Iron Sunrise (48 page)

"Oh, so it's nearly over," Wednesday said heavily. "Do you think we should do it?"

"I think we all ought to play our parts, Anita," Rachel emphasized. "Might be a good idea to get dressed, too. They might want us to go groundside"—blink blink—"and we ought to be prepared."

"Oh goody." Wednesday pulled a face. "It'll be freezing! I'll wear my coat and trousers." And she vanished back into the bathroom.

"Think she'll be all right?" Martin asked.

Rachel slowly nodded. "She's bearing up well so far." She scribbled hastily on her notepad: COMM CENTER? CAUSAL CHANNELS? R-BOMBS?

"Well, we ought to go and see what they want, shouldn't we?" he asked.

"Let me just get my shoes on."

BACKUPS

"Y'know, it's funny. For years I've had this recurring dream, nightmare, what the fuck. I'd be going about my life just like normal, when suddenly they'd be there. In the background, just—running things. Business as usual, same as it ever is. And I'd shit myself and go to the port and buy a ticket to, like, anywhere else. And I'd get on the ship and they'd be there, too, and all the crew would be them. And then I'd get to wherever the ship was going, and it would be the same. And they'd be all around me and they'd, they'd … "

Frank's subvocalized monologue wavered. It was all he could do just then; after the ReMastered guy with the creepy eyes had told him what he wanted he'd put the block back. His throat and the back of his mouth felt anesthetized, his tongue huge and limp. They'd used much cruder restraints on his arms and legs, and his hands felt cold and hurt from poor circulation. If he hadn't seen worse, been through worse, back in the camps, he'd have been paralyzed with terror. But as things stood, what he felt most strongly was a terrible resignation and a sense of regret.

Wednesday, I should have got you off the ship as fast as possible. Can you forgive me? He kept circling back to the mistakes he'd made, the assumption of mediocrity on the part of her pursuers. Even after the bomb at the embassy reception, he'd told himself she ought to be safe aboard a liner under a neutral flag. And—he'd wanted to stay with her. He liked her; she was a breath of fresh air blown into a life that had lately been one damn editorial rant after another. When she'd asked him to drop in and jumped his bones as soon as he shut the door he could have said "no"

gracefully—if he'd wanted to. Instead, they'd given each other something to think about, and inadvertently signed each others' death warrants.

ReMastered.

Frank was under no illusions about what it meant, an unfamiliar voice announcing an emergency on board, then his stateroom door crashing open, a gun buzzing and clicking in his face. They'd stuck him with a needleful of cold darkness, and he'd woken up in this stultifying cubicle, trussed to a chair and aching, unable to speak. That moment of panic had been terrible, though it had passed: he'd thought his heart was going to give out. Then the crazy one had come with a diamond the size of a quail's egg, forced him to dry-swallow a king's ransom in memories and pain.

What are her chances? he wondered, trying to think about something other than his own predicament—which, at a guess, would end with a friendly smile and the wrong end of a cortical spike as their anxiously meticulous executioners raped away his free will and sense of self—by focusing on Wednesday. If she's with Martin or his partner, they might try to conceal her.

Or she could hide out somewhere. She's good at hiding. She'd hidden a lot from him; he'd only really figured out how lonely she was late in the game, when she'd burrowed her chin into the base of his neck and sobbed silently for ten minutes. (He'd felt like a shit, fearing he'd misread her mind and manipulated her into bed—until she'd taken his cock in her hand and whispered in his ear that she was crying at her own foolishness for waiting so long. And who, in the end, was he to deny her anything she wanted?) The regret he felt was not for himself; he'd already outlived his allotted time years ago, when the ReMastered spat him out like a squeezed pip to drift through the cosmos and begin another life elsewhere. He wasn't afraid for himself, he realized distantly, because he'd been here already—it wasn't a surprise, just a long-deferred horror. But he felt a simmering anger and bitterness that Wednesday was going to go through that, too, sooner or later, the night of darkness in an improvised condemned cell that would only end when the executioner switched on the lights and laid out her tools.

