Skin peeled from the muscle. Bright microglobes of blood
leaped up to float in midair. The arm stayed rigid. A flat
amoebalike ripple of blood oozed from the long scrape.
"We can't try an arm for treason," the President said.
Lindsay shrugged one-sidedly. "I'm doing my best, sir." He I
knew that he would never pull that trigger. He thought they
might kill him for it, though he hoped to escape that. Life was I
important, but not so crucial as the trigger.
"We'll see what Judge Two says," the President said.
Lindsay was willing. This much had gone according to plan.
Judge Two was asleep in sick bay. She came awake with a start,
her eyes wild. She saw the blood, then stared at the President.
"Burn it, you've hurt him again."
"Not me," said the President, with a flicker of confusion and
guilt. The President explained while Judge 2 examined the arm
and bandaged it. "Might be psychosomatic."
"I want that arm moving," the President said. "Do it, soldier."
"Yes sir," said the Judge, startled. She hadn't realized they
were under military rule. She scratched her head. "I'm outa my
depth. I'm just a mechanic, not some Shaper psychotech." She
looked sidelong at the President; he was adamant. "Lemme
think. . . . This should do it." She produced another vial,
labeled in an impenetrable scrawl. "Convulsant. Five times as
powerful as the nerves' own firing signals." She drew up three
cc's. "We'd better tourniquet that arm. If this hits his blood-
stream it'll really rack him up." She looked guiltily at Lindsay.
"This'll hurt some. A lot."
Lindsay saw his chance. His arm was full of anesthetic, but he
could fake the pain. If he seemed to suffer badly enough, they
might forget about the test. They would feel he'd been punished
enough, for something that wasn't his fault. The Judge was
sympathetic; he could play her against the President. Their guilt
would do the rest.
He spoke sternly. "The President knows best. You should
follow his orders. Never mind my arm, it's numb anyway."
"You'll feel this, State. If you ain't dead." The needle went in.
She twisted the hose tight around his bicep. The tattoos rippled
as his veins began to bulge.
When agony hit he knew the anesthetic was useless. The
convulsant scorched him like acid. "It's burning!" he screamed.
"It's burning!" His arm rippled, its muscles writhing eerily. It
began to flop in spasms, yanking one end of the hose loose from the Judge's grip.
Congested blood seeped past the tourniquet into Lindsay's
chest. He choked on a scream and bent double, his face gray.
The drug crept like hot wires around his heart. He swallowed
his tongue and went into convulsions.
He was near death for two days. By the time he'd recovered,
the others had reached a decision. No one ever spoke of the test
again. It had never happened.
ABOARD THE RED CONSENSUS: 19-12-'16
"It's just a rock," said Rep 2. She brushed a roach from the
videoscreen.
"It's the target," said the Speaker of the House. The control
room was powered down, and the familiar chorus of pops, squeaks, and rumbles had dwindled to a faint, tense scratching.
The Speaker's face was greenish with screen light. "It's camouflage. They're in there. I can feel it."
"It's a rock," said Senator 3. Her tool belt rattled as she drifted
overhead, watching the screen. "They've scrammed, they've scarpered. There's no infrareds."
Lindsay drifted quietly in a corner of the control room, not
watching the screen. He was rubbing the tattooed skin of his
right arm, slowly, absently, staring at nothing. The skin had
healed, but the combination of drugs had burned the crushed
nerves. His skin felt rubbery below the cold ink of his tattoos.
His right-hand fingertips were numb.
He had no faith in the Shapers' restraint. The billowing sunsail
of the Red Consensus was supposed to hide the ship itself from
radar, preventing a preemptive strike from the asteroid. But he
expected at any moment to feel the last half second of impact as
Shaper weapons tore the ship apart. From within the gun room,
he heard the whine of the gunner's seat as Justice 3 shifted
nervously.
"They're waiting for us to drift past," the President said.
"They're waiting for a shot past the sail."
"They can't just blow us away," Senator 2 said plaintively. "We
might be sundogs. Mech defectors."
"Stay on that drone, Rep Three!" the President ordered.
Smiling sunnily, Rep 3 removed his earphones and turned his
goggled face toward the others. "What's that, Mr. President?"
"I said stay on those frequencies, God damn it!" the President
shouted.
"Oh, that," said Rep 3. He scratched within his spacesuit
collar, holding the doubled phones to one ear. "I was doing that
already. And -oh, yeah." He paused, while the crew held their
breath. The goggles blocked his eyesight, but he reached out
unerringly and touched switches on the board before him. The
control room was filled with a high-pitched staccato whine.
"Cut it in on visuals," Rep 3 explained, tapping the keyboard.
The asteroid vanished, replaced on the screen by column after
column of alphanumeric gibberish:
TCGAGGCTATCTAGCTAAAGCTCTCCCGATCGATATCGTCTCGAGATCGATCGATGCRTAGCRAGCTAGTTGTCGATCGTAGGGCTCGAGCTA. . .
"Shaper genetics code," the Speaker said. "I told you so."
"Their last signal before we take them out," the President said
boldly. "I'm declaring martial law as of this moment. I want
everyone in battle gear-except you, State. Hop to it."
The crew scrambled, their nerves unkinking in a burst of
action. Lindsay watched them go, thinking of the stream of data
to the Ring Council that had betrayed the outpost.
The Shapers might have thrown their lives away with that last
cry. But the enemy, at least, had someone who would know
their deaths, and mourn.
CHAPTER FOUR
ESAIRS XII: 21-12-'16
They called the asteroid ESAIRS 89-XII, the only name it had ever
had, drawn from an ancient catalog. ESAIRS XII was a potato-
shaped lump of slag, half a kilometer long.
The Red Consensus hovered over its bulging equator, anchored by a guy line.
Lindsay pulled himself one-handed down the line. Glimpsed
through his faceplate, the asteroid was dark, with long coal-
powder streaks of carbonaceous ore. Cold gray and white blurs
marked the charred impact points of primeval collisions. The
biggest craters were eighty meters across, huge lava sumps of
cracked slag and splattered glass.
Lindsay landed. The expanse beneath his boots was like pumice, a static off-while surf of petrified bubbles. He could see up
and down the asteroid's length, but its width curved out of sight
behind a horizon a dozen steps away.
He bent and pulled himself along, gripping knobs and cavities
with the rough fingers of his gauntlets. The right hand was bad.
The tough interior fabric of the glove felt soft as cotton to his
nerve-burned fingers.
He crawled, legs bobbing aimlessly, over the rim of an oblong
crater, the scarred gouge of some glancing collision. It was five
times as deep as he was tall, and its floor was a long gas-
smoothed blister of greenish basalt. A long bloated ridge of
molten rock had almost lifted free into space but then frozen,
preserving every last ripple and warp. . . .
It slid aside. The rock ridge shriveled, crumpling like silk, its