Iron Sunrise

by Charles Stross

  “Okay, let’s go.” She took his hand again and led him along the street.

  “You know where we’re going? The embassy reception hall?”

  “Never been there.” She pointed at the floor. “Got a guide.”

  “Oh good, tell everyone where we’re going,” he muttered. “I just hope they don’t mistake me for a vagrant.”

  “An, uh, what? What was that?”

  “A vagrant?” He raised an eyebrow at her. “They don’t have them where you come from? Lucky.”

  She checked the word in her lexicon. “I’ll tell them you’re my guest,” she said, and patted his hand. Having Frank around made her feel safe, like walking through a strange town with a huge and ferocious guard dog—the biological kind—to protect her. Her spirits rose as they neared the embassy.

  Embassies were traditionally the public representatives of a nation abroad. As such, they tended to be built with a swagger, gratuitously broad facades and conspicuously gilded flagpoles. The Muscovite embassy was typical of the breed, a big, classically styled limestone-and-marble heap squatting sullenly behind a row of poplar trees, a discreet virtual fence, and a lawn that appeared to have been trimmed with a micrometer gauge and nail scissors. But something about it wasn’t quite right. It might have been the flag out front—set to half-mast ever since the dreadful day, years ago, when the diplomatic causal channel went dead—or something more subtle. There was a down-at-heel air to it, of retired gentry keeping up appearances but quietly living beyond their means.

  And then there was the security cordon.

  “I’m Wed—uh, Victoria Strowger,” Wednesday chattered to the two armed cops as they examined her passport, “and this is Frank Johnson, my guest, and isn’t this exciting?” She clapped her hands as they waved her through the archway of an explosive sniffer. “I can’t believe I’ve been invited to a real embassy function! Wow, is that the Ambassador? No?”

  “You don’t have to lay it on quite that thick,” Frank said tiredly, catching up with her a minute later. “They’re not idiots. Pull a stunt like that at a real checkpoint, and they’ll have you in an interrogation cell before your feet touch the ground.”

  “Huh?” She shook her head. “A real checkpoint? What was that about, then?”

  “What it was about was telling everybody that there are guards about. There are all sorts of real defenses all around us, and barely out of view. Dogs, drones, all sorts of surveillance crap. Guess I was right—this stinks of a high-alert panic.”

  “Oh.” She leaned closer to him as she glanced around. There was a large marquee dome behind one wing of the embassy, lights strung between trees—and a handful of adults, one or two of them in elaborate finery but most of them simply wearing office garb, wandering around clutching glasses of fizzy wine. “Are we in danger?” From what Herman said—

  “I don’t think so. At least, I hope not.”

  There were tables in the dome, attentive catering staff and bottles of wine and battalions of glasses waiting to be filled, a spread of canapés and hand rolls and other bite-sized snacks laid out for the guests. A clump of bored-looking visitors clutched their obligatory glass and disposable platter, and in one or two cases a sad-looking handheld flag. The first time Wednesday saw a flag she had to look away, unsure whether to laugh or cry. Patriotism had never been a huge Muscovite virtue, and to see the way the fat woman in the red pants held on to her flag as if it were a life preserver made Wednesday want to slap her and yell Grow up! It’s all over! Except it also felt like . . . like watching Jerm, aged three, playing with the pewter pot containing Grandpa’s ashes. Abuse of the dead, an infection of history. And now, he was gone. She looked away, sniffed, and tried to clear the haze in her eyes. She’d never much liked her kid brother anyway, but not having him around to dislike felt wrong.

  A man and a woman wearing sober outfits that would have been at home in a law office were working the guest crowd in a low-key manner. Wednesday’s turn came remarkably fast. “Hello, I’m pleased you could be here today,” said the woman, fixing Wednesday with a professionally polished smile that was almost as tightly lacquered as her hair. “I’m Mary-Louise. I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure of meeting you before?”

  “Hi, I’m Wednesday.” She forced a tired smile. Crying earlier had dried out the skin around her eyes. “I’m just passing through, actually, on board the Romanov. Is this a regular event?”

  “We host one like it every year to mark the anniversary. Is there one where you live, can I ask?”

