‘Ah, Comrade Davidova—thanks for coming.’
‘I wasn’t aware I’d been asked,’ she said.
‘Oh, you were,’ the construct said. ‘This is, as they say, no accident.’
Myra nodded. No doubt it was indeed no accident that the first battlesat to allow her into its internal systems was the one in which the General was addressing his troops.
He waved a hand. ‘Welcome to a quick emergency session of the military org’s local cell.’ He grinned. ‘Which is pretty much the command of this station.’ The watching crew-members gave her longer looks now; some of them even smiled.
‘We need your help,’ the General told her flatly. ‘Nice display,’ he added. ‘May I?’
He reached over, thumb and forefinger pinching into her translucent globe, and with frightening insouciance overrode all her protocols and relocated her virtual view of the Earth and near-Earth space into the centre of the bridge.
She stared at the spinning shapes, fuming. He shouldn’t have been able to
do
that—
‘We still hold most of the battlesats.’ A quick sharp look. ‘That is to say, the anti-coup forces do, whatever their other alignments. But the struggle is still in the balance. We have about a sixth of the battle-sats securely on our side, the enemy likewise, and the others undecided.’
Myra was momentarily stunned. Despite what the General had said to her earlier, she’d had no idea, no expectation that the military org’s penetration
of Space Defense was so thorough—it must have taken years of work. But the General gave her no time to question or congratulate.
‘Here, here and here.’ He stabbed a forefinger at three battlesats, whose footprints between them covered most of the planet. ‘These are in enemy hands. We can’t hit them from the battlesats we hold, because that would risk a spasm of retaliation. But we need to hit them fast, to warn any others who are about to go over to the enemy. Take them out.’
He ran a finger lightly around the republic’s orbital caches of smart pebbles, lasers, KE weapons.
‘I can’t,’ Myra said. ‘I don’t have the skills, I don’t have the automation. None of us do.’
The General snapped his fingers. ‘The keys, Comrade, the keys. That’s all I need. The access codes.’
‘Let me consult my Defence Minister,’ said Myra, and backed out hastily. It was a relief—even with the sudden, swallowed surge of cyberspace sickness that it brought on—to find herself back in her office, looking at screens.
‘Val—’ she began.
‘I got that,’ said Valentina. ‘Kept half an eye on you with a partial piggyback. Who
is
that guy?’
Myra looked sidelong at her. ‘Good for you,’ she said. ‘That was the head of the FI military org. An AI. Our very own electric Trotsky.’
‘Fuck your mother,’ said Val, in Russian.
‘Right. We gonna give it the codes?’
‘Up to you,’ said Val. ‘You’re the PM.’
‘What,’ said Myra through clenched teeth, ‘would you
advise
?’
Val licked her lips. The others were either pointedly ignoring them or concentrating on their own areas.
‘Well, hell. Go with the military adviser, I’d say. Give it the codes.’
‘Will that work? Do we really have munitions up there that can down battlesats?’
‘Hard to say,’ said Valentina. ‘Ancient, never combat-tested, poorly maintained—but so are the battlesats! In theory, yes, they can overwhelm a battlesat’s defences.’
Myra was trying to think fast. It struck her that the battlesats themselves might be a diversion—old and powerful, but inflexible and vulnerable: an orbiting Maginot Line. Perhaps the General was fighting the last war, and
winning
it, while the real battles raged elsewhere.
She hesitated, then decided.
‘Give me the codes for the smart-pebble bombs,’ she said. Val zapped them across; Myra tabbed back to the battlesat and passed them to the General. He was waiting for her, with puzzled impatience.
‘Thank you,’ he said heavily, then disappeared. Myra looked around at
the now frantically active crew, gave them an awkward, cheery wave, and dropped back to her own command-centre.
‘That was quick.’ Valentina pointed at the display. Already, some of their orbital weapons had been activated. Myra devoutly hoped that what she was seeing as a representation wasn’t appearing on the enemy’s real-time monitors. In three places a cloud of sharp objects had burst out of cover and were moving in the same orbital paths as the three enemy battlesats, but in the opposite direction. They were due to collide with the battlesats in ten, eighteen and twenty-seven minutes.
