"I'm fine, Mr. Fromm!" She bobbed slightly, as if she'd already been hitting the martinis. "And who's your little friend? A new squirt, or am I very mistaken?"
"Ahem. Allow me to introduce Junior Flight Lieutenant Stephanie Grace, our newest flight operations officer. If I may beg your pardon, it's considered bad form to refer to trainees as squirts, outside of the training academy; and in any case, Lieutenant Grace has graduate degrees in relativistic dynamics and engineering."
"Oh, I'm so sorry!" To her credit, the dowager flushed slightly.
"It's perfectly all right." Steffi forced a smile and breathed a sigh of relief when Max peeled off to steer Mrs. Borozovski toward a table. No, I don't mind being patronized by rich drones one little bit, Mrs. Borozovski. Now, where's the table I'm supposed to ride herd on?
It was a completely spurious ritual, from Steffi's viewpoint. All the business class and higher suites were fully self-catering. There was no damn need to have a central galley and serve up a restricted menu and waste the valuable time of human chefs, not to mention the line officers who were required to turn up wearing mess uniforms and act like dinner party hosts.
On the other hand, as Commodore Martindale had put it back at staff college, the difference between a steerage passenger flying in cold sleep and a Sybarite-class passenger flying in a luxury apartment was about two thousand ecus per day of transit time—and the experience. Any peasant could afford to travel cold, but to balance the books and make for a healthy profit required cosseting the rich idiots and honeymooning couples, to which end any passenger line worthy of the name devoted considerable ingenuity. Up to and including providing etiquette training for engineers, tailored dress uniforms for desk-pushers, and anything else that might help turn a boring voyage into a uniquely memorable experience for the upper crust. Which especially meant sparing no expense over the first night and subsequent weekly banquets. At least they're not as bad as the house apes Sven puts up with, she thought mordantly. If I had his end of this job, I swear I'd go nuts … At least the honeymooning couples mostly stuck to ordering from room service or the food fabs in their rooms. Which left her sitting at the head of a table of twelve extremely lucrative passengers—think of it as twenty-four thousand ecus a day in value added to the bottom line—smiling, nodding politely, introducing them to one another, answering their inane questions, and passing the port.
Steffi made her way to her table, guided by a discreet pipper on the cuff of her brocade jacket. A handful of passengers had already arrived, but they knew enough to stand up as she arrived. "Please, be seated," she said, smiling easily as her chair slid out and retracted its arms for her. She nodded to the passengers, and one or two of them nodded back or even said "hello." Or something. She wasn't so sure about the sullen-looking girl in the deliberately slashed black lace top and hair that looked as if she'd stuck her fingers in a power socket, but the three hail-fellow-well-met types in the similar green shirts, two blond men and a straw-haired woman, all looked as if they were about to jump up and salute her. The fat probably-a-merchant-banker and her anorexic beanpole of a male companion just ignored her—probably offended that she wasn't at least a commander—and the withered old actuary from Turku didn't seem to notice her, but that was par for the course. Senile old cretin, Steffi thought, writing him off.
Anyone that rich who wouldn't stump up the cash for a telomere reset and AGE purge when their hair was turning white was not worth paying attention to. The middle-aged lady cellist from Nippon looked friendly enough, but a bit confused—her translator wasn't keeping up with the conversation—and that just left a honeymooning couple who had predictably elected to call room service instead.
"I'm Junior Flight Lieutenant Steffi Grace, and, on behalf of WhiteStar Lines, I'd like to welcome you to our table for the first night banquet en route to New Dresden. If you'd like to examine the menu, I'm sure your stewards will be with you shortly. In the meantime, I'd like to particularly recommend the—" she glanced at her cuff—"Venusian Cabernet Sauvignon blanc to accompany the salmon entrees." Imported at vast expense from the diamond-domed vineyards of Ishtar Planitia, the better to stroke the egos of the twenty-four-thousand-ecu diners.
Things went all right through the entrees, and Steffi made sure to knock back her antidrunk cap with the first mouthful of wine. It was an okay vintage, if you could get past the fact that it was wine, and—stripped of the ability to get drunk on it—wine was just sour grape juice. "Can I ask where you're from?" she asked the square-jawed blonde as she filled her glass.
