Rachel glared at the camera: “You were too busy to notice some asshole trying to blow up the whole of Geneva?”
“You were involved in that?” George looked astonished. “I assure you, I didn’t know — but this is far more important.”
“Don’t.” She yawned. “Just spill it.”
“I’ll be giving everybody the full briefing en route—”
“Everybody? How many people are you bringing in? What do you mean by en route — and how long is this going to take?”
George shrugged uncomfortably. “I can’t tell you that. Just plan for at least a month.”
“A month. Shit.” Rachel frowned at Martin’s expression of dismay. “This would be out-of-system, then?”
“Er, I can’t confirm or deny, but that’s a good guess.”
“Open-ended.”
“Yes.”
“Diplomatic. Black-bag. Or you wouldn’t want me along.”
“I-can-neither-confirm-nor-deny-that. At this time. Obviously.”
“You bastard!” she breathed. “No, not you, George.” She shook her head. “You realize I’m due about six years’ sabbatical, coming up in three months? Do you also realize I got married a couple of months ago and we’re planning on starting a family? What about my partner?”
George took a deep breath. He looked unhappy. “What do you want?”
“I want a—”
Rachel stopped dead for a moment. Code red, she thought, an icy sense of dread insinuating itself into her tired head. That’s really serious, isn’t it? Code red was reserved for war alerts — not necessarily ones that would bring the Security Council into play, but the code didn’t get used if shots weren’t about to be fired. Which meant …
“—I want a double berth,” she snapped. “I come back from a year-long clusterfuck in the New Republic, get hauled over the coals by some harpy from head office because of the hospitality budget, have to deal with the mess when some lunatic is visited by the Plutonium Fairy and tries to landscape downtown Geneva by way of an art happening because he can’t get a handjob, and now you want to drag me away from home and hearth on a wild goose chase into the back of nowhere: I figure a double berth is the least you can do for me.”
“Oh.” George held up his right hand. “Excuse me, just a moment.” His eyes flickered with laser speckle as some urgent news beamed straight onto his retinas. “You haven’t registered a change of status. I didn’t realize—”
“Damn right you didn’t realize. No long solo postings anymore, George, not for the foreseeable and not without planning.”
“Well.” He looked thoughtful. “We need you right now. But…” He rubbed his chin. “Look, I’ll try to get your husband or wife a diplomatic passport and a ticket out to, er, the embassy destination on the next available transport. But we need you, now, no messing.”
Rachel shook her head. “Not good enough. Martin comes along, or I don’t go.”
Across the bedroom, Martin crossed his arms, shrugged, miming incomprehension. Rachel pretended not to see.
“If that’s your final word,” George said slowly. He thought for a minute. “I think I can manage that, but only if your husband consents to sign on as a staff intern. There’s a fast courier ship waiting in orbit; this isn’t a joyride. Are you willing to do that?”
Rachel glanced sidelong at Martin. “Are you?”
He raised an eyebrow, then after a moment he nodded. “It’ll do. I’ve got nothing coming up in the next month, anyway. If you think … ?”
“I do.” She forced herself to smile at him, then glanced back in-field at George. “He’ll take it.”
“Good,” George said briskly. “If you can be ready to travel in an hour, that would be good. No need to bring clothing or supplies — there’s a budget for that en route. Just bring yourselves. Um, this child — it hasn’t been fertilized yet? Neither you nor your husband is pregnant, I hope?”
“No.” Rachel shook her head. “You want us in one hour? You can’t even hint what this is about?”
For a moment Cho looked haggard. “Not until we’re under way,” he said quietly. “It’s a maximum-security issue. But … about today. How many lives did you save?”
“Um. Three hundred kilotons would be … all of Geneva, if you want to look at it like that. About half a million people. Call it half of them dead, the other half homeless, if our little friend had got his shit together. Why?”
“Because about a thousand times that many people will die if we don’t pull this one off,” George said with quiet vehemence. “And that’s just for starters…”
ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER EDITORIAL
The Times of London — thundering the news since 1785! Now brought to you by Frank the Nose, sponsored by Consolidated Vultee Interstellar, Mariposa Interstructures, Bank Muamalat al-Failaka, CyberMouse™, and The First Universal Church of Kermit.
I want to talk to you about the disaster in New Moscow. Even if you phrase it in the morally bankrupt language of so-called objective journalism, this is a truly sickening mess, the kind of colossal eight-way clusterfuck that exists to keep angels, warbloggers, and every other species of disaster whore as happy as a wino in a whisky barrel. Like most people downline in this venerable organ’s light cone, you probably think New Moscow is someone else’s headache — a two-cow backwater McWorld populated by sinister sheep-swivers who tried messing around with godbreaker tech and got whacked, hard, by the Eschaton. A bit of hard gamma, a pretty new nebula, and it’ll all blow over in a couple more years. A recent flash survey commissioned by this blog found that 69 percent of earthworms had never heard of New Moscow; of those who had, 87 percent were sure that it has nothing to do with Terrestrial politics, and by the way, blow jobs aren’t really sexual intercourse, that old pervert Santa Claus comes down your chimney every December 25, and the Earth is flat.
Well, now is the time to peel back the foreskin of misconception and apply the wire brush of enlightenment to this mass of sticky half-truths and lies. The truth hurts, but not as much as the consequences of willful ignorance.
I was on New Moscow nine years ago, doing the usual peripatetic long-haul circuit climb out through the fleshpots of Septagon, the rural sprawl of Two Rivers, and whatever wild overgeneralizations you prefer to pin on places like Al-Assad, Brunei, and Beethoven. New Moscow was — I tell you three times — not a bucolic rural backwater. It’s kind of hard to be a bucolic rural backwater planet when you’ve got six continental-scale state governments participating in a planetary federation, cities the size of Memphis, Ajuba, and Tokyo, and an orbital infrastructure capable of building fusion-powered interplanetary freighters.
Insular is a word you might want to try pinning on New Moscow — how cosmopolitan can you be, with only two hundred million citizens and no shipyards capable of manufacturing FTL drive kernels? — but they maintained their core industrial competences better than many postintervention colonies, and they lived pretty well. Just because your ancestors came from Iowa and Kansas and you talk like you’re yawning the whole time, it does not follow that you are stupid, primitive, inbred, or a mad imperialist set on galactic conquest. I found the people of New Moscow to be generally as tolerant, friendly, open-minded, outward-looking, energetic, funny and humane as any other people I’ve known. If you were looking for the stereotypical McWorld, Moscow would be it: settled by unwilling refugees from the twenty-first-century Euro-American mainstream culture, people who took enlightenment values, representative democracy, mutual tolerance, and religious freedom as axioms, and built a civilization on that basis. A McWorld, we call them — bland, comfortable, tolerant, heirs to the Western historical tradition. Another description that fits would be: boring.