Singularity Sky

The Gathering Storm

“May I ask what I’m charged with?“ asked Martin.

The sunshine filtering through the skylight high overhead skewered the stuffy office air with bars of silver: Martin watched dust motes dance like stars behind the Citizen’s bullet-shaped head. The only noises in the room were the scratching of his pen on heavy official vellum and the repetitive grinding of gears as his assistant rewound the clockwork drive mechanism on his desktop analytical engine. The room smelled of machine oil and stale fear.

“Am I being charged with anything?” Martin persisted.

The Citizen ignored him and bent his head back to his forms. His young assistant, his regular chore complete, began unloading a paper tape from the engine.

Martin stood up. “If I am not being charged with anything, is there any reason why I should stay?” This time the Citizen Curator glared at him. “Sit,” he snapped.

Martin sat.

Outside the skylight, it was a clear, cold April afternoon; the clocks of St Michael had just finished striking fourteen hundred, and in the Square of the Five Corners, the famous Duchess’s Simulacrum was jerking through its eternal pantomime. The boredom grated on Martin. He found it difficult to adapt to the pace of events in the New Republic; it was doubly infuriating when he was faced with the eternal bureaucracy. He’d been here for four months now, four stinking months on a job which should have taken ten days. He was beginning to wonder if he would live to see Earth again before he died of old age.

In fact, he was so bored with waiting for his work clearance to materialize that this morning’s summons to an office somewhere behind the iron facade of the Basilisk came as a relief, something to break the monotony. It didn’t fill him with the stuttering panic that such an appointment would have kindled in the heart of a subject of the New Republic — what, after all, could the Curator’s Office do to him, an off-world engineering contractor with a cast-iron Admiralty contract? The summons had come on a plate borne by a uniformed courier, and not as a nighttime raid. That fact alone suggested a degree of restraint and, consequently, an approach to adopt, and Martin resolved to play the bemused alien visitor card as hard as he could.

After another minute, the Citizen lowered his pen and looked at Martin. “Please state your name,” he said softly.

Martin crossed his arms. “If you don’t know it already, why am I here?” he asked.

“Please state your name for the record.” The Citizen’s voice was low, clipped, and as controlled as a machine. He spoke the local trade-lingua — a derivative of the nearly universal old English tongue — with a somewhat heavy, Germanic accent.

“Martin Springfield.”

The Citizen made a note. “Now please state your nationality.”

“My what?”

Martin must have looked nonplussed, for the Citizen raised a gray-flecked eyebrow. “Please state your nationality. To what government do you owe allegiance?”

“Government?” Martin rolled his eyes. “I come from Earth. For legislation and insurance, I use Pinkertons, with a backup strategic infringement policy from the New Model Air Force. As far as employment goes, I am incorporated under charter as a personal corporation with bilateral contractual obligations to various organizations, including your own Admiralty. For reasons of nostalgia, I am a registered citizen of the People’s Republic of West Yorkshire, although I haven’t been back there for twenty years. But I wouldn’t say I was answerable to any of those, except my contractual partners — and they’re equally answerable to me.”

“But you are from Earth?” asked the Citizen, his pen poised.

“Yes.”

“Ah. Then you are a subject of the United Nations.” He made a brief note. “Why didn’t you admit this?”

“Because it isn’t true,” said Martin, letting a note of frustration creep into his voice. (But only a note: he had an idea of the Citizen’s powers, and had no intention of provoking him to exercise them.)

“Earth. The supreme political entity on that planet is the United Nations Organization. So it follows that you are a subject of it, no?”

“Not at all.” Martin leaned forward. “At last count, there were more than fifteen thousand governmental organizations on Earth. Of those, only about the top nine hundred have representatives in Geneva, and only seventy have permanent seats on the Security Council. The UN has no authority over any non-governmental organization or over individual citizens, it’s purely an arbitration body. I am a sovereign individual; I’m not owned by any government.”

“Ah,” said the Citizen. He laid his pen down very carefully beside his blotter and looked directly at Martin. “I see you fail to understand. I am going to do you a great favor and pretend that I did not hear the last thing you said. Vassily?”

His young assistant looked up. “Yah?”

“Out.”

The assistant — little more than a boy in uniform — stood and marched over to the door. It thudded shut solidly behind him.

