gut ache, hard vacuum thirty seconds."
Tapping echoed down the corridor. It had crept up imperceptibly under the sound of their voices. It continued with faint,
rhythmic precision, the flat click of plastic against stone.
"Aw, shit," said the President.
"I'll go," said the Chief Justice.
"It's nothing," Senator 3 said. "A blower settling." Lindsay
heard the rattle of her tool belt.
"I'm gone," the Chief Justice said. Lindsay felt a light movement of air as the old Mechanist floated past him.
Fifteen seconds passed in darkness. "We need light," the
Speaker hissed. "I'll use the saw and - "
The tapping stopped. The Chief Justice called out. "I have it!
It's a piece of-"
A sudden nasty crunch cut him off.
"Justice!" the President cried. They rushed down the corridor,
bumping and colliding blindly.
When they reached the spot, the Speaker pulled her saw, and
sparks flew. The noisemaker was a simple flap of stiff plastic,
glued to the mouth of a branching tunnel and tugged by a long
thread. The assassin -Paolo-had waited deep within the tunnel.
When he'd heard the old Mechanist's voice he had fired his
weapon, a slingshot. A heavy stone cube-Paolo's six-sided
die-was half buried in the dead pirate's fractured skull.
In the brief blazing light of sparks, Lindsay saw the dead man's head covered by a flattened mass of blood, held by surface
tension to the skin around the wound.
"We could leave," Lindsay said.
"Not without our own," the President said. "And not leaving
the one who did this. They got only five left."
"Four," Lindsay said. "I killed Fazil. Three, if I can talk to
Nora."
"No time for talk," the President said. "You're wounded,
State. Stay here and guard the airlock. When you see the others,
tell 'em we've gone to kill the four."
Lindsay forced himself to speak. "If Nora surrenders, Mr.
President, I hope that you'll - "
"Mercy was his job," said the President. Lindsay heard him tug
at the dead judge's body. "You got a weapon, State?"
"No."
"Take this, then." Me handed Lindsay the dead man's mechanical arm. "If one of 'em strays by here, kill them with the
old man's fist."
Lindsay clutched the cabled ridges of the stiff prosthetic wrist.
The others went quickly, with a click, a rustle, and the whisper
of calloused skin against stone. Lindsay floated back up the
tunnel to the airlock, bouncing along the smooth stone with
knees and shoulders, thinking of Nora.
The old woman wouldn't die, that was the horror of it. If it
had only been as quick and clean as Kleo had said it would.
Nora could have borne it, endured it as she endured all things.
But in the darkness, when she whipped the weighted sash
around the pirate's neck and pulled, it had not been quiet, it
had not been clean.
The old woman-Judge 2, the pirates called her-her throat
was a mass of cartilage and gristle, tough as wire beneath her
skin's false smoothness. Twice, when Nora thought she was dead
at last, the pirate woman had lurched shudderingly into life
again with a tortured rasp in the darkness. Nora's wrists bled
freely from the old woman's splintered nails. The body stank.
Nora smelled her own sweat. Her armpits were a tormenting
mass of rashes. She floated quietly in the pitch-black launch
control room, her bare feet perched on the dead woman's
shoulders, one end of the sash in each hand.
She had not fought well when the pirates had launched their
strike in the sudden blackout. She had hit someone, swinging
her stone bola, but then lost it in the struggle. Agnes had fought
hard and been wounded by the Speaker's handsaw. Paolo had
fought like a champion.
Kleo murmured a password from the door, and in a few
moments there was light in the room. "I told you they worked,"
Paolo said.
Kleo held the plastic candle away; the sodium at the lip of the
wick was still sputtering where it had ignited. The waxy plastic
reeked as the wick burned down. "I brought all you made,"
Kleo told Paolo. "You're a bright boy, dear."
Paolo nodded proudly. "My luck beat this contingency. And
I've killed two."
"You made the candles," Agnes said. " I said they wouldn't
work." She looked at him adoringly. "You're the one, Paolo.
Give me orders."
Nora saw the dead pirate's face in candlelight. She unwrapped
the strangling sash and tied it around her waist.
She felt another siege of weakness. Her eyes filled with tears
and she felt a sudden horror and regret for the woman she had
killed. It was the drugs Abelard had given her. She had been a fool to
take that first injection. Firing up with aphrodisiacs had been a
surrender, not just to the enemy but to those bits and pieces of
temptation and doubt that lurked within her. Throughout her
life, the brighter her convictions had burned, the darker these
shadows had been, flitting, creeping.
On her own, she might have held her ground. But there was
the fatal example of the other diplomats. The traitors. The
Academy had never officially spoken of them, leaving that to
the covert world of gossip and rumor that boiled unceasingly in
every Shaper colony. The rumors festered in darkness, taking on
all the distorted forms of the forbidden.
In her own mind, Nora had become a criminaclass="underline" sexual, ideological, professional. Things had happened to her that she dared
not speak of, even to Kleo. Her Family knew nothing of the
diplomatic training, the burning glare in every muscle, the at-
tack on face and brain that had made her own body into an
alien object before she turned sixteen.
If it had been anyone but another diplomat, she could have
fought and died with the conviction and serenity that Kleo
showed. But she had faced him now and understood. Abelard
was not as bright as she was, but he was resilient and quick. She
could become what he was. It was the first real alternative she
had ever known.
"I gave us light," Paolo bragged. He whirled his bola in a
twisting figure-eight, catching the string on his padded forearms.
"I played odds, even the farthest. I beat lan, I beat Fazil, and I
killed two." Sleeve ties flailed at his elbows as he slapped his
chest. "I say ambush, ambush, ambush!" The bola whirled to a
stop, wrapping his arm, and he pulled his slingshot from his
belt.
"They mustn't escape," Kleo said. Her face was warm and
calm in the candlelight, framed by the fringed gold crown of her
hairnet. "If survivors leave, they'll bring others. We can live,
darlings. They're stupid. And they're split. We've lost two, they
seven." A flicker of pain crossed her face. "The diplomat was
quick, but odds say he died in the launch ring. The others we
can outflank, like the Judges."
"Where are the two Representatives?" said Agnes. The Speaker's handsaw had slashed her above the left knee; she was pale
but still full of fight. "We have to get the rogue genetic. She's
trouble."
"What about the wetware?" Nora said. "It'll stale if we stay
powered down. We have to get power back."
"They'd know we were in the power plant!" Paolo said. "One
could start it, the others wait in ambush! Strike and fall back,
strike and fall back!"
"First we hide the bodies," Kleo said. She turned, bracing her
feet near the doorway, and tugged hand over hand on a line.
The third Judge appeared, his wrinkled neck almost slashed
through by Kleo's wire-thin garotte. The syringes on his belt
were filled with stolen wetware. Like Judge 2, he had been