Ascendancies by Bruce Sterling Page B

that out of your brain?”
    â€œWhy are you a soldier instead of a corpse?”
    â€œTimes change, Spider. The bright young lights get snuffed out, by your old friends, and those of us with long-range plans are left to settle old debts. You remember old debts, Spider?”
    â€œYou think you’re going to survive this meeting, don’t you, Prime?” She felt the muscles of her face knotting with a ferocious hatred she had no time to kill. “Three ships manned with your own clones. How long have you holed up in that rock of yours, like a maggot in an apple? Cloning and cloning. When was the last time a woman let you touch her?”
    His eternal smile twisted into a leer with bright teeth behind it. “It’s no use, Spider. You’ve already killed thirty-seven of me, and I just keep coming back, don’t I? You pathetic old bitch, what the hell is a maggot, anyway? Something like that mutant on your shoulder?”
    She hadn’t even known the pet was there, and her heart was stabbed with fear for it. “You’ve come too close!”
    â€œFire, then! Shoot me, you germy old cretin! Fire!”
    â€œYou’re not him!” she said suddenly. “You’re not First Jade! Hah! He’s dead, isn’t he?”
    The clone’s face twisted with rage. Lasers flared, and three of her habitats melted into slag and clouds of metallic plasma. A last searing pulse of intolerable brightness flashed in her brain from three melting telescopes.
    She cut loose with a chugging volley of magnetically accelerated iron slugs. At four hundred miles per second they riddled the first ship and left it gushing air and brittle clouds of freezing water.
    Two ships fired. They used weapons she had never seen before, and they crushed two habitats like a pair of giant fists. The web lurched with the impact, its equilibrium gone. She knew instantly which weapons systems were left, and she returned fire with metal-jacketed pellets of ammonia ice. They punched through the semiorganic sides of a second Shaper craft. The tiny holes sealed instantly, but the crew was finished; the ammonia vaporized inside, releasing instantly lethal nerve toxins.
    The last ship had one chance in three to get her command center. Two hundred years of luck ran out for Spider Rose. Static stung her hands from the controls. Every light in the habitat went out, and her computer underwent a total crash. She screamed and waited for death.
    Death did not come.
    Her mouth gushed with the bile of nausea. She opened the drawer in the darkness and filled her brain with liquid tranquility. Breathing hard, she sat back in her console chair, her panic mashed. “Electromagnetic pulse,” she said. “Stripped everything I had.”
    The pet warbled a few syllables. “He would have finished us by now if he could,” she told her pet. “The defenses must have come through from the other habitats when the mainframe crashed.”
    She felt a thump as the pet jumped into her lap, shivering with terror. She hugged it absently, rubbing its slender neck. “Let’s see,” she said into the darkness. “The ice toxins are down, I had them overridden from here.” She pulled the useless plug from her neck and plucked her robe away from her damp ribs. “It was the spray, then. A nice, thick cloud of hot ionized metallic copper. Blew every sensor he had. He’s riding blind in a metallic coffin. Just like us.”
    She laughed. “Except old Rose has a trick left, baby. The Investors. They’ll be looking for me. There’s nobody left to look for him. And I still have my rock.”
    She sat silently, and her artificial calmness allowed her to think the unthinkable. The pet stirred uneasily, sniffing at her skin. It had calmed a little under her caresses, and she didn’t want it to suffer.
    She put her free hand over its mouth and twisted its neck till it broke. The centrifugal gravity