Iron Sunrise s-2

by Charles Stross

  The lift motors creaked and hummed, and lights flickered on inside the car. “Seems to be working,” said Jamil, poking at the exposed control panel. “It’s got a separate flywheel power supply that I’m spinning up right now. Everybody in. What floor are we looking for?” he asked Wednesday.

  “Fourth,” she mumbled.

  Expect no mercy from the ReMastered. They will honor any promises they make to the letter, but semantic ambiguities will render them worthless.

  Important note: U. Franz Bergman is a malcontent. Prior to Hoechst’s arrival in Septagon he and his partner were preparing to defect. Hoechst’s hold on him is his partners upload data. An offer of medical reincarnation coupled with the upload record may constitute leverage in his case.

  Your old implant conforms to Moscow open systems specifications and is therefore able to receive this message. Unfortunately, owing to a protocol mismatch, I cannot contact other people directly. Please copy and forward this message to: Martin Springfield, Rachel Mansour, Frank Johnson, by way of your Septagon-compliant interface.

  The lift squealed to a halt. Wednesday shook herself. “Where now?” Portia demanded.

  “Where?” The doors opened onto darkness. The air was freezing cold, musty, and held a residual fetor, the stench of long-dead things that had mummified in place.

  “Can I have some light?”

  Behind her, a torch flared into brightness, sweeping long shadows into the corners of the curving passage. Wednesday stepped out of the lift car cautiously, her breath steaming in the freezing air. “This way.”

  Trying to re-create the path she’d taken all those years ago came hard. She walked slowly, fingers twitching furiously as she copied and forwarded the message from Herman. No telling when it would arrive, but the mesh networks and routing algorithms used by implants in the developed worlds would spool the mail until she got within personal network range of someone who could handshake with them — maybe even one of the ReMastered, if they’d had their systems upgraded for work out in the feral worlds.

  Frozen carpet creaked beneath her feet. Her pulse sped, and she glanced behind her, half-expecting to hear the clicking clatter of claws. Portia, Jamil, and Franz — an unlikely triptych of scheming evil — kept her moving on. They were near the toilet. “Here,” she said, her voice small.

  “You’re not going to—” Franz stopped.

  “What is it?” Portia demanded.

  “There’s a body in there. I think.” Wednesday swallowed.

  “Jamil. Check it out.” Jamil pushed past, taking his torch. Portia produced a smaller one, not much more than a glow stick really. A minute of banging about, then he called, “She’s right. I see a — hmm. Freeze-dried, I guess.”

  “Explain.” Portia thrust her face at Wednesday.

  “He, I, I—” Wednesday shuddered convulsively. “Like the paper said. I left it two decks down, three segments over,” she added.

  “Jamil, we’re going,” Portia called. “You’d better not be wasting our time,” she told Wednesday grimly.

  Wednesday led them back to the lift, which groaned and whined as it lowered them two more floors into the guts of the station. The gravity was higher there, but still not as harsh as she recalled; probably there’d been some momentum transfer between the different counterrotating sections, even superconducting magnetic bearings are unable to prevent atmospheric turbulence from bleeding off energy over time. You have new mail, Wednesday read, as the lift slowed. “Come on,” Jamil said, pushing her forward. “Let’s get this over with.”

  Message received. We understand. Get word out via hub comms? Any means necessary. — Martin

  The gaping door and the darkness within loomed out of the darkness. The seed of a plan popped into Wednesday’s head, unbidden. “I think I hid it in one of the cupboards. Can you give me a torch?” she asked.

  “Here.” Portia passed her the light wand.

  “Let’s see if I remember where…” Wednesday ducked into the room, her heart hammering and her hands damp. She’d only get one chance to do this.

  Turning, she flashed the torch around overturned desks, open cupboards. There. She bent down and picked up a cartridge, crammed it into one pocket — scooped up a second and a third, then straightened up. “Wrong cupboard,” she called. Where had she left it? She looked around, saw a flash of something the color of dried blood — leather. Ah! She pulled on it, and the bag slid into view. “Got it,” she said, stepping back out into the corridor.

