Except, someone fucking murdered them.
“Edbot: tweak my scat-profile down to point seven. I think I’m laying it on a bit heavily here.”
Shocked at the bad language? Good: I wanted to get your attention. What happened on New Moscow is shocking because it could have happened anywhere. It could have happened right here, on Earth — where you probably are right now, seeing how 70 percent of you readers are left-behinds — or on Marid’s world. It could even have happened to the obnoxious imperialist fuckwits from Orion’s Law or the quiet enlightened muslim technocrats of Bohraj. We are all vulnerable, because whoever vaped New Moscow has gotten clean away with a monstrous crime, and as long as there’s no formal investigation, they’re going to think maybe they can do it again. And I’m telling you now, whoever they are they are not a Muscovite.
The Times has managed to secure exclusive access to the Sixfold State Commission’s last available internal government budget, passed just under two years before the Zero Incident. (The most recent budget was not publicly released prior to the disaster.) We believe these data to be accurate, and I can assure you that military spending which might have provoked an Eschatological incursion was not even on the radar. A detailed audit [Edbot: add hyperlinks for supplementary material] shows that the official military spend was 270 million a year on maintaining the STL deterrent fleet, and another 600 mil on civil defense: mostly against natural disasters. There was not enough slack in the budget to buy more than another 100 mil in black project spend, and New Moscow’s shipyards — crucially — lacked the expertise and tooling to build or repair FTL fabrications. No causality-violation warfare here, folks, there’s nothing to see, nothing that might have caught the attention of the big E, no infrastructure for developing forbidden weapons or violating Rule Three. Accusing these guys of secretly building a causality-violation weapon just doesn’t hold water. On the other hand, they had just signed a cooperation and collaboration treaty with their nasty neighbors in Newpeace, which suggests several unpleasant possibilities, but nothing firm enough to print in a newsblog. At least, not yet.
Bottom line, someone did it to them. Probably some nasty sneaky human faction with weapons of mass destruction and an axe to grind against Moscow’s government, a perceived grudge that drove them to massacre millions of innocents purely to avenge some slight inflicted, no doubt, in complete ignorance of the fact that it was a slight. In other words, an act of genocide.
Finally: to the gradgrind scum in the feedback forum who says that the destruction of New Moscow by Act of Weakly Godlike Being means we should withhold funds from the aid and hardship budget to help resettle the refugees, all I can say is fuck off and die. You fill me with contempt. I am so angry that I shouldn’t really be writing this; I’m surprised the keyboard isn’t melting under my fingertips. I’m appalled that the question ever arose in the first place. You aren’t fit to be allowed to read the Times, and I’m canceling your subscription forthwith. You are a disgrace to the human species — kindly become extinct.
Ends (Times Leader)
Frank stubbed out his cigar angrily, grinding what was left of it into the ashtray with his thumb. “Fuck ’em,” he grumbled to himself. “Fuck ’em.” He took a deep breath, sucking in the blue soup that passed for air in his cramped stateroom. Sooner or later he’d have to turn the ventilation back on and pull down the plastic film he’d spread all over the smoke detector — otherwise, the life-support stewards would come round and give him their usual patronizing-but-polite lecture on shipboard life-support systems — but for now he took an obscure comfort in his ability to inhale the smog of his choice. Everything else about this ship was out of his grasp, locked down like a mobile theme park, and as a compulsive control-twiddler, Frank was pathologically uncomfortable with any environment he couldn’t mess up to his heart’s content.
Frank was pissed. He was so angry he had to get up and walk, before he gave in to the temptation to start banging his head on the bulkhead. It was one of his biggest problems, he admitted: he had an appalling capacity to feel other people’s pain. If he’d been able to have it surgically removed, he’d have done so — maybe he’d then have been able to make a career for himself in politics. But as it was, given his vocation, it just gave him violent conscience-aches. Especially when, as on this cruise, he was going to have to exorcise some of his own ghosts. So he blinked away the workflow and copy windows, folded up his keyboard and dropped it in a pocket, stood up, took a final deep breath of the blue toxic waste cloud — then opened the door for the first time in nearly twenty-four hours.
Somewhere in the crew quarters of the Romanov an alarm siren was probably whooping: “Danger! The troll in suite B312 has emerged! Send deodorant spray and prepare to decontaminate corridor B3! Danger! Danger! Chemical warfare alert!” He sniffed the unnaturally pure air, nostrils flaring. A big man, with a beetling brow and an expressive nose, one of his ex-lovers had described him as resembling a male silverback gorilla, a resemblance that his silver-and-black close-cropped hair only emphasized. Right then his skin glowed with youthful vigor, and he was almost vibrating with energy: he’d had his first telomere reset and aging fix only six months before, and was filled with a restless teenage exuberance that he’d almost forgotten existed. It was overflowing into his work by way of pugnacious editorials and take-no-prisoners prose, and after a few hours of writing it nearly had him bouncing off the ceiling.
The corridor was lined with doorways and walled with plush beige carpet, recessed handholds, and safety nets ready to turn it into a series of safety cubes in event of off-axis acceleration. Here and there, recessed false windows looked out onto scenes of bucolic harmony, desert sunsets and sandy beaches, vying with lush tropical rain forests and breathtaking starscapes. Indirect lighting turned it into a shadowless tube, bland as a business hotel and twice as boring. And it smelled of synthetic pine.
Frank snorted as he ambled along the corridor. He detested and despised this aspect of interstellar travel. What was the point of embarking on a perilous journey to far-off worlds if the experience was much like checking into one of those expensively manicured racks of self-contained service apartments designed to appeal to the lowest-common-denominator shit-for-brains salesdrone? Hotels with carefully bland hand-painted artwork on the walls, a cupboard where the ready-meal of your choice would appear in a prepack ready to eat, and the ceiling above the emperor-sized bed was ready to screen a hundred thousand crap movies or play a million shit immersives.
Well, fuck ’em! Fuck the complacent assholes, and their trade-mission-to-the-stars quick buck mentality. Inward-looking, pampered, greedy, and unwilling to look at anything beyond the end of their noses that doesn’t come with a reassuringly expensive price tag attached. Fuck ’em and their consumer demand for bland, boring flying hotels with supercilious or patronizing hired help, and absolutely nothing that might give them any sign they weren’t in Kansas anymore, Toto, that they might actually be aboard a million tons of smart matter wrapped around a quantum black hole slipping across the event horizon of the observable universe on a wave of curved space-time. Gosh, if they realized what was happening, they might be disturbed, frightened, even! And that might make them less inclined to buy a ticket with WhiteStar in future, thus impacting the corporate bottom line, so …