she could see the Kazakhstani cavalry—horse and motorised—outriding either flank of the evacuation, or migration. The scene was biblical, exodus and apocalypse in one. Banners and flags from the Revolution Square demonstration floated above the crowd, used as rallying points and mobile landmarks. The news remotes and reporters were following the process in a sort of stunned awe, not sure whether the angle was
Something similar, though not as yet so drastic, was happening in Almaty and other towns across the greater Republic. Chingiz Suleimanyov had pitched the appeal to evacuate as the ultimate protest march, against the West’s threats and its refusal of aid against the Sheenisov. If they were to be abandoned to the communists, they had nothing to lose by fleeing in advance to a place that claimed it would be defended. The threat of this avalanching into an unstoppable migration was already spreading panic in Western Europe. Northward, in the Former Union, regional and local chiefs were conferring on their own fragmentary networks, bruiting inflammatory talk of joining in.
“Come in, come in, ya bastard,” Myra muttered. She was riding in a hallucinatory ambience of virtual images, some of them pulled down from CNN and other services, others patched up from the command-centre, whose hardware they’d stripped from the offices and jury-rigged in the back of the Sovnarkom jeep. She could see a satellite image of herself from above—she could wave, and with a second’s delay see one of the dots on the ground wave back. (The reassuring thing was that it was the wrong dot, a hologram fetch of herself and her surroundings seamlessly merged with the images from several kilometres distant.) She could see her own face, projected to visual displays around the world by the camcopter hovering a few metres in front of her.
Right now she was trying to raise Logan. A residual loyalty to her former comrades in space impelled her to warn them of the probable imminent disaster. The scanning search of the Lagrange cluster wasn’t picking up New View. At length, frustrated, she switched to a broader sweep, and to her surprise connected almost immediately.
“Jesus fuck, Myra,” Logan said, without preliminary pleasantry. “This is your biggest fuck-up since the Third World War.” He didn’t make it sound like an accusation.
“Thanks for the reminder, comrade,” Myra snarled. “I’m going against my better judgement telling you this, but I’ve fallen out with your General. That little electric fucker has had the bright idea of making his own bid for world revolution, and I don’t intend to wait around to see how it all works out in practice, thank you very much.”
Tes, I had heard,” Logan said heavily. The delay seemed longer than usual; Myra guessed because she was strung out, running on stretched time. “You called to say that?” He sounded distracted. A very pretty black girl who looked about ten years old stuck her face past his, grimacing at the camera, filling its field with her microgravity sunburst of frizzy hair. Logan shoved at her.
“Oh, push off, Ellen May,” he said, not unkindly. “Go and pester your mum, OK? Or Janis. She’ll have something for you to do, you bet.”
The girl stuck out her tongue, then flicked away like a fish.
“Kids,” Logan grinned, indulgent despite himself.
“Yeah, they’re great,” Myra said, with a pang. “What I called you for is about that, actually. If that kid’s gonna have a future, you guys better get your ass out of Lagrange.”
“We have,” said Logan, five seconds later. “We raced through our preparations after the coup. We haven’t got as much gear as we’d like, but the asteroid miners are going to swing in and join us there. We finished the burn twelve hours ago.” He looked about. “Made a real mess of stuff I didn’t have time to lash down,” he added sadly.
^You’re on your way to
“Yes, at last.” His grin filled the screen. “Free at last!”
“What does the General think about this?”
“Ah,” said Logan. “When I found it was bidding to use your orbital nukes in the coup, I figured the same as you did. Not safe to stick around. You remember I said we’d have to leave a few hundred tons behind? Well, it’s among them, still in the clutter at Lagrange. We ditched the bugger.” His triumphant smile faded to a bleak inward gaze. “I hope.”
Ts it still in control of the Mil Org?”
“I guess so. We couldn’t do anything to it, beyond discarding the section the hardware was in. Its software is a different matter, it gets everywhere, but, hell—”
“What do you mean ‘it gets everywhere’? I’ve got a suspicion it’s downloaded to the Sheenisov’s weird Babbage engines, but—”
Logan nodded. Teah, and it’s probably copied its files to anything of yours that’s been in contact with it, like your phone, but it’s just the source code, it can’t do any harm so long as you don’t open the file—”
At that point the connection ended.
Myra took her phone from her pocket and was about to jerk its jack from her eyeband, just in case, when she realised the precaution was irrational. If the bugger was actually running on her phone they were doomed already. She thought about the time the General had appeared right in her own command-centre, and could only hope that Logan was right, and that only its source code, and not its live program, had been secreted there. And in other places…
Someday, somebody would open a file stored in the Institute at Glasgow, and find Parvus, and the General behind him. She wished that person luck. Then she remembered Menial MacClafferty, and realised she’d have to do more.
She had just finished rattling out her urgent message when she heard a dull, distant bang behind her, and turned. Through the eyeband’s night vision she saw on the horizon the expanding green glow of the first cruise missile to hit Kapitsa. It was not the last.
Hours later, in the twenty-below midnight, when most of the migration had camped around fuel-dump fires, Myra was sitting with Jason in front of a portable electric brazier, in the shelter of the dozing horse. She was simultaneously in the command-centre with the others, and with Chingiz. The UN and US had never intended to negotiate, and even the pretence had been dropped.
The Kazakhstani airforce was expending missiles, planes and lives above Almaty now. From space the command-centre was pulling down images of moves from the battlesats. Tiny, manned hunter-gatherer probes were burning off, matching orbits and velocities with the cached nukes. They had hunter-killer escorts, and they were obviously from opposed coalitions—already their exchanges of fire were being replayed on CNN, now that the Kapitsa bombardment had stopped for lack of remaining targets.
“… no choice,” Chingiz was saying. “Our first responsibility is to defend our people, the people we’ve taken on the duty to protect, even if that means killing more innocent people on the other side than would die on ours if we don’t.”
That’s talking, thought Myra, that’s the way to look at it, that’s right. Screw the greatest good of the greatest number. Or maybe not.
“That’s the end of the world,” said Valentina.
“It’s ending anyway,” Myra said. She looked up from the fire. “That’s my final analysis! We may even save lives in the long run, if we blind and cripple the forces that are getting ready for the last war.” She laughed bitterly. “In both senses of the phrase.”
An officer leaned into the visual field around Chingiz, and spoke urgently in his ear. Chingiz nodded, once, then raised his hand.
“This is it,” he said. “Some of the space settlers’ diamond ships have just entered the atmosphere. They’re heading for—”
Connection lost.
Myra jumped up, and to her utter horror and amazement she saw them, jinking and jittering through the sky towards her. Their infrared radiation signature was arrogantly clear—they didn’t need to bother with shielding, unlike the stealth fighters they resembled. One moment they were dots on the horizon, the next they were discs overhead, swooping past at a thousand metres. Their laser lances slashed the vast encampment, and were countered seconds too late by futile fusillades of skyward machine-gun fire. Then they were at the other horizon, andbanking around for a second runscreams of people and beasts in the night, dying under the laser beams and the
