Iron Sunrise

MURDER BY NUMBERS

Forty light years from Earth, the yacht Gloriana congealed out of the cold emptiness between stars, emitting an electric blue flare of Cerenkov radiation. If it drifted at the residual velocity carried over from its last reference frame shift, it would take nearly two hundred years to cover the distance separating it from the star system it was heading for, but drifting wasn’t the name of the game. After only a few minutes the ship’s inertial transfer unit came online. Lidar probed the space ahead for obstacles as the yacht came under acceleration.

The Gloriana had started life as a billionaire’s toy, but these days almost half the passenger volume was filled by the extensive diplomatic function spaces of a mobile embassy. The ship — and its three sisters — existed because it was cheaper for the UN to swallow the extra costs of running a starship than maintaining consulates on the couple of hundred planets that received visitors from Earth more than once in a decade but less than a thousand times a year. Now running between jump zones at full acceleration, Gloriana had been under way for a week; over the course of which time Rachel Mansour had become increasingly annoyed and worried by George Cho’s refusal to disclose the purpose or destination of the mission.

Finally, however, it looked as if she was about to get some answers.

The conference room was walled in a false woodgrain veneer that hardly sufficed to cover the smart skin guts of the ship. Tricked out in natural surfaces, the whole thing was as artificial as a cyborg smile. Maybe the big boardroom table (carved in the ornate intricacies of the neo-retrogothic fad of a century earlier) was made of wood, but Rachel wasn’t betting on it. She glanced round the occupied chairs as she sat down, recognizing Prifkin, Jane Hill, Chi Tranh, and Gail Jordan. George’s little munchkins are out in force, she noted ironically. She’d worked with most of them in the past; the lack of new faces told its own story.

“I take it nothing’s running to schedule, is it?”

“The best-laid plans of mice and men,” Cho commented apologetically. “You can lock the door now,” he told Pritkin. “I’ve got some papers for you, dumb hard copy only, and they do not leave this room.” He reached under the desk and retrieved six fat files, their covers banded with red and yellow stripes, then tapped a virtual button on his pad. There was a faint hissing sound from the air conditioning. “We’re now firewalled from the rest of the ship. No bandwidth, bottled air, and the ship itself isn’t within hailing distance of anything else … you can’t be too careful with this stuff.”

Rachel’s skin crawled. Last time she’d seen George put on the full-dress, loose-lips-sink-ships song and dance it had been the run in to the mess on Rochard’s World. Which had involved dirty-tricks black ops that could have backfired to the extent of starting an interstellar war. “How does this rate with the last, uh, mission?” she asked.

“Messier. All turn to page 114.” There was a rustle of dumb paper as everybody opened their files simultaneously. Someone whistled tunelessly, and Rachel glanced up in time to see Gail looking startled as she studied the page. Rachel began to read just in time for George to derail her concentration by talking. “Moscow. Named after the imperial capital of Idaho rather than the place in Europe, except Idaho didn’t have an empire back when the Eschaton grabbed a million confused Midwestemers from the first republic and stuffed them through a wormhole leading to the planetary surface.”

The words on the page swam before Rachel’s eyes: Bill of indictment in re: signatories of the Geneva Conventions on Causality Violation versus Persons Unknown responsible for the murder of—

“Moscow was, bluntly, another boring McWorld. And a bit backward, even by those standards. But it had a single — and fairly enlightened — federal government, a single language, and no history of genocide, nuclear war, cannibalism, slavery, or anything else very unpleasant to explain it. It wasn’t Utopia, but neither was it hell. In fact, I’d have said the Muscovites were rather nice. Easygoing, friendly, laid-back, a little sleepy. Unlike whoever murdered them.”

Rachel leaned back in her chair and watched George. Cho was a diplomat, and a polished and experienced gambler who liked nothing better than a game of three-stud poker — so the experience of seeing him actually looking angry and upset about something was a novelty in its own right. The wall behind him showed supporting evidence. Rippling fields of grain as far as the eyes could see, a city rising — if that was the word for an urban sprawl where only city hall was more than three stories high — from the feet of blue-tinted mountains, white-painted houses, huge automated factory complexes, wide empty roads stretching forever under a sky the color of bluebells.

“Not everyone on Moscow was totally laid-back,” George continued, after taking a sip from his water glass. “They had a small military, mostly equipped for disaster relief work — and a deterrent. Antimatter-fueled, ramscoop-assisted bombers, hanging out in the Oort cloud, about twelve light hours out.”

