Fall Revolution 4: The Sky Road

congratulate.
    ‘Here, here and here.’ He stabbed a forefinger at
three battlesats, whose footprints between them covered most of
the planet. ‘These are in enemy hands. We can’t hit
them from the battlesats we hold, because that would risk a spasm
of retaliation. But we need to hit them fast, to warn any others
who are about to go over to the enemy. Take them out.’
    He ran a finger lightly around the republic’s orbital
caches of smart pebbles, lasers, KE weapons.
    T can’t,’ Myra said. T don’t have the
skills, I don’t have the automation. None of us
do.’
    The General snapped his fingers. ‘The keys, Comrade, the
keys. That’s all I need. The access codes.’
    ‘Let me consult my Defence Minister,’ said
Myra,and backed out hastily. It was a relief – even with
the sudden, swallowed surge of cyberspace sickness that it
brought on – to find herself back in her office, looking at
screens.
    ‘Val – ’ she began.
    ‘I got that,’ said Valentina. ‘Kept half an
eye on you with a partial piggyback. Who is that
guy?’
    Myra looked sidelong at her. ‘Good for you,’ she
said. That was the head of the FI military org. An AI. Our very
own electric Trotsky.’
    Tuck your mother,’ said Val, in Russian.
    ‘Right. We gonna give it the codes?’
    ‘Up to you,’ said Val. You’re the
PM.’
    ‘What,’ said Myra through clenched teeth,
‘would you advise?’
    Val licked her lips. The others were either pointedly ignoring
them or concentrating on their own areas.
    ‘Well, hell. Go with the military adviser, I’d
say. Give it the codes.’
    ‘Will that work? Do we really have munitions up there
that can down battlesats?’
    ‘Hard to say,’ said Valentina. ‘Ancient,
never combat-tested, poorly maintained – but so are the
battlesats! In theory, yes, they can overwhelm a
bat-tlesat’s defences.’
    Myra was trying to think fast. It struck her that the
battlesats themselves might be a diversion – old and
powerful, but inflexible and vulnerable: an orbiting Maginot
line. Perhaps the General was fighting the last war, and winning it, while the real battles raged elsewhere.
    She hesitated, then decided.
    ‘Give me the codes for the smart-pebble bombs,’
she said. Val zapped them across; Myra tabbed back to the
battlesat and passed them to the General. Hewas waiting for her,
with puzzled impatience.
    „Thank you,’ he said heavily, then disappeared.
Myra looked around at the now frantically active crew, gave them
an awkward, cheery wave, and dropped back to her own
command-centre.
    That was quick.’ Valentina pointed at the display.
Already, some of their orbital weapons had been activated. Myra
devoutly hoped that what she was seeing as a representation
wasn’t appearing on the enemy’s real-time monitors.
In three places a cloud of sharp objects had burst out of cover
and were moving in the same orbital paths as the three enemy
battlesats, but in the opposite direction. They were due to
collide with the battlesats in ten, eighteen and twenty-seven
minutes.
    What happened next was over in less than a second – a
twinkle of laser paths in the void. The action replay followed
automatically, patiendy repeating the results for the slow rods
and cones and nerves of the human eye.
    Myra watched the battlesats’ deep-space radar beams
brush the oncoming KE volleys; saw their targeting-radar lock on.
Her laser-platform drones responded to that detection with
needles of light, stabbing to blind the battlesats – which
had, in the momentary meantime, released a cloud of chaff to
block that very manoeuvre. Then the battlesats struck back, with
a speed still bewildering even in slow motion. Each one projected
a thousand laser pulses, flashing like a fencer’s swift
sword, slicing up the KE weapons and their laser-platform
escorts.
    ‘Wow!’ she said, admiring despite herself.
    ‘Yeah, that’s some defence system,’ said
Valentina. ‘Not standard issue for a battlesat, I’ll
tell you that.’
    Myra zoomed the view. Each attack cloud was still there, as a
much larger cloud of much smaller objects. They would bombard the
battlesats, sure enough, they’d even do some damage, but it
would be more like a sand-blasting than a shelling.
    The time was 09.25. Forty minutes had passed since the
Heaviside nukes. The disruption they’d caused was easing
off; radio comms were still haywire, but more and more centres
were coming