Fall Revolution 4: The Sky Road

were
offered for immediate, co-ordinated action to that end. A swift
resolution of the emergency was anticipated. The population was
urged to remain calm and stay away from work for the day.
    ‘God, that is so cynical,’ Val said. ‘They
must have had dozens of back-dated statements, prepared for every
contingency, so they could claim to be acting to prevent whatever
the Security Council decided to do.’
    ‘Yes, yes,’ Myra said. ‘All SOP for a coup.
And a diversion, anyway. It’s in space that the real
battles are being fought. Maybe right at this moment! The whole
thing will be decided at the speed of light. Come on, let’s
get into command mode.’
    The others nodded, fell silent, turned to the screens and
started pulling in all available data and throwing analysis
software at it. After a minute or two they’d begun to mesh
as a team in their common virtual workspace. Information flashed
back and forth between their personal networks, the government
network, the Jane’s system, the newsfeeds, and field
reports from their own troops and agents.
    The big picture became as clear as the situation it revealed
was chaotic. Myra clocked through most of the world’s
significant capitals: Beijing, Pyongyang, Tokyo, Vladivostok,
Seattle, LA, Washington DC, New York, London, Paris, New Berlin,
Danzig, Moscow. All of them reported military strikes of one kind
or another, but they all had the aspect of putsches
– short-term grabs of public buildings or urban
strongholds, which could be held more by the reluctance of the
government forces to reduce them than by the strength of their
occupiers. It all had a suspiciously diversionary look about
it.
    All of the committed technophobe governments, from the Khmer
Vertes rulers of Bangkok, through the Islamic Republicans of
Arabia to the White Nationalists of Dallas, had their forces on
full alert and their media screaming imprecations against the
enemies of God, Man or Gaia (depending on local ideological
taste); but Myra judged them well aware that they were not,
themselves, immediate targets -it was the more liberal
governments, those who compromised between the pro-tech and
anti-tech forces, which were taking the fire.
    The more serious action was taking place in the imbricated
global hinterland of enclaves and mini-states and company
countries; along their fractal borderlines the local defence
forces were massed and mobilised, in a posture that was
aggressive in the Assembly Majority Alliance statelets, generally
defensive in the rest. Meanwhile, in the shadowy lands beyond and
behind even these anarchic polities, the forests and plains and
badlands and shanty towns brisded as the Green neo-barbarians,
the marginals and tribals awoke to the unlooked-for opportunities
of this new day.
    Jane’s Market Forces registered unexpected shifts
in the balance of power; minor skirmishes could have major
effects, putting troops and tactics and weapons to the test in
new conditions, or in real rather than simulated combat. Not much
blood was being shed, but fortunes were being made and lost,
alliances and antagonisms updated; the process had its own gory
fascination. Myra felt she could sit and look at it for
hours.
    But this was Earth, this was not where it was at. The battles
here, real or virtual, were fundamentally a diversion, and she
was duly being diverted. She turned her attention determinedly
skyward.
    With VaTs well-practised help she spun a neon orrery of
near-Earth space, separating out the relevant threads from the
skeins of commercial and military orbits. The planet itself
appeared as a transparent globe, etched with political and
geographical outlines, clouded with weather patterns,
cross-hatched with confrontations, pin-pricked with flashpoints.
Again its intricate patterns compelled her attention; again, she
turned away.
    Their own space-borne materiel – nuclear and
kinetic-energy weapons – were depicted as black rods and
cones, deep in the evergrowing ring of spacejunk that tracked the
main orbital thoroughfares.
    ‘Anything coming through yet from the
battle-sats?’
    ‘Some,’ said Val, sounding distracted.
‘I’m pulling in laser comms via various ground
stations. Shit, this is tricky – hold it, hold it…
ah!’
    The battlesat locations lit up, one by one; those with which
communication had been establishedblinked invitingly. Myra zoomed
in on one of them. A classic von Braun