The Sky Road

switch. His expression and tone were apologetic. “We stay,” he said. “It’s God’s will.”

And a matter of honour too, she guessed.

“Kapitsa it is, then,” she said.

The two men beamed at her as though she had done them a favour. Perhaps she had; they probably believed she’d just issued them two free passes to heaven. There were times when she envied the devout.

As the plane banked around she took the call from Valentina. This one was v-mail, recorded in one of the offices in the government building. Behind Valentina, men with Kalashnikovs lurked at windows. Bureaucrats turned desks into makeshift barricades. Somebody was operating a byte-shredder, wiping computer memories, setting up a blizzard of interference.

“Hi, Myra, hope this gets through. Jesus, did you hear that the nuke thing’s all over the media? We’ve got news collectors—warm bodies as well as remotes—coming in all the time, and the demonstrators are acting up for them so they can watch themselves being heroic on CNN. Fucking classic media feedback howl. The nuke thing has really freaked a lot of them out—in all the factions, the lefty headbangers and the pro-UN types and the fucking spa-cists. Not to mention our very own patriots. Our agents in the crowd—hell, even the reporters—are picking up talk about storming the building. We want you back as soon as you can; we’ll have a militia driver on standby at the airport.”

The message was time-stamped at 1.35 p.m., and it was now 2.50. Myra blinked up a split-screen of television news channels while taking the third call. The seatbelt light came on; the aeroplane was beginning its descent to Kapitsa. Thank God for ultra-precise radio tuning—Myra could remember when you couldn’t even take a call in level flight. The pilot’s voice was raised slightly as he argued with air-traffic control for precedence, throwing diplomatic weight and Kazakh curses about equally. Myra looked out of the window. More aircraft than usual— hastily hired jets, she guessed—were parked beside the runways. The media circus was in town.

Her anonymous caller flickered into view.

“Jason!”

The CIA agent gave her a tense smile, but warm around the eyes. “Hello, Myra. Good to see you. Wow, you look amazing. Just in time for your global stardom, huh?”

“Hah!”

“Almost as much excitement as the coup. Anyway… I’m here to tell you that we’ve got somewhere with the investigation.”

Undercarriage down, thump.

“What—oh, Georgi’s—”

“Yup. I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Myra, but—shit, we got this out of the black labs, it’s bleeding-edge stuff. We did an autopsy on a goddamn cell sample—don’t ask how we got it.”

A bump, a rocking forward, another bump, and the incline of deceleration.

“The point is, Myra, we found traces of a very specific, very subtle bit of nanotech. It’s not exactly a poison, that’s the clever thing. It builds up into a little machine, then disintegrates when it’s done its job. We found a few gear trains, but that was enough.”

The aircraft came to a halt and the seatbelt light went off. The door banged open and the steps angled down. Myra stood up and shuffled forward, behind Nurup and in front of Mustafa, still talking and listening. She waved absently to the pilot, left him a handful of gold coins as a bonus. She was thinking ahead.

“Enough for what?”

“Enough to identify it. It’s a spacer assassination weapon. A heart-stopper.”

A heart-stopper. Yes. It was that.

She blinked away the floating image of Jason to concentrate on her surroundings. No signs of actual incoming fire. She followed Nurup towards the terminal building, about a hundred metres away. Jason’s voice in her head continued.

“So there’s no doubt any more—it was murder. Now, there’s no proof the space movement had a hand in it, beyond supplying the weapon, but the circumstantial evidence is kind of strong.”

You could say that,” Myra agreed, making a conscious effort to unclench her jaw. Having her suspicions confirmed after all this time of indulging then dismissing them was a shock.

Fucking heart attack…

“They don’t exactly throw that sort of kit around,” she mused aloud. “Too easy to reverse-engineer, for one thing. But why would they do it?”

Through the long corridor, letting Nurup and Mustafa do the lookout. Out of the corner of her eye she could see the adjacent, outbound corridor, packed from end to end with a slow-moving queue.

“Well, the obvious motive would’ve been to stop him making the offer to the Kazakhstanis.”

“And how do you know about that?”

“Uh, that’s classified.”

Myra had to laugh.

“But how would they have known about it, I mean before—?”

“You tell me.”

They’d reached the concourse. It wasn’t quite as crowded or frantic as she’d begun to expect; most of those intent on leaving must have already left, or at least be in the exit queue. Much to her relief, no newshounds or reporters had spotted her yet, though she identified one or two by their flak-jackets and communications clutter and vaguely familiar faces. Scanning the crowd, she saw a man in the uniform of the Workers’ Militia, who caught her eye, saluted and started pushing towards her.

“It was as much of a surprise to everyone else in the government as it was to me,” she said. “We figured it was Georgi’s own bright idea, which he’d spring on us once he’d got some provisional—oh!”

Mustafa bumped into her back.

Jason waved to her, over heads.

“You never told me you were here!”

“Yeah, well… thought I’d surprise you.”

It was strange seeing his lips move, and hearing the words, beyond earshot. Like lip-reading, like telepathy.

“Who is that guy?” Nurup asked suspiciously.

“He’s OK,” said Myra. She wasn’t sure whether introducing Jason as a CIA agent would be a good idea, so she didn’t.

And then they met up, and to everyone’s surprise she and Jason met in a long embrace.

Jesus, man!”

She broke loose and turned to the militia driver.

“Thanks for coming. Room for these three guys?”

The driver nodded. “This way please.”

He led them to a service door which Myra knew she must have passed hundreds of times and never seen. Their progress was less inconspicuous—the two muj weren’t the only armed passengers, but they were the most noticeable. As the driver fiddled with the push-bar latch Myra noticed heads bob and a little buzzing camcopter swoop from the concourse’s rafters.

They hurried along a passageway of corrugated iron and unplaned, splintery joists, and emerged beside a jeep in a small bay of the car park.

“Ah, now that’s sensible transport,” Myra said as they all piled in. The Militia jeep had a light machine-gun mounted on its rollbar. Mustafa made that his post. Nurup sat in the front with the driver, rifle propped in the crook of his elbow, pointing up. Myra and Jason sat in the back, with Mustafa’s legs and the ammo belt between them. As the jeep careered out of the carpark and swerved on to the main road into town, Jason leaned over and said, loud above the noise and the slipstream, “You were saying?”

“About Georgi’s great plan, yeah. As far as we can tell he never told anyone else, not even Valentina. That was him all over—he was a bit of a Kazakhstani patriot, and he still tended to act like this whole place was his personal fief. Which it once was!”

The jeep was making good progress—most of the traffic was in the other direction, towards the airport or— judging by the amounts of luggage and household goods piled on top of cars and trucks—towards Karaganda. Her