Iron Sunrise s-2

by Charles Stross

  “We set them up for a long gun,” Rachel reminded him, shuddering slightly. Remembering the icy feeling in her guts as she’d walked out onstage wearing a bulletproof vest, knowing there was a reactive armor shield in front of her, and a crash cart with resuscitation and stabilization gear waiting behind the door, and an ambulance in back. Knowing that a sniper would have to shoot in through a fixed arc constrained by the windows and the podium at the back of the room, knowing the ballistic radar at the front of the killing zone should be able to blow the armor slabs into the path of a bullet-sized guided missile before it could reach her, knowing there were two anti-sniper teams waiting in the hedgerow out front — she’d still been unsure whether each breath would be her last. “They weren’t stupid. Didn’t bring a knife to a gunfight. Took an antipersonnel mine instead.”

  “And they got away with it again.” George sat down heavily on the edge of the lacquered and jade-inlaid desk, head bowed. “We should have fucking known—”

  “Tranh?” called Rachel.

  “We leaked,” the researcher said quietly. “We made it a honeypot, and we attracted the wasps, but probably only one of the passengers from the Romanov was involved, and we can’t tell which one because they fried the surveillance records and probably exfiltrated among the wounded. For all we know the assassin is among the dead. Worse, if they’re from an advanced infrastructure society like Septagon or somewhere with access to brain-mapping gear, the killer could have been any other guest or member of staff they managed to get five minutes alone with. And we couldn’t prove a thing. It looks like the only thing left to do is bring down the hammer and stop the ship leaving. Detain everybody. Want me to get on line to Martin? Have him lock it down?”

  “Don’t do that yet,” said Rachel.

  “Yes, do it,” said Cho. He took a deep breath. “We’re going to have to arrest them,” he told Rachel. “Even if it tips them off. They already know something-must suspect, surely, or else they wouldn’t have declined the honeypot—”

  “Not necessarily,” Rachel said urgently. “Listen, if you hold the ship, we’ll probably uncover an assassin — a dead one, if these people are as ruthless as we think. If we do that, what happens next? I’ll tell you what happens next: there’s a hiatus, then a different killer starts making the rounds, and this time we’ll have broken the traffic analysis chain so we won’t know where they are or where they’re going next. We need to let them run — but we have to stay in front of them.”

  George stood up and paced across the room. “I can’t take the risk. They’ve grown increasingly reckless, from selective assassination to indiscriminate bombing! What next, a briefcase nuke? Don’t you think they’re capable of that?”

  “They—” Rachel stopped dead. “They almost certainly are,” she admitted. “But don’t you think that makes it all the more important that we keep track of them and try to take them alive, so we can find out who’s behind it?”

  “You want to go aboard the ship,” said Tranh.

  “I don’t see any alternative.” There was a horrible familiarity to the situation; to keep on top of a crisis moving at FTL speeds, you had to ride the bullet. “My recommendation is that we let the Romanov depart on schedule, but that I — and any other core team members you see fit to assign to me — should be on board as passengers, and you serve your bill of attainder on the Master and tell her that she’s damn well going to do as I say in event of an emergency.

  “Meanwhile, the rest of the team should proceed aboard the Gloriana to the next destination where there’s a Muscovite embassy — I think that’ll be Vienna? Or wherever — and set up the next trap. Leaving behind a diplomatic support group here to keep an eye on Morrow and Baxter, and anyone off the Romanov who’s staying on.” She swallowed. “While we’re under way, I’ll liaise with the ship’s crew to try to identify anyone who’s acting suspiciously. Before and after the events. Martin may have spotted something while we were busy down here, but I haven’t had time to check yet. If we can get access to the onboard monitoring feeds, we might be able to wrap everything up before we arrive at the next port of call.”

