She rolled her eyes. As invisible friends went, Herman could do an unpleasantly good imitation of a pompous youth leader. Dark emptiness sprinkled with the jewel points of stars covered the far wall, a quiet surf of conversation rippling across the beach of heads in front of her. A familiar chill washed through her: too many questions, too little time to ask them.
"Why did they let me go?"
"You were not recognized as a threat. If you were, I would not have asked you to go. Forgive me. There is little time remaining. What you achieved was more important than I can tell you, and I am grateful for it."
"So what did I accomplish? Was it really worth it for those papers?"
"I cannot tell you yet. The first jump is due in less than two minutes. At that point we lose contact. You will be busy after that: Septagon is not like Old Newfoundland. Take care: I will be in touch when the time is right."
"Is something wrong, Vicki?" With a start she realized her father was watching her.
"Nothing, Dad." Instinctive dismissal: Where did he learn to be so patronizing? "What's going to happen?"
Morris Strowger shrugged. "We, uh, have to make five jumps before we arrive where we're going. The first—" He swallowed. "Home, uh, the explosion, is off to one side. You know what a conic section is?"
"Don't talk down to me." She nearly bit her tongue when she saw his expression. "Yes, Dad. I've done analytic geometry."
"Okay. The explosion is expanding in a sphere centered on, on, uh, home.
We're following a straight line—actually, a zigzag around a straight line between equipotent points in space-time—from the station, which is outside the sphere, to Septagon, which is outside the sphere of the explosion but on the other side. Our first jump takes us within the sphere of the explosion, about three light months inside it. The next jump takes us back out the other side."
"We're going into the explosion?"
Morris reached out and took her hand. "Yes, dear. It's—" He looked at the screen again, ducking to see past one of the heads blocking the way. Mum, Indica, was holding Jeremy, facing the screen: she had her hands on his shoulders. "It's not dangerous," he added. "The really bad stuff is all concentrated in the shock front, which is only a couple of light days thick.
Our shielding can cope with anything else; otherwise, Captain Mannheim would be taking us around the explosion. But that would take much longer, so—" He fell silent. A heavily accented voice echoed from the screen.
"Attention. This is your captain speaking. In about one minute we will commence jump transit for Septagon Central. We have a series of five jumps at seventy-hour intervals except for the fourth, which will be delayed eighteen hours. Our first jump takes us inside the shock front of the supernova: religionists may wish to attend the multifaith service of remembrance on G deck in three hours' time. Thank you."
The voice stopped abruptly, as if cut off. A stopwatch appeared in one corner of the wall, counting down the seconds. "What will we do now?"
Wednesday asked quietly.
Her father looked uncomfortable. "Find somewhere to live. They said they'd help us. Your mother and I will look for work, I suppose. Try to fit in—"
The black-jeweled sky shimmered, rainbow lights casting many-colored shadows across the watchers. A collective sigh went up: the wall-screen view of space was gone, replaced by the most insanely beautiful thing she had ever seen. Great shimmering curtains of green and red and purple light blocked out the stars, gauzy shrouds of fluorescent silk streaming in a wild breeze. At their heart, a brilliant diamond shone in the cosmos, a bloodred dumbbell of light growing from its poles. "Herman?" she whispered to herself. "Do you see that?" But there was no reply: and suddenly she felt empty, as hollow as the interior of the baby nebula the ship now floated in.
"All gone," she said aloud, and suddenly there were tears in her eyes: she made no protest when her father gathered her in his arms. He was crying, too, great racking sobs making his shoulders shake: she wondered what he could be missing for a moment, then caught its palest shadow and shuddered.
OUT OF THE FRYING PAN
"May I ask what I'm accused of?" Rachel asked for the third time. Don't let them get to you, she told herself, forcing her face into a bland smile: One slip and they'll hang you out to dry.
The daylight filtering through the window-wall was tinted pale blue by the slab of dumb aerogel, the sky above the distant mountains dimmed to a remote purple. Behind the heads of her inquisitors she focused on the contrail of a commuter plane scratching its way across the glass-smooth stratosphere.
