Leo was pulling a face at her: Wednesday pulled a face right back. “I think you just did, just by calling. Listen, are you in trouble? Has anyone been round to talk to you? Cops?”
“Yes.” His voice tended to break out into a croak when he was worried. “Said they just wanted to clear something up. Asked if I’d seen you. I said ‘no’.”
She relaxed slightly. “Your invisible friend, is he called Herman?”
A second’s silence. “You know Herman?”
“Listen to him,” she hissed, rolling her eyes some more and shrugging through the sound screen at Leo. “There’s something bad going on. I’m being followed. Just stay out of this, all right?”
“Okay.” He paused. “I want to ask you lots of questions sometime. Are you coming back?”
“I hope so.” Leo was looking bored. “Listen, I’ve got to go. Problem to deal with. Thanks for talking — I’ve got your callback. Bye.”
“I — uh. Bye.”
“Privacy off.” She grinned at Leo.
“Who was that?” he asked, curiously.
“Old friend,” she said carelessly. “Didn’t know I was leaving.”
“Well, isn’t that a shame?” He pointed at her place setting. “Your soup’s cold.”
“Oh well.” She shrugged, then stood up, her heart beating fast. It wasn’t arousal anymore, though. At least, it wasn’t sexual arousal. Her palms were cold and her stomach threatening to twist itself into knots. “Where are you staying on Noctis?” she asked. “I was thinking, maybe I could come visit you?”
“Uh, I don’t know. My uncle, he’s got some pretty weird ideas,” he said edgily. “How about we try your cabin? I’ve always wanted to see how the other half live.”
Shit. He knew which class she was in. Careless of him — or he was overconfident. “Okay,” she said lightly, smiling as he took her wrist and pulled her toward him. Another sniff of that enticing man-scent, something about his skin that made her want to slip her arm under his shirt and inhale. That’s something specific for your vomeronasal organ, something to go straight to your hypothalamus and get you wet, isn’t it? Her senses seemed to sharpen as she leaned against him. “Come on,” she breathed in his ear, wondering how on earth she was going to get out of this mess. Her heart was pounding, and it felt like lust, or terror, or both. She was actually leaning against him, knees weak with something. A neurotoxin? she wondered, but no — that would be much too public if he was what she thought he might be. Probably just pheromone receptor blockers. Come on.
On the staircase he paused for a moment and pulled her close. “Let me carry you?” he whispered in her ear. She nodded, dizzy with tension, and he picked her up, her head resting close to his ear as he climbed the stairs two steps at a time. A deck, the ring of Syb-class capsules. “Where’s your—”
“Hold on, put me down, I’ll find it.” She smiled at him and leaned close. The corridor lights were dim, most of the other passengers snoozing their way through the flight. He smelled of fresh sweat and something musky, treacherously intoxicating. Herman had taught her a term for this: Venus trap. She grabbed him and pressed her lips against his in a kiss that he returned enthusiastically. Hips bumped. “Shit, not here.” She tugged him along the corridor, nerves on fire. “Here.” She tapped the door panel. “I need the rest room. You go on inside and make yourself at home. I won’t be long.”
“Really?” he asked, stepping inside her room.
“Yeah.” She leaned close, nibbled him delicately on the neck. “I won’t be a minute.” Heart pounding, she stepped back and hit the door close button. Then she tapped the panel next to it, the privacy lock. Her heart was trying to climb out through her rib cage: “Did I really just do that?” she asked herself. “Wendigo. Suite, can you hear me?”
“Greetings, passenger Strowger! I can hear you.” Its voice was tinny, coming to her through the external control plate.
“Please lock my suite door. Do not unlock the door until one hour after arrival. I want to sleep in. Divert all incoming calls, cancel outgoing routing. Maximum sound damping. Return to full privacy mode and add voiceprint authentication to keyword.”
The simpleminded suite agent swallowed it. “Warning! Privacy may be overridden by authorized crew members in event of accident or medical emergency—”
“How many crew does this flight carry?” Her stomach lurched, icy cold soup sloshing.
“This is an unattended flight.”
“Keep it that way. Now shut up and don’t talk to anyone.” There was a tentative knocking from inside the cabin, almost inaudible through the smart foam. Then a faint bump as if something massive had bounced off the inside of the door. Wednesday pouted at it, then headed for the staircase, a wistful urge to run back and apologize still fighting it out with her common sense. Sex on legs, packaged just for her? Where were you during Sammy’s party? “Vacc’ing out Mom’n’Dad,” she muttered to herself, half-blind with anger and loss as she hunted round C deck for an empty row to colonize. “Unless he’s the best friendly fuck I’ve ever dropped by mistake…” She carried on arguing with herself for a long time before she dozed off, and by the time she was awake again the ferry had passed turnover and was nearly ready to dock.