  “You’ll have no backup,” said Cho. “If they panic and decide to bury the evidence—”

  “I’ll be right there to stop them,” Rachel said firmly. She glanced out the window. “It won’t be the first time. But if we do it, we have to do it right now. The Romanov is due to depart in less than five hours. I need to be on board with a sensible cover story and a full intrusion kit. A diplomatic bag, if possible, with full military cornucopia, just like the one we used last time.” She pretended not to notice George’s wince. “And I need to get out of this fucking rubber mask, and call Martin to tell him to stay aboard the Romanov, if you don’t mind.”

  “If I—” George shook his head. “Tranh. How do you evaluate Rachel’s proposed course of action?”

  “I’m afraid she’s right,” Tranh said stiffly. “But I—” he paused. “Who do you need?”

  “For a job like this?” Rachel shrugged. “Nobody is ready for this. I submit that the best cover is no cover. If I go with Martin, we should be overt — a couple of UN diplomats taking low-priority transport between postings, to meet up with the rest of our mission on Newpeace. No cover story at all, in other words — it takes the least effort to set up and it also gives me a clear line of authority back home, reason to talk to the Captain, that sort of thing. I’ll—” She looked worried. “First New Prague, then Newpeace. I heard that name before somewhere, didn’t I? Something bad, some atrocity.”

  “Newpeace.” George made a curse of it. “Yes. You don’t want to go there without immunity. Even with immunity. I’m going to have to send you the internal briefings on the place, Rachel. You don’t want to land there.”

  “Is it that bad?”

  “It’s a dictatorship run by the ReMastered,” Tranh said grimly. “Nasty little local ideology that seems to pop up like a poisonous toadstool in patches. And that fits with a bit of intel our back-office trawl pulled in. We’ve been grepping the public feeds for any references to Moscow, and we got a high probability hit off of a warblogger who’s traveling on the Romanov. He’s poking around the Moscow business from the other end, making some unsubstantiated but very paranoid suggestions about survivors — not diplomats — being tracked down and murdered. What’s more interesting is that he’s on board the Romanov and ReMastered was one of the keyword hits that flagged his column in our trawl. Nothing but innuendo so far, and he’s got an axe to grind — I was following up his history when things fell apart here — but they’re a local power, and they’ve been known to meddle in foreign affairs before now.”

  “They’re also ruthless enough that if they’re involved in this mess, I don’t want you going anywhere near one of their worlds, with or without diplomatic papers,” George added. “Look, you’ve got five hours until departure, and you’re going to take at least three to get up the beanstalk and into orbit. Get going. Get ready. I’ll get Gianni to open a credit line to the mission for you to use, and you, Tranh, you’re going along as Rachel’s backup. Make sure to brief her on who these ReMastered are, just in case. Rachel, Martin will travel with you. He knows the ship, so he’s your technical adviser. We’ll talk by channel once you’re under way and damn the expense. Right now I’ve got this mess to clean up. So don’t hang around.” He extended a hand. After a moment, Rachel took it. “Good luck,” he said. “I’ve got a feeling you’re going to need it.”

  The horror never ended, but after a while you could learn to live with it, Rachel reflected. Or rather, you learned to live between it, in the intervals, the white space between the columns of news, the quiet, civilized times that made the job worthwhile. You learned to live in order to make the whitespace bigger, to reduce the news, to work toward the end of history, to make the universe safe for peace. And you knew it was a zero-sum game at best and eventually you’d lose, but you were on the right side so that didn’t matter. Somebody had to do it. An
d then -

  Scum. There was no other word for it. Fragmentation grenades in the audience at a nondenominational secular-friendly memorial ceremony spelled scum. The audience screaming, a child with her hand blown off, a woman with no head. The pale-faced girl in the front row, desperately leaning over her friend, his head bloodied by the -

  “Is the payload ready?” she asked mildly.

  “One moment.” Pritkin unplugged his diagnostic probe. “Primed. Stick your finger in here. Shared secret time.”

  “Okay.” Rachel extended a hand, wrapped her fingers around the probe and waited for it to bleep, signifying successful quantum key exchange. Pritkin stuck the probe back into the slot in the large traveler’s trunk and waited for the light on its base to begin blinking red. Then he ejected it. “It’s all yours. Armed and loaded.” He straightened up and put the probe away.

