The trunk spoke back, in a flat monotone: “Authorized officer commanding. You have control.”
“Hey, I like that. Trunk, follow me.” She nodded to Pritkin. “See you at Newpeace.”
Scum! she thought, her rage controlled for the time being, directed and channeled. I’m coming for you. And when I find you, you’ll be sorry …
The express elevator up the beanstalk gave Rachel time to confront the horrors and try to shove them back into a corner of her mind. Tranh, she noted, was even more quiet and reserved than normal. The elevator car was almost two-thirds full, carrying a good number of crew members and tourists returning to the Romanov before it departed; also a sprinkling of quiet, worried-looking Dresdener citizens. While the R-bombs remained decades away, and the recall codes could still be issued, the panic hadn’t set in. Only the most paranoid tinfoil-hat wearers would be thinking about emigrating already. But with a population of hundreds of millions, even the lunatic fringe was large enough to populate a medium-sized city, and some of the middle-aged men and small family groups wore the cautious, haunted expression of refugees. They’d probably be checking in to steerage, to sleep away the long jump sequence without spending precious savings. Rachel figured her assassin wouldn’t be among them. He or she would want to be awake, to plan the next atrocity and keep a weather eye open for pursuers.
She tilted her seat back as far as it would go and waited for the oppressive shove of acceleration to go away. The car was only pulling two gees, but it was enough to make walking unfeasible and lifting a drinking cup uncomfortably difficult. The glowing blue space elevator cable zipped past beyond the transparent ceiling, an endless string with knots flickering by several times a second — the bulbous shells of the boost coils that coupled the car to its invisible magnetic corridor. They’re up there, she reminded herself. Along with a couple of thousand innocent passengers and crew. Over six hundred people had come down from the Romanov while it was docked; nearly four hundred had returned to the ship. Of those, three hundred and fifty had been aboard the ship — and taken their leave on the surfaces of each planet it had visited, including the ones where Muscovite diplomats had been attacked.
Only twenty or so of the passengers had been at the embassy reception, but that didn’t mean anything. If it is a bunch like the ReMastered, there won’t be a causal link, she decided. They’re not fools. She’d spent the first hour of the journey skimming George’s diplomatic backgrounder on known ReMastered black operations and was wondering how the hell she’d failed to hear about them before. It’s a big galaxy, but not that big when you get, what was Rosa’s term, bampots like these running amok. Working to a hunch was risky; it could blind you to who was really pulling your strings — but now she’d seen Tranh’s dossier, Rachel had a gut-deep feeling that they were somehow involved. The whole thing had the stench of diplomatic black ops all over it, and these guys were clearly crazy and ruthless enough to be responsible. The only question was why.
“Why the fuck didn’t you tell us this was a possibility?” she’d asked Tranh, halfway through reading — and then rereading in disbelief — the first page.
He’d shrugged apologetically, squirming under the acceleration load. “George said to keep it low-key. To avoid prejudicing the investigation.”
“Prejudice, hah.” Rachel had looked away.
Despite her violent aversion to museums, Rachel had an overdeveloped sense of historical contingency. Thanks to the arrival of cheap life-prolongation mods, her generation was one of the first to have lived through enough history to have a bellyful of it. She’d grown up in a throwback religious community that didn’t accept any social development postdating the midtwentieth century, and spent her first few adult decades as a troubled but outwardly dutiful surrendered wife. Then she’d hit middle age and jumped the hedge to see the world, the flesh, and the devil for herself. Along the way she’d acquired a powerful conviction that history was a series of accidents — God was either absent or playing a very elaborate practical joke (the Eschaton didn’t count, having explicitly denied that it was a deity) — and that the seeds of evil usually germinated in the footprints of people who knew how everybody else ought to behave and felt the need to tell them so. When she’d been born, there had still been people alive who remembered the Cold War, the gray behemoth of ideology slouching toward a nuclear destination. And the ReMastered rang some uneasy bells in the echoing library of her memory. She’d heard of things like this before. Why hasn’t anybody stepped on them yet? she wondered.
As she considered the question there was a chime. The elevator car slowed, and, for a stomach-churning moment, spun upside down. Acceleration resumed, pressing down on her like a lead-weighted net. “We will arrive in reception bay three in approximately nineteen minutes,” announced the cabin attendant. “Slowing to one gee two minutes before arrival, if you need to use the en suite facilities.”
Tranh caught her eye. “You ready?” He grunted.
“Yes.” Rachel didn’t elaborate. Tranh was nervous, and he’d let her know. “Done reading.” She tapped her secure notepad to demonstrate, and he attempted to nod — unwise and uncomfortable, judging from his grimace. Earlier, Rachel had tried holding the pad up, two-handed, and found it workable, except that her arms tried to go to sleep if she held the position for more than a couple of minutes. For a gadget that could fit in her wallet it felt remarkably like a lead brick. But there was something unhealthily compulsive about reading about the ReMastered. It was like scratching a fleabite until it bled: she didn’t want to do it but found herself unable to stop.
Scum, she thought as she read the in-depth report on Newpeace. How did they get away with it? It’s the most brilliant, horrible, thing I’ve seen in years. It made the imperial megalomania and straitlaced frigidity of the New Republic seem cozy and forgivable by comparison. Seminars on history’s most onerous tyrannies — so they know which errors of leniency to avoid?
The planet arrayed above her head was showing a visible disc, gibbous and misty, with a thin rind of atmosphere. Are they out to conquer this world, too? she wondered. The ReMastered showed every sign of being aggressively expansionist, convinced their ideology was the one true way. But logistical nightmares and the presence of STL bombers around almost every target world made interstellar power grabs unfeasibly risky. It was as if, during Earth’s nineteenth century, every imperialist set on colonizing another land had been forced to resupply by wooden sailing ship across the breadth of the Pacific Ocean, while facing defenders armed with nuclear-tipped missiles.
“So they came from Tonto and executed a classic Maoist-Fischerite insurgency campaign, mediated by zombies with brain implants driven by causal channel from a nest in the same solar system,” she noted beneath a harrowing account of the Peace Enforcement Agency’s subversion. Arranging a terrorist insurgency to justify a state clampdown, then providing the tools and trained personnel for the panicking incumbents to deploy, before decapitating them in a coup and consolidating power. “Hmm.” And if they grab the levers of power cleanly, before anyone realizes that half their politicians are brain-scooped moppets, they can decommission the STL bombers before they become a threat. Which in turn means … Hey, have they actually invented a repeatable strategy for interstellar conquest? And if so, did they come from somewhere else, before Tonto? In which case …