Fall Revolution 4: The Sky Road

back on-line via patches and work-arounds. The
outcome of this first serious exchange was already being
analysed. Myra cast a quick glance at Jane’s. The
coup’s stock was fluctuating wildly.
    ‘Shit – ’
    She was about to transfer her workspace to the battlesat again
but the General beat her to it. He -or it – suddenly
appeared in the command-centre, as a recognisable if not very
solid figure. Andrei and Denis, by this time evidently having
been brought up to speed by Val, didn’t react to the
apparition with more than open-mouthed astonishment.
    ‘Too bad,’ the General said, staring sadly at the
display. ‘These defences are portable, not fitted to the
station but brought in by the conspirators.’
    ‘Any other battlesats have them?’
    A sketch of a shrug. ‘We don’t. Maybe
they’re already being deployed among the waverers. Mutual
Protection nanofactures, is my guess.’
    Better than a guess, Myra reckoned.
    ‘You want another strike?’
    ‘No. Only one thing for it now. Nuke
‘em.’
    Myra glanced at Valentina. ‘Wait. Give us a first-cut
sim, Val.’
    Valentina ran down the locations of their orbital nuclear
weapons and launched a simulation of an immediate strike, in the
light of the new information about the battlesats’
capabilities. Stopped. Ran it again; and again; all in a few
seconds, but a wasteof time nonetheless. The answer was obvious.
The nukes could get close enough to the battlesats to take them
out – but near-Earth space was a lot more crowded than it
had been when the doctrine of that deployment had first been
developed. There was no way to avoid thousands of innocent
casualties and quadrillions of dollars’ worth of damage to
space habitats and industries.
    ‘It’s worse than that,’ Valentina pointed
out. The direct effect of the explosions and the EMP would be
just the beginning – there’s every possibility that
the debris would set off an ablation cascade – each
collision producing more debris, until in a matter of days
you’d have stripped the sky.’
    The ablation cascade was a known nightmare, one of the
deadliest threats to space habitation, or even exploration. Myra
had seen discussions and calculations to suggest that a
full-scale cascade would surround the Earth with rings of debris
which could make space travel unfeasibly dangerous for centuries…
    The General had a look which indicated that he was weighing
this in the balance. She could just see it now, that calculation
– even with a cascade, it was possible that the new diamond
ships could dodge and dogfight through the debris – the
barrier might not be impenetrable after all, and
meanwhile…
    Torget it,’ Myra said. ‘We aren’t going to
use the nukes.’ Her fingers were working away, codes were
flashing past her eyes – she was trying to find the channel
the General’s fetch had ridden in on.
    Something in her tone told the General there would be no
argument. Instead, he turned to the others and said, quite
pleasantly, ‘The comrade is not thinking objectively. Are
you willing to relieve her of her responsibilities?’
    ‘No,’ they told him, in gratifying unison.
    ‘Very well.’ He smiled at them, as if to say he
was sorry, but it had been worth a try.
    ‘And you can fuck right off,’ said Myra.
She tapped her forefinger, triumphantly, on an input-channel key,
and tuned him right out.

 
7
The Claimant Bar
     
     
    Out we went into the summer dusk. Moths sought the sun in
street-lamps, baffled. The few quiet roads between the house and
the Institute were crowded now, with local residents taking
advantage of the slack season in bars normally jammed with
students. Lads strutting their tight dark trousers, lasses
swaying their big bright skirts. We must have looked a less happy
couple, harried and hurrying.
    A few lights burnt in the Institute, one of them the light in
the corridor. As we stepped in and closed the door, the smell of
pipe-smoke was stronger than before, and familiar.
    ‘Someone’s around,’ Menial whispered.
    ‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘it’s –
’
    Right on cue, an office door down the corridor opened and
Anders Gantry stepped out. A small man with strong arms and a
beer-barrel of a belly, hair curling grey like the smoke from his
inseparable pipe. His shirt was merely grubby – his wife
managed to impose fresh linen on him every weekor so – but
his jacket had not been cleaned in years. It