Chapter 3
ABOARD THE RED CONSENSUS: 2-6-’16
When the last slave rocket from the Zaibatsu had peeled away, and the engines of the Red Consensus had cut in, Lindsay began to think he might be safe.
“So how about it, citizen?” the President said. “You sundogged off with the loot, right? What’s in the bag, State? Ice-cold drugs? Hot software?”
“No,” Lindsay said. “It can wait. First we have to check everyone’s face. Make sure it’s their own.”
“You’re twisted, State,” said one of the Senators. “That ‘antibiotic’ stuff is just agitprop crap. They don’t exist.”
“You’re safe,” the President said. “We know every angstrom on this ship, believe me.” He brushed an enormous crawling roach from the burlapped surface of Lindsay’s diplomatic bag. “You’ve scored, right? You want to buy into one of the cartels? We’re on assignment, but we can detour to one of the Belt settlements—Bettina or Themis, your choice.” The President grinned evilly. “It’ll cost you, though.”
“I’m staying with you,” Lindsay said.
“Yeah?” said the President. “Then this belongs to us!” He snatched up Lindsay’s diplomatic bag and threw it to the Speaker of the House.
“I’ll open it for you,” Lindsay said quickly. “Just let me explain first.”
“Sure,” the Speaker said. “You can explain how much it’s worth.” She pressed her portable power saw against the bag. Sparks flew and the reek of melted plastic filled the spacecraft. Lindsay averted his face.
The Speaker groped within the bag, bracing her knee against it in free-fall. With a wrenching motion she dragged out Lindsay’s booty. It was the yarite’s severed head.
She let go of the head with the sudden hiss of a scorched cat. “Get ’im!” the President yelled.
Two of the Senators bounced off the spacecraft’s walls and seized Lindsay’s arms and legs in painful jujutsu holds.
“You’re the assassin!” the President shouted. “You were hired to hit this old Mechanist! There’s no loot at all!” He looked at the input-studded head with a grimace of disgust. “Get it into the recycler,” he told one of the representatives. “I won’t have a thing like that aboard this ship. Wait a second,” he said as the representative took tentative hold of a lock of sparse hair. “Take it up to the machine shop first and dig out all the circuitry.”
He turned to Lindsay. “So that’s your game, eh, citizen? An assassin?”
Lindsay clung to their expectations. “Sure,” he said reflexively. “Whatever you say.”
There was an ominous silence, overlaid by distant thermal pops from the engines of the Red Consensus. “Let’s throw his ass out the airlock,” suggested the Speaker of the House.
“We can’t do that,” said the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. He was a feeble old Mechanist who was subject to nosebleeds. “He is still Secretary of State and can’t be sentenced without impeachment by the Senate.”
The three Senators, two men and a woman, looked interested. The Senate didn’t see much action in the government of the tiny Democracy. They were the least trusted members of the crew and were outnumbered by the House.
Lindsay shrugged. It was an excellent shrug; he had captured the feel of the President’s own kinesics, and the subliminal mimicry defused the situation for the crucial instant it took him to start talking. “It was a political job.” It was a boring voice, the leaden sound of moral exhaustion. It defused their bloodlust, made the situation into something predictable and tiresome. “I was working for the Mare Serenitatis Corporate Republic. They had a coup there. They’re shipping a lot of their population to the Zaibatsu soon and wanted me to pave the way.”
They were believing him. He put some color into his voice. “But they’re fascists. I prefer to serve a democratic government. Besides, they set an ‘antibiotic’ on my track—at least, I think it was them.” He smiled and spread his hands innocently, twisting his arms in the loosened grips of his captors. “I haven’t lied to you, have I? I never claimed that I wasn’t a killer. Besides, think of the money I made for you.”
“Yeah, there’s that,” the President said grudgingly. “But did you have to saw its head off?”
“I was following orders,” Lindsay said. “I’m good at that, Mr. President. Try me.”
