“Now!” Portia insisted.
“You promised.” Wednesday tightened her grip on the wallet and stared Portia in the eyes. “Going to break your word?”
“No.” Hoechst blinked, then relaxed. “No, I’m not.” She looked like a woman awakening from a turbulent dream. “You want to hold it until you see your friends, you go right ahead. I assume it is the right wallet? And the data cartridge you took?”
“Yes,” Wednesday said defensively, tightening her grip on it. The three riot cartridges she’d stolen felt huge in her hip pocket, certain to be visible. And while only Jamil had a gun slung in full sight, she had an edgy feeling that all the others were armed. They’d be carrying pistols, if nothing else. What was the old joke? Never bring a taser to an artillery duel.
“Then let’s go visit the control center.” Portia smiled. “Of course, if you’re wasting my time, you’ll have made me kill one of your friends, but you wouldn’t do that, would you?”
“Never bring a taser to an artillery duel,” muttered Steffi, glancing between the compact machine pistol (with full terminal guidance for its fin-stabilized bullets, not to mention a teraherz radar sight to allow the user to make aimed shots through thin walls) and the solid-state multispectral laser cannon (with self-stabilizing turret platform and a quantum-nucleonic generator backpack that could boil a liter of water in under ten seconds). Regretfully, she picked the machine pistol, the laser’s backpack being too unwieldy for the tight confines of a starship. But there was nothing stopping her from adding some other, less cumbersome toys, was there? After all, none of the spectators at her special one-woman military fashion show would be writing reviews afterward.
After half an hour, Steffi decided she was as ready as she’d ever be. The console by the door said that there was full pressure outside. Negligent of them, she thought as she pointed her gun through the door and scanned the corridor. It looked clear, ghostly gray in the synthetic colors displayed by her eye-patch gun-sight. Right, here goes.
She moved toward the nearest intersection corridor with crew country, darting forward, then pausing to scan rooms to either side. Need a DC center console, she decided. The oppressive silence was a reminder of the constant menace around her. If the hijackers wanted to lock down a ship, they could have depressurized it: that they hadn’t meant that they’d be back. Before then, she had to eliminate any guards they’d left behind, erase her presence from their surveillance system, and regain control.
Where are they? she asked herself, nerves on edge as she came close to the core staircase and lift utility ducts on this deck. They’re not stupid; they’ll have left a guard. They’ve got the surveillance net, so they must know I’m moving around up here. So where’s the ambush going to be? Smart guards wouldn’t risk losing her in a maze of passages and staterooms she knew better than they did. They’d simply lock the staircase doors between pressure zones, and nail her as soon as she conveniently locked herself in a narrow moving box.
Got it. Steffi ducked sideways into a narrow crew corridor and found herself facing the blank doors of a lift shaft. Readying herself, she hit the call button and crouched beside the doors, gun raised to scan. There were two possibilities. Either the lift car would contain an unpleasant surprise, or it would be empty — in which case, they’d be waiting for her wherever she arrived.
The gun showed her an empty cube before the doors opened. She moved instantly, jamming her key ring onto the emergency override pad on the control panel. Steffi clicked her tongue in concentration as she commanded the lift car to lower to motor maintenance position and open the doors. There was space on top of the pressurized car, a platform a meter and a half wide and a meter high, ridged with cables and motor controllers leading to the prime movers at each corner of the box. She scrambled aboard, then hit the button for the training bridge deck. What happened next would depend on how many guards they’d left behind for her. If there were enough to monitor the ship surveillance network as well as lay an ambush for her, she’d already lost, but she was gambling that her cover was still intact. As long as Svengali hadn’t talked, she stood a chance, because only a paranoid would take the same precautions over a Junior Flight Lieutenant that they’d need to neutralize a professional assassin … The lift seemed to take forever to climb down the shaft. Steffi crouched in the middle of the roof, curling herself around her gun. Her eye patch showed her a gray rectangle, ghost shadows unfolding below it — the empty body of the lift, descending into a tube of darkness too far away for the surface-piercing gun-sights to see. Four decks, three, two — the lift slowed. Steffi changed her angle, aiming past the side of the lift where the doors opened, out into the corridor.
Three targets, range five meters, group shots, gun to automatic. The machine pistol stuttered unevenly and the recoil pushed at her wrists, jets of hot gas belching from the reaction-control ducts around the barrel to center it on each target for precisely four shots. It was all over in a second. Steffi twitched around, hunting movement. Nothing: just three indistinct lumps of gray against a background of rectangles.
She hit the DOWN button again, then opened the doors and glanced incuriously at the bodies. Her forehead wrinkled. There was blood everywhere, leaking from two strength-through-joy types she recognized from the dinner table, and from — “Max?” she said aloud, then she caught herself with a quiet snarl of fury. The motherfucking clown who planned this is going to pay, with interest. She checked her gun readouts: nothing was moving, up and down the corridor.
She pushed through a crew-side doorway, oriented herself on a narrow corridor, and headed for the emergency room. Instinct stopped her just short of the corner, dropping to one knee with gun raised. Company? she wondered, motionless, trying to scan a comprehensible picture through the corner wall with tiny flicks of her fingertips. Yes? No? There was something there, and it moved -
They fired simultaneously. Steffi sensed, and heard, the bullet zip past her head as her own gun went into spasm, squirting the remaining contents of its magazine through the wall in a surge of penetrator rounds. There was a damp sound from just around the corner, then a loud thud. Steffi reloaded mechanically, then made a final check and stepped out into the corridor in front of the emergency bridge, stepping over the body of the guard.
“Bridge systems. Speak to me,” she commanded. “Are you listening?”
“Authenticating — welcome, Lieutenant Grace.” The bridge door slid open to reveal empty chairs, an air of deceptive normality.
“Conversational interface, please.” Steffi slid the door shut, then dropped into the pilot’s chair and turned it to face the door, her gun at the ready. “Identify all other personnel aboard ship, their locations and identities. If anyone moves toward this deck, let me know. Next, display on screen two all-system upgrades to passenger liaison network since previous departure. List whereabouts of all passengers traveling from and native to Tonto and Newpeace.” The walls began to fill up with information. “Dump specifics to my stash.” Steffi smiled happily. “Are all officers authenticated by retinal scan? Good. Who authorized the last PLN reload? Good. Now stand by to record a new job sequence.”
Wednesday had walked over to the desk at the front of the evacuation assembly point as if she didn’t have a care in the world. Rachel watched with growing misgivings as she spoke quietly to the fair-haired guy and they left together through the side exit into crew country. Martin leaned close. “I hope she’ll be all right.”
Half an hour later it was their turn. The passengers were growing more restive, talking among themselves in a quiet buzz of nervous anticipation, when a woman ducked through the door. “Rachel Mansour? Martin Springfield? Please come forward!”