“Ah—I’m honored,” said Vassily. He looked somewhat taken aback. A young officer, still sufficiently fresh from training that the varnish hadn’t eroded from his view of the universe, he looked up at the Citizen in awe. “Sir, humbly request permission to ask why? I mean, why now?”
“Because it’s about time you learned to do more than take minutes of committee meetings,” said the Citizen. His eyes gleamed behind their glasses; his moustache shuddered all the way out to its waxen points. “There comes a time when every officer needs to assume the full burden of his duties. I expect you have picked up at least a clue about how the job is done from the interminable reports you’ve been summarizing. Now it’s time to see if you can do it, no? On a low-risk assignment, I might add; I’m not sending you after the revolutionaries right away, ha-ha. So this afternoon you will go to sublevel two for field ops processing, then tomorrow you will start on the assignment. I expect to see a report on my desk, first thing every morning, starting the day after tomorrow. Show me what you can do!”
The next morning Martin was awakened by a peremptory rap on the door. “Telegram for Master Springfield!” called a delivery boy.
Martin pulled on a dressing gown and opened the door a crack. The telegram was passed inside; he signed for it quickly, pulled out the contents, and passed back the signed envelope. Blinking and bleary-eyed, he carried the message over to the window and pulled back the shutters to read it. It was a welcome surprise, if somewhat annoying to be woken for it—confirmation that his visa had been approved, his security vetting was complete, and that he was to report at 1800 that evening to the Navy beanstalk in South Austria for transit to the fleet shipyards in geosynchronous orbit.
Telegrams, he reflected, were so much less civilized than e-mail—the latter didn’t come with an officious youth who’d get you out of bed to sign for it. Such a shame that e-mail was unavailable in the New Republic and telegrams ubiquitous. But then again, e-mail was decentralized, telegrams anything but. And the New Republic was very keen on centralization.
He dressed, shaved, and made his way downstairs to the morning room to await his breakfast. He wore local garb—a dark jacket, tight breeches, boots, and a shirt with a ruff of lace at the collar—but of a subtly unfashionable cut, somehow betraying a lack of appreciation for the minutiae of fashion. Off-world styles, he found, tended to get in the way when trying to establish a working rapport with the locals: but if you looked just slightly odd, they’d sense your alienness without being overwhelmed by it, and make at least some allowances for your behavior. By any yardstick, the New Republic was an insular society, and interacting with it was difficult even for a man as well traveled as Martin, but at least the ordinary people made an effort.
He had become sufficiently accustomed to local customs that, rather than letting them irritate him, he was able to absorb each new affront with quiet resignation. The way the concierge stared down his patrician nose at him, or the stiff-collared chambermaids scurried by with downcast eyes, had become merely individual pieces in the complex jigsaw puzzle of Republican mores. The smell of wax polish and chlorine bleach, coal smoke from the boiler room, and leather seats in the dining room, were all alien, the odors of a society that hadn’t adapted to the age of plastic. Not all the local habits chafed. The morning’s news-sheet, folded crisply beside his seat at the breakfast table, provided a strangely evocative sense of homecoming—as if he had traveled on a voyage nearly three hundred years into the past of his own home culture, rather than 180 light-years out into the depths of space. Although, in a manner of speaking, the two voyages were exactly equivalent.
He breakfasted on butter mushrooms, sauteed goose eggs, and a particularly fine toasted sourdough rye bread, washed down with copious quantities of lemon tea. Finally, he left the room and made his way to the front desk.
“I would like to arrange transport,” he said. The duty clerk looked up, eyes distant and preoccupied. “By air, to the naval beanstalk at Klamovka, as soon as possible. I will be taking hand luggage only, and will not be checking out of my room, although I will be away for some days.”
“Ah, I see. Excuse me, sir.” The clerk hurried away into the maze of offices and tiny service rooms that hid behind the dark wood paneling of the hotel lobby.
