Iron Sunrise

PARTY GIRL

Centris Magna was a boringly average asteroid colony, built to a classic design that didn’t rely on gravity generators: a diamond tube fifty kilometers along the main axis and eight kilometers in diameter, spinning within the hollowed-out husk of a carbonaceous chondrite somewhere in Septagon Four’s inner debris belt. The inner core consisted of service facilities while the outer, high-gee levels were mostly zoned as parklands or recreational zones: the occupants lived in multilevel tenements in the mid-gee cylinders. It was a pattern repeated endlessly throughout the Septagon systems, among the hundreds of worldlets that made up the polity that had taken in most of the refugees from Moscow. And three years after her arrival, Wednesday had learned to hate it, and the grinding poverty it rubbed her nose in every minute of every day.

“Wednesday?” Her father’s voice was attenuated by her barely open bedroom door: if she pulled it shut, she could block him out completely. But if she pulled it shut -

“Wednesday. Where are you?”

Biting her tongue in concentration she finished tying her bootlaces, getting them perfect. There. She stood up. Boots, new boots, nearly knee high, gleaming like black mirrors over her skintight cloned pantherskin leggings. “Here, Dad.” Let him find her. A last look in the window, set to mirror-mode, confirmed that her chromatophores were toned in: blood-red lips, dead white skin, straight black hair. She picked up her jacket and stroked it awake, then held out her arms and waited for it to crawl into place and grip her tightly at elbows and shoulders. Nearly ready—

“Wednesday! Come here.”

She sighed. “Coming,” she called. Quietly, to herself: “Bye, room.”

“Goodbye,” said her bedroom, dimming the lights as she opened the door, feeling tall and slightly unbalanced in her new boots and headed through to the living room, where Dad would probably be waiting.

Morris was, as she’d expected, in the main room of the apartment. It was a big open space, a mezzanine floor upstairs on top of the dining room providing him with an office from which he could look down on the disordered chairs and multiforms of the communal area. Jeremy had been trying to undo amah’s housekeeping again, building an intricate dust trap of brightly colored phototropic snowflakes in the middle of the antique dining table that Dad periodically insisted they sit around for formal meals. The dust trap writhed toward her when she opened the door. Her father had been watching a passive on the wall; it froze as he looked round at her, ancient avatars looking impossibly smooth and shiny in the perspective-bending depths. “What’s that you’re wearing?” he asked wearily.

“Sammy’s throwing a party tonight,” she said, annoyed. (She almost added, How come you never go out? — but thought better of it at the last minute.) “I’m going with Alys and Mira.” Which was a white lie — she wasn’t talking to Mira, and Alys wasn’t talking to her — but they’d both be there, and anyway did it really matter who she went with when it would only take ten minutes and she’d be out all night? “First time out for my new boots!”

Dad sighed. He looked unwell, his skin pasty and bags under his eyes. Too much studying. Study, study, study — it was all he ever seemed to do, roosting up on top of the kitchen roof like a demented owl-bird. Smart drugs didn’t seem to help; he was having real difficulties assimilating it all. “I was hoping to have some time to talk with you,” he said tiredly. “Are you going to be out late?”

“All night,” she said. A frisson of anticipation made her tap her toes, scuff the floor: they were remarkably fine boots, shiny, black, high-heeled and high-laced, with silver trim. She’d found the design in a historical costuming archive she’d Dumpstered, and spent most of a day turning them into a program for the kitchen fab. She wasn’t going to tell him what the material had cost, real vat-grown leather like off a dead cow’s skin made some people go “ick” when you told them what you were wearing. “I like dancing,” she said, which was another little white lie, but Dad still seemed to harbor delusions of control, and she didn’t want him to get any ideas about grounding her, so making innocent noises was a good idea.

“Um.” Morris glanced away, worried, then stood up. “Can’t wait,” he mumbled. “Your mother and I are going to be away all day tomorrow. Sit down?”

“All right.” Wednesday pulled out one of the dining table chairs and dropped onto it back to front, arms crossed across the back. “What is it?”

“We’re — your mother and I, that is, uh—” Flustered, he ground to a halt. “Um. We worry about you.”

