Charles Stross - Iron Sunrise

“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 channels. “Intrasystem” was a bit of an understatement — Old Newfie and some of the other stations were actually light years outside the system’s Oort cloud, and the network also showed those interstellar channels that reached out across the gulf of parsecs to neighboring worlds — and the control center was hardly the core of the comms system. Most of the real action took place in a sealed server room full of silent equipment racks on the floor below. But human management demanded a hierarchy of control, and from this nerve center commands could be issued to send flash messages across interstellar space, queries to the home world, even directives to the TALIGENT defense hotline network.

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 grinned angrily. “It’s a key to the Moscow defense communications network.”

BING. Mail from Herman: Wednesday, danger, listen to Rachel.

Huh. Her eyes tracked to the console they’d been nearest. There were a number of authentication key slots in it, and it was much more primitive-looking, even crude, than the others. “I think that’s it.”

“Good guess.” Steffi kept the gun on her. “Put your key in the slot.”

“Huh?”

“I said, put your key in the slot. Or I’ll do it for you, over your dead body.”

“Okay, okay, no need to get nasty.” Wednesday leaned sideways and clicked the key she’d swiped from Hoechst’s desk into the slot. She shivered. “’Scuse me,” she said, and zipped her jacket up, then tugged the gloves over her hands. “Cold in here, isn’t it?”

“What do you think the code keys do?” Steffi asked mildly.

“Huh? They tell the bombers to commit to an attack or to cancel it, of course.” Wednesday shook her head. “We’ve just been through all this. The head ReMastered woman—” She stopped, fright and revulsion working on her together.

“Carry on,” said Steffi. She sounded tired, and Wednesday stared at her, seeing for the first time the nasty smear of goop all over her left arm.

“They’ve been lying,” Wednesday said flatly. “That’s what this is all about. The R-bombs aren’t all heading for New Dresden, some are heading for a ReMastered world. The ReMastered who took the ship were trying to stop that.”

“How interesting.” A flicker of pain crossed Steffi’s face as she turned her left hand over and opened it to reveal two keys. “Take these and insert them into slots four and eight on the same console.”

“What?” Wednesday stared at them in disbelief.

“Do it!” snapped Steffi. The gun barrel twitched at her impatiently.

“I’m doing it.” Wednesday stood up and leaned over Steffi carefully, taking the first key, moving slowly so as not to alarm her. She slid it into one of the slots Steffi had named. A diode lit up next to it, and suddenly the screen board below the keys flickered on. “Holy shit!”

“You can say that again.” A ghost of a smile flickered around Steffi’s lips. “Do you like the ReMastered, Wednesday?”

“Fuck!” She turned her head away and spat at the ice-cold deck. “You know better than that.”

BING. Mail from Rachel: Wednesday, whats going on?

“Well and good. Now do the same with the second key.”

“Okay.” Wednesday took the key and slid it into the remaining empty slot, her heart pounding with tension. She stared at it for a moment that dragged on. This is it, she thought. Suddenly possibilities seemed to open up around her, endless vistas of the possible. Horizons of power. She’d been powerless for so long it seemed almost like the natural state of existence. She turned round and glanced at Steffi, old and tired. The gun didn’t seem too significant anymore. “Would you like to tell me what you’re planning?” she asked.