Iron Sunrise

“You wait until she gets here.” The fan in the office rattled slightly, pumping tepid air in to dilute the chill. A thin layer of dust covered the desk, the visitor’s chairs, an empty watercooler.

“Mind if I sit down?” asked Martin.

“Be my guest.” Gun-boy raised an ironic eyebrow, and Martin sat down hastily before he changed his mind. Rachel stepped sideways in front of him, and he slipped an arm protectively around her waist, under the hem of her jacket.

“Can you tell us anything?” Rachel asked quietly as Martin slipped something into her waistband. “Like what this is all about?”

“No.”

“Okay.” Rachel sighed. “If that’s how you want it.” She sat down on the chair to Martin’s right and leaned against him, putting her left arm behind his shoulder. So they’re not monitoring the station protocols for traffic yet, she thought, hungry for hope. If they were, that mail from Wednesday would have set them off. She let her arm drop behind Martin’s back, then twisted her wrist round and fumbled with the object in her waistband until it went up her sleeve to mate with its companion.

Click. She felt, rather than heard, the noise. The gadget made handshake with her implants, and a countdown timer appeared in her vision: the number of seconds it would take for the gel-phase fuel cell to power up and the gadget to begin assembling itself. She’d seldom felt so naked in her life. If they’d extended the surface-piercing radar surveillance network from the ship into this room seven shades of alarm would be going off right now, and Gun-boy would put a bullet through her face long before the gadget was ready. Otherwise -

A creaking whine from the corridor a

Frank cleared his throat. “I understand,” he grunted, rubbing his wrists. He glared at her resentfully. “What now?”

“You wait.” Mathilde took a step back to stand beside Gun-boy.

“Lining up all your targets, huh?”

She cast Martin a very ugly look. “Wait for the boss. She won’t be long now.”

“You’re Frank, aren’t you? What happened?” Rachel whispered to him.

Frank grunted, and rubbed at his wrists again. “Got me early. In my room. You’re his partner?” He jerked his chin at Martin. “Thought I was the only one at first. Where are we?”

“Old Newfie. Wednesday’s station. Listen, we hid her but they — had you. She went with them.”

“Shit!” He met her eyes with an expression of terrible resignation. “You know what this means.”

Rachel gave a slight nod in the direction of the guards. “Don’t say it.”

“You can say anything you like,” Mathilde called, gri

“Fuck you!” Frank glared at her.

“Shut up.” Gun-boy pointed his machine pistol at Frank. For a tense moment Rachel was sure he would say something. The seconds stretched out into an infinitely long moment as Frank and the guard stared — then Frank slumped back in his chair.

“ ’Sokay. I can let go.” Frank glanced at her and yawned, his jaw muscles crackling. “I’m used to it — was used to it.” He rubbed his hands together, making small circling movements. Rachel tried not to show any sign of having noticed his frantic control gestures. Someone’s got a backlog of e-mail, she guessed, or itchy fingers.

They sat in silence for a couple of minutes, then a buzzing noise from along the corridor a

The doors opened. Many footsteps, moving toward the office in the curious broken rhythm of fractional gee. First in was a ski

“Rachel Mansour, from the UN, I presume?” The woman walked behind the station manager’s desk, turned the chair round, and sat down in it. “I’m very pleased to meet you.” She smiled as she reached into an outer pocket and placed a compact pistol on the desk in front of her, its barrel pointed at Rachel. “I see you’ve already met our young runaway. That will make things much simpler. Just one more person to come, then I think we’ll begin.”

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.”