“Oh, is that so?” Wednesday pulled a face at him. “I can look after myself.”

“But can you—” He caught himself, visibly struggling to keep something in. “Your school report,” he finally said.

“Yeah?” Her face froze in anticipation.

“You’re not getting on well with the other children, according to Master Talleyrand. He, they, uh, the school social board, are worried about your, um, they call it ‘acculturation’.”

“Oh, great!” she snapped. “I’ve—” She stopped. “I’m going out,” she said rapidly, her voice wobbling, and stood up before he could say anything.

“We’ll have to talk about this sometime,” he called after her, making no move to follow. “You can’t run away from it forever!”

Yes I can: watch me. Three steps took her past the kitchen door, another hop and a skip — risking a twisted ankle in the new boots — took her to the pressure portal. Pulse hammering, she thumped the release plate and swung it open manually, then dived through into the public right-of-way with its faded green carpet and turquoise walls. It was dim in the hallway, the main lights dialed down to signify twilight, and apart from a couple of small maintenance ’bots she had the passage to herself. She began to walk, a black haze of frustration and anger wrapped tightly around her like a cloak. Most of the front doors to either side were sealed, opening onto empty — sometimes depressurized — apartments; this sub-level was cheap to live in, but only poor refugees would want to do so. A dead end, like her prospects. Prospects — what prospects? From being comfortably middle-class her family had sunk to the status of dirt-poor immigrants, lacking opportunities, looked down on for everything from their rural background to things like Wednesday’s and Jerm’s implants — which had cost Morris and Indica half a year’s income back on Old Newfie, only to be exposed as obsolete junk when they arrived here. “Fucking social board,” she muttered to herself. “Fucking thought police.”

Centris Magna had been good in some ways: they had a much bigger apartment than back home, and there was lots of stuff happening. Lots of people her age, too. But there were bad things, too, and if anyone had asked Wednesday, she’d have told them that they outweighed the good by an order of magnitude. Not that anyone had actually asked her if she wanted to be subjected to the bizarre cultural ritual known as “schooling,” locked up for half her waking hours in an institution populated by imbeciles, sadistic sociopaths, bullies, and howling maniacs, with another three years to go before the Authorities would let her out. Especially because at fifteen in Moscow system she’d been within two years of adulthood — but in Septagon, you didn’t even get out of high school until you were twenty-two.

Centris Magna was part of the Septagon system, a loosely coupled cluster of brown dwarf stars with no habitable planets, settled centuries ago. It was probably the Eschaton’s heavy-handed idea of a joke: a group called the space settlers’ society had found themselves the sole proprietors of a frigid, barely terraformed asteroid, with a year’s supply of oxygen and some heavy engineering equipment for company. After about a century of bloodshed and the eventual suppression of the last libertarian fanatics, the Septagon orbitals had gravitated toward the free-est form of civilization that was possible in such a hostile environment: which meant intensive schooling, conscript service in the environmental maintenance crews, and zero tolerance for anyone who thought that hanging separately was better than hanging together. Wednesday, who had been one of the very few children growing up on a peripheral station supported by a planet with a stable biosphere, was not used to school, or defending the atmospheric commons, or to being expected to fit in. Especially because the education authorities had taken one look at her, pigeonholed her as a refugee from a foreign and presumably backward polity, and plugged her straight into a remedial school.

Nobody had inquired in her first year as to whether she was happy. Happy, with most of the people she knew light minutes away, scattered across an entire solar system? Happy, with the Bone Sisters ready to take any opportunity to commit surreptitious acts of physical violence against her? Happy when the first person she’d confided in had spread her private life around the commons like a ripped laundry bag? Happy fitting in like a cross-threaded screw, her dialect an object of mockery and her lost home a subject of dead yokel jokes? Happy to sit through endless boring lectures on subjects she’d taken a look at and given up on years ago, and through more boring lectures on subjects she was good at by teachers who didn’t have a clue and frequently got things wrong? Happy?

