Fall Revolution 4: The Sky Road

checked. Like, this time
yesterday…
    She sighed and turned her attention from the communists to
tracing the darker deeds of a real international conspiracy: the
space movement. Somewhere in that scored darkness, reading
between those lines of light, she had to find the footprints of a
larger and more ragged army, impatient to assume the world.
    Her first step – acknowledged by the system with
startled gratitude – was to update the information on
Mutual Protection’s labour-camp output. When this was
integrated and plausibly projected to the company’s whole
global archipelago, a first-cut re-evaluation of relative
military-industrial weightings sent ripples through the entire
web. Just as well she was working with a personal copy, Myra
thought wryly. This was information to kill for (although
already, presumably, discounted by Mutual Protection itself,
which must surely know she knew).
    She zapped the speculative update with a flashing
‘urgent’ tag to the People’s Commissar for
Finance, and a less urgent summary to the comrade over at
Defence. Then she invoked her ongoing dossier of space-movement
activity, meshed in the new output figures, and sent it to all
the commissars, with her own interpretation.
    The ‘space-movement coup’ had been talked about,
openly, for so long that it had become unreal – as unreal
as the Revolution had been, until it had
finally come to pass. Myra herself had cried wolf on
the coup, once before. But now she felt herself vin
dicated. And, again, David Reid was involved.
    Her former lover had built up Mutual Protection from a
security-service subsidiary of an insurance company into a global
business that dealt in restitution: criminals working to
compensate the damage they’d done. Originally touted as a
humane, market-driven reform and replacement of the old barbaric
prison systems, its extension from common criminals to political
and military prisoners after the Fall Revolution had given it an
appalling, unstoppable logic of runaway expansion, in much the
same way as the use of prison labour in the First Five-Year Plan
had done for the original GULag.
    For more than a decade now, those on the losing side of small
wars and increasingly minor crimes had provided the manpower for
a gigantic space-settlement boom, applying whatever skills they
had – or could rapidly learn – to pay off their
crime-debts as quickly as possible. At the same time, the
proliferation of space-movement enclaves, each of which incited a
horde of beleaguering barbarians or a swarm of furious
bureaucrats, had provided an endless pool of new convicts. Quite
a large proportion of the prisoners, on completion of their
payback time, had seized the abundant employment opportunities
the space projects offered.
    Mutual Protection was now the armature of a global coalition
of defence companies, launch companies, space settlement
programmes, political campaigns and a host of minor governments
– many of them creatures of these same companies. The
space-movement coalition was on the point of assembling enough
forces to re-create a stable world government and to bring the
former Space Defense batde-sats back under UN control. Their
objective, long mooted, was to roll back the environmentalist and
anti-technological opposition movements, and shift enough labour
and capital into Earth orbit to create a self-sustaining space
presence that could ride out any of the expected catastrophes
below – of which, God knew, there were plenty to choose
from.
    The coup itself was expected to proceed on two levels. One was
a political move to take over the rump ReUN, by the votes of all
the numerous ministates that could be subverted, suborned or
convinced. The other was a military move, thus legitimised, to
seize the old US/UN Space Defense battlesats. That, Myra
reckoned, was behind the speed-up in the labour-camps. No doubt
massive subversion was going on among the orbital military
personnel, but by the nature of the case there wasn’t much
she could know about that.
    She stared at the virtual screen for a long time, until the
clenchings of her fists and the twitchinggrimaces of her face and
the blinking-back of tears confused the ‘ware so much that
it shut off, and left her staring at the wall.
     
    Sovnarkom – the Council of People’s Commissars,
or, in more conventional terminology, the Cabinet – was the
appropriately small government of an