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 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.

“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 wheeled 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.”

“There’s three months left till rendezvous,” Lindsay said. “That gives me three more chances to guess.”

“You been in Carnaval,” she said. “You know what it’s like, shot up on ’disiacs. After that, you ain’t you, citizen. You’re just wall-to-wall meat.”

“I might surprise you,” Lindsay said. They locked eyes.

“If you do I’ll kill you, State. Adultery’s a crime.”

ABOARD THE RED CONSENSUS: 13-10-’16

One of the shipboard roaches woke Lindsay by nibbling his eyelashes. With a start of disgust, Lindsay punched it and it scuttled away.

Lindsay slept naked except for his groin cup. All the men wore them; they prevented the testicles from floating and chafing in free-fall. He shook another roach out of his red-and-silver jumpsuit, where it feasted on flakes of dead skin.

He got into his clothes and looked about the gym room. Two of the Senators were still asleep, their velcro-soled shoes stuck to the walls, their tattooed bodies curled fetally. A roach was sipping sweat from the female senator’s neck.

If it weren’t for the roaches, the Red Consensus would eventually smother in a moldy detritus of cast-off skin and built-up layers of sweated and exhaled effluvia. Lysine, alanine, methionine, carbamino compounds, lactic acid, sex pheromones: a constant stream of organic vapors poured invisibly, day and night, from the human body. Roaches were a vital part of the spacecraft ecosystem, cleaning up crumbs of food, licking up grease.

Roaches had haunted spacecraft almost from the beginning, too tough and adaptable to kill. At least now they were well-trained. They were even housebroken, obedient to the chemical lures and controls of the Second Representative. Lindsay still hated them, though, and couldn’t watch their grisly swarming and free-fall leaps and clattering flights without a deep conviction that he ought to be somewhere else. Anywhere else.

Dressed, Lindsay meandered in free-fall through the filamented doors between decks. The plasticized doors unraveled into strands as he approached and knitted themselves shut behind him. They were thin but airtight and as tough as steel when pressed. They were Shaper work. Stolen, probably, Lindsay thought.

He wandered into the control room, drawn by the instrumental music. Most of the crew was there. The President, two Reps, and Justice 3 were watching a Shaper agit-broadcast with strap-on videogoggles.

The Chief Justice was strapped in beside the waist-high console, monitoring deep-space broadcasts with the ship’s drone. The Chief Justice was by far the oldest member of the crew. He never took part in Carnaval. This, his age, and his office made him the crew’s impartial arbiter.

Lindsay spoke loudly beside the man’s earphones. “Any news?”

“The siege is still on,” the Mech said, without any marked satisfaction. “The Shapers are holding.” He stared emptily at the control boards. “They keep boasting about their victory in the Concatenation.”

Justice 2 came into the control room. “Who wants some ketamine?”

Rep 1 took off her videogoggles. “Is it good?”

“Fresh out of the chromatograph. I just made it myself.”

“The Concatenation was a real power in my day,” the Chief Justice said. With his earphones on, he hadn’t seen or heard the two women. Something about the broadcast he had monitored had stirred some deep layer of ancient indignation. “In my day the Concatenation was the whole civilized world.”

Through long habit, the women ignored him, raising their voices. “Well, how much?” Rep 1 said.

“Forty thousand a gram?” the Judge bargained.

“Forty thousand? I’ll give you twenty.”

“Come on, girl, you charged me twenty thousand just to do my nails.”

Lindsay listened with half an ear, wondering if he could cut himself in. The FMD still had its own banks, and though its currency was enormously inflated, it was still in circulation as the exclusive legal tender of eleven billionaires. Lindsay, unfortunately, as junior crew member, was already deeply in debt.

“Mare Serenitatis,” the old man said. “The Corporate Republic.” He fixed Lindsay suddenly with his ash-gray eyes. “I hear you worked for them.”

Lindsay was startled. The unwritten taboos of the Red Consensus suppressed discussion of the past. The old Mech’s face had brightened with a reckless upwash of memory. Decades of the same expressions had dug deep furrows into his ancient muscle and skin. His face was an idiosyncratic mask.

“I was only there briefly,” Lindsay lied. “I don’t know the moondocks well.”

“I was born there.”

Rep 1 cast an alarmed glance in the old man’s direction. “All right, forty thousand,” she said. The two women left for the lab. The President lifted his videogoggles. He looked sardonically at Lindsay, then deliberately turned up the volume on his headset. The other two, Rep 2 and the grizzled Justice 3, ignored the whole situation.

