Iron Sunrise

THE BULLET SEASON

Frank and Alice watched the beginnings of the demonstration from the top of the Demosthenes Hotel in downtown Samara. The top of the hotel was a flat synrock expanse carpeted in well-manicured grass, now browning at the edges. The swimming pool and bar in the center of the lawn was drained, water long since diverted for emergency irrigation. In fact, most of the hotel staff had gone — conscripted into the Peace Enforcement Organization, fled to the hills, joined the rebels, who knew what.

It wasn’t quite Frank’s first field job, but it was close enough that Alice, a tanned, blond, hard-as-nails veteran of many botched campaigns, had taken him under her wing and given him a clear-cut — some would say micromanaged — set of instructions for how to run the shop in her absence. Then she’d taken off into the heart of darkness in search of the real story, leaving Frank to cool his heels on the roof of the hotel. She’d returned from her latest expedition three days earlier, riding the back of a requisitioned militia truck with a crateful of camera drones and a magic box that took in water at one end and emitted something not entirely unlike cheap beer at the other — as long as the concentrate cans held out. Frank welcomed her back with mixed emotions. On the one hand, her tendency to use him as a gofer rankled slightly; on the other, he was slowly going out of his skull with a mixture of boredom and paranoia, minding the shop on his own and hoping like hell that nothing happened while the boss was away.

To get the hotel roof (right on the edge of City Square, empty and untended in the absence of foreign business travelers and visiting out-of-town politicos) they’d had to pay off the owner, a twitchy-eyelidded off-world entrepreneur called Vadim Trofenko, with untraceable slugs of buttery, high-purity gold. Nothing else would do in these troubled times, it seemed. Getting hold of the stuff had been a royal pain in the ass, and had entailed Alice going on a week-long trip up to orbit, leaving Frank to mind the bureau all on his lonesome. But at least the agency’s money was buying them the penthouse suite, however neglected it was. Most of the other hacks who’d descended like flies on the injured flank of the city of Samara to watch the much-ballyhooed descent into civil war at firsthand had discovered that they could find accommodation for neither love nor money.

Frank had hung in while his boss was away, hammering out hangovers and human-angle commentaries by day, and descending like some kind of pain-feeding vampire from his rooftop every night to walk the streets and talk to people in the cafes and bars and on boulevard corners, soaking up the local color and nodding earnestly at their grievances. Lately he’d taken to hanging out in the square with a recorder, where the students and unemployed gathered to chant their slogans at the uncaring ranks of police and the blank facade of the provincial assembly buildings. He did this long into the night, before staggering back to the big empty hotel bed to crash out. But not this morning.

“I’ve got a bad feeling, kid,” Alice had told him. She stared pensively out at the square. “A really bad feeling. Look to the back door; you wouldn’t want to catch your ass in it when they slam it shut. Somebody’s going to blink, and when the shit hits the fan…” She gestured at the window, out at the huge poster that covered most of the opposite wall of the square. “It’s the tension, mostly. It seems to be slackening. And that’s always a bad sign.”

Big Bill’s avuncular face beamed down, jovial and friendly as anyone’s favorite uncle, guarded from the protesters by a squad of riot police, day and night. Despite the sentries, someone had managed to fly a handheld drone into the dead politician’s right eye, splashing a red paint spot across his iris in a grisly reminder of what had happened to the last elected President.

“I didn’t exactly think things were getting better,” Frank equivocated. “But isn’t it just political chicken? Same old same old — they’ll devalue the dollaro and get a public works program going, someone will go out into the outback and haggle with Commandante Alpha, and things’ll begin working again. Won’t they?”

Alice snorted. “You wish. It only seems to be lightening up because the jokers are getting ready to pull something serious.”

