Iron Sunrise s-2

by Charles Stross

  The Times has this message for the culprits, whoever they are: The truth will out!

  Ends (Times Editorial)

  Cymbals chimed: the floor gave a faint lurch, almost imperceptible, barely sufficient to rattle the china in the dining lounges as the huge liner cut over to onboard gravity. Junior Flight Lieutenant Steffi Grace shook her head. “That’s not very good.”

  “It’s within tolerances, but only just,” agreed her boss, Flying Officer Max Fromm. He pointed at the big status board in front of her. “Want to tell me why?”

  “Hmm. Kernel balance looks good. We’ve stabilized nicely, and the mass distribution is spot on — no problems there. Um. I don’t see anything on board. But the station…” She paused, then brought up a map of the ambient gravity polarization field. “Oh. We picked up a little torque from the station’s generators when we tripped out. Is that what you’re after?”

  “No, but it’ll do.” Fromm nodded. “Remember that. These big new platforms the Septs are building kick back.” He brought back the original systems map. “Now, you’re going to talk me through the first stage of our departure, aren’t you?”

  Steffi nodded, and began to take him through the series of steps that the Captain and her bridge crew would be running upstairs as they maneuvered the huge liner clear of the Noctis docking tree. Down here in the live training room things weren’t as tense; just another session in the simulator, shadowing the bridge team. The training room was cramped, crammed with console emulators and with space for only a couple of people to crowd inside. In an emergency it could double as a replacement bridge — but it would have to be a truly desperate emergency to take out the flight deck, five levels down inside the hull.

  “Okay, now she’s pumping up the C-head ring. That’s, um, five giga-Teslas? That’s way more than she needs to maintain a steady one-gee field. Is she planning on buffering some really heavy shocks? Attitude control — we’re steady. No thermal roll to speak of, not out here in Septagon B, so she’s put just enough spin on the outer hull to hold us steady as we back out at five meters per second. That’s going to take, uh, two minutes until we’re clear far enough to begin a slow pitch up toward the departure corridor. Am I right?”

  “So far so good.” Max leaned back in his chair. “I hate these stations,” he said conversationally. “It’s not as if there’s much other traffic — we’ve got nearly a thousand seconds to clear the approaches — but it’s so damn crowded here it’s like threading a needle with a mooring cable.”

  “One wrong nudge—”

  “Yeah.” The Romanov was a huge beast. Beehive shaped, it was three hundred meters in diameter at its fattest and nearly five hundred meters long. The enormously massive singularity lurking inside its drive kernel supplied it with power and let it twist space-time into knots, but was absolutely no use for close-range maneuvering; and the hot thrusters it could use for altitude control would strip the skin off a hab if the Captain lit her up within a couple of kilometers. That left only the cold thrusters and gyrodynes for maintaining altitude during departure — but they had about as much effect as a team of ants trying to kick a dead whale down a beach. “One-sixty seconds to burner ignition, and we can crank up to departure speed, a hundred meters per second. Then just under an hour and a half to make it out to fifty kilometers and another blip on the burners to take us up to a thousand meters per second at half a gee. Another two hundred kilometers out, then we begin kernel spin-up. I haven’t looked at the flight plan for this run, but if she does her usual, once the kernel is up and running the Captain will crank us up to twenty gees and hold for about twelve hours. And she won’t mess around. That’s why she ran up the bulkhead rings now, when she’s got spare power to pump into them.” He stretched his arms out overhead, almost touching the damage control board. “Seen one departure, seen ’em all. Until the next time.”

  “Right.” Steffi pushed back her chair. “Do we have time for a coffee before the burn sequence?”

  “I don’t see why not.”

  Steffi stood up and squeezed past Max’s chair, trailing a hand across his shoulder in passing. He pretended not to notice, but she caught the ghost of his smile reflected in the screens as she turned toward the door. Two or three weeks of stealing time together didn’t make for a serious relationship in her estimate, but it beat sleeping alone on her first long cruise, and Max was more considerate than she’d expected. Not that she was incapable of coping. WhiteStar didn’t employ child labor, and she’d joined up at thirty-two, with her first career under her: she’d known exactly what she was letting herself in for. If anyone had accused him of taking advantage of her, she’d have taken a pointy stick to them. But so far discretion had paid off, and Steffi had no complaints.

