“Menial,” I pleaded, dismayed at the depths of her lack of understanding, “these files are part of my work, my whole career depends on them. So, please—”
I reached out, touching her hair.
Her eyes glinted.
“Oh, fuck off.” she told me, not quite a yell but loud and emphatic enough to turn heads.
“I’ll do that,” I replied, and rose and stalked out. I glanced back from the door, and saw only the top of her head, and the forward fall of her hair, and her hands over her face. The door swung shut behind me.
8
Western Approaches
“It’s over,” Valentina was saying.
“What’s over?” Myra asked. She shook her head, looking around her office. Val and Andrei and Denis were all there, perched on desks or window sills. The command-centre screens had vanished like a dream. Parvus hovered on the edge of her vision, looking as though about to speak.
“The putsch,” Valentina explained.
“Just like that?”
Myra stared, blinking through options presented by Parvus. The personal had its own analysis, and it was busy agreeing with Valentina. The battlesats seized by the space movement were enough to guard their beleaguered enclaves and launch sites, but not to tilt the balance of world power in their favour. The Security Council nations retained their control over the ReUN, but the battlesats that had resisted the coup had done so in their own name, not that of the ReUN. They remained dangerously autonomous.
At ground level all sorts of local balances had been tilted, almost entirely by the rapid re-evaluations of the real weight on the various sides that the bloody flurries of actual combat had induced. Disputes had been resolved or reopened, entire armies had mobilised or disbanded on the strength of the gigantic shadows thrown on the screens of analysis by the small engagements in the field.
“God,” said Myra disgustedly. “This is so decadent.” It reminded her of the Renaissance mercenaries that Machiavelli had moaned about in the Discourses, working out who would have won if they’d fought and abiding by that decision like gentlemen, while omitting the bloody business of actual battle. “Nobody wants a real fight, they’d rather follow the sims. Talk about the pornography of violence. Wankers.”
“It’s worse than that,” Denis said coarsely. “We’re fucked.” He threw a projection of a time-slice from Jane’s and laser-pointed the relevant areas. “Look.”
The ISTWR’s military profile and general credibility was no longer something that cautious strategists, estimating from past actions and present rumour, rated highly. It was negligible.
“We’ve been found out,” said Denis Gubanov. “In exactly the wrong way. They must have always reckoned with at least the possibility that we had nukes. Mutual Protection—or Reid, anyway—knew we had them. Point is, we didn’t use them, so it’s assumed we either don’t have them or don’t have the stomach to use them. We’ve gone from being Upper Volta with nukes to being Upper Volta without. And the weapons we did use didn’t work.”
“They worked—” Valentina began, rather defensively.
“Huh!” Myra snorted. “They worked just fine, only they didn’t destroy the targets. Yeah, I can see that doing our deterrence posture a power of good.”
The hotline phone—a solid, old-fashioned, unambiguous red phone on Myra’s desk—began to ring. She looked at it doubtfully for a moment, then shrugged and picked it up.
“Myra Godwin-Davidova.”
Pause.
“Hello, Myra. Dave here.”
She gave him a moment of nonplussed silence.
“Myra? It’s David Reid.”
“Yes. Hello,” she said. “What do you want now?”
There was a second’s delay in his reply.
“What do you want, is more like it.” Even over the crackly laser-to-landline link, she could hear his fury. “You had the whole situation in the balance, you know that? You had the fucking casting vote, Chairman Davidova! You had the nuclear option, and you threw it away! I’d almost rather you had used your goddamn nukes against us—at least that way the Security Council would have had control, and would’ve had to take responsibility. There’d be some chance of an end to the chaos, which is all we really wanted. As it is you’ve turned what should’ve been the endgame into another fucking stalemate.”
“I don’t see how that makes you any worse off.”
She heard a knocking noise and realised after a moment that he was banging something on his head.
“It’s made us all worse off! It’s like entropy, Myra, can’t you see that? Everybody’s climbed up a few flights, escalated, that’s the fucking word for it. We’re all higher up but relatively we’re no better placed, and we’ve lost energy, wasted work in the process. And you know the only people who’ll gain from that? The marginals, the fucking barb, that’s who.
Including your local godless communists.”
“It’s you who should have thought of that. Before you launched your bloody coup.”
Reid took a deep breath, a long sigh down the wire.
“Yeah, you’re right. It is my fault. Didn’t expect a counter-coup, that’s all.”
“What counter-coup?”
Again the odd delay.
“Don’t play the innocent. Somebody’s taken over most of the battlesats, and it sure wasn’t my lot. Nor the UN’s, come to that.”
“You don’t know who it was?”
“No. So who was it? You must know.”
Myra thought about this. Ah, hell, he’d find out anyway.
“The Fourth International,” she told him. “Space fraction, mil org.”
A second ticked past, then she heard Reid’s loud laugh. “Ha-ha-ha! OK, Myra, be like that. I’ll find out anyway. Meanwhile, take a look at the northeastern border, and see if it all still seems so funny. I’m well out of 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 south and 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.