Iron Sunrise

BACKUPS

“Y’know, it’s funny. For years I’ve had this recurring dream, nightmare, what the fuck. I’d be going about my life just like normal, when suddenly they’d be there. In the background, just — running things. Business as usual, same as it ever is. And I’d shit myself and go to the port and buy a ticket to, like, anywhere else. And I’d get on the ship and they’d be there, too, and all the crew would be them. And then I’d get to wherever the ship was going, and it would be the same. And they’d be all around me and they’d, they’d…”

Frank’s subvocalized monologue wavered. It was all he could do just then; after the ReMastered guy with the creepy eyes had told him what he wanted he’d put the block back. His throat and the back of his mouth felt anesthetized, his tongue huge and limp. They’d used much cruder restraints on his arms and legs, and his hands felt cold and hurt from poor circulation. If he hadn’t seen worse, been through worse, back in the camps, he’d have been paralyzed with terror. But as things stood, what he felt most strongly was a terrible resignation and a sense of regret.

Wednesday, I should have got you off the ship as fast as possible. Can you forgive me? He kept circling back to the mistakes he’d made, the assumption of mediocrity on the part of her pursuers. Even after the bomb at the embassy reception, he’d told himself she ought to be safe aboard a liner under a neutral flag. And — he’d wanted to stay with her. He liked her; she was a breath of fresh air blown into a life that had lately been one damn editorial rant after another. When she’d asked him to drop in and jumped his bones as soon as he shut the door he could have said “no” gracefully — if he’d wanted to. Instead, they’d given each other something to think about, and inadvertently signed each others’ death warrants.

ReMastered.

Frank was under no illusions about what it meant, an unfamiliar voice announcing an emergency on board, then his stateroom door crashing open, a gun buzzing and clicking in his face. They’d stuck him with a needleful of cold darkness, and he’d woken up in this stultifying cubicle, trussed to a chair and aching, unable to speak. That moment of panic had been terrible, though it had passed: he’d thought his heart was going to give out. Then the crazy one had come with a diamond the size of a quail’s egg, forced him to dry-swallow a king’s ransom in memories and pain.

What are her chances? he wondered, trying to think about something other than his own predicament — which, at a guess, would end with a friendly smile and the wrong end of a cortical spike as their anxiously meticulous executioners raped away his free will and sense of self — by focusing on Wednesday. If she’s with Martin or his partner, they might try to conceal her. Or she could hide out somewhere. She’s good at hiding. She’d hidden a lot from him; he’d only really figured out how lonely she was late in the game, when she’d burrowed her chin into the base of his neck and sobbed silently for ten minutes. (He’d felt like a shit, fearing he’d misread her mind and manipulated her into bed — until she’d taken his cock in her hand and whispered in his ear that she was crying at her own foolishness for waiting so long. And who, in the end, was he to deny her anything she wanted?)

The regret he felt was not for himself; he’d already outlived his allotted time years ago, when the ReMastered spat him out like a squeezed pip to drift through the cosmos and begin another life elsewhere. He wasn’t afraid for himself, he realized distantly, because he’d been here already — it wasn’t a surprise, just a long-deferred horror. But he felt a simmering anger and bitterness that Wednesday was going to go through that, too, sooner or later, the night of darkness in an improvised condemned cell that would only end when the executioner switched on the lights and laid out her tools.

Hoechst stood at the back of the auxiliary bridge behind Jamil and Friedrich, watching as the husks of the two puppetized bridge officers maneuvered the Romanov in toward the darkened, slowly precessing space station. Similar events would be unfolding in the engine control room above the drive kernel containment, where Mathilde was personally directing the engineering crew who had been selected for the privilege of serving the ReMastered. But the engineering spaces didn’t have anything like the view that filled the front wall of the cramped secondary flight deck — the gigantic stacked wagon wheels of Old Newfie spinning in stately splendor before the wounded eye socket of eternity, a red-rimmed hollow gouged from the interstellar void by the explosion of Moscow Prime six years ago.

“Impressive, isn’t it?” she asked Franz.

