Fall Revolution 4: The Sky Road

There are your swift
cavalry!’
    Myra really had never thought of it like that.
    ‘The only swift cavalry I’m worried about,’
she said bitterly, ‘are the goddamn Sheenisov.’
    To her astonishment and dismay, Irina began to cry. She pulled
a grubby tissue from her pocket and sobbed and sniffled into it
for a minute. On a sudden impulse, Myra reached across the table
and grasped her hand.
    ‘Oh God,’ Irina said at last. ‘I’m
sorry.’ She gave a long sniff and threw the tissue away,
accepted Myra’s offer of a cigarette.
    ‘No, Fm sorry,’ Myra said. T seem to have
said something to upset you.’
    Irina blinked several times. ‘No, no. It’s my own
fault. Oh, God, if you just knew. I stayed here to see you, not
just to let you in.’ The cigarette tip glowed to a cone,
she was sucking so hard. ‘Nobody else wanted to come in
this morning and meet you. Theythink you are a terrible person, a
monster, a criminal. I don’t’ She blinked again,
brightening. ‘I go back, you know. To Romania, and
to… other „post-civilised“ countries. All
right, to the Former Union. And you know what? People are happy
there, with their farms and workshops and their local armies and
petty loyalties. The bureaucrats are gone, and the mafias have no
prohibitions to get rich on, and they are gone. The provinces
have their small wars and their feuds, but ‘ she smiled
now, sadly ‘ – I sound like a feminist, if you
remember them, but the fact is, it’s just a testosterone
thing. Young men will kill each other, that’s the way of
it. For a woman, Moscow – hell, any provincial post-Soviet
town – is safer than Glasgow.’
    Oh, not another, Myra thought. A Green fellow-traveller, a
political pilgrim. I have seen the past and it works.
    ‘And when I see something like communism coming back,’ Irina went on, ‘when I see the goddamn
Sheenisov riding in their tanks, collectivising again,
assimilating all those little new societies, I want to see them
stopped.’
    She looked straight into Myra’s eyes. ‘You can do
it, you can stop them. You must fight, Myra. You’re our
only hope.’
    Myra felt like crying, herself.
     
    The Brits just didn’t do trains.
    They’d invented them. They had a couple of
centuries’ experience with them. They had more actual
enthusiasts for trains per head of the population than anywhere
else. They’d invented trainspotting. And they still
couldn’t seem to figure out how to make trains run on
time.
    So here they were on a bright, cold Sunday morning, somewhere
south of Penrith, and under traction from one electric engine
that sounded like it came from the sort of gadget you would use
for home improvements. Wooded hillsides slid slowly past. At
least she had a seat in First Class. The train’s guard was
just wandering through the adjoining Second Class, where all the
screaming kids were, and the refreshments trolley was being
trundled along behind him.
    Myra lit a cigarette and gazed out. She felt relatively
content, even with a long journey, made longer by bloody typical
Brit inefficiency, ahead of her. She had plenty of reading to do,
right there in her eyeband. Parvus had prepared her a digest of
recent British foreign policy, last time she’d done a
download. About 100 kilobytes, not counting hyperlinks and
appendices. Stacks of v-mail to catch up with.
    Not to mention the news. By now there was a regular CNN spot,
on the world-affairs specialist news-feed, dealing with the
ISTWR. The demos opposing the policy of federation with
Kazakhstan had grown to a daily assembly of two thousand or so,
with a couple of hundred people braving the chilly nights in
tents in Revolution Square. Some of their banners were what Myra
would’ve expected from her local ul-tralefts, the sort of
folks she’d tangled with outside the New Brit. Others were
liberal – pro-UN – or libertarian, with a pro-space,
pro-Outwarder undertone.
    Nobody on the street – or on the net – seemed to
have yet found out about the nukes; a small mercy, but Myra
suspected that some at least of those behind the various
demonstrators knew about them. Reid, for one, certainly did, and
she thought it possible that his hand was reaching for
themthrough the ISTWR’s home-grown space-movement
militants.
    Myra had spent the first hour or so of the journey at her
virtual keyboard, writing out reports back and instructions and
advice for her