CHAPTER 32
Hell’s Cross, Outpost Fisher Four
ANNOS MARTIS 238. 4. 0. 00:00
The funeral for a fallen Regulator begins with the building of a small structure, the House of Mourning. It is constructed of wood, if available. If not—and it almost never is, unless the Regulator is from wealth, because wood is one of the most precious commodities on Mars—then any flammable material will do.
A House of Mourning is one meter longer than the Regulator it will hold. Two meters wider. Three meters taller. The roof is angled at forty-five degrees. The peaks at either end are marked with a round seal. One seal represents the family of the mother. The second, the family of the father. These dimensions are in the Tenets, along with the rule that a fallen Regulator whose body is lost in battle must receive the same funeral as any other.
The seals on Ockham’s house are a lion and a star, carved by Spiner from the same wood used to build the rest of house. The lion, from his mother, represents the fierce hunter. The star, from his father, represents the capacity of imagination. When I see the house, I know that Ockham was his mother’s son.
Spiner, Jurm, and the other miners salvaged the wood from the old temple. They built it on the far side of the Zhao Zhou Bridge, across which we are carrying an effigy of Ockham on a simple bier. A linen shroud covers the bier. Maeve made the shroud herself, taken from a piece of tablecloth she smuggled on the journey from Old Boston. If we had it, his symbiarmor would be folded and placed under his head. His armalite would rest on his chest. Both of these are lost, like him.
Fuse, Jenkins, Jean-Paul, and I carry the bier. Vienne, on crutches, follows behind. Spiner walks beside her, and the miners trail after them. As we approach the house, Vienne swings open the doors of the building. We slide the bier onto a pyre made of fuel drums, then step outside. As chief, it is my duty to close the doors and seal them.
“Peace be with you, Regulator,” I say, my palms pressed together as I bow low.
“Peace be with you at last,” everyone responds. Like me, they press their palms together and bow.
“Peace be with you all,” Vienne says, a mourning shawl draped over her head and shoulders. She bows, then, standing on one foot, spreads her arms wide, a gesture that symbolizes the rising of the soul.
“Fire,” I say.
The miners move in. With hand torches, they set the House of Mourning ablaze. The flames catch quickly. The wood is old. Within a minute, the fuel barrels ignite, and a thick, hot fire consumes the house. I don’t know how long it will burn, but when it finishes, Ockham as we knew him will be no more. His beautiful death will carry him to Valhalla where he will live forever among the heroes. That is my hope for him, to have the afterlife he imagined.
“Vienne,” I say as we begin leaving.
She passes me without a word and without eye contact. I suppose I deserve it. Deserving it doesn’t ease the sting. As we process across the bridge to the Cross, the House of Mourning turning to ash behind us, my legs feel like lead. Exhaustion has hit, and the only thing I want is a warm bed. The cot in the bunk room is all I’m going to get, and it will have to do.
In the dream, I am floating. I see myself sitting in front of the console that controls a beanstalk space elevator. I hear my thoughts: They say I drew this crap assignment because of my education. But I know the truth. Mimi thinks I’m a useless rich boy and stuck me here to make a point—she’s the chief and I’m a boot straight out of battle school.
I yawn. It’s the eighty-ninth yawn of my shift. I’m counting. There is nothing else to do but watch the loaded space elevator shoot into the atmosphere, then drift back down to the supply pad. Load. Unload. Repeat. Until a diode blinks on the multivid. Finally, some action. I tap the image with the fingertip of my nanoglove. A hologram of my chief pops up.
“Durango,” Mimi says, “we’ve lost containment on a Big Daddy in Tunnel Two-E. The drone harness shorts out. It’s tearing the place to pieces.”
I hear screams over the audio feed. Mimi ducks, and the body of a technician flies over her head. “I’ve got nothing on my boards,” I say.
“Tell that to the Big Daddy, cowboy.”
“Uh, yes. I would but—”
“Shut your gob and convey these orders to the davos via the multivid. Clear the area. Establish a perimeter at ten clicks. Set up four EMPs in a square pattern. Order my Regulators not to engage the Big Daddy for any reason.”
