After an hour of careful planning, she turned the torch on and put her ear to the closet wall. Nothing. “Here goes,” she mumbled to herself, picking up the box cutter Martin had left her. The tiles he’d had the fabricator spam out were rigid and hard to cut at first, stiffened by the fine copper wire mesh of the Faraday cage threading through them. She stabbed at one edge, then worked the blade through and began tugging it down from the top of her hideaway.
Grunting with effort, Steffi sawed a slit all the way down one side of the wall, then continued sideways at the bottom. Finally, she squatted and peeled the corner up toward her. Fumbling in the twilight she found her way out blocked by something solid. It brought it all home to her, and suddenly the stinking darkness seemed to close around her head like a fist. Gasping, she shoved as hard as she could, and the obstruction shifted.
A minute later she found the light switch in the closet. Well, that’s done it, she told herself, heart pounding and stomach fluttering with nervous anticipation. If they’re out there—
She opened the door. The suite was empty. “Huh.” She took three steps forward, into the dayroom, reveling in her sudden freedom to move, taking in deep breaths of the clean air — suddenly recognizing for what it was the fetor she’d spent more than a day immersed in. Glancing around, she saw the desk. There was some kind of notepad on it, paper covered with writing in dumb pigment. Frowning, she picked it up and began to read by torchlight.
ALL PASSENGERS MOVING TO EVAC STATIONS. ARRIVING OLD NEWFIE/STATION MOSCOW SYSTEM PERIPHERY HALF/HR. HELP? MAY BE EVAC’ING SHIP.
NOT TRUST LT. CDR. FROMM. THE REMASTERED GOOD AT CONTROLLING PEOPLE.FROMM IS A PUPPET. PL IS NOW A UBIQ. SURVEILLANCE NET. QUERY OFFICER’S PASS WORKING?
FEEL FREE TO USE THE FABRICATOR IN THE TRUNK. IT MAKES GOOD TOYS, YOU’VE GOT BLANKET RESOURCE ACCESS PERMISSIONS.
Steffi felt her knees go weak. The thing in the closet was a general purpose fabricator, a cornucopia machine? She forced herself to sit down for a moment and close her eyes. “Fuck!” she said softly. The possibilities were endless. Then she took a deep breath. Query officer bypass working. If the hijackers were aboard and had turned the liaison network into a surveillance grid, they already know about her. But if they had evacuated the ship, she might have a chance, especially if they’d left the line crew authorization system in place.
Steffi thrust her left hand into her pocket and pulled out her control rings. Sliding them onto her fingers one by one she mouthed the subvocal command to start up her interface. If they’re watching, they’ll be here any moment, she told herself. But nothing happened; the timer began to spiral in her visual field, and the twist of a ring told her that she had new mail, but there was no knock at the door.
Slowly, she felt the ghost of a grin rising to her face as she scrolled rapidly through the ship’s status reports. In dock, evacuation systems tripped, drive systems tripped, bridge systems shut down, life support on homeostatic standby. “Thought you’d nailed down all the loose ends, did you? We’ll see about that!” She turned back to the closet and leaned over the control panel of the fabricator. “Give me an index,” she snapped at it. “Show me guns. All the guns you can make…”
MESSENGERS
Old Newfie’s basic systems had continued to run while the radiation shock front swept over it. Humans might be gone, life support might be dead — algal ponds crashed, macroscopic plants killed, even the cockroaches fried by the kiloGray radiation pulse — but the multimegaton wheel continued to spin endlessly in the frigid void, waiting for an uncertain return.
Wednesday’s breath steamed in the darkness of the docking hub. One of Portia’s minions had rigged up floodlights around the boarding tube from the liner, and stark shadows cut across the gray floor toward the spin coupling zoner. Dim silhouettes drifted slowly round, rotating between the floor and cathedral-high ceiling over a period of minutes.
“Can you hurry it up a bit?” Portia told her phone. “We need to be able to see in here.”
“Any moment. We’re still looking for the main breaker board.” Jamil and one of the other goons had headed off into the station to look for a backup power supply, wearing low-light goggles and rebreather masks in case they hit a gas trap. Getting the main reactors going would be difficult in the extreme — it would take weeks of painstaking work, checking out the reactor windings, then inching through the laborious task of bootstrapping a fusion cycle — but if they could find a backup fuel cell and light up the docking hub, they’d be able to rig a cable from the Romanov to the hub’s switchboard, and provide power and heat and air circulation to the administrative sectors. Old Newfie had once supported thousands of inhabitants. With a source of power, it could support them again for weeks or months, even without reseeding the life support and air farms.
“So where did you hide the backup cartridge?” Franz asked Wednesday, deceptively casual.
Wednesday frowned. “Somewhere in the police station — it was years ago, you know?” She stared at him. Something about the blond guy didn’t ring true. He looked excessively tense. “You’ll need power for the lifts in order to reach it.”
“This is no time for games,” he said, glancing at Hoechst, who was listening to her comm. “You don’t want to cross her.”
“Don’t I?” Wednesday glanced up at the axial cranes, skeletal gantries looming like lightning-struck trees out of the darkness high above. “I’d never have guessed.”
Portia nodded and lowered her comm. “We have lights,” she said, a note of satisfaction in her voice. Moments later, a loud clack echoed through the docking hub. The emergency floods came on overhead, casting a faint greenish glow across the floorscape. “We should have heat and fans in a few minutes,” she added, sounding satisfied. A nod at one of her other minions, a woman with straight hair the color of straw. “Start moving the passengers aboard, Mathilde, I want the passengers off that ship in ten minutes.”
“You’re evacuating it?” Wednesday stared.
“Yes. We seem to be missing a Junior Flight Lieutenant. I don’t want her getting any silly ideas about flying off while we’re all aboard the station.” Portia smiled thinly. “I’ll admit that if she can hide from a ubiquitous celldar net and shoot her way past the guards who are waiting she might have a chance, but somehow I doubt it.”
“Oh.” Wednesday deflated. She felt her rings vibrate, saw a pop-up notice in her left eye: new mail. She tried to conceal her surprise. (Mail? Here?) “Why were you killing our ambassadors?” she asked impulsively.
“Was I?” Hoechst raised an eyebrow. “Why were you hiding out with a pair of spooks from Earth?”
“Spooks?” Wednesday shook her head in puzzlement. “They wanted to help, once you hijacked the ship—”
Portia looked amused. “Everybody wants to help,” she said, raising her comm to her mouth. “You. Whoever I’m speaking to — Jordaan? Yes, it’s me. The two diplomats from Earth. And that fucking busybody journalist. We’re going to the station administrator’s office by way of a little detour along the way. Round up the diplomats and the scribbler. Take a backup and meet us at the station admin office in half an hour. Send Zursch and Anders to the communications room with the key, and have them wait for me there. I’ll be along after I’ve finished with the other errands. Understood? Right. See you there.” She focused on Wednesday. “It’s quite simple.” She took a deep breath. “I’m here to tidy up a huge mess that was left by my predecessor. If I don’t tidy it up, a lot of people are going to die, starting with your friends who I just mentioned, because if I fail to tidy up the mess successfully, I will die, and a lot of my people will die, and killing your friends will be the easiest way of conveying to you — and them — just how angry that makes me. I don’t really want to die, and I’d much rather not have to kill anybody — which is why I’m telling you this, to make sure you know it isn’t a fucking game.” She leaned toward Wednesday, her face drawn: “Have you got the picture yet?”