This was why Contingency Omega was one of the more sensitive documents in the New Republican Navy’s war plan library. Contingency Omega discussed possible ways and means of using causality violation—time travel within the preferred reference frame—for strategic advantage. Rochard’s World was a good forty light-years from New Austria; normally that meant five to eight jumps, a fairly serious journey lasting three or four weeks. Now, in time of war, the direct approach zones from New Austria could be presumed to be under guard. Any attack fleet would have to jump around the Queen’s Head Nebula, an effectively impassable cloud within which three or four protostellar objects were forming. And to exercise Contingency Omega—delicately balancing their arrival time against the receipt of the first distress signal from Rochard’s World, so that no absolute causality violation would take place but their arrival would take their enemies by surprise—well, that would add even more jumps, taking them deep into their own future light cone before looping back into the past, just inside the spacelike event horizon.
It was, Bauer realized, going to be the longest-range military operation in the history of the New Republic. And—God help him—it was his job to make sure it worked.
Burya Rubenstein whacked on the crude log table with a worn-out felt boot. “Silence!” he yelled. Nobody paid any attention; annoyed, he pulled out the compact pistol the trade machine had fabricated for him and fired into the ceiling. It only buzzed quietly, but the resulting fall of plaster dust got everybody’s attention. In the midst of all the choking and coughing, he barked, “Committee will come to order!”
“Why should we?” demanded a heckler at the back of the packed beer hall.
“Because if you don’t shut up and let me talk, you’ll have to answer to Politovsky and his dragoons. The worst I’ll do to you is shoot you—if the Duke gets his hands on you, you might have to work for a living!” Laughter. “His living. What we’ve got here is an unprecedented opportunity to cast off the shackles of economic slavery that bind us to soil and factory, and bring about an age of enlightened social mobility in which we are free to better ourselves, contribute to the common good, and learn to work smarter and live faster. But, comrades, the forces of reaction are ruthless and vigilant; even now a Navy shuttle is ferrying soldiers to Outer Chelm, which they plan to take and turn into a strongpoint against us.”
Oleg Timoshevski stood up with an impressive whining and clanking. “No worries! We’ll smash ‘em!” He waved his left arm in the air, and his fist morphed into the unmistakable shape of a gun launcher. Having leapt into the pool of available personal augmentation techniques with the exuberance of the born cyborg, he could pose as a poster for the Transhumanist Front, or even the Space and Freedom Party.
“That’s enough, Oleg.” Burya glared at him, then turned back to the audience. “We can’t afford to win this by violence,” he stressed. “In the short term, that may be tempting, but it will only serve to discredit us with the masses, and tradition tells us that, without the masses on our side, there can be no revolution. We have to prove that the forces of reaction corrode before our peace-loving forces for enterprise and progress without the need for repression—or ultimately all we will succeed in doing is supplanting those forces, and in so doing become indistinguishable from them. Is that what you want?”
“No! Yes! NO!” He winced at the furor that washed across the large room. The delegates were becoming exuberant, inflated with a sense of their own irresistible destiny, and far too much free wheat beer and vodka. (It might be synthetic, but it was indistinguishable from the real thing.)
“Comrades!” A fair-haired man, middle-aged and of sallow complexion, stood inside the main door to the hall. “Your at-tention please! Reactionary echelons of the imperialist junta are moving to encircle the Northern Parade Field! The free market is in danger!”
“Oh bugger,” muttered Marcus Wolff.
“Go see to it, will you?” Burya asked. “Take Oleg, get him out of my hair, and I’ll hold the fort here. Try to find something for Jaroslav to do while you’re about it—he can juggle or fire his water pistol at the soldiers or something; I can’t do with him getting underfoot.”
“Will do that, boss. Are you serious about, uh, not breaking heads?”
