Iron Sunrise

HOLD THE FRONT PAGE

Frank stretched his arms toward the ceiling of the breakfast room and yawned tremendously. He had slept in, and had a mild hangover. Still, it was better than being hagridden by memories of the incident in the bar the night before. For which he was grateful.

The breakfast lounge was like the other dining rooms — only slightly smaller, with a permanent heated buffet and no bar or cabaret stage against the opposite wall. That late in the morning it was almost empty. Frank helped himself to a plate, loaded it down with hash browns and paprika-poached eggs, added a side order of hot blueberry bagels fresh from the fabricator, and hunted around for a free table. The sole steward on duty wasted no time in offering him a coffeepot, and as he dug into his food Frank tried to kick his tired brain cells into confronting the new day’s agenda.

Item: Transfer point with Septagon Centris Noctis. Passengers departing and boarding. Hmm. Worth staking out the bulletin boards in case? Next item: See to transmitting latest updates. Spool incoming news, read and inwardly digest. Then … fuck it, eat first. He poured a measured dose of cream into his breakfast coffee and stirred it. Wonder if anything’s happened since the last jump?

It was the perpetual dilemma of the interstellar special correspondent — if you stayed in one place, you never got to see anything happen up close and personal, but you could stay plugged into the network of causal channels that spread news in empire time. If you traveled around, you were incommunicado from the instant the ship made its first jump until the moment it entered the light cone of the destination. But what the channels paid Frank for was his insights into strange cultures and foreign politics. You couldn’t get those by staying at home; so every new port of call triggered a mad scramble for information, to be digested into editorials and opinion pieces and essays during the subsequent flight, and spat out at the net next time the ship arrived in a system with bandwidth to the outside universe.

Frank yawned and poured himself another cup of coffee. He’d had too little sleep, too much rum and whisky, and faced a day’s work to catch up on preparation for the liner’s arrival at New Dresden. Septagon was so connected and so well covered that there was no real point going ashore there: it was a major data exporter. But New Dresden was off the beaten track, and directly in jeopardy as a result of the slow-motion disaster unfolding from Moscow system. When he got there he faced four days of complete insanity, starting with a descent on the first available priority pod and ending with a last-minute dash back to the docking tunnel, during which he had to file copy written en route, gather material for two weeks’ worth of features, and do anything else that needed attending to. He’d checked the timetables: he figured he could make the trip with two and a quarter hours to spare. Okay, make that three and a half days of buzzing around like a demented journalistic bluebottle, released on a ticket of leave in the middle of a promising field of diplomatic bullshit — it was a good thing that New Dresden wasn’t uptight about pharmaceuticals, because by the time Frank was back in his stateroom he’d be ready for the biggest methamphetamine crash in journalistic history. Which was precisely what you deserved if you tried to cover four continents, eight cities, three diplomatic receptions, and six interviews in three days, but c’est la vie.

Stomach filled and coffee flask emptied, Frank pushed back from the table and stood up. “When do we push back?” he asked the air casually.

“Departure is scheduled in just under two thousand seconds,” the ship replied softly, beaming its words directly into his ears. “Transition to onboard curved-space generator will be synchronized with the station, and there will be no free-fall lockdown. Acceleration to jump point will take a further 192,000 seconds approximately, and bandwidth access to Septagon switching will be maintained until that time. Do you have further requests?”

“No thank you,” Frank replied, slightly spooked by the way the ship’s expertise had anticipated his line of questioning. Damn thing must be plugged in to the Eschaton, he thought nervously. There were limits to what anyone sane would contemplate doing by way of artificial intelligence experiments — the slight ethical issue that a functioning AI would have a strong legal claim to personhood tended to put a brake on the more reckless researchers, even if the Eschaton’s existence didn’t hold a gun to their heads — but sometimes Frank wondered about the emergent smarts exhibited by big rule-driven systems like the ship’s passenger assistance liaison. Somehow it didn’t seem quite right for a machine he’d never met to be anticipating his state of mind.

He strolled distractedly around the promenade deck on C level, barely conscious of his surroundings. C deck by day shift was a different place to the darkened night-time corridors. Elegant plate-diamond windows to either side displayed boutiques, shops, beauty salons, and body sculptors. Whole trees, cunningly constrained in recessed tubs, grew at intervals in the corridor, their branches meshing overhead. Below them, tiny maintenance ’bots harvested browning leaves before they could fall and disturb the plush carpet.

