Iron Sunrise (32 page)

"I can keep to myself." Wednesday pulled her hands back into the long and elaborately embroidered cuffs of her jacket. "I'm not a child. Well, not everywhere. Legal standards differ."

"Yes, yes, and if you'd been born in the New Republic you'd be married with three or four children by now, but that doesn't mean you'd be an autonomous adult. I'm not supposed to keep an eye on you, I'm supposed to keep you from getting bored. All part of the service. What do you do with yourself when you want some cheap amusement, may I ask, if that isn't an indelicate question?"

"Oh, lots of things," she said idly. Raising an eyebrow at him: "But I don't think you want to know all the details. Something tells me I'm not your type."

"Well whoop-de-do. How perceptive, sister." Svengali steered them down a side passage then through a door into a conference suite, then out the far side of the room—which doubled as an emergency airlock—and into another passage. "More competition for the boys." He pulled a comical face.

"But seriously. What did you get up to at home when you were bored?"

"I used to be big on elevator surfing. Vacuum tunneling, too. I was into tai chi, but I sort of let it drop. And, oh, I read spy thrillers." She glanced around. "We're not in passenger country anymore, are we?"

There were no carpets or works of art, the doors were wider and of bare metal, and the ceiling was a flat, emissive glare. "Nope. This is one of the service passages." Svengali was disappointed at her lack of surprise, but he decided to continue anyway. "They connect all the public spaces. This is a crew lift. They don't run on cables, they're little self-powered pressurized vehicles running in the tunnels, and they can change direction at will. You don't want to try surfing these cars—it's too dangerous. That"—he pointed at an unmarked narrow door about half a meter high, sized for a small dwarf—"is the service door into a passenger suite. They're automatically locked while the room's occupied, but the valet 'bots use them while you're out and about."

"'Bots? Like, android amahs?"

"Who do you think made your bed?" Svengali carried on down the passage.

"Human spaces and human furniture are built for roughly human-shaped people. They could put something like an industrial fab in each room, or even make everything out of structured matter, but many people get nervous when they're too near smart stuff, and having mobile valet 'bots on trolleys is cheaper than providing one per room."

"Uh-huh. So you're telling me that everywhere in the ship is, like, connected to everywhere else? Using old-fashioned doors and passages and ducts?"

She was so wide-eyed that he decided it could only be sarcasm.

"If you design so that it'll only work with smart-matter utilities, something dumb will happen. That's the fifteenth corollary of Murphy's Law, or something. This ship is supposed to be able to get home with just a human crew, you know. That's partly why people are willing to pay for it." A side door opened onto a spiral staircase, cobwebby steps of nearly translucent aerogel ascending and descending into a dim blue mist in each direction.

"Up or down, m'lady?"

"Up, first."

"You realize we're only able to do this because I've got a badge," Svengali remarked, as they climbed. The kid had long legs and was in good shape.

He had to push himself to keep ahead of her.

"I guessed." She snuffled something that might have been a laugh. "It's still cool. What are those guts for?"

He followed her finger to the peristaltic pipes in the recess that ran alongside the stairs. "Probably semisolid waste disposal. They can reconfigure this stairwell into a tunnel if there's a major gravity outage, you know."

"Isn't that unlikely?"

"Probably." He carried on climbing for a bit. "Doesn't it worry you to be climbing a staircase inside what is basically a skyscraper sitting on top of a stasis chamber containing a twenty billion-ton extremal black hole?"

"I assume"—she paused for breath—"that if anything went wrong with it, it would all be over too fast to worry about."

"Probably." He paused. "That's why most of the crew—not me, I'm with Entertainments and Diversions, I mean the black gang, engineering ops—are along. In case something goes wrong, and they have to improvise."

"Well, isn't that comforting to know."

More sarcasm from Wednesday. It ran off him like water off a duck's back.

Here we are.

"Where?" She gawked past his shoulder at the boringly ordinary-looking door.

"Here." He smirked. "The backstage entrance to the live action theater on C

deck. Want to see a performance? Or maybe the theater bar?"

"Wow." She grinned. "Send in the clowns!"

With a flourish, Svengali passed her a red nose. Then they went inside.