“I will say this once, and once only.” The Citizen paused, and Martin realized with a shock that his outward impassivity was a tightly sealed lid holding down a roiling fury: “I do not care what silly ideas the stay-behinds of Earth maintain about their sovereignty. I do not care about being insulted by a young and insolent pup like you. But while you are on this planet you will live by our definitions of what is right and proper! Do I make myself clear?”

Martin recoiled. The Citizen waited to see if he would speak, but when he remained silent, continued icily. “You are here in the New Republic at the invitation of the Government of His Majesty, and will at all times comport yourself accordingly. This includes being respectful to Their Imperial Highnesses, behaving decently, legally, and honestly, paying taxes to the Imperial Treasury, and not spreading subversion. You are here to do a job, not to spread hostile alien propaganda or to denigrate our way of life! Am I making myself understood?”

“I don’t—” Martin paused, hunted for the correct, diplomatic words. “Let me rephrase, please. I am sorry if I have caused offense, but if that’s what I’ve done, would you mind telling me what I did? So I can avoid doing it again. If you won’t tell me what not to do, how can I avoid causing offense by accident?”

“You are unaware?” asked the Citizen. He stood up and paced around Martin, behind his chair, around the desk, and back to his own seat. There he stopped pacing, and glowered furiously. “Two nights ago, in the bar of the Glorious Crown Hotel, you were clearly heard telling someone — a Vaclav Hasek, I believe — about the political system on your home planet. Propaganda and nonsense, but attractive propaganda and nonsense to a certain disaffected segment of the lumpenproletariat. Nonsense verging on sedition, I might add, when you dropped several comments about — let me see—‘the concept of tax is no different from extortion,’ and ‘a social contract enforced by compulsion is not a valid contract.’ After your fourth beer, you became somewhat merry and began to declaim on the nature of social justice, which is itself something of a problem, insofar as you expressed doubt about the impartiality of a judiciary appointed by His Majesty in trying cases against the Crown.”

“That’s rubbish! Just a conversation over a pint of beer!”

“If you were a citizen, it would be enough to send you on a one-way trip to one of His Majesty’s frontier colonies for the next twenty years,” the Citizen said icily. “The only reason we are having this little tete-a-tete is because your presence in the Royal Dockyards is considered essential. If you indulge in any more such conversations over pints of beer, perhaps the Admiralty may be persuaded to wash their hands of you. And then where will you be?“

Martin shivered; he hadn’t expected the Citizen to be quite so blunt. “Are conversations about politics really that sensitive?” he asked.

“When held in a public place, and engaged in by an off-worlder with strange ideas, yes. The New Republic is not like the degenerate anarchist mess your fatherworld has sunk into. Let me emphasize that.

Because you are a necessary alien, you are granted certain rights by Their Imperial Highnesses. If you go outside those rights, you will be stamped on, and stamped on hard. If you find that difficult to understand, I suggest you spend the remainder of your free time inside your hotel room so that your mouth does not incriminate you accidentally. I ask you for a third time: Do I make myself understood?” Martin looked chastened. “Y-yes,” he said.

“Then get out of my office.”

Evening.

A man of medium height and unremarkable build, with brownish hair and a close-cropped beard, lay fully clad on the ornate counterpane of a hotel bed, a padded eyeshade covering his face. Shadows crept across the gloomy carpet as the sun sank below the horizon. The gas jets in the chandelier hissed, casting deep shadows across the room. A fly buzzed around the upper reaches of the room, pursuing a knife-edged search pattern.

Martin was not asleep. His entire inventory of countersur-veillance drones were out on patrol, searching his room for bugs in case the Curator’s Office was monitoring him. Not that he had many drones to search with: they were strictly illegal in the New Republic, and he’d been forced to smuggle his kit through customs in blocked sebaceous glands and dental caries. Now they were out in force, hunting for listening devices and reporting back to the monitors woven into his eyeshade.

Finally, concluding he was alone in the room, he recalled the fly — its SQUID-sensors untriggered — and put the fleas back into hibernation. He stood up and shuttered the window, then pulled the curtains closed. Short of the Curator’s Office having hidden a mechanical drum-recorder in the back of the wardrobe, he was unable to see any way that they could listen in on him.

He reached into the breast pocket of his jacket (rumpled, now, from being lain upon) and pulled out a slim, leather-bound book. ‘Talk to me.“

“Hello, Martin. Startup completed, confidence one hundred percent.”

