“We were—” He paused, carefully, searched for an acceptable word, unsure why it was so important to do so now that his real life was over before it had even begun. His throat was dry. “Close.” Close, that was the word. It brought it all home, while revealing nothing.
“If you value your intimacy so highly, you’re welcome to join her,” hell’s handmaiden told him half-seriously. She moved across the room in front of him, a blur before his eyes. He had to struggle to focus. “The ReMastered race doesn’t need moral weaklings. Or were you naive enough to think you were in love?”
“I’m—” angry, he realized. “I feel ill. Dysfunctional.” He was angrier than he’d ever been before — angry in his helplessness. He hadn’t been angry when her bodyguard had stunned him and he’d awakened strapped to a set of beams; just frightened and apprehensive beyond all reason. But now, with the thought that he might survive, there was room for anger. Erica’s dead. It shouldn’t have meant that much to him, but they’d been living outside the Directorate for too long. They’d been a little reckless, adopting feral ways, naive native sentimentality. And now, naive native pain and loss.
“You’re angry,” Hoechst said soothingly. “It’s a perfectly understandable human reaction. Something you thought was yours has just been taken away from you. I don’t blame you for it, and if you want to yell at me later, you’re welcome to. But right now Blumlein himself has given us a very important task, and if you get in my way, I’ll have to crush you. Nothing personal. And just in case it hasn’t sunk in, your friend was a countersub agent. Reporting directly to U. Scott’s Office of Internal Inquiries. Programmed to execute you at the first sign of disloyalty to Scott.” Franz found himself nodding, unconsciously agreeing; but all the time he was full of the scent of her skin, the memory of her laughter, their secret shared sin of commission, out here beyond the Directorate, where love wasn’t a state of war and hate wasn’t politics.
She wouldn’t have given me away, he thought. Not ever. Because she’d told him all about her second job within a day of their first frantic assignation, holed up in a hotel, hungry to the point of starvation for intimacy. It had been their dirty little secret, a shared furtive fantasy about eloping, defecting, lighting out for the event horizon. Either Hoechst — in her capacity as death’s angel — knew far less than she thought she did about the cell she was taking over, or the Directorate was rotten to the core anyway, and the unborn god a sick fantasy.
But you couldn’t ever let yourself dream such thoughts when you were around other ReMastered, not if you wanted to live. So Franz bundled up his scream of loss and pain, and shoved it down a long way, deep down where he could curl up around it later and lick the suppurating wound — and forced himself to nod vigorously.
“I’ll be all right soon,” he said meekly: “It was just a shock.” If he let them realize how deeply he and Erica had been involved …
“That’s good,” Hoechst said reassuringly. His nostrils flared, but he gave nothing away. Marx floated behind her like a lethal shadow, holding a spinal leech casually in one hand.
“What do you want me to do now?” he asked hoarsely.
“I want you to rest up and recover. We’re going on a journey, soon as we gather up the rest of your cell.”
“A journey—”
“New Dresden, via yacht.” She pulled a face. “Some yacht — it’s an old Heidegger-class frigate with its weapons systems ripped out and replaced with stores compartments and bunks. We’ve got about eight days to get there ahead of your runaway, who is traveling master class on a liner. When we get there, we’re going to rescue the situation, nail down all the loose ends, and stop the avalanche U. Vannevar Scott set in motion. Got that?”
“I—” He flexed his left hand; a stabbing pain in his wrist made him gasp. “I think I damaged something.”
“That’s all right.” She grinned at him with easy camaraderie: “You’re going to damage lots more things before this is over…”
It took an entire week for Portia to get round to raping him. For Franz, most of the time passed in a blur as he worked like an automaton; he was too busy rounding up his remaining agents to notice the cool, speculative looks she was sending his way.
It happened after Hoechst dealt with Kerguelen. Missing his target might have been excusable if he hadn’t already been on the gray list, and debatable even in spite of it, but he’d compounded the error by alerting the girl. She’d locked him in her own Syb-class cabin, turning the tables. Hoechst was incandescent with fury when she found out, and even Franz had felt an answering twinge of indignation through his haze of loss.
Portia collected Kerguelen from Noctis herself, ordering a diversion that cost the DD-S17 almost a day’s headway while it stooged around pretending to be a luxury yacht. She wore a watered silk gown of blue and violet to the police station where the unfortunate Kerguelen was being held, along with a blond wig and a king’s ransom in precious stones; she had the mannerisms and giggle down to perfection for her role as the second wife of a rich ship-owning magnate from al-Turku. Franz and Marx and Samow marched behind her stiffly, wearing the archaic uniforms and pained air of superiority of her household retainers. The show ended about five milliseconds after they got the anxiously grateful Ker across the boarding tube threshold and behind a ’lock door. Then she was at his throat.
“Bastard!” she hissed, wrist muscles standing out like steel bands as she choked him. It was a deadly insult among the ReMastered, but nobody was interested in Ker’s reply. Marx and Samow held his arms as he bucked and kicked against the bulkhead while she crushed his larynx. When he stopped moving, Hoechst looked round their small circle, sparing Franz such a malice-filled glare that he shuddered, sensing how close his own neck was to those strong hands, but then she relaxed slightly and nodded at him. “He showed me up,” she said coolly. “Worse, he made the Directorate look foolish. You also.”
“I understand,” he said woodenly, and that seemed to satisfy her.
“Samow, see that his neural map is reclaimed, then ditch the remains. Marx, give my compliments to the pilot and tell her it’s time to execute Plan Coyote. U. Bergman, come with me.” She turned and stalked toward the lift up to the crew decks. Franz followed her, his mind blank. Kerguelen had worked for him for three years, a happy-go-lucky youngster on his first out-of-system assignment. He was prone to living it up, but not self-consciously sloppy, and there seemed to be a serious ideological commitment underlying his actions. His self-evident belief in the cause, in the unborn god and the destiny of the ReMastered, had sometimes left Franz feeling like a hollow fraud.
Kerguelen had lived life as large as he was allowed to, as if he were working in the early days of a better universe. To see him broken and discarded rubbed home Franz’s own inadequacy. So he didn’t protest, but followed Hoechst, wafting in her trail of rustling silks and expensive floral triterpenoids and volatile oils. The faint smell of old-fashioned powder cosmetics stung his nose.
The DepSec’s suite was larger than the cubbyhole Franz was bunking in. It held a pair of chairs, a rolltop desk, and a separate folding bed. Perhaps it had once been the friggatenfuhrer’s quarters, back when the yacht had been a warship. Hoechst shut the door and waved him to a seat, but remained standing and busied herself with something at her table. He couldn’t take his eyes off her. She was beautiful, in a feral, ex-Directorate sort of way, but also frightening. Intimidating. A predator, beautiful but deadly and incapable of behaving any other way. She eased her wig off and placed it on the desk, then ran her fingertips through her close-cropped pale hair. “You look as if you need a drink.”
She was offering him a glass, he realized through a cloud of befuddlement. He accepted it instantly, his instinct for self-preservation kicking in. “Thank you.” She poured herself another from a cut-crystal decanter, some kind of amber fluid that stank of alcohol and ashes. “Is this an imported whisky?”