Black Hole Sun (11 page)

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

Ockham's punch glances off my symbiarmor. But I feel the force of it disperse through my body, and I almost take a step backward. Almost. The old man still has power, and he knows how to use it. But I'm younger, faster, and my armor's a few pay grades above his. If Ockham thinks he's facing a soft Offworlder, he's in for a surprise.

To answer the challenge, I pound his chest with both fists. He comes back at me, grinning through tobacco-stained teeth. He needs dental work. Lots of dental work.

And a sprig of mint.

“Strike fast and hard,” Mimi tells me. “You should end this as quickly as possible.”

“Yes, Mother,” I say.

“I formally challenge you for command of the davos,” Ockham says. Then he bows, palms pressed together.

“Challenge accepted,” I reply.

But the words no more than pass my lips then Vienne
interrupts. “Chief,” she says. “This fight is mine.”

“Vienne, no.” This has to be my battle, because I'm fighting the miners as much as I'm fighting Ockham. “Not this time.”

“I'm your second,” she says stubbornly. “It is my right to take on all comers.”

I start to argue when Mimi chimes in, “To refuse her is to dishonor her.”

“I know that!”

“If you dishonor her, she will never forgive you.”

“I know that, too!”

“But if you let her fight in your place, the miners will never respect you.”

“Yes! Yes! I've got it. This is one of those
g
u pì bù t
ng
messes that go with being chief. I know I'm damned if I do, damned if I don't. Okay?”

“Just making sure,” Mimi says.

If she weren't flash-cloned to my brain, I would knock her silly.

Taking a deep breath, realizing that all eyes are on me and Vienne, who is standing beside me frozen in the Regulator salute, I make the decision to hurt her.

“Vienne, you are excused. I will fight Ockham.”

She blanches. Then regains her composure and bows. Only I know the truth: My words burn like battery acid. Only seconds pass, but I can feel a chasm opening between us.

“Yes, chief.” She stands aside. “As you wish.”

I can't look at her. Turning away, I strip my armor down to the skivvies. Then stand calmly before Ockham. My body is lean and hard, the muscles rippling in my stomach as I flex, calling forth my chi.

Ockham tosses his head back. Laughs. “Nice belly, pretty boy. But you best not expect me to go easy on yo—ack!”

A chop to the windpipe silences him mid-sentence. Ockham grabs his throat and staggers back, trying to catch his breath. Pressing the advantage, I launch a scissors kick to the side of his head. Then drop into a crouch as I leg whip his knees.

The old warrior lands hard on his butt. Groans. As I move in to deliver a stomp to the ribs, a blow I've seen Vienne maim men with, Ockham rolls away. My foot stomps bare ground, and the old man kips up to his feet.

“Too slow,” he says, laughing at his escape.

His breath comes in wheezing gasps, but he's able to drop into a defensive stance. I recover quickly. Throw a round kick at the side of his head. It's a killing blow, but Ockham catches my foot easily in his thick-calloused hands. Draws my foot into his belly, then shoves hard and sends me spinning away.

“Too slow again. You ought to let the suzy fight your battles.”

For an instant it looks as if I'll crash headlong into the stone floor. But I twist like a goring drill and land on my toes. The soles of my feet smack the stone. The sound echoes in my ears.

Damn it, this needs to end now.

Before the sound fades, I attack again. This time, with a series of rapid-fire kicks to Ockham's chest. He blocks the first three with his forearms. But I drive a rock-hard heel into his solar plexus. Softly I land in the dust as he gags and heaves. His body bends at the waist like a steel bar melted in the center. The muscles in his face slacken, the skin on his cheeks turns red like he's been burned. His eyes droop and close halfway, the pupils dilated.

I slide behind Ockham. As he falls to one knee, struggling for breath, I step in to deliver the coup de grace—an overhand punch that Vienne taught me, aimed at the base of the neck. Where his brain stem is unprotected. The correct term for it is a rabbit punch, but Vienne is no rabbit. She's a cobra, and her strikes are lethal.

What am I doing? “No!” I yell the instant before the blow lands.

The sound of my voice causes Ockham to twitch his head to the side. My calloused knuckles land anyway. But the turn of Ockham's head has changed the target. Instead of the soft tissue of the neck, I hit boney skull.

Crack!

A bone breaks.

I think it's mine.

“It's yours,” Mimi says. “You delivered the punch at precisely the wrong angle.”

“Thanks for that crumb of recon,” I say. “Which one?”

“Fifth metacarpal. Hairline fracture. Treatment protocol requires ice and elevation above heart level to reduce swelling—”

“Remind me later,” I say.

Ockham slumps forward, eyes rolling into his head, and topples almost gently onto his side. I stand above him, take three calming breaths, and flex my hand. It burns like hot mercury. I bend down to check the old man's pulse. He's alive. Thank God.

