exercycles and some spring-loaded weights, with a rack of storage lockers beside the entrance port.
"Forget up and down," the President advised. "When we're
talking free-fall combat, the central rule is haragei. That's this."
He punched Lindsay suddenly in the stomach. Lindsay doubled
over with a wheeze and his velcro slippers ripped free from the
wall, shredding loudly.
The President grabbed Lindsay's wrist, and with a sinuous
transfer of torque he stuck Lindsay's feet to the ceiling. "Okay,
you're upside down now, right?" Lindsay stood on the upward
or bow side of the deck; the President crouched on the stern-
ward side, so that their feet pointed in opposite directions. He
glared upside down into Lindsay's eyes. His breath smelled of
raw algae.
"That's what they call the local vertical," he said. "The body
was built for gravity and the eyes look for gravity in any situ-
ation; that's the way the brain's wired. You're gonna look for
straight lines that go up and down and you're going to orient
yourself to those lines. And you're gonna get killed, soldier,
understand?"
"Yes sir!" Lindsay said. In the Republic, he'd been taught from
childhood to despise violence. Its only legitimate use was against
one's self. But his brush with the antibiotic had changed his
thinking.
"That's what haragei's for." The President slapped his own
belly. "This is your center of gravity, your center of torque. You
meet some enemy in free-fall, and you grapple with him, well,
your head is just a stalk, see? What happens depends on your
center of mass. Your haragei. Your actions, the places where
you can punch out with hands and feet, form a sphere. And that
sphere is centered on your belly. You think of that bubble
around you all the lime."
"Yes sir," Lindsay said. His attention was total.
"That's number one," the President said. "Now we're gonna
talk about number two. Bulkheads. Control of the bulkhead is
control of the fight. If I pull my feet up, off this bulkhead, how
hard do you think I can hit you?"
Lindsay was prudent. "Hard enough to break my nose, sir."
"Okay. But if I have my feet planted, so my own body holds
me fast against the recoil, what then?"
"You break my neck. Sir."
"Good thinking, soldier. A man without bracing is a helpless
man. If you got nothing else, you use the enemy's own body as
bracing. Recoil is the enemy of impact. Impact is damage.
Damage is victory. Understand?"
"Recoil is impact's enemy. Impact is damage, damage is victory," Lindsay said immediately. "Sir."
"Very good," the President said. He then reached out, and,
with a quick pivoting movement, he broke Lindsay's forearm
over his knee with a wet snap. "That's number three," he said
over Lindsay's sudden scream. "Pain."
"Well," said the Second Justice, "I see he showed you the old
number three."
"Yes, ma'am," Lindsay said.
The Second Justice slid a needle into his arm. "Forget that,"
she said kindly. "This isn't the army, this is sick bay. You can
just call me Judge Two."
A rubbery numbness spread over the fractured arm. "Thanks,
Judge." The Second Justice was an older woman, maybe close
to a century. It was hard to tell; her constant abuse of hormone
treatments had made her metabolism a patchwork of anomalies.
Her jawline was freckled with acne, but her wrists and shins
were flaky and varicose-veined.
"You're okay, State, you'll do," she said. She stuck Lindsay's
anesthetized arm into the wide rubber orifice of an old-
fashioned CAT scanner. Multiple x-rays whirred from its ring,
and a pivoting three-D image of Lindsay's arm appeared on the
scanner's screen.
"Good clean break, nothin' to it," she said analytically. "We've
all had it. You're almost one of us now. Want me to scroll you
up while the arm's still numb?"
"What?"
"Tattoos, citizen."
The thought appalled him. "Fine," he said at once. "Go right!
ahead."
"I knew you were okay from the beginning," she said, nudging
him in the ribs. "I'll do you a favor: vein-pop you with some of
those anabolic steroids. You'll muscle up in no time; the Prez'll
think you're a natural." She pulled gently on his forearm; the
sullen grating of jagged bone ends was like something happening
at the other end of a telescope.
She pulled a needled tattoo rig from the wall, where it clung
by a patch of velcro. "Any preferences?"
"I want some moths," Lindsay said.
The history of the Fortuna Miners' Democracy was a simple
one. Fortuna was a major asteroid, over two hundred kilometers
across. In the first flush of success, the original miners had
declared their independence.
As long as the ore held out, they did well. They could buy
their way out of political trouble and could pay for life-
extension treatments from other more advanced worlds.
But when the ore was gone and Fortuna was a mined-out heap
of rubble, they found they had crucially blundered. Their wealth
had vanished, and they had failed to pursue technology with the
cutthroat desperation of rival cartels. They could not survive on
their outmoded expertise or sustain an information economy.
Their attempts to do so only hastened their bankruptcy.
The defections began. The nation's best and most ambitious
personnel were brain-drained away to richer worlds. Fortuna
lost its spacecraft, as defectors decamped with anything not
nailed down.
The collapse was exponential, and the government devolved
upon smaller and smaller numbers of diehards. They got into
debt and had to sell their infrastructure to the Mech cartels;
they even had to auction off their air. The population dwindled
to a handful of knockabout dregs, mostly sundogs who'd me-
andered to Fortuna out of lack of alternatives.
They were, however, in full legal control of a national govern-
ment, with its entire apparat of foreign relations and diplomatic
protocol. They could grant citizenship, coin money, issue letters
of marque, sign treaties, negotiate arms control agreements.
There might be only a dozen of them, but that was irrelevant.
They still had their Mouse, their Senate, their legal precedents,
and their ideology.
They therefore redefined Fortuna, their national territory, as
the boundaries of their last surviving spacecraft, the Red Con-
sensus. Thus equipped with a mobile nation, they were able to
legally annex other people's property into their national bound-
aries. This was not theft. Nations are not capable of theft, a legal
fact of great convenience to the ideologues of the FMD. Protests
were forwarded to the Fortuna legal system, which was computerized and of formidable intricacy.
Lawsuits were the chief source of income for the pirate nation.
Most cases were settled out of court. In practice, this was a
simple process of bribing the pirates to make them go away. But
the pirates were very punctilious about form and took great
pride in preserving the niceties.
ABOARD THE RED CONSENSUS: 29-9-'16
"What are you doing in the sweatbox, State?"
Lindsay smiled uneasily. "The State of the Nation address," he
said. "I'd prefer to escape it." The President's rhetoric filled the
spacecraft, filtering past the slight figure of the First Representative. The girl slipped into the radiation shelter and wheeled the
heavy hatch shut behind her.
"That ain't very patriotic. State. You're the new hand here;
you ought to listen."