Iron Sunrise

by Charles Stross

  “I’ve got a bad feeling, kid,” Alice had told him. She stared pensively out at the square. “A really bad feeling. Look to the back door; you wouldn’t want to catch your ass in it when they slam it shut. Somebody’s going to blink, and when the shit hits the fan . . .” She gestured at the window, out at the huge poster that covered most of the opposite wall of the square. “It’s the tension, mostly. It seems to be slackening. And that’s always a bad sign.”

  Big Bill’s avuncular face beamed down, jovial and friendly as anyone’s favorite uncle, guarded from the protesters by a squad of riot police, day and night. Despite the sentries, someone had managed to fly a handheld drone into the dead politician’s right eye, splashing a red paint spot across his iris in a grisly reminder of what had happened to the last elected President.

  “I didn’t exactly think things were getting better,” Frank equivocated. “But isn’t it just political chicken? Same old same old—they’ll devalue the dollaro and get a public works program going, someone will go out into the outback and haggle with Commandante Alpha, and things’ll begin working again. Won’t they?”

  Alice snorted. “You wish. It only seems to be lightening up because the jokers are getting ready to pull something serious.”

  Up top wasn’t much different. “It’s gonna burn,” said Thelma, a short, deeply tanned woman who was related to one of the public bizintel agencies out around Turku in some obscurely mercenary way, and who’d weaseled her way into Alice’s confidence by sharing her stash of fuel cells with her. She was working over one of Alice’s tripod-mounted bug launchers when Frank came up onto the roof. The air still held the last of night’s chill, but the vast glazed dome of the sky promised another skull baker of a day. “Did you hear about the mess down Cardinal’s Way yesterday?”

  “Nope. What happened?” Frank held a chipped coffee mug bearing the hotel’s crest under the nozzle of Alice’s fizzbeer contraption and pushed the button. It gurgled creakily and dribbled a stream of piss-colored fluid, propelled by whatever was left of the hotel’s water tankage. The Peace Enforcement had turned off the water supply to the hotels in the business district two days before, officially in case they fell into the hands of subversive elements. In practice, it was a not-so-subtle “Fuck off, we’ve got business in hand” signal to the warblogger corps.

  “Over by the homeless aid center on West Circular Four. Another car bomb. Anyway, the polis cordoned off the area afterward and arrested everyone. Thing is, the car that went bang was an unmarked polis car: one they used for disappearances until a resistance camera tagged it a week ago. The only people who got hurt were doalies queuing for their maintenance. I was on my way there to meet Ish—a source—and word is that before it went up, a couple of cops parked it, then walked away.”

  “Uh-huh.” Frank passed her the mug of lukewarm fizzbeer. “Have you had any luck messaging off planet today?”

  “Funny you should ask that.” It was Alice, arriving on deck without warning. “Someone’s been running all the outgoing imagery I sent via the post office through a steg-scrubber, fuzzing the voxels.” She cast Frank a sharp look. “What makes you ask?”

  “Well, I haven’t had as much mail as usual . . .” he trailed off. “How do you know it’s being tampered with?” he asked, curiosity winning out.

  “How the fuck do you think Eric gets his request messages to me without the Peace Enforcement bugging the call? It’s our little back channel.” (Eric was their desk editor back home.)

  “That makes sense.” Frank was silent for a moment. “What’s he saying?”

  “Time to check our return tickets.” Alice gave a tight little smile.

  “Will you guys stop talking in code and tell me what you think’s going on?” demanded Thelma.

  “The cops are getting ready to break skulls, wholesale,” said Alice, pointing at the far side of the square. “They’ve been piling on the pressure for weeks. Now they’re lifting off, to let the protesters think they’ve got a bit of slack. They’ll come out to complain, and the cops get to round them all up. If that’s the right way to describe what’s coming.”

