Invisible Sun

by David Macinnis Gill

  “Got it, Mimi. No more playing chicken with a Düsseldorf.”

  “You’re okay?” I ask Riki-Tiki.

  “Beyond okay!” she says. “That was fun! In a weird sort of way.”

  “You and Vienne are a lot alike. In a weird sort of way.” I turn the bike out of the ditch and pull back onto the highway. “Welcome to the life of a Regulator,” I tell her as the bike starts to wobble violently. “Whoa! Hang on! Something’s wrong.”

  After pulling over to the shoulder of the road, I suss out the source of the wobbling. It’s the front wheel. The rim is bent. Great. Terrific. “Shén me niaŏ!”

  “What does that mean?” Riki-Tiki says.

  “It’s an ancient proverb from Earth. It means no good deed goes unpunished.”

  Riki-Tiki starts laughing. “Ha! It does not! I speak Chinese, and it means mmm-mmm-mmm.”

  I slap a hand over her mouth. “Shh! I heard something.” Subvocalizing, I tell Mimi to do a scan. “I could swear I heard an engine.”

  “Nothing so far,” she says. “At this point, your hearing is better than my sensors.”

  “Bet it half killed you to admit that.”

  “Instead of gloating,” Mimi reminds me, “would a better strategy be to hide your vehicle and seek shelter? Just in case.”

  “Right. Just in case.” I remove my hand from Riki-Tiki’s mouth and wipe her spit from my palm. “Ew. Did you have to?”

  She sticks out her tongue. “Serves you right for putting your hand over my mouth! All you had to do was say shh!”

  “Shh!”

  “Forget it!”

  “Hurry!” I push the bike into the brush and motion her to follow. “Somebody’s coming. We’ll come back for the bike later.”

  We jog up an overgrown trail toward the closest factory—a rotting refinery, judging by its three cooling towers.

  “Can the bike be fixed?” she asks.

  I pull back the chain-link fence. “Sure. I just need some tools.”

  She crawls through, then I follow.

  She points to a squat metal building labeled “Tool and Die Shop.” “Think you might find something in there while we’re hiding?”

  “Good eye.”

  We jog over to the front door of the shop. There’s a padlocked chain on it. I give it a good shake in hopes that rust has eaten through the metal. “No go.”

  For a second, I think about shooting the lock off. But the noise would echo for kilometers, and a big, fresh hole in the lock would be a dead giveaway.

  “Over here.” Riki-Tiki hops onto a pallet, then up a crate. She swings open a security grate and slips inside. “I’m in! Hurry up, slowpoke.”

  Mumbling about tight spaces, I follow her, albeit more slowly and carefully because of the cast on my arm.

  “Suck in that gut, cowboy,” Mimi says.

  I grunt. “Too many disabled limbs.”

  “Not to mention too much white rice.”

  “Everybody’s a critic—whoa!” I reach out, expecting to find a handhold on the other side of the grate and instead find only air.

  I topple forward and land hard on the concrete floor.

  “Oof.”

  Riki-Tiki offers me a hand up. Even in low light, I can see the glint of mischief in her eyes. “Did I forget to mention that the last step is a doozy?”

  “Why yes, you did.” I take a second to scan the shop. Storage area here. Workbench there. Lots of dark corners and slivers of light coming from the soaped windows and the double door entry. “Okay, so now we’re even. I’m sorry about the hand over the mouth thing.”

  “And I’m sorry that the crates I climbed down”—she points to two empty bins a couple meters away—“escorted themselves to the other side of the shop when you weren’t looking.”

  I pop my neck back into place. “Remind me never to play cards with you.”

  “Cards? I love cards!” she says. “I brought a set with me. Damn! They’re with my bedroll.”

  “Which is still in the bike.”

  As my eye adjusts to the light, I start making my way toward the racks of tools on the far side of the shop. “Let’s use our quiet voices,” I say. “And keep our ears peeled for—ow!”

  I slam my forehead into something hanging from the rafters. It’s heavy. It’s metal. It hurts.

  Riki-Tiki giggles. “Is that your quiet voice?”

