Iron Sunrise

by Charles Stross

  Portia reached a decision. The practicalities of it were risky, but then so was life. “Release him,” she told Jamil.

  “Is this wise?” Marx grunted, keeping his eyes focused dead center on Franz’s forehead. “We could repurpose him—”

  “I prefer my subordinates to have free will.” Her smile vanished abruptly. “Do you have a problem with that?”

  “Just looking out for your safety, boss.”

  “I’m quite sure that U. Franz Bergman will remember whose purpose he serves now that External Environmental Control Four has been, ah, absorbed by Group Six.”

  Jamil produced a knife from somewhere and began slicing away at the tape fastening Franz’s arms to the support bars.

  Franz’s eyes widened. “Did you say absorbed? What happened to Control Four?”

  “U. Vannevar Scott has been an extremely naughty boy,” Portia trilled. “So naughty that Overdepartmentsecretary Blumlein saw fit to take all his toys away.” Slight emphasis on the all, a raised eyebrow, a pouting lip. “You’re on the gray list.” Gray, as opposed to black, whose status was pith and reclaim with extreme prejudice. “It’s not very big, but you’re on it. Who knows? If you work hard, you may even stay there.”

  Franz slumped slightly, floating free of the anchor beams, nervously apprehensive. “What do you want me to do?” he asked. “Nobody told us anything about—” He swallowed.

  “Indeed.” Portia nodded at Jamil, big and solidly muscled. “You and Jamil are going to go and do the rounds. You’re going to give me a sitrep, and Jamil is going to sit on your shoulder and see how you go about it. Think of it as an entrance exam.” She recognized his unspoken question. “You and your people, both.”

  “I’m, uh, very grateful—”

  “Don’t be.” The brilliant smile was back. “I want to know what’s going on out there in the wild. You’ve got two kiloseconds to find out. And believe me, until I decide to pass you, dying will seem like the easy option.”

  by the time he got back to the pod, Franz was truly frightened. As if the mess he’d been holding together for the past nine months wasn’t bad enough, having the DepSec from hell descend on him with bodyguards and a full-dress away team was worse. Luckily Erica was with him, a calming influence. But the news—

  He glanced over his shoulder at her. She stared back at him, trying to look unaffected. A competent deputy station chief, following her boss’s lead. Jamil followed them both, imperturbable, threatening. “I’ll handle this,” he reassured her.

  “I understand.” He wanted to reach out and grab her hand, but he didn’t dare. Not in front of Jamil. She looked rattled enough as it was. Maybe it was because she’d figured out where they stood for herself, but he couldn’t be sure.

  The DepSec was waiting for him like a spider at the center of her web, black and shiny and carnivorous when she smiled, disturbingly red lips parting to reveal perfect teeth. Sea-green eyes as cold as death watched him. Behind her, the bodyguard waited. “You made it with fifty seconds to spare!” She glanced at Erica. “So, you’re U. Erica Blofeld?”

  Franz noticed Erica nodding out of the corner of his eye. He could smell the DepSec, the warm mind-fuzzing sense of family coming off her in waves. He could feel Erica’s nervousness. “Ye-es, Boss.”

  “Let her speak for herself,” Hoechst said gently. “You can speak, can’t you?” she added.

  “Yes.” Erica cleared her throat. “Yes, uh. Boss? Nobody told us anything.”

  “Jamil. Did U. Franz Bergman tell U. Erica Blofeld anything substantive about the change of management structure?”

  “No, boss.”

  “Good.” Hoechst focused on the woman. “What’s the situation, Erica? Tell me.”

  “I—” She shrugged uncomfortably. “Burr and Samow drew a blank. Kerguelen messaged to say he’d found the target, in transit to Noctis hab in a first-class berth. Last he sent, he was closing on her to lay a honeypot and do a field-expedient pickup. Since then I’ve heard nothing. He last called in about eleven hours ago, and they should be arriving at Noctis real soon, but he’s missed three checkpoints, and while I can think of several reasons for doing so, none of them are good.” She watched Hoechst closely, eyes flickering back and forth between her face and her hands.

  “Well, that is convenient.” Hoechst’s expression was bland. “Did it occur to any of you that the target of this action might be trained in evasion and self-defense?”

