The Ministry for the Future

becoming more and more robust. The developed petro-nations therefore tried to sell their oil to the developing non-petro nations, at a big discount. The developing petro-nations decided to power themselves with their own oil assets, and sold to their fellow developing nations-without-petro at even bigger discounts. These non-petro developing nations therefore were the last big carbon burners of note, and they were significant. But India had already shown what could be done by making their pivot to clean renewables after the heat wave. And China was leading the world in solar panel production. They were still selling and shipping their coal, and Japan was still importing it and burning it, among others. Russia and Australia were still exporting coal where they could. Despite all the sudden shifts, carbon was still being burned. Oh yes; to the tune of twenty gigatons a year. Did you think that because Arabia was virtuous, there would be no more cakes and ale? In fact, there was no quick end in sight. The image of a bubble bursting was apt in some respects, illusory in others. People still needed electricity and transport. Money still ruled, fire sales still sold carbon. The bubble that was bursting might still be the biosphere itself. The battle for the fate of the Earth continued.

Russia kept selling its oil and gas, which was a good thing for Europe, as much of Europe was heated in winter by Russian gas. As was made clear when the pipelines were bombed in the coldest part of that winter.

They were also selling their pebble-mob missiles. Either that or else they had sold, or given, or lost to theft or espionage, the plans for building pebble mobs. And in fact these missiles were not so hard to reverse engineer that they weren’t quickly becoming a part of all major militaries. Even part of some private armed forces’ arsenals, it appeared, which had to have purchased such high-tech devices from some major country. It was in fact somewhat terrifying that anyone at all owned such missiles.

They had been introduced by the Russians in the 2020s, and spread rapidly after that. They spread faster than the spread of the implications of their existence. Nation-states kept spending billions that could have been used elsewhere on navies and air forces and military bases, none of which could be defended against these new weapons. They were more powerful than the atomic bomb, in this very particular sense: you could use them. And they couldn’t be stopped. That was the main thing that was not being understood, either accidentally or on purpose, so that people wouldn’t have to change their armaments or their purchase orders: these missiles couldn’t be stopped. They were small, they launched from mobile launchers, they came from all directions in a coordinated attack in which they only congregated at their target in the last few seconds of their flights. They did not give off radioactive signals, and thus could be hidden until the moment of launch. And they were relatively cheap.

After you launched them, they flew at about a thousand miles an hour. That and the fact they only coalesced to their mob moment in the last seconds before impact was enough to forestall any realistic defense against them. They were lethally explosive versions of the drones that had brought down all the planes on Crash Day.

Aircraft carriers? Sunk. Bombers? Blown out of the sky. An oil tanker, boom, sunk in ten minutes. One of America’s eight hundred military bases around the world, shattered. Death and chaos, and no one findable to blame.

The war on terror? It lost.

Either everyone’s happy or no one is safe. But we’re never happy. So we’ll never be safe.

Or put it this way: Either every culture is respected, or no one is safe. Either everyone has dignity or no one has it.

Because why? Because this:

A private jet owned by a rich man— boom.

A coal-fired power plant in China— boom.

A cement factory in Turkey, boom. A mine in Angola, boom. A yacht in the Aegean, boom. A police station in Egypt, boom. The Hotel Belvedere in Davos, boom. An oil executive walking down the street, boom. The Ministry for the Future’s offices— boom.

What people then had to consider was that this list of targets could be greatly extended. The US Capitol, various houses of parliament, the Kaaba in Mecca, the Forbidden Palace in Beijing, the Taj Mahal— and so on.

No place on Earth was safe.

Meetings at Interpol and many other agencies concerned with global security were inconclusive as to the source or sources of these attacks when they happened. Although, as with the nerve gas made by the Russians and used to kill Russian dissidents in Britain, these pebble mobs were definitely complex military devices, not something you could cook up in your garage. They were nation-state devices, in effect, made for fairly big and sophisticated militaries by fairly advanced aerospace and computer companies, then sold or given to smaller actors.

So, after the Interpol meetings, a rumor began to circulate that it was in Russia where the Arabian coup against the Saudi royal family had been planned. But wait, why would the Russians be party to that? Because with Arabian oil off the table, and then Brazilian oil too, Russian oil was that much more valuable. But this was speculation only. The Russian government denied all these rumors and identified them as part of the ongoing anti-Russian campaign common in the West and elsewhere. Nothing to it. Each nation responsible for its own security. Russia was a keeper of all its treaty obligations and a force for stability in the world. Pebble mobs might even be a force for good, because now war was rendered impossible. It was mutual assured destruction, not of civilian populations, but of war machinery. An end to the twentieth-century concept of total war, a return to the focus on military-against-military that had characterized armed conflict before the breakdown of civilized norms established at Westphalia in 1648, then