“Okay.”
Phibul groaned again, then groaned louder; Frank turned and knelt by him. “Easy, man. Easy. You’re going to be all right. Phibul?”
“My—” Phibul tried to raise one hand. Frank caught it, torn between sympathy and a strong urge to go and take a look over the parapet at the plaza. The crowd noise was enormous. Alice had stopped tracking her airborne birds, and they’d wandered off-station; Frank had a dizzying, unstable view down side streets, watching a sea of heads flowing down the Unity Boulevard, then across the roofline of a bank to another road, where boxy gray vehicles were moving purposefully -
“Alice!” he shouted, sitting up: “Don’t launch it!”
Alice looked at him abstractedly as she flipped the trigger on her tripod and sent the discus spinning into the air above the rooftop. “What did you say?” she called, and for a desperate moment Frank thought it meant that everything would be all right, that the gray-painted vehicles and the brightly spinning disc and the sunburst flashes in the corner of his eye didn’t mean anything. But the window in his left eye disappeared, all the same. The laser beam skybounced from the antimissile battery to the fighting mirror above the bank building was invisible to the naked eye, and the fighting mirror sure didn’t care about journalistic credentials or, indeed, who owned the recce drones floating high above the city. All it knew about was friend, enemy, and counterbattery fire. “Take cover!” Frank yelled, just as the top of Alice’s head vanished in a spray of red mist with a horrible popping sound, like an egg exploding in a microwave oven.
For a minute or so Frank blanked. There was a horrible noise, a screeching roar in his ears — blood on his hands, blood on his knees, blood everywhere, an ocean to Phibul’s dried-up creek. He was dizzy and cold and the hand holding his didn’t seem to help. It seemed to want to let go. Alice in the bar downstairs. Alice explaining the facts of life to him after bribing a government official, joking about the honeymoon suite when they moved in. Alice flying drones over the cityscape far below, spotting traffic, spotting likely hot spots with a look on her face like -
There was shouting beyond the balcony. Shouting, and a grinding metallic squeal he’d heard before, down below. Alice was dead and he was stranded with a dried-up swimming pool, a stranger from Turku, and no way to make the fuckers pay. No real-time link.
“You can’t do anything for her.” There was a hand on his shoulder, small and hard — he shook it loose, then pushed himself to his knees dizzily.
“I know,” he heard someone else say. “I wish—” His voice cracked. He didn’t really know what that person wished anymore: it wasn’t really relevant, was it? He hadn’t been in love with Alice, but he’d trusted her; she was the brains of the operation, the wise older head who knew what the hell to do. This wasn’t supposed to happen. The head of mission wasn’t supposed to die in the field, brains splattered all over the roof by -
“Keep down,” Thelma whispered. “I think they’re going to start now.”
“Start?” he asked, shivering.
A hush fell across the square, then the noise of the crowd redoubled. And there was another sound; a pattering, like rain falling onto concrete from a clear blue sky, accompanied by a crackling roar. Then the screams. “Alice was right,” said Thelma, shuddering and crouching down below the parapet. Sweating and whey-faced, she looked the way Frank felt. “It’s the season for bullets.”
Below them, in the packed dusty square before the government buildings, the storm drains began to fill with blood.
Svengali had drunk half a bottle of single malt by the time Frank reached the massacre. His throat was hoarse, but he hadn’t stopped for long enough to ask for a refill. It hurt too much to pause. Now he held his glass out. “I don’t know how your liver copes with that.”
“He’s got the guts of a rat,” slurred Eloise: “hepatic alcohol dehydrogenase pathway and all.” She stood up, wobbling slightly. “’Scuse me, guys, but this isn’t my night for partying after all. Nice of you to invite me and maybe some other time and all, but I think I’m going to be having nightmares tonight.” She hit the release button on the doorframe and was gone into the twilight of the ship’s crew accommodation deck.
Svengali shook his head as he pulled the door shut. “And here I was, hoping for a threesome,” he said. He tipped a generous measure into Frank’s glass, then put the rapidly emptying bottle down. “So, the troops massacred the demonstrators. What has this got to do with those guys, whoever they are?”
