Iron Sunrise

IRREVOCABLE

They’d untaped his hands; leaning back, ignoring the guard, Frank had twitched his rings, switching his optic implants and ear pickups to record promiscuously. There was no point missing anything, even his own execution.

BING. He’d jumped a little when the mail flag came up; something from Wednesday. But the guard hadn’t noticed. None of them noticed. Just typical ReMastered foot soldiers, obedient and lethal. He read the message and felt his palms go damp. He was glad he was sitting down. So now Wednesday’s invisible friend is sending me e-mail? But he’s got to use her as a relay because she’s the only one of us with a setup compatible with this station? Shit.

Frank reflected bleakly on the need for bandwidth. If there’s some way to get that report out, wherever we are … we can’t all just vanish, can we? But the truth was anything but reassuring. Liners did vanish from time to time, and if this was the hijacking it appeared to be — bearing all the slick signs of ReMastered covert ops, the sly subversion of emergency reflexes — then there was no way word would ever get out.

BING. More mail from Wednesday had arrived, broadcast to him and Rachel and Martin — what? Some sort of code attachment, a new interface protocol for his implant to talk to the station’s ether. He tried to keep his face impassive as he mentally crossed his fingers and loaded the untrusted executable.

Then the newcomers arrived. Frank stared at them, his world narrowed suddenly to a single panicky choice, a flashback going back decades. He took it all in, Wednesday sullen between two guards, the woman in front holding the leather satchel, smiling at him. He remembered the bright sunlight on the rooftop of the Demosthenes Hotel, the acrid smell of propane stoves and dog shit wafting on the breeze across downtown Samara. Alice turning toward the parapet with a camera drone in her hands. The woman, again. Blond destruction on the day it rained bullets, the day when everything changed.

Frank blinked up at her. “Oh holy shitting fucking Christ, it’s you—”

“Increasing my little piggie count, this time.” Her smile broadened, turning ugly at the edges. “We really must stop bumping into each other like this, mustn’t we?”

“Shit, shit, shit—” Frank felt nauseous. The hot smell of Alice’s blood was in his nose; the roar and screams of the crowd as the bullets began spattering into them. “You were in Samara. On Newpeace. Who are you?” He barely noticed Wednesday’s jolt of surprise from the other side of the room as he focused in on the woman’s face.

“I’m U. Portia Hoechst, DepartmentSecretariat of Division Four of the Department of External Environmental Control, planetary dominion of Newpeace. The ‘U’ is short for ubermensch, or ubermadchen, take your pick.” Her smile was as wide as a shark’s gape. “At this point in the proceedings I’m supposed to gloatingly tell you my evil plans before I kill you. Then, if you believe the movies, a steel-jawed hero is supposed to erupt through the walls and teach me the error of my ways with extreme prejudice.”

She snorted. “Except there aren’t any steel-jawed heroes within sixteen light years of this station.” A hint of mirth in her eyes. “Not even that Third Lieutenant you’ve got squirreled away, at least not once the guards are through with her.” Frank felt his nails digging into the palms of his hands; his vision went gray and pixelated for a few seconds, and his heart pounded before he realized that it was the firmware patch from Wednesday loading on his implant’s virtual machine, combined with a raw, primal rage.

“Why are you telling us this?” Rachel asked quietly.

“Because I like a fucking audience!” Hoechst sat up. “And it’s going to be over soon, anyway.” She stopped smiling. “Oh, about the ‘let me tell you everything before I kill you’ bit: I’m not going to kill you. You might wish I had, but I’m not. As soon as I’ve got this station on auxiliary internal power and disabled external communications, all the passengers and crew are coming aboard. It won’t be much fun, but you’ll be able to last for the couple of months it takes for a rescue ship to reach you. Even you, Frank.” A flicker of a smile. “No reeducation camps here. You’re getting the VIP treatment.”

Frank stayed quiet, his guts tense. Fuck, we’re still on the net! he realized. The station’s causal channels were still working. This packet from Herman, whoever he was, was a protocol converter — with gathering disbelief Frank realized that he wasn’t cut off anymore. He could send mail. Or even pipe his raw recording feed straight to Eric, back home, there to do whatever he could with the posthumous spool. Take it like you give it, you fuckers! he thought triumphantly. His hands folded together against the cold, nobody saw him twisting his rings, setting up the narrowcast stream to his inbox on Earth. I am a camera!

Steffi watched the rerun of Svengali’s execution in grainy monochrome, tracking it through the labyrinthine maze of the surveillance system take spooled by the ship’s memory as the bridge systems hummed around her, rewinding the vessel’s software model of itself back to the state it had been in before the ReMastered lobotomized it.

She’d thought she was angry when the double-crossing clients ran amok, angry when she’d spent long hours crouched in a dark closet space with the soft-shoe shuffle of guards outside the door. But she hadn’t been angry at all. Not in comparison to her current state of mind. Livid with rage just barely began to describe it.

She’d worked with Sven for just short of a decade. In many ways they’d been closer than a married couple — herself the pretty face up front and visible, and he the fixer in the background, oiling the gears and reeling in the contracts. He’d found her when she was a teen punk, heading for rehab or a one-way trip to the exile colonies, seen through the rust and grime to the hard metal beneath, and polished it to a brilliant shine. In the early years she’d adored him, back before she matured enough to see him as he really was — theirs hadn’t been a sexual relationship (beyond an early exploratory fumbling), but it was a partnership based on need, and mutual respect, and blood. And now, just as they’d been on the edge of their greatest coup -

“I’m going to find you, and you’re going to wish you’d committed suicide first,” she told the face frozen to the screen. “And then—” her eyebrows furrowed — “I’m going to…” Going to do what?

