Charles Stross - Iron Sunrise

“My friend!” She gasped, and pushed past. For some reason, no arms restrained her. Bodies were laid out on the grass under the harsh spotlights, some of them unmoving, others with people in paramedic orange frantically working over them. Other people stood or shambled around in a daze, prodded by a couple of enhanced police dogs that seemed to have a better idea of what was going on than any of the humans. Only a couple of minutes had passed, and the noise of sirens was still getting closer, audible over the ringing in her ears.

She found him squatting on the grass, wearing face cake and a red nose spattered with blood, holding his head in his hands. His costume was a clown’s parody of a snobbish chef’s outfit. “Sven?” She gasped.

He looked up, eyes red, a trickle of blood running from one nostril. “Wed-Wed-”

“We’ve got to go,” she said, trying to think of anything else that wasn’t inane. “We’ll miss our, our…”

“You go, girl, I’ll, I—” He shook his head, looking dizzy. “Help?”

Was he here to perform? she asked herself. Then: “You’re hurt? Come on, on your feet. Back to the dining room. There’s medical triage in there, first aid. Let’s get you seen to and pick up Frank and catch a taxi. If we stay here, they’ll ask questions till we miss the ship.”

“Ship.” His hands came down. He looked at her eyes cautiously, expression slightly puzzled. “Came here to, had to, set up? Frank? Hurt? Is he—”

“Deafened and shocked, I think.” She shivered, feeling cold.

“But we can’t just—”

“We can. Listen, you’re one of my two guests, right? And we’ll give them a statement but we’ve got to do that right now, our ship leaves tonight. If you’re a guest, they won’t grill you like a performer or staff. I hope.”

Svengali tried to stand up, and Wednesday backed off to give him room. “Must. Just tell the, the medics—” He staggered, and somehow Wednesday caught his left arm and pulled it over her shoulder — and she was walking Svengali drunkenly around toward the front of the embassy as the first ambulance arrived on a whine of electric motors.

“I don’t fucking believe this!”

Rachel had never, ever, seen George Cho lose his temper before. It was impressive, and would have been frightening if she hadn’t had more important things to worry about than her boss flapping around like a headless chicken.

“They missed,” she said with forced detachment. “Six dead and however many more injured, but they missed. The reactive armor deflected most of the shrapnel straight up, and I hit the floor in time.” She clenched her hands together to keep them from shaking.

“Why weren’t the grounds sealed off afterward? Why don’t we know who — the cameras—”

“Did you think they would be amateurs?” she asked angrily, pacing past him to look out the window overseeing the lawn. The indoor lights had blown, along with most of the unshielded electronics in the embassy. The EMP pulse had been small, but was sufficient to do for most non-MilSpec equipment on-site. And someone had done a real number on the cameras with a brace of self-adhesive clown-face stickers. “Murderous clowns, but not amateurs.”

The convoy of ambulances had taken most of the injured to various local clinics, which had activated their major incident plans immediately. Those vehicles that were left were parked, sirens silenced, not in any hurry to remove the bodies until the SOC team had finished mapping the mess left by the bomb and Forensics had taken their sample grams of flesh, and the polite men and women in their long black coats had asked their pointed questions of the catering staff -

“We set them up for a long gun,” Rachel reminded him, shuddering slightly. Remembering the icy feeling in her guts as she’d walked out onstage wearing a bulletproof vest, knowing there was a reactive armor shield in front of her, and a crash cart with resuscitation and stabilization gear waiting behind the door, and an ambulance in back. Knowing that a sniper would have to shoot in through a fixed arc constrained by the windows and the podium at the back of the room, knowing the ballistic radar at the front of the killing zone should be able to blow the armor slabs into the path of a bullet-sized guided missile before it could reach her, knowing there were two anti-sniper teams waiting in the hedgerow out front — she’d still been unsure whether each breath would be her last. “They weren’t stupid. Didn’t bring a knife to a gunfight. Took an antipersonnel mine instead.”

“And they got away with it again.” George sat down heavily on the edge of the lacquered and jade-inlaid desk, head bowed. “We should have fucking known —”

“Tranh?” called Rachel.

“We leaked,” the researcher said quietly. “We made it a honeypot, and we attracted the wasps, but probably only one of the passengers from the Romanov was involved, and we can’t tell which one because they fried the surveillance records and probably exfiltrated among the wounded. For all we know the assassin is among the dead. Worse, if they’re from an advanced infrastructure society like Septagon or somewhere with access to brain-mapping gear, the killer could have been any other guest or member of staff they managed to get five minutes alone with. And we couldn’t prove a thing. It looks like the only thing left to do is bring down the hammer and stop the ship leaving. Detain everybody. Want me to get on line to Martin? Have him lock it down?”

“Don’t do that yet,” said Rachel.

“Yes, do it,” said Cho. He took a deep breath. “We’re going to have to arrest them,” he told Rachel. “Even if it tips them off. They already know something-must suspect, surely, or else they wouldn’t have declined the honeypot—”

“Not necessarily,” Rachel said urgently. “Listen, if you hold the ship, we’ll probably uncover an assassin — a dead one, if these people are as ruthless as we think. If we do that, what happens next? I’ll tell you what happens next: there’s a hiatus, then a different killer starts making the rounds, and this time we’ll have broken the traffic analysis chain so we won’t know where they are or where they’re going next. We need to let them run — but we have to stay in front of them.”

George stood up and paced across the room. “I can’t take the risk. They’ve grown increasingly reckless, from selective assassination to indiscriminate bombing! What next, a briefcase nuke? Don’t you think they’re capable of that?”

“They—” Rachel stopped dead. “They almost certainly are,” she admitted. “But don’t you think that makes it all the more important that we keep track of them and try to take them alive, so we can find out who’s behind it?”

“You want to go aboard the ship,” said Tranh.

“I don’t see any alternative.” There was a horrible familiarity to the situation; to keep on top of a crisis moving at FTL speeds, you had to ride the bullet. “My recommendation is that we let the Romanov depart on schedule, but that I — and any other core team members you see fit to assign to me — should be on board as passengers, and you serve your bill of attainder on the Master and tell her that she’s damn well going to do as I say in event of an emergency.

“Meanwhile, the rest of the team should proceed aboard the Gloriana to the next destination where there’s a Muscovite embassy — I think that’ll be Vienna? Or wherever — and set up the next trap. Leaving behind a diplomatic support group here to keep an eye on Morrow and Baxter, and anyone off the Romanov who’s staying on.” She swallowed. “While we’re under way, I’ll liaise with the ship’s crew to try to identify anyone who’s acting suspiciously. Before and after the events. Martin may have spotted something while we were busy down here, but I haven’t had time to check yet. If we can get access to the onboard monitoring feeds, we might be able to wrap everything up before we arrive at the next port of call.”