Schismatrix plus (9 page)

The yarite's network of beads would protect him. Kitsune had taught him how to work the beads from within. Even if the assassin avoided the traps, he could be struck down from within by high voltage or sharp flechettes. Lindsay walked the pattern flawlessly and burst into the yarite's quarters. He opened a videoscreen, flicked it on, and loaded the tape. It was a face from his past: the face of his best friend, the man who had tried to kill him, Philip Khouri Constantine.

"Hello, cousin," Constantine said.

The term was aristocratic slang in the Republic. But Constantine was a plebe. And Lindsay had never heard him put such hatred into the word.

"I take the liberty of contacting you in exile." Constantine looked drunk. He was speaking a little too precisely. The ring-shaped collar of his antique suit showed sweat on the olive skin of his throat. "Some of my Shaper friends share my interest in your career. They don't call these agents assassins. The Shapers call them 'antibiotics.'

"They've been operating here. The opposition is much less troublesome with so many dead from 'natural causes.' My old trick with the moths looks juvenile now. Very brash and risky.

"Still, the insects worked well enough, out here in the moondocks.... Time flies, cousin. Five months have changed things.

"The Mechanist siege is failing. When the Shapers are trapped and squeezed, they ooze out under pressure. They can't be beaten. We used to tell each other that, when we were boys, remember, Abelard? When our future seemed so bright we almost blinded each other, sometimes. Back before we knew what a bloodstain was....

"This Republic needs the Shapers. The colony's rotting. They can't survive without the biosciences. Everyone knows it, even the Radical Old.

"We never really talked to those old wireheads, cousin. You wouldn't let me; you hated them too much. And now I know why you were afraid to face them. They're tainted, Abelard, like you are. In a way, they're your mirror image. By now you know what a shock it is to see one." Constantine grinned and smoothed his wavy hair with a small, deft hand.

"But I talked to them, I came to terms. . . . There's been a coup here, Abelard. The Advisory Council is dissolved. Power belongs to the Executive Board for National Survival. That's me, and a few of our Preservationist friends. Vera's death changed everything, as we knew it would. Now we have our martyr. Now we're full of steel and fury.

"The Radical Old are leaving. Emigrating to the Mech cartels, where they belong. The aristocrats will have to pay the costs for it.

"There are others coming your way, cousin. The whole mob of broken-down aristos: Lindsays, Tylers, Kellands, Morrisseys. Political exiles. Your wife is with them. They're squeezed dry between their Shaper children and their Mechanist grandparents, and thrown out like garbage. They're all yours.

"I want you to mop up after me, tie up my loose ends. If you won't accept that, then go back to my messenger. He'll settle you." Constantine grinned, showing small, even teeth. "Except for death, you can't escape the game. You and Vera both knew that. And now I'm king, you're pawn." Lindsay shut off the tape.

He was ruined. The Kabuki Bubble had assumed a grotesque solidity; it was his own ambitions that had burst.

He was trapped. He would be unmasked by the Republic's refugees. His glittering deceptions would fly apart to leave him naked and exposed. Kitsune would know him for what he was: a human upstart, not her Shaper lover. His mind raced within the cage. To live here under Constantine's terms, in his control, in his contempt—the thought scalded him.

He had to escape. He had to leave this world at once. He had no time left for scheming.

Outside, the assassin was waiting, with Lindsay's own stolen face. To meet him again was death. But he might escape the man if he disappeared at once. And that meant the pirates.

Lindsay rubbed his bruised wrist. Slow fury built in him: fury at the Shapers and the destructive cleverness they had used to survive. Their struggle left a legacy of monsters. The assassin. Constantine. Himself. Constantine was younger than Lindsay. He had trusted Lindsay, looked up to him. But when Lindsay had come back on furlough from the Ring Council, he'd painfully felt how deeply the Shapers had changed him. And he had deliberately sent Constantine into their hands. As always, he had made it sound plausible, and Constantine's new skills were truly crucial. But Lindsay knew that he had done it selfishly, so that he'd have company, outside the pale. Constantine had always been ambitious. But where there had been trust, Lindsay had brought a new sophistication and deceit. Where he and Constantine had shared ideals, they now shared murder.

Lindsay felt an ugly kinship with the assassin. The assassin's training must have been much like his own. His own self-hatred added sudden venom to his fear of the man.

The assassin had Lindsay's face. But Lindsay realized with a sudden flash of insight that he could turn the man's own strength against him. He could pose as the assassin, turn the situation around. He could commit some awful crime, and the assassin would be blamed. Kitsune needed a crime. It would be his farewell gift to her, a message only she would understand. He could free her, and his enemy would pay the price.

He opened the diplomatic bag and tossed aside his paper heap of stocks. He opened the floorboards and stared at the body of the old woman, floating naked on the wrinkled surface of the waterbed. Then he searched the room for something that would cut.

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 worthy" 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 of 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.