Iron Sunrise

CLOWNING AROUND

Franz was snared.

Some time ago he’d heard a story about wild animals — he wasn’t sure what species — which, when snared, would chew a leg off to escape the hunter’s trap. It was a comforting myth, but clearly false in his estimate: because when you got down to it, when your own hand was wedged in the steel jaws of a dilemma, you learned to make do with what you’d got.

Hoechst had come up from the depths of the Directorate like a ravening black widow, carrying away Erica and menacing him with the poisoned chalice of her acquisitive desire. His own survival was at stake: I wasn’t expecting that. But he’d done as she told him, and she hadn’t lied. She hadn’t bitten his head off and nibbled daintily at the pulsing stump of his neck as she consummated her desire. Even though his trapped conscience hurt as violently as a physical limb. Her luggage included almost fifty grams of memory diamond, loaded with the souls and genomes of everyone in U. Scott’s network who’d failed her purge. Each morning he awakened with his heart racing, panting with the knowledge that he was walking along the lip of a seething crater. Knowing that death at her hands would be a purely temporary experience, that he’d awaken with his lover and uncounted billions more in the simulation spaces of the unborn god, did not make it easier to bear. For one thing, the unborn god had to be built — and that meant the destruction of the enemy. And for seconds …

Falling in love was like losing your religion. They were two sides of a coin that Franz and Erica had flipped some years ago, out among the feral humans. He was no longer sure what he believed. The idea of the unborn god picking over the bones of his human fallibility made his skin crawl. But this was foreshadowed: when the ReMastered finally destroyed the Eschaton and began their monumental task of reimplementation, the deity they’d build in their own image would hardly be a merciful and forgiving one. Perhaps it would be better to die the permanent death than to meet his share in the collective creation, down at the omega point at the end of time. But the more he contemplated it, the more he found that he couldn’t quite bring himself to pick one horn of the dilemma — either to chew away the restraining grip of his conscience and flee alone, or to force the black widow to execute him out of sheer disgust.

Which was why, on the evening of the first full day in flight, one hour before the first jump, he was kneeling on the floor of Portia’s Sybarite-class stateroom next to Marx, helping him load ammunition into a brace of handheld recoilless gun launchers while Samow and Mathilde armed their little bags of tricks. We’re really going to do this, he thought disbelievingly, as he stared at a squat cartridge. She’s really going to do it.

The idea was disorienting. Franz had thought, in his more optimistic — unrealistic — moments that maybe he and Erica could manage the trick: that perhaps they could flee the iron determination of the ReMastered race, escape from history, run and hide and find a distant world, live and work and indulge in the strange perversion called love, die forever and molder to humus, never to rise beneath the baleful gaze of the omniscient end child. But escape was a cruel illusion, like freedom, or love. A cruel illusion intended to temper the steel of the ReMastered.

He snapped the round into the box magazine before him, then picked up another and loaded it on top. It was the size of his thumb, nose gleaming with sensors and tail pocked with the tiny vents of solid-fuel rocket motors. One shot, one kill. Every time he pushed another BLAM into the magazine he felt something inside him clench up, thinking of Jamil plunging the propagation bush into the back of Erica’s head, turning her into so much more reliable meat to place on the altar of the unborn god for judgment. Kill them all, god will know his own meeting god is dead: we must become the new gods.

“This one’s full,” he said, and passed it to Marx.

“That’s enough for this set.” Marx carefully set aside one of the handguns and a linked bundle of magazines. “Okay, next one. Hurry up, we’ve only got an hour to get this sorted.”

“I’m hurrying.” Franz’s hands flew. “Nobody’s told me what I’m assigned to do during the action.”

“Maybe that’s because she hasn’t decided if she wants you alive for it.” Franz tried not to react in any way before Marx’s harsh assessment. It was all too possible that it was a test, and any sign of weakness might determine the outcome. “I obey and I labor for the unborn,” he said mildly, working on the ammunition case. “Hmm. The power charge on this one is low. How old is this box?” The big guided antipersonnel rounds needed a trickle charge of power while they were on the shelf — the biggest drawback of smart weapons was the maintenance load.

