Iron Sunrise

INTERLUDE 2

The darkened tool storage pod hanging from the aircon stack at the top of ring J normally smelled of packing foam and damp. Now it stank of silicone lube grease and fear.

A quiet voice recited a list of sins. “Let me recap. You hired ordinary goons who tracked the kid as far as a dead zone, but they lost her inside a derelict housing module. She was on her way to a fucking party, but nobody thought to trace her friends, find out where it was, and go there. Meanwhile, your other proxies liquidated her family, thus losing all possible links to the primary target and simultaneously warning her that her life was in danger. So tell me, Franz, how does a nineteen-year-old refugee manage to outsmart a pair of even remotely professional gangsters? And why did her skin traces show up all over the inside of the emergency lock leading into the depressurized cell?”

Pause. “Uh, would you believe, shit happens?” A longer pause. “The goons were tracking her via her interface rings. It’s my fault for not anticipating that she had evasion training; I expected it to be a straightforward track and tag. When she took off—”

U. Portia Hoechst sighed. “Give me some light in here, Jamil.”

The interior of the service pod lit up.

“Are you going to kill me now?” asked Franz. He looked mildly apprehensive, as if steeling himself for an unpleasant dental procedure. He didn’t have much of an alternative. Portia’s bodyguard Marx had done a thorough job of trussing him to a couple of anchor beams.

“That depends.” Portia tapped the end of her stylus against her front teeth thoughtfully as she stared at him. She narrowed her eyes. “There has been a culture of unacceptable slackness in this organization.”

Franz opened his mouth as if about to say something, then shut it again, slowly. A bead of sweat jiggled on his forehead, just below the hairline. It was growing visibly bigger, as she watched, held in place by surface tension, unable to run away in the milligee environment.

“What did you do next?” she asked, almost kindly.

“Well, I concluded she’d run. Either to the authorities for protection or somewhere outside the hab. So I sent Burr, Samow, and Kerguelen off to grab seats on the next departing ferry shuttles to other habs, with orders to do a full cap routine on her if she showed up, and I took myself and Erica down to the local cop shop to puppetize our way into their holding tank in case she turned out to have stayed home. As we only had the one puppetry kit in the entire system…” His voice trailed off.

“What other resources did you have? You only covered three shuttle flights with one finger on each. Isn’t that a bit thin?” Her voice was almost gentle.

“I was fully committed.” Franz sounded tense. “I only have six residents here, including me! That isn’t even enough to maintain a twenty-four-by-seven tail on a single individual, much less conduct a full penetration or cleanup. Why do you think I had to use paid muscle instead of properly programmed puppets? I’ve been requesting additional backup for months, but all that came down the line were orders to make better use of my resources and a 10 percent budget cut. Then your group…” He trailed off.

“Your requests. Were they at least acknowledged?”

“Yes.” He watched her warily, unsure where this chain of inquiry was leading. She watched him watching her, speculating. Franz was the resident in Centris, a station chief left over from U. Vannevar Scott’s operation, and therefore, automatically suspect. But he was also the only station chief in this entire system, the complex of orbital habs circling in the accretion belt around the brown dwarf at the heart of Septagon B. It was sheer luck that he’d even been able to move his team onto the right hab in the first place. If he was telling the truth, hung out to dry with six staff to pin down three hundred million people scattered through nearly five hundred orbital habitats and countless smaller stations and ships, he’d clearly been starved of support. While U. Scott had been pouring funds into his central security groups, snooping on his rivals within the Directorate. Portia stared at him. “I will investigate this, you know.” Franz watched her unflinchingly, not even sparing a glance for Marx. Marx was the one who’d pith him if it came to it, or even kill him, simply wasting his memories, leaving everything that he was to drain into nothingness. “Has your crew reported back about the loose end?”

Now his expression broke: irritation, even a spark of outright rebellion. “I’d be able to tell you if you’d unwrap me and give me a chance to find out,” he said waspishly. “Or ask Erica. Assuming you haven’t already decided she’s a broken tool and discarded her.”