“The—” Frank swallowed bile. “Remember the spook woman? She came back, after the massacre, with soldiers. And Thelma’s camera. She let Thelma scan the courtyard, then the guards sat her down with a gun at her head and the spook dictated my copy to me. Which I signed and submitted under my own name.”
“You—” Svengali’s eyes narrowed. “Isn’t that unethical?”
“So is threatening to execute hostages. What would you do in my shoes?”
“Hmm.” The clown topped off his own glass and took a full mouthful. “So you sent it, in order to…”
“Yeah. But it didn’t work.” He fell silent. Nothing was going to make him go into the next bit, the way they’d cuffed him, stuck needles full of interface busters in his arm to kill off his implants, and flipped him on his stomach to convulse, unable to look away or even close his eyes while they gut-shot Phibul and left him to bleed out, while two of the soldiers raped Thelma, then cut off her screams and then her breasts with their bayonets. Of the three of them, only Frank’s agency had bought him a full war correspondent’s insurance policy.
It had been the beginning of a living nightmare for Frank, a voyage through the sewers of the New Settlement’s concentration camps that only ended nine months later, when the bastards concluded that ensuring his silence was unnecessary and the ransom from his insurers was a bigger asset than his death through destructive labor. “I think they thought I was sleeping with her,” he said fuzzily.
“So you got away? They released you?”
“No: I ended up in the camps. They didn’t realize at first, the Newpeace folk who supported the Peace Enforcement, that those camps were meant for everyone, not just the fractious unemployed and the right-to-land agitators. But sooner or later everyone ended up there — everyone except the security apparat and the off-planet mercenaries the provisional government hired to run the machine. Who were all smartly turned-out, humorless, efficient, fast — like those kids in the bar. Just like them. And then there were the necklaces.”
“Necklaces?” Svengali squinted. “Are you shitting me?”
“No.” Frank shuddered and took a mouthful of whisky. “Try to pull it off, try to go somewhere you’re not supposed to, or just look at a guard wrong, and it’ll take your head off.” He rubbed the base of his throat, unconsciously. And then there was Processing Site Administrator Voss, but let’s not go there. “They killed three thousand people in the square, you know that? But they killed another two million in those camps over the next three years. And the fuckers got away with it. Because anyone who knows about them is too shit-scared to do anything. And it all happened a long time ago and a long way away. The first thing they did was pin down all the causal channels, take control of any incoming STL freighters, and subject all real-time communications in and out of the system to censorship. You can emigrate — they don’t mind that — but only via slower-than-light. Emigrants talk, but most people don’t pay attention to decades-old news. It’s just not current anymore,” he added bitterly. “When they decided to cash in my insurance policy they deported me via slower-than-light freighter. I spent twenty years in cold sleep: by the time I arrived nobody wanted to know what I’d been through.”
And it had been a long time before he’d been ready to seek the media out for himself: he’d spent six months in a hospital relearning that if a door was open, it meant he could go through it if he wanted, instead of waiting for a guard to lock it again. Six months of pain, learning again how to make decisions
for himself. Six months of remembering what it was to be an autonomous human being and not a robot made out of meat, trapped in the obedient machinery of his own body.
“Okay. So they … what? Go around conquering worlds? That sounds insane. Pardon me for casting aspersions on your good self’s character, but it is absolutely ridiculous to believe anyone could do such a thing. Destroy a world, yes, easily — but conquer one?”
“They don’t.” Frank leaned back against the partition. “I’m not sure what they do. Rumor in the camps was, they call themselves the ReMastered. But just what that means … Hell, there are rumors about everything from brainwashing to a genetically engineered master race. But the first rule of journalism is you can’t trust unsubstantiated rumors. All I know is, this ship is going to Newpeace, which they turned into a hellhole. And those guys are from somewhere called Tonto. What the fuck is going on?”