“Yes, boss.” He stood beside her, hands clasped behind his back to conceal his nervousness.

“They did it to themselves.” She shook her head slowly, almost disbelievingly. “With barely any prompting from U. Scott.”

“How hot is it out there?” Franz asked nervously.

“Not too bad.” Friedrich leaned past one of the zombies to examine a console display. “Looks to be about ten centiGrays per hour — you’d get sick in an hour or two if you went out there in a suit, but it’s well within tolerances for the ship’s shielding. And the station is probably all right, too, for short stays.”

One of the puppets murmured something to the other, who leaned sideways and began working his way through a stack of thruster-control settings. Jamil had edited their parameters so that they thought they were alone on the bridge. They were completely focused on the docking maneuver.

“It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” Portia murmured, staring at the sheets of violet and red smoke that circled the shock ring of the star’s death. “And the most ugly.” Her hands tightened on the back of the command pilot’s seat. With a visible effort she tore her concentration back to the job at hand, and glanced at Franz. “Is the hostage ready? How about you? Are you clear on what you’ve got to do?”

“Yes, boss.” Franz nodded, trying not to show any sign of emotion. She smiled at him, a superficially friendly expression that set his teeth on edge. Part of him wanted to punch her in the face, to kick and bite and rip with his own hands until she stopped moving. Another part of him wanted to cast himself at her feet and plead for forgiveness. “We confine the passengers in the evacuation stations and dump the corridors to vacuum. Then I make the girl present herself and bring her to you and the others on the station. Um, may I ask how we’re evacuating?”

“You may.” Portia stared at the screen pensively as the puppets muttered to each other, scheduled a course adjustment to nudge the multimegaton mass of the liner closer toward the docking tree at the hub of the enormous station. Methane tanks drifted huge and bulbous at the other end of the spindle, rimed with a carbon monoxide frost deposited by the passing shock wave that had swept over the station years before.

“Boss?” Franz asked nervously.

“The Heidegger will be arriving in a day and a half. We simply remove the puppets and disable the liner’s flight-control network before we leave. There’s enough food aboard — with the resources on the station — to keep them alive for a couple of months, by which time we’ll be able to send a cleanup team big enough to process them all. If they don’t cooperate, the cleanup team can use the station for target practice: nobody will find out for decades. Once they’re processed we can ship them off to one of the core worlds on the Romanov for reprocessing. This is as good a place to store them as any, don’t you think?”

“But the records! If anyone finds them—”

“Relax, they won’t. Nobody’s been back here in years. The station’s too uneconomical to recommission without a destination in mind, and too far off the track to be worth retrieving for scrap. All we have to do is retrieve the stolen records, send out the signals via the station manager’s TALIGENT channel, and configure the Romanov as a prison hulk for a couple of months.”

“What if they—” Franz stopped.

“You were thinking about the missing bridge officer, weren’t you?” Hoechst prodded. “Don’t bother. She’s a trainee, and she’s clearly not up to taking back the ship on her own, wherever she’s hiding out. We’ll leave you a guard detachment after the Heidegger gets here, just to make sure they don’t try anything silly.” She smiled, broadly. “If you can turn your mind to thinking up creative ways to booby-trap the flight deck after we’ve docked, that would be a good thing.”

Franz glanced at the screen and resisted the urge to rub his palms on his trousers. “You want me to stay behind, with the prisoners?” He asked.

“Not only that: I want you to oversee their processing.” She stared at him, inspecting his face with minute interest. “If you do well, I’ll take it as a sign that you are worth persisting with. I was impressed by the way you handled the clown, Franz. Keep me satisfied and it will be worth your while. Great rewards come to my willing supporters.” Her smile faded, a sign that she was thinking dark thoughts. “Now I think it’s time you winkled out the girl.”

The evacuation assembly point for B deck was near the rim. A radial corridor ran out from it to an emergency airlock that breached the ship’s inner hull. Worried passengers converged on it, some of them carrying bags stuffed with their essentials, others empty-handed. A few scattered stewards, harried and just as worried as the passengers, urged them along. Wednesday trailed after Rachel, holding back just a little. “What do you think they’re doing, Mom?” she asked. Mom? Who do you think you’re kidding? she asked herself ironically. Every time she used the word she felt a tiny stab of betrayal, although it was unfair to Rachel; the woman from Earth had done far more for her than she’d had any reason to expect.

