Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [51]
‘You don’t need me to tell you this puts us in a bit of a sticky position.’ He laughed as if to himself. ‘Sticky position, hah, that’s a good one.’ He was standing now, leaning his fists on the table. ‘What I want to know is, why the fuck did we not know about this?’
He sat down again, turned to Janis and added, in a tone of casual explanation: ‘Felix Dzerzhinsky Collective, my ass.’
The argument went on from there.
If Moh had hoped to divert them into mutual recrimination over a setback on the intelligence front, he didn’t succeed for long. Most of them insisted they’d logged all the rumours they’d run across, and found them evaluated as just that: rumours.
What really agitated them was the prospect of more situations like the one Moh had unwittingly found himself in, of shooting at people who, in terms of their political affiliations and personal relations, were on the same side as themselves. Much of the increasingly heated discussion went past Janis’s ears, but she could see a polarization taking place: Moh, Dafyd and Stone took the view that it changed nothing, while Mary and Alasdair argued for calling off any engagements that would bring them into conflict with the Left. The others were being pulled one way or the other. Moh, to her surprise and relief, contributed little to the debate other than the odd sardonic laugh or dry chuckle, such as when someone used the expression ‘what these comrades fail to understand…’.
But it was Moh who brought the discussion to an end, with a cough and a slight shrug of his shoulders.
He stood up again. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘we can’t take a vote now, too many of us’re out on active. What I propose is this: as a co-op we honour existing contracts. Any individual members who find they have a problem with defending particular installations, ask to be relieved beforehand. Anyone who takes an assignment and then bottles out is considered to have gone independent and takes full liability. And let’s get this in perspective, OK? We’ve always used minimum force.’
He paused, as if trying to work something out, then continued. ‘My conscience is clear. One more thing: if this goes beyond isolated sabbing and turns into a real offensive, all bets are off. That’s in the small print of all our contracts anyway. Everyone go along with that?’
They did, though Alasdair was the last and most reluctant to nod agreement.
‘What about if there is an ANR offensive?’ Dafyd asked. Everyone else laughed. He looked offended. Moh leaned over and grasped his shoulder.
‘If that happens, man,’ he said, ‘we do exactly what it says in the contract; we give our full support to the legitimate authorities!’
As Janis watched the laughter, the visible relaxation that this comment brought, she reflected on what it meant. Not its literal meaning but its studied ambiguity – Moh, or somebody, must have taken great delight in smuggling that clause into the small print. With all their disagreements, with their obvious cynicism and scepticism about the ANR, they took it for granted that its aims and arms were just.
As did she: it was an underlying premise, now that she came to think of it, for most of the people she knew. Long before they had come to power the Republicans had referred to the British state, the old establishment, as ‘the Hanoverian regime’, and now, long after the Republic’s fall, everybody called the restored Kingdom by that derisory name. Few took seriously the ANR’s claim to be the legal government, but few dismissed it entirely. In its controlled zones, dispersed and remote, and in the back of people’s minds, the Republic still existed. It had hegemony. That much it had already won.
Stone interrupted the now more social conversation with a remark about some people having jobs to go to. There was a sudden scramble for weapons, and in a few minutes