“That would be a negative, cowboy.”
“How about tracing the call to its point of origin?”
“Also negative,” she says with more than a hint of annoyance. “Can I remind you once again that my telemetry functions are severely hampered? You are not the only one who is half blind. Metaphorically speaking.”
“Your use of figurative language is duly noted,” I say. “So there’s no way to monitor his conversation?”
“You could try listening. I happen to know that both ears are functioning normally, despite the buildup of cerumen in your left ear canal.”
“I’ll wash the wax out later!”
Hand cupped over my ear, I lean against the stall.
Mimi makes a sound like clearing her throat. “That technique has dubious benefits. Try just listening. It is not one of your finer skills, I know.”
My brain is formulating a snappy comeback when Franks finally responds to the caller. “Yeah, I know how important finding this wanker is to the campaign, Archie, but it ain’t easy to find one jack in a thousand square kilo—sorry about that, Mr. Archibald. As I was saying, we checked the collective like you said, and he ain’t there. The monks, well, you can’t get nothing out of them, and our people on the road ain’t heard of him, neither. So me and Richards is figuring him for dead.”
Damn it, if we could just trace that call, we’d have a line on Archibald’s location, and therefore, Vienne. “Mimi, are you sure you can’t track it?”
I can almost see her shake her head. “Negative.”
In the other stall, Franks sighs heavily. “Yes, I hear you. I get it. There’s war between us and the CorpCom. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Me and Richards will keep looking, and if we find him— Right, when we find him, we’ll bring him in. Mostly in one piece, like you wanted. He’s beat up and blind. How far can he go? How’re we supposed to find you? Follow the smoke. Yeah, well, better be a big fire to— Hello? Hello? The great gob hung up on me!”
Franks slams a fist against the stall, and the door rattles on its hinges. It’s a great diversion, and I take the cue to slip out of the stall unnoticed. Glancing back over my shoulder, I open the door and bump into a big man with a full beard and hands as big as a skillet.
“It’s the other Sturmnacht,” Mimi says.
“Obviously,” I say as Richards grabs me by the neck and pulls me into the hallway. This time, instead of old boots, he stinks of latrine disinfectant.
It’s not an improvement.
“Well, well,” he says. “Look what we got here.”
“Did you wash with toilet cleaner?” I twist against his grip. “Or just spritz some for the ladies?”
Richards whistles. “For sure, we thought you was dead.”
I grab his wrist, digging my fingers into the tendons that control his grip. “So how about putting me down?”
“All right.” He tosses me against the wall. “You asked for it.”
My armor solidifies as I slide to the ground.
Time to take this outside, I think, getting back to my feet.
I hit the exit at the end of the hallway, which leads to a loading dock and a small mountain of bilge dross swarming with blowflies and permeated with thick, bulbous maggots.
“Mimi, scan—”
“Alert!”
Richards slams through the door. I brace for impact, but he’s on me too fast, quick for a big man. I see why, despite his inability to recite the entire alphabet without pausing for a mental breath, that he was sent after me.
He flings me again.
This time I go pinwheeling head over heels and land on my back in the garbage heap. I come up coated with leftover stew, potato peels, and a few chunks of rotted cabbage. My broken arm throbs like a steel pole’s been rammed through it, and I have to flick a handful of maggots off the cast.
“Hún zhang wángbā dàn!” I reach for my armalite again, but my holster’s empty. Shimatta!
“Well, look what I found,” Richards says as he bends down to pick up my gun. If he touches the armalite, he’s dead. But I’ll be without a weapon.
“No!” I dive forward, stretching out my hand.
Richards laughs, just before a cloud of tiny hairs leave my palm and spray him in the face. Screaming, he claws his eyes and writhes on the ground, wallowing in the same slop he threw me into.
But I’m not worried about him anymore. Not when there’s a layer of hairs sticking out of my right arm. “Holy vittujen kevät! What was that?”
“Urticating hairs,” Mimi replies, as if I’d just asked her to describe my socks.
