Black Hole Sun (18 page)

I push again and then start to slide. “Mimi!”

“Bottoms up, cowboy!”

I try to wedge my elbows and hands against the side of the stone. But the sides are too slick. “Damn it!” I yell as I slide faster. “Whoa!”

“Relax!” Maeve calls up the tunnel.

I can see the dot of her head now, getting larger as I accelerate, a broad grin on her face. What's she smiling about? I'm about to be dashed on the rock, and she's smiling? Cruel, heartless—

The bottom drops out. I fall almost straight down, toward
a brown mass of stone. No, it isn't stone—it's something else. I hit the brown mass feet first, and I stick like a knife in a target.

It's sand. Nice, soft sand—I'm not dashed on the rocks. The armor flies out of the tunnel after me and lands with a smack at the back of my head. “Ow!”

“Duck,” Mimi says.

Ha-ha. “Can I get a hand?” I ask Maeve. “This stuff kind of chafes.”

“Sorry, Durango.” She braces herself on the edge of the sand pit. Then offers a hand. “I didn't mean for that to happen.” Then she nods at a steel door a couple of meters away. “That's where we keep our treasure.”

“That's not what I call them.”

“That's not how we think of them, either. But the Dræu do.”

She rolls the door open and steps inside. Warm air meets my face, and I find the source of the fecund odor I smelled on the way down the tunnel chute. Lights flicker near the ceiling, illuminating the pathway, which is barely wide enough for me to navigate.

She pushes a photocell, and a huge multivid lights up. “What do you think?”

The screen shows a cloud-filled blue sky and the side of a green mountain with tall trees growing on it, rolling foothills, and a line of forest to the right. In the foreground a batch of tall grass sways in the breeze, and a crop of red flowers grows among it.

“It's beautiful.” I touch a palm to the screen. “Where is this? Earth?”

“This is the Eden of Mars,” she says, sounding like a virtual reality tour guide. “Outpost Fisher Four as the founders designed it, a new world of a perfectly harmonious, balanced biosphere. In Phase Blue the permafrost will melt away and leave land ripe for forestation and settlement.”

“What happened?”

She switches to her normal voice. “The planet warmed up, all right, enough for the Orthocracy to close us down. The equator was livable, so they thought, why keep feeding the skies with smoke when the job was finished for them? Who cared if a few thousand indentured miners got what'd been promised to them?”

I stare at the screen. It's beauty that I've never seen on Mars. “I didn't know.” I look from the screen to her. “It's not the story that the Orthocracy told. There were lots of stories they told wrong.”

Her eyes are bright, her expression a half frown. “What about the CorpComs? What stories have they told while you were off fighting wars with one another?”

“The CorpComs are better than the Orthocracy.”

“Maybe to you,” she says, and switches off the multivid. “But to us, there's no difference twixt one and the other.”

I'm sad to see the picture fade. “Why turn it off?”

“Because they're not fond of the light,” she says, and hands me a pair of phosogoggles.

First I pull on my symbiarmor and buckle my holster into place. Then I put on the goggles. “
They?
I thought we were talking about an
it
.”

“Depends on your definition of
it
. If you're thinking in terms of a hive mind, then it will do you.” She opens the door. “But if you think there's only one of the beasties inside, you're in for a bit of a shock.”

Along the walls of the cave are many long tanks filled with an amber liquid. Moving slowly in the liquid are hundreds, maybe thousands of creatures the size of my palm, with eight legs, a thick carapace, and a long proboscis. Floating along with them is a viscous liquid that I fear as much as any high-caliber sniper's shell or any blast from a plasma weapon. The common term for it is snot, but in reality, it's a highly corrosive secretion that can dissolve rock.

“Chigoes!” I shout.
“Ja vitut!”

“CorpCom exterminated the Big Daddies, that's true. But they didn't know about these.”

I bend down for a closer look. Watch them swim in the nutrient broth. Absentmindedly finger the scar on my temple. “You've got to destroy them. Think of what damage they could do when they're full-sized.”

“Nonsense,” she says. “They are full-sized, and they don't do anything except suck down nutrient soup and take care of their queen.”

“Queen? All the chigoes were males.”

She dips a hand in the tank, careful to avoid the snot, and uses the back of her fingers to stroke the shell of one of the chigoes. “Do you believe everything you're told? Or just the more blatant propaganda?”