Steffi leaned back her chair and closed her eyes, forcing the tight ball of rage back into the recesses of her skull, out of the way until it was needed. Where do I stand? She had the key to their bank accounts, if she needed it. And she had a couple of other keys, picked up here or there. She’d been in an office in Turku and a roadside rest stop on Eiger’s World, and a house on Earth, too, all in the past six months. Sven had done his homework before taking on the job, explained the alarming consequences of success to her and the importance of finding the keys. There’d been no point rummaging by the roadside, but she had two of them in her pocket, now, keys to the gates of hell itself. That had to count for something, didn’t it? And if the dim-witted UN diplomats didn’t know who she was, then all that left was the ReMastered.

If I can take them out of the picture, I can become Lieutenant Steffi Grace, and nobody will know any different, she realized. Or I can try for the third key, and access to a Muscovite diplomatic channel. She began to smile, her lips pulling back from her teeth in an expression very close to a feral snarl. See how they like it when I derail their plans. She sat up and leaned toward the pilot console. “Bridge systems, get me the full station package on our current port. Display dockside schematics on window four. Do you have access to the loading bay external cameras? Do you have access to the station communications network? Good. Record new job sequence, activation key rosebud.”

“You’re going to maroon us,” Wednesday said flatly. She took a stride toward the desk, but a tense motion with a gun barrel stopped her sharply. She turned to stare at Frank, wringing her hands together. Frank raised an eyebrow at her. What can I do about it? he thought, his stomach turning over. Why couldn’t you have stayed hidden?

“I’m not going to leave you alone for long.” Hoechst shrugged. “My own ship’s heading for home with a message too secret to trust to certain, shall we say, monitored channels. While it’s gone I need to take the Romanov on a little errand. I’m mopping up after my predecessor — one U. Vannevar Scott — who got a little bit too big for his boots.” That flickering smile. Almost without willing it Frank found himself staring at Wednesday. She looked as scared as he felt, her face drained and pale, but resolute, the condemned facing the scaffold. He forced himself to look back at Hoechst. The blinking status display in his left eye told its own story: every word that hit his ears was stripped down to its constituent bits, entangled with a qubit interface somewhere in the magical weirdness of a causal channel, the other end of which would pipe the data into Eric’s inbox. Let’s see how topical we can make this news, shall we, he thought at Hoechst, feeling the fear slowly turn to a warm glow of triumphant accomplishment. J’accuse!

“Scott decided to carve out his own little Directorate,” Hoechst continued, oblivious to the true size of her potential audience. “First, he needed a lever. That lever was going to be a bucolic backwater called Moscow. He got funding and clearance to operate on Moscow by offering the Directorate a new way of developing weapons forbidden by the Enemy — you call it the Eschaton — like temporal ablators. Moscow was going to be his weapons proving ground, a backwater nobody would expect to be going after causality-violation devices. Actually he wanted to be dictator of a whole bunch of planets, and Moscow was going to be his tool of conquest — also his insurance against the wrath of the High Directorate. But he got sloppy. He puppetized half the Muscovite military high command — an administrative backwater on that planet, nobody paid much attention to them — and thoroughly subverted the interstellar deterrent group. But then he decided to accelerate the weapons test program he’d promised the Directorate and use them himself instead of the original clumsy R-bomb plan.”

Wednesday stared at her. “You’re telling me the nova was a fucked-up weapons test?”

“Well, sure. In fact, it was an unauthorized fuck up.” Hoechst looked pensive. She reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out a small key, placing it very carefully in the middle of the desk in front of her. “We all make mistakes. In Scott’s case, it was his last; he’d gotten sloppy, and the — my boss — cleared me to take him down and rectify the situation. That was before we drained him and discovered certain unpleasant facts about his treason. That cartridge” — she held out a hand toward Wednesday — “is one of the loose ends. Immigration records of Scott’s agents moving in and out of Moscow. And details of the weapons project and the test schedule. Nothing we want to leave lying around. It’s a severe political embarrassment.”

“There’s more, isn’t there?” Frank asked, fascinated.

“Well, no shit!” Hoechst looked at him curiously, as if wondering why he was so interested in the abstract issues, rather than the proximate fate of his own skin. “There’s a flight of four R-bombs coming.” She frowned. “The cover story is that they’re aimed at New Dresden. And that’s what the Muscovite diplomats think.”

“What did he—”

“Shut the fuck up!” Hoechst frowned. She tapped one finger on the key. “They’re supposed to be running on New Dresden. That’s the official target ops plan that was on file, isn’t it? That’s what the Muscovite diplomats think. And they’re next to invisible when they’re under way. Except our fucking asshole Ubermensch Vannevar Scott was too cute by half. While he was puppetizing the Muscovite Defense Ministry, the first group he hit was the deterrence operations staff, including the flight crew of one of the bombers — the one that isn’t responding to messages. He was planning his defection at least ten years before Moscow went bang: one of those fucking bombers is running on Newpeace, our new regional capital, which is about as distant from Moscow as New Dresden.

“Not many ReMastered know this,” she added drily, “and my boss wants to keep it that way.”

Frank sat up straight. “Are you telling us the business with New Dresden, the ambassadors—”

“I haven’t been bumping off foreign diplomats.” She shook her head vehemently. “That was Scott’s plan. I told you he was sloppy, didn’t I? When things went wrong, when Moscow Prime exploded, he took steps to sweep the dirt under the rug. He paid an extremely accomplished assassin, the one you called Svengali.” For a moment she looked extremely tired. “Which is presumably what brought you aboard the Romanov,” she murmured in Rachel’s direction. Rachel stared at her, face impassive. “Svengali won’t be bothering us anymore, needless to say.”

“You want me to believe that this was all one man’s rogue operation?” Rachel asked, her voice low and controlled.

