Iron Sunrise s-2

by Charles Stross

  “Yes.” She nodded. A muscle in her left cheek jumped. “Bring me the head of Svengali the clown.”

  “I don’t have a spike—”

  “No reclaim,” she said firmly. She gave a delicate shudder of distaste. “There are some things that even the unborn god should be protected from.”

  “But that’s final! If you kill him without reclaiming his soul—”

  “Franz.” She stared at him coldly.

  “Boss.”

  She tilted her head to one side. “Sometimes I think you’re too soft for this job,” she said thoughtfully. “Are you?”

  “Boss! No.” He took a deep breath. “I have been slow to adjust to your management style. I will adapt.” That’s right, gnaw your own leg off.

  She nodded slightly. “See that you do.”

  “Yes.”

  He knew when he was being dismissed. Bring me the head of Sven the clown. Well, if that was what she wanted, he’d do it. But the thought of killing the guy and not offering him the last rite was … tasteless? No, worse than that. Taste was a value judgment. This was final, a total extinction. The boss had said: There are some things the unborn god should be protected from. Meaning, memories that must never be mapped and archived for posterity lest the machineries of heaven expose the machinations of mortals who might arrive on the unborn god’s doorstep exposed to criticism. Shit stank, and the unborn god must be born pure, once the abominably abhuman Eschaton was destroyed.

  Franz paused just outside the bridge door and took a deep breath of pure filtered air that didn’t stink of carnage. Samow’s localized EMP bomb had blipped a massive current surge through the facilities deck below the bridge, accessed via a storage locker. It had overloaded the superconducting electrograv ring under the bridge, temporarily exposing everything above it — as far as the next deck and the next ring — to the bone-splintering drag of the ship’s full thirty gees of acceleration for a fraction of a second. Meanwhile, Jamil and one of the trusted strike team goons had taken the training room, slaved to the bridge systems and doubling as an emergency bridge during the run-up to the ship’s first jump. The officer on duty hadn’t understood quite what was happening at first; Kurt had pithed and puppetized him, and that was their biometric token sorted.

  Now they were about three light years off course, crunching on the second jump of the series of four that the nav team had knocked together for them aboard the Heidegger. It was a calculated risk, taking over a liner under way, but so far it had worked well. The window of opportunity for the passengers and crew to do something about them was closing rapidly, and when Mathilde finished installing the ubiquitous surveillance software on the ship’s passenger liaison network it would be locked down tighter than a supermax prison.

  Portia’s planning had placed a platoon of special forces troops aboard the liner even before she arrived with her team of spooks and specialists. All they really needed was to take a bridge room, the drive engineering spaces, a couple of damage-control centers, and central life support. Once they could track everybody’s movements through walls and floors, and remotely lock the doors or cut off the air supply if they didn’t like what they were seeing, the ship would be theirs. Which left Franz facing a dilemma.

  There was no way Hoechst was going to let him run away. In fact, she’d probably kill him or send him for reimplementation as soon as look at him, once the Romanov arrived at Newpeace. It was stupid to expect her to grow a new body for Erica: that was a privilege even Director-level officials were rarely granted. If he could steal the memory diamond containing her reclaimed state vector and genetic map, then find some way to reach a polity where downloading and cloning weren’t instruments of state under control of the technotheocracy, he might be able to do something … but how likely was that? She’s dead, and I’m fucked, he told himself coldly. All I can hope for is to try to convince Portia I’m a willing servant—

  He made his way along the radial corridor, empty of all human traffic (Jordaan’s messing with the access permissions had locked almost all the crew out of the service tunnels for the duration of the takeover) and caught a crew elevator up to A deck and Hoechst’s command suite. When the door opened for him, one of Mathilde’s troops shoved a gun at him. “What do you want?”

  “Got a job to do for the boss.” He stepped inside and the door slid shut behind him. “Is Mathilde here?”

  “No.” The guard lowered his gun, went back to his position next to the door. “What do you need?”