  “Which department is this one billed to?” Rachel asked. “After the last time…”

  “Department of Collective Defense.” Pritkin smiled grimly. “You may find its inventory tree a little alarming.”

  “Indeed.” Rachel eyed the trunk appraisingly. “Full military fabworks?”

  “Yup. This little cornucopia can, with a bit of guidance and your authority, generate an entire military-industrial complex. Try not to lose it.”

  “Once was an accident, twice would be careless. All right.” She spoke to the trunk. “Do you recognize me?”

  The trunk spoke back, in a flat monotone: “Authorized officer commanding. You have control.”

  “Hey, I like that. Trunk, follow me.” She nodded to Pritkin. “See you at Newpeace.”

  Scum! she thought, her rage controlled for the time being, directed and channeled. I’m coming for you. And when I find you, you’ll be sorry …

  The express elevator up the beanstalk gave Rachel time to confront the horrors and try to shove them back into a corner of her mind. Tranh, she noted, was even more quiet and reserved than normal. The elevator car was almost two-thirds full, carrying a good number of crew members and tourists returning to the Romanov before it departed; also a sprinkling of quiet, worried-looking Dresdener citizens. While the R-bombs remained decades away, and the recall codes could still be issued, the panic hadn’t set in. Only the most paranoid tinfoil-hat wearers would be thinking about emigrating already. But with a population of hundreds of millions, even the lunatic fringe was large enough to populate a medium-sized city, and some of the middle-aged men and small family groups wore the cautious, haunted expression of refugees. They’d probably be checking in to steerage, to sleep away the long jump sequence without spending precious savings. Rachel figured her assassin wouldn’t be among them. He or she would want to be awake, to plan the next atrocity and keep a weather eye open for pursuers.

  She tilted her seat back as far as it would go and waited for the oppressive shove of acceleration to go away. The car was only pulling two gees, but it was enough to make walking unfeasible and lifting a drinking cup uncomfortably difficult. The glowing blue space elevator cable zipped past beyond the transparent ceiling, an endless string with knots flickering by several times a second — the bulbous shells of the boost coils that coupled the car to its invisible magnetic corridor. They’re up there, she reminded herself. Along with a couple of thousand innocent passengers and crew. Over six hundred people had come down from the Romanov while it was docked; nearly four hundred had returned to the ship. Of those, three hundred and fifty had been aboard the ship — and taken their leave on the surfaces of each planet it had visited, including the ones where Muscovite diplomats had been attacked.

  Only twenty or so of the passengers had been at the embassy reception, but that didn’t mean anything. If it is a bunch like the ReMastered, there won’t be a causal link, she decided. They’re not fools. She’d spent the first hour of the journey skimming George’s diplomatic backgrounder on known ReMastered black operations and was wondering how the hell she’d failed to hear about them before. It’s a big galaxy, but not that big when you get, what was Rosa’s term, bampots like these running amok. Working to a hunch was risky; it could blind you to who was really pulling your strings — but now she’d seen Tranh’s dossier, Rachel had a gut-deep feeling that they were somehow involved. The whole thing had the stench of diplomatic black ops all over it, and these guys were clearly crazy and ruthless enough to be responsible. The only question was why.

  “Why the fuck didn’t you tell us this was a possibility?” she’d asked Tranh, halfway through reading — and then rereading in disbelief — the first page.

  He’d shrugged apologetically, squirming under the acceleration load. “George said to keep it low-key. To avoid prejudicing the investigation.”

  “Prejudice, hah.” Rachel had looked away.

