Iron Sunrise s-2

by Charles Stross

  “Get the prisoner on the secure terminal,” Portia told the guard at the desk.

  Wednesday moved to sit down in the offered chair. The camera’s-eye view certainly showed her Frank. Her breath caught; they’d put him in a chair and taped his arms down, and he looked ill. His skin was sallow and dry. He looked up at the camera, bleary-eyed, and started. “Wednesday, is that you?” he said, his voice rasping.

  “It’s me.” She clasped her hands behind her back to keep from fidgeting. “Are you all right?”

  He rolled his head sideways, as if trying to see something behind the camera. After a moment he replied, “No, I’m a bit tied up.” He shook his head. “They got you, too. Was it me?”

  “No,” she lied, guessing what the truth would do to him. Behind the terminal she saw Portia make a little tight smile. Bitch.

  Reality check. “What was the last thing I did the night before the, uh, accident?” she asked, hoping desperately that he’d get it wrong, that he was just a machinima avatar, and that she’d been caught but he remained at liberty.

  “You made a phone call.” He closed his eyes. “They kept my throat under block too long,” he added. “Talking hurts.”

  “That’s enough,” said Portia. The comms specialist leaned over and killed the connection before Wednesday could protest. “Satisfied?” she asked.

  “Huh.” Wednesday scowled furiously. “So, you’ve got us.” She shrugged. “What do you fucking want?”

  The blond guy at the back of the room, the smiling blackmailer from the evacuation bay, cleared his throat. “Boss?”

  “Tell her, Franz.” Portia nodded agreeably, but Wednesday noticed that when she spoke to her soldiers her smile peeled away, exposing a frigid chill in her eyes.

  “You misplaced something belonging to our, uh, predecessors,” Franz said. He looked uneasy. “We know you hid it on the station. We want it back. When you return it to us, we have a couple of errands to run, then we’ll be leaving.” He raised an eyebrow. “Boss?”

  “Here’s the deal,” Portia said easily. “You take us to the items you left behind. We’ll bring your friend Frank along so you can see him, and those nosy diplomats you were hiding out with. No, we weren’t taken in by that business with the passports. Do you think we’re stupid? It was easier to leave you hiding out in their cabin; that way you immobilized yourselves, saving us the trouble. But I digress … if you give us what we want, we’ll leave you on board the station when we go. Our own ship will be arriving here soon. We’ll send a rescue and salvage expedition for the liner and everybody aboard it as soon as we’re clear. Despite what you’re thinking, we’re not interested in killing people, wholesale or retail: there’s been a change of management at the top, and our job is to clean up after them.”

  “Clean up?” Wednesday said skeptically. “Clean up what?”

  Portia sighed. “My predecessor had some rather silly plans to, um, build himself an empire.” She flashed Wednesday that grin again. “I’m not going to make any excuses. You wouldn’t believe them anyway. To cut a long story short, he succeeded in taking over some key members of the strategic operations staff in the Moscow government. His ambitions were bigger than his common sense — he wanted to short-circuit a very long-term project of ours, of the whole of the ReMastered actually, by developing a device that’s one of a class known collectively as causality-violation weapons. He also wanted to carve out an empire for himself, as maximum leader — an interstellar empire. It was quite the audacious plan, really. It’s a very good thing for all of us that he was no good at the little detail work. Unfortunately” — she cleared her throat — “the weapons lab on Moscow apparently tried to test the gadget prematurely. Something went wrong, spectacularly wrong.”

  “You’re trying to tell me it was an accident?” Wednesday demanded.

  “No.” Portia looked uncomfortable for a moment. “But the idiot responsible — the treacherous idiot, I stress — is, ah, dead. As a direct consequence of the event. In fact, it’s my job to mop up after him, tidy up the loose ends, and so on. Which includes stopping the R-bombs — I suppose you know about them? — by sending the abort codes. Which were in the bag you took, taken from the station administrator’s desk, along with a bunch of other records that are of no use to you but of considerable interest to me, insofar as they’ll help me root out the last of his co-conspirators.”

  “Oh.” Wednesday thought for a while. “So you want to clear everything up. Make it all better.”

  “Yes.” Portia smiled brilliantly at her. “Would you like to help us? I stress that to do anything else would amount to complicity in genocide.”