What happened next was over in less than a second—a twinkle of laser paths in the void. The action replay followed automatically, patiently repeating the results for the slow rods and cones and nerves of the human eye.
Myra watched the battlesats’ deep-space radar beams brush the oncoming KE volleys; saw their targeting-radar lock on. Her laser-platform drones responded to that detection with needles of light, stabbing to blind the battlesats—which had, in the momentary meantime, released a cloud of chaff to block that very manoeuvre. Then the battlesats struck back, with a speed still bewildering even in slow motion. Each one projected a thousand laser pulses, flashing like a fencer’s swift sword, slicing up the KE weapons and their laser-platform escorts.
‘Wow!’ she said, admiring despite herself.
‘Yeah, that’s some defence system,’ said Valentina. ‘Not standard issue for a battlesat, I’ll tell you that.’
Myra zoomed the view. Each attack cloud was still there, as a much larger cloud of much smaller objects. They would bombard the battlesats, sure enough, they’d even do some damage, but it would be more like a sandblasting than a shelling.
The time was 09.25. Forty minutes had passed since the Heaviside nukes. The disruption they’d caused was easing off; radio comms were still haywire, but more and more centres were coming back online via patches and work-arounds. The outcome of this first serious exchange was already being analysed. Myra cast a quick glance at
Jane’s.
The coup’s stock was fluctuating wildly.
‘Shit—’
She was about to transfer her workspace to the battlesat again but the General beat her to it. He—or it—suddenly appeared in the command-centre, as a recognisable if not very solid figure. Andrei and Denis, by this time evidently having been brought up to speed by Val, didn’t react to the apparition with more than open-mouthed astonishment.
‘Too bad,’ the General said, staring sadly at the display. ‘These defences
are portable, not fitted to the station but brought in by the conspirators. ’
‘Any other battlesats have them?’
A sketch of a shrug. ‘We don’t. Maybe they’re already being deployed among the waverers. Mutual Protection nanofactures, is my guess.’
Better than a guess, Myra reckoned.
‘You want another strike?’
‘No. Only one thing for it now. Nuke ’em.’
Myra glanced at Valentina. ‘Wait. Give us a first-cut sim, Val.’
Valentina ran down the locations of their orbital nuclear weapons and launched a simulation of an immediate strike, in the light of the new information about the battlesats’ capabilities. Stopped. Ran it again; and again; all in a few seconds, but a waste of time nonetheless. The answer was obvious. The nukes could get close enough to the battlesats to take them out—but near-Earth space was a lot more crowded than it had been when the doctrine of that deployment had first been developed. There was no way to avoid thousands of innocent casualties and quadrillions of dollars’ worth of damage to space habitats and industries.
‘It’s worse than that,’ Valentina pointed out. ‘The direct effect of the explosions and the EMP would be just the beginning—there’s every possibility that the debris would set off an ablation cascade—each collision producing more debris, until in a matter of days you’d have stripped the sky.’
The ablation cascade was a known nightmare, one of the deadliest threats to space habitation, or even exploration. Myra had seen discussions and calculations to suggest that a full-scale cascade would surround the Earth with rings of debris which could make space travel unfeasibly dangerous for
centuries
…
The General had a look which indicated that he was weighing this in the balance. She could just see it now, that calculation—even with a cascade, it was possible that the new diamond ships could dodge and dogfight through the debris—the barrier might not be impenetrable after all, and meanwhile …
‘Forget it,’ Myra said. ‘We aren’t going to use the nukes.’ Her fingers were working away, codes were flashing past her eyes—she was trying to find the channel the General’s fetch had ridden in on.
Something in her tone told the General there would be no argument. Instead, he turned to the others and said, quite pleasantly, ‘The comrade is not thinking objectively. Are you willing to relieve her of her responsibilities? ’
‘No,’ they told him, in gratifying unison.
‘Very well.’ He smiled at them, as if to say he was sorry, but it had been worth a try.