“Okay, I’m here. What do I do now?”
Noctis concourse wasn’t built with fail-safe operation in mind. It was a product of the ebullient Septagonese economic miracle, so optimistic that nothing could possibly go wrong. Gravity thereabouts was a variable, vectored in whichever direction the architects had willed it. There were jungles on the walls, sand dunes on the ceiling, moebius walkways snaking through them for maximum visual impact.
Wednesday hurried along a strip locked to a steady half gee, trailing behind a flickering lightbug. She passed occasional clumps of other long-distance travelers — a mix of emigrants, merchants taking the long caravanserai, wanderjahr youth on the Grand Tour — and a variety of variously enticing and annoying shops disguised as environmental features. Butterflies the size of dinner plates flapped slowly past overhead, their wings flickering with historical docudramas. A small toroidal rain cloud spun slowly over a bright crimson nest of muddy-rooted mangroves, small lightning discharges clicking across its inner hole. Wednesday glanced past it, through a chink in the artistic foliage that led into a sudden perspective shift; stars glinted through diamond windows over a kilometer away. It was very Septagon, life defying vacuum, and for a moment she was dizzy with homesickness and the infinitely deep pool of depression that waited just beneath the thin ice of her self-control. If we hadn’t come here, Mom and Dad would still be alive. If. If.
“Follow the lightbug to your connection with the liner Romanov. Once you reach the Romanov’s dock you should go aboard and remain in your stateroom until departure. Which is due in under six hours. I can cover for you for some time, but if you venture around the terminal, it is possible that a police agent will spot you and place you under volitional arrest. I believe there is a high probability that no charges will be brought, but you would miss the departure, and there is a high risk that the individuals pursuing you would locate you and make another attempt on your life. At the very least, they would be able to regain their lock on you. Good work with the suite, by the way.”
“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. Wh
ether 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.
“I was fully committed.” Franz sounded tense. “I only have six residents here, including me! That isn’t even enough to maintain a twenty-four-by-seven tail on a single individual, much less conduct a full penetration or cleanup. Why do you think I had to use paid muscle instead of properly programmed puppets? I’ve been requesting additional backup for months, but all that came down the line were orders to make better use of my resources and a 10 percent budget cut. Then your group…” He trailed off.
“Your requests. Were they at least acknowledged?”
“Yes.” He watched her warily, unsure where this chain of inquiry was leading. She watched him watching her, speculating. Franz was the resident in Centris, a station chief left over from U. Vannevar Scott’s operation, and therefore, automatically suspect. But he was also the only station chief in this entire system, the complex of orbital habs circling in the accretion belt around the brown dwarf at the heart of Septagon B. It was sheer luck that he’d even been able to move his team onto the right hab in the first place. If he was telling the truth, hung out to dry with six staff to pin down three hundred million people scattered through nearly five hundred orbital habitats and countless
smaller stations and ships, he’d clearly been starved of support. While U. Scott had been pouring funds into his central security groups, snooping on his rivals within the Directorate. Portia stared at him. “I will investigate this, you know.” Franz watched her unflinchingly, not even sparing a glance for Marx. Marx was the one who’d pith him if it came to it, or even kill him, simply wasting his memories, leaving everything that he was to drain into nothingness. “Has your crew reported back about the loose end?”
Now his expression broke: irritation, even a spark of outright rebellion. “I’d be able to tell you if you’d unwrap me and give me a chance to find out,” he said waspishly. “Or ask Erica. Assuming you haven’t already decided she’s a broken tool and discarded her.”
Portia reached a decision. The practicalities of it were risky, but then so was life. “Release him,” she told Jamil.
“Is this wise?” Marx grunted, keeping his eyes focused dead center on Franz’s forehead. “We could repurpose him—”
“I prefer my subordinates to have free will.” Her smile vanished abruptly. “Do you have a problem with that?”
“Just looking out for your safety, boss.”
“I’m quite sure that U. Franz Bergman will remember whose purpose he serves now that External Environmental Control Four has been, ah, absorbed by Group Six.”
Jamil produced a knife from somewhere and began slicing away at the tape fastening Franz’s arms to the support bars.
Franz’s eyes widened. “Did you say absorbed? What happened to Control Four?”
“U. Vannevar Scott has been an extremely naughty boy,” Portia trilled. “So naughty that Overdepartmentsecretary Blumlein saw fit to take all his toys away.” Slight emphasis on the all, a raised eyebrow, a pouting lip. “You’re on the gray list.” Gray, as opposed to black, whose status was pith and reclaim with extreme prejudice. “It’s not very big, but you’re on it. Who knows? If you work hard, you may even stay there.”
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