Iron Sunrise

by Charles Stross

  steffi stifled a yawn as she lowered herself into the chair at the head of the table in the dining room. An overlong shift spent poring over personnel movements with Rachel had left her bleary-eyed and wanting to throttle some of the more willfully persistent tourists. Having to follow that by stealing ten minutes to freshen up, then sitting at the head of a dining table for three or four hours of stroking the oversized egos of the more stupid upper-class passengers, was the kind of icing she didn’t need on her cake. But it’s better than being on the outside of the investigation, she told herself. And maybe she’d get some quality time with Max afterward; he was sitting up on the high table at the other side of the room, lofty but affable, everybody’s favorite picture of a senior officer. He’d need to blow off steam, too.

  “Mind if I join you?” She looked round. It was Martin, the diplomatic spook’s right hand.

  “By all means.” She managed a wan smile, keeping up appearances. Down the table, the middle-aged Nipponese woman smiled back at her, evidently mistaking its target, triggering an exchange of polite nods. By which time Martin was sitting to her left and idly scrolling through the menu. She looked around the table. It was half-empty. The troublesome kid was evidently eating in her room. So, come to think of it, were those creepy cultural exchange students from Tonto. Fucking stupid cover, she thought. A blind idiot could see there’s more to them than that. No such luck with the bankers, though.

  “How’s your day been?” she asked quietly as the stewards collected the empty soup bowls. “I haven’t seen your wife in here—is she working?”

  “Probably.” Martin winced and pinched the bridge of his nose. “She’s looking for someone, and she tends to overdo it when she’s got her teeth into something. I tell her to take some time off, it’ll make her more effective, but . . . I’ve spent all day interviewing tourists. It’s giving me a headache.”

  “Did any of them have anything useful to say?” she asked.

  “Not for the most part, no.”

  Liar, she thought, tensing. What are you concealing?

  The lighting strips lining the arched sculpture niches along the walls flickered, distracting her.

  “ ’Scuse me.” Steffi raised her left hand and twisted her interface rings urgently, hunting the command channel. The lights aboard a starship never flickered without a reason—especially not aboard a luxury liner with multiple redundant power circuits. Steffi hadn’t felt any vibration, but that didn’t mean anything. The ship’s curved-space generators were powerful enough to buffer a steady thirty gees of acceleration, and absorb the jolt of any impact unless it was large enough to cause a major structural failure. “Bridge comm, Grace here. Bridge—” She frowned. “That’s odd.” She glanced across the room at Max. He was standing up, turning to step down off the raised platform of the high table. He caught her eye, jerked his chin toward the main entrance, then strode toward it. Across the room she saw stewards discreetly breaking off their tasks, disappearing in the direction of their emergency stations.

  She caught up with Max a couple of meters down the hall. “Bridge isn’t answering.”

  “I know.” He opened an unmarked side door. “Nearest emergency locker is—ah, here.” Yanking the yellow-and-black handle forward, he pulled out the crash drawer and handed her an emergency bag—rebreather hood, gloves, multitool, first-aid ’bots. “No callback.” He looked thoughtful. “One moment—”

  “Already there.” Steffi had her tablet fully unfolded; she pasted it against the wall and tried to bring up the ship’s damage-control schematics. “Shit, why is it so slow? She stabbed at a local diagnostic pane. “There’s no bandwidth! Shipnet is down.”

  “We’ve got lights, air, and gravity.” He looked thoughtful. “What’s out is data. Listen, it may just be a major network crash. Relativistics weren’t due to start jump spool-up for half an hour yet, so we’re probably okay if we sit tight. You’re not trained for this, so I want you to go back to the dining room and keep a lid on the passengers. Relay any orders you hear and keep your ears open and try to stay out of trouble until you’re needed. Meanwhile, I’m going to get some stewards together and go find out what’s happening. Bridge first, engineering control if the bridge is out . . . Your story for the passengers is that everything is under control, line crew is investigating and there’ll be an announcement in due course. Think you can handle it?”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  Steffi headed for the passenger corridor, sparing a glance behind her as he waved a hand at a crewman who’d appeared from one of the service spaces: “Hey, you! Over here, I’ve got a job for you right now . . .”

