Bishop’s Road, Tharsis Plain
Zealand Prefecture
ANNOS MARTIS 238. 7. 25. 06:42
By the time a new day rose over the Labyrinth of the Night, I was long gone.
It took us a few hours to get the prisoners back to the collective and into the infirmary. Afterward, I parted ways with the Tengu. They had injured to heal, and it was obvious that their hopes for Vienne was a light that had dimmed. Only Riki-Tiki wanted to continue on with me, and it took Shoei’s sharpest tongue to keep her from leaving. Truthfully, I preferred to go it alone, and after a couple of fitful hours on an infirmary cot, I hit the road without telling anyone I’d left.
The morning sun is a heatless white ghost that casts dim light through the monsoon clouds, and I can smell ozone in the air. The red stone formations lining the highway shoot past, and disintegrating biodomes pass into and out of my peripheral vision. From the corner of my left eye, I can see black-gray smoke in the distance.
My visor is painted with streaks of mud. High winds pound my bike, and the cylinders roar as I hit the gas. The speedometer climbs. Sixty. Seventy. Eighty. Eighty-five.
The Bishop’s Highway cuts the Tharsis Plain in half. Designed as the first major roadway to expand trade past the original colonies, the Bishop was built with four lanes on each side of a median, each with its own speed. For a century on Mars, it was the way to move about if you were in a hurry. Then, when the oceans rose and the valleys greened, settlements moved to more fertile ground, and the Bishop fell into disuse. Unlike the other construction projects built by the Orthocracy, though, the highway is still structurally sound. In most places the lanes are intact, and you can make it all the way from the Labyrinth to Base Camp, where the Founders created the first settlement on Mars. However, if you aren’t careful and if you aren’t lucky, you can find yourself riding across the barren plains on a rough stretch of road full of potholes big enough to swallow your motorbike whole. Oh, and you’ll be low on hydrofuel, hungry, and shivering in the wind because you’re not dressed for the rainy season on the Tharsis Plateau.
“I told you to wear a raincoat,” Mimi says, clearly audible over the roar of the wind. “And to take provisions.”
“I brought food.”
“You brought snacks. How do you expect to track down Vienne on a diet of honey and rice cakes?”
“I survived on CorpCom MREs for months on end. Rice cakes and honey are delicacies in comparison.”
I gun the engine again, struggling to maintain a hold on the left grip. It’s hard enough to drive with a broken arm, but add a missing finger, and it gets downright flummoxing. The pinkie doesn’t seem important until it’s gone.
Funny how Vienne and I are united by a thing that isn’t there. It wasn’t supposed to be that way. We were both supposed to have a Beautiful Death at the Ceremony of Allegiances, not become outcasts.
The ceremony is as old as the Regulators. With the rise of the CorpComs, it has become a ritualized public spectacle that’s telecast on the multinets for the whole world to see. The purpose of the ceremony is to show ultimate allegiance by committing suicide, a life offering to both the Tenets of the Regulator and the individual Regulator’s Lord. According to tradition, a Regulator is bound to his chief, who in turn is bound to his Lord. When the Bishop was alive, the Lord meant the Bishop’s Council Nine, each of whom had his or her own standing army. With the advent of the Orthocracy, the Lord became the head of the Nine Families, and with the CorpComs, the Lord became the CEO of the CorpCom.
Being CEO of Zealand Corporate Command, my father was both my Lord and my father, which meant that when he fell from grace, I and my fellow Regulators fell with him. We had a choice: We could end our lives in the ceremony or we could refuse and enter a life of disgrace as a dalit by cutting off a pinkie finger as a symbolic gesture—a gesture that served as a permanent reminder of our failure and let everyone else know that we are outcasts.
After my father was convicted, they led him out to the courtyard in front of Parliament Tower. There he stood on a wooden platform, hands and legs shackled, as three hundred loyal Regulators stood in line behind a tent. One by one, they walked through darkness for a few meters, then climbed nine steps to a dais, where they knelt on a tatami mat and pulled the cowl from their heads. Before them was a simple box covered with a synsilk cloth. On a signal, a second pulled the cloth aside to reveal a glass vial and a sharp knife. The vial contained poison. All a loyal Regulator had to do was drink the poison, rise to his feet, and climb down the dais. By the time she reached the ground, her life would be over. Attendants would quickly wrap her body in a shroud and carry her away to another tent, where her family would be waiting. Later, they would cremate the remains and celebrate her Beautiful Death. All of this took hours. The morning and afternoon dripped away while Vienne and I waited at the end of the line. It was determined that I should go last, being the son of the failed CEO. But because my father was a criminal, that honor was taken away from me and given to Vienne, who was considered the bravest and fiercest of all the Zealand Regulators.
When it was finally my time, I followed the carpet through the tent to the dais. I climbed the stairs and knelt. With more of a flourish than I expected, the second pulled the cloth aside. I blinked twice. There was no vial. Only the knife. My response was followed by a roar from the crowd, as the cameras were trained on the box and telecast both what I saw and my reaction on the huge monitors above the tents. In unison, the crowd, the second, and I looked to the platform where my father was standing tall. Chin held high. Shoulders back. The meaning was clear. The Ceremony of Allegiances was first and foremost a way of honoring one’s Lord. My Lord did not want me dead. He wanted me alive—and disgraced. What could I do? I stared at the knife, then at my father. I snatched the knife, slapped my hand on the mat before me and severed my finger at the second joint. I stood and held the bloody hand aloft, ashamed and defiant at the same time, as the attendants rushed me down the steps and quickly set about the business of tourniqueting the wound. The crowd was still buzzing when Vienne took her place on the mat and waited for the second to reveal the vial and the knife in the box, then calmly repeated my action.
