Charles Stross - Iron Sunrise

She glanced round, hastily. There didn’t seem to be any cams down there, just hollow eye sockets gaping in the ceiling. Ahead, a dead zone sucked up the light: a big hall, ceiling so high it was out of sight, opened like a cavern off the end of the service tunnel. And she heard the noise again. The unmistakable sound of boots scuffing against concrete.

What do I — Old reflexes died hard: it took Wednesday a split second to realize that it was no good asking Herman for advice. She glanced around for somewhere to hide. If someone was stalking her, some crazy — more likely, a couple of Bone Sisters who’d lured her down there to whack her bad for wearing team invisicolors and carrying a cutter on their loop — she wanted to be way out of sight before they eyeballed her. The big cavern ahead looked like a good bet, but it was dark, too dark to see into, and if it was a dead end, she’d be bottled in. But the doorways off to the left looked promising; lots of housing modules, jerked airlocks gaping like eye sockets.

Wednesday darted sideways, trying to muffle her bootheels. The nearest door gaped wide, floor underlayers ruptured like decompressed intestines, revealing a maze of ducts and cables. She stepped over them delicately, stopped, leaned against the wall and forced herself to close her eyes for ten seconds. The wall was freezing cold, and the house smelled musty, as if something had rotted in there long ago. When she uncovered her eyes again, she could see some way into the gloom. The floor paneling resumed a meter inside the threshold, and a corridor split in two directions. She took the left fork hesitantly, tiptoeing quietly and breathing lightly, listening for the sound of pursuit. When it got too dark to see she fumbled her tracker ring round, and whispered, “I need a torch.” The thin blue diode glow wasn’t much, but it was enough to outline the room ahead of her — a big open space like her family’s own living room, gutted and abandoned.

She looked around the room. A broken fab bulked in one corner next to an exposed access crawlway. A sofa, seat rotted through with age and damp, occupied the opposite wall. Holding her breath, she forced herself not to sneeze. Words came to her, unbidden, on the breeze: “—fuck da bitch go?”

“One o’ these. Youse take starboard, I taken the port.”

Male voices, with a really strange accent, harsh-sounding and determined. Wednesday shuddered convulsively. Not the Sisters! Bone Sisters were bad — you crossed them, they crossed you and you needed surgery — but the white sorority didn’t hang out with -

Crunch. Cursing. Someone had stuck a foot in the open cable channel. Teetering on the edge of blind panic, Wednesday scurried toward the half-meter-high crawlway and scrambled along it on hands and knees, headfirst into a tube of twilight that stretched barely farther than arm’s length. The tube kinked sharply upward, pipes bundled together against a carrier surface. She paused, forced herself to relax, and rolled over onto her back so that she could see round the bend. Can I … ? Push from the knees, begin to sit up, stick boot toes into gaps in the carrier trunking, push …

Panting with effort, she levered herself up and out of view of the room. Please don’t have infrared trackers or dogs. The thought of the dogs still woke her up in a cold, shivering sweat, some nights. Please just be muggers. Knowing her luck, she’d crossed paths with a couple of serial fuckmonsters, transgressive nonconsensual looking for a meat puppet. And she didn’t have a backup: that cost real money, the kind that Mom and Dad didn’t have. She shuddered, forcing back panic, braced her elbows against the walls of the duct, and flicked her rings to shutdown. She switched off her implants — backup brain, retinal projectors, the lot. Completely off. She could die there and nobody would find the body until they tore down the walls. There could be a gas trap, and she’d never know. But then again, the hunters might be following her by tracking her emissions.

“She come ’ere? I not am ’inking ’dis.” Scuffling and voices and, frighteningly, a faint overspill of light from a hand torch. A second voice, swearing. “Search’e floor! Have youse taken beneath dat?”

“I have. Tracer an’ be saying she — shirting vanish. Tracer be losing she. Signal strong al’way from she’s home. Prey be wise to sigint ’striction.”

Not some girl gang shit: they were stalking her, had followed her all the way from home. Forget muggers, forget ordinary sickheads. Wednesday stifled a squeak of pure cold terror.

“I an’ be checking over the way. You be clearing dis side an’ if-neg we-all be waiting mid-way. If she be hiding, she-an be come out.”

“An’ we be dumping nitro down here? Bath she in unbreathable?”

The second one replied, contemptuous: “You-an’ be finding rotten meat after, you be dumping ’de breathing mix. Contractees, t’ey wanting authentication.” Footsteps clattered over the grating, stopped.

They’re going to wait me out in the corridor? At least they weren’t going to flood the entire sector with nitrogen, but even hearing them talking about it was frightening her. Rotten meat. They want to know I’m dead, she realized, and the dizzying sense of loss made her stomach heave. How do I get out of this?

Just asking the question helped; from somewhere she dredged up a memory of her invisible friend lecturing her, an elevator-surfing run during happier days back home. The first step in evading a pursuit is to identify and locate the pursuers. Then work out what sort of map they’re using and try to locate their blind spots. Not to take the stairs or the elevator, but to go through a service hatch, carefully step onto the roof of a car, and ride it to safety — or as a training game, all the way to Docking Control and back down again without showing up anywhere on Old Newfie’s security map. She’d learned to ghost through walls, disappear from tracking nets, dissolve in a crowd. Ruefully, Wednesday recalled Herman’s first lesson: When threatened, do not let yourself panic. Panic is the most likely thing to kill you. At the time, it had been fun.

It still is a game, she realized suddenly. A game for them. Whoever they are. But I don’t have to play by their rules. With that realization, she managed to recapture a tenuous sense of self-confidence. Now where?

The duct was pitch-black, but she vaguely recalled it leading upward before she’d switched her gear off. It looked like it had been a house once, a slum tenement for cheap labor — so cheap it didn’t even have en suite bathrooms and automated amahs to do the cleaning. Apartments there were prefab assemblies: a bunch of sealed, airtight modules connected by pressure-tight doors, bolted together in a big empty space and linked to the pressurized support mains by service tunnels like this one. This duct had to run somewhere pressurized. The only question was whether there was room for her to follow it all the way.

Wednesday braced herself against the back of the tube and began to lever herself up. The pipes and cables with their regular ties and their support grid were nearly as good as a ladder, and their insulation was soft and friable with age, forming spongy handholds for her questing fingers. She paused every half meter to feel above her with one hand and tried not to think about her clothing: the boots were a miserable pain for climbing in, but she couldn’t take them off, and as for what the duct was doing to her jacket …

Her questing hand found empty space. Gasping quietly she reached up, then felt the cables bend over in a curve onto what had to be the top of the rooms’ outer gas containment membrane. A final convulsive heave brought her up and over, and left her doubled over across the cable support, panting for breath, her legs still dangling over three meters of air space. Now she risked turning on her locater ring for a moment, still dialed to provide a light glow. Glancing around, she felt an edgy bite of claustrophobia. The crawl space widened to almost a meter, but was still only half a meter high. Ahead, there was a darkness that might be a branch off to one side, in the direction of the front door if she hadn’t lost her bearings. Wednesday pulled her legs up and crawled toward it.