Iron Sunrise Page 3

  The robotically smooth voice of the autopilot rolled across the bridge. “Kerberos unit and final passenger boarding notified two minutes ago and counting. Critical path elements in place. Entry status green, no exceptions raised—”

  “Then commence launch cycle immediately.”

  “Aye. Launch cycle commencing. Station power and utility disconnect proceeding. Station mass transfer disconnect proceeding. Boarding pier disconnect proceeding. Main engine spin-up engaged, station one. Live cargo systems spin-down engaged, station two.”

  “I hate live cargo,” Gertrude muttered. “Live cargo spin-down notification going out.” Fingers tapped invisible cells in the air in front of her face. “Hub lift interlocks to safe—”

  Mannheim stared at the complex web of dependencies that hovered over the blank wall of the bridge, a meter in front of his nose. Slowly, red nodes blinked to green as the huge starship prepared to cast free of the station. It was supposed to be the last ship ever to sail from this port. From time to time, he prodded a station glyph and spoke quietly to whoever’s voice answered from the thin air: loadmasters and supercargo and immigration control officers and civil polizei, Jack in the drive damage control center and Rudi in the crow’s nest. Once he even talked to Traffic Control. The station’s robot minders plodded on imperturbably, unaware that the end of their labor was in sight, coursing toward them on an expanding shock front of radiation-driven plasma. An hour went by. Someone invisible placed a mug of coffee at his right hand, and he drank, carried on talking and watching and occasionally cursing in a quiet voice, and drank again and it was cold.

  Finally, the ship was ready to depart.

  IMPACT: T plus 8 minutes—1.5 hours

  Moscow system died at the speed of light, death rippling outward on a tsunami of radiation.

  First to die were the weather satellites, close in on the star, watching for solar flares and prominences. Buoys built to track breezes were ripped adrift by the tornado blast of the artificially induced nova, not so much disabled as evaporated, adding their stripped nuclei to the boiling fury of the iron sunrise.

  Seconds later the radiation pulse melted the huge, flimsy solar collectors that glided in stately orbit half an astronomical unit out, feeding power to antimatter generators a hundred kilometers in diameter. Robot factories unattended by humans passed unmourned and unnoticed. The gamma pulse shed by their tons of stored antihydrogen added a candle glow to the hurricane.

  Eight minutes after detonation, the radiation front reached the innermost human habitat in the system: the world called Moscow. The neutrino flux was high enough to deliver a rapidly lethal radiation dose even after traveling right through the planet. The nightside fluoresced, atmosphere glowing dimly against the unbearably bright background. The gamma pulse, close behind it, flashed the dayside atmosphere to plasma and slammed it into the already melting rock. Supersonic tornadoes rippled around the daylight terminator, scouring the surface down to bedrock.

  Half an hour into the nova, the process of planetary disintegration was well under way. On the dayside, Moscow’s atmospheric pressure dropped drastically, and the primary gaseous constituents were hydrogen and oxygen radicals stripped from the boiling fog that had been the boreal ocean. Cloud top temperatures were already in the thousands of degrees, while Mach waves rippled through the turgid troposphere on the nightside, crushing houses like matchwood kindling to become pyres for the dying bodies of their occupants. The night receded before a ghastly daylight, the sullen glare of an exploding star reflected off the planet’s own comet trail of air. To an observer at ground level Moscow Prime would have covered half the sky, a magnesium flare of radiant energy that would still be bright enough to burn out eyeballs tens of trillions of kilometers away. The main shock wave of the explosion was approaching by then, a wave of plasma flash-heated to hundreds of millions of degrees, barely less dense than the dissipated atmosphere and traveling outward at 20 percent of lightspeed. When it arrived, Moscow vanished—swallowed like a watermelon at ground zero in the expanding fireball of an atomic explosion.

