*
The most dangerous aspect of the Value System was its effect on what his Securitician A training had called situation awareness. Every Monday morning, he switched off to insulate himself from the barbaric duties to come. Every Saturday afternoon, he switched back on, got paid and became a human being again to savour the bliss of the Saturday night party.
The danger arose when wielding a knife in the Separation Shop whilst tormented by thoughts that had been stewing around and around for days. It started on a Sunday night as he was waiting for sleep, trying but failing not to think about Sarah-Kelly. An occasion came to mind. On one of their first days out together, Sarah-Kelly and he had climbed up to McCaig’s Tower, the prominent but pointless mini-Colosseum overlooking the town of Oban. They stood arm in arm admiring the view across Oban Bay while the spring breeze whisked her hair against his cheek. Perhaps because the scene was so far removed from the ugliness of Lawrence’s past, she caught him quite off guard when she asked what Naclaski guns fired at.
“Breaches of Naclaski,” Lawrence replied.
“But what is Naclaski?”
Her ignorance so amazed him that he spoke on without thinking ahead to where the conversation might lead. It was easy to forget that regulations fundamental to the duties of a glory officer—as detailed in the training programme of the Securitician A licence—meant nothing to those whose lives never touched the sovereign class.
“Naclaski stands for National Clear Skies Initiative. The sovereigns claim privacy of the air above their land all the way to outer space.”
“What’s outer space?”
“It’s where the stars live.” He gave her a squeeze. Her education in the port of North Kensington basin had been parochial despite her family’s owning a barging business and being quite wealthy by slum standards. “Basically, nothing is allowed to cross the air above sovereign land. No aircraft, no balloons, no carrier pigeons, no radio transmissions.”
“Carrier pigeons? Come on—”
“Sovereign privacy is a stringent thing. If a flying boat gets lost in a winter storm and strays over sovereign land, it gets shot down by radar-guided Naclaski guns.”
“Who is radar?”
Lawrence laughed. Information about the tracking radar systems was, of course, strictly classified. It was foolish of him to mention it.
“Radar stands for Random Attack Direction Attribution Rule.”
“What on earth is that?”
“It’s a procedure... It doesn’t matter. Forget I said it.”
“What happens to the folk in the plane?”
“They die, unless they’re lucky enough to bale out by parachute.”
He had to explain what a parachute was.
“Folk jumping out of planes and floating down under silk umbrellas?” She obviously did not believe it.
“It’s true!”
“As true as folk walking on the moon?”
“They did walk on the moon—that is true.”
“Lawrence! Anyway, the reason I asked about Naclaski is because the guns around North Ken basin have been banging away something awful recently. Rosa was telling me in her last letter.” Rosa was Sarah-Kelly’s sister-in-law. “North Ken is right by the Grande Enceinte and all its forts. There’s the White City fort and the Ladbroke fort. Rosa says they’ve been banging away at two o’clock in the morning. I’ve never heard any plane flying at night, so what are they shooting at?
“They were probably shooting at radio trucks. Radicals have got more active recently with trucks out on the public drains around London and other big cities. They beam their ‘for the people’ crap and then beat it to a new location before the Naclaski scanners can pin-point them.”
“How do you mean, pin-point them?”
Lawrence hesitated. Strictly speaking, their talk was drifting to a level of detail that outsiders did not need to know. He sketched an explanation. Several scanners would fix the direction of the radio truck, then by drawing all the fixes on a map, the lines would converge at the truck’s location. However, it took five or ten minutes to gather all the fixes, estimate the truck’s speed, calculate the target point and then load the guns and get them laid.
Sarah-Kelly arched back laughing, showing the roof of her mouth.
“You beat any Naclaski gun,” she said, leaning against him. “Load the gun and get it laid… Did you ever do that?”
“Load the gun and get it laid?”
“Work in one of these gun companies.”
As he did not answer after a couple of seconds, she added:
“I know you don’t like talking about your work, but I do hear things. You talk in your sleep—did you know that?”
“It’s been said before.”
“Why do you keep going on about ‘brushes’?”
An electric shock of raw fear stabbed his bowels leaving his legs trembling. A ‘brush’ was slang for interception of surplus flow by a patrol barge. It meant a prevention.
“I don’t know. Perhaps I should take up painting. Come on, let’s find a café and warm up, this wind is like a knife.”
“It don’t seem that bad to me.”
Months later in the Value System, the conversation returned to haunt him. Sarah-Kelly might be untutored but she was smart. She would not forget that conversation. It was a time bomb. Any glory trooper who served near a flotilla of patrol barges could use their eyes. They could see ammunition boxes hefted off the quay before a patrol and empty ones tossed into trucks after a patrol. Although only barge crews and senior officers knew exactly what went on, a far wider society could hazard a pretty fair guess. Just one hint, just one sneer in Sarah-Kelly’s hearing could provoke her curiosity. She could