“Pretty much.” For a moment Hoechst looked terribly old. “Don’t underestimate him: U. Scott was one of the highest-ranking officials in, ah, External State Security. The foreign espionage service, in other words. And he was planning a coup. He was going to take Moscow and use the R-bombs to hold the entire Directorate at bay, and he was going to leverage his takeover of Moscow to destabilize New Dresden, via the trade war. He was already infiltrating the Dresden Foreign Ministry — without authorization. If he succeeded, he’d have had two planets, the beginnings of his own pocket interstellar empire.” She looked at Frank, meeting his eyes. “I know what you think of us. Regardless of that, whatever you think of our ideology, we are not insane, and we are not suicidal. One of the goals of the ReMastered Directorate is to render interstellar warfare not merely unthinkable, but impossible. Scott had to go.”

She sounds as if she’s trying to convince herself, Frank realized with a sinking feeling. This was not what he’d wanted to hear from her. He’d expected venomously triumphant self-justification, perhaps, or a gloating confession. Not this! he thought despairingly. If Eric decides to run this, it’ll be about the best piece of pro-ReMastered press they could ask for! The pot of gold at the end of Frank’s starbow had just turned out to be a chamber pot full of shit — and despite what he’d said earlier about journalistic ethics being a crock, he couldn’t see any obvious holes in her argument. Even releasing the prisoners in Hoechst’s stolen memory diamond — expensive as such a process would be — would probably not reverse its effect by much.

She took a deep breath and continued her confession: “Luckily, Scott pushed too hard, and the wheels came off. There are a couple of thousand Ubers on Newpeace, not to mention the ordinary humans, who would perhaps be of some concern to you. We’re spread terribly thin; if we have to evacuate that planet, we’d lose half a century’s hard work. There’s no way we could possibly convince all the Muscovite ambassadors to agree to cancel the R-bomb attack if they knew the truth. Doesn’t that mean something to you?”

Frank nodded, dazed. He looked around, taking in other shocked expressions. The tension in the ReMastered soldiers. The twitchy look on the blond guy standing against the wall next to Wednesday said it all. She’d laid out the dictator’s new suit in front of them, and it was threadbare: they were clearly shocked by Hoechst’s revelations. The spook from the revolution on Newpeace all those years ago, the gray eminence at the center of a web of interstellar assassination and intrigue, turned out to be a fixer who was desperately trying to save a planet from the posthumous legacy of a genocidal megalomaniac -

“It takes two to send the cancel code. I’ve got one of them — right here.” She tapped the key again. “There’s a causal channel connected to the TALIGENT offense control network: they abandoned it when they evacuated the station, but it wasn’t disconnected. I had Zursch and Anders collect the station manager’s key and take it there already. Hardware authentication, you see, all you need are the tokens. You don’t disconnect causal channels without good reason; they’re too expensive to set up in the first place.

“You have no idea how much it cost us to get our hands on this key — we had to extract it from the Ambassador to Newpeace. You don’t need to concern yourselves with how. The station manager’s was easier — silly fool actually left it in his office safe.” She shrugged. “There’s a diplomatic channel here, down in the communications center. One that’s linked into the military TALIGENT network.”

BING. New mail. Not now, Frank thought irritably, blinking it open before him. From: Wednesday. GOT 2 GO. SORRY. Huh? He glanced at her. “What—”

“You’ll be wanting that cartridge, I suppose,” Wednesday said, her expression sullen. “What happens to us then?”

“I destroy it in front of you.” Hoechst nodded at Frank. “You’re here to witness this.” A flicker of a grin. “Same as last time, without the unpleasant aftereffects. Which were not of my choosing, I should add.” Her gaze fell on Rachel next. “I then send the cancel codes to the R-bombs, using the station manager’s console, and take the Romanov to go pick up the crews and destroy the evidence. You get to wait here in the cold and try to keep everybody on the station alive until the rescue ship from Tonto arrives. After that—” She shook her head. “Not my department.”

“Diplomatic immunity,” Rachel said in a voice as dry as bone.

“Are you going to get picky? If it means a couple of hundred million innocent people die as a result?” Hoechst stared at her through narrowed eyes. “Thought not.”

“May I see the key?” Wednesday walked closer to the desk.

“Sure.” Hoechst held it up, twirling it slowly between forefinger and thumb, evidently enjoying the gesture. “Now, Wednesday child, if you’d be so good as to hand me the cartridge—”

The lights flickered.

Hoechst froze. “Mathilde,” she said thoughtfully, “it occurs to me that we haven’t heard from Joanna, or Stepan and Roman for that matter. I want you to take every available body — not you, Franz, you’re staying here — and deal with that missing Third Lieutenant. Then find out what happened to Joanna and her boys. Nothing good, I expect.”

“Yes, boss.” Mathilde headed for the door immediately, looking annoyed. She tagged Gun-boy on the way through. “C’mon, hunting time.”

The lights flickered again. “What do you suppose she’s doing?” asked Frank.

Steffi whistled as she walked, hastily, toward the docking tunnel. A head-up clock counted down in front of her left eye: eighty-two, eighty-one, eighty … She broke into a trot as the count headed for the final minute.

Big passenger-carrying spaceships were not designed to undock from big, high-population space stations by accident, or indeed anything short of a carefully choreographed and scheduled departure, overseen by the port authorities and the ship’s bridge crew. Fail-safe clamps pressurized by the atmosphere aboard both craft held the Romanov’s docking level against the hull of Old Newfie’s lifesystem, thousands of tons of force that could only be released by a controlled depressurization of the clamp rings. But Old Newfie had been reconfigured for undocking without port command authority before the final evacuation, and Steffi had usurped control over the Romanov’s life circuit as final officer on board. She’d given the bridge system a program to execute it, and she didn’t want to be around when the watchdog timer counted down to zero and set it off.