Hoechst stood at the back of the auxiliary bridge behind Jamil and Friedrich, watching as the husks of the two puppetized bridge officers maneuvered the Romanov in toward the darkened, slowly precessing space station.

Similar events would be unfolding in the engine control room above the drive kernel containment, where Mathilde was personally directing the engineering crew who had been selected for the privilege of serving the ReMastered. But the engineering spaces didn't have anything like the view that filled the front wall of the cramped secondary flight deck—the gigantic stacked wagon wheels of Old Newfie spinning in stately splendor before the wounded eye socket of eternity, a red-rimmed hollow gouged from the interstellar void by the explosion of Moscow Prime six years ago.

"Impressive, isn't it?" she asked Franz.

"Yes, boss." He stood beside her, hands clasped behind his back to conceal his nervousness.

"They did it to themselves." She shook her head slowly, almost disbelievingly. "With barely any prompting from U. Scott."

"How hot is it out there?" Franz asked nervously.

"Not too bad." Friedrich leaned past one of the zombies to examine a console display. "Looks to be about ten centiGrays per hour—you'd get sick in an hour or two if you went out there in a suit, but it's well within tolerances for the ship's shielding. And the station is probably all right, too, for short stays."

One of the puppets murmured something to the other, who leaned sideways and began working his way through a stack of thruster-control settings. Jamil had edited their parameters so that they thought they were alone on the bridge. They were completely focused on the docking maneuver.

"It's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen," Portia murmured, staring at the sheets of violet and red smoke that circled the shock ring of the star's death.

"And the most ugly." Her hands tightened on the back of the command pilot's seat. With a visible effort she tore her concentration back to the job at hand, and glanced at Franz. "Is the hostage ready? How about you? Are you clear on what you've got to do?"

"Yes, boss." Franz nodded, trying not to show any sign of emotion. She smiled at him, a superficially friendly expression that set his teeth on edge.

Part of him wanted to punch her in the face, to kick and bite and rip with his own hands until she stopped moving. Another part of him wanted to cast himself at her feet and plead for forgiveness. "We confine the passengers in the evacuation stations and dump the corridors to vacuum. Then I make the girl present herself and bring her to you and the others on the station.

Um, may I ask how we're evacuating?"

"You may." Portia stared at the screen pensively as the puppets muttered to each other, scheduled a course adjustment to nudge the multimegaton mass of the liner closer toward the docking tree at the hub of the enormous station. Methane tanks drifted huge and bulbous at the other end of the spindle, rimed with a carbon monoxide frost deposited by the passing shock wave that had swept over the station years before.

"Boss?" Franz asked nervously.

"The Heidegger will be arriving in a day and a half. We simply remove the puppets and disable the liner's flight-control network before we leave.

There's enough food aboard—with the resources on the station—to keep them alive for a couple of months, by which time we'll be able to send a cleanup team big enough to process them all. If they don't cooperate, the cleanup team can use the station for target practice: nobody will find out for decades. Once they're processed we can ship them off to one of the core worlds on the Romanov for reprocessing. This is as good a place to store them as any, don't you think?"

"But the records! If anyone finds them—"

"Relax, they won't. Nobody's been back here in years. The station's too uneconomical to recommission without a destination in mind, and too far off the track to be worth retrieving for scrap. All we have to do is retrieve the stolen records, send out the signals via the station manager's TALIGENT

channel, and configure the Romanov as a prison hulk for a couple of months."

"What if they—" Franz stopped.

"You were thinking about the missing bridge officer, weren't you?" Hoechst prodded. "Don't bother. She's a trainee, and she's clearly not up to taking back the ship on her own, wherever she's hiding out. We'll leave you a guard detachment after the Heidegger gets here, just to make sure they don't try anything silly." She smiled, broadly. "If you can turn your mind to thinking up creative ways to booby-trap the flight deck after we've docked, that would be a good thing."

Franz glanced at the screen and resisted the urge to rub his palms on his trousers. "You want me to stay behind, with the prisoners?" He asked.

