booty. It was the yarite's severed head.
She let go of the head with the sudden hiss of a scorched cat.
"Get 'im!" the President yelled.
Two of the Senators bounced off the spacecraft's walls and
seized Lindsay's arms and legs in painful jujutsu holds.
"You're the assassin!" the President shouted. "You were hired
to hit this old Mechanist! There's no loot at all!" He looked at
the input-studded head with a grimace of disgust. "Get it into
the recycler," he told one of the representatives. "I won't have a
thing like that aboard this ship. Wait a second," he said as the
representative took tentative hold of a lock of sparse hair.
"Take it up to the machine shop first and dig out all the
circuitry."
He turned to Lindsay. "So that's your game, eh, citizen? An
assassin?"
Lindsay clung to their expectations. "Sure," he said reflexively.
"Whatever you say."
There was an ominous silence, overlaid by distant thermal
pops from the engines of the Red Consensus. "Let's throw his
ass out the airlock," suggested the Speaker of the House.
"We can't do that," said the Chief Justice of the Supreme
Court. He was a feeble old Mechanist who was subject to
nosebleeds. "He is still Secretary of Stale and can't be sentenced
without impeachment by the Senate."
The three Senators, two men and a woman, looked interested.
The Senate didn't see much action in the government of the tiny
Democracy. They were the least trusted members of the crew
and were outnumbered by the House.
Lindsay shrugged. It was an excellent shrug; he had captured
the feel of the President's own kinesics, and the subliminal
mimicry defused the situation for the crucial instant it took him
to start talking. "It was a political job." It was a boring voice,
the leaden sound of moral exhaustion. It defused their
bloodlust, made the situation into something predictable and
tiresome. "I was working for the Mare Serenitatis Corporate!
Republic. They had a coup there. They're shipping a lot of their
population to the Zaibatsu soon and wanted me to pave the
way."
They were believing him. He put some color into his voice.
"But they're fascists. I prefer to serve a democratic government.
Besides, they set an 'antibiotic' on my track -at least, I think it
was them." Me smiled and spread his hands innocently, twisting
his arms in the loosened grips of his captors. "I haven't lied to
you, have I? I never claimed that I wasn't a killer. Besides, think
of the money I made for you."
"Yeah, there's that," the President said grudgingly. "But did
you have to saw its head off?"
"I was following orders," Lindsay said. "I'm good at that, Mr.
President. Try me."
ABOARD THE RED CONSENSUS: 13-6-'16
Lindsay had stolen the cyborg's head to free Kitsune, to guarantee that her power games would not come to light. He had
deceived her, but he had freed her as a message of apology. The
Shaper assassin would bear the blame for it. He hoped the
Geisha Bank would tear the man apart.
He put aside the horror. His Shaper teachers had warned him
about such feelings. When a diplomat was thrown into a new
environment, he should repress all thoughts of the past and
immediately soak up as much protective coloration as possible.
Lindsay surrendered to his training. Crammed into the tiny
spacecraft with the eleven-member Fortuna nation, Lindsay felt
the environment's semiotics as an almost physical pressure. It
would be hard to keep a sense of perspective, trapped in a can
with eleven lunatics.
Lindsay had not been in a real spacecraft since his schooldays
in the Shaper Ring Council. The Mech cargo drogue that had
shipped him into exile didn't count; its passengers were drugged
meat. The Red Consensus was lived in; it had been in service for
two hundred and fifteen years.
Within a few days, following bits of evidence present within the spacecraft, Lindsay learned more about its history than the
Fortuna Miners knew themselves.
The living decks of the Consensus had once belonged to a
Terran national entity, an extinct group calling themselves the
Soviet Union, or CCCP. The decks had been launched from
Earth to form one of a series of orbiting "defense stations."
The ship was cylindrical, and its living quarters were four
interlocked round decks. Each deck was four meters tall and
ten meters across. They had once been equipped with crude
airlock safety doors between levels, but those had been
wrenched out and replaced with modern self-sealing pressure
filaments.
The stern deck had been ripped clean to the padded walls. The
pirates used it for exercise and free-fall combat practice. They
also slept there, although, having no day or night, they were
likely to doze off anywhere at any time.
The next deck, closer to the bow, held their cramped surgery
and sick bay, as well as the "sweatbox," where they hid from
solar flares behind lead shielding. In the "broom closet," a
dozen antiquated spacesuits hung flabbily beside a racked-up
clutter of shellac sprayers, strap-on gas guns, ratchets, clamps,
and other "outside" tools. This deck had an airlock, an old
armored one to the outside, which still had a series of peeling
operations stickers in green Cyrillic capitals.
The next deck was a life-support section, full of gurgling racks
of algae. It had a toilet and a food synthesizer. The two units
were both hooked directly to the algae racks. It was an object
lesson in recycling, but not one that Lindsay relished much.
This deck also had a small machine shop; it was tiny, but the
lack of gravity allowed the use of every working surface.
The bow deck had the control room and the power hookups to
the solar panels. Lindsay grew to like this deck best, mostly
because of the music. The control room was an old one, but
nowhere near as old as the Consensus itself. It had been de-
signed by some forgotten industrial theorist who believed that
instruments should use acoustic signals. The cluster of systems,
spread out along a semicircular control panel, had few optical
readouts. They signaled their functions by rumbles, squeaks, and
steady modular beeping.
Bizarre at first, the sounds were designed to sink unobtrusively
into the backbrain. Any change in the chorus, though, was
immediately obvious. Lindsay found the music soothing, a com-
bination of heartbeat and brain.
The rest of the deck was not so pleasant: the armory, with its
nasty racks of tools, and the ship's center of corruption: the
particle beam gun. Lindsay avoided that compartment when he
could, and never spoke of it.
He could not escape the knowledge that the Red Consensus
was a ship of war.
"Look," the President told him, "taking out some feeble old
Mech whose brain's shut down is one thing. But taking out an
armed Shaper camp full of hot genetics types is a different
proposition. There's no room for feebs or thumb-sitters in the
Fortuna National Army."
"Yes sir," said Lindsay. The Fortuna National Army was the
military arm of the national government. Its personnel were
identical to the personnel of the civilian government, but this
was of no consequence. It had an entirely different organization
and set of operating procedures. Luckily the President was
commander in chief of the armed forces as well as head of state.
They did military drills in the fourth deck, which had been
stripped down to the ancient and moldy padding. It held three