Portia reached a decision. The practicalities of it were risky, but then so was life. “Release him,” she told Jamil.

“Is this wise?” Marx grunted, keeping his eyes focused dead center on Franz’s forehead. “We could repurpose him—”

“I prefer my subordinates to have free will.” Her smile vanished abruptly. “Do you have a problem with that?”

“Just looking out for your safety, boss.”

“I’m quite sure that U. Franz Bergman will remember whose purpose he serves now that External Environmental Control Four has been, ah, absorbed by Group Six.”

Jamil produced a knife from somewhere and began slicing away at the tape fastening Franz’s arms to the support bars.

Franz’s eyes widened. “Did you say absorbed? What happened to Control Four?”

“U. Vannevar Scott has been an extremely naughty boy,” Portia trilled. “So naughty that Overdepartmentsecretary Blumlein saw fit to take all his toys away.” Slight emphasis on the all, a raised eyebrow, a pouting lip. “You’re on the gray list.” Gray, as opposed to black, whose status was pith and reclaim with extreme prejudice. “It’s not very big, but you’re on it. Who knows? If you work hard, you may even stay there.”

Franz slumped slightly, floating free of the anchor beams, nervously apprehensive. “What do you want me to do?” he asked. “Nobody told us anything about—” He swallowed.

“Indeed.” Portia nodded at Jamil, big and solidly muscled. “You and Jamil are going to go and do the rounds. You’re going to give me a sitrep, and Jamil is going to sit on your shoulder and see how you go about it. Think of it as an entrance exam.” She recognized his unspoken question. “You and your people, both.”

“I’m, uh, very grateful—”

“Don’t be.” The brilliant smile was back. “I want to know what’s going on out there in the wild. You’ve got two kiloseconds to find out. And believe me, until I decide to pass you, dying will seem like the easy option.”

By the time he got back to the pod, Franz was truly frightened. As if the mess he’d been holding together for the past nine months wasn’t bad enough, having the DepSec from hell descend on him with bodyguards and a full-dress away team was worse. Luckily Erica was with him, a calming influence. But the news -

He glanced over his shoulder at her. She stared back at him, trying to look unaffected. A competent deputy station chief, following her boss’s lead. Jamil followed them both, imperturbable, threatening. “I’ll handle this,” he reassured her.

“I understand.” He wanted to reach out and grab her hand, but he didn’t dare. Not in front of Jamil. She looked rattled enough as it was. Maybe it was because she’d figured out where they stood for herself, but he couldn’t be sure.

The DepSec was waiting for him like a spider at the center of her web, black and shiny and carnivorous when she smiled, disturbingly red lips parting to reveal perfect teeth. Sea-green eyes as cold as death watched him. Behind her, the bodyguard waited. “You made it with fifty seconds to spare!” She glanced at Erica. “So, you’re U. Erica Blofeld?”

Franz noticed Erica nodding out of the corner of his eye. He could smell the DepSec, the warm mind-fuzzing sense of family coming off her in waves. He could feel Erica’s nervousness. “Ye-es. Boss.”

“Let her speak for herself,” Hoechst said gently. “You can speak, can’t you?” she added.

“Yes.” Erica cleared her throat. “Yes, uh. Boss? Nobody told us anything.”

“Jamil. Did U. Franz Bergman tell U. Erica Blofeld anything substantive about the change of management structure?”

“No, boss.”

“Good.” Hoechst focused on the woman. “What’s the situation, Erica? Tell me.”

“I—” She shrugged uncomfortably. “Burr and Samow drew a blank. Kerguelen messaged to say he’d found the target, in transit to Noctis hab in a first-class berth. Last he sent, he was closing on her to lay a honeypot and do a field-expedient pickup. Since then I’ve heard nothing. He last called in about eleven hours ago, and they should be arriving at Noctis real soon, but he’s missed three checkpoints, and while I can think of several reasons for doing so, none of them are good.” She watched Hoechst closely, eyes flickering back and forth between her face and her hands.

