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.”