“It’s in date. Anyway, we’ll be using them soon enough.” I could defect, he told himself. All I’d have to do is tell the Captain what’s happening — Except he didn’t know who else might be involved. All he knew about was Portia’s team, and Mathilde’s group. There might be others. Restart. If I defect — Erica would be dead forever, or doomed to resurrection beneath the hostile scrutiny of an angry god. Even if he could get his hands on the package of souls Portia was carrying for the Propagators, he had no easy way of instantiating Erica’s mind, let alone growing her a new body. That was privileged technology within the Directorate, ruthlessly controlled by the Propagators for their own purposes, and expensive and rare outside it. And if Hoechst is telling the truth — there were worse things to be than a DepSec’s serf. Much worse.

“Ah, Franz.” A warm voice, behind him. He forced himself to focus on what his hands were doing — pick, load, pick, load. She doesn’t mean anything, he thought. “Come with me. I’ve got a little job for you.”

He found himself standing up almost without willing it, like a sleepwalker. “I’m ready.”

“Hah! So I see.” Hoechst beckoned toward one of the side doors opening off her suite. “Over here.”

He followed her over and she opened the door of what he’d taken for a closet. Spot on: it was indeed a closet. With a chair in it, straps dangling from the armrests and front legs.

“What’s this?” he asked, heart thudding.

“Got a little job for you.” Hoechst smiled. “I’ve been studying this love phenomenon, and it has some interesting applications.” Her smile slipped. “It’s a pity we can’t just work our way through the passengers until we have the girl, then puppetize her and force her to comply.” She shook her head. “But whoever’s behind her almost certainly took precautions. So we’ll have to do this the old-fashioned way.”

“The old—” Franz stopped. “What do you mean?”

Hoechst pulled out a tablet and tapped it. A video loop started cycling, just a couple of seconds showing its target waving at someone off-screen. “Him.” She pointed at the face. “I’m giving you Marx and Luna. While everyone else is executing Plan Able, you will go to his cabin and bring him here. Undamaged, to the extent possible. I want a bargaining chip.”

“Hmm.” Franz shrugged. “Wouldn’t it be easier simply to force her?”

“This is force, of a kind.” Hoechst grinned at him. “Don’t you recognize it?” The grin vanished. “She has a history of evading capture, Franz. Kerguelen was not entirely negligent: he was up against experience. I’ve been reading U. Scott’s field files, predigested raw transcripts, not the pap he was content with. She won’t dodge me.”

“Ah,” Franz said faintly. “So what do you want me to do with him?”

“Just snatch him and bring him here while I’m dealing with the rest of the ship. If he cooperates, he and the girl can both be allowed to live — that’s the truth, not a convenient fiction. Although they and the rest of the passengers will be sent for ReMastering when we arrive at Newpeace.”

“Got it.” Franz frowned. She’s going to ReMaster everyone on the entire ship? Is she planning on making it disappear? “Do you want anything else?”

“Yes.” Hoechst leaned close, until he could feel her breath on his cheek. “This is job number one for you. I’ve got another lined up after we dock with station eleven. It’s going to be fun!” She patted him on the back. “Cheer up. Only another three weeks to go, and we’ll be home again. Then, if you’re good, maybe we can see about giving you back your toy.”

Steffi stifled a yawn as she lowered herself into the chair at the head of the table in the dining room. An overlong shift spent poring over personnel movements with Rachel had left her bleary-eyed and wanting to throttle some of the more willfully persistent tourists. Having to follow that by stealing ten minutes to freshen up, then sitting at the head of a dining table for three or four hours of stroking the oversized egos of the more stupid upper-class passengers, was the kind of icing she didn’t need on her cake. But it’s better than being on the outside of the investigation, she told herself. And maybe she’d get some quality time with Max afterward; he was sitting up on the high table at the other side of the room, lofty but affable, everybody’s favorite picture of a senior officer. He’d need to blow off steam, too.