For a second I can't believe my eyes. Then I spring forward. Yank her hand out of the tank. “Don't! You'll get—wait. How?”

I flip her hand over, expecting the same wound I saw on her neck. “No burns? How's that possible? I can see snot floating in the liquid.”

“Thanks for coming to my rescue,” Maeve says, and smiles. “Even if it wasn't needed. The chigoes can't hurt you if they're in the tanks. The nutrient bath neutralizes the acidity of their secretions. As long as they don't get loose, you have nothing to fear.”

“What happened to your neck, then? That keloid came from somewhere.”

“An accident. I was careless the first time we cleaned their tanks.”

“I don't understand. How? Why?”

“How is easy.” She gives the chigoe a playful push. Then washes her hands in a sink nearby. “They were born here, the only true Martians left living. The Earthers found some fossils and dug out the DNA, the way they learned to with dinosaurs and mastodons on their own planet. When they found out what the chigoes could do, they buggered up their DNA and turned them into slaves.”

I shake my head no, “Only sentient species can be enslaved. Otherwise they're only draft animals.”

“Define
sentient
.”

“Capable of rational thought.”

“That leaves off most of humankind.”

“Good point,” Mimi says. “I like this woman.”

Pipe down, I tell Mimi. The last thing I want to hear is that the monstrosities that ruined my life—and took hers—are intelligent. “All humans have the capacity for rational thought, Maeve, even if they never use it.”

“There's no difference between a man who can't think and one who chooses not to,” she says, and I shake my head, thinking that what we really need to do is finish the job of eradicating these animals. “No, the chigoe aren't sentient, but they not dumb animals, either. They're like bees, with a queen and one single mind.”

The mention of a queen reminds me of Eceni, which reminds me of what brought me here. Time is running out. We need to finish our business, so that I can finish it upside. “What's your purpose, then? What're you going to do when they're grown to size and start tunneling your whole outpost away?”

“Those would be the Big Daddies you're thinking of. These chigoes won't get any bigger than this.”

“What's the point of keeping them? They're still dangerous without being able to mine guanite ore, which the CorpCom don't have use for anymore.”

Maeve sticks a tongue in her cheek, then reaches into her pocket. “Do you think CorpCom would have a use”—she opens her hand, revealing a coarsely cut black stone—“for this?”

A diamond. For almost as long as Mars has been settled, the hunt for diamonds has been going on. Except for a few tiny slivers, no one had ever found any. “You're mining diamonds, and you paid my crew a hundred to save you?”

“Not diamonds. Diamond. We've only found one so far, and we can't sell it without losing our land to speculators or the CorpCom themselves.”

I understand her point. Fisher Four is worthless now, but if word leaked out about diamonds—even one diamond—prospectors would rush to take over the mines. If the CorpComs don't beat them to it. Still, hiding chigoes doesn't sit well with me. “Where did you get it?”

“From one of the chigoes. It brought it out of a tunnel that goes a least a kilometer straight down. There's no miner alive, and no Manchester big enough, to dig that far down. We need the chigoes to do it for us.”

“And the Dræu know about this?”

I watch the chigoes wriggling in the nutrient bath. They seem harmless, almost cute, as they bounce off one another and crowd near the surface in an attempt to get Maeve's attention. But then I feel a shudder of fear that's not my own. Mimi. She's afraid of them.

“Somehow they figured it out. How, I don't know. But
they want them bad. Imagine the coin they could extort by threatening to turn a few hundred omnivores loose.”

“Mimi,” I ask. “She's not lying this time, no?”

“All physiological indicators suggest she's telling the truth.”

So the miners are at some point going to be very wealthy. The thought tickles me. I wonder what Dame Bramimonde would think if they became her neighbors. “Just one of them could destroy an entire greenhouse factory.”

“Now,” she says, “you're catching on. This is why we can't just give the Dræu what they want, no matter who they take away from us.”

I have to remind myself that this is the same species that killed hundreds of soldiers. And Mimi. And almost killed Vienne. Then I feel a pang of guilt because of the fact that chigoes, even a small version of them, exist.

“You lied to us.”

“Would it have made such a difference if you'd known the truth?”

“You know damned well it would,” I say. “That's why you didn't say anything.”

She lifts her palms like a cut-rate Buddha. “Wouldn't you lie, too, if it meant saving your people?”

