Schismatrix plus - Bruce Sterling [43]
TCGAGGCTATCGTAGCTAAAGCTCTCCCGATCGATATCGTCTCGAGATCGATCGATGC-TTAGCTAGCTAGTTGTCGA TCGTAGGGCTCGAGCTA...
"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.
Chapter 4
ESAIRS XII: 21-12-'16
They called the asteroid esairs 89-xii, the only name it had ever had, drawn from an ancient catalog, esairs xii was a potato-shaped lump of slag, half a kilometer long.
The Red Consensus hovered over its bulging equator, anchored by a guy line.
Lindsay pulled himself one-handed down the line. Glimpsed through his faceplate, the asteroid was dark, with long coal-powder streaks of carbonaceous ore. Cold gray and white blurs marked the charred impact points of primeval collisions. The biggest craters were eighty meters across, huge lava sumps of cracked slag and splattered glass.
Lindsay landed. The expanse beneath his boots was like pumice, a static off-white surf of petrified bubbles. He could see up and down the asteroid's length, but its width curved out of sight behind a horizon a dozen steps away. He bent and pulled himself along, gripping knobs and cavities with the rough fingers of his gauntlets. The right hand was bad. The tough interior fabric of the glove felt soft as cotton to his nerve-burned fingers. He crawled, legs bobbing aimlessly, over the rim of an oblong crater, the scarred gouge of some glancing collision. It was five times as deep as he was tall, and its floor was a long gas-smoothed blister of greenish basalt. A long bloated ridge of molten rock had almost lifted free into space but then frozen, preserving every last ripple and warp....
It slid aside. The rock ridge shriveled, crumpling like silk, its warps and bumps revealed as shaded camouflage on a plastic film. A cavern yawned below. It was a tunnel, curving just below the surface. Lindsay picked his way cautiously down the slope and flung himself into the tunnel. He braced himself against its walls. Stretching overhead, he pushed against the tunnel's ceiling to plant his feet.
Sunlight dawned over the tiny horizon and fell into the tunnel. It was precisely circular and inhumanly smooth. Six tracks of thin metallic ribbon had been epoxied into place, running lengthwise along the corridor. In raw sunlight the tracks had the gleam of copper. The tunnel apparently girdled the asteroid. It curved rapidly, like the horizon. Before him, almost hidden by the tunnel's curvature, he glimpsed the dim sheen of brown plastic. Jumping and shoving along the walls, he bounced toward it in free-fall.
It was a plastic film with an inert fabric airlock. Lindsay pulled the zip-pered airlock tag and stepped in. He zipped it up behind him, undid a second zipper in the lock's inner wall, and climbed through. He was in a cavernous black and ocher balloon. It had been blown up within the tunnel, filling it tightly.
A figure in a plastic decontamination suit floated upside down below the ceiling, a bright green silhouette against hand-sprayed black arabesques on an ocher background.
Lindsay's suit had gone flat, indicating air pressure. He took his helmet off and inhaled cautiously. It was an oxy-nitrogen mix, standard air. Lindsay held his right arm across his chest with deliberate awkwardness.
"I, uh, have a prepared statement to read. If you have no objection."
"Please proceed." The woman's voice was thin, half muffled. He glimpsed her face behind the plate: cold eyes, tawny skin, dark hair held in a green net.
Lindsay read the words slowly, without inflection. "Greetings from the For-tuna