Charles Stross - Iron Sunrise

“Anything special?” asked Svengali.

“Just a feeling.” She put the bottle down. “They’re flakes.”

“Flakes? I’ve done flakes.” Svengali shrugged. “We’ve got fucking Peter Pans and Lolitas on the manifest. Flakes don’t go crazy over a little cigar smoke in a red-eye bar.”

“They’re not normal flakes,” she insisted.

“I think he’d have killed me if she hadn’t stopped him,” Frank managed to say. His hand holding the glass was shaking, rattling quietly on the bar top.

“Probably not.” Svengali finished his shot glass. “Just rendered you unconscious until the cleanup team got here.” He raised an eyebrow at Eloise. “Is there a panic button under the bar, or were you just masturbating furiously?”

“Panic button, putz.” She paused. “Say, nobody told me about any ersatz juvies. How do I tell if they come in my bar?”

“Go by the room tag manifest for their ages. Don’t assume kids are as young as they look. Or old folks, for that matter. You come from somewhere that restricts life extension rights, don’t you?” Svengali shrugged. “At least most of the Lolitas have a handle on how to behave in public, unlike dumb-as-a-plank there. Damn good thing, that, it can be really embarrassing when the eight-year-old you’re trying to distract with a string of brightly dyed handkerchiefs turns out to have designed the weaving machine that made them. Anyway, who are those people?”

“One minute.” Eloise turned away and did something with the bar slate. “That’s funny,” she said. “They’re all from someplace called Tonto. En route to Newpeace. Either of you ever heard of it?”

There was a dull clank as Frank dropped his glass on the floor.

“Oh shit,” he said.

Svengali stared at him. “You dropped your drink. Funny, I had you pegged for a man with bottle. You going to tell me what’s bugging you, big boy?”

“I’ve met people from there before.” He glanced at the mirror behind the bar, taking in the table, the five clean-cut types playing cards and studiously ignoring him, their quasi-uniform appearance and robust backwoods build. “Them. Here. Oh shit . I thought the Romanov was only making a refueling stop, but it must be a real port of call.”

An elbow prodded him in the ribs; he found Svengali staring up at him, speculation writ large on the off-duty clown’s face. “Come on, back to my room. I’ve got a bottle stashed in my trunk; you can tell me all about it. Eloise, room party after your shift?”

“I’m off in ten minutes, or whenever Lucid relieves me,” she said. Glancing at him, interestedly: “Is it a good story?”

“A story?” Frank echoed. “You could say.” He glanced at the table. A flashback to icy terror prickled across his skin, turned his guts to water. “We’d better leave quietly.” The woman, Mathilde, the one in charge, was watching him in one of the gilt-framed mirrors. Her expression wasn’t so much unfriendly as disinterested, like a woman trying to make up her mind whether or not to swat a buzzing insect. “Before they really notice us.”

“Now?” Svengali hopped down off his stool and got an arm under Frank’s shoulder. He’d had rather a lot to drink, but for some reason Svengali seemed almost sober. Frank, for his part, wasn’t sober so much as so frightened that it felt like it. He let Svengali lead him through the door, toward a lift cube, then from it down a narrow uncarpeted corridor to a small, cramped crew stateroom. “Come on. Not much farther,” said Svengali. “You want that drink?”

“I want—” Frank shivered. “Yeah,” he said. “Preferably somewhere where they don’t know it’s my room.”

“Somewhere.” Svengali keyed the door open, waved Frank down at one end of the narrow bunk, and shut the door. He rummaged in one of the overhead lockers and pulled out a metal flask and a pair of collapsible shot glasses. “So how come you know those guys?”

“I’m not sure.” Frank grimaced. “But they’re from Tonto, and going to New-peace. I had a really bad time on Newpeace once…”

Frank and Alice watched the beginnings of the demonstration from the top of the Demosthenes Hotel in downtown Samara. The top of the hotel was a flat synrock expanse carpeted in well-manicured grass, now browning at the edges. The swimming pool and bar in the center of the lawn was drained, water long since diverted for emergency irrigation. In fact, most of the hotel staff had gone — conscripted into the Peace Enforcement Organization, fled to the hills, joined the rebels, who knew what.

It wasn’t quite Frank’s first field job, but it was close enough that Alice, a tanned, blond, hard-as-nails veteran of many botched campaigns, had taken him under her wing and given him a clear-cut — some would say micromanaged — set of instructions for how to run the shop in her absence. Then she’d taken off into the heart of darkness in search of the real story, leaving Frank to cool his heels on the roof of the hotel. She’d returned from her latest expedition three days earlier, riding the back of a requisitioned militia truck with a crateful of camera drones and a magic box that took in water at one end and emitted something not entirely unlike cheap beer at the other — as long as the concentrate cans held out. Frank welcomed her back with mixed emotions. On the one hand, her tendency to use him as a gofer rankled slightly; on the other, he was slowly going out of his skull with a mixture of boredom and paranoia, minding the shop on his own and hoping like hell that nothing happened while the boss was away.

To get the hotel roof (right on the edge of City Square, empty and untended in the absence of foreign business travelers and visiting out-of-town politicos) they’d had to pay off the owner, a twitchy-eyelidded off-world entrepreneur called Vadim Trofenko, with untraceable slugs of buttery, high-purity gold. Nothing else would do in these troubled times, it seemed. Getting hold of the stuff had been a royal pain in the ass, and had entailed Alice going on a week-long trip up to orbit, leaving Frank to mind the bureau all on his lonesome. But at least the agency’s money was buying them the penthouse suite, however neglected it was. Most of the other hacks who’d descended like flies on the injured flank of the city of Samara to watch the much-ballyhooed descent into civil war at firsthand had discovered that they could find accommodation for neither love nor money.

Frank had hung in while his boss was away, hammering out hangovers and human-angle commentaries by day, and descending like some kind of pain-feeding vampire from his rooftop every night to walk the streets and talk to people in the cafes and bars and on boulevard corners, soaking up the local color and nodding earnestly at their grievances. Lately he’d taken to hanging out in the square with a recorder, where the students and unemployed gathered to chant their slogans at the uncaring ranks of police and the blank facade of the provincial assembly buildings. He did this long into the night, before staggering back to the big empty hotel bed to crash out. But not this morning.

“I’ve got a bad feeling, kid,” Alice had told him. She stared pensively out at the square. “A really bad feeling. Look to the back door; you wouldn’t want to catch your ass in it when they slam it shut. Somebody’s going to blink, and when the shit hits the fan…” She gestured at the window, out at the huge poster that covered most of the opposite wall of the square. “It’s the tension, mostly. It seems to be slackening. And that’s always a bad sign.”

Big Bill’s avuncular face beamed down, jovial and friendly as anyone’s favorite uncle, guarded from the protesters by a squad of riot police, day and night. Despite the sentries, someone had managed to fly a handheld drone into the dead politician’s right eye, splashing a red paint spot across his iris in a grisly reminder of what had happened to the last elected President.