  “Ha-ha,” I say as she scoots past me.

  At the tool rack, she starts mucking with the hand tools.

  “What’re you doing?” I cross the floor using a shuffle step and waving my hands around for random instruments of head trauma.

  “Choosing the tools we need, of course.” The sound of metal pieces clacking together echoes across the shop. “I’ve found a couple of slats we can use as a tire lever set, and we’ll need a ball-peen hammer. See anything we can use as edge to match the angle of the rim?”

  “I take it you’ve done this before?”

  She puffs up. “Who d’you think fixes Stain’s motorcycle? He’s too busy trying to achieve enlightenment to care about changing the oil.”

  I’m about to whisper how impressed I am by her mechanical genius when Mimi cuts in.

  “Reading multiple biorhythms at close proximity, of course.”

  “Affirmative,” I reply, then motion for Riki-Tiki to be quiet.

  “Fun!” she whispers.

  I crouch on one knee so that there’s a clear line of sight on both the door and the window. I turn my head side to side, trying to pick up the sound of footfalls.

  “Your senses were much sharper when I could fully monitor them,” Mimi says.

  “Hush,” I say. “With you yakking in my ear, a Hellbender could land and I wouldn’t be able to hear it.”

  Riki-Tiki taps me on the shoulder. “What’s going on?”

  Putting a finger to my lips, I whisper, “I heard some- thing.”

  “Me, too,” she says, grinning. “CorpCom shock troopers. They found the bike, and they are fanning out in a standard security formation.”

  “How do you know that?” Pulling my armalite, I move close to the outside wall. I try to get a visual through a crack in the wall.

  “Because that’s what the soldier in charge said just now,” Riki-Tiki whispers. “Probably could’ve heard it if you hadn’t been talking to yourself again.”

  Mimi laughs.

  “You didn’t hear them, either, Mimi.”

  “I am only as good as the equipment at my disposal.”

  Me, too, I think.

  I can hear them now. Muffled voices. Boots stomping across concrete and kicking aside debris. Not the best trained soldiers, are they?

  Riki-Tiki slips in beside me. She closes her right eye and squints with the left. “What’s the plan?”

  I shake my head. There is no plan except to wait it out and hope that they’ll move on. Like most of my plans, it’s not very imaginative, but it does have at least a fifty-fifty chance of succeeding.

  “More like ninety-ten for failure,” Mimi says.

  “Sixty-forty.”

  “You are delusional.”

  Outside, a high-pitched squeal. “Sir! Got a signal here!”

  A signal? What kind of signal? I’m asking myself as I pull Riki-Tiki away from the door.

  The squad leader steps into view.

  “Form up!” he barks. “Breach procedure!”

  We hunker down behind a metal lathe machine big enough to grind a boulder to a pebble, and I pop the safety on my weapon.

  “Stay here, no matter what happens,” I tell Riki-Tiki. “Mimi, give me a reading.”

  “I count six signatures in close proximity to the door.”

  I can take six, I think, and bring my armalite to firing position.

  “With six more three meters in the rear.”

  I can take a dozen.

  “With one arm and one eye?”

  “I just need one of each to shoot.”

  “If only your abilities we
re as great as your hubris.”

  Wham!

  A steel battering ram slams into the doors. The metal bends inward, and buckets of dust fall from the rafters. But the heavy chain holds, and I’m glad that I didn’t shoot the lock.

  Wham!

  The center of the door crumples, opening a large hole. A shock trooper foolishly sticks his head through the hole.

  An easy target. Right in my crosshairs.

  But I don’t shoot. Not when there are eleven more troopers lying in wait.

  He sweeps the shop with an electric torch. The beam dances up and down, along the walls. Right before it reaches the lathe, I lower my armalite and tuck my chin.

  The beam passes. Then stops and flicks back to the lathe.

  Re malaka! My brain screams to shoot him. But I don’t.

  Just be still.

  “Nothing here,” the trooper says finally.

  The beam moves on, and I exhale.

  Outside, the squad leader isn’t taking the news well. “Bollocks!” he yells. “Breach this door! Now!”