  “I need to use the ubiq tap as soon as everything’s installed. That, and I’d like to draw a sidearm and a neural spike. Boss wants a loose end tied off.”

  “Uh-huh.” The soldier sounded vaguely amused. “Ferris will sort you out.”

  The main room was a mess. Someone had been digging into the floor, opening up crawl spaces and installing a loom of cables that ran to a compact signal-processing mainframe squatting on the remains of what had once been a very expensive dressing table. Three or four techs were hunched over various connectors or blinking and gesturing at the air, shepherding their mobile code around the ship’s passenger liaison net. Another soldier was busy with a ruggedized communications console, very low-tech but entirely independent of the shipboard systems. She looked up as Franz came in. “What do you want?”

  “Crewman” — he consulted his implant — “4365, Svengali Q., no last name, occupation, entertainments specialist, subtype juvenile. I need to know where he is. And I need to draw a gun.”

  “Crewman 4365,” she drawled, “is currently locked in—” she frowned. “No. He’s down on H deck, radial four, orange ring, in the second-class dining area doing…” Her brow wrinkled. “What’s a ‘birthday party’?”

  “Never mind. Is he scheduled there for much longer?”

  “Yes, but there are other passengers—”

  “That’s all right.” Franz glanced around. “Now, about a handgun.”

  “Over there. Boss’s bedroom, there’s a crate by the sleeping platform. Uh-oh, incoming call.” She was back at her console without a second glance.

  Portia’s bedroom was a mess. Discarded equipment cases were scattered across the floor, the remains of a half-eaten meal cooling on the pillows. Franz found the crate and rummaged in it until he found a carton that contained a machine pistol and a couple of factory-packed magazines loaded with BLAMs. He held the gun to his forehead for long enough for its tiny brain to handshake with his implants, and upload its recent ballistic performance record and a simple aiming network. Franz didn’t much like carrying a gun; while he knew how to use one, having to do so in his line of work would usually mean that his cover was blown and his job, if not his life, was over. He rummaged further, and despite Portia’s injunction, he took a neural spike. You never knew …

  He was about to leave the room when he noticed something else. There was a pile of dirty clothing heaped on an open suitcase next to the bed. It looked like stuff the boss had been wearing earlier. He paused, momentarily curious. Would she? he wondered. Is it worth a look? Well yes, it was … probably. He glanced at the half-open door. There was nobody in sight. He knelt and ran his hands around the inside of the case, then the lid. He felt a lump in one side pocket. Cursing himself for his optimism, he unzipped the pouch and pulled out a small box. Then he stopped cursing. “Wow,” he breathed. He flipped the box open, then hastily closed it again, stood up, and shoved it into one hip pocket, then headed back into the reception room, his pulse pounding with guilty intent.

  The box had contained a gemstone the size of his thumb, sitting atop a ceramic block studded with optical ports — the reader/writer head. It was memory diamond, atoms arranged in a lattice of alternating carbon 12 and carbon 13 nuclei: the preferred data storage format for the unborn god’s chosen few. Dense and durable, twelve grams was enough to store a thousand neural maps and their associated genome data. This was Hoechst’s soul repository, where the upload data from anyone she terminated in the course of service would be
stored until they could be archived by the Propagators, against the day when the unborn god would be assembled and draw upon the frozen imprints. Such careless concealment in a piece of nondescript luggage had to be deliberate; probably she’d decided the ship’s strong room was too obvious a target. It was a symbol of her authority, of her power of life after death over those who served her. He could expect no mercy if she found him in possession of it. But if he could dig a single stored mind out of it and put it back, he’d be fine. And that was exactly the prospect that had his hands sweating and his heart pounding with pity and fear … and hope.

  Nobody paid any attention as he slipped back into the dayroom. “I’m going down to drop in on my target,” he told the comms specialist. “Got a field phone?”

  “Sure.” She tossed him a ruggedized handset. “Turns back into a pumpkin next jump. Bring it back for a reset.” Must be a causal channel, he realized. The untappable instant quantum devices were the tool of choice for communications security — at least between FTL hops.