  Sixty minutes: the radiation pulse ghosted through the rings of Siberia, a huge green ice giant with attendant moons strung around it like lucent pearls. They flashed briefly and sprouted streamers of glowing gas as the rings flared violet, forming a huge glowing disk of light that jetted outward from the star, consuming the mass of a small moon in seconds. Siberia absorbed a huge pulse of energy, sufficient to melt the tundra at its core and spawn gigantic storms. Hurricanes the size of Moscow raced toward the nightside of the giant planet as it, too, sprouted a glowing cometary tail. Unlike the inner bodies, Siberia was too huge to evaporate entirely. Though it glowed white-hot and molten, and its orbital track was distorted by the tremendous shock wave of the stellar explosion, the innermost core of nickel-iron remained—a gravestone marker that would take millions of years to cool in the twilight emptiness of Moscow system.

  The first survivor weathered the blast at a range of ninety-eight light minutes.

  Sleeping in deep orbit around the outer gas giant Zemlya, a robot beacon blinked awake at the first harsh glare of energy. The beacon carried huge reserves of coolant within its faceted black-armored carapace. Designed to withstand direct hits from a battleship’s laser grid, it weathered the storm—although it was sent tumbling, blasted right out of its seventy-year orbit by the surge of heavy charged particles. The beacon was 118 years old, one of 750 in its series. Code-named TALIGENT SPARROW, it was part of the early warning system of the Strategic Retaliation Command of the recently vaporized Moscow Foreign Office.

  TALIGENT SPARROW blinked and took stock. The stars were occluded by glowing gas and debris, some of them its own ablated skin. No matter: it had a task. Deep memory remembered the pattern of the seasons and turned sensors in search of Moscow. It tried vainly to swivel a high-gain antenna that had been reduced to a crumpled mass of molten tissue. Other sensors tried to distinguish the gamma flux of inbound relativistic missiles and failed, overloaded. A primitive expert system plumbed the depths of its decision tree and determined that something unknown had attacked it. Qubits trickled into entropy as TALIGENT SPARROW powered up its causal channel and shrieked murder at the uncaring stars.

  Somebody heard.

  IMPACT: T plus 1392 days, 13 hours, 02 minutes

  The police drone was robotically curt. “We’ve found your daughter. Please come to deck G-red, zone two meeting point, and collect her.”

  Morris Strowger stood up and glanced at his wife. He smiled. “I told you they’d find her.” The smile slowly faded.

  His wife didn’t look up. With her bony fingers thrust together between her knees and her bowed head, Indica Strowger’s shoulders shook as if she’d grabbed hold of a live power supply. “Go away,” she said very quietly, her voice hard and controlled. “I’ll be all right.”

  “If you’re sure—” Already the police drone was moving off. He glanced back uncertainly at her hunched form, then followed the insect away through crowded, human-smelling partition-runs, runs that were already deteriorating into a high-tech slum patrolled by bees with stun guns. Something about their departure, perhaps the final grim reality of dispossession, had snapped a band of tension that had held everyone together through the dark years just ended, and the solid ground of depression was giving way to a treacherous slurry of despair, hysteria, and uncertainty about the future. Dangerous times.

  Wednesday was waiting at the meeting point just as the bee had said. She looked alone and afraid, and Morris, who had been thinking of harsh words, suddenly found himself unable to speak. “Vicki—”

  “Dad!” She buried her chin in his shoulder, sharp-jawed like some young feral predator. She was shaking.

  “Where’ve you been? Your mother’s been going crazy!” That wasn’t the half of it. He hugged her, firmly, feeling a terrible sense of hollow unease ebb away. His daughter was back, and he was angry as hell at her—and unspeakably relieved.

  “I want
ed to be alone,” she said very quietly, voice muffled. He tried to step back, but she refused to let go. A pang: she did that when she didn’t want to tell him something. She was no good at dissembling, but her sense of privacy was acute. An old woman behind him was raising a fuss at the harassed constable, something about a missing boy—no, her pet dog. Her son, her Sonny. Wednesday looked up at him. “I needed time to think.” The lie solidified in a crystal moment, and he didn’t have the heart to call her on it. There’d be time for that, and to tell her about the official reprimand later: trespassing off-limits on board a ship wasn’t the same as exploring the empty quadrants of a station. She didn’t know how lucky she was that the Captain was understanding—and that unusual allowances were being made for stressed-out adults, never mind kids leaving home for the first time they could remember.

