“I’ll do my best.”
Steffi headed for the passenger corridor, sparing a glance behind her as he waved a hand at a crewman who’d appeared from one of the service spaces: “Hey, you! Over here, I’ve got a job for you right now…”
Everything seemed to be under control in the dining room. Steffi did a quick survey. The passengers were still wrapped up in conversation, not yet having noticed anything unusual. Small mercies … For a moment she considered leaving them in ignorance, but as soon as someone tried to check mail or call a friend they’d realize something was up.
She took a step up onto the platform supporting the high table. “Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention, please?”
Curious eyes turned toward her. “As some of you may have noticed, we’ve experienced a minor technical anomaly in the past few minutes. I’d like to assure you that the engineering crew are working on it, and there is no danger—”
The lights flickered for a moment, then went out. One or two stifled screams rose from the corners of the room — then the lights came back on. And with them a stranger’s voice, amplified, over the passenger liaison circuit, its tone calm and collected: “We regret to inform you that there has been a minor problem with the propulsion and engineering control center. There is no cause for alarm. Everything is under control, and we will be diverting to a nearby port rather than proceeding directly to New Prague. WhiteStar Line will announce a compensation package for your inconvenience in due course. In the meantime, we would appreciate it if you would return to your cabins and stay there until further notice. When the passenger liaison network is back up, please do not hesitate to use it to contact one of our team. We’re here to help you.”
Rachel was looking for Wednesday in the mostly-deserted D deck lounges when the gadget went off under the bridge. The bridge was on E deck. It was separated from D deck by two pressure bulkheads, a structural truss, and an electrograv ring designed to even out tidal surges, so the immediate blast effect was lost on her.
Martin had called her a couple of hours earlier, full visual via an office cam. “It checks out and it stinks like a month-dead cheese,” he insisted. “She’s a Moscow survivor, someone’s been trying to abduct or kill her, she was at the embassy reception when you were — oh, and there’s something else.”
His cheek twitched. He was about as agitated as she’d ever seen him get. “What else?” she demanded, annoyed with herself for going after such a transparent hook.
“She’s got a friend called Herman, and he’s why she’s here.” Martin shut up. She stared at him through the magic mirror in her visual field.
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope. Frank didn’t know any more — but I mean, hit me with the clue bat, right?”
“Oh shit.” She’d had to lean against the wall. “Did she pass anything else on to you?” She’d gone dizzy for a moment, as things dropped into place. Herman was the cover name an agent of the Eschaton had used to contact Martin, paying him to run obscure errands — errands that had emergent side effects that shook the chancelleries of a dozen worlds. Herman was only really interested in human beings when they tried to build time machines, violate causality, experiment with forbidden weapons. Moscow had died when, entirely without warning, its star had exploded. Which just didn’t happen, not to G-type dwarf stars in the middle of the main sequence of their life cycles.
“Yes. Maybe it’s a coincidence, and then again maybe there’s a large pig on final approach to the main docking bay — see the reaction control clusters on each flank? Herman said it was something to do with the ReMastered group aboard this ship and that they’re going to pull something after the first jump. Tonight, in other words. Rachel, I am not happy. This—”
“Stop. Let’s not go there right now.” She shook her head. “I need to find the girl before whoever’s looking for her catches up with us. Send me her details?”
“Sure.” Martin shuffled the rings on his left hand, and her tablet bleeped, then threw up a picture — young-looking physio, dark hair built up in an outrageous swirl, eye shadow like midnight. “Hard to miss. You’ll probably find her with Frank the journalist; they seem to be personally involved. Oh, she’s as young as she looks, too, so go easy on her.”
Rachel frowned pensively. “Don’t worry about me, worry about her. You go and have a word with the Captain — tell her we’re expecting some kind of trouble from a group of passengers. If necessary, tell her exactly who — but don’t tell her where the warning came from. There might be a leak in the crew. Besides which, if we overreact, we might not have a chance to learn anything…”
“Happy hunting.” He’d smiled at her until she cut the call. And that was why she came to be prowling past nine-tenths empty lounges and casually eyeballing the few passengers who were out in public, chatting, drinking, or schmoozing in the overstuffed furniture that seemed to be a WhiteStar trademark. Wednesday seemed to have vanished, along with her new boyfriend, and neither of them were carrying their locater badges. Damn these privacy freaks, anyway! Nowhere did she see a skinny girl with spiky hair and a serious luminosity deficiency, or a journalist built like a silverback gorilla.
Two hours after she’d begun, Rachel had combed decks G through D, making a pass around each circle corridor and checking every single public room, and she was getting frustrated. Where on earth can she have gotten to? she asked herself. Leaving a message on Wednesday’s voice mail didn’t seem to have gotten anywhere. It was getting to the point where she had half a mind to raise things with Steffi, see if the crew couldn’t do the job more efficiently: if only she could eliminate all the crew from the suspects list -
The luminous ceiling tiles flickered briefly, and the world filled with multicolored static. A vast silence went off inside her head. Rachel felt herself fatting and tried to raise her arms to protect herself. Vertigo! She hit the deck bruisingly hard and rolled sideways, her vision flickering. The static was slow to clear, leaving a line of bleeding ghost trails across her retinas. Rachel caught her breath, dizzy with fright, then realized that it wasn’t her eyesight: her intraocular displays had crashed and were rebooting. “Shit!” She glanced around. The skinny guy sitting in the leather sofa next to the upright piano in the Gold Lounge was frowning, rolling his rings around his fingers as if puzzled by something. Rings — Rachel twisted her own master ring, spun through diagnostic menus until she came to the critical one. EMP burst, said her event log. Kilovolts and microamps per meter: someone had just dumped a huge electromagnetic pulse through the walls. There was a faint tang of ozone in the air. The fast fuses in her MilSpec implants had saved them, but the other passengers -
“Oh shit!” She picked herself up and lurched drunkenly into the corridor. “Get me Martin.” Service unavailable. “Hell and damnation.” No surprise there. Why no sirens? She glanced around hastily, looking for an emergency locker — they’d be tastefully concealed aboard a liner, but they’d still be there — Why no partitions? The fail-safe doors ought to be descending if something bad had happened. A chilly claw of fear tugged at her. “Shit, time to get moving…”
The small boy in one corner of the lounge was walking toward her. “Hey, ma’am? My gamescape just flaked on me—”
She cast the kid a sickly smile. “Not now,” she said, then did a double take: “Why don’t you go to your room and tell your folks about it? They’ll be able to help you.” EMP / crashed implants and amusements / assassin traveling incognito / teen from Moscow being hunted / Eschaton involved / war crimes — she had a nagging sense that a shoe had just dropped hard, an enormous boot with a heel stuffed with plutonium or weaponized anthrax or gray goo or something equally apocalyptic, and she’d misinterpreted it as the sound of one hand clapping. Something like that. She broke into a trot, heading for the next radial. Got to find the damage-control point, she told herself, find out what’s going on—