If he succeeded, he'd have had two planets, the beginnings of his own pocket interstellar empire." She looked at Frank, meeting his eyes. "I know what you think of us. Regardless of that, whatever you think of our ideology, we are not insane, and we are not suicidal. One of the goals of the ReMastered Directorate is to render interstellar warfare not merely unthinkable, but impossible. Scott had to go."
She sounds as if she's trying to convince herself, Frank realized with a sinking feeling. This was not what he'd wanted to hear from her. He'd expected venomously triumphant self-justification, perhaps, or a gloating confession. Not this! he thought despairingly. If Eric decides to run this, it'll be about the best piece of pro-ReMastered press they could ask for! The pot of gold at the end of Frank's starbow had just turned out to be a chamber pot full of shit—and despite what he'd said earlier about journalistic ethics being a crock, he couldn't see any obvious holes in her argument. Even releasing the prisoners in Hoechst's stolen memory diamond—expensive as such a process would be—would probably not reverse its effect by much.
She took a deep breath and continued her confession: "Luckily, Scott pushed too hard, and the wheels came off. There are a couple of thousand Ubers on Newpeace, not to mention the ordinary humans, who would perhaps be of some concern to you. We're spread terribly thin; if we have to evacuate that planet, we'd lose half a century's hard work. There's no way we could possibly convince all the Muscovite ambassadors to agree to cancel the R-bomb attack if they knew the truth. Doesn't that mean something to you?"
Frank nodded, dazed. He looked around, taking in other shocked expressions. The tension in the ReMastered soldiers. The twitchy look on the blond guy standing against the wall next to Wednesday said it all. She'd laid out the dictator's new suit in front of them, and it was threadbare: they were clearly shocked by Hoechst's revelations. The spook from the revolution on Newpeace all those years ago, the gray eminence at the center of a web of interstellar assassination and intrigue, turned out to be a fixer who was desperately trying to save a planet from the posthumous legacy of a genocidal megalomaniac—
"It takes two to send the cancel code. I've got one of them—right here."
She tapped the key again. "There's a causal channel connected to the TALIGENT offense control network: they abandoned it when they evacuated the station, but it wasn't disconnected. I had Zursch and Anders collect the station manager's key and take it there already. Hardware authentication, you see, all you need are the tokens. You don't disconnect causal channels without good reason; they're too expensive to set up in the first place.
"You have no idea how much it cost us to get our hands on this key—we had to extract it from the Ambassador to Newpeace. You don't need to concern yourselves with how. The station manager's was easier—silly fool actually left it in his office safe." She shrugged. "There's a diplomatic channel here, down in the communications center. One that's linked into the military TALIGENT network."
BING. New mail. Not now, Frank thought irritably, blinking it open before him. From: Wednesday. GOT 2 GO. SORRY. Huh? He glanced at her.
"What—"
"You'll be wanting that cartridge, I suppose," Wednesday said, her expression sullen. "What happens to us then?"
"I destroy it in front of you." Hoechst nodded at Frank. "You're here to witness this." A flicker of a grin. "Same as last time, without the unpleasant aftereffects. Which were not of my choosing, I should add." Her gaze fell on Rachel next. "I then send the cancel codes to the R-bombs, using the station manager's console, and take the Romanov to go pick up the crews and destroy the evidence. You get to wait here in the cold and try to keep everybody on the station alive until the rescue ship from Tonto arrives.
After that—" She shook her head. "Not my department."
"Diplomatic immunity," Rachel said in a voice as dry as bone.
"Are you going to get picky? If it means a couple of hundred million innocent people die as a result?" Hoechst stared at her through narrowed eyes. "Thought not."
"May I see the key?" Wednesday walked closer to the desk.
"Sure." Hoechst held it up, twirling it slowly between forefinger and thumb, evidently enjoying the gesture. "Now, Wednesday child, if you'd be so good as to hand me the cartridge—"
The lights flickered.
Hoechst froze. "Mathilde," she said thoughtfully, "it occurs to me that we haven't heard from Joanna, or Stepan and Roman for that matter. I want you to take every available body—not you, Franz, you're staying here—and deal with that missing Third Lieutenant. Then find out what happened to Joanna and her boys. Nothing good, I expect."