  “Come on.” He turned her away from the desk, rubbed her shoulder. “Come on. Back to our, uh, cabin. Ship’s undocking soon. They’ll be widecasting from the bridge. You don’t want to miss that?”

  She looked up at him, an unreadable, serious expression on her face. “Oh, no.”

  IMPACT: T plus 4 hours, 6 minutes

  Two hundred and forty-six minutes after the Zero Incident, the freighter Taxis Pride congealed out of empty space, forty-six degrees out of the plane of the ecliptic, six light hours away from its final destination. Brad Mornington, skipper, was on the flight deck, nattering with Mary Haight, the relativistics op. Taxis Pride was a three-point shuttle, connecting Moscow to Iceland Seven station, thence to the Septagonese trans-shipment outpost at Blaylock B. Brad had made this zone transfer eighteen times in the past seven years, and it was as routine as the mug of strong, heavily sugared coffee that Alex placed by his elbow before the jump countdown commenced, which was just then cooling down enough to drink.

  Brad put out the standard navigation squawk and waited for a detailed flight path. In the meantime he pondered the food situation: the kitchen was getting somewhat monotonous, and the downside ferry would give him a chance to stretch his legs and reacquaint himself with clouds and sky again. Taxis Pride was a fast freighter, built to carry time-critical physical mail and perishables. The extremal singularity in her drive core let her accelerate in real space as rapidly as some warships: six light hours was a one-week cruise for her, not the painful odyssey an old hydrogen burner would have to endure. Mary concentrated on a backup star fix—routine, in case the traffic controllers were on strike again, just to keep her professional certification up to date. In her spare moments she was wondering if there’d be time to drop in on an old friend while they were docked for their cargo load cycle.

  Then the bridge screamer went off.

  “What the—get that!” Brad’s coffee went flying as he scrambled for the comm terminal. Mary jolted upright, whey-faced.

  “Got it. That’s not traffic—”

  “Hello, this is flight Echo Gold Nine Zero responding to broadcast squawk from, ah, Delta X-ray Zeus Seven, we have handshake. What’s the—”

  “Something flaky here, boss—”

  Red flashing lights blinked on the conference circuit. There was a thirty-second delay while they waited tensely for a reply.

  “Echo Gold Nine Zero this is Delta X-ray Zeus Seven, emergency relay service. Admiralty signal blue four, authentication follows message. This is a systemwide military emergency. Moscow is under quarantine—the whole system is under lockdown, no exceptions. Evacuate immediately. I emphasize, get your kernel spun up and get out of here immediately! Please acknowledge.”

  Brad flushed, furious. “This is some sort of fucking joke!” He waved off the authentication code and punched in the waypoint series for Moscow. “When I find the asshole—”

  “Brad. Come here.” He looked round sharply. Mary was leaning over the repeater from Wang’s crow’s nest downstairs. She looked sick.

  “What is it?”

  “Here.” She pointed to a plot that had just shown up. Taxis Pride was a fleet auxiliary, liable for mobilization in event of war: it carried near-military-grade passive sensors. “Gamma plot, classic proton-antiproton curve, about two AUs out. It’s redshifting on us. I got a fix on that relay service buoy, Brad: it’s at the origin point for that . . . burn.”

  “Shit!” The screen swam in front of Brad’s eyes. All of a sudden he remembered what it was like when he was nine, when his father told him his dog had died. “Shit!” Positronium was an unstable intermediate created during some matter-antimatter reactions. Redshifted, it was moving away from the reference frame of the observer at some fraction of the speed of light. Out from the star, it could mean only one thing—slower-than-light antimatter rockets, relativistic retaliation bombers cranking up for a kamikaze run on someone’s home world. “They’ve launched. They’ve fucking launched the deterrent fleet!”

