"How about Mars?" Lindsay suggested.
"No good, it's in opposition. We can try asteroids, though.
Check out the ecliptic." There was a moment's silence, filled by
the low-key music of the control room, as the stars wheeled.
Lindsay used haragei and felt the drone's turning as a smooth
movement around his own center of gravity. The constant training paid off; he felt solid, secure, confident. He breathed from
the pit of his stomach.
"There's one," the Rep said. A distant pinpoint of light centered itself in his field of vision and swelled into a smudge.
When it seemed about finger-sized, its edges fuzzed out and lost
definition. The Rep kicked in the computer resolution and the
image grew into a sausage-shaped cylinder, glowing in false
data-bit colors.
"It's a decoy," the Rep said.
"You think so?"
"Yeah, I've seen 'em. Shaper work. Just a polymer skin, a
balloon. Airtight, though. There might be someone in it."
"I've never seen one," Lindsay said.
"There's thousands." It was true. Shaper claim-jumpers in the
Belt had been manufacturing the decoys for years. The polymer
skins were large enough to house a small outpost of data spies,
drone hijackers, or defectors. Would-be Mech sundogs could
hide from police agencies there, or Shaper cypher experts could
lurk within them, tapping inter-cartel broadcasts.
The strategy was to overload Mech tracking systems with a
swarm of potential hideouts. The Shapers had made a strong
early showing in the struggle for the Belt, and there were still
isolated groups of Shaper agents moving from cell to cell behind
Mech lines while the Ring Council was under siege. Many
decoys were outfitted with propaganda broadcasting systems or
with solar wind-tracking devices that could distort their orbits;
some could shrink and expand repeatedly, disappearing from
Mech radar. It was cheaper to manufacture them than it was to
track down and destroy them, giving the Shapers a financial
edge.
The outpost the Red Consensus had been hired to hit was one
of those manufacturing centers.
"When there's peace," the Rep told him, "you get a dozen of
these, link 'em up with tubeways, and you got a good cheap
nation-station."
"Will there ever be peace?" Lindsay said.
(lacking pp 78-79 of this paper version)
modern Mech cartels, in the Shaper Ring Council, even in the
far-flung outposts of the cometary miners and the blazing smelters of intra-Mercurian orbit, every single thinking being carried
this knowledge. Too many generations had lived and died under
the shadow of catastrophe. It had soaked itself into everyone
from childhood.
Habitats were sacred; sacred because they were frail. The frailty was universal. Once one world was deliberately destroyed,
there could be no more safety anywhere, for anyone. Every
world would burst in a thousand infernos of total war.
There was no true safety. There had never been any. There
were a hundred ways to kill a world: fire, explosion, poison,
sabotage. The constant vigilance exercised by all societies could
only reduce the risk. The power of destruction was in the hands
of anyone and everyone. Anyone and everyone shared the burden of responsibility. The specter of destruction had shaped the
moral paradigm of every world and every ideology.
The destinies of man in space had not been easy, and Lindsay's
universe was not a simple one. There were epidemics of suicide,
bitter power struggles, vicious techno-racial prejudices, the crippling suppression of entire societies.
And yet the ultimate madness had been avoided. There was
war, yes: small-scale ambushes, spacecraft destroyed, tiny min-
ing camps claim-jumped with the murder of their inhabitants:
all the grim and obscure conflicts that burst like sparks from the
grinding impact of the Mech and Shaper superpowers. But
humankind had survived and flourished.
It was a deep and fundamental triumph. On the same deep
level of the mind that held the constant fear, there was a
stronger hope and confidence. Ft was a victory that belonged to
everyone, a victory so thorough and so deep that it had van-
shed from sight, and belonged to that secret realm of the mind
on which everything else is predicated.
And yet these pirates, as pirates must, controlled a weapon of
mass destruction. It was an ancient machine: a relic of a lunatic
era when men first pried open the Pandora crypts of physics. An
age when cosmic explosives had spread across the surface of
Earth like bleeding scabs across the brain of a paretic.
"I fired it myself last week," the President said, "so I know the
Zaibatsu security didn't booby-trap the bastard. Some of the
Mech cartels will do that. Pick you up with frontier craft four
thousand klicks out, shut down your weaponry, then put a delay
chip in the wiring-you pull the trigger, chip vaporizes, nerve
as. . . . It makes no difference. You pull that trigger in combat
you're dead anyway, ninety-nine percent. The Shapers we're
attacking have Armageddon stuff too. We gotta have anything
they have. We gotta do anything they can do. That's nuclear
war, soldier; otherwise, we can't talk together. . . . Now, fire."
"Fire!" cried Lindsay. There was nothing. The gun was silent.
"Something's wrong," Lindsay said.
"Gun down?"
"No, it's my arm. My arm." Me pulled backward. "I can't get it
off the pistol grip. The muscles have knotted."
"They what?" the President said. He gripped Lindsay's fore-
arm. The muscles stood out like cables, cramped in paralytic
rigor.
"Oh, God," Lindsay said, a well-practiced edge of hysteria in
his voice. "I can't feel your hand. Squeeze my arm."
The President crushed his forearm with bruising force.
"Nothing," Lindsay said. He had filled his arm with anesthetic
in the spacesuit. The cramping was a diplomatic trick. It was not
an easy one. He hadn't meant to get his fingers caught around
the grip.
The President dug his calloused fingertips into the outside
groove of Lindsay's elbow. Even past the anesthetic, pain knifed
through the crushed nerves. His hand jumped slightly, releasing
the grip. "I felt that, just a little," he said calmly. There was
something he could do with pain, if the vasopressin would help
him remember. .. . There. The pain transformed itself, lost its
color, became something nastily close to pleasure.
"I could try it left-handed," Lindsay said gamely. "Of course, if
that arm goes too, then - "
"What the hell's wrong with you. State?" The President dug his
thumb cruelly into the complex of nerves in Lindsay's wrist.
Lindsay felt the agony as a cool black sheet draped across his
brain. He almost lost consciousness; his eyes fluttered and he
smiled faintly.
"It must be some Shaper thing," he said. "Neural programming. They fixed it so that I could never do this." He swallowed
hard. "It's like it's not my arm." Sweat beaded on his forehead.
He was so wired on vasopressin that he could feel each muscle
in his face as a separate entity, just like they taught at the
Academy.
"I can't accept this," the President told him. "If you can't pull
the trigger then you can't be one of us."
"It might be possible to rig up some kind of mechanical thing,"
Lindsay said adroitly. "Some kind of piston-powered glove I
could fit over it. I'm willing, sir. It's this that's not." He lifted
the arm, stiffly, from the shoulder, then slammed it down on the
hard-edged ridge of the gun. He hit it again. "I can't feel it."