Fall Revolution 4: The Sky Road

to seize the battle-sats. They have the forces
to do it.’
    He paused, looking at her, or through her. ‘But we have
the forces to stop it. I can assure you, Myra, it’s all in
hand.’
    She shook her head. ‘That isn’t what our
intelligence indicates. I’ve checked, my Defence and
Foreign ministries have checked. We have agents in the batdesats,
as you must know – hell, some of them must be in your own
military org! If such a thing exists.’ She wished
she had read some of those mailings.
    ‘It most certainly does exist,’ the General said
firmly. ‘And it’s been feeding you
disinformation.’
    What?
    The entity stood up and stepped towards her in its virtual
space. It spread its hands and assumed an apologetic expression,
but with a sly conspiratorial gleam in its eyes.
    ‘Forgive me, Comrade Davidova. This was not done against
you. It was done against our common enemy: Reid’s faction
of the space movement.’
    ‘How – ’ she began, but she saw, she
saw.
    ‘I’m telling you this now,’ the General
said, ‘because today you lost your last disloyal Commissar.
Alexander Sherman has been passing on information to Reid for
months. He wasn’t the first, but he was the last’
    ‘Who were the others?’
    The General moved his hand in a smoothing gesture. T
can’t tell you that without compromising current
operations. That particular information is of no further use to
you anyway.’
    ‘I suppose not,’ Myra concurred reluctantly. She
wished she knew who the traitors were, all the same; hoped
Tatanya and Michael hadn’t been among them. She’d
quite liked those two…
    ‘So you used them – and us – as a
conduit for disinformation?’
    The General nodded. ‘And for information going the other
way – your updates to Jane’s have been most
helpful.’
    ‘Jeez.’ Her reactions to this were interestingly
complicated, she thought distantly. On the one hand she felt sore
at having been used, having been lied to; on the other, she could
admire the stagecraft of the deception. Above all she felt
relieved that the gloomily negative assessments she’d
worried over were all wrong.
    Unless the situation was even worse than she’d
thought –
    ‘The situation is better than you think, by far,’
said the General. ‘We have our people in place -the
battlesats won’t be taken without a struggle, which in most
cases we expect to win.’
    ‘Most cases won’t be enough. Even one
battlesat-’
    ‘Indeed. Which is where your orbital weaponry comes in.
The lasers, the EMP bursters, the smartpebbles, the
hunter-killers, the kinetic-energy weapons.
    Myra hadn’t known her arsenal was so extensive. (God, to
think that stockpile had once belonged to the Pope! Well, to the
Swiss Guards, anyway – quite possibly His Holiness had been
discreetly left out of the loop on that one.) She shivered in her
wrap, tugged it around her shoulders, lit another cigarette. She
didn’t know what to say: she felt her cheeks burning under
the General’s increasingly quizzical regard.
    ‘What do you want us to do with them?’ she asked
at last.
    Tm sure you can work that out,’ he said.
‘I’ll be in touch.’
    ‘But – ’
    He gave her a smile; heartbreaking, satanic.
    ‘I hope I see you again,’ he said. He reached out
a hand and made some fine adjustment to the air. The link went
down.
    Myra took off her eyeband and rubbed her eyes. Then she walked
unsteadily to the kitchen and made some tea, and sat drinking it
and smoking for about ten minutes, staring blankly into the
virtual spaces of her mind. She supposed she should do something,
or tell someone, but she couldn’t think what to do, or whom
to tell.
    Time enough in the morning, she decided.
    Her bedroom was small, a couple of metres’ clearance on
three sides of the double bed giving barely enough space for a
wardrobe and dressing-table. Over the years the room had
accumulated a smothering snowfall of soft furnishings, needlework
and ornaments; pretty things she’d bought on impulse and
never had the heart to throw out. The process was a natural
selection for an embarrassingly large collection of grannyish
clutter. Now and again – as now – it infuriated her
in its discrepancy with the rest of her life, her style, her
look. And then, on reflection, she’d figure that the
incongruity of the room’s appearance was what made it a
place where she could forget all care, and