  There was a vending machine near the facilities pod down the gray-painted crew corridor. She punched for two glasses of iced latte, thought about some biscuits, and decided against it. Bridge crew, even trainee bridge crew, dined with the upper-class passengers on a rota, and Max was up for dinner at the end of his shift in a couple of hours. It wouldn’t do to spoil his appetite. She was about to head back to the auxiliary control center when she spotted a stranger in the corridor outside — probably a passenger, judging by his lack of ID. “Can I help you?” she asked, sizing him up. He was tall, blond, male, blandly handsome, and built like an army recruiting poster. Not at all like Max, a little voice in the back of her head said critically.

  “Yah, yes. I was told the, ah, training bridge was on this level?” He had a strange accent, not hard to understand but slightly stilted. “I was told it was possible to visit it?”

  “Yes, it is.” She nodded. “But I’m afraid you’ll have to make an appointment if you want to look around. It’s in use throughout the voyage, and right now it’s the backup control center — in case there’s a problem with the main bridge. Are you wanting a tour?” He nodded. “In that case” — she steered him toward the nearest door back into passenger country — “can I suggest you take it up with your liaison officer after dinner? He or she will be able to take your details and arrange something for you tomorrow or the day after. I’ve got to get back to work now, so if you’ll excuse me…”

  She gently pushed him back toward the passenger section, waiting until he finished nodding and the door closed. Then she breathed a sigh of relief and ducked back through the closest door into wonderland. Max raised an eyebrow at her. “She’s begun pushback,” he said. “What kept you?”

  “The passengers are wandering.” She passed him an iced coffee. “I had to herd one out of the corridor just now.”

  “Happens every voyage. You lock a couple of thousand bored monkeys in a tin can, and you’ve got to expect one or two to go exploring. They’ll stop poking around eventually, when they realize everything interesting is sealed off. Just remember to keep your cabin door locked whether you’re in or out.”

  “Hah. I’ll do that.” She raised her glass. “Here’s to a quiet life…”

  “Wow!” Wednesday looked around the room, her eyes wide. It’s bigger than my bedroom back home. It’s bigger than our entire apartment! A pang of loss bit her. She shoved it aside hastily.

  She stood in the middle of an ocean of deep-pile carpet the color of clotted cream and looked about. The room was so wide that the ceiling seemed low, even though it was out of reach. A couple of sofas and an occasional table huddled at one end as if they were lonely. One wall looked like raw, undressed stonework; there was a door in it, with a curved, pointy bit at the top, opening onto a boudoir like something out of a medieval fantasy, all rich wooden paneling and tapestries. A huge four-poster bed completed the impression, but the medievalism was only skin-deep. The next door along led to a bathroom with a tub almost as large as the bed recessed into the white-tiled floor.

  “If you need anything, please call the purser’s office,” the steward told her. “Someone will be on hand to help you at all hours. Your trip itinerary should be able to tell you how all the suite uti
lities work, including the fabber in the closet over there.” (The closet lurking behind another open gothic archway looked to be about the size of a small factory.) “Do you need anything else right now?” he asked.

  “Uh, no.” She looked around. “I mean, yeah, I have to go buy some odds and ends. But, uh, not right now.”

  “By your leave.” He turned and left, smiling oddly, and the door to the corridor — no, the promenade deck, they called it — closed behind her.

  “Wow!” she repeated. Then she glanced at the door. “Door, lock yourself.” There was a discreet clack from the frame. “Wow!”

  Wednesday ambled over to the nearest sofa and flopped down in it, then unfastened her boots. “Ouch.” More than a day of wearing them had left her feet feeling like raw meat: she curled her toes in the carpet for almost a minute with her eyes closed, writhing slightly and panting. “Oh, that is so good!” After another minute, other senses began to intrude. “Hmm.”