‘And you can fuck
right
off,’ said Myra. She tapped her forefinger, triumphantly, on an input-channel key, and tuned him right out.
Out we went into the summer dusk. Moths sought the sun in streetlamps, baffled. The few quiet roads between the house and the Institute were crowded now, with local residents taking advantage of the slack season in bars normally jammed with students. Lads strutting their tight dark trousers, lasses swaying their big bright skirts. We must have looked a less happy couple, harried and hurrying.
A few lights burnt in the Institute, one of them the light in the corridor. As we stepped in and closed the door, the smell of pipe-smoke was stronger than before, and familiar.
‘Someone’s around,’ Merrial whispered.
‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘it’s—’
Right on cue, an office door down the corridor opened and Anders Gantry stepped out. A small man with strong arms and a beer-barrel of a belly, hair curling grey like the smoke from his inseparable pipe. His shirt was merely grubby—his wife managed to impose fresh linen on him every week or so—but his jacket had not been cleaned in years. It smelled like it had been used to beat down fires, which it had.
He was the best historical scholar in the University, and quite possibly in the whole British Isles; and the kindest and most modest man I’d ever met.
‘Ah, hello, Clovis,’ he boomed. ‘How good to see you!’ He strode up and shook hands. ‘And who’s your friend?’
‘Merrial—Dr Anders Gantry,’ I said.
He held her hand and inclined his head over her knuckles. ‘Charmed.’ He looked at her in a vaguely puzzled way for a moment, then turned to me. ‘Now, colha Gree, what can I do for you?’
Gantry had agreed to supervise my project; it was a persistent irritant to my conscience that I hadn’t seen or written to him all summer.
‘Oh, nothing at the moment, Dr Gantry. I’ve been doing a fair bit of preliminary research up North, and I’ve about finished the standard references. ’ I rubbed my ear, uneasily remembering the dust on the books. ‘And I thought I’d take the opportunity of a wee visit to Glasgow to drop by the library.’
‘That’s very commendable,’ he said. I was unsure of the exact level of irony in his voice, but it was there. ‘We’ve rather missed you around here.’
‘He works very hard,’ Merrial put in. ‘The space-launch platform project is on a tight schedule.’
‘Oh, so that’s where you are. Kishorn. Hmm. Good money to be made up there, I hear. And you, miss?’
‘I have an office job there,’ Merrial said blandly. She shot me a smile. ‘That’s how I know he works hard. He’s saving up money to live on next year.’
‘Well, I suppose there are ways and ways of preparing for a project,’ said Gantry, in a more indulgent tone. ‘No luck with patronage yet, I take it?’
‘None so far, no.’
He clapped me around the shoulders. ‘Perhaps you should try to extract some research money from the space scientists,’ he said. ‘Our great Deliverer had much to do with spaceflight herself. There might still be lessons in her life story, eh?’
Merrial’s face froze and I felt my knees turning to rubber.
‘Now that’s a thought,’ I said, as calmly as possible.
Gantry guffawed. ‘Aye, you might even fool them into thinking that!’ he said. ‘Good luck if you do. Now that you’re getting stuck in, Clovis, I have something to show you.’ He grinned, revealing his teeth, yellow as a dog’s. ‘It’s in the library.’
With that he turned away and bounded up the stairs. I followed, mouthing and gesturing helplessness to Merrial. To my relief, she seemed more amused than alarmed.
By the time we arrived at the open door of the library he’d vanished into the shadows.
‘What are we going to do?’ I whispered to Merrial.
‘If he stays around, you keep him busy,’ she said. ‘I’ll get the goods.’
I was about to tell her how unlikely she was to get away with that when Gantry came puffing up, carrying a load of cardboard folders that reached from his clasped hands at his belt to his uppermost chin.
‘Here we are,’ he said, lowering the tottering stack on to a table. He
sneezed. ‘Filthy with dust, I’m afraid.’ He wiped his nose and hands on an even dirtier handkerchief. ‘But it’s time you had a look at it: Myra Godwin’s personal archive.’