The corridor wasn’t empty, but passengers were thin on the ground — mostly they were still coming through the docking tube from Noctis orbital, the WhiteStar open port in Septagon system. Here went a young couple, perhaps rich honeymooners from Eiger’s World strolling arm in arm with the total inattention of the truly in love. There went a stooped old man with lank hair, a facial tic that kept one cheek jumping, and the remains of breakfast matted in his beard, heading toward a discreet opium den with a dull look of anticipation in his eyes. A gamine figure in black stopped dead and gaped into the window of a very expensive jewelery studio as Frank stepped around her — him, it — and slid to one side to avoid a purposefully striding steward. The ship was a shopping mall, designed to milk idle rich travelers of their surplus money. Frank, being neither idle nor rich, focused on threading a path around the occasional window-shoppers.

The promenade deck stretched in a two-hundred-meter loop around the central atrium of the ship’s passenger decks, an indoor waterfall and the huge sculptured staircases rising through it like glass-dressed fantasies. Halfway around it, Frank came to a gap in the shop fronts and a radial passage that led to a circular lounge, carpeted in red and paneled in improbably large sheets of ivory scrimshaw, with a stepped pit in the middle. It was almost empty, just a few morning folk sipping cups of coffee and staring into the inner space of their head-ups. Frank headed for a decadent-looking sofa, a concoction of goose-down cushions in cloned human leather covers, soft enough to swallow him and luxurious as a lover’s touch. He sprawled across it and unpocketed his keyboard, expanded it to full size, and donned his shades. “Right. Priorities,” he muttered to himself, trying to dismiss yet more intrusive memories from the night before at the caress of the leather. Whom do I mail first, the embassy or the UN consulate? Hmm …

He was half an hour into his morning correspondence when someone touched his left shoulder.

“Hey!” He tried to sit up, failed, flailed his arms for a moment, and managed to get a grip on the leading edge of the sofa.

“Are you Frank the Nose?” asked a female voice.

Frank pulled his shades right off, rather than dialing them back to transparency. “What the f — eh, what are you talking about?” he spluttered, reaching for his left shoulder with his left hand. It was the young woman he’d seen in the corridor. He couldn’t help noticing the pallor of her skin and the fact that every item of her costume was black. She was cute, in a tubercular kind of way. Elfin, that’s the word, he noted.

“I’m sorry to disturb you, it’s, like, I was told you were a warblogger?”

Frank spent a moment massaging his forehead as, briefly, a number of responses flitted through his head.

“Who wants to know?” he finally asked, surprising himself with his mildness. Click. Physically young — either genuinely young, or just rejuved. Pale, dark hair currently a mess, high cheekbones on clear-skinned face, female. Click. Alone. Click. Asking for Frank the Nose by name. Click. Is there a story here? Click. Get the story …

“A friend said I should get in touch with you,” said the kid. “You’re the journalist who’s looking into the — the end of Moscow?”

“What if I am?” Frank asked. She looked tense, worried about something. But what?

“I was born there,” she mumbled. “I grew up on Old Newfie, uh, portal station eleven. We were evacuated after — in time—”

“Have a seat.” Frank gestured at the other side of the sofa, trying to keep his face still. She flopped down in a heap of knees and elbows and impossibly long limbs. So what’s she doing here? “You said something about a friend?” he asked. “What’s your name?”

“You can call me Wednesday,” she said nervously. “Uh, there are people” — she glanced over her shoulder as if she expected assassins to come swarming out of the walls — “No, uh, no! That’s not where to begin. Why can’t I get this right?”

She ended on a note of plaintive despair, as if she was about to start tugging her hair.

Frank leaned back, watching her but trying to give her some space to decompress in. She was tired and edgy. There was something indefinable about her, the insecurity of the exile. He’d seen it before. She’s from Moscow! This could be good. If true, she’d make excellent local color for his dispatches — the personal angle, the woman in exile, a viewpoint to segue into for a situation report and editorial frame. Then he felt a stab of concern. What’s she doing here, looking for me? Is she in trouble? “Why did you want to talk to me?” he asked gently. “And what are you doing here?”

She looked around again. “I — shit!” Her face fell. “I, uh, I have to give a message to you.”

“A message.” Frank had an itchy feeling in the palms of his hands. The lead item walking in off the street to spill his or her guts into the ear of a waiting reporter, the exclusive waiting to happen, was a legend in the trade. It so rarely happened, vastly outnumbered by hoaxers and time-wasters, but when it did — Let’s not get ahead of the game, he told himself sternly. He watched her eyes and she stared right back. “Begin with the beginning,” he suggested. “Who’s your message from? And who’s it for?”

She huddled in the corner of the sofa as if it was the only stable place in her universe. “It’s, um, going to sound crazy. But I shouldn’t be here. On this ship, I mean. I mean, I’ve got to be here, because if I stayed behind I wouldn’t be safe. But I’m not supposed to be here, if you see what I mean.”

“Not supposed — do you have a ticket?” he asked. His brow wrinkled.