Happy was discovering that the school surveillance net had been brainwashed to ignore people wearing a specific shade of chromakey green, and to track people wearing black. Happy was discovering that Ellis could be counted on to have a stash of bootleg happy pills and would trade them for help with the biochemistry courseware, which at age nineteen was still about three years behind where she’d got to on her own at age fifteen. Happy was finding a couple of fellow misfits who didn’t have bad breath and boast about getting their ashes hauled the morning after. Happy was learning how not to get beaten up in camera blind spots by invisible assailants, and accused of confabulation and self-mutilation when she cried for help.

She didn’t dare think about the kind of happy that might come from Mom or Dad finally reskilling to the point where they could land themselves some paid work, or being able to move out of this shithole of a slum tenement, or even able to emigrate to a richer, bigger hab. About not having to look forward to the prospect of being treated like a baby for more than two-thirds of her current life span, until she hit thirty — the age of majority in Septagon. Or about -

Oops, she thought, glancing around. That wasn’t very smart, was it?

Introspection had distracted Wednesday as she left home. Which wasn’t particularly bad, normally: even the sparsely inhabited subsidized apartment corridors had surveillance coverage and environmental support. But she’d turned two corners, taken a shortcut through a disused corporate warren with override-forced doors, and been heading farther toward the distal pole where the party supposedly was. Sammy and her gang (who were not the school bullies, but the arbiters of fashion and cool, and never let Wednesday forget how lucky she was to be invited) had done this before, taken over an abandoned apartment or office zone, or even a manufacturing cube, gutted it, brought in temporary infrastructure and bootleg liquor, and cranked up the music. Moving out into the distal zone was daring: the sub-basement there was some of the oldest housing in the colony, long abandoned and scheduled for restructuring and development some time in the next ten years or so.

Wednesday had been blindly running the inertial route map Johnny deWitt had nervously beamed her the day before, saved to her cache: a flashing ring on her index finger pointed the path out to her. In her self-absorbed haze she hadn’t noticed how very deep the shadows were getting, nor how sparse the pedestrian traffic was, nor how many of the corridor lighting strips were smashed. Now she was alone, with nobody else in sight. There was detritus under foot, broken roofing panels, a stack of dusty utility hoses, missing doors gaping like rotten teeth in the walls — this whole sector looked unsafe, leaky. And now it occurred to her to start thinking. “Why Johnny?” she asked quietly. “Johnny?” Short, spotty, and ungifted with any sense of fashion, he’d have been the class nerd if he’d been smarter: as it was, he was simply a victim. And he hadn’t beamed her the ticket with any obvious ulterior motive, no stammering invitation to hole up in a soft space for an hour — just plain nervous, staring over his shoulder all the time. I could phone him and ask, but then I’d look like a fool. Weak. But … if I don’t phone him, I’ll be a fool.

“Dial Johnny the Sweat,” she subvocalized. Connecting … no signal. She blinked in disbelief. Surely there should be bandwidth down here? It was even more fundamental than oxygen. With bandwidth you could get rescue services or air, or find your way out of trouble. Without it, anything could happen.

There were rumors about these abandoned hab sectors. Dismembered bodies buried in the cable ducts, surveillance cams that would look away if you knew the secret gesture to bypass their programming, invitingly abandoned houses where one of the rooms was just a doorknob away from hard vacuum. But she’d never heard rumors of entire segments that were blacked out, where you couldn’t call someone or talk to your agents or notepad, where maintenance ’bots feared to crawl. That was beyond neglect; it was actively dangerous.

She walked through a wide, low-ceilinged hall. From the rails along one side and the lack of decoration it looked to have been some kind of utility tunnel, back when people lived and worked there. Empty doorways gaped to either side, some of them fronted with rubble — crushed dumb aerogel and regolith bricks, twisted frameworks. Most of the lights were dead, except for a strip along the middle of the ceiling that flickered intermittently. The air was stale and smelled musty, as if nothing much stirred it. For the first time Wednesday was glad of her survival sensor, which would scream if she was in danger of wandering into an anoxic gas trap.