He returned shortly thereafter, with the concierge in tow, a tall, stoop-shouldered man dressed head to foot in black, cadaverous and sunken-cheeked, who bore himself with the solemn dignity of a count or minor noble. “You require transport, sir?” asked the concierge.
“I’m going to the naval base at Klamovka,” Martin repeated slowly. “Today. I need transport arranging at short notice. I will be leaving my luggage at the hotel. I do not know how long I will be away, but I am not checking out.”
“I see, sir.” The concierge nodded at his subordinate, who scurried away and returned bearing three fat volumes— timetables for the various regional rail services. “I am afraid that no Zeppelin flights are scheduled between here and Klamovka until tomorrow. However, I believe you can get there this evening by train—if you leave immediately.”
“That will be fine,” said Martin. He had a nagging feeling that his immediate departure was the only thing he could do that would gratify the concierge—apart, perhaps, from dropping dead on the spot. “I’ll be back down here in five minutes. If your assistant could see to my tickets, please? On the tab.”
The concierge nodded, stony-faced. “On behalf of the hotel, I wish you a fruitful journey,” he intoned. “Marcus, see to this gentleman.” And off he stalked.
The clerk cracked open the first of the ledgers and glanced at Martin cautiously. “Which class, sir?”
“First.” If there was one thing that Martin had learned early, it was that the New Republic had some very strange ideas about class. He made up his mind. “I need to arrive before six o’clock tonight. I will be back here in five minutes. If you would be so good as to have my itinerary ready by then…”
“Yes, sir.” He left the clerk sweating over map and gazetteer, and climbed the four flights of stairs to his floor.
When he returned to the front desk, trailed by a footman with a bag in each hand, the clerk ushered him outside. “Your carnet, sir.” He pocketed the ornate travel document, itself as intricate as any passport. A steam coach was waiting. He climbed in, acknowledged the clerk’s bow with a nod, and the coach huffed away toward the railway station.
It was a damp and foggy morning, and Martin could barely see the ornate stone facade of the ministerial buildings from the windows of his carriage as they rolled past beside him.
The hotel rooms might lack telephones, there might be a political ban on networking and smart matter and a host of other conveniences, and there might be a class system out of the eighteenth century on Earth; but the New Republic had one thing going for it—its trains ran on time. PS 1347, the primary around which New Muscovy orbited, was a young third-generation G2 dwarf; it had formed less than two billion years ago (to Sol’s five), and consequently, the planetary crust of New Muscovy contained uranium ore active enough to sustain criticality without enrichment.
Martin’s coach drew up on the platform alongside the Trans-Peninsular Express. He climbed down from the cabin stiffly and glanced both ways: they’d drawn up a quarter of a kilometer down the marble tongue from the hulking engines, but still the best part of a kilometer away from the dismal tailings of fourth-class accommodation and mail. A majordomo, resplendent in bottle-green frock coat and gold braid, inspected his carnet before ushering him into a private compartment on the upper deck. The room was decorated in blue-dyed leather and old oak, trimmed in brass and gold leaf, and equipped with a marble-topped table and a bell-pull to summon service; it more closely resembled a smoking room back in the hotel than anything Martin associated with public transport.
As soon as the majordomo had left, Martin settled back in one of the deeply padded seats, drew the curtains aside to reveal the arching buttresses and curved roof of the
station, and opened his PA in book mode. Shortly thereafter, the train shuddered slightly and began to move: as the train slid out of the station, he glanced out of the window, unable to look away.
The city of New Prague was built just upstream from the tidal estuary of the River Vis; only the Basilisk, brooding atop a plug of eroded volcanic granite, rose much above the level of the plain. Indeed, the train would cruise through the lowlands using just one of its engines. The second reactor would only be brought to criticality when the train reached the foothills of the Apennines, the mountain range that separated the coastal peninsula from the continental interior of New Austria. Then the train would surge in a knife-straight line across nine hundred kilometers of desert before stopping, six hours later, at the foot of the Klamovka beanstalk.