“I’m not sure.” Rachel looked worried. “It’s possible there’s some trouble with the ship’s systems, since the incident that injured the bridge crew—” blink, blink.

Wednesday nodded and pulled a face, sighed theatrically. Am I looking bored yet? She glanced around. There weren’t that many passengers: they were mostly first-class travelers, rich business travelers and minor aristocracy from those worlds that had such. Where’s Frank? she wondered, searching frantically while trying not to be obvious about it. If I got him into this… I…

“Excuse me? Where are we going?” a worried-looking man asked Rachel, plucking at her arm. “You see, nobody’s told us any—”

“Don’t worry.” Rachel managed a forced smile. “We’re just going to the evacuation station. It’s only a precaution, doesn’t mean they’re going to evacuate us.”

“Oh good.” Still looking worried, he scampered ahead, leaving them in an island of quiet.

“Nervous?” Martin asked quietly, making Wednesday jump.

“Nervous?” She glared at him angrily. “If they’ve hurt—” They rounded the curve of the corridor and passed the red-painted crash doors recessed into the wall and blocking access to the airlock tube. The evacuation station was a circular open space about eight meters across, as crowded and nervous as a diplomatic cocktail party where the Ambassador had just announced his resignation. There was standing room only, and a couple of stressed-looking stewards holding their arms across the entrance to the evacuation airlock just in case some of the more skittish passengers decided to rush it for some reason.

“May I have your attention please?” A tall, blond man with hollows under his eyes called from one side of the room. “Would you mind clearing the inner pressure doors, please? That’s right, if you could move into the room, we can get this over with cleanly.”

Oh, shit! Wednesday tensed and ran her right thumb up the frogging she’d had her pressure-smart jacket grow. She’d dialed it into a turquoise tailcoat; it felt stiff and heavy, and simultaneously thin and vulnerable — stretched to cover more than its pressure limit, it’d be useless in an emergency depressurization. The whole idea of walking into an airlock when the bad guys had taken the ship struck her as the height of idiocy, even wearing her lacy white shalwar trousers over pressure leggings and boots -

But people behind her were pushing forward, and the doors back onto the corridor were dropping slowly down, sealing off her route back to the cabins. “What’s—” she began, but Martin gripped her hand.

“Wait,” he said tensely.

“We have an announcement to make,” the blond man called. “If I can have silence, please — that’s better.” He smiled thinly. “We’re about fifteen minutes from docking with the repair station. When we do so, you may be asked to evacuate onto the port ring in good order. We won’t know for sure if that will be necessary, or if you can return to your rooms, until after we dock. If you have to evacuate, try to do so in an orderly way — no pushing, give everybody room to move, keep walking once you hit the dockside until you reach the designated assembly area. Remember, this isn’t a critical pressure evacuation. There’s no risk that you’ll end up breathing vacuum, and you don’t need to run.”

He looked around the room. There was a brief mutter of comment, but no dissent. “And now for another matter,” he announced. “I’ve got a special message for Victoria Strowger, who I believe is in this room somewhere.” Wednesday jerked involuntarily, feeling Martin’s fingers dig into her wrist. “Your friend Frank is down on F deck. He sends his regards. As a rule we’re trying to keep everyone together at their designated evacuation stations, but if you want to see your friend again, you can step forward now, and I’ll take you there.” His smile widened. “This is your only chance, I’m afraid. Once we dock it’ll be too late.”

Wednesday glanced between Rachel and Martin frantically. She wanted to scream: What do I do now? Martin looked puzzled, but dawning horror was writ large on Rachel’s face. The man at the front was still talking, something about evacuation procedures. It was so slickly done, the message, that she half doubted she’d heard it.

“Go,” Rachel mouthed at her. A quick scribble on her paper pad: U GOT VALUE — PLAY 4 TIME.