"There are no charges," the leader of the kangaroo court said, smiling right back at her. "You haven't broken any regulations, have you?" The man next to her cleared his throat. "Well, none of ours," she added, her exaggeratedly dyed lips curling minutely in distaste. Rachel focused on her hairline. Madam Chairman was dressed in an exaggeratedly femme historical style—perhaps to add a touch of velvet and lace to her S&M
management style—but a ringlet of hair had broken free of whatever chemical cosh she used to discipline it, and threatened to flop over one razor-finished eyebrow in a quizzical curl.
'The excursion to Rochard's World was not my initiative, as I pointed out in my report," Rachel calmly repeated, despite the urge to reach across the table and tweak Madam Chairman's hairdo. Damn, I'd like to see you manage a field operation gone bad, she thought. "George Cho got the run-around from the New Republican government, the idiots had already decided to violate the Third Commandment before I arrived on the scene, and if I hadn't been in position, there wouldn't have been anybody on the ground when the shit hit the fan. So George sent me. As I think I've already stated, you're not cleared to read the full report. But that's not what this is about, is it?"
She leaned back and took a sip from her water glass, staring at the chief mugger through half-closed eyes. Madam Chairman the honorable Seat Warmer, who evidently rejoiced under the name of Gilda something-or-other, took advantage of the pause to lean sideways and whisper something in Minion Number One's ear. Rachel put her glass down and smiled tightly at Madam Chairman. She had the soul of an auditor and a coterie of gray yes-people; she'd come for Rachel out of nowhere the day before, armed with a remit to audit her and a list of questions as long as her arm, mostly centering on Rachel's last posting outside the terrestrial light cone. It had been clear from the start that she didn't know what the hell Rachel did for the diplomatic service, and didn't care. What she was pissed off about was the fact that Rachel was listed on the budget as an entertainments officer or cultural attaché—a glorified bribe factor for the department of trade—and that this was her turf. The fact that Rachel's listing was actually a cover for a very different job clearly didn't mean anything to her.
Rachel fixed Madam Chairman with her best poker face. "What you're digging for is who it was that authorized George to send me to Rochard's World, and who ordered the budget spend. The long and the short of that is, it's outside your remit. If you think you've got need to know, take it up with Security."
She smiled thinly. She'd been assigned to Cho's legation to the New Republic on the Ents payroll, but was really there for a black-bag job; she answered to the Black Chamber, and Madam Chairman would run into a brick wall as soon as she tried to pursue the matter there. But the Black Chamber had to maintain Rachel's official cover—the UN had an open hearings policy on audits to reassure its shareholders that their subscriptions were being spent equitably—and she was consequently stuck with going through the motions. Up to and including being fired for misappropriation of funds if some bureaucratic greasy-pole climber decided she was a good back to stab on the way up. It was just one of the risks that went with the job of being a covert arms control inspector.
Gilda's own smile slid imperceptibly into a frown. Her politician-model cosmetic implant didn't know how to interpret such an unprogrammed mood: for a moment, bluish scales hazed into view on her cheeks, and her pupils formed vertical slits. Then the lizard look faded. "I disagree," she said airily, waving away the objection. "It was your job, as officer on-site, to account for expenditure on line items. The UN is not made of money, we all have a fiduciary duty to our shareholders to ensure that peacekeeping operations run at a profit, and there is a small matter of eighty kilograms of highly enriched—weapons grade—uranium that remains unaccounted for.
Uranium, my dear, does not grow on trees. Next, there's your unauthorized assignment of a diplomatic emergency bag, class one, registered to this harebrained scheme of Ambassador Cho's, to support your junket aboard the target's warship. The bag was subsequently expended in making an escape when everything went wrong—as you predicted at the start of the affair, so you should have known better than to go along in the first place.
And then there's the matter of you taking aboard hitchhikers—"
"Under the terms of the common law of space, I had an obligation to rescue any stranded persons I could take on board." Rachel glared at Minion Number One, who glared right back, then hastily looked away. Damn, that was a mistake, she realized. A palpable hit. "I'll also remind you that I have a right under section two of the operational guidelines for field officers to make use of official facilities for rescuing dependents in time of conflict."
