Fall Revolution 4: The Sky Road

alert, of
course. Baikonur cosmodrome’s well under government
control. So’s the airstrip at Yubileine. Almaty’s
mobilised, militia on the streets, but they’re
loyal.’
    You hope, Myra thought The neat thing about a military coup
was that mobilisation against it could quite easily become part of it, as the lines of command writhed and broke and
reconnected.
    ‘Good, great. North-eastern front? Val, you
awake?’
    ‘Yeah, I’m with you. No moves from the Sheenisov
so far.’ Valentina patched in a satellite feed, updated by
the second: the steppe was still.
    ‘What about Mutual Protection here?’
    ‘Haven’t moved from the camp – and the
camp’s quiet’
    Myra relaxed a little. ‘Looks like our immediate
surroundings are secure, then. Any word from orbit,
Val?’
    Valentina shook her head. ‘All comms are very flaky,
can’t get anything coherent from the settlements, the
factories, the battlesats – ’
    ‘That’s impossible!’ She thought about how
it might be possible. ‘Oh my God, die sky –
‘
    ‘About ten minutes ago,’ Andrei announced, from
some glassy trance, ‘somebody nuked the Heaviside Layer.
Half a dozen bursts – not much EMP, but quite enough of
that and of charged particles to scramble radio signals for a
good few hours.’
    ‘So how are we getting even the news?’ Myra
demanded.
    ‘Cable,’ said Andrei. ‘Fibre-optics
aren’t affected. And some stuff’s getting through by
laser, obviously, like Val’s spysat downlink. Should
increase as people switch, or improvise. But for the moment
it’s dust in everybody’s eyes.’
    ‘Didn’t know the space movement had orbital
nukes,’ Denis said. ‘In fact, didn’t know
anybody but us had any serious nukes.’
    That was a point. Nuclear disarmament had been the only
universally popular, and (almost) universally successful, policy
of the US/UN after the Third World War. Even Myra, at the time,
had not resented or regretted the confiscation of the
ISTWR’s complement, along with all the rest. Only by
sheeraccident had an independent stockpile survived, in the hands
of a politically untouchable institution that counted its
supporters in billions, its age in millennia and its policy in
centuries. All other strategic nuclear weapons had been
dismantled. There were thousands of batdefield tactical nukes
still around, of course, but nobody’d ever worried much
about them: the consequences of their use had never been
shown live on television.
    (The images went through her mind, again, and the names of
cities: Kiev, Frankfurt, Berlin. She shook her head with a
shudder, shutting them out.)
    Valentina was giving her a hard stare. ‘They
weren’t ours, were they?’
    ‘Not as far as I know,’ Myra said. ‘Unless
you happened to turn over the access codes to somebody else,
eh?’
    Valentina shook her head, thin-lipped. ‘No.
Never.’
    ‘Right, so much for that theory,’ Myra said
briskly, to assure Val that she wasn’t under any suspicion.
‘Andrei, any ideas?’
    ‘Excuse me,’ said Andrei. ‘I’m still
trying to get through the front door.’
    ‘Oh, fuck!’ Myra tabbed a code to let him in.
    ‘Thanks… OK, I think the nukes were from the
tWside, against the coup.’
    ‘And where did they get them?’
    ‘What I think is that the UN hung on to some nukes for
itself, the secret stayed with some inner cadre of bureaucrats
who made it through the Revolution and the purges, and they put
it at the disposal of the current Secretary General.’
    ‘Makes sense, I suppose,’ said Denis. ‘What
I’d do.’
    ‘What’s the politics of this, Andrei?’ Myra
asked.
    ‘We were so sure they’d wait for the ReUN vote
– ’ she stopped and laughed. Trotsky himself had used
just such a stratagem. ‘Have the coup before the vote
– I wonder where they got that idea. Still, it kind of
undermines the appeal to legitimacy.’
    She still had one eye on the virtual screens of the cable
news. ‘Ah, wait, something coming in – ’
    They sat in silence as the presenter read out a communique
from a large group of small governments calling themselves the
Assembly Majority Alliance. The gist of it was that the present
Security Council had violated the Revised Charter of 2046 by
planning to use nuclear weapons in space; and a call for
immediate action to depose the conspirators and usurpers. The
forces of the Alliance governments and of Mutual Protection