She came awake with a gasp. Her heart felt as if it was about to burst, and the sheets under her were cold and clammy with sweat. Her left arm was numb, trapped under her because she lay on her side and behind -
A grunting snuffle that might have been a snore. She shifted, and he rolled against her back, curled protectively around her. Wednesday closed her eyes and leaned back. Remember, she thought dreamily, and shuddered. She could still almost smell the hot metallic taste of blood on her lips, the fecal stink of ruptured intestines. She’d gone to her stateroom and scrubbed for half an hour in the shower, but still felt as if she was soiled by the visceral fallout. Then he’d called, from the sick-bay, checking out. She’d told him she wanted to see him, and he’d come to her. Opened the door and dragged him inside and down onto the floor like animals. His urgency was as strong as hers. She smiled, still sleepy, and shuffled her hips back toward him until she could feel his penis against the small of her back.
“Frank?” she said quietly.
Another mumbled snore. He moved against her in his sleep. He’d been very carefuclass="underline" aware of his physical bulk. Not what she’d expected, but what she’d needed. Afterward, they’d clung together as if they were drowning, and he’d cried. Is this wise? she wondered. And then: Who cares?
Sleeping, Frank surrounded her. The slow rumble of his breath and the huge bulk of his body made her feel safe, really safe, for the first time since the terrible night of the party. She knew it for a bitter illusion, but it was a good one, and comforting. I hope he doesn’t want to pretend this never happened, she mused.
An indefinite time later, Wednesday carefully crawled out of bed to go to the bathroom. Almost as soon as she was upright, her earlobe vibrated like an angry bee. “Hello?” she said angrily, trying to subvocalize. “What kind of time do you call this?”
“Wednesday.” It was her own voice, weird and hollow-sounding as usual when it came from outside her own head. “Can you hear me?”
“Yeah. Herman? It’s middle of night shift here. I was trying to sleep.”
“Your motion triggered a callback to alert me. The ship you are on has already undocked and is now accelerating toward its primary jump point. Once it jumps, the causal channel I am currently using will decohere, and you will be on your own. Normally the Romanov’s flight plan would take it via two hops to New Prague, but a number of new passengers joined the ship at Dresden station, and you can expect a diversion.”
“A diversion?” Wednesday yawned, desperately wishing she was awake, or back in bed. She glanced through the door wistfully: Frank was a dark mountain range across the spine of the sleeping platform.
“The ReMastered group aboard your vessel has been exchanging coded communications with the office of an arms dealer from Hut Breasil. The arms dealer and their bodyguards are now aboard the Romanov. At the same time, the arms dealer has exchanged message traffic with the office of one Overdepartmentsecretary Blumlein on Newpeace, the de facto chairman of the Planetary Oversight Directorate and maximum leader of the Ministry of State Security. I lack informants on the ground, but I believe the arms dealer is a cover identity for a senior MOSS official who is taking personal control over the mop-up operation arising from their internal conflict over the incident at Moscow.”
“Whoa — stop! What do you mean? What mop-up? MOSS? What internal conflict?” Wednesday clutched her head. “What’s this got to do with me?” I want to go back to bed!
Herman kept his tone of voice even and slow, patient as ever. “I am developing a hypothesis about the destruction of your home, and the motivation behind the assassinations. Moscow system, and New Dresden, lie along the ReMastered race’s axis of expansion. Newpeace and Tonto are merely their most recent conquests, and the closest to Earth. They lie close to both Moscow and New Dresden, and those worlds would be logical targets for subversion and conquest. However, the ReMastered are prone to internal rifts and departmental feuding. They can be manipulated by outside influences such as the Eschaton. It is possible that one such department within the Ministry of State Security on Newpeace was induced to exploit their growing influence over domestic political figures in Moscow to use them as a proxy agency in a side project, the development of a causality-violation weapon. Such devices are hazardous not only because the Eschaton intervenes to prevent their deployment later up the time line, but because they tend to be unstable—”
“Later up the what? Hey, I thought you were the Eschaton! What is this?”
“Can a T-helper lymphocyte in a capillary in your little finger claim to be you? Of course I am part of the Eschaton, but I cannot claim to be the Eschaton. The Eschaton acquires most of its power by being able to harness causality violation — time travel — for computational purposes. Working causality-violation devices in the hands of others — whether designed as weapons, or as time machines, or as computers — would threaten the stability of its time line. That is why agencies such as I exist — to monitor requests from the oracle to take action that will defend the Eschaton’s causal integrity. In the case of Moscow, the most reasonable explanation is that the Muscovite government was experimenting with weapons of temporal disruption and blew their own star up by accident. But there was absolutely no rational explanation for why they might want to develop such weapons, left to their own devices. Which is why evidence of ReMastered infiltration would be most interesting. Especially in conjunction with the silence of the oracle.”
Wednesday was silent for a minute. Then: “Are you telling me that some asshole in the military destroyed my world by accident? Or because the ReMastered asked them to?”
“Not exactly.” A few seconds’ silence. Wednesday’s emotions churned, aghast and outraged. “When acquiring a new planet, the ReMastered do not walk in and take everything over at gunpoint. They infiltrate by inducing a crisis and being invited in to calm things down. Their main tool is their expertise in uploading and neural interfaces. While blackmail is often used for indirect leverage, they frequently work by abducting key midlevel officials — pithing them, copying their existing neural architecture, then installing an implant. Sometimes they leave the personality in place, just add an override switch — or they wipe everything and turn the body into a remote-control meat puppet. By using a causal channel to control the body, they can ensure that nobody will be able to tell that it’s being run by a ReMastered agent unless it is subjected to a brain scan or forced to make an FTL transit. The ReMastered are patient; frequently they will arrive in a system, take fifty to a hundred low-to-mid-ranking officials, then wait twenty or thirty years until one or more of their moppets is promoted into a position of influence. It is a very slow and labor-intensive process, but far cheaper and safer than attempting an overt war of interstellar conquest.”
“You mean they do this regularly?”
“Not often. They have fewer than twenty worlds, so far. My models do not predict that they will become a major threat for at least two centuries.”