  Wednesday straightened up. “I suppose so,” she muttered with barely concealed ill grace. “If you promise this will put an end to it all, and nobody will get hurt?”

  “You have my word.” Portia nodded gravely. “Shall we do it?”

  Behind her, the one called Franz opened the door.

  Darkness, stench, and a faint humming. Over the past two days, Steffi’s world had closed in with nightmarish speed. Now it was a rectangle two meters long, two meters high, and one meter wide. She shared it with a plastic bucket full of excrement, a bag of dry food, and a large water bottle. Most of the time she kept the torch switched off to conserve power. She’d spent some time trying to read, and she’d done some isometric exercises — careful to ensure there was no risk of kicking the bucket over — and spent some more time sleeping fitfully. But the boredom was setting in, and when she’d heard the announcement through the wall of her cell telling them to prepare for evacuation it had come as a relief. If the hijackers were off-loading the passengers, it meant there wouldn’t be anyone to get in her way when she did what had to be done.

  A liner the size of the Romanov didn’t vibrate, didn’t hum, and didn’t echo when docking on to a station. In fact, any sound or vibration would be a very bad sign indeed, shock waves overloading the antisound suppressors, jolts maxing out the electrogravitics, supports buckling and bulkheads crumpling. But the closet Steffi had helped Martin build her false wall into adjoined the corridor, and after the muffled sound of a slamming door she’d heard faint footsteps, then nothing. The silence went on for an eternity of minutes, like the loudest noise she’d ever heard.

  I’m going to get you, she repeated to herself. You’ve taken my ship, rounded up my fellow officers, and, and — An echo of an earlier life intruded: back-stabbing bastards. She wondered about Max, in the privacy of her head: he wasn’t likely to have avoided the hijackers, and they might think they could use him against her. If they even cared, if they knew who she was and what she could do. Fat chance. Steffi was grimly certain that nobody knew the truth about her — nobody but Sven, and if her partner and front man had talked, they’d have torn the ship apart to get their hands on her. Svengali knew things about Steffi — and she knew things about him — that would have gotten either of them a one-way trip into the judicial systems of a dozen planets if the other ever cut a deal. But Steffi trusted Svengali completely. They’d worked together for a decade, culminating in this insanely ambitious tour: wetworking their way across the galaxy, two political pest control operatives against an entire government-in-exile. The promised payoff would have been enough to see both of them into comfortable retirement, if the back-stabbing scumbags who were paying for the grand slam hadn’t panicked and hijacked the ship instead. And now, with the plans wrecked and Svengali quite possibly out of action, Steffi was seeing red.

  After an hour of careful planning, she turned the torch on and put her ear to the closet wall. Nothing. “Here goes,” she mumbled to herself, picking up the box cutter Martin had left her. The tiles he’d had the fabricator spam out were rigid and hard to cut at first, stiffened by the fine copper wire mesh of the Faraday cage threading through them. She stabbed at one edge, then worked the blade through and began tugging it down from the top of her hideaway.

  Grunting with effort, Steffi sawed a slit all the way down one side
of the wall, then continued sideways at the bottom. Finally, she squatted and peeled the corner up toward her. Fumbling in the twilight she found her way out blocked by something solid. It brought it all home to her, and suddenly the stinking darkness seemed to close around her head like a fist. Gasping, she shoved as hard as she could, and the obstruction shifted.

  A minute later she found the light switch in the closet. Well, that’s done it, she told herself, heart pounding and stomach fluttering with nervous anticipation. If they’re out there—

  She opened the door. The suite was empty. “Huh.” She took three steps forward, into the dayroom, reveling in her sudden freedom to move, taking in deep breaths of the clean air — suddenly recognizing for what it was the fetor she’d spent more than a day immersed in. Glancing around, she saw the desk. There was some kind of notepad on it, paper covered with writing in dumb pigment. Frowning, she picked it up and began to read by torchlight.

  ALL PASSENGERS MOVING TO EVAC STATIONS. ARRIVING OLD NEWFIE/STATION MOSCOW SYSTEM PERIPHERY HALF/HR. HELP? MAY BE EVAC’ING SHIP.

