Excerpt: Liner Notes

Anna hit the running deck late in the morning, immediately after the porter had arrived with the bags. She figured that on boarding day, after a three day port vacation, very few GC employees would be on the track. She was wrong. She spent the length of the track in a pack of upper execs.

She should have figured. All these GlobalCorp types were go-getters, upper-class Harvard Ship grads, or Stanford Liner kids, bred on a diet of bottled water, jogging, racquetball. It was as much a set of rites as falconry in the middle ages, or jousting. It was how you met people, what you talked about in the elevator, how you rose through the ranks. The new diet, your new ratio of sprints to laps, the right kind of bottled water.

Was she bitter? She had been a state school girl, back when the state universities still existed. Every bit as bright, every bit as motivated – but having to learn the modern versions of the secret handshakes, and of course never being able to claim pedigree from the institutions that gave you a pass to the executive club.

Had that been why she left her corporate life to work for the Resistance? Was it just bitterness?

No, she decided, it was more than that, far more. She’d bought in until The Exodus, and had even secured a place on a science liner, working for a GlobalCorps predecessor, doing the science they couldn’t trust to outsource to drylanders. Life had been good for her, and if she wasn’t going to ever rise to the top, she could certainly float along quite comfortably just below it. She had friends, her ship was a paradise, and every port brought wonderful adventures, fueled by the crazy exchange rate of the Global 500’s sea currency.

She’d been very happy until that day in Mumbai. That, to her knowledge, was the first inkling that she was on the wrong path. She’d cried that day, deep thick sobs, but it wasn’t that which had made that day a turning point. It was how few others cried. It was how effortlessly the ship had gone back to its well tanned and well-oiled self. It was how the next morning the same people were out running on the jogging deck, the same water, the same ratio of sprints to laps, the same meaningless conversation.

If that was what life on the fleet required she would set her opposition to it. She would not only leave it, but fight it.

As she jogged around the deck, she wondered if there was anything to give her away. Were there any outward signs she had not bought in? She was supposedly from a lesser ship in the fleet, should she gawk more? Be more impressed? Were the outfits Central had supplied *too* in fashion?

Her forged credentials said she was a reporter – should she fraternize with the other reporters more? It didn’t seem so? The male reporters seemed to sit together and gawk, or hit their regular round of contacts. The female reporters seemed to stay apart from rest, and maintain professionalism, lest they be caught talking cabana boy fantasies about an exec that could end their career. The ship practically oozed sex, and still, after all these years the female professional reaction was to button the top button and step three steps back. It was women’s lib in reverse, no doubt about that. The contraction of professional options since the crash had produced a culture on the lesser ships of women who looked like naught librarians and acted, well, like librarians. In the presence of the elite set, it was as if any outward display of sexuality by women from lesser ships would be an act of aggression against one’s betters.

One’s betters. Ugh. There was that train of thought again. One’s betters at what?

Clip, clop, clip clop.

She burst into the open from the covered part of the deck, and was struck by the peaceful beauty of the sunrise. A couple seagulls rested on the wires that led to the central power generator. Were they near land? She longed for the days before the Global 500 consortium had controlled the satellites, when anyone could use a GPS to find their position. The telecommunications satellites were also iffy, at least for resistance work. Now that the Global 500 and its rented military were essentially a government, every call was scanned and checked. The Resistance was lucky enough to have one rogue satellite through which some contact would be made, but coverage was small, spotty and unreliable.

Now to her mission. First, she needed to find out what this roll-out they had invited all the reporters for was. It was big, she knew that, probably the biggest roll-out since the Global 500 had rented the U.S. military. The hope in the resistance was that it wasn’t nearly as frightening a prospect. An optimist might even think that they could be announcing a move back towards land-based executive management.

Anna was not an optimist.

Once she heard the news of the announcement, she would have to work fast to get the unreleased details. If possible she’d radio back to base – although given that they were sailing south, out of the range of Archos One, the resistance satellite, she would likely be unable to make contact until landfall.

And here was where the plan got a little fuzzy. Given that she had no idea what the announcement was going to be, she’d have to deign and implement countermeasures on the spot. She’d gone over possibilities in her head – ranging from simply developing internal contacts to improvising arson in a lab – but of course none of it made sense without knowing what the announcement was about.

Contacts, though, contacts were likely to be essential. Looking down from the track towards sundeck seven, she caught something of interest in the sea of bronze skin. Walter Allard, CTO of GlobalCorps, was sitting with two reporters, laughing at something one of them had said.

Now that could be interesting – a CTO not only would have much inside information, but would presumably have very useful permissions on the network – and even a short access window to the most basic information had eluded the Resistance so far.

In this Sea of Stepford, Walter would likely not give her a second look. But the reporters he was talking to – that was a different story. A chance meeting would have to be arranged, and she would have to work from there – opportunistically. Something to work on before Wednesday’s announcement.

Good.

Invigorated by the thought, she broke into a fast sprint, and, powered by a second wind, flew by a set of now flagging executives.

One’s betters. Ha.