“Am I serious?” Rubenstein shrugged. “I’d rather we didn’t go nuclear, but feel free to do anything necessary to gain the upper hand—as long as we keep the moral high ground. If possible. We don’t need a fight now; it’s too early. Hold off for a week, and the guards will be deserting like rats leaving a sinking ship. Just try to divert them for now. I’ve got a communique to issue which ought to put the cat among the pigeons with the lackeys of the ruling class.”
Wolff stood and walked around to Timoshevski’s table. “Oleg, come with me. We have a job to do.” Burya barely noticed: he was engrossed, nose down in the manual of a word processor that the horn of plenty had dropped in his lap. After spending his whole life writing longhand or using a laborious manual typewriter, this was altogether too much like black magic, he reflected. If only he could figure out how to get it to count the number of words in a paragraph, he’d be happy: but without being able to cast off, how could he possibly work out how much lead type would be needed to fill a column properly?
The revolutionary congress had been bottled up in the old Corn Exchange for three days now. Bizarre growths like black metal ferns had colonized the roof, turning sunlight and atmospheric pollution into electricity and brightly colored plastic cutlery. Godunov, who was supposed to be in charge of catering, had complained bitterly at the lack of tableware (as if any true revolutionary would bother with such trivia) until Misha, who had gotten much deeper into direct brain interfaces than even Oleg, twitched his nose and instructed the things on the roof to start producing implements. Then Misha went away on some errand, and nobody could turn the spork factory off. Luckily there seemed to be no shortage of food, munitions, or anything else for that matter: it seemed that Burya’s bluff had convinced the Duke that the democratic soviet really did have nuclear weapons, and for the time being the dragoons were steering well clear of the yellow brick edifice at the far end of Freedom Square.
“Burya! Come quickly! Trouble at the gates!”
Rubenstein looked up from his draft proclamation. “What is it?” he snapped. “Speak clearly!”
The comrade (Petrov, wasn’t that his name?) skidded to a halt in front of his desk. “Soldiers,” he gasped.
“Aha.” Burya stood. “Are they shooting yet? No? Then I will talk to them.” He stretched, trying to ease the stiffness from his aching muscles and blinking away tiredness. “Take me to them.”
A small crowd was milling around the gates to the Corn Exchange. Peasant women with head scarves, workers from the ironworks on the far side of town—idle since their entire factory had been replaced by a miraculous, almost organic robot complex that was still extending itself—even a few gaunt, shaven-headed zeks from the corrective labor camp behind the castle: all milling around a small clump of frightened-looking soldiers. “What is going on?” demanded Rubenstein.
“These men, they say—”
“Let them speak for themselves.” Burya pointed to the one nearest the gate. “You. You aren’t shooting at us, so why are you here, comrade?”
“I, uh,” the trooper paused, looking puzzled.
“We’s sick of being pushed around by them aristocrats, that’s wot,” said his neighbor, a beanpole-shaped man with a sallow complexion and a tall fur hat that most certainly wasn’t standard-issue uniform. “Them royalist parasite bastids, they’s locked up in ‘em’s castle drinking champagne and ’specting us to die keeping ‘em safe. While out here all ’uns enjoying themselves and it’s like the end of the regime, like? I mean, wot’s going on? Has true libertarianism arrived yet?”
“Welcome, comrades!” Burya opened his arms toward the soldier. “Yes, it is true! With help from our allies of the Festival, the iron hand of the reactionary junta is about to
be over-thrown for all time! The new economy is being born; the marginal cost of production has been abolished, and from now on, if any item is produced once, it can be replicated infinitely. From each according to his imagination, to each according to his needs! Join us, or better still, bring your fellow soldiers and workers to join us!”
There was a sharp bang from the roof of the Corn Exchange, right at the climax of his impromptu speech; heads turned in alarm. Something had broken inside the spork factory and a stream of rainbow-hued plastic implements fountained toward the sky and clattered to the cobblestones on every side, like a harbinger of the postindustrial society to come. Workers and peasants alike stared in open-mouthed bewilderment at this astounding display of productivity, then bent to scrabble in the muck for the brightly colored sporks of revolution. A volley of shots rang out and Burya Rubenstein raised his hands, grinning wildly, to accept the salute of the soldiers from the Skull Hill garrison.