The wall dissolved into icy interstellar darkness and a close-up of a starship — not an elegant FTL yacht like this one, with the spherical bump of its drive kernel squatting beneath a tower of accommodation and cargo decks, but the evil angular lines of a planet-buster. Most of the slower-than-light bomber consisted of fuel containment vessels, and the huge inverted funnel of the ram field generator. Scooping up interstellar hydrogen for reaction mass, using antimatter to energize it, the warship could boost itself to more than 80 percent of lightspeed in a matter of weeks. Steering toward a target, it would then drift until it was time for terminal approach. Then, instead of decelerating, the crew and the ramscoop would separate and make their own way — leaving the remains of the ship to slam into the target planet.

“This is a reconstruction of a Muscovite Vindicator-class second-strike STL bomber. Our best intelligence gives it a maximum tau factor of point two and a dry rest mass of three kilotons — extremely high for the product of a relatively backward world — with an aggregate kinetic yield of 120 million megatons. It’s probably designed to prefragment prior to impact, and coming in at 80 percent of lightspeed with several hundred penetration aids and a wake shield against ablator clouds, it would be able to saturate any reasonable planetary ballistic defense system. It would deliver about 20 percent more energy than the Chicxulub impactor that hit Earth 65 million years ago, enough to devastate a continent and trigger a dinosaur winter. In other words, it’s a pretty typical second-strike slower-than-light deterrent for a planet that didn’t have any enemies or major foreign policy engagements; an insurance policy against invaders.

“Moscow had four of these monsters, and we know for sure that the early warning system alerted them before the stellar shock front reached their fire-bases; we know at least three of them came under acceleration. What happened to the fourth ship is unclear at this time. They probably took some serious damage from the nova, but we have to assume that those four ships are engaged on a strike mission.”

George sat down again and refilled his water glass. Rachel shivered slightly. They launched? But where to? The idea was disquieting, even revolting: “Has anyone ever actually launched an STL deterrent before, that you know of? I don’t think I’ve ever heard of one being used…”

“May I?” It was Chi Tranh, lean-featured and quiet, the expert on weapons of mass destruction and, sometimes, her back-office researcher. Not a field agent, but George had evidently included him in the operation from the start, judging by the way he nodded along. “The answer is no,” said Tranh. “We have never seen one of these weapons systems used in anger. Nobody can start a war using STL ships — it would give years for a pre-emptive retaliatory strike. The idea is simply to have a deterrent — a club up your sleeve that makes the cost of invading and occupying your world too expensive for an aggressor to bear. This is a first, at least within our light cone.” He sat back and nodded at George.

“Who were they directed at?” Gail asked tentatively. “I mean, who would do such a thing? How are they controlled? Have they—” She looked bewildered, which gave Rachel little satisfaction: the easily flustered protocol officer wasn’t her first choice of someone to bring into the inner circle. What was George thinking? she wondered.

“Peace.” George made soothing gestures with his left hand. “We, um … at the time of the event, Moscow was engaged in heated and unpleasant trade discussions with New Dresden. That’s in your briefing documents, too, by the way. A previous trade deal cemented between a Muscovite delegation and the central committee of the Balearic Federation collapsed when the, um, Balearics were finally forced to sue for peace with the provisional government of Novy Srebrenicza. Prior to the peace of ’62, the Balearics controlled the planet’s sole surviving skyhook, which gave them a chokehold on the surface-to-orbit bulk freight trade. But after ’62, the Patriotic Homeland Front was running the show.

They decided to renegotiate several of their local bilateral trade arrangements — in their favor, of course — to help with the reconstruction. Things got extremely heated when they impounded a Muscovite starship and confiscated its cargo: differential levels of engineering support orbit-side in both systems meant that, although New Dresden had more turmoil and a war to recover from, heavy shipping was a proportionately much more expensive item on Moscow, which didn’t have the tech base to fabricate drive kernels. The Muscovites’ consulate was downsized to a negotiating core, and a large chunk of the Dresdener embassy was expelled a couple of weeks before the, ah, event.”

“So the bombers launched, on New Dresden,” Rachel concluded with a sinking feeling.

“We, um, think so,” said George. “We’re not sure. Tranh?”