Up top wasn’t much different. “It’s gonna burn,” said Thelma, a short, deeply tanned woman who was related to one of the public bizintel agencies out around Turku in some obscurely mercenary way, and who’d weaseled her way into Alice’s confidence by sharing her stash of fuel cells with her. She was working over one of Alice’s tripod-mounted bug launchers when Frank came up onto the roof. The air still held the last of night’s chill, but the vast glazed dome of the sky promised another skull baker of a day. “Did you hear about the mess down Cardinal’s Way yesterday?”

“Nope. What happened?” Frank held a chipped coffee mug bearing the hotel’s crest under the nozzle of Alice’s fizzbeer contraption and pushed the button. It gurgled creakily and dribbled a stream of piss-colored fluid, propelled by whatever was left of the hotel’s water tankage. The Peace Enforcement had turned off the water supply to the hotels in the business district two days before, officially in case they fell into the hands of subversive elements. In practice, it was a not-so-subtle “Fuck off, we’ve got business in hand” signal to the warblogger corps.

“Over by the homeless aid center on West Circular Four. Another car bomb. Anyway, the polis cordoned off the area afterward and arrested everyone. Thing is, the car that went bang was an unmarked polis car: one they used for disappearances until a resistance camera tagged it a week ago. The only people who got hurt were doalies queuing for their maintenance. I was on my way there to meet Ish — a source — and word is that before it went up, a couple of cops parked it, then walked away.”

“Uh-huh.” Frank passed her the mug of lukewarm fizzbeer. “Have you had any luck messaging off planet today?”

“Funny you should ask that.” It was Alice, arriving on deck without warning. “Someone’s been running all the outgoing imagery I sent via the post office through a steg-scrubber, fuzzing the voxels.” She cast Frank a sharp look. “What makes you ask?”

“Well, I haven’t had as much mail as usual…” he trailed off. “How do you know it’s being tampered with?” he asked, curiosity winning out.

“How the fuck do you think Eric gets his request messages to me without the Peace Enforcement bugging the call? It’s our little back channel.” (Eric was their desk editor back home.)

“That makes sense.” Frank was silent for a moment. “What’s he saying?”

“Time to check our return tickets.” Alice gave a tight little smile.

“Will you guys stop talking in code and tell me what you think’s going on?” demanded Thelma.

“The cops are getting ready to break skulls, wholesale,” said Alice, pointing at the far side of the square. “They’ve been piling on the pressure for weeks. Now they’re lifting off, to let the protesters think they’ve got a bit of slack. They’ll come out to complain, and the cops get to round them all up. If that’s the right way to describe what’s coming.”

The situation on Newpeace — or, more accurately, in the provincial capitals of Redstone and Samara and Old Venice Beach — had been deteriorating for about three years, ever since the last elections. Newpeace had been settled by (or, it was more accurate to say, the Eschaton had dumped on the planet) four different groups in dispersed areas — confused Brazilian urbanites from Rio; ferocious, insular, and ill-educated hill villagers from Borneo; yet more confused middle-class urban stay-at-homes from Hamburg, Germany; and the contents of a sleepy little seaside town in California. Each colony had been plonked down in a different corner of the planet’s one major continent — a long, narrow, skinny thing the shape of Cuba but nearly six thousand kilometers long — along with a bunch of self-replicating robot colony factories, manuals and design libraries sufficient to build and maintain a roughly late-twentieth-century tech level McCivilization, and a ten-meter-tall diamond slab with the Three Commandments of the Eschaton engraved on it in ruby letters that caught the light of the rising sun.

Leave a planet like that to mature and ferment for three centuries: the result was a vaguely federal system with six major provinces, three languages, a sizable Catholic community, and an equally sizable bunch of Eschaton-worshiping nutbars from the highlands who spent their surplus income building ten-meter-tall cargo cult diamond monoliths. It hadn’t been entirely tranquil, but they hadn’t fought a major war for nearly two hundred years — until now.

“But isn’t most of the resistance out in the hills?” asked Frank. “I mean, they’re not going to come down hard in the towns, are they?”

“They’ve got to do it, and do it soon,” Alice said irritably. “Running around the hills is hard work; at least in the city the protesters are easy to find. That’s why I say they’re going to do it here, and do it soon. You seen the latest on the general strike?”