  The situation on Newpeace—or, more accurately, in the provincial capitals of Redstone and Samara and Old Venice Beach—had been deteriorating for about three years, ever since the last elections. Newpeace had been settled by (or, it was more accurate to say, the Eschaton had dumped on the planet) four different groups in dispersed areas—confused Brazilian urbanites from Rio; ferocious, insular, and ill-educated hill villagers from Borneo; yet more confused middle-class urban stay-at-homes from Hamburg, Germany; and the contents of a sleepy little seaside town in California. Each colony had been plonked down in a different corner of the planet’s one major continent—a long, narrow, skinny thing the shape of Cuba but nearly six thousand kilometers long—along with a bunch of self-replicating robot colony factories, manuals and design libraries sufficient to build and maintain a roughly late-twentieth-century tech level McCivilization, and a ten-meter-tall diamond slab with the Three Commandments of the Eschaton engraved on it in ruby letters that caught the light of the rising sun.

  Leave a planet like that to mature and ferment for three centuries: the result was a vaguely federal system with six major provinces, three languages, a sizable Catholic community, and an equally sizable bunch of Eschaton-worshiping nutbars from the highlands who spent their surplus income building ten-meter-tall cargo cult diamond monoliths. It hadn’t been entirely tranquil, but they hadn’t fought a major war for nearly two hundred years—until now.

  “But isn’t most of the resistance out in the hills?” asked Frank. “I mean, they’re not going to come down hard in the towns, are they?”

  “They’ve got to do it, and do it soon,” Alice said irritably. “Running around the hills is hard work; at least in the city the protesters are easy to find. That’s why I say they’re going to do it here, and do it soon. You seen the latest on the general strike?”

  “Is it going ahead?” Frank raised an eyebrow.

  Thelma spat. “Not if the Peace Enforcement Organization scum get their way.”

  “Wrong.” Alice looked grimly satisfied. “The latest I’ve got from the Transport Workers’ collective, last time I spoke to them—Emilio was clear on it being a negotiating gambit. They don’t expect actually to have to play that card: it would hurt them far more than it would hurt the federales. But the feds can act as if it’s a genuine threat. The collective are playing into their hands. Watch my lips: there’s going to be a crackdown. Ever since Friedrich Gotha bought the election after Wilhelm he’s been creaming himself looking for an excuse to fuck the rebels hard. Did you hear about Commandante Alpha being in the area? That’d be a bad sign, you ask me. I’ve been trying to arrange an interview but—”

  “Commandante Alpha does not exist,” a woman’s voice called from the staircase. Frank turned and squinted against the rising sun. Whoever she was, she’d come up the service stairs: despite the sun in his eyes he had a vague impression of a slightly plump ice blonde, dressed for knocking around the outback like all the other journalists and war whores thronging the city and waiting for the storm to break. Something about her nagged at him for a moment before he realized what it was; her bush jacket and trousers looked as if they’d been laundered less than five minutes earlier. They were crisp, video anchor crisp, militarily precise. Whoever’s paying for the live video bandwidth better have deep pockets, he thought vaguely as she continued. “He’s a psywar fabrication. Doesn’t exist, you see. He’s just a totem designed to inspire support and loyalty to the resistance movement among confused villagers.”

  “Does it make any difference?” asked Alice. She was busy unpacking another drone as she talked. “I mean, the thing about a mass movement is, once it gets going it’s hard to stop it. Even if you take down a charismatic leader, as long as the roots of the grievance remain, another fucking stupid hero will come along and pick up the flag. Leaders generate themselves. Once you get a cycle of
revenge and retribution going . . .”

  “Exactly.” The new arrival nodded approvingly. “That’s what’s so interesting about it. Commandante Alpha is an idea. To dispose of him the PEO will have to do more than simply point out that he does not exist.”

  “Huh?” Frank heard a distant noise like the tide coming in; an impossibility, for they were more than three hundred kilometers from the sea, and besides, Newpeace had no moons large enough to raise tides. He pulled out his keyboard and tapped out a quick note to himself. “Who did you say you were?”

  “I didn’t.” The woman stared at him. It was not a friendly expression. “You are Frank the Nose Johnson, correct?”

  Something about her manner made him tense. “Who’s asking?”

  She ignored the question. “And you are Alice Spencer, so you must be Thelma Couper. Three little piggies, warbloggers united. It’s your good luck that you’re all very lazy little piggies, up here on the roof this historic morning rather than down on the streets with the unsuspecting mob. If you’re smart little piggies, you’ll stay here and not try to leave the building. Relax, watch the fireworks, drink your beer, and don’t bother trying to get an outside line. I’ll come for you later.”

