Schismatrix plus - Bruce Sterling [30]
"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.