“I don’t!” she yells. “It’s your death I’m worried about!”
“Oh.”
“Is that all you have to say?” She shakes me. “Sometimes, Durango, I really do want to shoot you.”
“Can’t you just settle for punching me?”
“Thief!” The Noriker starts rocking, and then the woman named Thela throws back the flap. She points a roasted finger at me. “Thief! You stole my soul!”
“Down!” Vienne yanks her from the truck.
But Thela isn’t going easily. She kicks and scratches as we wrestle her to the ground, my knee pinning her head down.
“Be still!” I yell, but she sinks her teeth into my shin, which should not be possible. “Ow! That hurt!”
Enough’s enough. I grab her around the waist and toss her ass back into the bed of the truck.
The screaming stops.
“Durango.” Vienne’s face turns pale. “Did you say—?”
“It hurt, yeah.” I tug on the symbiarmor, which is as loose and unresponsive as normal cloth.
We exchange a der scheißkerl look.
“Our armor’s fragged,” she says.
“We’re dead.”
“Not yet,” she says. “Not until they manage to kill us.”
A whistle sounds. At the gate, an officer shouts orders. The Sturmnacht form ranks, then march double time toward us.
I pull Vienne behind the truck for cover.
“Mimi,” I say. “Do a systems check on the nanobots to see what’s happened to symbiarmor functions. Mimi?”
Static.
The reboot didn’t work.
No Mimi.
No armor.
No ammo.
No choice. “They’re coming in hot. If we resist, they’ll kill us. We have to surrender.” I’m almost begging Vienne. “Live to fight another day.”
“No retreat.” She raises the rifle like a club. “No surrender.”
“Vienne, be rational. Don’t do this. I’m not going to watch you die.”
“Then close your eyes,” she says, her voice taking a razor-sharp edge. “I would rather fall in battle than be taken. I will not be held prisoner again.”
Again? When was Vienne ever—
“Stand down!” the officer yells as his troops surround the truck. “We will shoot you!”
“Vienne, please,” I say, desperate to convince her.
“No retreat.” She shakes her head. “No surrender.”
“You said that already.”
“You needed to hear it again.”
The ranks of Sturmnacht split, and a jack about my age moves through the ranks to meet us. Dressed in a ridiculous flowing cape, he seems too tall, legs too stilted, arms made of loosely connected, birdlike bones. His face is small and heart shaped, a shank of straw-colored hair draped across his forehead, and his clothes are baggy, as if borrowed from someone else’s wardrobe.
“Thank you, Duke,” he says. “I’ll take it from here.”
He waves a dozen troops toward our position, where they surround Vienne. She lunges at them, and they wisely expand the circle.
“Permission to fire?” the officer asks.
“Not yet,” the straw-haired jack says.
Enough of this. Vienne may hate me forever, but I’m not about to let her die a stupid death. “Under section seven-point-two of the Zuuric Convention,” I announce, “we submit ourselves as prisoners of war.”
“Speak for yourself!” Vienne yells.
The corners of the leader’s mouth draw up in the imitation of a smile. Then he rams a fist in my gut. The blow doubles me over, and I fall to one knee.
Now I recognize the poxer’s face. He was in the boardroom back in Christchurch—Archibald Bragg. That’s who Lyme chose as his underboss, the son of the CEO?
“This is no war,” Archibald says. “We will take prisoners when we see fit. Unfortunately for you, I don’t see fit.”
I turn my head to see Vienne take out a trooper with a front kick, grab his blaster, and lay down fire. Three soldiers go down before the others can draw on her.
“Stop!” I lunge for her, but the butt of a battle rifle meets my temple, and the lights go out.
Chapter 12
Tranquility Canyon, Noctis Labyrinthus
Zealand Prefecture
ANNOS MARTIS 238. 7. 20. 12:01
The sun is at high noon when the Noriker stops on the road above the canyon. My Sturmnacht acquaintances, Richards and Franks, drag me across the high desert, the toes of my blood-spattered boots leaving a wake in the dirt. Head drooping, I let them carry my full weight, each of them holding one of my arms.