“Mind if I join you?” She looked round. It was Martin, the diplomatic spook’s right hand.

“By all means.” She managed a wan smile, keeping up appearances. Down the table, the middle-aged Nipponese woman smiled back at her, evidently mistaking its target, triggering an exchange of polite nods. By which time Martin was sitting to her left and idly scrolling through the menu. She looked around the table. It was half-empty. The troublesome kid was evidently eating in her room. So, come to think of it, were those creepy cultural exchange students from Tonto. Fucking stupid cover, she thought. A blind idiot could see there’s more to them than that. No such luck with the bankers, though.

“How’s your day been?” she asked quietly as the stewards collected the empty soup bowls. “I haven’t seen your wife in here — is she working?”

“Probably.” Martin winced and pinched the bridge of his nose. “She’s looking for someone, and she tends to overdo it when she’s got her teeth into something. I tell her to take some time off, it’ll make her more effective, but … I’ve spent all day interviewing tourists. It’s giving me a headache.”

“Did any of them have anything useful to say?” she asked.

“Not for the most part, no.”

Liar, she thought, tensing. What are you concealing?

The lighting strips lining the arched sculpture niches along the walls flickered, distracting her.

“’Scuse me.” Steffi raised her left hand and twisted her interface rings urgently, hunting the command channel. The lights aboard a starship never flickered without a reason — especially not aboard a luxury liner with multiple redundant power circuits. Steffi hadn’t felt any vibration, but that didn’t mean anything. The ship’s curved-space generators were powerful enough to buffer a steady thirty gees of acceleration, and absorb the jolt of any impact unless it was large enough to cause a major structural failure. “Bridge comm, Grace here. Bridge—” She frowned. “That’s odd.” She glanced across the room at Max. He was standing up, turning to step down off the raised platform of the high table. He caught her eye, jerked his chin toward the main entrance, then strode toward it. Across the room she saw stewards discreetly breaking off their tasks, disappearing in the direction of their emergency stations.

She caught up with Max a couple of meters down the hall. “Bridge isn’t answering.”

“I know.” He opened an unmarked side door. “Nearest emergency locker is — ah, here.” Yanking the yellow-and-black handle forward, he pulled out the crash drawer and handed her an emergency bag — rebreather hood, gloves, mul-titool, first-aid ’bots. “No callback.” He looked thoughtful. “One moment—”

“Already there.” Steffi had her tablet fully unfolded; she pasted it against the wall and tried to bring up the ship’s damage-control schematics. “Shit, why is it so slow? She stabbed at a local diagnostic pane. “There’s no bandwidth! Shipnet is down.”

“We’ve got lights, air, and gravity.” He looked thoughtful. “What’s out is data. Listen, it may just be a major network crash. Relativistics weren’t due to start jump spool-up for half an hour yet, so we’re probably okay if we sit tight. You’re not trained for this, so I want you to go back to the dining room and keep a lid on the passengers. Relay any orders you hear and keep your ears open and try to stay out of trouble until you’re needed. Meanwhile, I’m going to get some stewards together and go find out what’s happening. Bridge first, engineering control if the bridge is out … Your story for the passengers is that everything is under control, line crew is investigating and there’ll be an announcement in due course. Think you can handle it?”

“I’ll do my best.”

Steffi headed for the passenger corridor, sparing a glance behind her as he waved a hand at a crewman who’d appeared from one of the service spaces: “Hey, you! Over here, I’ve got a job for you right now…”

Everything seemed to be under control in the dining room. Steffi did a quick survey. The passengers were still wrapped up in conversation, not yet having noticed anything unusual. Small mercies … For a moment she considered leaving them in ignorance, but as soon as someone tried to check mail or call a friend they’d realize something was up.

She took a step up onto the platform supporting the high table. “Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention, please?”

