Martin nodded, uncertain. “Promise me you’ll try to get your name off the register?” he asked.
’Til try,” she said, abruptly sober. She shuddered. “Whether I’ll succeed is another matter, though. It’s a dirty job, but someone’s got to do it. And most people are too smart to volunteer in the first place.”
She returned to consciousness slowly, half-aware of a pounding headache and a nauseated stomach, in conjunction with sore leg muscles and crumpled bedding. A feeling that she was far too dirty to have just had two baths preoccupied her for a moment until another thought intruded — where was Martin?
“Ow,” she moaned, opening her eyes. Martin was sitting up on the other side of the bed, watching her with a quizzical expression. He seemed to be listening to something.
“It’s George Cho,” he said, sounding puzzled. “I thought you had your phone blocked?”
“George?” She struggled to sit up. “What time is it?” An icon blinked into view, hovering in front of the wardrobe. “Oh shit.” Three in the morning. What does George want with me at three o’clock? she wondered. “Nothing good … pass the call?”
“Rachel? No video?”
“We’re in bed, George,” she said indistinctly. “It’s the middle of the night. What the hell did you think?”
“Oh, I’m sorry.” A picture blinked into view on the flat surface of the wardrobe. George was one of the few mainstream career diplomats senior enough to know what her real job description was. Normally dapper, and cultivating a bizarre facsimile of old age that some of the more primitive polities seemed to mistake for distinguished, George currently looked worried and unkempt. “It’s a code red,” he said apologetically.
Rachel sat up as fast as she could. “Hold on a minute,” she said. “Where’d you put the hangover juice, Martin?”
“Bathroom, left cupboard, top shelf,” he said.
“Give me a minute,” she told George. “Okay?”
“Er, yes indeed.” He nodded, looking worriedly at the pickup.
It took her one minute precisely to grab a bathrobe, a glass of water, and the bottle of wakeup juice. “This had better be good,” she warned George. “What’s the hurry?”
“Can you be ready to move in half an hour?” asked Cho, looking nervous. “It’s a full dress team op. I’ve been trying to get through to you for hours. You weren’t at the office this afternoon — what happened?”
Rachel glared at the camera: “You were too busy to notice some asshole trying to blow up the whole of Geneva?”
“You were involved in that?” George looked astonished. “I assure you, I didn’t know — but this is far more important.”
“Don’t.” She yawned. “Just spill it.”
“I’ll be giving everybody the full briefing en route—”
“Everybody? How many people are you bringing in? What do you mean by en route — and how long is this going to take?”
George shrugged uncomfortably. “I can’t tell you that. Just plan for at least a month.”
“A month. Shit.” Rachel frowned at Martin’s expression of dismay. “This would be out-of-system, then?”
“Er, I can’t confirm or deny, but that’s a good guess.”
“Open-ended.”
“Yes.”
“Diplomatic. Black-bag. Or you wouldn’t want me along.”
“I-can-neither-confirm-nor-deny-that. At this time. Obviously.”
“You bastard!” she breathed. “No, not you, George.” She shook her head. “You realize I’m due about six years’ sabbatical, coming up in three months? Do you also realize I got married a couple of months ago and we’re planning on starting a family? What about my partner?”
George took a deep breath. He looked unhappy. “What do you want?”
“I want a—”
Rachel stopped dead for a moment. Code red, she thought, an icy sense of dread insinuating itself into her tired head. That’s really serious, isn’t it? Code red was reserved for war alerts — not necessarily ones that would bring the Security Council into play, but the code didn’t get used if shots weren’t about to be fired. Which meant …
“—I want a double berth,” she snapped. “I come back from a year-long clusterfuck in the New Republic, get hauled over the coals by some harpy from head office because of the hospitality budget, have to deal with the mess when some lunatic is visited by the Plutonium Fairy and tries to landscape downtown Geneva by way of an art happening because he can’t get a handjob, and now you want to drag me away from home and hearth on a wild goose chase into the back of nowhere: I figure a double berth is the least you can do for me.”
