“Now, now.” Max nodded politely to a plumply padded dowager whose thirty-year physique belied the fact that her formal business suit was at least a century out of fashion. “Good evening, Mrs. Borozovski! How are you tonight?”
“I’m fine, Mr. Fromm!” She bobbed slightly, as if she’d already been hitting the martinis. “And who’s your little friend? A new squirt, or am I very mistaken?”
“Ahem. Allow me to introduce Junior Flight Lieutenant Stephanie Grace, our newest flight operations officer. If I may beg your pardon, it’s considered bad form to refer to trainees as squirts, outside of the training academy; and in any case, Lieutenant Grace has graduate degrees in relativistic dynamics and engineering.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry!” To her credit, the dowager flushed slightly.
“It’s perfectly all right.” Steffi forced a smile and breathed a sigh of relief when Max peeled off to steer Mrs. Borozovski toward a table. No, I don’t mind being patronized by rich drones one little bit, Mrs. Borozovski. Now, where’s the table I’m supposed to ride herd on?
It was a completely spurious ritual, from Steffi’s viewpoint. All the business class and higher suites were fully self-catering. There was no damn need to have a central galley and serve up a restricted menu and waste the valuable time of human chefs, not to mention the line officers who were required to turn up wearing mess uniforms and act like dinner party hosts. On the other hand, as Commodore Martindale had put it back at staff college, the difference between a steerage passenger flying in cold sleep and a Sybarite-class passenger flying in a luxury apartment was about two thousand ecus per day of transit time — and the experience. Any peasant could afford to travel cold, but to balance the books and make for a healthy profit required cosseting the rich idiots and honeymooning couples, to which end any passenger line worthy of the name devoted considerable ingenuity. Up to and including providing etiquette training for engineers, tailored dress uniforms for desk-pushers, and anything else that might help turn a boring voyage into a uniquely memorable experience for the upper crust. Which especially meant sparing no expense over the first night and subsequent weekly banquets. At least they’re not as bad as the house apes Sven puts up with, she thought mordantly. If I had his end of this job, I swear I’d go nuts … At least the honeymooning couples mostly stuck to ordering from room service or the food fabs in their rooms. Which left her sitting at the head of a table of twelve extremely lucrative passengers — think of it as twenty-four thousand ecus a day in value added to the bottom line — smiling, nodding politely, introducing them to one another, answering their inane questions, and passing the port.
Steffi made her way to her table, guided by a discreet pipper on the cuff of her brocade jacket. A handful of passengers had already arrived, but they knew enough to stand up as she arrived. “Please, be seated,” she said, smiling easily as her chair slid out and retracted its arms for her. She nodded to the passengers, and one or two of them nodded back or even said “hello.” Or something. She wasn’t so sure about the sullen-looking girl in the deliberately slashed black lace top and hair that looked as if she’d stuck her fingers in a power socket, but the three hail-fellow-well-met types in the similar green shirts, two blond men and a straw-haired woman, all looked as if they were about to jump up and salute her. The fat probably-a-merchant-banker and her anorexic beanpole of a male companion just ignored her — probably offended that she wasn’t at least a commander — and the withered old actuary from Turku didn’t seem to notice her, but that was par for the course. Senile old cretin, Steffi thought, writing him off. Anyone that rich who wouldn’t stump up the cash for a telomere reset and AGE purge when their hair was turning white was not worth paying attention to. The middle-aged lady cellist from Nippon looked friendly enough, but a bit confused — her translator wasn’t keeping up with the conversation — and that just left a honeymooning couple who had predictably elected to call room service instead.
“I’m Junior Flight Lieutenant Steffi Grace, and, on behalf of WhiteStar Lines, I’d like to welcome you to our table for the first night banquet en route to New Dresden. If you’d like to examine the menu, I’m sure your stewards will be with you shortly. In the meantime, I’d like to particularly recommend the—” she glanced at her cuff — “Venusian Cabernet Sauvignon blanc to accompany the salmon entrees.” Imported at vast expense from the diamond-domed vineyards of Ishtar Planitia, the better to stroke the egos of the twenty-four-thousand-ecu diners.
Things went all right through the entrees, and Steffi made sure to knock back her antidrunk cap with the first mouthful of wine. It was an okay vintage, if you could get past the fact that it was wine, and — stripped of the ability to get drunk on it — wine was just sour grape juice. “Can I ask where you’re from?” she asked the square-jawed blonde as she filled her glass. “I’ve seen you around, I think, but we haven’t spoken before.”
“I am Mathilde, of clade Todt, division Sixt. These are my clade-mates Peter and Hans,” said the woman, waving one beefy hand to take in the strapping young men to either side of her. Are they young? wondered Steffi: they looked awfully self-assured and well coordinated. Normally you didn’t see that sort of instinctive grace in anyone who was less than sixty, not without martial arts practice. Most people eventually picked up that kind of economical motion if their bodies didn’t nose-dive into senescence by middle age, before they had time to mature, but this looked like the product of hard training, if not anabolic steroids. “We are traveling to Newpeace, as a youth enlightenment and learning mission.” She smiled superciliously. “That is, we are to learn about the other worlds that have discovered the benefits of ReMastery and spread harmony among them.”
“Uh-huh. And what is it, to be ReMastered, if you don’t mind my asking? Is it some sort of club?” Steffi prodded. They were, after all, paying her wages. Curiosity about her employers was a powerful instinct.
“It is everything,” Mathilde said gushingly. She caught herself. “It is a way of life.” Slightly shy and bashful now, as if she had let too much slip: “It is very fulfilling.”
“Yes, but—” Steffi felt her forehead wrinkling with concentration. Why do I feel as if I’m being looked down on? she wondered. Never mind. “And you?” she asked the kid with the black hair. If she was a kid; she was about the same build as Steffi, after all.
“Oh, don’t mind me, I’ll just sit in this corner and drink myself into a new liver. I’m sure the trust fund will pay.” The last sentence came out in a monotone as she caught Steffi’s eye, and Steffi realized: Something’s wrong here.
“We try to take our drinking easy, at least until after the meal,” she said lightly. “What was your name again?”
“Wednesday,” the girl — Young woman? Dangerous drunk? — said quietly. “That’s what they call me. Victoria Strowger on your passenger list. That’s what my ID calls me.”
“Whichever you prefer,” Steffi said warily.
The starters arrived, delicately poached small medallions of salmon served under a white sauce, and Steffi managed to get fat Fiona the merchant banker rolling on a paean to the merits of virtual-rate currency triangulation versus more indirect, causality-conserving means of converting funds between worlds separated by a gulf of light years. She was somewhat relieved to find that a lecture on the credit control implications of time travel was sufficient to hold the rapt if slightly incomprehending attention of the three youth leaders from clade Todt, whatever that was. Wednesday, meanwhile, plowed into her third glass of wine with a grim determination that reminded Steffi of some of the much older and more grizzled travelers she’d met — not actual alcoholics, but people possessed by a demon that badly wanted them to wake up with a hangover on the morrow, a demon that demanded an exorcism by the most painful terms available short of self-mutilation. Getting drunk this soon in a voyage, before the boredom began to bite, wasn’t a healthy sign. And as for her dress sense, even though Steffi was no follower of style, she could see that Wednesday was relying on a talent for improvisation that must have been labeled “not needed on voyage.”