Iron Sunrise (17 page)

Happy when the first person she'd confided in had spread her private life around the commons like a ripped laundry bag? Happy fitting in like a cross-threaded screw, her dialect an object of mockery and her lost home a subject of dead yokel jokes? Happy to sit through endless boring lectures on subjects she'd taken a look at and given up on years ago, and through more boring lectures on subjects she was good at by teachers who didn't have a clue and frequently got things wrong? Happy?

Happy was discovering that the school surveillance net had been brainwashed to ignore people wearing a specific shade of chromakey green, and to track people wearing black. Happy was discovering that Ellis could be counted on to have a stash of bootleg happy pills and would trade them for help with the biochemistry courseware, which at age nineteen was still about three years behind where she'd got to on her own at age fifteen.

Happy was finding a couple of fellow misfits who didn't have bad breath and boast about getting their ashes hauled the morning after. Happy was learning how not to get beaten up in camera blind spots by invisible assailants, and accused of confabulation and self-mutilation when she cried for help.

She didn't dare think about the kind of happy that might come from Mom or Dad finally reskilling to the point where they could land themselves some paid work, or being able to move out of this shithole of a slum tenement, or even able to emigrate to a richer, bigger hab. About not having to look forward to the prospect of being treated like a baby for more than two-thirds of her current life span, until she hit thirty—the age of majority in Septagon.

Or about—

Oops, she thought, glancing around. That wasn't very smart, was it?

Introspection had distracted Wednesday as she left home. Which wasn't particularly bad, normally: even the sparsely inhabited subsidized apartment corridors had surveillance coverage and environmental support.

But she'd turned two corners, taken a shortcut through a disused corporate warren with override-forced doors, and been heading farther toward the distal pole where the party supposedly was. Sammy and her gang (who were not the school bullies, but the arbiters of fashion and cool, and never let Wednesday forget how lucky she was to be invited) had done this before, taken over an abandoned apartment or office zone, or even a manufacturing cube, gutted it, brought in temporary infrastructure and bootleg liquor, and cranked up the music. Moving out into the distal zone was daring: the sub-basement there was some of the oldest housing in the colony, long abandoned and scheduled for restructuring and development some time in the next ten years or so.

Wednesday had been blindly running the inertial route map Johnny deWitt had nervously beamed her the day before, saved to her cache: a flashing ring on her index finger pointed the path out to her. In her self-absorbed haze she hadn't noticed how very deep the shadows were getting, nor how sparse the pedestrian traffic was, nor how many of the corridor lighting strips were smashed. Now she was alone, with nobody else in sight. There was detritus under foot, broken roofing panels, a stack of dusty utility hoses, missing doors gaping like rotten teeth in the walls—this whole sector looked unsafe, leaky. And now it occurred to her to start thinking. "Why Johnny?" she asked quietly. "Johnny?" Short, spotty, and ungifted with any sense of fashion, he'd have been the class nerd if he'd been smarter: as it was, he was simply a victim. And he hadn't beamed her the ticket with any obvious ulterior motive, no stammering invitation to hole up in a soft space for an hour—just plain nervous, staring over his shoulder all the time. I could phone him and ask, but then I'd look like a fool. Weak. But … if I don't phone him, I'll be a fool.

"Dial Johnny the Sweat," she subvocalized. Connecting … no signal. She blinked in disbelief. Surely there should be bandwidth down here? It was even more fundamental than oxygen. With bandwidth you could get rescue services or air, or find your way out of trouble. Without it, anything could happen.

There were rumors about these abandoned hab sectors. Dismembered bodies buried in the cable ducts, surveillance cams that would look away if you knew the secret gesture to bypass their programming, invitingly abandoned houses where one of the rooms was just a doorknob away from hard vacuum. But she'd never heard rumors of entire segments that were blacked out, where you couldn't call someone or talk to your agents or notepad, where maintenance 'bots feared to crawl. That was beyond neglect; it was actively dangerous.

She walked through a wide, low-ceilinged hall. From the rails along one side and the lack of decoration it looked to have been some kind of utility tunnel, back when people lived and worked there. Empty doorways gaped to either side, some of them fronted with rubble—crushed dumb aerogel and regolith bricks, twisted frameworks. Most of the lights were dead, except for a strip along the middle of the ceiling that flickered intermittently.

