Charles Stross - Iron Sunrise

She stopped as she saw a shadow of a frown cross Steffi’s face, and forced herself to shrug, miming disinterest. Suddenly her heart was pounding and her palms sweating. She slowly stood up and, when Steffi said nothing, walked toward one side of the window. As she did so, she waited for the solar nebula to vanish from the view, leaving nothing but a scattering of stars across the blackness. Then she twisted a control tab in one jacket pocket. It stiffened around her, waistband tightening and sealing against her pressure leggings under the lacy trousers. Black against a black background, she thought, taking deep breaths. She ran a hand through her hair and surreptitiously popped the seal that held her hood closed inside the collar of her jacket. Then she turned to face Steffi. “What do you want?” she asked as casually as she could manage.

Steffi chuckled, a deeply ugly sound. “I want about, oh, 50 million in bearer bonds, a yacht with independent jump capability, and some hostages to see me out of the immediate vicinity — oh, and that bitch’s head on a trophy plaque. Along with the guy who killed Sven. He won’t be coming back. What the hell did you think, kid? We were in this for the good of our souls?” She sat up. “You still listening in, Rachel?”

Martin replied. “She’s trying to find someone to talk to on Earth,” he said diffidently. “They’ve got to authenticate her before she can tell them what the situation is—”

“Bullshit!” Steffi snorted. “I’ll give you one hour, no more. At the end of an hour, if you aren’t making the right noises, you can kiss Dresden and Newpeace goodbye. If the answer’s yes, I’ll tell you who to deposit the bonds with and we can discuss the next step, namely transport. The TALIGENT terminal stays with me — it’s a causal channel, you know it’ll decohere at the first jump, but until then you’ll know where I am.” She looked thoughtful. “As a first step, though, you can bring me Hoechst’s head, and the head of the scumbag who killed Sven. Not attached to their bodies. I know that doesn’t sound like your idea of fun, but I want to be sure they’re dead.”

Wednesday stared at her in disgust. Is this what it comes down to? she wondered. Is this what you get if you stop worrying you might be a monster? She glanced behind her at the window, nervously. I thought I knew you. Then over at the side of the room. Comms, reactivate, she told her implant.

BING.Wednesday, please respond? It was Rachel. I’m listening. Who is Steffi, really?

The reply took a few seconds to come. Wednesday leaned against the wall beside the window, experimenting with the fabric texturing controls at the back of her jacket, seeing just how sticky she could make it go without losing its structural integrity. There was some setting called “gecko’s feet” that seemed pretty strong …

Near as I can tell, she’s an alias for Miranda Katachurian. Citizen, Novy Kurdistan, last seen eleven years ago with a criminal record as long as your arm. Wanted for questioning in connection with armed robbery charges, then vanished.

“Steffi,” Wednesday asked hesitantly, “what did you do it for?”

BING. Wednesday? Are you all right? Do you need help? Frank.

“For?” Steffi looked puzzled for a moment. Then her expression cleared. “We did it for the money, kid.”

L8R: LUV U, she replied to Frank, then glanced at Rachel’s last message as she answered Steffi.

“And you’re, uh, going to send the irrevocable go code to the R-bombers if you don’t get what you want?”

Steffi grinned. “You’re learning.” Wednesday nodded, hastily composing a final reply.

“And doesn’t it strike you that there’s something wrong about that?”

“Why should it?” Steffi stared at her. “The universe doesn’t owe me a living, and you can’t eat ideals, kid. It’s time you grew up and got over your history.”

Case closed, sent Wednesday. “I guess you’re right,” she said, leaning back against the wall as hard as she could and dialing the stickiness up to max. Then she brought up her right hand and threw underhand at Steffi. “Here, catch!” With her left hand she yanked hard on her collar, pulling the hood up and over her head and triggering the jacket’s blowout reflex. Then she waited to die.

The noise was so loud that it felt like a punch in the stomach and a slap on the ears, leaving her head ringing. A fraction of a second later there was a second noise, a gigantic whoosh, like a dinosaur sneezing. Leviathan tried to tear her from the wall with his tentacles; she could feel her arms and legs flailing in the tornado gale. Something hit her so hard she tried to scream, sending a white-hot nail of pain up her right ankle. Her ears hurt with a deep dull ache that made her want to stick knife blades into them to scratch out the source of the pain. Then the noise began to die away as the station’s pressure baffles slammed shut around the rupture, her helmet seal secured itself and inflated in a blast of canned air from the jacket vesicles, and her vision began to clear.

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.

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.