“I’ll think about it,” she said, granting him at least this victory, for what it was worth. She looked around. “We’ve arrived.”
The hotel’s ornately furnished function suite was filled with people in dark clothes, standing about in small groups and conversing in low voices. Already they were beginning to relax out of their funereal solemnity, to smile and laugh a little: life goes on. Fine.
Myra and Reid walked together to the long tables on which the buffet was spread, and contrived to lose each other in the random movement of people selecting food and drinks. With a plate of savouries in one hand and a large glass of whisky in the other, Myra looked around. Over in one corner Andrei Mukhartov was deep in conversation with a lady in a black suit and a large hat; she was answering his quiet questions in a loud voice. Myra hoped this representative of the tattered Western fringe of the former United States wasn’t talking about anything confidential. Possibly that was the point. She noticed that Valentina was standing alone, in an olive-green outfit whose black armband was rather shouted down by an astonishing amount of gold braid. Myra made a less than subtle bee-line for her.
“Ah, there you are,” she said, as Valentina turned. She nudged her defence minister towards the nearest of the many small tables dotted around the vast floor. They sat.
“New uniform?” Myra asked.
Valentina’s rigid epaulettes moved up and down. “Never had much occasion for it before,” she said.
“Never knew you’d accumulated so many medals, either.”
Valentina had to laugh. Teah, it is a bit… Brezhnevian, isn’t it?”
“All too appropriate, for us. The period of stagnation.’.
Valentina devoured a canape, not looking away from Myra. “Indeed. I see you had a little chat with our main inward investor.”
“Yes. He made me an interesting offer,” Myra looked down at her plate, picked up something with legs. “I do hope this stuff’s synthetic; I’d hate to think of the radiation levels if it isn’t.”
“I think we have to rely on somebody’s business ethics on the radiation question,” Valentina said.
“Ah, right.” Myra peered at the shrimp’s shell; it had an ICI trademark. Full of artificial goodness. She hauled the pale pink flesh out with her teeth. “Anyway, Madame Comrade People’s Commissar for Defence, my dear: our inward investor gave me to understand that he knows we’ve done a little less… outward divestment than I’d been led to believe.”
Valentina, rather to her credit, Myra thought, looked embarrassed.
“I inherited the assets from my predecessors… and I never mentioned them because I thought you already knew, or you didn’t and you needed to have deniability.”
So it was true. The confirmation was less of a shock than Reid’s original claim had been. It would take a while for the full enormity of it all to sink in.
Myra nodded, her mouth full. Swallowed, with a shot of whisky. “The latter, actually. I didn’t know. I thought they’d all been seized by the Yanks after the war.”
“Most of them were. There was one exception, though. A large portfolio of assets that made it through the crackdown, that the US/UN just couldn’t get their hands on; one contract that was always renewed. Until the Fall Revolution, of course. Then it… lapsed, and I was left holding the babies. They were sent back to us in a large consignment of large diplomatic bags, from various locations, all controlled by…”
“You can tell me now, I take it?”
Valentina looked around, and shrugged.
“The original ministate, with the original mercenary defence force.”
Myra had to think for a moment before she realised just which state Valentina was talking about.
“Jesus wept!”
“Quite possibly,” said Valentina, “quite possibly he did.”
There are times when all you can do is be cynical, put up a hard front, don’t let it get to you… Myra joined in Valentina’s dark chuckle.
“So what happened to the assets, and why is our investor concerned about them?”
“Ah,” said Valentina. “You’ll recall the Sputnik centenary a couple of years ago. We rather extravagantly launched one of our obsolete boosters to celebrate it. What I did at the time was take the opportunity to place most of our embarrassing legacy in orbit.”
“In Earth orbit?” Myra resisted an irrational impulse to pull her head down between her shoulders.
“Some of them,” said Valentina. “The ones designed specifically for orbital use, you know? They’re in high orbit, quite safe.” She frowned, and against some inner resistance added, “Well, fairly safe. But the rest we sent to an even safer place: Lagrange.”
Myra had a momentary mental picture, vivid as a virtual display, of Lagrange: L5, one of the points where Earth’s gravity and the Moon’s combined to create a region of orbital stability, and which had, over half a century, accumulated a cluttered cluster of research stations, military satellites, official and unofficial space habitats, canned Utopias, abandoned spacecraft, squatted modules, random junk… It was the space movement’s promised land, and with the new nanofactured ultralight laser-launched spacecraft its population was rising as fast as Kapitsa’s was falling.
“Oh, fucking hell,” said Myra.
“Don’t worry,” Valentina assured her. “They’re almost undetectable among all the debris.”
Myra didn’t have the heart to tell her how much she was missing the point.
“Why the fuck did you park them there?” she demanded. “Safe, in a way, yeah, that I can understand, but didn’t it occur to you that if it ever came out, we might find our intentions… misunderstood?”
Valentina looked even more embarrassed. “It was—well, it was a Party thing, Myra. A request.”
“Oh, right. Jeez. Are you still in the fucking Party?”
Valentina chuckled. “I am the Party. The ISTWR section, at least.”
“Now that Georgi’s gone. Shit, I’d forgotten.”
They hadn’t even put the fourth flag, the flag of the Fourth, on his coffin. Shit. Not that it mattered now. Not to Georgi, anyway. And not to those who’d gathered to pay their respects—the only one present who’d have understood its significance was Reid.
“Don’t worry,” said Valentina.
“What does the International want with—oh, fuck. I can think of any number of things it might want with them.”
Valentina nodded. “Some of them could be to our advantage.”
“Hah. I’ll be the judge of that. You’ve kept the access codes to yourself?”
“Of course!”
“Well, that’s something.”
“So our man’s proposing in a buy-out, is he?” Valentina continued. “Could be worth considering.”
“Yeah.” Myra stood up, taking her glass. “I’m going to talk to him some more. Thanks for the update, Val.”
She refilled her glass, with vodka this time, and set out in a carefully casual ramble to where Reid stood chatting to an awestruck gaggle of low-level functionaries. Denis Gubanov and one of Reid’s greps circled unobtrusively, keeping a wary distance from the group and from each other, each at a La-grange point of his own. She couldn’t hear the conversation. On her way, she was intercepted by Alexander Sherman. The Industry Commissar was wearing the same sharp plastic suit, its colour adjusted to black. He looked shiftier than usual; a bad sign.
“Ah, Myra. A sad day for us all.” He shook his head slowly. “A sad day.”