  “I don’t think so,” Wednesday said doubtfully. “Centris Magna, in Septagon. Quite a lot of us went there from Old Newfie—”

  “Station eleven! Is that where you came from?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, very good! I had a cousin there. Listen, here’s Subminister Hasek, come to be very cultural with us tonight. We’ve got food, drink, a media presentation, and Rhona Geiss will be singing—but I’ve got to see to everyone else. Help yourself to everything, and if you need anything else, Mr. Tranh there will see to you.” She vanished in a flurry of wide sleeves and coattails, leaving Wednesday to watch in bemusement as a corpulent old man the size of a brown bear shambled slowly into the dome, a gleaming, polished woman at either side. One of them reminded Wednesday of Steffi so much that she blinked, overtaken by an urge to say hello to the friendly ship’s officer. When she looked again, the moment of recognition passed. A gaggle of teenagers gave ground to the threesome reluctantly as they walked in front of a circle of stewards setting up a table.

  Wednesday accepted a glass of wine and cast around for Frank, but he’d wandered off somewhere while the greeters had been working her. Expect trouble. Sure, but what kind?

  A row of glass doors had been shoved back from the room at one side of the embassy, and a couple of embassy staffers were arranging rows of chairs across the floor, then out onto the manicured lawn. The far wall of the reception room had become a screen, a blue-white-green disc eerily similar to the one Wednesday had seen from orbit as she boarded the orbit-to-surface elevator capsule. It floated in the middle of a sea of stars. Home, she thought, dully. She hadn’t felt homesick for years, not really, and then it had been for Old Newfie rather than this abstraction of a place she’d been born on—but now she felt a certain dangerous nostalgia begin to bite, and an equal and opposite cynical impulse to sneer at the idea. What has Moscow ever done for me? she asked herself. Then memory stabbed at her: her parents, the look on Mayor Pocock’s face as they’d hauled down the flag in the hub concourse before the evacuation . . . too many memories. Memories she couldn’t escape.

  Herman spoke in her earbud: “Most people come for the readings, remain for the singing of the national anthem, then leave and get steaming drunk. You might want to emulate them.”

  Twenty minutes and one glass of wine later, Wednesday found a corner seat at one end of the front row. The other visitors were filtering in slowly, nothing like as organized as a funeral party entering a chapel of rest. By all appearances a number of them were already leading her at the drinking.

  As the room filled up, and some people spilled onto the overflow chairs on the lawn, Wednesday felt someone sit in the chair next to her. “Frank?” She glanced round.

  “These are your people?” he said. Something in his expression made her wonder if he had internal ghosts of his own to struggle with. He seemed haunted by something.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “Some other time.” She turned round to face the front. A few stragglers were still filling the seats, but a door had opened to one side of the podium and a dignified-looking albeit slightly portly woman—possibly middle-aged, possibly a centenarian, it was difficult to tell—walked up to the stage.

  With her chestnut hair tied back with a ribbon, her black embroidered coat buttoned at the waist and cut back above and below, and the diamond-studded chain of office draped across her shoulders, she was exactly what Wednesday had expec
ted the Ambassador to be. She cleared her throat and the sound system caught and exploded her rasping breath across the lawn. “Welcome,” she said. “Again, welcome. Today is the fifth anniversary, absolute time standard years, of the death, and exile, of our compatriots. I”—she paused, an unreadable expression on her face—“I know that, like you, I have difficulty understanding that event. We can’t go home, now or ever. The door is shut, all options closed. There is no sense of closure: no body in a coffin, no assailant under arrest and charged with murder.

  “But—” She took a deep breath: “I shall try to be brief. We are still here, however much we mourn our friends and relatives who were engulfed by the holocaust. We survive. We bear witness. We go on, and we will rebuild our lives, and we will remember them.

  “Someone destroyed our homes. As an agent of the surviving caretaker government, I dedicate my life to this task: to bear witness, and to identify the guilty parties, whoever they are and wherever they may be sheltering. They will be held to account, and the accounting will be sufficient to deter anyone else who ever contemplates such monstrous acts in future.”

