“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
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…
Torget 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
7
The Claimant Bar
Out we went into the summer dusk. Moths sought the sun in street-lamps, 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,” Menial 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?”
“Menial—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,” Menial 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,” Menial 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?”
Menial’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 Menial. 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 Menial.
“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.
