Rachel cleared her throat. "Hoechst was certain Svengali was the assassin.
And she had his paymaster's records."
"What made you think Sven worked alone?" Steffi winked at Wednesday, a horribly knowing look that made her try to burrow into her chair to avoid it.
She felt unclean.
"You set off that bomb—"
"No, that was someone else," Steffi said thoughtfully. "One of Hoechst's little surprises. I think she was trying to kill me. I just nailed a couple of others in the comfort of their own diplomatic residences. And relieved them of certain items from their personal safes, by way of insurance." She held up the tablet: "Which brings me to the subject at hand." She looked at Wednesday. "Can either of you give me a good reason not to transmit the irrevocable go code?"
Wednesday licked her lips. "They killed my parents and brother. They destroyed my home, in case you hadn't noticed. They did—things—to Frank. And you want me to tell you not to kill 'em all?"
Steffi looked amused. "Out of the mouths of babes," she called in the direction of the mike. "What's your offer, Rachel?"
"Let me get back to you in a minute." Rachel sounded very tense. "You're not helping, Wednesday: remember, only one of the R-bombs is heading for a Re-Mastered world. The rest are still running on New Dresden. Think about that before you open your mouth again."
"I'll give you five minutes to talk to your boss," said Steffi. "You might consider my pecuniary motives while you're at it." Then she flicked a switch on the console next to her and raised an eyebrow at Wednesday. "Do you really want me to kill everyone on two planets?" she asked.
"I'm not sure." Wednesday looked out of the picture window pensively. A huge whorl of violet-red gas, spokes of blue running radially through it, drifted across a black velvet backdrop iced with the unblinking pinpricks of a million stars. Frank is alive, she thought. Hoechst is dead, though. Will they prosecute me? I could claim self-defense against hijackers. The celestial smoke ring swung slowly past outside, a brilliant graveyard marker that would last a million years or more. And Frank hates them, too. But then she thought about New Dresden and the people she'd passed through like a ghost that had outlived the destruction of her planet. Jostling kids in a perfectly ordinary city. Blue skies and tall buildings. "I think I'm too insignificant to make that kind of decision," she said slowly. "I don't know who could." She shivered as a thought struck her. "I'm glad the murderer's dead. But to blame everyone behind them, their whole civilization … "
She stopped as she saw a shadow of a frown cross Steffi's face, and forced herself to shrug, miming disinterest. Suddenly her heart was pounding and her palms sweating. She slowly stood up and, when Steffi said nothing, walked toward one side of the window. As she did so, she waited for the solar nebula to vanish from the view, leaving nothing but a scattering of stars across the blackness. Then she twisted a control tab in one jacket pocket. It stiffened around her, waistband tightening and sealing against her pressure leggings under the lacy trousers. Black against a black background, she thought, taking deep breaths. She ran a hand through her hair and surreptitiously popped the seal that held her hood closed inside the collar of her jacket. Then she turned to face Steffi. "What do you want?" she asked as casually as she could manage.
Steffi chuckled, a deeply ugly sound. "I want about, oh, 50 million in bearer bonds, a yacht with independent jump capability, and some hostages to see me out of the immediate vicinity—oh, and that bitch's head on a trophy plaque. Along with the guy who killed Sven. He won't be coming back.
What the hell did you think, kid? We were in this for the good of our souls?"
She sat up. "You still listening in, Rachel?"
Martin replied. "She's trying to find someone to talk to on Earth," he said diffidently. "They've got to authenticate her before she can tell them what the situation is—"
"Bullshit!" Steffi snorted. "I'll give you one hour, no more. At the end of an hour, if you aren't making the right noises, you can kiss Dresden and Newpeace goodbye. If the answer's yes, I'll tell you who to deposit the bonds with and we can discuss the next step, namely transport. The TALIGENT terminal stays with me—it's a causal channel, you know it'll decohere at the first jump, but until then you'll know where I am." She looked thoughtful. "As a first step, though, you can bring me Hoechst's head, and the head of the scumbag who killed Sven. Not attached to their bodies. I know that doesn't sound like your idea of fun, but I want to be sure they're dead."
