Iron Sunrise

by Charles Stross

  George tapped the tabletop. “It’s in your dossier. There were twelve full-dress embassies from Moscow in residence at the time of the disaster. Unfortunately, two of the ambassadors had been recalled for consultation immediately before the incident, and they are presumed dead. Of the remaining ten, one committed suicide immediately, one died in a vehicular accident six months later—it was ruled an accident; he seems to have fallen in front of a train—and, well, this is where it gets interesting. I hope you all have strong stomachs . . .”

  after the meeting she caught up with Martin. He was idling on the promenade deck, playing with the image enhancement widgets on the main viewing window.

  “How did it go?” he asked, glancing up at her from the chaise longue. He seemed to be treating the journey as an enforced vacation, she noticed; dressing casually, lounging around, catching up on his reading and viewing, spending his surplus energy in the gym. But he looked worried now, as if she’d brought a storm cloud of depression in with her.

  “It’s a lot to swallow. Budge over.” He made some space for her to sit down. “I want a drink.”

  “I’ll get you one. What do you—”

  “No, don’t. I said I wanted a drink, not that I’m going to have one.”

  She stared gloomily at the wall-sized expanse of darkness on the other side of the almost empty room. Something circular and penumbral, darker than the interstellar night, cut an arc out of the dusting of unwinking stars. “What’s that?”

  “Brown dwarf. Uncataloged, it’s about half a light year away. I’ve got the window accumulating a decent visible light image of it right now.”

  “Oh, okay.” Rachel leaned back against the wall. The designers had tricked out the promenade deck in a self-conscious parody of the age of steam. From the holystoned oak planking of the floor to the retro-Victoriana of the furniture, it could have been a slice out of some nuclear-powered liner from the distant planet-bound past, a snapshot of the Titanic perhaps, a time populated by women in bonnets and ballooning skirts, men in backward baseball caps and plus-fours, zeppelins and jumbos circling overhead. But it wasn’t big enough to be convincing, and instead of a view across the sea, there was just a screen the size of a wall and her husband wearing a utility kilt with pockets stuffed with gadgets he never went anywhere without.

  “How bad was it?” he asked quietly.

  “Bad?” She shrugged. “On a scale of one to ten, with the New Republic an eight or nine, this is about an eleven. A chunk of it is die-before-disclosing stuff, but I guess there’s no harm in letting you in on the public side. Which is bad enough.” She shook her head. “What time is it?”

  “Mm, about 1500, shipboard. There was some announcement about setting the clocks forward tonight, as well.”

  “Okay.” She tapped her fingertips idly on the lacquered side table. “I think I will take you up on that drink, as long as there’s some sober-up available just in case.”

  “Umph.” Martin twisted one of his rings. “Pitcher of iced margaritas on the promenade deck, please.” He watched her closely. “Is my ex-employer involved?”

  “Hmm. I don’t think so.” Rachel touched his shoulder. “You haven’t heard anything, have you?”

  “I’m on the beach, I think.” His cheek twitched. “And between contracts, so there’s no conflict of interests.”

  “Good,” she said, taking his free hand, “good.”

  “You don’t sound happy.”

  “That’s because—” She shook her head. “Why the hell are people so stupid?”

  “Stupid? What do you mean?” He lifted her hand slightly, inspecting the back of her wrist intently.

  “People.” It came out as a curse. “Like that asshole in Geneva. Turns out there was a, a—” She swallowed, and before she could continue the dumb waiter beside the table dinged for attention. “And that bitch in Ents. I set a search going, by the way. Pulled some strings. I should have all the dirt on her when we get home.” She turned to open the dumb waiter and found there was a tray inside. “That was fast.” She removed two glasses, passing one to Martin.

  “Where was I? Yes, stupid, wanton, destructive assholes. About five years ago, that supernova out near the Septagon stars, a system called Moscow. Turns out it wasn’t a natural event at all. Someone iron-bombed the star. That’s a causality-violation device, and about as illegal as they come—also apparently unstable to build and hazardous as hell. I’d like to know why it didn’t attract a certain local deity’s attention. Anyway, the Moscow republic had a modest deterrent fleet in their Oort cloud, far enough out to just about survive the blast, and they were in the middle of a trade dispute. So they launched, and now we’re trying to talk their diplomatic staff into calling off a strike on a planet with nearly a billion inhabitants who we are pretty damn sure had nothing to do with the war crime.”

