“Ah, Franz.” A warm voice, behind him. He forced himself to focus on what his hands were doing — pick, load, pick, load. She doesn’t mean anything, he thought. “Come with me. I’ve got a little job for you.”
He found himself standing up almost without willing it, like a sleepwalker. “I’m ready.”
“Hah! So I see.” Hoechst beckoned toward one of the side doors opening off her suite. “Over here.”
He followed her over and she opened the door of what he’d taken for a closet. Spot on: it was indeed a closet. With a chair in it, straps dangling from the armrests and front legs.
“What’s this?” he asked, heart thudding.
“Got a little job for you.” Hoechst smiled. “I’ve been studying this love phenomenon, and it has some interesting applications.” Her smile slipped. “It’s a pity we can’t just work our way through the passengers until we have the girl, then puppetize her and force her to comply.” She shook her head. “But whoever’s behind her almost certainly took precautions. So we’ll have to do this the old-fashioned way.”
“The old—” Franz stopped. “What do you mean?”
Hoechst pulled out a tablet and tapped it. A video loop started cycling, just a couple of seconds showing its target waving at someone off-screen. “Him.” She pointed at the face. “I’m giving you Marx and Luna. While everyone else is executing Plan Able, you will go to his cabin and bring him here. Undamaged, to the extent possible. I want a bargaining chip.”
“Hmm.” Franz shrugged. “Wouldn’t it be easier simply to force her?”
“This is force, of a kind.” Hoechst grinned at him. “Don’t you recognize it?” The grin vanished. “She has a history of evading capture, Franz. Kerguelen was not entirely negligent: he was up against experience. I’ve been reading U. Scott’s field files, predigested raw transcripts, not the pap he was content with. She won’t dodge me.”
“Ah,” Franz said faintly. “So what do you want me to do with him?”
“Just snatch him and bring him here while I’m dealing with the rest of the ship. If he cooperates, he and the girl can both be allowed to live — that’s the truth, not a convenient fiction. Although they and the rest of the passengers will be sent for ReMastering when we arrive at Newpeace.”
“Got it.” Franz frowned. She’s going to ReMaster everyone on the entire ship? Is she planning on making it disappear? “Do you want anything else?”
“Yes.” Hoechst leaned close, until he could feel her breath on his cheek. “This is job number one for you. I’ve got another lined up after we dock with station eleven. It’s going to be fun!” She patted him on the back. “Cheer up. Only another three weeks to go, and we’ll be home again. Then, if you’re good, maybe we can see about giving you back your toy.”
Steffi stifled a yawn as she lowered herself into the chair at the head of the table in the dining room. An overlong shift spent poring over personnel movements with Rachel had left her bleary-eyed and wanting to throttle some of the more willfully persistent tourists. Having to follow that by stealing ten minutes to freshen up, then sitting at the head of a dining table for three or four hours of stroking the oversized egos of the more stupid upper-class passengers, was the kind of icing she didn’t need on her cake. But it’s better than being on the outside of the investigation, she told herself. And maybe she’d get some quality time with Max afterward; he was sitting up on the high table at the other side of the room, lofty but affable, everybody’s favorite picture of a senior officer. He’d need to blow off steam, too.
“Mind if I join you?” She looked round. It was Martin, the diplomatic spook’s right hand.
“By all means.” She managed a wan smile, keeping up appearances. Down the table, the middle-aged Nipponese woman smiled back at her, evidently mistaking its target, triggering an exchange of polite nods. By which time Martin was sitting to her left and idly scrolling through the menu. She looked around the table. It was half-empty. The troublesome kid was evidently eating in her room. So, come to think of it, were those creepy cultural exchange students from Tonto. Fucking stupid cover, she thought. A blind idiot could see there’s more to them than that. No such luck with the bankers, though.
“How’s your day been?” she asked quietly as the stewards collected the empty soup bowls. “I haven’t seen your wife in here — is she working?”
“Probably.” Martin winced and pinched the bridge of his nose. “She’s looking for someone, and she tends to overdo it when she’s got her teeth into something. I tell her to take some time off, it’ll make her more effective, but … I’ve spent all day interviewing tourists. It’s giving me a headache.”
“Did any of them have anything useful to say?” she asked.
“Not for the most part, no.”
Liar, she thought, tensing. What are you concealing?
The lighting strips lining the arched sculpture niches along the walls flickered, distracting her.
“’Scuse me.” Steffi raised her left hand and twisted her interface rings urgently, hunting the command channel. The lights aboard a starship never flickered without a reason — especially not aboard a luxury liner with multiple redundant power circuits. Steffi hadn’t felt any vibration, but that didn’t mean anything. The ship’s curved-space generators were powerful enough to buffer a steady thirty gees of acceleration, and absorb the jolt of any impact unless it was large enough to cause a major structural failure. “Bridge comm, Grace here. Bridge—” She frowned. “That’s odd.” She glanced across the room at Max. He was standing up, turning to step down off the raised platform of the high table. He caught her eye, jerked his chin toward the main entrance, then strode toward it. Across the room she saw stewards discreetly breaking off their tasks, disappearing in the direction of their emergency stations.
She caught up with Max a couple of meters down the hall. “Bridge isn’t answering.”
“I know.” He opened an unmarked side door. “Nearest emergency locker is — ah, here.” Yanking the yellow-and-black handle forward, he pulled out the crash drawer and handed her an emergency bag — rebreather hood, gloves, mul-titool, first-aid ’bots. “No callback.” He looked thoughtful. “One moment—”
“Already there.” Steffi had her tablet fully unfolded; she pasted it against the wall and tried to bring up the ship’s damage-control schematics. “Shit, why is it so slow? She stabbed at a local diagnostic pane. “There’s no bandwidth! Shipnet is down.”
“We’ve got lights, air, and gravity.” He looked thoughtful. “What’s out is data. Listen, it may just be a major network crash. Relativistics weren’t due to start jump spool-up for half an hour yet, so we’re probably okay if we sit tight. You’re not trained for this, so I want you to go back to the dining room and keep a lid on the passengers. Relay any orders you hear and keep your ears open and try to stay out of trouble until you’re needed. Meanwhile, I’m going to get some stewards together and go find out what’s happening. Bridge first, engineering control if the bridge is out … Your story for the passengers is that everything is under control, line crew is investigating and there’ll be an announcement in due course. Think you can handle it?”