  Alice grabbed hold of Frank’s arm, painfully hard. He hadn’t even noticed that he’d begun to move toward the stranger. “Who the fuck are you?” he demanded.

  The woman ignored him, instead turning back to the staircase. “See you around,” she called over her shoulder, a mocking smile on her face. Alice loosened her grip on Frank’s elbow. She took two steps toward the stairwell, then froze. She slowly spread her arms and stepped backwards, away from the steps.

  “What—”

  “Don’t,” Alice said tightly. “Just don’t. I think we’re under house arrest.”

  Frank looked round the open doorway leading down to the penthouse.

  “Hey, freak! Get back! Didn’t you hear the boss-woman?”

  Frank got. “Shit!”

  “My thoughts exactly.” Alice nodded. “Y’know what? I think they want witnesses. Just far away enough not to smell the tear gas.”

  Frank found that his hands were shaking. “That cop—”

  “Smart guy.” It was Thelma; she sounded mocking, but maybe it was simply nerves—his or hers, didn’t matter. “How’s he armed?”

  Alice seemed mostly unaffected. “He’s got body armor. Some kind of riot gun.” She paused. “Shit! He’s in blue. Did you see that, Frank?”

  Frank nodded. “So?”

  “So, cops hereabouts wear black. Blue means army.”

  “Oh. Oh!”

  The noise outside was getting louder.

  “Does that sound like a demonstration to you?” asked Thelma.

  “Could be the big one, for the land protesters they locked up last week.” Alice started dictating names to her chunky plastic disposaphone—she’d had it for only three weeks, since she arrived on Newpeace, but the digits were already peeling off the buttons on its fascia—then frowned. “It keeps saying ‘network congested.’ Fuck it. You guys? Can you get through to anyone?”

  “I can’t be arsed trying,” Thelma said disgustedly. “It’s a setup. Leastways we’re supposed to survive this one long enough to file our reports and get out. I think.”

  Frank looked at his own phone: it blinked its display at him in electronic perplexity, locked out of the network. He shook his head, unsure what to believe. Then there was a thud from behind him. He turned and saw that someone had come out of the stairwell and fallen over, right at the top. There was blood, bright on the concrete. It was Phibul, the small guy from Siam who was booked in one floor down. Frank knelt beside him. Phibul was breathing fast, bleeding messily from his head. “You!” Frank looked up and found himself staring up the barrel of a gun. He froze. “Get this sack of shit outa my face. You show your head, you bettah pray I don’ think you doalie.”

  Frank licked his lips; they felt like parchment. “Okay,” he said, very quietly. Phibul groaned. The guard took a step back, servos whining at knee and ankle. The gun barrel was flecked with red.

  “Nothing happen’ here,” said the guard. “You under stand?”

  “I—I understand.” Frank blinked, humiliated and angry, but mostly just frightened. The guard took another step back, down the stairs, then another. Frank didn’t move until he was out of sight at the bottom. Phibul groaned again and he looked down, then began fumbling in his pockets for his first-aid kit.

  The surf-on-a-beach noise was joined by a distant hammering drone: the sound of drums and pipe, marching with the people.

  “Let me help, dammit!” Frank looked up as Thelma knelt beside him. “Shit.” She gently peeled back one of Phibul’s eyelids, then the other. “Pupillary reflex is there, but he’s gonna have some concussion.”

  “Fucker whacked him over the head with his gun barrel.”

  “Could be worse,” she said tersely. “C’mon. Let’s get him over to the sun lounger.”

  A couple of pops and whines came from the edge of the roof—Alice was sending bird-sized drones spinning through the air to orbit overhead, circling for perspective shots taking in the entire square. Frank took a deep breath, smelling hot blood, Thelma’s sweat—surprisingly rank—and the stink of his own fear. A hot tangy undernote of dust rose from the soon-to-be-baking surface of the plaza. “I’ve got an open channel,” Alice called over her shoulder. “One of the local streams is relaying some kind of federal announcement. Do me a favor, Frank, get it out of my face. Transcribe and summarize.”