“That’s good.” He cleared his throat. “Back channel. Execute. I’d like to talk to Herman.”

“Paging.”

The book fell silent and Martin waited impassively. It looked like a personal assistant, a discreet digital secretary for a modern Terran business consultant. While such devices could be built into any ambient piece of furniture — clothing, even a prosthetic tooth — Martin kept his in the shape of an old-fashioned hardback. However, normal personal assists didn’t come with a causal channel plug-in, especially one with a ninety-light-year reach and five petabits of bandwidth. Even though almost two petabits had been used when the agent-in-place passed it to him via a dead letter drop on a park bench, it was outrageously valuable to Martin. In fact, it was worth his life — if the secret police caught him with it.

A slower-than-light freighter had spent nearly a hundred years hauling the quantum black box at the core of the causal channel out from Septagon system; a twin to it had spent eighty years in the hold of a sister ship, en route to Earth. Now they provided an instantaneous communications channel from one planet to the other; instantaneous in terms of special relativity, but not capable of violating causality, and with a total capacity limited to the number of qubits they had been created with. Once those 5 billion megabits were gone, they’d be gone for good — or until the next slower-than-light freighter arrived.

(Not that such ships were rare — building and launching a one-kilogram starwisp, capable of carrying a whopping great hundred-gram payload across a dozen light-years, wasn’t far above the level of a cottage industry — but the powers that ran things here in the New Republic were notoriously touchy about contact with the ideologically impure outside universe.)

“Hello?” said the PA.

“PA: Is that Herman?” asked Martin.

“PA here. Herman is on the line and all authentication tokens are updated.”

“I had an interview with a Citizen from the Curator’s Office today,” said Martin. “They’re extremely sensitive about subversion.” Twenty-two words in five seconds: sampled at high fidelity, about half a million bits. Transcribed to text, that would make about one hundred bytes, maybe as few as fifty bytes after non-lossy compression. Which left fifty fewer bytes in the link between Martin’s PA and Earth. If Martin went to the Post Office, they would charge him a dollar a word, he’d have to queue for a day, and there would be a postal inspector listening in.

“What happened?” asked Herman.

“Nothing important, but I was warned off, and warned hard. I’ll put it in my report. They didn’t question my affiliation.”

“Any query over your work?”

“No. No suspicion, as far as I can tell.”

“Why did they question you?”

“Spies in bars. They want the frighteners on me. I haven’t been on board the Lord Vanek yet. Dockyard access control is very tight. I think they’re upset about something.”

“Any confirmation of unusual events? Fleet movements? Workup toward departure?”

“Nothing I know about.” Martin bit back his further comment: talking to Herman via the illegal transmitter always made him nervous. “I’m keeping my eyes on the ball. Report ends.”

“Bye.”

“PA: shut down link now.”

“The link is down.” Throughout the entire conversation, Martin noted, the only voice he had heard was his; the PA spoke in its owner’s tones, the better to be a perfect receptionist, and the CC link was so expensive that sending an audio stream over it would be a foolish extravagance. Talking to himself across a gulf of seventy light-years made Martin feel very lonely. Especially given the very real nature of his fears.

So far, he’d successfully played the gormless foreign engineering contractor with a runaway mouth, held overlong on a two-week assignment to upgrade the engines on board His Majesty’s battlecruiser Lord Vanek. In fact, he was doing such a good job that he’d gotten to see the inside of the Basilisk, and escaped alive.

But he wasn’t likely to do so twice, if they learned who he was working for.

“Do you think he is a spy?“ asked trainee procurator Vassily Muller.

“Not as far as I know.” The Citizen smiled thinly at his assistant, the thin scar above his left eye wrinkling with satanic amusement. “If I had any evidence that he was a spy, he would rapidly become an ex-spy.

And an ex-everything else, for that matter. But that is not what I asked you, is it?” He fixed his subordinate with a particular expression he had perfected for dealing with slow students. ‘Tell me why I let him go.“

“Because …” The trainee officer looked nonplussed. He’d been here six months, less than a year out of gymnasium and the custody of the professors, and it showed. He was still a teenager, fair-haired, blue-eyed, and almost painfully unskilled in the social nuances: like so many intelligent men who survived the elite boarding school system, he was also inclined to intellectual rigidity. Privately, the Citizen thought this was a bad thing, at least in a secret policeman — rigidity was a habit that would have to be broken if he was ever to be of much use. On the other hand, he seemed to have inherited his father’s intelligence. If he’d inherited his flexibility, too, without the unfortunate rebelliousness, he’d make an excellent operative.

