Iron Sunrise

IMPACT: T plus 1392 days, 17 hours, 30 minutes

“What do you mean, she’s missing?” Constable Ito said irritably. “Can’t you keep your children under—”

The tall, stooped man ran his fingers through his thi

“Home?” Ito pushed his visor up and stared at the worried father. “She couldn’t be that stupid. Could she?”

“Kids!” It came out like a curse, though it wasn’t intended as one. “No, I don’t think she’s that stupid. But she’s not on the ship, either, or at least she’s turned off her implants — Constable Klein sent out a broadcast ping for her an hour ago. And she seemed upset about something this morning.”

“Shit. Implants, huh? I’ll put out a notice, all right? Things are insane around here right now. Have you any idea what it’s like trying to rehouse fifteen thousand people? She’ll probably turn up somewhere she isn’t meant to be, crew service areas or something. Or decided to hitch a lift on Sikorsky’s Dream for the hell of it, before she undocked. She’ll turn up, that I promise you. Full ID, please?”

“Victoria Strowger. Age sixteen. ID 3 of that name.”

“Ah, okay.” Ito made an odd series of gestures with the rings on his right hand, tracing runes in copspace. “Okay, if she’s somewhere aboard this pile of junk, that should find her. If not, it’ll escalate to a general search in about ten minutes. Now if you’ll excuse me until then—”

“Certainly.” Morris Strowger sidled away from the Constable’s desk. “She’s probably just dropped her badge down the toilet,” he muttered to himself. Behind him the next in the queue, an elderly woman, was haranguing the Constable about the size of her accommodation module: she refused to believe that her apartment — one human-sized cell in a five-thousand-person honeycomb of refugee pods slung in the cargo bay of the New Dresden freighter Long March — was all any of them would get until arrival in the nearest Septagon system. The relocation was paid for, gratis, courtesy of the (new) New Dresden government, and the residual assets of the Republic of Moscow’s balance of trade surplus, but the pods weren’t exactly the presidential suite of a luxury liner. 1 hope Vicki gets tired of hiding soon. Maybe it’ll do her some good if the Constabulary find her first and run her in. Teach her not to go looking for trouble in the middle of an emergency …

IMPACT: T plus 1390 days

Take a girl like that. Pallid complexion, cropped mop of black hair, pale blue eyes: waif or demon? She was a bit of a loner. Preternaturally smart for her age: her parents pla

Wednesday was a misfit. Like misfits from time immemorial, she’d had an invisible friend since she was young: they played together, exploring the espionage envelope. Elevator surfing. Duct diving — with an oxy mask; you could never tell what might be on the other side of a sealed bulkhead. But most kids didn’t have invisible friends who talked back via the expensive net implants their parents had shelled out for, much less taught them skills like steganography, traffic analysis, tail spotting, and Dumpster diving. And most kids grew out of having invisible friends, whereas Wednesday didn’t. That was because most misfit kids’ invisible friends were imaginary. Wednesday’s wasn’t.

When she was younger she’d told her brother Jeremy about her friend, who was called Herman: but Jerm had blabbed to Mum, and the result was a tense inquisition and trips to the network engineers, then the counselor’s office. When she realized what was expected of her she denied everything, of course, but not abruptly; Herman told her how to do it so as to allay their suspicions. You’re never alone with schizophrenia, he’d joked mordantly, a

Everyone had known evacuation day was coming for months. They’d known about it to the day, to the hour in fact, since a couple of weeks after the Incident. The ships began to arrive a week ahead of zero hour. Normally Old Newfie only received one liner a month, clearing via customs to transfer passengers and cargo to the short-haul local freighters that bounced back and forth across the last parsec. But right now all the docking bays on the hub were extended, piers pressurized like great gray hagfish sucking the guts out of the station.

The surviving in-system freighters had come home for the final time two weeks earlier, rerigged with ferry tanks for the final flight. Everyone huddled together on the one station, thirty thousand souls drifting above the ecliptic of a gloomy red gas giant eight times the mass of Jupiter. They had fuel — that was what Old Newfoundland Four was in the business of selling — six hundred megatons of refined methane ice bunkered in a tank farm streaming kilometers behind the axle of the big wheel. And they were close enough to one of the regular trade routes between Septagon system and the core worlds to pick up passing trade, close enough to act as an interchange for local traffic bound for Moscow. They were still profitable and self-sufficient, had been even since before the disaster. But they couldn’t stay there — not with the iron sunrise coming. The liner Sikorsky’s Dream nuzzled up to the hub, taking VIPs and the governor and his staff. Behind it hung two freighters from New Dresden, sent in yet another symbolic gesture of reconciliation. They looked like pregnant midwife toads, blistered with bulky refugee pods hanging from their cargo spines, steerage for tens of thousands of passengers on the three-week, forty-light year journey to Septagon for resettlement.

Even Septagon would be uncomfortably close to the shock front, but it was the best relocation center on offer. There was money enough to house and reskill everyone, and a governing polity that actively courted immigration. It would be a chance to draw a line under the incident, to look to the future, and to turn away from the dull despair and the cloud of mourning that had hovered over the station since news of the Zero Incident arrived three and a half years ago. There had been suicides then, and more than one near riot; the station was haunted by a thousand ghosts for every one alive. It was no fit place to raise a child.