  “Sounds bad.” She watched him raise his glass, a guarded expression on his face.

  “The headache is, the place they launched on—New Dresden—isn’t squeaky clean. They had a series of really bloody civil wars over the past century or so, and what they’re left with may be stable but isn’t necessarily happy. Meanwhile, Moscow—damn!” She put the glass down. “Worlds with a single planetary government aren’t meant to be peaceful and open and into civil rights! When I see a planet with just one government, I look for the mass graves. It’s some kind of natural law or something—world governments grow out of the barrel of a gun.”

  “Um. You mean, the good guys are getting ready to commit genocide? And the bad guys are asking you in to talk them out of it? Is that the picture?”

  “No.” She took a quick pull of her ice-cold margarita. “If that was all it was, I think I could cope with it. Just another talk-down, after all. No, there’s something much worse going on in here. A real stinking shitty mess. But George wants to keep a lid on it for the time being, so I can’t dump it on your shoulder.”

  “So.” One of the most soothing things about Martin was that he could tell when not to push her. This was one of those times: instead of shoving, he stretched his arm along the back of the sofa, offering her a shoulder. After a moment, she leaned against him.

  “Thanks.”

  “It’s all right.” He waited while she shifted to a more comfortable position. “What are we going to do, then? When we arrive? Dresden, did you say?”

  “Well.” She considered her words carefully. “I’m on the Ents budget listed as a cultural attaché. So I’m going to do some cultural attaché things. There’s a memorial ceremony to attend, meetings, probably the usual bunch of diplomatic parties to organize. Luckily Dresden’s relatively developed, socially and industrially, not like New Prague.” She pulled a face. “You’re probably going to have the wonderful, unmissable, once-in-a-lifetime chance to be my diplomatic wife for a few weeks. Once-in-a-lifetime’s all you’ll take before you flee screaming back to a shipyard, I promise you.”

  “Ten ecus says you’re wrong.” He hugged her.

  “And fifty says you won’t make it. Sucker.” She kissed him, then pulled back to arm’s length, smiling. Then her smile slipped. “I’ve got some other stuff to do,” she said quietly, “and maybe a side trip. But I can’t talk about it.”

  “Can’t, or don’t want to?”

  “Can’t.” She emptied her glass and put it down. “It’s the other I told you about. Sorry.”

  “I’m not pushing,” he said slyly. “I just want to know everything you get up to when I’m not around!” He continued in a more serious tone of voice: “Promise me if it’s anything like, uh, last week, you’ll try to let me know in advance?”

  “I—” She nodded. “I’ll try,” she said softly. “If it’s remotely possible.” Which was entirely true, and she hated herself for it—he meant well, and the idea that he might think she was lying to him stung her—but there were things she wasn’t at liberty to talk about, just as there were topics Martin wouldn’t raise within earshot of her coworkers. Serious, frightening
, things. And if she didn’t cooperate with Cho’s covert agenda, she’d be gambling with other people’s lives. Because, when she thought about it, she couldn’t see any sane alternative to what George was proposing to do.

  Flashback, one hour earlier

  “Here’s the Honorable Maurice Pendelton, ambassador of the Republic of Moscow to the court of Ayse Bayar, Empress of al-Turku.”

  George Cho stood up and fiddled with a control ring. The wall behind him flickered to a view of an office—ornately paneled in wood, gas-lit and velvet-draped, richly carpeted and dominated by a ponderous desk bearing an antique workstation. There was something else on the desk; for a moment Rachel couldn’t quite work out what she was looking at, then she realized that it was a man, slumped across the green leather blotter. A timer counted down seconds in the top left corner of the display. In his back—

  “Murder?” asked Jane, tight-lipped. Rachel hadn’t seen much of her since the events back on New Prague, when Jane had uncomplainingly shouldered the burden of Rachel’s research work inside the diplomatic compound. She wondered idly how Jane would cope with a field assignment if she couldn’t even figure out a scene like this for herself.