“But—” Wednesday looked back at Martin, who was now clearly worried. They’ve got Frank, she thought frantically. They’ve got Frank! She’d been afraid, walking in there, that it was a trap, but she hadn’t realized just what kind it would be.

Rachel was still scribbling, OLD NF = UR HOME GRND. Realization dawned: Wednesday nodded, feeling sick in the pit of her stomach. “Okay,” she said, and before she could change her mind she began to shove through the crowd of bodies toward the front of the room, where the blackmailer was waiting for her.

“So who the fuck are you?” Wednesday asked belligerently. “And what do you want?”

The woman in charge of the hijackers smiled indulgently. “You can call me Portia, my dear. And all I want is a little talk.”

Wednesday sized her up suspiciously. The blond guy stood behind her blocking the doorway, and there were a couple of guards — one of them manning a comms console, the other watching her from behind the leader — but they’d made no move to search her or apply restraints or anything. This Portia woman wasn’t what she’d expected, either. She wasn’t angry, or evil-tempered, or anything. Nor was she wearing one-piece overalls with built-in pressure seals like the others. In fact, she seemed friendly and slightly indulgent. I’d be indulgent, too, if everything was going my way, Wednesday warned herself. “What do you want?” she demanded. “And where’s Frank?”

“Your friend isn’t here.” Portia sniffed. “He’s in a suite on B deck that hasn’t, ah, been evacuated.” She flashed Wednesday a grin, baring perfect teeth at her. “Would you like to talk to him? Just to prove that he’s all right? My offer was genuine, by the way, when I said you could see him again. In fact, I’ll go further; if you cooperate fully with me, then once our business is over you can have him back, intact.”

“You’re a liar. Why should you?” Wednesday regretted the words almost before they were out of her mouth: Stupid, goading her when she holds all the cards!

But Portia didn’t take it amiss. “Over the years I’ve found that a reputation for keeping my word is a valuable tool — it makes negotiating much easier if everybody knows you’re trustworthy. You, ah, don’t know that yet — but if you want to talk to your friend … ?”

“Ah—” Wednesday felt a sick tension in her gut. “Yeah. I’ll talk to him.” Shit! If he’s all right — A second interior voice kicked in, icily cold — They’ll be watching you both for leverage. Make no mistake, she’s not doing this just for you.

“Get the prisoner on the secure terminal,” Portia told the guard at the desk.

Wednesday moved to sit down in the offered chair. The camera’s-eye view certainly showed her Frank. Her breath caught; they’d put him in a chair and taped his arms down, and he looked ill. His skin was sallow and dry. He looked up at the camera, bleary-eyed, and started. “Wednesday, is that you?” he said, his voice rasping.

“It’s me.” She clasped her hands behind her back to keep from fidgeting. “Are you all right?”

He rolled his head sideways, as if trying to see something behind the camera. After a moment he replied, “No, I’m a bit tied up.” He shook his head. “They got you, too. Was it me?”

“No,” she lied, guessing what the truth would do to him. Behind the terminal she saw Portia make a little tight smile. Bitch.

Reality check. “What was the last thing I did the night before the, uh, accident?” she asked, hoping desperately that he’d get it wrong, that he was just a machinima avatar, and that she’d been caught but he remained at liberty.

“You made a phone call.” He closed his eyes. “They kept my throat under block too long,” he added. “Talking hurts.”

“That’s enough,” said Portia. The comms specialist leaned over and killed the connection before Wednesday could protest. “Satisfied?” she asked.

“Huh.” Wednesday scowled furiously. “So, you’ve got us.” She shrugged. “What do you fucking want?”

The blond guy at the back of the room, the smiling blackmailer from the evacuation bay, cleared his throat. “Boss?”

“Tell her, Franz.” Portia nodded agreeably, but Wednesday noticed that when she spoke to her soldiers her smile peeled away, exposing a frigid chill in her eyes.

“You misplaced something belonging to our, uh, predecessors,” Franz said. He looked uneasy. “We know you hid it on the station. We want it back. When you return it to us, we have a couple of errands to run, then we’ll be leaving.” He raised an eyebrow. “Boss?”

