Iron Sunrise

by Charles Stross

  Lying outstretched in the duct above the room, looking down through the air recirculation grille, Wednesday explored her third and final cartridge by touch. It wasn’t like the two riot foam grenades, and this was a headache: there was someone down there, and she looked vaguely familiar. It was hard to tell through the grille—

  Fuckmonsters! Family killers. She remembered Jerm taunting her, Dad looking worried—he did a lot of that—Indica stern and slightly withdrawn from reality, her distant willowy mother. Love and rage, sorrow and a sense of loss. She looked down through the grille, saw the woman sitting back to back in the nearer horseshoe. They’re ReMastered. She’d heard quite enough about them from Frank to know what they were about. Portia and her mocking grin. Wednesday’s teeth ground with hatred, hot tears of rage prickling at the sides of her eyes. Oh, you’re going to regret this!

  She risked a peek of light from her rings, illuminating the scored casing on this cartridge. The activation button had a dial setting with numbers on it, and there was no half-open end. Is it a banger? she wondered. It seemed unlikely, on the face of it—grenades on a space station were a crazy idea—but you couldn’t rule anything out. So she dialed her jacket to shrink-fit, pulled the hood over her face, and sealed it to the leggings she wore under her trousers. E-mail:Herman, what the fuck is this?Attach image: Send. Her fingers were trembling with cold. Come on, reply . . .

  BING.This is a type-20 impact-fused grenade. Stun radius: five meters. Lethal radius: two meters. EMP minimized, tissue ablation maximized.Attachment: operations manual.What are you doing with it?

  E-mail:Herman, I’m going to make them pay for Mom, Dad, and Jerm.Send.

  The woman looked up at her, and Wednesday froze. “You’d better come down right now,” Steffi called up to her. The gun muzzle was a black emptiness, pointing right at her face. “No messing.”

  “Shit,” Wednesday mumbled under her breath. Louder, “That you, Steffi?”

  “Fuck. Hello, wunderkind.” The gun muzzle didn’t move. “I said come down here right now. That’s an order.”

  “I’m coming.” Something told her that the grenade wouldn’t be much use. Wednesday bunched her legs up and kicked hard, twice. The grille fell away. Wednesday lowered herself feet-first through the hole, then dropped; in the low-gee environment it seemed to take forever to reach the floor. “What were you going to do if I didn’t, shoot me?”

  “Yes,” said Steffi. Her eyes were hollow: she looked as if she hadn’t slept for days. And her voice was curiously flat, lacking all sign of emotion.

  Wednesday shrugged uneasily and held her hands out. “Look,” she said, “I brought one of the keys along.”

  “A key.” Steffi motioned her toward the unoccupied chair. “How useful,” she murmured. “Do you know what it’s a key to?”

  “Yeah.” Wednesday grinned angrily. “It’s a key to the Moscow defense communications network.”

  BING.Mail from Herman:Wednesday, danger, listen to Rachel.

  Huh. Her eyes tracked to the console they’d been nearest. There were a number of authentication key slots in it, and it was much more primitive-looking, even crude, than the others. “I think that’s it.”

  “Good guess.” Steffi kept the gun on her. “Put your key in the slot.”

  “Huh?”

  “I said, put your key in the slot. Or I’ll do it for you, over your dead body.”

  “Okay, okay, no need to get nasty.” Wednesday leaned sideways and clicked the key she’d swiped from Hoechst’s desk into the slot. She shivered. “ ’Scuse me,” she said, and zipped her jacket up, then tugged the gloves over her hands. “Cold in here, isn’t it?”

  “What do you think the code keys do?” Steffi asked mildly.

  “Huh? They tell the bombers to commit to an attack or to cancel it, of course.” Wednesday shook her head. “We’ve just been through all this. The head ReMastered woman—” She stopped, fright and revulsion working on her together.

  “Carry on,” said Steffi. She sounded tired, and Wednesday stared at her, seeing for the first time the nasty smear of goop all over her left arm.

  “They’ve been lying,” Wednesday said flatly. “That’s what this is all about. The R-bombs aren’t all heading for New Dresden, some are heading for a ReMastered world. The ReMastered who took the ship were trying to stop that.”