Wednesday stared at her in disgust. Is this what it comes down to? she wondered. Is this what you get if you stop worrying you might be a monster?
She glanced behind her at the window, nervously. I thought I knew you.
Then over at the side of the room. Comms, reactivate, she told her implant.
BING. Wednesday, please respond? It was Rachel. I'm listening. Who is Steffi, really?
The reply took a few seconds to come. Wednesday leaned against the wall beside the window, experimenting with the fabric texturing controls at the back of her jacket, seeing just how sticky she could make it go without losing its structural integrity. There was some setting called "gecko's feet"
that seemed pretty strong …
Near as I can tell, she's an alias for Miranda Katachurian. Citizen, Novy Kurdistan, last seen eleven years ago with a criminal record as long as your arm. Wanted for questioning in connection with armed robbery charges, then vanished.
"Steffi," Wednesday asked hesitantly, "what did you do it for?"
BING. Wednesday? Are you all right? Do you need help? Frank.
"For?" Steffi looked puzzled for a moment. Then her expression cleared.
"We did it for the money, kid."
L8R: LUV U, she replied to Frank, then glanced at Rachel's last message as she answered Steffi.
"And you're, uh, going to send the irrevocable go code to the R-bombers if you don't get what you want?"
Steffi grinned. "You're learning." Wednesday nodded, hastily composing a final reply.
"And doesn't it strike you that there's something wrong about that?"
"Why should it?" Steffi stared at her. "The universe doesn't owe me a living, and you can't eat ideals, kid. It's time you grew up and got over your history."
Case closed, sent Wednesday. "I guess you're right," she said, leaning back against the wall as hard as she could and dialing the stickiness up to max. Then she brought up her right hand and threw underhand at Steffi.
"Here, catch!" With her left hand she yanked hard on her collar, pulling the hood up and over her head and triggering the jacket's blowout reflex. Then she waited to die.
The noise was so loud that it felt like a punch in the stomach and a slap on the ears, leaving her head ringing. A fraction of a second later there was a second noise, a gigantic whoosh, like a dinosaur sneezing. Leviathan tried to tear her from the wall with his tentacles; she could feel her arms and legs flailing in the tornado gale. Something hit her so hard she tried to scream, sending a white-hot nail of pain up her right ankle. Her ears hurt with a deep dull ache that made her want to stick knife blades into them to scratch out the source of the pain. Then the noise began to die away as the station's pressure baffles slammed shut around the rupture, her helmet seal secured itself and inflated in a blast of canned air from the jacket vesicles, and her vision began to clear.
Wednesday gasped and tried to move, then remembered to unglue the back of her jacket. The room was a mess. There was no sign of Steffi, or the two chairs at the console, or half the racks that had cluttered the place up. An explosion of snow: they'd kept essential manuals on hard copy, and the blast and subsequent decompression had shredded and strewn the bound papers everywhere. But the window—
Wednesday looked out past shattered glass knives, out at a gulf of 40
trillion kilometers of memories and cold. Eyelids of unblinking red and green stared back at her from around an iron pupil, the graveyard of a shattered star. With an effort of will she tore her gaze away and walked carefully across the wreckage until she found the TALIGENT terminal, lying on its side, still held to the deck by a rat's nest of cables. She bent over and carefully pulled the keys out. Then she walked over to the window and deliberately threw one of them out into the abyss. The others she pocketed—after all, the diplomats from Earth would be needing them.
As the last key disappeared, a mail window from Rachel popped up. Urgent!
Wednesday, please respond! Are you hurt? Do you need help?
Wednesday ignored it and went in search of the emergency airlock kit instead. She didn't have time to answer mail: it would probably take her most of her remaining oxygen supply to get the airlock set up so she could safely reenter the land of the living beyond the pressure bulkhead. She had to prioritize, just like Herman had shown her all those years ago, alone in the cold darkness beyond the stars.
Her friends would be waiting for her on the other side of the wall: Martin who'd helped her to hide, and Rachel who'd shown her what to do without knowing it, and Frank, who meant more to her than she was sure was sensible. They would still be there when she'd worked out what she meant to do. And they'd be there to help her when she said goodbye to home for the final time and turned her back on the iron sunrise.