“The Republic had a system in my day,” the Mech said. “Political families. The Tylers, the Kellands, the Lindsays. Then there was an underclass of refugees we’d taken in, just before the Interdict with Earth. The plebes, we called them. They were the last ones to get off the planet, just before things fell apart. So they had nothing. We had the kilowatts in our pockets, and the big mansions. And they had the little plastic slums.”

“You were an aristocrat?” Lindsay said. He couldn’t restrain his fatalistic interest.

“Apples,” the Mech said sadly. The word was heavy with nostalgia. “Ever had an apple? They’re a kind of vegetable growth.”

“I think so.”

“Birds. Parks. Grass. Clouds. Trees.” The Mech’s right arm, a prosthetic job, whirred softly as he whacked a roach from the console with one wiretendoned finger. “I knew it would come to trouble, this business with the plebes.… I even wrote a play about it once.”

“A play? For the theatre? What was it called?”

Vague surprise showed in the old man’s eyes. “The Conflagration.”

“You’re Evan James Tyler Kelland,” Lindsay blurted. “I—ah … I saw your play. In the archives.” Evan Kelland was Lindsay’s own great-granduncle. An obscure radical, his play of social protest had been lost for years until Lindsay, hunting for weapons, had found it in the Museum. Lindsay had staged the play’s revival to annoy the Radical Old. The men who had exiled Kelland were still in power, sustained by Mech technologies after a hundred years. When the time was right they had exiled Lindsay too.

Now they were in the cartels, he remembered suddenly. Constantine, the descendant of plebes, had cut a deal with the wireheads. And the aristocracy had paid at last, as Kelland had prophesied. Lindsay, and Evan Kelland, had only paid early.

“You happened to see my play,” Kelland said. Suspicion turned the lines in his face to deep crevasses. He looked away, his ash-gray eyes full of pain and obscure humiliation. “You shouldn’t have presumed.”

“I’m sorry,” Lindsay said. He looked with new dread at his old kinsman’s mechanical arm. “We won’t speak of this again.”

“That would be best.” Kelland turned up his earphones and seemed to lose the grip on his fury. His eyes grew mild and colorless. Lindsay looked at the others, deliberately blind behind their videogoggles. None of this had happened.

ABOARD THE RED CONSENSUS: 27-10-’16

“Sleep troubles, citizen?” said the Second Judge. “Those steroids getting under your skin, stepping on your dream time? I can fix it.” She smiled, showing three ancient, discolored teeth amid a rack of gleaming porcelain.

“I’d appreciate it,” Lindsay said, struggling for politeness. The steroids had covered his long arms with ropes of muscle, healed the constellation of bruises from constant jujutsu drills, and filled him with hot flashes of aggressive fury. But they robbed him of sleep, leaving only feverish catnaps.

As he watched the Fortuna medic through red-rimmed eyes, he was reminded of his ex-wife. Alexandrina Lindsay had had just that same china-doll precision of movement, the same parchmentlike skin, the same telltale age wrinkles on the knuckles. His wife had been eighty years old. And, watching the Judge, Lindsay felt stifled by secondhand sexual attraction.

“This’ll do it,” Judge Two said, drawing up a hypo of muddy fluid from a plastic-topped vial. “Some REM promoter, serotonin agonists, muscle relaxant, and just a taste of mnemonics to pry loose troublesome memories. Use it all the time myself; it’s fabulous. While you’re out, I’ll scroll up the other arm.”

“Not just yet,” Lindsay said through gritted teeth. “I haven’t decided what I want on it yet.”

The Second Judge put away her tattoo rig with a moue of disappointment. She seemed to live, eat, and breathe needles, Lindsay thought. “Don’t you like my work?” she said.

Lindsay examined his right arm. The bone had knitted well, but he’d put on so much muscle that the designs were distorted: coax-cable snakes with television eyes, white death’s-heads with flat solar-panel wings, knives wreathed in lightning, and everywhere, fluttering along and between them, a horde of white moths. The skin of his arm from wrist to bicep was so laden with ink that it felt cold to the touch and no longer sweated.

“It was well done,” he said as the hypo sank into his arm through the hollow eye of a skull. “But wait till I’ve finished muscling for the rest, all right, citizen?”

“Sweet dreams,” she said.