Curious eyes turned toward her. “As some of you may have noticed, we’ve experienced a minor technical anomaly in the past few minutes. I’d like to assure you that the engineering crew are working on it, and there is no danger—”

The lights flickered for a moment, then went out. One or two stifled screams rose from the corners of the room — then the lights came back on. And with them a stranger’s voice, amplified, over the passenger liaison circuit, its tone calm and collected: “We regret to inform you that there has been a minor problem with the propulsion and engineering control center. There is no cause for alarm. Everything is under control, and we will be diverting to a nearby port rather than proceeding directly to New Prague. WhiteStar Line will announce a compensation package for your inconvenience in due course. In the meantime, we would appreciate it if you would return to your cabins and stay there until further notice. When the passenger liaison network is back up, please do not hesitate to use it to contact one of our team. We’re here to help you.”

Rachel was looking for Wednesday in the mostly-deserted D deck lounges when the gadget went off under the bridge. The bridge was on E deck. It was separated from D deck by two pressure bulkheads, a structural truss, and an electrograv ring designed to even out tidal surges, so the immediate blast effect was lost on her.

Martin had called her a couple of hours earlier, full visual via an office cam. “It checks out and it stinks like a month-dead cheese,” he insisted. “She’s a Moscow survivor, someone’s been trying to abduct or kill her, she was at the embassy reception when you were — oh, and there’s something else.”

His cheek twitched. He was about as agitated as she’d ever seen him get. “What else?” she demanded, annoyed with herself for going after such a transparent hook.

“She’s got a friend called Herman, and he’s why she’s here.” Martin shut up. She stared at him through the magic mirror in her visual field.

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope. Frank didn’t know any more — but I mean, hit me with the clue bat, right?”

“Oh shit.” She’d had to lean against the wall. “Did she pass anything else on to you?” She’d gone dizzy for a moment, as things dropped into place. Herman was the cover name an agent of the Eschaton had used to contact Martin, paying him to run obscure errands — errands that had emergent side effects that shook the chancelleries of a dozen worlds. Herman was only really interested in human beings when they tried to build time machines, violate causality, experiment with forbidden weapons. Moscow had died when, entirely without warning, its star had exploded. Which just didn’t happen, not to G-type dwarf stars in the middle of the main sequence of their life cycles.

“Yes. Maybe it’s a coincidence, and then again maybe there’s a large pig on final approach to the main docking bay — see the reaction control clusters on each flank? Herman said it was something to do with the ReMastered group aboard this ship and that they’re going to pull something after the first jump. Tonight, in other words. Rachel, I am not happy. This—”

“Stop. Let’s not go there right now.” She shook her head. “I need to find the girl before whoever’s looking for her catches up with us. Send me her details?”

“Sure.” Martin shuffled the rings on his left hand, and her tablet bleeped, then threw up a picture — young-looking physio, dark hair built up in an outrageous swirl, eye shadow like midnight. “Hard to miss. You’ll probably find her with Frank the journalist; they seem to be personally involved. Oh, she’s as young as she looks, too, so go easy on her.”

Rachel frowned pensively. “Don’t worry about me, worry about her. You go and have a word with the Captain — tell her we’re expecting some kind of trouble from a group of passengers. If necessary, tell her exactly who — but don’t tell her where the warning came from. There might be a leak in the crew. Besides which, if we overreact, we might not have a chance to learn anything…”

“Happy hunting.” He’d smiled at her until she cut the call. And that was why she came to be prowling past nine-tenths empty lounges and casually eyeballing the few passengers who were out in public, chatting, drinking, or schmoozing in the overstuffed furniture that seemed to be a WhiteStar trademark. Wednesday seemed to have vanished, along with her new boyfriend, and neither of them were carrying their locater badges. Damn these privacy freaks, anyway! Nowhere did she see a skinny girl with spiky hair and a serious luminosity deficiency, or a journalist built like a silverback gorilla.

