Iron Sunrise (26 page)

"Samow, see that his neural map is reclaimed, then ditch the remains. Marx, give my compliments to the pilot and tell her it's time to execute Plan Coyote. U. Bergman, come with me." She turned and stalked toward the lift up to the crew decks. Franz followed her, his mind blank. Kerguelen had worked for him for three years, a happy-go-lucky youngster on his first out-of-system assignment. He was prone to living it up, but not self-consciously sloppy, and there seemed to be a serious ideological commitment underlying his actions. His self-evident belief in the cause, in the unborn god and the destiny of the ReMastered, had sometimes left Franz feeling like a hollow fraud.

Kerguelen had lived life as large as he was allowed to, as if he were working in the early days of a better universe. To see him broken and discarded rubbed home Franz's own inadequacy. So he didn't protest, but followed Hoechst, wafting in her trail of rustling silks and expensive floral triterpenoids and volatile oils. The faint smell of old-fashioned powder cosmetics stung his nose.

The DepSec's suite was larger than the cubbyhole Franz was bunking in. It held a pair of chairs, a rolltop desk, and a separate folding bed. Perhaps it had once been the friggatenfuhrer's quarters, back when the yacht had been a warship. Hoechst shut the door and waved him to a seat, but remained standing and busied herself with something at her table. He couldn't take his eyes off her. She was beautiful, in a feral, ex-Directorate sort of way, but also frightening. Intimidating. A predator, beautiful but deadly and incapable of behaving any other way. She eased her wig off and placed it on the desk, then ran her fingertips through her close-cropped pale hair. "You look as if you need a drink."

She was offering him a glass, he realized through a cloud of befuddlement.

He accepted it instantly, his instinct for self-preservation kicking in. "Thank you." She poured herself another from a cut-crystal decanter, some kind of amber fluid that stank of alcohol and ashes. "Is this an imported whisky?"

She curled her lower lip thoughtfully, then replaced the decanter stopper and sat down on the chair opposite him. "Yes." She smoothed her gown over her knees and looked momentarily abashed, as if she couldn't remember how she came to be there, a fairy-tale princess aboard a warship of the ReMastered race. "You should try it."

He raised his glass, then paused, trying to remember the formula: "To your very good health." He silently appended a less flattering toast.

She raised her glass back to him. "And yours." Her cheek twitched. "If that's your idea of a toast to my health, I can't imagine what my painful death would warrant."

Her words struck home. "Boss, I—"

"Silence." She watched him over the rim of her glass, green eyes narrowed.

Sweat-spiked black hair, high cheekbones, full red lips, narrow waist: a warrior's body held in a sheath of silk that had taken master couturiers a month to stitch. She had the inhumanly symmetrical features that only a first-line clade could afford to buy for the alpha instances of their phenotype.

"I brought you here because I think we may have gotten off on the wrong foot when we were first introduced."

Franz sat frozen in his chair, the glass of scotch—worth a small fortune, for it had been imported across more than two hundred light years—clutched in his right hand. "I'm not sure I understand you."

"I think you do." Hoechst watched him, unblinking except for the occasional flicker of her nictitating membranes. "I've been following your profile. You would be surprised how much information on their subjects even the privacy fetishists of Septagon manage to collect. Our target refugee, for instance. I think I've got a handle on her—she made the mistake of talking to some friends after her unfortunate run-in with that waste of air, and I think I know where she's bound for. But she's not the only one."

Now it comes, he realized, the muscles in his neck tensing involuntarily.

She's going to—what? If she wanted him dead, she could have executed him along with Ker.

She kept her eyes on him, avaricious for information: "You were 'in love'

with U. Erica Blofeld, weren't you?"

A stab of unreasoning anger provoked him to speak frankly: "I'd rather not talk about it. You've got what you want, haven't you? My undivided attention and the liquidation of an elite countersub agent from Scott's personal cadre. Isn't that enough?"