“This can’t be right,” she muttered to herself. With a twitch of her rings she brought up a full route map, zoomed to scale so that this corner of the colony’s public spaces was on the display. (The rings were another thing that rubbed it in; back in Moscow’s system they’d have been a bulky, boxy personal digital assistant, not a set of hand jewels connected to her nervous system by subtle implants.) The whole segment was grayed out, condemned, off-limits. Somewhere on the way she’d gone blundering through a doorway that was down on the map as a blank wall. “Bother.” The party — she dumped her follow-me tag into the map — lay roughly a hundred meters outside the shield wall of the pressure cylinder. “Shit,” she added, this time with feeling. Someone had put Johnny up to it, spiking her with a falsie — or, more subtly, run a middleman spoof on his hacked ring. She could see it in her mind’s eye: a bunch of mocking in-things joking about how they’d send the little foreign bitch on a climb down into the dirty underbelly of the world. Something rattled in the rubbish at one side of the hall, rats or -

She glanced round, hastily. There didn’t seem to be any cams down there, just hollow eye sockets gaping in the ceiling. Ahead, a dead zone sucked up the light: a big hall, ceiling so high it was out of sight, opened like a cavern off the end of the service tunnel. And she heard the noise again. The unmistakable sound of boots scuffing against concrete.

What do I — Old reflexes died hard: it took Wednesday a split second to realize that it was no good asking Herman for advice. She glanced around for somewhere to hide. If someone was stalking her, some crazy — more likely, a couple of Bone Sisters who’d lured her down there to whack her bad for wearing team invisicolors and carrying a cutter on their loop — she wanted to be way out of sight before they eyeballed her. The big cavern ahead looked like a good bet, but it was dark, too dark to see into, and if it was a dead end, she’d be bottled in. But the doorways off to the left looked promising; lots of housing modules, jerked airlocks gaping like eye sockets.

Wednesday darted sideways, trying to muffle her bootheels. The nearest door gaped wide, floor underlayers ruptured like decompressed intestines, revealing a maze of ducts and cables. She stepped over them delicately, stopped, leaned against the wall and forced herself to close her eyes for ten seconds. The wall was freezing cold, and the house smelled musty, as if something had rotted in there long ago. When she uncovered her eyes again, she could see some way into the gloom. The floor paneling resumed a meter inside the threshold, and a corridor split in two directions. She took the left fork hesitantly, tiptoeing quietly and breathing lightly, listening for the sound of pursuit. When it got too dark to see she fumbled her tracker ring round, and whispered, “I need a torch.” The thin blue diode glow wasn’t much, but it was enough to outline the room ahead of her — a big open space like her family’s own living room, gutted and abandoned.

She looked around the room. A broken fab bulked in one corner next to an exposed access crawlway. A sofa, seat rotted through with age and damp, occupied the opposite wall. Holding her breath, she forced herself not to sneeze. Words came to her, unbidden, on the breeze: “—fuck da bitch go?”

“One o’ these. Youse take starboard, I taken the port.”

Male voices, with a really strange accent, harsh-sounding and determined. Wednesday shuddered convulsively. Not the Sisters! Bone Sisters were bad — you crossed them, they crossed you and you needed surgery — but the white sorority didn’t hang out with -

Crunch. Cursing. Someone had stuck a foot in the open cable channel. Teetering on the edge of blind panic, Wednesday scurried toward the half-meter-high crawlway and scrambled along it on hands and knees, headfirst into a tube of twilight that stretched barely farther than arm’s length. The tube kinked sharply upward, pipes bundled together against a carrier surface. She paused, forced herself to relax, and rolled over onto her back so that she could see round the bend. Can I … ? Push from the knees, begin to sit up, stick boot toes into gaps in the carrier trunking, push …

Panting with effort, she levered herself up and out of view of the room. Please don’t have infrared trackers or dogs. The thought of the dogs still woke her up in a cold, shivering sweat, some nights. Please just be muggers. Knowing her luck, she’d crossed paths with a couple of serial fuckmonsters, transgressive nonconsensual looking for a meat puppet. And she didn’t have a backup: that cost real money, the kind that Mom and Dad didn’t have. She shuddered, forcing back panic, braced her elbows against the walls of the duct, and flicked her rings to shutdown. She switched off her implants — backup brain, retinal projectors, the lot. Completely off. She could die there and nobody would find the body until they tore down the walls. There could be a gas trap, and she’d never know. But then again, the hunters might be following her by tracking her emissions.

