Iron Sunrise

by Charles Stross

  “Then that brings me to my next question.” Blumlein paused for a moment, looking thoughtful, then snapped his fingers; a moppet minced forward, knelt to present a small silver box atop a velvet cushion. He took the box, flipped the lid open, and removed the inhaler within: “Dose?”

  “Thank you kindly, no.”

  He nodded, then bent over it for a few seconds. “Ah, that’s better.” Cold blue eyes, pinprick pupils. “The core of the matter. In the hypothetical case that I was to charge you with implementing U. Scott’s plan and carrying it to completion, for the greater good of the clade—” he sent a flickering glance in the direction of the stage, and at that moment Hoechst realized that despite every protestation of privacy, he believed the Propagators or the Arm might be watching, might have corrupted his own puppet master—“how would you go about it?”

  Oh. Oh. Portia shivered, appalled by the vista of opportunities before her. This could mean her elevation to parity with Blumlein, to board level for an entire planet if she played her hand successfully. An almost sexual thrill: Then nobody could touch me! To be in control of the mechanics—she clamped down on the thought immediately, before it could form. First things first. The cost would be high, the temptation to Blumlein to have her executed before she could become a threat would be enormous . . .

  Composing herself, she nodded slightly and picked up her glass. “I would first have to assure myself that I had the approval of the Directorate,” she began, not glancing at the stage. “Then, once I had that, I’d pursue U. Scott’s general plan, but directing events on-site in person rather than entrusting control to an extra layer of subordination. I don’t believe you can have a sufficiently tight grasp on an action if you try to exercise remote control; every level of authority you delegate adds delay and an additional risk of failure, and the plan has too many contingencies to entrust command to a junior puppeteer who lacks the big picture. And I’d divert the target of his enterprise to a, ah, more acceptable one . . .”

  party girl

  centris magna was a boringly average asteroid colony, built to a classic design that didn’t rely on gravity generators: a diamond tube fifty kilometers along the main axis and eight kilometers in diameter, spinning within the hollowed-out husk of a carbonaceous chondrite somewhere in Septagon Four’s inner debris belt. The inner core consisted of service facilities while the outer, high-gee levels were mostly zoned as parklands or recreational zones: the occupants lived in multilevel tenements in the mid-gee cylinders. It was a pattern repeated endlessly throughout the Septagon systems, among the hundreds of worldlets that made up the polity that had taken in most of the refugees from Moscow. And three years after her arrival, Wednesday had learned to hate it, and the grinding poverty it rubbed her nose in every minute of every day.

  “Wednesday?” Her father’s voice was attenuated by her barely open bedroom door: if she pulled it shut, she could block him out completely. But if she pulled it shut—

  “Wednesday. Where are you?”

  Biting her tongue in concentration she finished tying her bootlaces, getting them perfect. There. She stood up. Boots, new boots, nearly knee high, gleaming like black mirrors over her skintight cloned pantherskin leggings. “Here, Dad.” Let him find her. A last look in the window, set to mirror-mode, confirmed that her chromatophores were toned in: blood-red lips, dead white skin, straight black hair. She picked up her jacket and stroked it awake, then held out her arms and waited for it to crawl into place and grip her tightly at elbows and shoulders. Nearly ready—

  “Wednesday! Come here.”

  She sighed. “Coming,” she called. Quietly, to herself: “Bye, room.”

  “Goodbye,” said her bedroom, dimming the lights as she opened the door, feeling tall and slightly unbalanced in her new boots and headed through to the living room, where Dad would probably be waiting.

  Morris was, as she’d expected, in the main room of the apartment. It was a big open space, a mezzanine floor upstairs on top of the dining room providing him with an office from which he could look down on the disordered chairs and multiforms of the communal area. Jeremy had been trying to undo amah’s housekeeping again, building an intricate dust trap of brightly colored phototropic snowflakes in the middle of the antique dining table that Dad periodically insisted they sit around for formal meals. The dust trap writhed toward her when she opened the door. Her father had been watching a passive on the wall; it froze as he looked round at her, ancient avatars looking impossibly smooth and shiny in the perspective-bending depths. “What’s that you’re wearing?” he asked wearily.