“Is it going ahead?” Frank raised an eyebrow.

Thelma spat. “Not if the Peace Enforcement Organization scum get their way.”

“Wrong.” Alice looked grimly satisfied. “The latest I’ve got from the Transport Workers’ collective, last time I spoke to them — Emilio was clear on it being a negotiating gambit. They don’t expect actually to have to play that card: it would hurt them far more than it would hurt the federales. But the feds can act as if it’s a genuine threat. The collective are playing into their hands. Watch my lips: there’s going to be a crackdown. Ever since Friedrich Gotha bought the election after Wilhelm he’s been creaming himself looking for an excuse to fuck the rebels hard. Did you hear about Commandante Alpha being in the area? That’d be a bad sign, you ask me. I’ve been trying to arrange an interview but—”

“Commandante Alpha does not exist,” a woman’s voice called from the staircase. Frank turned and squinted against the rising sun. Whoever she was, she’d come up the service stairs: despite the sun in his eyes he had a vague impression of a slightly plump ice blonde, dressed for knocking around the outback like all the other journalists and war whores thronging the city and waiting for the storm to break. Something about her nagged at him for a moment before he realized what it was; her bush jacket and trousers looked as if they’d been laundered less than five minutes earlier. They were crisp, video anchor crisp, militarily precise. Whoever’s paying for the live video bandwidth better have deep pockets, he thought vaguely as she continued. “He’s a psywar fabrication. Doesn’t exist, you see. He’s just a totem designed to inspire support and loyalty to the resistance movement among confused villagers.”

“Does it make any difference?” asked Alice. She was busy unpacking another drone as she talked. “I mean, the thing about a mass movement is, once it gets going it’s hard to stop it. Even if you take down a charismatic leader, as long as the roots of the grievance remain, another fucking stupid hero will come along and pick up the flag. Leaders generate themselves. Once you get a cycle of revenge and retribution going…”

“Exactly.” The new arrival nodded approvingly. “That’s what’s so interesting about it. Commandante Alpha is an idea. To dispose of him the PEO will have to do more than simply point out that he does not exist.”

“Huh?” Frank heard a distant noise like the tide coming in; an impossibility, for they were more than three hundred kilometers from the sea, and besides, Newpeace had no moons large enough to raise tides. He pulled out his keyboard and tapped out a quick note to himself. “Who did you say you were?”

“I didn’t.” The woman stared at him. It was not a friendly expression. “You are Frank the Nose Johnson, correct?”

Something about her manner made him tense. “Who’s asking?”

She ignored the question. “And you are Alice Spencer, so you must be Thelma Couper. Three little piggies, warbloggers united. It’s your good luck that you’re all very lazy little piggies, up here on the roof this historic morning rather than down on the streets with the unsuspecting mob. If you’re smart little piggies, you’ll stay here and not try to leave the building. Relax, watch the fireworks, drink your beer, and don’t bother trying to get an outside line. I’ll come for you later.”

Alice grabbed hold of Frank’s arm, painfully hard. He hadn’t even noticed that he’d begun to move toward the stranger. “Who the fuck are you?” he demanded.

The woman ignored him, instead turning back to the staircase. “See you around,” she called over her shoulder, a mocking smile on her face. Alice loosened her grip on Frank’s elbow. She took two steps toward the stairwell, then froze. She slowly spread her arms and stepped backwards, away from the steps.

“What—”

“Don’t,” Alice said tightly. “Just don’t. I think we’re under house arrest.”

Frank looked round the open doorway leading down to the penthouse.

“Hey, freak! Get back! Didn’t you hear the boss-woman?”

Frank got. “Shit!”

“My thoughts exactly.” Alice nodded. “Y’know what? I think they want witnesses. Just far away enough not to smell the tear gas.”