At night, the Republic was truest to itself. The Preservationists preferred the night, when watchful older eyes were closed in sleep.

Truths hidden in daylight revealed themselves in blazing nightlights. The solar energy of the power panels was the Republic’s currency. Only the wealthiest could squander financial power.

To his right, at the world cylinder’s north end, light poured from the hospitals. In their clinics around the cylinder’s axis, the frail bones of the Radical Old rested easily, almost in free-fall. Gouts of light spilled from distant windows and landing pads, a smeared and bogus Milky Way of wealth.

Suddenly Lindsay, looking up, was behind those windows. It was his Great-Grandfather’s suite. The old Mechanist floated in a matrix of life-support tubes, his eye sockets wired to a video input, in a sterile suite flooded with oxygen.

“Grandfather, I’m leaving,” Lindsay said. The old man raised one hand, so crippled with arthritis that its swollen knuckles bulged, and rippled, and suddenly burst into a hissing net of needle-tipped tubes. They whipped into Lindsay, clinging, piercing, sucking. Lindsay opened his mouth to scream—

The lights were far away. He was walking across the fretted glass window-pane. He emerged onto the Agricultural panel.

A faint smell of curdling rot came with the wind. He was near the Sours.

Lindsay’s shoes hissed through genetically altered wiregrass at the swamp’s margins. Grasshoppers creaked in the undergrowth, and a chitinous thing the size of a rat scurried away from him. Philip Constantine had the rot under siege.

The wind gusted. Constantine’s tent flapped loudly in the darkness. By the tent’s doorflaps, two globes on stakes shone with yellow bioluminescence.

Constantine’s sprawling tent dominated the wiregrass borderlands, with the Sours to its north and the fertile grainfields shielded behind it. The no-man’s land, where he battled the contagion, clicked and rustled with newly minted vermin from his labs.

From within, he heard Constantine’s voice, choked with sobs.

“Philip!” he said. He went inside.

Constantine sat at a wooden bench before a long metal lab bureau, cluttered with Shaper glassware. Racks of specimen cases stood like bookshelves, loaded with insects under study. Globes on slender, flexible supports cast a murky yellow light.

Constantine seemed smaller than ever, his boyish shoulders hunched beneath his lab jacket. His round eyes were bloodshot and his hair was disheveled.

“Vera’s burned,” Constantine said. He trembled silently and put his face into his gloved hands. Lindsay sat on the bench beside him and threw his long, bony arm over Constantine’s back.

They were sitting together as they had sat so often, so long ago. Side by side as usual, joking together in their half-secret argot of Ring Council slang, passing a spiked inhaler back and forth. They laughed together, the quiet laughter of shared conspiracy. They were young, and breaking all the rules, and after a few long whiffs from the inhaler they were brighter than anyone human had a right to be.

Constantine laughed happily, and his mouth was full of blood. Lindsay came awake with a start, opened his eyes, and saw the sick bay of the Red Consensus. He closed his eyes and slept again at once.

Lindsay’s cheeks were wet with tears. He was not sure how long they had been sitting together, sobbing. It seemed a long time. “Can we talk freely here, Philip?”

“They don’t need police spies here,” Constantine said bitterly. “That’s why we have wives.”

“I’m sorry for what’s come between us, Philip.”

“Vera’s dead,” Constantine said. He closed his eyes. “You and I did this. We engineered her death. We share that guilt. We know our power now. And we’ve discovered our differences.” He wiped his eyes with a round disk of filter paper.

“I lied to them,” Lindsay said. “I said my uncle died of heart failure. The inquest said as much. I let them think so, so that I could shield you. You killed him, Philip. But it was me you meant to kill. Only my uncle stumbled into the trap.”

“Vera and I discussed it,” Constantine said. “She thought you would fail, that you wouldn’t carry out the pact. She knew your weaknesses. I knew them. I bred those moths for stings and poison. The Revolution needs its weapons. I gave her the pheromones to drive them into frenzy. She took them gladly.”

“You didn’t trust me,” Lindsay said.

“And you’re not dead.”

Lindsay said nothing.

“Look at this!” Constantine peeled off one of his lab gloves. Beneath it his olive skin was shedding like a reptile’s. “It’s a virus,” he said. “It’s immortality. A Shaper kind, from the cells themselves, not those Mech prosthetics. I’m committed, cousin.”

