The walk to the government building woke her up even more, boosted her mood better than any tab. The air was crisp, the morning sky unexpectedly colourful, reds and oranges and yellows shading to green at the horizon. She noticed people staring up at the sky.
Its colours were changing visibly, flowing—suddenly she realised she was looking at an aurora, thousands of miles south of where aurorae should be seen. As she stopped and looked up, openmouthed, the sky brightened for a few seconds from some great illumination below the horizon.
She ran. She sprinted through the streets, barged through the doors, yelled at Security and bounded up the stairs. As she strode into her office her earpiece pinged, and a babble of tinny voices contended for her attention. She sat heavily on the edge of her desk and flipped down her eyeband, keyed up the news.
The tanks were rolling, all around the world.
Without taking her eyes off the newsfeeds, Myra slid across her desk and lowered herself into her chair. She rattled out commands on the armrest keypads, transforming the office’s walls into screens for an emergency command-centre. The first thing she did was secure the building; then she hit the emergency call for Sovnarkom. The thrown fetches of Andrei, Denis and Valentina sprang to attention on the screens—whether their physical bodies were in their offices, on their way in or still in bed didn’t matter, as long as their eyebands were online.
Myra glanced around their virtual presences.
‘OK, comrades, this is the big one,’ she said. ‘First, is everything clear with us?’
It was unlikely that the ISTWR’s tiny Workers’ Militia and tinier People’s Army would have joined the coup, but more unlikely things were happening before her eyes every few seconds. (A night-time amphibious landing at South Street Seaport! Tanks in Pennsylvania Avenue! Attack helicopters shelling Westminster Bridge!)
‘We’re sound,’ said Denis. Even his fetch looked drawn and hungover. ‘So’s Kazakhstan, they’re staying out of this. Army’s on alert, of course. Baikonur cosmodrome’s well under government control. So’s the airstrip at Yubileine. Almaty’s mobilised, militia on the streets, but they’re loyal.’
You hope, Myra thought. The neat thing about a military coup was that mobilisation against it could quite easily become
part
of it, as the lines of command writhed and broke and reconnected.
‘Good, great. North-eastern front? Val, you awake?’
‘Yeah, I’m with you. No moves from the Sheenisov so far.’ Valentina patched in a satellite feed, updated by the second: the steppe was still.
‘What about Mutual Protection here?’
‘Haven’t moved from the camp—and the camp’s quiet.’
Myra relaxed a little. ‘Looks like our immediate surroundings are secure, then. Any word from orbit, Val?’
Valentina shook her head. ‘All comms are very flaky, can’t get anything coherent from the settlements, the factories, the battlesats—’
‘That’s impossible!’ She thought about how it might be possible. ‘Oh my God, the sky—’
‘About ten minutes ago,’ Andrei announced, from some glassy trance, ‘somebody nuked the Heaviside Layer. Half a dozen bursts—not much EMP, but quite enough of that and of charged particles to scramble radio signals for a good few hours.’
‘So how are we getting even the news?’ Myra demanded.
‘Cable,’ said Andrei. ‘Fibre-optics aren’t affected. And some stuff’s getting through by laser, obviously, like Val’s spysat downlink. Should increase as people switch, or improvise. But for the moment it’s dust in everybody’s eyes.’
‘Didn’t know the space movement had orbital nukes,’ Denis said. ‘In fact, didn’t know anybody but us had
any
serious nukes.’
That was a point. Nuclear disarmament had been the only universally popular, and (almost) universally successful, policy of the US/ UN after the Third World War. Even Myra, at the time, had not resented or regretted the confiscation of the ISTWR’s complement, along with all the rest. Only by sheer accident had an independent stockpile survived, in the hands of a politically
untouchable institution that counted its supporters in billions, its age in millennia and its policy in centuries. All other strategic nuclear weapons had been dismantled. There were thousands of battlefield tactical nukes still around, of course, but nobody’d ever worried much about
them
: the consequences of their use had never been shown live on television.
