Ken Macleod - The Sky Road

“Well, hello again,” she said. Her gaze swept the half-dozen of her employees gathered around Reid; they were all making comical efforts to flee, walking backwards as discreetly as possible. “Head-hunting my lower-middle cadres as well as my commissars?”

Tup,” said Reid, quite unabashed. He made a fractional movement of his fingertips and eyebrows, and his supplicants—or applicants—dispersed like smoke in a draught. The grep and Gubanov continued their watchful mutual circling. A waiter went past with a salver of glasses and a tray of Beluga on rye; Myra and Reid helped themselves from both, then stood facing each other with a slight awkwardness, like tongue-tied teenagers after a dance.

“I could do some head-hunting the other way, you know,” Myra said. “Perhaps I should buy a spy or two from you. It turns out you’re better informed about our investment portfolio than I’ve been. Particularly its, ah, spread.”

Reid acknowledged this with a small nod.

Tuts us in a difficult position,” he said. “You have the drop on us, frankly. Earth orbit is the high ground, after all.”

Oh? she thought to herself. So he didn’t know about Lagrange? Or didn’t want her to know he knew .

“However,” Reid went on, Tm pretty confident that you won’t, um, liquidate. For obvious reasons.”

“So why the offer?”

“Peace of mind… nah, seriously. Between us, you and I know everyone who knows of the current level of exposure. But neither of us can guarantee that that’ll last. A word in the wrong place and there could be severe market jitters on my side. Which, I hasten to add, would not be to your benefit, either, so we have a mutual—”

“Assured deterrence?”

Reid gave her a shut the fuck up look. “You could say that… but I’d rather you didn’t.”

Myra grinned evilly. “OK,” she said. “It’s still no deal, Dave.”

He gazed back at her, expressionless, but he couldn’t hide the plea in his voice. “Will you at least agree not to dump your assets during the takeover bid? Not to make any offers to the competition?”

Oh, Jeez. This was a tricky one. She had no intention of doing any of the things he feared. On the other hand—if he were to fear them (even if only theoretically, and only at the margin, but still…) it might restrain him. It might keep him, and his allies, from crossing that invisible border, that terminator between the daylight and the dark. Let them hate, as long as they fear.

She shook her head, and saw her multiple reflections do the same, in solemn repetition. The act of observation collapses the wave-function, yes: the die cast, the cat dies.

“Sorry, Dave,” she told him. “I can’t make any promises.”

His gaze measured hers for a moment, and then he shrugged.

“You win some, you lose some,” he said lightly. “See you around, Myra.”

She watched him walk away, as she so often had. His grep followed at a safe distance. Denis raised his eyebrows, rolled his eyes, came over.

“What was all that about?”

“Oh, just some old stuff between us,” Myra said. “We don’t see eye to eye, is all.” She took his arm. “Let’s see how Andrei is getting on with that lady from the Western United States, shall we?”

Not well, as it turned out. This was not the place for secret diplomacy, even if they’d been using the privacy shields, which they weren’t. Juniper Bear, the West American unofficial consul, was making her diplomatic position no secret at all. Her broad-brimmed black hat with black wax fruit around its crown seemed chosen to amplify her voice, even though her pose indicated urgent, confidential communication.

“…Just in the last month we hit a Green guerilla incursion from SoCal, and at the same time a White Aryan Nations push across the Rockies, and would you believe the First Nations Federation, the goddamn Indians, lobbing significant conventional hardware on our northern settlements on the Cannuck side of the old border? Let me tell you, Comrade Mukhartov, we could do with some orbital backup, this time on our side for a change.” She laughed, grinning at Myra and Valentina as they joined the conversation. “Would you believe? she repeated, “the goddamn Greens are actually lobbying the old guard to keep the battlesats as asteroid defence? Like we ever really needed that, and now we got everything bigger’n a pea out there mapped and tracked, we might as well worry about a new ice age!”

“Well, that’s coming,” said Valentina.

Juniper Bear’s hatbrim tilted. “Sure, the Milankovitch cycle, yeah, but it isn’t a worry, now is it?” She laughed. “Hey, I remember global warming!”

“And thafs happening,” Myra said. “But, like you say, it isn’t a worry, not any more. And the ozone holes, and the background radiation levels, and the synthetic polymers in every organic, and the jumping genes and all that, yeah, we’re not worrying.” She felt surprised at the sound of her own voice, at how angry she felt about all that, now she was articulating it; it was as though she had a deep Green deep inside her, just waiting to get out. “But to be honest, Ms Bear, we are worried about something else. About the plan to revitalise the ReUnited Nations. Even if they will be the enemies of our enemies, in the first instance. We don’t want that kind of power turned against anyone on Earth, ever again.” She took off her hat, fingering the smooth hairs and running her thumb over the red star and gold sigil; realised she was standing there, literally cap in hand, begging for help.

Juniper Bear shook her head. She was an old woman, not as old as Myra; she looked about thirty, by pre-rejuvenation reckoning, when her face was in repose, but the weight of her years showed in her every facial expression, if you were old enough to notice these things. You learned to transmit and to receive those non-verbal tics, in parallel processes of increasing wisdom.

“That’s what our opposition are saying,” the woman said. “No more New World Orders!’ Well, I’m sorry, but we need a real new world order, one on our side this time. It’ll be only temporary—once we get enough forces out there, there’s no way anyone can keep central control. Once the emergency is over, it’ll just…” She made a downward-planning gesture.

“Wither away?”

Juniper’s creased eyes registered the irony, her compressed lips her refusal to let it deflect her. “Speaking of states that wither away,” she said, changing the subject adroitly, “if any of you find yourselves looking for new opportunities, when all this is over one way or another…”

Valentina and Andrei said nothing, at least not in Myra’s presence; but Myra herself smiled, and nodded, and said she’d bear it in mind.

“Well!” said Andrei Mukhartov, when the function was over and the guests had departed, the diplomats, the apparatchiks and captains of industry. Andrei, Valentina, Denis and Myra had retired to one of the hotel’s smaller and quieter bars. Hardwood and mirrors, leather and glass, plush carpets and quiet music. There were plenty of people in the bar who’d had nothing directly to do with the funeral. This made for a degree of security for the four remaining Commissars, huddled as they were around a vodka bottle on a corner table, like dissidents. “Thanks for your intervention earlier, comrades. I thought I was getting somewhere until you turned up.”

“You thought wrong,” said Myra. She didn’t feel like arguing the point. “I know Juniper, she’ll seem to agree with you and then start talking about the war. Which is where we came in. You didn’t lose anything.”

“Huh,” grunted Andrei. He knocked back a thumbnail glass. “Tell me why you need a Foreign Secretary at all.”