[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.“Asshole!” he added.A few hurrahs from the crowd.“Ladies and gentlemen, I hope I’m not spoiling your innocence when I point out that the mayor does occasionally lie to us,” Helot said.“We all know this.We expect it from him.That’s why we voted for him.Because he was the best liar.”“I am not a liar!”“Hands up if you suspect the mayor might lie sometimes,” Helot asked the ship.Hundreds of outstretched hands appeared almost instantly, their numbers swelling as the crowd exchanged reminders with each other of his past over–promises.“The reason the mayor is lying right now is to cover up what he’s done,” Helot continued.“He was planning to destroy the engines of this ship so that we couldn’t stop at Tau Prius.”Gasps filled the crowd, most still standing with their hands up.“That’s the biggest lie of all!” Kinsella shouted.“You were trying to split the ship in two!”Helot laughed, a fake, forced, utterly unbelievable stretch of a laugh.But the audience laughed alongside him.“Kinsella,” Helot began, his exasperation clearly feigned, at least to Kinsella’s ear.“Do you have any proof of this at all? Of these wild accusations you’re throwing around?”“You told me all of this yourself!”“Do you even know what evidence means?” The audience laughed again.A woman in the front row fainted.Not now, you idiot.Kinsella glared at Bletmann, who waved frantically at someone in the crowd, which only seemed to prompt more women to faint.“Allow me to show you what evidence means,” Helot continued.“You’ll recall our conversation right before you tried to blackmail me into silence?”“What?”“Security Chief Thorias is shortly going to be transmitting proof to the ship that you ordered the creation of falsified images of child pornography, which you intended to plant in my personal effects.To blackmail me to stand aside as you attempted your plot.”“That’s not why I was trying to blackmail you!” Kinsella shouted.He groaned at the exact same time that everyone else in the crowd groaned.“That was a joke,” he shouted.“I was joking.” At the edges of the crowd, people began filtering away.“Come on! I’m not the bad guy here.”Helot went in for the kill.“Kinsella’s been on the run ever since his plot failed.That’s why you haven’t seen him; he’s been hiding from our security teams.And now he’s trying to orchestrate a coup.Or more of a reverse coup.” Clearly seeing the same looks of confusion on the crowd’s faces that Kinsella was looking at, Helot hesitated.“A coup is when the army…never mind.A coup is a bad thing.Kinsella is doing a bad thing.”The crowd had no problem accepting that.A discontented murmur started to build, punctuated by a few angry shouts and at least two more faints.“Stop doing coups!” someone close to the stage yelled, pointing at Kinsella.“Stop couping us, Mayor!”“Are you fucking serious?” Kinsella shouted, quivering.“You fucking imbeciles.”“I would ask the citizens of the Argos to please restrain the mayor until security can arrive to take him into custody,” Helot said, the punch line echoing off the buildings lining the plaza.Kinsella knew when cowardly running was the better part of valor, and had already leapt off the stage by the time Helot had finished his request, retreating into the building from which he had emerged, his bodyguards forming a vanguard behind him.They at least had understood who was really couping who, or perhaps more likely, hadn’t followed the conversation at all.§A click interrupted the daydream Stein had been having about punching her boss in the face.In an alcove on the side of the room, a meal bar rattled down a chute, bounced once in the dispensing alcove, then fell to the floor below, marking the arrival of lunch time.Getting up from her bunk, Stein crossed the room and picked up the meal bar, her bruised body complaining with every movement.It turned out that Hogg was amongst the gentlest of the security goons; every other one Stein had met since her capture had taken a vigorous interest in foiling the many attempts at resisting arrest they imagined she was making.Although not an expert on the matter, she suspected she was earning a little more attention than most criminals in custody.So, they actually think I set off a bomb.The cell was nicer than the one in the bow, not much different from the basic ultra–low–end studio apartment she’d had in school but for the door that never opened.A solid platform mounted to one of the walls held a pair of mattress approximations, one above the other.In the opposite corner sat a toilet, beside that a sink.Further down the wall was the alcove where food regularly crashed into view.An armored security sensor in the upper corner of the room watched over everything dispassionately.Opposite the bunk was a desk, outwardly identical to every other desk on board the ship.Inwardly, it had a sharply limited interface and was unable to send messages or access many parts of the network, only allowing the cell’s occupant to read filtered selections from the public news feeds and library.Stein had done little but read this for the past two days, at least when not fantasizing about making her boss wet his pants in front of his new peers.She slumped down in the chair, and began picking at her meal bar, paging through the news feeds [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]