After a minute’s silence, the Citizen prodded him. “That is not an acceptable answer, young man. Try again.”

“Ah, you let him go because he has a loose mouth, and where he goes, it will be easier to see who listens to him?”

“Better, but not entirely true. What you said earlier intrigues me. Why don’t you think he is a spy?” Vassily did a double take; it was almost painful to watch as he tried to deal with the Citizen’s abrupt about-face. “He’s too talkative, isn’t he, sir? Spies don’t call attention to themselves, do they? It’s not in their interests. And again, he’s an engineer contracted to work for the fleet, but the ship was built by the company he works for, so why would they want to spy on it? And he can’t be a professional subversive, either. Professionals would know better than to blab in a hotel bar.” He stopped and looked vaguely self-satisfied.

“Good going. Such a shame I don’t agree with you.”

Vassily gulped. “But I thought you said he wasn’t a—” He stopped himself. “You mean he’s too obviously not a spy. He draws attention to himself in bars, he argues politics, he does things a spy would not do — as if he wants to lay our suspicions at ease?”

“Very good,” said the Citizen. “You are learning to think like a Curator! Please note that I never said that Mr. Springfield is not a spy. Neither did I assert that he is one. He might well be; equally well, he might not. However, I will be unsatisfied until you have resolved the issue, one way or the other. Do you understand?”

“You want me to prove a negative?” Vassily was almost going cross-eyed with the effort of trying to understand the Citizen’s train of thought. “But that’s impossible!”

“Exactly!” The Citizen cracked a thin smile as he clapped his subordinate on the shoulder. “So you’ll have to find some way of making it a positive that you prove, won’t you? And that is your assignment for the foreseeable future, Junior Procurator Muller. You will go forth and try to prove that our irritating visitor of the morning is not a spy — or to gather sufficient evidence to justify his arrest. Come, now!

Haven’t you been champing at the bit to get out of this gloomy dungeon and see a bit of the capital, as I believe you referred to it only last week? This is your chance. Besides, when you return, think about the story you’ll have to tell that piece of skirt you’ve been chasing ever since you arrived here!”

“Ah — I’m honored,” said Vassily. He looked somewhat taken aback. A young officer, still sufficiently fresh from training that the varnish hadn’t eroded from his view of the universe, he looked up at the Citizen in awe. “Sir, humbly request permission to ask why? I mean, why now?”

“Because it’s about time you learned to do more than take minutes of committee meetings,” said the Citizen. His eyes gleamed behind their glasses; his moustache shuddered all the way out to its waxen points. “There comes a time when every officer needs to assume the full burden of his duties. I expect you have picked up at least a clue about how the job is done from the interminable reports you’ve been summarizing. Now it’s time to see if you can do it, no? On a low-risk assignment, I might add; I’m not sending you after the revolutionaries right away, ha-ha. So this afternoon you will go to sublevel two for field ops processing, then tomorrow you will start on the assignment. I expect to see a report on my desk, first thing every morning, starting the day after tomorrow. Show me what you can do!” The next morning Martin was awakened by a peremptory rap on the door. ‘Telegram for Master Springfield!“ called a delivery boy.

Martin pulled on a dressing gown and opened the door a crack. The telegram was passed inside; he signed for it quickly, pulled out the contents, and passed back the signed envelope. Blinking and bleary-eyed, he carried the message over to the window and pulled back the shutters to read it. It was a welcome surprise, if somewhat annoying to be woken for it — confirmation that his visa had been approved, his security vetting was complete, and that he was to report at 1800 that evening to the Navy beanstalk in South Austria for transit to the fleet shipyards in geosynchronous orbit.

Telegrams, he reflected, were so much less civilized than e-mail — the latter didn’t come with an officious youth who’d get you out of bed to sign for it. Such a shame that e-mail was unavailable in the New Republic and telegrams ubiquitous. But then again, e-mail was decentralized, telegrams anything but. And the New Republic was very keen on centralization.

