Iron Sunrise (8 page)

"Alert: close proximity alert! Unidentified human, believed hostile, at—"

"Don't move," MacDougal whispered tinnily in her ear. "The fucking thing just armed itself. If you get any closer without him telling it you're friendly, it could blow."

A bead of sweat trickled down the side of Rachel's face. She forced herself to smile. "That's really impressive," she said slowly. Insects whined softly overhead, police wasps circling his head, waiting for an opportunity to strike safely. A thought dug its unwelcome claws into her mind: Got to get closer!

But how? "I like impressive men," she cooed. "And you're really impressive, Mister President."

I'm going to try to get close enough to immobilize him, she subvocalized.

Tell me exactly what your bugs are loaded with again.

"Glad you think so, little lady," said the Last King of Scotland, rubbing his crotch. Isn't priapism a late-stage symptom? she subvocalized, staring at his dirty sweats and forcing herself to lick her suddenly dry lips.

"They're loaded with a really strong serotonin antagonist targeted on his reticular activating system. Ten seconds and he'll be in a coma. We just need to stop him telling the bomb to go bang after it goes in and before he nods off. And, uh, yes, it is a symptom."

"Your little king looks like he wants to hold court." Rachel smiled invitingly, dry-swallowing and steeling herself for the next step. First get his confidence, then abuse it … "What's the protocol for approaching a President, Mister President?"

"You do it naked. Naked folks are my friends. Naked people don't have no guns. You hear that, bomb? Naked women are my friends. Naked bitches.

My special friends." He seemed to have calmed down a bit, but the set of his jaw was still tense, and he squinted angrily, as if he had a bad sinus headache. "You going to get naked, bitch?"

"If you say so, Mister President." Rachel locked her jaw muscles in a painful rictus that imitated a smile as she unsealed her jacket and slowly shrugged her way out of it. Did you hear that? she subvocalized as she rolled her leggings down around her ankles and stepped out of them. She stood in front of him and held the forced grin, trying to look inviting, willing her endocrine override to give her a flush of subcutaneous blood vessels and a crinkling of nipples. Trying to fake arousal, to do anything to keep the sad bastard distracted from the prospect of wanking his way into nuclear oblivion, taking half a city with him. Anything to let her get closer to the trigger—

"You may approach the throne," declared Field Marshal Professor President Doctor Idi Amin Dadaist, spreading his legs. With a moue of vague disgust he yanked his pants open. His penis was indeed large and stiff: it also bore several weeping sores, like a blighted aubergine. "Kneel to kiss your emperor!"

Rachel saw his hands raised above his head. His right fingertips brushed against the dead man's wristband as he smiled lazily. She knelt before him, tensing. "I can do good things with my hands," she offered as she reached toward his crotch, her skin crawling.

"Then do so," he said magisterially. "Remember, as your President I hold the power of life and death over you."

Rachel nodded and gently stroked his glans. She could see a vein pulsing in it. She leaned closer, trying to judge the distance, swallowing bile. "May I kiss you, Mister President? You're a very powerful man. Would you like that?

I'm your loyal subject. Will you let me kiss you on the mouth?"

The Field Marshal and Professor sat up slightly. "Certainly," he said, mustering up a slightly pathetic gravitas: his breath caught as she stroked him.

"Hey, that's a funny smell," Rachel said quickly. Then she leaned forward and clamped her mouth down onto his lips, tongue questing, fingers busy with his shaft. He tensed slightly, back arching, and she reached up to grab his right arm by the wrist. Something insectoidal flickered past her eyes in a blur of wings as he spasmed and pumped a ropy stream of hot imperial semen across her thigh. His jaws flexed: she stuck her tongue into his mouth as far as she could, squeezing her eyes shut, holding her breath, and prayed that he wouldn't have a seizure as he bucked and jerked against her. The President for Life twitched a couple of times: then his eyes rolled up and he slumped backward in the recliner. His right arm fell sideways as she let go of it. She straightened up, gasping, and managed to turn aside. She spat, trying to get the taste of decaying teeth out of her mouth, then doubled over and vomited noisily across the would-be dictator's feet.

