Iron Sunrise

“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 ru

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

“As far as I know, our only expert on the layout of this station is currently ru

“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 cha

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 gri