"I've seen you around, I think, but we haven't spoken before."
"I am Mathilde, of clade Todt, division Sixt. These are my clade-mates Peter and Hans," said the woman, waving one beefy hand to take in the strapping young men to either side of her. Are they young? wondered Steffi: they looked awfully self-assured and well coordinated. Normally you didn't see that sort of instinctive grace in anyone who was less than sixty, not without martial arts practice. Most people eventually picked up that kind of economical motion if their bodies didn't nose-dive into senescence by middle age, before they had time to mature, but this looked like the product of hard training, if not anabolic steroids. "We are traveling to Newpeace, as a youth enlightenment and learning mission." She smiled superciliously.
"That is, we are to learn about the other worlds that have discovered the benefits of ReMastery and spread harmony among them."
"Uh-huh. And what is it, to be ReMastered, if you don't mind my asking? Is it some sort of club?" Steffi prodded. They were, after all, paying her wages.
Curiosity about her employers was a powerful instinct.
"It is everything," Mathilde said gushingly. She caught herself. "It is a way of life." Slightly shy and bashful now, as if she had let too much slip: "It is very fulfilling."
"Yes, but—" Steffi felt her forehead wrinkling with concentration. Why do I feel as if I'm being looked down on? she wondered. Never mind. "And you?" she asked the kid with the black hair. If she was a kid; she was about the same build as Steffi, after all.
"Oh, don't mind me, I'll just sit in this corner and drink myself into a new liver. I'm sure the trust fund will pay." The last sentence came out in a monotone as she caught Steffi's eye, and Steffi realized: Something's wrong here.
"We try to take our drinking easy, at least until after the meal," she said lightly. "What was your name again?"
"Wednesday," the girl—Young woman? Dangerous drunk?—said quietly.
"That's what they call me. Victoria Strowger on your passenger list. That's what my ID calls me."
"Whichever you prefer," Steffi said warily.
The starters arrived, delicately poached small medallions of salmon served under a white sauce, and Steffi managed to get fat Fiona the merchant banker rolling on a paean to the merits of virtual-rate currency triangulation versus more indirect, causality-conserving means of converting funds between worlds separated by a gulf of light years. She was somewhat relieved to find that a lecture on the credit control implications of time travel was sufficient to hold the rapt if slightly incomprehending attention of the three youth leaders from clade Todt, whatever that was. Wednesday, meanwhile, plowed into her third glass of wine with a grim determination that reminded Steffi of some of the much older and more grizzled travelers she'd met—not actual alcoholics, but people possessed by a demon that badly wanted them to wake up with a hangover on the morrow, a demon that demanded an exorcism by the most painful terms available short of self-mutilation. Getting drunk this soon in a voyage, before the boredom began to bite, wasn't a healthy sign. And as for her dress sense, even though Steffi was no follower of style, she could see that Wednesday was relying on a talent for improvisation that must have been labeled "not needed on voyage."
The shit refrained from hitting the fan until dessert was served. Steffi had made the tactical mistake of asking Mathilde again just what being ReMastered could do for her—Is it a religion? Or a political theory? she'd been wondering ever since the very fulfilling crack—and Mathilde decided to deliver a lecture. "Being ReMastered would give you a new perspective on life," Mathilde explained earnestly to the entire table. Even Peter and Hans nodded appreciatively. "It is a way of life that ensures all our actions are directed toward the greatest good. We are not, however, slaves: there is none of the submissiveness of the decadent and degenerate Dar al-Islam. We are fresh and free and strong and joyfully bend our shoulders to the great work out of common cause, with the aim of building a bright future in which all humans will be free to maximize their potential, free of the shadow of the antihuman Eschaton, and free of the chains of superstitious unscientific thinking."
Wednesday, who until then had been rolling the stem of her empty wineglass between her fingers—Steffi had discreetly scaled back on the frequency of top-ups after her fourth—put her glass down on the table. She licked a fingertip, and began slowly rubbing it around the lip of the glass.
