Myra looked sidelong at her. “Good for you,” she said. That was the head of the FI military org. An AI. Our very own electric Trotsky.”
Tuck your mother,” said Val, in Russian.
“Right. We gonna give it the codes?”
“Up to you,” said Val. You’re the PM.”
“What,” said Myra through clenched teeth, “would you advise?”
Val licked her lips. The others were either pointedly ignoring them or concentrating on their own areas.
“Well, hell. Go with the military adviser, I’d say. Give it the codes.”
“Will that work? Do we really have munitions up there that can down battlesats?”
“Hard to say,” said Valentina. “Ancient, never combat-tested, poorly maintained—but so are the battlesats! In theory, yes, they can overwhelm a battlesat’s defences.”
Myra was trying to think fast. It struck her that the battlesats themselves might be a diversion—old and powerful, but inflexible and vulnerable: an orbiting Maginot line. Perhaps the General was fighting the last war, and winning it, while the real battles raged elsewhere.
She hesitated, then decided.
“Give me the codes for the smart-pebble bombs,” she said. Val zapped them across; Myra tabbed back to the battlesat and passed them to the General. He was waiting for her, with puzzled impatience.
“Thank you,” he said heavily, then disappeared. Myra looked around at the now frantically active crew, gave them an awkward, cheery wave, and dropped back to her own command-centre.
That was quick.” Valentina pointed at the display. Already, some of their orbital weapons had been activated. Myra devoutly hoped that what she was seeing as a representation wasn’t appearing on the enemy’s real-time monitors. In three places a cloud of sharp objects had burst out of cover and were moving in the same orbital paths as the three enemy battlesats, but in the opposite direction. They were due to collide with the battlesats in ten, eighteen and twenty-seven minutes.
What happened next was over in less than a second—a twinkle of laser paths in the void. The action replay followed automatically, patiendy repeating the results for the slow rods and cones and nerves of the human eye.
Myra watched the battlesats’ deep-space radar beams brush the oncoming KE volleys; saw their targeting-radar lock on. Her laser-platform drones responded to that detection with needles of light, stabbing to blind the battlesats—which had, in the momentary meantime, released a cloud of chaff to block that very manoeuvre. Then the battlesats struck back, with a speed still bewildering even in slow motion. Each one projected a thousand laser pulses, flashing like a fencer’s swift sword, slicing up the KE weapons and their laser-platform escorts.
“Wow!” she said, admiring despite herself.
“Yeah, that’s some defence system,” said Valentina. “Not standard issue for a battlesat, I’ll tell you that.”
Myra zoomed the view. Each attack cloud was still there, as a much larger cloud of much smaller objects. They would bombard the battlesats, sure enough, they’d even do some damage, but it would be more like a sand-blasting than a shelling.
The time was 09.25. Forty minutes had passed since the Heaviside nukes. The disruption they’d caused was easing off; radio comms were still haywire, but more and more centres were coming 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 waste of 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 week or so—but his jacket had not been cleaned in years. It smelled like it had been used to beat down fires, which it had.