“Oh.” George held up his right hand. “Excuse me, just a moment.” His eyes flickered with laser speckle as some urgent news beamed straight onto his retinas. “You haven’t registered a change of status. I didn’t realize—”
“Damn right you didn’t realize. No long solo postings anymore, George, not for the foreseeable and not without planning.”
“Well.” He looked thoughtful. “We need you right now. But…” He rubbed his chin. “Look, I’ll try to get your husband or wife a diplomatic passport and a ticket out to, er, the embassy destination on the next available transport. But we need you, now, no messing.”
Rachel shook her head. “Not good enough. Martin comes along, or I don’t go.”
Across the bedroom, Martin crossed his arms, shrugged, miming incomprehension. Rachel pretended not to see.
“If that’s your final word,” George said slowly. He thought for a minute. “I think I can manage that, but only if your husband consents to sign on as a staff intern. There’s a fast courier ship waiting in orbit; this isn’t a joyride. Are you willing to do that?”
Rachel glanced sidelong at Martin. “Are you?”
He raised an eyebrow, then after a moment he nodded. “It’ll do. I’ve got nothing coming up in the next month, anyway. If you think … ?”
“I do.” She forced herself to smile at him, then glanced back in-field at George. “He’ll take it.”
“Good,” George said briskly. “If you can be ready to travel in an hour, that would be good. No need to bring clothing or supplies — there’s a budget for that en route. Just bring yourselves. Um, this child — it hasn’t been fertilized yet? Neither you nor your husband is pregnant, I hope?”
“No.” Rachel shook her head. “You want us in one hour? You can’t even hint what this is about?”
For a moment Cho looked haggard. “Not until we’re under way,” he said quietly. “It’s a maximum-security issue. But … about today. How many lives did you save?”
“Um. Three hundred kilotons would be … all of Geneva, if you want to look at it like that. About half a million people. Call it half of them dead, the other half homeless, if our little friend had got his shit together. Why?”
“Because about a thousand times that many people will die if we don’t pull this one off,” George said with quiet vehemence. “And that’s just for starters…”
ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER EDITORIAL
The Times of London — thundering the news since 1785! Now brought to you by Frank the Nose, sponsored by Consolidated Vultee Interstellar, Mariposa Interstructures, Bank Muamalat al-Failaka, CyberMouse™, and The First Universal Church of Kermit.
I want to talk to you about the disaster in New Moscow. Even if you phrase it in the morally bankrupt language of so-called objective journalism, this is a truly sickening mess, the kind of colossal eight-way clusterfuck that exists to keep angels, warbloggers, and every other species of disaster whore as happy as a wino in a whisky barrel. Like most people downline in this venerable organ’s light cone, you probably think New Moscow is someone else’s headache — a two-cow backwater McWorld populated by sinister sheep-swivers who tried messing around with godbreaker tech and got whacked, hard, by the Eschaton. A bit of hard gamma, a pretty new nebula, and it’ll all blow over in a couple more years. A recent flash survey commissioned by this blog found that 69 percent of earthworms had never heard of New Moscow; of those who had, 87 percent were sure that it has nothing to do with Terrestrial politics, and by the way, blow jobs aren’t really sexual intercourse, that old pervert Santa Claus comes down your chimney every December 25, and the Earth is flat.
Well, now is the time to peel back the foreskin of misconception and apply the wire brush of enlightenment to this mass of sticky half-truths and lies. The truth hurts, but not as much as the consequences of willful ignorance.
I was on New Moscow nine years ago, doing the usual peripatetic long-haul circuit climb out through the fleshpots of Septagon, the rural sprawl of Two Rivers, and whatever wild overgeneralizations you prefer to pin on places like Al-Assad, Brunei, and Beethoven. New Moscow was — I tell you three times — not a bucolic rural backwater. It’s kind of hard to be a bucolic rural backwater planet when you’ve got six continental-scale state governments participating in a planetary federation, cities the size of Memphis, Ajuba, and Tokyo, and an orbital infrastructure capable of building fusion-powered interplanetary freighters.
