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, ab-human. “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.