Two hours after she’d begun, Rachel had combed decks G through D, making a pass around each circle corridor and checking every single public room, and she was getting frustrated. Where on earth can she have gotten to? she asked herself. Leaving a message on Wednesday’s voice mail didn’t seem to have gotten anywhere. It was getting to the point where she had half a mind to raise things with Steffi, see if the crew couldn’t do the job more efficiently: if only she could eliminate all the crew from the suspects list -

The luminous ceiling tiles flickered briefly, and the world filled with multicolored static. A vast silence went off inside her head. Rachel felt herself fatting and tried to raise her arms to protect herself. Vertigo! She hit the deck bruisingly hard and rolled sideways, her vision flickering. The static was slow to clear, leaving a line of bleeding ghost trails across her retinas. Rachel caught her breath, dizzy with fright, then realized that it wasn’t her eyesight: her intraocular displays had crashed and were rebooting. “Shit!” She glanced around. The skinny guy sitting in the leather sofa next to the upright piano in the Gold Lounge was frowning, rolling his rings around his fingers as if puzzled by something. Rings — Rachel twisted her own master ring, spun through diagnostic menus until she came to the critical one. EMP burst, said her event log. Kilovolts and microamps per meter: someone had just dumped a huge electromagnetic pulse through the walls. There was a faint tang of ozone in the air. The fast fuses in her MilSpec implants had saved them, but the other passengers -

“Oh shit!” She picked herself up and lurched drunkenly into the corridor. “Get me Martin.” Service unavailable. “Hell and damnation.” No surprise there. Why no sirens? She glanced around hastily, looking for an emergency locker — they’d be tastefully concealed aboard a liner, but they’d still be there — Why no partitions? The fail-safe doors ought to be descending if something bad had happened. A chilly claw of fear tugged at her. “Shit, time to get moving…”

The small boy in one corner of the lounge was walking toward her. “Hey, ma’am? My gamescape just flaked on me—”

She cast the kid a sickly smile. “Not now,” she said, then did a double take: “Why don’t you go to your room and tell your folks about it? They’ll be able to help you.” EMP / crashed implants and amusements / assassin traveling incognito / teen from Moscow being hunted / Eschaton involved / war crimes — she had a nagging sense that a shoe had just dropped hard, an enormous boot with a heel stuffed with plutonium or weaponized anthrax or gray goo or something equally apocalyptic, and she’d misinterpreted it as the sound of one hand clapping. Something like that. She broke into a trot, heading for the next radial. Got to find the damage-control point, she told herself, find out what’s going on—

She dodged a couple of confused passengers who seemed to be looking for someone. She sported an anonymous gray side door into crew country and tried to open it. It refused to recognize her until she got tired of waiting and twisted the black-and-yellow emergency handle: from beyond it she could hear distant, muted sirens. The auxiliary lighting circuit had tripped, and the walls shed a lurid shadowless glow. “Send to Martin, off-line by best emergency mesh routing,” she subvocalized to her personal assist, mumbling at her rings. “Martin, if you get this message, we’re in deep shit. Something—” she turned a corner, followed signs for the G deck ops center — “big is going down, and I think we’re sitting on the target.” The ops center door was open ahead, a couple of crew just visible in the gloom inside doing something. One of them glanced at her, then stepped forward. “I think—”

She stopped dead, eyes wide, as the public address system came on: “We regret to inform you that there has been a minor problem with the propulsion and engineering control center…”

The man blocking the doorway was pointing an autonomous rifle at her. Rachel froze as it tracked her, snuffling slightly, its barrel pointing right at her face. “Who are you and what are you doing here?” he demanded.

“I, uh—” She stopped, heart hammering. “I was looking for a steward?” she asked, her voice rising in an involuntary squeak. She began to take a step back, then froze as the man tensed. He had blond hair, brown eyes, and pale skin: he was built with the sparse, muscular grace of a dancer or martial artist — or special forces, she realized. Even a cursory glance told her she wouldn’t stand a chance if he decided to shoot her; the gun was some kind of smart shotgun/grenade launcher hybrid, probably able to fire around corners and see through walls. “My rings stopped working — What’s this about help?” she asked, doing her best to look confused. It wasn’t hard.