I rub my arm against my chest, and the hairs disappear. “Out of me? That’s insane! How did I grow urticating hairs?”
“Not you, the symbiarmor.”
“My suit is growing hairs?” I say. “And you didn’t sort of notice?”
Sounding like a susie who’s been cheated on, Mimi says, “It seems that I am not the only adaptive technology in play here. I do not like being uninformed, and I am not fond of sharing.”
“Jealous much?”
“I am jealous,” she says. “Your symbiarmor is obviously evolving, a feature that I had no record of. How can I be expected to control the functions of the nanobots when I do not have access to complete data?”
“I . . . don’t know?”
While I’m distracted by the sudden revelation that my armor is undergoing puberty, I let my guard down, and Franks takes the chance to get the drop on me.
“Don’t you twitch.” He’s behind me, raising his voice to be heard over Richards, who is now whimpering loudly. “Hear me? Not a single muscle. Turn around.”
I sigh. “How can I turn around if I’m not supposed to twitch?”
He pushes the double barrels of a shotgun into my back. “Don’t get smart with me, boy. Turn around.”
So I face the thug. First, I notice that the shotgun is pointed at my chest. Then, I notice that Franks has shockingly white legs. He follows my line of sight to the ground, where his pants are gathered around his ankles.
“What?” he says. “I was in a hurry.”
“I’m just glad your shirt has a long tail.”
Franks pulls back the double hammers. “Quit trying to be funny. I don’t like funny.”
I nod, looking at the man’s knobby knees, stifling a laugh. “Mimi, this one’s not the sharpest cleaver on the butcher block, is he?”
“It does not take brains to pull a trigger, cowboy.”
Franks spits on the floor but makes no move to pull up his trousers. “Here’s how it’s going to play out. Me and you’s going to take a little ride—”
“Where to?”
“It don’t matter where! Now shut up, boy. I lost my train of thought.”
“We’re going to take a little trip.”
“That’s right. A trip. And then, I hand you over to Archibald and collect my reward.”
“Reward? I was under the impression that Archie didn’t give those out.”
He nudges me with the barrels. “For you, he will. That farging ginger wants a piece of you real bad. If he didn’t, I’d already cut your cocky ass in half. Think that fancy suit’s going to protect you? Try taking a double-barrel full of explosive shot in the gut.”
“Explosive shot?” I say. “That changes things.”
Mimi agrees.
I hold my hand higher. “Okay, I give up. I’ll take a little ride with you. What about your buddy? He’s going to be out of it for a while.”
“Forget him.” Franks spits in Richards’s general direction. “Think I’ll keep that reward all to myself. Now get moving!”
I point at his ankles. “Um, what about your pants? It’s awful damp to go commando.”
Franks looks down, and I grab the stock of the shotgun. Knock it to the side. Slam my cast against his face.
The shotgun fires both barrels, blowing a huge, smoking hole in the back wall of the building.
Inside the roadhouse, the patrons dive for cover.
“You’re out of ammo,” I tell him. “Reckon that leaves you with your pants down physically and metaphorically.”
“Huh?”
“Tsk. I’m disappointed in your inability to understand figurative language,” I say. “Say good night, Gracie.”
Franks turns his head to the side. “Who’s Grac—”
Thump! I pop him in the jowls, and he’s down.
“See that blank expression on his face?” Mimi says. “That is exactly what you look like when I quote poetry.”
“That’s exactly how I feel, too.”
After securing my armalite, I step through the hole in the wall and enter the pub. The guests should still be cowering behind tables, but they’re sitting in the dust, acting as if an exploding wall is a common occurrence.
On the way out, I speak to the owner. “Sorry about the ruckus. Man on the ground out there says he and his friend will take care of the damages. But you might want to collect before they wake up.”
He gives me a blank look that I choose to count as a yes. I push through the front door and into the parking lot. “Now, Mimi. Tell me about those hairs. Could they be related in any way to the ones that chigoe fired into my face?”
“Oh, cowboy. I thought you would never ask.”
