Iron Sunrise

by Charles Stross

  She looked around the room. A broken fab bulked in one corner next to an exposed access crawlway. A sofa, seat rotted through with age and damp, occupied the opposite wall. Holding her breath, she forced herself not to sneeze. Words came to her, unbidden, on the breeze: “—fuck da bitch go?”

  “One o’ these. Youse take starboard, I taken the port.”

  Male voices, with a really strange accent, harsh-sounding and determined. Wednesday shuddered convulsively. Not the Sisters! Bone Sisters were bad—you crossed them, they crossed you and you needed surgery—but the white sorority didn’t hang out with—

  Crunch. Cursing. Someone had stuck a foot in the open cable channel. Teetering on the edge of blind panic, Wednesday scurried toward the half-meter-high crawlway and scrambled along it on hands and knees, headfirst into a tube of twilight that stretched barely farther than arm’s length. The tube kinked sharply upward, pipes bundled together against a carrier surface. She paused, forced herself to relax, and rolled over onto her back so that she could see round the bend. Can I . . . ? Push from the knees, begin to sit up, stick boot toes into gaps in the carrier trunking, push . . .

  Panting with effort, she levered herself up and out of view of the room. Please don’t have infrared trackers or dogs. The thought of the dogs still woke her up in a cold, shivering sweat, some nights. Please just be muggers. Knowing her luck, she’d crossed paths with a couple of serial fuckmonsters, transgressive nonconsensuals looking for a meat puppet. And she didn’t have a backup: that cost real money, the kind that Mom and Dad didn’t have. She shuddered, forcing back panic, braced her elbows against the walls of the duct, and flicked her rings to shutdown. She switched off her implants—backup brain, retinal projectors, the lot. Completely off. She could die there and nobody would find the body until they tore down the walls. There could be a gas trap, and she’d never know. But then again, the hunters might be following her by tracking her emissions.

  “She come ’ere? I not am ’inking ’dis.” Scuffling and voices and, frighteningly, a faint overspill of light from a hand torch. A second voice, swearing. “Search ’e floor! Have youse taken beneath dat?”

  “I have. Tracer an’ be saying she—shitting vanish. Tracer be losing she. Signal strong al’way from she’s home. Prey be wise to sigint ’striction.”

  Not some girl gang shit: they were stalking her, had followed her all the way from home. Forget muggers, forget ordinary sickheads. Wednesday stifled a squeak of pure cold terror.

  “I an’ be checking over the way. You be clearing dis side an’ if-neg we-all be waiting mid-way. If she be hiding, she-an be come out.”

  “An’ we be dumping nitro down here? Bath she in unbreathable?”

  The second one replied, contemptuous: “You-an’ be finding rotten meat after, you be dumping ’de breathing mix. Contractees, t’ey wanting authentication.” Footsteps clattered over the grating, stopped.

  They’re going to wait me out in the corridor? At least they weren’t going to flood the entire sector with nitrogen, but even hearing them talking about it was frightening her. Rotten meat. They want to know I’m dead, she realized, and the dizzying sense of loss made her stomach heave. How do I get out of this?

  Just asking the question helped; from somewhere she dredged up a memory of her invisible friend lecturing her, an elevator-surfing run during happier days back home. The first step in evading a pursuit is to identify and locate the pursuers. Then work out what sort of map they’re using and try to locate their blind spots. Not to take the stairs or the elevator, but to go through a service hatch, carefully step onto the roof of a car, and ride it to safety—or as a training game, all the way to Docking Control and back down again without showing up anywhere on Old Newfie’s security map. She’d learned to ghost through walls, disappear from tracking nets, dissolve in a crowd. Ruefully, Wednesday recalled Herman’s first lesson: When threatened, do not let yourself panic. Panic is the most likely thing to kill you. At the time, it had been fun.

  It still is a game, she realized suddenly. A game for them. Whoever they are. But I don’t have to play by their rules. With that realization, she managed to recapture a tenuous sense of self-confidence. Now where?