“There has been a minor accident,” the goon said, sounding very calm but clipping his words: “Return to your cabin. Everything is under control.” He stopped and stared at her coolly.

“Uh, yeah, under control, I can see that,” Rachel muttered, backing away from him. He made no move to follow her, but simply stood in the doorway watching as she turned and walked back toward passenger country. Her skin crawled as if she could feel the gun watching the small of her back, eager to discharge. When she was far enough away she gave in to the impulse to run — he’d probably expect no less of a frightened passenger. Just as long as he didn’t realize how good her night vision was. Good enough to have seen the woman slumped over the workstation in the gloom behind him. Good enough to have seen the other woman working on her back with something that looked disturbingly like a mobile neurosurgery toolkit.

Under control. “Shit,” she mumbled, fumbling with the door and noticing for the first time that her hands were shaking. Bad guys in G deck damage-control center, infoweapons in passenger country, what else do I need? The door banged shut behind her. She shook her head. Hijackers—

She turned toward the central atrium, meaning to take the old-fashioned staircase back up to her room in search of Martin. She took a single step forward, and the dark-haired girl ran into her.

The air in the flight deck stank of blood, ozone, and feces. The desks and equipment racks around the room looked as if someone had run them through a scrap metal press; anything that wasn’t bolted down had fallen over and shattered, hard, including the bridge officers unlucky enough to be in the room when the gadget had gone off. Bodies bent at strange angles lay beneath broken chairs or lay splayed across the floor, leaking.

Portia wrinkled her nose in distaste. “This really won’t do,” she insisted. “I want this mess cleared up as soon as we’ve got the surveillance net locked down. I want it to look like we’ve been in charge all along, not as if we just butchered the flight crew.”

“Boss.” Jamil nodded. He glanced at the front wall-screen, which had ripped away from the bulkhead and slumped into a thin sheet across the floor. “What about operational capacity?”

“That’s a lower priority. We’ve got the auxiliary bridge, we’ll run things from there for now.” She pulled a face. “On second thoughts, before you tidy up get someone to reclaim anything they can get out of these.” She stared at an officer who lay on the floor, her neck twisted and skull flattened. “Obviously, I don’t expect total uploads.”

“Thirty gees for a hundred milliseconds is about the same as falling off a fifteen-story building,” Marx volunteered.

“So she didn’t have a head for heights.” Hoechst’s cheek twitched. “Get going.”

“Yes, boss.” He hurried off to find someone with a neural spike.

As he left, Portia’s phone rang. She raised the archaic rubbery box to her head. “Control, sitrep. Ah … yes, that’s good. Is he all right? Fully programmed? Excellent, get him in front of a screen as soon as you get into the liaison router, we need to reassure the passengers there’s a real officer in charge … What’s the structural load-out like? How high did the surge … all right. Right. Good, I’m glad you told me. Yes, tell Maria to detain any other members of the crew who reach D-con on decks G through C … Yes, that’s what I meant. I want any line officers who survived identified and segregated immediately. Stash them in the C deck D-con center for now and report back when you’ve got them all accounted for. Be discreet, but in event of resistance shoot first: the unborn god will know his own … Yeah, you, too. Over.” She turned and nodded to Franz. “Right. Now it’s your turn. I take it the girl isn’t in her cabin?”

Franz straightened up. “She’s missing. Her tag says she’s there, but it looks like she fooled it deliberately and her own implants aren’t compatible with these damn Earth-standard systems. One of the ship’s junior officers was searching for her — I think she’s gone to ground.” He delivered his little speech with an impassive face, although his stomach tensed in anticipation of Hoechst’s wrath.

“That’s all right,” she said mildly, taking him by surprise. “What did I tell you to expect earlier? Just keep an eye open for her. Mathilde’s crew is configuring the passenger access points to work as a mesh field for celldar, and she’ll have the entire ship under surveillance in a few hours. Now, what about the other one?”

“Taken, as per your orders. He’d returned to his room for some reason. Marx took him down with no problems, and we’ve got him stashed in the closet.”