  “Sammy’s throwing a party tonight,” she said, annoyed. (She almost added, How come you never go out?—but thought better of it at the last minute.) “I’m going with Alys and Mira.” Which was a white lie—she wasn’t talking to Mira, and Alys wasn’t talking to her—but they’d both be there, and anyway did it really matter who she went with when it would only take ten minutes and she’d be out all night? “First time out for my new boots!”

  Dad sighed. He looked unwell, his skin pasty and bags under his eyes. Too much studying. Study, study, study—it was all he ever seemed to do, roosting up on top of the kitchen roof like a demented owl-bird. Smart drugs didn’t seem to help; he was having real difficulties assimilating it all. “I was hoping to have some time to talk with you,” he said tiredly. “Are you going to be out late?”

  “All night,” she said. A frisson of anticipation made her tap her toes, scuff the floor: they were remarkably fine boots, shiny, black, high-heeled and high-laced, with silver trim. She’d found the design in a historical costuming archive she’d Dumpstered, and spent most of a day turning them into a program for the kitchen fab. She wasn’t going to tell him what the material had cost, real vat-grown leather like off a dead cow’s skin made some people go “ick” when you told them what you were wearing. “I like dancing,” she said, which was another little white lie, but Dad still seemed to harbor delusions of control, and she didn’t want him to get any ideas about grounding her, so making innocent noises was a good idea.

  “Um.” Morris glanced away, worried, then stood up. “Can’t wait,” he mumbled. “Your mother and I are going to be away all day tomorrow. Sit down?”

  “All right.” Wednesday pulled out one of the dining table chairs and dropped onto it back to front, arms crossed across the back. “What is it?”

  “We’re—your mother and I, that is, uh—” Flustered, he ground to a halt. “Um. We worry about you.”

  “Oh, is that so?” Wednesday pulled a face at him. “I can look after myself.”

  “But can you—” He caught himself, visibly struggling to keep something in. “Your school report,” he finally said.

  “Yeah?” Her face froze in anticipation.

  “You’re not getting on well with the other children, according to Master Talleyrand. He, they, uh, the school social board, are worried about your, um, they call it ‘acculturation’.”

  “Oh, great!” she snapped. “I’ve—” She stopped. “I’m going out,” she said rapidly, her voice wobbling, and stood up before he could say anything.

  “We’ll have to talk about this sometime,” he called after her, making no move to follow. “You can’t run away from it forever!”

  Yes I can: watch me. Three steps took her past the kitchen door, another hop and a skip—risking a twisted ankle in the new boots—took her to the pressure portal. Pulse hammering, she thumped the release plate and swung it open manually, then dived through into the public right-of-way with its faded green carpet and turquoise walls. It was dim in the hallway, the main lights dialed down to signify twilight, and apart from a couple of small maintenance ’bots she had the passage to herself. She began to walk, a black haze of frustration and anger wrapped tightly around her like a cloak. Most of the front doors to either side were sealed, opening onto empty—sometimes depressurized—apartments; this sub-level was cheap to live in, but only poor refugees would want to do so. A dead end,
like her prospects. Prospects—what prospects? From being comfortably middle-class her family had sunk to the status of dirt-poor immigrants, lacking opportunities, looked down on for everything from their rural background to things like Wednesday’s and Jerm’s implants—which had cost Morris and Indica half a year’s income back on Old Newfie, only to be exposed as obsolete junk when they arrived here. “Fucking social board,” she muttered to herself. “Fucking thought police.”

  Centris Magna had been good in some ways: they had a much bigger apartment than back home, and there was lots of stuff happening. Lots of people her age, too. But there were bad things, too, and if anyone had asked Wednesday, she’d have told them that they outweighed the good by an order of magnitude. Not that anyone had actually asked her if she wanted to be subjected to the bizarre cultural ritual known as “schooling,” locked up for half her waking hours in an institution populated by imbeciles, sadistic sociopaths, bullies, and howling maniacs, with another three years to go before the Authorities would let her out. Especially because at fifteen in Moscow system she’d been within two years of adulthood—but in Septagon, you didn’t even get out of high school until you were twenty-two.

