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 careful: 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."
"Oh." Wednesday fell silent. "But none of the diplomats are puppets," she pointed out. "They'd have made FTL transfers to get to their embassies. So there's no evidence, is there?"
"There is evidence," Herman pointed out. "The ReMastered focus on you, and the items you found aboard Old Newfie before its evacuation, suggest that it was used as a point of entry for some years, and that the insurgency group operating in Moscow were careless. The ReMastered focus on assassinating Muscovite diplomats is itself suggestive, although I am not yet certain of their motives. The faction responsible appears to want to force the Muscovite diplomatic corps to send the irrevocable go code to the R-bombers, thus precipitating a political crisis on New Dresden with implications elsewhere. But it is difficult to be sure."
"But you—you"—Wednesday struggled for words—"You're part of the Eschaton. Can't you stop them? Don't you want to stop them?"
"Why do you think I am talking to you?" Her own voice, calm and sympathetic. "I cannot undo the destruction of Moscow because the accident did not trigger the Eschaton's temporal immune response. Higher agencies are investigating the possibility of a threat to the Eschaton itself. I am trying to prevent the ReMastered from achieving their goal of taking New Dresden, or whatever else they want to achieve. I'm also trying to stop them from acquiring the final technical reports from the weapons project on Moscow. And I'm trying to ensure that the diplomatic corps from Earth is alerted to the threat. This is a low-level response by the standards of the Eschaton. The ReMastered belief system requires the destruction of the Eschaton. They are nowhere near acquiring that capability, and have not yet triggered the Eschaton's primary defense reflexes, but if they do … you would not wish to live within a thousand light years."
"Oh." It came out sounding weak, and Wednesday hated herself for it. "And what about me? What am I going to do afterward? My family … " A huge sense of loss stopped her in her tracks. She glanced at the sleeping figure in the bed and the sense of loss subsided, but only a fraction.
"You are old enough to make up your own mind about your future. And I cannot accept responsibility for events that I was not forewarned about or involved in. But I will ensure that you do not lack money in the short term, while you sort your life out, if you survive the next few days."
"If?" Wednesday paced over toward the picture wall. "What do you mean, if?"
"The ReMastered group from MOSS is aboard this ship for a reason.
Sometime after the next jump I expect them to do something drastic. It might be as crude as an attempt to snatch and puppetize you, but there are too many witnesses aboard this ship to whom you might have spoken. A more sensible approach would be to ensure that this ship never reaches its destination. You should prepare yourself. Learn the crew access spaces and the details I downloaded into your ring. One other thing: three diplomats from Earth's United Nations Organization have joined the ship.
You can trust them implicitly. In particular, you can talk to Martin Springfield, who has worked for me in the past. He may be able to help protect you.
And one other point. If you get the chance to reacquire the documentary evidence of ReMastered weapons tests in Moscow system, turn it over to the diplomats. That is the one thing you can do that will cause the most damage to the ReMastered."
"I'll bear it in mind." Her voice wavered. "But you said they're going to break the door down and kidnap me—what am I supposed to do about that?"
"Simple: don't be in your cabin when they come for you." Herman paused.
"Too much time. I have downloaded some further design patterns into your rings. Keep your jacket by you at all times."
"My jacket?"
"Yes. You never know when you'll need it." Herman's tone was light. "Good luck, and goodbye. Oh, and if by some chance the Romanov ends up at New Prague, talk to Rachel before you decide to take a day trip to the surface. Otherwise, it might come as a shock … "
Click. The call ended. Wednesday cursed quietly for a moment, then noticed a change in the room. She glanced up.
"What was that about?" asked Frank, his expression grave. "Was someone picking an argument?"
She stared at him, her heart suddenly pounding and her mouth dry. "My invisible friend—" she began. "When do we jump?"
"Not for at least a day. Why don't you come here and tell me about it?" He moved to one side of the bed, making a space for her.
"But I—" She stopped, the sense of dread receding somewhat. "A day?"
Long habit and ingrained distrust told her that mentioning Herman to anyone would only get her into trouble. Logic, and something else, told her that concealing him from Frank would be a mistake. "I'm not supposed to talk about it," she said. "And you'll think I'm crazy!"
"No." He looked at her thoughtfully. "I don't think you're crazy." His expression was open and surprisingly vulnerable—which only made him harder for her to read. "Why don't you start at the beginning?"
She climbed into bed and leaned against him. He put an arm round her shoulders as she took a deep breath. "When I was ten I had an invisible friend," she admitted. "I only discovered he worked for the Eschaton after home blew up … "
Martin glanced up as Rachel opened the door to the cramped office cube, off to one side of the executive planning suite. His face was lined and weary. "You're all right?" he asked.
"Never been better." Rachel pulled a face, then yawned. "Damn, need a wake-up dose." She looked at the table, glanced at the young-looking Lieutenant sitting at the other side of it from Martin. "Introduce me?"
"Yeah. This is Junior Flight Lieutenant Stephanie Grace. Just back from ground leave. While she's been away I've been working with her boss, Flying Officer Max Fromm. Um, Steffi? This is my wife, Rachel Mansour.
Rachel is a cultural attache with—"
"Not that introduction." Rachel grinned humorlessly as she held up a warrant card. Her head, surrounded by the UN three-W logo on a background of stars. "Black Chamber. That's Colonel Mansour, Combined Defense Corps, on detached duty with the UN Standing Committee on Interstellar Disarmament. Purely for purposes of pulling rank where appropriate, you understand. I'd rather the passengers and crew outside your chain of command didn't learn of my presence just yet. Do we understand each other?"