“Yes, chief! Will do!” I tap her image away. Hail the five other members of our davos—Squirt, Switch, Decker, Pike, and Vienne—and pass on Mimi’s orders. “Chief says, do not engage the Big Daddy. For any reason.”
“Roger that,” Vienne, Mimi’s second, responds.
Then I hit three buttons in rapid succession. Images of Tunnel Two pop up. One shows the high caverns that contain the holding pens for the Big Daddies. The second shows the catwalks above the tunnel, patrolled by handlers armed with electrostatic prods. The third is Tunnel Two-E. It’s filled with wounded shock troops and the marauding Big Daddy.
That’s where the action is. Where I want to be. Not stuck playing messenger boy. I keep my eyes trained on the Two-E feed. Watch Mimi take cover behind a shipping container. She shouts at the troopers, “Fall back! Fall back!”
But the Big Daddy blocks them with its massive carapace, a shell so thick mortar rounds won’t pierce it. The troopers can’t fall back, and their needle cannons are useless against the bioengineered chigoe. I lean close to the screen, my heart racing, as the Big Daddy snatches a trooper with its mandibles. With one easy snick, it splits the man in two. Then I see the Big Daddy starting to spin. “Chief!” I yell into the headset. “Behind you! Behind you!”
“Say again?” she yells back as the chigoe sprays thick liquid across the mass of the shock troopers. Including Mimi who is moving to the fatally injured man. The troopers fall screaming. Her symbiarmor seems to protect Mimi. But then she turns to face the multivid.
Half of her face is missing. “Chief!”
Mimi mouths a silent word. Reaches toward the camera. The feed from Tunnel Two-E pixilates. Then fails.
“Vienne!” I yell, watching our davos reach the tunnel. “Chief is down! Repeat, chief is down! I’m coming to you.”
“No,” Vienne says, “stay at your station. We can handle this, boot.”
I tap on the headpiece, causing the signal to break up. “Can’t hear you. I’m losing the feed.” Then I throw off the headset. Grab my armalite. Sprint down the stairs to a power sled that takes me to the tunnel. When I arrive, I push through a legion of shock troopers taking position in the main entrance. Inside, the Big Daddy is still raging. I try to hail Vienne.
No answer.
They’re all dead. I find their bodies strewn around. Mangled by the Big Daddy that attacked them.
But I keep moving. The Big Daddy drifts to the rear of the tunnel. I take cover behind another shipping container.
“What should I do?” I yell to no one. “Chief? Vienne? Anybody? What should I do?”
“Help me,” the chief answers. Her voice, a hoarse whisper.
“Chief!” I find Mimi half buried in debris. What’s left of her face is a twisted knot. My stomach almost chunders as I bend down to lift her. “I’ll get you out of here, chief.”
“No,” she rasps, her misshapen mouth barely able to form the words. “Save others first.”
“I can’t. You’re my chief.”
“Do…it! I…order!”
“Yes, chief.”
Turning my back on her, I pull Vienne out of the rubble. A streak of the chigoe’s secretions runs from up her back, the armor melted away. The skin is bubbling there, and I am afraid the caustic chemical will burn to the bone. As quickly as I can manage, I carry her to the medics at the entrance of the tunnel.
“Take care of her,” I say as I pass her off.
But duty returns me to Mimi. Again, I bend down. “Chief?”
“Others?” she says.
“Vienne made it,” I say.
As the Big Daddy rampages, slamming its massive shell into the walls of the tunnels, which chokes the air with dust, I slide an arm under her knees. Cradle her to my chest. Though the pain should be excruciating, she makes no noise. My heart sinks. No pain means no nerve endings left. “Hang on, chief.”
“Call me Mimi.”
“Mimi, hang on.”
She snatches at my chest with the claw of a hand. “Don’t let…die, cowboy. This…not…beautiful death.” With a shudder, she lets go of a last, rustling breath, and she dies in my arms. Then the tunnel goes suddenly silent, and I don’t have the wherewithal to notice.
As I stand, I see an enormous shadow rise over me. There’s a hissing sound. Something wet hits the cowl covering the back of my head. The air stinks of battery acid, and I heard a pop. My symbiarmor discharges a jolt of static electricity. My limbs go rigid.