  Everything seemed to be under control in the dining room. Steffi did a quick survey. The passengers were still wrapped up in conversation, not yet having noticed anything unusual. Small mercies . . . For a moment she considered leaving them in ignorance, but as soon as someone tried to check mail or call a friend they’d realize something was up.

  She took a step up onto the platform supporting the high table. “Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention, please?”

  Curious eyes turned toward her. “As some of you may have noticed, we’ve experienced a minor technical anomaly in the past few minutes. I’d like to assure you that the engineering crew are working on it, and there is no danger—”

  The lights flickered for a moment, then went out. One or two stifled screams rose from the corners of the room—then the lights came back on. And with them a stranger’s voice, amplified, over the passenger liaison circuit, its tone calm and collected: “We regret to inform you that there has been a minor problem with the propulsion and engineering control center. There is no cause for alarm. Everything is under control, and we will be diverting to a nearby port rather than proceeding directly to New Prague. WhiteStar Line will announce a compensation package for your inconvenience in due course. In the meantime, we would appreciate it if you would return to your cabins and stay there until further notice. When the passenger liaison network is back up, please do not hesitate to use it to contact one of our team. We’re here to help you.”

  rachel was looking for Wednesday in the mostly-deserted D deck lounges when the gadget went off under the bridge. The bridge was on E deck. It was separated from D deck by two pressure bulkheads, a structural truss, and an electrograv ring designed to even out tidal surges, so the immediate blast effect was lost on her.

  Martin had called her a couple of hours earlier, full visual via an office cam. “It checks out and it stinks like a month-dead cheese,” he insisted. “She’s a Moscow survivor, someone’s been trying to abduct or kill her, she was at the embassy reception when you were—oh, and there’s something else.”

  His cheek twitched. He was about as agitated as she’d ever seen him get. “What else?” she demanded, annoyed with herself for going after such a transparent hook.

  “She’s got a friend called Herman, and he’s why she’s here.” Martin shut up. She stared at him through the magic mirror in her visual field.

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope. Frank didn’t know any more—but I mean, hit me with the clue bat, right?”

  “Oh shit.” She’d had to lean against the wall. “Did she pass anything else on to you?” She’d gone dizzy for a moment, as things dropped into place. Herman was the cover name an agent of the Eschaton had used to contact Martin, paying him to run obscure errands—errands that had emergent side effects that shook the chancelleries of a dozen worlds. Herman was only really interested in human beings when they tried to build time machines, violate causality, experiment with forbidden weapons. Moscow had died when, entirely without warning, its star had exploded. Which just didn’t happen, not to G-type dwarf stars in the middle of the main sequence of their life cycles.

  “Yes. Maybe it’s a coincidence, and then again maybe there’s a large pig on final approach to the main docking bay—see the reaction control clusters on each flank? Herman said it was something to do with the
ReMastered group aboard this ship and that they’re going to pull something after the first jump. Tonight, in other words. Rachel, I am not happy. This—”

  “Stop. Let’s not go there right now.” She shook her head. “I need to find the girl before whoever’s looking for her catches up with us. Send me her details?”

  “Sure.” Martin shuffled the rings on his left hand, and her tablet bleeped, then threw up a picture—young-looking physio, dark hair built up in an outrageous swirl, eye shadow like midnight. “Hard to miss. You’ll probably find her with Frank the journalist; they seem to be personally involved. Oh, she’s as young as she looks, too, so go easy on her.”

  Rachel frowned pensively. “Don’t worry about me, worry about her. You go and have a word with the Captain—tell her we’re expecting some kind of trouble from a group of passengers. If necessary, tell her exactly who—but don’t tell her where the warning came from. There might be a leak in the crew. Besides which, if we overreact, we might not have a chance to learn anything . . .”