  “How interesting.” A flicker of pain crossed Steffi’s face as she turned her left hand over and opened it to reveal two keys. “Take these and insert them into slots four and eight on the same console.”

  “What?” Wednesday stared at them in disbelief.

  “Do it!” snapped Steffi. The gun barrel twitched at her impatiently.

  “I’m doing it.” Wednesday stood up and leaned over Steffi carefully, taking the first key, moving slowly so as not to alarm her. She slid it into one of the slots Steffi had named. A diode lit up next to it, and suddenly the screen board below the keys flickered on. “Holy shit!”

  “You can say that again.” A ghost of a smile flickered around Steffi’s lips. “Do you like the ReMastered, Wednesday?”

  “Fuck!” She turned her head away and spat at the ice-cold deck. “You know better than that.”

  BING.Mail from Rachel:Wednesday, what’s going on?

  “Well and good. Now do the same with the second key.”

  “Okay.” Wednesday took the key and slid it into the remaining empty slot, her heart pounding with tension. She stared at it for a moment that dragged on. This is it, she thought. Suddenly possibilities seemed to open up around her, endless vistas of the possible. Horizons of power. She’d been powerless for so long it seemed almost like the natural state of existence. She turned round and glanced at Steffi, old and tired. The gun didn’t seem too significant anymore. “Would you like to tell me what you’re planning?” she asked.

  “What do you think?” Steffi asked. “They killed Sven, kid. Sven was my partner.” A flicker of fury crossed her face. “I’m not going to let them get away with that. Undocked the ship, to stop them escaping. Shot my way past the guards. Now they’ve got to come to me.” She looked at the console, and her gaze lingered on the keys and their glowing authentication lights. “So sit down and shut up.”

  Wednesday sat, staring at Steffi. The gun didn’t move away from her. Doubts began to gnaw at the edges of her certainty. What does she want? Wednesday wondered. Three keys, that’s enough to send an irrevocable go code, isn’t it?

  “What are you going to do?” asked Wednesday.

  “What does it look like?” Steffi put her gun down carefully on the desk beside her, next to something boxy. She picked it up.

  “I don’t know,” Wednesday said cautiously. “What do you want?”

  “Revenge. An audience.” Steffi’s cheek twitched. “Something puerile like that.”

  Wednesday shook her head. “I don’t understand.”

  “Well, you can answer a question.” Steffi held the box close to her and Wednesday saw that it was some kind of pocket data tablet, its surface glowing with virtual buttons. “How did you get here? Did they send you? Did she think giving me an extra key was a good idea?”

  “I don’t understand what you mean.” Wednesday stared at her. “I ran away from them. The boss woman, Hurst or whatever she’s called—she had me and Frank and the diplomats in the station mayor’s office when something happened. She sent half her guards off to look for you and I, I—” She realized she was breathing too fast, but she couldn’t stop. There were flashing lights at the corners of her vision. BING.Mail from—Wednesday killed her message interface. “She forced me to give her the papers. But it was in the police station, and last time I was there I ransacked the arms locker, so I grabbed a riot bomb and when she told me to give her the papers I grabbed the key and dropped a foam ball in front of her.” She finished in a breathless gabble, watching Steffi’s face.

  “Oh, very good!” Steffi grinned humorlessly. “So you just happened to be running down here with a key to
the defense network?”

  “Yes,” Wednesday said simply.

  “And one of those bombers is running on one of their worlds.” Steffi shook her head. “Idiots!” she murmured. There was a musical chime from the console next to her. “Ah, about time.” She raised her voice as she tapped a button. “Yes, who am I speaking to?”

  “It’s Rachel,” said Wednesday.

  “Steffi, is that you?” Rachel said simultaneously over the conference circuit.

  “Yes, it’s me.” Steffi closed her eyes but kept her hand on the gadget.

  “You got rid of the ship, didn’t you? Why did you do that?”

  “Oh, it won’t go far. They were planning on using it: undocking was the easiest way to stop them. As it is, you’ve got bandwidth here—you can call for help and someone will come and pick you up. And the other passengers.”