  “Give it here.” Portia held out her hand.

  “Can’t you wait until we get back to the hub?” Wednesday stared at her, bravado rising. The leather wallet with the diplomatic seal of the Moscow government on it and the bulge where she’d stashed the data cartridge hung from one hand.

  “Now!” Portia insisted.

  “You promised.” Wednesday tightened her grip on the wallet and stared Portia in the eyes. “Going to break your word?”

  “No.” Hoechst blinked, then relaxed. “No, I’m not.” She looked like a woman awakening from a turbulent dream. “You want to hold it until you see your friends, you go right ahead. I assume it is the right wallet? And the data cartridge you took?”

  “Yes,” Wednesday said defensively, tightening her grip on it. The three riot cartridges she’d stolen felt huge in her hip pocket, certain to be visible. And while only Jamil had a gun slung in full sight, she had an edgy feeling that all the others were armed. They’d be carrying pistols, if nothing else. What was the old joke? Never bring a taser to an artillery duel.

  “Then let’s go visit the control center.” Portia smiled. “Of course, if you’re wasting my time, you’ll have made me kill one of your friends, but you wouldn’t do that, would you?”

  “Never bring a taser to an artillery duel,” muttered Steffi, glancing between the compact machine pistol (with full terminal guidance for its fin-stabilized bullets, not to mention a teraherz radar sight to allow the user to make aimed shots through thin walls) and the solid-state multispectral laser cannon (with self-stabilizing turret platform and a quantum-nucleonic generator backpack that could boil a liter of water in under ten seconds). Regretfully, she picked the machine pistol, the laser’s backpack being too unwieldy for the tight confines of a starship. But there was nothing stopping her from adding some other, less cumbersome toys, was there? After all, none of the spectators at her special one-woman military fashion show would be writing reviews afterward.

  After half an hour, Steffi decided she was as ready as she’d ever be. The console by the door said that there was full pressure outside. Negligent of them, she thought as she pointed her gun through the door and scanned the corridor. It looked clear, ghostly gray in the synthetic colors displayed by her eye-patch gun-sight. Right, here goes.

  She moved toward the nearest intersection corridor with crew country, darting forward, then pausing to scan rooms to either side. Need a DC center console, she decided. The oppressive silence was a reminder of the constant menace around her. If the hijackers wanted to lock down a ship, they could have depressurized it: that they hadn’t meant that they’d be back. Before then, she had to eliminate any guards they’d left behind, erase her presence from their surveillance system, and regain control.

  Where are they? she asked herself, nerves on edge as she came close to the core staircase and lift utility ducts on this deck. They’re not stupid; they’ll have left a guard. They’ve got the surveillance net, so they must know I’m moving around up here. So where’s the ambush going to be? Smart guards wouldn’t risk losing her in a maze of passages and staterooms she knew better than they did. They’d simply lock the staircase doors between pressure zones, and nail her as soon as she conveniently locked herself in a narrow moving box.

  Got it. Steffi ducked sideways into a narrow crew corridor and found herself facing the blank doors of a lift shaft. Readying herself, she hit the call button and crouched beside the doors, gun raised to scan. There were two possibilities. Either the l
ift car would contain an unpleasant surprise, or it would be empty — in which case, they’d be waiting for her wherever she arrived.

  The gun showed her an empty cube before the doors opened. She moved instantly, jamming her key ring onto the emergency override pad on the control panel. Steffi clicked her tongue in concentration as she commanded the lift car to lower to motor maintenance position and open the doors. There was space on top of the pressurized car, a platform a meter and a half wide and a meter high, ridged with cables and motor controllers leading to the prime movers at each corner of the box. She scrambled aboard, then hit the button for the training bridge deck. What happened next would depend on how many guards they’d left behind for her. If there were enough to monitor the ship surveillance network as well as lay an ambush for her, she’d already lost, but she was gambling that her cover was still intact. As long as Svengali hadn’t talked, she stood a chance, because only a paranoid would take the same precautions over a Junior Flight Lieutenant that they’d need to neutralize a professional assassin … The lift seemed to take forever to climb down the shaft. Steffi crouched in the middle of the roof, curling herself around her gun. Her eye patch showed her a gray rectangle, ghost shadows unfolding below it — the empty body of the lift, descending into a tube of darkness too far away for the surface-piercing gun-sights to see. Four decks, three, two — the lift slowed. Steffi changed her angle, aiming past the side of the lift where the doors opened, out into the corridor.