“We can’t track RAIR bombers once they go ballistic,” said Tranh. “It’s standard procedure to launch in a random direction at high delta-vee, crank up to about point one light, then shut down and drift for a bit before lining up on the real target and boosting steadily to cruise speed. The drive torch is highly directional, and if nobody is in line behind it to see the gamma signature, it’s easy to miss. Especially as the bombers launch from out in the Oort cloud and aim their exhausts to miss the inner system completely during the initial boost phase. Once they’re under way the crew, usually four or six of them, enter suspended animation for a month or more, then the Captain wakes up and uses the bomber’s causal channel to establish contact with one of the remaining consulates or embassies. He or she also opens any sealed orders. In this case, we’ve been informed — through confidential channels, initially by the Muscovite embassy on Earth — that a week before Moscow was hit, the Governor-General’s office updated the default fire plan for the V-force to target New Dresden. We don’t know why she did that, but the trade dispute…” Tranh trailed off.

“That’s the situation.” George shook his head. “Doubtless the Muscovite government didn’t expect to be attacked by New Dresden — but as a precaution they selected New Dresden as a default target, leaving the fallout for the diplomatic corps to deal with. New Dresden is thirty-six light years from Moscow, so at full bore the bombers can be there in forty years. Thirty-five now, and counting. New Dresden has a population of over eight hundred million. There is no way, even if we install extra skyhooks and obtain maximum cooperation from the neighbors, that we can evacuate nearly a billion people — the required cubage, over thirty million seats a year, exceeds the entire terrestrial registered merchant fleet’s capacity. Never mind the refugee problem — who’d take them in?”

“I don’t believe they could be so stupid!” Gail said vehemently. Rachel watched her cautiously. Gail might be good at organizing the diplomatic niceties, but in some respects she was very naive. “How could they? Is there a recall signal?”

“Yes, there’s a recall code,” George admitted. “The problem is getting the surviving members of the Muscovite diplomatic corps to send it.”

Rachel flipped through the pages of her briefing document rapidly. Ah, yes, I was afraid it would be something like this. Background: the bombers communicated with the remaining embassies via causal channel. In the absence of a recall code, the bombers would proceed on a strike mission to the designated target, their crews in cold sleep for most of the voyage. After conducting the attack, the crew — with their ramscoops and life-support modules — could decelerate or cruise on to another system at near lightspeed. If a recall code was received first, standard procedure was for the crew to burn their remaining fuel, braking to a halt in deep space, and for the embassy to lay on a rescue ship to remove the crew, laying scuttling charges to decommission the bombers in situ.

“How is a recall code sent?” Rachel inquired.

“Via causal channel from one of the embassies,” said Tranh. “Because the bombers are strictly STL, they maintain contact with the government-in-exile. The ambassadors possess authentication tokens that the bomber crews can use to confirm their identity. Having authenticated themselves, they have a vote code system — if two or more of them send a recall code, the bomber crews are required to stand down and disclose their position and vector for a decommissioning flight. But — and this is a big but — there’s also a coercion code. It is known only to the ambassadors, like the recall code, and if three or more ambassadors send the coercion code, the bomber crews are required to destroy their causal channel and proceed to the target. The coercion code overrides the recall code; the theory is that it will only be used if an aggressor has somehow managed to lay his or her hands on an ambassador and is holding a gun to their head. The ambassadors can tell the black hats the wrong code and, if three or more of them are under duress, ensure that the strike mission goes forward.”

“Oh. Oh.” Gail shook her head. “Those poor people! How many ambassadors do we have to work on? With?”

George tapped the tabletop. “It’s in your dossier. There were twelve full-dress embassies from Moscow in residence at the time of the disaster. Unfortunately, two of the ambassadors had been recalled for consultation immediately before the incident, and they are presumed dead. Of the remaining ten, one committed suicide immediately, one died in a vehicular accident six months later — it was ruled an accident; he seems to have fallen in front of a train — and, well, this is where it gets interesting. I hope you all have strong stomachs…”

After the meeting she caught up with Martin. He was idling on the promenade deck, playing with the image enhancement widgets on the main viewing window.

“How did it go?” he asked, glancing up at her from the chaise longue. He seemed to be treating the journey as an enforced vacation, she noticed; dressing casually, lounging around, catching up on his reading and viewing, spending his surplus energy in the gym. But he looked worried now, as if she’d brought a storm cloud of depression in with her.

“It’s a lot to swallow. Budge over.” He made some space for her to sit down. “I want a drink.”

“I’ll get you one. What do you—”

“No, don’t. I said I wanted a drink, not that I’m going to have one.”