  “She has keys,” Wednesday called, motivated by an impulse halfway between guilt and malice. “They’re in the console now.”

  “You little—” Steffi stopped, glared at her. “Yes, I’ve got three keys,” she told the speakerphone. “They’re all locked and loaded into the TALIGENT terminal.” She relaxed slightly. “Are you listening?”

  “Yes,” Rachel said tensely.

  “Good. Just so we understand each other.”

  “How’s Wednesday?” asked Rachel.

  Steffi nodded to her. “I’m fine,” she called. “Just a bit, uh, confused. Are you calling on behalf of the corpsefucker?”

  Rachel sounded weary. “She’s dead, Wednesday. You can’t breathe riot foam. You let her have it right in the face.” For an instant Wednesday felt nothing but exultation. Then a moment later she wondered: What’s happening to me?

  “That’s very good,” Steffi said approvingly.

  “She had it coming,” Wednesday mumbled.

  “Yes, I daresay she did,” Rachel replied—clearly the open mike was very sensitive. “That’s why I’m calling. It looks like we won. The ReMastered can’t get to the ship, Hoechst is dead, half of them are missing, the rest are doing what U. Franz tells them—and he wants to defect. You’ve got the keys, Frank is right now filing an exclusive report that blows the lid off their operations in Moscow and New Dresden, and it’s all over.” She paused for a moment. “So why have you locked yourselves in?”

  Wednesday glanced at Steffi in surprise.

  “Because you’re going to do exactly what I tell you to do,” Steffi said, her tone deceptively casual. Her face was wan, but she hung on to the box in her right hand. “I’ve got perimeter surveillance systems on all surfaces in here. The TALIGENT terminal is armed and on the same subnet as this tablet. Wednesday can tell you I’m not bluffing.” She swallowed. “Fun things you can do with a tablet.” Her hand tightened on it. “If I take my thumb off this screen, it’ll send a message to the terminal. I think you can guess what it will say.”

  Wednesday stared at her. “It sends an irrevocable go code? How did you figure out how to do that?”

  Steffi sighed. “How did I get the keys in the first place?” She shook her head. “You shouldn’t have gone to that embassy reception, kid. You could have been hurt.”

  Rachel cleared her throat. “Hoechst was certain Svengali was the assassin. And she had his paymaster’s records.”

  “What made you think Sven worked alone?” Steffi winked at Wednesday, a horribly knowing look that made her try to burrow into her chair to avoid it. She felt unclean.

  “You set off that bomb—”

  “No, that was someone else,” Steffi said thoughtfully. “One of Hoechst’s little surprises. I think she was trying to kill me. I just nailed a couple of others in the comfort of their own diplomatic residences. And relieved them of certain items from their personal safes, by way of insurance.” She held up the tablet: “Which brings me to the subject at hand.” She looked at Wednesday. “Can either of you give me a good reason not to transmit the irrevocable go code?”

  Wednesday licked her lips. “They killed my parents and brother. They destroyed my home, in case you hadn’t noticed. They did—things—to Frank. And you want me to tell you not to kill ’em all?”

  Steffi looked amused. “Out of the mouths of babes,” she called in the direction of the mike. “What’s your offer, Rachel?”

  “Let me get back to you in a minute.” Rachel sounded very tense. “You’re not helping, Wednesday: remember, only one of the R-bombs is heading for a ReMastered world. The rest are still running on New Dresden. Think about that before you open your mouth again.”

  “I’ll give you five minutes to talk to your boss,” said Steffi. “You might consider my pecuniary motives while you’re at it.” Then she flicked a switch on the console next to her and raised an eyebrow at Wednesday. “Do you really want me to kill everyone on two planets?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure.” Wednesday looked out of the picture window pensively. A huge whorl of violet-red gas, spokes of blue running radially through it, drifted across a black velvet backdrop iced with the unblinking pinpricks of a million stars. Frank is alive, she thought. Hoechst is dead, though. Will they prosecute me? I could claim self-defense against hijackers. The celestial smoke ring swung slowly past outside, a brilliant graveyard marker that would last a million years or more. And Frank hates them, too. But then she thought about New Dresden and the people she’d passed through like a ghost that had outlived the destruction of her planet. Jostling kids in a perfectly ordinary city. Blue skies and tall buildings. “I think I’m too insignificant to make that kind of decision,” she said slowly. “I don’t know who could.” She shivered as a thought struck her. “I’m glad the murderer’s dead. But to blame everyone behind them, their whole civilization . . .”

