‘You kidding? Haven’t you heard, man?’
Moh shook his head, suppressing the impulse to give Jordan a kick. Eyes on the net, that’s the sodding job description…
‘Yanks have declared an emergency; space traffic and launches are bottlenecked. Nobody with any form’s gonna get out until the face-off with Japan’s over. With a load of encrypted data? – forget it.’
‘What about all this stuff you’ve ordered?’
‘It’s all clean,’ Logan said. ‘Empty storage, legitimate supplies. And it’s on its way. Expedited before the crackdown.’
‘Neat,’ Moh said. Somehow it didn’t surprise him. ‘So what do I do with this chunk of non-access RAM?’
‘Go to the ANR,’ said Logan. ‘Safest place.’
‘Ha fucking ha.’
‘I’m serious. The knaboj, they’ll look after you. Anyway, it’s theirs. The Black Plan.’
‘You know what I think?’ Moh said, looking down at the gun’s memory case. (The Party must always command the gun; the gun must never command the Party. Mao.) He looked up just as his words reached Logan. ‘They’re its.’
Logan stirred, shifting without noticeable attention into one of the isometric exercise routines that low-g folk had to keep up if they were ever to be one-g folk again. ‘There’s a lot going on,’ he said. ‘A lot coming down the line. We know about the offensives and…things are moving out here, too. The space-movement fraction I told you about, we’ve made progress, we’ll do what we can—’
‘Hey,’ said Moh, ‘is there any connection between these comrades and the ones in the Sta—?’
Logan smiled, his face moving towards and away from the camera.
‘Don’t even ask,’ he said. ‘Gotta go. Take care.’
Click to black. Then, unexpectedly, the screen came on again:
Message To: mk@cheka.com.uk
From: bdonovan@cla.org.ter
Display here?
Moh hesitated, wondering whether anything nastier than a message might arrive. He decided that, since the Kalashnikov firmware had withstood everything ever thrown at it, there was little risk. There was not the slightest possibility that his reading the message would give its sender any trace of his physical location. In a sense he wouldn’t even be reading it here; his agent programs would have automatically done a search of the standard maildrop host machines as soon as he’d linked into the communication net. He hit Enter.
No pathway listing; pretty good anonymity. Just:
You wrote:
I appreciate that, and I understand your problem, but I must insist that it is *your* problem. The challenge has been issued and I cannot retract it without further possible loss of respect. Privately, I agree to delay any appeal to the Geneva Convention court system but in the meantime the call for a citizen’s arrest must stand until you personally claim a ransom for Ms C Duvalier the aforesaid person to be in your (nominal) custody at the time. In normal cases a settlement between our respective organizations would suffice but this has become a question of the good name of both Ms Duvalier and myself.
Regards
Brian Donovan
Carbon Life Alliance
Registered Terrorist Organization #3254
Go to the ANR, Logan had said. The idea had its merits, not least that it would get him out of the whole mess with Donovan. Still leave the comrades in it, though – that was the problem. At some point he might have to approach the ANR in any case, although what they would make of his story was anybody’s guess.
Moh turned and stepped out of the booth. Jordan and Janis looked up at him, but he nodded absently and ignored them. Asking them to keep a lookout had been careless: it wasn’t what they did for a living, or what they habitually did to keep on living. He flipped his glades down and made a slow sweep of all he could see.
The streams of people entering and leaving the mall had, if anything, thickened. Smaller groups wandered around the outlying stalls in the building’s shadow or in the harsh sunlight. The only breaches of the peace going on were knots of Neos swaying back from their lunchtime drinking sessions, raucously singing assorted national-communist anthems.
In the distance, traffic on the old flyover was stationary. Nothing unusual in that – it was a public road – but…
Some kind of commotion in the shanty-towns piled up below the road. Moh unclipped the gunsight and held it up, patching the image to his glades. Typical settlement scene, lots of visual clutter: the distracting diversity of the shacks, clothes-lines sagging across yards and paths, diverted power cables strung all over the place, aerials on jury-rigged pylons, grey gleam of sewage streams. In among it all, the gaudy colours of variegated costumes and flapping rags on…people moving, fast, scattering and scurrying from…
A spread-out line of black-clad, visored figures striding steadily through the narrow lanes. Kingdom cops. Moh could hardly believe the sight until he remembered that this wasn’t legally part of Norlonto at all. It still seemed outrageously provocative of the Hanoverians to march in like this – the area was if anything more anarchistic than the anarchy around it.
He whirled around, calling to Janis and Jordan to look over there, and started checking for any reaction. Nobody’d noticed yet, or they were taking it calmly. Glancing from group to group he saw a familiar face in the crowd – couldn’t be, wrong walk – wait a second, never saw her walking, why…
His attention, and a moment later his stepped-up vision, focused again on the girl who’d been at the space-movement table. She was threading her way purposefully through the crowd, more or less towards where he stood. Her whole manner and posture were at odds with her earlier pose. Thinking back Kohn could see that it had been doubly faked, imitating an imitation; some of the younger and sillier people in the space movement thought it a cool pose, and she’d been imitating that.
Might not mean anything, but suddenly everything had meaning – in a wash of good old communist paranoia: comrades, this is no accident – and Moh started walking, fast, in a direction he at first thought was random.
‘What’s going on?’ Jordan asked, loping beside him, Janis jogging to keep up. Moh stopped, throwing them both off-balance.
‘Jordan, time to split. You nip back in, help old Bernstein pack up. He has places to dive into around here. Hole up with him until it’s over, then take the monorail back to our place. Start a search for Cat: you’ll pick up the trace on the house phone; go from there and keep an eye on the net. Try to contact the ANR. I’ll call you later.’