  She walked toward the bathroom, leaving a trail of discarded clothing behind her. By the time she reached it she was naked. “Shower, shower, where are you?” she called. It turned out that the shower was in a separate cubicle from the toilet, the bathroom proper, and the — “A full-body hair remover?” She boggled slightly. What would you want to remove all your hair for? Legs or armpits or pubes she could see, but eyebrows?

  “Manicure and pedicure facilities are available on D deck,” recited a recording, just grainy enough not to make her wonder if a real person was in the room with her. “A range of basic clothing is available from the apartment fab. Fitted and designer items are available from the tailors on F deck. See the panel beside the sink for additional makeover and service options.”

  “Urk.” Wednesday backed toward the shower cubicle, pulled a face, and sniffed one armpit. “Eew!” First things first. What did Herman say? You’re a rich, idle, bored heiress: play the part.

  She showered thoroughly, staying under the spray nozzles until her skin felt as if it was going to come off. She washed her hair thoroughly, trying to get the grit and desperation of the past week off her body. The all-body depilator she gave a wide berth — the consequences of an accident with the controls could be too embarrassing for words — but the mirror wall by the sink had a full skin programmer that could talk to her chromatophores, so she spent an absorbing half hour reprogramming her makeup: night-dark eyeliner, blue lips, dead white skin, and glossy black hair. If anyone asks, I’m in mourning, she thought, and a sudden stab of agonizing guilt made it less than a lie.

  She hatched from the bathroom an hour and a half later, naked as the day she was born. The lounge seemed enormous, cold, and empty. Worse, she couldn’t imagine putting on her old clothes. So she wandered over to the closet and looked inside. “Is there a clothing menu for this thing?” she asked.

  A lightbug led her to the fabber, a large boxy extrusion from the wall of a walk-in wardrobe she hadn’t suspected. “Please select options. Materials and energy will be billed to your room service total.”

  “Oh.” Five minutes scrolling through patterns convinced her of one thing: whoever’d programmed the fab’s design library hadn’t done so with her in mind. Eventually she settled for some basic underwear, a pair of black trousers and a long-sleeved top that wasn’t too offensive, and rubber-soled socks for her feet. The fab hummed and burped up a load of hot, fresh clothing a minute later, still smelling faintly of solvents. Wednesday pulled them on immediately. Bet the shops are more expensive but have better stuff, she thought cynically.

  An hour spent poking around the shops on F deck convinced her that she was right. The names were unfamiliar, but the attitude of the staff — and the items in the displays — said it all. They were priced to satisfy exactly the sort of rich bitch Herman had suggested she play, but as far as Wednesday was concerned they were a dead loss: the target audience was too old, even if they were well preserved. The ultrafemme gowns and dresses had icky semiotics, the shops for people from cultures with sumptuary laws and dress codes were too weird, the everyday stuff was too formal — What would I want to do with that, wear it to a business meeting? she thought, fingering one exquisitely tailored jacket — and there was nothing flaky or uplevel to catch her imagination. No fun.

  In the end, she bought a lacy white trouser-skirt combination to wear to dinner, and left it at that. The horrible truth was beginning to dawn on her: I’ve got an enormous suite to myself, but nothing to do! And I’m here for a week! With no toys. Wednesday didn’t have anyone to share the voyage with unless she felt like pestering Frank, and she wasn’t sure how he’d respond. He looked young, but it was hard to tell. And he’s got a job to do. And there’s no news. Not while the ship was engaged in a series of causality-violating jumps, lock-stitching space time to its drive kernel. And the shops are crap. She glanced across the diamond-walled atrium in growing disbelief. And I bet the other Sybarite-class passengers are all boring assholes, diplomats, and rich old business queens and all. Clearly, very few people her age traveled this way.

  I’m already bored! And there are still three hours to go before dinner!

  “Feeding time at the zoo,” Max muttered darkly. “Wonder who they’re feeding?”

  “The social director, with any luck. Stuffed and basted.” Steffi kept a straight face, staring right ahead as they headed into the dining room. “Stupid custom.”

  “Now, now.” Max nodded politely to a plumply padded dowager whose thirty-year physique belied the fact that her formal business suit was at least a century out of fashion. “Good evening, Mrs. Borozovski! How are you tonight?”

  “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 pas
sing 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.