“I’m going to find you, and you’re going to wish you’d committed suicide first,” she told the face frozen to the screen. “And then—” her eyebrows furrowed — “I’m going to…” Going to do what?
Steffi leaned back her chair and closed her eyes, forcing the tight ball of rage back into the recesses of her skull, out of the way until it was needed. Where do I stand? She had the key to their bank accounts, if she needed it. And she had a couple of other keys, picked up here or there. She’d been in an office in Turku and a roadside rest stop on Eiger’s World, and a house on Earth, too, all in the past six months. Sven had done his homework before taking on the job, explained the alarming consequences of success to her and the importance of finding the keys. There’d been no point rummaging by the roadside, but she had two of them in her pocket, now, keys to the gates of hell itself. That had to count for something, didn’t it? And if the dim-witted UN diplomats didn’t know who she was, then all that left was the ReMastered.
If I can take them out of the picture, I can become Lieutenant Steffi Grace, and nobody will know any different, she realized. Or I can try for the third key, and access to a Muscovite diplomatic channel. She began to smile, her lips pulling back from her teeth in an expression very close to a feral snarl. See how they like it when I derail their plans. She sat up and leaned toward the pilot console. “Bridge systems, get me the full station package on our current port. Display dockside schematics on window four. Do you have access to the loading bay external cameras? Do you have access to the station communications network? Good. Record new job sequence, activation key rosebud.”
“You’re going to maroon us,” Wednesday said flatly. She took a stride toward the desk, but a tense motion with a gun barrel stopped her sharply. She turned to stare at Frank, wringing her hands together. Frank raised an eyebrow at her. What can I do about it? he thought, his stomach turning over. Why couldn’t you have stayed hidden?
“I’m not going to leave you alone for long.” Hoechst shrugged. “My own ship’s heading for home with a message too secret to trust to certain, shall we say, monitored channels. While it’s gone I need to take the Romanov on a little errand. I’m mopping up after my predecessor — one U. Vannevar Scott — who got a little bit too big for his boots.” That flickering smile. Almost without willing it Frank found himself staring at Wednesday. She looked as scared as he felt, her face drained and pale, but resolute, the condemned facing the scaffold. He forced himself to look back at Hoechst. The blinking status display in his left eye told its own story: every word that hit his ears was stripped down to its constituent bits, entangled with a qubit interface somewhere in the magical weirdness of a causal channel, the other end of which would pipe the data into Eric’s inbox. Let’s see how topical we can make this news, shall we, he thought at Hoechst, feeling the fear slowly turn to a warm glow of triumphant accomplishment. J’accuse!
“Scott decided to carve out his own little Directorate,” Hoechst continued, oblivious to the true size of her potential audience. “First, he needed a lever. That lever was going to be a bucolic backwater called Moscow. He got funding and clearance to operate on Moscow by offering the Directorate a new way of developing weapons forbidden by the Enemy — you call it the Eschaton — like temporal ablators. Moscow was going to be his weapons proving ground, a backwater nobody would expect to be going after causality-violation devices. Actually he wanted to be dictator of a whole bunch of planets, and Moscow was going to be his tool of conquest — also his insurance against the wrath of the High Directorate. But he got sloppy. He puppetized half the Muscovite military high command — an administrative backwater on that planet, nobody paid much attention to them — and thoroughly subverted the interstellar deterrent group. But then he decided to accelerate the weapons test program he’d promised the Directorate and use them himself instead of the original clumsy R-bomb plan.”
Wednesday stared at her. “You’re telling me the nova was a fucked-up weapons test?”
“Well, sure. In fact, it was an unauthorized fuck up.” Hoechst looked pensive. She reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out a small key, placing it very carefully in the middle of the desk in front of her. “We all make mistakes. In Scott’s case, it was his last; he’d gotten sloppy, and the — my boss — cleared me to take him down and rectify the situation. That was before we drained him and discovered certain unpleasant facts about his treason. That cartridge” — she held out a hand toward Wednesday — “is one of the loose ends. Immigration records of Scott’s agents moving in and out of Moscow. And details of the weapons project and the test schedule. Nothing we want to leave lying around. It’s a severe political embarrassment.”
“There’s more, isn’t there?” Frank asked, fascinated.
“Well, no shit!” Hoechst looked at him curiously, as if wondering why he was so interested in the abstract issues, rather than the proximate fate of his own skin. “There’s a flight of four R-bombs coming.” She frowned. “The cover story is that they’re aimed at New Dresden. And that’s what the Muscovite diplomats think.”
“What did he—”
“Shut the fuck up!” Hoechst frowned. She tapped one finger on the key. “They’re supposed to be running on New Dresden. That’s the official target ops plan that was on file, isn’t it? That’s what the Muscovite diplomats think. And they’re next to invisible when they’re under way. Except our fucking asshole Ubermensch Vannevar Scott was too cute by half. While he was puppetizing the Muscovite Defense Ministry, the first group he hit was the deterrence operations staff, including the flight crew of one of the bombers — the one that isn’t responding to messages. He was planning his defection at least ten years before Moscow went bang: one of those fucking bombers is running on Newpeace, our new regional capital, which is about as distant from Moscow as New Dresden.
“Not many ReMastered know this,” she added drily, “and my boss wants to keep it that way.”
Frank sat up straight. “Are you telling us the business with New Dresden, the ambassadors—”
“I haven’t been bumping off foreign diplomats.” She shook her head vehemently. “That was Scott’s plan. I told you he was sloppy, didn’t I? When things went wrong, when Moscow Prime exploded, he took steps to sweep the dirt under the rug. He paid an extremely accomplished assassin, the one you called Svengali.” For a moment she looked extremely tired. “Which is presumably what brought you aboard the Romanov,” she murmured in Rachel’s direction. Rachel stared at her, face impassive. “Svengali won’t be bothering us anymore, needless to say.”
“You want me to believe that this was all one man’s rogue operation?” Rachel asked, her voice low and controlled.
“Pretty much.” For a moment Hoechst looked terribly old. “Don’t underestimate him: U. Scott was one of the highest-ranking officials in, ah, External State Security. The foreign espionage service, in other words. And he was planning a coup. He was going to take Moscow and use the R-bombs to hold the entire Directorate at bay, and he was going to leverage his takeover of Moscow to destabilize New Dresden, via the trade war. He was already infiltrating the Dresden Foreign Ministry — without authorization. If he succeeded, he’d have had two planets, the beginnings of his own pocket interstellar empire.” She looked at Frank, meeting his eyes. “I know what you think of us. Regardless of that, whatever you think of our ideology, we are not insane, and we are not suicidal. One of the goals of the ReMastered Directorate is to render interstellar warfare not merely unthinkable, but impossible. Scott had to go.”