Schismatrix plus - Bruce Sterling [16]
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