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 …