Charles Stross - Iron Sunrise

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IRON SUNRISE - Charles Stross

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IRON SUNRISE

Charles Stross

For Olivia and Howard

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

edbo

Thanks due to: Emmett O'Brien, Caitlin Blasdell, Andrew Wilson, Simon Bisson, Cory Doctorow, Ken

McLeod, and James Nicoll. In particular I'd like to single out Emmett, for going far beyond where any

reader might be expected to; Caitlin, my agent, for asking the questions that needed asking; and Geoff

Miller, for an inspiring quote.

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE: Wednesday Child

The Iron Sunrise

Out of the Frying Pan

Harmless

Magical Mystery Tour

Another Day, Another Editorial

The Bullet Season

Interlude: 1

Party Girl

The Damned Don't Die

Murder by Numbers

Spy vs Spy

Interlude: 2

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Hold the Front Page

Sybarite Class

Preparing for Ghosts and Dogs

Showtime

Set Us Up the Bomb

Grateful Dead

Interlude: 3

Clowning Around

Too Many Children

Backups

Messengers

Irrevocable

EPILOGUE: Homefront

PROLOGUE: WEDNESDAY CHILD

IMPACT: T plus 1392 days. 18 hours, 09 minutes

Wednesday ran through the darkened corridors of the station, her heart pounding. Behind her, unseen yet

sensed as a constant menacing presence, ran her relentless pursuer—a dog. The killhound wasn't

supposed to be here: neither was she. Old Newfoundland Four was in the process of final evacuation, the

last ship supposed to have undocked from bay green fourteen minutes ago—an icon tattooed on the

inside of her left eye showed her this, time counting negative—heading out for the nearest flat space-

time for the jump to safety. The launch schedule took no notice of tearaway teens, crazed Dresdener

captains with secret orders, and gestapo dogs with murder burning in their gun-sight eyes. She panted

desperately, nerves straining on the edge of panic, lungs burning in the thin, still air. Sixteen years old

and counting, and if she didn't find a way to elude the dog and climb back to the docking hub soon—

She didn't want to be there when the wavefront arrived.

Three-point-six light years away, and almost three-point-six years ago, all two hundred million

inhabitants of a nondescript McWorld called Moscow had died. Moscow, an introverted if not entirely

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rural polity, had been in the midst of political upheavals and a nasty trade dispute with New Dresden,

something boring to do with biodiversity and free trade, engineering agribusiness and exchange rate

controls. Old Newfoundland Four, Portal Station Eleven, was the last remaining sovereign territory of

the Federal Republic of Moscow. They'd hauled down the flag in the hub concourse four hours ago,

sounded the last retreat with a final blare of brass trumpetry, and marched slowly to the docking hub.

Game over, nation dissolved. There'd been a misunderstanding, and Dresdener warships had impounded

a freighter from Moscow. Pistol shots fired across a crowded docking hub. Then someone—to this day,

the successor Dresdener government hotly denied responsibility, even though they'd executed their

predecessors just to be sure—had hit Moscow Prime with a proscribed device.

Wednesday didn't remember Moscow very clearly. Her father was a nitrogen cycle engineer, her mother

a protozoan ecology specialist: they'd lived on the station since she was four, part of the team charged

with keeping the life-support heart of the huge orbital complex pumping away. But now the heart was

still. There was no point in pretending anymore. In less than a day the shock front of Moscow Prime's

funeral pyre would slam past, wreaking havoc with any habitat not shielded by a good thirty meters of

metal and rock. Old Newfie, drifting in stately orbit around a planetless brown dwarf, was simply too

big and too flimsy to weather a supernova storm at a range of just over a parsec.

Wednesday came to a crossroads. She stopped, panting, and tried to orient herself, biting back a wail of

despair. Left, right, up, or down? Sliding down to the habitat levels of the big wheel had been a mistake.

There were elevators and emergency tunnels all the way up to the hub, and all the way down to the

heavy zone. The central post office, traffic control, customs, and bioisolation were all located near the

maintenance core at the hub. But the top of the pressurized wheel rim was sixty meters above her, then

there was another hundred meters of spoke to climb before she could get to the hub, and the dog would

sense her if she used the lifts. There was too much centrifugal force down here, dragging at her like real

gravity; she could turn her head sharply without feeling dizzy, and her feet felt like lead. Climbing

would be painfully slow at first, the Coriolis force a constant tug trying to pull her sideways off the

ladder to safety.

Dim lighting panels glowed along the ceiling, turned down to Moonlight Seven. The vines in the small

hubgarden at the center of the crossroads drooped, suffering already from eighteen hours of darkness.

Everything down here was dead or dying, like the body she'd found in the public toilet two decks up and

three segments over. When she realized the dog was still on her tail she'd headed back home to the

apartment she'd shared with her parents and younger brother, hoping the scent would confuse the hound

while she sneaked away onto one of the other evacuation ships. But now she was trapped down here

with it, and what she should really have done was head for the traffic control offices and barricade the

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doors—

Her training nudged her forward. This sector was given over to administration offices, station police,

customs and trade monitors, and the small clump of services that fed them during their work shifts.