  “The inquisitor’s report was very clear about the fact that his arms weren’t long enough for him to stab himself in the back—at least, not with a sword,” Tranh said drily. “Especially not with enough force to nail the torso to the tabletop. Proximate cause of death was a severed dorsal aorta and damage to the pericardium—he bled out and died within seconds, but most of the mess is behind the desk.”

  George fidgeted with his rings and the camera viewpoint slewed dizzyingly around the room. The scene behind the ambassador’s desk was a mess. Blood had gouted from the wound in his back and splattered across his chair, pooling in viscid puddles beneath his desk. Footprints congealed in the rich carpet, an obscene trail leading toward the door.

  “I take it this is important to our mission,” said Rachel. “Do we have a full crime scene report? Was the killer apprehended?”

  “No and no,” Cho said with gloomy satisfaction. “The Office of the Vizier of Morning took control of the investigation outside the embassy, and while the Turku authorities have been polite and helpful to us, they have declined to give us full details of the killing, other than this diorama shot. Note, if you will, the theatrical red nose and bushy moustache a party or parties unknown applied to the Ambassador’s face—after he was dead, according to the Vizier’s Office. Oh, in case you were wondering, the killer wasn’t apprehended. For the sake of face the Vizier’s Office rounded up a couple of petty thieves, forced them to confess, then beheaded them in front of the public newsfeeds, but our confidential sources assure us that the real investigation is still continuing. Which brings me to incident number two.”

  Another wall-sized photograph of chaos. This time it was a roadside disaster—the wreckage of a large vehicle, obviously some sort of luxury people mover, lay scattered across a road, uniformed emergency crews and rescue vehicles all around it. Blue sheets covered misshapen mounds to either side. Much of the debris was scorched; some of it was still smoking.

  “This was an embassy limousine, taking her excellency Simonette Black to a conference on resettlement policy for refugee populations in Bonn, the capital of the Frisian Foundation, a confederation of independent states on Eiger’s World. Which, unlike al-Turku, is a Deutsch Mc World with no real history of political violence other than a couple of wars fought over oil fields and states’ rights a century or two ago.”

  George pointed at some bushes to one side of the road, and the screen obligingly zoomed. Something gleamed: “That is a reflector post for an infrared beam. If we look at the source”—the viewpoint flipped dizzyingly into the sky then back down, 180 degrees away from the post—“we find this.” A green box, with a round hole in its front, above a complex optical sight and some kind of rubber mat. The box, too, looked scorched. “I’m told that’s a disposable antiarmor missile launcher, hypervelocity, with a two-stage penetrator jet designed to punch through ceramic armor or high-Tesla fields. The poor people in the limousine—Black, her wife, their driver, the chargé d’immigration, and two bodyguards—didn’t stand a chance. It was stolen from an army depot one week before the incident. It was armed by remote control and rigged to fire when the beam was interrupted. I’m told that the plastic object underneath the missile launcher is an, ah, whoopee cushion. A rubber bladder that emits a flatulent sound when sat upon.”

  Rachel looked down at her pad. To her surprise, she realized she’d begun to doodle on it with her stylus in ink transfer mode. Pictures of mushroom clouds and Mach waves knocking over groundscrapers and arcologies. She glanced up. “Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence,” she said. “Any more?”

  George’s shoulders fell. He looked very old for a moment, even though Rachel knew he was seven years her junior. “Yes,” he said. Another diorama filled the wall. “I’ve been saving this until last. This is the Honorable Maureen Davis, ambassador to the United Nations of Earth in Geneva.” Gail looked away, visibly upset, and Rachel wondered distantly if she was going to cry. Violent death didn’t just strip the victims of their dignity, it insulted the survivors. And it was a personal insult to Rachel. We were supposed to protect her! An attack on a visiting diplomat reflected on the honor of the nation or coalition that played host to them. And this—

  “Did we let this happen on our watch?” she demanded angrily. “After knowing that two other ambassadors had died in questionable circumstances?” She closed the dossier in front of her and flattened it against the table, pressing until her knuckles turned white.