PREPARING FOR GHOSTS AND DOGS

Rachel Mansour, Commissioner, UN Standing Committee on Interstellar Disarmament (Investigative Branch), walked slowly down the intimidatingly wide steps in front of the building of the Ministry of Cosmic Harmony.

Behind her, huge marble columns supported a massive mirror-finished geodesic hemisphere that loomed over the neighborhood like a giant cyborg turtle. A sea of people flooded around her across the Plaza of Public Affairs, office workers and bureaucrats going about their daily work between the offices in the ministry basements, and the scattered subdepartments and public malls at the other side of the open space. The Eastern Palace squatted to her right, a pink-and-white brick mansion that had been converted to a museum to the Hegemony and the people's revolution that had overturned it more than a century earlier, here in Sarajevo, capital of the planetary empire.

She felt light-headed, an effect of coming out into the chilly open air after her claustrophobic interview with the subminister in charge of security arrangements for foreign embassies. After twenty-six days aboard the Gloriana, everything from the unprocessed air to the color of daylight seemed peculiar. There was perhaps just a small amount of gravitational adjustment, too—and a head-spinning load of mild culture shock.

She marched down the steps and out onto the plaza. Vendors selling spiced cocoa drinks, stir-fried octopi, and bootlegged recordings of old public executions tried to attract her attention. She ignored them. He didn't say no, she thought, remembering the subminister frowning ear to ear behind his desk: he wasn't very happy. "You are telling me that our security is inadequate?" he'd challenged her.

"No, I'm telling you that three other diplomatic security corps failed, in series, and two of them were forewarned. Your people might be better, but I hope you'll forgive me for not taking it on trust."

"Go ahead with your scheme, then, if the Muscovites agree. We will of course deny all knowledge if it goes wrong."

It was a step up from what she'd have gotten a generation ago, but New Dresden wasn't that bad. They had learned the enlightened self-interest meme here, and picked up the idea of a loyal opposition. They even elected their government officials, these days, although in this city the Party maintained its hereditary veto. All told, New Dresden was more civilized than many places she could have ended up. Less so than some others—but so what? As long as they follow their best interests. And don't go haring off into the darkness again, like they did seventy years ago. Still, maybe it would be for the best if she kept Martin out of the frame. She'd have to text him via the embassy channel. She tugged her jacket tighter across her shoulders, trying to think her way into the mind of the bureaucratic herd in their dark, closely tailored uniforms. But she couldn't fool herself about the subminister's likely report to his bosses.

People didn't always follow their best interests. Human beings were distressingly bad at risk analysis, lousy with hidden motivations and neuroses, anything but the clean rational actors that economists or diplomats wanted so desperately to believe in, and diplomats had to go by capabilities, not intentions. In dealing with the Muscovite diplomats in residence the Party officials must feel as if they were handling a hungry and aroused venomous snake, one that could turn on them and bite at any moment. They'd tolerate George Cho playing his little shell game with Ambassador Morrow for precisely as long as it increased the likelihood of Morrow's issuing the recall code, and not a second longer.

Speaking of whom, the Ambassador—easily identifiable by the two bodyguards—was sitting at a table at the pavement restaurant. Rachel walked round to the kitchen side then marched up to the nearest bodyguard—who was focusing on the square, not on the waiters approaching from the restaurant entrance—and tapped him on the shoulder. "Rachel Mansour, to see the Honorable Elspeth Morrow."

The bodyguard jumped. "Whoa!"

Morrow looked up, her face colorless and her expression bored. "You're late. George Cho said I should talk to you. Strongly implied that I needed to talk to you. Who are you?"

Rachel pulled out a chair and sat down. "I work for the same people as George. Different department, though. Officially, I'm on protocol.

Unofficially, I'll deny everything." She smiled faintly.

Morrow waved at the chair with poor grace. "Okay, spook. So, what does George want?"

Rachel leaned back, then glanced at the bodyguard. "You know about the, ah, problem that concerns us." She studied Morrow intently, seeing a slim woman, evidently in her early forties. Moscow hadn't been good at antiaging therapy, but she could easily have been twenty years older. She wore her chestnut hair shoulder-length, and her green eyes seemed haunted by … just haunted. There had to be hundreds of millions of ghosts already riding at her shoulder, and the knowledge that she could add to their ranks—What must that do to her? Rachel wondered. "Forgive me for asking, but did you know Maureen Davis, Simonette Black, or Maurice Pendelton well?" she asked.

