Schismatrix plus - Bruce Sterling [15]
"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,