The Sky Road

from the Mutual Protection company and its proteges within the state apparatus: a coup d’etat Now, she suspected that Mutual Protection and its allies were into the final moves of a much wider game-plan, as wide as it could be: a coup du monde. Or coup d’etoile! She stalked to the window, shedding her coat and hat and gloves in quick, violent movements, leaned on her knuckles on the sill and scanned her surroundings in a spasm of fang-baring territoriality. No tanks or tramping feet sounded in her city’s streets, no black helicopters clattered in her country’s sky. What did she expect? There were days at least to go before anything happened—and, when it did, the opening blows would be overt in larger capitals than hers; she’d be nipped by CNN soundbites in the new order’s first seconds.

She sighed and turned away, picked up her dropped clothes and hung them carefully on the appropriate branches of a chrome-plated rack. The office was as self-consciously retro-modernist as the styles on the street, if a little more sophisticated—pine walls and floor, lobate leather layers at random on both; ornaments in steel and silver, ebony and plastic, of planetary globes and interplanetary craft. She dropped into the office chair and leaned back, letting it massage her shoulders and neck. She slid the band across her eyes, summoned a head-up display and rolled her eyes to study it. The anti-viral ’ware playing across her retinae flickered, but there was nothing untoward for it to report; here, as in all the offices, the walls had teeth. Her own software was wrapped around her, its loyalty as intimate, and as hard to subvert, as the enhanced immune-systems in her blood. It was personal, it was a personal, a unique configuration of software agents that scanned the world and Myra’s responses to the world, and built up from that interaction a shrewd assessment of her needs and interests. It looked out information for her, and it looked after her investments. It did to the world nets what her Sterling search engine did for her Library—it selected and extracted what was relevant from the vast and choppy sea of data in which most people swam or, more often, drowned.

Having a good suite of personal ’ware was slighdy more important for a modern politician than the traditional personal networks of influence and intelligence. In the decade since she’d recovered power, Myra had made sure that her networks—both kinds, virtual and actual—were strong and intertwined, strong enough to carry her if the structure of the state ever again let her down. Though even that was unlikely—her purges, though bloodless, had been as ruthless as Tito’s. No official of the ISTWR would ever again have the slightest misapprehension of where their best interests lay, and no employee or agent of Mutual Protection would fancy their chances of changing that.

She’d have to consult with the rest of Sovnarkom soon enough—a meeting was scheduled for 3 p.m.—and round up some of the scurrying underlings from the corridors to prepare for it, but she wanted to get her own snapshot of the situation first.

Myra’s personal didn’t have a personality, as far as she knew, but it had a persona: a revolutionary, a stock- market speculator, an arms dealer, a spy; a freewheeling, high-rolling, all-swindling communist-capitalist conspirator out of some Nazi nightmare. It had a name.

Tarvus,” she whispered. The retinal projectors on her eyeband summoned an image of a big man in a baggy suit and a shirt stretched across his belly like a filled sail, scudding along on gales of information. He strolled towards her, smiling, his pockets stuffed with papers, his cigarette hand waving as he prepared to tell her something. She’d never come across a recording of the original Parvus in action, but she’d given this one the appearance of one historic Trotskyist leader, and the mad-scientist mannerisms of another, whose standard speech she’d once sat through, long ago in the Student Union in Glasgow.

“Give me the big picture.”

Parvus nodded. He ran his fingers through his mop of white hair, furrowed his brow, grinned maniacally.

“Jane’s, I think.” He flicked an inch of ash, conjured a screen. Her gaze fixed on an option; she blinked, and the room vanished from her sight; again, and Earth fell away.

