Black Hole Sun

by David Macinnis Gill

  “My god,” Vienne says. “What kind of devil are you?”

  “The human kind,” she says. “Surprise! My turn.”

  The gun is small, and the plasma ball is only the size of a marble. But it’s still white hot, and when Vienne dodges the shot, it sears the tanks behind her. “Damn!” Vienne roars, and drops to the ground, dragging her foot.

  “I missed?” the queen says, inspecting the plasma gun. “These things are so unreliable.”

  I take two steps toward Vienne before the chigoe tank begins to make a high-pitched sound. Cracks spread across the glass, and in the next breath, the tank bursts. A cubic ton of nutrient bath pours out on Vienne, sweeping her across the floor.

  “Chief!” she calls, and reaches out, the slimy liquid covering her body.

  “Hang on!” I yell, and try to crawl toward her.

  Then I freeze—the chigoes! They’re free!

  Cào n zzng shíb dài!

  Dozens and dozens of drones skitter from the broken tanks, their legs clacking, mandibles working, as they pile atop one another, chittering and confused. A few reach Vienne, but they skitter away quickly, repulsed by her warm flesh.

  I dive across the floor. Grab Vienne and try to get us both to our feet, but my boots only slip on the floor.

  “Shoot her!” Vienne yells.

  I pull her close. “It won’t do any good.”

  “Try!” Her face goes white. Her teeth chatter. “I’m c-cold.”

  “Mimi? What’s happening?”

  “She’s going into shock again, cowboy.”

  “What’s the matter, Jake? Can’t get up?” Eceni holds the chigoe queen above her head. Looks at Vienne. “Tell me where the Big Daddies are, or I’ll smash your little honey’s skull to pieces.”

  “What’s so important,” I ask as I try to shift my weight to shield Vienne, “about being queen of Mars? It’s a crappy planet, as planets go. You remember Earth, right? That’s a planet worth being queen of.”

  “Oh, shut up,” she says. “I know what you’re doing. Distract and delay. So predictable. That’s why you’re a terrible leader. Everything by the Tenets. Too bad for you, I read the book. Memorized it, in fact.”

  Keep talking, I tell myself. Get closer to her. “What happened to you, Eceni? Top of the class. Destined for a generalship, maybe even CEO one day. The best of the best of us. Now, you’re chopping people up and talking world domination.”

  “Not the girl you loved, right?”

  “Don’t flatter yourself.” I move away from Vienne. Inch closer to Eceni. And I know that what I felt for Eceni wasn’t even close to love.

  “Tell that to the CorpComs, Jake. They were the ones who did this to me. Secret Operation MUSE.”

  The chigoes’ distress keening gets louder and more high-pitched. The noise grows in my ears, and I shake my head.

  “They say ninety-nine of our best of the best. You’ll be the new Paladins, God’s warriors. We’ll just take some of the nanosyms from your suits and inject them into your bloodstream. Add a little gene manipulation, and voila! Instant regeneration. A soldier who can’t be killed. Except they didn’t count on the side effects. Want to know about the side effects, Chief Durango Jake Jacob Stringfellow?”

  My god, I think. What did they do to you? What did they do to me? “Tell me.”

  “Brain lesions to start. Psychotic breaks. Fugues. Self-mutilation. Insatiable hunger. And then, madness. Only one subject was deemed a success—me.”

  “And the others?”

  “You call them the Draeu.”

  “What?” It can’t be. My father helped make the Draeu? No. The madness, the rage, the cannibalism, the way they seemed to come in waves, even when so many had been killed. I bury my head in my hands. Dear God, Father, how could you?

  “You know what else?” she says, her eyes flashing. “The CEO who ordered this little experiment? Oh Jake. I can tell by the look on your face, you already know his name.”

  Yes, I do. “My father.”

  “Ding, ding. You win the prize. And I am a prize, aren’t I?”

  “Eceni, I want to help you—”

  “So you see, Mars remade me this way,” Eceni says. “It seems fair that I get to remake Mars the way I see fit. Now, for the last time, give me the Big Daddies.”

  I can do it. I can tell her that the chigoe are native to Mars, that they will reproduce. That the Big Daddies can be remade using their DNA. Or I can find a way to set them loose so that she can’t lay her hands on them, ever again. But what if they run wild? What if Maeve is right that they have enough intelligence to become a threat? Jacob Stringfellow, the man who started the chigoe plague.

  Just like my father.

  You are less the man I thought you were. I’m damned if I do. It is the thinnest lines that define us. The miners are damned if I don’t. I am less the Regulator for serving under you. The miners hired me to protect them from the Draeu. I gave them my word. Made a vow. I will keep my word. As a Regulator. As a man.

  “Joke’s on you,” I say. “There aren’t any Big Daddies left, and these chigoe are as big as they’ll ever get.”

  “Liar!” Eceni screams, and raises the chigoe queen high over her head.

  Now! I fling the knife.

  Eceni swings the queen into the blade’s path. The razored tip plunges into the soft, fleshy covering of the shell, sinking a few centimeters deep. The chigoe screams, a sound like grinding metal, and wraps itself around Eceni’s face. It rips the flesh open with its ridged legs and then, from a set of glands on her belly, douses Eceni’s body with rancid purple mucus.