He dressed, shaved, and made his way downstairs to the morning room to await his breakfast. He wore local garb — a dark jacket, tight breeches, boots, and a shirt with a ruff of lace at the collar — but of a subtly unfashionable cut, somehow betraying a lack of appreciation for the minutiae of fashion. Off-world styles, he found, tended to get in the way when trying to establish a working rapport with the locals: but if you looked just slightly odd, they’d sense your alien-ness without being overwhelmed by it, and make at least some allowances for your behavior. By any yardstick, the New Republic was an insular society, and interacting with it was difficult even for a man as well traveled as Martin, but at least the ordinary people made an effort.

He had become sufficiently accustomed to local customs that, rather than letting them irritate him, he was able to absorb each new affront with quiet resignation. The way the concierge stared down his patrician nose at him, or the stiff-collared chambermaids scurried by with downcast eyes, had become merely individual pieces in the complex jigsaw puzzle of Republican mores. The smell of wax polish and chlorine bleach, coal smoke from the boiler room, and leather seats in the dining room, were all alien, the odors of a society that hadn’t adapted to the age of plastic. Not all the local habits chafed. The morning’s news-sheet, folded crisply beside his seat at the breakfast table, provided a strangely evocative sense of homecoming — as if he had traveled on a voyage nearly three hundred years into the past of his own home culture, rather than 180 light-years out into the depths of space. Although, in a manner of speaking, the two voyages were exactly equivalent.

He breakfasted on butter mushrooms, sauteed goose eggs, and a particularly fine toasted sourdough rye bread, washed down with copious quantities of lemon tea. Finally, he left the room and made his way to the front desk.

“I would like to arrange transport,” he said. The duty clerk looked up, eyes distant and preoccupied. “By air, to the naval beanstalk at Klamovka, as soon as possible. I will be taking hand luggage only, and will not be checking out of my room, although I will be away for some days.”

“Ah, I see. Excuse me, sir.” The clerk hurried away into the maze of offices and tiny service rooms that hid behind the dark wood paneling of the hotel lobby.

He returned shortly thereafter, with the concierge in tow, a tall, stoop-shouldered man dressed head to foot in black, cadaverous and sunken-cheeked, who bore himself with the solemn dignity of a count or minor noble. “You require transport, sir?” asked the concierge.

“I’m going to the naval base at Klamovka,” Martin repeated slowly. ‘Today. I need transport arranging at short notice. I will be leaving my luggage at the hotel. I do not know how long I will be away, but I am not checking out.“

“I see, sir.” The concierge nodded at his subordinate, who scurried away and returned bearing three fat volumes— timetables for the various regional rail services. “I am afraid that no Zeppelin flights are scheduled between here and Klamovka until tomorrow. However, I believe you can get there this evening by train — if you leave immediately.”

“That will be fine,” said Martin. He had a nagging feeling that his immediate departure was the only thing he could do that would gratify the concierge — apart, perhaps, from dropping dead on the spot. “I’ll be back down here in five minutes. If your assistant could see to my tickets, please? On the tab.” The concierge nodded, stony-faced. “On behalf of the hotel, I wish you a fruitful journey,” he intoned.

“Marcus, see to this gentleman.” And off he stalked.

The clerk cracked open the first of the ledgers and glanced at Martin cautiously. “Which class, sir?”

“First.” If there was one thing that Martin had learned early, it was that the New Republic had some very strange ideas about class. He made up his mind. “I need to arrive before six o’clock tonight. I will be back here in five minutes. If you would be so good as to have my itinerary ready by then …”

“Yes, sir.” He left the clerk sweating over map and gazetteer, and climbed the four flights of stairs to his floor.

When he returned to the front desk, trailed by a footman with a bag in each hand, the clerk ushered him outside. “Your carnet, sir.” He pocketed the ornate travel document, itself as intricate as any passport. A steam coach was waiting. He climbed in, acknowledged the clerk’s bow with a nod, and the coach huffed away toward the railway station.

It was a damp and foggy morning, and Martin could barely see the ornate stone facade of the ministerial buildings from the windows of his carriage as they rolled past beside him.

The hotel rooms might lack telephones, there might be a political ban on networking and smart matter and a host of other conveniences, and there might be a class system out of the eighteenth century on Earth; but the New Republic had one thing going for it — its trains ran on time. PS 1347, the primary around which New Muscovy orbited, was a young third-generation G2 dwarf; it had formed less than two billion years ago (to Sol’s five), and consequently, the planetary crust of New Muscovy contained uranium ore active enough to sustain criticality without enrichment.