  NOT TRUST LT. CDR. FROMM. THE REMASTERED GOOD AT CONTROLLING PEOPLE.FROMM IS A PUPPET. PL IS NOW A UBIQ. SURVEILLANCE NET. QUERY OFFICER’S PASS WORKING?

  FEEL FREE TO USE THE FABRICATOR IN THE TRUNK. IT MAKES GOOD TOYS, YOU’VE GOT BLANKET RESOURCE ACCESS PERMISSIONS.

  Steffi felt her knees go weak. The thing in the closet was a general purpose fabricator, a cornucopia machine? She forced herself to sit down for a moment and close her eyes. “Fuck!” she said softly. The possibilities were endless. Then she took a deep breath. Query officer bypass working. If the hijackers were aboard and had turned the liaison network into a surveillance grid, they already know about her. But if they had evacuated the ship, she might have a chance, especially if they’d left the line crew authorization system in place.

  Steffi thrust her left hand into her pocket and pulled out her control rings. Sliding them onto her fingers one by one she mouthed the subvocal command to start up her interface. If they’re watching, they’ll be here any moment, she told herself. But nothing happened; the timer began to spiral in her visual field, and the twist of a ring told her that she had new mail, but there was no knock at the door.

  Slowly, she felt the ghost of a grin rising to her face as she scrolled rapidly through the ship’s status reports. In dock, evacuation systems tripped, drive systems tripped, bridge systems shut down, life support on homeostatic standby. “Thought you’d nailed down all the loose ends, did you? We’ll see about that!” She turned back to the closet and leaned over the control panel of the fabricator. “Give me an index,” she snapped at it. “Show me guns. All the guns you can make…”

  MESSENGERS

  Old Newfie’s basic systems had continued to run while the radiation shock front swept over it. Humans might be gone, life support might be dead — algal ponds crashed, macroscopic plants killed, even the cockroaches fried by the kiloGray radiation pulse — but the multimegaton wheel continued to spin endlessly in the frigid void, waiting for an uncertain return.

  Wednesday’s breath steamed in the darkness of the docking hub. One of Portia’s minions had rigged up floodlights around the boarding tube from the liner, and stark shadows cut across the gray floor toward the spin coupling zoner. Dim silhouettes drifted slowly round, rotating between the floor and cathedral-high ceiling over a period of minutes.

  “Can you hurry it up a bit?” Portia told her phone. “We need to be able to see in here.”

  “Any moment. We’re still looking for the main breaker board.” Jamil and one of the other goons had headed off into the station to look for a backup power supply, wearing low-light goggles and rebreather masks in case they hit a gas trap. Getting the main reactors going would be difficult in the extreme — it would take weeks of painstaking work, checking out the reactor windings, then inching through the laborious task of bootstrapping a fusion cycle — but if they could find a backup fuel cell and light up the docking hub, they’d be able to rig a cable from the Romanov to the hub’s switchboard, and provide power and heat and air circulation to the administrative sectors. Old Newfie had once supported thousands of inhabitants. With a source of power, it could support them again for weeks or months, even without reseeding the life support and air farms.

  “So where did you hide the backup cartridge?” Franz asked Wednesday, deceptively casual.

  Wednesday frowned. “Somewhere in the police station — it was years ago, you know?” She stared at him. Something about the blond guy didn’t ring true. He looked excessively tense. “You’ll need power for the lifts in order to reach it.”

  “This is no time for games,” he said, glancing at Hoechst, who was listening to her comm. “You don’t want to cross her.”

  “Don’t I?” Wednesday glanced up at the axial cranes, skeletal gantries looming like lightning-struck trees out of the darkness high above. “I’d never have guessed.”

  Portia nodded and lowered her comm. “We have lights,” she said, a note of satisfaction in her voice. Moments later, a loud clack echoed through the docking hub. The emergency floods came on overhead, casting a faint greenish glow across the floorscape. “We should have heat and fans in a few minutes,” she added, sounding satisfied. A nod at one of her other minions, a woman with straight hair the color of straw. “Start moving the passengers aboard, Mathilde, I want the passengers off that ship in ten minutes.”

  “You’re evacuating it?” Wednesday stared.