The main boarding ramp was in sight, a tunnel rising up to the loading deck of the station, huge station pressure doors visible to either side as looming shadows. Steffi ducked into a side door and trotted up the maintenance path alongside the main ramp, gray walls closing in bare centimeters to either side of her shoulders. Forty-seven, forty-six … And she was facing the emergency airlock, a domed door set in a solid bulkhead beside the main tunnel. She spun the manual override wheel and stepped into the rotating chamber, cranked it round — basic hand cranks were provided in case of a power failure — and tumbled out into the shadows alongside the big station doors.

Too close, she thought, pulling her night-vision goggles down. The twilit dock was a maze of shadows and eerily glowing heat patches. A huge slug trail of luminosity led away from the tunnel, toward a door leading to the main customs post — waste heat from the passengers whom the ReMastered had taken aboard the station, probably. But there was nobody in sight. Careless, Steffi thought, and she darted away from the airlock toward the towering wall of one of the station spokes, determined and ready to execute the second stage of her plan.

Something thumped her left arm exactly like a blow from a careless passerby, just as her threat indicator lit up and her eye patch outlined a door that had just opened. Steffi reacted instinctively, her little machine pistol chattering to itself. The bullet paths curved weirdly in the Coriolis force, spiraling toward the target as the rounds overcorrected for the changing centrifugal effect: another bullet whispered through the air where her head had been a fraction of a second earlier, then her attacker collapsed. Steffi ran as fast as she could for the tower, but something was wrong. She felt as if she weighed too much, and when she tried to reach for a reload her left arm flopped around, not working properly.

“Shit.” She crouched in the doorway, heart pounding, panting for breath in the freezing air. Now the pain started, coming in waves that almost made her faint. Her left hand felt sticky. She put down her gun and fumbled, one-handed, for one of the gel trauma packs she’d had the cornucopia spit out for her. “It’s only a flesh wound,” she told herself through chattering teeth. “It’s only—”

The gel pack went in and for a moment everything was gray and grainy. Then the pain didn’t so much subside as begin to regularize, not driving her to the brink of unconsciousness, becoming possible to manage. Steffi leaned back against the wall and panted, then picked up her gun. If I stay here, they’ll see my heat trace, she realized. And besides …

Two, one, zero: the countdown stopped. A noise like a million steam kettles boiling as one came from the vicinity of the docking doors. Steffi winced as her eardrums pulsed once, twice — then with a huge crashing boom the doors slammed down into the space the Romanov’s tunnel had just pulled away from.

Got you, you bastards! she thought, although exhaustion and pain sapped the realization of all pleasure. Now let’s see how accurate that floor plan is.

Hoechst looked uncertain for a moment, as a faint vibration traveled through the deck. “The passengers are all in the customs hall,” she said, glancing at Franz. “Why don’t you go—”

Frank, distracted, glanced sideways at Wednesday. He sat up. “What are you—”

Wednesday pulled a plastic cylinder out of her pocket and held it toward Hoechst. “Share and enjoy.” There was a note of anger in her voice, and something else, something like triumph that made Frank dive for the floor, covering his eyes as she tossed the cylinder at the desk -

There was a brilliant flash of blue and a loud bang.

Wednesday was already halfway to the door as a hot, damp wave pummeled across the top of Frank’s head. It solidified almost instantly, aerogel foam congealing in a hazy fine mesh of fog with glass-sharp knife edges. Someone inside the fogbank was coughing and gargling. The remaining guard dived into it, desperately trying to batter and scoop his way through to Hoechst, choking in the misty sponge created by the riot bomb.

Frank rolled over on his back, taking in a confused kaleidoscope of impressions. Someone zipped past his face in a blur of motion. A buzzing rattle set his teeth on edge. Vague shadows at the limits of vision turned and fell. There was a scream, sharply cut off, a gurgling sound from the fogbank, a painfully loud bang from a riot gun discharging through a doorway, and more blue foam drifting into the room, blocking the door, congealing in sticky, spiky lumps.

He finished rolling, gasping for breath. I’m still alive? he wondered, dully. “Wednesday!” he called.

“Save it.” That was Martin. A groaning sound came from the floor.

“You. Frank. Help me.” That was Rachel’s voice, panting, gasping. What’s wrong? he wondered. He sat up, momentarily chagrined not to have seen the fight, expecting a soldier’s gun in his face at any moment.

“We’ve got to get her out of there!” Rachel was half-inside the riot foam fogbank, hacking at it with a plastic-bladed knife she’d assembled from the stiffened lapels of her jacket by some kind of sartorial black magic. “Unless it’s set to melt, she’s going to suffocate!”

The remaining ReMastered guard lay on the floor, splayed out as if a compact tornado had zapped him with a UV optical taser. The edgy one, the traitor, sat very still, watching everything alertly. For some reason he seemed very calm. “You,” Frank gasped. “Help.”

“No.” He cocked his head on one side, eyes bright, and very deliberately crossed his arms. “Let her choke.”

“What? I don’t understand—”

Frank bent over one of the guards, searching his belt for some kind of knife, anything to help Rachel with. Martin seemed stunned, shaking his head like a punch-drunk fighter. The semiconscious man at Frank’s feet stirred. Frank did a double take and changed tasks, rolling the man over. “Anyone got some tape?”

“I have.” The guy who’d given Frank the diamond sounded drained by the effort of talking. He stood up slowly, paused when Rachel looked round at him, then slowly knelt and pulled a roll of utility tape from one pocket. He yanked the guard’s arms round and taped his wrists together behind his back, then repeated the job on his ankles and moved on. “I’d really be happier if you’d leave Portia to die,” he added slowly, raising his voice and looking at Rachel as she panted, digging large lumps of bluish glassy foam loose from the mound. “She’s killed more people than you’ve had hot meals.”