EPILOGUE: HOME FRONT
Home. It was getting to be a strange place, as alien as a hotel room on a distant planet. Rachel walked into the hall and dropped her shoulder bag, blinking tiredly: it was still three in the morning by the shipboard time of the Gloriana even though it was two in the afternoon there in Geneva, and the cumulative effects of switching from the hundred-kilosecond diplomatic clock back to a terrestrial time zone was going to give her bad jet lag.
Behind her, Martin yawned hugely. "How's it look?" he asked.
"It's all there." She ran a finger along the sideboard tiredly. Something buzzed in the next room, a household dust precipitator in need of a new filter or a robot scavenger with a damaged knee. "Place hasn't burned down while we've been away." She stared with distaste at the bulletin board on the wall, flashing red with notices of overdue bills. "Really got to get a proper housing agent who understands three-month trips at short notice. Last time I was away this long they sent the polis round to break down the door in case I'd died or something."
"You're not dead." Martin yawned again and let the front door swing shut.
"I'm not dead. I just feel that way … "
Three months away from home had built up an enormous backlog of maintenance tasks, and Rachel couldn't face them just then. "Listen. I'm going to have a shower, then go to bed," she said. "You want to stay up and order some food in, be my guest. Or check the bills. But it can wait until tomorrow. Right?"
"You have a point." Martin shrugged and leaned the big suitcase against the wall next to a hideously ugly wooden statue of the prophet Yusuf Smith that Rachel had picked up in a casbah somewhere in Morocco a few years earlier. "I was going to message Wednesday, see how she and Frank are doing, but—bed first."
"Yeah." Rachel stumbled up the steps to the mezzanine, dropping her sandals and clothes as she went, and gratefully registered that the house automatics had changed the sheets and freshened the comforter. "Home sweet home, safe at last." After weeks of tension and the paranoid days at the mercy of the ReMastered, it seemed almost too good to be true.
She returned to consciousness slowly, half-aware of a pounding headache and a nauseated stomach, in conjunction with sore leg muscles and crumpled bedding and a thick, warm sense of exhaustion that pervaded her body as if she'd been drugged. Someday they'll develop a drug for jet lag that really works, she thought fuzzily before another thought intruded.
Where was Martin?
"Ow!" she moaned, opening her eyes.
Martin was sitting up in bed watching her, concerned. "You awake? I've been checking the mail, and we've got a problem."
"Shit!" Rachel came to full consciousness in an instant, exhausted but painfully aware that she'd screwed up. "What is it?"
"Something about a meeting you're meant to be in later today. Like, in an hour's time. I nearly missed it—it's directed to the household, flagged as low priority. What could it be?"
"Shit! It's a stitch-up. Who is it?"
Martin blinked at the screen on the wardrobe door. "Something to do with the Entertainments and Culture Pecuniary Oversight Committee?" he asked, looking puzzled.
"Double shit!" A horrible sense of deja vu gripped her as she tried to sit up.
"What time is it?"
"It's two in the afternoon." Martin yawned. "Let me forward it to you."
Rachel read fast. "Departmental audit," she said tersely. "I'm going to have to get into headquarters, in a hurry."
Martin blinked. "I thought you'd taken care of that nonsense."
"Me? I've been away. Thought you might have noticed." She frowned.
"Leaving the fox in charge of the henhouse, it would seem. I wonder if my sources have found anything out about her … "
Bleary-eyed and tired, she spawned a couple of search agents to filter her mail—both the public accounts and a couple of carefully anonymized private ones.
"Looks like the asshole in Ents is acting up. Since I missed some kind of audit investigation six weeks ago, she managed to file a default reprimand against me. She's gotten wind I'm back in town and is moving to file criminal malfeasance charges, embezzling or misuse of funds, or something equally spurious. She's running a board of inquiry right now. If I don't get there—"
"I'll call you a pod." Martin was already out of bed. "Any idea what she's got against you?"
"I don't know—" Rachel froze. The search had stopped, highlighting something new and alarming. "Oops! Head office are pissed."
"Head office?"
"Black Chamber, not Entertainments and Culture. They don't want her digging." Rachel began to smile. " 'Stop her,' they say. They don't say how."