  She stopped as she saw a shadow of a frown cross Steffi’s face, and forced herself to shrug, miming disinterest. Suddenly her heart was pounding and her palms sweating. She slowly stood up and, when Steffi said nothing, walked toward one side of the window. As she did so, she waited for the solar nebula to vanish from the view, leaving nothing but a scattering of stars across the blackness. Then she twisted a control tab in one jacket pocket. It stiffened around her, waistband tightening and sealing against her pressure leggings under the lacy trousers. Black against a black background, she thought, taking deep breaths. She ran a hand through her hair and surreptitiously popped the seal that held her hood closed inside the collar of her jacket. Then she turned to face Steffi. “What do you want?” she asked as casually as she could manage.

  Steffi chuckled, a deeply ugly sound. “I want about, oh, 50 million in bearer bonds, a yacht with independent jump capability, and some hostages to see me out of the immediate vicinity—oh, and that bitch’s head on a trophy plaque. Along with the guy who killed Sven. He won’t be coming back. What the hell did you think, kid? We were in this for the good of our souls?” She sat up. “You still listening in, Rachel?”

  Martin replied. “She’s trying to find someone to talk to on Earth,” he said diffidently. “They’ve got to authenticate her before she can tell them what the situation is—”

  “Bullshit!” Steffi snorted. “I’ll give you one hour, no more. At the end of an hour, if you aren’t making the right noises, you can kiss Dresden and Newpeace goodbye. If the answer’s yes, I’ll tell you who to deposit the bonds with and we can discuss the next step, namely transport. The TALIGENT terminal stays with me—it’s a causal channel, you know it’ll decohere at the first jump, but until then you’ll know where I am.” She looked thoughtful. “As a first step, though, you can bring me Hoechst’s head, and the head of the scumbag who killed Sven. Not attached to their bodies. I know that doesn’t sound like your idea of fun, but I want to be sure they’re dead.”

  Wednesday stared at her in disgust. Is this what it comes down to? she wondered. Is this what you get if you stop worrying you might be a monster? She glanced behind her at the window, nervously. I thought I knew you. Then over at the side of the room. Comms, reactivate, she told he
r implant.

  BING.Wednesday, please respond? It was Rachel. I’m listening. WhoisSteffi, really?

  The reply took a few seconds to come. Wednesday leaned against the wall beside the window, experimenting with the fabric texturing controls at the back of her jacket, seeing just how sticky she could make it go without losing its structural integrity. There was some setting called “gecko’s feet” that seemed pretty strong . . .

  Near as I can tell, she’s an alias for Miranda Katachurian. Citizen, Novy Kurdistan, last seen eleven years ago with a criminal record as long as your arm. Wanted for questioning in connection with armed robbery charges, then vanished.

  “Steffi,” Wednesday asked hesitantly, “what did you do it for?”

  BING.Wednesday? Are you all right? Do you need help? Frank.

  “For?” Steffi looked puzzled for a moment. Then her expression cleared. “We did it for the money, kid.”

  L8R: LUV U, she replied to Frank, then glanced at Rachel’s last message as she answered Steffi.

  “And you’re, uh, going to send the irrevocable go code to the R-bombers if you don’t get what you want?”

  Steffi grinned. “You’re learning.” Wednesday nodded, hastily composing a final reply.

  “And doesn’t it strike you that there’s something wrong about that?”

  “Why should it?” Steffi stared at her. “The universe doesn’t owe me a living, and you can’t eat ideals, kid. It’s time you grew up and got over your history.”

  Case closed, sent Wednesday. “I guess you’re right,” she said, leaning back against the wall as hard as she could and dialing the stickiness up to max. Then she brought up her right hand and threw underhand at Steffi. “Here, catch!” With her left hand she yanked hard on her collar, pulling the hood up and over her head and triggering the jacket’s blowout reflex. Then she waited to die.