“No!” I say.
Qí yán fèn tu ye?
, she sounds just like Father. “Lying is never the right thing. My crew has to know the truth. They have to know what they're fighting for.”

“They will quit us,” Maeve says. “Leave us to the Dræu.”

“Maybe,” I say. “It'd be their right, seeing as how they'd been deceived.”

“But what about you?” she says, “Would you stay?”

She takes my hands in hers. They're cracked like old leather, the rough, creviced hands of a miner. A lifetime of hard labor and pain is in them, and I know that her lies have nothing to do with the vow I made.

“I promised to fight the Dræu for you,” I say. “I started this job, and I intend to finish it.” Even if kills me.

“Which,” Mimi says as I turn to go, “it probably will.”

Hell's Cross, Outpost Fisher Four
ANNOS MARTIS
238. 4. 0. 00:00

The funeral for a fallen Regulator begins with the building of a small structure, the House of Mourning. It is constructed of wood, if available. If not—and it almost never is, unless the Regulator is from wealth, because wood is one of the most precious commodities on Mars—then any flammable material will do.

A House of Mourning is one meter longer than the Regulator it will hold. Two meters wider. Three meters taller. The roof is angled at forty-five degrees. The peaks at either end are marked with a round seal. One seal represents the family of the mother. The second, the family of the father. These dimensions are in the Tenets, along with the rule that a fallen Regulator whose body is lost in battle must receive the same funeral as any other.

The seals on Ockham's house are a lion and a star, carved by Spiner from the same wood used to build the rest of house. The lion, from his mother, represents the fierce
hunter. The star, from his father, represents the capacity of imagination. When I see the house, I know that Ockham was his mother's son.

Spiner, Jurm, and the other miners salvaged the wood from the old temple. They built it on the far side of the Zhao Zhou Bridge, across which we are carrying an effigy of Ockham on a simple bier. A linen shroud covers the bier. Maeve made the shroud herself, taken from a piece of tablecloth she smuggled on the journey from Old Boston. If we had it, his symbiarmor would be folded and placed under his head. His armalite would rest on his chest. Both of these are lost, like him.

Fuse, Jenkins, Jean-Paul, and I carry the bier. Vienne, on crutches, follows behind. Spiner walks beside her, and the miners trail after them. As we approach the house, Vienne swings open the doors of the building. We slide the bier onto a pyre made of fuel drums, then step outside. As chief, it is my duty to close the doors and seal them.

“Peace be with you, Regulator,” I say, my palms pressed together as I bow low.

“Peace be with you at last,” everyone responds. Like me, they press their palms together and bow.

“Peace be with you all,” Vienne says, a mourning shawl draped over her head and shoulders. She bows, then, standing on one foot, spreads her arms wide, a gesture that symbolizes the rising of the soul.

“Fire,” I say.

The miners move in. With hand torches, they set the House of Mourning ablaze. The flames catch quickly. The wood is old. Within a minute, the fuel barrels ignite, and a thick, hot fire consumes the house. I don't know how long it will burn, but when it finishes, Ockham as we knew him will be no more. His beautiful death will carry him to Valhalla where he will live forever among the heroes. That is my hope for him, to have the afterlife he imagined.

“Vienne,” I say as we begin leaving.

She passes me without a word and without eye contact. I suppose I deserve it. Deserving it doesn't ease the sting. As we process across the bridge to the Cross, the House of Mourning turning to ash behind us, my legs feel like lead. Exhaustion has hit, and the only thing I want is a warm bed. The cot in the bunk room is all I'm going to get, and it will have to do.

 

In the dream, I am floating. I see myself sitting in front of the console that controls a beanstalk space elevator. I hear my thoughts: They say I drew this crap assignment because of my education. But I know the truth. Mimi thinks I'm a useless rich boy and stuck me here to make a point—she's the chief and I'm a boot straight out of battle school.

I yawn. It's the eighty-ninth yawn of my shift. I'm counting. There is nothing else to do but watch the loaded space elevator shoot into the atmosphere, then drift back down to the supply pad. Load. Unload. Repeat. Until a diode blinks on
the multivid. Finally, some action. I tap the image with the fingertip of my nanoglove. A hologram of my chief pops up.

“Durango,” Mimi says, “we've lost containment on a Big Daddy in Tunnel Two-E. The drone harness shorts out. It's tearing the place to pieces.”