“But if I leave her, what does that make me?” Rachel gasped between attacks.

“She’s—” Frank stopped as Rachel straightened up, shaking her head. He looked past her; she’d dug as far as the edge of the desk, far enough to see that the blue-tinted foam was turning red.

“What the fuck do we do now?”

“We—” the blond guy stopped. “Portia lies,” he said conversationally. “She lies instinctively. I don’t know whether she was telling the truth or not, but that girl got away with, with the evidence. The smoking gun. I don’t know what she thinks she’s doing, but if she gets the evidence to the communications room where the secure hotline terminal to the R-bombers is located — or if you do-she could destroy a planet. She’s got the key. Right now we’ve got a problem in the shape of about twelve other ReMastered soldiers, mostly standing guard over the passengers, but at least two of them will be on the Romanov’s emergency bridge. Unless Portia was right and that missing officer—” He stopped.

“What is it?” Frank leaned toward him: “Tell me, dammit!”

“Portia sent the other key to the comms room. Wednesday’s on her way — she’s not a fool, she’s got something in mind — and Portia as good as told her that she’d ordered her family killed.” For a moment the blond man looked as if someone had walked over his grave. “What’s she going to do now?”

“Oh shit.” Martin was struggling to his feet, lurching drunkenly. “We have to get to the comms room. Franz, can you talk your way past whoever’s guarding it?”

“I can try.” The blond guy — Franz — stared at him. “Can I rely on you to support my petition for diplomatic asylum if I do? And to help me obtain a body for one of the involuntary uploads in the memory diamond he’s carrying?” He nodded at Frank.

“You want to — okay, yes. I think I can swing asylum for you. You won’t have to worry about the ReMastered on Earth. They won’t be looking our way for a very long time to come.” Rachel stood up, still panting, red-faced and looking as if she’d run a marathon. “Military boost,” she said, managing to force a smile as Frank focused on her. “I just hope the comms center systems are shut down right now—”

“Involuntary?” Frank interrupted. “Would they be a suitable witness for, um, excesses committed by her?” He cracked his knuckles.

“I think so,” Franz said, almost absentmindedly. “The comms center must still be running, no? For the evacuation.” He examined the mound of blue foam that blocked the exit Wednesday had taken. “Telemetry during undocking, availability for ships coming to visit in the future — like the Romanov — that sort of thing.”

“Do we know where it is?” Frank asked.

“As far as I know, our only expert on the layout of this station is currently running away from us carrying one of the two keys it will take to kill everyone on Newpeace.” Franz carefully placed a hand on top of a foamy stalagmite and tugged, then winced: his palm was red when he pulled it away. “I suggest we try to figure out a way to go round.”

“Mail her,” Frank suggested to Rachel.

She paused, thoughtful. “Not yet. But she sideloaded us the local comms protocol stack—”

He twitched his rings. “Yeah, there’s an online map. Follow the yellow brick road.” He looked worried. “I hope she’s all right.”

The station’s communication center was a broad, semicircular space a couple of decks below the station manager’s office. Two horseshoe-shaped desks provided a workspace for three chairs each; one-half of the wall was occupied by a systems diagram depicting the mesh of long-distance bandwidth bearers that constituted the Moscow system’s intrasystem network of causal channels. “Intrasystem” was a bit of an understatement — Old Newfie and some of the other stations were actually light years outside the system’s Oort cloud, and the network also showed those interstellar channels that reached out across the gulf of parsecs to neighboring worlds — and the control center was hardly the core of the comms system. Most of the real action took place in a sealed server room full of silent equipment racks on the floor below. But human management demanded a hierarchy of control, and from this nerve center commands could be issued to send flash messages across interstellar space, queries to the home world, even directives to the TALIGENT defense hotline network.

The flat wall opposite the curved systems map was a solid slab of diamond-reinforced glass, triple-glazed against the chilly vacuum. It looked out from one wall of a spoke, gazing toward infinity. The void wheeled around it outside, a baleful red-and-violet smoke ring covering half the sky.

The room had been left in good order when the station was evacuated. Dark as a desert night and chilly as a freezer, the dust had slowly settled in a thin layer across the workstations and procedure folders. Years passed as the smoke ring whirled larger, blowing toward the window. Then the humans returned. First came two soldiers, quiet and subdued in the face of the staring void: then a small death, remorseless and fast.

Lying outstretched in the duct above the room, looking down through the air recirculation grille, Wednesday explored her third and final cartridge by touch. It wasn’t like the two riot foam grenades, and this was a headache: there was someone down there, and she looked vaguely familiar. It was hard to tell through the grille -

Fuckmonsters! Family killers. She remembered Jerm taunting her, Dad looking worried — he did a lot of that — Indica stern and slightly withdrawn from reality, her distant willowy mother. Love and rage, sorrow and a sense of loss. She looked down through the grille, saw the woman sitting back to back in the nearer horseshoe. They’re ReMastered. She’d heard quite enough about them from Frank to know what they were about. Portia and her mocking grin. Wednesday’s teeth ground with hatred, hot tears of rage prickling at the sides of her eyes. Oh, you’re going to regret this!

She risked a peek of light from her rings, illuminating the scored casing on this cartridge. The activation button had a dial setting with numbers on it, and there was no half-open end. Is it a banger? she wondered. It seemed unlikely, on the face of it — grenades on a space station were a crazy idea — but you couldn’t rule anything out. So she dialed her jacket to shrink-fit, pulled the hood over her face, and sealed it to the leggings she wore under her trousers. E-mail: Herman, what the fuck is this? Attach image: Send. Her fingers were trembling with cold. Come on, reply …

BING. This is a type-20 impact-fused grenade. Stun radius: five meters. Lethal radius: two meters. EMP minimized, tissue ablation maximized. Attachment: operations manual. What are you doing with it?

