“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.”