"Perhaps not." Her cheek muscles tensed, pulling the sides of her mouth up into something that resembled a smile but didn't touch her eyes. "You've been in Septagon space for too long, Franz. In a way it's not your fault. It could happen to anyone, spending too long on their own without backup and indoctrination, forming their own little schismatic reality, wondering if perhaps the Directorate was really the only way of doing things, wondering if you could possibly ignore it and pretend it would go away. Isn't that it?

You don't need to admit anything, by the way, this isn't an inquisition. I'm not going to feed you to the Propagators. But you can express yourself freely here. I don't mind. You have my permission to shout at me.

Remember what I said earlier?"

"You … " His fingers tightened on the glass. For a despairing moment he thought about smashing it and going for her throat, before the reality of his situation struck home. "So what? Nothing I can say matters. You wouldn't believe my denials."

"Well then!" She smiled, and it filled him with anger, because her expression was so genuine—she looked joyously happy, and grief and envy said that nobody should be allowed to look that way, ever again—when Erica was dead. And even though he knew it was just his glands speaking, that this, too, would pass, it goaded him. "I have a problem," she said, continuing as if nothing was wrong. She rubbed her right knee through the sheer fabric of her gown. "We're about to go and close down some loose ends. If we succeed, the sky is the limit. Not only will everybody in this unit be rehabilitated, but I will be—well, promotion is not the most of it." She leaned toward him, confidingly. "At the higher levels, Franz, things are a little different. Unforgivable disciplinary errors become understandable personality flaws. The Propagators become tools with which the garden is teased into a pleasing shape: servants, not masters.

Quite possibly, expedient termination orders become reversible."

He licked his lips. "Reversible?"

"I haven't sent U. Blofeld's state vector to the Propagators yet," she said softly, as if the very thought was new to her. "We don't have a Propagator with us, so I bear responsibility for life records and a memory diamond that is to be turned over to them only at the end of our mission. And I retained tissue samples."

Thoughtfully: "The sole complete upload image of her brain currently exists right here aboard this ship. And they need not end up with the Propagators, if a suitable alternative presents itself. What I do with them is still open. I'm short on personnel here—you were right about your mission being grossly underresourced. U. Scott was systematically overreporting his manifest, filtering people off your team for missions elsewhere, and maintaining two sets of books. I didn't bring enough support staff along, and I'm even shorter on people who understand the feral humans out here. I need someone who can act as my right hand while Bayreuth is holding things down back home."

She leaned toward him confidingly and took his left hand in hers: "If we succeed, I can give her back to you, Franz. There's a medical replicator in the medical suite aboard the CG-52. My support ship. It's expensive and against normal operational procedure, but they can clone her a new body and download her into it. You can have her back again if that's what you want. As long as you're willing to do some things for me."

"Things?" Franz felt himself leaning toward her, drawn by the terrible force of her will and by the abominable hope she dangled in front of him. Bring Erica back? In return for … what? His stomach churned with hope and dread.

"They're not the sort of jobs I can give an ordinary subordinate. They're jobs that only someone who's lived among feral humans for several years can do."

"What jobs?"

She pulled his hand close, placing it palm down on her thigh. "You fell in love, didn't you? That's still supposed to be possible for us, but I've never heard of two ReMastered who did it to each other at the same time. So you'll have a better grasp of how to use the phenomenon to manipulate ferals than anyone else here." She smelled of floral extracts, and something else: the musk of power, sebaceous glands expressing pheromones that were only switched on in alpha ReMastered.

It was exciting and frightening and made him angry. He dropped his glass and pulled back, away from her. "I don't want—"

She was on her feet, then leaning over him. "I don't care what you want,"

she said coolly. "Unless it's U. Erica. In which case you'll do as I say with a shit-eating grin for the next three months, won't you?"

He stared at her breasts. Under the thin layers of silk he could see her nipples, aureoles flushed and crinkled with dominance. The dizzying smell was getting to him. His own traitorous hope prevented him from resisting.

"Love is a grossly underrated tool within the Directorate, Franz. You're going to teach me how to use it."

