Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [259]
The Germans reached the Ukrainian border, and stopped. The Poles, in headlong flight, plunged straight into the ongoing Ukrainian civil war. The British Chiefs of Staff presented an ultimatum to the government. Generals, leaders of the Unionist parties, and members of the pensioned-off, semi-privatised Royal Family made up a constant stream of visitors to the US Embassy. Reluctant Republican Guards, only doing their job, fought off determined demonstrators in Grosvenor Square. There was talk of a military coup.
Myra called again. The German offer had gone up to twenty million. I said no. Needless to say I never mentioned this to the rest of the committee.
My paging program almost reached Eleanor, at least twice.
There wasn’t a coup. Instead, the overseas parts of the British armed forces went to war without the government’s permission. Another government – civilian, spraying an inky cloud of constitutional justifications – was formed out of the opposition, the Lords and the King. It won immediate diplomatic recognition in the US and Britain’s vacant seat at the UN. It declared war on Germany.
The Poles regrouped, allied with a couple of Ukrainian factions and attacked the German concentrations. They used chemical weapons. Simultaneously, some Bosnian exiles – it was never established which nationality they came from – poisoned Hamburg’s water supply. The Germans rolled forward on all fronts. The French and Russians finally came off the fence on the Security Council.
The Republican government still controlled the internal forces of the country, while the Royal junta controlled the state’s external power. In a bizarre way they had to co-operate, or at least maintain a division of labour: while one was participating in American airdrops over the Balkans and naval manoeuvres in the Mediterranean, the other was frantically mobilising the civilian population for civil defence. In effect the Kingdom outlawed the past ten years of Britain’s history, while the Republic legalised a revolution.
It would have been an interesting revolution. Which of the competing extremisms – including ours – would have emerged victorious is still debated. As it is, I had an interesting week. The space movement really was as big as the old peace movement had been, and the rockets on our banners were our own. I left the demonstrations to those members of the committee who were good at that sort of thing, and spent my time obsessively organising militia and defence company patrols in the free-trade zones and the Greenbelt, negotiating with our contacts in the state apparatus and – in between times – writing more, faster, than ever. If I hadn’t been worried about Eleanor and in constant fear of German air-raids I’d have been even happier than I was. I had reached my Finland Station.
Someone was shaking my shoulder. I raised my head from my forearms and looked about. It was 10.15 a.m., and I was at my desk in the FreeSpace office. I must have closed my eyes for a moment about six hours earlier. The office was crowded but quiet. People were looking at screens, not at me; except for Annette, who was holding onto me, staring.
‘What’s happened?’
‘Somebody’s nuked Kiev.’
‘Oh, my God.’
I stood up. She buried her face in my shoulder. I held on to her as sobs made her quake, and glared about until someone silently pushed a screen into view. An entire German army had been wiped out by an airburst over the