“But what do I do?” she demanded nervously, stepping around a gaggle of flightless birds that had decided to roost in the middle of the footpath.
“Once you are on the liner and it is under way, they cannot reinforce their surveillance. I believe they are stretched thin, covering the orbitals around Centris Delta. There may be one or more aboard the ship, but you should be able to avoid them. Use the funds in your account to buy essentials aboard the ship; keep yourself alert. The next port of call is New Dresden, and I expect by that time to have fully identified your pursuers.”
“Wait — you mean you don’t know who they are? What is this?” Her voice rose.
“I believe them to be a faction of a group calling themselves the ReMastered. Whether they are an official faction, or a rogue splinter group, is unknown at this time. They may even be using the ReMastered as a cover: they’ve concealed their trail very effectively. If you go along with my suggestions, you will force them to expose themselves. Do you understand? I will have help waiting for you at New Dresden.”
“You mean this ship is going to New Dresden? I—” She found herself talking into silence. “Shit. ReMastered.” Whoever they were, at least she had a name, now. A name for something to hate.
The loop path branched, and her lightbug darted off to one side. Wednesday followed it tiredly. It was past midnight by her local time, and she badly needed something to keep her going. Here, the concourse took a turn for the more conventional. The vegetation thinned out, replaced by tiled blood diamond panes the size of her feet. Large structures bumped up from the floor and walls, freight lifts and baggage handlers and stairwells leading down into the docking tunnels that led out to the berthed starships. Some ships maintained their own gravity, didn’t they? Wednesday wasn’t sure what to expect of this one — wasn’t it from Old Earth? She vaguely remembered lectures about the place, docutours and ecodramas. It had all sounded confusingly complicated and backward, and she’d been trying to keep Priz the Axe from cracking her tablet instead of listening to the professora. Was Earth a high-level kind of place, or backward like home had been?
The lightbug paused in front of her, then went dark. “Welcome to embarkation point four,” piped her itinerary, somewhat muffled from inside a jacket pocket. “Please have your itinerary, identification documents, and skinprint ready for inspection!” The bug lit up again, darting back and forth between Wednesday and a powered walkway leading to the level below the concourse.
“Okay.” Wednesday unsealed her pocket. “Uh, identification. Hmm.” She fumbled with her rings for a moment. “Herman,” she hissed, “do these rings authenticate me?”
Click. “Default identity, Victoria Strowger. Message from owner: Have fun with these, and remember to check the files I’ve stored in them under your alias.” Clunk.
She blinked, bemused. “O-kay…”
Down below the wild efflorescences of the port concourse she found herself in a cool, well-lit departure hall fronting a boarding tunnel. A redheaded woman in some kind of ornate blue-and-gold uniform — How quaint! she thought — stood by the entrance. “Your papers, please?”
“Uh, Vicky Strowger.” She held up her itinerary. “Have I come to the right place?”
The woman glanced aside at some kind of internal list. “Yes, we’ve been expecting you.” She smiled with professional ease. “I see you’ve got a companiotronic guide. Would you like me to update it for shipboard use?”
“Sure.” Wednesday handed the furry blue nuisance over to the woman. “If you don’t mind me asking, who are you and what happens next?”
“Good questions,” the woman said distractedly, stroking the back of the guide’s skull while it spasmed in a fit of downloading. “I’m Elena, from the purser’s office. If you have any questions later, feel free to ask room service to put you through to me. We’re not scheduled to depart for another five and a half hours, but most passengers are already aboard, which is why — Ah, hello! Mr. Hobson? You’re earlier than usual, sir. If you’d care to wait one second — Here you are, Victoria. If you’d like to go through into the elevator it will take you straight to the accommodation level you’re on. Do you have any luggage?” She raised an eyebrow at Wednesday’s small shake of the head. “All right. You’re in Sybarite-class row four, Corridor C. There’s a fab you can use for the basics in your room, and a range of boutiques two levels down and one corridor across from you if you want to shop for extras later. Anything else you need to know, feel free to ask for me. Bye!” She was already turning to deal with the unusually early Mr. Hobson as Wednesday slid the talking travel guide back into its pocket. She shook her head: Too much, too fast. So Earth had fabs? Then it wasn’t a backwater like New Dresden — or home — and she wasn’t going to have to camp out in a refugee cell for a week. Maybe the journey would turn out all right, especially if Herman had given her his usual thorough map of the service facilities …
INTERLUDE 2
The darkened tool storage pod hanging from the aircon stack at the top of ring J normally smelled of packing foam and damp. Now it stank of silicone lube grease and fear.
A quiet voice recited a list of sins. “Let me recap. You hired ordinary goons who tracked the kid as far as a dead zone, but they lost her inside a derelict housing module. She was on her way to a fucking party, but nobody thought to trace her friends, find out where it was, and go there. Meanwhile, your other proxies liquidated her family, thus losing all possible links to the primary target and simultaneously warning her that her life was in danger. So tell me, Franz, how does a nineteen-year-old refugee manage to outsmart a pair of even remotely professional gangsters? And why did her skin traces show up all over the inside of the emergency lock leading into the depressurized cell?”
Pause. “Uh, would you believe, shit happens?” A longer pause. “The goons were tracking her via her interface rings. It’s my fault for not anticipating that she had evasion training; I expected it to be a straightforward track and tag. When she took off—”
U. Portia Hoechst sighed. “Give me some light in here, Jamil.”
The interior of the service pod lit up.
“Are you going to kill me now?” asked Franz. He looked mildly apprehensive, as if steeling himself for an unpleasant dental procedure. He didn’t have much of an alternative. Portia’s bodyguard Marx had done a thorough job of trussing him to a couple of anchor beams.
“That depends.” Portia tapped the end of her stylus against her front teeth thoughtfully as she stared at him. She narrowed her eyes. “There has been a culture of unacceptable slackness in this organization.”
Franz opened his mouth as if about to say something, then shut it again, slowly. A bead of sweat jiggled on his forehead, just below the hairline. It was growing visibly bigger, as she watched, held in place by surface tension, unable to run away in the milligee environment.
“What did you do next?” she asked, almost kindly.
“Well, I concluded she’d run. Either to the authorities for protection or somewhere outside the hab. So I sent Burr, Samow, and Kerguelen off to grab seats on the next departing ferry shuttles to other habs, with orders to do a full cap routine on her if she showed up, and I took myself and Erica down to the local cop shop to puppetize our way into their holding tank in case she turned out to have stayed home. As we only had the one puppetry kit in the entire system…” His voice trailed off.
“What other resources did you have? You only covered three shuttle flights with one finger on each. Isn’t that a bit thin?” Her voice was almost gentle.