“Sure.” She tossed him a ruggedized handset. “Turns back into a pumpkin next jump. Bring it back for a reset.” Must be a causal channel, he realized. The untappable instant quantum devices were the tool of choice for communications security — at least between FTL hops.
“Check.” He slipped it into his pocket. “See you around.”
There was an uproar in the dining room. Steffi stood up. “Please!” she shouted. “Please calm down! The situation’s under control—”
Predictably, it didn’t work. But she had to try: “Listen! Please sit down. Lieutenant Commander Fromm is investigating this problem. I assure you nothing serious is wrong, but if you would just sit down and give us time to sort things out—”
“I’d give up, if I were you,” Martin said quietly. Half the passengers were flocking toward the exits, evidently in a hurry to return to their rooms. The rest were milling around like a herd of frightened sheep, unsure whose lead to follow. “They’re not going to listen. What the hell is happening, anyway?”
“I don’t—” Steffi caught herself. Shit! Play dumb, idiot! “Max is looking into it. At best, some idiot’s played a prank with the liaison network. At worst?” She shrugged.
“Who made the announcement?” Martin asked.
“I don’t know.” But I can guess. She frowned. “And no way would the skipper divert from our course — for one thing, New Prague is about the closest port of call on our route! For another—” She shrugged. “It doesn’t add up.”
“I’m not going to say the word,” Martin said slowly, “but I think something has gone very wrong. Something to do with the investigation.”
Steffi’s guts turned to ice. Confirmation of her own worst fears: it was a stitch-up. “I couldn’t possibly comment. I should be heading to my duty station—”
She forced herself to pause for a couple of seconds. “What would you do if this was your call?”
“It’s either a genuine accident, in which case damage control is on top of it or we’d be dead already, or — well, you put it together; the net’s down, a stranger is announcing some weird accident and telling passengers to go to their rooms, and we’ve got a couple of killers loose on board. Frankly, I’d send everyone to their cabins. They’re self-contained with emergency oxygen supplies and fabs for basic food, it’s where they want to go, they can hole up, and if it is a hijacking, it’ll give the hijackers a headache. Meanwhile we can find out what’s going on and either try to help out or find somewhere to hole up.” The ghost of a smile tugged at his lips, then fell away. “Seriously. Get them out of here. Dispersal is good.”
“Shit!” She stood up and raised her voice again: “If you’d all go straight to your cabins and stay out of the corridors until somebody tells you it’s all right, that would help us immensely.”
Almost at once the crush at the exits redoubled as first-class passengers streamed away from their seats. Within a minute the dining room was almost empty. “Right. Now what?” She asked, edgily. If Max was all right, he should have sent a runner by now. So he wasn’t, and the shit had presumably hit the fan. Twitching her rings didn’t seem to help; she was still locked out of the network.
“Now we go somewhere unexpected. Uh, your rings still not working?” She nodded. “Right, switch off everything.”
“But—”
“Just do it.” Martin reached into a pocket and pulled out a battered-looking leather-bound hardback book. “PA, global peripheral shutdown. Go to voice-only.” He shook his head, wincing slightly. “I know it feels weird, but—”
Steffi shrugged uncomfortably, then blinked her way through a series of menus until she found the hard power-down option on her personal area network. “Are you sure about it?”
“Sure? Who’s sure of anything? But if someone’s taking over the ship, they’re going to view nailing down line officers — even trainees — as a priority. Way I’d plan it, first your comms would go down, then people would simply vanish one by one.” Steffi blinked and nodded, then sent the final command and watched the clock projected in her visual field wink out. Martin stood up. “Come on.” They followed the last diners out into the main radial heading for the central concourse, but before they’d passed the nearest crossway Martin paused at a side door. “Can you open this?”
“Sure.” Steffi grasped the handle and twisted. Sensors in the handle recognized her handprint and gave way. “Not much here but some stores and—”
“First thing to do is to cover up that uniform.” Martin was already through the door. “Got to get you looking like a steward or a passenger. Don’t think they’ll be looking for me or Rachel yet.” He pushed open the next door, onto a dizzying spiral of steps broken every six meters by another pressure door. “Come on, long climb ahead.”
Steffi tensed, wondering if she was going to have to break his neck there and then. “Why do you—”
“Because you’re a line officer, why else? If we’re being hijacked, you know how to fly this damn thing; at least you’re in the chain of command. I know enough about the drive layout on this tub to spin up the kernel, but if we get control back, we’re going to need you to authenticate us to the flight systems and log me in as flight engineer. If I’m wrong, we’ll hear about it as soon as the PLN comes back up. So start climbing!”
Steffi relaxed. “Okay, I’m climbing, I’m climbing.”
TOO MANY CHILDREN
“You—” Rachel swaged on her feet. The girl shook her head violently, looking spooked, and muttered something inaudible. Then she glanced over her shoulder. “Are you Victoria Strowger?”
Wednesday’s head whipped round. “Who wants to know?”
Her shoulders set, she was clearly on the defensive. “Calm down,” said Rachel. “I’m Martin’s partner. Listen, the ReMastered are going to be all over us in a couple of minutes if we don’t get the hell out of the public spaces. All I want is to ask you a couple of questions. Can we take this up in my suite?”
Wednesday stared at her, eyes narrowing in calculation. “Okay. What’s going on?”
Rachel took a deep breath. “I think the ship’s being hijacked. Do you know where Frank is?”
“I — no.” Wednesday looked shaken. “He was going to go back to his room to fetch something, he said.”
“Oh dear.” Rachel tried to keep a straight face; the kid looked really worried at her tone of voice. “Are you coming? We can look him up later.”
“But I need to find him!” There was an edgy note of panic in her voice.
“Believe me, right now he’s either completely safe, or he’s already a prisoner, and they’ll be using him as bait for you.”
“Fuck!” Wednesday looked alarmed.
“Come on,” coaxed Rachel. “Do you want them to find both of you?” A sick sense of dread dogged her: if Martin was right, Wednesday and Frank were romantically entangled. She cringed at the memory of how she’d once felt, knowing Martin had been taken. “Listen, we’ll find him later — get to safety first, though, or we won’t be able to. Switch your rings off right now, unless you want to be found. I know you’re not on the shipboard net, but if they’re still emitting, the bad guys may know how to ping them.” Rachel turned toward the main stairwell. It was filling up with people, chattering hordes of passengers coming out to see what was going on, or heading back to their rooms; a handful of harried-looking stewards scurried hither and yon, or tried to answer questions for which they didn’t have any answers.
“You know what’s going on, don’t you?”
Rachel concentrated on the stairs, trying to ignore her shaking muscles and the urge to shiver whenever she thought back to what she’d seen in the D-con room. Six flights to go.
“What is going on?”
“Shut up and climb.” Five flights to go. “Shit!” They were nearing D deck, and the crowd was thinner — there were fewer staterooms — and there was the first sign of trouble, a man standing in the middle of the landing and blocking the next flight of stairs. His face was half-obscured by a pair of bulky low-tech imaging goggles, like something out of the dawn of the infowar age; but the large-caliber gun he held looked lethally functional.