“Here’s the deal,” Portia said easily. “You take us to the items you left behind. We’ll bring your friend Frank along so you can see him, and those nosy diplomats you were hiding out with. No, we weren’t taken in by that business with the passports. Do you think we’re stupid? It was easier to leave you hiding out in their cabin; that way you immobilized yourselves, saving us the trouble. But I digress … if you give us what we want, we’ll leave you on board the station when we go. Our own ship will be arriving here soon. We’ll send a rescue and salvage expedition for the liner and everybody aboard it as soon as we’re clear. Despite what you’re thinking, we’re not interested in killing people, wholesale or retail: there’s been a change of management at the top, and our job is to clean up after them.”

“Clean up?” Wednesday said skeptically. “Clean up what?”

Portia sighed. “My predecessor had some rather silly plans to, um, build himself an empire.” She flashed Wednesday that grin again. “I’m not going to make any excuses. You wouldn’t believe them anyway. To cut a long story short, he succeeded in taking over some key members of the strategic operations staff in the Moscow government. His ambitions were bigger than his common sense — he wanted to short-circuit a very long-term project of ours, of the whole of the ReMastered actually, by developing a device that’s one of a class known collectively as causality-violation weapons. He also wanted to carve out an empire for himself, as maximum leader — an interstellar empire. It was quite the audacious plan, really. It’s a very good thing for all of us that he was no good at the little detail work. Unfortunately” — she cleared her throat — “the weapons lab on Moscow apparently tried to test the gadget prematurely. Something went wrong, spectacularly wrong.”

“You’re trying to tell me it was an accident?” Wednesday demanded.

“No.” Portia looked uncomfortable for a moment. “But the idiot responsible — the treacherous idiot, I stress — is, ah, dead. As a direct consequence of the event. In fact, it’s my job to mop up after him, tidy up the loose ends, and so on. Which includes stopping the R-bombs — I suppose you know about them? — by sending the abort codes. Which were in the bag you took, taken from the station administrator’s desk, along with a bunch of other records that are of no use to you but of considerable interest to me, insofar as they’ll help me root out the last of his co-conspirators.”

“Oh.” Wednesday thought for a while. “So you want to clear everything up. Make it all better.”

“Yes.” Portia smiled brilliantly at her. “Would you like to help us? I stress that to do anything else would amount to complicity in genocide.”

Wednesday straightened up. “I suppose so,” she muttered with barely concealed ill grace. “If you promise this will put an end to it all, and nobody will get hurt?”

“You have my word.” Portia nodded gravely. “Shall we do it?”

Behind her, the one called Franz opened the door.

Darkness, stench, and a faint humming. Over the past two days, Steffi’s world had closed in with nightmarish speed. Now it was a rectangle two meters long, two meters high, and one meter wide. She shared it with a plastic bucket full of excrement, a bag of dry food, and a large water bottle. Most of the time she kept the torch switched off to conserve power. She’d spent some time trying to read, and she’d done some isometric exercises — careful to ensure there was no risk of kicking the bucket over — and spent some more time sleeping fitfully. But the boredom was setting in, and when she’d heard the announcement through the wall of her cell telling them to prepare for evacuation it had come as a relief. If the hijackers were off-loading the passengers, it meant there wouldn’t be anyone to get in her way when she did what had to be done.

A liner the size of the Romanov didn’t vibrate, didn’t hum, and didn’t echo when docking on to a station. In fact, any sound or vibration would be a very bad sign indeed, shock waves overloading the antisound suppressors, jolts maxing out the electrogravitics, supports buckling and bulkheads crumpling. But the closet Steffi had helped Martin build her false wall into adjoined the corridor, and after the muffled sound of a slamming door she’d heard faint footsteps, then nothing. The silence went on for an eternity of minutes, like the loudest noise she’d ever heard.

