Charles Stross - Iron Sunrise

“You—” Svengali’s eyes narrowed. “Isn’t that unethical?”

“So is threatening to execute hostages. What would you do in my shoes?”

“Hmm.” The clown topped off his own glass and took a full mouthful. “So you sent it, in order to…”

“Yeah. But it didn’t work.” He fell silent. Nothing was going to make him go into the next bit, the way they’d cuffed him, stuck needles full of interface busters in his arm to kill off his implants, and flipped him on his stomach to convulse, unable to look away or even close his eyes while they gut-shot Phibul and left him to bleed out, while two of the soldiers raped Thelma, then cut off her screams and then her breasts with their bayonets. Of the three of them, only Frank’s agency had bought him a full war correspondent’s insurance policy.

It had been the beginning of a living nightmare for Frank, a voyage through the sewers of the New Settlement’s concentration camps that only ended nine months later, when the bastards concluded that ensuring his silence was unnecessary and the ransom from his insurers was a bigger asset than his death through destructive labor. “I think they thought I was sleeping with her,” he said fuzzily.

“So you got away? They released you?”

“No: I ended up in the camps. They didn’t realize at first, the Newpeace folk who supported the Peace Enforcement, that those camps were meant for everyone, not just the fractious unemployed and the right-to-land agitators. But sooner or later everyone ended up there — everyone except the security apparat and the off-planet mercenaries the provisional government hired to run the machine. Who were all smartly turned-out, humorless, efficient, fast — like those kids in the bar. Just like them. And then there were the necklaces.”

“Necklaces?” Svengali squinted. “Are you shitting me?”

“No.” Frank shuddered and took a mouthful of whisky. “Try to pull it off, try to go somewhere you’re not supposed to, or just look at a guard wrong, and it’ll take your head off.” He rubbed the base of his throat, unconsciously. And then there was Processing Site Administrator Voss, but let’s not go there. “They killed three thousand people in the square, you know that? But they killed another two million in those camps over the next three years. And the fuckers got away with it. Because anyone who knows about them is too shit-scared to do anything. And it all happened a long time ago and a long way away. The first thing they did was pin down all the causal channels, take control of any incoming STL freighters, and subject all real-time communications in and out of the system to censorship. You can emigrate — they don’t mind that — but only via slower-than-light. Emigrants talk, but most people don’t pay attention to decades-old news. It’s just not current anymore,” he added bitterly. “When they decided to cash in my insurance policy they deported me via slower-than-light freighter. I spent twenty years in cold sleep: by the time I arrived nobody wanted to know what I’d been through.”

And it had been a long time before he’d been ready to seek the media out for himself: he’d spent six months in a hospital relearning that if a door was open, it meant he could go through it if he wanted, instead of waiting for a guard to lock it again. Six months of pain, learning again how to make decisions for himself. Six months of remembering what it was to be an autonomous human being and not a robot made out of meat, trapped in the obedient machinery of his own body.

“Okay. So they … what? Go around conquering worlds? That sounds insane. Pardon me for casting aspersions on your good self’s character, but it is absolutely ridiculous to believe anyone could do such a thing. Destroy a world, yes, easily — but conquer one?”

“They don’t.” Frank leaned back against the partition. “I’m not sure what they do. Rumor in the camps was, they call themselves the ReMastered. But just what that means … Hell, there are rumors about everything from brainwashing to a genetically engineered master race. But the first rule of journalism is you can’t trust unsubstantiated rumors. All I know is, this ship is going to Newpeace, which they turned into a hellhole. And those guys are from somewhere called Tonto. What the fuck is going on?”

“You’re the blogger.” Svengali put the bottle down, a trifle unsteadily. He frowned. “Are you going to try to find out? I’m sure there’s a story in it…”

In a stately home by the banks of a dried-up river on a world with two small moons, a woman with sea-green eyes and crew-cut black hair sat behind a desk, reading reports. The house was enormous and ancient, walls of stone supported by ancient oak timber beams, and the French windows were thrown wide open to admit a breeze from the terrace before the house. The woman, engrossed in her reading, didn’t notice the breeze or even the smell of rose blossom wafting in on it. She was too busy paging through memoranda on her tablet, signing warrants, changing lives.

The door made a throat-clearing sound. “Ma’am, you have a visitor.”

“Who is it, Frank?” She glanced at the brass terminal plaque that had been hacked into the woodwork by an overenthusiastic former resident.

“S. Frazier Bayreuth. He says he has some sort of personal report for you.”

“Personal,” she muttered. “All right. Show him in.” She pushed her chair back, brushing imaginary lint from the shoulder of her tunic, and thumbed her tablet to a security-conscious screen saver.

The door clicked, and she rose as it opened. Holding out a hand: “Frazier.”

“Ma’am.” There was no click of heels — he wore no boots — but he bowed stiffly, from the neck.

“Sit down, sit down. You’ve been spending too much time in the New Republic.”

S. Frazier Bayreuth sank into the indicated chair, opposite her desk, and nodded wearily. “They rub off on you.”

“Hah.” It came out as a grim cough. “How are the compatibility metrics looking?

“Better than they were a year ago, better than anybody dared hope, but they won’t be mature enough for integration for a long time yet. Reactionary buffoons, if you ask me. But that’s not why I’m here. Um. May I ask how busy you are?”

The woman behind the desk stared at him, head slightly askew. “I can give you half an hour right now,” she said slowly. “If this is urgent.”

Bayreuth’s cheek twitched. A wiry, brown-haired man who looked as if he was made of dried leather, he wore blue-gray seamless fatigues; battle dress in neutral, chromatophores and impact diffusers switched off, as if he’d come straight from a police action, only pausing to remove his armor and equipment webbing. “It’s urgent all right.” He glanced at the open window. “Are we clear?”

She nodded. “Nobody who overhears us will understand anything,” she said, unsmiling, and he shivered slightly. In a ubiquitous surveillance society, any such bare-faced assertion of privacy clearly carried certain implications.

“All right, then. It’s about the Environmental Service cleanup report on Moscow.”

“The cleanup.” She gritted her teeth. “What is it this time?”

“Arbeiter Neurath begs to report that he has identified auditable anomalies in the immigration trace left by the scram team as they cleaned up and departed. On at least three occasions over the three years leading up to the Zero Incident and the five years since then, personnel working in the Environmental Operations Team under U. Vannevar Scott failed to behave consistently in accordance with best practice guidelines for exfiltrating feral territory. That, in itself, I would not need to bring to your attention, my lady. The guilty parties have been reprocessed and their errors added to the documentation corpus pour en-courager les autres. He cleared his throat. “But…”