  Despite her violent aversion to museums, Rachel had an overdeveloped sense of historical contingency. Thanks to the arrival of cheap life-prolongation mods, her generation was one of the first to have lived through enough history to have a bellyful of it. She’d grown up in a throwback religious community that didn’t accept any social development postdating the midtwentieth century, and spent her first few adult decades as a troubled but outwardly dutiful surrendered wife. Then she’d hit middle age and jumped the hedge to see the world, the flesh, and the devil for herself. Along the way she’d acquired a powerful conviction that history was a series of accidents — God was either absent or playing a very elaborate practical joke (the Eschaton didn’t count, having explicitly denied that it was a deity) — and that the seeds of evil usually germinated in the footprints of people who knew how everybody else ought to behave and felt the need to tell them so. When she’d been born, there had still been people alive who remembered the Cold War, the gray behemoth of ideology slouching toward a nuclear destination. And the ReMastered rang some uneasy bells in the echoing library of her memory. She’d heard of things like this before. Why hasn’t anybody stepped on them yet? she wondered.

  As she considered the question there was a chime. The elevator car slowed, and, for a stomach-churning moment, spun upside down. Acceleration resumed, pressing down on her like a lead-weighted net. “We will arrive in reception bay three in approximately nineteen minutes,” announced the cabin attendant. “Slowing to one gee two minutes before arrival, if you need to use the en suite facilities.”

  Tranh caught her eye. “You ready?” He grunted.

  “Yes.” Rachel didn’t elaborate. Tranh was nervous, and he’d let her know. “Done reading.” She tapped her secure notepad to demonstrate, and he attempted to nod — unwise and uncomfortable, judging from his grimace. Earlier, Rachel had tried holding the pad up, two-handed, and found it workable, except that her arms tried to go to sleep if she held the position for more than a couple of minutes. For a gadget that could fit in her wallet it felt remarkably like a lead brick. But there was something unhealthily compulsive about reading about the ReMastered. It was like scratching a fleabite until it bled: she didn’t want to do it but found herself unable to stop.

  Scum, she thought as she read the in-depth report on Newpeace. How did they get away with it? It’s the most brilliant, horrible, thing I’ve seen in years. It made the imperial megalomania and straitlaced frigidity of the New Republic seem cozy and forgivable by comparison. Seminars on history’s most onerous tyrannies — so they know which errors of leniency to avoid?

  The planet arrayed above her head was showing a visible disc, gibbous and misty, with a thin rind of atmosphere. Are they out to conquer this world, too? she wondered. The ReMastered showed every sign of being aggressively expansionist, convinced their ideology was the one true way. But logistical nightmares and the presence of STL bombers around almost every target world made interstellar power grabs unfeasibly risky. It was as if, during Earth’s nineteenth century, every imperialist set on colonizing another land had been forced to resupply by wooden sailing ship across the breadth of the Pacific Ocean, while facing defenders armed with nuclear-tipped missiles.
>
  “So they came from Tonto and executed a classic Maoist-Fischerite insurgency campaign, mediated by zombies with brain implants driven by causal channel from a nest in the same solar system,” she noted beneath a harrowing account of the Peace Enforcement Agency’s subversion. Arranging a terrorist insurgency to justify a state clampdown, then providing the tools and trained personnel for the panicking incumbents to deploy, before decapitating them in a coup and consolidating power. “Hmm.” And if they grab the levers of power cleanly, before anyone realizes that half their politicians are brain-scooped moppets, they can decommission the STL bombers before they become a threat. Which in turn means … Hey, have they actually invented a repeatable strategy for interstellar conquest? And if so, did they come from somewhere else, before Tonto? In which case …

  The whole ReMastered project, to destroy the Eschaton and replace it with another god, one with access to the uploaded memories of every human being who’d ever lived — and then to re-create humanity in the image of the new god they intended to serve — sounded so ridiculous on the face of it that it pleaded to be written off as a crackpot religion from the darkness beyond the terrestrial light cone. But something about it made Rachel’s skin crawl. I’ve heard of something like this before, somewhere else. But where?

  She was still trying to answer the question when there was a succession of chimes, the elevator capsule spun around once more, and the view was replaced with smooth metal walls inching past at a snail’s pace. She had her safety harness unbuckled before the attendant managed to say, “Welcome to orbital transfer station three.” By the time the doors were open, she was on her feet with her pad stowed in a pocket, ready to collect her luggage from the hold.