  Franz tried to answer. “We didn’t—”

  “Shut up! That was a rhetorical question.” Hoechst looked past him at the doorway. “You’ve told me what I needed to know, and I thank you,” she said graciously, nodding to Erica. “Jamil, give U. Erica Blofeld coffee now.”

  Franz kicked off the floor, hit the ceiling and rolled, intending to bounce off it and take Jamil in the gut. Desperation triggered his boost reflexes, narrowing focus until the world was a gray-walled tunnel. But Jamil had already brought up something like a silvery hand-sized Christmas tree, and he stabbed it toward the back of Erica’s head. Erica’s eyes bulged. She spasmed, beginning to turn as blood gouted—

  Something hit Franz hard, in the small of his back.

  “can you hear me?”

  “I think he’s playing moppet, boss.”

  Not exactly. There was a searing pain in his back, and his head felt as if he had the worst hangover in human space. In fact, he felt sick. But that wasn’t the worst part of it. The worst part of it was that he was conscious again, which meant that he was still alive, which meant . . .

  “Listen to me, Franz. Your station deputy was on the black list. She reported to U. Scott’s Countersubversion Department. I will ensure that her reclaimed state vector is dispatched to the Propagators with all due decency, and leave judgment of her soul up to the unborn god. But you will open your eyes within thirty seconds, or you’ll join her. Do you understand?”

  He opened his eyes. The twilight was painfully bright. A quivering black sphere of uncoagulated blood floated past, wobbling slowly in the direction of one of the extractor vents. Despair hit him like a velvet club.

  “We were—” He paused, carefully, searched for an acceptable word, unsure why it was so important to do so now that his real life was over before it had even begun. His throat was dry. “Close.” Close, that was the word. It brought it all home, while revealing nothing.

  “If you value your intimacy so highly, you’re welcome to join her,” hell’s handmaiden told him half-seriously. She moved across the room in front of him, a blur before his eyes. He had to struggle to focus. “The ReMastered race doesn’t need moral weaklings. Or were you naive enough to think you were in love?”

  “I’m—” angry, he realized. “I feel ill. Dysfunctional.” He was angrier than he’d ever been before—angry in his helplessness. He hadn’t been angry when her bodyguard had stunned him and he’d awakened strapped to a set of beams; just frightened and apprehensive beyond all reason. But now, with the thought that he might survive, there was room for anger. Erica’s dead. It shouldn’t have meant that much to him, but they’d been living outside the Directorate for too long. They’d been a little reckless, adopting feral ways, naive native sentimentality. And now, naive native pain and loss.

  “You’re angry,” Hoechst said soothingly. “It’s a perfectly understandable human reaction. Something you thought was yours has just been taken away from you. I don’t blame you for it, and if you want to yell at me later, you’re welcome to. But right now Blumlein himself has given us a very important task, and if you get in my way, I’ll have to crush you. Nothing personal. And just in case it hasn’t sunk in, your friend was a countersub agent. Reporting directly to U. Scott’s Office of Internal Inquiries. Programmed to execute you at the first sign of disloyalty to Scott.” Franz found himself nodding, unconsciously agreeing; but all the time he was full of the scent of her skin, the memory of her laughter, their secret shared sin of commission, out here beyond the Directorate, where love wasn’t a sta
te of war and hate wasn’t politics.

  She wouldn’t have given me away, he thought. Not ever. Because she’d told him all about her second job within a day of their first frantic assignation, holed up in a hotel, hungry to the point of starvation for intimacy. It had been their dirty little secret, a shared furtive fantasy about eloping, defecting, lighting out for the event horizon. Either Hoechst—in her capacity as death’s angel—knew far less than she thought she did about the cell she was taking over, or the Directorate was rotten to the core anyway, and the unborn god a sick fantasy.

  But you couldn’t ever let yourself dream such thoughts when you were around other ReMastered, not if you wanted to live. So Franz bundled up his scream of loss and pain, and shoved it down a long way, deep down where he could curl up around it later and lick the suppurating wound—and forced himself to nod vigorously.

  “I’ll be all right soon,” he said meekly: “It was just a shock.” If he let them realize how deeply he and Erica had been involved . . .