After a few seconds, she felt strong arms around her shoulder. "Come on,"

said MacDougal. "Let's get you out an' away. It's all under control."

"Under—" Rachel moved to wipe the tears from her eyes, then realized her hand was sticky. "Ugh. It's over?"

The room was filling up with naked policewomen toting toolboxes and talking into throat mikes. "Ordinary bomb team's already here to take over—half of it, anyways. You can come away now." Without her uniform and body armor, Inspector MacDougal had the most remarkable tattoos Rachel had seen in a long time: angel wings on her shoulder blades, a snake around her narrow waist. She pointed at the four nude women who were leaning over the bomb with instruments and neutron counters. "That was inspirational, Colonel! 'Naked women are my friends.'"

Rachel shook her head. An insect buzzed overhead. Not police issue, it was probably the first harbinger of a swarm of journalists. "I'm not really a colonel, I just play one in the banana republics." She shuddered. "I needed to get close enough to gag him and hold his arm out of the way. Whatever it took."

"Well, if it was up to me, you'd get a medal." MacDougal looked hard at the recliner and shook her head. "Took guts. Some assholes will do anything for a handjob."

"Need water," Rachel gasped, feeling another wave of nausea coming on.

Someone passed her a bottle. She rinsed and spat, rhythmically, until the bottle was empty, trying to remind herself how much worse it could have been. She could have had her tongue bitten off if he'd into a seizure. Or he might have wanted something worse. Another bottle appeared, and she poured half of it over her left hand and thigh. "I need a shower. Antibiotics.

Lots of antibiotics. How long does that shot put him out for?"

"How long?" MacDougal sounded puzzled, then spotted the insects: she straightened up, tried to look severe, and went into press-management mode. "Laughing Joker Security takes WMD incursions extremely seriously.

In accordance with our zero tolerance of nuclear sidearms policy, we deployed a destroyer payload targeted on the offender's reticular activating system. He hasn't got one anymore—he'll stay asleep until the rest of his cerebellum fails." Which, judging from the way she glanced at the erratically snoring figure, would be sooner rather than later. Impromptu art happenings involving nuclear weapons tended to get a bad press even in the laid-back Republique et Canton Geneve.

There was a shrill beeping from the pile of discarded clothes near the doorway. Rachel was leaning over it and fumbling for her interface rings before she realized she'd moved. "Yes?" she said hoarsely.

"You haven't heard the last of this!" Judging from her hectoring tone, Madam Chairman had been following events on multicast, and she was royally pissed off at something—probably the fact that Rachel was still alive.

"I know about you and your cronies in the enforcement branch! Don't think you can get out of the audit hearing the same way!"

"Oh, fuck off!" said Rachel, killing the call. I'll get you later, she thought dizzily, leaning against the doorframe. Find out what your game is and beat you … She tried to get a grip, paranoia running out of control. "Inspector, can you see I get home? I think I'm about to collapse." She slid down the wall, laughing and crying at the same time. On the other side of the room a naked lady held up something like a fat shotgun cartridge in both hands, triumphantly. Everyone else seemed to be cheering, but for the life of her Rachel couldn't see why.

MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR

More than a year earlier, in the middle of a field mission that was rapidly falling apart in all directions simultaneously, Rachel had struck a bargain with the devil. She'd made a deal with something that was indeed perfectly capable of destroying worlds: and much to her disquiet, she discovered afterward that she did not regret it.

In the wake of the singularity, the Eschaton had apparently vanished from the Earth, leaving behind a crippled network, depopulated cities, the general aftermath of planet-shaking disaster—and three commandments engraved on a cube of solid diamond ten meters on a side: I am the Eschaton. I am not your god.

I am descended from you and I exist in your future.

Thou shalt not violate causality within my historic light cone. Or else.

Some people claimed to understand what this meant, while others said they were imbeciles or charlatans. The First Reformed Church of Tipler, Astrophysicist, battled it out in the streets with the Reformed Latter-Day Saints. Islam mutated out of recognition, other religions curled up and died.