ABOARD THE RED CONSENSUS: 13-6-’16
Lindsay had stolen the cyborg’s head to free Kitsune, to guarantee that her power games would not come to light. He had deceived her, but he had freed her as a message of apology. The Shaper assassin would bear the blame for it. He hoped the Geisha Bank would tear the man apart.
He put aside the horror. His Shaper teachers had warned him about such feelings. When a diplomat was thrown into a new environment, he should repress all thoughts of the past and immediately soak up as much protective coloration as possible.
Lindsay surrendered to his training. Crammed into the tiny spacecraft with the eleven-member Fortuna nation, Lindsay felt the environment’s semiotics as an almost physical pressure. It would be hard to keep a sense of perspective, trapped in a can with eleven lunatics.
Lindsay had not been in a real spacecraft since his schooldays in the Shaper Ring Council. The Mech cargo drogue that had shipped him into exile didn’t count; its passengers were drugged meat. The Red Consensus was lived in; it had been in service for two hundred and fifteen years.
Within a few days, following bits of evidence present within the spacecraft, Lindsay learned more about its history than the Fortuna Miners knew themselves.
The living decks of the Consensus had once belonged to a Terran national entity, an extinct group calling themselves the Soviet Union, or CCCP. The decks had been launched from Earth to form one of a series of orbiting “defense stations.”
The ship was cylindrical, and its living quarters were four interlocked round decks. Each deck was four meters tall and ten meters across. They had once been equipped with crude airlock safety doors between levels, but those had been wrenched out and replaced with modern self-sealing pressure filaments.
The stern deck had been ripped clean to the padded walls. The pirates used it for exercise and free-fall combat practice. They also slept there, although, having no day or night, they were likely to doze off anywhere at any time.
The next deck, closer to the bow, held their cramped surgery and sick bay, as well as the “sweatbox,” where they hid from solar flares behind lead shielding. In the “broom closet,” a dozen antiquated spacesuits hung flabbily beside a racked-up clutter of shellac sprayers, strap-on gas guns, ratchets, clamps, and other “outside” tools. This deck had an airlock, an old armored one to the outside, which still had a series of peeling operations stickers in green Cyrillic capitals.
The next deck was a life-support section, full of gurgling racks of algae. It had a toilet and a food synthesizer. The two units were both hooked directly to the algae racks. It was an object lesson in recycling, but not one that Lindsay relished much. This deck also had a small machine shop; it was tiny, but the lack of gravity allowed the use of every working surface.
The bow deck had the control room and the power hookups to the solar panels. Lindsay grew to like this deck best, mostly because of the music. The control room was an old one, but nowhere near as old as the Consensus itself. It had been designed by some forgotten industrial theorist who believed that instruments should use acoustic signals. The cluster of systems, spread out along a semicircular control panel, had few optical readouts. They signaled their functions by rumbles, squeaks, and steady modular beeping.
Bizarre at first, the sounds were designed to sink unobtrusively into the backbrain. Any change in the chorus, though, was immediately obvious. Lindsay found the music soothing, a combination of heartbeat and brain.
The rest of the deck was not so pleasant: the armory, with its nasty racks of tools, and the ship’s center of corruption: the particle beam gun. Lindsay avoided that compartment when he could, and never spoke o
f it.
He could not escape the knowledge that the Red Consensus was a ship of war.
“Look,” the President told him, “taking out some feeble old Mech whose brain’s shut down is one thing. But taking out an armed Shaper camp full of hot genetics types is a different proposition. There’s no room for feebs or thumb-sitters in the Fortuna National Army.”
“Yes sir,” said Lindsay. The Fortuna National Army was the military arm of the national government. Its personnel were identical to the personnel of the civilian government, but this was of no consequence. It had an entirely different organization and set of operating procedures. Luckily the President was commander in chief of the armed forces as well as head of state.
They did military drills in the fourth deck, which had been stripped down to the ancient and moldy padding. It held three exercycles and some spring-loaded weights, with a rack of storage lockers beside the entrance port.
