The voucher blinked its wide, dark, excessively cute eyes at her. “Good.” She dropped it back in her pocket and stretched out on the huge expanse of padded cushions behind her. For a moment she wondered if she should have asked the voucher to leave her a bottle of something drinkable, then dismissed the thought. Privacy was more important just then, and besides, if there was something to drink, the way her luck was running right now she’d probably drink herself into a sodden stupor and choke on her own vomit. She held her hand to her face. “Get me Herman.”
“I’m here.” The voice was anonymous, bland.
“You corpsefucker,” she hissed.
“I can tell you what is happening,” said Herman.
After a moment, she made a noise.
“On Old Newfoundland, before the evacuation. I made a mistake, Wednesday.”
“No shit.”
“Like the mistake you made in attempting to return home. There were skin particles on the outside of your jacket, Wednesday. Both you and your friend. It will take at least four hours for the police forensics to identify your genome, but then you may be suspected of vandalism at best, conspiracy to commit murder at worst. Your friend will be eliminated from the investigation rapidly, but you may be unable to return home until the situation is resolved. Did you want that to happen to you?”
She couldn’t see anything. Her rings, biting into the palm of her hand, were her only contact with reality.
“What did you say?”
“I said.” She took a deep breath and tried to remember. “Meant to say. What makes you think this is home?”
“You live here.”
“That’s not good enough.” She fell silent. Herman, too, fell silent for a few seconds. “I would have protected your family if I could.”
“What do you mean, if?”
“I thought there were only two or three hunters. I was wrong. Earlier, I thought events were of no significance that were highly significant. I should not have left you alone here. I should not have let your family stay here, so close to the resettlement hub. I should not have let you settle in Septagon at all.”
“What do you want?” Her voice rose to a squeak that she hated.
“I want you to be my helper again.” Pause. “I want you to go on a voyage for me. You will be provided with money. There will be an errand. Then you can let go. It will take less than two hundred days, no longer.”
“I want my family back. I want…” She couldn’t go on.
“I cannot give you your parents.” Herman sounded infinitely remote, flat, abhuman. “But if you work for me, the hunters who took them will suffer a setback. And they will never trouble you again.”
MURDER BY NUMBERS
Forty light years from Earth, the yacht Gloriana congealed out of the cold emptiness between stars, emitting an electric blue flare of Cerenkov radiation. If it drifted at the residual velocity carried over from its last reference frame shift, it would take nearly two hundred years to cover the distance separating it from the star system it was heading for, but drifting wasn’t the name of the game. After only a few minutes the ship’s inertial transfer unit came online. Lidar probed the space ahead for obstacles as the yacht came under acceleration.
The Gloriana had started life as a billionaire’s toy, but these days almost half the passenger volume was filled by the extensive diplomatic function spaces of a mobile embassy. The ship — and its three sisters — existed because it was cheaper for the UN to swallow the extra costs of running a starship than maintaining consulates on the couple of hundred planets that received visitors from Earth more than once in a decade but less than a thousand times a year. Now running between jump zones at full acceleration, Gloriana had been under way for a week; over the course of which time Rachel Mansour had become increasingly annoyed and worried by George Cho’s refusal to disclose the purpose or destination of the mission.
Finally, however, it looked as if she was about to get some answers.
The conference room was walled in a false woodgrain veneer that hardly sufficed to cover the smart skin guts of the ship. Tricked out in natural surfaces, the whole thing was as artificial as a cyborg smile. Maybe the big boardroom table (carved in the ornate intricacies of the neo-retrogothic fad of a century earlier) was made of wood, but Rachel wasn’t betting on it. She glanced round the occupied chairs as she sat down, recognizing Prifkin, Jane Hill, Chi Tranh, and Gail Jordan. George’s little munchkins are out in force, she noted ironically. She’d worked with most of them in the past; the lack of new faces told its own story.
“I take it nothing’s running to schedule, is it?”
“The best-laid plans of mice and men,” Cho commented apologetically. “You can lock the door now,” he told Pritkin. “I’ve got some papers for you, dumb hard copy only, and they do not leave this room.” He reached under the desk and retrieved six fat files, their covers banded with red and yellow stripes, then tapped a virtual button on his pad. There was a faint hissing sound from the air conditioning. “We’re now firewalled from the rest of the ship. No bandwidth, bottled air, and the ship itself isn’t within hailing distance of anything else … you can’t be too careful with this stuff.”
Rachel’s skin crawled. Last time she’d seen George put on the full-dress, loose-lips-sink-ships song and dance it had been the run in to the mess on Rochard’s World. Which had involved dirty-tricks black ops that could have backfired to the extent of starting an interstellar war. “How does this rate with the last, uh, mission?” she asked.
“Messier. All turn to page 114.” There was a rustle of dumb paper as everybody opened their files simultaneously. Someone whistled tunelessly, and Rachel glanced up in time to see Gail looking startled as she studied the page. Rachel began to read just in time for George to derail her concentration by talking. “Moscow. Named after the imperial capital of Idaho rather than the place in Europe, except Idaho didn’t have an empire back when the Eschaton grabbed a million confused Midwestemers from the first republic and stuffed them through a wormhole leading to the planetary surface.”
