Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [291]
I laughed. ‘If it was, somebody would have told me.’
‘I think somebody just did,’ Annette said. ‘Anyway, there’s only one way to find out. Go to Kazakhstan. I assume it won’t be difficult to find Myra, or she’d have told you how.’
I looked at her, astonished. It was a proposal I was just working around to myself. From Annette I’d have expected, if anything, a fight against it.
‘I don’t want you to go,’ she said. ‘I don’t even know if you do. But I’m more afraid of doing nothing. Nobody’s spoken out for you since the troops came in. I don’t think they trust you any more.’
‘They?’
‘The space movement people. The comrades.’
‘There’s no conspiracy,’ I grinned. It was one of my catchphrases.
Annette’s eyes were sad and serious.
‘This time, you could be wrong,’ she said.
She stood up and moved to the house computer, keying the board in a brisk rattle. ‘Well come on,’ she said. ‘Go and help her. I’ll try and book you a flight. You get ready, and for heaven’s sake remember to pack your gun.’
I complied, shaking my head. None of the thoughts Annette had expressed had ever crossed my mind before. ‘Love never dies’.
Well, fuck me.
I was tempted to make the journey by one of the steadily plying airships, but as Annette pointed out those took days, and were usually loaded with freight and crowded with space-workers hung over after a month’s leave in Norlonto. So I found myself leaving Stanstead on a regular jet, much larger than the one that Reid and I had taken thirty years earlier. No anti-aircraft fire this time; the Urals corridor had long since been bombed into a safe passage.
Stanstead to Almaty, its airport still shell-pocked from the victory of the Kazakh People’s Front; north to Karaganda, a frightening, grimy place, black even in the snow: post-Soviet, post-industrial, post-independence, post-everything. From Karaganda there was a regular hop to Kapitsa; because the ISTWR was still an independent enclave, I was detained for a check – the first in my whole journey. Front cadres and local officials scrutinised my documents, tapped my details into some ancient mainframe (located in India, if the response time was anything to go by) then broke into smiles and offers of Johnny Walker Red Label when my records came up. I had said good things about the KPF, when it wasn’t fashionable. They insisted on telling me how much they admired this, and after a few whiskies I told them how much I admired them. They’d fought the US/UN, reunited their country without fueling nationalist fires, and refrained from imposing their state on the one part of the country that didn’t want it.
‘The ISTWR?’ They thought this was funny. They hadn’t refrained out of any high-flown principles.
‘Why not, then?’ I shrugged slightly, glanced at the map above the customs-officers’ desk. Not the little enclave’s defensive capacity, that was for sure.
‘Bad lands,’ I was told. ‘Bomb country.’
They say the steppe around Kapitsa glows in the dark, but it’s just starlight reflected off the snowfields. That’s what I told myself on the flight, as I dozed off the effects of good whisky taken neat, jolted awake and smoked and dozed again. Only two other seats on the aircraft were occupied, and their occupants were as keen to keep their own company as I was. I kept my reading-light off, pressed the side of my face to the window, and watched the black thread of the road from Karaganda to Semipalatinsk wend across the steppe, and even fancied I saw the tiny sparks of light from the snow-ploughs.
We landed in a twenty-below dawn on a runway just cleared of snow. A minibus hurried us to the terminal. Beyond the swept-up mounds of dirty snow the gantries stood skeletal and dark. Few aircraft were parked, none were coming in. The airport building was as