Iron Sunrise s-2

by Charles Stross

  “No.”

  “Okay.” Rachel sighed. “If that’s how you want it.” She sat down on the chair to Martin’s right and leaned against him, putting her left arm behind his shoulder. So they’re not monitoring the station protocols for traffic yet, she thought, hungry for hope. If they were, that mail from Wednesday would have set them off. She let her arm drop behind Martin’s back, then twisted her wrist round and fumbled with the object in her waistband until it went up her sleeve to mate with its companion.

  Click. She felt, rather than heard, the noise. The gadget made handshake with her implants, and a countdown timer appeared in her vision: the number of seconds it would take for the gel-phase fuel cell to power up and the gadget to begin assembling itself. She’d seldom felt so naked in her life. If they’d extended the surface-piercing radar surveillance network from the ship into this room seven shades of alarm would be going off right now, and Gun-boy would put a bullet through her face long before the gadget was ready. Otherwise -

  A creaking whine from the corridor announced the arrival of another lift car. A few seconds later Mathilde appeared, this time leading Frank. Frank was in a bad way, his skin ashen and his hands taped together in front of him. He looked around, eyes unreadable, wearing the same clothes he’d been in when Martin had interviewed him. They were the worse for wear. “Sit,” Mathilde told him, pointing to the chair next to Rachel. She produced a box cutter: “Hold out your hands. We’ve got the girl. Piss us off, and you’ll never see her again.”

  Frank cleared his throat. “I understand,” he grunted, rubbing his wrists. He glared at her resentfully. “What now?”

  “You wait.” Mathilde took a step back to stand beside Gun-boy.

  “Lining up all your targets, huh?”

  She cast Martin a very ugly look. “Wait for the boss. She won’t be long now.”

  “You’re Frank, aren’t you? What happened?” Rachel whispered to him.

  Frank grunted, and rubbed at his wrists again. “Got me early. In my room. You’re his partner?” He jerked his chin at Martin. “Thought I was the only one at first. Where are we?”

  “Old Newfie. Wednesday’s station. Listen, we hid her but they — had you. She went with them.”

  “Shit!” He met her eyes with an expression of terrible resignation. “You know what this means.”

  Rachel gave a slight nod in the direction of the guards. “Don’t say it.”

  “You can say anything you like,” Mathilde called, grinning maliciously at him. “We have complete freedom of speech — anything you want to say we will listen to.”

  “Fuck you!” Frank glared at her.

  “Shut up.” Gun-boy pointed his machine pistol at Frank. For a tense moment Rachel was sure he would say something. The seconds stretched out into an infinitely long moment as Frank and the guard stared — then Frank slumped back in his chair.

  “ ’Sokay. I can let go.” Frank glanced at her and yawned, his jaw muscles crackling. “I’m used to it — was used to it.” He rubbed his hands together, making small circling movements. Rachel tried not to show any sign of having noticed his frantic control gestures. Someone’s got a backlog of e-mail, she guessed, or itchy fingers.

  They sat in silence for a couple of minutes, then a buzzing noise from along the corridor announced the imminent arrival of yet another self-propelled lift car. Rachel looked round automatically.

  The doors opened. Many footsteps, moving toward the office in the curious broken rhythm of fractional gee. First in was a skinny, edgy-looking man; then a woman of a certain age, her eyes cold and her expression satisfied. Then Wednesday, walking in front of a guy with long hair in a ponytail, holding a boxy urban combat weapon. Her expression was ugly when she saw Frank looking like a morning-after wreck.

  “Rachel Mansour, from the UN, I presume?” The woman walked behind the station manager’s desk, turned the chair round, and sat down in it. “I’m very pleased to meet you.” She smiled as she reached into an outer pocket and placed a compact pistol on the desk in front of her, its barrel pointed at Rachel. “I see you’ve already met our young runaway. That will make things much simpler. Just one more person to come, then I think we’ll begin.”

  IRREVOCABLE

  They’d untaped his hands; leaning back, ignoring the guard, Frank had twitched his rings, switching his optic implants and ear pickups to record promiscuously. There was no point missing anything, even his own execution.