He picked at an elastic shred of skin. “Vera chose you, not me. I’m going to live forever, and to hell with you and your cant about humanities. Mankind’s a dead issue now, cousin. There are no more souls. Only states of mind. If you think you can deny that, then here.” He handed Lindsay a dissection scalpel. “Prove yourself. Prove your words weren’t empty. Prove you’re better dead and human.”

The knife was in Lindsay’s hand. He stared at the flesh of his wrist. He stared at Constantine’s throat. He raised the knife over his head, poised it, and screamed aloud.

The sound woke him, and he found himself in sick bay, drenched in sweat, while the Second Judge, her eyes heavy with intoxicants, ran one veiny hand along the inside of his thigh.

ABOARD THE RED CONSENSUS: 20-11-’16

The Third Representative, or Rep 3 as he was commonly called, was a stocky, perpetually grinning young man with a scarred nose and short, brush-cut sandy hair.

Like many EVA experts, he was a space fanatic and spent most of his time outside the ship, towed on long kilometers of line. Stars talked to him, and the Sun was his friend. He always wore his spacesuit, even inside the craft, and the whiff of long-fermented body odor came through its open helmet collar with eye-watering pungency.

“I’m gonna send out the drone,” he said to Lindsay as they ate together in the control room. “You can hook up to it from in here. It’s almost like being Outside.”

Lindsay put aside his empty canister of green paste. The drone was an ancient planetary probe, found in long-forgotten orbit by some long-forgotten crew, but its telescopes and microwave antennae were still useful, and it could broadcast as well. Hundreds of klicks out on its fiber-optic cable, the unmanned drone could pick up deep-space broadcasts and mislead enemy radar with electronic countermeasures. “Sure, citizen,” Lindsay said. “What the hell.”

Rep 3 nodded eagerly. “It’ll be beautiful, State. Your brain’ll spread out so-fast-so-thin be like a second skin for you.”

“I won’t take any drugs,” Lindsay said guardedly.

“You can’t take drugs,” Rep 3 said. “If you take drugs the Sun won’t talk to you.” He picked a pair of strap-on videogoggles from the console and adjusted them over Lindsay’s head. Within the goggles, a tiny video system projected images directly onto the eyeballs. The drone was shut down at the moment; Lindsay saw only an array of cryptic blue alphanumeric readouts across the bottom of his vision. There was no sense of a screen. “So far so good,” he said.

He heard a series of keyboard clicks as Rep 3 activated the drone. Then the whole ship shook gently as the robot probe cast off. Lindsay heard his guide strap on another pair of showphones, and then, through the drone’s cameras, he saw the outside of the Consensus for the first time.

It was pitiful how shabby and makeshift it looked. The old engines had been ripped off the stern and replaced with a jury-rigged attack tunnel, a long, flexible, accordioned tube with the jagged teeth of a converted mining drill at its end. A new engine, one of the old-fashioned Shaper electromagnetic SEPS types, had been welded on at the end of four long stanchions. The globular engine was a microwave hazard and was kept as far as possible from the crew’s quarters. Foil-wrapped control cables snaked up the stanchions, which had been clumsily bolted to the stern deck.

Beside the stanchions crouched the inert hulk of a mining robot. Seeing it waiting there, powered down, Lindsay realized what a powerful weapon it was; its gaping, razor-sharp claws could rip a ship like tinfoil.

Another mechanism clung to the hull: a parasite rocket. The old corrugated hull, painted an ugly shade of off-green, bore scrapes and scratches from the little rocket’s magnetic feet. Being mobile, the parasite handled all the retrorocket work.

The third deck, with its life-support system, was an untidy mashed tangle of fat ventilation and hydraulics tubes, some so old that their insulation had burst and hung in puffy free-fall streamers. “Don’t worry, we don’t use those,” Rep 3 said conversationally.

The four jointed solar panels spread laterally from the fourth deck, a gleaming cross of black silicon cut by copper gridwork. The nasty muzzle of the particle beam gun was just visible around the curve of the hull.

“Little star nation under the Sun’s eye,” the Rep said. He swung the drone around so that, briefly, Lindsay saw the drone’s own tether line. Then its cameras focused on the rigging of the spacecraft’s solar sail. In the bow was a storage chamber of accordioned fabric, but it was empty now; the nineteen tons of metallic film were spread for light pressure in a silver arc two kilometers across. The camera zoomed in and Lindsay saw as the sail expanded that it too was old: creased a bit here and there, and peppered with micrometeor holes.

