Iron Sunrise

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.

EPILOGUE: HOME FRONT

Home. It was getting to be a strange place, as alien as a hotel room on a distant planet. Rachel walked into the hall and dropped her shoulder bag, blinking tiredly: it was still three in the morning by the shipboard time of the Gloriana even though it was two in the afternoon there in Geneva, and the cumulative effects of switching from the hundred-kilosecond diplomatic clock back to a terrestrial time zone was going to give her bad jet lag.

Behind her, Martin yawned hugely. “How’s it look?” he asked.

“It’s all there.” She ran a finger along the sideboard tiredly. Something buzzed in the next room, a household dust precipitator in need of a new filter or a robot scavenger with a damaged knee. “Place hasn’t burned down while we’ve been away.” She stared with distaste at the bulletin board on the wall, flashing red with notices of overdue bills. “Really got to get a proper housing agent who understands three-month trips at short notice. Last time I was away this long they sent the polis round to break down the door in case I’d died or something.”

“You’re not dead.” Martin yawned again and let the front door swing shut. “I’m not dead. I just feel that way…”

Three months away from home had built up an enormous backlog of maintenance tasks, and Rachel couldn’t face them just then. “Listen. I’m going to have a shower, then go to bed,” she said. “You want to stay up and order some food in, be my guest. Or check the bills. But it can wait until tomorrow. Right?”

“You have a point.” Martin shrugged and leaned the big suitcase against the wall next to a hideously ugly wooden statue of the prophet Yusuf Smith that Rachel had picked up in a casbah somewhere in Morocco a few years earlier. “I was going to message Wednesday, see how she and Frank are doing, but — bed first.”

“Yeah.” Rachel stumbled up the steps to the mezzanine, dropping her sandals and clothes as she went, and gratefully registered that the house automatics had changed the sheets and freshened the comforter. “Home sweet home, safe at last.” After weeks of tension and the paranoid days at the mercy of the ReMastered, it seemed almost too good to be true.

She returned to consciousness slowly, half-aware of a pounding headache and a nauseated stomach, in conjunction with sore leg muscles and crumpled bedding and a thick, warm sense of exhaustion that pervaded her body as if she’d been drugged. Someday they’ll develop a drug for jet lag that really works, she thought fuzzily before another thought intruded. Where was Martin?

“Ow!” she moaned, opening her eyes.

Martin was sitting up in bed watching her, concerned. “You awake? I’ve been checking the mail, and we’ve got a problem.”

“Shit!” Rachel came to full consciousness in an instant, exhausted but painfully aware that she’d screwed up. “What is it?”

“Something about a meeting you’re meant to be in later today. Like, in an hour’s time. I nearly missed it — it’s directed to the household, flagged as low priority. What could it be?”

“Shit! It’s a stitch-up. Who is it?”

Martin blinked at the screen on the wardrobe door. “Something to do with the Entertainments and Culture Pecuniary Oversight Committee?” he asked, looking puzzled.

“Double shit!” A horrible sense of deja vu gripped her as she tried to sit up. “What time is it?”

“It’s two in the afternoon.” Martin yawned. “Let me forward it to you.”

Rachel read fast. “Departmental audit,” she said tersely. “I’m going to have to get into headquarters, in a hurry.”

Martin blinked. “I thought you’d taken care of that nonsense.”

“Me? I’ve been away. Thought you might have noticed.” She frowned.

“Leaving the fox in charge of the henhouse, it would seem. I wonder if my sources have found anything out about her…”

Bleary-eyed and tired, she spawned a couple of search agents to filter her mail — both the public accounts and a couple of carefully anonymized private ones.

“Looks like the asshole in Ents is acting up. Since I missed some kind of audit investigation six weeks ago, she managed to file a default reprimand against me. She’s gotten wind I’m back in town and is moving to file criminal malfeasance charges, embezzling or misuse of funds, or something equally spurious. She’s ru

“I’ll call you a pod.” Martin was already out of bed. “Any idea what she’s got against you?”

“I don’t know—” Rachel froze. The search had stopped, highlighting something new and alarming. “Oops! Head office are pissed.”

“Head office?”

“Black Chamber, not Entertainments and Culture. They don’t want her digging.” Rachel began to smile. “ ‘Stop her,’ they say. They don’t say how.”

“Take care,” said Martin, a flicker of concern on his face. “You don’t want to overreact.”

“Overreact?” She raised an eyebrow. “The bitch tried to get me slung out on my ass, she tried to obstruct a UXB operation, and she’s trying to file criminal charges against me, and I’m overreacting?” She paused over the arms locker at the back of the closet. “No, that would be overreacting. Don’t want to get blood in the carpet.”

He stared at her. “Did I just hear what I think I heard? You’re going to take her down?”

“Yeah. Although I don’t think I’ll need to use violence. That would be unsubtle, and I swore off unsubtle, oh, about thirty seconds ago.” Rachel peeled a transdermal patch onto the inside of her left elbow. Her gaze turned to the open case by the bedroom door, full of items she’d acquired over the course of the cruise on the Romanov. Gradually she began to smile. “I’ve got to make a couple of calls. This should be fun…”

The UN headquarters campus hadn’t changed visibly in Rachel’s absence — the same neoclassical glass-and-steel skyscraper, looming over old Geneva’s stone arteries and quaint domes, the same big statues of founders Otto von Bismarck and Tim Berners-Lee sitting out front in the plaza. Rachel headed into the lobby, looking around tensely. There was a civil cop standing by the ornate reception throne, talking to the human greeter there. Rachel nodded in their direction then moved on toward the antique elevator bank, feeling reassured. I wonder how George is doing? she asked herself as the doors slid open. Handling the aftermath of the New Moscow cleanup. Big headache, that.