“Well, that is convenient.” Hoechst’s expression was bland. “Did it occur to any of you that the target of this action might be trained in evasion and self-defense?”

Franz tried to answer. “We didn’t—”

“Shut up! That was a rhetorical question.” Hoechst looked past him at the doorway. “You’ve told me what I needed to know, and I thank you,” she said graciously, nodding to Erica. “Jamil, give U. Erica Blofeld coffee now.”

Franz kicked off the floor, hit the ceiling and rolled, intending to bounce off it and take Jamil in the gut. Desperation triggered his boost reflexes, narrowing focus until the world was a gray-walled tunnel. But Jamil had already brought up something like a silvery hand-sized Christmas tree, and he stabbed it toward the back of Erica’s head. Erica’s eyes bulged. She spasmed, beginning to turn as blood gouted -

Something hit Franz hard, in the small of his back.

“Can you hear me?”

“I think he’s playing moppet, boss.”

Not exactly. There was a searing pain in his back, and his head felt as if he had the worst hangover in human space. In fact, he felt sick. But that wasn’t the worst part of it. The worst part of it was that he was conscious again, which meant that he was still alive, which meant …

“Listen to me, Franz. Your station deputy was on the black list. She reported to U. Scott’s Countersubversion Department. I will ensure that her reclaimed state vector is dispatched to the Propagators with all due decency, and leave judgment of her soul up to the unborn god. But you will open your eyes within thirty seconds, or you’ll join her. Do you understand?”

He opened his eyes. The twilight was painfully bright. A quivering black sphere of uncoagulated blood floated past, wobbling slowly in the direction of one of the extractor vents. Despair hit him like a velvet club.

“We were—” He paused, carefully, searched for an acceptable word, unsure why it was so important to do so now that his real life was over before it had even begun. His throat was dry. “Close.” Close, that was the word. It brought it all home, while revealing nothing.

“If you value your intimacy so highly, you’re welcome to join her,” hell’s handmaiden told him half-seriously. She moved across the room in front of him, a blur before his eyes. He had to struggle to focus. “The ReMastered race doesn’t need moral weaklings. Or were you naive enough to think you were in love?”

“I’m—” angry, he realized. “I feel ill. Dysfunctional.” He was angrier than he’d ever been before — angry in his helplessness. He hadn’t been angry when her bodyguard had stunned him and he’d awakened strapped to a set of beams; just frightened and apprehensive beyond all reason. But now, with the thought that he might survive, there was room for anger. Erica’s dead. It shouldn’t have meant that much to him, but they’d been living outside the Directorate for too long. They’d been a little reckless, adopting feral ways, naive native sentimentality. And now, naive native pain and loss.

“You’re angry,” Hoechst said soothingly. “It’s a perfectly understandable human reaction. Something you thought was yours has just been taken away from you. I don’t blame you for it, and if you want to yell at me later, you’re welcome to. But right now Blumlein himself has given us a very important task, and if you get in my way, I’ll have to crush you. Nothing personal. And just in case it hasn’t sunk in, your friend was a countersub agent. Reporting directly to U. Scott’s Office of Internal Inquiries. Programmed to execute you at the first sign of disloyalty to Scott.” Franz found himself nodding, unconsciously agreeing; but all the time he was full of the scent of her skin, the memory of her laughter, their secret shared sin of commission, out here beyond the Directorate, where love wasn’t a state of war and hate wasn’t politics.

She wouldn’t have given me away, he thought. Not ever. Because she’d told him all about her second job within a day of their first frantic assignation, holed up in a hotel, hungry to the point of starvation for intimacy. It had been their dirty little secret, a shared furtive fantasy about eloping, defecting, lighting out for the event horizon. Either Hoechst — in her capacity as death’s angel — knew far less than she thought she did about the cell she was taking over, or the Directorate was rotten to the core anyway, and the unborn god a sick fantasy.

