Iron Sunrise

by Charles Stross

  “Well.” Franz thought for a moment. “I came here to talk, so that’s not a problem. Is Sven the clown about?”

  “Yes.” She smirked at him unhelpfully.

  “Are you going to tell me where he is?”

  “No.” He stood up, ready to loom over her, but she didn’t show any sign of intimidation. “I really don’t think you’ve got his best interests in mind.”

  Best interests in mind? What the hell kind of infant is this? “Isn’t he going to be a better judge of that than you?”

  To his surprise, she acted as if she was seriously considering the idea. “Possibly,” she admitted. “If you stay right there, I’ll ask him.” Pause. “Hey, Sven! What you say?”

  “I say,” said a voice right behind Franz’s ear, “he’s right. Don’t move, what-what?” Franz froze, feeling a hard prod in the small of his back. “That’s right. Sound screen on. Jen, if you’d be so good as to keep the party running? I’m going to take a little walk with my friend here. Friend, when I stop talking you’re going to turn around slowly and start walking. Or I’ll have to shoot your balls off. I’m told it hurts.”

  Franz turned round slowly. The clown barely came up to his chin. His face was a bizarre plastic mask: gigantic grinning lips, bulbous nose, green spikes of hair. He wore a pink tutu, elaborate mountaineering boots, and held something resembling a makeup compact in his right hand as if it was a gun.

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  “Start walking.” The clown nodded toward the door.

  “If I do that, you’ll die,” Franz said calmly.

  “I will, will I? Then so shall you.” The face behind the plastic grin wasn’t smiling, and the makeup compact wasn’t wavering. It was probably some kind of low-caliber pistol. “Who sent you?”

  “Your client.” Franz leaned back against the wall and laced his fingers together in front of him to stop his hands shaking.

  “My client. Can you describe this mysterious client?”

  “You were approached on Earth by a man who identified himself as Gordon Black. He contacted you in the usual way and offered you a fee of twenty thousand per target plus expenses and soft money, installments payable with each successive hit, zero for a miss. Black was about my height, dark hair, his cover was an export agent from—”

  “Stop. All right. What do you want? Seeking me out like this, I assume the deal’s off, what-what?”

  “That’s right.” Franz tried to make himself relax, pretend this was just another informer and cat’s-paw like the idiots he’d had to deal with on Magna. It wasn’t easy with a bunch of raucous children running around outside their cone of silence and a gun pointing at his guts. He knew Svengali’s record; U. Scott hadn’t stinted on the expenses when it came to covering his own trail of errors. “The business in Sarajevo with the trap suggests that the arrangement has no future. Someone’s identified the sequence.”

  “Yes, well, this wouldn’t have happened if you’d taken my original advice about changing ships at Turku,” Svengali said waspishly. “Traffic analysis is always a problem. Like attempts to sever connections and evade obligations on the part of employers. Did you think I worked alone?”

  “No,” Franz said evenly, “but my boss may take some convincing. ‘Bring me the head of Svengali the clown,’ she said. I think you’ll agree that’s pretty fucking stupid on the face of it, which is why I decided to interpret her orders creatively and have a little chat with you first. Then maybe you can carry your head in to see her while it’s still attached to your body.”

  “Hmm.” Svengali looked thoughtful, insofar as Franz could see any expression at all under the layers of pseudo-flesh. “Yes, well I think I’ll take you up on the offer, and thank you for making it. The sooner this is sorted out, the better.”

  “I’m glad you agree.” Franz straightened up. “We walk out of here together after I signal my backup. I take it your backup is aboard the ship?”

  “Believe whatever you want.” Svengali shrugged. “Send your signal, pretty boy.”

  “Sure.” Franz held up his mobile and squeezed the speed button. Idiot, he thought disgustedly. Svengali had screwed up, making the fatal assumption that having a friend aboard to keep watch would be sufficient unto the day. It hadn’t occurred to him that they might be unable to deliver any damning evidence for rather a long time if the entire ship disappeared. Or that the ReMastered might not want a professional assassin running around while they were trying to sort everything out. Then he gestured at the door. “After you?”

  “You first.”