My eyes stay closed. It keeps the mud out, and besides, my bionic one is a fair dinkum mess. Hair, caked with blood and dirt, hangs over my face. That’s a good thing, because they think I’m dead, and I want to keep it that way.
“Keep walking, Franks,” Richards grunts. “This jack’s heavy as a sack of rocks.”
Franks shakes my limp arm. “So he’s a Regulator? Not so tough after all, huh?”
“This ain’t no real Regulator, Franks. Look at his finger. This jack’s a dalit.”
“Dalit?” Franks says, huffing as he shifts his grip to my ammo belt.
“Don’t you know nothing?” Richards drawls. “A dalit is a Regulator gone bad. Some turn to begging. Some to thieving. Some, like this one, turns to being a goody-goody hired gun.”
“Huh?” From the sound of it, he scratches the heavy stubble on his jowls. “How’d you know that?”
“Use that microbe you call a brain,” Richards says, guiding us down a short path. The brown mud suddenly turns to blue-gray sky: we’ve reached the lip of the canyon. “Some great gob hired him and his partner to rescue them farmers we took as collateral.”
“Almost worked, too.” Franks whistles. “Never seen no susie shoot like that one. Think Archie’s going to kill her, too?”
“When he’s done having his fun with her, probably.” Richards grunts again. “But that Archie’s a bit of a dill bird, so there’s no telling what he might do.”
They drop me like a sack of spoiled rations. I turn my head quickly to avoid breaking my nose on the loose stones. One of them plants a foot in my gut. I stifle a groan and hold in the breath that wants desperately to escape.
“What you doing that for?” Richards says. “He’s dead.”
Remain calm, I tell myself, as the anger rises in my throat. Bide your time. You’re going to rescue her, but you can’t do it now.
“Let’s pop him anyhow,” Franks says, sounding too eager for my taste. “Mess up that pretty face some more.”
“Waste of ammo. Ammo costs money. You got extra coin to buy me more ammo?”
“Extra?” Franks says. “Already I owe Mr. Lyme a month’s back pay.”
“Then drop the poxer down the hill and shut your piehole. You’re giving me a headache.”
On the count of three, they hoist me into the air and sling my corpse down the side of the canyon. Squeezing my eyes and mouth shut, I take the force of the fall, allowing my body to flop around like a useless hunk of meat as I slide down a dry gully.
Oof!
I hit an outcropping, and the air escapes my lungs. I only hope that the Sturmnacht aren’t curious enough to stay behind and watch. For a few interminable seconds, I lie perfectly still, my left leg and right arm bent beneath me. My face is half turned toward the sun, and through my good eye, I trace the trail back to the top of the canyon.
There’s nobody at the top of the embankment. For now. But I stay low, just in case.
Everything below my elbows is deadened, and when I flex my hands, the fingers feel like numb sausages. It takes a few minutes to even feel the prickles of electric pain that remind me that yes, these parts are actually connected. My face feels like a mass of bee stings. One side is swollen shut, my mouth and nose puffy with blood. If I turn my head too quickly, everything spins. It’s like vertigo, only more intense.
; Damn, we were this close to escaping the outpost. If only I had done what Vienne asked.
“Mimi?”
I tap my right temple, feeling the thick surgical scar through my hairline. Static. The EMP scrambled all electronic impulses.
“Mimi, it’s time to wake up. Begin reboot sequence.”
I squeeze my right eye, a prosthetic implant, shut for three seconds, waiting for the quiet chime that signals the reboot. Seconds, then minutes, tick by.
There is no chime.
Just static.
“Mimi?” I say out loud. “Mimi! Where are you?”
A thought crosses my mind, and it terrifies me: What if I’ve lost Mimi, and with her, any chance of ever rescuing Vienne? Moaning, I pull myself into a sitting position. I try to test my left arm, but it’s numb, already swelling up from a horrific bruise over the fibula. Then I feel something warm on my forehead.
Blood.
Lots of it.
While I’m looking at the red liquid puddling in my palm, my vision wavers. Above me, I hear the buzz of a vortex generator, the sound of an aerofoil banking between the walls of the canyons. I raise my hand to signal the aviator for help when half of my visual field goes black.
