Ken Macleod - The Sky Road

A bump, a rocking forward, another bump, and the incline of deceleration.

“The point is, Myra, we found traces of a very specific, very subtle bit of nanotech. It’s not exactly a poison, that’s the clever thing. It builds up into a little machine, then disintegrates when it’s done its job. We found a few gear trains, but that was enough.”

The aircraft came to a halt and the seatbelt light went off. The door banged open and the steps angled down. Myra stood up and shuffled forward, behind Nurup and in front of Mustafa, still talking and listening. She waved absently to the pilot, left him a handful of gold coins as a bonus. She was thinking ahead.

“Enough for what?”

“Enough to identify it. It’s a spacer assassination weapon. A heart-stopper.”

A heart-stopper. Yes. It was that.

She blinked away the floating image of Jason to concentrate on her surroundings. No signs of actual incoming fire. She followed Nurup towards the terminal building, about a hundred metres away. Jason’s voice in her head continued.

“So there’s no doubt any more—it was murder. Now, there’s no proof the space movement had a hand in it, beyond supplying the weapon, but the circumstantial evidence is kind of strong.”

You could say that,” Myra agreed, making a conscious effort to unclench her jaw. Having her suspicions confirmed after all this time of indulging then dismissing them was a shock.

Fucking heart attack …

“They don’t exactly throw that sort of kit around,” she mused aloud. “Too easy to reverse-engineer, for one thing. But why would they do it?”

Through the long corridor, letting Nurup and Mustafa do the lookout. Out of the corner of her eye she could see the adjacent, outbound corridor, packed from end to end with a slow-moving queue.

“Well, the obvious motive would’ve been to stop him making the offer to the Kazakhstanis.”

“And how do you know about that?”

“Uh, that’s classified.”

Myra had to laugh.

“But how would they have known about it, I mean before—?”

“You tell me.”

They’d reached the concourse. It wasn’t quite as crowded or frantic as she’d begun to expect; most of those intent on leaving must have already left, or at least be in the exit queue. Much to her relief, no newshounds or reporters had spotted her yet, though she identified one or two by their flak-jackets and communications clutter and vaguely familiar faces. Scanning the crowd, she saw a man in the uniform of the Workers’ Militia, who caught her eye, saluted and started pushing towards her.

“It was as much of a surprise to everyone else in the government as it was to me,” she said. “We figured it was Georgi’s own bright idea, which he’d spring on us once he’d got some provisional—oh!”

Mustafa bumped into her back.

Jason waved to her, over heads.

“You never told me you were here! ”

“Yeah, well… thought I’d surprise you.”

It was strange seeing his lips move, and hearing the words, beyond earshot. Like lip-reading, like telepathy.

“Who is that guy?” Nurup asked suspiciously.

“He’s OK,” said Myra. She wasn’t sure whether introducing Jason as a CIA agent would be a good idea, so she didn’t.

And then they met up, and to everyone’s surprise she and Jason met in a long embrace.

Jesus, man!”

She broke loose and turned to the militia driver.

“Thanks for coming. Room for these three guys?”

The driver nodded. “This way please.”

He led them to a service door which Myra knew she must have passed hundreds of times and never seen. Their progress was less inconspicuous—the two muj weren’t the only armed passengers, but they were the most noticeable. As the driver fiddled with the push-bar latch Myra noticed heads bob and a little buzzing camcopter swoop from the concourse’s rafters.

They hurried along a passageway of corrugated iron and unplaned, splintery joists, and emerged beside a jeep in a small bay of the car park.

“Ah, now that’s sensible transport,” Myra said as they all piled in. The Militia jeep had a light machine-gun mounted on its rollbar. Mustafa made that his post. Nurup sat in the front with the driver, rifle propped in the crook of his elbow, pointing up. Myra and Jason sat in the back, with Mustafa’s legs and the ammo belt between them. As the jeep careered out of the carpark and swerved on to the main road into town, Jason leaned over and said, loud above the noise and the slipstream, “You were saying?”

“About Georgi’s great plan, yeah. As far as we can tell he never told anyone else, not even Valentina. That was him all over—he was a bit of a Kazakhstani patriot, and he still tended to act like this whole place was his personal fief. Which it once was!”

The jeep was making good progress—most of the traffic was in the other direction, towards the airport or—judging by the amounts of luggage and household goods piled on top of cars and trucks—towards Karaganda. Her relief at seeing the evacuation already under way was dampened by flashback images of other roads, other columns of vehicles: the road to Basra, the road out of Warsaw, the perimeter of Atlanta…

But no, not here! They had their own air cover—Kazakhstan’s elite aerospace defence force would surely shield these refugees. She thought briefly of setting up a conference call with Valentina and Chingiz, but decided against it. This conversation with Jason was the most urgent she could have right now, for reasons that were more than personal.

“OK,” Jason was saying, “as to the motive, right, did anyone else approach you for some kind of similar deal, after Georgi’s death but before the coup?”

“Only the fucking space movement!” She swallowed hard. “David Reid himself, at Georgi’s funeral.”

“Jesus H. That kind of fingers them, doesn’t it?”

Myra found the question of who knew about what bugging her.

“Well, there’s a problem with that,” she said. “Whoever killed Georgi, or had him killed, must have known that that would make us suspicious of the spacers. I mean, even before you found the evidence, I had them in the frame. And it’s a bit hard to reconstruct now, you know how it is, but when I refused to give Dave any hands-off guarantees, let alone any more… active support, well, that suspicion must have been in the scales. Might even have tipped them.”

Mustafa shouted something and brought the machine-gun down and around to the rear. Myra shifted her legs smartly away from the ammo belt and twisted her head around. Five hundred metres behind them was a small, jockeying pack of cars and jeeps, in front of a cloud of dust and beneath a halo of camcopters. She clapped Mustafa’s thigh.

“Leave them alone!” she yelled.

He replied with some Uzbek profanity, but desisted, swinging the machine-gun muzzle skyward again.

“So you’re saying killing Georgi was counterproductive for the spacers?”

“Damn right!”

“OK.” Jason leaned back in the cramped seat and closed his eyes for a moment. “ Cui bono? Who benefited?”

“Ah, shit,” said Myra, realizing, just as the jeep turned the corner into Revolution Square, and stopped. Myra grabbed the rollbar and pulled herself up. Long practice in estimating the size of demos clicked into place automatically, like eyeband software.

About ten thousand.

“Oh, Jeez,” she said.

It was not a particularly militant or angry crowd, at that moment. Tents and shelters and stalls had been set up, and many of the banners were propped against them or leaning on street furniture, or stuck in the patches of now trampled grass or beds of flowers that chequered the square. People stood or sat about, in small groups, chatting, drinking coffee, reading news off broadsheets or eyebands or han-dhelds, listening to speeches and songs, arguing with each other or with the scattered ones and twos of the Workers’ Militia. Some were dressed casually, others in their best outfits or in national costumes or street-theatre radiation overalls.