“Prez says, next time, if we can afford it, we get a monolayer sprayer, stencil a big mother-burner skull and crossed lightnings on the outside of that,” the Rep offered.

“Good idea,” Lindsay said. He was off steroids now, and feeling a lot more tolerant.

“I’ll take it out,” the Rep said. Lindsay heard more clicks, and suddenly the drone unreeled its way into deep space at frightening speed. In seconds, the Red Consensus shrank to thimble-size beside the tabletop smear of its sail. Lindsay was seized with a gut-wrenching vertigo and clutched blindly at the console. He closed his eyes tightly within the goggles, then opened them onto the cosmic panorama of deep space.

“Milky Way,” the Rep said. An enormous arc of white spread itself across half of reality. Lindsay lost control of perspective: he felt for a moment that the billion white pinpoints of the galactic ridge were pressing pitilessly down onto his eyeballs. He closed his eyes again, deeply thankful that he was not actually out there.

“That’s where the aliens will come from,” the Rep informed him.

Lindsay opened his eyes. It was just a bubble, he told himself, with white specks spattered on it: a bubble with himself at its center—there, now he had it stabilized. “What aliens?”

“The aliens, State.” The Rep was genuinely puzzled. “You know they’re out there.”

“Sure,” Lindsay said.

“Wanna watch the Sun a while? Maybe it’ll tell us something.”

“How about Mars?” Lindsay suggested.

“No good, it’s in opposition. We can try asteroids, though. Check out the ecliptic.” There was a moment’s silence, filled by the low-key music of the control room, as the stars wheeled. Lindsay used haragei and felt the drone’s turning as a smooth movement around his own center of gravity. The constant training paid off; he felt solid, secure, confident. He breathed from the pit of his stomach.

“There’s one,” the Rep said. A distant pinpoint of light centered itself in his field of vision and swelled into a smudge. When it seemed about finger-sized, its edges fuzzed out and lost definition. The Rep kicked in the computer resolution and the image grew into a sausage-shaped cylinder, glowing in false data-bit colors.

“It’s a decoy,” the Rep said.

“You think so?”

“Yeah, I’ve seen ’em. Shaper work. Just a polymer skin, a balloon. Airtight, though. There might be someone in it.”

“I’ve never seen one,” Lindsay said.

“There’s thousands.” It was true. Shaper claim-jumpers in the Belt had been manufacturing the decoys for years. The polymer skins were large enough to house a small outpost of data spies, drone hijackers, or defectors. Would-be Mech sundogs could hide from police agencies there, or Shaper cypher experts could lurk within them, tapping inter-cartel broadcasts.

The strategy was to overload Mech tracking systems with a swarm of potential hideouts. The Shapers had made a strong early showing in the struggle for the Belt, and there were still isolated groups of Shaper agents moving from cell to cell behind Mech lines while the Ring Council was under siege. Many decoys were outfitted with propaganda broadcasting systems or with solar wind-tracking devices that could distort their orbits; some could shrink and expand repeatedly, disappearing from Mech radar. It was cheaper to manufacture them than it was to track down and destroy them, giving the Shapers a financial edge.

The outpost the Red Consensus had been hired to hit was one of those manufacturing centers.

“When there’s peace,” the Rep told him, “you get a dozen of these, link ’em up with tubeways, and you got a good cheap nation-station.”

“Will there ever be peace?” Lindsay said.

The walls hummed as the Red Consensus reeled in line. “When the aliens come,” the Rep said.

ABOARD THE RED CONSENSUS: 30-11-’16

They were training in the gym. “That’s enough for today,” the President said. “You’re all looking good. Even State has the fundamentals down.”

The three Reps laughed, lifting off their helmets. Lindsay popped the seal and pulled the suit helmet over his head. The combat session had lasted longer than he’d expected. He had hidden the wad from an inhaler inside the suit; he’d soaked it in vasopressin. He knew what was coming next, and he knew he would need his training at its finest pitch. But the fumes had been stronger than he’d realized; he felt dizzy, and his bladder ached.

“You’re flushed, State,” the President said. “Feel winded?”

“It’s the air inside the suit, sir,” Lindsay lied, the words ringing loudly in his own ears. “The oxygen, sir.” The vasopressin had dilated the blood vessels beneath his skin.

Rep 1 laughed and made a face. “State’s a feeb.”

“At ease, the rest of you citizens. State and I have business.”