“Tā maādebiing bionic eye.” I smack my temple. A jolt of pain shoots through my brain, and my head spins. Oh lovely, I have a concussion, too. How can things get any worse?
I put a hand on the ground to steady myself and get an answer.
Five meters above my head, rock dust begins to cascade from the side of the canyon. There’s an earsplitting squeal, and a long, needlelike claw emerges. It flicks in and out rapidly, as if tasting the air, then with a snick sound, disappears.
“No way.” My eyes are playing tricks. My brain’s addled.
Sharp chunks of rock explode from the canyon wall. Another squeal, so loud it makes my ears ring, and eight arachnid legs spring from the hole. Serrated claws grip the rock, boney skeleton scraping like chalk on slate, until a pair of claws—oozing and dripping with viscous secretions that stink like sour cabbage rotting in a jar—emerges from its mouth, followed by two bulbous compound eyes. For a second it pauses, clacking its claws together. Then its eyes focus on me. Its whole body quivers, and it scuttles down to the outcropping.
Less than a meter from my feet.
“Oh merde,” I say, because the insectoid is a chigoe, Mars’s only surviving native species, once thought extinct but accidently set loose on the world.
By me.
If Mimi were awake, she’d be laughing at the irony of the situation.
“Good little chigger,” I mutter through puffed lips, then labor to get both feet under me. I half walk, half crawl to the edge of the outcropping. “Go play. Durango’s not going to hurt you.”
Ooze drips from its quivering mouth to the ground.
The stone begins to sizzle.
I pick up a loose rock as big as my hand. With all the strength left to muster, I bounce it off the chigoe’s carapace.
It shrieks and scuttles away.
Whew, I think, that was close.
Then it rears up on its hind legs, turns its thick thorax toward me, and kicks out waves of fine, barbed hairs that sink into the right side of my face.
At first I feel nothing—until the pain hits, then my screams echo down the canyon. Blinded and in agony, I stumble past the edge of the outcropping, and feel my feet touch nothing.
So bright.
My brain feels too small for my skull. Pounding. Tight.
There’s a familiar smell about this place. Medicinal. Something I should recognize. A compress is bandaged to the wound on my temple. It stinks like ammonia. For an instant, I panic that the smell is from a gangrenous wound. I feel the skin nearby, though, and it is cool to the touch.
I roll over and puke on the floor.
“Just shoot me.” Then I remember that someone probably has. I giggle madly, and my brain explodes with a meteor shower of hurt.
So I puke again.
The smell of vomit rises from the floor. It doesn’t bother me as much as it should. I throw my right arm across my eyes. Funny, the left one seems to be incommunicado.
Somewhere, a woman is singing. Her voice is very high, almost coloratura, but not screechy like the fat opera singers they always show on the multivids. Maybe it’s the singer’s accent, but the tune sounds very old and very sad.
No, not sad. Melancholy.
“Vienne?”
Must find that voice.
I sit up and steel myself. I even wince by reflex before I realize that the pain is gone.
Hallelujah.
Taking a deep breath, I expand my chest, and lightning strikes my rib cage.
It’s dark the next time I wake up.
This time, I’m paralyzed. No movement, no voice, locked in the darkness with no way of escaping. My skull feels like a thin-shelled egg filled with hydrogen that at any time could crack and explode, and my thoughts would slip away like so much ether.
“Mimi?” I scream inside my head. “Mimi! Please answer me. I need you!”
This time, there’s no static.
“I’m here, cowboy.”
“I thought . . .” The panic in my chest dissipates. “Thought . . . I’d lost you forever.”
“Only if forever lasts one hundred nineteen minutes.”
“I puked. Twice.”
“Pardon me for not keeping count.”
The air smells antiseptic, that familiar medicinal scent, like alcohol and povidone-iodine scrub. Which means I’m in an infirmary and not dead.
“You are woozy and somewhat incoherent, but not dead,” Mimi says. “Unless I am conversing with a ghost, and I am not programmed for astral communication.”