  The duct was pitch-black, but she vaguely recalled it leading upward before she’d switched her gear off. It looked like it had been a house once, a slum tenement for cheap labor—so cheap it didn’t even have en suite bathrooms and automated amahs to do the cleaning. Apartments there were prefab assemblies: a bunch of sealed, airtight modules connected by pressure-tight doors, bolted together in a big empty space and linked to the pressurized support mains by service tunnels like this one. This duct had to run somewhere pressurized. The only question was whether there was room for her to follow it all the way.

  Wednesday braced herself against the back of the tube and began to lever herself up. The pipes and cables with their regular ties and their support grid were nearly as good as a ladder, and their insulation was soft and friable with age, forming spongy handholds for her questing fingers. She paused every half meter to feel above her with one hand and tried not to think about her clothing: the boots were a miserable pain for climbing in, but she couldn’t take them off, and as for what the duct was doing to her jacket . . .

  Her questing hand found empty space. Gasping quietly she reached up, then felt the cables bend over in a curve onto what had to be the top of the rooms’ outer gas containment membrane. A final convulsive heave brought her up and over, and left her doubled over across the cable support, panting for breath, her legs still dangling over three meters of air space. Now she risked turning on her locater ring for a moment, still dialed to provide a light glow. Glancing around, she felt an edgy bite of claustrophobia. The crawl space widened to almost a meter, but was still only half a meter high. Ahead, there was a darkness that might be a branch off to one side, in the direction of the front door if she hadn’t lost her bearings. Wednesday pulled her legs up and crawled toward it.

  She came to a branch point, an intersection with a duct that had been built with humans in mind. The ceiling rose to a meter, and another quick flash of the ring revealed lighting panels (dead and dusty) and a flat, clear crawlway. She worked her way round into it, and shuffled along on hands and knees as fast as she could go. After about six meters she came to a large inspection hatch and paused. I’m over the road, aren’t I? She put her ear to the hatch and listened, trying to ignore the thudding of her pulse.

  “—be not seeing any’ting.” The voice was faint and tinny, but distinct.

  “But she not being ’ere!” Protest, muted by metal. “ ’An being gone. Considered an’ we tracer ’coy with ’an wall ghost? Be telling you not she-an ’ere.”

  “Tell you th’ man she not being not here? I an’ you wait.”

  Wednesday crept forward, taking shallow breaths and forcing herself not to move too fast. On the other side of the road there’d be another apartment module, and maybe a utility hub or a tunnel up to the next level, where she could get away from these freaks, whoever they were, with their weird dialect and frightening intent. She was still sick with fear, but now there was a hot ember of anger to go with it. Who do they think they are? Hunting her like dogs through the abandoned underbelly of the cylindrical city—the years fell away, bringing back the same stomach-churning fear and resentment.

  Another node, another risky flash of light revealing another tunnel. This time she took the branch that headed toward the big empty cavern at the end of the passage. It ran straight for ten meters, then she flashed her ring again and saw a jagged edge ahead, dust and debris on the floor, what looked like the mummified turds of some tunnel-running animal and a pile of blown-out wall insulation. Beyond the ledge her light was swallowed by darkness and a distant dripping noise.

  Shit. She knelt on the cold metal floor and glanced back. Below and behind her, two strange men were stalking her network shadow. Here in meatspace, though, she was blocked. Wasn’t she? She crawled forward slowl
y and looked out into the cavern. There could be anything here: a gas trap full of carbon dioxide, or a cryogenic leak, insulation ripped and walls so cold you’d freeze to them on contact. She sniffed the air, edging close to panic again. Herman would know . . . But Herman wasn’t there. Herman hadn’t followed her from Old Newfie. He’d told her at the time: causal channels broke when you tried to move an end point faster than light, and the one his agent had planted on her—a pediatrician who’d spent an internship on the hab when she was twelve—was now corrupt. She’d have to figure it out for herself if she wanted to get to Sammy’s party. Or anywhere. Home, even.

  “An’ chasing ghost.” The voice was muffled, distant, echoing up the corridor below her. “If she here, how an’ finding she? Dustrial yard my son, dustrial. An’ ghost I telling.” A light flickered across shadows in the gloom on the floor of the cavern and Wednesday held her breath.