Insular is a word you might want to try pinning on New Moscow — how cosmopolitan can you be, with only two hundred million citizens and no shipyards capable of manufacturing FTL drive kernels? — but they maintained their core industrial competences better than many postintervention colonies, and they lived pretty well. Just because your ancestors came from Iowa and Kansas and you talk like you’re yawning the whole time, it does not follow that you are stupid, primitive, inbred, or a mad imperialist set on galactic conquest. I found the people of New Moscow to be generally as tolerant, friendly, open-minded, outward-looking, energetic, funny and humane as any other people I’ve known. If you were looking for the stereotypical McWorld, Moscow would be it: settled by unwilling refugees from the twenty-first-century Euro-American mainstream culture, people who took enlightenment values, representative democracy, mutual tolerance, and religious freedom as axioms, and built a civilization on that basis. A McWorld, we call them — bland, comfortable, tolerant, heirs to the Western historical tradition. Another description that fits would be: boring.
Except, someone fucking murdered them.
“Edbot: tweak my scat-profile down to point seven. I think I’m laying it on a bit heavily here.”
Shocked at the bad language? Good: I wanted to get your attention. What happened on New Moscow is shocking because it could have happened anywhere. It could have happened right here, on Earth — where you probably are right now, seeing how 70 percent of you readers are left-behinds — or on Marid’s world. It could even have happened to the obnoxious imperialist fuckwits from Orion’s Law or the quiet enlightened muslim technocrats of Bohraj. We are all vulnerable, because whoever vaped New Moscow has gotten clean away with a monstrous crime, and as long as there’s no formal investigation, they’re going to think maybe they can do it again. And I’m telling you now, whoever they are they are not a Muscovite.
The Times has managed to secure exclusive access to the Sixfold State Commission’s last available internal government budget, passed just under two years before the Zero Incident. (The most recent budget was not publicly released prior to the disaster.) We believe these data to be accurate, and I can assure you that military spending which might have provoked an Eschatological incursion was not even on the radar. A detailed audit [Edbot: add hyperlinks for supplementary material] shows that the official military spend was 270 million a year on maintaining the STL deterrent fleet, and another 600 mil on civil defense: mostly against natural disasters. There was not enough slack in the budget to buy more than another 100 mil in black project spend, and New Moscow’s shipyards — crucially — lacked the expertise and tooling to build or repair FTL fabrications. No causality-violation warfare here, folks, there’s nothing to see, nothing that might have caught the attention of the big E, no infrastructure for developing forbidden weapons or violating Rule Three. Accusing these guys of secretly building a causality-violation weapon just doesn’t hold water. On the other hand, they had just signed a cooperation and collaboration treaty with their nasty neighbors in Newpeace, which suggests several unpleasant possibilities, but nothing firm enough to print in a newsblog. At least, not yet.
Bottom line, someone did it to them. Probably some nasty sneaky human faction with weapons of mass destruction and an axe to grind against Moscow’s government, a perceived grudge that drove them to massacre millions of innocents purely to avenge some slight inflicted, no doubt, in complete ignorance of the fact that it was a slight. In other words, an act of genocide.
Finally: to the gradgrind scum in the feedback forum who says that the destruction of New Moscow by Act of Weakly Godlike Being means we should withhold funds from the aid and hardship budget to help resettle the refugees, all I can say is fuck off and die. You fill me with contempt. I am so angry that I shouldn’t really be writing this; I’m surprised the keyboard isn’t melting under my fingertips. I’m appalled that the question ever arose in the first place. You aren’t fit to be allowed to read the Times, and I’m canceling your subscription forthwith. You are a disgrace to the human species — kindly become extinct.
Ends (Times Leader)