  They were a long-practiced team: he didn’t have to tell Mary what to do. She was already bringing back up the gravitational potential maps he’d need for the jump. Brad canceled his half-planned course and fed in the return journey jump coordinates. “Hello Delta X-ray Zeus Seven, this is flight Echo Gold Nine Zero acknowledging. We are preparing to return to Iceland Seven soonest. Can you clarify the situation for us. Other shipping may be in the queue and need warning off. Do you need assistance? Over.” Then he got on the blower to Liz, down in kernel monitoring, explaining to her that, no, this wasn’t a joke, and yes, he was going to overrun the drive maintenance cycle, and yes, it was going to put the Pride in the dock for a month and there was a good reason for it all—

  “Echo Gold Nine Zero, departure cleared. This is Delta X-ray Zeus Seven, relaying through NavServ buoy six-nine-three via causal channel. Situation as follows: inner system exterminated by surprise attack using weapons of mass destruction approximately two-seven-zero minutes ago absolute time. Your range three-six-zero light minutes considered marginal for survival: the star’s gone. We’re assuming one hundred percent fatalities on Moscow, repeat, one hundred percent. V-force has launched, but we’ve got no idea who did it. As of two hours ago, Moscow system is under complete interdict. Wait—” for a moment the steady voice wavered. “Oh. Oh my! That felt weird.” A pause. “Echo Gold Nine Zero, we’ve just taken a core radiation pulse. Funny, two kilometers of rock shielding outside us. Ah, shit. Off the scale. Neutrinos, has to be. Echo Gold Nine Zero, this is Delta X-ray Zeus Seven, there’s—I don’t think there’s anything you can do for us. Get the hell out while you still can—warn everybody off. Signing off now.”

  Brad stared at the comm status display without seeing it. Then he mashed his palm down on the general channel glyph. “Crew, captain speaking.” He glanced at Mary and saw her staring back at him. Waiting. “We have a situation. Change of plan.” Glancing down at his panel he blinked and dragged the urgent course correction into the flight sequence. “We’re not going home. Ever.”

  Taxis Pride was the first ship to leave Moscow system after the explosion. Another two ships made it out, one of them badly damaged by jumping into the tail of the shock wave. Word of the explosion filtered out: several freighters were saved from jumping into a fiery grave by dint of a massive and well-coordinated emergency alert. Over the next few weeks, the inhabitants of the Iceland Seven refinery station—a mere eight light months from Moscow—were evacuated to Shenjen Principality, and as the shock wave rolled outward, more vulnerable habitats were evacuated in turn. The nearest populated planetary system, Septagon Central, was far enough away to be saved by the heavy radiation shielding on its orbital republics. Meanwhile, years would pass before another starship visited the radiation-scarred corpse of Moscow system.

  IMPACT: T plus 1392 days, 18 hours, 11 minutes

  “What’s your finding?” demanded the Captain.

  The three dogs grinned at him from their positions around his cramped day cabin. One of them bent to lick at a patch of blue foam sticking to its left hind leg. The foam hissed and smoked where saliva ran. “There is nothing to report on the first incident, the
customs officer. We regret to inform you that he must be classed as missing, presumed dead, unless we subsequently learn that he boarded one of the other ships. The second incident was a juvenile delinquent escapade committed by an asocial teenager. No trusted subsystems appear to have been compromised. I have no direct access to the cargo carried in the security zone, but you have assured me yourself that none of the black manifest packages are missing. The recorded history of the delinquent is consistent with this event, as is her subsequent behavior, and a search of the documentation corpus pertaining to socialization of juvenile adults in prewar New Moscow society indicates that territorial escapades of this kind are a not-infrequent response to environmental stress.”

  “Why did she get in there in the first place?” Mannheim leaned forward, glaring at the lead hellhound with a mixture of anxiety and distrust. “I thought you were supposed to be guarding—”

  “In my judgment her actions are compatible with typical human adolescent dysfunctional behavior. This search-and-rescue security unit is not authorized to use lethal force to protect bonded cargo, Captain. A secondary consideration was that her absence had been noticed by familial parties and formally reported after she was officially transferred aboard the evacuation ferry. Remanding the delinquent into the care of her parents, with subsequent monitoring and supervision for the duration of the voyage, will prevent repetition and will not invite further attention.”