She stared gloomily at the wall-sized expanse of darkness on the other side of the almost empty room. Something circular and penumbral, darker than the interstellar night, cut an arc out of the dusting of unwinking stars. “What’s that?”

“Brown dwarf. Uncataloged, it’s about half a light year away. I’ve got the window accumulating a decent visible light image of it right now.”

“Oh, okay.” Rachel leaned back against the wall. The designers had tricked out the promenade deck in a self-conscious parody of the age of steam. From the holystoned oak planking of the floor to the retro-Victoriana of the furniture, it could have been a slice out of some nuclear-powered liner from the distant planet-bound past, a snapshot of the Titanic perhaps, a time populated by women in bonnets and ballooning skirts, men in backward baseball caps and plus-fours, zeppelins and jumbos circling overhead. But it wasn’t big enough to be convincing, and instead of a view across the sea, there was just a screen the size of a wall and her husband wearing a utility kilt with pockets stuffed with gadgets he never went anywhere without.

“How bad was it?” he asked quietly.

“Bad?” She shrugged. “On a scale of one to ten, with the New Republic an eight or nine, this is about an eleven. A chunk of it is die-before-disclosing stuff, but I guess there’s no harm in letting you in on the public side. Which is bad enough.” She shook her head. “What time is it?”

“Mm, about 1500, shipboard. There was some announcement about setting the clocks forward tonight, as well.”

“Okay.” She tapped her fingertips idly on the lacquered side table. “I think I will take you up on that drink, as long as there’s some sober-up available just in case.”

“Umph.” Martin twisted one of his rings. “Pitcher of iced margaritas on the promenade deck, please.” He watched her closely. “Is my ex-employer involved?”

“Hmm. I don’t think so.” Rachel touched his shoulder. “You haven’t heard anything, have you?”

“I’m on the beach, I think.” His cheek twitched. “And between contracts, so there’s no conflict of interests.”

“Good,” she said, taking his free hand, “good.”

“You don’t sound happy.”

“That’s because—” She shook her head. “Why the hell are people so stupid?”

“Stupid? What do you mean?” He lifted her hand slightly, inspecting the back of her wrist intently.

“People.” It came out as a curse. “Like that asshole in Geneva. Turns out there was a, a—” She swallowed, and before she could continue the dumb waiter beside the table dinged for attention. “And that bitch in Ents. I set a search going, by the way. Pulled some strings. I should have all the dirt on her when we get home.” She turned to open the dumb waiter and found there was a tray inside. “That was fast.” She removed two glasses, passing one to Martin.

“Where was I? Yes, stupid, wanton, destructive assholes. About five years ago, that supernova out near the Septagon stars, a system called Moscow. Turns out it wasn’t a natural event at all. Someone iron-bombed the star. That’s a causality-violation device, and about as illegal as they come — also apparently unstable to build and hazardous as hell. I’d like to know why it didn’t attract a certain local deity’s attention. Anyway, the Moscow republic had a modest deterrent fleet in their Oort cloud, far enough out to just about survive the blast, and they were in the middle of a trade dispute. So they launched, and now we’re trying to talk their diplomatic staff into calling off a strike on a planet with nearly a billion inhabitants who we are pretty damn sure had nothing to do with the war crime.”

“Sounds bad.”

She watched him raise his glass, a guarded expression on his face.

“The headache is, the place they launched on — New Dresden — isn’t squeaky clean. They had a series of really bloody civil wars over the past century or so, and what they’re left with may be stable but isn’t necessarily happy. Meanwhile, Moscow — damn!” She put the glass down. “Worlds with a single planetary government aren’t meant to be peaceful and open and into civil rights! When I see a planet with just one government, I look for the mass graves. It’s some kind of natural law or something — world governments grow out of the barrel of a gun.”

“Um. You mean, the good guys are getting ready to commit genocide? And the bad guys are asking you in to talk them out of it? Is that the picture?”

“No.” She took a quick pull of her ice-cold margarita. “If that was all it was, I think I could cope with it. Just another talk-down, after all. No, there’s something much worse going on in here. A real stinking shitty mess. But George wants to keep a lid on it for the time being, so I can’t dump it on your shoulder.”

“So.” One of the most soothing things about Martin was that he could tell when not to push her. This was one of those times: instead of shoving, he stretched his arm along the back of the sofa, offering her a shoulder. After a moment, she leaned against him. “Thanks.”

