Schismatrix plus - Bruce Sterling [65]
"We're gonna eat your fuckin' livers." He lowered his voice. "Take 'em out, State."
Nora clawed past Paolo and screamed aloud. "Abelard! Abelard, it's true, I swear it by everything between us! Abelard, you're not stupid, let us live!
I want to live—"
Paolo clamped his hand over her mouth and pulled her back. She clung to the barricade, now glued firm, staring down the hall. A white form was drifting there. A spacesuit. Not a Mavrides one, but one of the bloated armored ones from the Red Consensus.
Paolo's slingshot was useless against the suit. "This is it," he muttered.
"The cusp." He released Nora and pulled a candle and a flat bladder of liquid from within his blouse. He wrapped the bladder around the candle, cinching it with a sleeve-tie. He hefted the bomb. "Now they burn." Nora threw her sash around his neck. She put her good knee into his back and pulled savagely. Paolo made a sound like broken pipes and kicked away from the entrance. He clawed at the sash. He was strong. He was the one with luck. Nora pulled harder. Abelard was alive. The idea gave her strength. She pulled harder. Paolo was pulling just as hard. His fists were locked around the belt's gray fabric so hard that blood oozed from his nail-cut palms in little crescent blisters.
There were screams down the hall. Screams and the sound of the power saw.
And now the knot that had never left her shoulders had spread into her arms and Paolo was pulling against muscle that had set like iron. He was not breathing in the sudden silence that followed. The wrinkled ridge of the sash had vanished into his neck. He was dead, still pulling.
She let the ends of the sash slide through her cramped fingers. Paolo twisted slowly in free-fall, his face blackened, his arms locked in place. He seemed to be strangling himself.
A gauntleted hand, drenched in blood, came through the crescent hole at the side of the barricade. There was a muffled buzzing from within the spacesuit. He was trying to talk.
She rushed to his side. He leaned his head against the outside of the barricade, shouting within the helmet. "Dead!" he said. "They're dead!"
"Take off the helmet," she said.
He shrugged his right shoulder within the suit. "My arm!" he said. She stuck one hand through the crevice and helped him twist the helmet off. It popped free with a suck of air and the familiar reek of his body. There were half-dried scabs of blood under his nostrils and one in his left ear. He had been decompressed.
Carefully, she ran her hand across his sweating cheek. "We're alive, aren't we?"
"They were going to kill you," he said. "I couldn't let them."
"The same for me." She looked backward at Paolo. "It was like suicide to kill him. I think I'm dead."
"No. We belong to each other. Say so, Nora."
"Yes, we do," she said, and pressed her face blindly against the gap between them. He kissed her with the bright salt taste of blood. The demolition had been thorough. Kleo had finished the job. She had crept out in a spacesuit and soaked the inside of the Red Consensus with sticky contact venom.
But Lindsay had gone there before her. He had leaped the gap of naked space, decompressing himself, to get one of the armored spacesuits. He'd caught Kleo in the control room. In her thin suit she was no match for him; he'd ripped her suit open and she'd died of the poison.
Even the Family's robot had suffered. The two Reps had lobotomized it while passing through the decoy room. Operations by the launch ring ran at manic speed, the brain-stripped robot loading ton after ton of carbon ore into the overstuffed and belching wetware. A frothing mass of plastic output gushed into the launch ring, which was itself ruined by the skidding launch cage. But that was the least of their problems.
The worst was sepsis. The organisms brought from the Zaibatsu wreaked havoc on the delicate biosystems of esairs xii. Kleo's garden was a leprous