“You hurt yourself,” Vienne says.

“Just a metacarpal,” I reply.

“You should have killed him,” she says. “It's your right.”

“We need him to fight the Dræu. Besides, now that I've kicked his ass, he has to fall in line. It's in the Tenets, right.”

She nods, satisfied. “Right.”

We step away. Allow the miners to minister to him. Spiner and Jurm check Ockham for injuries.

“Is he still alive?” I ask.

“He's breathing,” Jurm says.

“I reckon that counts as living,” I say, and then wait until Mimi tells me that his injuries are minor. “Don't move him until we check him out. Call your medic down here.”

The miners shrug, and no one moves. A few of them murmur about taking orders from a
dalit
and helping a damned Regulator.

“Do it,” Áine says, striding toward us. “There's no arguing when a man's hurt. Jurm, I'll get Maeve. You and two
others, fetch a gurney from the infirmary.
Now
. If you don't mind.” She pauses and then adds, “Please.”

She catches my eye. Shakes her head. Walks up the stairs. There is frustration there. And fear. How can I blame her? Dissension in the ranks. Two Regulators injured, one possibly crippled, with a cannibalistic enemy in the wings, waiting to attack fortifications that aren't finished. I feel like a mountain climber whose only toehold is a thin lip of crumbling rock.

“Will Ockham die?” Jean-Paul asks Vienne, his body colored rust from the fight, the blood from his mouth drying black on his belly.

His voice gives me a start. I almost forgot he was there.

“No,” I hear Vienne answer. “He's too mean to die.”

Jean-Paul flashes that same determined look I saw back in the New Eden bazaar. “What about my training? How will I become a Regulator now?”

“Here's some advice,” she says, leading him away, “and it won't cost you a penny. If you want to become a Regulator, try to learn from the man who won the fight, not the one who lost it.”

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

In the dream, I'm lying on a stainless-steel table in a white room. A blue light is burning above the gurney. My hand reaches up, trying to block it and succeeding only in barking skin from my knuckles. There is a coarse mesh basket protecting the light. This is a field hospital, and I've been fighting death with my fists. A respirator tube is stuffed down my throat, and two surgeons in scrubs stand over me.

“Theoretically,” the man says, “it will work.”

“Theory is fine and good,” the woman says. “But what if his mind can't accept the symbiont? It could lead to psychic breakdown, schizophrenia—”

What
could? I try to say, but something stops me.

“Let me remind you who his father is,” the man says, and places a mask over my face. “If CEO Stringfellow wants this to work, it's going to work.”

“In theory.”

“Now you're catching on.”

Catching on to what, I think, but then the dream ends. It always ends right there.

I awake in a sweat. Is that the way the flash-cloning process really happened, or is it the version my mind has concocted for me? Even Mimi doesn't know. It happened before she joined me.

My heart thumping, I roll to my back to find my center. Breathe in. Breathe out. When I'm calm, I open my eyes. The quarters are dark.

Although the mines where shut down years ago, I can imagine hearing the ceaseless whir and clang of the ore being run up to the tipple and then dropped into the conveyor belts that separated it for shipping. I can almost smell the acrid scent of the ore, the stink of the enzymes the Big Daddies secreted during their tunneling. I stretch, exhale noisily, and roll from the cot.

“That was not eight hours of sleep, cowboy,” Mimi scolds me.

“Close enough.” Though from the way my body's buzzing, I know that it wasn't even half that.

I've lived on two, maybe three hours of sleep for weeks on end now. I'm tired. It's not that I don't want to sleep, to dream my own dreams for once, instead of revisiting past nightmares. But I can't. My brain won't let me. And there's the matter of this job I accepted. It's my duty to protect the miners, and I can't do it from slumber land.

After pulling on my symbiarmor, I pick up my boots and tiptoe across the floor. On my way out, I check the other cots. Ockham is in the infirmary, sleeping off the fight, and Jean-Paul's at his side. Jenkins lies snoring loud enough to cause a cave-in. Fuse's cot is empty.

So is Vienne's. A pang of jealousy stings me. It isn't a good idea for them to wander off in the night. The miners on guard duty might think they're Dræu and accidentally club them with one of those heavy wrenches.

“Mimi, locate Vienne and Fuse.”

“‘But, Och! I backward cast my e'e. On prospects drear!'”

“I'm too sleepy for obscure literary references. Just locate them, please.”

She gives me the bearings, and I set off to find my crew. Without a clear idea of where to go or where I'm going, I follow Mimi's directions to the letter. I'm beginning to see how living in the mines disrupts your biorhythms. There's no natural day and night here, so the signals that your body needs to regulate itself aren't there. The miners try to simulate the natural passing of a day by raising and dimming the lights.