Martin’s coach drew up on the platform alongside the Trans-Peninsular Express. He climbed down from the cabin stiffly and glanced both ways: they’d drawn up a quarter of a kilometer down the marble tongue from the hulking engines, but still the best part of a kilometer away from the dismal tailings of fourth-class accommodation and mail. A majordomo, resplendent in bottle-green frock coat and gold braid, inspected his carnet before ushering him into a private compartment on the upper deck. The room was decorated in blue-dyed leather and old oak, trimmed in brass and gold leaf, and equipped with a marble-topped table and a bell-pull to summon service; it more closely resembled a smoking room back in the hotel than anything Martin associated with public transport.

As soon as the majordomo had left, Martin settled back in one of the deeply padded seats, drew the curtains aside to reveal the arching buttresses and curved roof of the station, and opened his PA in book mode. Shortly thereafter, the train shuddered slightly and began to move: as the train slid out of the station, he glanced out of the window, unable to look away.

The city of New Prague was built just upstream from the tidal estuary of the River Vis; only the Basilisk, brooding atop a plug of eroded volcanic granite, rose much above the level of the plain. Indeed, the train would cruise through the lowlands using just one of its engines. The second reactor would only be brought to criticality when the train reached the foothills of the Apennines, the mountain range that separated the coastal peninsula from the continental interior of New Austria. Then the train would surge in a knife-straight line across nine hundred kilometers of desert before stopping, six hours later, at the foot of the Klamovka beanstalk.

The scene was quite extraordinary. Martin gazed at it in barely controlled awe. Though he didn’t like to admit it, he was something of a tourist, permanently searching for a sense of fresh beauty that he could secretly revel in. There wasn’t anything like this left on Earth; the wild ride of the twentieth century and the events that had followed the Singularity in the twenty-first had distorted the landscape of every industrialized nation. Even in the wake of the population crash, you couldn’t find open countryside, farms, hedges, and neatly planned villages — at least, not without also finding monorails, arcologies, fall-out hot spots, and the weird hillocks of the Final Structure. The lowland landscape through which the Trans-Peninsular Express ran resembled a vision of pre-postindustrial England, a bucolic dreamscape where the trains ran on time and the sun never set on the empire.

But railway journeys pale rapidly, and after half an hour, the train was racing through the valleys in a blur of steel and brass. Martin went back to his book, and was so engrossed in it that he barely noticed the door open and close — until a woman he had never seen before sat down opposite him and cleared her throat.

“Excuse me,” he said, looking up. “Are you sure you have the right compartment?” She nodded. “Quite sure, thank you. I didn’t request an individual one. Did you?”

“I thought—” He fumbled in his jacket for his carnet. “Ah. I see.” He cursed the concierge silently, thumbed the PA off, then looked at her. “I thought I had a compartment to myself; I see I was wrong.

Please accept my apologies.”

The woman nodded graciously. She had long black hair coiled in a bun, high cheekbones and brown eyes; her dark blue gown seemed expensively plain by this society’s standards. Probably a middle-class housewife, he guessed, but his ability to judge social status within the New Republic was still somewhat erratic. He couldn’t even make a stab at her age: heavy makeup, and the tight bodice, billowing skirts and puffed sleeves of capital fashion made an effective disguise.

“Are you going far?” she asked brightly.

“All the way to Klamovka, and thence up the naval beanstalk,” he said, somewhat surprised at this frank interrogation.

“What a coincidence; that’s where I’m going, too. You will excuse me for asking, but am I right in thinking you are not native to this area?”

She looked interested, to a degree that Martin found irritatingly intrusive. He shrugged. “No, I’m not.” He reopened his PA and attempted to bury his nose in it, but his unwanted traveling companion had other ideas.

“I take it from your accent that you are not native to this planet, either. And you’re going to the Admiralty yards. Would you mind me asking your business there?”

“Yes,” he said curtly, and stared pointedly at his PA. He hadn’t initially registered how forward she was being, at least for a woman of her social class, but it was beginning to set his nerves on edge, ringing alarms. Something about her didn’t feel quite right. Agent provocateur? he wondered. He had no intention of giving the secret police any further excuses to haul him in; he wanted them to think he’d learned the error of his ways and determined to reform.