The suits were entered through a long horseshoe-shaped inseam along the crotch and thighs. The others, except for Rep 3, were out of their suits in seconds. Lindsay unzipped his seam and kicked his legs out of the heavy magnetic boots.

The others left, leaving Lindsay and the President. Lindsay shrugged the suit over his head, and as he did so he squeezed his right hand shut within the suit’s bulky arm, driving a hypo needle deep into the base of his palm. He plucked the needle loose and let it float down into the glove fingers.

He left the suit open to air it out and tucked it under one arm. No one would bother it; it was Lindsay’s now, with the diplomatic seal of the FMD on both shoulders. He followed the President up a deck and stowed the suit on its rack.

The two of them were alone in the “broom closet.” The President’s face was anxious. “You’re ready, soldier? You feel okay? Ideologically, I mean?”

“Yes, sir,” Lindsay said. “My mind’s made up, sir.”

“Then follow me.” They went up two more decks to the control room. The President hauled himself head first through the narrow armory room and into the gun compartment.

Lindsay followed. His head throbbed, dilated blood vessels pounding rhythmically. He felt sharper than broken glass. He took a deep breath and pulled himself feet first into the gunroom. He plunged at once into an underworld of paranoia.

“You’re ready?”

“Yes, sir,” Lindsay said. Slowly, he strapped himself into the skeletal control chair. The ancient gun was grisly and impressive. He felt a flash of intuition suddenly, a cold steel certainty that the muzzle of the gun was pointed at his own gut. To pull the trigger would be to blow himself apart.

Lindsay remembered the procedures. In his state they might as well have been stenciled on his brain. He ran his hand over the matte-black surface of the control panel and kicked in power with a tap of the rocker switch. Behind him, the muffled music of the control room dropped an octave as the power drain set in. A rack of evil red blips and readouts sprang into life below the eerie blue of the target screen.

Lindsay looked past the screen, his eyes blurring. There was a light sheen of oil on the ribbed struts along the gun barrel. Thick black hard-edged ribs: superconducting magnets, oozing gutlike coils of foil-covered power cables.

It was a pornography of death. A degradation of the human genius in abject whoredom to racial suicide.

Lindsay tripped an arming switch and flipped up the first safety seal. He stuck his right hand within the hollow behind the seal. His fingers settled around a ribbed plastic grip. He flicked aside another catch with his thumb. The machine began to whine.

“We all have to do it,” the President said. “It can’t rest on any one of us.”

“I understand, sir,” Lindsay said. He had rehearsed the words. The gun was not aimed at anything; it pointed off the ecliptic into empty galactic space. No one would be harmed. All he had to do was pull the trigger. He was not going to be able to do it.

“We all hate it,” the President said. “The gun’s under seal at all times, I swear it. But we gotta have it. You never know what you’ll find in the next action. Maybe the big score. The score that’ll buy us into a cartel, make us a nation again. Then we can junk this monster.”

“Yes, sir.” It was not something he could confront directly, not something he could coldly think through. It was too deep for that. It was the basis of the universe.

Worlds could burst. The walls held life itself, and outside those locks and bulkheads loomed utterly pitiless darkness, the lethal nothingness of naked space. In the old circumlunars, in the modern Mech cartels, in the Shaper Ring Council, even in the far-flung outposts of the cometary miners and the blazing smelters of intra-Mercurian orbit, every single thinking being carried this knowledge. Too many generations had lived and died under the shadow of catastrophe. It had soaked itself into everyone from childhood.

Habitats were sacred; sacred because they were frail. The frailty was universal. Once the world was deliberately destroyed, there could be no more safety anywhere, for anyone. Every world would burst in a thousand infernos of total war.

There was no true safety. There had never been any. There were a hundred ways to kill a world: fire, explosion, poison, sabotage. The constant vigilance exercised by all societies could only reduce the risk. The power of destruction was in the hands of anyone and everyone. Anyone and everyone shared the burden of responsibility. The specter of destruction had shaped the moral paradigm of every world and every ideology.

The destinies of man in space had not been easy, and Lindsay’s universe was not a simple one. There were epidemics of suicide, bitter power struggles, vicious techno-racial prejudices, the crippling suppression of entire societies.

And yet the ultimate madness had been avoided. There was war, yes: small-scale ambushes, spacecraft destroyed, tiny mining camps claim-jumped with the murder of their inhabitants: all the grim and obscure conflicts that burst like sparks from the grinding impact of the Mech and Shaper superpowers. But humankind had survived and flourished.