I’m going to get you, she repeated to herself. You’ve taken my ship, rounded up my fellow officers, and, and — An echo of an earlier life intruded: back-stabbing bastards. She wondered about Max, in the privacy of her head: he wasn’t likely to have avoided the hijackers, and they might think they could use him against her. If they even cared, if they knew who she was and what she could do. Fat chance. Steffi was grimly certain that nobody knew the truth about her — nobody but Sven, and if her partner and front man had talked, they’d have torn the ship apart to get their hands on her. Svengali knew things about Steffi — and she knew things about him — that would have gotten either of them a one-way trip into the judicial systems of a dozen planets if the other ever cut a deal. But Steffi trusted Svengali completely. They’d worked together for a decade, culminating in this insanely ambitious tour: wet-working their way across the galaxy, two political pest control operatives against an entire government-in-exile. The promised payoff would have been enough to see both of them into comfortable retirement, if the back-stabbing scumbags who were paying for the grand slam hadn’t panicked and hijacked the ship instead. And now, with the plans wrecked and Svengali quite possibly out of action, Steffi was seeing red.

After an hour of careful planning, she turned the torch on and put her ear to the closet wall. Nothing. “Here goes,” she mumbled to herself, picking up the box cutter Martin had left her. The tiles he’d had the fabricator spam out were rigid and hard to cut at first, stiffened by the fine copper wire mesh of the Faraday cage threading through them. She stabbed at one edge, then worked the blade through and began tugging it down from the top of her hideaway.

Grunting with effort, Steffi sawed a slit all the way down one side of the wall, then continued sideways at the bottom. Finally, she squatted and peeled the corner up toward her. Fumbling in the twilight she found her way out blocked by something solid. It brought it all home to her, and suddenly the stinking darkness seemed to close around her head like a fist. Gasping, she shoved as hard as she could, and the obstruction shifted.

A minute later she found the light switch in the closet. Well, that’s done it, she told herself, heart pounding and stomach fluttering with nervous anticipation. If they’re out there—

She opened the door. The suite was empty. “Huh.” She took three steps forward, into the dayroom, reveling in her sudden freedom to move, taking in deep breaths of the clean air — suddenly recognizing for what it was the fetor she’d spent more than a day immersed in. Glancing around, she saw the desk. There was some kind of notepad on it, paper covered with writing in dumb pigment. Frowning, she picked it up and began to read by torchlight.

ALL PASSENGERS MOVING TO EVAC STATIONS. ARRIVING OLD NEWFIE/STATION MOSCOW SYSTEM PERIPHERY HALF/HR. HELP? MAY BE EVAC’ING SHIP.

NOT TRUST LT. CDR. FROMM. THE REMASTERED GOOD AT CONTROLLING PEOPLE.FROMM IS A PUPPET. PL IS NOW A UBIQ. SURVEILLANCE NET. QUERY OFFICER’S PASS WORKING?

FEEL FREE TO USE THE FABRICATOR IN THE TRUNK. IT MAKES GOOD TOYS, YOU’VE GOT BLANKET RESOURCE ACCESS PERMISSIONS.

Steffi felt her knees go weak. The thing in the closet was a general purpose fabricator, a cornucopia machine? She forced herself to sit down for a moment and close her eyes. “Fuck!” she said softly. The possibilities were endless. Then she took a deep breath. Query officer bypass working. If the hijackers were aboard and had turned the liaison network into a surveillance grid, they already know about her. But if they had evacuated the ship, she might have a chance, especially if they’d left the line crew authorization system in place.

Steffi thrust her left hand into her pocket and pulled out her control rings. Sliding them onto her fingers one by one she mouthed the subvocal command to start up her interface. If they’re watching, they’ll be here any moment, she told herself. But nothing happened; the timer began to spiral in her visual field, and the twist of a ring told her that she had new mail, but there was no knock at the door.

Slowly, she felt the ghost of a grin rising to her face as she scrolled rapidly through the ship’s status reports. In dock, evacuation systems tripped, drive systems tripped, bridge systems shut down, life support on homeostatic standby. “Thought you’d nailed down all the loose ends, did you? We’ll see about that!” She turned back to the closet and leaned over the control panel of the fabricator. “Give me an index,” she snapped at it. “Show me guns. All the guns you can make…”