“You’re the blogger.” Svengali put the bottle down, a trifle unsteadily. He frowned. “Are you going to try to find out? I’m sure there’s a story in it…”
INTERLUDE 1
In a stately home by the banks of a dried-up river on a world with two small moons, a woman with sea-green eyes and crew-cut black hair sat behind a desk, reading reports. The house was enormous and ancient, walls of stone supported by ancient oak timber beams, and the French windows were thrown wide open to admit a breeze from the terrace before the house. The woman, engrossed in her reading, didn’t notice the breeze or even the smell of rose blossom wafting in on it. She was too busy paging through memoranda on her tablet, signing warrants, changing lives.
The door made a throat-clearing sound. “Ma’am, you have a visitor.”
“Who is it, Frank?” She glanced at the brass terminal plaque that had been hacked into the woodwork by an overenthusiastic former resident.
“S. Frazier Bayreuth. He says he has some sort of personal report for you.”
“Personal,” she muttered. “All right. Show him in.” She pushed her chair back, brushing imaginary lint from the shoulder of her tunic, and thumbed her tablet to a security-conscious screen saver.
The door clicked, and she rose as it opened. Holding out a hand: “Frazier.”
“Ma’am.” There was no click of heels — he wore no boots — but he bowed stiffly, from the neck.
“Sit down, sit down. You’ve been spending too much time in the New Republic.”
S. Frazier Bayreuth sank into the indicated chair, opposite her desk, and nodded wearily. “They rub off on you.”
“Hah.” It came out as a grim cough. “How are the compatibility metrics looking?
“Better than they were a year ago, better than anybody dared hope, but they won’t be mature enough for integration for a long time yet. Reactionary buffoons, if you ask me. But that’s not why I’m here. Um. May I ask how busy you are?”
The woman behind the desk stared at him, head slightly askew. “I can give you half an hour right now,” she said slowly. “If this is urgent.”
Bayreuth’s cheek twitched. A wiry, brown-haired man who looked as if he was made of dried leather, he wore blue-gray seamless fatigues; battle dress in neutral, chromatophores and impact diffusers switched off, as if he’d come straight from a police action, only pausing to remove his armor and equipment webbing. “It’s urgent all right.” He glanced at the open window. “Are we clear?”
She nodded. “Nobody who overhears us will understand anything,” she said, unsmiling, and he shivered slightly. In a ubiquitous surveillance society, any such bare-faced assertion of privacy clearly carried certain implications.
“All right, then. It’s about the Environmental Service cleanup report on Moscow.”
“The cleanup.” She gritted her teeth. “What is it this time?”
“Arbeiter Neurath begs to report that he has identified auditable anomalies in the immigration trace left by the scram team as they cleaned up and departed. On at least three occasions over the three years leading up to the Zero Incident and the five years since then, personnel working in the Environmental Operations Team under U. Vannevar Scott failed to behave consistently in accordance with best practice guidelines for exfiltrating feral territory. That, in itself, I would not need to bring to your attention, my lady. The guilty parties have been reprocessed and their errors added to the documentation corpus pour encourager les autres. He cleared his throat. “But…”
The woman stared at him, her expression relaxed: Bayreuth tensed. When U. Portia Hoechst looked most relaxed she was at her most dangerous — if not to him, then to someone else, some designated enemy of the mission, roadkill on the highway to destiny. She might be thirty, or ninety — it was hard to tell with ReMastered, before the sudden unraveling of the genome that brought their long lives to an abrupt but peaceful close — but if asked to gamble Bayreuth would have placed his money at the higher end of the scale. Peaceful eyes, relaxed eyes, eyes that had seen too many horrors to tense and flicker at a death warrant.
“Continue,” she said in a neutral tone of voice.
“Neurath took it upon herself to examine the detailed findings of U. Scott’s team. She discovered further anomalies and brought them to my attention. I confirmed her observations and realized the issue must be escalated. In addition to the breakdown of operational discipline in the Moscow away team, there is some evidence that Scott has been, ah, relocating skeletons from the family closet into the oubliette, if you follow me.”
“You have evidence.”
