Schismatrix plus - Bruce Sterling [63]
Paolo finished the Shaper woman. Kleo was still strangling the second woman, who had died; Paolo slammed his bola into the back of the dead woman's head and Kleo released her, yanking her stiffened hands away. She rubbed them together as if spreading on lotion, breathing hard. "Put out that fire," she said.
Paolo approached the flaming, gluey mass of hay and plastics carefully. He shrugged out of his heavy blouse, which was speckled with pinholes of acid, and threw it over the fire as if trapping an animal. He stamped it vindictively, and there was darkness. Kleo spat on the sodium tip of another candle, which sputtered into life.
"Not good," she said. "I'm hurt. Nora?" Nora looked down at her leg, felt it. The kneecap was loose beneath the skin. There was no pain yet, only a shocked numbness. "My knee," she said, and coughed. "She killed Agnes."
"There's just three left," Kleo said. "The Speaker, her man, and Senator Three. We have them. My poor precious darlings." She threw her arms around Paolo, who stiffened at the sudden gesture but then relaxed, cradling his head in the hollow at Kleo's neck and shoulder.
"I'll start the power plant," Nora said. She drifted to the wall panel and tapped switches for the preliminary sequence.
"Paolo and I will cover the entrances and wait for them," Kleo said.
"Nora, you go to the radio room. Raise the Council, report in. We'll regroup there." She gave Nora the candle and left.
Nora stuck the candle above the tokamak's control board and got it up into stage one. A bluish glow seeped through the polarized blast shield as magnetic fields uncurled within the chamber. The tokamak flickered uneasily as it bootstrapped its way up to fusion velocities. False sunlight flared yellow as the ion streams collided and burned. The field stabilized, and suddenly all the lights were on.
Holding it warily, Nora snuffed the candle against the wall. Paolo brushed petulantly at the acid blisters on his unprotected hands.
"I'm the one, Nora," he said. "The one percent destined for survival."
"I know that, Paolo."
"I'll remember you, though. All of you. I loved you, Nora. I wanted to tell you one more time."
"It's a privilege to live in your memory, Paolo."
"Goodbye, Nora."
"If I ever had luck," Nora said, "it's yours." He smiled, hefting his slingshot.
Nora left. She skidded quickly through the tunnels, holding one leg stiff. Waves of pain dug into her, knotting her body. Without the spinal crab, she could no longer stop the cramps.
The pirates had been through the radio room. They had smashed about them wildly in the darkness. The transmitters were saw-torn wreckage; the table-top console had been wrenched off and flung aside.
Fluid leaked from the liquid crystal display. Nora pulled needle and thread from her hairnet and sewed up the gash in the screen. The CPU was still working; there were signals incoming from the dishes outside. But the deciphering programs were down. Ring Council transmissions were gibberish. She picked up a general frequency propaganda broadcast. The slashed television still worked, though it blurred around the stitches. And there it was: the outside world. There was not much to it: words and pictures, lines on a screen. She ran her fingertips gently over the scalding pain in her knee.
She could not believe what the faces on the screen were telling her, what the images showed. It was as if the little screen in its days of darkness had fermented somehow, and the world behind it was frothing over, all its poisons wet-wared into wine. The faces of the Shaper politicos were alight with astounded triumph.
She watched the screen, transfixed. The shocked public statements of Mechanist leaders: broken men, frightened women, their routines and systems stripped away. The Mech armor of plans and contingencies had been picked off like a scab, showing the raw flesh of their humanity. They gabbled, they scrambled for control,