E-mail: Herman, I’m going to make them pay for Mom, Dad, and Jerm. Send.

The woman looked up at her, and Wednesday froze. “You’d better come down right now,” Steffi called up to her. The gun muzzle was a black emptiness, pointing right at her face. “No messing.”

“Shit,” Wednesday mumbled under her breath. Louder, “That you, Steffi?”

“Fuck. Hello, wunderkind.” The gun muzzle didn’t move. “I said come down here right now. That’s an order.”

“I’m coming.” Something told her that the grenade wouldn’t be much use. Wednesday bunched her legs up and kicked hard, twice. The grille fell away. Wednesday lowered herself feet-first through the hole, then dropped; in the low-gee environment it seemed to take forever to reach the floor. “What were you going to do if I didn’t, shoot me?”

“Yes,” said Steffi. Her eyes were hollow: she looked as if she hadn’t slept for days. And her voice was curiously flat, lacking all sign of emotion.

Wednesday shrugged uneasily and held her hands out. “Look,” she said, “I brought one of the keys along.”

“A key.” Steffi motioned her toward the unoccupied chair. “How useful,” she murmured. “Do you know what it’s a key to?”

“Yeah.” Wednesday grinned angrily. “It’s a key to the Moscow defense communications network.”

BING. Mail from Herman: Wednesday, danger, listen to Rachel.

Huh. Her eyes tracked to the console they’d been nearest. There were a number of authentication key slots in it, and it was much more primitive-looking, even crude, than the others. “I think that’s it.”

“Good guess.” Steffi kept the gun on her. “Put your key in the slot.”

“Huh?”

“I said, put your key in the slot. Or I’ll do it for you, over your dead body.”

“Okay, okay, no need to get nasty.” Wednesday leaned sideways and clicked the key she’d swiped from Hoechst’s desk into the slot. She shivered. “’Scuse me,” she said, and zipped her jacket up, then tugged the gloves over her hands. “Cold in here, isn’t it?”

“What do you think the code keys do?” Steffi asked mildly.

“Huh? They tell the bombers to commit to an attack or to cancel it, of course.” Wednesday shook her head. “We’ve just been through all this. The head ReMastered woman—” She stopped, fright and revulsion working on her together.

“Carry on,” said Steffi. She sounded tired, and Wednesday stared at her, seeing for the first time the nasty smear of goop all over her left arm.

“They’ve been lying,” Wednesday said flatly. “That’s what this is all about. The R-bombs aren’t all heading for New Dresden, some are heading for a ReMastered world. The ReMastered who took the ship were trying to stop that.”

“How interesting.” A flicker of pain crossed Steffi’s face as she turned her left hand over and opened it to reveal two keys. “Take these and insert them into slots four and eight on the same console.”

“What?” Wednesday stared at them in disbelief.

“Do it!” snapped Steffi. The gun barrel twitched at her impatiently.

“I’m doing it.” Wednesday stood up and leaned over Steffi carefully, taking the first key, moving slowly so as not to alarm her. She slid it into one of the slots Steffi had named. A diode lit up next to it, and suddenly the screen board below the keys flickered on. “Holy shit!”

“You can say that again.” A ghost of a smile flickered around Steffi’s lips. “Do you like the ReMastered, Wednesday?”

“Fuck!” She turned her head away and spat at the ice-cold deck. “You know better than that.”

BING. Mail from Rachel: Wednesday, whats going on?

“Well and good. Now do the same with the second key.”

“Okay.” Wednesday took the key and slid it into the remaining empty slot, her heart pounding with tension. She stared at it for a moment that dragged on. This is it, she thought. Suddenly possibilities seemed to open up around her, endless vistas of the possible. Horizons of power. She’d been powerless for so long it seemed almost like the natural state of existence. She turned round and glanced at Steffi, old and tired. The gun didn’t seem too significant anymore. “Would you like to tell me what you’re planning?” she asked.

“What do you think?” Steffi asked. “They killed Sven, kid. Sven was my partner.” A flicker of fury crossed her face. “I’m not going to let them get away with that. Undocked the ship, to stop them escaping. Shot my way past the guards. Now they’ve got to come to me.” She looked at the console, and her gaze lingered on the keys and their glowing authentication lights. “So sit down and shut up.”

Wednesday sat, staring at Steffi. The gun didn’t move away from her. Doubts began to gnaw at the edges of her certainty. What does she want? Wednesday wondered. Three keys, that’s enough to send an irrevocable go code, isn’t it?

“What are you going to do?” asked Wednesday.

“What does it look like?” Steffi put her gun down carefully on the desk beside her, next to something boxy. She picked it up.

“I don’t know,” Wednesday said cautiously. “What do you want?”

“Revenge. An audience.” Steffi’s cheek twitched. “Something puerile like that.”

Wednesday shook her head. “I don’t understand.”

“Well, you can answer a question.” Steffi held the box close to her and Wednesday saw that it was some kind of pocket data tablet, its surface glowing with virtual buttons. “How did you get here? Did they send you? Did she think giving me an extra key was a good idea?”

“I don’t understand what you mean.” Wednesday stared at her. “I ran away from them. The boss woman, Hurst or whatever she’s called — she had me and Frank and the diplomats in the station mayor’s office when something happened. She sent half her guards off to look for you and I, I—” She realized she was breathing too fast, but she couldn’t stop. There were flashing lights at the corners of her vision. BING. Mail from — Wednesday killed her message interface. “She forced me to give her the papers. But it was in the police station, and last time I was there I ransacked the arms locker, so I grabbed a riot bomb and when she told me to give her the papers I grabbed the key and dropped a foam ball in front of her.” She finished in a breathless gabble, watching Steffi’s face.