“Good. When the kid surfaces you can let her know we’ve got him, and what will happen to him if she doesn’t cooperate.” She looked pensive. “In the meantime, I want you to go and pay off the clown. Right away.”

“The clown,” Franz repeated. The clown? That was okay by him. No ethical dilemmas there, nothing to lose sleep over …

“Yes.” She nodded. A muscle in her left cheek jumped. “Bring me the head of Svengali the clown.”

“I don’t have a spike—”

“No reclaim,” she said firmly. She gave a delicate shudder of distaste. “There are some things that even the unborn god should be protected from.”

“But that’s final! If you kill him without reclaiming his soul—”

“Franz.” She stared at him coldly.

“Boss.”

She tilted her head to one side. “Sometimes I think you’re too soft for this job,” she said thoughtfully. “Are you?”

“Boss! No.” He took a deep breath. “I have been slow to adjust to your management style. I will adapt.” That’s right, gnaw your own leg off.

She nodded slightly. “See that you do.”

“Yes.”

He knew when he was being dismissed. Bring me the head of Sven the clown. Well, if that was what she wanted, he’d do it. But the thought of killing the guy and not offering him the last rite was … tasteless? No, worse than that. Taste was a value judgment. This was final, a total extinction. The boss had said: There are some things the unborn god should be protected from. Meaning, memories that must never be mapped and archived for posterity lest the machineries of heaven expose the machinations of mortals who might arrive on the unborn god’s doorstep exposed to criticism. Shit stank, and the unborn god must be born pure, once the abominably abhuman Eschaton was destroyed.

Franz paused just outside the bridge door and took a deep breath of pure filtered air that didn’t stink of carnage. Samow’s localized EMP bomb had blipped a massive current surge through the facilities deck below the bridge, accessed via a storage locker. It had overloaded the superconducting electrograv ring under the bridge, temporarily exposing everything above it — as far as the next deck and the next ring — to the bone-splintering drag of the ship’s full thirty gees of acceleration for a fraction of a second. Meanwhile, Jamil and one of the trusted strike team goons had taken the training room, slaved to the bridge systems and doubling as an emergency bridge during the run-up to the ship’s first jump. The officer on duty hadn’t understood quite what was happening at first; Kurt had pithed and puppetized him, and that was their biometric token sorted.

Now they were about three light years off course, crunching on the second jump of the series of four that the nav team had knocked together for them aboard the Heidegger. It was a calculated risk, taking over a liner under way, but so far it had worked well. The window of opportunity for the passengers and crew to do something about them was closing rapidly, and when Mathilde finished installing the ubiquitous surveillance software on the ship’s passenger liaison network it would be locked down tighter than a supermax prison.

Portia’s planning had placed a platoon of special forces troops aboard the liner even before she arrived with her team of spooks and specialists. All they really needed was to take a bridge room, the drive engineering spaces, a couple of damage-control centers, and central life support. Once they could track everybody’s movements through walls and floors, and remotely lock the doors or cut off the air supply if they didn’t like what they were seeing, the ship would be theirs. Which left Franz facing a dilemma.

There was no way Hoechst was going to let him run away. In fact, she’d probably kill him or send him for reimplementation as soon as look at him, once the Romanov arrived at Newpeace. It was stupid to expect her to grow a new body for Erica: that was a privilege even Director-level officials were rarely granted. If he could steal the memory diamond containing her reclaimed state vector and genetic map, then find some way to reach a polity where downloading and cloning weren’t instruments of state under control of the technotheocracy, he might be able to do something … but how likely was that? She’s dead, and I’m fucked, he told himself coldly. All I can hope for is to try to convince Portia I’m a willing servant—

He made his way along the radial corridor, empty of all human traffic (Jordaan’s messing with the access permissions had locked almost all the crew out of the service tunnels for the duration of the takeover) and caught a crew elevator up to A deck and Hoechst’s command suite. When the door opened for him, one of Mathilde’s troops shoved a gun at him. “What do you want?”