"How—"

"Hush." She pulled up the skirts of her gown, bunched them around her waist, and sat down on his lap. He couldn't get away, much less force himself not to respond to her dominance pheromones. He grew stiff and felt his face flush as she unbuttoned his comic-opera jacket and rubbed her breasts against him. "I want you to teach me about love. It's going to take a few sessions, but that's all right—we've got time for a first lesson right now.

How did you do it with her? Did she start it, or did you, or was it something else?" She began to work at the buttons of his trousers. "If you want to see her again, you'll show me what you did for her … "

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Let's talk some more about the Moscow disaster and its inevitable fallout—this time from the point of view of the people at ground zero, staring down the flight path of the oncoming bullets. These people are edgy and unhappy, and you should be, too—because what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, and if we allow this slow-motion atrocity to set a precedent, we might be the next bird on the block.

New Dresden is not a McWorld: it's a shitty little flea hole populated by pathologically suspicious Serbs, bumptiously snobbish Saxons, three different flavors of Balkan refugee, and an entire bestiary of psychopathic nationalist loons. The planetary national sport is the grudge match, at which they are undisputed past masters. I say "past masters" for a reason—they're not as bad as they used to be. The planet has been unified for the past ninety years, since the survivors finished merrily slaughtering everyone else, formed a federation, had a nifty little planetary-scale nuclear war, formed another federation, and buried the hatchet (in one another's backs).

For most of the past forty years, New Dresden has been ruled by a sinister lunatic, Colonel-General Palacky, chairman of PORC, the Planetary Organization of Revolutionary Councils. Most of Palacky's policies were dictated by his astrologers, including his now-notorious abolition of the currency and its replacement with bills divisible by 9, his lucky number.

Palacky was a raving egomaniac; he renamed the month of January after himself and fixed the rest of the calendar, too, except for November and December (his mother-in-law got August, for some reason). However, toward the end, he became a recluse, seldom venturing beyond the high iron gates of the presidential palace. There he presided over an endless party, providing fire-eaters, wrestlers, tribal dancers, drag queens, and prostitutes for his guests, while dwarfs balancing silver platters loaded with cocaine on their heads patrolled the corridors to ensure all his protégés had a good time. Needless to say, the palace gates were topped with the decaying skulls of those army officers and PORC delegates who disagreed with the Colonel-General over such fundamental policy issues as the need to feed the people.

The inevitable revolution—which finally came four years ago, in the wake of the Moscow scandal—saw Palacky thrown from his own executive ornithopter and installed a more pragmatic junta of bickering, but not entirely insane, PORC apparatchiks. Thus proving some point about it being bad form for any one PORCer to hog the entire trough.

Anyway, that's the dark picture. On the bright side, they're not as remorselessly reactionary as Gouranga, as totalitarian and oppressive as Newpeace, as boringly bucolic as Moscow used to be, as intolerantly Islamic as Al-Wahab, or … you get the picture. A planet is a big place, and even the excesses of the PORC junta can't really damage the economy too badly. Given a couple of decades of civilization and a few war crimes tribunals, New Dresden will be well on the way to being the sort of place that rational tourists don't automatically cross off their itineraries with a shudder.

In fact, as long as you don't question the political wisdom of a system with sixteen secret police forces, thirty-seven ministries with their own militias, four representative assemblies (three of which are run on single-party-state lines by different single parties and all of which have veto power over one another), and above all, as long as you don't mention the civil war, New Dresden can be a welcoming place for visitors. Just as long as your purpose in visiting is to buy the pretty rustic souvenirs and quaint quantum nanocomputers, ooh and aah at the wonderful reconstructed ethnic villages in Chtoborrh Province, and drink the fine laagered ales in the alpine coaching houses, you can't go wrong.

Life isn't that bad for the ordinary people, as near as I can tell. I couldn't get close enough to be sure, because to do that I'd have to spend twenty years as a deep-cover mole. I wasn't exaggerating the national suspicion toward strangers. It's a survival trait on New Dresden; they've been breeding for paranoia for centuries. But from outside, the standard of living is clearly rising and looks pretty damned good compared to a clusterfuck like the New Republic.