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…”

In a stately home by the banks of a dried-up river on a world with two small moons, a woman with sea-green eyes and crew-cut black hair sat behind a desk, reading reports. The house was enormous and ancient, walls of stone supported by ancient oak timber beams, and the French windows were thrown wide open to admit a breeze from the terrace before the house. The woman, engrossed in her reading, didn’t notice the breeze or even the smell of rose blossom wafting in on it. She was too busy paging through memoranda on her tablet, signing warrants, changing lives.

The door made a throat-clearing sound. “Ma’am, you have a visitor.”

“Who is it, Frank?” She glanced at the brass terminal plaque that had been hacked into the woodwork by an overenthusiastic former resident.

“S. Frazier Bayreuth. He says he has some sort of personal report for you.”

“Personal,” she muttered. “All right. Show him in.” She pushed her chair back, brushing imaginary lint from the shoulder of her tunic, and thumbed her tablet to a security-conscious screen saver.

The door clicked, and she rose as it opened. Holding out a hand: “Frazier.”

“Ma’am.” There was no click of heels — he wore no boots — but he bowed stiffly, from the neck.

“Sit down, sit down. You’ve been spending too much time in the New Republic.”

S. Frazier Bayreuth sank into the indicated chair, opposite her desk, and nodded wearily. “They rub off on you.”

“Hah.” It came out as a grim cough. “How are the compatibility metrics looking?

“Better than they were a year ago, better than anybody dared hope, but they won’t be mature enough for integration for a long time yet. Reactionary buffoons, if you ask me. But that’s not why I’m here. Um. May I ask how busy you are?”

The woman behind the desk stared at him, head slightly askew. “I can give you half an hour right now,” she said slowly. “If this is urgent.”

Bayreuth’s cheek twitched. A wiry, brown-haired man who looked as if he was made of dried leather, he wore blue-gray seamless fatigues; battle dress in neutral, chromatophores and impact diffusers switched off, as if he’d come straight from a police action, only pausing to remove his armor and equipment webbing. “It’s urgent all right.” He glanced at the open window. “Are we clear?”

She nodded. “Nobody who overhears us will understand anything,” she said, unsmiling, and he shivered slightly. In a ubiquitous surveillance society, any such bare-faced assertion of privacy clearly carried certain implications.

“All right, then. It’s about the Environmental Service cleanup report on Moscow.”

“The cleanup.” She gritted her teeth. “What is it this time?”

“Arbeiter Neurath begs to report that he has identified auditable anomalies in the immigration trace left by the scram team as they cleaned up and departed. On at least three occasions over the three years leading up to the Zero Incident and the five years since then, personnel working in the Environmental Operations Team under U. Vannevar Scott failed to behave consistently in accordance with best practice guidelines for exfiltrating feral territory. That, in itself, I would not need to bring to your attention, my lady. The guilty parties have been reprocessed and their errors added to the documentation corpus pour en-courager les autres. He cleared his throat. “But…”

The woman stared at him, her expression relaxed: Bayreuth tensed. When U. Portia Hoechst looked most relaxed she was at her most dangerous — if not to him, then to someone else, some designated enemy of the mission, roadkill on the highway to destiny. She might be thirty, or ninety — it was hard to tell with ReMastered, before the sudden unraveling of the genome that brought their long lives to an abrupt but peaceful close — but if asked to gamble Bayreuth would have placed his money at the higher end of the scale. Peaceful eyes, relaxed eyes, eyes that had seen too many horrors to tense and flicker at a death warrant.

“Continue,” she said in a neutral tone of voice.

“Neurath took it upon herself to examine the detailed findings of U. Scott’s team. She discovered further anomalies and brought them to my attention. I confirmed her observations and realized the issue must be escalated. In addition to the breakdown of operational discipline in the Moscow away team, there is some evidence that Scott has been, ah, relocating skeletons from the family closet into the oubliette, if you follow me.”

“You have evidence.”

“Indeed.” Bayreuth suppressed an urge to shuffle. Hoechst made him nervous; she was far from the worst mistress he’d served — quite the contrary — but he’d never yet seen her smile. He had a horrible feeling that he was about to, and the consequences made him increasingly uneasy. Her dislike of U. Vannevar Scott needed no explanation — they were of different clades, and in no way compatible other than their service to the ultimate — but it was to be devoutly hoped that none of it rubbed off on him. The wars of the bosses at overstaffsupervisor level and above were best avoided if you wanted to keep your head, much less aspire to those heights yourself one day.

“Disclose it.”

Bayreuth took a deep breath. You can’t back out now. “A major weak link has come to light. It turns out that Scott’s team established an MO by which all traffic to and from Moscow went through a single choke point. The theory was that in event of a leak, only the one location would require sanitizing. Leaving aside the question of backup routing and fail-over capacity, this means that the immigration desk at this one location held a complete audit trail of all our agents’ movements in and out of the system.”

U. Portia Hoechst frowned very slightly. “I do not follow your argument. Surely this would have been destroyed by the Zero Incident … ?”

Bayreuth shook his head slowly and watched her eyes widen. “The bottleneck they picked was an isolated fuel dump and immigration post about a parsec from Moscow. It was evacuated some time ago, before the shock wave hit. U. Scott sent a proxy squad to tidy up any loose ends on the station, trash the immigration records, liquidate any witnesses, that sort of thing. Doubtless if it had worked properly it would have been an elegant and sufficient solution to the problem, but it would appear that a number of unexplained incidents occurred during the evacuation. Such as his written instructions to the agent on-site going missing, such as the failure to return all copies of the backup dumps from the sealed immigration desk, and possibly more. There is some question over a classified log of the experimental protocols that were then in progress, which appears to have been misplaced during the evacuation. The agent sent dogs, boss. State security dogs borrowed from the Dresdener Foreign Office. He seemed to think that sending a proper sterilization team to do the job by the book was unnecessary. All swept under the rug, of course, the evidence securely encrypted — that’s why it’s taken so long to come to light.”