Iron Sunrise (47 page)

"Your attention, please. Passenger liaison is now fully reconstructed and accepting requests. I am Lieutenant Commander Max Fromm, acting Captain. I would like to apologize for the loss of service. Two hours ago, a technical glitch in our drive control circuit exposed the occupants of the flight deck and other engineering spaces to a temporary overgee load. A number of the crew have been incapacitated. As the senior line officer, I have moved control to the auxiliary bridge, and we are diverting to the nearest station with repair facilities. We will arrive there in thirty-two hours and will probably be able to proceed on our scheduled voyage approximately two days later.

"I regret to inform you that it is believed that this incident may not have been accidental. It has been reported that our passenger manifest includes a pair of individuals belonging to a terrorist group identified with revanchist Muscovite nationalism. Crew and deputies drawn from the ReMastered youth leadership cadre aboard this vessel are combing the ship as I speak, and we expect to have the killers in custody shortly. In the meantime, the privacy blocks provided by WhiteStar for your comfort are being temporarily suspended to facilitate the search.

"Please stay in your cabins if at all possible. Please enable your communications nodes at all times. Before leaving your cabins, please contact passenger liaison and let us know why. I will announce the all clear in due course, but your cooperation would be appreciated while the emergency is in effect."

"Corpsefuckers!" Wednesday stood up and paced over to the main door, like a restless cat. "What do they—"

"Anita," Rachel said warningly.

Wednesday sighed. "Yes, Mom?"

Martin finished shoving the big diplomatic fab trunk up against the panels and turned round. She's got the exasperated adolescent bit down perfectly, he noted approvingly. And she'd managed to change her appearance completely. Her hair was a mass of blond ringlets and she'd switched from black leather and tight leggings to a femme dress that rustled when she moved. The bows in her hair made her look about five years younger, but the pout was the same, and with the work Rachel had done on her cheeks and fingerprints—let's just hope they crashed the liaison system hard enough that they don't pay too much attention to the biometric tags, he thought grimly. Because—

"Sit down, girl. You're making me dizzy."

"Aw, Mom!" She pulled a face.

Rachel pulled a face right back. "We need to look like a family," she'd pointed out half an hour earlier, while Martin was walling Steffi and a three-day supply of consumables into the priest's hole. "There's a chunk of familial backbiting, and a chunk of consistency, and we want you to look as unlike the Victoria Strowger they're hunting for as possible. Wednesday wears black and is extremely spiky. So you're going to wear pink, and be fluffy and frilly. At least for a while."

"Three fucking days?" Wednesday complained.

"They've crashed the liaison network," Rachel pointed out, "and crashed it hard. That's the only edge we've got, because when they bring it up again they'll be able to configure it as celldar—every ultrawideband node in the ship's corridors and staterooms will be acting as a teraherz radar transmitter. With the right software loaded into the nodes they'll be able to see right through your clothing, in the dark, and track you wherever you go to within millimeters. We have to act as if we're under surveillance the whole time once the net comes back up, because if they're remotely competent—and they must be if they've just hijacked a liner with complete surprise—it'll give them total control over the ship and total surveillance over everybody they can see."

"Except someone hidden at the back of a closet inside a Faraday cage,"

Martin murmured as he slotted another panel into place, still stinking of hot plastic and metal from the military fabricator's output hopper.

"Yes, Mom." Wednesday paced back to the armchair and dropped into it in a sea of lace. "Do you think they'll—"

The door chimed—then opened without pause. "Excuse us, sir and ladies."

Three crewmen walked in without waiting, wearing the uniforms and peaked caps of the purser's office. The man in the lead had a neatly trimmed beard and dead eyes. "I am Lieutenant Commander Fromm and I apologize for the lack of warning. Are you Rachel Mansour? And Martin Springfield?" He spoke like an automaton, voice almost devoid of inflection, and Martin noted a bruise near the hairline on his left temple, almost concealed by his cap.

"And our daughter Anita," Rachel added smoothly. Wednesday frowned and looked away from the men, scuffing the carpet with her boot soles.

"Anita Mansour-Springfield?"

Fromm looked momentarily blank, but one of the men behind him checked a tablet: "That's what it says here, sir."

"Oh." Fromm still looked vacant. "Do you know of a Victoria Strowger?" he said stiffly.