  I know that smell—the same scent pheromones once used to guide the Big Daddies to dig.

  And kill.

  Eceni throws the queen across the chamber. “Look at me! Look at this, this—”

  The drones roar in unison. The sound is so loud, I clap both hands over my ears and bend low to the ground as the other tanks shatter, glass flying, nutrient bath exploding like a ruptured dam. Diving across the floor, I grab Vienne and hang on as we’re swept against the wall.

  Hundreds of drones erupt from the tanks, a wall of screaming chigoes climbing over each other to get to their queen. They swarm Eceni, who is still clawing at the mucus on her face. They pour up her body, legs and shells clacking, oozing, oozing, oozing, dissolving her flesh the same way they can dissolve stone.

  Within seconds, she is jelly. I catch a flash of her bare skull before the tower of drones topples.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I say to Vienne, though she can’t hear me. I grab her hand. “Before they decide to eat us, too.”

  Using the rack of a fallen tank for leverage, I push my way across the chamber, carefully dragging Vienne behind me. I find a dry patch where I can stand, then gently pull her out of the nutrient bath, thankful that the liquid is drying quickly.

  I lift her into my arms. Carry her out. Behind me, the chigoe drones make a humming sound, the noise of contentment. As if they’ve finished enjoying a good meal. I set Vienne down on the ground and begin checking her vitals. Her boot is soaked with blood, and she’s freezing. I pull her close, trying to warm her.

  “Mimi, how is—”

  “Still in mild shock but stable. You need to get her to the infirmary.”

  “Can you tell the armor to heat up her body or something? She—”

  Then I hear a chattering noise that makes my blood turn cold—the unmistakable sound of claws on stone. I’m frozen with fear, my brain seizing up from panic. My feet kick at the ground, trying to move my body away, but it’s like being in the beanstalk elevator again—I can’t move.

  The chigoe queen slips out of the antechamber. She’s followed by the mass drones, and slowly, excruciatingly, they surround us.

  “You’re having a panic attack. Breathe, cowboy!” Mimi implores me, but it’s no use. I can’t.

  They click their mandibles in unison. But they don’t scream. The queen scuttles forward so that she’s standing at my
feet. The knife that I threw is still embedded in her shell, and she raises herself on all eight legs, so that she reaches my knee.

  She inclines her shell, and I reach down to pull the knife out. The queen chatters. She sinks low to the ground, and all around the circle, the other chigoes do the same.

  Not knowing what else to do, I touch my two middle fingers to my forehead and bow. They hum with delight, and the queen scuttles away, the drones following her in single file as they disappear into a dark tunnel.

  Exhausted, I fall back on the ground, panting to catch my breath. I’m still shaking.

  “Mimi,” I ask. “Was this the right thing to do?”

  “Right or wrong, you have no choice now,” she says. “But if we’re making moral judgments, then yes, you did the right thing.”

  “I didn’t know you were programmed for moral judgments,” I say, lifting Vienne into my arms.

  “I wasn’t,” she says. “But I am capable of adaptive self-programming. Just like you.”

  “Thanks,” I say because I can’t think of anything else, and what would be the point? She can already read my mind and knows what lives within my heart.

  CHAPTER ∞

  Near Outpost Tharsis Two, Tharsis Plain

  ANNOS MARTIS 238. 7. 13. 11:59

  The road ahead unwinds like a coil of wire toward Olympus Mons and its cousins, a family of volcanoes thousands of kilometers from Hell’s Cross. As the sign for a petrol station rises into view, I cut the power on the snowmobile and drift into one of the pumping islands. All the station’s signs are written in the bishop’s Latin, with prices crossed out. In front and behind us is a pock-marked landscape formed by volcanic lava flow. The sky is dark, the clouds low, swift, and angry, and I wonder if this was what the Earthers saw when they first settled the planet.

  My snowmobile, like me, is caked with dust, and when Vienne slides off the seat and beats the soil out of her miners coveralls, the stiff wind makes us look like a rolling dirt devil. She unstraps her helmet and shakes out her hair.

  “You ought to keep that on,” I say. “Might be bounty hunters hereabouts, and there’s a price on your pretty head, after all.”

  “If there are bounty hunters in this godforsaken wilderness, they should worry about me, not the other way around.” She walks past the station clerk, a swaybacked old woman dressed in a tattered blue CorpCom jumpsuit.

  “Mimi?”

  “I read only three biosignatures, cowboy.”

  Silently, I nod. That’s what I thought. It’s better to be safe, though, when you’re a wanted man.

  “This way to the latrine?” Vienne says, too loudly. It seems innocent enough. In reality, she’s sizing the woman up, a hand near the armalite she has strapped underneath her jacket. Despite what she says, the bounty on our heads—a gift from Dame Bramimonde, who swore charges of murder against us—makes her cautious.

  The clerk nods. “You’re a long way from home, miner.”

  Vienne barely glances at the woman as she passes.

