The Sky Road

People handed their stuff over with a sickeningly eager compliance.

“Want your jacket back?”

Myra nodded. He tossed it, still folded, to her; held on to the holstered automatic, the passport and the uplink phone.

“You’ll get these back later,” he said.

She put the jacket on. It was a thin suit jacket and didn’t do much to keep out the chill.

“What do you mean, ‘later’?” she asked.

He laughed at her.

Tou’re coining with us. Well let you go soon.”

The wind just got colder.

Myra gestured at her blood-spattered blouse and blood-soaked skirt.

“Excuse me if I don’t believe you.”

“War is hell, ink?” he agreed biighuy. He moved his hand as though tossing something light away. “The guard was a spy, anyway.”

Myra said nothing.

“OK, youse lot!” some guy on a horse was shouting. “Get back on the train and stay there. Don’t try chasing us, don’t anyone try shooting after us. “ ’Cause if you do, we’ll come back an’ kill youse all. And don’t leave the train after we’re gone, neither, or the choppers will pick you off in the fields.”

The group filed into the train through one of the doorways. Myra could see them dispersing along the carriages.

“That’s all you’re going to do?”

The red-haired man nodded. “This time.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “I mean, I feel sorry for these people, but not sorry enough to kill them. And I’m not going to waste time searching the train for valuables. No point in being greedy, otherwise the trains would just stop coming through. Just enough tax to cover the op, you know.”

“What op?”

He stared at her. “Getting hold of you.”

Oh, shit. She’d thought that was what he’d been driving at. She blinked rapidly, recording his image, and triggering a search protocol on her eyeband, to see if this knowledgeable bandit was known himself.

“You did all this just to get me?” She smiled sourly, over chattering teeth. “How did you know I was on the train?”

The man looked at her scornfully. “That wasn’t difficult,” he said. He waved a hand expansively but evasively. “We’re everywhere.”

“Seems a bit excessive.”

“Some things you just can’t say in a phone call,” he said idly. Then he shifted his feet and straightened up, grinning. “Besides, raiding is such fun.” He drew in a long breath of fresh air as though inhaling a drug. “It’s a lifestyle thing.”

A slender, dark-skinned woman with curly, wavy blonde hair down to her waist rode up on a big black horse, leading a similar horse and a dun mare. She smiled at the tall man, and turned a colder smile to Myra.

“You know how to ride?”

In a moment everyone was mounted. Myra tugged up her bloody skirt as she settled in the saddle. The tall man waved and whistled three blasts. Suddenly the Greens were dispersing away from the train, diagonally up the scree-slope to the trees or, as those around Myra did, straight across the wet meadow. She found herself on a hell- for-leather gallop behind Fix, with the blonde-haired woman and the red-haired man on either flank. Over a hedge, down a path, into a narrow wooded dell.

Somewhere far away, the sound of a helicopter. Then some short machine-gun bursts, though at whom they were aimed, Myra did not wish to guess.

Myra rode silently like the others, but in the spectral company of Parvus; the AI was murmuring into her bone-conduction earclip and flashing Grolier screens up in front of her eyes. Nothing more current was available without the uplink phone. He’d provisionally identified the man who’d captured her, but it wasn’t very enlightening —the latest pictures of him were from about twelve years ago, and he hadn’t been a land-pirate then. He had been a net commentator, and—before that—a minor agitator in the Fall Revolution. The television clips of his rants explained why he looked vaguely familiar—she’d watched the British national democratic revolution in the time she’d been able to spare from following the Siberian Popular Front’s assault on Vladivostok.

The dell opened to a larger valley, thickly settled. Old stone houses, geodesic domes, wattle huts, new thatched cottages, a few nanofactured carbon-shell constructions. A lot of cattle and sheep in the fields; kids running everywhere. The path became a gravel road which widened, at the centre of the main street, to a small cobbled square. In the centre, just by a verdigrised copper statue of a Tommy with a fixed bayonet, memorial to the fallen of three world wars, was an outdated but still effective anti-aircraft missile battery. No higher than the statue itself, it held a rack of a dozen metre-long rockets. Myra could read the small print of what they were tipped with: laser-fuser tactical nukes.

People crowded around, welcoming the returning raiders. They called the red-haired man what she thought at first was “Red”, which made sense; then realised it was “Rev”, which made no sense at all. It certainly wasn’t the name her search had come up with. The kids were cheering and doing the high-stepping, highjumping Zulu war-dance called toyi-toying.

Fix reined in his horse in front of a large stone building which had a low-ceilinged front room open to the street: a cafe. Myra followed suit, dismounted and was led through into a back room with a fire, and high leather chairs around a table. The room smelt of woodsmoke and alcohol and unwashed humanity and damp dogs.

“Have a seat.”

Myra sat and the two men and the woman sat down opposite her. They regarded her in silence for a moment. She decided to hazard the Grolier’s guess.

Jordan Brown,” she said. “And you must be Cat Duvalier.” That name was in the entry’s small print as Jordan Brown’s wife.

“Well done,” the man said, unperturbed. “Nifty little machine you’ve got there.”

Myra flipped the eyeband back. “Yes. So tell me, Mr Brown, what it is you want.”

“It’s Reverend Brown,” he said. “First Minister of the Last Church of the Unknowable God.” He smiled. “But please, call me Jordan.” He looked over his shoulder and shouted an order. “Beer and brandy!”

He slung his cloak over a chair; without it, leaning over the table in his T-shirt and wild hair, he looked somewhat more intimidating. Some absence in his gaze reminded Myra of spetznatz veterans, or old Afghantsi. The Blue Beret slogan on the T-shirt just might not be ironic, she thought. A boy padded in carrying glasses and bottles.

“All we’ve got at the moment,” the woman called Cat said. “What’ll you have?”

“I’ll have a beer.”

She accepted the drink without thanks, and lit a cigarette without asking permission or offering to share. Damned if she was going to act as though she was enjoying their hospitality.

“You were saying, Reverend.”

Jordan Brown spread his hands. Just to talk things over.”

“You’ve gone to a lot of trouble to do that.”

“I sure have,” he said. Tve risked the lives of my fighters, I’ve exposed one of my agents, I’ve had a man slaughtered like a pig—which he was, but that’s nothing to you—and had another train guard shot in the belly just for trying to do his job. Quite possibly, some of the passengers have already fallen to friendly fire.” He shrugged. “And I would have killed more, if I’d had to. The point is, I’ll get away with it.” He waved his hand above his head. “We all will. The helicopter was the worst the British can do against us.”

Myra looked straight at him. “Like I care. You might not get off so lightly when this gets back to the Kazakhstani Republic.”

Jordan nodded soberly. “No doubt I’m trampling all over diplomatic niceties. But it’s you that came to Britain to get help, not the other way round. So you’ll forgive me for not worrying too much.”

“Hah!”