"Not only that: I want you to oversee their processing." She stared at him, inspecting his face with minute interest. "If you do well, I'll take it as a sign that you are worth persisting with. I was impressed by the way you handled the clown, Franz. Keep me satisfied and it will be worth your while. Great rewards come to my willing supporters." Her smile faded, a sign that she was thinking dark thoughts. "Now I think it's time you winkled out the girl."

The evacuation assembly point for B deck was near the rim. A radial corridor ran out from it to an emergency airlock that breached the ship's inner hull. Worried passengers converged on it, some of them carrying bags stuffed with their essentials, others empty-handed. A few scattered stewards, harried and just as worried as the passengers, urged them along.

Wednesday trailed after Rachel, holding back just a little. "What do you think they're doing, Mom?" she asked. Mom? Who do you think you're kidding? she asked herself ironically. Every time she used the word she felt a tiny stab of betrayal, although it was unfair to Rachel; the woman from Earth had done far more for her than she'd had any reason to expect.

"I'm not sure." Rachel looked worried. "It's possible there's some trouble with the ship's systems, since the incident that injured the bridge crew—"

blink, blink.

Wednesday nodded and pulled a face, sighed theatrically. Am I looking bored yet? She glanced around. There weren't that many passengers: they were mostly first-class travelers, rich business travelers and minor aristocracy from those worlds that had such. Where's Frank? she wondered, searching frantically while trying not to be obvious about it. If I got him into this … I

"Excuse me? Where are we going?" a worried-looking man asked Rachel, plucking at her arm. "You see, nobody's told us any—"

"Don't worry." Rachel managed a forced smile. "We're just going to the evacuation station. It's only a precaution, doesn't mean they're going to evacuate us."

"Oh good." Still looking worried, he scampered ahead, leaving them in an island of quiet.

"Nervous?" Martin asked quietly, making Wednesday jump.

"Nervous?" She glared at him angrily. "If they've hurt—" They rounded the curve of the corridor and passed the red-painted crash doors recessed into the wall and blocking access to the airlock tube. The evacuation station was a circular open space about eight meters across, as crowded and nervous as a diplomatic cocktail party where the Ambassador had just announced his resignation. There was standing room only, and a couple of stressed-looking stewards holding their arms across the entrance to the evacuation airlock just in case some of the more skittish passengers decided to rush it for some reason.

"May I have your attention please?" A tall, blond man with hollows under his eyes called from one side of the room. "Would you mind clearing the inner pressure doors, please? That's right, if you could move into the room, we can get this over with cleanly."

Oh, shit! Wednesday tensed and ran her right thumb up the frogging she'd had her pressure-smart jacket grow. She'd dialed it into a turquoise tailcoat; it felt stiff and heavy, and simultaneously thin and vulnerable—stretched to cover more than its pressure limit, it'd be useless in an emergency depressurization. The whole idea of walking into an airlock when the bad guys had taken the ship struck her as the height of idiocy, even wearing her lacy white shalwar trousers over pressure leggings and boots—

But people behind her were pushing forward, and the doors back onto the corridor were dropping slowly down, sealing off her route back to the cabins.

"What's—" she began, but Martin gripped her hand.

"Wait," he said tensely.

"We have an announcement to make," the blond man called. "If I can have silence, please—that's better." He smiled thinly. "We're about fifteen minutes from docking with the repair station. When we do so, you may be asked to evacuate onto the port ring in good order. We won't know for sure if that will be necessary, or if you can return to your rooms, until after we dock. If you have to evacuate, try to do so in an orderly way—no pushing, give everybody room to move, keep walking once you hit the dockside until you reach the designated assembly area. Remember, this isn't a critical pressure evacuation. There's no risk that you'll end up breathing vacuum, and you don't need to run."

He looked around the room. There was a brief mutter of comment, but no dissent. "And now for another matter," he announced. "I've got a special message for Victoria Strowger, who I believe is in this room somewhere."

Wednesday jerked involuntarily, feeling Martin's fingers dig into her wrist.

"Your friend Frank is down on F deck. He sends his regards. As a rule we're trying to keep everyone together at their designated evacuation stations, but if you want to see your friend again, you can step forward now, and I'll take you there." His smile widened. "This is your only chance, I'm afraid. Once we dock it'll be too late."