“Got a job to do for the boss.” He stepped inside and the door slid shut behind him. “Is Mathilde here?”

“No.” The guard lowered his gun, went back to his position next to the door. “What do you need?”

“I need to use the ubiq tap as soon as everything’s installed. That, and I’d like to draw a sidearm and a neural spike. Boss wants a loose end tied off.”

“Uh-huh.” The soldier sounded vaguely amused. “Ferris will sort you out.”

The main room was a mess. Someone had been digging into the floor, opening up crawl spaces and installing a loom of cables that ran to a compact signal-processing mainframe squatting on the remains of what had once been a very expensive dressing table. Three or four techs were hunched over various connectors or blinking and gesturing at the air, shepherding their mobile code around the ship’s passenger liaison net. Another soldier was busy with a ruggedized communications console, very low-tech but entirely independent of the shipboard systems. She looked up as Franz came in. “What do you want?”

“Crewman” — he consulted his implant — “4365, Svengali Q., no last name, occupation, entertainments specialist, subtype juvenile. I need to know where he is. And I need to draw a gun.”

“Crewman 4365,” she drawled, “is currently locked in—” she frowned. “No. He’s down on H deck, radial four, orange ring, in the second-class dining area doing…” Her brow wrinkled. “What’s a ‘birthday party’?”

“Never mind. Is he scheduled there for much longer?”

“Yes, but there are other passengers—”

“That’s all right.” Franz glanced around. “Now, about a handgun.”

“Over there. Boss’s bedroom, there’s a crate by the sleeping platform. Uh-oh, incoming call.” She was back at her console without a second glance.

Portia’s bedroom was a mess. Discarded equipment cases were scattered across the floor, the remains of a half-eaten meal cooling on the pillows. Franz found the crate and rummaged in it until he found a carton that contained a machine pistol and a couple of factory-packed magazines loaded with BLAMs. He held the gun to his forehead for long enough for its tiny brain to handshake with his implants, and upload its recent ballistic performance record and a simple aiming network. Franz didn’t much like carrying a gun; while he knew how to use one, having to do so in his line of work would usually mean that his cover was blown and his job, if not his life, was over. He rummaged further, and despite Portia’s injunction, he took a neural spike. You never knew …

He was about to leave the room when he noticed something else. There was a pile of dirty clothing heaped on an open suitcase next to the bed. It looked like stuff the boss had been wearing earlier. He paused, momentarily curious. Would she? he wondered. Is it worth a look? Well yes, it was … probably. He glanced at the half-open door. There was nobody in sight. He knelt and ran his hands around the inside of the case, then the lid. He felt a lump in one side pocket. Cursing himself for his optimism, he unzipped the pouch and pulled out a small box. Then he stopped cursing. “Wow,” he breathed. He flipped the box open, then hastily closed it again, stood up, and shoved it into one hip pocket, then headed back into the reception room, his pulse pounding with guilty intent.

The box had contained a gemstone the size of his thumb, sitting atop a ceramic block studded with optical ports — the reader/writer head. It was memory diamond, atoms arranged in a lattice of alternating carbon 12 and carbon 13 nuclei: the preferred data storage format for the unborn god’s chosen few. Dense and durable, twelve grams was enough to store a thousand neural maps and their associated genome data. This was Hoechst’s soul repository, where the upload data from anyone she terminated in the course of service would be stored until they could be archived by the Propagators, against the day when the unborn god would be assembled and draw upon the frozen imprints. Such careless concealment in a piece of nondescript luggage had to be deliberate; probably she’d decided the ship’s strong room was too obvious a target. It was a symbol of her authority, of her power of life after death over those who served her. He could expect no mercy if she found him in possession of it. But if he could dig a single stored mind out of it and put it back, he’d be fine. And that was exactly the prospect that had his hands sweating and his heart pounding with pity and fear … and hope.

Nobody paid any attention as he slipped back into the dayroom. “I’m going down to drop in on my target,” he told the comms specialist. “Got a field phone?”

“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.”