"Yes, boss." Mathilde headed for the door immediately, looking annoyed.
She tagged Gun-boy on the way through. "C'mon, hunting time."
The lights flickered again. "What do you suppose she's doing?" asked Frank.
Steffi whistled as she walked, hastily, toward the docking tunnel. A head-up clock counted down in front of her left eye: eighty-two, eighty-one, eighty …
She broke into a trot as the count headed for the final minute.
Big passenger-carrying spaceships were not designed to undock from big, high-population space stations by accident, or indeed anything short of a carefully choreographed and scheduled departure, overseen by the port authorities and the ship's bridge crew. Fail-safe clamps pressurized by the atmosphere aboard both craft held the Romanov's docking level against the hull of Old Newfie's lifesystem, thousands of tons of force that could only be released by a controlled depressurization of the clamp rings. But Old Newfie had been reconfigured for undocking without port command authority before the final evacuation, and Steffi had usurped control over the Romanov's life circuit as final officer on board. She'd given the bridge system a program to execute it, and she didn't want to be around when the watchdog timer counted down to zero and set it off.
The main boarding ramp was in sight, a tunnel rising up to the loading deck of the station, huge station pressure doors visible to either side as looming shadows. Steffi ducked into a side door and trotted up the maintenance path alongside the main ramp, gray walls closing in bare centimeters to either side of her shoulders. Forty-seven, forty-six … And she was facing the emergency airlock, a domed door set in a solid bulkhead beside the main tunnel. She spun the manual override wheel and stepped into the rotating chamber, cranked it round—basic hand cranks were provided in case of a power failure—and tumbled out into the shadows alongside the big station doors.
Too close, she thought, pulling her night-vision goggles down. The twilit dock was a maze of shadows and eerily glowing heat patches. A huge slug trail of luminosity led away from the tunnel, toward a door leading to the main customs post—waste heat from the passengers whom the ReMastered had taken aboard the station, probably. But there was nobody in sight. Careless, Steffi thought, and she darted away from the airlock toward the towering wall of one of the station spokes, determined and ready to execute the second stage of her plan.
Something thumped her left arm exactly like a blow from a careless passerby, just as her threat indicator lit up and her eye patch outlined a door that had just opened. Steffi reacted instinctively, her little machine pistol chattering to itself. The bullet paths curved weirdly in the Coriolis force, spiraling toward the target as the rounds overcorrected for the changing centrifugal effect: another bullet whispered through the air where her head had been a fraction of a second earlier, then her attacker collapsed. Steffi ran as fast as she could for the tower, but something was wrong. She felt as if she weighed too much, and when she tried to reach for a reload her left arm flopped around, not working properly.
"Shit." She crouched in the doorway, heart pounding, panting for breath in the freezing air. Now the pain started, coming in waves that almost made her faint. Her left hand felt sticky. She put down her gun and fumbled, one-handed, for one of the gel trauma packs she'd had the cornucopia spit out for her. "It's only a flesh wound," she told herself through chattering teeth.
"It's only—"
The gel pack went in and for a moment everything was gray and grainy.
Then the pain didn't so much subside as begin to regularize, not driving her to the brink of unconsciousness, becoming possible to manage. Steffi leaned back against the wall and panted, then picked up her gun. If I stay here, they'll see my heat trace, she realized. And besides …
Two, one, zero: the countdown stopped. A noise like a million steam kettles boiling as one came from the vicinity of the docking doors. Steffi winced as her eardrums pulsed once, twice—then with a huge crashing boom the doors slammed down into the space the Romanov's tunnel had just pulled away from.
Got you, you bastards! she thought, although exhaustion and pain sapped the realization of all pleasure. Now let's see how accurate that floor plan is.
Hoechst looked uncertain for a moment, as a faint vibration traveled through the deck. "The passengers are all in the customs hall," she said, glancing at Franz. "Why don't you go—"
Frank, distracted, glanced sideways at Wednesday. He sat up. "What are you—"
Wednesday pulled a plastic cylinder out of her pocket and held it toward Hoechst. "Share and enjoy." There was a note of anger in her voice, and something else, something like triumph that made Frank dive for the floor, covering his eyes as she tossed the cylinder at the desk—
There was a brilliant flash of blue and a loud bang.