  The ram slams the door again and again until the hinges give, and it falls to the ground, still attached to the chain. Four troopers pour in a second later, the outside light illuminating them like glowing targets.

  I reach over to push Riki-Tiki to the ground for cover.

  But my hand finds nothing.

  She’s gone?

  Impossible! A second ago, she was right there. How can she move without making a sound? Panicked, I slap the ground, as if groping in the dark would help.

  “Cowboy,” Mimi says. “Look up.”

  Then I see her.

  Up on the ceiling.

  Swinging like a gymnast from the main rafter, she lets go, tucks into a ball, and slams into the lead trooper before he even sees her. He falls onto the workbench, and she vaults off the wall.

  She grabs the two long metal slats from the bench, then flicks her wrists simultaneously.

  The slats hit two troopers in the face.

  One drops.

  The second stumbles back into another trooper, who fires a blaster shot through the roof as he falls on his ass.

  My turn.

  The butt of my armalite to the chin of the shooter knocks him out, and before the other two troopers can react, I put a couple of rounds in their bellies. Their armor absorbs the bullets, but not the force, and they fly backward like a steel boom has flattened them.

  Still in the shadows inside the shop, I drop to a three-point stance, aiming at the six troopers formed up in support. But one look tells me that something’s gone awry.

  The troopers are already down.

  Damn.

  Somebody beat me to them.

  “Riki-Tiki?” I ask.

  “Right here,” she says from behind me. “You’re a very good shot.”

  “And you’re a very good acrobat. Remind me to remind you not to pull a stunt like that again.”

  “Aw, you never let me have any fun.”

  “You’re not the first person to say that.” I sweep the perimeter. No sight of any other hostiles. “Mimi?”

  “Reading one active biorhythm, chief. The others register as unconscious.”

  Riki-Tiki slips by me.

  “Wait!” I say.

  “Why?” she calls as she bounds outside. “It’s just Stain.”

  As if the devil’s name has been spoken, Stain pushes back a dark fur-lined hood to reveal his face and hops down from the roof of the shop. He grabs Riki-Tiki and swings her around, kicking up oily-colored dust.

  “How did you find us?” Riki-Tiki says as she lets go of the monk’s long brown overcoat.

  Under the coat, he’s wearing no shirt, baggy pants, and a pair of leather boots. “I’ve trailed you all along. Ever since Master and Mistress noticed that you were missing.” He smiles at her, but it’s posed, like he’s sitting for a digigraph. “Now that I’ve found you, it’s time for you to go back home.”

  A cold wind blows Riki-Tiki’s pink hair across her face. She pushes it aside and locks her arms across her chest. “No.”

  “Listen to me,” Stain says. “This hunt for Vienne is a fool’s errand. If Ghannouj forbids you to leave, you must remain in the monastery or risk being—”

  “What Ghannouj says doesn’t matter.” She stamps her foot. “I’m of age, and I’ll do as I choose. That includes helping find Vienne. So if you’re so worried about me, you’ll come along. Because I won’t be going back until she’s found.”

  After checking the perimeter, I move to the downed shock troops.

  I roll the squad leader over. His face is covered with welts. The others have the same swollen marks. Looks like Stain’s been up to his old tricks. I wonder how tough he’d be without a bag full of killer bees.

  “Dalit,” Stain says. “Talk to her. Explain that even if you manage to find Vienne, she will not . . . she will not be the same.”

  He takes a couple of steps toward me. Our eyes lock, and he gives me a hard stare, trying to intimidate me. He thinks he can scare me? Even with one eye, I can match any stink he throws at me.

  “Riki-Tiki is of age,” I say. “She can make her own choices.”

  He moves closer so that our noses are almost touching. I can smell stomach acid on his breath. “How can I trust her to your care after what happened to Vienne?”

  “Reckon that means you’ll be coming along then,” I say, fighting the urge to spit in his face. “There might be more CorpComs about, so we better secure the area.”

  Stain waves away the suggestion. “All of them have been taken care of. In fact, I was bored waiting for you to come out of your mouse hole.”

  “Then let’s get moving before the CorpComs wake up.” I start dragging the troopers inside the shop. Stain deigns to help, while Riki-Tiki runs inside to collect her tools.

