Fall Revolution 4: The Sky Road

main inward
investor.’
    ‘Yes. He made me an interesting offer,’ Myra
looked down at her plate, picked up something with legs. ‘I
do hope this stuff’s synthetic; I’d hate to think of
the radiation levels if it isn’t.’
    ‘I think we have to rely on somebody’s business
ethics on the radiation question,’ Valentina said.
    ‘Ah, right.’ Myra peered at the shrimp’s
shell; it had an ICI trademark. Full of artificial goodness. She
hauled the pale pink flesh out with her teeth. ‘Anyway,
Madame Comrade People’s Commissar for Defence, my dear: our
inward investor gave me to understand that he knows we’ve
done a little less… outward divestment than I’d been
led to believe.’
    Valentina, rather to her credit, Myra thought, looked
embarrassed.
    ‘I inherited the assets from my predecessors… and
I never mentioned them because I thought you already knew, or you
didn’t and you needed to have deniability.’
    So it was true. The confirmation was less of a shock than
Reid’s original claim had been. It would take a while for
the full enormity of it all to sink in.
    Myra nodded, her mouth full. Swallowed, with a shot of whisky.
‘The latter, actually. I didn’t know. I thought
they’d all been seized by the Yanks after the
war.’
    ‘Most of them were. There was one exception, though. A
large portfolio of assets that made it through the crackdown,
that the US/UN just couldn’t get their hands on; one
contract that was always renewed. Until the Fall Revolution, of
course. Then it… lapsed, and I was left holding the
babies. They were sent back to us in a large consignmentof large
diplomatic bags, from various locations, all controlled
by…’
    ‘You can tell me now, I take it?’
    Valentina looked around, and shrugged.
    ‘The original ministate, with the original mercenary
defence force.’
    Myra had to think for a moment before she realised just which
state Valentina was talking about.
    ‘Jesus wept!’
    ‘Quite possibly,’ said Valentina, ‘quite
possibly he did.’
    There are times when all you can do is be cynical, put up a
hard front, don’t let it get to you… Myra joined in
Valentina’s dark chuckle.
    ‘So what happened to the assets, and why is our investor
concerned about them?’
    ‘Ah,’ said Valentina. ‘You’ll recall
the Sputnik centenary a couple of years ago. We rather
extravagantly launched one of our obsolete boosters to celebrate
it. What I did at the time was take the opportunity to place most
of our embarrassing legacy in orbit.’
    ‘In Earth orbit?’ Myra resisted an
irrational impulse to pull her head down between her
shoulders.
    ‘Some of them,’ said Valentina. ‘The ones
designed specifically for orbital use, you know? They’re in
high orbit, quite safe.’ She frowned, and against some
inner resistance added, ‘Well, fairly safe. But the rest we
sent to an even safer place: Lagrange.’
    Myra had a momentary mental picture, vivid as a virtual
display, of Lagrange: L5, one of the points where Earth’s
gravity and the Moon’s combined to create a region of
orbital stability, and which had, over half a century,
accumulated a cluttered cluster of research stations, military
satellites, official andunofficial space habitats, canned
Utopias, abandoned spacecraft, squatted modules, random
junk…It was the space movement’s promised land, and
with the new nanofactured ultralight laser-launched spacecraft
its population was rising as fast as Kapi-tsa’s was
falling.
    ‘Oh, fucking hell,’ said Myra.
    ‘Don’t worry,’ Valentina assured her.
‘They’re almost undetectable among all the
debris.’
    Myra didn’t have the heart to tell her how much she was
missing the point.
    ‘Why the fuck did you park them there?’ she
demanded. ‘Safe, in a way, yeah, that I can understand, but
didn’t it occur to you that if it ever came out, we might
find our intentions… misunderstood?’
    Valentina looked even more embarrassed. ‘It was –
well, it was a Party thing, Myra. A request’
    ‘Oh, right. Jeez. Are you still in the fucking
Party?’
    Valentina chuckled. ‘I am the Party. The ISTWR section,
at least’
    ‘Now that Georgi’s gone. Shit, I’d
forgotten.’
    They hadn’t even put the fourth flag, the flag of the
Fourth, on his coffin. Shit. Not that it mattered now. Not to
Georgi, anyway. And not to those who’d gathered to pay
their respects – the only one present