Schismatrix plus (5 page)

The people beyond the Wall had their own wildly varying mythos. They were said to live in a jungle of overgrown pines and mimosas. They were hideously inbred and afflicted with double thumbs and congenital deafness. Others claimed there was nothing remotely human beyond the Wall: just a proliferating cluster of software, which had acquired a sinister autonomy. It was, of course, possible that the land beyond the Wall had been secretly invaded and conquered by—aliens. An entire postindustrial folklore had sprung up around this enthralling concept, buttressed with ingenious arguments. Everyone expected aliens sooner or later. It was the modern version of the Millennium.

Ryumin was patient with him; while Lindsay slept feverishly, he patrolled the Zaibatsu with his camera robot, looking for news. Lindsay turned the corner on his illness. He kept down some soup and a few fried bricks of spiced protein.

One of Ryumin's stacks of equipment began to chime with a piercingly clear electronic bleeping. Ryumin looked up from where he sat sorting cassettes. 'That's the radar," he said. "Hand me that headset, will you?" Lindsay crawled to the radar stack and untangled a set of Ryumin's adhesive eyephones. Ryumin clamped them to his temples. "Not much resolution on radar," he said, closing his eyes. "A crowd has just arrived. Pirates, most likely. They're milling about on the landing pad."

He squinted, though his eyes were already shut. "Something very large is moving about with them. They've brought something huge. I'd better switch to telephoto." He yanked the headset's cord and its plug snapped free.

"I'm going outside for a look," Lindsay said. "I'm well enough."

"Wire yourself up first," Ryumin said. "Take that earset and one of the cameras."

Lindsay attached the auxiliary system and stepped outside the zippered airlock into the curdled air.

He backed away from Ryumin's dome toward the rim of the land panel. He turned and trotted to a nearby stile, which led over the low metal wall, and trained his camera upward.

"That's good," came Ryumin's voice in his ear. "Cut in the brightness amps, will you? That little button on the right. Yes, that's better. What do you make of it, Mr. Dze?"

Lindsay squinted through the lens. Far above, at the northern end of the Zai-batsu's axis, a dozen sundogs were wrestling in free-fall with a huge silver bag.

"It looks like a tent," Lindsay said. "They're inflating it." The silver bag wrinkled and tumesced suddenly, revealing itself as a blunt cylinder. On its side was a large red stencil as wide as a man was tall. It was a red skull with two crossed lightning bolts.

"Pirates!" Lindsay said.

Ryumin chuckled. "I thought as much."

A sharp gust of wind struck Lindsay. He lost his balance on the stile and looked behind him suddenly. The glass window strip formed a long white alley of decay. The hexagonal metaglass frets were speckled with dark plugs, jack-strawed here and there with heavy reinforcement struts. Leaks had been sprayed with airtight coats of thick plastic. Sunlight oozed sullenly through the gaps.

"Are you all right?" Ryumin said.

"Sorry," Lindsay said. He tilted the camera upward again. The pirates had gotten their foil balloon airborne and had turned on its pair of small pusher-propellers. As it drifted away from the landing pad, it jerked once, then surged forward. It was towing something—an oddly shaped dark lump larger than a man.

"It's a meteorite," Ryumin told him. "A gift for the people beyond the Wall. Did you see the dark rocks that stand in the Sterilized Zone? They're all gifts from pirates. It's become a tradition."

"Wouldn't it be easier to carry it along the ground?"

"Are you joking? It's death to set foot in the Sterilized Zone."

"I see. So they're forced to drop it from the air. Do you recognize these pirates?"

"No," Ryumin said. "They're new here. That's why they need the rock."

"Someone seems to know them," Lindsay said. "Look at that." He focused the camera to look past the airborne pirates to the sloping gray-brown surface of the Zaibatsu's third land panel. Most of this third panel was a bleak expanse of fuzz-choked mud, with surging coils of yellowish ground fog.

Near the third panel's blasted northern suburbs was a squat, varicolored dome, built of jigsawed chunks of salvaged ceramic and plastic. A foreshortened, antlike crowd of sundogs had emerged from the dome's airlock. They stared upward, their faces hidden by filter masks. They had dragged out a large crude machine of metal and plastic, fitted with pinions, levers, and cables. They jacked the machine upward until one end of it pointed into the sky.

"What are they doing?" Lindsay said.