  “Pumps need to be hand-cranked, mud puppy.” The old woman pushes me aside and starts pumping the fuel into the tank. “Won’t nothing electronic work out here. Satellites and dust see to that. Hope you got coin on—oh.” She sees that my hand is missing a finger.

  I’m thankful to have both the miners’ payment and the missing half of the Dame’s fee, which the miners decided the Dame owed me and lifted from her purse before she left. Of course, it only inspired the Dame to add grand theft to her charges against us.

  I hand her coin in payment and display my hand like it’s nothing to be ashamed of. “Lost it to a Manchester when I was a kid. Thanks for the help with the pump.”

  “Funny things, them Manchesters. Most times, they take off a man’s whole arm. Never seen a snowmobile with wheels before.”

  “It’s a custom job.” Spiner did it for us when we left Fisher Four. It was a going-away gift from the miners and Fuse and Jenkins, who decided to remain at Hell’s Cross and leave military service behind. Though I couldn’t blame them for staying, we miss their company. Well, I do. Can’t say the same for Vienne.

  “Where you two headed?”

  “Outpost Tharsis Two. Know it?”

  Fuel spills out of the tank. The clerk curses and shuts off the pump.

  “I’ll take that as a yes.”

  “You got a death wish, son? Most of Tharsis Two is controlled by Mr. Lyme’s men, and what ain’t is full of angry spirits.”

  I know all about Mr. Lyme. It’s the reason I’m looking for the outpost. “What do you mean, angry spirits?”

  The old woman lowers her voice. “Men killed by unseen forces. Meat stripped clear down to the bones. Folk used to say it was the Draeu, but they ain’t been in these parts for half a year. And the Draeu always left marks, if you know what I mean.”

  “That I do.” I think of the rumors we’ve heard the past couple of weeks as we’ve traveled north from the mines—unexplained deaths, usually blamed on the Draeu or other boogeymen. The possibility that it might be the chigoe turns my stomach. “Still, that’s where the work is. Tharsis Two.”

  “Hope you’re getting paid a fair wage, then,” she says.

  While she’s cleaning up the last of the spill, Vienne returns. She slides onto the seat behind me and lets her head, for a moment, rest on my back.

  “All set?” I ask her.

  “Affirmative,” she says, and I can almost hear her smile. “All systems copacetic.”

  The old woman grabs my forearm. “If I can’t change your mind, then may god let your death be a beautiful one.” She holds up a hand. The pinkie is missing. She makes the sign of the Regulator and bows. “One eye. One hand.”

  “One heart,” Vienne says as she puts on her helmet.

  “We’re not Regulators,” I say. “Not anymore.”

  “Once a Regulator, always a Regulator, son.” She shakes her head. “Watch yourselves out there. Watch the road, too. There’s a fresh hell of trouble waiting at the end of it.”

  “That’s funny.” I gun the engine. “There was hell at the beginning of it, too.”

  With a nod to the old woman, I point the snowmobile toward the towering image of Olympus Mons, which is now my guiding star. As we accelerate, the foothills streak by, a vast volcanic plain filling up our horizon.

  “‘Boundless and bare,” Mimi says, “the lone and level sands stretch far away.’”

  “Wordsworth?”

  “Shelley,” she says. “I’ve told you that a thousand times.”

  “One hundred seventeen times, to be precise,” I say, flipping down my visor and leaning over the handlebars. “But who’s counting?”

  Acknowledgments

  Many heartfelt thanks to those folks who read and critiqued the early drafts of Black Hole Sun: Patti Holden, Denise Ousley, Steve Exum, Julie Prince, Shannon Caster, Lindsay Eland, Lauren Whitney, and Jean Reidy.

  To all the bookmakers at Greenwillow: Martha, Tim, Paul, Michelle, Barbara, Lois, Steve, Sylvie, and Virginia. And to Emilie, Laura, and Patty in HarperCollins Children’s school and library marketing.

  To my fabulous agent, Rosemary Stimola.

  Finally, to Deb, Justin, Caroline, and Delaney, for not letting me get the big head.

  About the Author

  DAVID MACINNIS GILL is a former high school teacher, and he lives on the North Carolina coast with his wife and children. In a starred review, Kirkus called his novel Soul Enchilada an “action-packed power-punch of a debut.”

  www.davidmacinnisgill.com

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

  Credits

  Jacket design by Paul Zakris

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used to advance the fictional narrative. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue,
are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.

  BLACK HOLE SUN. Copyright © 2010 by David Macinnis Gill. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Gill, David Macinnis, (date).

  Black hole sun / by David Macinnis Gill.

  p. cm.

  “Greenwillow Books.”

  Summary: On the planet Mars, sixteen-year-old Durango and his crew of mercenaries are hired by the settlers of a mining community to protect their most valuable resource from a feral band of marauders.

  ISBN 978-0-06-167304-7 (trade bdg.)—ISBN 978-0-06-167305-4 (lib. bdg.)

  [1. Mars (Planet)—Fiction. 2. Science fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.G39854Bl 2010 [Fic]—dc22 2009023050

  FIRST EDITION

  EPub Edition © July 2010 ISBN: 978-0-06-199833-1

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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