Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [154]
She looked into its deep storage, as Moh had done when he’d first checked it out. What she saw was incomprehensible, a blurred flicker of motion; definitely not, as he’d described it, passive data storage. She backed out quickly.
The phone beeped. She thumbed the receiver. Snow and lines appeared, then the machine cycled through backup systems. When the image stabilized it was of Van’s face. The quality was worse than she’d seen in years.
‘Hello, Janis. Are you all right?’
‘I’m fine. Now. For now. How are things with you?’
Van grimaced. ‘Complicated. The offensive has been aborted, but our unreliable allies in the Left Alliance have triggered a civilian uprising, which we are trying to direct. There are grave dangers, because we have not annihilated the key enemy units. They are holding off from decisive engagement, expecting UN intervention at any moment. So are we. The situation in Britain has gone right to the top of all agendas. Leave the settlement as soon as you’re ready. The first thing they’ll do is hit known ANR camps.’
‘This is an ANR camp?’
‘No, it’s an undefended civilian settlement. That’s why we evacuated it.’
‘Oh.’ Yes, that was the thing to do when you expected to be fighting the US/UN. Hurry the civilians out of civilian areas, carry the wounded out of anything with a Red Cross on it.
‘Dr Van.’
‘Yes.’
‘Can you tell me – have you found out anything yet?’
Van nodded, his face looking ancient. ‘I can tell you now. The whole comm network is compromised; we have nothing to lose. This afternoon Donovan’s organization launched a massive virus attack. It was apparently targeted on the Watchmaker AIS. If any of them remain they are in isolated hardware. That was when we lost our system, what you call the Black Plan. And Dissembler.’ He shrugged. ‘They may have been destroyed at the same time. And it would seem likely that—’
‘You’re telling me he was killed by a computer virus?’ The monstrous comedy of it fought in her eyes and throat.
‘I know,’ Van said, ‘it seems grotesque. At some level I think we didn’t believe that what Kohn reported was really happening. But I’ve seen the EMGs of his synapses, and they are…unique. Even in my experience.’
A slight undertone of his voice brought the thought to mind that there were more monstrous deaths than this, worse and weirder ways to go. Janis took a deep breath.
‘I’m ready,’ she said.
She picked up the gun.
Van told her where to find directions to the nearest deep shelter, and she walked that night for kilometres along dark roads. At a hydroelectric power station she stopped and called out the passwords, and a hand came out of the darkness and guided her inside a mountain. In the morning she saw outside on the window screens, and was absurdly reassured to see that this mountain and all the other hills about it were patterned with varied shades of red-brown and yellow and faded green, like camouflage.
Later that morning she was pulled excitedly to watch a replay of an incident that had just happened. A fighter-bomber flashed along the glen, then exploded in an airburst that turned the screen white. As the explosion faded they saw the fireball rolling and tumbling and shedding wreckage for several kilometres before everything hit the ground, setting heather alight.
They replayed it lots of times, always with the same cheers. She hoped the girl in the observation post had kept her head down and her eyes shut.
She never learned how many people lived inside that mountain. Hundreds. The fighters were somewhere else; their absence made little difference to the structure of the population here – there were young men and women as well as old, and there were parents who worried about children who were with the fighters.
The screens that showed the news were at first jammed. As the communities had