“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.”