  “Terascan—”

  “—Show none. See, titan alloy walls, you be seeing? She ghost decoy, an’ I telling you.”

  “Yurg, he an’ being not happy.”

  Titanium walls? She looked down. Metal ductwork. If they had a terahertz scanner, they’d find her in a flash—except these old dumb metal ducts, fabbed from junk metal ore left over from the quarrying of the asteroid, made an excellent Faraday cage. No signal. Her shoulders shook as she heard bootheels below her, stomp and turn.

  “Me an’ you, we be going back uplight her patch. Wait there an’ she.”

  Stomp. Stomp. Angry footsteps, moving away down the corridor. Wednesday took a deep breath. Can’t hurt? She twitched her rings back on for ten seconds and waited, then off again. The footsteps didn’t return, nor the angry searching voices, but it was several minutes before she trusted herself to turn them back on again, and this time leave them glowing at her knuckles.

  “Fuckmonsters,” she mumbled. Not that Centris Magna was exactly overflowing with sex criminals, but it was easier to believe than—

  Her phone squeaked for attention.

  “Yes?” she demanded.

  “Wednesday. This is Herman. Do you understand?”

  “What—” Her head was reeling with coincidence. “It’s been a long time!”

  “Yes. Please pay attention. Your life is in danger. I am transferring funds to your purse for later retrieval. Keep your implants turned off: if you do that, I will be able to make it difficult for your pursuers to locate you. There is a ladder to one side of your current location; climb one floor, take the second exit on the left, first right, and keep going until you enter a densely populated area. Mingle with a crowd if you can find one. Do not go home, or you will endanger your family. I will contact you again shortly and provide directions. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, but—” She was talking to herself.

  “Fuckmonster,” she snapped, trying to sound as if she meant it. Herman? After three years of silence she felt weak at the knees. Did I imagine it? She turned up the light on her finger, saw the piles of debris and the scuff marks on her oh-so-labor-intensive boots. “No.” Saw the ladder running down to floor level and up to the next corridor up beside the platform. “Yes!”

  the damned don’t die

  for this party Sam had repoed a dead light industrial unit on the edge of the reclaim zone. Wednesday didn’t go there immediately; she headed uplight a couple of levels to a boringly bourgeois housing arc, found a public fresher, and used the facilities. Besides getting the muck off her boots and leggings and telling her jacket to clean itself over the toilet, her hair was a mess and her temper was vile. How dare those scumbags follow me? She dialed her lips to blue and the skin around her eyes to angry black, got her hair back into a semblance of order, then paused. “Angry. Angry!”

  She shook her head; the face in the mirror shook right back, then winked at her. “Can I recommend something, dear?” asked the mirror.

  In the end she let it talk her into ordering up a wispy, colorful sarong, a transparent flash of silky rainbows to wrap around her waist. It didn’t fit with her mood, but she had to admit it was a good idea—her jacket, picking up on her temper, had spiked up across her shoulders until she resembled an angry hedgehog, and without the softening touch she’d have people avoiding her all evening. Then she used the mirror to call Sam’s receptionist and, swallowing her pride, asked for directions. The party was impromptu and semirandom; as good a place to hide out as anywhere, just as long as nobody tailed her there. And she had no intention of letting herself be tagged and followed twice in one night shift.

  Sam had taken over an empty industrial module a couple of levels below the basement slums, spray-bombed it black, and moved in a bunch of rogue domestic appliances. Light pipes nailgunned to rubbery green foam flared erratically at each corner of the room. The seating was dead, exotic knotworks of malformed calcium teratomas harvested from a biocoral tank, all ribs and jawbones. Loud waltz music shotgunned into screeching feedback by a buggy DJ-AI attacked her eardrums. There was a bar full of dumb and dumber, the robot waiter vomiting alcoholic drinks, and passing out joints and pink noise generators. Sameena knew how to run a party, Wednesday grudgingly acknowledged. Decriminalization lite, prosperity-bound urban youth experimenting with the modicum of risk that their subtly regimented society allowed them. A cat lay on top of a dead solvent tank, one foreleg hanging down, staring at everyone who entered. She grinned up at it. It lashed its tail angrily and looked away.