“It’s all right.” He waited while she shifted to a more comfortable position. “What are we going to do, then? When we arrive? Dresden, did you say?”

“Well.” She considered her words carefully. “I’m on the Ents budget listed as a cultural attache. So I’m going to do some cultural attache things. There’s a memorial ceremony to attend, meetings, probably the usual bunch of diplomatic parties to organize. Luckily Dresden’s relatively developed, socially and industrially, not like New Prague.” She pulled a face. “You’re probably going to have the wonderful, unmissable, once-in-a-lifetime chance to be my diplomatic wife for a few weeks. Once-in-a-lifetime’s all you’ll take before you flee screaming back to a shipyard, I promise you.”

“Ten ecus says you’re wrong.” He hugged her.

“And fifty says you won’t make it. Sucker.” She kissed him, then pulled back to arm’s length, smiling. Then her smile slipped. “I’ve got some other stuff to do,” she said quietly, “and maybe a side trip. But I can’t talk about it.”

“Can’t, or don’t want to?”

“Can’t.” She emptied her glass and put it down. “It’s the other I told you about. Sorry.”

“I’m not pushing,” he said slyly. “I just want to know everything you get up to when I’m not around!” He continued in a more serious tone of voice: “Promise me if it’s anything like, uh, last week, you’ll try to let me know in advance?”

“I—” She nodded. “I’ll try,” she said softly. “If it’s remotely possible.” Which was entirely true, and she hated herself for it — he meant well, and the idea that he might think she was lying to him stung her — but there were things she wasn’t at liberty to talk about, just as there were topics Martin wouldn’t raise within earshot of her coworkers. Serious, frightening, things. And if she didn’t cooperate with Cho’s covert agenda, she’d be gambling with other people’s lives. Because, when she thought about it, she couldn’t see any sane alternative to what George was proposing to do.

“Here’s the Honorable Maurice Pendelton, ambassador of the Republic of Moscow to the court of Ayse Bayar, Empress of al-Turku.”

George Cho stood up and fiddled with a control ring. The wall behind him flickered to a view of an office — ornately paneled in wood, gas-lit and velvet-draped, richly carpeted and dominated by a ponderous desk bearing an antique workstation. There was something else on the desk; for a moment Rachel couldn’t quite work out what she was looking at, then she realized that it was a man, slumped across the green leather blotter. A timer counted down seconds in the top left corner of the display. In his back -

“Murder?” asked Jane, tight-lipped. Rachel hadn’t seen much of her since the events back on New Prague, when Jane had uncomplainingly shouldered the burden of Rachel’s research work inside the diplomatic compound. She wondered idly how Jane would cope with a field assignment if she couldn’t even figure out a scene like this for herself.

“The inquisitor’s report was very clear about the fact that his arms weren’t long enough for him to stab himself in the back — at least, not with a sword,” Tranh said drily. “Especially not with enough force to nail the torso to the table-top. Proximate cause of death was a severed dorsal aorta and damage to the pericardium — he bled out and died within seconds, but most of the mess is behind the desk.”

George fidgeted with his rings and the camera viewpoint slewed dizzyingly around the room. The scene behind the ambassador’s desk was a mess. Blood had gouted from the wound in his back and splattered across his chair, pooling in viscid puddles beneath his desk. Footprints congealed in the rich carpet, an obscene trail leading toward the door.

“I take it this is important to our mission,” said Rachel. “Do we have a full crime scene report? Was the killer apprehended?”

“No and no,” Cho said with gloomy satisfaction. “The Office of the Vizier of Morning took control of the investigation outside the embassy, and while the Turku authorities have been polite and helpful to us, they have declined to give us full details of the killing, other than this diorama shot. Note, if you will, the theatrical red nose and bushy moustache a party or parties unknown applied to the Ambassador’s face — after he was dead, according to the Vizier’s Office. Oh, in case you were wondering, the killer wasn’t apprehended. For the sake of face the Vizier’s Office rounded up a couple of petty thieves, forced them to confess, then beheaded them in front of the public newsfeeds, but our confidential sources assure us that the real investigation is still continuing. Which brings me to incident number two.”

Another wall-sized photograph of chaos. This time it was a roadside disaster — the wreckage of a large vehicle, obviously some sort of luxury people mover, lay scattered across a road, uniformed emergency crews and rescue vehicles all around it. Blue sheets covered misshapen mounds to either side. Much of the debris was scorched; some of it was still smoking.

