The Sky Road

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, die 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 batdefield 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 tWside, 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 communique 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 back-dated 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 goveminent 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—short-term 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 mini-states 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 brisded 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 VaTs 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, cross-hatched with confrontations, pin- pricked with flashpoints. Again its intricate patterns compelled her attention; again, she turned away.

Their own space-borne materiel—nuclear and kinetic-energy weapons—were depicted as black rods and cones, deep in the evergrowing ring of spacejunk 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