“Can I have some light?”

Behind her, a torch flared into brightness, sweeping long shadows into the corners of the curving passage. Wednesday stepped out of the lift car cautiously, her breath steaming in the freezing air. “This way.”

Trying to re-create the path she’d taken all those years ago came hard. She walked slowly, fingers twitching furiously as she copied and forwarded the message from Herman. No telling when it would arrive, but the mesh networks and routing algorithms used by implants in the developed worlds would spool the mail until she got within personal network range of someone who could handshake with them — maybe even one of the ReMastered, if they’d had their systems upgraded for work out in the feral worlds.

Frozen carpet creaked beneath her feet. Her pulse sped, and she glanced behind her, half-expecting to hear the clicking clatter of claws. Portia, Jamil, and Franz — an unlikely triptych of scheming evil — kept her moving on. They were near the toilet. “Here,” she said, her voice small.

“You’re not going to—” Franz stopped.

“What is it?” Portia demanded.

“There’s a body in there. I think.” Wednesday swallowed.

“Jamil. Check it out.” Jamil pushed past, taking his torch. Portia produced a smaller one, not much more than a glow stick really. A minute of banging about, then he called, “She’s right. I see a — hmm. Freeze-dried, I guess.”

“Explain.” Portia thrust her face at Wednesday.

“He, I, I—” Wednesday shuddered convulsively. “Like the paper said. I left it two decks down, three segments over,” she added.

“Jamil, we’re going,” Portia called. “You’d better not be wasting our time,” she told Wednesday grimly.

Wednesday led them back to the lift, which groaned and whined as it lowered them two more floors into the guts of the station. The gravity was higher there, but still not as harsh as she recalled; probably there’d been some momentum transfer between the different counterrotating sections, even superconducting magnetic bearings are unable to prevent atmospheric turbulence from bleeding off energy over time. You have new mail, Wednesday read, as the lift slowed. “Come on,” Jamil said, pushing her forward. “Let’s get this over with.”

The gaping door and the darkness within loomed out of the darkness. The seed of a plan popped into Wednesday’s head, unbidden. “I think I hid it in one of the cupboards. Can you give me a torch?” she asked.

“Here.” Portia passed her the light wand.

“Let’s see if I remember where…” Wednesday ducked into the room, her heart hammering and her hands damp. She’d only get one chance to do this.

Turning, she flashed the torch around overturned desks, open cupboards. There. She bent down and picked up a cartridge, crammed it into one pocket — scooped up a second and a third, then straightened up. “Wrong cupboard,” she called. Where had she left it? She looked around, saw a flash of something the color of dried blood — leather. Ah! She pulled on it, and the bag slid into view. “Got it,” she said, stepping back out into the corridor.

“Give it here.” Portia held out her hand.

“Can’t you wait until we get back to the hub?” Wednesday stared at her, bravado rising. The leather wallet with the diplomatic seal of the Moscow government on it and the bulge where she’d stashed the data cartridge hung from one hand.

“Now!” Portia insisted.

“You promised.” Wednesday tightened her grip on the wallet and stared Portia in the eyes. “Going to break your word?”

“No.” Hoechst blinked, then relaxed. “No, I’m not.” She looked like a woman awakening from a turbulent dream. “You want to hold it until you see your friends, you go right ahead. I assume it is the right wallet? And the data cartridge you took?”

“Yes,” Wednesday said defensively, tightening her grip on it. The three riot cartridges she’d stolen felt huge in her hip pocket, certain to be visible. And while only Jamil had a gun slung in full sight, she had an edgy feeling that all the others were armed. They’d be carrying pistols, if nothing else. What was the old joke? Never bring a taser to an artillery duel.

“Then let’s go visit the control center.” Portia smiled. “Of course, if you’re wasting my time, you’ll have made me kill one of your friends, but you wouldn’t do that, would you?”

“Never bring a taser to an artillery duel,” muttered Steffi, glancing between the compact machine pistol (with full terminal guidance for its fin-stabilized bullets, not to mention a teraherz radar sight to allow the user to make aimed shots through thin walls) and the solid-state multispectral laser cannon (with self-stabilizing turret platform and a quantum-nucleonic generator backpack that could boil a liter of water in under ten seconds). Regretfully, she picked the machine pistol, the laser’s backpack being too unwieldy for the tight confines of a starship. But there was nothing stopping her from adding some other, less cumbersome toys, was there? After all, none of the spectators at her special one-woman military fashion show would be writing reviews afterward.

After half an hour, Steffi decided she was as ready as she’d ever be. The console by the door said that there was full pressure outside. Negligent of them, she thought as she pointed her gun through the door and scanned the corridor. It looked clear, ghostly gray in the synthetic colors displayed by her eye-patch gun-sight. Right, here goes.

She moved toward the nearest intersection corridor with crew country, darting forward, then pausing to scan rooms to either side. Need a DC center console, she decided. The oppressive silence was a reminder of the constant menace around her. If the hijackers wanted to lock down a ship, they could have depressurized it: that they hadn’t meant that they’d be back. Before then, she had to eliminate any guards they’d left behind, erase her presence from their surveillance system, and regain control.

Where are they? she asked herself, nerves on edge as she came close to the core staircase and lift utility ducts on this deck. They’re not stupid; they’ll have left a guard. They’ve got the surveillance net, so they must know I’m moving around up here. So where’s the ambush going to be? Smart guards wouldn’t risk losing her in a maze of passages and staterooms she knew better than they did. They’d simply lock the staircase doors between pressure zones, and nail her as soon as she conveniently locked herself in a narrow moving box.

Got it. Steffi ducked sideways into a narrow crew corridor and found herself facing the blank doors of a lift shaft. Readying herself, she hit the call button and crouched beside the doors, gun raised to scan. There were two possibilities. Either the lift car would contain an unpleasant surprise, or it would be empty — in which case, they’d be waiting for her wherever she arrived.

The gun showed her an empty cube before the doors opened. She moved instantly, jamming her key ring onto the emergency override pad on the control panel. Steffi clicked her tongue in concentration as she commanded the lift car to lower to motor maintenance position and open the doors. There was space on top of the pressurized car, a platform a meter and a half wide and a meter high, ridged with cables and motor controllers leading to the prime movers at each corner of the box. She scrambled aboard, then hit the button for the training bridge deck. What happened next would depend on how many guards they’d left behind for her. If there were enough to monitor the ship surveillance network as well as lay an ambush for her, she’d already lost, but she was gambling that her cover was still intact. As long as Svengali hadn’t talked, she stood a chance, because only a paranoid would take the same precautions over a Junior Flight Lieutenant that they’d need to neutralize a professional assassin … The lift seemed to take forever to climb down the shaft. Steffi crouched in the middle of the roof, curling herself around her gun. Her eye patch showed her a gray rectangle, ghost shadows unfolding below it — the empty body of the lift, descending into a tube of darkness too far away for the surface-piercing gun-sights to see. Four decks, three, two — the lift slowed. Steffi changed her angle, aiming past the side of the lift where the doors opened, out into the corridor.