Darkened office doorways hung open, unattended, dust already gathering on chairs and desks. Very

deliberately, she stepped into the police station. Behind the counter a public notice poster scrolled

endlessly, STATION CLOSED. Grunting with effort, she clambered over the chest-high barrier, then

rolled down behind it.

The antique leather satchel Herman had told her to take banged against her hip; she cursed it and what it

had brought her to. It was half-full of paper: rich, slightly creamy fabric-weave paper, written on with

real ink that didn't swim and mutate into different fonts when you stroked the margin. Dumb matter, the

sort of medium you used when you really, really didn't want some tame infowar worm to unpick your

traffic. Nestled at the bottom of the bag was a locked cassette full of molecular storage—records from

the station customs post. Records that somebody thought were important enough to kill for.

She twitched a ring, dialing the lights up to Twilight Three, and looked around the cop shop. She'd been

there once before, when Constable Barca had given her year a tour of the premises. That had been a

pointed adult hint about how to stay out of trouble. Things were different now, the offices and detention

areas and waiting rooms all gaping like empty sockets in a skull. The administration thought they knew

all about teenagers, but they were wrong. She'd seen the locked cupboard in the ready room and got Pete

to front a question about it: sticky foam and pepper gas, breathing masks and handcuffs in case of civil

disorder. In case of riot, break glass. Old Newfie was mostly peaceful; there'd been just one murder and

only a handful of fights in the past thirty years. Admin thought a SWAT team was what you sent to deal

with a wasp's nest in a ventilation duct. She paused at the locked cabinet, dumped the satchel, and

grabbed something that looked more useful.

Claws rattled on the floor outside the office, and paused.

IMPACT: T plus 1392 days, 17 hours, 30 minutes

"What do you mean, she's missing?" Constable Ito said irritably. "Can't you keep your children under—"

The tall, stooped man ran his fingers through his thinning hair. "If you had kids—no, I'm sorry! Look,

she's not here. I know she has a shipboard badge because I pinned it on her jacket myself, all right? She's

not here, and I'm afraid she might have gone back home or something."

"Home?" Ito pushed his visor up and stared at the worried father. "She couldn't be that stupid. Could

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IRON SUNRISE - Charles Stross

she?"

"Kids!" It came out like a curse, though it wasn't intended as one. "No, I don't think she's that stupid. But

she's not on the ship, either, or at least she's turned off her implants—Constable Klein sent out a

broadcast ping for her an hour ago. And she seemed upset about something this morning."

"Shit. Implants, huh? I'll put out a notice, all right? Things are insane around here right now. Have you

any idea what it's like trying to rehouse fifteen thousand people? She'll probably turn up somewhere she

isn't meant to be, crew service areas or something. Or decided to hitch a lift on Sikorsky's Dream for the

hell of it, before she undocked. She'll turn up, that I promise you. Full ID, please?"

"Victoria Strowger. Age sixteen. ID 3 of that name."

"Ah, okay." Ito made an odd series of gestures with the rings on his right hand, tracing runes in

copspace. "Okay, if she's somewhere aboard this pile of junk, that should find her. If not, it'll escalate to

a general search in about ten minutes. Now if you'll excuse me until then—"

"Certainly." Morris Strowger sidled away from the Constable's desk. "She's probably just dropped her

badge down the toilet," he muttered to himself. Behind him the next in the queue, an elderly woman,

was haranguing the Constable about the size of her accommodation module: she refused to believe that

her apartment—one human-sized cell in a five-thousand-person honeycomb of refugee pods slung in the

cargo bay of the New Dresden freighter Long March—was all any of them would get until arrival in the

nearest Septagon system. The relocation was paid for, gratis, courtesy of the (new) New Dresden

government, and the residual assets of the Republic of Moscow's balance of trade surplus, but the pods

weren't exactly the presidential suite of a luxury liner. 1 hope Vicki gets tired of hiding soon. Maybe it'll

do her some good if the Constabulary find her first and run her in. Teach her not to go looking for

trouble in the middle of an emergency …

IMPACT: T plus 1390 days

Take a girl like that. Pallid complexion, cropped mop of black hair, pale blue eyes: waif or demon? She

was a bit of a loner. Preternaturally smart for her age: her parents planned her, used a sensible modicum

of predictive genomics to avoid the more serious pitfalls. Paid for the most expensive interface implants

they could buy, imported from Septagon: they wanted only the best for her. She was seventeen and

sullen, going through one of those phases. Refusing to wear anything but black, spending her free time

poking around in strange service ducts, training an eighteen-million-synapse nerve garden in her

bedroom (parents didn't even want to think about what she might be training it to dream of). She grew

plants: deadly nightshade, valerian, aconite, hemlock—and what were they going to do with the latter

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