Fall Revolution 4: The Sky Road

usual dashnik emigre diversions – plotting,
pleading, mounting sabotage expeditions, low-key terrorism. We
don’t encourage it’ He rubbed a finger up and down
the side of his nose. ‘Naturally, we try to prevent
it… to the best of our ability, but our resources are
quite inadequate for such a task.’
    ‘But of course.’ Myra smiled. ‘Could you
raise me some muj? Two or three good men, not fanatics,
not suicidal, but willing to take a risk and have a go if
necessary. I’m still deeply reluctant to fly into Se-mey.
Too much opportunity for an opportune mechanical failure –
frankly, I’m getting a little paranoid about anything
that’s computer controlled, on either side. So, if I may,
I’d like to drive, with bodyguards.’
    Ghingiz raised his eyebrows. ‘Drive all the
way?’
    ‘No, no. Fly to Karaganda, announce what I’m
doing, then drive to Semey, bypassing the ISTWR.’
    ‘Ah, yes.’ He teased some of the hairs in one
shaggy eyebrow back into place. ‘A little local difficulty
there.’ He sounded reproachful.
    ‘The situation’s under control,’ Myra
said.
    ‘Perhaps. But, on balance, I would suggest that you
don’t go back there, or even bypass it by truck or jeep
through the Polygon. Far more dangerous than flying.’ He
raised a hand, stilling her incipient protest. ‘I know what
you mean about the computers, and flight control. I too have
thought about this. You will get your bodyguards. You make your
announcement, fly to Semey, then wander where you will until
someone makes contact – which, as you say, someone surely
will. You will pass on the proposals and await developments. Then
you will fly from Semey back to Kapitsa, and either declare the
conflict settled, or rally your people for their part in the
common defence.’ He smiled thinly. ‘Either way, your
internal political problems will be over. Externally, however, it
may turn out that the Sheen-isov are not our most immediate
problem…’
    ‘Ah, yes,’ said Myra. ‘The next move.
Presumably at least one of the countries we made our offer to
will start to worry about what we’re going to do with the
nukes, and the option of disarming us will move up the agenda
pretty damn quick.’
    ‘Precisely,’ said Chingiz. ‘The US-spacer
nexus is the one we probably have to worry about most – as
your friend in New York said, the space industrialists and
settlers are understandably edgy on the subject.’
    ‘They’re your nukes now,’ Myra said.
‘We’ll go along with anything you say. Presumably
you’d want us to stand them down and turn over the
operational codes.’
    Chingiz slammed his fist on his massive desk, making Myra
jump.
    ‘No!’ he said. ‘We are not going to
be pushed around. We are not going to give up our nukes without
guarantees of military aid. And we are willing tothreaten nuclear
retaliation against any attack.’
    ‘So you’re ready to go to the wire on this
one?’
    ‘Absolutely,’ said Chingiz. ‘To the wire.
But not beyond.’
    ‘All right,’ said Myra. ‘We’ll go with
you. We’ll see who blinks first.’
    ‘Thank you,’ said Chingiz. His face relaxed a
little. ‘It’s a high-risk strategy, I know. But the
endgame is upon us, and I for one am not going into it
defenceless.’
    Myra nodded.
    ‘The best thing you can do,’ she said, ‘is
act as though you’re ready to wash your hands of us –
of the ISTWR. Denounce and disown us – privately of course,
on the hotline – and urge the UN or US or whoever to
negotiate directly with us. That should buy us some
time.’
    ‘Only if they believe you’re mad enough to do
it.’
    Myra bared her teeth. ‘They will.’
     
    Sernipalatinsk, or Semey, was a pleasant enough town, whose
steppe location had let it spread out so much that even its
taller buildings looked low, even its narrower streets wide.
There was room in those broad streets for trees whose dusty
leaves had been an object of suspicious Geiger-counter monitoring
on her first visit, in the late 1980s. The good old days of the
Nevada-Semipalatinsk Association against nuclear testing. Of all
the betrayals she’d perpetrated against her youth, this one
stung the most. Marxism, Trotskyism and socialism could go hang;
it was the implacable naive humanist internationalism of that
protest, its irrefutable medical and statistical basis, its sheer
bloody outrage rooted in biology rather than ideology,