Ken Macleod - The Sky Road

It was like the old Civilization game, Myra sometimes thought, with a new twist: Barbarism II. Nobody was going to wipe the board, nobody was going to Alpha Centauri. They were all going down together, into the dark… Just as soon as enough major players decided to contest the incontestable, and put the simulations to the audit of war.

But, for the moment, the dark was full of twisting light. And in the real world, blinked up as backdrop, one front was more than virtual, and closer than she’d like. Beyond the northern border of Kazakhstan, itself hundreds of kilometres north of the ISTWR, the Sino-Soviet Union’s ragged front-line advanced in flickers of real fire: guerilla skirmishes and sabotage on one side, half-hearted long-range shelling and futile carpet-bombing on the other.

The Sheenisov—the name was subtly derogatory, like Vietcong for NLF and Yank for United Nations—were the century’s first authentic communist threat, who really believed in their updated version of the ideology which communistans like the ISTWR parodied in post-futurist pastiche. Based in the god forsaken back-country of recusant collective farms and worker-occupied factories, stubbornly surviving decades of counter-revolution and war, armed by partisan detachments of deserters (self-styled, inevitably, “loyalists’) from the ex-Soviet Eastern and ex-PRC Northern armies, they’d held most of Mongolia and Siberia and even parts of north-west China since the Fall Revolution back in 2045, and in the years since then they’d spread across the steppe like lichen. Myra detested and admired them in equal measure.

Of more immediate, and frustrating, concern: the Sheenisov were outside the virtual world, a torn black hole in the net. Their computers were permanently offline; their cadres didn’t trade combat futures; they refused all simulated confrontation or negotiation; like the Green marginals in the West and the Khmer Vertes in the South, the Reds in the East put all to the test of practice, the critique of arms. Even Jane’s could only guess at their current disposition.

But their serrated south-western edge was clear enough, and as usual it was cutting closer to her domain than it had been the last time she’d checked. Like, this time yesterday…

She sighed and turned her attention from the communists to tracing the darker deeds of a real international conspiracy: the space movement. Somewhere in that scored darkness, reading between those lines of light, she had to find the footprints of a larger and more ragged army, impatient to assume the world.

Her first step—acknowledged by the system with startled gratitude—was to update the information on Mutual Protection’s labour-camp output. When this was integrated and plausibly projected to the company’s whole global archipelago, a first-cut reevaluation of relative military-industrial weightings sent ripples through the entire web. Just as well she was working with a personal copy, Myra thought wryly. This was information to kill for (although already, presumably, discounted by Mutual Protection itself, which must surely know she knew).

She zapped the speculative update with a flashing “urgent” tag to the People’s Commissar for Finance, and a less urgent summary to the comrade over at Defence. Then she invoked her ongoing dossier of space-movement activity, meshed in the new output figures, and sent it to all the commissars, with her own interpretation.

The “space-movement coup” had been talked about, openly, for so long that it had become unreal—as unreal as the Revolution had been, until it had finally come to pass. Myra herself had cried wolf on the coup, once before. But now she felt herself vindicated. And, again, David Reid was involved.

Her former lover had built up Mutual Protection from a security-service subsidiary of an insurance company into a global business that dealt in restitution: criminals working to compensate the damage they’d done. Originally touted as a humane, market-driven reform and replacement of the old barbaric prison systems, its extension from common criminals to political and military prisoners after the Fall Revolution had given it an appalling, unstoppable logic of runaway expansion, in much the same way as the use of prison labour in the First Five-Year Plan had done for the original GULag.

For more than a decade now, those on the losing side of small wars and increasingly minor crimes had provided the manpower for a gigantic space-settlement boom, applying whatever skills they had—or could rapidly learn—to pay off their crimedebts as quickly as possible. At the same time, the proliferation of space-movement enclaves, each of which incited a horde of beleaguering barbarians or a swarm of furious bureaucrats, had provided an endless pool of new convicts. Quite a large proportion of the prisoners, on completion of their payback time, had seized the abundant employment opportunities the space projects offered.

Mutual Protection was now the armature of a global coalition of defence companies, launch companies, space settlement programmes, political campaigns and a host of minor governments—many of them creatures of these same companies. The space-movement coalition was on the point of assembling enough forces to re-create a stable world government and to bring the former Space Defense batde-sats back under UN control. Their objective, long mooted, was to roll back the environmentalist and anti-technological opposition movements, and shift enough labour and capital into Earth orbit to create a self-sustaining space presence that could ride out any of the expected catastrophes below—of which, God knew, there were plenty to choose from.

The coup itself was expected to proceed on two levels. One was a political move to take over the rump ReUN, by the votes of all the numerous ministates that could be subverted, suborned or convinced. The other was a military move, thus legitimised, to seize the old US/UN Space Defense battlesats. That, Myra reckoned, was behind the speed-up in the labour-camps. No doubt massive subversion was going on among the orbital military personnel, but by the nature of the case there wasn’t much she could know about that.

She stared at the virtual screen for a long time, until the clenchings of her fists and the twitching grimaces of her face and the blinking-back of tears confused the ’ware so much that it shut off, and left her staring at the wall.

Sovnarkom—the Council of People’s Commissars, or, in more conventional terminology, the Cabinet—was the appropriately small government of an almost unviably small state (population 99,854, last time anyone had bothered to count, and dropping by the day). The structures of the ISTWR were an exercise in socialist camp, modelled on those of the old Soviet republics but without the leading role of the Party. The result of that strategic omission had been a democracy as genuine as that of its inspiration had been false. Or so it had seemed, in the republic’s more prosperous days.

Myra arrived early, and took the privilege of the first arrival—the chairman’s seat, at the head of the long, bare table of scarred mahogany with a clunky blast-proof secretarial device in the centre. There were another dozen seats, six along either side of the table, each with its traditional mineral water and notepaper in front of it. The room was bare, win-dowless but lit by full-spectrum plates in the ceiling. The only decoration on the white walls was a framed photograph of the long-dead nuclear physicist after whom the city was named.

Valentina Kozlova came in, her military fatigues elegant as always, her hair untidy, her hands full of hardcopy. She was in her fifties, a still-young child of the century, young enough and lucky enough to have got the anti-ageing treatments before she got old. She smiled tensely and sat down. Then Andrei Mukhartov, cropped-blond, fortyish and looking it—probably by intent—soberly conventional in a three-piece suit of electric-blue raw silk. Denis Gubanov, younger than the others, ostentatiously casual, needing a shave, looking as though he’d just come in from sounding out an informer in some sleazy spaceport bar. Alexander Sherman arrived last, giving his usual impression of having been pulled away from more urgent business. His fashionable pseudo-plastic jump-suit was doubtless just the job for his post, but Myra liked it even less than she liked him. He sat down and glanced around as though expecting the meeting to begin immediately, then pursed his lips and slid two sheets of paper across to Myra.