Charles Stross - Iron Sunrise

“How’s your day been?” she asked quietly as the stewards collected the empty soup bowls. “I haven’t seen your wife in here — is she working?”

“Probably.” Martin winced and pinched the bridge of his nose. “She’s looking for someone, and she tends to overdo it when she’s got her teeth into something. I tell her to take some time off, it’ll make her more effective, but … I’ve spent all day interviewing tourists. It’s giving me a headache.”

“Did any of them have anything useful to say?” she asked.

“Not for the most part, no.”

Liar, she thought, tensing. What are you concealing?

The lighting strips lining the arched sculpture niches along the walls flickered, distracting her.

“’Scuse me.” Steffi raised her left hand and twisted her interface rings urgently, hunting the command channel. The lights aboard a starship never flickered without a reason — especially not aboard a luxury liner with multiple redundant power circuits. Steffi hadn’t felt any vibration, but that didn’t mean anything. The ship’s curved-space generators were powerful enough to buffer a steady thirty gees of acceleration, and absorb the jolt of any impact unless it was large enough to cause a major structural failure. “Bridge comm, Grace here. Bridge—” She frowned. “That’s odd.” She glanced across the room at Max. He was standing up, turning to step down off the raised platform of the high table. He caught her eye, jerked his chin toward the main entrance, then strode toward it. Across the room she saw stewards discreetly breaking off their tasks, disappearing in the direction of their emergency stations.

She caught up with Max a couple of meters down the hall. “Bridge isn’t answering.”

“I know.” He opened an unmarked side door. “Nearest emergency locker is — ah, here.” Yanking the yellow-and-black handle forward, he pulled out the crash drawer and handed her an emergency bag — rebreather hood, gloves, mul-titool, first-aid ’bots. “No callback.” He looked thoughtful. “One moment—”

“Already there.” Steffi had her tablet fully unfolded; she pasted it against the wall and tried to bring up the ship’s damage-control schematics. “Shit, why is it so slow? She stabbed at a local diagnostic pane. “There’s no bandwidth! Shipnet is down.”

“We’ve got lights, air, and gravity.” He looked thoughtful. “What’s out is data. Listen, it may just be a major network crash. Relativistics weren’t due to start jump spool-up for half an hour yet, so we’re probably okay if we sit tight. You’re not trained for this, so I want you to go back to the dining room and keep a lid on the passengers. Relay any orders you hear and keep your ears open and try to stay out of trouble until you’re needed. Meanwhile, I’m going to get some stewards together and go find out what’s happening. Bridge first, engineering control if the bridge is out … Your story for the passengers is that everything is under control, line crew is investigating and there’ll be an announcement in due course. Think you can handle it?”

“I’ll do my best.”

Steffi headed for the passenger corridor, sparing a glance behind her as he waved a hand at a crewman who’d appeared from one of the service spaces: “Hey, you! Over here, I’ve got a job for you right now…”

Everything seemed to be under control in the dining room. Steffi did a quick survey. The passengers were still wrapped up in conversation, not yet having noticed anything unusual. Small mercies … For a moment she considered leaving them in ignorance, but as soon as someone tried to check mail or call a friend they’d realize something was up.

She took a step up onto the platform supporting the high table. “Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention, please?”

Curious eyes turned toward her. “As some of you may have noticed, we’ve experienced a minor technical anomaly in the past few minutes. I’d like to assure you that the engineering crew are working on it, and there is no danger—”

The lights flickered for a moment, then went out. One or two stifled screams rose from the corners of the room — then the lights came back on. And with them a stranger’s voice, amplified, over the passenger liaison circuit, its tone calm and collected: “We regret to inform you that there has been a minor problem with the propulsion and engineering control center. There is no cause for alarm. Everything is under control, and we will be diverting to a nearby port rather than proceeding directly to New Prague. WhiteStar Line will announce a compensation package for your inconvenience in due course. In the meantime, we would appreciate it if you would return to your cabins and stay there until further notice. When the passenger liaison network is back up, please do not hesitate to use it to contact one of our team. We’re here to help you.”

Rachel was looking for Wednesday in the mostly-deserted D deck lounges when the gadget went off under the bridge. The bridge was on E deck. It was separated from D deck by two pressure bulkheads, a structural truss, and an electrograv ring designed to even out tidal surges, so the immediate blast effect was lost on her.

Martin had called her a couple of hours earlier, full visual via an office cam. “It checks out and it stinks like a month-dead cheese,” he insisted. “She’s a Moscow survivor, someone’s been trying to abduct or kill her, she was at the embassy reception when you were — oh, and there’s something else.”

His cheek twitched. He was about as agitated as she’d ever seen him get. “What else?” she demanded, annoyed with herself for going after such a transparent hook.

“She’s got a friend called Herman, and he’s why she’s here.” Martin shut up. She stared at him through the magic mirror in her visual field.

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope. Frank didn’t know any more — but I mean, hit me with the clue bat, right?”

“Oh shit.” She’d had to lean against the wall. “Did she pass anything else on to you?” She’d gone dizzy for a moment, as things dropped into place. Herman was the cover name an agent of the Eschaton had used to contact Martin, paying him to run obscure errands — errands that had emergent side effects that shook the chancelleries of a dozen worlds. Herman was only really interested in human beings when they tried to build time machines, violate causality, experiment with forbidden weapons. Moscow had died when, entirely without warning, its star had exploded. Which just didn’t happen, not to G-type dwarf stars in the middle of the main sequence of their life cycles.

“Yes. Maybe it’s a coincidence, and then again maybe there’s a large pig on final approach to the main docking bay — see the reaction control clusters on each flank? Herman said it was something to do with the ReMastered group aboard this ship and that they’re going to pull something after the first jump. Tonight, in other words. Rachel, I am not happy. This—”

“Stop. Let’s not go there right now.” She shook her head. “I need to find the girl before whoever’s looking for her catches up with us. Send me her details?”

“Sure.” Martin shuffled the rings on his left hand, and her tablet bleeped, then threw up a picture — young-looking physio, dark hair built up in an outrageous swirl, eye shadow like midnight. “Hard to miss. You’ll probably find her with Frank the journalist; they seem to be personally involved. Oh, she’s as young as she looks, too, so go easy on her.”

Rachel frowned pensively. “Don’t worry about me, worry about her. You go and have a word with the Captain — tell her we’re expecting some kind of trouble from a group of passengers. If necessary, tell her exactly who — but don’t tell her where the warning came from. There might be a leak in the crew. Besides which, if we overreact, we might not have a chance to learn anything…”