Fractions (64 page)

‘If that was a motion,' I said drily, ‘I'll second it. Meanwhile, comrades, I beg your leave for a few minutes.' I nodded to them solemnly, turned the sound down and flipped to the phone channel.

Eleanor's face appeared and I patched it to the main television. A joyful babble filled the room and then fell silent as Eleanor spoke.

‘Hi folks,' she said. ‘Sorry to have got you all so worried. I couldn't get through on my handset, and there's a queue of about fifty behind me for the hotel phone. Can't stay long. Are you all OK?'

‘We're all fine,' Annette said. Eleanor's partner leaned briefly into view, smiled and waved. ‘Oh, hello Colin,' Annette went on. ‘When are you coming back?'

Eleanor frowned. Colin, behind her, was restraining the impatience of the next in line. ‘I don't know,' she said. ‘The airport's closed for now. They say flights'll resume tomorrow, but there'll be chaos out there. We might as well sit it out until the operation's over.'

‘The
operation
?' I squawked. ‘I don't know what they're telling you over there, but from here it looks like the beginning of the big one. The Yanks are very cross indeed, the Russians are sounding nervous, and some of the little republics the Europawehr's bearing down on are fingering their nukes. Get the hell out as soon as you can. Get to the airport
right now.
If people around you are complacent, that's their problem, and your opportunity.'

Eleanor was about to reply when the picture dissolved and a was replaced by an apologetic-looking man in a suit that said ‘Hotel Manager' as plainly as a name-badge. ‘I'm sorry sir, we can't permit this conversation to continue.' The connection broke, to yells of indignation at our end.

Tanya turned on me. ‘Why did you have to shoot your mouth off? We didn't even get to speak to her!'

‘I'm sorry,' I said. ‘I really am. But I don't think anybody over there realises how serious it is. Maybe finding that their phone-calls are being monitored will –'

‘It won't,' said Annette. ‘You should know that. All that Eleanor will have seen is the screen going fuzzy.'

After some more recriminations, eventually calmed by Annette, I stalked out with my comms rig and sat down on a bed. Through the open window I could hear doleful singing from one of the many fundamentalist and charismatic churches that had in recent years congregated in the area. I wondered if my own activities were any less futile. Then the strength of my scepticism returned to me. I punched through.

At the meeting there was only a debate going between those who wanted to push for: British involvement; American involvement; neutrality; and – coming up on the outside – using the war as an opportune moment to launch a libertarian insurrection.

I could handle that.

 

The phone was ringing. I woke up and waved the light on. The clock said 03.38 and the little red bulb on the phone winked: an encrypted call. I picked it up and thumbed the switch. Myra's face appeared on the display, black-and-white in a military cap and uniform. She looked as if she'd been up all night.

‘Oh,' I said, ungraciously, stupid and irritable with sleep and disappointment. ‘It's you.' I'd hoped it was Eleanor.

‘Hello, Jon,' Myra said. ‘Sorry to disturb you, but it's –'

‘Who's that?' Annette struggled awake.

‘It's Myra,' I said. ‘Business.'

Annette glanced at the screen, grunted and pulled the covers over her head. I half-heard something like ‘nuclear whore', and hoped Myra hadn't.

‘What is it?'

‘It's the Germans,' Myra said. ‘They're shopping around for nuclear cover, and they're making us a very good offer.'

‘You'd better take it,' I said, ‘before they arrive.'

‘That's what I think,' Myra said. ‘Problem: we're over-booked, as you can imagine. The Germans are offering to buy out enough of our existing clients to reverse that. Will you sell?'

‘For what?'

‘Five million Deutschmarks, in gold, at pre-war – that is, day before yesterday's – prices, no questions asked. I have the German negotiator on the line right now, and the Swiss bank account is verified.'

‘Christ! Give me a moment to think, OK?'

I hit the blank/silent button to hide my confusion and tried to think fast. It seemed odd that the Germans hadn't set up some such deal before they actually launched Operation Restore Order, but perhaps the risk of exposing their intentions had prevented them. Now they were improvising a nuclear defence policy at blitzkrieg speed.

The offer was tempting, even apart from the money. With Eleanor in Berlin…

But we were here. The British nuclear deterrent was currently tied up in a dispute with the US, so ours – and other private-sector arrangements – was all we had to rely on. Who knew if we might need the option, perhaps after Eleanor was safely home?

And there was another consideration. If we sold our share of the Kazakh nukes to the Germans, the FreeSpace company would be undeniably involved in the war, on the German side. The repercussions of that were incalculable, and unlikely to be pleasant.

