“I’m not going to leave you alone for long.” Hoechst shrugged. “My own ship’s heading for home with a message too secret to trust to certain, shall we say, monitored channels. While it’s gone I need to take the Romanov on a little errand. I’m mopping up after my predecessor — one U. Vannevar Scott — who got a little bit too big for his boots.” That flickering smile. Almost without willing it Frank found himself staring at Wednesday. She looked as scared as he felt, her face drained and pale, but resolute, the condemned facing the scaffold. He forced himself to look back at Hoechst. The blinking status display in his left eye told its own story: every word that hit his ears was stripped down to its constituent bits, entangled with a qubit interface somewhere in the magical weirdness of a causal channel, the other end of which would pipe the data into Eric’s inbox. Let’s see how topical we can make this news, shall we, he thought at Hoechst, feeling the fear slowly turn to a warm glow of triumphant accomplishment. J’accuse!
“Scott decided to carve out his own little Directorate,” Hoechst continued, oblivious to the true size of her potential audience. “First, he needed a lever. That lever was going to be a bucolic backwater called Moscow. He got funding and clearance to operate on Moscow by offering the Directorate a new way of developing weapons forbidden by the Enemy — you call it the Eschaton — like temporal ablators. Moscow was going to be his weapons proving ground, a backwater nobody would expect to be going after causality-violation devices. Actually he wanted to be dictator of a whole bunch of planets, and Moscow was going to be his tool of conquest — also his insurance against the wrath of the High Directorate. But he got sloppy. He puppetized half the Muscovite military high command — an administrative backwater on that planet, nobody paid much attention to them — and thoroughly subverted the interstellar deterrent group. But then he decided to accelerate the weapons test program he’d promised the Directorate and use them himself instead of the original clumsy R-bomb plan.”
Wednesday stared at her. “You’re telling me the nova was a fucked-up weapons test?”
“Well, sure. In fact, it was an unauthorized fuck up.” Hoechst looked pensive. She reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out a small key, placing it very carefully in the middle of the desk in front of her. “We all make mistakes. In Scott’s case, it was his last; he’d gotten sloppy, and the — my boss — cleared me to take him down and rectify the situation. That was before we drained him and discovered certain unpleasant facts about his treason. That cartridge” — she held out a hand toward Wednesday — “is one of the loose ends. Immigration records of Scott’s agents moving in and out of Moscow. And details of the weapons project and the test schedule. Nothing we want to leave lying around. It’s a severe political embarrassment.”
“There’s more, isn’t there?” Frank asked, fascinated.
“Well, no shit!” Hoechst looked at him curiously, as if wondering why he was so interested in the abstract issues, rather than the proximate fate of his own skin. “There’s a flight of four R-bombs coming.” She frowned. “The cover story is that they’re aimed at New Dresden. And that’s what the Muscovite diplomats think.”
“What did he—”
“Shut the fuck up!” Hoechst frowned. She tapped one finger on the key. “They’re supposed to be running on New Dresden. That’s the official target ops plan that was on file, isn’t it? That’s what the Muscovite diplomats think. And they’re next to invisible when they’re under way. Except our fucking asshole Ubermensch Vannevar Scott was too cute by half. While he was puppetizing the Muscovite Defense Ministry, the first group he hit was the deterrence operations staff, including the flight crew of one of the bombers — the one that isn’t responding to messages. He was planning his defection at least ten years before Moscow went bang: one of those fucking bombers is running on Newpeace, our new regional capital, which is about as distant from Moscow as New Dresden.
“Not many ReMastered know this,” she added drily, “and my boss wants to keep it that way.”
Frank sat up straight. “Are you telling us the business with New Dresden, the ambassadors—”
“I haven’t been bumping off foreign diplomats.” She shook her head vehemently. “That was Scott’s plan. I told you he was sloppy, didn’t I? When things went wrong, when Moscow Prime exploded, he took steps to sweep the dirt under the rug. He paid an extremely accomplished assassin, the one you called Svengali.” For a moment she looked extremely tired. “Which is presumably what brought you aboard the Romanov,” she murmured in Rachel’s direction. Rachel stared at her, face impassive. “Svengali won’t be bothering us anymore, needless to say.”
“You want me to believe that this was all one man’s rogue operation?” Rachel asked, her voice low and controlled.
“Pretty much.” For a moment Hoechst looked terribly old. “Don’t underestimate him: U. Scott was one of the highest-ranking officials in, ah, External State Security. The foreign espionage service, in other words. And he was planning a coup. He was going to take Moscow and use the R-bombs to hold the entire Directorate at bay, and he was going to leverage his takeover of Moscow to destabilize New Dresden, via the trade war. He was already infiltrating the Dresden Foreign Ministry — without authorization. If he succeeded, he’d have had two planets, the beginnings of his own pocket interstellar empire.” She looked at Frank, meeting his eyes. “I know what you think of us. Regardless of that, whatever you think of our ideology, we are not insane, and we are not suicidal. One of the goals of the ReMastered Directorate is to render interstellar warfare not merely unthinkable, but impossible. Scott had to go.”
She sounds as if she’s trying to convince herself, Frank realized with a sinking feeling. This was not what he’d wanted to hear from her. He’d expected venomously triumphant self-justification, perhaps, or a gloating confession. Not this! he thought despairingly. If Eric decides to run this, it’ll be about the best piece of pro-ReMastered press they could ask for! The pot of gold at the end of Frank’s starbow had just turned out to be a chamber pot full of shit — and despite what he’d said earlier about journalistic ethics being a crock, he couldn’t see any obvious holes in her argument. Even releasing the prisoners in Hoechst’s stolen memory diamond — expensive as such a process would be — would probably not reverse its effect by much.
She took a deep breath and continued her confession: “Luckily, Scott pushed too hard, and the wheels came off. There are a couple of thousand Ubers on Newpeace, not to mention the ordinary humans, who would perhaps be of some concern to you. We’re spread terribly thin; if we have to evacuate that planet, we’d lose half a century’s hard work. There’s no way we could possibly convince all the Muscovite ambassadors to agree to cancel the R-bomb attack if they knew the truth. Doesn’t that mean something to you?”
Frank nodded, dazed. He looked around, taking in other shocked expressions. The tension in the ReMastered soldiers. The twitchy look on the blond guy standing against the wall next to Wednesday said it all. She’d laid out the dictator’s new suit in front of them, and it was threadbare: they were clearly shocked by Hoechst’s revelations. The spook from the revolution on Newpeace all those years ago, the gray eminence at the center of a web of interstellar assassination and intrigue, turned out to be a fixer who was desperately trying to save a planet from the posthumous legacy of a genocidal megalomaniac -