I hear screams over the audio feed. Mimi ducks, and the body of a technician flies over her head. “I've got nothing on my boards,” I say.

“Tell that to the Big Daddy, cowboy.”

“Uh, yes. I would but—”

“Shut your gob and convey these orders to the davos via the multivid. Clear the area. Establish a perimeter at ten clicks. Set up four EMPs in a square pattern. Order my Regulators not to engage the Big Daddy for any reason.”

“Yes, chief! Will do!” I tap her image away. Hail the five other members of our davos—Squirt, Switch, Decker, Pike, and Vienne—and pass on Mimi's orders. “Chief says, do not engage the Big Daddy. For any reason.”

“Roger that,” Vienne, Mimi's second, responds.

Then I hit three buttons in rapid succession. Images of Tunnel Two pop up. One shows the high caverns that contain the holding pens for the Big Daddies. The second shows the catwalks above the tunnel, patrolled by handlers armed with electrostatic prods. The third is Tunnel Two-E. It's filled with wounded shock troops and the marauding Big Daddy.

That's where the action is. Where I want to be. Not stuck playing messenger boy. I keep my eyes trained on the Two-E
feed. Watch Mimi take cover behind a shipping container. She shouts at the troopers, “Fall back! Fall back!”

But the Big Daddy blocks them with its massive carapace, a shell so thick mortar rounds won't pierce it. The troopers can't fall back, and their needle cannons are useless against the bioengineered chigoe. I lean close to the screen, my heart racing, as the Big Daddy snatches a trooper with its mandibles. With one easy snick, it splits the man in two. Then I see the Big Daddy starting to spin. “Chief!” I yell into the headset. “Behind you! Behind you!”

“Say again?” she yells back as the chigoe sprays thick liquid across the mass of the shock troopers. Including Mimi who is moving to the fatally injured man. The troopers fall screaming. Her symbiarmor seems to protect Mimi. But then she turns to face the multivid.

Half of her face is missing. “Chief!”

Mimi mouths a silent word. Reaches toward the camera. The feed from Tunnel Two-E pixilates. Then fails.

“Vienne!” I yell, watching our davos reach the tunnel. “Chief is down! Repeat, chief is down! I'm coming to you.”

“No,” Vienne says, “stay at your station. We can handle this, boot.”

I tap on the headpiece, causing the signal to break up. “Can't hear you. I'm losing the feed.” Then I throw off the headset. Grab my armalite. Sprint down the stairs to a power sled that takes me to the tunnel. When I arrive, I push through a legion of shock troopers taking position in the
main entrance. Inside, the Big Daddy is still raging. I try to hail Vienne.

No answer.

They're all dead. I find their bodies strewn around. Mangled by the Big Daddy that attacked them.

But I keep moving. The Big Daddy drifts to the rear of the tunnel. I take cover behind another shipping container.

“What should I do?” I yell to no one. “Chief? Vienne? Anybody? What should I do?”

“Help me,” the chief answers. Her voice, a hoarse whisper.

“Chief!” I find Mimi half buried in debris. What's left of her face is a twisted knot. My stomach almost chunders as I bend down to lift her. “I'll get you out of here, chief.”

“No,” she rasps, her misshapen mouth barely able to form the words. “Save others first.”

“I can't. You're my chief.”

“Do…it! I…order!”

“Yes, chief.”

Turning my back on her, I pull Vienne out of the rubble. A streak of the chigoe's secretions runs from up her back, the armor melted away. The skin is bubbling there, and I am afraid the caustic chemical will burn to the bone. As quickly as I can manage, I carry her to the medics at the entrance of the tunnel.

“Take care of her,” I say as I pass her off.

But duty returns me to Mimi. Again, I bend down. “Chief?”

“Others?” she says.

“Vienne made it,” I say.

As the Big Daddy rampages, slamming its massive shell into the walls of the tunnels, which chokes the air with dust, I slide an arm under her knees. Cradle her to my chest. Though the pain should be excruciating, she makes no noise. My heart sinks. No pain means no nerve endings left. “Hang on, chief.”

“Call me Mimi.”

“Mimi, hang on.”

She snatches at my chest with the claw of a hand. “Don't let…die, cowboy. This…not…beautiful death.” With a shudder, she lets go of a last, rustling breath, and she dies in my arms. Then the tunnel goes suddenly silent, and I don't have the wherewithal to notice.