But you couldn’t ever let yourself dream such thoughts when you were around other ReMastered, not if you wanted to live. So Franz bundled up his scream of loss and pain, and shoved it down a long way, deep down where he could curl up around it later and lick the suppurating wound — and forced himself to nod vigorously.

“I’ll be all right soon,” he said meekly: “It was just a shock.” If he let them realize how deeply he and Erica had been involved …

“That’s good,” Hoechst said reassuringly. His nostrils flared, but he gave nothing away. Marx floated behind her like a lethal shadow, holding a spinal leech casually in one hand.

“What do you want me to do now?” he asked hoarsely.

“I want you to rest up and recover. We’re going on a journey, soon as we gather up the rest of your cell.”

“A journey—”

“New Dresden, via yacht.” She pulled a face. “Some yacht — it’s an old Heidegger-class frigate with its weapons systems ripped out and replaced with stores compartments and bunks. We’ve got about eight days to get there ahead of your runaway, who is traveling master class on a liner. When we get there, we’re going to rescue the situation, nail down all the loose ends, and stop the avalanche U. Vannevar Scott set in motion. Got that?”

“I—” He flexed his left hand; a stabbing pain in his wrist made him gasp. “I think I damaged something.”

“That’s all right.” She grinned at him with easy camaraderie: “You’re going to damage lots more things before this is over…”

It took an entire week for Portia to get round to raping him. For Franz, most of the time passed in a blur as he worked like an automaton; he was too busy rounding up his remaining agents to notice the cool, speculative looks she was sending his way.

It happened after Hoechst dealt with Kerguelen. Missing his target might have been excusable if he hadn’t already been on the gray list, and debatable even in spite of it, but he’d compounded the error by alerting the girl. She’d locked him in her own Syb-class cabin, turning the tables. Hoechst was incandescent with fury when she found out, and even Franz had felt an answering twinge of indignation through his haze of loss.

Portia collected Kerguelen from Noctis herself, ordering a diversion that cost the DD-S17 almost a day’s headway while it stooged around pretending to be a luxury yacht. She wore a watered silk gown of blue and violet to the police station where the unfortunate Kerguelen was being held, along with a blond wig and a king’s ransom in precious stones; she had the mannerisms and giggle down to perfection for her role as the second wife of a rich ship-owning magnate from al-Turku. Franz and Marx and Samow marched behind her stiffly, wearing the archaic uniforms and pained air of superiority of her household retainers. The show ended about five milliseconds after they got the anxiously grateful Ker across the boarding tube threshold and behind a ’lock door. Then she was at his throat.

“Bastard!” she hissed, wrist muscles standing out like steel bands as she choked him. It was a deadly insult among the ReMastered, but nobody was interested in Ker’s reply. Marx and Samow held his arms as he bucked and kicked against the bulkhead while she crushed his larynx. When he stopped moving, Hoechst looked round their small circle, sparing Franz such a malice-filled glare that he shuddered, sensing how close his own neck was to those strong hands, but then she relaxed slightly and nodded at him. “He showed me up,” she said coolly. “Worse, he made the Directorate look foolish. You also.”

“I understand,” he said woodenly, and that seemed to satisfy her.

“Samow, see that his neural map is reclaimed, then ditch the remains. Marx, give my compliments to the pilot and tell her it’s time to execute Plan Coyote. U. Bergman, come with me.” She turned and stalked toward the lift up to the crew decks. Franz followed her, his mind blank. Kerguelen had worked for him for three years, a happy-go-lucky youngster on his first out-of-system assignment. He was prone to living it up, but not self-consciously sloppy, and there seemed to be a serious ideological commitment underlying his actions. His self-evident belief in the cause, in the unborn god and the destiny of the ReMastered, had sometimes left Franz feeling like a hollow fraud.