"Who knows?" Ryumin said. "That's the Eighth Orbital Army, or so they call themselves. They've been hermits up till now."

The airship passed overhead, casting blurred shadows onto all three land panels. One of the sundogs triggered the machine.

A long metal harpoon flicked upward and struck home. Lindsay saw metal foil rupture in the airship's tail section. The javelin gleamed crazily as it whirled end over end, its flight disrupted by the collision and the curve of Coriolis force. The metal bolt vanished into the filthy trees of a ruined orchard.

The airship was in trouble. Its crew kicked and thrashed in midair, struggling to force their collapsing balloon away from the ground attackers. The massive stone they were towing continued its course with weightless, serene inertia. As its towline grew tight, it slowly tore off the airship's tail.

With a whoosh of gas, the airship crumpled into a twisted metal rag. The engines fell, tugging the metal foil behind them in a rippling streamer. The pirates thrashed as if drowning, struggling to stay within the zone of weightlessness. Their plight was desperate, since the zone was riddled with slow, sucking downdrafts that could send fliers tumbling to their deaths. The rock blundered into the rippling edge of a swollen cloudbank. The dark mass veered majestically downward, wobbling a bit, and vanished into the mist. Moments later it reappeared below the cloud, plummeting downward in a vicious Coriolis arc.

It slammed into the glass and patchwork of the window strip. Lindsay, following it with his camera, heard the sullen crunch of impact. Glass and metal grated and burst free in a sucking roar.

The belly of the cloud overhead bulged downward and began to twist. A white plume spread above the blowout with the grace of creeping frost. It was steam, condensing from the air in the suddenly lowered pressure. Lindsay held the camera above his head and leaped down onto the grimy floor of the window. He ran toward the blowout, ignoring Ryumin's surprised protests.

A minute's broken-field running brought him as close as he dared go. He crouched behind the rusted steel strut of a plug, ten meters from the impact site. Looking down past his feet through the dirty glass, Lindsay saw a long tail of freezing spray fanning out in rainbowed crystals against the shine of the sunlight mirrors.

A roaring vortex of sucking wind sprang up, slinging gusts of rain. Lindsay cupped one hand around the camera's lens.

Motion caught his eye. A group of oxygen farmers in masks and coveralls were struggling across the glass from the bordering panel. They cradled a long hose in their arms. They lurched forward doggedly, staggering in the wind, weaving among the plugs and struts.

Caught by the wind, a camouflaged surveillance plane crashed violently beside the hole. Its wreckage was sucked through at once.

The hose jerked and bucked with a gush of fluid. A thick spray of gray-green plastic geysered from its nozzle, hardening in midair. It hit the glass and clung there.

Under the whirlwind's pressure the plastic warped and bulged, but held. As more gushed forth, the wind was choked and became a shrill whistle. Even after the blowout was sealed, the farmers continued to pump plastic sludge across the impact zone. Rain fell steadily from the agitated clouds. Another knot of farmers stood along the window wall, leaning their masked heads together and pointing into the sky.

Lindsay turned and looked upward with the rest.

The sudden vortex had spawned a concentric surf of clouds. Through a crescent-shaped gap, Lindsay saw the dome of the Eighth Orbital Army, across the width of the Zaibatsu. Tiny forms in white suits ringed the dome, lying on the ground. They did not move.

Lindsay focused the telephoto across the interior sky. The fanatics of the Eighth Orbital Army lay sprawled on the fouled earth. A knot of them had been caught trying to escape into the airlock; they lay in a tangle, their arms outstretched.

He saw no sign of the airship pirates. He thought for a moment that they had all escaped back to the landing port. Then he spotted one of them, mashed flat against another window panel.

"That was excellent footage," Ryumin said in his ear. "It was also very stupid."

"I owed you a favor," Lindsay said. He studied the dead. "I'm going over there," he decided.

"Let me send the robot. There'll be looters there soon."

"Then I want them to know me," Lindsay said. "They might be useful." He crossed another stile onto the land panel. His lungs felt raw, but he had decided never to wear a breathing mask. His reputation was more important than the risk.

