Somewhere far away, the sound of a helicopter. Then some short machine-gun bursts, though at whom they were aimed, Myra did not wish to guess.
Myra rode silently like the others, but in the spectral company of Parvus; the AI was murmuring into her bone-conduction earclip and flashing Grolier screens up in front of her eyes. Nothing more current was available without the uplink phone. He’d provisionally identified the man who’d captured her, but it wasn’t very enlightening—the latest pictures of him were from about twelve years ago, and he hadn’t been a land-pirate then. He had been a net commentator, and—before that—a minor agitator in the Fall Revolution. The television clips of his rants explained why he looked vaguely familiar—she’d watched the British national democratic revolution in the time she’d been able to spare from following the Siberian Popular Front’s assault on Vladivostok.
The dell opened to a larger valley, thickly settled. Old stone houses, geodesic domes, wattle huts, new thatched cottages, a few nanofactured carbon-shell constructions. A lot of cattle and sheep in the fields; kids running everywhere. The path became a gravel road which widened, at the centre of the main street, to a small cobbled square. In the centre, just by a verdigrised copper statue of a Tommy with a fixed bayonet, memorial to the fallen of three world wars, was an outdated but still effective anti-aircraft missile battery. No higher than the statue itself, it held a rack of a dozen metre-long rockets. Myra could read the small print of what they were tipped with: laser-fuser tactical nukes.
People crowded around, welcoming the returning raiders. They called the red-haired man what she thought at first was “Red”, which made sense; then realised it was “Rev”, which made no sense at all. It certainly wasn’t the name her search had come up with. The kids were cheering and doing the high-stepping, highjumping Zulu war-dance called toyi-toying.
Fix reined in his horse in front of a large stone building which had a low-ceilinged front room open to the street: a cafe. Myra followed suit, dismounted and was led through into a back room with a fire, and high leather chairs around a table. The room smelt of woodsmoke and alcohol and unwashed humanity and damp dogs.
“Have a seat.”
Myra sat and the two men and the woman sat down opposite her. They regarded her in silence for a moment. She decided to hazard the Grolier’s guess.
Jordan Brown,” she said. “And you must be Cat Duvalier.” That name was in the entry’s small print as Jordan Brown’s wife.
“Well done,” the man said, unperturbed. “Nifty little machine you’ve got there.”
Myra flipped the eyeband back. “Yes. So tell me, Mr Brown, what it is you want.”
“It’s Reverend Brown,” he said. “First Minister of the Last Church of the Unknowable God.” He smiled. “But please, call me Jordan.” He looked over his shoulder and shouted an order. “Beer and brandy!”
He slung his cloak over a chair; without it, leaning over the table in his T-shirt and wild hair, he looked somewhat more intimidating. Some absence in his gaze reminded Myra of spetznatz veterans, or old Afghantsi. The Blue Beret slogan on the T-shirt just might not be ironic, she thought. A boy padded in carrying glasses and bottles.
“All we’ve got at the moment,” the woman called Cat said. “What’ll you have?”
“I’ll have a beer.”
She accepted the drink without thanks, and lit a cigarette without asking permission or offering to share. Damned if she was going to act as though she was enjoying their hospitality.
“You were saying, Reverend.”
Jordan Brown spread his hands. Just to talk things over.”
“You’ve gone to a lot of trouble to do that.”
“I sure have,” he said. Tve risked the lives of my fighters, I’ve exposed one of my agents, I’ve had a man slaughtered like a pig—which he was, but that’s nothing to you—and had another train guard shot in the belly just for trying to do his job. Quite possibly, some of the passengers have already fallen to friendly fire.” He shrugged. “And I would have killed more, if I’d had to. The point is, I’ll get away with it.” He waved his hand above his head. “We all will. The helicopter was the worst the British can do against us.”
Myra looked straight at him. “Like I care. You might not get off so lightly when this gets back to the Kazakhstani Republic.”
Jordan nodded soberly. “No doubt I’m trampling all over diplomatic niceties. But it’s you that came to Britain to get help, not the other way round. So you’ll forgive me for not worrying too much.”
“Hah!”
“Anyway,’Jordan went on, Tve no wish to get into a pissing-contest. I have something more important to say to you. So. Are you willing to have a serious conversation?”
Myra shrugged, looking around theatrically. “Why not? I don’t see any better entertainment.” She poured a brandy chaser, again without false courtesy.
Jordan Brown leaned forward on his bare forearms, took a swig of brandy and began to speak.
^You’ve come to Britain to get military aid against the Sheenisov. You might even get it. What I want to tell you is two things. One, don’t do it. It won’t do you any good. You can’t fight communism with imperialism. It’s just throwing napalm on the fire.”
Myra favoured him with a look that said she’d heard this before. “If you say so. And what else do you have to tell me? Try and make it something that’s news to me, how about that?”
“You’re in worse trouble than you think,” Jordan said. “The entity you call the General is working for the Sheenisov.”
Myra almost choked on her sip of brandy. She coughed fire for a moment. She felt totally disoriented.
“What? And how the hell would you know?”
“Strictly speaking,’Jordan Brown said, “the Sheenisov are working for it. As to how I know He held out a hand towards Cat. She leaned forward as Jordan leaned back.
“Myra,” she said earnesdy, “I may be a barbarian now, but I used to be like you. I used to be in the International.”
“Oh, Jesus!” Myra exploded. “Half the fucking world is run by ex-Trots! Tell me something I don’t know, like how you heard about the FI mil org—the General.”
“I was coming to that,” Gat said, mildly enough—but Myra could read the younger woman’s face like a computer screen, and she could see the momentary spasm of impatient rage. This barbarian lady was someone who’d got dangerously used to not being interrupted. Cat forced a smile. T still hear rumours.”
“Rumours? That’s what you’re relying on?”
“It seems you’ve just confirmed one,” Jordan said, dryly.
Myra acknowledged that she had. But it seemed a situation where stonewalling would be less productive than admitting that the General existed, and trying to find out where the rumour came from. Parvus hadn’t spotted anything like that…
“Did you pick this up off the net, or what?”
Jordan looked at Fix and Cat, and all three of them laughed. To Myra, it sounded like a mocking laugh.
“God, you people,” Jordan said. His tone changed as he went on, becoming an invocation, or an imprecation. “You have a screen between you and the world all the time. We have the human world, and the natural world. We have the whole world that you call marginal, the scattered society of free humanity. We have the whisper in the market, the gesture on the road, the chalked mark on the pavement. The twist of a leaf, the turning of a twig. We have the smell carried on the wind. We have the night sky and the names of all its fixed and moving and falling stars. We have our friends in all your cities and camps and armies. We have the crystal radio that receives and the spark-gap that transmits, in codes you have forgotten, on wavelengths you no longer monitor, in languages that you disdained to learn.”