Tapping echoed down the corridor. It had crept up imperceptibly under the sound of their voices. It continued with faint, rhythmic precision, the flat click of plastic against stone.
“Aw, shit,” said the President.
“I’ll go,” said the Chief Justice.
“It’s nothing,” Senator 3 said. “A blower settling.” Lindsay heard the rattle of her tool belt.
“I’m gone,” the Chief Justice said. Lindsay felt a light movement of air as the old Mechanist floated past him.
Fifteen seconds passed in darkness. “We need light,” the Speaker hissed. “I’ll use the saw and—”
The tapping stopped. The Chief Justice called out. “I have it! It’s a piece of—”
A sudden nasty crunch cut him off.
“Justice!” the President cried. They rushed down the corridor, bumping and colliding blindly.
When they reached the spot, the Speaker pulled her saw, and sparks flew. The noisemaker was a simple flap of stiff plastic, glued to the mouth of a branching tunnel and tugged by a long thread. The assassin—Paolo—had waited deep within the tunnel. When he’d heard the old Mechanist’s voice he had fired his weapon, a slingshot. A heavy stone cube—Paolo’s six-sided die—was half buried in the dead pirate’s fractured skull.
In the brief blazing light of sparks, Lindsay saw the dead man’s head covered by a flattened mass of blood, held by surface tension to the skin around the wound.
“We could leave,” Lindsay said.
“Not without our own,” the President said. “And not leaving the one who did this. They got only five left.”
“Four,” Lindsay said. “I killed Fazil. Three, if I can talk to Nora.”
“No time for talk,” the President said. “You’re wounded, State. Stay here and guard the airlock. When you see the others, tell ’em we’ve gone to kill the four.”
Lindsay forced himself to speak. “If Nora surrenders, Mr. President, I hope that you’ll—”
“Mercy was his job,” said the President. Lindsay heard him tug at the dead judge’s body. “You got a weapon, State?”
“No.”
“Take this, then.” He handed Lindsay the dead man’s mechanical arm. “If one of ’em strays by here, kill them with the old man’s fist.”
Lindsay clutched the cabled ridges of the stiff prosthetic wrist. The others went quickly, with a click, a rustle, and the whisper of calloused skin against stone. Lindsay floated back up the tunnel to the airlock, bouncing along the smooth stone with knees and shoulders, thinking of Nora.
The old woman wouldn’t die, that was the horror of it. If it had only been as quick and clean as Kleo had said it would, Nora could have borne it, endured it as she endured all things. But in the darkness, when she whipped the weighted sash around the pirate’s neck and pulled, it had not been quiet, it had not been clean.
The old woman—Judge 2, the pirates called her—her throat was a mass of cartilage and gristle, tough as wire beneath her skin’s false smoothness. Twice, when Nora thought she was dead at last, the pirate woman had lurched shudderingly into life again with a tortured rasp in the darkness. Nora’s wrists bled freely from the old woman’s splintered nails. The body stank.
Nora smelled her own sweat. Her armpits were a tormenting mass of rashes. She floated quietly in the pitch-black launch control room, her bare feet perched on the dead woman’s shoulders, one end of the sash in each hand.
She had not fought well when the pirates had launched their strike in the sudden blackout. She had hit someone, swinging her stone bola, but then lost it in the struggle. Agnes had fought hard and been wounded by the Speaker’s handsaw. Paolo had fought like a champion.
Kleo murmured a password from the door, and in a few moments there was light in the room. “I told you they worked,” Paolo said.
Kleo held the plastic candle away; the sodium at the tip of the wick was still sputtering where it had ignited. The waxy plastic reeked as the wick burned down. “I brought all you made,” Kleo told Paolo. “You’re a bright boy, dear.”
Paolo nodded proudly. “My luck beat this contingency. And I’ve killed two.”
“You made the candles,” Agnes said. “I said they wouldn’t work.” She looked at him adoringly. “You’re the one, Paolo. Give me orders.”
Nora saw the dead pirate’s face in candlelight. She unwrapped the strangling sash and tied it around her waist.
She felt another siege of weakness. Her eyes filled with tears and she felt a sudden horror and regret for the woman she had killed.
