Schismatrix plus - Bruce Sterling [61]
"You made the candles," Agnes said. "/ said they wouldn't work." She looked at him adoringly. "You're the one, Paolo. Give me orders." Nora saw the dead pirate's face in candlelight. She unwrapped the strangling sash and tied it around her waist.
She felt another siege of weakness. Her eyes filled with tears and she felt a sudden horror and regret for the woman she had killed. It was the drugs Abelard had given her. She had been a fool to take that first injection. Firing up with aphrodisiacs had been a surrender, not just to the enemy but to those bits and pieces of temptation and doubt that lurked within her. Throughout her life, the brighter her convictions had burned, the darker these shadows had been, flitting, creeping.
On her own, she might have held her ground. But there was the fatal example of the other diplomats. The traitors. The Academy had never officially spoken of them, leaving that to the covert world of gossip and rumor that boiled unceasingly in every Shaper colony. The rumors festered in darkness, taking on all the distorted forms of the forbidden.
In her own mind, Nora had become a criminal: sexual, ideological, professional. Things had happened to her that she dared not speak of, even to Kleo. Her Family knew nothing of the diplomatic training, the burning glare in every muscle, the attack on face and brain that had made her own body into an alien object before she turned sixteen.
If it had been anyone but another diplomat, she could have fought and died with the conviction and serenity that Kleo showed. But she had faced him now and understood. Abelard was not as bright as she was, but he was resilient and quick. She could become what he was. It was the first real alternative she had ever known.
"I gave us light," Paolo bragged. He whirled his bola in a twisting figure-eight, catching the string on his padded forearms. "I played odds, even the farthest. I beat Ian, I beat Fazil, and I killed two." Sleeve ties flailed at his elbows as he slapped his chest. "I say ambush, ambush, ambush!" The bola whirled to a stop, wrapping his arm, and he pulled his slingshot from his belt.
"They mustn't escape," Kleo said. Her face was warm and calm in the candlelight, framed by the fringed gold crown of her hairnet. "If survivors leave, they'll bring others. We can live, darlings. They're stupid. And they're split. We've lost two, they seven." A flicker of pain crossed her face. "The diplomat was quick, but odds say he died in the launch ring. The others we can outflank, like the Judges."
"Where are the two Representatives?" said Agnes. The Speaker's handsaw had slashed her above the left knee; she was pale but still full of fight. "We have to get the rogue genetic. She's trouble."
"What about the wetware?" Nora said. "It'll stale if we stay powered down. We have to get power back."
"They'd know we were in the power plant!" Paolo said. "One could start it, the others wait in ambush! Strike and fall back, strike and fall back!"
"First we hide the bodies," Kleo said. She turned, bracing her feet near the doorway, and tugged hand over hand on a line. The third Judge appeared, his wrinkled neck almost slashed through by Kleo's wire-thin garotte. The syringes on his belt were filled with stolen wetware. Like Judge 2, he had been caught at his theft.
Paolo peeled camo plastic from the launch room's secret alcove. The bodies of Senators 1 and 2 already floated within it, killed by Agnes and Paolo. They shoved the other dead inside, reluctant to touch them. "They'll know they're here," Agnes said. "They'll smell them." She sneezed violently.
"They'll think it's themselves," Paolo said, smoothing the filmy false wall back into place.
"To the tokamak," Kleo said. "I'll take the candles; Agnes, you take point."
"All right." Agnes stripped off her blouse and heavy hairnet. She attached them together with a few loose stitches. Puffing out in free-fall, they looked like a human form in the dimness. She slipped into the narrow corridor, pushing the decoy ahead of her with her extended arm. The others followed,