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.
“Nothing is written,” she said. “The future is ours to shape. When you take the cities, spare the scientists and engineers. Whatever they may have done in the past you need them for the future. Let’s make it a better one.”
The camcopter spun around, soared, darted about wildly and dived into the ground. The horses’ hooves, the worn tyres of the vehicles, crushed it in seconds. Myra wasn’t worried; she could see her own image, with a few seconds’ delay, appearing in the corner of her eyeband where CNN still chattered away. The rest of the field was filled with bizarre hallucinations, the net’s near-death experience.
God filled the horizon, bigger than the sunrise.
I sat on the plinth of the statue of the Deliverer, and smoked a cigarette to fight my stomach’s heaves. Gradually my mind and my body returned to some kind of equilibrium. The din of the launch celebrations, the lights of the houses and pubs, became again something I could regard without disgust and hear without dismay. I stood up, and the ground was steady under my feet. I looked up, and the sky was dark and starry above my head.
I walked a few steps from the statue and turned around. The Deliverer on her horse reared above me. Menial had told me, a couple of weeks earlier, the reason why the Deliverer’s features varied on all the statues I’d ever seen. She was a myth, a multiplicity. Her hordes had never ridden from far Kazakhstan to Lisbon’s ancient shore, as the songs and stories say. They had never swept all before them. Instead, each town and city had been invaded by a horde raised closer to home, on its very own hinterland. How many hundred, how many thousand towns had met the new order in the form of a wild woman on a horse, riding in at the head of a ragtag army to proclaim that the net was thrown off, the sky was fallen, and the world was free?
It was that final message, the last ever spoken from the net and the screens, that had identified them with that singular woman, the Deliverer. I leaned forward, to read again the words chiselled on this plinth, as it is on them all, from far Kazakhstan to Lisbon’s ancient shore:
NOTHING IS WRITTEN. THE FUTURE IS OURS TO SHAPE. WHEN YOU TAKE THE CITIES, SPARE THE SCIENTISTS AND ENGINEERS. WHATEVER THEY MAY HAVE DONE IN THE PAST YOU NEED THEM FOR THE FUTURE. LET’S MAKE IT A BETTER ONE.
The last words of the old world, and the first of the new.
I thought of Menial, and took another step back, still drawing on my cigarette. She was older than I had ever imagined possible. But she was also, I realised, still as young as she’d seemed when I’d first seen her. Nothing had changed, nothing could change that lovely, eager, open personality. She was not old, she had merely… stayed young.