“Is that a problem?” Logan asked. “Best place for them, surely.”
She had to admire his cool.
“Somehow I don’t think that was why the International asked for them to be put there.”
“Ah,” said Logan. “So you know about that.”
“Yeah,” said Myra. “Thanks a bunch for not telling me.”
Logan mumbled something entirely predictable about need-to-know. Myra cut off his ramble with an angry chop of her hand.
“Give me a fucking break,” she said, exasperated. “I can figure that out for myself. The nukes are an element of the situation, but they’re not my main concern right now. I just thought I should let you know that I know about them, for the same reason that you should’ve told me: for the sake of politeness, if nothing else. OK?”
“Well, yeah, OK,” Logan allowed, grudgingly. “So what is your main problem?”
“I was wondering,” said Myra, “if you’d grabbed them because you intended to do something about the coup. Like, you know, stop it.”
Logan laughed. “Me personally?”
“No. The International. And don’t tell me you personally are the only member it’s got up there.”
“Oh, no, not at all.” Logan stared at her, obviously puzzled. “We got plenty of comrades, I mean New View is basically ours, but it’s been a long time since the Party had an army, Myra, you know that as well as I do. We do have a military org, like, but it’s just a… a small cadre.”
“Of course I know that. But I also know what a small military cadre is for. It’s so that when you do need an army you can recruit your soldiers from other armies. You telling me the space fraction’s done no Party work on the battlesats? In all those years?”
Logan looked uncomfortable. “Not exactly, no, I’m not saying that. We have—well, naturally we have sympathisers, we get reports—”
“And so do we,” she said. “Some of them from the same comrades as you do.” She wasn’t entirely certain of this—need-to-know, again—but it would give him something to think about. “Who actually knows about the nukes?”
“Valentina Kozlova,” said Logan. “And your ex-husband, Georgi Davidov.” If Logan noticed Myra’s involuntary start at this news, he gave no sign. “And me, obviously. That’s it. The only people who know. Unless there’s been a leak.”
“Hmm,” said Myra. “Reid doesn’t seem to know about them—he knows we have nukes in space, but he thinks they’re all in Earth orbit.” She paused.
“Wait a fucking minute. If you’re the only person up here who knows about them, then the request from the Party a couple of years ago was in fact a request from you. You, personally.”
“Well, yeah,” Logan said. He didn’t seem bothered at all. “In my capacity as Party Secretary for the space fraction, that is.”
“You took it upon yourself to do that? What the fuck was on your mind?” God, she thought, there I go again with the incredulous screech. She added, in a flat, steady voice, “Besides, what gave you the right to interfere in my section, and in my section’s state?”
Logan squirmed, like someone shifting uncomfortably in an invisible chair. “I had a valid instruction to do it. From the military org.”
“Ah! So there is someone else who knows about it!”
“Not as such,” said Logan. “The military org is…” He hesitated.
“Like you said, a small cadre?” Myra prompted.
“In a manner of speaking,” said Logan. He looked as though he was steeling himself for an admission. “It’s an AI.”
Myra felt her back thump against the back of her chair—she was literally thrown by this statement. She took a deep breath.
“Let’s scroll this past us again, shall we? Tell me if I’ve got this right. Two years ago, at the Sputnik centenary, Val gets a message from you, asking for part of our stash of nukes. It’s a valid Party request, she decides I don’t need to know, and she blithely complies. And the reason this happened is because you got a request from a fucking computer?”
“An AI military expert system,” Logan said pedantically. “But yeah, that’s about the size of it.”
Myra groped blindly for a cigarette, lit it shakily. “And just how long has the Fourth International been taking military advice from an AI?” Logan did some mental arithmetic. “About forty years,” he said.
It was no big secret, Myra learned. Just one of those things she’d never needed to know. The AI had originated as an economic and logistic planning system devised by a Trotskyist software expert in the British Labour Party. This planning mechanism had been used by the United Republic of Great Britain, and inherited by its self-proclaimed successor, the underground Army of the New Republic, after Britain had been occupied, and its monarchy restored, by the Yanks in the Third World War. It had acquired significant upgrades, not all of them intended, during the twenty-year guerilla war that followed, and had played some disputed role in the British national insurrection during the Fall Revolution in 2045. Its central software routines had been smuggled into space by a refugee from the New Republic’s post-victory consolidation. It had been expanding its capacities, and its activities, ever since.
“Most people call it the General,” Logan told her. “Aces the Turing, no sweat.”
“But what’s it doing?” Myra asked. “If it’s such a shit-hot adviser, why aren’t we winning?”
“Depends what you mean by ‘we’,” Logan said. “And what you mean by ‘winning’.”
Myra had, she realised, no answer to that. Perhaps the AI adviser had picked up on the Analysis analysis, and agreed that the situation was hopeless.
Logan was looking at her with sympathetic curiosity, a sort of reversed mirror-image of the hostile bafflement she was directing at him. He must have gone native up there; he’d got used to this situation, and to this style of work, over the decades, and had forgotten the common courtesies of even their notional comradeship.
“Anyways,” he was saying, “you can ask it all that yourself.” He poked, absently, at the control-panel between his feet; looked up; said, Tutting you through.”
Before Myra could so much as open her mouth, Logan had vanished, and had been replaced by the military AI. She’d had a mental picture of it, ever since Logan had first mentioned it: something like the Jane’s software, a VR gizmo of lines and lights. At best a piece of simulant automation, like Parvus.
He was a young man in sweat-stained camos, sitting casually on a rock in a clearing in temperate woodland: lichen and birch-bark, sound of water, birdsong, leaf-shadow, a wisp of woodsmoke. It looked like he’d paused here, perhaps was considering setting up a camp. The man looked every inch the commandante—his long, wavy black hair and his black stubble and dark eyes projected something of the glamour of Guevara, the arrogance of Trotsky. He also reminded Myra, disturbingly, of Georgi—enough to make her suspect that the image she saw was keyed to her personality; that it had been precisely tuned to give her this overwhelming impression of presence, of charisma.
“Hello,” he said. “I’ve wanted to meet you for a long time, Myra.”
She opened her hands. You could have called.”
“No doubt I would have done, quite soon.” The entity smiled. “I prefer that people come to me. It avoids subsequent misunderstandings. Anyway—I understand you have two concerns: the nukes at La-grange, and the space-movement coup. Regarding the first—the nukes are still under your control. Your Defence Minister still has the access codes. I requested that the weapons themselves be moved here for security.” He shrugged, and smiled again. “They’re all yours. So are the weapons in Earth orbit—which are, of course, more immediately accessible, and usable. This brings me to your other concern—the coup. It is imminent.”