Frank reflected bleakly on the need for bandwidth. If there’s some way to get that report out, wherever we are … we can’t all just vanish, can we? But the truth was anything but reassuring. Liners did vanish from time to time, and if this was the hijacking it appeared to be — bearing all the slick signs of ReMastered covert ops, the sly subversion of emergency reflexes — then there was no way word would ever get out.
BING. More mail from Wednesday had arrived, broadcast to him and Rachel and Martin — what? Some sort of code attachment, a new interface protocol for his implant to talk to the station’s ether. He tried to keep his face impassive as he mentally crossed his fingers and loaded the untrusted executable.
Then the newcomers arrived. Frank stared at them, his world narrowed suddenly to a single panicky choice, a flashback going back decades. He took it all in, Wednesday sullen between two guards, the woman in front holding the leather satchel, smiling at him. He remembered the bright sunlight on the rooftop of the Demosthenes Hotel, the acrid smell of propane stoves and dog shit wafting on the breeze across downtown Samara. Alice turning toward the parapet with a camera drone in her hands. The woman, again. Blond destruction on the day it rained bullets, the day when everything changed.
Frank blinked up at her. “Oh holy shitting fucking Christ, it’s you—”
“Increasing my little piggie count, this time.” Her smile broadened, turning ugly at the edges. “We really must stop bumping into each other like this, mustn’t we?”
“Shit, shit, shit—” Frank felt nauseous. The hot smell of Alice’s blood was in his nose; the roar and screams of the crowd as the bullets began spattering into them. “You were in Samara. On Newpeace. Who are you?” He barely noticed Wednesday’s jolt of surprise from the other side of the room as he focused in on the woman’s face.
“I’m U. Portia Hoechst, DepartmentSecretariat of Division Four of the Department of External Environmental Control, planetary dominion of Newpeace. The ‘U’ is short for ubermensch, or ubermadchen, take your pick.” Her smile was as wide as a shark’s gape. “At this point in the proceedings I’m supposed to gloatingly tell you my evil plans before I kill you. Then, if you believe the movies, a steel-jawed hero is supposed to erupt through the walls and teach me the error of my ways with extreme prejudice.”
She snorted. “Except there aren’t any steel-jawed heroes within sixteen light years of this station.” A hint of mirth in her eyes. “Not even that Third Lieutenant you’ve got squirreled away, at least not once the guards are through with her.” Frank felt his nails digging into the palms of his hands; his vision went gray and pixelated for a few seconds, and his heart pounded before he realized that it was the firmware patch from Wednesday loading on his implant’s virtual machine, combined with a raw, primal rage.
“Why are you telling us this?” Rachel asked quietly.
“Because I like a fucking audience!” Hoechst sat up. “And it’s going to be over soon, anyway.” She stopped smiling. “Oh, about the ‘let me tell you everything before I kill you’ bit: I’m not going to kill you. You might wish I had, but I’m not. As soon as I’ve got this station on auxiliary internal power and disabled external communications, all the passengers and crew are coming aboard. It won’t be much fun, but you’ll be able to last for the couple of months it takes for a rescue ship to reach you. Even you, Frank.” A flicker of a smile. “No reeducation camps here. You’re getting the VIP treatment.”
Frank stayed quiet, his guts tense. Fuck, we’re still on the net! he realized. The station’s causal channels were still working. This packet from Herman, whoever he was, was a protocol converter — with gathering disbelief Frank realized that he wasn’t cut off anymore. He could send mail. Or even pipe his raw recording feed straight to Eric, back home, there to do whatever he could with the posthumous spool. Take it like you give it, you fuckers! he thought triumphantly. His hands folded together against the cold, nobody saw him twisting his rings, setting up the narrowcast stream to his inbox on Earth. I am a camera!
Steffi watched the rerun of Svengali’s execution in grainy monochrome, tracking it through the labyrinthine maze of the surveillance system take spooled by the ship’s memory as the bridge systems hummed around her, rewinding the vessel’s software model of itself back to the state it had been in before the ReMastered lobotomized it.
She’d thought she was angry when the double-crossing clients ran amok, angry when she’d spent long hours crouched in a dark closet space with the soft-shoe shuffle of guards outside the door. But she hadn’t been angry at all. Not in comparison to her current state of mind. Livid with rage just barely began to describe it.
She’d worked with Sven for just short of a decade. In many ways they’d been closer than a married couple — herself the pretty face up front and visible, and he the fixer in the background, oiling the gears and reeling in the contracts. He’d found her when she was a teen punk, heading for rehab or a one-way trip to the exile colonies, seen through the rust and grime to the hard metal beneath, and polished it to a brilliant shine. In the early years she’d adored him, back before she matured enough to see him as he really was — theirs hadn’t been a sexual relationship (beyond an early exploratory fumbling), but it was a partnership based on need, and mutual respect, and blood. And now, just as they’d been on the edge of their greatest coup -
“I’m going to find you, and you’re going to wish you’d committed suicide first,” she told the face frozen to the screen. “And then—” her eyebrows furrowed — “I’m going to…” Going to do what?
Steffi leaned back her chair and closed her eyes, forcing the tight ball of rage back into the recesses of her skull, out of the way until it was needed. Where do I stand? She had the key to their bank accounts, if she needed it. And she had a couple of other keys, picked up here or there. She’d been in an office in Turku and a roadside rest stop on Eiger’s World, and a house on Earth, too, all in the past six months. Sven had done his homework before taking on the job, explained the alarming consequences of success to her and the importance of finding the keys. There’d been no point rummaging by the roadside, but she had two of them in her pocket, now, keys to the gates of hell itself. That had to count for something, didn’t it? And if the dim-witted UN diplomats didn’t know who she was, then all that left was the ReMastered.
If I can take them out of the picture, I can become Lieutenant Steffi Grace, and nobody will know any different, she realized. Or I can try for the third key, and access to a Muscovite diplomatic channel. She began to smile, her lips pulling back from her teeth in an expression very close to a feral snarl. See how they like it when I derail their plans. She sat up and leaned toward the pilot console. “Bridge systems, get me the full station package on our current port. Display dockside schematics on window four. Do you have access to the loading bay external cameras? Do you have access to the station communications network? Good. Record new job sequence, activation key rosebud.”
“You’re going to maroon us,” Wednesday said flatly. She took a stride toward the desk, but a tense motion with a gun barrel stopped her sharply. She turned to stare at Frank, wringing her hands together. Frank raised an eyebrow at her. What can I do about it? he thought, his stomach turning over. Why couldn’t you have stayed hidden?