“She come ’ere? I not am ’inking ’dis.” Scuffling and voices and, frighteningly, a faint overspill of light from a hand torch. A second voice, swearing. “Search’e floor! Have youse taken beneath dat?”

“I have. Tracer an’ be saying she — shirting vanish. Tracer be losing she. Signal strong al’way from she’s home. Prey be wise to sigint ’striction.”

Not some girl gang shit: they were stalking her, had followed her all the way from home. Forget muggers, forget ordinary sickheads. Wednesday stifled a squeak of pure cold terror.

“I an’ be checking over the way. You be clearing dis side an’ if-neg we-all be waiting mid-way. If she be hiding, she-an be come out.”

“An’ we be dumping nitro down here? Bath she in unbreathable?”

The second one replied, contemptuous: “You-an’ be finding rotten meat after, you be dumping ’de breathing mix. Contractees, t’ey wanting authentication.” Footsteps clattered over the grating, stopped.

They’re going to wait me out in the corridor? At least they weren’t going to flood the entire sector with nitrogen, but even hearing them talking about it was frightening her. Rotten meat. They want to know I’m dead, she realized, and the dizzying sense of loss made her stomach heave. How do I get out of this?

Just asking the question helped; from somewhere she dredged up a memory of her invisible friend lecturing her, an elevator-surfing run during happier days back home. The first step in evading a pursuit is to identify and locate the pursuers. Then work out what sort of map they’re using and try to locate their blind spots. Not to take the stairs or the elevator, but to go through a service hatch, carefully step onto the roof of a car, and ride it to safety — or as a training game, all the way to Docking Control and back down again without showing up anywhere on Old Newfie’s security map. She’d learned to ghost through walls, disappear from tracking nets, dissolve in a crowd. Ruefully, Wednesday recalled Herman’s first lesson: When threatened, do not let yourself panic. Panic is the most likely thing to kill you. At the time, it had been fun.

It still is a game, she realized suddenly. A game for them. Whoever they are. But I don’t have to play by their rules. With that realization, she managed to recapture a tenuous sense of self-confidence. Now where?

The duct was pitch-black, but she vaguely recalled it leading upward before she’d switched her gear off. It looked like it had been a house once, a slum tenement for cheap labor — so cheap it didn’t even have en suite bathrooms and automated amahs to do the cleaning. Apartments there were prefab assemblies: a bunch of sealed, airtight modules connected by pressure-tight doors, bolted together in a big empty space and linked to the pressurized support mains by service tunnels like this one. This duct had to run somewhere pressurized. The only question was whether there was room for her to follow it all the way.

Wednesday braced herself against the back of the tube and began to lever herself up. The pipes and cables with their regular ties and their support grid were nearly as good as a ladder, and their insulation was soft and friable with age, forming spongy handholds for her questing fingers. She paused every half meter to feel above her with one hand and tried not to think about her clothing: the boots were a miserable pain for climbing in, but she couldn’t take them off, and as for what the duct was doing to her jacket …

Her questing hand found empty space. Gasping quietly she reached up, then felt the cables bend over in a curve onto what had to be the top of the rooms’ outer gas containment membrane. A final convulsive heave brought her up and over, and left her doubled over across the cable support, panting for breath, her legs still dangling over three meters of air space. Now she risked turning on her locater ring for a moment, still dialed to provide a light glow. Glancing around, she felt an edgy bite of claustrophobia. The crawl space widened to almost a meter, but was still only half a meter high. Ahead, there was a darkness that might be a branch off to one side, in the direction of the front door if she hadn’t lost her bearings. Wednesday pulled her legs up and crawled toward it.

She came to a branch point, an intersection with a duct that had been built with humans in mind. The ceiling rose to a meter, and another quick flash of the ring revealed lighting panels (dead and dusty) and a flat, clear crawlway. She worked her way round into it, and shuffled along on hands and knees as fast as she could go. After about six meters she came to a large inspection hatch and paused. I’m over the road, aren’t I? She put her ear to the hatch and listened, trying to ignore the thudding of her pulse.

“—be not seeing any’ting.” The voice was faint and tinny, but distinct.

