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.”

“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.”

“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.”