The symbiarmor has shorted out. I am frozen. Unable to move. A mummy trapped in its sarcophagus. A dead man. As I struggle against my own armor, the searing pain of the chigoe’s secretions burns through the disabled fabric. I scream as shock troopers pour into the tunnel. They aim their needle cannons and plasma blasters at the Big Daddy, driving it back long enough to set up a light-mass grenade launcher. Everything goes black.
Now a burst of static electricity jolts me awake. Mimi shouts in my head, “Wake up! The Dame went off the grid. I have lost her signature.”
I drop to the floor, my symbiarmor absorbing some of the impact. I pull on my boots and buckle on my holster. “Why didn’t you wake me up?” I slide open the door and jog down the hallway to the main door.
“I attempted to wake you for ten minutes. That was the third charge of static. Be thankful you were still in your armor.”
“Open a vid link. Regulators! Form ranks at the cross in one minute. Jenkins! Jenkins! Stop snoring!” I close the link and run to the Cross. There, the remnants of the bonfire are emitting smoke and ash. A few miners lay sleeping around it. “Mimi, how long’s the Dame been out of range?”
“Five minutes. Her last bearing was west-northwest from this point.”
The direction gives us a place to start to looking, but in a mine, there’s no way to tell where she is. She could be on the surface or in one of a thousand chigoe holes.
“Cowboy,” Mimi says, “I have lost Jean-Paul’s signature as well.”
Damn it. “You were still tracking him, too?”
“You never told me to stop.”
“Point taken,” I say. “What was his last bearing?”
“West-northwest.”
The same as his mother’s. “He’s going after her.”
“So it appears.”
“The first time I laid eyes on that kid, I knew he was trouble.” I flex my hands—I’m going to throttle the boy.
A few seconds later my davos appears—Fuse coming from the tunnels, Ebi from quarters, and Jenkins from the miners’ quarters, looking blurry-eyed and dragging the chain gun behind him.
Vienne is last to report, her foot in an air cast, using a pair of crutches. Even wounded, she carries herself effortlessly.
“You need to be resting,” I tell her.
In response, she pulls off the cast and tosses the crutch aside. She pulls on her boot, which was tucked under an arm. “I’ll rest when I’m dead.”
I start to argue when Mimi interrupts. “Sensor readings suggest that she’s using painkillers.”
“Are they working?”
“I just provide information, cowboy. You get to make the decisions.”
It would be easier to pin a diaper on Jenkins than tell Vienne she can’t fight. And my plan depends on her.
“Regulators,” I greet them when they’re at attention. “We have a situation. Dame Bramimonde has left Fisher Four.”
“Mother!” Ebi says, and Vienne cuts her a look.
“I’m tempted to let the Dr?u have her, but it looks like Jean-Paul’s followed her. As much as I’d like to throttle his skinny little neck, he’s still an acolyte, which makes him one of us. Maybe.”
“Mother, how could you!” Ebi says, bowing her head quickly, an odd ring to her voice. “Chief, I am humiliated by her actions. I swear to—”
“Later,” I say, because I’m not buying it. “There’s a job to be done. Here’s the plan. Vienne and Ebi, follow the main tunnel out, then head northwest along this bearing for one half click. Scout for a trail, but don’t go beyond a half click, got it?”
“Go.” I turn to Fuse and Jenkins. “You two, same distance, but take a heading of fifteen degrees to the north. Stay on the main tunnels. No side trips, no chigoe holes. If you run into any trouble, signal me.”
“This could be an ambush, chief,” Fuse says.
“Keep your eyes and ears open, Fuse. That’s exactly what it could be.” Or it could be an evil old crone doing the worst possible thing at the worst possible moment.
“Yes, chief,” Fuse says. “Come on, Jenkins. And stop dragging that chain gun. The squealing noise is killing me.”
“Mimi,” I say when they’re across the Zhao Zhou Bridge. “Monitor all their signatures. I need to know the second anybody’s out of range.”
I open a private vid link to Vienne. “Let me know if anything odd happens.”
“Yes, chief.”
“I mean it, Vienne. Keep an eye on everybody. Trust no one. Not even me.”