“This was an embassy limousine, taking her excellency Simonette Black to a conference on resettlement policy for refugee populations in Bonn, the capital of the Frisian Foundation, a confederation of independent states on Eiger’s World. Which, unlike al-Turku, is a Deutsch McWorld with no real history of political violence other than a couple of wars fought over oil fields and states’ rights a century or two ago.”

George pointed at some bushes to one side of the road, and the screen obligingly zoomed. Something gleamed: “That is a reflector post for an infrared beam. If we look at the source” — the viewpoint flipped dizzyingly into the sky then back down, 180 degrees away from the post — “we find this.” A green box, with a round hole in its front, above a complex optical sight and some kind of rubber mat. The box, too, looked scorched. “I’m told that’s a disposable anti-armor missile launcher, hypervelocity, with a two-stage penetrator jet designed to punch through ceramic armor or high-Tesla fields. The poor people in the limousine — Black, her wife, their driver, the charge d’immigration, and two bodyguards — didn’t stand a chance. It was stolen from an army depot one week before the incident. It was armed by remote control and rigged to fire when the beam was interrupted. I’m told that the plastic object underneath the missile launcher is an, ah, whoopee cushion. A rubber bladder that emits a flatulent sound when sat upon.”

Rachel looked down at her pad. To her surprise, she realized she’d begun to doodle on it with her stylus in ink transfer mode. Pictures of mushroom clouds and Mach waves knocking over groundscrapers and arcologies. She glanced up. “Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence,” she said. “Any more?”

George’s shoulders fell. He looked very old for a moment, even though Rachel knew he was seven years her junior. “Yes,” he said. Another diorama filled the wall. “I’ve been saving this until last. This is the Honorable Maureen Davis, ambassador to the United Nations of Earth in Geneva.” Gail looked away, visibly upset, and Rachel wondered distantly if she was going to cry. Violent death didn’t just strip the victims of their dignity, it insulted the survivors. And it was a personal insult to Rachel. We were supposed to protect her! An attack on a visiting diplomat reflected on the honor of the nation or coalition that played host to them. And this -

“Did we let this happen on our watch?” she demanded angrily. “After knowing that two other ambassadors had died in questionable circumstances?” She closed the dossier in front of her and flattened it against the table, pressing until her knuckles turned white.

“No.” George took a deep breath. “She was the first to die — just the last for us to be aware of. At first we penciled it in as a simple murder — horrible, but not special. Unlike the other two incidents we have a complete crime scene breakdown and we’re pursuing the murderer with every resource at our disposal. We are” — he took another breath — “appalled and outraged that this has happened. But more than that, we’re very much afraid that it’s going to happen again. Tranh, could you explain?”

Tranh stood up again and began to recite in a flat monotone that suggested that he, too, was trying to hold down the lid on his outrage. “Ambassador Davis was discovered in the state you see by a housekeeper maintenance contractor who called to deal with a fault alert by the house cleaning ’bot. The amah was confused by, well, a conflict between its recognizer for human beings and its garbage collection monitor. That doesn’t happen very often these days, but Ambassador Davis had an antique that still had a heuristic support contract in force. Embassy security admitted the maintenance contractor and immediately discovered the ambassador in this state. They immediately requested our assistance — unlike their counterparts on Turku.” His voice quivered with outrage as he added, “The killer used a bungee cord for a ligature.”

Foul play? That’s one way of putting it, Rachel observed. Ambassadors did not, as a rule, hang themselves in the stairwell of their own residences using rubberized ropes. Nor did they do so after pinioning their hands behind them, not to mention fracturing the backs of their skulls on mysteriously missing blunt objects.

“Ah yes, she shot herself three times in the back of the head and jumped out of the sixth floor window just to make us look bad,” she muttered, drawing a wide-eyed look of confusion from Gail. “When did this happen relative to the others? In the empire time defined by the Moscow embassy causal channels, if you’ve got the figures. That might tell us something.”

“The order was” — George flipped pages in a separate file — “Ambassador Davis at datum zero, followed by Simonette Black at T plus fourteen days, six hours, three minutes. Then Ambassador Pendelton thirty-four days, nineteen hours and fifty-two minutes later.” He gazed at Rachel tiredly. “Any other questions?”

“Yes.” She leaned back in her chair, tapping her stylus on the cover of her briefing file. “Are Turku and the, uh, Frisian Foundation coordinating their investigations? Are they even aware of the other assassinations?”