  “Okay.” Frank accepted the virtual pipe, let it stream through the corner of his left eye as he watched Thelma efficiently cut up a wound dressing and gum it down on the mess of blood and thin hair atop Phibul’s head. Despite the fear he was glad they were facing this together—not alone and frightened, locked in their rooms or in a police cell. The distant surf had become an approaching roar of voices. Alice threw some output at him from two of her birds, and he shuffled them round until he could see the back of his own head, kneeling alongside the drained swimming pool next to an injured reporter and a busy woman. “This is—hey, everybody!”

  He tweaked the stream over onto one of Alice’s repeater screens. There was a background of martial music (which hereabouts sounded like classical heavy metal) and a pompous guy in midnight blue, lots of technicolor salad on his chest, sitting uneasily behind a desk. “In view of the state of emergency, the Peace Commission has instructed all loyal citizens to stay indoors wherever possible. In the affected cities of Samara and Redstone, a curfew came into effect as of 2600 hours yesterday. Anyone outdoors in the region of Greater Samara and Metropolitan Redstone must seek shelter immediately. Assembly in groups of more than four individuals is forbidden and, in accordance with the Suppression of Terrorism Regulations, Peace Enforcement units will use lethal force if they consider themselves to be under threat—”

  Thelma stood up. “I’ve got to get a channel off-world,” she said tensely. “You guys up to helping me?”

  “How do you propose to do that?” Alice asked mildly, turning round. She was wearing repeater glasses rather than using optic implants—a stupid retro affectation, in Frank’s view—and they cast a crazy quilt of colored light across her eyes. “Didn’t you hear? We’re being routed around. If you try to crack their security, they’ll probably point some of their infowar assets your way—”

  “I’ve got a causal channel in my luggage,” Thelma confessed, looking scared but determined. “It’s on the second floor. If we could get past laughing boy downstairs—”

  “You’ve got your own causal channel?” Frank asked, hope vying with disbelief.

  “Yeah, one that goes straight home to Turku via a one-hop relay in Septagon. No worries.” She turned her hands palms up. “Ask me no questions, I’ll tell you no lies. But if I can’t get a secure handshake with it, it’s not a lot of use, is it?”

  “What do you need?” Alice asked, suddenly intent. Frank focused on
her expression in a sudden moment of scrutiny: eyes widening, cheekbones sharp under dark skin, breath speeding—

  “I need the thing physically up here, so I can handshake with it. I didn’t know we were going to be bottled up here when—” She shook her head in the direction of the stairwell.

  “How big is it?” Alice demanded.

  “Tiny—it’s the second memory card in my camera.” She held her thumb and forefinger apart. “Looks just like a normal solid-state plug. Blue packaging.”

  “Your camera doesn’t do real time?” Frank asked.

  “I’ve seen it and it does; it’s got local memory backup against network outages,” Alice said tersely. “Let me guess. You’ve got the channel in your camera so you can bypass local censorship, shoot in real time, and have the outtake saved straight to your editor’s desk? That’s got to be costing someone an arm and a leg. All right, this camera is where, exactly?”

  “Room hundred and seventeen, floor two. Corner window with a balcony.”

  “Hmm. Did you leave the balcony door open?”

  “I think so—why?”

  Alice looked over the waist-high safety wall, then backed away from the edge. “I’m not climbing down there. But a bird—hmm. Think I’ve got a sampler head left. If it can eject the card . . . you want me to have a go? Willing to stake half your bandwidth to me if I can liberate it?”

  “Guess so. It’s got about six terabits left. Fifty-fifty split.” Thelma nodded. “How about it?”

  “Six terabits—” Frank shook his head in surprise. He hated to think how much it must have cost to haul those milligrams of entangled quantum dots across the endless light years between here and Turku by slower-than-light starwisp. Once used they were gone for good, coherence destroyed by the process that allowed them to teleport the state of a single bit between points in causally connected space-time. STL shipping prices started at a million dollaros per kilogram-parsec; it was many orders of magnitude more expensive than FTL, and literally took decades or centuries of advance planning to set up. But if it could get them a secure, instantaneous link out onto the interstellar backbone nets . . .