He skirted the Black Medicals' stronghold and crossed a second window strip. He walked north to the ragtag junk dome of the Orbital Army. It was the only outpost in the entire third panel, which had been abandoned to a particularly virulent form of the blight. This had once been an agricultural zone, and the heightened fertility of the soil brought forth a patchy crop of ankle-high mold. Farm buildings, all pastel ceramic and plastic, had been looted but not demolished, and their stiff inorganic walls and gaping windows seemed to long to lapse into an unattainable state of rot. The recluses' dome was built of plastic door panels, chopped to shape and caulked.

The corpses lay frozen, their limbs oddly bent, for they had been dead before they hit the ground, and their arms and legs had bounced a little, loosely, with the impact. There was a curious lack of horror about the scene. The faceless masks and watertight body suits of the dead fanatics conveyed a sense of bloodless, prim efficiency. Nothing marked the dead as human beings except the military insignia on their shoulders. He counted eighteen of them. The lenses on the faces of the dead were fogged over with internal steam.

He heard the quiet whir of aircraft. A pair of ultralights circled once and skidded in for a landing. Two of the airship pirates had arrived. Lindsay trained his camera on them. They dismounted, unplugging their credit cards, and the aircraft taxied off.

They walked toward him in the half-crouching shuffle of people unused to gravity. Lindsay saw that their uniforms were full-length silver skeletons etched over a blood-red background.

The taller pirate prodded a nearby corpse with his foot. "You saw this?" he said in English.

"The spyplanes killed them," Lindsay said. "They endangered the habitat."

"The Eighth Orbital Army," the taller pirate mused, examining a shoulder patch. The second pirate muttered through her mask's filters, "Fascists. Antina-tionalist scum."

"You knew them?" Lindsay said.

"We dealt with them," said the first pirate. "We didn't know they were here, though." He sighed. "What a burn. Do you suppose there are others inside?"

"Only dead ones," Lindsay said. "The planes use x-ray lasers."

"Really?" the first pirate said. "Wish I could get my hands on one of those."

Lindsay twirled his left hand, a gesture in surveillance argot stating that they were watched. The taller pirate looked upward quickly. Sunlight glinted on the silver skull inlaid over his face.

He looked at Lindsay, his eyes hidden behind gleaming silver-plated eye sockets. "Where's your mask, citizen?"

"Here," Lindsay said, touching his face.

"A negotiator, huh? Looking for work, citizen? Our last diplomat just took the plunge. How are you in free-fall?"

"Be careful, Mr. President," the second pirate warned. "Remember the confirmation hearings."

"Let me handle the legal implications," the President said impatiently.

"I'll introduce us. I'm the President of the Fortuna Miners' Democracy, and this is my wife, the Speaker of the House."

"Lin Dze, with Kabuki Intrasolar," Lindsay said. "I'm a theatrical impresario."

"That some kind of diplomat?"

"Sometimes, your excellency."

The President nodded. The Speaker of the House warned, "Don't trust him, Mr. President."

"The executive branch handles foreign relations, so shut the fuck up," the President snarled. "Listen, citizen, it's been a hard day. Right now, we oughta be in the Bank, having a scrub, maybe getting juiced, but instead these fascists cut in on us with their surface-to-air stuff, a preemptive strike, you follow me? So now our airship's burned and we've lost our fuckin' rock."

"That's a shame," Lindsay said.

The President scratched his neck. "You just can't make plans in this business. You learn to take it as it comes." He hesitated. "Let's get out of this stink, anyway. Maybe there's loot inside."

The Speaker of the House took a hand-held power saw out of a holster on her red webbing belt and began to saw through the wall of the sundog dome. The caulk between the plastic panels powdered easily. "You got to go in unexpected if you want to live," the President explained. "Don't ever, never go in an enemy airlock. You never know what's in 'em." Then he spoke into a wrist attachment. He used a covert operational jargon; Lindsay couldn't follow the words.

Together the two pirates kicked out the wall and stepped inside. Lindsay followed them, holding his camera. They replaced the burst-out panel, and the woman sprayed it with sealant from a tiny propellant can.

The President pulled off his skull mask and sniffed the air. He had a blunt, pug-nosed, freckled face; his short ginger-colored hair was sparse, and the skin of his scalp gleamed oddly. They had emerged into the communal kitchen of the Eighth Orbital Army: there were cushions and low tables, a microwave, a crate of plastic-wrapped protein, and half a dozen tall fermenting units, bubbling loudly. A dead woman whose face looked sunburned sprawled on the floor by the doorway.