Frank yawned and poured himself another cup of coffee. He’d had too little sleep, too much rum and whisky, and faced a day’s work to catch up on preparation for the liner’s arrival at New Dresden. Septagon was so connected and so well covered that there was no real point going ashore there: it was a major data exporter. But New Dresden was off the beaten track, and directly in jeopardy as a result of the slow-motion disaster unfolding from Moscow system. When he got there he faced four days of complete insanity, starting with a descent on the first available priority pod and ending with a last-minute dash back to the docking tunnel, during which he had to file copy written en route, gather material for two weeks’ worth of features, and do anything else that needed attending to. He’d checked the timetables: he figured he could make the trip with two and a quarter hours to spare. Okay, make that three and a half days of buzzing around like a demented journalistic bluebottle, released on a ticket of leave in the middle of a promising field of diplomatic bullshit — it was a good thing that New Dresden wasn’t uptight about pharmaceuticals, because by the time Frank was back in his stateroom he’d be ready for the biggest methamphetamine crash in journalistic history. Which was precisely what you deserved if you tried to cover four continents, eight cities, three diplomatic receptions, and six interviews in three days, but c’est la vie.
Stomach filled and coffee flask emptied, Frank pushed back from the table and stood up. “When do we push back?” he asked the air casually.
“Departure is scheduled in just under two thousand seconds,” the ship replied softly, beaming its words directly into his ears. “Transition to onboard curved-space generator will be synchronized with the station, and there will be no free-fall lockdown. Acceleration to jump point will take a further 192,000 seconds approximately, and bandwidth access to Septagon switching will be maintained until that time. Do you have further requests?”
“No thank you,” Frank replied, slightly spooked by the way the ship’s expertise had anticipated his line of questioning. Damn thing must be plugged in to the Eschaton, he thought nervously. There were limits to what anyone sane would contemplate doing by way of artificial intelligence experiments — the slight ethical issue that a functioning AI would have a strong legal claim to personhood tended to put a brake on the more reckless researchers, even if the Eschaton’s existence didn’t hold a gun to their heads — but sometimes Frank wondered about the emergent smarts exhibited by big rule-driven systems like the ship’s passenger assistance liaison. Somehow it didn’t seem quite right for a machine he’d never met to be anticipating his state of mind.
He strolled distractedly around the promenade deck on C level, barely conscious of his surroundings. C deck by day shift was a different place to the darkened night-time corridors. Elegant plate-diamond windows to either side displayed boutiques, shops, beauty salons, and body sculptors. Whole trees, cunningly constrained in recessed tubs, grew at intervals in the corridor, their branches meshing overhead. Below them, tiny maintenance ’bots harvested browning leaves before they could fall and disturb the plush carpet.
The corridor wasn’t empty, but passengers were thin on the ground — mostly they were still coming through the docking tube from Noctis orbital, the WhiteStar open port in Septagon system. Here went a young couple, perhaps rich honeymooners from Eiger’s World strolling arm in arm with the total inattention of the truly in love. There went a stooped old man with lank hair, a facial tic that kept one cheek jumping, and the remains of breakfast matted in his beard, heading toward a discreet opium den with a dull look of anticipation in his eyes. A gamine figure in black stopped dead and gaped into the window of a very expensive jewelery studio as Frank stepped around her — him, it — and slid to one side to avoid a purposefully striding steward. The ship was a shopping mall, designed to milk idle rich travelers of their surplus money. Frank, being neither idle nor rich, focused on threading a path around the occasional window-shoppers.
The promenade deck stretched in a two-hundred-meter loop around the central atrium of the ship’s passenger decks, an indoor waterfall and the huge sculptured staircases rising through it like glass-dressed fantasies. Halfway around it, Frank came to a gap in the shop fronts and a radial passage that led to a circular lounge, carpeted in red and paneled in improbably large sheets of ivory scrimshaw, with a stepped pit in the middle. It was almost empty, just a few morning folk sipping cups of coffee and staring into the inner space of their head-ups. Frank headed for a decadent-looking sofa, a concoction of goose-down cushions in cloned human leather covers, soft enough to swallow him and luxurious as a lover’s touch. He sprawled across it and unpocketed his keyboard, expanded it to full size, and donned his shades. “Right. Priorities,” he muttered to himself, trying to dismiss yet more intrusive memories from the night before at the caress of the leather. Whom do I mail first, the embassy or the UN consulate? Hmm …
He was half an hour into his morning correspondence when someone touched his left shoulder.
“Hey!” He tried to sit up, failed, flailed his arms for a moment, and managed to get a grip on the leading edge of the sofa.
“Are you Frank the Nose?” asked a female voice.
Frank pulled his shades right off, rather than dialing them back to transparency. “What the f — eh, what are you talking about?” he spluttered, reaching for his left shoulder with his left hand. It was the young woman he’d seen in the corridor. He couldn’t help noticing the pallor of her skin and the fact that every item of her costume was black. She was cute, in a tubercular kind of way. Elfin, that’s the word, he noted.
“I’m sorry to disturb you, it’s, like, I was told you were a warblogger?”
Frank spent a moment massaging his forehead as, briefly, a number of responses flitted through his head.
“Who wants to know?” he finally asked, surprising himself with his mildness. Click. Physically young — either genuinely young, or just rejuved. Pale, dark hair currently a mess, high cheekbones on clear-skinned face, female. Click. Alone. Click. Asking for Frank the Nose by name. Click. Is there a story here? Click. Get the story …
“A friend said I should get in touch with you,” said the kid. “You’re the journalist who’s looking into the — the end of Moscow?”
“What if I am?” Frank asked. She looked tense, worried about something. But what?
“I was born there,” she mumbled. “I grew up on Old Newfie, uh, portal station eleven. We were evacuated after — in time—”
“Have a seat.” Frank gestured at the other side of the sofa, trying to keep his face still. She flopped down in a heap of knees and elbows and impossibly long limbs. So what’s she doing here? “You said something about a friend?” he asked. “What’s your name?”
“You can call me Wednesday,” she said nervously. “Uh, there are people” — she glanced over her shoulder as if she expected assassins to come swarming out of the walls — “No, uh, no! That’s not where to begin. Why can’t I get this right?”
She ended on a note of plaintive despair, as if she was about to start tugging her hair.
Frank leaned back, watching her but trying to give her some space to decompress in. She was tired and edgy. There was something indefinable about her, the insecurity of the exile. He’d seen it before. She’s from Moscow! This could be good. If true, she’d make excellent local color for his dispatches — the personal angle, the woman in exile, a viewpoint to segue into for a situation report and editorial frame. Then he felt a stab of concern. What’s she doing here, looking for me? Is she in trouble? “Why did you want to talk to me?” he asked gently. “And what are you doing here?”