Charles Stross - Iron Sunrise

“Uh-huh.” The soldier sounded vaguely amused. “Ferris will sort you out.”

The main room was a mess. Someone had been digging into the floor, opening up crawl spaces and installing a loom of cables that ran to a compact signal-processing mainframe squatting on the remains of what had once been a very expensive dressing table. Three or four techs were hunched over various connectors or blinking and gesturing at the air, shepherding their mobile code around the ship’s passenger liaison net. Another soldier was busy with a ruggedized communications console, very low-tech but entirely independent of the shipboard systems. She looked up as Franz came in. “What do you want?”

“Crewman” — he consulted his implant — “4365, Svengali Q., no last name, occupation, entertainments specialist, subtype juvenile. I need to know where he is. And I need to draw a gun.”

“Crewman 4365,” she drawled, “is currently locked in—” she frowned. “No. He’s down on H deck, radial four, orange ring, in the second-class dining area doing…” Her brow wrinkled. “What’s a ‘birthday party’?”

“Never mind. Is he scheduled there for much longer?”

“Yes, but there are other passengers—”

“That’s all right.” Franz glanced around. “Now, about a handgun.”

“Over there. Boss’s bedroom, there’s a crate by the sleeping platform. Uh-oh, incoming call.” She was back at her console without a second glance.

Portia’s bedroom was a mess. Discarded equipment cases were scattered across the floor, the remains of a half-eaten meal cooling on the pillows. Franz found the crate and rummaged in it until he found a carton that contained a machine pistol and a couple of factory-packed magazines loaded with BLAMs. He held the gun to his forehead for long enough for its tiny brain to handshake with his implants, and upload its recent ballistic performance record and a simple aiming network. Franz didn’t much like carrying a gun; while he knew how to use one, having to do so in his line of work would usually mean that his cover was blown and his job, if not his life, was over. He rummaged further, and despite Portia’s injunction, he took a neural spike. You never knew …

He was about to leave the room when he noticed something else. There was a pile of dirty clothing heaped on an open suitcase next to the bed. It looked like stuff the boss had been wearing earlier. He paused, momentarily curious. Would she? he wondered. Is it worth a look? Well yes, it was … probably. He glanced at the half-open door. There was nobody in sight. He knelt and ran his hands around the inside of the case, then the lid. He felt a lump in one side pocket. Cursing himself for his optimism, he unzipped the pouch and pulled out a small box. Then he stopped cursing. “Wow,” he breathed. He flipped the box open, then hastily closed it again, stood up, and shoved it into one hip pocket, then headed back into the reception room, his pulse pounding with guilty intent.

The box had contained a gemstone the size of his thumb, sitting atop a ceramic block studded with optical ports — the reader/writer head. It was memory diamond, atoms arranged in a lattice of alternating carbon 12 and carbon 13 nuclei: the preferred data storage format for the unborn god’s chosen few. Dense and durable, twelve grams was enough to store a thousand neural maps and their associated genome data. This was Hoechst’s soul repository, where the upload data from anyone she terminated in the course of service would be stored until they could be archived by the Propagators, against the day when the unborn god would be assembled and draw upon the frozen imprints. Such careless concealment in a piece of nondescript luggage had to be deliberate; probably she’d decided the ship’s strong room was too obvious a target. It was a symbol of her authority, of her power of life after death over those who served her. He could expect no mercy if she found him in possession of it. But if he could dig a single stored mind out of it and put it back, he’d be fine. And that was exactly the prospect that had his hands sweating and his heart pounding with pity and fear … and hope.

Nobody paid any attention as he slipped back into the dayroom. “I’m going down to drop in on my target,” he told the comms specialist. “Got a field phone?”

“Sure.” She tossed him a ruggedized handset. “Turns back into a pumpkin next jump. Bring it back for a reset.” Must be a causal channel, he realized. The untappable instant quantum devices were the tool of choice for communications security — at least between FTL hops.

“Check.” He slipped it into his pocket. “See you around.”

There was an uproar in the dining room. Steffi stood up. “Please!” she shouted. “Please calm down! The situation’s under control—”

Predictably, it didn’t work. But she had to try: “Listen! Please sit down. Lieutenant Commander Fromm is investigating this problem. I assure you nothing serious is wrong, but if you would just sit down and give us time to sort things out—”

“I’d give up, if I were you,” Martin said quietly. Half the passengers were flocking toward the exits, evidently in a hurry to return to their rooms. The rest were milling around like a herd of frightened sheep, unsure whose lead to follow. “They’re not going to listen. What the hell is happening, anyway?”

“I don’t—” Steffi caught herself. Shit! Play dumb, idiot! “ Max is looking into it. At best, some idiot’s played a prank with the liaison network. At worst?” She shrugged.

“Who made the announcement?” Martin asked.

“I don’t know.” But I can guess. She frowned. “And no way would the skipper divert from our course — for one thing, New Prague is about the closest port of call on our route! For another—” She shrugged. “It doesn’t add up.”

“I’m not going to say the word,” Martin said slowly, “but I think something has gone very wrong. Something to do with the investigation.”

Steffi’s guts turned to ice. Confirmation of her own worst fears: it was a stitch-up. “I couldn’t possibly comment. I should be heading to my duty station—”

She forced herself to pause for a couple of seconds. “What would you do if this was your call?”

“It’s either a genuine accident, in which case damage control is on top of it or we’d be dead already, or — well, you put it together; the net’s down, a stranger is announcing some weird accident and telling passengers to go to their rooms, and we’ve got a couple of killers loose on board. Frankly, I’d send everyone to their cabins. They’re self-contained with emergency oxygen supplies and fabs for basic food, it’s where they want to go, they can hole up, and if it is a hijacking, it’ll give the hijackers a headache. Meanwhile we can find out what’s going on and either try to help out or find somewhere to hole up.” The ghost of a smile tugged at his lips, then fell away. “Seriously. Get them out of here. Dispersal is good.”

“Shit!” She stood up and raised her voice again: “If you’d all go straight to your cabins and stay out of the corridors until somebody tells you it’s all right, that would help us immensely.”

Almost at once the crush at the exits redoubled as first-class passengers streamed away from their seats. Within a minute the dining room was almost empty. “Right. Now what?” She asked, edgily. If Max was all right, he should have sent a runner by now. So he wasn’t, and the shit had presumably hit the fan. Twitching her rings didn’t seem to help; she was still locked out of the network.

“Now we go somewhere unexpected. Uh, your rings still not working?” She nodded. “Right, switch off everything.”