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.One of Ryumin’s stacks of equipment began to chime with a piercingly clear electronic bleeping.Ryumin looked up from where he sat sorting cassettes.“That’s the radar,” he said.“Hand me that headset, will you?”Lindsay crawled to the radar stack and untangled a set of Ryumin’s adhesive eyephones.Ryumin clamped them to his temples.“Not much resolution on radar,” he said, closing his eyes.“A crowd has just arrived.Pirates, most likely.They’re milling about on the landing pad.”He squinted, though his eyes were already shut.“Something very large is moving about with them.They’ve brought something huge.I’d better switch to telephoto.” He yanked the headset’s cord and its plug snapped free.“I’m going outside for a look,” Lindsay said.“I’m well enough.”“Wire yourself up first,” Ryumin said.“Take that earset and one of the cameras.”Lindsay attached the auxiliary system and stepped outside the zippered airlock into the curdled air.He backed away from Ryumin’s dome toward the rim of the land panel.He turned and trotted to a nearby stile, which led over the low metal wall, and trained his camera upward.“That’s good,” came Ryumin’s voice in his ear.“Cut in the brightness amps, will you? That little button on the right.Yes, that’s better.What do you make of it, Mr.Dze?”Lindsay squinted through the lens.Far above, at the northern end of the Zaibatsu’s axis, a dozen sundogs were wrestling in free-fall with a huge silver bag.“It looks like a tent,” Lindsay said.“They’re inflating it.” The silver bag wrinkled and tumesced suddenly, revealing itself as a blunt cylinder.On its side was a large red stencil as wide as a man was tall.It was a red skull with two crossed lightning bolts.“Pirates!” Lindsay said.Ryumin chuckled.“I thought as much.”A sharp gust of wind struck Lindsay.He lost his balance on the stile and looked behind him suddenly.The glass window strip formed a long white alley of decay.The hexagonal metaglass frets were speckled with dark plugs, jackstrawed here and there with heavy reinforcement struts.Leaks had been sprayed with airtight coats of thick plastic.Sunlight oozed sullenly through the gaps.“Are you all right?” Ryumin said.“Sorry,” Lindsay said.He tilted the camera upward again.The pirates had gotten their foil balloon airborne and had turned on its pair of small pusher-propellers.As it drifted away from the landing pad, it jerked once, then surged forward.It was towing something—an oddly shaped dark lump larger than a man.“It’s a meteorite,” Ryumin told him.“A gift for the people beyond the Wall.Did you see the dark rocks that stand in the Sterilized Zone? They’re all gifts from pirates.It’s become a tradition.”“Wouldn’t it be easier to carry it along the ground?”“Are you joking? It’s death to set foot in the Sterilized Zone.”“I see.So they’re forced to drop it from the air.Do you recognize these pirates?”“No,” Ryumin said.“They’re new here.That’s why they need the rock.”“Someone seems to know them,” Lindsay said.“Look at that.”He focused the camera to look past the airborne pirates to the sloping gray-brown surface of the Zaibatsu’s third land panel.Most of this third panel was a bleak expanse of fuzz-choked mud, with surging coils of yellowish ground fog.Near the third panel’s blasted northern suburbs was a squat, varicolored dome, built of jigsawed chunks of salvaged ceramic and plastic.A foreshortened, antlike crowd of sundogs had emerged from the dome’s airlock.They stared upward, their faces hidden by filter masks.They had dragged out a large crude machine of metal and plastic, fitted with pinions, levers, and cables.They jacked the machine upward until one end of it pointed into the sky.“What are they doing?” Lindsay said.“Who knows?” Ryumin said.“That’s the Eighth Orbital Army, or so they call themselves.They’ve been hermits up till now.”The airship passed overhead, casting blurred shadows onto all three land panels.One of the sundogs triggered the machine.A long metal harpoon flicked upward and struck home.Lindsay saw metal foil rupture in the airship’s tail section.The javelin gleamed crazily as it whirled end over end, its flight disrupted by the collision and the curve of Coriolis force.The metal bolt vanished into the filthy trees of a ruined orchard.The airship was in trouble.Its crew kicked and thrashed in midair, struggling to force their collapsing balloon away from the ground attackers.The massive stone they were towing continued its course with weightless, serene inertia.As its towline grew tight, it slowly tore off the airship’s tail.With a whoosh of gas, the airship crumpled into a twisted metal rag.The engines fell, tugging the metal foil behind them in a rippling streamer.The pirates thrashed as if drowning, struggling to stay within the zone of weightlessness [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]