Morrow nodded. "Maurice was an old friend," she said slowly. "I didn't know Black other than by repute. Maureen … we knew each other. But Maurice is the one I feel for." She leaned forward. "What do you know about this?"

she asked quietly. "Why did George bring you? You're black ops, aren't you?"

Rachel raised a hand to summon a waiter. "I'm, um, working with George's team from the other side," she said quietly. "George works for a diplomatic solution. Me, it's my job to … well, George very urgently wants to ensure that if someone tries to kill you—which we think is a high probability in the next week or so—firstly, we want them to fail, and secondly, they should fail in such a way that we can find out who they are and why they're doing it, and roll up not only the point assassin but their entire network."

"You do assassinations yourself?" Elspeth stared at her as if she'd sprouted a second head. "I didn't know Earth did—"

"No!" Rachel gave a little self-deprecating laugh. "Quite the opposite." The waiter arrived. "I'll have the mango croquette and roast shoulder of pork, thanks. And a glass of, um, the traditional red bonnet viper tisane?" She spoke without looking up, but from the corner of her vision noticed the bodyguard shadowing the waiter with aggressive vigilance. She nodded at Morrow. "The UN, as you can imagine, would very much like to resolve the current impasse between the government of Moscow in Exile and New Dresden. If for no other reason than to avoid the horrible precedent it would create if your vengeance fleet completes its mission. We especially don't want to see a situation where a party or parties unknown butcher so many of the remaining Muscovite government-in-exile's senior ranks that the situation becomes irrevocable. We want to know who is trying to engineer this situation, and why."

Morrow nodded. "Well, so do I," she said calmly. "That's why I have bodyguards."

Rachel managed a faint smile. "With all due respect, I'm sure your bodyguard is perfectly adequate for dealing with run-of-the-mill problems.

However, in all three cases to date the assassin succeeded in passing through a secured zone and making an unobstructed getaway. This tells us that we're not dealing with an ordinary lunatic—we're dealing with a formidable professional, or even a team. Ordinary guards don't cut it. If I was the killer, you would be dead by now. My briefcase could be loaded with a bomb, your bodyguard could be shot with his own weapon … do you see?"

Elspeth nodded reluctantly.

"I'm here to keep you alive," Rachel said quietly. "There's a—well, I can't go into our sources. But we think there's probably going to be an attempt on your life between six and ten days from now."

"Oh." Morrow shook her head. Oddly, she seemed to relax a trifle, as if the immediacy of the warning, the concreteness of the high jeopardy, gave her something to cling to. "What do you think you can do if this master assassin wants to kill me?"

The waiter arrived with Rachel's order on a tray. "Oh, I can think of half a dozen possibilities," Rachel said. She smiled tiredly. Then she peered at Elspeth's face closely until the ambassador blinked. "We'll have to run it past the ship's surgeon, but I think Plan A can be made to work."

"What? What have you got in mind?"

"Plan A is the shell game." Rachel put her glass down. "We're assuming that our unidentified but highly competent assassins are also well informed.

If this is the case, they'll probably learn or guess that you've been warned before they set up the hit. So what George would like to do is play a shell game with them. Step zero is to send Dr. Baxter off-planet—somewhere where we're fairly certain there are no assassins. We'd like you to ensure that you've got as few public appearances and important meetings as possible during the window of opportunity.

"And then … well, I'm about your height, and the body mass difference can be finessed with padding and loose clothing. The real trick will be getting the face and hair and posture right. We're going to ensure that for your remaining public appearances you have a body double. Bait, in other words.

You will be hiding in a locked room in a nuclear bunker with a closed-cycle air supply and half an assault division sitting on top of it—or as a guest on board a UN diplomatic yacht, sovereign territory of Earth, with a couple of cruisers from the New Dresden navy keeping an eye on it, if you prefer. It's up to you: they want to keep you alive, too, as long as those missiles are heading in this direction. But I'm going to hang my tail out where someone can try to grab it—not with a long gun, but up close and personal, so we can snatch them."