(The images went through her mind, again, and the names of cities: Kiev, Frankfurt, Berlin. She shook her head with a shudder, shutting them out.)
Valentina was giving her a hard stare. ‘They weren’t
ours
, were they?’
‘Not as far as I know,’ Myra said. ‘Unless you happened to turn over the access codes to somebody else, eh?’
Valentina shook her head, thin-lipped. ‘No. Never.’
‘Right, so much for that theory,’ Myra said briskly, to assure Val that she wasn’t under any suspicion. ‘Andrei, any ideas?’
‘Excuse me,’ said Andrei. ‘I’m still trying to get through the front door.’
‘Oh, fuck!’ Myra tabbed a code to let him in.
‘Thanks … OK, I think the nukes were from the
UN
side, against the coup.’
‘And where did they get them?’
‘What I think is that the UN hung on to some nukes for itself, the secret stayed with some inner cadre of bureaucrats who made it through the Revolution and the purges, and they put it at the disposal of the current Secretary General.’
‘Makes sense, I suppose,’ said Denis. ‘What I’d do.’
‘What’s the politics of this, Andrei?’ Myra asked. ‘We were so sure they’d wait for the ReUN vote—’ she stopped and laughed. Trotsky himself had used just such a stratagem. ‘Have the coup before the vote—I wonder where they got that idea. Still, it kind of undermines the appeal to legitimacy.’
She still had one eye on the virtual screens of the cable news. ‘Ah, wait, something coming in—’
They sat in silence as the presenter read out a communiqué from a large group of small governments calling themselves the Assembly Majority Alliance. The gist of it was that the present Security Council had violated the Revised Charter of 2046 by planning to use nuclear weapons in space; and a call for immediate action to depose the conspirators and usurpers. The forces of the Alliance governments and of Mutual Protection were offered for immediate, co-ordinated action to that end. A swift resolution of the emergency was anticipated. The population was urged to remain calm and stay away from work for the day.
‘God, that is so cynical,’ Val said. ‘They must have had dozens of backdated statements, prepared for every contingency, so they could claim to be acting to prevent whatever the Security Council decided to do.’
‘Yes, yes,’ Myra said. ‘All SOP for a coup. And a diversion, anyway. It’s in
space that the real battles are being fought. Maybe right at this moment! The whole thing will be decided at the speed of light. Come on, let’s get into command mode.’
The others nodded, fell silent, turned to the screens and started pulling in all available data and throwing analysis software at it. After a minute or two they’d begun to mesh as a team in their common virtual workspace. Information flashed back and forth between their personal networks, the government network, the
Jane’s
system, the newsfeeds, and field reports from their own troops and agents.
The big picture became as clear as the situation it revealed was chaotic. Myra clocked through most of the world’s significant capitals: Beijing, Pyongyang, Tokyo, Vladivostok, Seattle, LA, Washington DC, New York, London, Paris, New Berlin, Danzig, Moscow. All of them reported military strikes of one kind or another, but they all had the aspect of
putsches
—shortterm grabs of public buildings or urban strongholds, which could be held more by the reluctance of the government forces to reduce them than by the strength of their occupiers. It all had a suspiciously diversionary look about it.
All of the committed technophobe governments, from the Khmer Vertes rulers of Bangkok, through the Islamic Republicans of Arabia to the White Nationalists of Dallas, had their forces on full alert and their media screaming imprecations against the enemies of God, Man or Gaia (depending on local ideological taste); but Myra judged them well aware that they were not, themselves, immediate targets—it was the more liberal governments, those who compromised between the pro-tech and anti-tech forces, which were taking the fire.
The more serious action was taking place in the imbricated global hinterland of enclaves and ministates and company countries; along their fractal borderlines the local defence forces were massed and mobilised, in a posture that was aggressive in the Assembly Majority Alliance statelets, generally defensive in the rest. Meanwhile, in the shadowy lands beyond and behind even these anarchic polities, the forests and plains and badlands and shanty towns bristled as the Green neo-barbarians, the marginals and tribals awoke to the unlooked-for opportunities of this new day.