“Indeed.” Bayreuth suppressed an urge to shuffle. Hoechst made him nervous; she was far from the worst mistress he’d served — quite the contrary — but he’d never yet seen her smile. He had a horrible feeling that he was about to, and the consequences made him increasingly uneasy. Her dislike of U. Vannevar Scott needed no explanation — they were of different clades, and in no way compatible other than their service to the ultimate — but it was to be devoutly hoped that none of it rubbed off on him. The wars of the bosses at overstaffsupervisor level and above were best avoided if you wanted to keep your head, much less aspire to those heights yourself one day.
“Disclose it.”
Bayreuth took a deep breath. You can’t back out now. “A major weak link has come to light. It turns out that Scott’s team established an MO by which all traffic to and from Moscow went through a single choke point. The theory was that in event of a leak, only the one location would require sanitizing. Leaving aside the question of backup routing and fail-over capacity, this means that the immigration desk at this one location held a complete audit trail of all our agents’ movements in and out of the system.”
U. Portia Hoechst frowned very slightly. “I do not follow your argument. Surely this would have been destroyed by the Zero Incident … ?”
Bayreuth shook his head slowly and watched her eyes widen. “The bottleneck they picked was an isolated fuel dump and immigration post about a parsec from Moscow. It was evacuated some time ago, before the shock wave hit. U. Scott sent a proxy squad to tidy up any loose ends on the station, trash the immigration records, liquidate any witnesses, that sort of thing. Doubtless if it had worked properly it would have been an elegant and sufficient solution to the problem, but it would appear that a number of unexplained incidents occurred during the evacuation. Such as his written instructions to the agent on-site going missing, such as the failure to return all copies of the backup dumps from the sealed immigration desk, and possibly more. There is some question over a classified log of the experimental protocols that were then in progress, which appears to have been misplaced during the evacuation. The agent sent dogs, boss. State security dogs borrowed from the Dresdener Foreign Office. He seemed to think that sending a proper sterilization team to do the job by the book was unnecessary. All swept under the rug, of course, the evidence securely encrypted — that’s why it’s taken so long to come to light.”
“Oh dear.” Hoechst grinned at him. “Is that all?” she asked warmly, and Bayreuth shivered. From being
cold as ice, suddenly Hoechst had warmed to him. “And he failed to report this?”
Bayreuth nodded. He didn’t trust himself to speak right then.
“And your channel into Scott’s department…” She raised an eyebrow.
“The channel is a very personal friend of Otto Neurath,” he emphasized. “However you decide to act on this information, I would ask you to behave leniently in her case. I believe Otto shows a lot of potential for intelligent action in support of his superior’s goals, and an indelicate response to his special friend might, ah, compromise his future utility. Parenthetically speaking.”
“Oh, Georg. What kind of monster do you take me for?” The terrible smile disappeared. “I’m not stupid, you know. Or bloodthirsty. At least, not needlessly.” She snorted. “Otto can keep his toy, once her loyalties have been retargeted on our team. I won’t break her for him.” Bayreuth nodded, relieved. Her restraint, for which he could claim responsibility, would only serve to bind Otto tighter to his rising faction. “As for you—” the terrifying grin was back — “how would you like to open discussions with Scott’s department, about our forthcoming merger?”
“Me?” He blinked, shocked.
“Yes, you.” She nodded. “I’ve been thinking you deserved the added opportunities that come with an elevated degree of responsibility for some time now, Georg. What was that phrase? A lot of potential for intelligent action in support of his superior’s goals, I think you said.”
“Why, I’m deeply grateful, but—”
“Don’t be. Not yet.” She gestured out through the window, at the terrace of rosebushes and the garden beyond the ha-ha, the walls and trees and the avenue leading uphill to the stately home. “If what you’re telling me is correct, we have a serious leak to fix. And I think I may need to fix it on-site. I’ve been weaving destinies from behind a desk for too long, Georg. Scott’s mistake is typical of what happens when you stay out of the field and lose touch with reality.”
“Are you going to travel in person, then? What about your estates and committees—”
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