But it doesn't work that well. Because people had been living underground as long as there were people on Mars, the effects of life underground are well-known, including chronic insomnia, acute claustrophobia, and vitamin D deficiency due to the lack of exposure to sunlight. Gene therapy helps alleviate some of the problems. The simple
truth, though, is that the human body needs sunlight to live. Here, there is none. Maybe that explains why miners are so ornery.

“Mimi, switch my bionic eye to night vision lens.”

“Cowboy,” she laughs. “Your ocular implant does not have a night vision function, and you know it.”

“Switch to laser vision, then,” I tease her. Sometimes, though, it would be nice to have special powers.

“The phrase
if looks could kill
is still just a saying.”

“What good is a nanoprocessor visual prosthesis if I can't see in the dark or shoot things with my eye?” I miss seeing a low-hanging cable and smack my forehead into it. “Ow!”

“So that you can see objects with low clearance.” Mimi laughs. “And then duck.”

Mimi isn't the only one laughing. Áine, who is having a good giggle at my expense, appears in the corridor ahead. “That's why you ort not walk around in the mine.”

Oh no. Not her. I swear I hear Mimi laugh. Raising a glow light on a lanyard, Áine holds the light up to her face. Then shines it on mine.

“You laughed at my pain,” I say. “That's not very nice.”

“I laughed because you were clumsy, and clumsy's fair game.” Áine slips her arm in mine. “What brings you out at this hour? It'd officially be nighttime, and that means sleep time. Or is two days of constant work not enough for you?”

I rub my forehead. Just a small goose egg. “I don't sleep much.”

“Because you miss the sun?” she asks, resting her hip against mine. The shape of her face is outlined in yellow light, giving her skin a soft glow. “Or is it because you're lonely?”

My mind flashes to Vienne and the hurt, angry look she gave me after I wouldn't let her fight. “Lonely? No. In general, I don't have much time to sleep. It's difficult—”

“To always be in charge? To never have time to rest your head?”

To have another person's nightmares in your head, I say to myself. “Right, to be in charge. Something like that. What about you? Why're you out and about, since it's sleep time?”

“Sentry duty, silly. We all got to do it.” She pulls me by the good hand and doesn't let go when I try subtly to shake loose. “Follow me. I'll show you something that will help you relax.”

Locking my heels, I say, “I should stay here. Keep an eye on things. Like you said, I'm the chief, and it's been a hard day.”

She gives me a tug. “Though they might be lousy soldiers, miners know how to keep watch on the tunnels. Your mean old Regulators are safe. Come along now.”

Towing me along like a space barge, she heads down the corridor for several meters, then makes an abrupt right turn. It's darker here. I have no choice but to follow the glow of her lanyard.

How did I get myself into this? Wandering dark hallways
with a suzy. If Jenkins and Fuse find out, they'll never let me live it down. And Vienne. Though physical contact with females isn't technically against the Tenets, being alone with one is. Vienne thinks Regulators should be above reproach. Especially the chief.

“That armor,” Áine says. “It feels scaly. Don't you ever take it off? Other than fighting, I mean.”

“Mimi, get me out of this.”

“Come again, cowboy,” she says. “Your signal is full of static.”

“I, um, need to check the, ah, work on the corridor back there. Make sure we told the miners which of the secondary tunnels to use explosives on.”

“The charge's already been set. We miners know how to knock down tunnels quick as spit.”

“Well, then there's the barricade building out by the Zhao Zhou Bridge.”

“Quit worrying about that, too.” She makes a turn, and the tunnel slopes downward. “I'm here to help you relax, no? So, tell me, how'd you got to learn how to fight like that? The miners all thought your face was too pretty. That you'd got that suzy to do your fighting for you.”

I laugh. “That suzy taught me how to fight.”

“Oh?” She tilts her chin up toward me. “She's not the only suzy who knows how to teach a boy a few things.”

“Mimi! How do I get out of this mess without offending her?”

“Got yourself in, cowboy. Get yourself out.”

“Look, Áine, you seem like a nice girl—”

“I
am
a nice girl,” she says, and pulls a lever hidden by the darkness. “You ought to see how nice I can be.”

There's a rumbling sound, and an air lock in front of her begins to open. She turns to face me, her body now a silhouette, and I realize that she's wearing a dress with leggings, not coveralls. “Welcome to the sun.”

Bluish light pours into the tunnel. A rush of frigid air makes the downy hair on my temples rise. She pulls me through the lock and rolls it shut.

“Hurry,” she says, her face bathed in blue light so strong, it overwhelms the glowing yellow of her lantern. “Before the cold leeches inside.”

