“Good.” Hoechst was no longer smiling. “Now tell me what’s gone wrong. I want to know everything.”
“With the plan? Nothing’s—”
“No, I mean everything. Every little thing that might have drawn attention to you.”
“Uh, well, um. We’re not used to working undercover or in feral conditions, and I think we made one or two mistakes in the early days. Luckily our ops cover is just about perfect; because they know we’re ReMastered, they make allowances for our being odd. It’s astonishing how willing they are to believe that we’re harmless passengers. Nobody even questioned that we were a youth leadership group! I thought it was absurd—”
Portia cleared her throat pointedly. Mathilde nearly jumped out of her skin.
“Let’s get something straight.” Hoechst’s gaze drilled into the young task group leader. “If you’ve done your job right, you have nothing to fear. If you’ve made honest but noncritical mistakes, and admit them and help remedy the situation, you have nothing to fear. What you should be afraid of is the consequences of covering up. Do I make myself clear? So cut the nervous chatter and tell me. What went wrong? What should I be aware of?”
“Oh.” Mathilde stared at her for a moment as if she’d sprouted a second head. Then her shoulders slumped very slightly. “Hans made a scene with one of the passengers on our first night aboard ship. We were all in one of the social areas — a bar, I believe they call them — when one of the ferals attempted to poison him with some sort of intoxicant. Nobody hurt, though. There is a small but vociferous group of passengers who appear to dislike us for some reason. But apart from that, not much has happened that I would classify as untoward. Hans I disciplined, and I consider the matter closed. The others—” She shrugged. “I cannot control what feral humans think of our program. I was uncertain I should even draw it to your attention…”
“I understand completely.” Hoechst bent her head over the cargo case, inspecting the boxy black plastic contents within. “The, ah, excesses of some of our predecessors have cast ReMastery in a very poor light, I’m afraid, and our overall goal of extending its benefits to everyone can only make them more suspicious.” She brooded for a moment. “I don’t intend to aggravate the situation.” She looked up, catching Mathilde’s gaze: “There will be no reports of atrocities or excesses arising from this intervention. One way or another.”
Mathilde smiled slowly.
Wednesday ran through abandoned hab spaces in the high-gee rings of an ancient station. Doorways gaped like empty eye sockets to either side of her; the floor sucked at her heels like molasses, dragging her backward. Something unseen ran behind her, dogging her footsteps like a nightmare — the skitter of claws, the clack of boots. She knew it was sharpening knives for her, but she couldn’t remember why — everything behind her was blank. Ahead of her was bad, too. Something hidden, something waiting. The pursuer was catching up, and when it caught her a fountain of red pulp splattered across her face. She was in the entrance to a toilet block on the admin deck, and there was a body and when she tugged at it, saying, “Come on, Dad,” it looked round and it wasn’t her father, blue-faced with asphyxia; it was Sven the clown, and he was smiling.
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—”