It was the drugs Abelard had given her. She had been a fool to take that first injection. Firing up with aphrodisiacs had been a surrender, not just to the enemy but to those bits and pieces of temptation and doubt that lurked within her. Throughout her life, the brighter her convictions had burned, the darker these shadows had been, flitting, creeping.
On her own, she might have held her ground. But there was the fatal example of the other diplomats. The traitors. The Academy had never officially spoken of them, leaving that to the covert world of gossip and rumor that boiled unceasingly in every Shaper colony. The rumors festered in darkness, taking on all the distorted forms of the forbidden.
In her own mind, Nora had become a criminal: sexual, ideological, professional. Things had happened to her that she dared not speak of, even to Kleo. Her Family knew nothing of the diplomatic training, the burning glare in every muscle, the attack on face and brain that had made her own body into an alien object before she turned sixteen.
If it had been anyone but another diplomat, she could have fought and died with the conviction and serenity that Kleo showed. But she had faced him now and understood. Abelard was not as bright as she was, but he was resilient and quick. She could become what he was. It was the first real alternative she had ever known.
“I gave us light,” Paolo bragged. He whirled his bola in a twisting figure-eight, catching the string on his padded forearms. “I played odds, even the farthest. I beat Ian, I beat Fazil, and I killed two.” Sleeve ties flailed at his elbows as he slapped his chest. “I say ambush, ambush, ambush!” The bola whirled to a stop, wrapping his arm, and he pulled his slingshot from his belt.
“They mustn’t escape,” Kleo said. Her face was warm and calm in the candlelight, framed by the fringed gold crown of her hairnet. “If survivors leave, they’ll bring others. We can live, darlings. They’re stupid. And they’re split. We’ve lost two, they seven.” A flicker of pain crossed her face. “The diplomat was quick, but odds say he died in the launch ring. The others we can outflank, like the Judges.”
“Where are the two Representatives?” said Agnes. The Speaker’s handsaw had slashed her above the left knee; she was pale but still full of fight. “We have to get the rogue genetic. She’s trouble.”
“What about the wetware?” Nora said. “It’ll stale if we stay powered down. We have to get power back.”
“They’d know we were in the power plant!” Paolo said. “One could start it, the others wait in ambush! Strike and fall back, strike and fall back!”
“First we hide the bodies,” Kleo said. She turned, bracing her feet near the doorway, and tugged hand over hand on a line. The third Judge appeared, his wrinkled neck almost slashed through by Kleo’s wire-thin garotte. The syringes on his belt were filled with stolen wetware. Like Judge 2, he had been caught at his theft.
Paolo peeled camo plastic from the launch room’s secret alcove. The bodies of Senators 1 and 2 already floated within it, killed by Agnes and Paolo. They shoved the other dead inside, reluctant to touch them. “They’ll know they’re here,” Agnes said. “They’ll smell them.” She sneezed violently.
“They’ll think it’s themselves,” Paolo said, smoothing the filmy false wall back into place.
“To the tokamak,” Kleo said. “I’ll take the candles; Agnes, you take point.”
“All right.” Agnes stripped off her blouse and heavy hairnet. She attached them together with a few loose stitches. Puffi
ng out in free-fall, they looked like a human form in the dimness. She slipped into the narrow corridor, pushing the decoy ahead of her with her extended arm.
The others followed, Nora as rear guard.
At each intersection they halted, listening, smelling. Agnes would push her clothes ahead, then peer quickly around the lip of the opening. Kleo would pass her the candle and she would check for ambushers.
As they neared the tokamak power plant, Agnes sneezed loudly again. After a moment Nora smelled it as well: an appalling alien stench. “What is it?” she whispered to Kleo, ahead of her.
“Fire, I think. Smoke.” Kleo was grim. “The Reshaped one is smart, I think she has gone to the tokamak.”
“Look!” Agnes whispered loudly. From the corridor branching to their left, a thin gray stream undulated in the candle’s light. Agnes ran her fingers through it, and the smoke broke into dissipating wisps. Agnes coughed rawly and caught herself against the wall, her naked ribs heaving silently.
Kleo blew out the candle. In the darkness they saw a feeble gleam reflected along the bends and curves of the tunnel’s smooth stone.