“Amazing,” I say. “Mimi, map this locat—”

“Mapped, slowpoke.”

I step over a high threshold and onto a sheet of ice. Before us, the tunnel opens into corkscrew-shaped ice cavern. Its ceiling towers a hundred meters above us, and its walls, made of ice like stained glass, stretch up like spires of a cathedral. Light from an unseen opening above whispers to me, beckoning me.

“What is this place?” I ask, my head raised in awe.

“It's an ice cave. There's a glacier above Hell's Cross. When the terraforming melted the permafrost, the runoff created these.”

The possibility that the harsh tundra could hide beauty
like this lifts my spirits. “You mean there are more?”

She shakes her head. “Not that we know about. When the old miners found the first few, they made the mistake of trying to walk on them. One miner hit the ice with a pick, and the crack ran the length of the walls, all the way to the surface. The cavern gave out, and two of them died.”

I test my footing on the sheet of ice. “So I shouldn't try sledding.”

“Not if you want to live.” She tilts her head. Smiles. Touches her stomach.

Lifting my head, I let the light and the chill wind sweep over my face. “Do all the miners know about this?”

She squeezes my hand. “We don't keep secrets from ourselves.”

No, I think, just from outsiders. “It goes all the way to the surface?”

“That's where the light comes from, silly.”

“Right,” I say, and then realize that I am silly. No, an idiot. Being in an ice cave with a girl who's changed into a dress and—

She pulls closer to me. “Want a lick?”

“No thanks,” I say. Time to put the Áine express in reverse. “I really have to get back.”

Áine reaches up. Breaks off an icicle. “Try one. This is where we get most of our fresh water.” She runs the tip of the icicle over her bottom lip. Then leans her head back and drops of frigid water fall onto her outstretched tongue.

“Cowboy,” Mimi interrupts, “I am reading signs of distress, but my external sensors indicate no proximal threat to you.”

“Oh, there's a threat,” I say aloud by mistake. A clear and present one.

Áine cocks her head. “Threat?”

“Sorry. I was, ah, talking to myself.”

“You were telling yourself that there's a threat here?”

“More or less.”

“Tch.” She puts the icicle into my free hand. “You think I'm threatening? I'm flattered.”

“That's not what I meant.” I bite the tip of the icicle like it's a carrot. Pulverize it with my molars. Hand it back to her half-eaten. “I notice you're really good at twisting everything I say.”

“You do that a lot.” She throws her arms around my neck. “Try to draw attention away from yourself. I'd noticed it when we met in New Eden. Why so humble, soldier boy?”

I unclasp her arms. “Not humble. Just have a job to do. And I don't want to insult you, but I do need to go.” Now. Before I get myself in deep trouble with my crew.

“Okay, I'll let you go.” Áine runs the tips of her fingers down the inside of my arm. “If you tell me how the symbiarmor works? Can you feel this?”

“It tickles,” I say. “The fabric has a million microsensors woven into the fibers. It transmits electrical signals to my skin, and my brain sorts them out.”

“Your brain?”

“Nanobots in my nervous system sort the impulses and then send feedback to the bioadaptive cloth in the armor.”

She puts her hands on my belly. “Mmm, warm. You're better than a pair of mittens. We could use a big, strong, handsome young man like you around here. I've got ways to make it worth your while.”

I push her hands back and step away. “That's about enough.”

Then she surprises me by pointing at the line that runs from the corner of my eye to the edge of my ear. “How'd you get that scar?”

“I lost a fight with a Big Daddy.”

I expect her to coo over the scar, but seeing it changes the look in her eye. She hikes the sleeve of her blouse to reveal a thick scar running up her forearm. “I got that from a live wire. The shock knocked me ten meters.”

“Oh yeah?” I say, because two can play this game. I lift the back of my shirt, showing her a splatter pattern of thick, purple scars. “Before it split my skull open, the Big Daddy sprayed me with its acid.”

“Tch,” she says. “That's not so bad.” She pulls back her hair. Exposes a jagged line of scar tissue. “I jumped off a crane and landed on the treads. Almost scalped myself. And I didn't have no high-priced sawbones to stitch me back up, either. Maeve had to do it.”

Squinting hard, I reach up to my eye. Give it a hard twist.
There's a clicking sound, and I pluck the eyeball from its socket. “Synthetic eyeball. Beat that.” I smile triumphantly and reinsert the prosthetic.

“Nothing but a flesh wound.” She rolls up a legging to show the wound that had made her limp. The skin is raised like the caldera of a volcano, with the inside a glossy mass of red and puce colored tissue. It's still fresh, barely begun to heal. “The Dræu shot me right there. They killed the two girls I was with. Then left me on the ice to die.”

A faraway look comes to her eyes, and she angrily rolls down the legging. Competition over.