Ken Macleod - The Sky Road

“Jesus fuck, Myra,” Logan said, without preliminary pleasantry. “This is your biggest fuck-up since the Third World War.” He didn’t make it sound like an accusation.

“Thanks for the reminder, comrade,” Myra snarled. “I’m going against my better judgement telling you this, but I’ve fallen out with your General. That little electric fucker has had the bright idea of making his own bid for world revolution, and I don’t intend to wait around to see how it all works out in practice, thank you very much.”

Tes, I had heard,” Logan said heavily. The delay seemed longer than usual; Myra guessed because she was strung out, running on stretched time. “You called to say that?” He sounded distracted. A very pretty black girl who looked about ten years old stuck her face past his, grimacing at the camera, filling its field with her microgravity sunburst of frizzy hair. Logan shoved at her.

“Oh, push off, Ellen May,” he said, not unkindly. “Go and pester your mum, OK? Or Janis. She’ll have something for you to do, you bet.”

The girl stuck out her tongue, then flicked away like a fish.

“Kids,” Logan grinned, indulgent despite himself.

“Yeah, they’re great,” Myra said, with a pang. “What I called you for is about that, actually. If that kid’s gonna have a future, you guys better get your ass out of Lagrange.”

“We have,” said Logan, five seconds later. “We raced through our preparations after the coup. We haven’t got as much gear as we’d like, but the asteroid miners are going to swing in and join us there. We finished the burn twelve hours ago.” He looked about. “Made a real mess of stuff I didn’t have time to lash down,” he added sadly.

^You’re on your way to Mars?”

“Yes, at last.” His grin filled the screen. “Free at last!”

“What does the General think about this?”

“Ah,” said Logan. “When I found it was bidding to use your orbital nukes in the coup, I figured the same as you did. Not safe to stick around. You remember I said we’d have to leave a few hundred tons behind? Well, it’s among them, still in the clutter at Lagrange. We ditched the bugger.” His triumphant smile faded to a bleak inward gaze. “I hope.”

Ts it still in control of the Mil Org?”

“I guess so. We couldn’t do anything to it, beyond discarding the section the hardware was in. Its software is a different matter, it gets everywhere, but, hell—”

“What do you mean ‘it gets everywhere’? I’ve got a suspicion it’s downloaded to the Sheenisov’s weird Babbage engines, but—”

Logan nodded. Teah, and it’s probably copied its files to anything of yours that’s been in contact with it, like your phone, but it’s just the source code, it can’t do any harm so long as you don’t open the file—”

At that point the connection ended.

Myra took her phone from her pocket and was about to jerk its jack from her eyeband, just in case, when she realised the precaution was irrational. If the bugger was actually running on her phone they were doomed already. She thought about the time the General had appeared right in her own command-centre, and could only hope that Logan was right, and that only its source code, and not its live program, had been secreted there. And in other places…

Someday, somebody would open a file stored in the Institute at Glasgow, and find Parvus, and the General behind him. She wished that person luck. Then she remembered Menial MacClafferty, and realised she’d have to do more.

She had just finished rattling out her urgent message when she heard a dull, distant bang behind her, and turned. Through the eyeband’s night vision she saw on the horizon the expanding green glow of the first cruise missile to hit Kapitsa. It was not the last.

Hours later, in the twenty-below midnight, when most of the migration had camped around fuel-dump fires, Myra was sitting with Jason in front of a portable electric brazier, in the shelter of the dozing horse. She was simultaneously in the command-centre with the others, and with Chingiz. The UN and US had never intended to negotiate, and even the pretence had been dropped.

The Kazakhstani airforce was expending missiles, planes and lives above Almaty now. From space the command-centre was pulling down images of moves from the battlesats. Tiny, manned hunter-gatherer probes were burning off, matching orbits and velocities with the cached nukes. They had hunter-killer escorts, and they were obviously from opposed coalitions—already their exchanges of fire were being replayed on CNN, now that the Kapitsa bombardment had stopped for lack of remaining targets.

“… no choice,” Chingiz was saying. “Our first responsibility is to defend our people, the people we’ve taken on the duty to protect, even if that means killing more innocent people on the other side than would die on ours if we don’t.”

That’s talking, thought Myra, that’s the way to look at it, that’s right. Screw the greatest good of the greatest number. Or maybe not.

“That’s the end of the world,” said Valentina.

“It’s ending anyway,” Myra said. She looked up from the fire. “That’s my final analysis! We may even save lives in the long run, if we blind and cripple the forces that are getting ready for the last war.” She laughed bitterly. “In both senses of the phrase.”

An officer leaned into the visual field around Chingiz, and spoke urgently in his ear. Chingiz nodded, once, then raised his hand.

“This is it,” he said. “Some of the space settlers’ diamond ships have just entered the atmosphere. They’re heading for—”

Connection lost.

Myra jumped up, and to her utter horror and amazement she saw them, jinking and jittering through the sky towards her. Their infrared radiation signature was arrogantly clear—they didn’t need to bother with shielding, unlike the stealth fighters they resembled. One moment they were dots on the horizon, the next they were discs overhead, swooping past at a thousand metres. Their laser lances slashed the vast encampment, and were countered seconds too late by futile fusillades of skyward machine-gun fire. Then they were at the other horizon, andbanking around for a second runscreams of people and beasts in the night, dying under the laser beams and the humming rain of their own misdirected, falling ordnance Earth versus the flying saucers! Way cool!

Myra shook off that mad thought and reached for the command-centre controls as though through thick mud. Valentina’s eyes shone in the firelight for a moment, and Myra saw in them a reflection of her own resolution. Then she and Valentina stooped together to their task. As Myra rattled through the codes, she waited for the laser’s hot tongue on her neck.

The diamond ships were far too fast for human control, or even for their enhanced, superhuman occupants. Their main guidance systems were realtime uplinks to the space stations, which a few good nuclear explosions could disrupt.

The sky went white, and the black discs fell like leaves.

The ablation cascade did not happen all at once. Lagrange went to eternity instantaneously, in one appalling sphere of hell-hot helium fusion, but Earth orbit was a different thing. Hours, perhaps days, would pass before the last product of human ingenuity and industry was scraped from the sky. Even so, the comsats were among the first to fail. Most, indeed, were taken out by the electromagnetic pulses alone. Riding into the first dawn of the new world, Myra knew that the little camcopter dancing a couple of metres in front of her might well be relaying the last television news most of its watchers would ever see.

Behind her, in a slow straggle that ended with the ambulances and litters of the injured and dying, the Kazakh migration spread to the horizon. The sun was rising behind them, silhouetting their scattered, tattered banners. There was only one audience, now, that was worth speaking to: the inheritors.