  BING. He’d jumped a little when the mail flag came up; something from Wednesday. But the guard hadn’t noticed. None of them noticed. Just typical ReMastered foot soldiers, obedient and lethal. He read the message and felt his palms go damp. He was glad he was sitting down. So now Wednesday’s invisible friend is sending me e-mail? But he’s got to use her as a relay because she’s the only one of us with a setup compatible with this station? Shit.

  Frank reflected bleakly on the need for bandwidth. If there’s some way to get that report out, wherever we are … we can’t all just vanish, can we? But the truth was anything but reassuring. Liners did vanish from time to time, and if this was the hijacking it appeared to be — bearing all the slick signs of ReMastered covert ops, the sly subversion of emergency reflexes — then there was no way word would ever get out.

  BING. More mail from Wednesday had arrived, broadcast to him and Rachel and Martin — what? Some sort of code attachment, a new interface protocol for his implant to talk to the station’s ether. He tried to keep his face impassive as he mentally crossed his fingers and loaded the untrusted executable.

  Then the newcomers arrived. Frank stared at them, his world narrowed suddenly to a single panicky choice, a flashback going back decades. He took it all in, Wednesday sullen between two guards, the woman in front holding the leather satchel, smiling at him. He remembered the bright sunlight on the rooftop of the Demosthenes Hotel, the acrid smell of propane stoves and dog shit wafting on the breeze across downtown Samara. Alice turning toward the parapet with a camera drone in her hands. The woman, again. Blond destruction on the day it rained bullets, the day when everything changed.

  Frank blinked up at her. “Oh holy shitting fucking Christ, it’s you—”

  “Increasing my little piggie count, this time.” Her smile broadened, turning ugly at the edges. “We really must stop bumping into each other like this, mustn’t we?”

  “Shit, shit, shit—” Frank felt nauseous. The hot smell of Alice’s blood was in his nose; the roar and screams of the crowd as the bullets began spattering into them. “You were in Samara. On Newpeace. Who are you?” He barely noticed Wednesday’s jolt of surprise from the other side of the room as he focused in on the woman’s face.

  “I’m U. Portia Hoechst, DepartmentSecretariat of Division Four of the Department of External Environmental Control, planetary dominion of Newpeace. The ‘U’ is short for ubermensch, or ubermadchen, take your pick.” Her smile was as wide as a shark’s gape. “At this point in the proceedings I’m supposed to gloatingly tell you my evil plans before I kill you. Then, if you believe the movies, a steel-jawed hero is supposed to erupt through the walls and teach me the error of my ways with extreme prejudice.”

  She snorted. “Except there aren’t any steel-jawed heroes within sixteen light years of this station.” A hint of mirth in her eyes. “Not even that Third Lieutenant you’ve got squirreled away, at least not once the guards are through with her.” Frank felt his nails digging into the palms of his hands; his vision went gray and pixelated for a few seconds, and his heart pounded before he realized that it was the firmware patch from Wednesday loading on his implant’s virtual machine, combined with a raw, primal rage.

  “Why are you telling us this?” Rachel asked quietly.

  “Because I like a fucking audience!” Hoechst sat up. “And it’s going to be over soon, anyway.” She stopped smiling. “Oh, about the ‘let me tell you everything before I kill you’ bit: I’m not going to kill you. You might wish I had, but I’m not. As soon as I’
ve got this station on auxiliary internal power and disabled external communications, all the passengers and crew are coming aboard. It won’t be much fun, but you’ll be able to last for the couple of months it takes for a rescue ship to reach you. Even you, Frank.” A flicker of a smile. “No reeducation camps here. You’re getting the VIP treatment.”

  Frank stayed quiet, his guts tense. Fuck, we’re still on the net! he realized. The station’s causal channels were still working. This packet from Herman, whoever he was, was a protocol converter — with gathering disbelief Frank realized that he wasn’t cut off anymore. He could send mail. Or even pipe his raw recording feed straight to Eric, back home, there to do whatever he could with the posthumous spool. Take it like you give it, you fuckers! he thought triumphantly. His hands folded together against the cold, nobody saw him twisting his rings, setting up the narrowcast stream to his inbox on Earth. I am a camera!

  Steffi watched the rerun of Svengali’s execution in grainy monochrome, tracking it through the labyrinthine maze of the surveillance system take spooled by the ship’s memory as the bridge systems hummed around her, rewinding the vessel’s software model of itself back to the state it had been in before the ReMastered lobotomized it.

