The whole ReMastered project, to destroy the Eschaton and replace it with another god, one with access to the uploaded memories of every human being who'd ever lived—and then to re-create humanity in the image of the new god they intended to serve—sounded so ridiculous on the face of it that it pleaded to be written off as a crackpot religion from the darkness beyond the terrestrial light cone. But something about it made Rachel's skin crawl. I've heard of something like this before, somewhere else. But where?
She was still trying to answer the question when there was a succession of chimes, the elevator capsule spun around once more, and the view was replaced with smooth metal walls inching past at a snail's pace. She had her safety harness unbuckled before the attendant managed to say,
"Welcome to orbital transfer station three." By the time the doors were open, she was on her feet with her pad stowed in a pocket, ready to collect her luggage from the hold.
The station blurred past her, unnoticed: departure gates, an outgoing customs desk she cleared with an imperious wave of her diplomatic tags, bowing and scraping from functionaries, a luggage trolley to carry her heavy case. Then she reached a docking tunnel that was more like a shopping mall, all carpet and glassed-in side bays exhibiting the blandishments of a hundred luxury stores and hotels. The white-gloved officer from the purser's team at the desk took one look at her passport and priority pass, and tried to usher her through into a VIP lift. She had to make him wait until Tranh caught up.
"Where are we berthed?" she asked.
"Ah, if I can see your—ah, I see." The Junior Lieutenant blinked through the manifest. "Ma'am, sir, if you'd like to follow me, you're to be accommodated on Bravo deck, that's executive territory. I show a Queen-class suite reserved for each of you. If you'd just care to wait a moment while I find out if they're ready—this was a very-short-notice booking, I'm terribly sorry—ah, yes. This way. Please?"
"Is Martin Springfield about?" she asked anxiously.
"Springfield? I know of no—oh, him. Yes he is. He's in a meeting with Flying Officer Fromm. Do you want me to page him for you?"
"No, that's fine. We're traveling together. If you could message him my room details when he comes out of his meeting?"
More corridors, more lifts. Exquisite wood paneling, carved on distant worlds and imported at vast expense for the fitting-out of the liner. Gilded statuary in niches, hand-woven rugs on the floors of the first-class quarters.
So this is what Martin works on for a living? she wondered. A door gaped wide and two white-uniformed stewards bowed as Rachel tiredly led her luggage inside. "That will be all for now, thanks," she said, dismissing them.
As the door closed, she looked around. "Well, that's an improvement over the last time … "
Last time Rachel had traveled on a diplomatic passport she'd had a cramped berth in officer territory on a battlecruiser. This time she probably had more space to herself than the Admiral's suite. She locked the door, bent to unfasten her shoes, and stretched her feet in the thick pile carpet. "I ought to do this more often," she told the ceiling. Her eyes were threatening to close from exhaustion—she'd been on her feet and alert for danger most of the time since the debacle at the embassy, and it was four in the morning, by Sarajevo local time—but business came first. From her shoulder bag she removed a compact receiver and busied herself quartering the room until she was satisfied that the only wireless traffic she could pick up consisted of legitimate emanations from room service. She sighed and put the machine down, then raised her phone. "Voice mail for Martin, copy to Tranh," she said. "I'm going to crash out for four hours, then I'm going back on duty. Call me if there are any developments. If not, we'll meet up to discuss our strategy tomorrow after I have time to talk to the Captain. Martin, feel free to come round whenever you get out of your meeting. Over."
Finally, she checked the door. It was locked. Good, she thought. She walked over to the bed, set a wake-up alarm on her rings, and collapsed, not bothering to undress first. She was asleep almost as soon as her head hit the pillows, and the nightmares, when they came, were as bad as she'd feared.
Light's, sirens, and night. A welter of impressions had closed around Wednesday, threatening to engulf her and cast her adrift on a sea of nightmare fodder. Svengali staggered alongside her, nursing an arm. A paramedic shone a torch in her face. She waved it aside. "He needs help!"
she shouted, holding the clown upright. She sat beside him for an eternity while a paramedic strapped up his arm, ran a teraherz scanner across his skull to check for fractures—someone else was working on her bruised forehead, but it was hard to keep track of things. An indeterminate time later she was standing up. "We need to get to the port," she was explaining in nightmare slow motion to a police officer who didn't seem to understand:
"Our ship leaves in a couple of hours—"
She kept having to repeat herself. Why did she keep having to repeat herself: Nobody was listening. Lights, sirens. She was sitting down now, and the light were flashing past and the sirens were overhead … I'm in a police car, she realized hazily. Sitting between Svengali and Frank. Frank had one arm around he shoulders, sheltering her. But this was wrong. They hadn't done anything wrong, had they? Were they under arrest? Going to miss the flight—
"Here you go." The door opened. Frank clambered out, then held Wednesday's arm, helping her out of the car. "We're holding the capsule for you—step this way." And it was true. She felt tears of relief prickling at her eyelids, trying to escape. Leaning on Frank. Svengali behind her, and two more carloads—the police were helping, shunting the off-worlders off-world.
The full VIP treatment. Why? she wondered vaguely. Then a moment's thought brought it home. Anything to look helpful to the diplomats …
Wednesday began to function again sixty kilometers above the equator, as the maglev pod began to power up from subsonic cruise to full orbital ascent acceleration.
