“Fuck you!” Frank glared at her.
“Shut up.” Gun-boy pointed his machine pistol at Frank. For a tense moment Rachel was sure he would say something. The seconds stretched out into an infinitely long moment as Frank and the guard stared — then Frank slumped back in his chair.
“ ’Sokay. I can let go.” Frank glanced at her and yawned, his jaw muscles crackling. “I’m used to it — was used to it.” He rubbed his hands together, making small circling movements. Rachel tried not to show any sign of having noticed his frantic control gestures. Someone’s got a backlog of e-mail, she guessed, or itchy fingers.
They sat in silence for a couple of minutes, then a buzzing noise from along the corridor announced the imminent arrival of yet another self-propelled lift car. Rachel looked round automatically.
The doors opened. Many footsteps, moving toward the office in the curious broken rhythm of fractional gee. First in was a skinny, edgy-looking man; then a woman of a certain age, her eyes cold and her expression satisfied. Then Wednesday, walking in front of a guy with long hair in a ponytail, holding a boxy urban combat weapon. Her expression was ugly when she saw Frank looking like a morning-after wreck.
“Rachel Mansour, from the UN, I presume?” The woman walked behind the station manager’s desk, turned the chair round, and sat down in it. “I’m very pleased to meet you.” She smiled as she reached into an outer pocket and placed a compact pistol on the desk in front of her, its barrel pointed at Rachel. “I see you’ve already met our young runaway. That will make things much simpler. Just one more person to come, then I think we’ll begin.”
IRREVOCABLE
They’d untaped his hands; leaning back, ignoring the guard, Frank had twitched his rings, switching his optic implants and ear pickups to record promiscuously. There was no point missing anything, even his own execution.
BING. He’d jumped a little when the mail flag came up; something from Wednesday. But the guard hadn’t noticed. None of them noticed. Just typical ReMastered foot soldiers, obedient and lethal. He read the message and felt his palms go damp. He was glad he was sitting down. So now Wednesday’s invisible friend is sending me e-mail? But he’s got to use her as a relay because she’s the only one of us with a setup compatible with this station? Shit.
Frank reflected bleakly on the need for bandwidth. If there’s some way to get that report out, wherever we are … we can’t all just vanish, can we? But the truth was anything but reassuring. Liners did vanish from time to time, and if this was the hijacking it appeared to be — bearing all the slick signs of ReMastered covert ops, the sly subversion of emergency reflexes — then there was no way word would ever get out.
BING. More mail from Wednesday had arrived, broadcast to him and Rachel and Martin — what? Some sort of code attachment, a new interface protocol for his implant to talk to the station’s ether. He tried to keep his face impassive as he mentally crossed his fingers and loaded the untrusted executable.
Then the newcomers arrived. Frank stared at them, his world narrowed suddenly to a single panicky choice, a flashback going back decades. He took it all in, Wednesday sullen between two guards, the woman in front holding the leather satchel, smiling at him. He remembered the bright sunlight on the rooftop of the Demosthenes Hotel, the acrid smell of propane stoves and dog shit wafting on the breeze across downtown Samara. Alice turning toward the parapet with a camera drone in her hands. The woman, again. Blond destruction on the day it rained bullets, the day when everything changed.
Frank blinked up at her. “Oh holy shitting fucking Christ, it’s you—”
“Increasing my little piggie count, this time.” Her smile broadened, turning ugly at the edges. “We really must stop bumping into each other like this, mustn’t we?”
“Shit, shit, shit—” Frank felt nauseous. The hot smell of Alice’s blood was in his nose; the roar and screams of the crowd as the bullets began spattering into them. “You were in Samara. On Newpeace. Who are you?” He barely noticed Wednesday’s jolt of surprise from the other side of the room as he focused in on the woman’s face.
“I’m U. Portia Hoechst, DepartmentSecretariat of Division Four of the Department of External Environmental Control, planetary dominion of Newpeace. The ‘U’ is short for ubermensch, or ubermadchen, take your pick.” Her smile was as wide as a shark’s gape. “At this point in the proceedings I’m supposed to gloatingly tell you my evil plans before I kill you. Then, if you believe the movies, a steel-jawed hero is supposed to erupt through the walls and teach me the error of my ways with extreme prejudice.”
She snorted. “Except there aren’t any steel-jawed heroes within sixteen light years of this station.” A hint of mirth in her eyes. “Not even that Third Lieutenant you’ve got squirreled away, at least not once the guards are through with her.” Frank felt his nails digging into the palms of his hands; his vision went gray and pixelated for a few seconds, and his heart pounded before he realized that it was the firmware patch from Wednesday loading on his implant’s virtual machine, combined with a raw, primal rage.
“Why are you telling us this?” Rachel asked quietly.
“Because I like a fucking audience!” Hoechst sat up. “And it’s going to be over soon, anyway.” She stopped smiling. “Oh, about the ‘let me tell you everything before I kill you’ bit: I’m not going to kill you. You might wish I had, but I’m not. As soon as I’ve got this station on auxiliary internal power and disabled external communications, all the passengers and crew are coming aboard. It won’t be much fun, but you’ll be able to last for the couple of months it takes for a rescue ship to reach you. Even you, Frank.” A flicker of a smile. “No reeducation camps here. You’re getting the VIP treatment.”
Frank stayed quiet, his guts tense. Fuck, we’re still on the net! he realized. The station’s causal channels were still working. This packet from Herman, whoever he was, was a protocol converter — with gathering disbelief Frank realized that he wasn’t cut off anymore. He could send mail. Or even pipe his raw recording feed straight to Eric, back home, there to do whatever he could with the posthumous spool. Take it like you give it, you fuckers! he thought triumphantly. His hands folded together against the cold, nobody saw him twisting his rings, setting up the narrowcast stream to his inbox on Earth. I am a camera!
Steffi watched the rerun of Svengali’s execution in grainy monochrome, tracking it through the labyrinthine maze of the surveillance system take spooled by the ship’s memory as the bridge systems hummed around her, rewinding the vessel’s software model of itself back to the state it had been in before the ReMastered lobotomized it.
She’d thought she was angry when the double-crossing clients ran amok, angry when she’d spent long hours crouched in a dark closet space with the soft-shoe shuffle of guards outside the door. But she hadn’t been angry at all. Not in comparison to her current state of mind. Livid with rage just barely began to describe it.
She’d worked with Sven for just short of a decade. In many ways they’d been closer than a married couple — herself the pretty face up front and visible, and he the fixer in the background, oiling the gears and reeling in the contracts. He’d found her when she was a teen punk, heading for rehab or a one-way trip to the exile colonies, seen through the rust and grime to the hard metal beneath, and polished it to a brilliant shine. In the early years she’d adored him, back before she matured enough to see him as he really was — theirs hadn’t been a sexual relationship (beyond an early exploratory fumbling), but it was a partnership based on need, and mutual respect, and blood. And now, just as they’d been on the edge of their greatest coup -