“Forget up and down,” the President advised. “When we’re talking free-fall combat, the central rule is haragei. That’s this.” He punched Lindsay suddenly in the stomach. Lindsay doubled over with a wheeze and his velcro slippers ripped free from the wall, shredding loudly.
The President grabbed Lindsay’s wrist, and with a sinuous transfer of torque he stuck Lindsay’s feet to the ceiling. “Okay, you’re upside down now, right?” Lindsay stood on the upward or bow side of the deck; the President crouched on the sternward side, so that their feet pointed in opposite directions. He glared upside down into Lindsay’s eyes. His breath smelled of raw algae.
“That’s what they call the local vertical,” he said. “The body was built for gravity and the eyes look for gravity in any situation; that’s the way the brain’s wired. You’re gonna look for straight lines that go up and down and you’re going to orient yourself to those lines. And you’re gonna get killed, soldier, understand?”
“Yes sir!” Lindsay said. In the Republic, he’d been taught from childhood to despise violence. Its only legitimate use was against one’s self. But his brush with the antibiotic had changed his thinking.
“That’s what haragei’s for.” The President slapped his own belly. “This is your center of gravity, your center of torque. You meet some enemy in free-fall, and you grapple with him, well, your head is just a stalk, see? What happens depends on your center of mass. Your haragei. Your actions, the places where you can punch out with hands and feet, form a sphere. And that sphere is centered on your belly. You think of that bubble around you all the time.”
“Yes sir,” Lindsay said. His attention was total.
“That’s number one,” the President said. “Now we’re gonna talk about number two. Bulkheads. Control of the bulkhead is control of the fight. If I pull my feet up, off this bulkhead, how hard do you think I can hit you?”
Lindsay was prudent. “Hard enough to break my nose, sir.”
“Okay. But if I have my feet planted, so my own body holds me fast against the recoil, what then?”
“You break my neck. Sir.”
“Good thinking, soldier. A man without bracing is a helpless man. If you got nothing else, you use the enemy’s own body as bracing. Recoil is the enemy of impact. Impact is damage. Damage is victory. Understand?”
“Recoil is impact’s enemy. Impact is damage, damage is victory,” Lindsay said immediately. “Sir.”
“Very good,” the President said. He then reached out, and, with a quick pivoting movement, he broke Lindsay’s forearm over his knee with a wet snap. “That’s number three,” he said over Lindsay’s sudden scream. “Pain.”
“Well,” said the Second Justice, “I see he showed you the old number three.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Lindsay said.
The Second Justice slid a needle into his arm. “Forget that,” she said kindly. “This isn’t the army, this is sick bay. You can just call me Judge Two.”
A rubbery numbness spread over the fractured arm. “Thanks, Judge.” The Second Justice was an older woman, maybe close to a century. It was hard to tell; her constant abuse of hormone treatments had made her metabolism a patchwork of anomalies. Her jawline was freckled with acne, but her wrists and shins were flaky and varicose-veined.
“You’re okay, State, you’ll do,” she said. She stuck Lindsay’s anesthetized arm into the wide rubber orifice of an old-fashioned CAT scanner. Multiple x-rays whirred from its ring, and a pivoting three-D image of Lindsay’s arm appeared on the scanner’s screen.
“Good clean break, nothin’ to it,” she said analytically. “We’ve all had it. You’re almost one of us now. Want me to scroll you up while the arm’s still numb?”
“What?”
“Tattoos, citizen.”
The thought appalled him. “Fine,” he said at once. “Go right ahead.”
“I knew you were okay from the beginning,” she said, nudging him in the ribs. “I’ll do you a favor: vein-pop you with some of those anabolic steroids. You’ll muscle up in no time; the Prez’ll think you’re a natural.” She pulled gently on his forearm; the sullen grating of jagged bone ends was like something happening at the other end of a telescope.
She pulled a needled tattoo rig from the wall, where it clung by a patch of velcro. “Any preferences?”
“I want some moths,” Lindsay said.