  Three targets, range five meters, group shots, gun to automatic. The machine pistol stuttered unevenly and the recoil pushed at her wrists, jets of hot gas belching from the reaction-control ducts around the barrel to center it on each target for precisely four shots. It was all over in a second. Steffi twitched around, hunting movement. Nothing: just three indistinct lumps of gray against a background of rectangles.

  She hit the DOWN button again, then opened the doors and glanced incuriously at the bodies. Her forehead wrinkled. There was blood everywhere, leaking from two strength-through-joy types she recognized from the dinner table, and from — “Max?” she said aloud, then she caught herself with a quiet snarl of fury. The motherfucking clown who planned this is going to pay, with interest. She checked her gun readouts: nothing was moving, up and down the corridor.

  She pushed through a crew-side doorway, oriented herself on a narrow corridor, and headed for the emergency room. Instinct stopped her just short of the corner, dropping to one knee with gun raised. Company? she wondered, motionless, trying to scan a comprehensible picture through the corner wall with tiny flicks of her fingertips. Yes? No? There was something there, and it moved -

  They fired simultaneously. Steffi sensed, and heard, the bullet zip past her head as her own gun went into spasm, squirting the remaining contents of its magazine through the wall in a surge of penetrator rounds. There was a damp sound from just around the corner, then a loud thud. Steffi reloaded mechanically, then made a final check and stepped out into the corridor in front of the emergency bridge, stepping over the body of the guard.

  “Bridge systems. Speak to me,” she commanded. “Are you listening?”

  “Authenticating — welcome, Lieutenant Grace.” The bridge door slid open to reveal empty chairs, an air of deceptive normality.

  “Conversational interface, please.” Steffi slid the door shut, then dropped into the pilot’s chair and turned it to face the door, her gun at the ready. “Identify all other personnel aboard ship, their locations and identities. If anyone moves toward this deck, let me know. Next, display on screen two all-system upgrades to passenger liaison network since previous departure. List whereabouts of all passengers traveling from and native to Tonto and Newpeace.” The walls began to fill up with information. “Dump specifics to my stash.” Steffi smiled happily. “Are all officers authenticated by retinal scan? Good. Who authorized the last PLN reload? Good. Now stand by to record a new job sequence.”

  Wednesday had walked over to the desk at the front of the evacuation assembly point as if she didn’t have a care in the world. Rachel watched with growing misgivings as she spoke quietly to the fair-haired guy and they left together through the side exit into crew country. Martin leaned close. “I hope she’ll be all right.”

  Half an hour later it was their turn. The passengers were growing more restive, talking among themselves in a quiet buzz of nervous anticipation, when a woman ducked through the door. “Rachel Mansour? Martin Springfield? Please come forward!”

  She gripped Martin’s hand, squeezing out a message in a private code rusty from disuse: “Rumbled.”

  “Ack. Go?”

  “Yes.” She pulled him forward, pushing between a yakking family group and a self-important fellow in the robe of an Umbrian merchant banker. “You want to talk?” she asked, staring at the woman.

  “No, I want you both to come with me,” she said casually. “Someone else wants to talk to you.”

  “Then we’ll be happy to comply,” Rachel said, forcing a smile. All this, and not even a briefing beforehand? For a moment she wished she was back in the claustrophobic tenement off the Place du Molard, waiting for the bomb squad. She tried not to notice Martin, whose nervousness was transparently obvious. “Where do you want us to go?”

