Schismatrix plus - Bruce Sterling [60]
"Aw, shit," said the President.
"I'll go," said the Chief Justice.
"It's nothing," Senator 3 said. "A blower settling." Lindsay heard the rattle of her tool belt.
"I'm gone," the Chief Justice said. Lindsay felt a light movement of air as the old Mechanist floated past him.
Fifteen seconds passed in darkness. "We need light," the Speaker hissed.
"I'll use the saw and—"
The tapping stopped. The Chief Justice called out. "I have it! It's a piece of—"
A sudden nasty crunch cut him off.
"Justice!" the President cried. They rushed down the corridor, bumping and colliding blindly.
When they reached the spot, the Speaker pulled her saw, and sparks flew. The noisemaker was a simple flap of stiff plastic, glued to the mouth of a branching tunnel and tugged by a long thread. The assassin—Paolo—had waited deep within the tunnel. When he'd heard the old Mechanist's voice he had fired his weapon, a slingshot. A heavy stone cube—Paolo's six-sided die—was half buried in the dead pirate's fractured skull.
In the brief blazing light of sparks, Lindsay saw the dead man's head covered by a flattened mass of blood, held by surface tension to the skin around the wound.
"We could leave," Lindsay said.
"Not without our own," the President said. "And not leaving the one who did this. They got only five left."
"Four," Lindsay said. "I killed Fazil. Three, if I can talk to Nora."
"No time for talk," the President said. "You're wounded, State. Stay here and guard the airlock. When you see the others, tell 'em we've gone to kill the four."
Lindsay forced himself to speak. "If Nora surrenders, Mr. President, I hope that you'll—"
"Mercy was his job," said the President. Lindsay heard him tug at the dead judge's body. "You got a weapon, State?"
"No."
"Take this, then." He handed Lindsay the dead man's mechanical arm. "If one of 'em strays by here, kill them with the old man's fist." Lindsay clutched the cabled ridges of the stiff prosthetic wrist. The others went quickly, with a click, a rustle, and the whisper of calloused skin against stone. Lindsay floated back up the tunnel to the airlock, bouncing along the smooth stone with knees and shoulders, thinking of Nora. The old woman wouldn't die, that was the horror of it. If it had only been as quick and clean as Kleo had said it would, Nora could have borne it, endured it as she endured all things. But in the darkness, when she whipped the weighted sash around the pirate's neck and pulled, it had not been quiet, it had not been clean.
The old woman—Judge 2, the pirates called her—her throat was a mass of cartilage and gristle, tough as wire beneath her skin's false smoothness. Twice, when Nora thought she was dead at last, the pirate woman had lurched shudder-ingly into life again with a tortured rasp in the darkness. Nora's wrists bled freely from the old woman's splintered nails. The body stank. Nora smelled her own sweat. Her armpits were a tormenting mass of rashes. She floated quietly in the pitch-black launch control room, her bare feet perched on the dead woman's shoulders, one enu of the sash in each hand. She had not fought well when the pirates had launched their strike in the sudden blackout. She had hit someone, swinging her stone bola, but then lost it in the struggle. Agnes had fought hard and been wounded by the Speaker's handsaw. Paolo had fought like a champion.
Kleo murmured a password from the door, and in a few moments there was light in the room. "I told you they worked," Paolo said. Kleo held the plastic candle away; the sodium at the tip of the wick was still sputtering where it had ignited. The waxy plastic reeked as the wick burned down. "I brought all you made," Kleo told Paolo. "You're a bright boy, dear."
Paolo nodded proudly. "My luck beat this contingency. And I've killed