Wednesday was already halfway to the door as a hot, damp wave pummeled across the top of Frank's head. It solidified almost instantly, aerogel foam congealing in a hazy fine mesh of fog with glass-sharp knife edges. Someone inside the fogbank was coughing and gargling. The remaining guard dived into it, desperately trying to batter and scoop his way through to Hoechst, choking in the misty sponge created by the riot bomb.
Frank rolled over on his back, taking in a confused kaleidoscope of impressions. Someone zipped past his face in a blur of motion. A buzzing rattle set his teeth on edge. Vague shadows at the limits of vision turned and fell. There was a scream, sharply cut off, a gurgling sound from the fogbank, a painfully loud bang from a riot gun discharging through a doorway, and more blue foam drifting into the room, blocking the door, congealing in sticky, spiky lumps.
He finished rolling, gasping for breath. I'm still alive? he wondered, dully.
"Wednesday!" he called.
"Save it." That was Martin. A groaning sound came from the floor.
"You. Frank. Help me." That was Rachel's voice, panting, gasping. What's wrong? he wondered. He sat up, momentarily chagrined not to have seen the fight, expecting a soldier's gun in his face at any moment.
"We've got to get her out of there!" Rachel was half-inside the riot foam fogbank, hacking at it with a plastic-bladed knife she'd assembled from the stiffened lapels of her jacket by some kind of sartorial black magic. "Unless it's set to melt, she's going to suffocate!"
The remaining ReMastered guard lay on the floor, splayed out as if a compact tornado had zapped him with a UV optical taser. The edgy one, the traitor, sat very still, watching everything alertly. For some reason he seemed very calm. "You," Frank gasped. "Help."
"No." He cocked his head on one side, eyes bright, and very deliberately crossed his arms. "Let her choke."
"What? I don't understand—"
Frank bent over one of the guards, searching his belt for some kind of knife, anything to help Rachel with. Martin seemed stunned, shaking his head like a punch-drunk fighter. The semiconscious man at Frank's feet stirred.
Frank did a double take and changed tasks, rolling the man over. "Anyone got some tape?"
"I have." The guy who'd given Frank the diamond sounded drained by the effort of talking. He stood up slowly, paused when Rachel looked round at him, then slowly knelt and pulled a roll of utility tape from one pocket. He yanked the guard's arms round and taped his wrists together behind his back, then repeated the job on his ankles and moved on. "I'd really be happier if you'd leave Portia to die," he added slowly, raising his voice and looking at Rachel as she panted, digging large lumps of bluish glassy foam loose from the mound. "She's killed more people than you've had hot meals."
"But if I leave her, what does that make me?" Rachel gasped between attacks.
"She's—" Frank stopped as Rachel straightened up, shaking her head. He looked past her; she'd dug as far as the edge of the desk, far enough to see that the blue-tinted foam was turning red.
"What the fuck do we do now?"
"We—" the blond guy stopped. "Portia lies," he said conversationally. "She lies instinctively. I don't know whether she was telling the truth or not, but that girl got away with, with the evidence. The smoking gun. I don't know what she thinks she's doing, but if she gets the evidence to the communications room where the secure hotline terminal to the R-bombers is located—or if you do-she could destroy a planet. She's got the key. Right now we've got a problem in the shape of about twelve other ReMastered soldiers, mostly standing guard over the passengers, but at least two of them will be on the Romanov's emergency bridge. Unless Portia was right and that missing officer—" He stopped.
"What is it?" Frank leaned toward him: "Tell me, dammit!"
"Portia sent the other key to the comms room. Wednesday's on her way—she's not a fool, she's got something in mind—and Portia as good as told her that she'd ordered her family killed." For a moment the blond man looked as if someone had walked over his grave. "What's she going to do now?"
"Oh shit." Martin was struggling to his feet, lurching drunkenly. "We have to get to the comms room. Franz, can you talk your way past whoever's guarding it?"
"I can try." The blond guy—Franz—stared at him. "Can I rely on you to support my petition for diplomatic asylum if I do? And to help me obtain a body for one of the involuntary uploads in the memory diamond he's carrying?" He nodded at Frank.