In the parking lot, I’m starting my motorbike when I see a truck marked with a painted-over Zealand Corp symbol, the sure sign of a stolen vehicle. It must belong to the Sturmnacht.
Which gives me an idea.
After killing the engine, I walk around to the rear of the Noriker, intent on doing a little mischief. Instead, I find some pink-haired susie has beaten me to it.
“Riki-Tiki,” I say, as I watch her drain the air from a tire. “What do you think you’re doing?”
She doesn’t even flinch, must less stop her work. “Helping you escape, obviously. Were you aware that you drag your left leg when you walk? It’s a unique gait. Not that I needed that to know it was you. I can hear you breathe a half dozen meters away.”
“Can not.” I rub my sore knee, the source of the unique gait.
“Can, too,” She moves on the front tires. “You whistle when you exhale. Probably from a deviated septum. Has your nose been broken?”
Twice in a fight. Another time by Vienne, by accident. I think it was by accident. “Forget about my nose.” I say. “Stop trying to deflect. What are you doing, as in how did you get two hundred kilometers from the monastery?”
“You gave me a ride, silly head.” Her work done, she scampers past me, easily slipping through my grasp as I try to snag.
“I did no such thing.” I follow her to my bike, where she hops on the rear seat.
“Sure you did.” She knocks on the storage compartment. “I wanted to help you find Vienne, no matter what the mistress and master said, so I hid in here.”
“No way. It’s too small.”
“Ha! Shows what you know.” She folds her arms and pretends to be miffed. “Ghannouj is a master contortionist, and he taught me how to make myself very, very small.”
“Ghannouj,” I snicker, thinking of the man whose girth is greater than his height fitting into any confined space, “is a master contortionist?”
Now she doesn’t have to pretend to be miffed. “Humph. Just because you can’t imagine it does not mean it can’t happen.”
“‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,’” Mimi says, “‘than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’”
“Shakespeare?”
“Very good, cowboy,” Mimi says. “You are learning to appreciate fine art.”
“My father used to quote that to me every time I said I wanted to be a Regulator. By the way, why didn’t you tell me we had a stowaway?”
“You did not ask,” Mimi says. “I am not a mind reader, you know.”
“You are, too!”
“Well, your mind never wrote that chapter.”
I smell a conspiracy. “Riki-Tiki, obviously I can’t leave you here to fend for yourself, so the next station that comes along, you’re on a transport back home. Deal?”
“No deal,” she says.
“What?”
“No deal. I don’t like transports, and if you don’t hurry and start this hunk o’ junk, those Sturmnacht are going to be out here and probably very angry that you flattened their tires.”
“I flattened their tires?”
She beams.
“And how do you know about the Sturmnacht?”
“Because I was inside the whole time, silly head,” she laughs. “That Franks man has very white legs, doesn’t he?”
“You were inside the roadhouse?” I say, amazed. “I didn’t see you there.”
“Of course not. I was trained by the Tengu!” she says, as if it’s common knowledge. “You should start the motor now.”
“Why?”
Across the parking lot, the front door of the roadhouse flies open. Franks and Richards scramble outside, chased by the angry proprietor, who is armed with a heavy skillet and a string of colorful insults.
I start the bike and shout to Riki-Tiki. “This doesn’t change the terms of our deal!”
“You’re cute when you argue!” she hollers back as the bike thunders out of the parking lot, raining gravel in its wake. “No wonder Vienne loves you so much!”
Chapter 19
Badlands, Tharsis Plain
Zealand Prefecture
ANNOS MARTIS 238. 7. 25. 09:14
With Lyme’s men hot on our trail, I decide that the Bishop’s Highway is not the smartest way to travel. At the next exit ramp, with Riki-Tiki riding behind me, I leave the highway and take a semi-abandoned military cutoff route, which is lined with a far-as-the-eye-can-see string of industrial buildings, most of them built for processing petrofuels from Mars’s minerals. But the factories never turned a profit, and when the CorpComs took over Mars, Zealand Corp shut them down. Now they stand like derelict hulks, rusting their way into oblivion until a recycling crew can work its way through them.