Jane’s Market Forces
registered unexpected shifts in the balance of power; minor skirmishes could have major effects, putting troops and tactics and weapons to the test in new conditions, or in real rather than simulated combat. Not much blood was being shed, but fortunes were being made and lost, alliances and antagonisms updated; the process had its own gory fascination. Myra felt she could sit and look at it for hours.
But this was Earth, this was not where it was at. The battles here, real or
virtual, were fundamentally a diversion, and she was duly being diverted. She turned her attention determinedly skyward.
With Val’s well-practised help she spun a neon orrery of near-Earth space, separating out the relevant threads from the skeins of commercial and military orbits. The planet itself appeared as a transparent globe, etched with political and geographical outlines, clouded with weather patterns, crosshatched with confrontations, pin-pricked with flashpoints. Again its intricate patterns compelled her attention; again, she turned away.
Their own space-borne
matériel
—nuclear and kinetic-energy weapons—were depicted as black rods and cones, deep in the ever-growing ring of space-junk that tracked the main orbital thoroughfares.
‘Anything coming through yet from the battlesats?’
‘Some,’ said Val, sounding distracted. ‘I’m pulling in laser comms via various ground stations. Shit, this is tricky—hold it, hold it … ah!’
The battlesat locations lit up, one by one; those with which communication had been established blinked invitingly. Myra zoomed in on one of them. A classic von Braun space station, with a rotating tubular ring joined by thinner tubular spokes to an inner ring surrounding the contra-rotating spin-compensated axial tower. The living-quarters and hydroponics were around the ring, in the fake gravity of the spin; the laser-cannon and rocket-racks and particle-beam weapons and military command-centre were in the free-fall hub. The whole enormous mandala had a camp Nazi grandeur, spoiled only by the ungainly arrays of solar panels it had sprouted while its nuclear reactor had run down.
It was one of dozens in various orbits. Space Defense had enforced the Pax Americana of the US/UN Imperium, a twenty-year Reich between the Third World War and the Fall Revolution. In that revolution the battlesats had passed into the hands of their personnel—soldiers’ soviets in space—and, ever since, they’d sought a role to replace their lost empire. Everything from power-beam transmission to asteroid defence had been tried, to little profit. The stations survived on a trickle of subsidy—or ‘user fees’—from the similarly diminished UN, paid mainly to prevent the battlesats’ going rogue out of sheer desperation.
Now the forces of the coup were offering them a new empire, one a lot more justifiable and enforceable than the old.
‘So what’s the score with this one?’ Myra asked.
‘Still loyal,’ replied Val. ‘They just reported in to say they weren’t going with the Alliance.’
‘Any way of checking that?’
‘Don’t know, I’m hailing them—ah! they’re letting us in.’
‘I’ll go,’ said Myra, ‘you stay with the big picture.’
With a clunky, disorienting transition, she found herself standing in a real-time representation of the battlesat’s bridge. It was about fifteen metres across, and crowded. The interior matched the exterior’s style: banks of flashing lights among chrome and black surfaces; a cluttered overgrowth of retrofitted modern kit among a profusion of plants, like in a civilian space settlement. The layout was optimised for free-fall, with the crew-members strapped into seats and couches at unexpected angles to each other. In this section of the shaft there were actual windows, through which she could see the great wheel turn in the sunlight, and the Earth’s swirling clouds below. She blinked, and overprinted the real view with its software image.
The crew were wearing eyebands, and some of them could see Myra’s fetch in their own virtual palimpsests of the scene—but they spared her no more than a glance. Another spectral presence had all their attention.
The General sat on a window sill, surveying the bridge with narrowed eyes. He’d been saying something; his words seemed to hang in the air, resonating in the circuits of the display. He interrupted himself and turned to face her.