The Sky Road

apologetic expression, but with a sly conspiratorial gleam in its eyes.

“Forgive me, Comrade Davidova. This was not done against you. It was done against our common enemy: Reid’s faction of the space movement.”

“How—” she began, but she saw, she saw.

“I’m telling you this now,” the General said, “because today you lost your last disloyal Commissar. Alexander Sherman has been passing on information to Reid for months. He wasn’t the first, but he was the last.”

“Who were the others?”

The General moved his hand in a smoothing gesture. T can’t tell you that without compromising current operations. That particular information is of no further use to you anyway.”

“I suppose not,” Myra concurred reluctantly. She wished she knew who the traitors were, all the same; hoped Tatanya and Michael hadn’t been among them. She’d quite liked those two…

“So you used them—and us—as a conduit for disinformation?”

The General nodded. “And for information going the other way—your updates to Jane’s have been most helpful.”

“Jeez.” Her reactions to this were interestingly complicated, she thought distantly. On the one hand she felt sore at having been used, having been lied to; on the other, she could admire the stagecraft of the deception. Above all she felt relieved that the gloomily negative assessments she’d worried over were all wrong.

Unless the situation was even worse than she’d thought—

“The situation is better than you think, by far,” said the General. “We have our people in place—the battlesats won’t be taken without a struggle, which in most cases we expect to win.”

“Most cases won’t be enough. Even one battlesat—”

“Indeed. Which is where your orbital weaponry comes in. The lasers, the EMP bursters, the smart pebbles, the hunter-killers, the kinetic-energy weapons Myra hadn’t known her arsenal was so extensive. (God, to think that stockpile had once belonged to the Pope! Well, to the Swiss Guards, anyway—quite possibly His Holiness had been discreetly left out of the loop on that one.) She shivered in her wrap, tugged it around her shoulders, lit another cigarette. She didn’t know what to say: she felt her cheeks burning under the General’s increasingly quizzical regard.

“What do you want us to do with them?” she asked at last.

Tm sure you can work that out,” he said. “I’ll be in touch.”

“But—”

He gave her a smile; heartbreaking, satanic.

“1 hope I see you again,” he said. He reached out a hand and made some fine adjustment to the air. The link went down.

Myra took off her eyeband and rubbed her eyes. Then she walked unsteadily to the kitchen and made some tea, and sat drinking it and smoking for about ten minutes, staring blankly into the virtual spaces of her mind. She supposed she should do something, or tell someone, but she couldn’t think what to do, or whom to tell.

Time enough in the morning, she decided.

Her bedroom was small, a couple of metres’ clearance on three sides of the double bed giving barely enough space for a wardrobe and dressing-table. Over the years the room had accumulated a smothering snowfall of soft furnishings, needlework and ornaments; pretty things she’d bought on impulse and never had the heart to throw out. The process was a natural selection for an embarrassingly large collection of grannyish clutter. Now and again—as now—it infuriated her in its discrepancy with the rest of her life, her style, her look. And then, on reflection, she’d figure that the incongruity of the room’s appearance was what made it a place where she could forget all care, and sleep.

In the morning it seemed like a dream.

All the more so, Myra realised as she struggled up to consciousness through the layers of sleep and hangover and tangled, sweat-clammy bedding, because she had dreamed about the General. She felt vaguely ashamed about that, embarrassed in front of her waking self; not because the dream had been erotic— though it had been—but because it had been besotted, devoted, servile, like those dreams the Brits used to have about Royalty. She sat up in the bed and pushed back the pillow, leaned back and tried to think about it rationally.

The entity, the military AI, would have had God only knew how many software generations to evolve an intimate knowledge of humanity. It had had time to become what the Japanese called an idoru, a software representation that was better than the real thing, smarter and sexier than any possible human mind or form, like those wide-eyed, faux-innocent anime brats or the simulated stars of pornography and romance. Sex wasn’t the half of it—there were other codes, other keys, in the semiotics of charm: the subtle suggestions of wisdom, the casual hints at a capacity for violence, the assumed readiness to command, the mirroring glance of empathy; all the elements that went to make up an image of a man that men would die for and women would fall for.

So, she told herself, she wasn’t such a pathetic case, after all. Happens to the best of us. As she reached for her medical kit and clicked out the tablets to fix the hangover, she caught herself smiling at the memory of the General’s smile. Annoyed with herself again, she got out of bed and padded to the kitchen in her fluffy slippers and fuzzy nightgown, and gulped cold water while the coffee percolated. She added a MoodLift tab to her ReSolve dose and her daily intake of anti-ageing supplements and knocked them back all at once. She felt better.

The time was 8 o’clock. She put her contacts in and flicked on a television tile and watched it while spooning muesli and yoghurt and listening to the murmured morning briefing from Parvus. The news, as usual, was bad, but no worse than usual. No martial music or ballet on all channels—that was enough to count as good news. After a coffee and a cigarette she felt almost human. She supposed she might as well get up and go to work.

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, open-mouthed, 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 hung-over. “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.”