Later that morning she was pulled excitedly to watch a replay of an incident that had just happened. A fighter-bomber flashed along the glen, then exploded in an airburst that turned the screen white. As the explosion faded they saw the fireball rolling and tumbling and shedding wreckage for several kilometres before everything hit the ground, setting heather alight.
They replayed it lots of times, always with the same cheers. She hoped the girl in the observation post had kept her head down and her eyes shut.
She never learned how many people lived inside that mountain. Hundreds. The fighters were somewhere else; their absence made little difference to the structure of the population here – there were young men and women as well as old, and there were parents who worried about children who were with the fighters.
The screens that showed the news were at first jammed. As the communities had come together the government had extended what grip it could. It could not hide the mounting waves of demonstrations and strikes that broke against it, or the harassment of its forces by units of the ANR, now fallen back to guerilla fighting but on a far wider scale than before the offensive.
The US President announced a new levy of conscription.
The censorship and jamming stopped. There was talk of a new constitution, a revision of the Settlement. A day later there was talk about the revolution, as if it had already happened. They offered a New Kingdom.
‘I don’t go much for intuition,’ Jordan said, ‘but I’ve got a real bad feeling about this.’
It was the fourth day since the faltering offensive had been taken up and taken over by the rising crowds, and the biggest demonstration yet, overflowing Trafalgar Square. The Hanoverian troops were nowhere to be seen, but everyone knew where they were. Invisible lines were not crossed.
The sky was a red shout above the black streets. News-hawks circled overhead, their mikes and lenses and pheromone detectors out like vibrissae, alert for the rumour, the glance, the smell of fear. Jordan and Cat sat on the steps of the National Gallery, drinking coffee from styrofoam cups and muching doner kebabs. (Thirty-five marks: the petty bourgeoisie had thrown itself into the revolution in its own inimitable way.)
‘I know what you mean,’ Cat said. ‘It’s intended. The whole City of Westminster is intended to make you feel like that. Nothing but shops and offices and official buildings and statues. It all belongs to capital or the state. No, it’s more than that. It’s ornate, gross. Centuries of surplus value stored up like fat. This time I hope we level the place.’
‘Well, that’s part of it,’ Jordan said, gazing over the knots of arguing people that filled the square. ‘Not all. We seem to have all this power, the government’s on the run, but we haven’t won.’
‘Damn right we haven’t,’ Cat said. ‘That’s why we’re here. We’re gonna keep coming here until the Hanoverians come out of their bunkers and barracks with their hands up, or come out shooting.’
‘At least some of us will be shooting back.’
Cat looked at him. ‘Not for long.’ She leaned back against the stone, closed her eyes and began to sing as if to herself:
Rise up, all foes of intervention,
rise up, all those who would be free!
Don’t trust the state and its intentions
we ourselves must win our liberty!
He didn’t know the song, but he recognized it with a shiver down his spine: he’d heard it as background noise on history tapes of other demonstrations, in other squares, other cities – Seoul and São Paulo, Moscow and Jo’burg and Berlin. After it the gas-shells would cough, the rifles speak, the bullets sing.
so now we face the final showdown
for the skies and the streets of Earth.
What though they start the fatal countdown?
There are better worlds in birth!
So comrades come rally
and the last fight let us—
Something had happened. A gasp, a whisper, a rumour spread through the crowd in visible shockwaves. Cat broke off singing and sat up, one hand on her ear. She turned and pressed his ear, too, against the tiny speaker. He heard the news of the century’s turning-point while leaning on her cheek with her hair across his face.
America was on strike from coast to coast.
Cat had such a look of triumph that it was as if she’d pulled the whole thing off herself. ‘We always knew this would happen!’ she said. ‘“The West shall rise again” – remember? The American workers have finally told the imperialists to shove it! Yeah, man! Yee fucking hah!’ She jumped to her feet and cupped her hands to her mouth and yelled: ‘US! UN! Remember the West shall rise again! Vive la quatrième internationale!’
A few metres away from them an old man from the Beulah City contingent burst into speech, leaning back and looking upwards at the news-hawks, his fists raised above his head. ‘“Sit thou silent, and get thee into darkness, O daughter of the Chaldeans: for thou shalt no more be called, The lady of kingdoms. Let now the astrologers, the stargazers, the monthly prognosticators, stand up, and save thee from these things that shall come upon thee!”’
He wandered off through the crowd, still shouting imprecations.
‘What’s all that about?’ Cat asked. Jordan grinned at the joy and puzzlement on her face.
‘Babylon is fallen,’ he said.
‘Does that mean we’ve won?’ Janis asked, when the dangerous driving and the firing into the air had stopped. The four men who shared with her the front seat of the truck all shouted ‘Yes!’ or ‘No!’, and then laughed. As soon as the news had come through she had been told to leave the shelter. The small convoy had picked her up (gun on the ground, one hand on her head, the other with a thumb stuck out) at the Strathcarron junction. They were heading south at a speed that forced her to look into the far distance or at the faces of her companions – anywhere but at the road.
‘That’s your answer for you,’ said the man between her and the door. Donald Patel had an accent like MacLennan’s and it seemed incongruous with his delicate dark features. ‘It means the Americans are not coming, that’s for sure. They won’t be seeing much of the rocket’s red glare over there for a while.’ More laughter.
After half an hour news came through that His Majesty’s Government had decided to continue the struggle against terrorism from exile. A new voice interrupted, announcing that the United Republic had been restored, and a provisional government established. The Hanoverian forces on the ground, bidding to negotiate an end to the conflict short of actual surrender, were politely informed this was not an option.
Janis realized, as the trucks lurched and swayed towards Glasgow and the traffic got heavier all the time, that the men’s jubilation at the victory of the Republic was not that of soldiers being demobilized. Most of the people on the road had just been mobilized. They were going to war. And she wouldn’t be waving them a cheery goodbye and catching the red-eye to Heathrow.
At Buchanan Street Bus Station the convoy stopped. They all piled out and were pointed to a huge marquee where she was stamped and registered and sworn in again, stripped and showered and tagged. She was a soldier.
The enemy was described by her unit’s political officer: ‘It’s not so much the Hanoverian remnants we have to worry about. It’s all the Free State rabble that flourished under their protection. The eco-terrorists, the cultist mini-states, the backyard separatists and sandpit socialists who betrayed the Republic the first time. The fake left who preferred having their own petty kingdoms to fighting their corner in a democracy. They all went along with the Restoration Settlement and only made noises when our people were surviving like hunted beasts. Now they’re coming out of their holes to have a go at carving a bigger chunk for themselves. They think the Republic is weaker than the Kingdom. Our job is to make them think again. They can have any way of life they want, run their communities as they see fit, but they can’t keep other folk out with guns or use guns to expand their territories. They can even keep their guns, but it’s going to be our guns on the street.’