“But she not being ’ere!” Protest, muted by metal.

“’An being gone. Considered an’ we tracer ’coy with ’an wall ghost? Be telling you not she’an ’ere.”

“Tell you th’man she not being not here? I an’ you wait.”

Wednesday crept forward, taking shallow breaths and forcing herself not to move too fast. On the other side of the road there’d be another apartment module, and maybe a utility hub or a tunnel up to the next level, where she could get away from these freaks, whoever they were, with their weird dialect and frightening intent. She was still sick with fear, but now there was a hot ember of anger to go with it. Who do they think they are? Hunting her like dogs through the abandoned underbelly of the cylindrical city — the years fell away, bringing back the same stomach-churning fear and resentment.

Another node, another risky flash of light revealing another tunnel. This time she took the branch that headed toward the big empty cavern at the end of the passage. It ran straight for ten meters, then she flashed her ring again and saw a jagged edge ahead, dust and debris on the floor, what looked like the mummified turds of some tunnel-running animal and a pile of blown-out wall insulation. Beyond the ledge her light was swallowed by darkness and a distant dripping noise.

Shit. She knelt on the cold metal floor and glanced back. Below and behind her, two strange men were stalking her network shadow. Here in meatspace, though, she was blocked. Wasn’t she? She crawled forward slowly and looked out into the cavern. There could be anything here: a gas trap full of carbon dioxide, or a cryogenic leak, insulation ripped and walls so cold you’d freeze to them on contact. She sniffed the air, edging close to panic again. Herman would know … But Herman wasn’t there. Herman hadn’t followed her from Old Newfie. He’d told her at the time: causal channels broke when you tried to move an end point faster than light, and the one his agent had planted on her — a pediatrician who’d spent an internship on the hab when she was twelve — was now corrupt. She’d have to figure it out for herself if she wanted to get to Sammy’s party. Or anywhere. Home, even.

“An’ chasing ghost.” The voice was muffled, distant, echoing up the corridor below her. “If she here, how an’ finding she? Dustrial yard my son, dustrial. An’ ghost I telling.” A light flickered across shadows in the gloom on the floor of the cavern and Wednesday held her breath.

“Terascan—”

“—Show none. See, titan alloy walls, you be seeing? She ghost decoy, an’ I telling you.”

“Yurg, he an’ being not happy.”

Titanium walls? She looked down. Metal ductwork. If they had a teraherz scanner, they’d find her in a flash — except these old dumb metal ducts, fabbed from junk metal ore left over from the quarrying of the asteroid, made an excellent Faraday cage. No signal. Her shoulders shook as she heard bootheels below her, stomp and turn.

“Me an’ you, we be going back uplight her patch. Wait there an’ she.”

Stomp. Stomp. Angry footsteps, moving away down the corridor. Wednesday took a deep breath. Can’t hurt? She twitched her rings back on for ten seconds and waited, then off again. The footsteps didn’t return, nor the angry searching voices, but it was several minutes before she trusted herself to turn them back on again, and this time leave them glowing at her knuckles.

“Fuckmonsters,” she mumbled. Not that Centris Magna was exactly overflowing with sex criminals, but it was easier to believe than -

Her phone squeaked for attention.

“Yes?” she demanded.

“Wednesday. This is Herman. Do you understand?”

“What—” Her head was reeling with coincidence. “It’s been a long time!”

“Yes. Please pay attention. Your life is in danger. I am transferring funds to your purse for later retrieval. Keep your implants turned off: if you do that, I will be able to make it difficult for your pursuers to locate you. There is a ladder to one side of your current location; climb one floor, take the second exit on the left, first right, and keep going until you enter a densely populated area. Mingle with a crowd if you can find one. Do not go home, or you will endanger your family. I will contact you again shortly and provide directions. Do you understand?”

“Yes, but—” She was talking to herself.

“Fuckmonster,” she snapped, trying to sound as if she meant it. Herman? After three years of silence she felt weak at the knees. Did I imagine it? She turned up the light on her finger, saw the piles of debris and the scuff marks on her oh-so-labor-intensive boots. “No.” Saw the ladder running down to floor level and up to the next corridor up beside the platform. “Yes!”