  She paused, head tilted slightly to one side as if she was listening to something—and, as she continued, Wednesday realized, She is listening to something. Someone is reading her a speech and she’s simply echoing it! Startled, she almost missed the Ambassador’s next words: “We will now pause for a minute in silent contemplation. Those of us who believe in the intervention of higher agencies may wish to pray; those of us who don’t may take heart from the fact that we are not alone, and we will make sure that our friends and families did not die in vain.”

  Wednesday was disinclined to meditate on much of anything. She looked around surreptitiously, examining fixtures and fittings. The ambassador’s girth—She’s not fat, but she’s carrying a lot of padding around the waist. And those boxes around the podium . . . and the guy at the back there, and that woman in the dark suit and business glasses . . . Something smelled wrong. In fact, something smelled killing zone, a game Herman had taught her years before. How to spot an ambush. This is just like a, a trap, she realized. But who—

  Wednesday turned back and was watching the Ambassador’s eyes as it happened. They widened slightly as somebody a couple of rows behind Wednesday made a nervous noise. Then the Ambassador snapped into motion, sudden as a machine, arms coming up to protect her face as she ducked.

  Then:

  Why am I lying down? Wednesday wondered fuzzily. Why? She could see, but everything was blurry and her ears ached. I feel sick. She tried to moan and catch her breath and there was an acrid stink of burning. Abruptly she realized that her right hand was wet and sticky, and she was curled around something bony. Dampness. She tried to lever herself up with her left hand, and the air was full of dust, the lights were out, and thinly, in the distance through the ringing in her ears, she heard screams.

  A flicker of light. A moment later, she was clearer. The podium—the woman wasn’t there. The boxes to either side had exploded like air bags, blasting heavy shields into the air in front of the Ambassador as she ducked. But behind her, behind them . . . Wednesday sat up and glanced down, realized someone was screaming. There was blood on the back of her hand, blood on her sleeve, blood on the chairs. A bomb, she thought fuzzily. Then: I ought to do something.People were screaming. A hand and an arm lay in the middle of the aisle next to her, the elbow a grisly red mess. Frank was lying on the floor next to her. The back of his head looked as if it had been sprayed with red paint. As she recognized him, he moved, one arm flailing at the ground in a stunned reflex. The woman who had been seated behind him was still seated, but her head ended in a glutinous stump somewhere between her neck and her nose. Bomb, Wednesday realized again, confused but trying to hold on to the thought. More thoughts: Herman warned me. Frank!

  She leaned over him in panic. “Frank! Talk to me!” He opened his mouth and tried to say something. She winced, unable to hear him. Is he dying? she wondered, feeling lost and anxious. “Frank!” A dizzy laugh welled up as she tried to remember details from a first-aid course she’d taken years ago—Is he breathing? Yes. Is he bleeding? It was hard to tell; there was so much blood everywhere that she couldn’t see if it was his. Frank mumbled something at her. He wasn’t flailing around. In fact, he seemed to be trying to move. “Wait, you mustn’t—” Frank sat up. He felt around the back of his head and winced, then peered at Wednesday owlishly.

  “Dizzy,” he said, and slowly toppled toward her.

  Wednesday managed to brace herself with one arm as he fainted. He must weigh over a hundred kilos, she realized fuzzily. She looked round, searching for help, but the shout died in her throat. It hadn’t been a big bomb—not much more than a grenade—but it had burst in the middle of the audience, ripping half a dozen bodies into bloody pulp, and splashing meat and bone and blood around like evil paint. A man with half his clothes blasted off his body and his upper torso painted red stumbled into the epicenter blindly, arms outstretched as if looking for someone. A woman, sitting in her chair like an incisor seated in a jaw between the empty red holes of pulled teeth, screamed and clutched her shredded arm. Nightmares merged at the edges, bleeding over into daylight, rawhead and bloody-bones come out to play. Wednesday licked her lips, tasted bright metal dampness, and whimpered as her stomach tried to eject wine and half-digested canapés.

  The next thing she knew, a man in black was standing over her, a gun at the ceiling—looking past her, talking urgently to a floating drone. She tried to shake her head. Something was crushing her. “—an you walk?” he said. “—your friend?”

