Charles Stross - Iron Sunrise

“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 running a board of inquiry right now. If I don’t get there—”

“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.

The dossier on Madam Chairman that had been sitting in her mailbox — as per her back-channel requests, pulling in favors while she was away — was rather interesting, albeit increasingly worrying when she thought about the implications. Rising star, come out of nowhere, promoted rapidly, rivals recanting or resigning in disgrace or meeting with disaster: it was all a bit carnivorous for the normally laid-back UN, and to have a desk monster like that aiming squarely at her raised all sorts of nasty questions. Especially when you started asking where she’d gotten the money to buy that big house on the lakeshore …

The dossier wasn’t the only thing Rachel found in her inbox when she ran a search. Formal notice of a disciplinary tribunal, filed that morning with a hearing scheduled for early afternoon, was not exactly the sort of thing she expected to find mixed in with the bills — not when it could have been sent direct to her phone and flagged as a priority item. She paused outside the committee room, composing her face in a careful smile, then opened the door.

“—Has shown no sign of compliance with the designated administrative orders in spite of disciplinary notices delivered four months, three months, and most recently two days ago—” The speaker paused. “Yes?”

Rachel smiled. “Hello, Gilda.” Madam Chairwoman sat up straight and stared at her. Two yes-men to either side, and a secretary-recorder, and some gray-faced executive from accounts who’d been invited to witness all followed suit. “Sorry I’m late, but if you wanted to get my attention, you really ought to have mailed me direct rather than disguising the summons as a laundry bill.”

“Hello, Rachel .” Madam Chairman smiled coldly. “We were just discussing your negligent attitude to departmental procedures. So good of you to furnish us with a further example.”