Fall Revolution 4: The Sky Road

it
– I’m on a shuttle for Lagrange. Bye.’
    He closed the connection in some manner that sounded like
slamming down the receiver on an old-fashioned phone, with an
impact that made her wince.
    Before she could look at the north-eastern border, Parvus
stepped into frame and raised a hand. Myra gestured to the others
to wait.
    ‘Yes?’
    The stout phantom waved his hands expansively. ‘Ah,
Myra, I have had to move fast on your investments. I received the
hot inside tip -’ he laid a yellowed finger to his ruddy
nose ‘ – that Mutual Protection are liquidating their
assets.’
    ‘What!’ Myra had by this time got so used to
‘assets’ being a euphemism for ‘nukes’
that she almost ducked under the desk. Her startled gaze raced
down the latest news bulletin – nothing.
    ‘Oh, you mean financially.’
    ‘Of course financially. When the last war starts I will
tell you straight. No, Mutual Protection are selling up, pulling
out.’
    ‘Pulling out from where?’
    ‘From here. From Kazakhstan.’ He looked at her
sadly, almost sympathetically. ‘From Earth.’
     
    Over the next few days it became clear that the main gainers
from the brief lurch into actual violence were the marginals, who
took their own advantage of the distraction – and Mutual
Protection’s hasty liquidation – to expand their
domains in country after country; and the Sheenisov.
    They made a push along the pass at Zaysan, to the south-east.
Kazakhstani long-range bombers pounded the Sino-Soviet combat
drones – devices of unsetding and diverse appearance,
combinations of almost Soviet mechanical clunkiness with
quasi-organic nanotech sheen. Their wrecks, or corpses, littered
the roads and hillsides outside Buran. Any functioning components
had a disturbing tendency to reassemble. The Kazakhstani
bombing-runs stopped as supplies of bombs began to run out.
Sheenisov spetsnatz teams – casting hologram feints,
radar ghosts, sonic body-doubles – skirmished among the
wreckage and dug in at the furthest limit of their advance.
Meanwhile, a tank-borne human army, or horde, was outflanking the
Altay Mountains at the northern end of the range: rolling
southand west from the Katun basin, and down the road and railway
from Barnaul, unopposed. By the end of the fourth day after the
coup attempt they’d crossed Kazakhstan’s northern
border, and paused.
    The oblys council in Semipalatinsk – evidendy
softened by intimidation or subversion – invited them in,
and they cheerfully accepted the invitation. They rode in like
liberators, welcomed by cheering crowds, and settled down with
every appearance of being there to stay.
    The red phone rang again.
    ‘Chingiz Suleimanyov,’ the caller identified
himself. The current President of Kazakhstan; his nickname of
‘Genghis President’ was not quite fair. ‘I have
a proposal for your government, Madame Dav-idova, and for you
personally…’
     
    The following morning Myra got up and dressed, and packed. She
had most of her luggage sent on to the airport. She loaded stacks
of old files, in formats going back all the way through floppy
disks to actual paper, into a couple of crates, sealed and
diplomatic-bagged and sent off to another destination. Then she
began stripping her flat, with a kind of rage at herself. She
commandeered some kids from the militia to take the stuff down
the stairs -physically, she wasn’t up to that, and she knew
it.
    The bedroom’s contents went first, all the cushions and
throws, the tatting and trim, the lacework and lacquer and lapis
lazuli – out, all of it, into big black plastic sacks that
went straight to the nearest craft-market stall for a derisory
sum. Let them make their own way again, let them travel the
circuits like trade-goods, like cowrie shells and crated
Marlboros, back to the Camden Locks and Greenwich Villages of the
world. The posters on the walls went next, toanother stall, for
other collectors. The vinyl records and the compact discs –
that was what they were called, she thought with a smile, as she
hefted their stacked bulk – to a third.
    And then the books. That did hurt, but she went on with it;
grimly, grimily hauling them down from their shelves, sorting and
stacking. Again and again tempted to sift, to stray; now and
again lost in a book, or in the reminiscences it provoked. Blink,
knuckle the eye, slam the covers shut, sneeze out the dust, move
on. Her eyes