Iron Sunrise

by Charles Stross

For Olivia and Howard

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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Thanks due to: Emmett O’Brien, Caitlin Blasdell, Andrew Wilson, Simon Bisson, Cory Doctorow, Ken McLeod, and James Nicoll. In particular I’d like to single out Emmett, for going far beyond where any reader might be expected to; Caitlin, my agent, for asking the questions that needed asking; and Geoff Miller, for an inspiring quote.

PROLOGUE: WEDNESDAY CHILD

IMPACT: T plus 1392 days. 18 hours, 09 minutes

Wednesday ran through the darkened corridors of the station, her heart pounding. Behind her, unseen yet sensed as a constant menacing presence, ran her relentless pursuer — a dog. The killhound wasn’t supposed to be here: neither was she. Old Newfoundland Four was in the process of final evacuation, the last ship supposed to have undocked from bay green fourteen minutes ago — an icon tattooed on the inside of her left eye showed her this, time counting negative — heading out for the nearest flat space-time for the jump to safety. The launch schedule took no notice of tearaway teens, crazed Dresdener captains with secret orders, and gestapo dogs with murder burning in their gun-sight eyes. She panted desperately, nerves straining on the edge of panic, lungs burning in the thin, still air. Sixteen years old and counting, and if she didn’t find a way to elude the dog and climb back to the docking hub soon -

She didn’t want to be there when the wavefront arrived.

Three-point-six light years away, and almost three-point-six years ago, all two hundred million inhabitants of a nondescript McWorld called Moscow had died. Moscow, an introverted if not entirely rural polity, had been in the midst of political upheavals and a nasty trade dispute with New Dresden, something boring to do with biodiversity and free trade, engineering agribusiness and exchange rate controls. Old Newfoundland Four, Portal Station Eleven, was the last remaining sovereign territory of the Federal Republic of Moscow. They’d hauled down the flag in the hub concourse four hours ago, sounded the last retreat with a final blare of brass trumpetry, and marched slowly to the docking hub. Game over, nation dissolved. There’d been a misunderstanding, and Dresdener warships had impounded a freighter from Moscow. Pistol shots fired across a crowded docking hub. Then someone — to this day, the successor Dresdener government hotly denied responsibility, even though they’d executed their predecessors just to be sure — had hit Moscow Prime with a proscribed device.

Wednesday didn’t remember Moscow very clearly. Her father was a nitrogen cycle engineer, her mother a protozoan ecology specialist: they’d lived on the station since she was four, part of the team charged with keeping the life-support heart of the huge orbital complex pumping away. But now the heart was still. There was no point in pretending anymore. In less than a day the shock front of Moscow Prime’s funeral pyre would slam past, wreaking havoc with any habitat not shielded by a good thirty meters of metal and rock. Old Newfie, drifting in stately orbit around a planetless brown dwarf, was simply too big and too flimsy to weather a supernova storm at a range of just over a parsec.

Wednesday came to a crossroads. She stopped, panting, and tried to orient herself, biting back a wail of despair. Left, right, up, or down? Sliding down to the habitat levels of the big wheel had been a mistake. There were elevators and emergency tunnels all the way up to the hub, and all the way down to the heavy zone. The central post office, traffic control, customs, and bioisolation were all located near the maintenance core at the hub. But the top of the pressurized wheel rim was sixty meters above her, then there was another hundred meters of spoke to climb before she could get to the hub, and the dog would sense her if she used the lifts. There was too much centrifugal force down here, dragging at her like real gravity; she could turn her head sharply without feeling dizzy, and her feet felt like lead. Climbing would be painfully slow at first, the Coriolis force a constant tug trying to pull her sideways off the ladder to safety.

Dim lighting panels glowed along the ceiling, turned down to Moonlight Seven. The vines in the small hubgarden at the center of the crossroads drooped, suffering already from eighteen hours of darkness. Everything down here was dead or dying, like the body she’d found in the public toilet two decks up and three segments over. When she realized the dog was still on her tail she’d headed back home to the apartment she’d shared with her parents and younger brother, hoping the scent would confuse the hound while she sneaked away onto one of the other evacuation ships. But now she was trapped down here with it, and what she should really have done was head for the traffic control offices and barricade the doors -

Her training nudged her forward. This sector was given over to administration offices, station police, customs and trade monitors, and the small clump of services that fed them during their work shifts. Darkened office doorways hung open, unattended, dust already gathering on chairs and desks. Very deliberately, she stepped into the police station. Behind the counter a public notice poster scrolled endlessly, STATION CLOSED. Grunting with effort, she clambered over the chest-high barrier, then rolled down behind it.

The antique leather satchel Herman had told her to take banged against her hip; she cursed it and what it had brought her to. It was half-full of paper: rich, slightly creamy fabric-weave paper, written on with real ink that didn’t swim and mutate into different fonts when you stroked the margin. Dumb matter, the sort of medium you used when you really, really didn’t want some tame infowar worm to unpick your traffic. Nestled at the bottom of the bag was a locked cassette full of molecular storage — records from the station customs post. Records that somebody thought were important enough to kill for.

She twitched a ring, dialing the lights up to Twilight Three, and looked around the cop shop. She’d been there once before, when Constable Barca had given her year a tour of the premises. That had been a pointed adult hint about how to stay out of trouble. Things were different now, the offices and detention areas and waiting rooms all gaping like empty sockets in a skull. The administration thought they knew all about teenagers, but they were wrong. She’d seen the locked cupboard in the ready room and got Pete to front a question about it: sticky foam and pepper gas, breathing masks and handcuffs in case of civil disorder. In case of riot, break glass. Old Newfie was mostly peaceful; there’d been just one murder and only a handful of fights in the past thirty years. Admin thought a SWAT team was what you sent to deal with a wasp’s nest in a ventilation duct. She paused at the locked cabinet, dumped the satchel, and grabbed something that looked more useful.

Claws rattled on the floor outside the office, and paused.