The history of the Fortuna Miners’ Democracy was a simple one. Fortuna was a major asteroid, over two hundred kilometers across. In the first flush of success, the original miners had declared their independence.
As long as the ore held out, they did well. They could buy their way out of political trouble and could pay for life-extension treatments from other more advanced worlds.
But when the ore was gone and Fortuna was a mined-out heap of rubble, they found they had crucially blundered. Their wealth had vanished, and they had failed to pursue technology with the cutthroat desperation of rival cartels. They could not survive on their outmoded expertise or sustain an information economy. Their attempts to do so only hastened their bankruptcy.
The defections began. The nation’s best and most ambitious personnel were brain-drained away to richer worlds. Fortuna lost its spacecraft, as defectors decamped with anything not nailed down.
The collapse was exponential, and the government devolved upon smaller and smaller numbers of diehards. They got into debt and had to sell their infrastructure to the Mech cartels; they even had to auction off their air. The population dwindled to a handful of knockabout dregs, mostly sundogs who’d meandered to Fortuna out of lack of alternatives.
They were, however, in full legal control of a national government, with its entire apparat of foreign relations and diplomatic protocol. They could grant citizenship, coin money, issue letters of marque, sign treaties, negotiate arms control agreements. There might be only a dozen of them, but that was irrelevant. They still had their House, their Senate, their legal precedents, and their ideology.
They therefore redefined Fortuna, their national territory, as the boundaries of their last surviving spacecraft, the Red Consensus. Thus equipped with a mobile nation, they were able to legally annex other people’s property into their national boundaries. This was not theft. Nations are not capable of theft, a legal fact of great convenience to the ideologues of the FMD. Protests were forwarded to the Fortuna legal system, which was computerized and of formidable intricacy.
Lawsuits were the chief source of income for the pirate nation. Most cases were settled out of court. In practice, this was a simple process of bribing the pirates to make them go away. But the pirates were very punctilious about form and took great pride in preserving the niceties.
ABOARD THE RED CONSENSUS: 29-9-’16
“What are you doing in the sweatbox, State?”
Lindsay smiled uneasily. “The State of the Nation address,” he said. “I’d prefer to escape it.” The President’s rhetoric filled the spacecraft, filtering past the slight figure of the First Representative. The girl slipped into the radiation shelter and whee
led the heavy hatch shut behind her.
“That ain’t very patriotic, State. You’re the new hand here; you ought to listen.”
“I wrote it for him,” Lindsay said. He knew he had to treat this woman carefully. She made him nervous. Her sinuous movements, the ominous perfection of her features, and the sharp, somehow overattentive intensity of her gaze all told him that she was Reshaped.
“You Shaper types,” she said. “You’re slick as glass.”
“Are we?” he said.
“I’m no Shaper,” she said. “Look at these teeth.” She opened her mouth and showed a crooked overlapping incisor and canine. “See? Bad teeth, bad genetics.”
Lindsay was skeptical. “You had that done yourself.”
“I was born,” she insisted. “Not decanted.”
Lindsay rubbed a fading combat-training bruise on his high cheekbone. It was hot and close in the box. He could smell her.
“I was a ransom,” the girl admitted. “A fertilized ovum, but a Fortuna citizen brought me to term.” She shrugged. “I did do the teeth, it’s true.”
“You’re a rogue Shaper, then,” Lindsay said. “They’re rare. Ever had your quotient done?”
“My IQ? No. I can’t read,” she said proudly. “But I’m Rep One, the majority whip in the House. And I’m married to Senator One.”
“Really? He never mentioned it.”
The young Shaper adjusted her black headband. Beneath it, her red-blonde hair was long and done up with bright pink alligator clips. “We did it for tax reasons. I’d throw you a juice otherwise, maybe. You’re looking good, State.” She drifted closer. “Better now that the arm’s healed up.” She ran one fingertip along the tattooed skin of his wrist.
“There’s always Carnaval,” Lindsay said.
“Carnaval don’t count,” she said. “You can’t tell it’s me, tripped out on aphrodisiacs.”
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