"You weren't married to him at the time," Madam Chairman cut in icily.
"Are you sure it wasn't a marriage of convenience?" Minion Number Two chirped out, hunting for an opportunistic shot.
"I would say the facts do tend to support that assumption," Minion Number One agreed.
"The facts of the matter are that you appear to have spent a great deal of UN money without achieving anything of any significance," Madam Chairman trilled in a singsong. She was on a roll: she leaned forward, bosom heaving with emotion and cheeks flushed with triumph as she prepared for the kill. "We hold you to account for this operation, Junior Attaché Mansour. Not to put too fine a point on it, you wasted more than two million ecus of official funds on a wildcat mission that didn't deliver any measurable benefits you can point to. You're on the personnel roster under my oversight, and your screwup makes Entertainments and Culture look bad. Or hadn't you realized the adverse impact your spy fantasies might have on the serious job of marketing our constituent's products abroad? I can find some minor contributions to the bottom line on your part m the distant past, but you're very short on mitigating factors; for that reason, we're going to give you twenty-seven—"
"Twenty-six!" interrupted Minion Number Two.
"—Twenty-six days to submit to a full extra-departmental audit with a remit to prepare a report on the disposition of funds during operation Mike November Charlie Four Seven-slash-Delta, and to evaluate the best practices compliance of your quality outcome assurance in the context of preventing that brushfire conflict from turning into a full-scale interstellar war." Madam Chairman simpered at her own brilliance, fanning herself with a hard copy of Rachel's public-consumption report.
"A full-scale audit?" Rachel burst out: "You stupid, stupid, desk pilot!" She glanced round, fingering the control rings for her personal assist twitchily. A security guard would have gone for the floor at that point, but Rachel managed to restrain herself even though the adrenaline was flowing, and the upgrades installed in her parasympathetic peripheral nervous system were boosting her toward combat readiness. "Try to audit me. Just try it!"
She crossed her arms tensely. "You'll hit a brick wall. Who's in your management matrix grid? Do you think we can't reach all of them? Do you really want to annoy the Black Chamber?"
Madam Chairman rose and faced Rachel stiffly, like a cobra ready to spit.
"You, you slimy little minx, you cowboy—" she hissed, waving a finger under Rachel's nose—"I'll see you on the street before you're ever listed under Entertainments and Culture again! I know your game, you scheming little pole-climber, and I'll—"
Rachel was about to reply when her left earlobe buzzed. "Excuse me a moment," she said, raising a hand, "incoming." She cupped a hand to her ear. "Yeah, who is this?"
"Stop that at once! This is my audit committee, not a talking shop—"
"Polis dispatch. Are you Rachel Mansour? SXB active three-zero-two? Can you confirm your identity?"
Rachel stood up, her pulse pounding, feeling weak with shock. "Yes, that's me," she said distantly. "Here's my fingerprint." She touched a finger to her forehead, coupling a transdermal ID implant to the phone so that it could vouch for her.
"Someone stop her! Philippe, can't you jam her? This is a disgrace!"
"Voiceprint confirmed. I have you authenticated. This is the Fourth Republican Police Corporation, dispatch control for Geneva. You're in the Place du Molard, aren't you? We have an urgent SXB report that's just across the way from you. We've called in the regional squad, but it's our bad luck that something big's going down just outside Brasilia, and the whole team is out there providing backup. They can't get back in less than two hours, and the headcase is threatening us with an excursion in only fifty-four minutes."
"Oh. Oh, hell!" Situations like this tended to dredge up reflexive blasphemies left over from her upbringing. Rachel turned toward the door, blanking on her surroundings. Sometimes she had nightmares about this sort of thing, nightmares that dragged her awake screaming in the middle of the night, worrying Martin badly. "Can you have someone pick me up in the concourse? Brief me on the way in. You know I haven't handled one of these in years? I'm on the reserve list."
"Stop that now!" Madam Chairman was in the way, standing between Rachel and the doorway. She pouted like a fighting fish faced with a mirror, bloodred lips tight with anger and fists balled. "You can't just walk out of here!"
"What are you going to do, slap me?" Rachel asked, sounding amused.