The scene was quite extraordinary. Martin gazed at it in barely controlled awe. Though he didn’t like to admit it, he was something of a tourist, permanently searching for a sense of fresh beauty that he could secretly revel in. There wasn’t anything like this left on Earth; the wild ride of the twentieth century and the events that had followed the Singularity in the twenty-first had distorted the landscape of every industrialized nation. Even in the wake of the population crash, you couldn’t find open countryside, farms, hedges, and neatly planned villages—at least, not without also finding monorails, arcologies, fall-out hot spots, and the weird hillocks of the Final Structure. The lowland landscape through which the Trans-Peninsular Express ran resembled a vision of pre-postindustrial England, a bucolic dreamscape where the trains ran on time and the sun never set on the empire.
But railway journeys pale rapidly, and after half an hour, the train was racing through the valleys in a blur of steel and brass. Martin went back to his book, and was so engrossed in it that he barely noticed the door open and close—until a woman he had never seen before sat down opposite him and cleared her throat.
“Excuse me,” he said, looking up. “Are you sure you have the right compartment?”
She nodded. “Quite sure, thank you. I didn’t request an individual one. Did you?”
“I thought—” He fumbled in his jacket for his carnet. “Ah. I see.” He cursed the concierge silently, thumbed the PA off, then looked at her. “I thought I had a compartment to myself; I see I was wrong. Please accept my apologies.”
The woman nodded graciously. She had long black hair coiled in a bun, high cheekbones and brown eyes; her dark blue gown seemed expensively plain by this society’s standards. Probably a middle-class housewife, he guessed, but his ability to judge social status within the New Republic was still somewhat erratic. He couldn’t even make a stab at her age: heavy makeup, and the tight bodice, billowing skirts and puffed sleeves of capital fashion made an effective disguise.
“Are you going far?” she asked brightly.
“All the way to Klamovka, and thence up the naval beanstalk,” he said, somewhat surprised at this frank interrogation.
“What a coincidence; that’s where I’m going, too. You will excuse me for asking, but am I right in thinking you are not native to this area?”
She looked interested, to a degree that Martin found irritatingly intrusive. He shrugged. “No, I’m not.” He reopened his PA and attempted to bury his nose in it, but his unwanted traveling companion had other ideas.
“I take it from your accent that you are not native to this planet, either. And you’re going to the Admiralty yards. Would you mind me asking your business there?”
“Yes,” he said curtly, and stared pointedly at his PA. He hadn’t initially registered how forward she was being, at least for a woman of her social class, but it was beginning to set his nerves on edge, ringing alarms. Something about her didn’t feel quite right. Agent provocateur? he wondered. He had no intention of giving the secret police any further excuses to haul him in; he wanted them to think he’d learned the error of his ways and determined to reform.
“Hmm. But when I came in you were reading a treatise on relativistic clock-skew correction algorithms as applied to the architecture of modern starship drive compensators. So you’re an engineer of some sort, retained by the Admiralty to do maintenance work on fleet vessels.” She grinned, and her expression unnerved Martin: white teeth, red lips, and something about her manner that reminded him of home, where women weren’t just well-bred ornaments for the family tree. “Am I right?”
“I couldn’t possibly comment.” Martin shut his PA again and glared at her. “Who are you, and what the hell do you want?” The social programming he’d absorbed on his journey out to the New Republic forbade such crudity in the presence of a lady, but she was obviously no more a lady than he was a Republican yeoman. The social program could go play with itself.
“My name is Rachel Mansour, and I’m on my way to the naval dockyards on business which may well intersect with your own. Unless I’m mistaken, in which case you have my most humble apologies, you are Martin Springfield, personally incorporated and retained by contract to the New Republican Admiralty to perform installation upgrades on the drive control circuitry of the Svejk-class battlecruiser Lord Vanek. After Lord Ernst Vanek, founder of the New Republic’s Navy. Correct?”