“What about you?” I say, not feeling any pain, oddly. “One second you’re jabbering away, then—kaput.”
“Good word, kaput. We were hit by an EMP, an electromagnetic pulse. It shorted out your symbiarmor and forced a hard reboot of your AI. Namely, me.”
“Ha.” I laugh. “You got coldcocked.”
“A fate that befell you minutes later, I gather.”
“I’m such a copycat,” I say. “Where’s Vienne? I heard her voice.”
“Not her,” she says. “Just an aural hallucination from brain trauma.”
“She’s not here? But I thought . . . I thought she was singing to me.”
“I am sorry, cowboy.”
“What happened to Vienne?”
“My functions were off-line,” she says. “You know more than I do.”
“But my brain’s all jumbled up like garbage soup. I can’t—wait, a chigoe bit me.”
“A chigoe?”
“In the eye. With its butt.”
“Physically impossible, but that may explain why your ocular implant is no longer responding to commands.”
“My bionic eye broke?” For some reason, I find this funny, even though I know it’s not. “I feel drugged.”
“That is because you are. I detect a combination of synthetic opiates and neuromuscular-blocking drugs specifically targeted to skeletal muscles, which explains your paralysis, lack of pain, and general loopiness.”
“Also,” I say, “I can’t see a thing.”
“Because the room is dark.”
“I would laugh, but it’d make me puke,” I say. “Do a scanner sweep? Maybe Vienne is close by.”
“Negative, cowboy. Your prosthetic eye was a key component in your suit’s telemetry system,” she says. “Without it, I’m almost as blind as you are.”
“Well, tāmādebi.”
“Amen to that.”
Light.
With a click of a switch, fluorescent light fills the room, and I see that I’m lying facedown on a table, my head supported by a cushioned O-ring, and staring at a red-tile floor. Two bare feet appear. A silver anklet and painted toenails.
“Vienne?” I call to Mimi.
“Negative, cowboy.”
“Where’s Vienne?” I
try to say out loud, but my mouth feels like it’s stuffed with a rag, and the words won’t form. A machine begins to hum. The table revolves so that I’m turned to face upward.
Surgery lights on. A woman steps into view. Rebecca. Her hair is pinned up in a bun, and she’s wearing a mask, her eyes protected by surgical goggles. She is also wielding a wicked pair of forceps.
“Hey, hero.” She shines a light in my left eye. “At least we know you’re not dead.”
“What about Vienne?” I yell, but only succeed in making a strangled noise. “Mimi, can’t you do something?”
“No,” she says, sounding more angry and helpless than I’ve ever heard. “There is nothing I can do because there is nothing you can do.”
I want to scream in frustration, but even that eludes me.
“Sorry about the talking thing,” Rebecca says. “The mild paralysis is from a dose of pancuronium bromide. You kept thrashing around, so I had to sedate you. Joad, hold his left eyelid back.”
“Got it.” Joad leans into view. He’s not wearing any surgical garb, and his hand looks very dirty.
“A little wider, please,” she tells him. “There are still several hairs in the cornea. Durango, do try to relax. Plucking urticating hairs out of a cornea is delicate work, and lately, I’ve gotten used to working on plants, which have no nerve endings.”
Pain is more than the sum of its neurons, I think.
Methodically, Rebecca plucks the hairs out, setting each aside. “If I didn’t know better, I swear you ran into a Goliath bird-eater spider, except that it’s an Earth species that went extinct when the Amazon was deforested. Lucky our crop duster found you before nutrias made a snack of your corpse.”
“How nonclinical of her,” Mimi says. “This woman calls herself a professional?”
“She’s a botanist.”
“How apropos,” Mimi says, “since she has the bedside manner of a potted plant.”
Rebecca changes the angle of the light. She purses her lips, perplexed. “Weird. Thought I saw more hairs embedded in the vitreous body. Now they’re . . . gone?”
How can they be gone? I think.
She sets down the forceps. “Did you eat them, Durango? I know, I know, I’m not funny. Just a little gallows humor. I like to talk while I work. Right, Joad?”
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