"How do you feel?" she asked Frank, her voice sounding distant and flat beneath the ringing in her ears.
"Like shit." He grimaced. His head was bandaged into something that resembled a translucent blue turtle shell and he looked woozy from the painkillers they'd planted on him. "Told me to go straight to sick-bay." He looked at her, concerned. "Did you just say something?"
"No," she said.
"You'll have to speak up. I'm having difficulty hearing."
"What happened to Sven?" she asked.
Svengali, who was sitting on Frank's far side, took it on himself to answer.
"Someone tried to kill the Ambassador," he said slowly. "The Dresdener government shat a brick. I have no idea why they let us go—"
"No. It was you," Frank said flatly. "Because you're Muscovite. Aren't you?"
"Yes." Wednesday nodded uncertainly. "Whatever that means … "
"So." Frank nodded tiredly. "They assumed your guests were, too. As the embassy net was down and all they had to go on were passports issued by wherever the guests lived—you're traveling on Septagon ID, but you're not a citizen yet right?"
"Oh." Wednesday shook her head slowly, her neck muscles complaining because of the unaccustomed gee load. "Oh! Who could it be?" she asked hesitantly. "I thought you said whoever was after me—" Her eyes narrowed.
"Who's after you?" Svengali asked, clearly puzzled.
"I was sure." Frank looked frustrated. "The, the security alert. They canceled my interviews. In fact, that was the only public appearance the Ambassador put in while we were groundside. And did you notice the way she didn't go outside? Didn't even move outside of that podium with the reactive armor? But they left the windows and doors open. And there were cops everywhere on the grounds as soon as that bomb went off. Didn't she look padded—"
"The Ambassador was miming the speech," said Wednesday.
"What?" Svengali looked surprised. "What do you mean she was miming?"
"I saw her," Wednesday said. "I was right in the front row. It was the way she spoke—and she was wearing an earbud. From where I was sitting I could see it. Wearing body armor, too, I guess. You know what? I think they expected something to happen. Only not what did, if you follow me."
"An assassination attempt. The wrong assassination attempt." Frank sounded almost dreamy. "On the wrong target. Not you, Wednesday." He gave her arm a light squeeze. "A different assassin. One who didn't play ball. Sven, what were you doing down there?"
"I was hired to do a fucking floor show after dinner!" he snapped tensely.
"What do you think? This isn't a vacation for me, laughing boy."
"That's okay," said Frank. He closed his eyes and leaned back in his chair.
"Sorry," Svengali grumbled.
"This would be for the house you're planning on buying when you retire,"
prompted Wednesday, a cold sweat prickling in the small of her back.
"Yeah, that's it," Svengali agreed, sounding almost grateful.
"I hope you get there," she said in a small voice.
"I hope they find the fucking assholes who crashed the party," Frank said, sounding distantly angry. Wednesday stroked his knuckles, soothing him into silence, then leaned against his shoulder.
The rest of the trip back to orbit passed uneventfully.
INTERLUDE 3
Several new passengers had joined the Romanov at New Dresden. One of them had taken an imperial suite with the nobs on A deck while the rest were accommodated variously in business- and tourist-class staterooms, but all of them had these things in common: they had booked rooms on the liner at short notice roughly a day after a private yacht, the Heidegger, had briefly called at Dresden station, and they were all traveling under false passports.
The luxury suite was not an extravagance, but a necessity. As was the way Lars swept it regularly for transmitters and the various species of insect that might creep into a room aboard a luxury liner that had been booked by an arms merchant from Hut Breasil. Portia wanted the cubic volume for conferencing and a base of operations, and the cover identity excused some of the rather more alarming contents of her personal luggage. Which was why Mathilde, answering the invitation to visit the imperial suite, was startled to find the door being held open for her by an armed bodyguard and the room's occupant seated on a chaise longue in front of an open crate of self-propelled gun launchers.
"U. Mathilde Todt. Come in." Hoechst inclined her head. 'You look confused," she said.
"Ah. I was expecting—"
Hoechst beamed at her. "An austerity regime?" She rose. "Yes, well, cover identities must be maintained. And why would a rich arms dealer travel in cabbage class?"
Marx let the door close behind the woman. She stepped forward, as if sleepwalking. "It's been too long."
Hoechst nodded. "Consider yourself under direction again."
Mathilde rubbed her face. "You're my new control? Out here in person?" A note of gratified surprise crept into her voice.
"Unlike U. Scott, I don't believe in letting things slide," Hoechst said drily.
"I've been running around for the past two months, tying ligatures around leaks. Now it's your turn. Tell me how it's going."
"It's—" Mathilde licked her lips—"I've got everything in place for both the scenarios I was given, the abduction or the other one. Everything except the primary strike team. We've scoped out all the critical points, and the necessary equipment is on board. We had to suborn three baggage loaders and one bellboy to get it in place, but it's done, and they swallowed the cover story—there was no need to get technical with them." Getting technical was a euphemism for sinking a tree of nanoelectrodes into their brain stems and turning them into moppets—meat puppets. What it left behind afterward wasn't much use for anything except uploading and forwarding to the Propagators. "Peter is my number two in charge of line ops, and Mark is ready with the astrogation side of things. In fact, we're ready to go whenever you give the word."
"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.