Iron Sunrise Read Free

unfit for minors, and slapped a parental control on that section of the database. Her friends—those she counted as friends—were mostly on the other ships. Even Herman had told her he'd be unable to talk after the ship's first jump. It would have been more fun if they'd had cold sleep tankage, but there was no way that the station's facilities could process more than a couple of hundred at a time: so Wednesday was to be a martyr to boredom for the next week.
    The only consolation was that she had a whole new world to explore—a starship. She hadn't been on a ship since she was eight, and the itch to put learning into practice was irresistible. Besides, Herman said he knew and could show her the layout of this particular vessel. It was a late-model Backhoe series heavy lifter fabricated in the yards over Burgundy, with life-support superstructure by Thurn und Taxis Pty of New Dresden. It was just a trash hauler—fusion rockets, contrarotating spin wheels—nothing as sophisticated as a momentum transfer unit or grav generators. Its jump module was a sealed unit purchased from someplace where they knew how to make such things; neither Dresden nor Moscow had the level of tech infrastructure necessary to throw naked singularities around. But Herman knew his way around the ship, and Wednesday was bored. So obviously it was time to go exploring; and when she told him, he had some interesting suggestions for where to go.
    Wednesday was lousy at staying out of locked rooms. Her second-year tutor had summed it up: "She's like a cat—takes a shut door as a personal insult." She took her pick gun and tablet with her as a matter of course, not out of malice or a desire to burgle, but simply because she couldn't abide not knowing what lay on the far side of a door. (The ship had a double-walled hull, and the only doors that breached into vacuum were airlocks.
    Unless she was stupid enough to pick a door with flashing pressure warning lights, heavy gaskets, and mechanical interlocks, she wasn't running any risks. Or so she thought … )
    The ship wasn't exactly off-limits to passengers, but she had a feeling her presence would be discouraged if anyone noticed her. So she sneaked up into the central service axis and back down into the crew ring the smart way: sitting on the roof of a powered elevator car, her stiction pads locked to the metal as it swam up the tunnel, decelerating and shedding angular momentum. She rode it up and down twice, searching for ventilation ducts with the aid of a torch, before she made her move. She swam through darkened service shafts, down another tube, hitched a lift on the roof of a passenger car, and surfed all the way into one of the main ventilation bronchi. The maintenance moles in the airflow system left her alone, because she was alive and moving, which was just as well, really. After an hour of hobbiting around in the ducts she was tired and a bit disoriented—and it was then that she came across the filtration hood that Herman had told her to expect.
    It sat in the floor of a cramped duct, humming softly to itself, laminar pumps blurring quietly in the twilight. A faint blue glow of ultraviolet lamps shone from the edges. Fascinated, she bent close to inspect it. Sterilizers aboard a star-ship? Only in the life-support system, as a rule. But this was the accommodation deck, so what was it doing here? A quick once-over of the mounting bolts revealed another anomaly—a fine wire leading down through a hole in the floor of the duct. It was obviously an alarm cable. Not the sort of unreliable IR sensor that might be set off by a passing maintenance pig, nor a nerve garden eyeball sensor to be bamboozled by shadows, but an honest old-fashioned burglar alarm! She attacked it with her multitool and the compact maintenance kit she'd acquired a few months ago. Wires were easy—
    A minute later she had the filtration hood unbolted and angled up at one side. Dropping an eyeball through was the work of