  Centris Magna was part of the Septagon system, a loosely coupled cluster of brown dwarf stars with no habitable planets, settled centuries ago. It was probably the Eschaton’s heavy-handed idea of a joke: a group called the space settlers’ society had found themselves the sole proprietors of a frigid, barely terraformed asteroid, with a year’s supply of oxygen and some heavy engineering equipment for company. After about a century of bloodshed and the eventual suppression of the last libertarian fanatics, the Septagon orbitals had gravitated toward the free-est form of civilization that was possible in such a hostile environment: which meant intensive schooling, conscript service in the environmental maintenance crews, and zero tolerance for anyone who thought that hanging separately was better than hanging together. Wednesday, who had been one of the very few children growing up on a peripheral station supported by a planet with a stable biosphere, was not used to school, or defending the atmospheric commons, or to being expected to fit in. Especially because the education authorities had taken one look at her, pigeonholed her as a refugee from a foreign and presumably backward polity, and plugged her straight into a remedial school.

  Nobody had inquired in her first year as to whether she was happy. Happy, with most of the people she knew light minutes away, scattered across an entire solar system? Happy, with the Bone Sisters ready to take any opportunity to commit surreptitious acts of physical violence against her? Happy when the first person she’d confided in had spread her private life around the commons like a ripped laundry bag? Happy fitting in like a cross-threaded screw, her dialect an object of mockery and her lost home a subject of dead yokel jokes? Happy to sit through endless boring lectures on subjects she’d taken a look at and given up on years ago, and through more boring lectures on subjects she was good at by teachers who didn’t have a clue and frequently got things wrong? Happy?

  Happy was discovering that the school surveillance net had been brainwashed to ignore people wearing a specific shade of chromakey green, and to track people wearing black. Happy was discovering that Ellis could be counted on to have a stash of bootleg happy pills and would trade them for help with the biochemistry courseware, which at age nineteen was still about three years behind where she’d got to on her own at age fifteen. Happy was finding a couple of fellow misfits who didn’t have bad breath and boast about getting their ashes hauled the morning after. Happy was learning how not to get beaten up in camera blind spots by invisible assailants, and accused of confabulation and self-mutilation when she cried for help.

  She didn’t dare think about the kind of happy that might come from Mom or Dad finally reskilling to the point where they could land themselves some paid work, or being able to move out of this shithole of a slum tenement, or even able to emigrate to a richer, bigger hab. About not having to look forward to the prospect of being treated like a baby for more than two-thirds of her current life span, until she hit thirty—the age of majority in Septagon. Or about—

  Oops, she thought, glancing around. That wasn’t very smart, was it?

  Introspection had distracted Wednesday as she left home. Which wasn’t particularly bad, normally: even the sparsely inhabited subsidized apartment corridors had surveillance coverage and environmental support. But she’d turned two corners, taken a shortcut through a disused corporate warren with override-forced doors, and been heading farther toward the distal pole where the party supposedly was. Sammy and her gang (who were not the school bullies, but the arbiters of fashion and cool, and never let Wednesday forget how lucky she was to be invited) had done this before, taken over an abandoned apartment or office zone, or even a manufacturing cube, gutted it, brought in temporary infrastructure and bootleg liquor, and cranked up the music. Moving out into the distal zone was daring: the sub-basement there was some of the oldest housing in the colony, long abandoned and scheduled for restructuring and development some time in the next ten years or so.

  Wednesday had been blindly running the inertial route map Johnny de Witt had nervously beamed her the day before, saved to her cache: a flashing ring on her index finger pointed the path out to her. In her self-absorbed haze she hadn’t noticed how very deep the shadows were getting, nor how sparse the pedestrian traffic was, nor how many of the corridor lighting strips were smashed. Now she was alone, with nobody else in sight. There was detritus under foot, broken roofing panels, a stack of dusty utility hoses, missing doors gaping like rotten teeth in the walls—this whole sector looked unsafe, leaky. And now it occurred to her to start thinking. “Why Johnny?” she asked quietly. “Johnny?” Short, spotty, and ungifted with any sense of fashion, he’d have been the class nerd if he’d been smarter: as it was, he was simply a victim. And he hadn’t beamed her the ticket with any obvious ulterior motive, no stammering invitation to hole up in a soft space for an hour—just plain nervous, staring over his shoulder all the time. I could phone him and ask, but then I’d look like a fool. Weak. But . . . if I don’t phone him, I’ll be a fool.