  “All right.” Franz walked through the door back into the corridor. “Who was the kid?” he asked curiously.

  “Who, Jen? Oh, she’s just a Lolita from childcare. Helping out with the party.”

  “Party? What ideology are they?” Franz added, sounding puzzled.

  “Not ideology, birthday. Don’t you have any idea—”

  One moment the clown was two paces behind Franz, the small box held loosely in his right hand. The next instant he was flattened against the wall and bringing the gun up to bear on Franz, his lips pulled back with a rictus of hate. Then he twitched violently, a shudder rippling all the way through him from head to toes. He collapsed like a discarded glove puppet.

  Franz turned round slowly. “Took your time,” he said.

  “Not really. I had to get into position without alerting him.” Strasser bent over the clown and put his weapon away. “Come and help me move this before it bleeds out and makes a mess on the carpet.”

  Franz joined him. Together they lifted the body. Whatever Strasser had shot him with had turned Svengali’s eyes ruby red from burst blood vessels. He felt like a warm sack of meat.

  “Let’s get him into one of the lifts,” Franz volunteered. “The boss wants to see his head. I reckon we ought to oblige her.”

  martin was still piling the contents of the walk-in closet up against the newly fitted partition when the passenger liaison net came back up. It made its presence known in several ways—with a flood of ultrawideband radiation, a loud chime, and a human voice broadcast throughout the ship.

  “Your attention, please. Passenger liaison is now fully reconstructed and accepting requests. I am Lieutenant Commander Max Fromm, acting Captain. I would like to apologize for the loss of service. Two hours ago, a technical glitch in our drive control circuit exposed the occupants of the flight deck and other engineering spaces to a temporary overgee load. A number of the crew have been incapacitated. As the senior line officer, I have moved control to the auxiliary bridge, and we are diverting to the nearest station with repair facilities. We will arrive there in thirty-two hours and will probably be able to proceed on our scheduled voyage approximately two days later.

  “I regret to inform you that it is believed that this incident may not have been accidental. It has been reported that our passenger manifest includes a pair of individuals belonging to a terrorist group identified with revanchist Muscovite nationalism. Crew and deputies drawn from the ReMastered youth leadership cadre aboard this vessel are combing the ship as I speak, and we expect to have the killers in custody shortly. In the meantime, the privacy blocks provided by WhiteStar for your comfort are being temporarily suspended to facilitate the search.

  “Please stay in your cabins if at all possible. Please enable your communications nodes at all times. Before leaving your cabins, please contact passenger liaison and let us know why. I will announce the all clear in due course, but your cooperation would be appreciated while the emergency is in effect.”

  “Corpsefuckers!” Wednesday stood up and paced over to the main door, like a restless cat. “What do they—”

  “Anita,” Rachel said warningly.

  Wednesday sighed. “Yes, Mom?”

  Martin finished shoving the big diplomatic fab trunk up against the panels and turned round. She’s got the exasperated adolescent bit down perfectly, he noted approvingly. And she’d managed to change her appearance completely
. Her hair was a mass of blond ringlets and she’d switched from black leather and tight leggings to a femme dress that rustled when she moved. The bows in her hair made her look about five years younger, but the pout was the same, and with the work Rachel had done on her cheeks and fingerprints—let’s just hope they crashed the liaison system hard enough that they don’t pay too much attention to the biometric tags, he thought grimly. Because—

  “Sit down, girl. You’re making me dizzy.”

  “Aw, Mom!” She pulled a face.

  Rachel pulled a face right back. “We need to look like a family,” she’d pointed out half an hour earlier, while Martin was walling Steffi and a three-day supply of consumables into the priest’s hole. “There’s a chunk of familial backbiting, and a chunk of consistency, and we want you to look as unlike the Victoria Strowger they’re hunting for as possible. Wednesday wears black and is extremely spiky. So you’re going to wear pink, and be fluffy and frilly. At least for a while.”

  “Three fucking days?” Wednesday complained.