“Oh, very good!” Steffi grinned humorlessly. “So you just happened to be running down here with a key to the defense network?”

“Yes,” Wednesday said simply.

“And one of those bombers is running on one of their worlds.” Steffi shook her head. “Idiots!” she murmured. There was a musical chime from the console next to her. “Ah, about time.” She raised her voice as she tapped a button. “Yes, who am I speaking to?”

“It’s Rachel,” said Wednesday.

“Steffi, is that you?” Rachel said simultaneously over the conference circuit.

“Yes, it’s me.” Steffi closed her eyes but kept her hand on the gadget.

“You got rid of the ship, didn’t you? Why did you do that?”

“Oh, it won’t go far. They were planning on using it: undocking was the easiest way to stop them. As it is, you’ve got bandwidth here — you can call for help and someone will come and pick you up. And the other passengers.”

“She has keys,” Wednesday called, motivated by an impulse halfway between guilt and malice. “They’re in the console now.”

“You little—” Steffi stopped, glared at her. “Yes, I’ve got three keys,” she told the speakerphone. “They’re all locked and loaded into the TALIGENT terminal.” She relaxed slightly. “Are you listening?”

“Yes,” Rachel said tensely.

“Good. Just so we understand each other.”

“How’s Wednesday?” asked Rachel.

Steffi nodded to her.

“I’m fine,” she called. “Just a bit, uh, confused. Are you calling on behalf of the corpsefucker?”

Rachel sounded weary. “She’s dead, Wednesday. You can’t breathe riot foam. You let her have it right in the face.” For an instant Wednesday felt nothing but exultation. Then a moment later she wondered: What’s happening to me?

“That’s very good,” Steffi said approvingly.

“She had it coming,” Wednesday mumbled.

“Yes, I daresay she did,” Rachel replied — clearly the open mike was very sensitive. “That’s why I’m calling. It looks like we won. The ReMastered can’t get to the ship, Hoechst is dead, half of them are missing, the rest are doing what U. Franz tells them — and he wants to defect. You’ve got the keys, Frank is right now filing an exclusive report that blows the lid off their operations in Moscow and New Dresden, and it’s all over.” She paused for a moment. “So why have you locked yourselves in?”

Wednesday glanced at Steffi in surprise.

“Because you’re going to do exactly what I tell you to do,” Steffi said, her tone deceptively casual. Her face was wan, but she hung on to the box in her right hand. “I’ve got perimeter surveillance systems on all surfaces in here. The TALIGENT terminal is armed and on the same subnet as this tablet. Wednesday can tell you I’m not bluffing.” She swallowed. “Fun things you can do with a tablet.” Her hand tightened on it. “If I take my thumb off this screen, it’ll send a message to the terminal. I think you can guess what it will say.”

Wednesday stared at her. “It sends an irrevocable go code? How did you figure out how to do that?”

Steffi sighed. “How did I get the keys in the first place?” She shook her head. “You shouldn’t have gone to that embassy reception, kid. You could have been hurt.”

Rachel cleared her throat. “Hoechst was certain Svengali was the assassin. And she had his paymaster’s records.”

“What made you think Sven worked alone?” Steffi winked at Wednesday, a horribly knowing look that made her try to burrow into her chair to avoid it. She felt unclean.

“You set off that bomb—”

“No, that was someone else,” Steffi said thoughtfully. “One of Hoechst’s little surprises. I think she was trying to kill me. I just nailed a couple of others in the comfort of their own diplomatic residences. And relieved them of certain items from their personal safes, by way of insurance.” She held up the tablet: “Which brings me to the subject at hand.” She looked at Wednesday. “Can either of you give me a good reason not to transmit the irrevocable go code?”

Wednesday licked her lips. “They killed my parents and brother. They destroyed my home, in case you hadn’t noticed. They did — things — to Frank. And you want me to tell you not to kill ’em all?”

Steffi looked amused. “Out of the mouths of babes,” she called in the direction of the mike. “What’s your offer, Rachel?”

“Let me get back to you in a minute.” Rachel sounded very tense. “You’re not helping, Wednesday: remember, only one of the R-bombs is heading for a Re-Mastered world. The rest are still running on New Dresden. Think about that before you open your mouth again.”

“I’ll give you five minutes to talk to your boss,” said Steffi. “You might consider my pecuniary motives while you’re at it.” Then she flicked a switch on the console next to her and raised an eyebrow at Wednesday. “Do you really want me to kill everyone on two planets?” she asked.

“I’m not sure.” Wednesday looked out of the picture window pensively. A huge whorl of violet-red gas, spokes of blue running radially through it, drifted across a black velvet backdrop iced with the unblinking pinpricks of a million stars. Frank is alive, she thought. Hoechst is dead, though. Will they prosecute me? I could claim self-defense against hijackers. The celestial smoke ring swung slowly past outside, a brilliant graveyard marker that would last a million years or more. And Frank hates them, too. But then she thought about New Dresden and the people she’d passed through like a ghost that had outlived the destruction of her planet. Jostling kids in a perfectly ordinary city. Blue skies and tall buildings. “I think I’m too insignificant to make that kind of decision,” she said slowly. “I don’t know who could.” She shivered as a thought struck her. “I’m glad the murderer’s dead. But to blame everyone behind them, their whole civilization…”

She stopped as she saw a shadow of a frown cross Steffi’s face, and forced herself to shrug, miming disinterest. Suddenly her heart was pounding and her palms sweating. She slowly stood up and, when Steffi said nothing, walked toward one side of the window. As she did so, she waited for the solar nebula to vanish from the view, leaving nothing but a scattering of stars across the blackness. Then she twisted a control tab in one jacket pocket. It stiffened around her, waistband tightening and sealing against her pressure leggings under the lacy trousers. Black against a black background, she thought, taking deep breaths. She ran a hand through her hair and surreptitiously popped the seal that held her hood closed inside the collar of her jacket. Then she turned to face Steffi. “What do you want?” she asked as casually as she could manage.