  “Check.” He slipped it into his pocket. “See you around.”

  There was an uproar in the dining room. Steffi stood up. “Please!” she shouted. “Please calm down! The situation’s under control—”

  Predictably, it didn’t work. But she had to try: “Listen! Please sit down. Lieutenant Commander Fromm is investigating this problem. I assure you nothing serious is wrong, but if you would just sit down and give us time to sort things out—”

  “I’d give up, if I were you,” Martin said quietly. Half the passengers were flocking toward the exits, evidently in a hurry to return to their rooms. The rest were milling around like a herd of frightened sheep, unsure whose lead to follow. “They’re not going to listen. What the hell is happening, anyway?”

  “I don’t—” Steffi caught herself. Shit! Play dumb, idiot! “Max is looking into it. At best, some idiot’s played a prank with the liaison network. At worst?” She shrugged.

  “Who made the announcement?” Martin asked.

  “I don’t know.” But I can guess. She frowned. “And no way would the skipper divert from our course — for one thing, New Prague is about the closest port of call on our route! For another—” She shrugged. “It doesn’t add up.”

  “I’m not going to say the word,” Martin said slowly, “but I think something has gone very wrong. Something to do with the investigation.”

  Steffi’s guts turned to ice. Confirmation of her own worst fears: it was a stitch-up. “I couldn’t possibly comment. I should be heading to my duty station—”

  She forced herself to pause for a couple of seconds. “What would you do if this was your call?”

  “It’s either a genuine accident, in which case damage control is on top of it or we’d be dead already, or — well, you put it together; the net’s down, a stranger is announcing some weird accident and telling passengers to go to their rooms, and we’ve got a couple of killers loose on board. Frankly, I’d send everyone to their cabins. They’re self-contained with emergency oxygen supplies and fabs for basic food, it’s where they want to go, they can hole up, and if it is a hijacking, it’ll give the hijackers a headache. Meanwhile we can find out what’s going on and either try to help out or find somewhere to hole up.” The ghost of a smile tugged at his lips, then fell away. “Seriously. Get them out of here. Dispersal is good.”

  “Shit!” She stood up and raised her voice again: “If you’d all go straight to your cabins and stay out of the corridors until somebody tells you it’s all right, that would help us immensely.”

  Almost at once the crush at the exits redoubled as first-class passengers streamed away from their seats. Within a minute the dining room was almost empty. “Right. Now what?” She asked, edgily. If Max was all right, he should have sent a runner by now. So he wasn’t, and the shit had presumably hit the fan. Twitching her rings didn’t seem to help; she was still locked out of the network.

  “Now we go somewhere unexpected. Uh, your rings still not working?” She nodded. “Right, switch off everything.”

  “But—”

  “Just do it.” Martin reached into a pocket and pulled out a battered-looking leather-bound hardback book. “PA, global peripheral shutdown. Go to voice-only.” He shook his head, wincing slightly. “I know it feels weird, but—”

  Steffi shrugged uncomfortably, then blinked her way through a series of menus until she found the hard power-down option on her personal area network. “Are you sure about it?”

  “Sure? Who’s sure of anything? But if someone’s taking over the ship, they’re going to view nailing down line officers — even trainees — as a priority. Way I’d plan it, first your comms would go down, then people would simply vanish one by one.” Steffi blinked and nodded, then sent the final command and watched the clock projected in her visual field wink out. Martin stood up. “Come on.” They followed the last diners out into the main radial heading for the central concourse, but before they’d passed the nearest crossway Martin paused at a side door. “Can you open this?”

  “Sure.” Steffi grasped the handle and twisted. Sensors in the handle recognized her handprint and gave way. “Not much here but some stores and—”

  “First thing to do is to cover up that uniform.” Martin was already through the door. “Got to get you looking like a steward or a passenger. Don’t think they’ll be looking for me or Rachel yet.” He pushed open the next door, onto a dizzying spiral of steps broken every six meters by another pressure door. “Come on, long climb ahead.”