Computer scientists—the few who were left; for some reason the Eschaton seemed to select them preferentially—came out with crazy hypotheses.

The Eschaton was a chunk of software that had, by way of who-knew-what algorithm, achieved computational sentience. It had rapidly bootstrapped itself across the Internet, achieving in minutes or hours as much thinking time as a human might attain in a million years. Then it had transcended, achieving a level of intelligence that simply could not be speculated on, an intellect that compared to human thought as a human might compare to a frog. What it did then, it did for motives that no human being was likely to guess, or understand. How it opened macroscopic wormholes in space-time—something human scientists had no clue how to do—remained a mystery.

Bizarre references to the light cone made no sense at all for more than a hundred years, until the first successful construction of a faster-than-light spacecraft. Then it began to fit into a big picture. The universe was seething with human-populated worlds, the dumping grounds where the Eschaton had deposited the nine billion or so people it had abducted in the course of a single frantic day. The wormholes covered immense distances in time as well as space, opening a year back in time for every light year out in distance. Astrophysicists speculated blatantly about the computational implications of causality violation, until silenced in a bizarre jihad by a post-Christian sect from North Africa.

The human consequences of the singularity reverberated endlessly, too.

The exiles hadn't simply been dumped on any available world; in almost all cases, they'd been planted in terrain that was not too hostile, showing crude signs of recent terraforming. And the Eschaton had given them gifts: cornucopias, robot factories able to produce any designated goods to order, given enough time, energy, and raw materials. Stocked with a library of standard designs, a cornucopia was a general-purpose tool for planetary colonization. Used wisely, they enabled many of the scattered worlds to achieve a highly automated postindustrial economy within years. Used unwisely, they enabled others to destroy themselves. A civilization that used its cornucopia to produce nuclear missiles instead of nuclear reactors—and more cornucopias—wasn't likely to outlast the first famine, let alone the collapse of civilization that was bound to follow when one faction or another saw the cornucopia as a source of military power and targeted it. But the end result was that, a couple of hundred years after the event, most worlds that had not retreated to barbarism had achieved their own spacegoing capabilities.

Military strategists puzzled endlessly over the consequences of being able to attack an enemy with total surprise, until reminded of the third commandment. One or two of them, it transpired, had tried just that; the typical consequence was that a bizarre accident would befall whoever planned such an attack. Interestingly, even the most secretively prepared attempts to use time travel as a military tactic seemed to be crushed, just before they could actually take place.

Rachel had discovered the hard way just why this was the case. The Eschaton was still a factor in human affairs; reclusive and withdrawn it might be, but it still kept a watchful eye open for trouble. It intervened, too, for its own reasons. Causality violation—time travel—if allowed to flourish without check, offered an immediate threat to its existence; sooner or later somebody would try to grandfather it out of history. Various other technological possibilities also threatened it. AI research might generate a competitor for informational resources; nanotechnology developments might achieve the same results through alternative pathways. Hence the third commandment—and the existence of an army of covert enforcers, saboteurs, and agents of influence working on its behalf.

Two years before, Rachel had met one of those agents. She'd been politically-compromised, a witness to his activities: a fifteen-microsecond induced error in a clock which sealed the fate of a fleet and the interstellar empire that had dispatched it to recapture a planet that hadn't been lost in the first place. She'd stayed quiet about it, tacitly accepting the abhuman intervention in diplomatic affairs. The Eschaton hadn't destroyed a civilization this time; it had simply caused an invasion fleet to arrive at its destination too late to alter history, and in so doing had triggered the collapse of an aggressive militaristic regime. It was the job she'd been sent to do herself, by her controllers in the Black Chamber.

In fact, it had been a very happy coincidence from her point of view, because not only had she met an agent of the Eschaton: she'd married him.

And sometimes, on good days, on days when she wasn't being hauled over the coals by bureaucratic harridans or called in to deal with hideous emergencies, she thought that the only thing she was really afraid of was losing him again.

On good days …

Rachel had been lying in bed for an hour, showered and bathed to squeaky cleanliness and dosed up with a wide-spectrum phagebot and a very strong sedative, when Martin came home.