Fall Revolution 4: The Sky Road

trilling note, twice.
    ‘Right, Fix, spread the word,’ he said. ‘We
got her. Tax them and leave. Let’s get outta here before
the helicopters come.’
    The other man jogged off, shouting orders. In a minute, out of
the corner of her eye, Myra could see the tax being organised:
the people from the train had all been herded into one group, and
a man with a shotgun and a woman with a sack were going around,
taking money and jewellery and small pieces of kit and personal
weapons. People handed their stuff over with a sickeningly eager
compliance.
    ‘Want your jacket back?’
    Myra nodded. He tossed it, still folded, to her; held on to
the holstered automatic, the passport and the uplink phone.
    „You’ll get these back later,’ he said.
    She put the jacket on. It was a thin suit jacket and
didn’t do much to keep out the chill.
    ‘What do you mean, „later“?’ she
asked.
    He laughed at her.
    Tou’re coining with us. Well let you go soon.’
    The wind just got colder.
    Myra gestured at her blood-spattered blouse and blood-soaked
skirt.
    ‘Excuse me if I don’t believe you.’
    ‘War is hell, ink?’ he agreed biighuy. He moved
his hand as though tossing something light away. ‘The guard
was a spy, anyway.’
    Myra said nothing.
    ‘OK, youse lot!’ some guy on a horse was shouting.
‘Get back on the train and stay there. Don’t try
chasing us, don’t anyone try shooting after us.
‘Cause if you do, we’ll come back an’ kill
youse all. And don’t leave the train after we’re
gone, neither, or the choppers will pick you off in the
fields.’
    The group filed into the train through one of the doorways.
Myra could see them dispersing along the carriages.
    ‘That’s all you’re going to do?’
    The red-haired man nodded. ‘This time.’ He jerked
his thumb over his shoulder. ‘I mean, I feel sorry for
these people, but not sorry enough to kill them. And I’m
not going to waste time searching the train for valuables. No
point in being greedy, otherwise the trains would just stop
coming through. Just enough tax to cover the op, you
know.’
    ‘What op?’
    He stared at her. ‘Getting hold of you.’
    Oh, shit. She’d thought that was what he’d been
driving at. She blinked rapidly, recording his image, and
triggering a search protocol on her eyeband, to see if this
knowledgeable bandit was known himself.
    ‘You did all this just to get me?’ She smiled
sourly, over chattering teeth. ‘How did you know I was on
the train?’
    The man looked at her scornfully. ‘That wasn’t
difficult,’ he said. He waved a hand expansively but
evasively. ‘We’re everywhere.’
    ‘Seems a bit excessive.’
    ‘Some things you just can’t say in a phone
call,’ he said idly. Then he shifted his feet and
straightened up, grinning. ‘Besides, raiding is such
fun.’ He drew in a long breath of fresh air as though
inhaling a drug. ‘It’s a lifestyle thing.’
    A slender, dark-skinned woman with curly, wavy blonde hair
down to her waist rode up on a big black horse, leading a similar
horse and a dun mare. She smiled at the tall man, and turned a
colder smile to Myra.
    ‘You know how to ride?’
    In a moment everyone was mounted. Myra tugged up her bloody
skirt as she settled in the saddle. The tall man waved and
whistled three blasts. Suddenly the Greens were dispersing away
from the train, diagonally up the scree-slope to the trees or, as
those around Myra did, straight across the wet meadow. She found
herself on a hell-for-leather gallop behind Fix, with the
blonde-haired woman and the red-haired man on either flank. Over
a hedge, down a path, into a narrow wooded dell.
    Somewhere far away, the sound of a helicopter. Then some short
machine-gun bursts, though at whom they were aimed, Myra did not
wish to guess.
     
    Myra rode silently like the others, but in the spectral
company of Parvus; the AI was murmuring into her bone-conduction
earclip and flashing Grolier screens up in front of her eyes.
Nothing more current was available without the uplink phone.
He’d provisionally identified the man who’d captured
her, but it wasn’t very enlightening – the latest
picturesof him were from about twelve years ago, and he
hadn’t been a land-pirate then. He had been a net
commentator, and – before that – a minor agitator in
the Fall Revolution. The television clips of his rants explained
why he looked vaguely familiar – she’d