“Fire,” Kleo said. For the first time, Nora heard fear in her leader’s voice. “I’ll go first.”
“No!” Agnes brushed her lips against Kleo’s ear and whispered to her rapidly. The two women embraced, and Agnes sneaked forward, leaving her clothes and pressing herself against the tunnel wall. When Nora followed the others she felt Agnes’s smeared sweat cold against the stone.
Nora peered behind her, guarding their back. Where was Abelard? He wasn’t dead, she thought. If only he were here now, with his incessant glibness, and his gray eyes glowing with an animal’s determination to survive…
A sudden sharp clack echoed up the tunnel. A second passed, Agnes screamed, and the air filled with the sharp metallic stench of acid. There were howls of pain and hatred, the snap of Paolo’s slingshot. Nora’s back and shoulders tightened so suddenly that they cramped in agony and she scrambled head first down the tunnel, deafened by her own screams.
The rogue genetic whirled in the red gleam of firelight, slashing Agnes across the face with the spout of her weapon, a bellows. The air was full of flying globes of corrosive acid, drawn from a wetware tank. Steam curled from Agnes’s naked chest. To the side, Kleo grappled, slashing and kicking, with the stocky Rep 2, whose arm was broken by Paolo’s shot. Paolo was pulling another heavy stone from his belt pouch.
Nora yanked the sash from her waist with a silken hiss and launched herself at the enemy Shaper. The woman saw her coming. She wrapped a leg around Agnes’s throat, crushing it, and swung forward, arms spread to grapple.
Nora swung her weighted sash at the woman’s face. She caught it, grinned with her crooked teeth, and darted a hand at Nora’s face, two fingers spread to spear her eyes. Nora twisted and the nails drew blood from her cheeks. She kicked, missed, kicked with the other leg, felt a sudden searing pain as the combat-trained pirate sank her fingers into the joint of her knee. She was strong, with a genetic’s smooth, deceptive strength. Nora fumbled at the other end of the sash and smashed the weight against the pirate’s cheek. Rep 1 grinned and Nora felt something snap as her kneecap soggily gave way. Suddenly blood sprayed across her as Paolo’s slung shot broke the woman’s jaw.
Her mouth hung open, bloody, in the firelight, as the pirate woman fought with the sudden wild strength of desperation. The back of her heel slammed bruisingly into Nora’s solar plexus as she launched herself at Paolo. Paolo was ready; his bola whipped overhand from nowhere with the force of a hatchet, taking the woman’s ear off and slashing deep into her collarbone. She faltered and Paolo stamped her body into the wall.
The pirate’s head cracked against the stone and Paolo was on her at once, slashing into her throat with the bola’s cord. Behind him Kleo and the other woman struggled in midair, the pirate flailing with legs and a broken arm as Kleo’s braced thumbs pressed relentlessly into the woman’s throat.
Nora, winded by the kick, struggled for breath. Her whole rib cage locked in a sudden radiating cramp. Somehow she forced a thin gasp of smoky air into her lungs, wheezed, then breathed again, feeling as if her chest were full of molten lead. Agnes died before her eyes, skin steaming from the acid spray.
Paolo finished the Shaper woman. Kleo was still strangling the second woman, who had died; Paolo slammed his bola into the back of the dead woman’s head and Kleo released her, yanking her stiffened hands away. She rubbed them together as if spreading on lotion, breathing hard. “Put out that fire,” she said.
Paolo approached the flaming, gluey mass of hay and plastics carefully. He shrugged out of his heavy blouse, which was speckled with pinholes of acid, and threw it over the fire as if trapping an animal. He stamped it vindictively, and there was darkness. Kleo spat on the sodium tip of another candle, which sputtered into life.
“Not good,” she said. “I’m hurt. Nora?”
Nora looked down at her leg, felt it. The kneecap was loose beneath the skin. There was no pain yet, only a shocked numbness. “My knee,” she said, and coughed. “She killed Agnes.”
“There’s just three left,” Kleo said. “The Speaker, her man, and Senator Three. We have them. My poor precious darlings.” She threw her arms around Paolo, who stiffened at the sudden gesture but then relaxed, cradling his head in the hollow at Kleo’s neck and shoulder.