The words on the page swam before Rachel’s eyes: Bill of indictment in re: signatories of the Geneva Conventions on Causality Violation versus Persons Unknown responsible for the murder of—
“Moscow was, bluntly, another boring McWorld. And a bit backward, even by those standards. But it had a single — and fairly enlightened — federal government, a single language, and no history of genocide, nuclear war, cannibalism, slavery, or anything else very unpleasant to explain it. It wasn’t Utopia, but neither was it hell. In fact, I’d have said the Muscovites were rather nice. Easygoing, friendly, laid-back, a little sleepy. Unlike whoever murdered them.”
Rachel leaned back in her chair and watched George. Cho was a diplomat, and a polished and experienced gambler who liked nothing better than a game of three-stud poker — so the experience of seeing him actually looking angry and upset about something was a novelty in its own right. The wall behind him showed supporting evidence. Rippling fields of grain as far as the eyes could see, a city rising — if that was the word for an urban sprawl where only city hall was more than three stories high — from the feet of blue-tinted mountains, white-painted houses, huge automated factory complexes, wide empty roads stretching forever under a sky the color of bluebells.
“Not everyone on Moscow was totally laid-back,” George continued, after taking a sip from his water glass. “They had a small military, mostly equipped for disaster relief work — and a deterrent. Antimatter-fueled, ramscoop-assisted bombers, hanging out in the Oort cloud, about twelve light hours out.”
The wall dissolved into icy interstellar darkness and a close-up of a starship — not an elegant FTL yacht like this one, with the spherical bump of its drive kernel squatting beneath a tower of accommodation and cargo decks, but the evil angular lines of a planet-buster. Most of the slower-than-light bomber consisted of fuel containment vessels, and the huge inverted funnel of the ram field generator. Sc
ooping up interstellar hydrogen for reaction mass, using antimatter to energize it, the warship could boost itself to more than 80 percent of lightspeed in a matter of weeks. Steering toward a target, it would then drift until it was time for terminal approach. Then, instead of decelerating, the crew and the ramscoop would separate and make their own way — leaving the remains of the ship to slam into the target planet.
“This is a reconstruction of a Muscovite Vindicator-class second-strike STL bomber. Our best intelligence gives it a maximum tau factor of point two and a dry rest mass of three kilotons — extremely high for the product of a relatively backward world — with an aggregate kinetic yield of 120 million megatons. It’s probably designed to prefragment prior to impact, and coming in at 80 percent of lightspeed with several hundred penetration aids and a wake shield against ablator clouds, it would be able to saturate any reasonable planetary ballistic defense system. It would deliver about 20 percent more energy than the Chicxulub impactor that hit Earth 65 million years ago, enough to devastate a continent and trigger a dinosaur winter. In other words, it’s a pretty typical second-strike slower-than-light deterrent for a planet that didn’t have any enemies or major foreign policy engagements; an insurance policy against invaders.
“Moscow had four of these monsters, and we know for sure that the early warning system alerted them before the stellar shock front reached their fire-bases; we know at least three of them came under acceleration. What happened to the fourth ship is unclear at this time. They probably took some serious damage from the nova, but we have to assume that those four ships are engaged on a strike mission.”
George sat down again and refilled his water glass. Rachel shivered slightly. They launched? But where to? The idea was disquieting, even revolting: “Has anyone ever actually launched an STL deterrent before, that you know of? I don’t think I’ve ever heard of one being used…”
“May I?” It was Chi Tranh, lean-featured and quiet, the expert on weapons of mass destruction and, sometimes, her back-office researcher. Not a field agent, but George had evidently included him in the operation from the start, judging by the way he nodded along. “The answer is no,” said Tranh. “We have never seen one of these weapons systems used in anger. Nobody can start a war using STL ships — it would give years for a pre-emptive retaliatory strike. The idea is simply to have a deterrent — a club up your sleeve that makes the cost of invading and occupying your world too expensive for an aggressor to bear. This is a first, at least within our light cone.” He sat back and nodded at George.
“Who were they directed at?” Gail asked tentatively. “I mean, who would do such a thing? How are they controlled? Have they—” She looked bewildered, which gave Rachel little satisfaction: the easily flustered protocol officer wasn’t her first choice of someone to bring into the inner circle. What was George thinking? she wondered.
“Peace.” George made soothing gestures with his left hand. “We, um … at the time of the event, Moscow was engaged in heated and unpleasant trade discussions with New Dresden. That’s in your briefing documents, too, by the way. A previous trade deal cemented between a Muscovite delegation and the central committee of the Balearic Federation collapsed when the, um, Balearics were finally forced to sue for peace with the provisional government of Novy Srebrenicza. Prior to the peace of ’62, the Balearics controlled the planet’s sole surviving skyhook, which gave them a chokehold on the surface-to-orbit bulk freight trade. But after ’62, the Patriotic Homeland Front was running the show.