‘That really is amazing,’ I said. My voice sounded like a twelve-year-old boy seeing a girl naked for the first time. I picked them up and put them down, one by one. Eight altogether: bulging cardboard wallets ordered by decade, from the 1970s to the 2050s.
I hardly dared to breathe on them as I opened the first one and looked at the document on the top of the pile, a shoddily cyclostyled, rusty-stapled bundle of pages with the odd title
Building a revolutionary party in capitalist America. Published as a fraternal courtesy to the cosmic current.
‘Why haven’t I seen these before?’ I asked.
Gantry shuffled uncomfortably. He glanced at Merrial, rubbed his chin and said, ‘Am I right in thinking you’re a tinker?’
‘You’re right, I am that,’ Merrial said, without hesitation.
Gantry smiled, looking relieved. ‘Um, well. Between ourselves and all that. Scholars and tinkers both know, I’m sure, that we have to be … discreet, about the Deliverer’s … more discreditable deeds and, ah, youthful follies. So, although previous biographers have seen these documents, we don’t tend to show them to undergraduates. What I hope, Clovis, is that you’ll see a way to go beyond the, um, shall we say hagiographic treatments of the past, without …’ He paused, sucking at his lower lip. ‘Ah, well, no need to spell it out.’
‘Of course not,’ I said.
I looked at the master scholar with what I’m sure must have been an expression of gratifying respect. ‘Shall we have a look through them now?’
Gantry stepped back and threw up his hands in mock horror. ‘No, no! Can’t have me looking over your shoulder at the raw material, Clovis. Unaided original work, and all that. This is yours, and there’s a thesis in there if ever I saw one. No, it’s time I was off and left you to it.’ He hesitated. ‘Ah, I shouldn’t need to tell you, colha Gree, but not a word about this, or a single page of it, outside, all right?’
I had a brief, intense tussle with my conscience, which neatly tripped me up and jumped on me. ‘Nothing for the vulgar, of course,’ I said carefully. ‘But in principle I could, well, show it to or discuss it with other scholars?’
‘Goes without saying,’ Gantry confirmed jovially. He tapped the side of his nose. ‘If you can find anyone you’d trust not to claim it as their own.’ He winked at Merrial. ‘Untrustworthy bunch, these scholars, I think you’ll find.’ He punched me, playfully as he thought, in the ribs. ‘Confidence, man, confidence! I’m sure you have the wit to understand and explicate this lot yourself, and it’ll make your name, you mark my words!’
‘Thank you,’ I said, after a painful intake of breath. ‘Well … I think I’ll make a start right now.’
‘Yes, indeed. Splendid idea. Don’t stay up too late.’ His complicitous grin made it obvious that he thought it unlikely that we’d stay up too late. ‘Best be off then,’ he said, as though to himself, then backed to the door and turned away.
‘Good night to you, sir!’ Merrial called out after him.
‘Good night,’ came faintly back from the stairwell.
Merrial let out a long breath.
‘What a strange little man,’ she said, in the manner of someone who has just encountered one of the Wee Folk.
‘He’s not entirely typical of scholars,’ I said.
‘I should hope not,’ Merrial said. ‘Wouldn’t want you turning into something like that.’
‘Heaven forbid,’ I said, adding loyally, ‘but he’s a fine man for all his funny ways.’ I looked down at the stack of folders. ‘Maybe it would be a good idea,’ I said slowly, ‘if you were to do your thing with the computer, and I could stay here, just in case he comes back.’
‘Oh, and leave me to face the deils all on my own?’ Merrial mocked, then laughed, relenting. ‘Aye, that is not a bad idea. If he or anyone else comes in, keep them busy. I’ll not be long, and I’ll be fine.’
‘What about this security barrier?’
She waved a hand and made a rude noise. ‘Faugh! This wee gadget here has routines that can roast security barriers over a firewall and eat them for breakfast.’
Considering how she’d had to program something a lot simpler than that to sort out the dates, I doubted her, but supposed that was the black logic for you.