The air was stale and smelled musty, as if nothing much stirred it. For the first time Wednesday was glad of her survival sensor, which would scream if she was in danger of wandering into an anoxic gas trap.

"This can't be right," she muttered to herself. With a twitch of her rings she brought up a full route map, zoomed to scale so that this corner of the colony's public spaces was on the display. (The rings were another thing that rubbed it in; back in Moscow's system they'd have been a bulky, boxy personal digital assistant, not a set of hand jewels connected to her nervous system by subtle implants.) The whole segment was grayed out, condemned, off-limits. Somewhere on the way she'd gone blundering through a doorway that was down on the map as a blank wall. "Bother."

The party—she dumped her follow-me tag into the map—lay roughly a hundred meters outside the shield wall of the pressure cylinder. "Shit," she added, this time with feeling. Someone had put Johnny up to it, spiking her with a falsie—or, more subtly, run a middleman spoof on his hacked ring.

She could see it in her mind's eye: a bunch of mocking in-things joking about how they'd send the little foreign bitch on a climb down into the dirty underbelly of the world. Something rattled in the rubbish at one side of the hall, rats or—

She glanced round, hastily. There didn't seem to be any cams down there, just hollow eye sockets gaping in the ceiling. Ahead, a dead zone sucked up the light: a big hall, ceiling so high it was out of sight, opened like a cavern off the end of the service tunnel. And she heard the noise again.

The unmistakable sound of boots scuffing against concrete.

What do I—Old reflexes died hard: it took Wednesday a split second to realize that it was no good asking Herman for advice. She glanced around for somewhere to hide. If someone was stalking her, some crazy—more likely, a couple of Bone Sisters who'd lured her down there to whack her bad for wearing team invisicolors and carrying a cutter on their loop—she wanted to be way out of sight before they eyeballed her. The big cavern ahead looked like a good bet, but it was dark, too dark to see into, and if it was a dead end, she'd be bottled in. But the doorways off to the left looked promising; lots of housing modules, jerked airlocks gaping like eye sockets.

Wednesday darted sideways, trying to muffle her bootheels. The nearest door gaped wide, floor underlayers ruptured like decompressed intestines, revealing a maze of ducts and cables. She stepped over them delicately, stopped, leaned against the wall and forced herself to close her eyes for ten seconds. The wall was freezing cold, and the house smelled musty, as if something had rotted in there long ago. When she uncovered her eyes again, she could see some way into the gloom. The floor paneling resumed a meter inside the threshold, and a corridor split in two directions. She took the left fork hesitantly, tiptoeing quietly and breathing lightly, listening for the sound of pursuit. When it got too dark to see she fumbled her tracker ring round, and whispered, "I need a torch." The thin blue diode glow wasn't much, but it was enough to outline the room ahead of her—a big open space like her family's own living room, gutted and abandoned.

She looked around the room. A broken fab bulked in one corner next to an exposed access crawlway. A sofa, seat rotted through with age and damp, occupied the opposite wall. Holding her breath, she forced herself not to sneeze. Words came to her, unbidden, on the breeze: "—fuck da bitch go?"

"One o' these. Youse take starboard, I taken the port."

Male voices, with a really strange accent, harsh-sounding and determined.

Wednesday shuddered convulsively. Not the Sisters! Bone Sisters were bad—you crossed them, they crossed you and you needed surgery—but the white sorority didn't hang out with—

Crunch. Cursing. Someone had stuck a foot in the open cable channel.

Teetering on the edge of blind panic, Wednesday scurried toward the half-meter-high crawlway and scrambled along it on hands and knees, headfirst into a tube of twilight that stretched barely farther than arm's length. The tube kinked sharply upward, pipes bundled together against a carrier surface. She paused, forced herself to relax, and rolled over onto her back so that she could see round the bend. Can I … ? Push from the knees, begin to sit up, stick boot toes into gaps in the carrier trunking, push …

Panting with effort, she levered herself up and out of view of the room.