“Why?” I asked, my head light from the loss of blood and endorphins.
“You are my crew and my chief,” she said. “My loyalty is first to you. If you are dalit, then I must be dalit, too.”
I must be dalit, too. The words still ring in my ears. Vienne’s sacrifice brought us together, and yet every time I look at her missing finger, I feel guilt vibrating like a death knell inside. Yes, that sacrifice brought us together, but does it also keep us apart?
“I have taken the liberty of checking my database for maps while you were wallowing in ironic self-loathing,” Mimi says, interrupting my train of thought. “Four kilometers ahead, there is an off-ramp that connects to Highway one-seventeen. Two kilometers north from there, you will find a roadhouse.”
“You’re giving me directions like I’m some kind of wanker,” I say. “What’re you trying to tell me?”
“You are suffering from exhaustion and your blood glucose levels are precariously low,” Mimi says. “So in effect, I am telling you to pull over and get something to eat. Note that I did not call you a wanker, even though there is enough relevant data to draw that conclusion.”
“Okay, Mom! Geez. Can’t I be single-minded once in a while?”
“You have an AI flash-cloned to your brain. Your days of single-mindedness are long gone.”
“Touché.” I slow down to avoid the wreck of a school bus left to gather rust in the open. “How do you know that roadhouse is still open?”
“I do not know if it is,” she says. “But it is the only establishment within forty kilometers on this map, so it is worth the chance.”
“In other words, you’re acting on blind faith.”
“No, acting on the only information available and hoping that it is still accurate,” she says. “Hope, unlike love, is never blind.”
After hours of nothing but road, my motorbike, and the never-ending horizon, I started feeling something gnawing in my gut. It’s just hunger, I tell myself, and for almost a hundred kilometers, I believe the lie. When my appetite kicks in, along with it comes the realization that the pangs are from loneliness. For years Vienne and I fought side by side, starting out as crew and ending up as . . . something. Without her, I feel exposed, my back unprotected.
There’s an adage on Mars: A man will drink himself to death before he starves. There’s some truth to that, so it’s not really a surprise to me that the roadhouse is still open for business. Like almost every other building in this territory, the roadhouse is a rectangle made of shipping containers welded together. It is separated from a village by a low fence made of scavenged wire. The roof is a quilt work of metal sheets laid over a latticed work of rebar posts, and with the wind blowing, a few of the sheets rise and fall like loose flaps of skin.
“Water,” I tell the proprietor as I take a seat. When he pops a bottle of carbonated water on the counter, I ask, “Got anything without bubbles?”
“Only that which would poison you,” he says.
“I’ll take the bubbles.”
I empty the bottle. The carbonation eats at my throat, burning like the grief that’s dissolving my insides. I can’t get the image of Vienne on that video feed out of my mind. I hate the way the Sturmnacht stared and laughed at her, the way her eyes were ashed over like a charcoal fire. Is that the last image I’m going to have of her?
“Anything to eat?” the proprietor asks. “The cook just fried up a mess of hot beignets, and they sure are good.”
“Cowboy, you need to eat.”
“Ha. You just want beignets because they trigger the endorphin centers of my brain.”
“It is a gift.”
“What is?”
“Your ability to state the obvious.”
While I’m eating the beignets for Mimi, I scan the other patrons of the roadhouse. Three jacks in coveralls sit near the other hearth. Next to them, an old man and woman argue, their table full of empty bottles. Then I notice a familiar face, one that I last saw right before he and his buddy threw me into a canyon.
Franks is sitting at the bar, a cigar cupped in his hand. A waitress passes by him with a tray of food on her shoulder. She stops cold and blushes. Laughing, Franks stands up like he’s going to leave the bar, then, as the waitress is turning away, taps the ash from his cigar into a bowl of amino grits.
“Watch my plate,” Franks growls as he slides off his stool. “I got to take a whiz.”
He heads for the latrine. After giving him a thirty- second head start, I follow him. I wait outside the latrine until a clanging sound tells me that Franks is in a stall. Then I slip inside, holding the door so it won’t make noise, and find a place to hide. The wretched smell reminds me of New Savannah, the old city in the south where we used to do mercenary work.
The sound of Franks’s coughing fit brings me back to reality.
“Hello?” he says after the fit ends. He’s on a wireless call. I take the chance to park myself atop a toilet tank, where the acoustics are better.
“No, we ain’t found him yet. Thought you was too busy starting his fires to bother with us. You’ve done burnt down half the territory. We can see the smoke twenty kilometers away.”
“Mimi,” I ask. “Can you intercept the wireless signal? I want to hear both sides of the conversation.”
“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.
The kick from the shotgun drops Franks on his back. He looks up, dazed, as I wrench the weapon away and fling it onto the roof.
“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!”