She smiled and slipped away; after an anxious minute of listening, I heard the sound of the inner door being opened and the scrape of a chair being dragged across the floor and propped against it. I relaxed a little and turned again to the files—to the paper files, I mentally corrected myself, for the first time making the connection between ‘files’ in Merrial’s and, I presumed, tinkers’ usage, and my own.
I was eager to get into the early decades, but I knew that would be somewhat self-indulgent, and that I would have plenty of time for that. It was the later years, closer to the time of the Deliverance, that were hidden from history. I picked up the folder for the final decade, the 2050s, and was about to open it when I heard Merrial scream.
I don’t remember getting to the door of the dark archive. I only remember standing there, my forward momentum arrested by a shock of dread that stopped me like a sparrow hitting a window. The file folder, absurdly enough, was still in my hands, and I held up that heavy mass of flimsy paper and fragile cardboard like a weapon—or a shield.
Merrial too was holding a weapon—the chair she’d been sitting on, and had evidently just sprung out of. In front of her, and above the computer, in a lattice of ruby light, stood the figure of a man. He was a tall man, and stout with it, his antique garb of cream-coloured jacket and trousers flapping and his shock of white hair streaming in the same invisible gale that had blown his hat away down some long corridor whose diminishing perspective carried it far beyond the walls of the room. His face was red and wrathful, his fist shaking, his mouth shouting something we couldn’t hear.
Holding the chair above her head, her forearm in front of her eyes, chanting some arcane abracadabra, Merrial advanced like one facing into a fire, and seized her seer-stone and machinery from the table. Its wire, yanked from its inconveniently placed socket, lashed back like a snapped fishing-line. The little peg at the end, now bent like a fishhook, flew towards me and rapped against the file-folder. Merrial whirled around at the same moment, and saw me. She gave me a look worth dying for, and then a calm smile.
‘Time to go,’ she said. She let the chair clatter down, and turned again to face the silently screaming entity she’d aroused. As she backed away from the thing, it vanished. A mechanism somewhere in the computer whirred, then stopped. A light on its face flickered, briefly, then went out.
All the lights went out. From downstairs we faintly heard an indignant yell. I could hear Merrial stuffing her apparatus back in its sack. She bumped into me, still walking backwards.
Holding hands as though on a precipice, we made our way through the library’s suffocating dark. I could smell the dry ancient papers, the friable glue and frayed thread and leather of the bindings. From those fibres the ancients could have resurrected lost species of trees and breeds of cattle, I thought madly. Pity they hadn’t.
After a long minute our eyes began to adjust to the faint light that filtered in past window-blinds, and from other parts of the building. We walked with more confidence through the maze towards the door. On the ground floor of the building we could hear Gantry blundering and banging about.
Then, behind us, I heard a stealthy step. Merrial heard it too and froze, her hand in mine suddenly damp. Another step, and the sound of something
dragging.
I almost broke into a screeching run.
‘It’s all right,’ Merrial said, her voice startlingly loud. ‘It’s a sound-projection—just another thing to scare us off.’
Behind us, a low, deep laugh.
‘Steady,’ said Merrial.
My thigh hit the edge of the table by the door. ‘Just a second,’ I said. I let go of her hand, grabbed one more file-folder, put it in my other hand and then caught Merrial’s hand again.
We reached the library door, slammed it behind us and descended the
stairs as fast as we safely could, or faster. Then we lost all caution and simply fled, rushing headlong past Gantry’s angry and puzzled face, lurid in the small flame of the pipe-lighter he held above his head, and out into the night.
Night it was—for hundreds of metres around, all the power was off. We stopped running when we reached the first functioning streetlamps, on Great Western Road.
I looked at Merrial’s face, shiny with sweat, yellow in the sodium puddle.
‘What in the name of Reason was that?’
Merrial shook her head. ‘My mouth’s dry,’ she croaked. ‘I need a drink.’
My feet led me unerringly to the nearest bar, the Claimant. It was quiet that evening, and Merrial was able to grab a corner seat while I bought a couple of pints and a brace of whiskies. By the empty fireplace a fiddler played and a woman sang, an aching Gaelic threnody of loss.