The Evening News bulletin. And now for today’s headlines. The crisis over the invasion of Rochard’s World by the so-called Festival continues. Attempts at diplomatic intermediation having been rebuffed, it now appears that military action is inevitable. Word from the occupied territory is hard to obtain, but to the best of our knowledge, the garrison under Duke Politovsky continue to fight valiantly to defend the Imperial standard. Ambassador Al-Haq of Turku said earlier on this program that the government of Turku agreed that the expansionist policies of the so-called Festival represent an intolerable threat to peace.
“The woman who chained herself to the railings of the Imperial residence yesterday morning, demanding votes and property rights for ladies, has been found to have a long history of mental disorders characterized by paranoid hysteria. Leaders of the Mothers’ Union today denied any knowledge of her actions and decried them as unfeminine. She is expected to be charged with causing a public disturbance later this week.
“Baseless rumors circulating on Old Earth about the Admiralty’s planned rolling series of upgrades to our naval capability caused numerous extraplanetary investment companies to sell stocks short, resulting in a plummeting exchange rate and the withdrawal of several insurance companies from the New Republic market. No announcement has yet been made by the chairman of the Royal Bank, but officials from the chamber of trade are currently drawing up charges against those companies participating in the stampede, accusing them of slander and conspiracy to establish a trade cartel using the current defense alert as a pretext.
“The four anarchists hanged at Krummhopf Prison today were attended by—”
Click.
“I hate this fucking planet,” Martin whispered, sinking deeper into the porcelain bathtub. It was the only good feature of the poky little two-room dockside apartment they’d plugged him into. (The bad features, of course, included the likelihood of bugging devices.) He stared at the ceiling, two meters above him, trying to ignore the radio news.
The phone rang.
Cursing, Martin hauled himself out of the bath and, dripping, hopped into the living room. “Yes?” he demanded.
“Had a good day?” A woman’s voice; it took him a second to place it.
“Lousy,” he said with feeling. And hearing from you doesn’t make it any better, he thought: the idea of being sucked into some kind of diplomatic scam didn’t appeal. But the urge to grumble overrode minor irritation. “Their list of embargoed technology includes cranial interfaces. It’s all crappy VR immersion gloves and keyboards: everything I look at now is covered in purple tesseracts, and my fingers ache.”
“Well, it sounds like you’ve had a really good day, compared to mine. Have you had anything to eat yet?”
“Not yet.” Suddenly Martin noticed that he was starving, not to mention bored. “Why?”
“You’re going to like this,” she said lightly. “I know a reasonable restaurant on C deck, two up and three corridors over from security zone gateway five. Can I buy you dinner?”
Martin thought for a moment. Normally he’d have refused, seeking some way to avoid contact with the UN diplomatic spook. But he was hungry; and not just for food. The casual invitation reminded him of home, of a place where people were able to talk freely. The lure of company drew him out, and after dressing, he followed her directions, trying not to think too deeply about it.
The visiting officers’ quarters were outside the security zone of the base, but there was still a checkpoint to pass through before he reached the airlock to the civilian sections of the station. Outside the checkpoint, he stepped into a main corridor. It curved gently to the left, following the interior of the station’s circumference: more passages opened off it, as did numerous doorways. He walked around a corner and out onto the street—“Martin!” She took his arm. “So pleased to see you!”
She’d changed into a green dress with a tight bodice and long black gloves. Her shoulders and upper arms were bare, but for a ribbon around her throat, which struck him as odd; something in his customs briefing nagged at his memory. “Pretend you’re pleased to see me,” she hissed. “Pretend for the cameras. You’re taking me out to buy me dinner. And call me Ludmilla in public.”