“No and no.” George inclined his head slightly. “You have more questions. Let’s hear them, and your reasoning.”

“All right.” Rachel sat up straight and looked at Gail. “You might not want to hear this.”

“I can take it.” She looked back, angry and bewildered. “I don’t have to like it.”

“Okay.” Rachel tapped the file in front of her. “As the man said, once is happenstance, twice might be coincidence, but three times is enemy action. We have a very nasty situation evolving, in which there exists a dwindling pool of assets — ambassadors — such that if the total drops below three, 800 million people will die. From an initial nine survivors, three have been murdered in the past three months. I assume the rest are under heavy guard—”

“Wherever possible,” George murmured.

“—But we basically have a crisis on our hands. Someone has figured out how to kill 800 million birds with just six stones. Leaving aside the killer’s evident penchant for cruel practical jokes, we know absolutely nothing about who they are and what motivates them. In fact, what we appear to know may actually be deliberate deception. And we’re the only people who are treating these assassinations as part of a big picture, rather than isolated killings.”

“That’s essentially correct,” said Tranh. “There are other investigative measures we are taking, but” — he shrugged, looking unhappy — “it takes time.”

“Well then.” Rachel licked her lips, which had become unpleasantly dry. “As I see it, our ideal outcome is to convince them to issue the abort code to the bombers immediately, before any more of them die. But right now they’ll probably view any such request with extreme suspicion — the murders could be seen as a conspiracy to force them to issue the code. Or we could prove to them that the New Dresdeners didn’t do the dirty deed and show them who did — if we have any idea.”

She nodded when Cho shook his head. “I was afraid of that. The other option is to stake out a goat, wait for the assassins to show up, and try to trace them back to their masters. But we have a mess of motives at work here. Someone seems to want to ensure that the Muscovite weapons destroy New Dresden, and I’ve got to ask, why? Who could possibly benefit from wiping out one — or maybe even two — planets?” She glanced around the table.

“That’s essentially where we’ve got to,” George said heavily, “except for the final part.”

“Explain.” She leaned forward attentively.

“We don’t have time to stake them all out. Given the current attrition rate, we’ve got to face the risk of losing four more ambassadors in the next month. We haven’t caught a single assassin, so we don’t know who’s doing it. So tell me what you deduce from that fact.”

“That we’re in the shit,” Rachel said in a low monotone. She leaned forward tensely. “Let’s look at this as a crime in progress. If we shelve the means and opportunity questions, who’s got a motive? Who could possibly gain by arranging for Moscow to bomb the crap out of Dresden in thirty-five years’ time?”

She held up a hand and began counting off fingers. “One: a third party who hates Dresden. I think we can take that as a non sequitur; nobody is ever crazy enough to want to exterminate an entire planet. At least, nobody who’s that crazy ever gets their hands on the means to do it.” Well, virtually nobody, she reminded herself, flashing back a week. Idi would have done it — if he’d had an R-bomb. But he didn’t. So … “Two: a faction among the Muscovite exiles who really, really hates Dresden — enough to commit murder, murder of their own people, just to make sure. Three: someone who wants to strike a negotiating position of some kind. It could be blackmail, for example, and the ransom note hasn’t arrived yet. Four: it’s a continent smasher. Could be a really nasty bunch of folks have decided to make sure it goes home, as a prelude to a, uh, rescue and reconstruction mission of a rather permanent nature.”

“You’re saying it could be some other government that wants to take advantage of the situation?” Gail looked aghast.

“That’s realpolitik for you.” Rachel shrugged. “I’m not saying it is, but … do we have any candidates?” She raised an eyebrow at Tranh.

“Possibly.” He frowned. “Among the neighbors … I can’t see the New Republic doing that, can you?”

Rachel shook her head. “They’re out for the count.”

“Then, hmm. Forget Turku, forget Malacia, forget Septagon. None of them have an expansionist government except Septagon, and they’re not interested in anything with a primary that masses more than point zero five of Sol or comes with inhabitable planets. There’s Newpeace, but they’re still in a mess from the civil war. And Eiger isn’t likely. Tonto, that’s another of those weird semiclosed dictatorships. They might have an angle on it. But it’s not anything obvious, is it?”