  She’d thought she was angry when the double-crossing clients ran amok, angry when she’d spent long hours crouched in a dark closet space with the soft-shoe shuffle of guards outside the door. But she hadn’t been angry at all. Not in comparison to her current state of mind. Livid with rage just barely began to describe it.

  She’d worked with Sven for just short of a decade. In many ways they’d been closer than a married couple — herself the pretty face up front and visible, and he the fixer in the background, oiling the gears and reeling in the contracts. He’d found her when she was a teen punk, heading for rehab or a one-way trip to the exile colonies, seen through the rust and grime to the hard metal beneath, and polished it to a brilliant shine. In the early years she’d adored him, back before she matured enough to see him as he really was — theirs hadn’t been a sexual relationship (beyond an early exploratory fumbling), but it was a partnership based on need, and mutual respect, and blood. And now, just as they’d been on the edge of their greatest coup -

  “I’m going to find you, and you’re going to wish you’d committed suicide first,” she told the face frozen to the screen. “And then—” her eyebrows furrowed — “I’m going to…” Going to do what?

  Steffi leaned back her chair and closed her eyes, forcing the tight ball of rage back into the recesses of her skull, out of the way until it was needed. Where do I stand? She had the key to their bank accounts, if she needed it. And she had a couple of other keys, picked up here or there. She’d been in an office in Turku and a roadside rest stop on Eiger’s World, and a house on Earth, too, all in the past six months. Sven had done his homework before taking on the job, explained the alarming consequences of success to her and the importance of finding the keys. There’d been no point rummaging by the roadside, but she had two of them in her pocket, now, keys to the gates of hell itself. That had to count for something, didn’t it? And if the dim-witted UN diplomats didn’t know who she was, then all that left was the ReMastered.

  If I can take them out of the picture, I can become Lieutenant Steffi Grace, and nobody will know any different, she realized. Or I can try for the third key, and access to a Muscovite diplomatic channel. She began to smile, her lips pulling back from her teeth in an expression very close to a feral snarl. See how they like it when I derail their plans. She sat up and leaned toward the pilot console. “Bridge systems, get me the full station package on our current port. Display dockside schematics on window four. Do you have access to the loading bay external cameras? Do you have access to the station communications network? Good. Record new job sequence, activation key rosebud.”

  “You’re going to maroon us,” Wednesday said flatly. She took a stride toward the desk, but a tense motion with a gun barrel stopped her sharply. She turned to stare at Frank, wringing her hands together. Frank raised an eyebrow at her. What can I do about it? he thought, his stomach turning over. Why couldn’t you have stayed hidden?

  “I’m not going to leave you alone for long.” Hoechst shrugged. “My own ship’s heading for home with a message too secret to trust to certain, shall we say, monitored channels. While it’s gone I need to take the Romanov on a little errand. I’m mopping up after my predecessor — one U. Vannevar Scott — who got a little bit too big for his boots.” That flickering smile. Almost without willing it Frank found himself staring at Wednesday. She looked as scared as he felt, her face drained and pale, but resolute, the condemned facing the scaffold. He forced himself to look back at Hoechst. The blinking status display in his left eye told its own story: every word that hit his ears was stripped down to its constituent bits, entangled with a qubit interface somewhere in the magical weirdness of a causal channel, the other end of which would pipe the data into Eric’s inbox. Let’s see how topical we can make this news, shall we, he thought at Hoechst, feeling the fear slowly turn to a warm glow of triumphant accomplishment. J’accuse!

  “Scott decided to carve out his own little Directorate,” Hoechst continued, oblivious to the true size of her potential audience. “First, he needed a lever. That lever was going to be a bucolic backwater called Moscow. He got funding and clearance to operate on Moscow by offering the Directorate a new way of developing weapons forbidden by the Enemy — you call it the Eschaton — like temporal ablators. Moscow was going to be his weapons proving ground, a backwater nobody would expect to be going after causality-violation devices. Actually he wanted to be dictator of a whole bunch of planets, and Moscow was going to be his tool of conquest — also his insurance against the wrath of the High Directorate. But he got sloppy. He puppetized half the Muscovite military high command — an administrative backwater on that planet, nobody paid much attention to them — and thoroughly subverted the interstellar deterrent group. But then he decided to accelerate the weapons test program he’d promised the Directorate and use them himself instead of the original clumsy R-bomb plan.”