  “Follow me.” The woman opened the side door and motioned them through. She had a friend waiting on the other side, a big guy who held his gun openly and watched them with incurious eyes. “This way.”

  She led them up a short staircase and out into a wide cargo tunnel. The air became increasingly chilly as they walked along it. Rachel shivered. She wasn’t dressed for an excursion into a freezer hold. “Where are we?”

  “Keep it for the boss.”

  “If you say so.” Rachel tried to keep her voice light, as if this was a mystery excursion managed by the crew to keep bored passengers amused. They turned a corner onto a wider docking tunnel, then up a ramp that led into a vast twilight space. Floods glittered high above as the gravity did an alarmingly abrupt fade, dropping to less than a tenth of normal in the space of a few meters. We’re outside the ship, she squeezed. Martin nodded. Not for the first time she wished she dared use her implants to text him, but the risk of interception in the absence of a secured quantum channel was too great. If only I knew how complete their surveillance capability was, she told herself. If. She shivered violently and watched her breath steam before her face. “Far to go?”

  The blond woman motioned her toward a doorway at the far side of the docking hub. Warm light shone from it. “Shit, it’s cold out here,” Martin muttered. They hurried forward without any urging on the part of their guards.

  “Stop.” The one with the gun held up a hand as they neared the door. “Mathilde?”

  “Yah.” The blond woman produced a bulky comm and spoke into it. “Mathilde here. The two — diplomats. Outside control. I’m sending them in.” She turned and glared at Rachel and Martin, waving at the door. “That way.”

  “Where else?” Rachel looked around as she entered the room. It was brightly lit, and a whine from overhead suggested that a local aircon unit was fighting a losing battle against the chill. The man with the gun was behind them, and for a sickening moment as she saw the largely empty room, she wondered if he was meant to kill them and leave their bodies there. Then a door slid open in the wall opposite.

  “Go in.” Gun-boy waved them forward. “It’s a lift.”

  “Okay, I’m going, I’m going.” Rachel stepped forward. Martin followed her, with Gun-boy trailing to the rear. The doors closed and the lift began to move, sinking toward the high-gee levels of the station. It squealed as it went, long-idle wheels protesting as they clawed along toothed rails that had chilled below normal operating temperatures. They descended in silence, Rachel leaning against Martin in the far corner of the cargo lift from the guard. The guard kept his weapon on them the whole time, seemingly immune to distraction.

  The lift juddered to a halt, and its door slid open on a well-lit corrido
r. There were more fans, humming and grating at overload. The chill was less extreme, and when the guard waved them toward an open door at the other end of the passage, Rachel couldn’t see her breath. “Where are we?” she asked.

  “Waiting for the boss. Go right in.” Gun-boy looked bored and annoyed, but not inclined toward immediate violence. Rachel tensed, then nodded and went right in. There was a sign on the open door she read as she passed it: DIRECTOR’S SUITE. Well, what a surprise, she thought tiredly, mentally kicking herself for not having seen this coming. Then her implant twitched. She had to suppress a start as she blinked, rapidly: new mail here, of all places? How …

  She read it quickly, almost trancing out — almost missing the deep pile carpet, the withered brown trees in their pots to either side of the big wood-topped desk, and the door leading into the inner office. Then more mail came in — this time, a reply from Martin. She glanced at him sharply, then turned round to stare at Gun-boy. The goon leaned against the wall just inside the doorway. “Who is this boss of yours?” she asked. “Do we have to wait long?”

  “You wait until she gets here.” The fan in the office rattled slightly, pumping tepid air in to dilute the chill. A thin layer of dust covered the desk, the visitor’s chairs, an empty watercooler.

  “Mind if I sit down?” asked Martin.

  “Be my guest.” Gun-boy raised an ironic eyebrow, and Martin sat down hastily before he changed his mind. Rachel stepped sideways in front of him, and he slipped an arm protectively around her waist, under the hem of her jacket.

  “Can you tell us anything?” Rachel asked quietly as Martin slipped something into her waistband. “Like what this is all about?”