Rachel frowned. “There seem to be a couple of dictatorships in this sector, aren’t there? Funny: they aren’t normally stable enough to last…”

“There’s some kind of weird political ideology, calling themselves the Re-Mastered. Tonto went ReMastered forty or fifty years ago,” offered Jane. “Don’t know much about them: they’re not nice people.” She shivered. “Why do you ask?”

Rachel’s frown deepened. “If you can dig anything up I’d appreciate hearing it. George, you’re holding something back, aren’t you?”

The ambassador sat up slightly, then nodded. “Yes, I am.” He glanced round the table.

“You probably figured out why I wanted you; it’s because none of you had any conceivable link either to Moscow or New Dresden. Which, incidentally, is where we’re en route. It so happens that Ambassador Elspeth Morrow is in residence in Sarajevo, and Harrison Baxter, former trade minister of the Muscovite government — and the highest surviving government officer, he’s also on the code schedule — is there, too. He was sent just before the incident, to attempt to resolve the trade dispute. I strongly suspect that they’re the next logical target, being a two-for-one hit. Our cover story — for everyone outside this room — is that we’re here to discuss the R-bomb situation with Morrow and Baxter.

“The real task in hand is somewhat different. It’s to keep them alive and if possible capture one of the killers and backtrack to their masters. Which is where you come in, Rachel. Tranh, your job is to brief the embassy guard and the Dresdener Interior Ministry special security police and act as external security liaison. Gail, you and I are going to talk directly to the Minister and the Ambassador and impress the urgency of the situation upon them. You handle protocol, I’ll handle diplomacy. Pritkin, you’re our switchboard and front office. Jane, I need you on back office, coordinating any intel we get from home about the circumstances of the murders. Rachel, you’ve got a nasty, suspicious mind. I want you to try and set up a trap for the killers — assuming they surface. And I’ve, well, got a little surprise.”

“Surprise,” she mimicked. “Uh-huh. One of those surprises?”

“Those?” echoed Jane.

“Those.” Rachel grimaced. “Spill it, George.”

Cho took a deep breath. “For you, I’ve got a covert job in mind. You’re about the same size and build as Ambassador Morrow. You fill in the dotted line.”

“Oh. Oh no.” Rachel shook her head. “You can’t do this to me!”

“Oh yes?” Tranh’s smile wasn’t entirely friendly. “What was that you were saying earlier about wanting to nail the culprits?”

“Um.” She nodded like a puppet with a blown feedback circuit. “If you’re right about there being a hit planned.”

“I think we’re right.” George nodded. “Because there’s another datum I haven’t given you.”

“Oh yeah?”

“In addition to a time series on the murders, we ran a spatial map and a full shipping traffic analysis. It turns out that there are about three starships that called at each location a day or so before the hit, then moved on afterward. They’re busy places, mostly. Anyway, one of those ships is a freighter, and none of the crew went down from orbit at any port on its cycle. Another is — well, if you want to accuse the Malacian Navy of trying to start a war with three of their neighbors by whacking diplomats, you draw their attention to the suspicious maneuvers of one of their cruisers. Whose flight plan for the current goodwill tour was finalized nearly a year before Ambassador Black arrived on Eiger’s World. Which leaves just one suspect.”

“Stop winding me up, George. Just tell it straight.”

George looked at her, his expression one of wounded dignity. “My, my! Very well, then. It’s the WhiteStar liner Romanov, outbound from Earth on a yearlong tour circuit. It was in orbit around Eiger’s World when Ambassador Black was murdered. It was in orbit around Turku when Pendelton was murdered. And while it wasn’t parked over Kilimanjaro when Ambassador Davis was murdered, the smoking gun is that it arrived a day later, then departed. That was the zero incident. The arrival times line up. It is in principle possible that an assassin joined the Romanov after killing Ambassador Davis, then traveled to Turku and Eiger’s World to repeat the task.”

Rachel knotted her fingers together. “Tell me it isn’t calling at New Dresden next?”

“It’s not. It’s en route to Septagon Four — but first port of call after that is New Dresden, sure enough. We should get there a couple of weeks ahead of it. And that’s basically why I wanted you on board. We’ll show up as a special diplomatic team tasked with demonstrating that the Dresdener governments’ hands are clean. You will be attached to our team — that’s your cover story — but your real job will be to set up a trap in which you body double for Ambassador Morrow, a week before our killer turns up. And when they try to take you out, we’ll have them. And then” — his expression was fierce — “let’s hope we can get to the bottom of this before the assassins murder 800 million people.”