"Who?" Rachel looked politely puzzled. "Is that the terrorist you're looking for?"

"Terr-or-ist." Fromm nodded stiffly. "If you see her, report to us immediately.

Please." His eyes looked red, almost bloodshot. Martin peered at him intently. He isn't blinking! he realized. "I must revalidate your diplomatic credentials. Please. Your passports."

"Martin?" Rachel looked at him. "Would you fetch Commander Fromm our papers, please?" She remained seated on the chaise longue at the side of the dayroom, a picture of languor.

"All right." He walked over to the closet, throwing the doors wide, and retrieved the passports from the briefcase on top of the fab without turning on the closet light. Let them get a glimpse of a cluttered closet with no room for anyone to hide … "We should like you to withdraw surveillance from this suite," he added, as he handed the passports over. "And as soon as she's up to it, I'd like you to convey my best wishes for a speedy recovery and a happy code red to Captain Hussein. I'd like to see her when she's got time, if possible."

"I am sure Captain Hussein will see you," Fromm said slowly, and passed the passports to one of the other two officers for a check.

Captain Nazma Hussein is almost certainly dead, Martin realized, the cold hand of fear tickling his guts. And you should know what a diplomatic code red means. He forced a smile. "Are the papers in order?"

"Yes," the man behind Fromm said curtly. "We can go now."

Fromm turned round without a word and marched out the door. The two other men followed him. The one who'd checked their papers paused in the doorway. "If you hear anything, please call us," he said curtly. "We're from the ReMastered race, and we're here to help you."

The door clicked shut. Wednesday was on her feet almost immediately.

"You fuckmonsters! I'm going to rip your heads off and shit down your necks! I—"

"Anita!" Rachel was on her feet, too. She grabbed Wednesday's shoulders swiftly and held her. "Stay calm."

Martin walked in front of her and held up an archaic paper notepad and a tiny stub of pencil, TERAHERZ CELLDAR SIGNAL IN HERE, he scribbled twitchily in small letters, REZ ONE CM. SOUND TOO. CANT READ

XPRESSNS, CAN C GESTRS, SOLID OBJECTS IN POCKETS, GUNS.

"What's—" Wednesday gasped, then leaned her head against Rachel's shoulder. Rachel embraced her. She sobbed, the sound muffled. Rachel stroked the back of her neck slowly, CAPTAIN DEAD, FROMM

REMASTERED ZOMBI.

"I'm not sure I believe this," Rachel said quietly. "It's awful, isn't it?"

Wednesday nodded wordlessly, tears flowing.

"Looks like they lost the liaison network completely," Martin observed, looking away. What set that off? he wondered. Her family? He wanted to be able to speak freely, to tell her that the scum who'd done it weren't going to get away, but he also wondered how true any such reassurance would be.

"On the bright side, they revalidated our passports." Including the one in the name of Anita, with Wednesday's face and biometric tags pasted in.

"Liaison," he said, raising his voice, "what's this station we're putting into for repairs?"

The liaison network took a moment to reply. Its voice was slightly flatter than it had been the day before. "Our repair destination is portal station eleven, Old Newfoundland. This station is not approved for passenger egress. Do you require further assistance?"

"That will be all," Martin said, his voice hollow.

"Old Newfie?" Wednesday asked incredulously, raising her tear-streaked face from Rachel's shoulder. "Did you hear that? We're going to Old Newfie!"

Thirty-two hours:

They stayed in their suite as instructed, forcing small talk and chitchat to convey the impression of familial claustrophobia. Wednesday milked her role for all it was worth—her adolescent histrionics had a sharp edge of bitterness that made Martin fantasize about strangling her after a while, or at least breaking character sufficiently to give her a good tongue-lashing.

But that wasn't on the cards. His book-sized personal assist, loaded with nonstandard signal-processing software, showed him some curious patterns in the ambient broadband signals, worryingly tagged sequential pulse trains.

"I'm bored," Wednesday said fractiously. "Can't I go out?"

"You heard what the officer said, dear," Rachel responded for about the fourth time, face set in a mask of unduly tried patience. "We're diverting somewhere for repairs, and they want to keep the common spaces clear for access." Wednesday scribbled furiously on Martin's paper notepad: OLD

NEWF LIFE/SUPP DOWN HEAVY RAD. Rachel blinked. "Why don't you just watch another of those antique movies or something?"