  “They’ve crashed the liaison network,” Rachel pointed out, “and crashed it hard. That’s the only edge we’ve got, because when they bring it up again they’ll be able to configure it as celldar—every ultrawideband node in the ship’s corridors and staterooms will be acting as a terahertz radar transmitter. With the right software loaded into the nodes they’ll be able to see right through your clothing, in the dark, and track you wherever you go to within millimeters. We have to act as if we’re under surveillance the whole time once the net comes back up, because if they’re remotely competent—and they must be if they’ve just hijacked a liner with complete surprise—it’ll give them total control over the ship and total surveillance over everybody they can see.”

  “Except someone hidden at the back of a closet inside a Faraday cage,” Martin murmured as he slotted another panel into place, still stinking of hot plastic and metal from the military fabricator’s output hopper.

  “Yes, Mom.” Wednesday paced back to the armchair and dropped into it in a sea of lace. “Do you think they’ll—”

  The door chimed—then opened without pause. “Excuse us, sir and ladies.” Three crewmen walked in without waiting, wearing the uniforms and peaked caps of the purser’s office. The man in the lead had a neatly trimmed beard and dead eyes. “I am Lieutenant Commander Fromm and I apologize for the lack of warning. Are you Rachel Mansour? And Martin Springfield?” He spoke like an automaton, voice almost devoid of inflection, and Martin noted a bruise near the hairline on his left temple, almost concealed by his cap.

  “And our daughter Anita,” Rachel added smoothly. Wednesday frowned and looked away from the men, scuffing the carpet with her boot soles.

  “Anita Mansour-Springfield?”

  Fromm looked momentarily blank, but one of the men behind him checked a tablet: “That’s what it says here, sir.”

  “Oh.” Fromm still looked vacant. “Do you know of a Victoria Strowger?” he said stiffly.

  “Who?” Rachel looked politely puzzled. “Is that the terrorist you’re looking for?”

  “Terr-or-ist.” Fromm nodded stiffly. “If you see her, report to us immediately. Please.” His eyes looked red, almost bloodshot. Martin peered at him intently. He isn’t blinking! he realized. “I must revalidate your diplomatic credentials. Please. Your passports.”

  “Martin?” Rachel looked at him. “Would you fetch Commander Fromm our papers, please?” She remained seated on the chaise longue at the side of the dayroom, a picture of languor.

  “All right.” He walked over to the closet, throwing the doors wide, and retrieved the passports from the briefcase on top of the fab without turning on the closet light. Let them get a glimpse of a cluttered closet with no room for anyone to hide . . . “We should like you to withdraw surveillance from this suite,” he added, as he handed the passports over. “And as soon as she’s up to it, I’d like you to convey my best wishes for a speedy recovery and a happy code red to Captain Hussein. I’d like to see her when she’s got time, if possible.”

  “I am sure Captain Hussein will see you,” Fromm said slowly, and passed the passports to one of the other two officers for a check.

  Captain Nazma Hussein is almost certainly dead, Martin realized, the cold hand of fear tickling his guts. And you should know what a diplomatic code red means. He forced a smile. “Are the papers in order?”

  “Yes,” the man behind Fromm said curtly. “We can go now.”

  Fromm turned round without a word and marched out the door. The two other men followed him. The one who’d checked their papers paused in the doorway. “If you hear anything, please call us,” he said curtly. “We’re from the ReMastered race, and we’re here to help you.”

  The door clicked shut. Wednesday was on her feet almost immediately. “You fuckmonsters! I’m going to rip your heads off and shit down your necks! I—”

  “Anita!” Rachel was on her feet, too. She grabbed Wednesday’s shoulders swiftly and held her. “Stay calm.”

  Martin walked in front of her and held up an archaic paper notepad and a tiny stub of pencil. TERAHERTZ CELLDAR SIGNAL IN HERE, he scribbled twitchily in small letters. REZ ONE CM. SOUND TOO. CANT READ XPRESSNS, CAN CGESTRS, SOLID OBJECTS IN POCKETS, GUNS.

  “What’s—” Wednesday gasped, then leaned her head against Rachel’s shoulder. Rachel embraced her. She sobbed, the sound muffled. Rachel stroked the back of her neck slowly. CAPTAIN DEAD. FROMM REMASTERED ZOMBI.

  “I’m not sure I believe this,” Rachel said quietly. “It’s awful, isn’t it?”

