Charles Stross - Iron Sunrise

“I said I don’t want to talk about it,” she said, and he broke off from trying to get her back to relax.

“If you don’t want to talk about it, what do you want?” he asked, beginning to sound annoyed. “I could be out there.” He didn’t sound as if he believed it.

“Then go.” She reached backward and grabbed his thigh blindly, contradicting herself. “Stay. I’m not sure.” She was always bad at handling this, the difficult morning-after socializing that went with a one-off fuck with someone who she didn’t know. “Why do you have to talk?”

“Because you’re interesting.” He sounded serious, which was a bad sign. “I haven’t met you before. And I think I like you.”

“Oh.” She glanced over at the dance floor, legs moving in irregular strobing flashes of light only a meter or two from their sweaty nest. He smelled of some kind of musk, and the faint tang of semen. She rolled over on her back, fetching up against the padded back of the recess, and looked at him. “You got something else in mind?”

He stared at her sleepily. “If you want to swap links, maybe we could meet up some other time?”

I’m being propositioned! she realized, startled. Not just sex. “Maybe later.” She looked him up and down, mentally dressing him, wondering what it would be like. A boyfriend? Tension clawed at her, an unscratchable itch. She glanced at her hand. “My phone’s turned off, and I can’t switch it back on.”

“If that’s—”

“No!” She grabbed his hand: “I’m really, not, uh, being—” She pulled him towards her. “Oh.” That wasn’t the right answer, was it? she thought, as the slide of hot skin against her — and the interesting drugs they’d been taking — made the breath catch in her throat and brought a twitch of life to his groin. She reached out and caught him in her hands. “No swapping links. Just tonight. Make it like it’s your last, best time.” Cunning fingers found a nipple. “Oh, that’s too easy.” And it was back into the unthinking depths, with a frogman called Blow to be her skin pilot and a nagging tension at the back of her skull, banished for the moment by an exchange of lust.

Wednesday came awake suddenly, naked and sticky and alone on the foam pad. It still smelled of Blow. The dance floor action was going, but more slowly, the music ratcheting toward a false dawn shutdown. She felt alone for a moment, then cold. Damn, she thought hazily. He was good. Should have swapped—

There was a set of rings on the pad next to her. And a self-heating coffee can set solicitously close to them.

“What the fuck?” She shook her head, taking stock. What a guy. She felt a momentary stab of loss: someone who’d take time out from a party to give her a back rub after making skinny, even if she hadn’t wanted to talk … that was worth knowing. But he’d left a set of rings. She picked them up, puzzling. They looked to be about the right size. Still puzzled, she flipped the heater tab on the coffee and slid her own rings off, pulled the new set on, and twitched them alive. Instead of the half-expected authentication error, there was a tuneful chord and a smell of rose blossom as they glommed on to her implants and registered her as their rightful owner. Fully authenticated, with access to a whole bunch of stuff that was now instantiating itself in her implants from off a public server somewhere: “Wow! Hey, voice mail. Any word from Herman?” she asked.

“Retrieving. You have a noninteractive message. Hello, Wednesday. This is Herman. Your instructions are as follows. Do not go home. Go to Transit Terminal B. There is a ticket waiting for you there, booked under the authority of professor-gymnast David Larsen, for your participation in a student work placement project. Collect the ticket and leave this hab immediately. Retain these rings, they’re keyed to a new identity and set up to route packets to you via a deep market anonymizer. You cannot be traced through them. I will contact you in due course. Let me emphasize that you should not, under any circumstances, go home.” Click.

She stared at her rings in astonishment. “Herman?” she asked, biting her lower lip. “Herman?” Don’t go home. A cold chill brought up the gooseflesh on her back. Oh shit. She began fumbling with her pile of clothes. “ Herman…”

Her invisible agents, the software ghosts behind the control rings and her implants and the whole complex of mechanized identity that was Wednesday’s persona within the Septagon network, didn’t reply. She dragged her leggings and boots on, shrugged into the spidersilk camisole, and held out her arms for the jacket; the sarong she stuffed in a temporary pocket. Jittery and nervous with worry, mouth ashy with the taste of overstewed Blue Mountain, she lurched out of the privacy niche and around the edge of the dance floor. Miss Ball Gag was gagged no longer, straddling the lap of Mister Latex, taking it hard and fast and letting the audience know about it with both lungs. Exhibitionists. Wednesday spared her a second’s snort as she slid past the bar and round the corner and out along a corridor — then up the first elevator she came to. She had a bad feeling, and the sense of unease grew worse the farther she went. She felt dirty and tired and she ached, and a gnawing edge of guilt bit into her. Shouldn’t she have called home, warned someone? Who? Mom or Dad? Wouldn’t they think she -

“Holy shit.”

She stopped dead and abruptly turned away from the through-route, heart hammering and palms sticky.

The corridor that led to her home run was blocked dead, the eery blue ghost glow of polis membrane slashed across it like a scar. Cops in full vacuum gear stood beside a low-loader with green-and-orange flashing spurs, pushing a mobile airlock toward the pressure barrier.

“Oh shit oh shit oh shit…” The seconds spurted through her fingers like grease. She ducked around another corner, opened her eyes, and began looking for a dead zone. Fucking Bone Sisters … well no, this wasn’t their doing, was it? Dom games require a sub witness, a survivor. This was Yurg, he an being not happy and strangers’ boot steps clicking in the cold, wet darkness behind her. And Herman on the phone for the first time in years. She found a corner, stopped, and massaged the pressure points in her jacket, the ones she’d spent so much time building into it. It clamped together around her ribs like a corset, then she reached over and pulled the hood over her head. The leggings were part of the same outfit; she rucked them up, then stretched the almost-liquid hem right over the outside of her boots, her beautiful dumb-matter platform-heeled lace-up air-leaking boots. “Pressurize,” she said, then a moment later: “Fade.” The jacket rubbed between her shoulder blades, letting her know it was active, and the opaque hood over her face flickered into transparency. Only the hissing of her breath reminded her that from then on in she was impregnable, hermetically sealed, and invisible so long as she danced through the Bone Sisters’ blind spots.

There was a service passage one level up and two over, and she ghosted past the slave trolleys, trying to make no noise on the hard metal floor as she counted her way toward the door leading to -

“Shit and corruption.” The door handle was sealed with the imperious flashing blue of a police warning. Below the handle, the indicator light glowed steady red, a gas trap alert. Panicky claustrophobia seized her. “Where the fuck is my family?” She brought up her rings and called up the home network. “Dad? Mom? Are you there?”

A stranger’s voice answered her: “Who is this?”