Steffi chuckled, a deeply ugly sound. “I want about, oh, 50 million in bearer bonds, a yacht with independent jump capability, and some hostages to see me out of the immediate vicinity — oh, and that bitch’s head on a trophy plaque. Along with the guy who killed Sven. He won’t be coming back. What the hell did you think, kid? We were in this for the good of our souls?” She sat up. “You still listening in, Rachel?”

Martin replied. “She’s trying to find someone to talk to on Earth,” he said diffidently. “They’ve got to authenticate her before she can tell them what the situation is—”

“Bullshit!” Steffi snorted. “I’ll give you one hour, no more. At the end of an hour, if you aren’t making the right noises, you can kiss Dresden and Newpeace goodbye. If the answer’s yes, I’ll tell you who to deposit the bonds with and we can discuss the next step, namely transport. The TALIGENT terminal stays with me — it’s a causal channel, you know it’ll decohere at the first jump, but until then you’ll know where I am.” She looked thoughtful. “As a first step, though, you can bring me Hoechst’s head, and the head of the scumbag who killed Sven. Not attached to their bodies. I know that doesn’t sound like your idea of fun, but I want to be sure they’re dead.”

Wednesday stared at her in disgust. Is this what it comes down to? she wondered. Is this what you get if you stop worrying you might be a monster? She glanced behind her at the window, nervously. I thought I knew you. Then over at the side of the room. Comms, reactivate, she told her implant.

BING. Wednesday, please respond? It was Rachel. I’m listening. Who is Steffi, really?

The reply took a few seconds to come. Wednesday leaned against the wall beside the window, experimenting with the fabric texturing controls at the back of her jacket, seeing just how sticky she could make it go without losing its structural integrity. There was some setting called “gecko’s feet” that seemed pretty strong …

Near as I can tell, she’s an alias for Miranda Katachurian. Citizen, Novy Kurdistan, last seen eleven years ago with a criminal record as long as your arm. Wanted for questioning in connection with armed robbery charges, then vanished.

“Steffi,” Wednesday asked hesitantly, “what did you do it for?”

BING. Wednesday? Are you all right? Do you need help? Frank.

“For?” Steffi looked puzzled for a moment. Then her expression cleared. “We did it for the money, kid.”

L8R: LUV U, she replied to Frank, then glanced at Rachel’s last message as she answered Steffi.

“And you’re, uh, going to send the irrevocable go code to the R-bombers if you don’t get what you want?”

Steffi grinned. “You’re learning.” Wednesday nodded, hastily composing a final reply.

“And doesn’t it strike you that there’s something wrong about that?”

“Why should it?” Steffi stared at her. “The universe doesn’t owe me a living, and you can’t eat ideals, kid. It’s time you grew up and got over your history.”

Case closed, sent Wednesday. “I guess you’re right,” she said, leaning back against the wall as hard as she could and dialing the stickiness up to max. Then she brought up her right hand and threw underhand at Steffi. “Here, catch!” With her left hand she yanked hard on her collar, pulling the hood up and over her head and triggering the jacket’s blowout reflex. Then she waited to die.

The noise was so loud that it felt like a punch in the stomach and a slap on the ears, leaving her head ringing. A fraction of a second later there was a second noise, a gigantic whoosh, like a dinosaur sneezing. Leviathan tried to tear her from the wall with his tentacles; she could feel her arms and legs flailing in the tornado gale. Something hit her so hard she tried to scream, sending a white-hot nail of pain up her right ankle. Her ears hurt with a deep dull ache that made her want to stick knife blades into them to scratch out the source of the pain. Then the noise began to die away as the station’s pressure baffles slammed shut around the rupture, her helmet seal secured itself and inflated in a blast of canned air from the jacket vesicles, and her vision began to clear.

Wednesday gasped and tried to move, then remembered to unglue the back of her jacket. The room was a mess. There was no sign of Steffi, or the two chairs at the console, or half the racks that had cluttered the place up. An explosion of snow: they’d kept essential manuals on hard copy, and the blast and subsequent decompression had shredded and strewn the bound papers everywhere. But the window -

Wednesday looked out past shattered glass knives, out at a gulf of 40 trillion kilometers of memories and cold. Eyelids of unblinking red and green stared back at her from around an iron pupil, the graveyard of a shattered star. With an effort of will she tore her gaze away and walked carefully across the wreckage until she found the TALIGENT terminal, lying on its side, still held to the deck by a rat’s nest of cables. She bent over and carefully pulled the keys out. Then she walked over to the window and deliberately threw one of them out into the abyss. The others she pocketed — after all, the diplomats from Earth would be needing them.

As the last key disappeared, a mail window from Rachel popped up. Urgent! Wednesday, please respond! Are you hurt? Do you need help?

Wednesday ignored it and went in search of the emergency airlock kit instead. She didn’t have time to answer mail: it would probably take her most of her remaining oxygen supply to get the airlock set up so she could safely reenter the land of the living beyond the pressure bulkhead. She had to prioritize, just like Herman had shown her all those years ago, alone in the cold darkness beyond the stars.

Her friends would be waiting for her on the other side of the wall: Martin who’d helped her to hide, and Rachel who’d shown her what to do without knowing it, and Frank, who meant more to her than she was sure was sensible. They would still be there when she’d worked out what she meant to do. And they’d be there to help her when she said goodbye to home for the final time and turned her back on the iron sunrise.