“Victoria Strowger. Age sixteen. ID 3 of that name.”
“Ah, okay.” Ito made an odd series of gestures with the rings on his right hand, tracing runes in copspace. “Okay, if she’s somewhere aboard this pile of junk, that should find her. If not, it’ll escalate to a general search in about ten minutes. Now if you’ll excuse me until then—”
“Certainly.” Morris Strowger sidled away from the Constable’s desk. “She’s probably just dropped her badge down the toilet,” he muttered to himself. Behind him the next in the queue, an elderly woman, was haranguing the Constable about the size of her accommodation module: she refused to believe that her apartment — one human-sized cell in a five-thousand-person honeycomb of refugee pods slung in the cargo bay of the New Dresden freighter Long March — was all any of them would get until arrival in the nearest Septagon system. The relocation was paid for, gratis, courtesy of the (new) New Dresden government, and the residual assets of the Republic of Moscow’s balance of trade surplus, but the pods weren’t exactly the presidential suite of a luxury liner. 1 hope Vicki gets tired of hiding soon. Maybe it’ll do her some good if the Constabulary find her first and run her in. Teach her not to go looking for trouble in the middle of an emergency …
IMPACT: T plus 1390 days
Take a girl like that. Pallid complexion, cropped mop of black hair, pale blue eyes: waif or demon? She was a bit of a loner. Preternaturally smart for her age: her parents planned her, used a sensible modicum of predictive genomics to avoid the more serious pitfalls. Paid for the most expensive interface implants they could buy, imported from Septagon: they wanted only the best for her. She was seventeen and sullen, going through one of those phases. Refusing to wear anything but black, spending her free time poking around in strange service ducts, training an eighteen-million-synapse nerve garden in her bedroom (parents didn’t even want to think about what she might be training it to dream of). She grew plants: deadly nightshade, valerian, aconite, hemlock — and what were they going to do with the latter when it reached full height? (Nobody knew. Nobody knows.) She liked listening to depressing music in her room with the door shut. Her anxious parents shoehorned her into the usual healthy outdoor pursuits — climbing lessons, solar sailing, karate — but none of them took a grip on her imagination. Her legal forename was Victoria, but the other teens all called her Wednesday; she hated it, but not as much as she hated her given name.
Wednesday was a misfit. Like misfits from time immemorial, she’d had an invisible friend since she was young: they played together, exploring the espionage envelope. Elevator surfing. Duct diving — with an oxy mask; you could never tell what might be on the other side of a sealed bulkhead. But most kids didn’t have invisible friends who talked back via the expensive net implants their parents had shelled out for, much less taught them skills like steganography, traffic analysis, tail spotting, and Dumpster diving. And most kids grew out of having invisible friends, whereas Wednesday didn’t. That was because most misfit kids’ invisible friends were imaginary. Wednesday’s wasn’t.
When she was younger she’d told her brother Jeremy about her friend, who was called Herman: but Jerm had blabbed to Mum, and the result was a tense inquisition and trips to the network engineers, then the counselor’s office. When she realized what was expected of her she denied everything, of course, but not abruptly; Herman told her how to do it so as to allay their suspicions. You’re never alone with schizophrenia, he’d joked mordantly, annoying her because she knew that schizophrenia was nothing to do with having multiple personalities, and everything to do with hearing voices in her head. When she’d first learned about it she’d dialed chlorpromazine and flupenthixol up from the kitchen pharm, and staggered around in a haze for days while Herman witheringly explained how she might have poisoned herself: Parkinson’s was a not-unknown side effect of primitive neuroleptics. It wasn’t a word she’d known before he used it.
Everyone had known evacuation day was coming for months. They’d known about it to the day, to the hour in fact, since a couple of weeks after the Incident. The ships began to arrive a week ahead of zero hour. Normally Old Newfie only received one liner a month, clearing via customs to transfer passengers and cargo to the short-haul local freighters that bounced back and forth across the last parsec. But right now all the docking bays on the hub were extended, piers pressurized like great gray hagfish sucking the guts out of the station.
The surviving in-system freighters had come home for the final time two weeks earlier, rerigged with ferry tanks for the final flight. Everyone huddled together on the one station, thirty thousand souls drifting above the ecliptic of a gloomy red gas giant eight times the mass of Jupiter. They had fuel — that was what Old Newfoundland Four was in the business of selling — six hundred megatons of refined methane ice bunkered in a tank farm streaming kilometers behind the axle of the big wheel. And they were close enough to one of the regular trade routes between Septagon system and the core worlds to pick up passing trade, close enough to act as an interchange for local traffic bound for Moscow. They were still profitable and self-sufficient, had been even since before the disaster. But they couldn’t stay there — not with the iron sunrise coming. The liner Sikorsky’s Dream nuzzled up to the hub, taking VIPs and the governor and his staff. Behind it hung two freighters from New Dresden, sent in yet another symbolic gesture of reconciliation. They looked like pregnant midwife toads, blistered with bulky refugee pods hanging from their cargo spines, steerage for tens of thousands of passengers on the three-week, forty-light year journey to Septagon for resettlement.
Even Septagon would be uncomfortably close to the shock front, but it was the best relocation center on offer. There was money enough to house and reskill everyone, and a governing polity that actively courted immigration. It would be a chance to draw a line under the incident, to look to the future, and to turn away from the dull despair and the cloud of mourning that had hovered over the station since news of the Zero Incident arrived three and a half years ago. There had been suicides then, and more than one near riot; the station was haunted by a thousand ghosts for every one alive. It was no fit place to raise a child.
Dad and Mum and Jeremy had moved aboard the Long March two days ago, dragging Wednesday along in their glassy-eyed optimistic undertow. There were holes in the facade, empty figures in the family photograph. Cousin Jane, Uncle Mark, Grandpa and Grandma weren’t coming. At least, not in the living flesh; they were dust now, burned by the godwind that would blow past the station in four days’ time.
Harried wardens had shown Wednesday and her family to their deck, corridor, segment, and cell. They had a family space: four sleeping pods and a two-by-three living room with inflatable furniture. It would be home for the voyage. They were to eat in the canteen on Rose Deck, bathe in the communal hygiene unit on Tulip, and count themselves lucky for being alive at all — unlike Mica and her husband, friends and neighbors who’d been home on a month’s leave for the first time in five years when the Incident took place.
Within hours, Wednesday had been bored silly. Her plants were dead, her nerve garden shut down for cold storage, and they had been ordered to remain in steerage until after departure, with nothing but the inane prattle of the entertainment net and the ship’s lobotomized media repository for company. Some budding genius from New Dresden — a more regimented society than Moscow’s — had decided that horror interactives and books were unfit for minors, and slapped a parental control on that section of the database. Her friends — those she counted as friends — were mostly on the other ships. Even Herman had told her he’d be unable to talk after the ship’s first jump. It would have been more fun if they’d had cold sleep tankage, but there was no way that the station’s facilities could process more than a couple of hundred at a time: so Wednesday was to be a martyr to boredom for the next week.