I toggled the output switch. Myra's eyebrows flashed.

‘So?'

‘Sorry, Myra, no deal. Not our fight, and all that.'

Even on the tiny hand-held screen her face registered an increase in her weariness, but her voice conveyed no reproach when she said, ‘I understand. OK, Jon, I'll try somewhere else. Signing off.'

‘Goodnight. See you again.'

She smiled as if this were some hopeless fancy. Her image shrank to a dot.

However momentous, in retrospect, my decision may seem, the fact is I slept well the rest of that night.

 

The next day the government lost a no-confidence motion (due to the abstention of only five MPs, the three Workers' Power and two World Socialists) and fell, to be replaced by a more radical coalition drawing in support from the smaller parties. Neutrality was affirmed. The Upper House – elected now, but a transitional mix of old Lords and new Senators – debated the war issue separately, and came to a different conclusion. The first pro-war demonstrations, in the Midlands, were violently broken up by Republican Guards and Workers Power Party militants.

It was a bloody disgrace and we said so. At the same time – having won the argument in the committee – we started organising a campaign for neutrality and keeping out of the war. The UN imposed sanctions on Germany and Austria. The British ambassador walked out of the UN, a gesture which even I thought histrionic. It was to cost the Republic dear.

The Germans shelled Warsaw, live on CNN.

We didn't hear from Eleanor over the whole of the following week. I have no memory of sleep in that week. Civil wars flared like secondary fires on the widening perimeter of the German advance. Britain edged close to it as the issue of joining the US/UN mobilisation against Germany became inseparable from the issue of the Republic. The government increasingly relied on support in the streets, as demonstrations against participation in the war multiplied and spread and clashed with pro-war demonstrations that demanded the old Britain back. The pro-war forces called us Huns. We called them Hanoverians. Neither side thought of the other as British any more.

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 otherwise empty Ukrainian capital. Within minutes, as I watched, the same thing happened on the southern front, in Baku. The Russian and Turkish armies were both in action now, and news was coming through of British and American landings on the Aegean coast.

And Israel had declared war on Germany. It was ridiculous. What could they do? I thought, and then I suddenly realised that they'd probably just
done
it.

I flipped to N-TV for the reaction from Germany. A reporter was talking to the camera, in front of the Bundestag. He was saying something about Frankfurt, and he sounded terrified.

He clapped a hand to his ear, tilting his head.

His face paled, and the screen went white.

His voice, if you could call it that, continued for some time.

 

The war had ended. The peace process began. For Britain it began with stealth bombers and cruise missiles, and continued with paratroopers and teletroopers and lynch-mobs. The Royalist junta, its American allies and the British counter-revolutionary mobs between them killed about a hundred thousand people in six days. After that they had a country that knew its place in the New World Order.

It was still ungovernable. Under the Republic's reforms, freeing up the housing, education and labour markets, there had already developed a tendency towards differentiation – self-ghettoisation, as I saw it, especially when it wasn't spontaneous but promoted by the Republic's unfortunate encouragement of identity politics. Bombing, invasion and civil war hardened the tendency into an irresistible force, as every minority fled to the dubious safety of its own tribe. Regional assemblies took the hint and drew old borders in fresh blood: North Wales, South Wales, Cumbria, West Scotland, East Scotland…even our own Greenbelt and free trade zones became safe havens, refugees piling in on top of refugees. The militias defended the area as best they could.

The final session of the Republic's Federal Assembly passed its authority over to the Army Council, a body made up of the few senior officers who had stayed loyal. It called on the civilian population to avoid needless sacrifice and to resume armed resistance ‘at such time or times as the Army Council of the Army of the New Republic shall decide'. They thus gave a shred of legal cover to an indefinitely prolonged campaign of merciless terrorism, as they well knew. Then they all walked out of the former main workshop of the Ford Motor Company's Dagenham site into the withering fire of the surrounding tanks.

It was probably the proudest moment in the history of British democracy. I watched it in the basement of a safe house on an illegal Iraqi satellite channel, and it made me vomit.

 

I knew I should be working; there was always another article to send out on the net, another friend or foe to contact, another militia unit's fate to check; but I was hacking German casualty lists, searching for a name I hoped against hope that I wouldn't find. The Israelis had tipped their long-range missiles with tactical, not strategic, warheads. Even in Berlin there were more survivors than anyone had expected. There was always a chance…

The phone rang.

‘Dad?'

‘
Eleanor
!'

‘Yes. Are you all right?'