  “That’s good,” Hoechst said reassuringly. His nostrils flared, but he gave nothing away. Marx floated behind her like a lethal shadow, holding a spinal leech casually in one hand.

  “What do you want me to do now?” he asked hoarsely.

  “I want you to rest up and recover. We’re going on a journey, soon as we gather up the rest of your cell.”

  “A journey—”

  “New Dresden, via yacht.” She pulled a face. “Some yacht—it’s an old Heidegger-class frigate with its weapons systems ripped out and replaced with stores compartments and bunks. We’ve got about eight days to get there ahead of your runaway, who is traveling master class on a liner. When we get there, we’re going to rescue the situation, nail down all the loose ends, and stop the avalanche U. Vannevar Scott set in motion. Got that?”

  “I—” He flexed his left hand; a stabbing pain in his wrist made him gasp. “I think I damaged something.”

  “That’s all right.” She grinned at him with easy camaraderie: “You’re going to damage lots more things before this is over . . .”

  it took an entire week for Portia to get round to raping him. For Franz, most of the time passed in a blur as he worked like an automaton; he was too busy rounding up his remaining agents to notice the cool, speculative looks she was sending his way.

  It happened after Hoechst dealt with Kerguelen. Missing his target might have been excusable if he hadn’t already been on the gray list, and debatable even in spite of it, but he’d compounded the error by alerting the girl. She’d locked him in her own Syb-class cabin, turning the tables. Hoechst was incandescent with fury when she found out, and even Franz had felt an answering twinge of indignation through his haze of loss.

  Portia collected Kerguelen from Noctis herself, ordering a diversion that cost the DD-517 almost a day’s headway while it stooged around pretending to be a luxury yacht. She wore a watered silk gown of blue and violet to the police station where the unfortunate Kerguelen was being held, along with a blond wig and a king’s ransom in precious stones; she had the mannerisms and giggle down to perfection for her role as the second wife of a rich ship-owning magnate from al-Turku. Franz and Marx and Samow marched behind her stiffly, wearing the archaic uniforms and pained air of superiority of her household retainers. The show ended about five milliseconds after they got the anxiously grateful Ker across the boarding tube threshold and behind a ’lock door. Then she was at his throat.

  “Bastard!” she hissed, wrist muscles standing out like steel bands as she choked him. It was a deadly insult among the ReMastered, but nobody was interested in Ker’s reply. Marx and Samow held his arms as he bucked and kicked against the bulkhead while she crushed his larynx. When he stopped moving, Hoechst looked round their small circle, sparing Franz such a malice-filled glare that he shuddered, sensing how close his own neck was to those strong hands, but then she relaxed slightly and nodded at him. “He showed me up,” she said coolly. “Worse, he made the Directorate look foolish. You also.”

  “I understand,” he said woodenly, and that seemed to satisfy her.

  “Samow, see that his neural map is reclaimed, then ditch the remains. Marx, give my compliments to the pilot and tell her it’s time to execute Plan Coyote. U. Bergman, come with me.” She turned and stalked toward the lift up to the crew decks. Franz followed her, his mind blank. Kerguelen had worked for him for three years, a happy-go-lucky youngster on his first out-of-system assignment. He was prone to living it up, but not self-consciously sloppy, and there seemed to be a serious ideological commitment underlying his actions. His self-evident belief in the cause, in the unborn god and the destiny of the ReMastered, had sometimes left Franz feeling like a hollow fraud.

  Kerguelen had lived life as large as he was allowed to, as if he were working in the early days of a better universe. To see him broken and discarded rubbed home Franz’s own inadequacy. So he didn’t protest, but followed Hoechst, wafting in her trail of rustling silks and expensive floral triterpenoids and volatile oils. The faint smell of old-fashioned powder cosmetics stung his nose.

  The DepSec’s suite was larger than the cubbyhole Franz was bunking in. It held a pair of chairs, a rolltop desk, and a separate folding bed. Perhaps it had once been the frig-gatenführer’s quarters, back when the yacht had been a warship. Hoechst shut the door and waved him to a seat, but remained standing and busied herself with something at her table. He couldn’t take his eyes off her. She was beautiful, in a feral, ex-Directorate sort of way, but also frightening. Intimidating. A predator, beautiful but deadly and incapable of behaving any other way. She eased her wig off and placed it on the desk, then ran her fingertips through her close-cropped pale hair. “You look as if you need a drink.”