“Hmm. But when I came in you were reading a treatise on relativistic clock-skew correction algorithms as applied to the architecture of modern starship drive compensators. So you’re an engineer of some sort, retained by the Admiralty to do maintenance work on fleet vessels.” She grinned, and her expression unnerved Martin: white teeth, red lips, and something about her manner that reminded him of home, where women weren’t just well-bred ornaments for the family tree. “Am I right?”

“I couldn’t possibly comment.” Martin shut his PA again and glared at her. “Who are you, and what the hell do you want?” The social programming he’d absorbed on his journey out to the New Republic forbade such crudity in the presence of a lady, but she was obviously no more a lady than he was a Republican yeoman. The social program could go play with itself.

“My name is Rachel Mansour, and I’m on my way to the naval dockyards on business which may well intersect with your own. Unless I’m mistaken, in which case you have my most humble apologies, you are Martin Springfield, personally incorporated and retained by contract to the New Republican Admiralty to perform installation upgrades on the drive control circuitry of the Svejk-class battlecruiser Lord Vanek. After Lord Ernst Vanek, founder of the New Republic’s Navy. Correct?” Martin returned the PA to his jacket pocket and glanced out of the window, trying to still a sudden wave of cold fear. “Yes. What business of yours is it?”

“You may be interested to learn that four hours ago, consensus absolute time, the New Model Air Force — whose underwriting service you subscribe to — invoked the Eschaton clause in all strategic guarantees bearing on the Republic. At the same time, someone tipped off the UN Standing Committee on Multilateral Interstellar Disarmament that the New Republic is gearing up for war, in defense of a colony outpost that’s under siege. You aren’t paying the extra premium for insurance against divine retribution, are you? So right now you’re not covered for anything other than medical and theft.” Martin turned back to look at her. “Are you accusing me of being a spy?” He met her eyes. They were dark, intelligent, and reserved — absolutely unreadable. “Who the hell are you, anyway?” She shook a card out of her sleeve and opened it toward him. A head — recognizably her own, but with close-cropped hair — floated above it in holographic miniature, wreathed against a familiar backdrop. The sheer unexpectedness of it electrified him: shivers chased up and down his spine as his implants tried to damp down an instinctive panic reaction rising from his adrenal glands. “UN diplomatic intelligence, special operations group. I’m here to find out what the current situation is, and that includes finding out just what last-minute modifications the Admiralty is making to the ships comprising the expeditionary force. You are going to cooperate, aren’t you?” She smiled again, even more unnervingly, with an expression that reminded Martin of a hungry ferret.

“Um.” What the hell are the CMID doing here? This isn’t in the mission plan! “This is going to be one of those trips, isn’t it?” He rubbed his forehead and glanced at her again: she was still waiting for his response. Shit, improvise, dammit, before she suspects something! “Look, do you know what they do to spies here?”

She nodded, no longer smiling. “I do. But I’ve also got my eyes on the bottom line, which is that this is an impending war situation. It’s my job to keep track of it — we can’t afford to let them run riot this close to Earth. Being garrotted would certainly spoil anyone’s day, but starting an interstellar war or attracting the attention of the Eschaton is even worse, at least for the several planets full of mostly innocent bystanders who are likely to be included in the collateral damage. Which is my overriding concern.” She stared at him with frightening intensity, and the card disappeared between two lace-gloved fingers.

“We need to get together and talk, Martin. Once you’re up at the dockyard and settled in, I’ll contact you. I don’t care what else you agree to or disagree with, but we are going to have a talk tomorrow. And I’m going to pick your brains, and confirm that you’re just a bystander, and tell your insurers you’re a safe bet. Do you understand?”

“Uh, yes.” He stared at her and tried to look as if he’d just realized that she was, in fact, a devil, and he had signed away his soul. He hoped she’d believe him — naive engineer, sucked in out of his depths, confronted with an agent of Higher Authority — but had a cold sense that if she didn’t fall for it, he might be in real trouble. Herman and the CMID weren’t exactly on speaking terms …

“Excellent.” She reached into her purse and pulled out a battered-looking, gunmetal-colored PA.

“Speaking. Send: Rabbit green. Ack.”

The PA spoke back: “Ack. Message sent.” It took Martin a moment or two to recognize the voice as his own.

She slipped the case away and stood to leave the compartment. “You see,” she said from the doorway, a quirky smile tugging at her lips, “life here isn’t necessarily as dull as you thought! See you later …”