“Oh.” Wednesday thought for a while. “So you want to clear everything up. Make it all better.”

“Yes.” Portia smiled brilliantly at her. “Would you like to help us? I stress that to do anything else would amount to complicity in genocide.”

Wednesday straightened up. “I suppose so,” she muttered with barely concealed ill grace. “If you promise this will put an end to it all, and nobody will get hurt?”

“You have my word.” Portia nodded gravely. “Shall we do it?”

Behind her, the one called Franz opened the door.

Darkness, stench, and a faint humming. Over the past two days, Steffi’s world had closed in with nightmarish speed. Now it was a rectangle two meters long, two meters high, and one meter wide. She shared it with a plastic bucket full of excrement, a bag of dry food, and a large water bottle. Most of the time she kept the torch switched off to conserve power. She’d spent some time trying to read, and she’d done some isometric exercises — careful to ensure there was no risk of kicking the bucket over — and spent some more time sleeping fitfully. But the boredom was setting in, and when she’d heard the announcement through the wall of her cell telling them to prepare for evacuation it had come as a relief. If the hijackers were off-loading the passengers, it meant there wouldn’t be anyone to get in her way when she did what had to be done.

A liner the size of the Romanov didn’t vibrate, didn’t hum, and didn’t echo when docking on to a station. In fact, any sound or vibration would be a very bad sign indeed, shock waves overloading the antisound suppressors, jolts maxing out the electrogravitics, supports buckling and bulkheads crumpling. But the closet Steffi had helped Martin build her false wall into adjoined the corridor, and after the muffled sound of a slamming door she’d heard faint footsteps, then nothing. The silence went on for an eternity of minutes, like the loudest noise she’d ever heard.

I’m going to get you, she repeated to herself. You’ve taken my ship, rounded up my fellow officers, and, and — An echo of an earlier life intruded: back-stabbing bastards. She wondered about Max, in the privacy of her head: he wasn’t likely to have avoided the hijackers, and they might think they could use him against her. If they even cared, if they knew who she was and what she could do. Fat chance. Steffi was grimly certain that nobody knew the truth about her — nobody but Sven, and if her partner and front man had talked, they’d have torn the ship apart to get their hands on her. Svengali knew things about Steffi — and she knew things about him — that would have gotten either of them a one-way trip into the judicial systems of a dozen planets if the other ever cut a deal. But Steffi trusted Svengali completely. They’d worked together for a decade, culminating in this insanely ambitious tour: wet-working their way across the galaxy, two political pest control operatives against an entire government-in-exile. The promised payoff would have been enough to see both of them into comfortable retirement, if the back-stabbing scumbags who were paying for the grand slam hadn’t panicked and hijacked the ship instead. And now, with the plans wrecked and Svengali quite possibly out of action, Steffi was seeing red.

After an hour of careful planning, she turned the torch on and put her ear to the closet wall. Nothing. “Here goes,” she mumbled to herself, picking up the box cutter Martin had left her. The tiles he’d had the fabricator spam out were rigid and hard to cut at first, stiffened by the fine copper wire mesh of the Faraday cage threading through them. She stabbed at one edge, then worked the blade through and began tugging it down from the top of her hideaway.

Grunting with effort, Steffi sawed a slit all the way down one side of the wall, then continued sideways at the bottom. Finally, she squatted and peeled the corner up toward her. Fumbling in the twilight she found her way out blocked by something solid. It brought it all home to her, and suddenly the stinking darkness seemed to close around her head like a fist. Gasping, she shoved as hard as she could, and the obstruction shifted.

A minute later she found the light switch in the closet. Well, that’s done it, she told herself, heart pounding and stomach fluttering with nervous anticipation. If they’re out there—

She opened the door. The suite was empty. “Huh.” She took three steps forward, into the dayroom, reveling in her sudden freedom to move, taking in deep breaths of the clean air — suddenly recognizing for what it was the fetor she’d spent more than a day immersed in. Glancing around, she saw the desk. There was some kind of notepad on it, paper covered with writing in dumb pigment. Frowning, she picked it up and began to read by torchlight.

ALL PASSENGERS MOVING TO EVAC STATIONS. ARRIVING OLD NEWFIE/STATION MOSCOW SYSTEM PERIPHERY HALF/HR. HELP? MAY BE EVAC’ING SHIP.

NOT TRUST LT. CDR. FROMM. THE REMASTERED GOOD AT CONTROLLING PEOPLE.FROMM IS A PUPPET. PL IS NOW A UBIQ. SURVEILLANCE NET. QUERY OFFICER’S PASS WORKING?

FEEL FREE TO USE THE FABRICATOR IN THE TRUNK. IT MAKES GOOD TOYS, YOU’VE GOT BLANKET RESOURCE ACCESS PERMISSIONS.

Steffi felt her knees go weak. The thing in the closet was a general purpose fabricator, a cornucopia machine? She forced herself to sit down for a moment and close her eyes. “Fuck!” she said softly. The possibilities were endless. Then she took a deep breath. Query officer bypass working. If the hijackers were aboard and had turned the liaison network into a surveillance grid, they already know about her. But if they had evacuated the ship, she might have a chance, especially if they’d left the line crew authorization system in place.

Steffi thrust her left hand into her pocket and pulled out her control rings. Sliding them onto her fingers one by one she mouthed the subvocal command to start up her interface. If they’re watching, they’ll be here any moment, she told herself. But nothing happened; the timer began to spiral in her visual field, and the twist of a ring told her that she had new mail, but there was no knock at the door.

Slowly, she felt the ghost of a grin rising to her face as she scrolled rapidly through the ship’s status reports. In dock, evacuation systems tripped, drive systems tripped, bridge systems shut down, life support on homeostatic standby. “Thought you’d nailed down all the loose ends, did you? We’ll see about that!” She turned back to the closet and leaned over the control panel of the fabricator. “Give me an index,” she snapped at it. “Show me guns. All the guns you can make…”

Old Newfie’s basic systems had continued to run while the radiation shock front swept over it. Humans might be gone, life support might be dead — algal ponds crashed, macroscopic plants killed, even the cockroaches fried by the kiloGray radiation pulse — but the multimegaton wheel continued to spin endlessly in the frigid void, waiting for an uncertain return.

Wednesday’s breath steamed in the darkness of the docking hub. One of Portia’s minions had rigged up floodlights around the boarding tube from the liner, and stark shadows cut across the gray floor toward the spin coupling zoner. Dim silhouettes drifted slowly round, rotating between the floor and cathedral-high ceiling over a period of minutes.

“Can you hurry it up a bit?” Portia told her phone. “We need to be able to see in here.”

“Any moment. We’re still looking for the main breaker board.” Jamil and one of the other goons had headed off into the station to look for a backup power supply, wearing low-light goggles and rebreather masks in case they hit a gas trap. Getting the main reactors going would be difficult in the extreme — it would take weeks of painstaking work, checking out the reactor windings, then inching through the laborious task of bootstrapping a fusion cycle — but if they could find a backup fuel cell and light up the docking hub, they’d be able to rig a cable from the Romanov to the hub’s switchboard, and provide power and heat and air circulation to the administrative sectors. Old Newfie had once supported thousands of inhabitants. With a source of power, it could support them again for weeks or months, even without reseeding the life support and air farms.