  “Yes. We seem to be missing a Junior Flight Lieutenant. I don’t want her getting any silly ideas about flying off while we’re all aboard the station.” Portia smiled thinly. “I’ll admit that if she can hide from a ubiquitous celldar net and shoot her way past the guards who are waiting she might have a chance, but somehow I doubt it.”

  “Oh.” Wednesday deflated. She felt her rings vibrate, saw a pop-up notice in her left eye: new mail. She tried to conceal her surprise. (Mail? Here?) “Why were you killing our ambassadors?” she asked impulsively.

  “Was I?” Hoechst raised an eyebrow. “Why were you hiding out with a pair of spooks from Earth?”

  “Spooks?” Wednesday shook her head in puzzlement. “They wanted to help, once you hijacked the ship—”

  Portia looked amused. “Everybody wants to help,” she said, raising her comm to her mouth. “You. Whoever I’m speaking to — Jordaan? Yes, it’s me. The two diplomats from Earth. And that fucking busybody journalist. We’re going to the station administrator’s office by way of a little detour along the way. Round up the diplomats and the scribbler. Take a backup and meet us at the station admin office in half an hour. Send Zursch and Anders to the communications room with the key, and have them wait for me there. I’ll be along after I’ve finished with the other errands. Understood? Right. See you there.” She focused on Wednesday. “It’s quite simple.” She took a deep breath. “I’m here to tidy up a huge mess that was left by my predecessor. If I don’t tidy it up, a lot of people are going to die, starting with your friends who I just mentioned, because if I fail to tidy up the mess successfully, I will die, and a lot of my people will die, and killing your friends will be the easiest way of conveying to you — and them — just how angry that makes me. I don’t really want to die, and I’d much rather not have to kill anybody — which is why I’m telling you this, to make sure you know it isn’t a fucking game.” She leaned toward Wednesday, her face drawn: “Have you got the picture yet?”

  Wednesday recoiled. “I, uh…” She swallowed. “Yes.”

  “Good.” Something seemed to go out of Hoechst, leaving her empty and tired. “Everybody thinks they’re doing the right thing, kid. All the time. It’s about the only rule that explains how fucked-up this universe is.” A wan smile crept across her face. “Nobody is a villain in their own head, are they? We all know we’re doing the right thing, which is why we’re in this mess. So why don’t you show me where this police post is, and we’ll dig our way out of it together?”

&
nbsp; “Uh, I, uh…” She was shaking, Wednesday realized distantly. Shaking with rage. You fuckmonster, you killed my parents! And you want me to cooperate? But it was an impotent fury: confronted with someone like Portia, there wasn’t anything she could see that would make things better, no sign of any way out that didn’t involve doing what the ReMastered wanted. Which was why they were the ReMastered, of course. Not villains in their own heads. “This way.” You have mail blinked in her visual field as she walked across the frost-sparkling metal of the dock toward the empty shadows of the lift shafts. Almost instinctively, she twitched her fingers to accept.

  Hello, Wednesday. This is Herman. If you are reading this message, you are back on the Old Newfie communications net — which was not shut down when the station was evacuated. Please reply.

  “Are you all right?” asked the one called Franz, reaching for her elbow as she stumbled.

  “Just a slip. Icy,” she muttered. She thrust her hands into her pocket to conceal her finger-twitched response.

  I’m here. Where are you? Send.

  The reply arrived as they waited while Jamil went over one of the lift motors with a circuit tester. It was icy cold in the station: breath clouded the air, sparkling in the twilight overspill from the lights.

  I am where I always was. My causal channel is still linked into the station network. The station’s other comms channels are still operational, including the diplomatic channel U. Hoechst intends to use to send the “stop” code to the Muscovite R-bombs. Hoechst acquired one of the “stop” codes from her predecessor, U. Scott. There is another code key in the station administrators safe in the central control office. Svengali and his partner successfully panicked the surviving Muscovite diplomatic corps. My highest-probability scenario is that Hoechst’s objective is to take control of the Muscovite R-bombs under cover of decommissioning them, then to use her ownership of the R-bombs to convince both the Muscovite ambassadors and the Dresdener authorities that the R-bombs are committed to an irrevocable attack. This will lay the foundations for a ReMastered takeover of Dresden. The current junta members will flee, providing promotion avenues for ReMastered proxies and generating public disorder in anticipation of an attack that will never arrive.