"The clades of the ReMastered are organized among divisions, and their members work together. We rear our children in the best way, with all the devotion and attention to detail that a creche can deliver, and we find useful and meaningful work for them as soon as they are old enough to need purpose and direction. We teach morality—not the morality of the weak, but the morality of the strong—and we raise them to be healthy; the best phenotypes go back into the pool to generate the next harvest, but we don't simply leave that to brute nature. As intelligent beings we are above random chance." Whir, whir went Wednesday's finger. "We want strong, healthy, intelligent workers, not degenerate secondhanders and drones—"
Mathilde stopped talking, apparently oblivious to the glassy-eyed and slightly horrified stares she was receiving from the merchant banker and the actuary, and glared at Wednesday. "Stop doing that," she snapped.
"Tell me what happens to the people you don't need," Wednesday said in a threatening monotone, "then I'll stop."
"We do not do anything—" Mathilde caught herself, took a deep breath, and looked down her nose at Wednesday. "Occasionally a planetary government petitions us for admission. Then we send advisers to help them work out how best to deal with their criminal elements and decadent factions. Will you stop doing that, child? It is disruptive. I would go further and say it was typical of your indolence if I didn't believe this was merely an aberration on your part." She smiled, baring even, gleaming teeth that gave the lie to her veiled jab.
Wednesday smiled right back and kept rubbing the rim of the glass. The Japanese lady cellist chose that moment to join in with her own fingertip, smiling and nodding at her in linguistically challenged camaraderie. Steffi glanced at Mathilde. If looks could kill, Wednesday would be a smoking hole in the bulkhead. "If you don't take over worlds," Wednesday said, slurring slightly, "how's it that people want to join you? 'Mean t'say, I've only heard a bit about the concentration camps, an' obviously he's gotta grudge, but you'd think the summary executions and forced labor'd make joining the ReMastered 'bout as popular as rabies." She bared her teeth at Steffi, in a flicker of amusement that vanished as fast as it had come. Hum, hum, hum went the fingertip.
"There are no concentration camps," Mathilde said icily. "Our enemies spread lies"—her look took in the whole length of the table, as if no one was above suspicion—"and obviously some fools fall for them." She lingered over Wednesday. "But repeating such slanders—"
"Wanna meet anin—an, uh, ex-inmate?" Wednesday cocked her head on one side. She's drunk as a skunk, Steffi realized with a cold feeling in her overfull stomach. Damn, how'd she get so shit-faced? She's handling it well, but—The last thing she needed was Mathilde going for Wednesday's throat over the cheeseboard. Not if she wanted to keep the other Syb-class passengers happy. "Got least one of 'em aboard this ship. Call him a liar, why don'tcha."
"I think that's quite enough." Steffi forced herself to smile. "Time to change the subject, if you don't mind," she added, with a warning glance at Wednesday. But the kid couldn't seem to take the hint, even when it was delivered by sledgehammer.
"I've had more than enough," Wednesday slurred, sitting up straight but staying focused on Mathilde. They're like a pair of cats, squaring off, Steffi realized, wondering if she was going to have to break up a fight. Except that Mathilde didn't look remotely drunk, and Wednesday looked as if she was too drunk to care that the ReMastered woman was built like the northern end of a southbound assault gunship, with muscles where most people had opinions. "I'm sick of this bullshit. Here we all are, sitting round"—she waved a hand vaguely at the rest of the dining room, then blinked in surprise—"sitting round the table when down in steerage refugee kids are, are … "
Steffi was out of her chair almost before she realized she'd come to a decision. Wednesday's back was tense as steel when she wrapped one arm around her shoulders. "Come on," she said gently. "Come with me.
You're right, you don't need to be here. Leave everything to me, I'll get it sorted out. Stand up?" For a moment she was sure it wouldn't work, but a second later Wednesday pushed herself upright. She would have been swaying but for Steffi's supporting arm. "Come on, come with me. You're doing fine." She steered Wednesday round toward the nearest door, barely noticing the ReMastered woman's stone-hard glare drilling into her—or was it Wednesday? "Come on." To the gold braid on her left cuff: "Table six—someone cover for me, please. Taking a distressed guest back to her room."
They were barely past the doorway when Wednesday tried to break away.
Steffi grabbed her. "No! 'M going to—" Oh shit! Steffi repositioned her grip and hustled Wednesday toward the potted palm she'd taken a tentative lurch toward. But once she was head-down over the plant pot Wednesday proved she was made of stern stuff, drawing deep gulping breaths and slowly getting her stomach under control.