  “Mmf. Try.” She pushed against Frank’s deadweight, and Frank tensed and groaned. “Frank—” The guard was away, bending over another body and suddenly dropping to his knees, frantically pumping at a still chest.

  “I’m, I’m—” He blinked, sleepily. “Wednesday?”

  Sit up, she thought fuzzily. “Are you okay?”

  “I think—” He paused. “My head.” For a miracle, the weight on her shoulder slackened. “Are you hurt?” he asked her.

  “I—” She leaned against him, now. “Not badly. I think.”

  “Can’t stay here,” he said faintly. “The bomb. Before the bomb. Saw you, Sven.”

  “Saw who?”

  “Jim. Clown.” He looked as if he was fading. Wednesday leaned toward him. “Sven was here. Wearing a waiter’s—” His eyelids fluttered.

  “Make sense! What are you saying?” she hissed, driven by a sense of urgency she didn’t understand. “What do you mean—”

  “Svengali. Back. Performer.” His eyes opened. “Got to find Sven.”

  “Are you telling me you saw him—” Shock brought Wednesday into focus.

  “Yes. Yes. Find him. He’s . . .” Frank’s eyes closed.

  Wednesday waved at a passing guard: “Here!” A head turned. “My friend, concussion. Help?”

  “Oh shit, another—” The guard waved one of her colleagues over. “Medic!”

  Wednesday slid after Frank, torn between a pressing need to see that he was all right and a conviction that she should go look for the clown. Leaving Frank felt wrong,like letting go of her only lifeline to stability. Just an hour ago he’d seemed so solid he could anchor her to the universe, but now everything was in flux. She stumbled toward the side door, her head whirling, guts churning. Her right hand stung, a hot, aching pain. Svengali? She wondered: what could he be doing here? A short passage and another open door brought her weaving and stumbling onto the lawn at the back of the embassy building. Bright light glared down from overhead floods, starkly silhouetting a swarm of cops buzzing around the perimeter like disturbed hornets. Sven? she thought.

  She stumbled around the side of the building. A woman blocked her way: “You can’t come—”

  “My friend!” She gasped, and pushed past. For some reason, no arms restrained her. Bodies were laid out on the grass under the harsh spotlights, some of them unmoving, others with people in p
aramedic orange frantically working over them. Other people stood or shambled around in a daze, prodded by a couple of enhanced police dogs that seemed to have a better idea of what was going on than any of the humans. Only a couple of minutes had passed, and the noise of sirens was still getting closer, audible over the ringing in her ears.

  She found him squatting on the grass, wearing face cake and a red nose spattered with blood, holding his head in his hands. His costume was a clown’s parody of a snobbish chef’s outfit. “Sven?” She gasped.

  He looked up, eyes red, a trickle of blood running from one nostril. “Wed-Wed—”

  “We’ve got to go,” she said, trying to think of anything else that wasn’t inane. “We’ll miss our, our . . .”

  “You go, girl, I’ll, I—” He shook his head, looking dizzy. “Help?”

  Was he here to perform? she asked herself. Then: “You’re hurt? Come on, on your feet. Back to the dining room. There’s medical triage in there, first aid. Let’s get you seen to and pick up Frank and catch a taxi. If we stay here, they’ll ask questions till we miss the ship.”

  “Ship.” His hands came down. He looked at her eyes cautiously, expression slightly puzzled. “Came here to, had to, set up? Frank? Hurt? Is he—”

  “Deafened and shocked, I think.” She shivered, feeling cold.

  “But we can’t just—”

  “We can. Listen, you’re one of my two guests, right? And we’ll give them a statement but we’ve got to do that right now, our ship leaves tonight. If you’re a guest, they won’t grill you like a performer or staff. I hope.”

  Svengali tried to stand up, and Wednesday backed off to give him room. “Must. Just tell the, the medics—” He staggered, and somehow Wednesday caught his left arm and pulled it over her shoulder—and she was walking Svengali drunkenly around toward the front of the embassy as the first ambulance arrived on a whine of electric motors.

  grateful dead

  “i don’t fuckingbelieve this!”