Frank found that his hands were shaking. “That cop—”

“Smart guy.” It was Thelma; she sounded mocking, but maybe it was simply nerves — his or hers, didn’t matter. “How’s he armed?”

Alice seemed mostly unaffected. “He’s got body armor. Some kind of riot gun.” She paused. “Shit! He’s in blue. Did you see that, Frank?”

Frank nodded. “So?”

“So, cops hereabouts wear black. Blue means army.”

“Oh. Oh!”

The noise outside was getting louder.

“Does that sound like a demonstration to you?” asked Thelma.

“Could be the big one, for the land protesters they locked up last week.” Alice started dictating names to her chunky plastic disposaphone — she’d had it for only three weeks, since she arrived on Newpeace, but the digits were already peeling off the buttons on its fascia — then frowned. “It keeps saying ‘network congested.’ Fuck it. You guys? Can you get through to anyone?”

“I can’t be arsed trying,” Thelma said disgustedly. “It’s a setup. Leastways we’re supposed to survive this one long enough to file our reports and get out. I think.”

Frank looked at his own phone: it blinked its display at him in electronic perplexity, locked out of the network. He shook his head, unsure what to believe. Then there was a thud from behind him. He turned and saw that someone had come out of the stairwell and fallen over, right at the top. There was blood, bright on the concrete. It was Phibul, the small guy from Siam who was booked in one floor down. Frank knelt beside him. Phibul was breathing fast, bleeding messily from his head. “You!” Frank looked up and found himself staring up the barrel of a gun. He froze. “Get this sack of shit outa my face. You show your head, you bettah pray I don’ think you doalie.”

Frank licked his lips; they felt like parchment. “Okay,” he said, very quietly. Phibul groaned. The guard took a step back, servos whining at knee and ankle. The gun barrel was flecked with red.

“Nothing happen’ here,” said the guard. “You unnerstand?”

“I — I understand.” Frank blinked, humiliated and angry, but mostly just frightened. The guard took another step back, down the stairs, then another. Frank didn’t move until he was out of sight at the bottom. Phibul groaned again and he looked down, then began fumbling in his pockets for his first-aid kit.

The surf-on-a-beach noise was joined by a distant hammering drone: the sound of drums and pipe, marching with the people.

“Let me help, dammit!” Frank looked up as Thelma knelt beside him. “Shit.” She gently peeled back one of Phibul’s eyelids, then the other. “Pupillary reflex is there, but he’s gonna have some concussion.”

“Fucker whacked him over the head with his gun barrel.”

“Could be worse,” she said tersely. “C’mon. Let’s get him over to the sun lounger.”

A couple of pops and whines came from the edge of the roof — Alice was sending bird-sized drones spinning through the air to orbit overhead, circling for perspective shots taking in the entire square. Frank took a deep breath, smelling hot blood, Thelma’s sweat — surprisingly rank — and the stink of his own fear. A hot tangy undernote of dust rose from the soon-to-be-baking surface of the plaza. “I’ve got an open channel,” Alice called over her shoulder. “One of the local streams is relaying some kind of federal announcement. Do me a favor, Frank, get it out of my face. Transcribe and summarize.”

“Okay.” Frank accepted the virtual pipe, let it stream through the corner of his left eye as he watched Thelma efficiently cut up a wound dressing and gum it down on the mess of blood and thin hair atop Phibul’s head. Despite the fear he was glad they were facing this together — not alone and frightened, locked in their rooms or in a police cell. The distant surf had become an approaching roar of voices. Alice threw some output at him from two of her birds, and he shuffled them round until he could see the back of his own head, kneeling alongside the drained swimming pool next to an injured reporter and a busy woman. “This is — hey, everybody!”

