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.

“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 battlesats 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.

T can’t,” Myra said. T 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.”

Tuck 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, patiendy 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 sand- blasting 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 on-line 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.

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