  “Dial Johnny the Sweat,” she subvocalized. Connecting . . . no signal. She blinked in disbelief. Surely there should be bandwidth down here? It was even more fundamental than oxygen. With bandwidth you could get rescue services or air, or find your way out of trouble. Without it, anything could happen.

  There were rumors about these abandoned hab sectors. Dismembered bodies buried in the cable ducts, surveillance cams that would look away if you knew the secret gesture to bypass their programming, invitingly abandoned houses where one of the rooms was just a doorknob away from hard vacuum. But she’d never heard rumors of entire segments that were blacked out, where you couldn’t call someone or talk to your agents or notepad, where maintenance ’bots feared to crawl. That was beyond neglect; it was actively dangerous.

  She walked through a wide, low-ceilinged hall. From the rails along one side and the lack of decoration it looked to have been some kind of utility tunnel, back when people lived and worked there. Empty doorways gaped to either side, some of them fronted with rubble—crushed dumb aerogel and regolith bricks, twisted frameworks. Most of the lights were dead, except for a strip along the middle of the ceiling that flickered intermittently. The air was stale and smelled musty, as if nothing much stirred it. For the first time Wednesday was glad of her survival sensor, which would scream if she was in danger of wandering into an anoxic gas trap.

  “This can’t be right,” she muttered to herself. With a twitch of her rings she brought up a full route map, zoomed to scale so that this corner of the colony’s public spaces was on the display. (The rings were another thing that rubbed it in; back in Moscow’s system they’d have been a bulky, boxy personal digital assistant, not a set of hand jewels connected to her nervous system by subtle implants.) The whole segment was grayed out, condemned, off-limits. Somewhere on the way she’d gone blunder
ing through a doorway that was down on the map as a blank wall. “Bother.” The party—she dumped her follow-me tag into the map—lay roughly a hundred meters outside the shield wall of the pressure cylinder. “Shit,” she added, this time with feeling. Someone had put Johnny up to it, spiking her with a falsie—or, more subtly, run a middleman spoof on his hacked ring. She could see it in her mind’s eye: a bunch of mocking in-things joking about how they’d send the little foreign bitch on a climb down into the dirty underbelly of the world. Something rattled in the rubbish at one side of the hall, rats or—

  She glanced round, hastily. There didn’t seem to be any cams down there, just hollow eye sockets gaping in the ceiling. Ahead, a dead zone sucked up the light: a big hall, ceiling so high it was out of sight, opened like a cavern off the end of the service tunnel. And she heard the noise again. The unmistakable sound of boots scuffing against concrete.

  What do I—Old reflexes died hard: it took Wednesday a split second to realize that it was no good asking Herman for advice. She glanced around for somewhere to hide. If someone was stalking her, some crazy—more likely, a couple of Bone Sisters who’d lured her down there to whack her bad for wearing team invisicolors and carrying a cutter on their loop—she wanted to be way out of sight before they eyeballed her. The big cavern ahead looked like a good bet, but it was dark, too dark to see into, and if it was a dead end, she’d be bottled in. But the doorways off to the left looked promising; lots of housing modules, jerked airlocks gaping like eye sockets.

  Wednesday darted sideways, trying to muffle her bootheels. The nearest door gaped wide, floor underlayers ruptured like decompressed intestines, revealing a maze of ducts and cables. She stepped over them delicately, stopped, leaned against the wall and forced herself to close her eyes for ten seconds. The wall was freezing cold, and the house smelled musty, as if something had rotted in there long ago. When she uncovered her eyes again, she could see some way into the gloom. The floor paneling resumed a meter inside the threshold, and a corridor split in two directions. She took the left fork hesitantly, tiptoeing quietly and breathing lightly, listening for the sound of pursuit. When it got too dark to see she fumbled her tracker ring round, and whispered, “I need a torch.” The thin blue diode glow wasn’t much, but it was enough to outline the room ahead of her—a big open space like her family’s own living room, gutted and abandoned.