He tweaked the stream over onto one of Alice’s repeater screens. There was a background of martial music (which hereabouts sounded like classical heavy metal) and a pompous guy in midnight blue, lots of technicolor salad on his pest, sitting uneasily behind a desk. “In view of the state of emergency, the Peace Commission has instructed all loyal citizens to stay indoors wherever possible. In the affected cities of Samara and Redstone, a curfew came into effect as of 2600 hours yesterday. Anyone outdoors in the region of Greater Samara and Metropolitan Redstone must seek shelter immediately. Assembly in groups of more than four individuals is forbidden and, in accordance with the Suppression of Terrorism Regulations, Peace Enforcement units will use lethal force if they consider themselves to be under threat—”

Thelma stood up. “I’ve got to get a channel off-world,” she said tensely. “You guys up to helping me?”

“How do you propose to do that?” Alice asked mildly, turning round. She was tearing repeater glasses rather than using optic implants — a stupid retro affectation, in Frank’s view — and they cast a crazy quilt of colored light across her eyes. “Didn’t you hear? We’re being routed around. If you try to crack their security, they’ll probably point some of their infowar assets your way—”

“I’ve got a causal channel in my luggage,” Thelma confessed, looking scared but determined. “It’s on the second floor. If we could get past laughing boy downstairs—”

“You’ve got your own causal channel?” Frank asked, hope vying with disbelief.

“Yeah, one that goes straight home to Turku via a one-hop relay in Septagon. No worries.” She turned her hands palms up. “Ask me no questions, I’ll tell you no lies. But if I can’t get a secure handshake with it, it’s not a lot of use, is it?”

“What do you need?” Alice asked, suddenly intent. Frank focused on her expression in a sudden moment of scrutiny: eyes widening, cheekbones sharp under dark skin, breath speeding -

“I need the thing physically up here, so I can handshake with it. I didn’t know we were going to be bottled up here when—” She shook her head in the direction of the stairwell.

“How big is it?” Alice demanded.

“Tiny — it’s the second memory card in my camera.” She held her thumb and forefinger apart. “Looks just like a normal solid-state plug. Blue packaging.”

“Your camera doesn’t do real time?” Frank asked.

“I’ve seen it and it does; it’s got local memory backup against network outages,” Alice said tersely. “Let me guess. You’ve got the channel in your camera so you can bypass local censorship, shoot in real time, and have the outtake saved straight to your editor’s desk? That’s got to be costing someone an arm and a leg. All right, this camera is where, exactly?”

“Room hundred and seventeen, floor two. Corner window with a balcony.”

“Hmm. Did you leave the balcony door open?”

“I think so — why?”

Alice looked over the waist-high safety wall, then backed away from the edge. “I’m not climbing down there. But a bird — hmm. Think I’ve got a sampler head left. If it can eject the card … you want me to have a go? Willing to stake half your bandwidth to me if I can liberate it?”

“Guess so. It’s got about six terabits left. Fifty-fifty split.” Thelma nodded. “How about it?”

“Six terabits—” Frank shook his head in surprise. He hated to think how much it must have cost to haul those milligrams of entangled quantum dots across the endless light years between here and Turku by slower-than-light star-wisp. Once used they were gone for good, coherence destroyed by the process that allowed them to teleport the state of a single bit between points in causally connected space-time. STL shipping prices started at a million dollaros per kilogram-parsec; it was many orders of magnitude more expensive than FTL, and literally took decades or centuries of advance planning to set up. But if it could get them a secure, instantaneous link out onto the interstellar backbone nets …

“Yeah, let’s try it,” said Alice. The noise from beyond the balcony was getting I louder.

Frank saw that Alice was already rooting through her bag of tricks. She surfaced with a translucent disc the size of her hand, trailing short tentacles that disquietingly resembled those of a box jellyfish. “I think this should do the trick.”

“Is it strong enough?” Thelma asked edgily. “If that thing drops it, we’ll never—”

“It’ll do,” Alice called. She flipped it upside down and coupled it to its small propane tank. “With you in a minute, just as soon as I’ve gassed it up.”

“Okay.”

Phibul groaned again, then groaned louder; Frank turned and knelt by him. “Easy, man. Easy. You’re going to be all right. Phibul?”