  “No.” George took a deep breath. “She was the first to die—just the last for us to be aware of. At first we penciled it in as a simple murder—horrible, but not special. Unlike the other two incidents we have a complete crime scene breakdown and we’re pursuing the murderer with every resource at our disposal. We are”—he took another breath—“appalled and outraged that this has happened. But more than that, we’re very much afraid that it’s going to happen again. Tranh, could you explain?”

  Tranh stood up again and began to recite in a flat monotone that suggested that he, too, was trying to hold down the lid on his outrage. “Ambassador Davis was discovered in the state you see by a housekeeper maintenance contractor who called to deal with a fault alert by the house cleaning ’bot. The amah was confused by, well, a conflict between its recognizer for human beings and its garbage collection monitor. That doesn’t happen very often these days, but Ambassador Davis had an antique that still had a heuristic support contract in force. Embassy security admitted the maintenance contractor and immediately discovered the ambassador in this state. They immediately requested our assistance—unlike their counterparts on Turku.” His voice quivered with outrage as he added, “The killer used a bungee cord for a ligature.”

  Foul play? That’s one way of putting it, Rachel observed. Ambassadors did not, as a rule, hang themselves in the stairwell of their own residences using rubberized ropes. Nor did they do so after pinioning their hands behind them, not to mention fracturing the backs of their skulls on mysteriously missing blunt objects.

  “Ah yes, she shot herself three times in the back of the head and jumped out of the sixth floor window just to make us look bad,” she muttered, drawing a wide-eyed look of confusion from Gail. “When did this happen relative to the others? In the empire time defined by the Moscow embassy causal channels, if you’ve got the figures. That might tell us something.”

  “The order was”—George flipped pages in a separate file—“Ambassador Davis at datum zero, followed by Simonette Black at T plus fourteen days, six hours, three minutes. Then Ambassador Pendelton thirty-four days, nineteen hours and fifty-two minutes later.” He gazed at Rachel tiredly. “Any other questions?”

  “Yes.” She leaned back in her chair, tapping her stylus on the cover of her briefing file. “Are Turku and the, uh, Frisian Foundation coordina
ting their investigations? Are they even aware of the other assassinations?”

  “No and no.” George inclined his head slightly. “You have more questions. Let’s hear them, and your reasoning.”

  “All right.” Rachel sat up straight and looked at Gail. “You might not want to hear this.”

  “I can take it.” She looked back, angry and bewildered. “I don’t have to like it.”

  “Okay.” Rachel tapped the file in front of her. “As the man said, once is happenstance, twice might be coincidence, but three times is enemy action. We have a very nasty situation evolving, in which there exists a dwindling pool of assets—ambassadors—such that if the total drops below three, 800 million people will die. From an initial nine survivors, three have been murdered in the past three months. I assume the rest are under heavy guard—”

  “Wherever possible,” George murmured.

  “—But we basically have a crisis on our hands. Someone has figured out how to kill 800 million birds with just six stones. Leaving aside the killers’ evident penchant for cruel practical jokes, we know absolutely nothing about who they are and what motivates them. In fact, what we appear to know may actually be deliberate deception. And we’re the only people who are treating these assassinations as part of a big picture, rather than isolated killings.”

  “That’s essentially correct,” said Tranh. “There are other investigative measures we are taking, but”—he shrugged, looking unhappy—“it takes time.”

  “Well then.” Rachel licked her lips, which had become unpleasantly dry. “As I see it, our ideal outcome is to convince them to issue the abort code to the bombers immediately, before any more of them die. But right now they’ll probably view any such request with extreme suspicion—the murders could be seen as a conspiracy to force them to issue the code. Or we could prove to them that the New Dresdeners didn’t do the dirty deed and show them who did—if we have any idea.”

  She nodded when Cho shook his head. “I was afraid of that. The other option is to stake out a goat, wait for the assassins to show up, and try to trace them back to their masters. But we have a mess of motives at work here. Someone seems to want to ensure that the Muscovite weapons destroy New Dresden, and I’ve got to ask, why? Who could possibly benefit from wiping out one—or maybe even two—planets?” She glanced around the table.