“Yes.” She managed a faint flicker of what might have been an impish grin if she hadn’t been so close to exhaustion. “Thanks to Herman.”

“Uh-huh.” Is she a crazy? Frank wondered. This could be trouble … He pushed the thought aside.

“The — information — I’ve got for you is that if you visit Old New — sorry, portal station eleven, and go down to cylinder four, kilo deck, segment green, and look in the public facility there you’ll find a corpse with his head down the toilet. And, uh, behind the counter of the police station in cylinder six, segment orange, there’s a leather attache case with handwritten orders in, like, real ink on paper, saying that whoever the orders are for is to wipe all the customs records, trash the immigration tracking and control system — but bring a single copy home — and if necessary, kill anyone who looks like they’re going to notice what’s going on. Fat chance, as the customs and immigration cops were pulled out six months earlier, but the man in the toilet was in uniform—” She swallowed.

Frank realized that his fingers were digging into the arm of the sofa so tightly that the soft leather was threatening to rip. “Customs records?” he said mildly. “Who told you to tell me this?” he asked. “Your friend?”

“Herman,” she said, deadpan. “My fairy godfather. Okay, my rich uncle then.”

“Hmm.” He gave her a long, cool stare. Is she a crazy? “This message—”

“Ah, shit.” She waved a hand in front of her face. “I’m no good at lying,” she said guiltily. “Listen, I need your help. Herman said you’d know what to do. They’re, uh, he said the same people, the ones who killed the cop — he’s down as missing in the evacuation, nobody wanted to go back for him — are looking for anyone who might be a witness. They tried—” she took a deep breath. “No, someone tried to mug me a few days ago. Or worse. I got away. They’re looking for me because the shipboard security came back onto the station and found me and I’m one of the only loose ends, and now they’re not panicking over the evacuation they’re trying to tie everything up…” She subsided in confusion.

“Oh.” Oh very good, Frank, he told himself sarcastically. How very articulate of you! He shook his head. “Let me get this straight. You’re not alone. You ran across something on your station before the evacuation, right before it. Something you think is important. Now someone’s trying to kill you, you think, so you hopped aboard this ship. Is that substantially correct?”

She nodded violently. “Yeah.”

Okay. Heads she’s a kook, tails she’s tripped over something very smelly indeed. What should I do? Put that way, it was fairly obvious: run some background checks, try to prove she was a kook before accepting anything at face value. But she didn’t look crazy. What she looked like was a tired, shaky young woman who’d been booted out of her life by forces beyond her control. Frank shuffled against the cushions, struggling to sit up. “Do you have any idea who the, uh, killers might be?”

“Well.” She looked uncertain. “The ship that took us off was from Dresden. And the case with the orders was in the Captain’s luggage store.”

“It was—” Frank stared at her. “How did you get to see it then?”

“I guess you could say I broke in.” She screwed her face into something that might have been meant to look like an embarrassed smile.

“You—” Frank stared some more. “I think you’d better tell me all about it,” he said quietly. “By the way, the public spaces here are all monitored, all the time. But the staterooms are private. If you’re going to say anything that might incriminate you, we ought to go somewhere that isn’t being recorded. Do you have a room?”

“Uh, I guess so.” She looked at him uncertainly. “My ticket says I do, but I didn’t choose it. And I’ve only just come aboard.” She glanced at the doorway self-consciously. “I haven’t even bought any stuff yet. I was in a real hurry.”

“Okay, we’ll go wherever your ticket says. If you don’t mind, I’d like to record an interview and check some facts out. Then—” A thought struck him. “Do you have any money?” he asked.

“I don’t know.” She looked even more uncertain. “My friend wired me some, I think.”

“You think?”

“There are too many zeroes.” Her eyes were wide.

“Hmm. Well, if that’s a problem, I’ll see what I can sort out for you. White-Star likes to soak you for extras, but at least on board this ship you won’t want for complimentary scented Egyptian cotton towels and luxury pedicure kits. And if we’re—” He paused. “Where did you friend buy you a ticket to?” he asked.

“Some place called, uh, Newpeace?”

Shit! An icy calm descended on Frank. “Well, I think we might just have to see about extending it a bit farther. All the way to Earth itself, and maybe back home afterward.”

“Why?”

“Newpeace isn’t somewhere I’d want to send my worst enemy. It’s run by scum who call themselves the ReMastered.”

“Oh no!”

Suddenly she was on her feet, looking alarmed. Frank blinked in surprise. “What have you heard about them?” he demanded.

“Herman said it was probably the ReMastered who killed my—” She choked up, her shoulders shaking.

“Let’s go to my room,” Frank said quietly, his pulse roaring in his ears. “We can talk about it there.”