The gel pack went in and for a moment everything was gray and grainy. Then the pain didn’t so much subside as begin to regularize, not driving her to the brink of unconsciousness, becoming possible to manage. Steffi leaned back against the wall and panted, then picked up her gun. If I stay here, they’ll see my heat trace, she realized. And besides …
Two, one, zero: the countdown stopped. A noise like a million steam kettles boiling as one came from the vicinity of the docking doors. Steffi winced as her eardrums pulsed once, twice — then with a huge crashing boom the doors slammed down into the space the Romanov’s tunnel had just pulled away from.
Got you, you bastards! she thought, although exhaustion and pain sapped the realization of all pleasure. Now let’s see how accurate that floor plan is.
Hoechst looked uncertain for a moment, as a faint vibration traveled through the deck. “The passengers are all in the customs hall,” she said, glancing at Franz. “Why don’t you go—”
Frank, distracted, glanced sideways at Wednesday. He sat up. “What are you—”
Wednesday pulled a plastic cylinder out of her pocket and held it toward Hoechst. “Share and enjoy.” There was a note of anger in her voice, and something else, something like triumph that made Frank dive for the floor, covering his eyes as she tossed the cylinder at the desk -
There was a brilliant flash of blue and a loud bang.
Wednesday was already halfway to the door as a hot, damp wave pummeled across the top of Frank’s head. It solidified almost instantly, aerogel foam congealing in a hazy fine mesh of fog with glass-sharp knife edges. Someone inside the fogbank was coughing and gargling. The remaining guard dived into it, desperately trying to batter and scoop his way through to Hoechst, choking in the misty sponge created by the riot bomb.
Frank rolled over on his back, taking in a confused kaleidoscope of impressions. Someone zipped past his face in a blur of motion. A buzzing rattle set his teeth on edge. Vague shadows at the limits of vision turned and fell. There was a scream, sharply cut off, a gurgling sound from the fogbank, a painfully loud bang from a riot gun discharging through a doorway, and more blue foam drifting into the room, blocking the door, congealing in sticky, spiky lumps.
He finished rolling, gasping for breath. I’m still alive? he wondered, dully. “Wednesday!” he called.
“Save it.” That was Martin. A groaning sound came from the floor.
“You. Frank. Help me.” That was Rachel’s voice, panting, gasping. What’s wrong? he wondered. He sat up, momentarily chagrined not to have seen the fight, expecting a soldier’s gun in his face at any moment.
“We’ve got to get her out of there!” Rachel was half-inside the riot foam fogbank, hacking at it with a plastic-bladed knife she’d assembled from the stiffened lapels of her jacket by some kind of sartorial black magic. “Unless it’s set to melt, she’s going to suffocate!”
The remaining ReMastered guard lay on the floor, splayed out as if a compact tornado had zapped him with a UV optical taser. The edgy one, the traitor, sat very still, watching everything alertly. For some reason he seemed very calm. “You,” Frank gasped. “Help.”
“No.” He cocked his head on one side, eyes bright, and very deliberately crossed his arms. “Let her choke.”
“What? I don’t understand—”
Frank bent over one of the guards, searching his belt for some kind of knife, anything to help Rachel with. Martin seemed stunned, shaking his head like a punch-drunk fighter. The semiconscious man at Frank’s feet stirred. Frank did a double take and changed tasks, rolling the man over. “Anyone got some tape?”
“I have.” The guy who’d given Frank the diamond sounded drained by the effort of talking. He stood up slowly, paused when Rachel looked round at him, then slowly knelt and pulled a roll of utility tape from one pocket. He yanked the guard’s arms round and taped his wrists together behind his back, then repeated the job on his ankles and moved on. “I’d really be happier if you’d leave Portia to die,” he added slowly, raising his voice and looking at Rachel as she panted, digging large lumps of bluish glassy foam loose from the mound. “She’s killed more people than you’ve had hot meals.”
“But if I leave her, what does that make me?” Rachel gasped between attacks.
“She’s—” Frank stopped as Rachel straightened up, shaking her head. He looked past her; she’d dug as far as the edge of the desk, far enough to see that the blue-tinted foam was turning red.
“What the fuck do we do now?”
“We—” the blond guy stopped. “Portia lies,” he said conversationally. “She lies instinctively. I don’t know whether she was telling the truth or not, but that girl got away with, with the evidence. The smoking gun. I don’t know what she thinks she’s doing, but if she gets the evidence to the communications room where the secure hotline terminal to the R-bombers is located — or if you do-she could destroy a planet. She’s got the key. Right now we’ve got a problem in the shape of about twelve other ReMastered soldiers, mostly standing guard over the passengers, but at least two of them will be on the Romanov’s emergency bridge. Unless Portia was right and that missing officer—” He stopped.
“What is it?” Frank leaned toward him: “Tell me, dammit!”
“Portia sent the other key to the comms room. Wednesday’s on her way — she’s not a fool, she’s got something in mind — and Portia as good as told her that she’d ordered her family killed.” For a moment the blond man looked as if someone had walked over his grave. “What’s she going to do now?”
“Oh shit.” Martin was struggling to his feet, lurching drunkenly. “We have to get to the comms room. Franz, can you talk your way past whoever’s guarding it?”
“I can try.” The blond guy — Franz — stared at him. “Can I rely on you to support my petition for diplomatic asylum if I do? And to help me obtain a body for one of the involuntary uploads in the memory diamond he’s carrying?” He nodded at Frank.
“You want to — okay, yes. I think I can swing asylum for you. You won’t have to worry about the ReMastered on Earth. They won’t be looking our way for a very long time to come.” Rachel stood up, still panting, red-faced and looking as if she’d run a marathon. “Military boost,” she said, managing to force a smile as Frank focused on her. “I just hope the comms center systems are shut down right now—”
“Involuntary?” Frank interrupted. “Would they be a suitable witness for, um, excesses committed by her?” He cracked his knuckles.
“I think so,” Franz said, almost absentmindedly. “The comms center must still be running, no? For the evacuation.” He examined the mound of blue foam that blocked the exit Wednesday had taken. “Telemetry during undocking, availability for ships coming to visit in the future — like the Romanov — that sort of thing.”
“Do we know where it is?” Frank asked.
“As far as I know, our only expert on the layout of this station is currently running away from us carrying one of the two keys it will take to kill everyone on Newpeace.” Franz carefully placed a hand on top of a foamy stalagmite and tugged, then winced: his palm was red when he pulled it away. “I suggest we try to figure out a way to go round.”
“Mail her,” Frank suggested to Rachel.
She paused, thoughtful. “Not yet. But she sideloaded us the local comms protocol stack—”
He twitched his rings. “Yeah, there’s an online map. Follow the yellow brick road.” He looked worried. “I hope she’s all right.”
The station’s communication center was a broad, semicircular space a couple of decks below the station manager’s office. Two horseshoe-shaped desks provided a workspace for three chairs each; one-half of the wall was occupied by a systems diagram depicting the mesh of long-distance bandwidth bearers that constituted the Moscow system’s intrasystem network of causal channels. “Intrasystem” was a bit of an understatement — Old Newfie and some of the other stations were actually light years outside the system’s Oort cloud, and the network also showed those interstellar channels that reached out across the gulf of parsecs to neighboring worlds — and the control center was hardly the core of the comms system. Most of the real action took place in a sealed server room full of silent equipment racks on the floor below. But human management demanded a hierarchy of control, and from this nerve center commands could be issued to send flash messages across interstellar space, queries to the home world, even directives to the TALIGENT defense hotline network.