  “Can’t forget these,” she says as we drag the last trooper inside, lash them together using their own flexicuffs, and do our best to bolt the door back into place. The door won’t hold for long once they wake up and get loose from the cuffs, but maybe it’ll give us time to escape.

  “Where are you going?” Stain asks as we reach the road again. The bike is where we left it, with Stain’s machine parked a couple of meters away.

  I take the tools from Riki-Tiki. “To fix my wheel.”

  “Obviously,” he says. “What I meant was, how do you know where to find Vienne?”

  “Back at the roadhouse,” I say, as Riki-Tiki pushes me aside and starts using the slats to remove the tire. I feel bad not helping, but obviously a one-handed klutz is just in the way. “I ran into the Sturmnacht that Archibald put on my tail, and I learned a useful piece of intel that will lead us right to their boss.”

  “What would that be?” Stain says.

  “Follow the smoke.” I point to the horizon, where the clouds are darker than they should be. “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Where there’s fire, there’s Archie. And when we find Archie, we’ll find Vienne.”

  Chapter 20

  Woolwich Reclamation Center, Upper Tharsis Plain

  Zealand Prefecture

  ANNOS MARTIS 238. 7. 26. 07:56

  Dressed in the uniform of a CorpCom Ranger captain, Archibald is concentrating on a slapdash shack sitting atop a slight rise next to a cesspool, a farmhouse with grayed-out clapboard siding and a brick foundation. It has narrow, naked windows with no curtains. Its shingled roof is buckled and warped, with two chimneys stabbing through it. The house caught his eye for one reason: the words “Desperta Ferro!” painted in large red letters on the walls.

  It is the first to burn.

  He lets his eye travel past the house to a half-dozen shanty shacks and a derelict chicken coop. The wire is caked in rust, and the coop has collapsed.

  The chickens have all flown, he says to himself and laughs.

  They are on fire, the buildings. The shacks, the coops, all of it being consumed by a dozen separate red-orange hot fires that form a singl
e stack of smoke that rises hundreds of feet into the clear sky. The official name of this place is Woolwich Center for Recycling and Reclamation. It’s a town grown up around one of Zealand Corp’s hundreds of centers created to recycle all the organic and inorganic waste from the prefecture. It was a town. Now it’s quickly becoming a pile of ash.

  “So the recycling center is being recycled.” Archibald smirks as he crosses the field to where the portable brig is parked.

  As he nears the brig, the guards jump to attention, but he sends them away. When they are out of earshot, he slides open a viewfinder. Inside, Vienne is cuffed to a metal chair. Her head lolls forward. An IV drip is attached to her arm.

  He closes the viewfinder and enters the brig. On a table next to Vienne, an assistant unrolls a set of instruments.

  “Don’t bother,” he says. “Those don’t work on her. Administer the dose.”

  With a wary look, the assistant draws serum from a vial and injects it into the IV.

  “You’re dismissed,” he says.

  When the assistant has been gone for several minutes, he hunkers down next to Vienne, his mouth just a few centimeters from her ear. “You can fight this, my love—”

  “Don’t call me that!”

  “Or you can accept it. The truth is I can give you something you’ve lost.”

  “You,” she says, gasping, “can’t give me . . . anything.”

  “That’s not true, is it?” He taps her mutilated pinkie finger. “You lost this.”

  She shakes her head. “Didn’t lose it.”

  “Exactly. You gave it away. You willingly allowed it to be chopped off like a piece of link sausage, but you didn’t want to become a dalit, did you?”

  “Yes, I did. The Tenets—”

  “Don’t lie to me. The serum my assistant gave you prevents it. So even though you didn’t want to become dalit, you did. Why?”

  No answer.

  “An omission of the truth is the same as a lie. It’s one of my mother’s favorite sayings. So tell the truth: You became a dalit for him, didn’t you?”

  “No.”

  “The word is ‘yes.’ Say it with me. Yes.”

  She fights against his command, her face straining against the effort of keeping the word in her mouth. But after a minute, the struggle ends.