Please don't have infrared trackers or dogs. The thought of the dogs still woke her up in a cold, shivering sweat, some nights. Please just be muggers. Knowing her luck, she'd crossed paths with a couple of serial fuckmonsters, transgressive nonconsensual looking for a meat puppet. And she didn't have a backup: that cost real money, the kind that Mom and Dad didn't have. She shuddered, forcing back panic, braced her elbows against the walls of the duct, and flicked her rings to shutdown. She switched off her implants—backup brain, retinal projectors, the lot. Completely off. She could die there and nobody would find the body until they tore down the walls. There could be a gas trap, and she'd never know. But then again, the hunters might be following her by tracking her emissions.

"She come 'ere? I not am 'inking 'dis." Scuffling and voices and, frighteningly, a faint overspill of light from a hand torch. A second voice, swearing. "Search'e floor! Have youse taken beneath dat?"

"I have. Tracer an' be saying she—shirting vanish. Tracer be losing she.

Signal strong al'way from she's home. Prey be wise to sigint 'striction."

Not some girl gang shit: they were stalking her, had followed her all the way from home. Forget muggers, forget ordinary sickheads. Wednesday stifled a squeak of pure cold terror.

"I an' be checking over the way. You be clearing dis side an' if-neg we-all be waiting mid-way. If she be hiding, she-an be come out."

"An' we be dumping nitro down here? Bath she in unbreathable?"

The second one replied, contemptuous: "You-an' be finding rotten meat after, you be dumping 'de breathing mix. Contractees, t'ey wanting authentication." Footsteps clattered over the grating, stopped.

They're going to wait me out in the corridor? At least they weren't going to flood the entire sector with nitrogen, but even hearing them talking about it was frightening her. Rotten meat. They want to know I'm dead, she realized, and the dizzying sense of loss made her stomach heave. How do I get out of this?

Just asking the question helped; from somewhere she dredged up a memory of her invisible friend lecturing her, an elevator-surfing run during happier days back home. The first step in evading a pursuit is to identify and locate the pursuers. Then work out what sort of map they're using and try to locate their blind spots. Not to take the stairs or the elevator, but to go through a service hatch, carefully step onto the roof of a car, and ride it to safety—or as a training game, all the way to Docking Control and back down again without showing up anywhere on Old Newfie's security map.

She'd learned to ghost through walls, disappear from tracking nets, dissolve in a crowd. Ruefully, Wednesday recalled Herman's first lesson: When threatened, do not let yourself panic. Panic is the most likely thing to kill you. At the time, it had been fun.

It still is a game, she realized suddenly. A game for them. Whoever they are. But I don't have to play by their rules. With that realization, she managed to recapture a tenuous sense of self-confidence. Now where?

The duct was pitch-black, but she vaguely recalled it leading upward before she'd switched her gear off. It looked like it had been a house once, a slum tenement for cheap labor—so cheap it didn't even have en suite bathrooms and automated amahs to do the cleaning. Apartments there were prefab assemblies: a bunch of sealed, airtight modules connected by pressure-tight doors, bolted together in a big empty space and linked to the pressurized support mains by service tunnels like this one. This duct had to run somewhere pressurized. The only question was whether there was room for her to follow it all the way.

Wednesday braced herself against the back of the tube and began to lever herself up. The pipes and cables with their regular ties and their support grid were nearly as good as a ladder, and their insulation was soft and friable with age, forming spongy handholds for her questing fingers. She paused every half meter to feel above her with one hand and tried not to think about her clothing: the boots were a miserable pain for climbing in, but she couldn't take them off, and as for what the duct was doing to her jacket …

Her questing hand found empty space. Gasping quietly she reached up, then felt the cables bend over in a curve onto what had to be the top of the rooms' outer gas containment membrane. A final convulsive heave brought her up and over, and left her doubled over across the cable support, panting for breath, her legs still dangling over three meters of air space.

Now she risked turning on her locater ring for a moment, still dialed to provide a light glow. Glancing around, she felt an edgy bite of claustrophobia. The crawl space widened to almost a meter, but was still only half a meter high. Ahead, there was a darkness that might be a branch off to one side, in the direction of the front door if she hadn't lost her bearings. Wednesday pulled her legs up and crawled toward it.