The Sky Road

“Ah, yes.” He teased some of the hairs in one shaggy eyebrow back into place. “A little local difficulty there.” He sounded reproachful.

“The situation’s under control,” Myra said.

“Perhaps. But, on balance, I would suggest that you don’t go back there, or even bypass it by truck or jeep through the Polygon. Far more dangerous than flying.” He raised a hand, stilling her incipient protest. “I know what you mean about the computers, and flight control. I too have thought about this. You will get your bodyguards. You make your announcement, fly to Semey, then wander where you will until someone makes contact—which, as you say, someone surely will. You will pass on the proposals and await developments. Then you will fly from Semey back to Kapitsa, and either declare the conflict settled, or rally your people for their part in the common defence.” He smiled thinly. “Either way, your internal political problems will be over. Externally, however, it may turn out that the Sheenisov are not our most immediate problem…”

“Ah, yes,” said Myra. “The next move. Presumably at least one of the countries we made our offer to will start to worry about what we’re going to do with the nukes, and the option of disarming us will move up the agenda pretty damn quick.”

“Precisely,” said Chingiz. “The US-spacer nexus is the one we probably have to worry about most—as your friend in New York said, the space industrialists and settlers are understandably edgy on the subject.”

“They’re your nukes now,” Myra said. “We’ll go along with anything you say. Presumably you’d want us to stand them down and turn over the operational codes.”

Chingiz slammed his fist on his massive desk, making Myra jump.

“No!” he said. “We are not going to be pushed around. We are not going to give up our nukes without guarantees of military aid. And we are willing to threaten nuclear retaliation against any attack.”

“So you’re ready to go to the wire on this one?”

“Absolutely,” said Chingiz. “To the wire. But not beyond.”

“All right,” said Myra. “We’ll go with you. We’ll see who blinks first.”

“Thank you,” said Chingiz. His face relaxed a little. “It’s a high-risk strategy, I know. But the endgame is upon us, and I for one am not going into it defenceless.”

Myra nodded.

“The best thing you can do,” she said, “is act as though you’re ready to wash your hands of us—of the ISTWR. Denounce and disown us—privately of course, on the hotline—and urge the UN or US or whoever to negotiate directly with us. That should buy us some time.”

“Only if they believe you’re mad enough to do it.”

Myra bared her teeth. “They will.”

Sernipalatinsk, or Semey, was a pleasant enough town, whose steppe location had let it spread out so much that even its taller buildings looked low, even its narrower streets wide. There was room in those broad streets for trees whose dusty leaves had been an object of suspicious Geiger-counter monitoring on her first visit, in the late 1980s. The good old days of the Nevada-Semipalatinsk Association against nuclear testing. Of all the betrayals she’d perpetrated against her youth, this one stung the most. Marxism, Trotskyism and socialism could go hang; it was the implacable naive humanist internationalism of that protest, its irrefutable medical and statistical basis, its sheer bloody outrage rooted in biology rather than ideology, which had been her purest, fiercest flame. She had thought nuclear weapons the vilest work of man, whose very possession contaminated, and whose mere testing was murderous.

Nurup Kerbayev and Mustafa Altynsaryn, her proudly counter-revolutionary bodyguards, strolled a polite step or two behind her, beards and bandoliers bristling, Kalashnikovs slung on their shoulders. Nurup was ethnically Kazakh-Russian; Mustafa looked more Mongoloid, almost Han Chinese. With their AKs and baggy pants and scuffed boots and bulging jackets they both looked just like counterrevolutionary bandits. They also looked like Sheenisov soldiery or the local population, whom the Sheenisov had encouraged to carry arms as a deterrent to counter- revolutionary banditry.

They walked down the streets and across the squares quite unchallenged, though one or two people gave Myra a curious glance, as though recognising her from her television appearance the previous evening. Apart from the parked tanks on the street-corners, around each of which a curious crowd, mainly of children and young people, fraternised with the relaxed-looking crew, the town so far showed litde sign of being caught up in a social revolution. It was the weird fighting-machines that were alarming. They stalked and lurched about like Martian invaders; but the locals treated them with casual familiarity, like traffic or street-furniture. Perhaps, Myra thought wryly, it was the absence of searing heat-rays and writhing metal tentacles that did the trick.

As well as those combat drones, big clunky calculating-machines were being installed, indoors in shop-fronts and factories, outdoors in the squares. Gears and teeth and crystal spheres, building to frenetic orreries of some alternate solar systern, Copernican with Ptolemaic epicyles. Nanotech dripped and congealed around the brass and steel, like epoxy that never quite set. Around noon Myra and her companions watched one being winched off a flatbed truck and placed carefully in a plaza below a cosmonaut monument.

“Fucking bizarre,” said Myra, half to herself, as a Sheenisov cadre clambered on to the plinth and began an explanatory harangue in Uzbek, not one of her languages.

“With this they will replace the market,” Nurup scoffed, under his breath. “God help us all.”

A lively market in soft drinks and hot food was already forming around the strange device. Nurup and Mustafa bought her Coke and kebabs, and themselves a hotdog each. Both talked quietly to the stall-keepers. Taking the food, they sat down on a bench and ate.

“There is much discontent,” Mustafa said eagerly.

“Bazaar gossip,” Nurup said. “Stall-keepers will tell you anything. They will tell the Sheenisov they love them.”

The two men argued obliquely but intensely for a few minutes about the prospects for terrorist action against the Sheenisov.

“We’re not here for that,” Myra reminded them. She shared out cigarettes, then together they walked out of the square. Neither of the men raised any questions about her random following of the streets, until they ended up at the bank of the broad Irtysh river. Flats on the opposite bank, a riverside walk on this. A small pleasure steamer chugged downriver, ferrying a calculating-machine on its promenade deck.

Myra leaned against a railing, gazing into the river. The two men leaned against the railing, looking the other way. People passed. After a few minutes of this Mustafa asked what was going on.

“Nothing,” said Myra, not turning around. “Or maybe something. I’m assuming we’ve been followed, or watched. I’m quite prepared to wait here for at least an hour. Make yourselves comfortable.”

But they were too edgy and too alert to be comfortable. The most they did was light another of her Dunhills. Myra slipped her eyeband down and was at once struck by a sense of deja vu, as the whole scene around her hazed over, sleeted with grey flecks. After a moment she realised the source of that sense of recognition—it reminded her of how she’d first seen towns like this, back in the 90s: through their Soviet pollution haze. She blinked, moved the eyeband up and down, tried to pick up the nets. Nothing but the grey snow. Even Parvus,. summoned from memory, looked frazzled by it.

Sheenisov jamming. Shit.

She’d just given up this experiment when she heard her name called. She turned. Shin Se-Ha and Kim Nok- Yung walked side by side by the pathway, waving to her.

“It’s all right,” she told her swiftly tense bodyguards. “I know these guys.”

She shook hands, smiling, with the Korean and the Japanese; introduced them to the Kazakhstanis. Discreet compliments on her rejuvenated appearance were exchanged with her admiration for their now healthier physiques. Even their relatively humane imprisonment had marked them, weighing them down with something which their new freedom—if freedom it was—had enabled them to shrug off. They walked taller. They confronted the Kazakhstani emigres unabashed.

“So, you are Sheenisov,” said Mustafa, in a disgusted tone.

“Lay off,” said Myra. “They’re OK We have to talk.”

“Yes,” said Nok-Yung. “We have to talk.”

It was a mild day, for the time of year. Not shirtsleeve weather, but comfortable if you dressed warm, as they all had. Myra indicated a semi-circle of benches in a concreted picnic area along the bank a little. The two ex-