  Wednesday stared at her. “You’re telling me the nova was a fucked-up weapons test?”

  “Well, sure. In fact, it was an unauthorized fuck up.” Hoechst looked pensive. She reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out a small key, placing it very carefully in the middle of the desk in front of her. “We all make mistakes. In Scott’s case, it was his last; he’d gotten sloppy, and the — my boss — cleared me to take him down and rectify the situation. That was before we drained him and discovered certain unpleasant facts about his treason. That cartridge” — she held out a hand toward Wednesday — “is one of the loose ends. Immigration records of Scott’s agents moving in and out of Moscow. And details of the weapons project and the test schedule. Nothing we want to leave lying around. It’s a severe political embarrassment.”

  “There’s more, isn’t there?” Frank asked, fascinated.

  “Well, no shit!” Hoechst looked at him curiously, as if wondering why he was so interested in the abstract issues, rather than the proximate fate of his own skin. “There’s a flight of four R-bombs coming.” She frowned. “The cover story is that they’re aimed at New Dresden. And that’s what the Muscovite diplomats think.”

  “What did he—”

  “Shut the fuck up!” Hoechst frowned. She tapped one finger on the key. “They’re supposed to be running on New Dresden. That’s the official target ops plan that was on file, isn’t it? That’s what the Muscovite diplomats think. And they’re next to invisible when they’re under way. Except our fucking asshole Ubermensch Vannevar Scott was too cute by half. While he was puppetizing the Muscovite Defense Ministry, the first group he hit was the deterrence operations staff, including the flight crew of one of the bombers — the one that isn’t responding to messages. He was planning his defection at least ten years before Moscow went bang: one of those fucking bombers is running on Newpeace, our
new regional capital, which is about as distant from Moscow as New Dresden.

  “Not many ReMastered know this,” she added drily, “and my boss wants to keep it that way.”

  Frank sat up straight. “Are you telling us the business with New Dresden, the ambassadors—”

  “I haven’t been bumping off foreign diplomats.” She shook her head vehemently. “That was Scott’s plan. I told you he was sloppy, didn’t I? When things went wrong, when Moscow Prime exploded, he took steps to sweep the dirt under the rug. He paid an extremely accomplished assassin, the one you called Svengali.” For a moment she looked extremely tired. “Which is presumably what brought you aboard the Romanov,” she murmured in Rachel’s direction. Rachel stared at her, face impassive. “Svengali won’t be bothering us anymore, needless to say.”

  “You want me to believe that this was all one man’s rogue operation?” Rachel asked, her voice low and controlled.

  “Pretty much.” For a moment Hoechst looked terribly old. “Don’t underestimate him: U. Scott was one of the highest-ranking officials in, ah, External State Security. The foreign espionage service, in other words. And he was planning a coup. He was going to take Moscow and use the R-bombs to hold the entire Directorate at bay, and he was going to leverage his takeover of Moscow to destabilize New Dresden, via the trade war. He was already infiltrating the Dresden Foreign Ministry — without authorization. If he succeeded, he’d have had two planets, the beginnings of his own pocket interstellar empire.” She looked at Frank, meeting his eyes. “I know what you think of us. Regardless of that, whatever you think of our ideology, we are not insane, and we are not suicidal. One of the goals of the ReMastered Directorate is to render interstellar warfare not merely unthinkable, but impossible. Scott had to go.”

  She sounds as if she’s trying to convince herself, Frank realized with a sinking feeling. This was not what he’d wanted to hear from her. He’d expected venomously triumphant self-justification, perhaps, or a gloating confession. Not this! he thought despairingly. If Eric decides to run this, it’ll be about the best piece of pro-ReMastered press they could ask for! The pot of gold at the end of Frank’s starbow had just turned out to be a chamber pot full of shit — and despite what he’d said earlier about journalistic ethics being a crock, he couldn’t see any obvious holes in her argument. Even releasing the prisoners in Hoechst’s stolen memory diamond — expensive as such a process would be — would probably not reverse its effect by much.