  Steffi tensed, wondering if she was going to have to break his neck there and then. “Why do you—”

  “Because you’re a line officer, why else? If we’re being hijacked, you know how to fly this damn thing; at least you’re in the chain of command. I know enough about the drive layout on this tub to spin up the kernel, but if we get control back, we’re going to need you to authenticate us to the flight systems and log me in as flight engineer. If I’m wrong, we’ll hear about it as soon as the PLN comes back up. So start climbing!”

  Steffi relaxed. “Okay, I’m climbing, I’m climbing.”

  TOO MANY CHILDREN

  “You—” Rachel swaged on her feet. The girl shook her head violently, looking spooked, and muttered something inaudible. Then she glanced over her shoulder. “Are you Victoria Strowger?”

  Wednesday’s head whipped round. “Who wants to know?”

  Her shoulders set, she was clearly on the defensive. “Calm down,” said Rachel. “I’m Martin’s partner. Listen, the ReMastered are going to be all over us in a couple of minutes if we don’t get the hell out of the public spaces. All I want is to ask you a couple of questions. Can we take this up in my suite?”

  Wednesday stared at her, eyes narrowing in calculation. “Okay. What’s going on?”

  Rachel took a deep breath. “I think the ship’s being hijacked. Do you know where Frank is?”

  “I — no.” Wednesday looked shaken. “He was going to go back to his room to fetch something, he said.”

  “Oh dear.” Rachel tried to keep a straight face; the kid looked really worried at her tone of voice. “Are you coming? We can look him up later.”

  “But I need to find him!” There was an edgy note of panic in her voice.

  “Believe me, right now he’s either completely safe, or he’s already a prisoner, and they’ll be using him as bait for you.”

  “Fuck!” Wednesday looked alarmed.

  “Come on,” coaxed Rachel. “Do you want them to find both of you?” A sick sense of dread dogged her: if Martin was right, Wednesday and Frank were romantically entangled. She cringed at the memory of how she’d once felt, knowing Martin had been taken. “Listen, we’ll find him later — get to safety first, though, or we won’t be able to. Switch your rings off right now, unless you want to be found. I know you’re not on the shipboard net, but if they’re still emitting, the bad guys may know how to ping them.” Rachel turned toward the main stairwell. It was filli
ng up with people, chattering hordes of passengers coming out to see what was going on, or heading back to their rooms; a handful of harried-looking stewards scurried hither and yon, or tried to answer questions for which they didn’t have any answers.

  “You know what’s going on, don’t you?”

  Rachel concentrated on the stairs, trying to ignore her shaking muscles and the urge to shiver whenever she thought back to what she’d seen in the D-con room. Six flights to go.

  “What is going on?”

  “Shut up and climb.” Five flights to go. “Shit!” They were nearing D deck, and the crowd was thinner — there were fewer staterooms — and there was the first sign of trouble, a man standing in the middle of the landing and blocking the next flight of stairs. His face was half-obscured by a pair of bulky low-tech imaging goggles, like something out of the dawn of the infowar age; but the large-caliber gun he held looked lethally functional.

  “You. Stop. Who are you and where are you going?”

  Rachel stopped. She could feel Wednesday a step behind her, shivering — about to break and run, if she didn’t do something fast. “I’m Rachel Mansour, this is my daughter Anita. We were just going back to our suite. It’s on B deck. What’s going on?” She stared at the gun apprehensively, trying to look as if she was surprised to see it. Ooh, isn’t it big! She steeled herself, prepping her military implants for the inevitable. If he checked the manifest and realized -

  “I’m with the shipboard security detail. We’ve got reason to believe there’s a dangerous criminal loose aboard ship.” He stared at them as if memorizing their faces. “When you get to your rooms, stay there until you hear an announcement that it’s safe to leave.” He stepped to one side and waved them on. Rachel took a deep breath and sidled past him, glancing over her shoulder to make sure Wednesday was still there.

  After a moment’s hesitation the young woman followed her. She had the wit to keep quiet until they were round the next spiral in the staircase. “Shipboard security my ass. What the fuck was that about?”