“There’s more, isn’t there?” Frank asked, fascinated.

“Well, no shit!” Hoechst looked at him curiously, as if wondering why he was so interested in the abstract issues, rather than the proximate fate of his own skin. “There’s a flight of four R-bombs coming.” She frowned. “The cover story is that they’re aimed at New Dresden. And that’s what the Muscovite diplomats think.”

“What did he—”

“Shut the fuck up!” Hoechst frowned. She tapped one finger on the key. “They’re supposed to be running on New Dresden. That’s the official target ops plan that was on file, isn’t it? That’s what the Muscovite diplomats think. And they’re next to invisible when they’re under way. Except our fucking asshole Ubermensch Vannevar Scott was too cute by half. While he was puppetizing the Muscovite Defense Ministry, the first group he hit was the deterrence operations staff, including the flight crew of one of the bombers — the one that isn’t responding to messages. He was planning his defection at least ten years before Moscow went bang: one of those fucking bombers is running on Newpeace, our new regional capital, which is about as distant from Moscow as New Dresden.

“Not many ReMastered know this,” she added drily, “and my boss wants to keep it that way.”

Frank sat up straight. “Are you telling us the business with New Dresden, the ambassadors—”

“I haven’t been bumping off foreign diplomats.” She shook her head vehemently. “That was Scott’s plan. I told you he was sloppy, didn’t I? When things went wrong, when Moscow Prime exploded, he took steps to sweep the dirt under the rug. He paid an extremely accomplished assassin, the one you called Svengali.” For a moment she looked extremely tired. “Which is presumably what brought you aboard the Romanov,” she murmured in Rachel’s direction. Rachel stared at her, face impassive. “Svengali won’t be bothering us anymore, needless to say.”

“You want me to believe that this was all one man’s rogue operation?” Rachel asked, her voice low and controlled.

“Pretty much.” For a moment Hoechst looked terribly old. “Don’t underestimate him: U. Scott was one of the highest-ranking officials in, ah, External State Security. The foreign espionage service, in other words. And he was planning a coup. He was going to take Moscow and use the R-bombs to hold the entire Directorate at bay, and he was going to leverage his takeover of Moscow to destabilize New Dresden, via the trade war. He was already infiltrating the Dresden Foreign Ministry — without authorization. If he succeeded, he’d have had two planets, the beginnings of his own pocket interstellar empire.” She looked at Frank, meeting his eyes. “I know what you think of us. Regardless of that, whatever you think of our ideology, we are not insane, and we are not suicidal. One of the goals of the ReMastered Directorate is to render interstellar warfare not merely unthinkable, but impossible. Scott had to go.”

She sounds as if she’s trying to convince herself, Frank realized with a sinking feeling. This was not what he’d wanted to hear from her. He’d expected venomously triumphant self-justification, perhaps, or a gloating confession. Not this! he thought despairingly. If Eric decides to run this, it’ll be about the best piece of pro-ReMastered press they could ask for! The pot of gold at the end of Frank’s starbow had just turned out to be a chamber pot full of shit — and despite what he’d said earlier about journalistic ethics being a crock, he couldn’t see any obvious holes in her argument. Even releasing the prisoners in Hoechst’s stolen memory diamond — expensive as such a process would be — would probably not reverse its effect by much.

She took a deep breath and continued her confession: “Luckily, Scott pushed too hard, and the wheels came off. There are a couple of thousand Ubers on Newpeace, not to mention the ordinary humans, who would perhaps be of some concern to you. We’re spread terribly thin; if we have to evacuate that planet, we’d lose half a century’s hard work. There’s no way we could possibly convince all the Muscovite ambassadors to agree to cancel the R-bomb attack if they knew the truth. Doesn’t that mean something to you?”

Frank nodded, dazed. He looked around, taking in other shocked expressions. The tension in the ReMastered soldiers. The twitchy look on the blond guy standing against the wall next to Wednesday said it all. She’d laid out the dictator’s new suit in front of them, and it was threadbare: they were clearly shocked by Hoechst’s revelations. The spook from the revolution on Newpeace all those years ago, the gray eminence at the center of a web of interstellar assassination and intrigue, turned out to be a fixer who was desperately trying to save a planet from the posthumous legacy of a genocidal megalomaniac -

“It takes two to send the cancel code. I’ve got one of them — right here.” She tapped the key again. “There’s a causal channel connected to the TALIGENT offense control network: they abandoned it when they evacuated the station, but it wasn’t disconnected. I had Zursch and Anders collect the station manager’s key and take it there already. Hardware authentication, you see, all you need are the tokens. You don’t disconnect causal channels without good reason; they’re too expensive to set up in the first place.

“You have no idea how much it cost us to get our hands on this key — we had to extract it from the Ambassador to Newpeace. You don’t need to concern yourselves with how. The station manager’s was easier — silly fool actually left it in his office safe.” She shrugged. “There’s a diplomatic channel here, down in the communications center. One that’s linked into the military TALIGENT network.”

BING. New mail. Not now, Frank thought irritably, blinking it open before him. From: Wednesday. GOT 2 GO. SORRY. Huh? He glanced at her. “What—”

“You’ll be wanting that cartridge, I suppose,” Wednesday said, her expression sullen. “What happens to us then?”

“I destroy it in front of you.” Hoechst nodded at Frank. “You’re here to witness this.” A flicker of a grin. “Same as last time, without the unpleasant aftereffects. Which were not of my choosing, I should add.” Her gaze fell on Rachel next. “I then send the cancel codes to the R-bombs, using the station manager’s console, and take the Romanov to go pick up the crews and destroy the evidence. You get to wait here in the cold and try to keep everybody on the station alive until the rescue ship from Tonto arrives. After that—” She shook her head. “Not my department.”

“Diplomatic immunity,” Rachel said in a voice as dry as bone.

“Are you going to get picky? If it means a couple of hundred million innocent people die as a result?” Hoechst stared at her through narrowed eyes. “Thought not.”

“May I see the key?” Wednesday walked closer to the desk.

“Sure.” Hoechst held it up, twirling it slowly between forefinger and thumb, evidently enjoying the gesture. “Now, Wednesday child, if you’d be so good as to hand me the cartridge—”

The lights flickered.

Hoechst froze. “Mathilde,” she said thoughtfully, “it occurs to me that we haven’t heard from Joanna, or Stepan and Roman for that matter. I want you to take every available body — not you, Franz, you’re staying here — and deal with that missing Third Lieutenant. Then find out what happened to Joanna and her boys. Nothing good, I expect.”

“Yes, boss.” Mathilde headed for the door immediately, looking annoyed. She tagged Gun-boy on the way through. “C’mon, hunting time.”

The lights flickered again. “What do you suppose she’s doing?” asked Frank.

Steffi whistled as she walked, hastily, toward the docking tunnel. A head-up clock counted down in front of her left eye: eighty-two, eighty-one, eighty … She broke into a trot as the count headed for the final minute.