  She was offering him a glass, he realized through a cloud of befuddlement. He accepted it instantly, his instinct for self-preservation kicking in. “Thank you.” She poured herself another from a cut-crystal decanter, some kind of amber fluid that stank of alcohol and ashes. “Is this an imported whisky?”

  She curled her lower lip thoughtfully, then replaced the decanter stopper and sat down on the chair opposite him. “Yes.” She smoothed her gown over her knees and looked momentarily abashed, as if she couldn’t remember how she came to be there, a fairy-tale princess aboard a warship of the ReMastered race. “You should try it.”

  He raised his glass, then paused, trying to remember the formula: “To your very good health.” He silently appended a less flattering toast.

  She raised her glass back to him. “And yours.” Her cheek twitched. “If that’s your idea of a toast to my health, I can’t imagine what my painful death would warrant.”

  Her words struck home. “Boss, I—”

  “Silence.” She watched him over the rim of her glass, green eyes narrowed. Sweat-spiked black hair, high cheekbones, full red lips, narrow waist: a warrior’s body held in a sheath of silk that had taken master couturiers a month to stitch. She had the inhumanly symmetrical features that only a first-line clade could afford to buy for the alpha instances of their phenotype. “I brought you here because I think we may have gotten off on the wrong foot when we were first introduced.”

  Franz sat frozen in his chair, the glass of scotch—worth a small fortune, for it had been imported across more than two hundred light years—clutched in his right hand. “I’m not sure I understand you.”

  “I think you do.” Hoechst watched him, unblinking except for the occasional flicker of her nictitating membranes. “I’ve been following your profile. You would be surprised how much information on their subjects even the privacy fetishists of Septagon manage to collect. Our target refugee, for instance. I think I’ve got a handle on her—she made the mistake of talking to some friends after her unfortunate run-in with that waste of air, and I think I know where she’s bound for. But she’s not the only one.”

  Now it comes, he realized, the muscles in his neck tensing involuntarily. She’s going to—what? If she wanted him dead,
she could have executed him along with Ker.

  She kept her eyes on him, avaricious for information: “You were ‘in love’ with U. Erica Blofeld, weren’t you?”

  A stab of unreasoning anger provoked him to speak frankly: “I’d rather not talk about it. You’ve got what you want, haven’t you? My undivided attention and the liquidation of an elite countersub agent from Scott’s personal cadre. Isn’t that enough?”

  “Perhaps not.” Her cheek muscles tensed, pulling the sides of her mouth up into something that resembled a smile but didn’t touch her eyes. “You’ve been in Septagon space for too long, Franz. In a way it’s not your fault. It could happen to anyone, spending too long on their own without backup and indoctrination, forming their own little schismatic reality, wondering if perhaps the Directorate was really the only way of doing things, wondering if you could possibly ignore it and pretend it would go away. Isn’t that it? You don’t need to admit anything, by the way, this isn’t an inquisition. I’m not going to feed you to the Propagators. But you can express yourself freely here. I don’t mind. You have my permission to shout at me. Remember what I said earlier?”

  “You . . .” His fingers tightened on the glass. For a despairing moment he thought about smashing it and going for her throat, before the reality of his situation struck home. “So what? Nothing I can say matters. You wouldn’t believe my denials.”

  “Well then!” She smiled, and it filled him with anger, because her expression was so genuine—she looked joyously happy, and grief and envy said that nobody should be allowed to look that way, ever again—when Erica was dead. And even though he knew it was just his glands speaking, that this, too, would pass, it goaded him. “I have a problem,” she said, continuing as if nothing was wrong. She rubbed her right knee through the sheer fabric of her gown. “We’re about to go and close down some loose ends. If we succeed, the sky is the limit. Not only will everybody in this unit be rehabilitated, but I will be—well, promotion is not the most of it.” She leaned toward him, confidingly. “At the higher levels, Franz, things are a little different. Unforgivable disciplinary errors become understandable personality flaws. The Propagators become tools with which the garden is teased into a pleasing shape: servants, not masters. Quite possibly, expedient termination orders become reversible.”