They decided to renegotiate several of their local bilateral trade arrangements — in their favor, of course — to help with the reconstruction. Things got extremely heated when they impounded a Muscovite starship and confiscated its cargo: differential levels of engineering support orbit-side in both systems meant that, although New Dresden had more turmoil and a war to recover from, heavy shipping was a proportionately much more expensive item on Moscow, which didn’t have the tech base to fabricate drive kernels. The Muscovites’ consulate was downsized to a negotiating core, and a large chunk of the Dresdener embassy was expelled a couple of weeks before the, ah, event.”
“So the bombers launched, on New Dresden,” Rachel concluded with a sinking feeling.
“We, um, think so,” said George. “We’re not sure. Tranh?”
“We can’t track RAIR bombers once they go ballistic,” said Tranh. “It’s standard procedure to launch in a random direction at high delta-vee, crank up to about point one light, then shut down and drift for a bit before lining up on the real target and boosting steadily to cruise speed. The drive torch is highly directional, and if nobody is in line behind it to see the gamma signature, it’s easy to miss. Especially as the bombers launch from out in the Oort cloud and aim their exhausts to miss the inner system completely during the initial boost phase. Once they’re under way the crew, usually four or six of them, enter suspended animation for a month or more, then the Captain wakes up and uses the bomber’s causal channel to establish contact with one of the remaining consulates or embassies. He or she also opens any sealed orders. In this case, we’ve been informed — through confidential channels, initially by the Muscovite embassy on Earth — that a week before Moscow was hit, the Governor-General’s office updated the default fire plan for the V-force to target New Dresden. We don’t know why she did that, but the trade dispute…” Tranh trailed off.
“That’s the situation.” George shook his head. “Doubtless the Muscovite government didn’t expect to be attacked by New Dresden — but as a precaution they selected New Dresden as a default target, leaving the fallout for the diplomatic corps to deal with. New Dresden is thirty-six light years from Moscow, so at full bore the bombers can be there in forty years. Thirty-five now, and counting. New Dresden has a population of over eight hundred million. There is no way, even if we install extra skyhooks and obtain maximum cooperation from the neighbors, that we can evacuate nearly a billion people — the required cubage, over thirty million seats a year, exceeds the entire terrestrial registered merchant fleet’s capacity. Never mind the refugee problem — who’d take them in?”
“I don’t believe they could be so stupid!” Gail said vehemently. Rachel watched her cautiously. Gail might be good at organizing the diplomatic niceties, but in some respects she was very naive. “How could they? Is there a recall signal?”
“Yes, there’s a recall code,” George admitted. “The problem is getting the surviving members of the Muscovite diplomatic corps to send it.”
Rachel flipped through the pages of her briefing document rapidly. Ah, yes, I was afraid it would be something like this. Background: the bombers communicated with the remaining embassies via causal channel. In the absence of a recall code, the bombers would proceed on a strike mission to the designated target, their crews in cold sleep for most of the voyage. After conducting the attack, the crew — with their ramscoops and life-support modules — could decelerate or cruise on to another system at near lightspeed. If a recall code was received first, standard procedure was for the crew to burn their remaining fuel, braking to a halt in deep space, and for the embassy to lay on a rescue ship to remove the crew, laying scuttling charges to decommission the bombers in situ.
“How is a recall code sent?” Rachel inquired.
“Via causal channel from one of the embassies,” said Tranh. “Because the bombers are strictly STL, they maintain contact with the government-in-exile. The ambassadors possess authentication tokens that the bomber crews can use to confirm their identity. Having authenticated themselves, they have a vote code system — if two or more of them send a recall code, the bomber crews are required to stand down and disclose their position and vector for a decommissioning flight. But — and this is a big but — there’s also a coercion code. It is known only to the ambassadors, like the recall code, and if three or more ambassadors send the coercion code, the bomber crews are required to destroy their causal channel and proceed to the target. The coercion code overr
ides the recall code; the theory is that it will only be used if an aggressor has somehow managed to lay his or her hands on an ambassador and is holding a gun to their head. The ambassadors can tell the black hats the wrong code and, if three or more of them are under duress, ensure that the strike mission goes forward.”
“Oh. Oh.” Gail shook her head. “Those poor people! How many ambassadors do we have to work on? With?”
George tapped the tabletop. “It’s in your dossier. There were twelve full-dress embassies from Moscow in residence at the time of the disaster. Unfortunately, two of the ambassadors had been recalled for consultation immediately before the incident, and they are presumed dead. Of the remaining ten, one committed suicide immediately, one died in a vehicular accident six months later — it was ruled an accident; he seems to have fallen in front of a train — and, well, this is where it gets interesting. I hope you all have strong stomachs…”
After the meeting she caught up with Martin. He was idling on the promenade deck, playing with the image enhancement widgets on the main viewing window.
“How did it go?” he asked, glancing up at her from the chaise longue. He seemed to be treating the journey as an enforced vacation, she noticed; dressing casually, lounging around, catching up on his reading and viewing, spending his surplus energy in the gym. But he looked worried now, as if she’d brought a storm cloud of depression in with her.
“It’s a lot to swallow. Budge over.” He made some space for her to sit down. “I want a drink.”
“I’ll get you one. What do you—”
“No, don’t. I said I wanted a drink, not that I’m going to have one.”
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