Her first virtual view, spun in orbit, was from Jane’s Market Forces—a publicly available, but prohibitively expensive, real-time survey of military deployments around the world. She was running the next-but-one release, currently in beta test. It had cost the republic’s frugal defence budget nothing more than the stipend to place a patriotic Kazakh postgrad in the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s equally cash-starved IT department. (That, and an untraceable credit line to his comms account.) Myra, long familiar with the conventional symbols and ideographs, took it all in at an abstract level: colour-coded, vectored graphs in a 3-D space, with other dimensions implied by subtle shadings and the timing of pulsations. That photic filigree hung like a complicated cloud-system over the relatively static histograms depicting the hardware and the warm bodies. The physical locations and quantities of personnel and materiel could provide only a basement-level understanding of the world military balance, just as the location of physical plant was only a rough cut of the state of the world market. Second by second, market and military forces shifted unpredictably, their mutual interpenetration more complex than any ideology had ever foreseen. With most of the world’s official armies revolutionary or mercenary or both, and most of the conflicts settled in unarguable simulation before they started, everyone from the bankers down through the generals to the grunts on the ground would shrug and accept the virtual verdict, and change sides, reinforce or retreat in step with their software shadows—all except the Greens, and the Reds. They fought for real, and played for keeps.

It was like the old Civilization game, Myra sometimes thought, with a new twist: Barbarism II. Nobody was going to wipe the board, nobody was going to Alpha Centauri. They were all going down together, into the dark… Just as soon as enough major players decided to contest the incontestable, and put the simulations to the audit of war.

But, for the moment, the dark was full of twisting light. And in the real world, blinked up as backdrop, one front was more than virtual, and closer than she’d like. Beyond the northern border of Kazakhstan, itself hundreds of kilometres north of the ISTWR, the Sino-Soviet Union’s ragged front-line advanced in flickers of real fire: guerilla skirmishes and sabotage on one side, half-hearted long-range shelling and futile carpet-bombing on the other.

The Sheenisov—the name was subtly derogatory, like Vietcong for NLF and Yank for United Nations—were the century’s first authentic communist threat, who really believed in their updated version of the ideology which communistans like the ISTWR parodied in post-futurist pastiche. Based in the god forsaken back-country of recusant collective farms and worker-occupied factories, stubbornly surviving decades of counter-revolution and war, armed by partisan detachments of deserters (self-styled, inevitably, “loyalists’) from the ex-Soviet Eastern and ex-PRC Northern armies, they’d held most of Mongolia and Siberia and even parts of north-west China since the Fall Revolution back in 2045, and in the years since then they’d spread across the steppe like lichen. Myra detested and admired them in equal measure.

Of more immediate, and frustrating, concern: the Sheenisov were outside the virtual world, a torn black hole in the net. Their computers were permanently offline; their cadres didn’t trade combat futures; they refused all simulated confrontation or negotiation; like the Green marginals in the West and the Khmer Vertes in the South, the Reds in the East put all to the test of practice, the critique of arms. Even Jane’s could only guess at their current disposition.

But their serrated south-western edge was clear enough, and as usual it was cutting closer to her domain than it had been the last time she’d checked. Like, this time yesterday…

She sighed and turned her attention from the communists to tracing the darker deeds of a real international conspiracy: the space movement. Somewhere in that scored darkness, reading between those lines of light, she had to find the footprints of a larger and more ragged army, impatient to assume the world.

Her first step—acknowledged by the system with startled gratitude—was to update the information on Mutual Protection’s labour-camp output. When this was integrated and plausibly projected to the company’s whole global archipelago, a first-cut reevaluation of relative military-industrial weightings sent ripples through the entire web. Just as well she was working with a personal copy, Myra thought wryly. This was information to kill for (although already, presumably, discounted by Mutual Protection itself, which must surely know she knew).

She zapped the speculative update with a flashing “urgent” tag to the People’s Commissar for Finance, and a less urgent summary to the comrade over at Defence. Then she invoked her ongoing dossier of space-movement activity, meshed in the new output figures, and sent it to all the commissars, with her own interpretation.

The “space-movement coup” had been talked about, openly, for so long that it had become unreal—as unreal as the Revolution had been, until it had finally come to pass. Myra herself had cried wolf on the coup, once before. But now she felt herself vindicated. And, again, David Reid was involved.

Her former lover had built up Mutual Protection from a security-service subsidiary of an insurance company into a global business that dealt in restitution: criminals working to compensate the damage they’d done. Originally