  “Happy hunting.” He’d smiled at her until she cut the call. And that was why she came to be prowling past nine-tenths empty lounges and casually eyeballing the few passengers who were out in public, chatting, drinking, or schmoozing in the overstuffed furniture that seemed to be a WhiteStar trademark. Wednesday seemed to have vanished, along with her new boyfriend, and neither of them were carrying their locater badges. Damn these privacy freaks, anyway! Nowhere did she see a skinny girl with spiky hair and a serious luminosity deficiency, or a journalist built like a silverback gorilla.

  Two hours after she’d begun, Rachel had combed decks G through D, making a pass around each circle corridor and checking every single public room, and she was getting frustrated. Where on earth can she have gotten to? she asked herself. Leaving a message on Wednesday’s voice mail didn’t seem to have gotten anywhere. It was getting to the point where she had half a mind to raise things with Steffi, see if the crew couldn’t do the job more efficiently: if only she could eliminate all the crew from the suspects list—

  The luminous ceiling tiles flickered briefly, and the world filled with multicolored static. A vast silence went off inside her head. Rachel felt herself falling and tried to raise her arms to protect herself. Vertigo! She hit the deck bruisingly hard and rolled sideways, her vision flickering. The static was slow to clear, leaving a line of bleeding ghost trails across her retinas. Rachel caught her breath, dizzy with fright, then realized that it wasn’t her eyesight: her intraocular displays had crashed and were rebooting. “Shit!” She glanced around. The skinny guy sitting in the leather sofa next to the upright piano in the Gold Lounge was frowning, rolling his rings around his fingers as if puzzled by something. Rings—Rachel twisted her own master ring, spun through diagnostic menus until she came to the critical one. EMP burst, said her event log. Kilovolts and microamps per meter: someone had just dumped a huge electromagnetic pulse through the walls. There was a faint tang of ozone in the air. The fast fuses in her MilSpec implants had saved them, but the other passengers—

  “Oh shit!” She picked herself up and lurched drunkenly into the corridor. “Get me Martin.” Service unavailable. “Hell and damnation.” No surprise there. Why no sirens? She glanced around hastily, looking for an emergency locker—they’d be tastefully concealed aboard a liner, but they’d still be there—Why no partitions? The fail-safe doors ought to be descending if something bad had happened. A chilly claw of fear tugged at her. “Shit, time to get moving . . .”

  The small boy in one corner of the lounge was walking toward her. “Hey, ma’am? My gamescape just flaked on me—”

  She cast the kid a sickly smile. “Not now,” she said, then did a double take: “Why don’t you go to your room and tell your folks about it? They’ll be able to help you.” EMP / crashed implants and amusements / assassin traveling incognito / teen from Moscow being hunted / Eschaton involved / war crimes —she had a nagging sense that a shoe had just dropped hard, an enormous boot with a heel stuffed with plutonium or weaponized anthrax or gray goo or something equally apocalyptic, and she’d misinterpreted it as the sound of one hand clapping. Something like that. She broke into a trot, heading for the next radial. Got to find the damage-control point, she told herself, find out what’s going on—

  She dodged a couple of confused passengers who seemed to be looking for someone. She spotted an anonymous gray side door into crew country and tried to open it. It refused to recognize her until she got tired of waiting and twisted the black-and-yellow emergency handle: from beyond it she could hear distant, muted sirens. The auxiliary lighting circuit had tripped, and the walls shed a lurid shadowless glow. “Send to Martin, off-line by best emergency mesh routing,” she subvocalized to her personal assist, mumbling at her rings. “Martin, if you get this message, we’re in deep shit. Something—” she turned a corner, followed signs for the G deck ops center—“big is going down, and I think we’re sitting on the target.” The ops center door was open ahead, a couple of crew just visible in the gloom inside doing something. One of them glanced at her, then stepped forward. “I think—”

  She stopped dead, eyes wide, as the public address system came on: “We regret to inform you that there has been a minor problem with the propulsion and engineering control center . . .”

  The man blocking the doorway was pointing an autonomous rifle at her. Rachel froze as it tracked her, snuffling slightly, its barrel pointing right at her face. “Who are you and what are you doing here?” he demanded.