  “Wednesday!” A plump boy, mirrored contact lenses, sweat gleaming red in the pit lights: Pig. He clutched a half-empty glass of something that might be beer.

  “Pig.” She looked around. Pig was wired. Pig was always wired, boringly religious about his heterocyclic chemistry: a bioresearch geek. Ten kilos of brown adipose cells full of the weirdest organic chemistry you could imagine boiled away beneath his skin. He kept trying to breed a better liposome for his gunge-phase experiments. Said it kept him warm: one of these days someone was going to light his joint, and he’d go off like one of those old-time suicide bombers. “Have you seen Fi?”

  “Fi? Don’t want hang round Fiona! She boring.”

  Wednesday focused on Pig for the first time. His pupils were pinpricks, and he was breathing hard. “What are you on?”

  “Dumbers. Ran up a nice little hydroxylated triterpenoid to crank down the old ethanol dehydrogenase. Teaching m’self about beer ’n’ hangovers. What did you bring?” He made as if to paw at her sleeve. She ducked round him gracefully.

  “Myself,” she said, evaluating and assessing. Pig, sober, would just about fill her needs. Pig, drunk, wasn’t even on the cards. “Just my wonderful self, fat boy. Where’s Fi?”

  Pig grunted and took a big swig from his glass. Swaying, he spilled some of it down his chin. “Next cell over.” Grunt. “Had bad day thinking too hard thismorn. ’M’I dumb yet?”

  She stared at him. “What’s the cube root of 2,362?”

  “Mmm . . . six-point-nine . . . point-nine-seven . . . point-nine-seven-one . . .”

  She left Pig slowly factoring his way out of her trap in a haze of Newtonian approximation and drifted on into the night, a pale-skinned ghost dressed in artful black tatters. Fancy dress, forgotten youthful death cults. She allowed herself to feel a bit more mellow toward Pig, even condescending to think fondly of him. Pig’s wallowing self-abasement made her own withdrawn lack of socialization feel a bit less retarded. The world was full of nerds and exiles. The hothouse of forced brilliance the Septagon system produced also generated a lot of smart misfits, and even if none of them fit in individually, together they made an interesting mosaic.

  There were people dancing in the next manufactory cell, accelerated bagpipes, feedback howls, a zek who’d hacked himself into a drum-machine trance whacking on a sensor grid to provide a hammering beat. It was an older crowd, late teens/early twenties, the tail end of high school. There were fewer fashion victims than you’d see at a normal high school hop, but wilder extremes; most people dressed—or didn’t—as if
they picked up whatever was nearest to their bed that morning, plus one or two exaggeratedly bizarre ego statements. A naked, hairless boy with a clanking crotch full of chromed chain links, dancing cheek to cheek with another boy, long-haired, wearing a swirling red gown that left his pierced and swollen nipples visible. A teenage girl in extreme fetish gear hobbled past; her wasp-waist corsetry, leather ball gag, wrist and ankle chains were all visible beneath a transparent, floor-sweeping dress. Wednesday ignored the exhibitionist extremals: they were fundamentally boring, attention-craving types who needed to be needed and were far too demanding to make good fuckfriends.

  She headed for the back of the unit, hunting real company. Fiona was sitting on top of a dead cornucopia box, wearing black leggings and a T-shirt locked to the output from an entropy pool. She was chatting to a boy wearing a pressure suit liner with artfully slashed knees. The spod clutched a nebulizer, and was gesticulating dreamily. Fi looked up and called, “Wednesday!”

  “Fi!” Wednesday leaned forward and hugged her. Fiona’s breath was smoky. “What is this, downer city?”

  Fi shrugged. “Sammy said make it dumb, but not everyone got it.” (On the dance floor Miss Ball Gag was having difficulty communicating with some boy in a black rubber body-stocking who wanted to dance: their sign language protocols were incompatible.) Fi smiled. “Vinnie, meet Wednesday. You want a drink, Wednesday?”