The Sky Road

leaning forward into Menial’s smoke, almost into the tent of her hair. “All right.” The heel of my hand was rubbing beneath my eye; irritated with myself, I stopped doing that and fiddled with the cigarette instead. The sound of the laughter and conversation at the bar was like the noise of a burn over a rock, washing over and hiding our talk. We could say anything.

“I’m really at a loss,” I said. “I can’t believe you just set me up, but unless you tell me what’s really going on—”

“I told you,” she said. “I can’t. Can’t you trust me on that?”

“Oh, I can trust you on that all right,” I said. “But if I don’t get those files back like I promised, nobody at the University will ever trust me again.”

She looked as tense, as torn, as I felt.

Tm very sorry about that,” she said. “But there’s nothing I can do about it.”

“Come on,” I said. “There must be. Hell, if I get the files back, I can give your lot copies of all the files. Isn’t that worth more to them than just what they’ve got?”

“You don’t understand,” Menial said. “Now that we know about the other files, we’re going to have to get them all. Like Fergal said, they’re ours.”

“Ours’, indeed! I was unwilling, or unready, to challenge her about the society to which that might refer. I spread my hands. “You can’t expect me to accept that without a damn good reason, which you’re not giving me.”

“I’ve told you. I can’t. So why don’t we just forget about all this?”

“Menial,” I pleaded, dismayed at the depths of her lack of understanding, “these files are part of my work, my whole career depends on them. So, please—”

I reached out, touching her hair.

Her eyes glinted.

“Oh, fuck off.” she told me, not quite a yell but loud and emphatic enough to turn heads.

“I’ll do that,” I replied, and rose and stalked out. I glanced back from the door, and saw only the top of her head, and the forward fall of her hair, and her hands over her face. The door swung shut behind me.

8 Western Approaches

“It’s over,” Valentina was saying.

“What’s over?” Myra asked. She shook her head, looking around her office. Val and Andrei and Denis were all there, perched on desks or window sills. The command-centre screens had vanished like a dream. Parvus hovered on the edge of her vision, looking as though about to speak.

“The putsch,” Valentina explained.

“Just like that?”

Myra stared, blinking through options presented by Parvus. The personal had its own analysis, and it was busy agreeing with Valentina. The battlesats seized by the space movement were enough to guard their beleaguered enclaves and launch sites, but not to tilt the balance of world power in their favour. The Security Council nations retained their control over the ReUN, but the battlesats that had resisted the coup had done so in their own name, not that of the ReUN. They remained dangerously autonomous.

At ground level all sorts of local balances had been tilted, almost entirely by the rapid re-evaluations of the real weight on the various sides that the bloody flurries of actual combat had induced. Disputes had been resolved or reopened, entire armies had mobilised or disbanded on the strength of the gigantic shadows thrown on the screens of analysis by the small engagements in the field.

“God,” said Myra disgustedly. “This is so decadent.” It reminded her of the Renaissance mercenaries that Machiavelli had moaned about in the Discourses, working out who would have won if they’d fought and abiding by that decision like gentlemen, while omitting the bloody business of actual battle. “Nobody wants a real fight, they’d rather follow the sims. Talk about the pornography of violence. Wankers.”

“It’s worse than that,” Denis said coarsely. “We’re fucked.” He threw a projection of a time-slice from Jane’s and laser-pointed the relevant areas. “Look.”

The ISTWR’s military profile and general credibility was no longer something that cautious strategists, estimating from past actions and present rumour, rated highly. It was negligible.

“We’ve been found out,” said Denis Gubanov. “In exactly the wrong way. They must have always reckoned with at least the possibility that we had nukes. Mutual Protection—or Reid, anyway—knew we had them. Point is, we didn’t use them, so it’s assumed we either don’t have them or don’t have the stomach to use them. We’ve gone from being Upper Volta with nukes to being Upper Volta without. And the weapons we did use didn’t work.”

“They worked—” Valentina began, rather defensively.

“Huh!” Myra snorted. “They worked just fine, only they didn’t destroy the targets. Yeah, I can see that doing our deterrence posture a power of good.”

The hotline phone—a solid, old-fashioned, unambiguous red phone on Myra’s desk—began to ring. She looked at it doubtfully for a moment, then shrugged and picked it up.

“Myra Godwin-Davidova.”

Pause.

“Hello, Myra. Dave here.”

She gave him a moment of nonplussed silence.

“Myra? It’s David Reid.”

“Yes. Hello,” she said. “What do you want now?”

There was a second’s delay in his reply.

“What do you want, is more like it.” Even over the crackly laser-to-landline link, she could hear his fury. “You had the whole situation in the balance, you know that? You had the fucking casting vote, Chairman Davidova! You had the nuclear option, and you threw it away! I’d almost rather you had used your goddamn nukes against us—at least that way the Security Council would have had control, and would’ve had to take responsibility. There’d be some chance of an end to the chaos, which is all we really wanted. As it is you’ve turned what should’ve been the endgame into another fucking stalemate.”

“I don’t see how that makes you any worse off.”

She heard a knocking noise and realised after a moment that he was banging something on his head.

“It’s made us all worse off! It’s like entropy, Myra, can’t you see that? Everybody’s climbed up a few flights, escalated, that’s the fucking word for it. We’re all higher up but relatively we’re no better placed, and we’ve lost energy, wasted work in the process. And you know the only people who’ll gain from that? The marginals, the fucking barb, that’s who.

Including your local godless communists.”

“It’s you who should have thought of that. Before you launched your bloody coup.”

Reid took a deep breath, a long sigh down the wire.

“Yeah, you’re right. It is my fault. Didn’t expect a counter-coup, that’s all.”

“What counter-coup?”

Again the odd delay.

“Don’t play the innocent. Somebody’s taken over most of the battlesats, and it sure wasn’t my lot. Nor the UN’s, come to that.”

“You don’t know who it was?”

“No. So who was it? You must know.”

Myra thought about this. Ah, hell, he’d find out anyway.

“The Fourth International,” she told him. “Space fraction, mil org.”

A second ticked past, then she heard Reid’s loud laugh. “Ha-ha-ha! OK, Myra, be like that. I’ll find out anyway. Meanwhile, take a look at the northeastern border, and see if it all still seems so funny. I’m well out of it— I’m on a shuttle for Lagrange. Bye.”