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‘Old joke,’ Myra said, but I could see she wasn’t annoyed. ‘I’ll tell you an older one. Soviet. “How do we know Marxism is a philosophy? Because if it was a science, they’d have tried it out first on dogs.”’

There was such withering proletarian contempt in her voice that we all had to laugh, and then Myra shot back: ‘Well comrades, these people were the dogs, and they’ve made something work. I wish you could stay for a few days and see it. Or even come and visit in October.’

‘Why October?’

‘Centenary celebrations,’ Myra said. ‘We’re planning a real impressive fireworks display.’

‘I’ll bet,’ Reid said dryly. ‘The biggest in the world, no doubt. Unfortunately, we have our own revolution to get back to.’

Myra sighed. ‘Business…You ready with those forms?’

‘Ready when you are.’

We signed, flashbulbs popped, and that was it. The world would know that I had the Bomb.

When the Soviet Union broke up, Kazakhstan had for a while found itself playing the unfamiliar role of a Great Power, because it had on its territory a number of nuclear weapons. When Kazakhstan broke up, one of its fragments had retained some (different, and better) nuclear weapons, with the additional difference that the International Scientific and Technical Workers’ Republic – initially nothing more than a division of the ex-Soviet Rocket Forces, a few thousand nuked-upon Kazakhs and a strip of steppe – had known what to do with them.

They exported nuclear deterrence. Not the weapons themselves – that, perish the thought, would have been illegal – but the salutary effect of possessing them. Our contract was pretty standard, and it simply gave us an option to call in a nuclear strike on anyone who used nuclear weapons against us, and who didn’t provide full compensation. Anyone who nuked us – even accidentally or incidentally – had to pay up or get nuked themselves.

The beauty of this arrangement was that any number of clients – the more the better – could have a claim on a relatively small number of nukes, an effect rather like fractional reserve banking. It also meant that anyone who wanted to tempt the ISTWR with a first-use deal would have had to offer more than the income from all the deterrent clients, and that would have cost far more than just building or stealing their own nukes. So the chances of the system being used for nuclear aggression were minute. Above all, for the first time, nuclear deterrence was available to anyone willing to pay for it, and the cost was reasonable enough for every homeland to have one.

Especially when the competion caught on: rogue submarine commanders, missile crews in Siberia and Alaska who wanted payment in real money for a change, groups of ambitious junior officers in Africa all started selling off shares in the family plutonium.

Another triumph for the free market.

Not everyone agreed.

‘When I saw the pictures,’ Annette raged, ‘of you with that anorexic floozy, I thought you’d run off with her! This is worse!’

Oh, no it ain’t, I thought, and I was right. We quarrelled, we argued, we got over it. This was just ideas, not bodies. I could be an actual instead of a potential mass murderer, and it would have hurt her less than me screwing somebody else.

Not that I ever said it. Some weapons are best kept in reserve.

11

Down Time

Wilde stood looking dubiously at the pack and the two sets of weapons that Tamara had laid out on the table. He lifted the pack and put it back down again.

‘What have you got in there?’ he said. ‘Nukes?’

Tamara looked up from a scanner, which she was using to download the latest maps of the Fifth Quarter to her contacts, and shook her head. ‘No nukes,’ she said firmly. ‘Discharging nuclear explosives within city limits is a serious offence.’

‘I’m glad to hear it,’ said Wilde. ‘So that’s us ready to go, then.’

‘More or less.’ Tamara folded away the scanner. ‘We need to be ready to go at any time, but that doesn’t mean we have to go now. Reid will book the hearing, and we’ll