She dodged a couple of confused passengers who seemed to be looking for someone. She sported an anonymous gray side door into crew country and tried to open it. It refused to recognize her until she got tired of waiting and twisted the black-and-yellow emergency handle: from beyond it she could hear distant, muted sirens. The auxiliary lighting circuit had tripped, and the walls shed a lurid shadowless glow. “Send to Martin, off-line by best emergency mesh routing,” she subvocalized to her personal assist, mumbling at her rings. “Martin, if you get this message, we’re in deep shit. Something—” she turned a corner, followed signs for the G deck ops center — “big is going down, and I think we’re sitting on the target.” The ops center door was open ahead, a couple of crew just visible in the gloom inside doing something. One of them glanced at her, then stepped forward. “I think—”
She stopped dead, eyes wide, as the public address system came on: “We regret to inform you that there has been a minor problem with the propulsion and engineering control center…”
The man blocking the doorway was pointing an autonomous rifle at her. Rachel froze as it tracked her, snuffling slightly, its barrel pointing right at her face. “Who are you and what are you doing here?” he demanded.
“I, uh—” She stopped, heart hammering. “I was looking for a steward?” she asked, her voice rising in an involuntary squeak. She began to take a step back, then froze as the man tensed. He had blond hair, brown eyes, and pale skin: he was built with the sparse, muscular grace of a dancer or martial artist — or special forces, she realized. Even a cursory glance told her she wouldn’t stand a chance if he decided to shoot her; the gun was some kind of smart shotgun/grenade launcher hybrid, probably able to fire around corners and see through walls. “My rings stopped working — What’s this about help?” she asked, doing her best to look confused. It wasn’t hard.
“There has been a minor accident,” the goon said, sounding very calm but clipping his words: “Return to your cabin. Everything is under control.” He stopped and stared at her coolly.
“Uh, yeah, under control, I can see that,” Rachel muttered, backing away from him. He made no move to follow her, but simply stood in the doorway watching as she turned and walked back toward passenger country. Her skin crawled as if she could feel the gun watching the small of her back, eager to discharge. When she was far enough away she gave in to the impulse to run — he’d probably expect no less of a frightened passenger. Just as long as he didn’t realize how good her night vision was. Good enough to have seen the woman slumped over the workstation in the gloom behind him. Good enough to have seen the other woman working on her back with something that looked disturbingly like a mobile neurosurgery toolkit.
Under control. “Shit,” she mumbled, fumbling with the door and noticing for the first time that her hands were shaking. Bad guys in G deck damage-control center, infoweapons in passenger country, what else do I need? The door banged shut behind her. She shook her head. Hijackers—
She turned toward the central atrium, meaning to take the old-fashioned staircase back up to her room in search of Martin. She took a single step forward, and the dark-haired girl ran into her.
The air in the flight deck stank of blood, ozone, and feces. The desks and equipment racks around the room looked as if someone had run them through a scrap metal press; anything that wasn’t bolted down had fallen over and shattered, hard, including the bridge officers unlucky enough to be in the room when the gadget had gone off. Bodies bent at strange angles lay beneath broken chairs or lay splayed across the floor, leaking.
Portia wrinkled her nose in distaste. “This really won’t do,” she insisted. “I want this mess cleared up as soon as we’ve got the surveillance net locked down. I want it to look like we’ve been in charge all along, not as if we just butchered the flight crew.”
“Boss.” Jamil nodded. He glanced at the front wall-screen, which had ripped away from the bulkhead and slumped into a thin sheet across the floor. “What about operational capacity?”
“That’s a lower priority. We’ve got the auxiliary bridge, we’ll run things from there for now.” She pulled a face. “On second thoughts, before you tidy up get someone to reclaim anything they can get out of these.” She stared at an officer who lay on the floor, her neck twisted and skull flattened. “Obviously, I don’t expect total uploads.”
“Thirty gees for a hundred milliseconds is about the same as falling off a fifteen-story building,” Marx volunteered.
“So she didn’t have a head for heights.” Hoechst’s cheek twitched. “Get going.”
“Yes, boss.” He hurried off to find someone with a neural spike.
As he left, Portia’s phone rang. She raised the archaic rubbery box to her head. “Control, sitrep. Ah … yes, that’s good. Is he all right? Fully programmed? Excellent, get him in front of a screen as soon as you get into the liaison router, we need to reassure the passengers there’s a real officer in charge … What’s the structural load-out like? How high did the surge … all right. Right. Good, I’m glad you told me. Yes, tell Maria to detain any other members of the crew who reach D-con on decks G through C … Yes, that’s what I meant. I want any line officers who survived identified and segregated immediately. Stash them in the C deck D-con center for now and report back when you’ve got them all accounted for. Be discreet, but in event of resistance shoot first: the unborn god will know his own … Yeah, you, too. Over.” She turned and nodded to Franz. “Right. Now it’s your turn. I take it the girl isn’t in her cabin?”
Franz straightened up. “She’s missing. Her tag says she’s there, but it looks like she fooled it deliberately and her own implants aren’t compatible with these damn Earth-standard systems. One of the ship’s junior officers was searching for her — I think she’s gone to ground.” He delivered his little speech with an impassive face, although his stomach tensed in anticipation of Hoechst’s wrath.
“That’s all right,” she said mildly, taking him by surprise. “What did I tell you to expect earlier? Just keep an eye open for her. Mathilde’s crew is configuring the passenger access points to work as a mesh field for celldar, and she’ll have the entire ship under surveillance in a few hours. Now, what about the other one?”
“Taken, as per your orders. He’d returned to his room for some reason. Marx took him down with no problems, and we’ve got him stashed in the closet.”
“Good. When the kid surfaces you can let her know we’ve got him, and what will happen to him if she doesn’t cooperate.” She looked pensive. “In the meantime, I want you to go and pay off the clown. Right away.”
“The clown,” Franz repeated. The clown? That was okay by him. No ethical dilemmas there, nothing to lose sleep over …
“Yes.” She nodded. A muscle in her left cheek jumped. “Bring me the head of Svengali the clown.”
“I don’t have a spike—”
“No reclaim,” she said firmly. She gave a delicate shudder of distaste. “There are some things that even the unborn god should be protected from.”
“But that’s final! If you kill him without reclaiming his soul—”
“Franz.” She stared at him coldly.
“Boss.”
She tilted her head to one side. “Sometimes I think you’re too soft for this job,” she said thoughtfully. “Are you?”
“Boss! No.” He took a deep breath. “I have been slow to adjust to your management style. I will adapt.” That’s right, gnaw your own leg off.
She nodded slightly. “See that you do.”