  “I, uh—” She stopped, heart hammering. “I was looking for a steward?” she asked, her voice rising in an involuntary squeak. She began to take a step back, then froze as the man tensed. He had blond hair, brown eyes, and pale skin: he was built with the sparse, muscular grace of a dancer or martial artist—or special forces, she realized. Even a cursory glance told her she wouldn’t stand a chance if he decided to shoot her; the gun was some kind of smart shotgun/grenade launcher hybrid, probably able to fire around corners and see through walls. “My rings stopped working—What’s this about help?” she asked, doing her best to look confused. It wasn’t hard.

  “There has been a minor accident,” the goon said, sounding very calm but clipping his words: “Return to your cabin. Everything is under control.” He stopped and stared at her coolly.

  “Uh, yeah, under control, I can see that,” Rachel muttered, backing away from him. He made no move to follow her, but simply stood in the doorway watching as she turned and walked back toward passenger country. Her skin crawled as if she could feel the gun watching the small of her back, eager to discharge. When she was far enough away she gave in to the impulse to run—he’d probably expect no less of a frightened passenger. Just as long as he didn’t realize how good her night vision was. Good enough to have seen the woman slumped over the workstation in the gloom behind him. Good enough to have seen the other woman working on her back with something that looked disturbingly like a mobile neurosurgery toolkit.

  Under control. “Shit,” she mumbled, fumbling with the door and noticing for the first time that her hands were shaking. Bad guys in G deck damage-control center, infoweapons in passenger country, what else do I need? The door banged shut behind her. She shook her head. Hijackers—

  She turned toward the central atrium, meaning to take the old-fashioned staircase back up to her room in search of Martin. She took a single step forward, and the dark-haired girl ran into her.

  the air in the flight deck stank of blood, ozone, and feces. The desks and equipment racks around the room looked as if someone had run them through a scrap metal press; anything that wasn’t bolted down had fallen over and shattered, hard, including the bridge officers unlucky enough to be in the room when the gadget had gone off. Bodies bent at strange angles lay beneath broken chairs or lay splayed across the floor, leaking.

  Portia wrinkled her nose in distaste. “This really won’t do,” she insisted. “I want this mess cleared up as soon as we’ve got
the surveillance net locked down. I want it to look like we’ve been in charge all along, not as if we just butchered the flight crew.”

  “Boss.” Jamil nodded. He glanced at the front wall-screen, which had ripped away from the bulkhead and slumped into a thin sheet across the floor. “What about operational capacity?”

  “That’s a lower priority. We’ve got the auxiliary bridge, we’ll run things from there for now.” She pulled a face. “On second thoughts, before you tidy up get someone to reclaim anything they can get out of these.” She stared at an officer who lay on the floor, her neck twisted and skull flattened. “Obviously, I don’t expect total uploads.”

  “Thirty gees for a hundred milliseconds is about the same as falling off a fifteen-story building,” Marx volunteered.

  “So she didn’t have a head for heights.” Hoechst’s cheek twitched. “Get going.”

  “Yes, boss.” He hurried off to find someone with a neural spike.

  As he left, Portia’s phone rang. She raised the archaic rubbery box to her head. “Control, sitrep. Ah . . . yes, that’s good. Is he all right? Fully programmed? Excellent, get him in front of a screen as soon as you get into the liaison router, we need to reassure the passengers there’s a real officer in charge . . . What’s the structural load-out like? How high did the surge . . . all right. Right. Good, I’m glad you told me. Yes, tell Maria to detain any other members of the crew who reach D-con on decks G through C . . . Yes, that’s what I meant. I want any line officers who survived identified and segregated immediately. Stash them in the C deck D-con center for now and report back when you’ve got them all accounted for. Be discreet, but in event of resistance shoot first: the unborn god will know his own . . . Yeah, you, too. Over.” She turned and nodded to Franz. “Right. Now it’s your turn. I take it the girl isn’t in her cabin?”