Industry Commissar was wearing the same sharp plastic suit, its colour adjusted to black. He looked shiftier than usual; a bad sign.
‘Ah, Myra. A sad day for us all.’ He shook his head slowly. ‘A sad day.’
‘Yes,’ said Myra. The phrase
get on with it
once more came to mind.
Alex took a deep breath and, as if telepathic, announced, ‘I have something to tell you. It’s not a good time, but … Well, I’ve had an offer from Mr Reid.’
‘To buy out our assets?’
‘No, no!’ Alex looked surprised at the suggestion. ‘An
employment
offer.’
‘Oh, right,’ said Myra dismissively. She waved a hand as she walked past him. ‘Take it.’
She could see herself in the big gilt-framed mirrors as she walked up; they faced similar mirrors at the far side of the room, and for a moment she saw herself multiplied, a potential infinity of different versions of herself: a visual, virtual image of the many worlds interpretation. She had entertained a childish notion, once, that mirror images might be windows into those other worlds. Did the photon ever decide, she’d wondered, did it ever turn aside in its reflection?
What she saw was the endlessly repeated image of a tall, thin woman in a long black dress, moving towards the still oblivious Reid like some MIRVed nemesis. She saw the flickered glances exchange their messages, between
her Security Commissar, Reid’s security man, Reid, and herself, until Reid’s reflected eyes met her actual eyes, and widened.
She encountered a sort of deadness in the air, and realised that the security men were, between them, setting up audio countermeasures, casting a cloak of silence around the group. Then she was through the region of dead air, where the voices were garbled and strange, and suddenly the conversation was audible—for the moment before it died on the lips of those who noticed her arrival.
‘Well, hello again,’ she said. Her gaze swept the half-dozen of her employees gathered around Reid; they were all making comical efforts to flee, walking backwards as discreetly as possible. ‘Headhunting my lower-middle cadres as well as my commissars?’
‘Yup,’ said Reid, quite unabashed. He made a fractional movement of his fingertips and eyebrows, and his supplicants—or applicants—dispersed like smoke in a draught. The grep and Gubanov continued their watchful mutual circling. A waiter went past with a salver of glasses and a tray of Beluga on rye; Myra and Reid helped themselves from both, then stood facing each other with a slight awkwardness, like tongue-tied teenagers after a dance.
‘I could do some head-hunting the other way, you know,’ Myra said. ‘Perhaps I should buy a spy or two from you. It turns out you’re better informed about our investment portfolio than I’ve been. Particularly its, ah, spread.’
Reid acknowledged this with a small nod.
‘Puts us in a difficult position,’ he said. ‘You have the drop on us, frankly. Earth orbit is the high ground, after all.’
Oh?
she thought to herself. So he didn’t know about Lagrange? Or didn’t want her to know he knew.
‘However,’ Reid went on, ‘I’m pretty confident that you won’t, um, liquidate. For obvious reasons.’
‘So why the offer?’
‘Peace of mind … nah, seriously. Between us, you and I know everyone who knows of the current level of exposure. But neither of us can guarantee that that’ll last. A word in the wrong place and there could be severe market jitters on my side. Which, I hasten to add, would not be to your benefit, either, so we have a mutual—’
‘Assured deterrence?’
Reid gave her a
shut the fuck up
look. ‘You could say that … but I’d rather you didn’t.’
Myra grinned evilly. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘It’s still no deal, Dave.’
He gazed back at her, expressionless, but he couldn’t hide the plea in his voice. ‘Will you at least agree not to dump your assets during the takeover bid? Not to make any offers to the competition?’
Oh, Jeez. This was a tricky one. She had no intention of doing any of the
things he feared. On the other hand—if he were to fear them (even if only theoretically, and only at the margin, but still …) it might restrain him. It might keep him, and his allies, from crossing that invisible border, that terminator between the daylight and the dark. Let them hate, as long as they fear.
She shook her head, and saw her multiple reflections do the same, in solemn repetition. The act of observation collapses the wave-function, yes: the die cast, the cat dies.
‘Sorry, Dave,’ she told him. ‘I can’t make any promises.’
His gaze measured hers for a moment, and then he shrugged.
‘You win some, you lose some,’ he said lightly. ‘See you around, Myra.’
She watched him walk away, as she so often had. His grep followed at a safe distance. Denis raised his eyebrows, rolled his eyes, came over.
‘What was all that about?’
‘Oh, just some old stuff between us,’ Myra said. ‘We don’t see eye to eye, is all.’ She took his arm. ‘Let’s see how Andrei is getting on with that lady from the Western United States, shall we?’