"Charles Stross - Iron Sunrise" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

for, much less taught them skills like steganography, traffic analysis, tail spotting, and Dumpster diving.
And most kids grew out of having invisible friends, whereas Wednesday didn't. That was because most
misfit kids' invisible friends were imaginary. Wednesday's wasn't.
When she was younger she'd told her brother Jeremy about her friend, who was called Herman: but Jerm
had blabbed to Mum, and the result was a tense inquisition and trips to the network engineers, then the
counselor's office. When she realized what was expected of her she denied everything, of course, but not
abruptly; Herman told her how to do it so as to allay their suspicions. You're never alone with
schizophrenia, he'd joked mordantly, annoying her because she knew that schizophrenia was nothing to
do with having multiple personalities, and everything to do with hearing voices in her head. When she'd
first learned about it she'd dialed chlorpromazine and flupenthixol up from the kitchen pharm, and
staggered around in a haze for days while Herman witheringly explained how she might have poisoned
herself: Parkinson's was a not-unknown side effect of primitive neuroleptics. It wasn't a word she'd
known before he used it.
Everyone had known evacuation day was coming for months. They'd known about it to the day, to the
hour in fact, since a couple of weeks after the Incident. The ships began to arrive a week ahead of zero
hour. Normally Old Newfie only received one liner a month, clearing via customs to transfer passengers
and cargo to the short-haul local freighters that bounced back and forth across the last parsec. But right
now all the docking bays on the hub were extended, piers pressurized like great gray hagfish sucking the
guts out of the station.
The surviving in-system freighters had come home for the final time two weeks earlier, rerigged with
ferry tanks for the final flight. Everyone huddled together on the one station, thirty thousand souls
drifting above the ecliptic of a gloomy red gas giant eight times the mass of Jupiter. They had fuel—that
was what Old Newfoundland Four was in the business of selling—six hundred megatons of refined


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 IRON SUNRISE - Charles Stross


methane ice bunkered in a tank farm streaming kilometers behind the axle of the big wheel. And they
were close enough to one of the regular trade routes between Septagon system and the core worlds to
pick up passing trade, close enough to act as an interchange for local traffic bound for Moscow. They
were still profitable and self-sufficient, had been even since before the disaster. But they couldn't stay
there—not with the iron sunrise coming. The liner Sikorsky's Dream nuzzled up to the hub, taking VIPs
and the governor and his staff. Behind it hung two freighters from New Dresden, sent in yet another
symbolic gesture of reconciliation. They looked like pregnant midwife toads, blistered with bulky
refugee pods hanging from their cargo spines, steerage for tens of thousands of passengers on the three-
week, forty-light year journey to Septagon for resettlement.
Even Septagon would be uncomfortably close to the shock front, but it was the best relocation center on
offer. There was money enough to house and reskill everyone, and a governing polity that actively
courted immigration. It would be a chance to draw a line under the incident, to look to the future, and to
turn away from the dull despair and the cloud of mourning that had hovered over the station since news
of the Zero Incident arrived three and a half years ago. There had been suicides then, and more than one
near riot; the station was haunted by a thousand ghosts for every one alive. It was no fit place to raise a
child.
Dad and Mum and Jeremy had moved aboard the Long March two days ago, dragging Wednesday along
in their glassy-eyed optimistic undertow. There were holes in the facade, empty figures in the family
photograph. Cousin Jane, Uncle Mark, Grandpa and Grandma weren't coming. At least, not in the living
flesh; they were dust now, burned by the godwind that would blow past the station in four days' time.
Harried wardens had shown Wednesday and her family to their deck, corridor, segment, and cell. They