Iron Sunrise

An indefinite time later, Wednesday carefully crawled out of bed to go to the bathroom. Almost as soon as she was upright, her earlobe vibrated like an angry bee. “Hello?” she said angrily, trying to subvocalize. “What kind of time do you call this?”

“Wednesday.” It was her own voice, weird and hollow-sounding as usual when it came from outside her own head. “Can you hear me?”

“Yeah. Herman? It’s middle of night shift here. I was trying to sleep.”

“Your motion triggered a callback to alert me. The ship you are on has already undocked and is now accelerating toward its primary jump point. Once it jumps, the causal cha

“A diversion?” Wednesday yawned, desperately wishing she was awake, or back in bed. She glanced through the door wistfully: Frank was a dark mountain range across the spine of the sleeping platform.

“The ReMastered group aboard your vessel has been exchanging coded communications with the office of an arms dealer from Hut Breasil. The arms dealer and their bodyguards are now aboard the Romanov. At the same time, the arms dealer has exchanged message traffic with the office of one Overdepartmentsecretary Blumlein on Newpeace, the de facto chairman of the Planetary Oversight Directorate and maximum leader of the Ministry of State Security. I lack informants on the ground, but I believe the arms dealer is a cover identity for a senior MOSS official who is taking personal control over the mop-up operation arising from their internal conflict over the incident at Moscow.”

“Whoa — stop! What do you mean? What mop-up? MOSS? What internal conflict?” Wednesday clutched her head. “What’s this got to do with me?” I want to go back to bed!

Herman kept his tone of voice even and slow, patient as ever. “I am developing a hypothesis about the destruction of your home, and the motivation behind the assassinations. Moscow system, and New Dresden, lie along the ReMastered race’s axis of expansion. Newpeace and Tonto are merely their most recent conquests, and the closest to Earth. They lie close to both Moscow and New Dresden, and those worlds would be logical targets for subversion and conquest. However, the ReMastered are prone to internal rifts and departmental feuding. They can be manipulated by outside influences such as the Eschaton. It is possible that one such department within the Ministry of State Security on Newpeace was induced to exploit their growing influence over domestic political figures in Moscow to use them as a proxy agency in a side project, the development of a causality-violation weapon. Such devices are hazardous not only because the Eschaton intervenes to prevent their deployment later up the time line, but because they tend to be unstable—”

“Later up the what? Hey, I thought you were the Eschaton! What is this?”

“Can a T-helper lymphocyte in a capillary in your little finger claim to be you? Of course I am part of the Eschaton, but I ca

Wednesday was silent for a minute. Then: “Are you telling me that some asshole in the military destroyed my world by accident? Or because the ReMastered asked them to?”

“Not exactly.” A few seconds’ silence. Wednesday’s emotions churned, aghast and outraged. “When acquiring a new planet, the ReMastered do not walk in and take everything over at gunpoint. They infiltrate by inducing a crisis and being invited in to calm things down. Their main tool is their expertise in uploading and neural interfaces. While blackmail is often used for indirect leverage, they frequently work by abducting key midlevel officials — pithing them, copying their existing neural architecture, then installing an implant. Sometimes they leave the personality in place, just add an override switch — or they wipe everything and turn the body into a remote-control meat puppet. By using a causal cha

“You mean they do this regularly?”

“Not often. They have fewer than twenty worlds, so far. My models do not predict that they will become a major threat for at least two centuries.”

“Oh.” Wednesday fell silent. “But none of the diplomats are puppets,” she pointed out. “They’d have made FTL transfers to get to their embassies. So there’s no evidence, is there?”

“There is evidence,” Herman pointed out. “The ReMastered focus on you, and the items you found aboard Old Newfie before its evacuation, suggest that it was used as a point of entry for some years, and that the insurgency group operating in Moscow were careless. The ReMastered focus on assassinating Muscovite diplomats is itself suggestive, although I am not yet certain of their motives. The faction responsible appears to want to force the Muscovite diplomatic corps to send the irrevocable go code to the R-bombers, thus precipitating a political crisis on New Dresden with implications elsewhere. But it is difficult to be sure.”

“But you — you” — Wednesday struggled for words — “You’re part of the Eschaton. Can’t you stop them? Don’t you want to stop them?”

“Why do you think I am talking to you?” Her own voice, calm and sympathetic. “I ca

“Oh.” It came out sounding weak, and Wednesday hated herself for it. “And what about me? What am I going to do afterward? My family…” A huge sense of loss stopped her in her tracks. She glanced at the sleeping figure in the bed and the sense of loss subsided, but only a fraction.