Martin returned the PA to his jacket pocket and glanced out of the window, trying to still a sudden wave of cold fear. “Yes. What business of yours is it?”
“You may be interested to learn that four hours ago, consensus absolute time, the New Model Air Force—whose underwriting service you subscribe to—invoked the Eschaton clause in all strategic guarantees bearing on the Republic. At the same time, someone tipped off the UN Standing Committee on Multilateral Interstellar Disarmament that the New Republic is gearing up for war, in defense of a colony outpost that’s under siege. You aren’t paying the extra premium for insurance against divine retribution, are you? So right now you’re not covered for anything other than medical and theft.”
Martin turned back to look at her. “Are you accusing me of being a spy?” He met her eyes. They were dark, intelligent, and reserved—absolutely unreadable. “Who the hell are you, anyway?”
She shook a card out of her sleeve and opened it toward him. A head—recognizably her own, but with close-cropped hair—floated above it in holographic miniature, wreathed against a familiar backdrop. The sheer unexpectedness of it electrified him: shivers chased up and down his spine as his implants tried to damp down an instinctive panic reaction rising from his adrenal glands. “UN diplomatic intelligence, special operations group. I’m here to find out what the current situation is, and that includes finding out just what last-minute modifications the Admiralty is making to the ships comprising the expeditionary force. You are going to cooperate, aren’t you?” She smiled again, even more unnervingly, with an expression that reminded Martin of a hungry ferret.
“Um.” What the hell are the CMID doing here? This isn’t in the mission plan! “This is going to be one of those trips, isn’t it?” He rubbed his forehead and glanced at her again: she was still waiting for his response. Shit, improvise, dammit, before she suspects something! “Look, do you know what they do to spies here?”
She nodded, no longer smiling. “I do. But I’ve also got my eyes on the bottom line, which is that this is an impending war situation. It’s my job to keep track of it—we can’t afford to let them run riot this close to Earth. Being garrotted would certainly spoil anyone’s day, but starting an interstellar war or attracting the attention of the Eschaton is even worse, at least for the several planets full of mostly innocent bystanders who are likely to be included in the collateral damage. Which is my overriding concern.”
She stared at him with frightening intensity, and the card disappeared between two lace-gloved fingers. “We need to get together and talk, Martin. Once you’re up at the dockyard and settled in, I’ll contact you. I don’t care what else you agree to or disagree with, but we are going to have a talk tomorrow. And I’m going to pick your brains, and confirm that you’re just a bystander, and tell your insurers
you’re a safe bet. Do you understand?”
“Uh, yes.” He stared at her and tried to look as if he’d just realized that she was, in fact, a devil, and he had signed away his soul. He hoped she’d believe him—naive engineer, sucked in out of his depths, confronted with an agent of Higher Authority—but had a cold sense that if she didn’t fall for it, he might be in real trouble. Herman and the CMID weren’t exactly on speaking terms…
“Excellent.” She reached into her purse and pulled out a battered-looking, gunmetal-colored PA. “Speaking. Send: Rabbit green. Ack.”
The PA spoke back: “Ack. Message sent.” It took Martin a moment or two to recognize the voice as his own.
She slipped the case away and stood to leave the compartment. “You see,” she said from the doorway, a quirky smile tugging at her lips, “life here isn’t necessarily as dull as you thought! See you later…”
PREPARATIONS FOR DEPARTURE
His Imperial Majesty, the Emperor Ivan Hasek III, by grace of God the protector of the people of the New Republic, growled exasperatedly. “Get the Admiral out of bed and make him presentable—I have a cabinet meeting at noon, and I need to talk to him now.”
“Yes, sir! I most humbly beg your pardon, and beg leave to be excused to do as Your Majesty commands.” The butler virtually bowed and scraped his way off the telephone.
“What’s the implied ‘or else’?” Duke Michael, the Emperor’s brother, inquired drily. “You’d have him clapped in irons?”
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