“I’ll start the power plant,” Nora said. She drifted to the wall panel and tapped switches for the preliminary sequence.
“Paolo and I will cover the entrances and wait for them,” Kleo said. “Nora, you go to the radio room. Raise the Council, report in. We’ll regroup there.” She gave Nora the candle and left.
Nora stuck the candle above the tokamak’s control board and got it up into stage one. A bluish glow seeped through the polarized blast shield as magnetic fields uncurled within the chamber. The tokamak flickered uneasily as it bootstrapped its way up to fusion velocities. False sunlight flared yellow as the ion streams collided and burned. The field stabilized, and suddenly all the lights were on.
Holding it warily, Nora snuffed the candle against the wall.
Paolo brushed petulantly at the acid blisters on his unprotected hands. “I’m the one, Nora,” he said. “The one percent destined for survival.”
“I know that, Paolo.”
“I’ll remember you, though. All of you. I loved you, Nora. I wanted to tell you one more time.”
“It’s a privilege to live in your memory, Paolo.”
“Goodbye, Nora.”
“If I ever had luck,” Nora said, “it’s yours.”
He smiled, hefting his slingshot.
Nora left. She skidded quickly through the tunnels, holding one leg stiff. Waves of pain dug into her, knotting her body. Without the spinal crab, she could no longer stop the cramps.
The pirates had been through the radio room. They had smashed about them wildly in the darkness. The transmitters were saw-torn wreckage; the table-top console had been wrenched off and flung aside.
Fluid leaked from the liquid crystal display. Nora pulled needle and thread from her hairnet and sewed up the gash in the screen. The CPU was still working; there were signals incoming from the dishes outside. But the deciphering programs were down. Ring Council transmissions were gibberish.
She picked up a general frequency propaganda broadcast. The slashed television still worked, though it blurred around the stitches.
And there it was: the outside world. There was not much to it: words and pictures, lines on a screen. She ran her fingertips gently over the scalding pain in her knee.
She could not believe what the faces on the screen were telling her, what the images showed. It was as if the little screen in its days of darkness had fermented somehow, and the world behind it was frothing over, all its poisons wetwared into wine. The faces of the Shaper politicos were alight with astounded triumph.
She watched the screen, transfixed. The shocked public statement
s of Mechanist leaders: broken men, frightened women, their routines and systems stripped away. The Mech armor of plans and contingencies had been picked off like a scab, showing the raw flesh of their humanity. They gabbled, they scrambled for control, each contradicting the last. Some with tight smiles that looked wired on by surgery, others misty-eyed with secondhand religious awe, gesturing vaguely, their faces bright as children’s.
And the doyens of the Shaper academic-military complex: the smooth-faced Security types, facile, triumphant, still too pleased at the amazing coup to show their ingrained suspicion. And the intelligentsia, dazzled by potential, speculating wildly, their objectivity in rags.
Then she saw one. There were more, a dozen of them. They were huge. Their legs alone were as tall as men, enormous corded masses of muscle, bone, and tendon under slickly polished corrugated hide. Scales. Brown scaled hide showed under their clothing: they wore skirts, glittering beads on wire. Their mighty chests were bare, with great keelbone ridges of sternum. Compared to the treelike legs and the massive jutting tails, their arms were long and slender, with quick, swollen-tipped fingers and oddly socketed thumbs. Their heads were huge, the size of a man’s torso, split with great cavernous grins full of thumb-sized flat peg teeth. They seemed to have no ears, and their black eyeballs, the size of fists, were shielded under pebbly lids and grayish nictitating membranes. Ribbed, iridescent frills draped the backs of their heads.
There were people talking to them, holding cameras. Shaper people. They seemed to be hunched in fear before the aliens; their backs were bent, they shuffled subserviently from one to another. It was gravity, Nora realized. The aliens used a heavy gravity.
They were real! They moved with relaxed, ponderous grace. Some were holding clipboards. Others were talking, with fluted, birdlike tongues as long as a forearm.
By size alone they dominated the proceedings. There was nothing formalized or stagy about it; even the solemn narration could not hide the essential nature of the meeting. The aliens were not frightened or even much impressed. They had no bluster, no mystique. They were businesslike. Like tax collectors.
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