WORRIED ABOUT FRANK.

Martin glanced up from his PA. "Nothing to gain by worrying, Anita," he murmured: "They've got everything under control, and there's nothing we can do to help."

"Don't want to watch a movie."

"Sometimes all you can do is try and wait it out," Rachel said philosophic

"When events are out of your control, trying to force them your way is counterproductive."

"That sounds like bullshit to me, Mom." Wednesday's eyes narrowed.

"Really?" Rachel looked only half-amused. "Let me give you an example then, a story about my, uh, friend the bomb disposal specialist. She was called out of a meeting one day because the local police had been called in to reckon with a troublesome artist … "

Wednesday sighed theatrically, then settled down to listen attentively. She seemed almost amused, as if she thought Rachel was spinning these stories out of whole cloth, making them up on the spur of the moment. If only you knew, thought Martin. Still, she was putting on a good act, especially under the stressful circumstances. He'd known more than a few mature adults who'd have gone to pieces under the pressure of knowing that the ship had been taken by hijackers, and they were the target of the operation. If only …

He shut down his PA's netlink and scribbled a note on it, leaving it where she'd spot it when Rachel finished, WHY OLD NEWF? "Anyway, here's the point. If my friend had tried to rush the crazy, she'd have triggered the bomb's defense perimeter. Instead she just waited for him to open up a loophole. He did it himself, really. That's what I mean by waiting, not forcing.

You keep looking at the door. Was there something you were thinking of doing out there?"

"Oh, I just need to stretch my legs," she said disingenuously. It wasn't as if she hadn't been pacing up and down the floor every half hour as it was.

"Maybe p look at the bridge, if they'll let me in, or see things. I think I left some of my stuff somewhere and I ought to get it back." She caught his eye and he nodded minutely.

LEFT STUFF OLD NEWF? "What did you lose?"

"Oh, it was my shoulder bag, you know the leather one with the badge on top And some paper I was scribbling on. I think it was somewhere near the, um, purser's office. And there was a book in it."

"We'll see about getting it back later," Rachel said, glancing up from her tablet. "Are you sure you didn't leave it in the closet?" she asked.

"Quite sure, Mom," Wednesday said tightly, B-BLOCK TOILET BY POLICE

STATION—GOVMNT BACKUP DISK.

Martin managed not to jump out of his skin. "It was quite expensive, as I recall." He raised an eyebrow.

"One of a kind." Wednesday blinked furiously. "I want it back before someone else finds it," she said, forcing a tone of spoiled pique.

Trying to figure it out, whatever it was that Wednesday had stashed near the police station in Old Newfie, was infuriating, but he didn't dare say so openly while they might be under surveillance. The combination of ultrawideband transceivers, reprogrammed liaison network nodes, and speech recognition software had turned the entire ship into a panopticon prison—one where mentioning the wrong words could get a passenger into a world of pain. Martin's head hurt just thinking about it, and he had an idea from her tense, clipped answers to any questions he asked her that Rachel felt the same way.

They made it through a sleepless night (Wednesday staked out the smaller room off to one side of the suite for herself) and a deeply boring breakfast served up by the suite's fab. Everything tasted faintly of plasticizers, and sometime during the night the suite had switched over to its independent air supply and life support—a move that deeply unsettled Martin.

Wednesday was monopolizing the bathroom, trying to coax something more than a thin shower out of the auxiliary water-purification system, when a faint tremor rattled the floor, and the liaison system dinged for attention.

Martin looked up instinctively. "Your attention please. We will be arriving at our emergency repair stop in just over one hour's time. Due to technical circumstances beyond our control, we would appreciate it if all passengers would assemble in the designated evacuation areas prior to docking. This is a precautionary measure, and you will be allowed to return to your cabins after arrival. Please be ready to move in fifteen minutes' time."

The bathroom door popped open, emitting a trickle of steam and a bedraggled-looking Wednesday: "What's that about?" she asked anxiously.

"Probably nothing." Rachel stared at her and blinked rapidly, a code they were evolving for added emphasis—or negation. "I think they just want us where they can keep an eye on us."