“Certainly.” He forced a smile. “My dear! How nice to see you!” He took her arm and tried to follow her lead. “Which way?” he muttered.
“You’re doing fine for an amateur. Third establishment on the right. There’s a table in your name. I’m your companion for the night. Sorry about the cloak-and-dagger bit, but you’re being monitored by base security, and if I were officially here as me, they’d start asking you questions. It’s much more convenient if I’m a woman of easy virtue.”
Martin flushed. “I see,” he said. The penny dropped, finally: in this straitlaced culture, a woman who displayed bare skin below her chin was a bit racy, to say the least. Which meant, now he thought about it, that the hotel was full of—
“You haven’t used the hotel facilities since you arrived?” she asked, raising an eyebrow.
Martin shook his head. “I don’t believe in getting arrested in foreign jurisdictions,” he mumbled to cover his discomfort. “And the local customs here are confusing. What do you think of them?”
She squeezed his arm. “No comment,” she said lightly. “Ladies here aren’t supposed to swear.” She gathered her skirts in as he opened the door for her. “Still, I doubt this social order will last many more years. They’ve had to invest a lot of energy to maintain the status quo so long.”
“You sound like you’re looking forward to its collapsing.” He held out his card to a liveried waiter, who bowed and scurried off into the restaurant.
“I am. Aren’t you?”
Martin sighed quietly. “Now that you come to mention it, I wouldn’t shed any tears. All I want to do is get this job over with and go home again.”
“I wish my life were that simple. I can’t afford to be angry: I’m supposed to help protect this civilization from the consequences of its own stupidity. It’s hard to fix social injustices when the people you’re trying to help are all dead.”
“Your table, sir,” said the waiter, reappearing and bowing deeply. Rachel emitted an airheaded giggle; Martin followed the waiter, with Rachel in tow behind him.
She kept up the bubbleheaded pose until they were seated in a private booth and had ordered the menu of the day. As soon as the waiter disappeared, she dropped it. “You want to know what’s going on, who I am, and what this is all about,” she said quietly. “You also want to know whether you should cooperate, and what’s in it for you. Right?”
He nodded, unwilling to open his mouth, wondering how much she knew of his real business.
“Good.” She stared at him soberly. “I take it you already decided not to turn me in to base security. That would have been a bad mistake, Martin; if not for you, then for a lot of other people.”
He lowered his gaze, staring at the place setting in front of her. Silver cutlery, linen napkin, starched tablecloth overflowing on all sides like a waterfall.
And Rachel’s breasts. Her dress made it impossible to ignore them, even though he tried not to stare: woman of easy virtue, indeed. He settled for looking her in the face. “There’s something I don’t understand going on here,” he said. “What is it?”
“All will be explained. The first thing I’m going to say is, after you hear my pitch, you can walk away unless you decide to involve yourself. I mean it; I came on heavily earlier, but really, I don’t want you around unless you’re a willing participant. Right now, they think you’re just a loud-mouthed engineer. If they look too closely at me—” She paused. Her lips thinned a little. “I’m female. I’ll get precious little mercy if they trip over me by accident, but they don’t really think of women as free agents, much less defense intelligence specialists, and by this time tomorrow, I should have my diplomatic credentials sorted out and be able to go public. Anyway: about what’s going on here. Are you going to get up and walk out right now, or do you want in?”
Martin thought for a moment. What should I do ? The solution seemed obvious: “I’ll settle for some answers. And dinner. Anything’s better than being locked up in that pesthole of a base.”
“Okay.” She leaned back comfortably. “First.” She held up a gloved finger. “What’s going on? That’s actually a bit tricky to say. The UN has no jurisdiction here, but we’ve got enough clout to wreck the New Republic’s trade treaties with half their neighbors if the New Republic was, for instance, found to be breaking conventions on warfare or application of forbidden technologies.”
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