Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [150]
She shook her head fiercely. ‘I wouldn’t do it,’ she said. Perhaps missing the English ambiguity, Van left. She heard racing trucks, and a helicopter taking off. There was a fine research facility at Nairn, the Republic’s provincial capital: that was where it was headed. She might go there someday, find out if it had been the drugs that had killed him. Or the lack of drugs.
MacLennan’s words came back. She hadn’t been a good guard, a good soldier.
Not even a good scientist.
The memories that had eluded her on the hilltop came back now, clear and bitter. She remembered the war. The War of European Integration, when Germany had led a desperate bid to unite the continent under the star-circled banner, snuff out the national conflicts fuelled by US/UN meddling and create a counterweight to the New World Order.
Just a lass, not really understanding. The stifling heat of the Metro shelter had made her gasp and cry. Her mother shouted at her for walking over the bedding spread on the platforms. The three-metre-high screens curved to the subway walls showed the progress of the war.
They weren’t in this war: they were neutral; and yet British soldiers were fighting in it. Some of the channels spoke as if Britain itself were fighting. It was confusing and terrifying, especially as some people down in the shelter cheered when British soldiers appeared while others shouted with anger.
Her mother tried to explain. ‘It’s the King’s men who are in the war, love, not us. But the King’s government has a seat at the UN—’
She paused, not sure if Janis had understood. The girl nodded firmly. ‘The den of thieves and slaves,’ she said.
‘That’s right. And they’re fighting against the Germans on the side of the UN, that really means the Americans, so that when the war’s over the Americans will help the King and all his men to come back here and rule us again, or the Germans will attack us before the war’s over and then we’ll be defeated another way.’
She had been playing in one of the side corridors when she heard a roar of voices, and rushed to the subway platform to look at the screens and take in the excited words. Germany had stopped fighting. The war was over. She didn’t stop to see her parents; she didn’t see or hear them shove through through the crowds and call after her as she turned to race up the stationary escalators.
She had known only what was over, not what was beginning. She didn’t know that Berlin and Frankfurt had been incinerated in Israel’s last favour for its old protector. She didn’t know that this would be the pretext the US needed to make itself the arbiter of the planet. Nothing her parents had told her, nothing even in the political-education classes, could have prepared her for the next six days: the bombers roaming the undefended skies, the pillaging, rampaging assault of the US/UN’s illiterate conscripts and barbarian levies, the teletroopers punching through walls and crushing the defenders in steel fists, the demoralized crowds cheering peace and surrender and Restoration, turning on the radical regime that they blamed for their plight, joining in the witch-hunts and roundups and lynchings.
She didn’t know that the wind was from the east and that the rain washing away her sweat and stink was laden with fission products from the earlier obliteration of Kiev and Baku. Until her frantic mother dragged her back into the shelter she celebrated the peace.
Jordan and Cat walked hand in hand along the centre of Blackstock Road, in the middle of the crowd. They were not the only ones carrying weapons, and in other ways, too, their appearance was inconspicuous. It was a safe bet that no one here had ever seen Jordan on cable television. The people around them were Beulah City inhabitants: a very different section of the population from those who had come in at the northern border. They were machine-minders, waiters and waitresses,