Like the factories, the roadway isn’t maintained, either, and there are fresh divots in the pavement. My front tire bumps up and down, the handlebars shake my hand, and I can feel the tires losing their grip. Although the motorbike weighs half a ton and chatters like a chainsaw on steel, it feels as if I’m floating on the road.
“Want me to drive?” Riki-Tiki says.
“Nope.”
The last time I felt like this was the first day I mustered into the Regulators. My new chief, Mimi, brought me into a Quonset hut, where eight Regulators stood, spit and polished, locked and loaded, at attention. Arms heaped with gear bags full of ammo boxes, clips, utility belts, assorted knives, I struggled to maintain my balance and almost mowed my new chief down when she stopped to address her davos.
“Watch it, Greenie,” she growled. “Else I’ll have you replaced with a pack mule. It could probably shoot straighter than you, anyhow. Isn’t that right?”
“Yes, chief!”
“Regulators, meet our new crew, Greenhorn Regulator Jacob Stringfellow. He’s the rich, spoiled-rotten, Battle School brat I warned you about. Stringfellow! From henceforth, you will be known only as Greenhorn or Greenie, never Stringfellow. Got that, Greenie?”
I didn’t answer, since I wasn’t really sure she was addressing me, so Mimi leg-whipped the backs of my knees and I went down like a velocicopter with a busted rotor, all the Regulators’ gear bags on top of me.
“Don’t move a millimeter, Greenie!” This time, I knew she meant me, and I didn’t dare make a peep.
“Regulators, grab your gear! We’ve got a mission. Dismissed.”
Her exit was followed by laughter, and one by one the packs were lifted off me as the members of what would become my family grabbed their stuff and trailed out the door, not bothering to say a word to me. It wasn’t until the last pack was lifted
that I realized a pair of liquid blue eyes was boring right through me. Vienne’s jaw was set, her mouth downturned in a way that I would later learn was a sardonic smile.
“I’m glad you’re here,” she said.
“Really?” I sounded like a salamander was clogging my vocal chords.
She slung her pack easily over a shoulder, then offered me a hand up. “Roger that. Until you showed up, I was the Greenie. Thanks for taking my place.”
“What do they call you now?”
“Mimi calls me Vienne, but you only get to call me Regulator. Now get off your butt, rich boy, we’ve got work to do.” I reached for the hand and she pulled it away, pretending to smooth down her hair. It was the first of many times Vienne put me in my place.
“Pothole!” Mimi screams in my ear.
Ahead, a hole big enough to park a Noriker in opens up on the highway. I yank the bike hard into the left lane. My front tire chatters, trying to grip pavement. The rear end fishtails, and I cut into the slide.
Feel the handlebars wrench from my good hand.
Watch in slow motion as the rear end swings one hundred and eighty degrees around in a cloud of black tar smoke and blue-gray exhaust that leaves me out of breath and parked in the other lane, staring at a Düsseldorf ‘s aluminum grill growing bigger and bigger.
I shout “Tā mādebi!” and gun it. For a half second, the bike does not move. The Düsseldorf’s driver lays on the horn, as if I can’t see a few metric tons of steel bearing down on us. Then, in a surge of fuel-induced panic, we shoot forward toward the truck and its sounding horn.
“Turn!” Mimi yells.
“Turn!” Riki-Tiki screams.
When it looks as if we’ll be roadkill, we both swerve, the truck weaving across the lane and my bike sliding into a ditch. We pass with a burst of wind and a dopplering air horn.
I almost wet myself.
“What do you mean,” Mimi says, “almost?”
I rest my head on the handlebars. “Stupid pothole.”
Riki-Tiki squeezes tight against my back. I can feel her hands shaking. “Thank you for not killing us.”
“Yes, that was kind of you,” Mimi says. “Next time, try to stay in your own lane.”
Invisible Sun Page 16