It was a deep and fundamental triumph. On the same deep level of the mind that held the constant fear, there was a stronger hope and confidence. It was a victory that belonged to everyone, a victory so thorough and so deep that it had vanished from sight, and belonged to that secret realm of the mind on which everything else is predicated.

And yet these pirates, as pirates must, controlled a weapon of mass destruction. It was an ancient machine: a relic of a lunatic era when men first pried open the Pandora crypts of physics. An age when cosmic explosives had spread across the surface of Earth like bleeding scabs across the brain of a paretic.

“I fired it myself last week,” the President said, “so I know the Zaibatsu security didn’t booby-trap the bastard. Some of the Mech cartels will do that. Pick you up with frontier craft four thousand klicks out, shut down your weaponry, then put a delay chip in the wiring—you pull the trigger, chip vaporizes, nerve gas.… It makes no difference. You pull that trigger in combat you’re dead anyway, ninety-nine percent. The Shapers we’re attacking have Armageddon stuff too. We gotta have anything they have. We gotta do anything they can do. That’s nuclear war, soldier; otherwise, we can’t talk together.… Now, fire.”

“Fire!” cried Lindsay. There was nothing. The gun was silent.

“Something’s wrong,” Lindsay said.

“Gun down?”

“No, it’s my arm. My arm.” He pulled backward. “I can’t get it off the pistol grip. The muscles have knotted.”

“They what?” the President said. He gripped Lindsay’s forearm. The muscles stood out like cables, cramped in paralytic rigor.

“Oh, God,” Lindsay said, a well-practiced edge of hysteria in his voice. “I can’t feel your hand. Squeeze my arm.”

The President crushed his forearm with bruising force. “Nothing,” Lindsay said. He had filled his arm with anesthetic in the spacesuit. The cramping was a diplomatic trick. It was not an easy one. He hadn’t meant to get his fingers caught around the grip.

The President dug his calloused fingertips into the outside groove of Lindsay’s elbow. Even past the anesthetic, pain knifed through the crushed nerves. His hand jumped slightly, releasing the grip. “I felt that, just a little,” he said calmly. There was something he could do with pain, if the vasopressin would help him remember.… There. The pain transformed itself, lost its color, became something nastily close to pleasure.

“I could try it left-handed,” Lindsay said gamely. “Of course, if that arm goes too, then—”

“What the hell’s wrong with you, State?” The President dug his thumb cruelly into the complex of nerves in Lindsay’s wrist. Lindsay felt the agony as a cool black sheet draped across his brain. He almost lost consciousness; his eyes fluttered and he smiled faintly.

“It must be some Shaper thing,” he said. “Neural programming. They fixed it so that I could never do this.” He swallowed hard. “It’s like it’s not my arm.” Sweat beaded on his forehead. He was so wired on vasopressin that he could feel each muscle in his face as a separate entity, just like they taught at the Academy.

“I can’t accept this,” the President told him. “If you can’t pull the trigger then you can’t be one of us.”

“It might be possible to rig up some kind of mechanical thing,” Lindsay said adroitly. “Some kind of piston-powered glove I could fit over it. I’m willing, sir. It’s this that’s not.” He lifted the arm, stiffly, from the shoulder, then slammed it down on the hard-edged ridge of the gun. He hit it again. “I can’t feel it.” Skin peeled from the muscle. Bright microglobes of blood leaped up to float in midair. The arm stayed rigid. A flat amoebalike ripple of blood oozed from the long scrape.

“We can’t try an arm for treason,” the President said.

Lindsay shrugged one-sidedly. “I’m doing my best, sir.” He knew that he would never pull that trigger. He thought they might kill him for it, though he hoped to escape that. Life was important, but not so crucial as the trigger.

“We’ll see what Judge Two says,” the President said.

Lindsay was willing. This much had gone according to plan.

Judge Two was asleep in sick bay. She came awake with a start, her eyes wild. She saw the blood, then stared at the President. “Burn it, you’ve hurt him again.”

“Not me,” said the President, with a flicker of confusion and guilt. The President explained while Judge 2 examined the arm and bandaged it. “Might be psychosomatic.”

“I want that arm moving,” the President said. “Do it, soldier.”