“My—” Phibul tried to raise one hand. Frank caught it, torn between sympathy and a strong urge to go and take a look over the parapet at the plaza. The crowd noise was enormous. Alice had stopped tracking her airborne birds, and they’d wandered off-station; Frank had a dizzying, unstable view down side streets, watching a sea of heads flowing down the Unity Boulevard, then across the roofline of a bank to another road, where boxy gray vehicles were moving purposefully -

“Alice!” he shouted, sitting up: “Don’t launch it!”

Alice looked at him abstractedly as she flipped the trigger on her tripod and sent the discus spinning into the air above the rooftop. “What did you say?” she called, and for a desperate moment Frank thought it meant that everything would be all right, that the gray-painted vehicles and the brightly spinning disc and the sunburst flashes in the corner of his eye didn’t mean anything. But the window in his left eye disappeared, all the same. The laser beam skybounced from the antimissile battery to the fighting mirror above the bank building was invisible to the naked eye, and the fighting mirror sure didn’t care about journalistic credentials or, indeed, who owned the recce drones floating high above the city. All it knew about was friend, enemy, and counterbattery fire. “Take cover!” Frank yelled, just as the top of Alice’s head vanished in a spray of red mist with a horrible popping sound, like an egg exploding in a microwave oven.

For a minute or so Frank blanked. There was a horrible noise, a screeching roar in his ears — blood on his hands, blood on his knees, blood everywhere, an ocean to Phibul’s dried-up creek. He was dizzy and cold and the hand holding his didn’t seem to help. It seemed to want to let go. Alice in the bar downstairs. Alice explaining the facts of life to him after bribing a government official, joking about the honeymoon suite when they moved in. Alice flying drones over the cityscape far below, spotting traffic, spotting likely hot spots with a look on her face like -

There was shouting beyond the balcony. Shouting, and a grinding metallic squeal he’d heard before, down below. Alice was dead and he was stranded with a dried-up swimming pool, a stranger from Turku, and no way to make the fuckers pay. No real-time link.

“You can’t do anything for her.” There was a hand on his shoulder, small and hard — he shook it loose, then pushed himself to his knees dizzily.

“I know,” he heard someone else say. “I wish—” His voice cracked. He didn’t really know what that person wished anymore: it wasn’t really relevant, was it? He hadn’t been in love with Alice, but he’d trusted her; she was the brains of the operation, the wise older head who knew what the hell to do. This wasn’t supposed to happen. The head of mission wasn’t supposed to die in the field, brains splattered all over the roof by -

“Keep down,” Thelma whispered. “I think they’re going to start now.”

“Start?” he asked, shivering.

A hush fell across the square, then the noise of the crowd redoubled. And there was another sound; a pattering, like rain falling onto concrete from a clear blue sky, accompanied by a crackling roar. Then the screams. “Alice was right,” said Thelma, shuddering and crouching down below the parapet. Sweating and whey-faced, she looked the way Frank felt. “It’s the season for bullets.”

Below them, in the packed dusty square before the government buildings, the storm drains began to fill with blood.

Svengali had drunk half a bottle of single malt by the time Frank reached the massacre. His throat was hoarse, but he hadn’t stopped for long enough to ask for a refill. It hurt too much to pause. Now he held his glass out. “I don’t know how your liver copes with that.”

“He’s got the guts of a rat,” slurred Eloise: “hepatic alcohol dehydrogenase pathway and all.” She stood up, wobbling slightly. “’Scuse me, guys, but this isn’t my night for partying after all. Nice of you to invite me and maybe some other time and all, but I think I’m going to be having nightmares tonight.” She hit the release button on the doorframe and was gone into the twilight of the ship’s crew accommodation deck.

Svengali shook his head as he pulled the door shut. “And here I was, hoping for a threesome,” he said. He tipped a generous measure into Frank’s glass, then put the rapidly emptying bottle down. “So, the troops massacred the demonstrators. What has this got to do with those guys, whoever they are?”