As I stand, I see an enormous shadow rise over me. There's a hissing sound. Something wet hits the cowl covering the back of my head. The air stinks of battery acid, and I heard a pop. My symbiarmor discharges a jolt of static electricity. My limbs go rigid.

The symbiarmor has shorted out. I am frozen. Unable to move. A mummy trapped in its sarcophagus. A dead man. As I struggle against my own armor, the searing pain of the chigoe's secretions burns through the disabled fabric. I scream as shock troopers pour into the tunnel. They aim their needle cannons and plasma blasters at the Big Daddy, driving it back long enough to set up a light-mass grenade launcher. Everything goes black.

Now a burst of static electricity jolts me awake. Mimi shouts in my head, “Wake up! The Dame went off the grid. I have lost her signature.”

I drop to the floor, my symbiarmor absorbing some of the impact. I pull on my boots and buckle on my holster. “Why didn't you wake me up?” I slide open the door and jog down the hallway to the main door.

“I attempted to wake you for ten minutes. That was the third charge of static. Be thankful you were still in your armor.”

“Open a vid link. Regulators! Form ranks at the cross in one minute. Jenkins! Jenkins! Stop snoring!” I close the link and run to the Cross. There, the remnants of the bonfire are emitting smoke and ash. A few miners lay sleeping around it. “Mimi, how long's the Dame been out of range?”

“Five minutes. Her last bearing was west-northwest from this point.”

The direction gives us a place to start to looking, but in a mine, there's no way to tell where she is. She could be on the surface or in one of a thousand chigoe holes.

“Cowboy,” Mimi says, “I have lost Jean-Paul's signature as well.”

Damn it. “You were still tracking him, too?”

“You never told me to stop.”

“Point taken,” I say. “What was his last bearing?”

“West-northwest.”

The same as his mother's. “He's going after her.”

“So it appears.”

“The first time I laid eyes on that kid, I knew he was trouble.” I flex my hands—I'm going to throttle the boy.

A few seconds later my davos appears—Fuse coming from the tunnels, Ebi from quarters, and Jenkins from the miners' quarters, looking blurry-eyed and dragging the chain gun behind him.

Vienne is last to report, her foot in an air cast, using a pair of crutches. Even wounded, she carries herself effortlessly.

“You need to be resting,” I tell her.

In response, she pulls off the cast and tosses the crutch aside. She pulls on her boot, which was tucked under an arm. “I'll rest when I'm dead.”

I start to argue when Mimi interrupts. “Sensor readings suggest that she's using painkillers.”

“Are they working?”

“I just provide information, cowboy. You get to make the decisions.”

It would be easier to pin a diaper on Jenkins than tell Vienne she can't fight. And my plan depends on her.

“Regulators,” I greet them when they're at attention. “We have a situation. Dame Bramimonde has left Fisher Four.”

“Mother!” Ebi says, and Vienne cuts her a look.

“I'm tempted to let the Dræu have her, but it looks like Jean-Paul's followed her. As much as I'd like to throttle his skinny little neck, he's still an acolyte, which makes him one of us. Maybe.”

“Mother, how could you!” Ebi says, bowing her head quickly, an odd ring to her voice. “Chief, I am humiliated by her actions. I swear to—”

“Later,” I say, because I'm not buying it. “There's a job to be done. Here's the plan. Vienne and Ebi, follow the main tunnel out, then head northwest along this bearing for one half click. Scout for a trail, but don't go beyond a half click, got it?”

“Go.” I turn to Fuse and Jenkins. “You two, same distance, but take a heading of fifteen degrees to the north. Stay on the main tunnels. No side trips, no chigoe holes. If you run into any trouble, signal me.”

“This could be an ambush, chief,” Fuse says.

“Keep your eyes and ears open, Fuse. That's exactly what it could be.” Or it could be an evil old crone doing the worst possible thing at the worst possible moment.

“Yes, chief,” Fuse says. “Come on, Jenkins. And stop dragging that chain gun. The squealing noise is killing me.”

“Mimi,” I say when they're across the Zhao Zhou Bridge. “Monitor all their signatures. I need to know the second anybody's out of range.”

I open a private vid link to Vienne. “Let me know if anything odd happens.”

“Yes, chief.”

“I mean it, Vienne. Keep an eye on everybody. Trust no one. Not even me.”