Charles Stross - Iron Sunrise

“What do you need?” Alice asked, suddenly intent. Frank focused on her expression in a sudden moment of scrutiny: eyes widening, cheekbones sharp under dark skin, breath speeding -

“I need the thing physically up here, so I can handshake with it. I didn’t know we were going to be bottled up here when—” She shook her head in the direction of the stairwell.

“How big is it?” Alice demanded.

“Tiny — it’s the second memory card in my camera.” She held her thumb and forefinger apart. “Looks just like a normal solid-state plug. Blue packaging.”

“Your camera doesn’t do real time?” Frank asked.

“I’ve seen it and it does; it’s got local memory backup against network outages,” Alice said tersely. “Let me guess. You’ve got the channel in your camera so you can bypass local censorship, shoot in real time, and have the outtake saved straight to your editor’s desk? That’s got to be costing someone an arm and a leg. All right, this camera is where, exactly?”

“Room hundred and seventeen, floor two. Corner window with a balcony.”

“Hmm. Did you leave the balcony door open?”

“I think so — why?”

Alice looked over the waist-high safety wall, then backed away from the edge. “I’m not climbing down there. But a bird — hmm. Think I’ve got a sampler head left. If it can eject the card … you want me to have a go? Willing to stake half your bandwidth to me if I can liberate it?”

“Guess so. It’s got about six terabits left. Fifty-fifty split.” Thelma nodded. “How about it?”

“Six terabits—” Frank shook his head in surprise. He hated to think how much it must have cost to haul those milligrams of entangled quantum dots across the endless light years between here and Turku by slower-than-light star-wisp. Once used they were gone for good, coherence destroyed by the process that allowed them to teleport the state of a single bit between points in causally connected space-time. STL shipping prices started at a million dollaros per kilogram-parsec; it was many orders of magnitude more expensive than FTL, and literally took decades or centuries of advance planning to set up. But if it could get them a secure, instantaneous link out onto the interstellar backbone nets …

“Yeah, let’s try it,” said Alice. The noise from beyond the balcony was getting I louder.

Frank saw that Alice was already rooting through her bag of tricks. She surfaced with a translucent disc the size of her hand, trailing short tentacles that disquietingly resembled those of a box jellyfish. “I think this should do the trick.”

“Is it strong enough?” Thelma asked edgily. “If that thing drops it, we’ll never—”

“It’ll do,” Alice called. She flipped it upside down and coupled it to its small propane tank. “With you in a minute, just as soon as I’ve gassed it up.”

“Okay.”

Phibul groaned again, then groaned louder; Frank turned and knelt by him. “Easy, man. Easy. You’re going to be all right. Phibul?”

“My—” Phibul tried to raise one hand. Frank caught it, torn between sympathy and a strong urge to go and take a look over the parapet at the plaza. The crowd noise was enormous. Alice had stopped tracking her airborne birds, and they’d wandered off-station; Frank had a dizzying, unstable view down side streets, watching a sea of heads flowing down the Unity Boulevard, then across the roofline of a bank to another road, where boxy gray vehicles were moving purposefully -

“Alice!” he shouted, sitting up: “Don’t launch it!”

Alice looked at him abstractedly as she flipped the trigger on her tripod and sent the discus spinning into the air above the rooftop. “What did you say?” she called, and for a desperate moment Frank thought it meant that everything would be all right, that the gray-painted vehicles and the brightly spinning disc and the sunburst flashes in the corner of his eye didn’t mean anything. But the window in his left eye disappeared, all the same. The laser beam skybounced from the antimissile battery to the fighting mirror above the bank building was invisible to the naked eye, and the fighting mirror sure didn’t care about journalistic credentials or, indeed, who owned the recce drones floating high above the city. All it knew about was friend, enemy, and counterbattery fire. “Take cover!” Frank yelled, just as the top of Alice’s head vanished in a spray of red mist with a horrible popping sound, like an egg exploding in a microwave oven.

For a minute or so Frank blanked. There was a horrible noise, a screeching roar in his ears — blood on his hands, blood on his knees, blood everywhere, an ocean to Phibul’s dried-up creek. He was dizzy and cold and the hand holding his didn’t seem to help. It seemed to want to let go. Alice in the bar downstairs. Alice explaining the facts of life to him after bribing a government official, joking about the honeymoon suite when they moved in. Alice flying drones over the cityscape far below, spotting traffic, spotting likely hot spots with a look on her face like -

There was shouting beyond the balcony. Shouting, and a grinding metallic squeal he’d heard before, down below. Alice was dead and he was stranded with a dried-up swimming pool, a stranger from Turku, and no way to make the fuckers pay. No real-time link.

“You can’t do anything for her.” There was a hand on his shoulder, small and hard — he shook it loose, then pushed himself to his knees dizzily.

“I know,” he heard someone else say. “I wish—” His voice cracked. He didn’t really know what that person wished anymore: it wasn’t really relevant, was it? He hadn’t been in love with Alice, but he’d trusted her; she was the brains of the operation, the wise older head who knew what the hell to do. This wasn’t supposed to happen. The head of mission wasn’t supposed to die in the field, brains splattered all over the roof by -

“Keep down ,” Thelma whispered. “I think they’re going to start now.”

“Start?” he asked, shivering.

A hush fell across the square, then the noise of the crowd redoubled. And there was another sound; a pattering, like rain falling onto concrete from a clear blue sky, accompanied by a crackling roar. Then the screams. “Alice was right,” said Thelma, shuddering and crouching down below the parapet. Sweating and whey-faced, she looked the way Frank felt. “It’s the season for bullets.”

Below them, in the packed dusty square before the government buildings, the storm drains began to fill with blood.

Svengali had drunk half a bottle of single malt by the time Frank reached the massacre. His throat was hoarse, but he hadn’t stopped for long enough to ask for a refill. It hurt too much to pause. Now he held his glass out. “I don’t know how your liver copes with that.”

“He’s got the guts of a rat,” slurred Eloise: “hepatic alcohol dehydrogenase pathway and all.” She stood up, wobbling slightly. “’Scuse me, guys, but this isn’t my night for partying after all. Nice of you to invite me and maybe some other time and all, but I think I’m going to be having nightmares tonight.” She hit the release button on the doorframe and was gone into the twilight of the ship’s crew accommodation deck.

Svengali shook his head as he pulled the door shut. “And here I was, hoping for a threesome,” he said. He tipped a generous measure into Frank’s glass, then put the rapidly emptying bottle down. “So, the troops massacred the demonstrators. What has this got to do with those guys, whoever they are?”

“The—” Frank swallowed bile. “Remember the spook woman? She came back, after the massacre, with soldiers. And Thelma’s camera. She let Thelma scan the courtyard, then the guards sat her down with a gun at her head and the spook dictated my copy to me. Which I signed and submitted under my own name.”