Fall Revolution 4: The Sky Road

guys and your wonderful dual-key command-centre out physically.
The other is lining up rendezvous with the nukes in space. You
can bet that while you think you’re smart, stringing them
along, they are stringing you along, and
they’re both going after the same things.’
    He looked around again, more confident now. ‘This is
endgame. Not just for us, but for them. One side or the other
– the West-stroke-spacers-stroke- Outwarders, or the
East-stroke-the-General-stroke- Sheenisov – is going to
grab these weapons and use them, sooner rather than
later.’
    ‘But – ’ shouted Val, shocked. ‘The
ablation cascade!’
    ‘Not a problem for either of them, at the level
we’re talking about. The Sheenisov’s horizons are
strictly Earthbound, for the next few centuries. And their
computers are invulnerable to EMP hits-they’re mechanical,
not electronic. As to the spacists and the Mil Org, neither of
them is dependent on going back to Earth, or on anything else
getting off. And each unit of these forces probably calculates
that they can cut and run for a higher orbit, or La-grange. Of
course, they’d rather avoid it, but if they have to
they’ll take it on the chin.
    ‘So my advice to you all,’ he concluded,
‘and to those people out there, is get the hell out And
warn everybody that at the first sign of any messing with you, or
Kazakhstan, or the nukes – you’ll blow them all to
hell. Use the nukes against battlesats or detonate in place
– either way you’ll set off the ablation
cascade.’
    ‘Christ,’ said Myra, shaken. ‘That means the
end of satellite guidance, global positioning, comsats, the nets,
everything! It’ll be like the world going blind!’
    ‘Yeah,’ said Jason grimly. ‘And every army
in the world, too. They’re so dependent on space-based
comms and sims that they’ll be fucked. Except for the
marginals, the Greens, the barbarians and the Sheenisov.’
He laughed. ‘If that doesn’t scare them, nothing
will.’
    The guards at the window were moving from the sides to the
centre, gazing out with complete lack of concern for cover. One
of them turned around.
    ‘The cavalry has arrived,’ he said.
    For a moment Myra thought he meant the Sheen-isov. Then she
realised that Chingiz had come through on his promise, and that
the cavalry was their own.
     
    The steppe at nightfall was a moving mass of vehicles and
horses. As far as Myra knew, every last person in Kapitsa was
moving out. She rode somewhere near the front; she tried to ride
at the front, but she kept being overtaken by people in vehicles
faster than her black mare. The Sovnarkom rump, and Jason and her mujahedin, rode in jeeps beside her. With her eyeband
image-intensifiers at full power she could see the Kazakhstani
cavalry – horse and motorised – outriding either
flank of the evacuation, or migration. The scene was biblical,
exodus and apocalypse in one. Banners and flags from the
Revolution Square demonstration floated above the crowd, used as
rallying points and mobile landmarks. The news remotes and
reporters were following the process in a sort of stunned awe,
not sure whether the angle was Road People (refugees,
pathetic) or Kazakh Rouge (menaces, fanatic).
    Something similar, though not as yet so drastic, was happening
in Almaty and other towns across the greater Republic. Chingiz
Suleimanyov had pitched the appeal to evacuate as the ultimate
protest march, against the West’s threats and its refusal
of aid against the Sheenisov. If they were to be abandoned to the
communists, they had nothing to lose by fleeing in advance to a
place that claimed it would be defended. The threat of this
avalanching into an unstoppable migration was already spreading
panic in Western Europe. Northward, in the Former Union, regional
and local chiefs were conferring on their own fragmentary
networks, bruiting inflammatory talk of joining in.
    ‘Come in, come in, ya bastard,’ Myra muttered. She
was riding in a hallucinatory ambience of virtual images, some of
them pulled down from CNN and other services, others patched up
from the command-centre, whose hardware they’d stripped
from the offices and jury-rigged in the back of the Sovnarkom
jeep. She could see a satellite image of herself from above
– she could wave, and with a second’s delay see one
of the dots on the ground wave back. (The reassuring thing was
that it was the wrong dot, a