Kerguelen had lived life as large as he was allowed to, as if he were working in the early days of a better universe. To see him broken and discarded rubbed home Franz’s own inadequacy. So he didn’t protest, but followed Hoechst, wafting in her trail of rustling silks and expensive floral triterpenoids and volatile oils. The faint smell of old-fashioned powder cosmetics stung his nose.

The DepSec’s suite was larger than the cubbyhole Franz was bunking in. It held a pair of chairs, a rolltop desk, and a separate folding bed. Perhaps it had once been the friggatenfuhrer’s quarters, back when the yacht had been a warship. Hoechst shut the door and waved him to a seat, but remained standing and busied herself with something at her table. He couldn’t take his eyes off her. She was beautiful, in a feral, ex-Directorate sort of way, but also frightening. Intimidating. A predator, beautiful but deadly and incapable of behaving any other way. She eased her wig off and placed it on the desk, then ran her fingertips through her close-cropped pale hair. “You look as if you need a drink.”

She was offering him a glass, he realized through a cloud of befuddlement. He accepted it instantly, his instinct for self-preservation kicking in. “Thank you.” She poured herself another from a cut-crystal decanter, some kind of amber fluid that stank of alcohol and ashes. “Is this an imported whisky?”

She curled her lower lip thoughtfully, then replaced the decanter stopper and sat down on the chair opposite him. “Yes.” She smoothed her gown over her knees and looked momentarily abashed, as if she couldn’t remember how she came to be there, a fairy-tale princess aboard a warship of the ReMastered race. “You should try it.”

He raised his glass, then paused, trying to remember the formula: “To your very good health.” He silently appended a less flattering toast.

She raised her glass back to him. “And yours.” Her cheek twitched. “If that’s your idea of a toast to my health, I can’t imagine what my painful death would warrant.”

Her words struck home. “Boss, I—”

“Silence.” She watched him over the rim of her glass, green eyes narrowed. Sweat-spiked black hair, high cheekbones, full red lips, narrow waist: a warrior’s body held in a sheath of silk that had taken master couturiers a month to stitch. She had the inhumanly symmetrical features that only a first-line clade could afford to buy for the alpha instances of their phenotype. “I brought you here because I think we may have gotten off on the wrong foot when we were first introduced.”

Franz sat frozen in his chair, the glass of scotch — worth a small fortune, for it had been imported across more than two hundred light years — clutched in his right hand. “I’m not sure I understand you.”

“I think you do.” Hoechst watched him, unblinking except for the occasional flicker of her nictitating membranes. “I’ve been following your profile. You would be surprised how much information on their subjects even the privacy fetishists of Septagon manage to collect. Our target refugee, for instance. I think I’ve got a handle on her — she made the mistake of talking to some friends after her unfortunate run-in with that waste of air, and I think I know where she’s bound for. But she’s not the only one.”

Now it comes, he realized, the muscles in his neck tensing involuntarily. She’s going to — what? If she wanted him dead, she could have executed him along with Ker.

She kept her eyes on him, avaricious for information: “You were ‘in love’ with U. Erica Blofeld, weren’t you?”

A stab of unreasoning anger provoked him to speak frankly: “I’d rather not talk about it. You’ve got what you want, haven’t you? My undivided attention and the liquidation of an elite countersub agent from Scott’s personal cadre. Isn’t that enough?”

“Perhaps not.” Her cheek muscles tensed, pulling the sides of her mouth up into something that resembled a smile but didn’t touch her eyes. “You’ve been in Septagon space for too long, Franz. In a way it’s not your fault. It could happen to anyone, spending too long on their own without backup and indoctrination, forming their own little schismatic reality, wondering if perhaps the Directorate was really the only way of doing things, wondering if you could possibly ignore it and pretend it would go away. Isn’t that it? You don’t need to admit anything, by the way, this isn’t an inquisition. I’m not going to feed you to the Propagators. But you can express yourself freely here. I don’t mind. You have my permission to shout at me. Remember what I said earlier?”

“You…” His fingers tightened on the glass. For a despairing moment he thought about smashing it and going for her throat, before the reality of his situation struck home. “So what? Nothing I can say matters. You wouldn’t believe my denials.”