“The—” Frank swallowed bile. “Remember the spook woman? She came back, after the massacre, with soldiers. And Thelma’s camera. She let Thelma scan the courtyard, then the guards sat her down with a gun at her head and the spook dictated my copy to me. Which I signed and submitted under my own name.”

“You—” Svengali’s eyes narrowed. “Isn’t that unethical?”

“So is threatening to execute hostages. What would you do in my shoes?”

“Hmm.” The clown topped off his own glass and took a full mouthful. “So you sent it, in order to…”

“Yeah. But it didn’t work.” He fell silent. Nothing was going to make him go into the next bit, the way they’d cuffed him, stuck needles full of interface busters in his arm to kill off his implants, and flipped him on his stomach to convulse, unable to look away or even close his eyes while they gut-shot Phibul and left him to bleed out, while two of the soldiers raped Thelma, then cut off her screams and then her breasts with their bayonets. Of the three of them, only Frank’s agency had bought him a full war correspondent’s insurance policy.

It had been the beginning of a living nightmare for Frank, a voyage through the sewers of the New Settlement’s concentration camps that only ended nine months later, when the bastards concluded that ensuring his silence was unnecessary and the ransom from his insurers was a bigger asset than his death through destructive labor. “I think they thought I was sleeping with her,” he said fuzzily.

“So you got away? They released you?”

“No: I ended up in the camps. They didn’t realize at first, the Newpeace folk who supported the Peace Enforcement, that those camps were meant for everyone, not just the fractious unemployed and the right-to-land agitators. But sooner or later everyone ended up there — everyone except the security apparat and the off-planet mercenaries the provisional government hired to run the machine. Who were all smartly turned-out, humorless, efficient, fast — like those kids in the bar. Just like them. And then there were the necklaces.”

“Necklaces?” Svengali squinted. “Are you shitting me?”

“No.” Frank shuddered and took a mouthful of whisky. “Try to pull it off, try to go somewhere you’re not supposed to, or just look at a guard wrong, and it’ll take your head off.” He rubbed the base of his throat, unconsciously. And then there was Processing Site Administrator Voss, but let’s not go there. “They killed three thousand people in the square, you know that? But they killed another two million in those camps over the next three years. And the fuckers got away with it. Because anyone who knows about them is too shit-scared to do anything. And it all happened a long time ago and a long way away. The first thing they did was pin down all the causal channels, take control of any incoming STL freighters, and subject all real-time communications in and out of the system to censorship. You can emigrate — they don’t mind that — but only via slower-than-light. Emigrants talk, but most people don’t pay attention to decades-old news. It’s just not current anymore,” he added bitterly. “When they decided to cash in my insurance policy they deported me via slower-than-light freighter. I spent twenty years in cold sleep: by the time I arrived nobody wanted to know what I’d been through.”

And it had been a long time before he’d been ready to seek the media out for himself: he’d spent six months in a hospital relearning that if a door was open, it meant he could go through it if he wanted, instead of waiting for a guard to lock it again. Six months of pain, learning again how to make decisions for himself. Six months of remembering what it was to be an autonomous human being and not a robot made out of meat, trapped in the obedient machinery of his own body.

“Okay. So they … what? Go around conquering worlds? That sounds insane. Pardon me for casting aspersions on your good self’s character, but it is absolutely ridiculous to believe anyone could do such a thing. Destroy a world, yes, easily — but conquer one?”

“They don’t.” Frank leaned back against the partition. “I’m not sure what they do. Rumor in the camps was, they call themselves the ReMastered. But just what that means … Hell, there are rumors about everything from brainwashing to a genetically engineered master race. But the first rule of journalism is you can’t trust unsubstantiated rumors. All I know is, this ship is going to Newpeace, which they turned into a hellhole. And those guys are from somewhere called Tonto. What the fuck is going on?”

“You’re the blogger.” Svengali put the bottle down, a trifle unsteadily. He frowned. “Are you going to try to find out? I’m sure there’s a story in it…”