  Wednesday nodded wordlessly, tears flowing.

  “Looks like they lost the liaison network completely,” Martin observed, looking away. What set that off? he wondered. Her family? He wanted to be able to speak freely, to tell her that the scum who’d done it weren’t going to get away, but he also wondered how true any such reassurance would be. “On the bright side, they revalidated our passports.” Including the one in the name of Anita, with Wednesday’s face and biometric tags pasted in. “Liaison,” he said, raising his voice, “what’s this station we’re putting into for repairs?”

  The liaison network took a moment to reply. Its voice was slightly flatter than it had been the day before. “Our repair destination is portal station eleven, Old Newfoundland. This station is not approved for passenger egress. Do you require further assistance?”

  “That will be all,” Martin said, his voice hollow.

  “Old Newfie?” Wednesday asked incredulously, raising her tear-streaked face from Rachel’s shoulder. “Did you hear that? We’re going to Old Newfie!”

  thirty-two hours:

  They stayed in their suite as instructed, forcing small talk and chitchat to convey the impression of familial claustrophobia. Wednesday milked her role for all it was worth—her adolescent histrionics had a sharp edge of bitterness that made Martin fantasize about strangling her after a while, or at least breaking character sufficiently to give her a good tongue-lashing. But that wasn’t on the cards. His book-sized personal assist, loaded with nonstandard signal-processing software, showed him some curious patterns in the ambient broadband signals, worryingly tagged sequential pulse trains.

  “I’m bored,” Wednesday said fractiously. “Can’t I go out?”

  “You heard what the officer said, dear,” Rachel responded for about the fourth time, face set in a mask of unduly tried patience. “We’re diverting somewhere for repairs, and they want to keep the common spaces clear for access.” Wednesday scribbled furiously on Martin’s paper notepad: OLD NEWF LIFE/SUPP DOWN HEAVY RAD. Rachel blinked. “Why don’t you just watch another of those antique movies or something?”

  WORRIED ABOUT FRANK.

  Martin glanced up from his PA. “Nothing to gain by worrying, Anita,” he murmured: “They’ve got everything under control, and there’s nothing we can do to help.”

  “Don’t want to watch a movie.”

  “Sometimes all you can do is try a
nd wait it out,” Rachel said philosophically. “When events are out of your control, trying to force them your way is counterproductive.”

  “That sounds like bullshit to me, Mom.” Wednesday’s eyes narrowed.

  “Really?” Rachel looked only half-amused. “Let me give you an example, then, a story about my, uh, friend the bomb disposal specialist. She was called out of a meeting one day because the local police had been called in to deal with a troublesome artist . . .”

  Wednesday sighed theatrically, then settled down to listen attentively. She seemed almost amused, as if she thought Rachel was spinning these stories out of whole cloth, making them up on the spur of the moment. If only you knew, thought Martin. Still, she was putting on a good act, especially under the stressful circumstances. He’d known more than a few mature adults who’d have gone to pieces under the pressure of knowing that the ship had been taken by hijackers, and they were the target of the operation. If only . . .

  He shut down his PA’s netlink and scribbled a note on it, leaving it where she’d spot it when Rachel finished. WHY OLD NEWF? “Anyway, here’s the point: If my friend had tried to rush the crazy, she’d have triggered the bomb’s defense perimeter. Instead she just waited for him to open up a loophole. He did it himself, really. That’s what I mean by waiting, not forcing. You keep looking at the door. Was there something you were thinking of doing out there?”

  “Oh, I just need to stretch my legs,” she said disingenuously. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t been pacing up and down the floor every half hour as it was. “Maybe go look at the bridge, if they’ll let me in, or see things. I think I left some of my stuff somewhere and I ought to get it back.” She caught his eye and he nodded minutely.

  LEFT STUFF OLD NEWF? “What did you lose?”

  “Oh, it was my shoulder bag, you know the leather one with the badge on it? And some paper I was scribbling on. I think it was somewhere near the, um, purser’s office. And there was a book in it.”

  “We’ll see about getting it back later,” Rachel said, glancing up from her tablet. “Are you sure you didn’t leave it in the closet?” she asked.