The more serious action was taking place in the imbricated global hinterland of enclaves and mini-states and company countries; along their fractal borderlines the local defence forces were massed and mobilised, in a posture that was aggressive in the Assembly Majority Alliance statelets, generally defensive in the rest. Meanwhile, in the shadowy lands beyond and behind even these anarchic polities, the forests and plains and badlands and shanty towns brisded as the Green neo-barbarians, the marginals and tribals awoke to the unlooked-for opportunities of this new day.
Jane’s Market Forces registered unexpected shifts in the balance of power; minor skirmishes could have major effects, putting troops and tactics and weapons to the test in new conditions, or in real rather than simulated combat. Not much blood was being shed, but fortunes were being made and lost, alliances and antagonisms updated; the process had its own gory fascination. Myra felt she could sit and look at it for hours.
But this was Earth, this was not where it was at. The battles here, real or virtual, were fundamentally a diversion, and she was duly being diverted. She turned her attention determinedly skyward.
With VaTs well-practised help she spun a neon orrery of near-Earth space, separating out the relevant threads from the skeins of commercial and military orbits. The planet itself appeared as a transparent globe, etched with political and geographical outlines, clouded with weather patterns, cross-hatched with confrontations, pin-pricked with flashpoints. Again its intricate patterns compelled her attention; again, she turned away.
Their own space-borne materiel—nuclear and kinetic-energy weapons—were depicted as black rods and cones, deep in the evergrowing ring of spacejunk that tracked the main orbital thoroughfares.
“Anything coming through yet from the battlesats?”
“Some,” said Val, sounding distracted. “I’m pulling in laser comms via various ground stations. Shit, this is tricky—hold it, hold it… ah!”
The battlesat locations lit up, one by one; those with which communication had been established blinked invitingly. Myra zoomed in on one of them. A classic von Braun space station, with a rotating tubular ring joined by thinner tubular spokes to an inner ring surrounding the contra-rotating spin-compensated axial tower. The living-quarters and hydroponics were around the ring, in the fake gravity of the spin; the laser-cannon and rocket-racks and particle-beam weapons and military command-centre were in the free-fall hub. The whole enormous mandala had a camp Nazi grandeur, spoiled only by the ungainly arrays of solar panels it had sprouted while its nuclear reactor had run down.
It was one of dozens in various orbits. Space Defense had enforced the Pax Americana of the US/ UN Imperium, a twenty-year Reich between the Third World War and the Fall Revolution. In that revolution the battlesats had passed into the hands of their personnel—soldiers’ Soviets in space—and, ever since, they’d sought a role to replace their lost empire. Everything from power-beam transmission to asteroid defence had been tried, to little profit. The stations survived on a trickle of subsidy—or “user fees”—from the similarly diminished UN, paid mainly to prevent the battlesats’ going rogue out of sheer desperation.
Now the forces of the coup were offering them a new empire, one a lot more justifiable and enforceable than the old.
“So what’s the score with this one?” Myra asked.
“Still loyal,” replied Val. “They just reported in to say they weren’t going with the Alliance.”
“Any way of checking that?”
“Don’t know, I’m hailing them—ah! they’re letting us in.”
“I’ll go,” said Myra, “you stay with the big picture.”
With a clunky, disorienting transition, she found herself standing in a real-time representation of the battlesat’s bridge. It was about fifteen metres across, and crowded. The interior matched the exterior’s style: banks of flashing lights among chrome and black surfaces; a cluttered overgrowth of retrofitted modern kit among a profusion of plants, like in a civilian space settlement. The layout was optimised for free-fall, with the crew-members strapped into seats and couches at unexpected angles to each other. In this section of the shaft there were actual windows, through which she could see the great wheel turn in the sunlight, and the Earth’s swirling clouds below. She blinked, and overprinted the real view with its software image.
The crew were wearing eyebands, and some of them could see Myra’s fetch in their own virtual palimpsests of the scene—but they spared her no more than a glance. Another spectral presence had all their attention.
The General sat on a window sill, surveying the bridge with narrowed eyes. He’d been saying something; his words seemed to hang in the air, resonating in the circuits of the display. He interrupted himself and turned to face her.
“Ah, Comrade Davidova—thanks for coming.”
“I wasn’t aware I’d been asked,” she said.
“Oh, you were,” the construct said. “This is, as they say, no accident.”
Myra nodded. No doubt it was indeed no accident that the first battlesat to allow her into its internal systems was the one in which the General was addressing his troops.
He waved a hand. “Welcome to a quick emergency session of the military org’s local cell.” He grinned. “Which is pretty much the command of this station.” The watching crew-members gave her longer looks now; some of them even smiled.
“We need your help,” the General told her flatly. “Nice display,” he added. “May I?”
He reached over, thumb and forefinger pinching into her translucent globe, and with frightening insouciance overrode all her protocols and relocated her virtual view of the Earth and near-Earth space into the centre of the bridge.
She stared at the spinning shapes, fuming. He shouldn’t have been able to do that—
“We still hold most of the battlesats.” A quick sharp look. “That is to say, the anti-coup forces do, whatever their other alignments. But the struggle is still in the balance. We have about a sixth of the battlesats securely on our side, the enemy likewise, and the others undecided.”
Myra was momentarily stunned. Despite what the General had said to her earlier, she’d had no idea, no expectation that the military org’s penetration of Space Defense was so thorough—it must have taken years of work. But the General gave her no time to question or 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?”