“Yes sir,” said the Judge, startled. She hadn’t realized they were under military rule. She scratched her head. “I’m outa my depth. I’m just a mechanic, not some Shaper psychotech.” She looked sidelong at the President; he was adamant. “Lemme think.… This should do it.” She produced another vial, labeled in an impenetrable scrawl. “Convulsant. Five times as powerful as the nerves’ own firing signals.” She drew up three cc’s. “We’d better tourniquet that arm. If this hits his bloodstream it’ll really rack him up.” She looked guiltily at Lindsay. “This’ll hurt some. A lot.”

Lindsay saw his chance. His arm was full of anesthetic, but he could fake the pain. If he seemed to suffer badly enough, they might forget about the test. They would feel he’d been punished enough, for something that wasn’t his fault. The Judge was sympathetic; he could play her against the President. Their guilt would do the rest.

He spoke sternly. “The President knows best. You should follow his orders. Never mind my arm, it’s numb anyway.”

“You’ll feel this, State. If you ain’t dead.” The needle went in. She twisted the hose tight around his bicep. The tattoos rippled as his veins began to bulge.

When agony hit he knew the anesthetic was useless. The convulsant scorched him like acid. “It’s burning!” he screamed. “It’s burning!” His arm rippled, its muscles writhing eerily. It began to flop in spasms, yanking one end of the hose loose from the Judge’s grip.

Congested blood seeped past the tourniquet into Lindsay’s chest. He choked on a scream and bent double, his face gray. The drug crept like hot wires around his heart. He swallowed his tongue and went into convulsions.

He was near death for two days. By the time he’d recovered, the others had reached a decision. No one ever spoke of the test again. It had never happened.

ABOARD THE RED CONSENSUS: 19-12-’16

“It’s just a rock,” said Rep 2. She brushed a roach from the videoscreen.

“It’s the target,” said the Speaker of the House. The control room was powered down, and the familiar chorus of pops, squeaks, and rumbles had dwindled to a faint, tense scratching. The Speaker’s face was greenish with screen light. “It’s camouflage. They’re in there. I can feel it.”

“It’s a rock,” said Senator 3. Her tool belt rattled as she drifted overhead, watching the screen. “They’ve scrammed, they’ve scarpered. There’s no infrareds.”

Lindsay drifted quietly in a corner of the control room, not watching the screen. He was rubbing the tattooed skin of his right arm, slowly, absently, staring at nothing. The skin had healed, but the combination of drugs had burned the crushed nerves. His skin felt rubbery below the cold ink of his tattoes. His right-hand fingertips were numb.

He had no faith in the Shapers’ restraint. The billowing sunsail of the Red Consensus was supposed to hide the ship itself from radar, preventing a preemptive strike from the asteroid. But he expected at any moment to feel the last half second of impact as Shaper weapons tore the ship apart. From within the gun room, he heard the whine of the gunner’s seat as Justice 3 shifted nervously.

“They’re waiting for us to drift past,” the President said. “They’re waiting for a shot past the sail.”

“They can’t just blow us away,” Senator 2 said plaintively. “We might be sundogs. Mech defectors.”

“Stay on that drone, Rep Three!” the President ordered.

Smiling sunnily, Rep 3 removed his earphones and turned his goggled face toward the others. “What’s that, Mr. President?”

“I said stay on those frequencies, God damn it!” the President shouted.

“Oh, that,” said Rep 3. He scratched within his spacesuit collar, holding the doubled phones to one ear. “I was doing that already. And—oh, yeah.” He paused, while the crew held their breath. The goggles blocked his eyesight, but he reached out unerringly and touched switches on the board before him. The control room was filled with a high-pitched staccato whine.

“Cut it in on visuals,” Rep 3 explained, tapping the keyboard. The asteroid vanished, replaced on the screen by column after column of alphanumeric gibberish:

TCGAGGCTATCGTAGCTAAAGCTCTCCCGATCGATATCGTCTCGAGATCGATCGATGCTTAGCTAGCTAGTTGTCGATCGTAGGGCTCGAGCTA …

“Shaper genetics code,” the Speaker said. “I told you so.”

“Their last signal before we take them out,” the President said boldly. “I’m declaring martial law as of this moment. I want everyone in battle gear—except you, State. Hop to it.”

The crew scrambled, their nerves unkinking in a burst of action. Lindsay watched them go, thinking of the stream of data to the Ring Council that had betrayed the outpost.

The Shapers might have thrown their lives away with that last cry. But the enemy, at least, had someone who would know their deaths, and mourn.