“Well then!” She smiled, and it filled him with anger, because her expression was so genuine — she looked joyously happy, and grief and envy said that nobody should be allowed to look that way, ever again — when Erica was dead. And even though he knew it was just his glands speaking, that this, too, would pass, it goaded him. “I have a problem,” she said, continuing as if nothing was wrong. She rubbed her right knee through the sheer fabric of her gown. “We’re about to go and close down some loose ends. If we succeed, the sky is the limit. Not only will everybody in this unit be rehabilitated, but I will be — well, promotion is not the most of it.” She leaned toward him, confidingly. “At the higher levels, Franz, things are a little different. Unforgivable disciplinary errors become understandable personality flaws. The Propagators become tools with which the garden is teased into a pleasing shape: servants, not masters. Quite possibly, expedient termination orders become reversible.”

He licked his lips. “Reversible?”

“I haven’t sent U. Blofeld’s state vector to the Propagators yet,” she said softly, as if the very thought was new to her. “We don’t have a Propagator with us, so I bear responsibility for life records and a memory diamond that is to be turned over to them only at the end of our mission. And I retained tissue samples.”

Thoughtfully: “The sole complete upload image of her brain currently exists right here aboard this ship. And they need not end up with the Propagators, if a suitable alternative presents itself. What I do with them is still open. I’m short on personnel here — you were right about your mission being grossly underresourced. U. Scott was systematically overreporting his manifest, filtering people off your team for missions elsewhere, and maintaining two sets of books. I didn’t bring enough support staff along, and I’m even shorter on people who understand the feral humans out here. I need someone who can act as my right hand while Bayreuth is holding things down back home.”

She leaned toward him confidingly and took his left hand in hers: “If we succeed, I can give her back to you, Franz. There’s a medical replicator in the medical suite aboard the CG-52. My support ship. It’s expensive and against normal operational procedure, but they can clone her a new body and download her into it. You can have her back again if that’s what you want. As long as you’re willing to do some things for me.”

“Things?” Franz felt himself leaning toward her, drawn by the terrible force of her will and by the abominable hope she dangled in front of him. Bring Erica back? In return for … what? His stomach churned with hope and dread.

“They’re not the sort of jobs I can give an ordinary subordinate. They’re jobs that only someone who’s lived among feral humans for several years can do.”

“What jobs?”

She pulled his hand close, placing it palm down on her thigh. “You fell in love, didn’t you? That’s still supposed to be possible for us, but I’ve never heard of two ReMastered who did it to each other at the same time. So you’ll have a better grasp of how to use the phenomenon to manipulate ferals than anyone else here.” She smelled of floral extracts, and something else: the musk of power, sebaceous glands expressing pheromones that were only switched on in alpha ReMastered.

It was exciting and frightening and made him angry. He dropped his glass and pulled back, away from her. “I don’t want—”

She was on her feet, then leaning over him. “I don’t care what you want,” she said coolly. “Unless it’s U. Erica. In which case you’ll do as I say with a shit-eating grin for the next three months, won’t you?”

He stared at her breasts. Under the thin layers of silk he could see her nipples, aureoles flushed and crinkled with dominance. The dizzying smell was getting to him. His own traitorous hope prevented him from resisting. “Love is a grossly underrated tool within the Directorate, Franz. You’re going to teach me how to use it.”

“How—”

“Hush.” She pulled up the skirts of her gown, bunched them around her waist, and sat down on his lap. He couldn’t get away, much less force himself not to respond to her dominance pheromones. He grew stiff and felt his face flush as she unbuttoned his comic-opera jacket and rubbed her breasts against him. “I want you to teach me about love. It’s going to take a few sessions, but that’s all right — we’ve got time for a first lesson right now. How did you do it with her? Did she start it, or did you, or was it something else?” She began to work at the buttons of his trousers. “If you want to see her again, you’ll show me what you did for her…”