Shadow on the Sun (20 page)

CHAPTER 38

The Hive

Olympus Mons

ANNOS MARTIS
239. 2. 19. 03:56

 

 

Two floors below the Nursery sits the Hive's Situation Room. Protected by five meters of reinforced concrete, the Situation Room is divided into three separate areas: a public meeting room, quarters for the staff, and, set apart by steel doors and armed guards, Lyme's private military War Room.

In the War Room, multinets line the walls from floor to ceiling, each screen devoted to monitoring the progress of Sturmnacht forces in each of the six prefectures now under Lyme's control. From here, he can monitor all troop movements, all new offensives, and all battle outcomes against MahindraCorp. And if he chooses, he can have Dolly rewind the feeds and watch them all, over and over again.

“Dolly,” Lyme says as he paces back and forth in front of the screens, “replay the video feed of Alpha Team's assault on Mahindra Palace.”

“Affirmative, General,” she says.

 

> Video update > Operation Pink Slip

 

The screen cuts to the team in action, then Alpha Team's attack on the control room, followed by the three missiles launching. The next shot is from aerial reconnaissance, showing a ballistic missile tracking over the countryside, then homing in on Elysia Palace's onion-shaped dome.

 

> Operation Pink Slip . . . successful.

 

Lyme applauds as Lieutenant Riacin enters the War Room behind him. “I never get tired of seeing that.”

“Nor I, sir,” Riacin says. “It was a devastating blow to Mahindra.”

“Have you ever heard of a badger, Riacin?” Lyme asks.

“A what, sir?”

“Badger. Earth animal.
Taxidea taxus
. Famous for its hinged jaw, wretched disposition, and ability to burrow when threatened. Pulling an angry, entrenched badger from its hole was considered a blood sport in ancient times.”

“Ah, I understand,” Riacin says. “How did one survive this badger baiting?”

“The key was not to go after the badger, but to convince that badger to come after you.”

“Thus abandoning his hole.” Riacin nods. “Would you like me to patch you into a comlink with Mahindra?”

“Ah, Riacin, you know me too well.” Lyme coughs. “I suspect that Mahindra is unavailable on normal protocols, so we will have to be creative. Dolly?”

The main multinet screen flickers. Dolly's face appears. “At your command, sir.”

“I would very much like to speak with General Mahindra,” Lyme says. “See if you can locate her for me, please.”

“To do so, I would need to redirect resources to external multinet feeds. May I have your permission to breach the firewall protocols? Doing so will make my systems vulnerable.”

“Permission granted.”

“Affirmative. Firewalls breached. Algorithmic search strings initiated. Subject located,” she says. “Security overrides complete. Establishing a comlink in three . . . two . . . one.”

Dolly's image is replaced with Mahindra's surprised face. “Expect its delivery by—what the hell? Stringfellow! How did you break into my feed?”

“Dear Mahindra,” Lyme says, “there is no feed I cannot hack, no palace that I cannot destroy, no hole that I can't dig out to reach you.”

“You insolent twit.”

“I do not blame you for being angry,” Lyme says, chuckling. “If someone had stolen my Crucible guidance system and then destroyed my family's heritage, I would want to crush him, too.”

“What do you want?” Mahindra says. “I have no time for games, Stringfellow.”

“Your surrender. Unconditionally. No terms. Clemency for your allies, but your officers will face a firing squad, and you will hang in public.”

“My surrender? Are you insane?” Mahindra says. “You are in no position to demand that.”

“Oh, I think I am,” Lyme says. “Since I command the most powerful weapon this planet has known.”

“If you command it,” Mahindra says, “why haven't you used it?”

Lyme winces. “You fashion yourself a woman of the people, Mahindra. I offer you a chance to spare the people in return for your own life.”

“I'm going to tell you the same thing I should have told you nineteen years ago,” she says.
“Jaa apni bajaa!”

“Spare me the profanity,” he says. “My soldiers destroyed your steel and concrete castle—what do you think they'll do to a soft woman like you?”

“Your soldiers?” Mahindra says. “You mean these?” She steps aside to reveal a viewing screen. On it, Alpha Team is gathering at a space elevator. Alpha One, call sign Sarge, steps into the elevator's drop tube. As he falls, his body hits a laser detection switch, and a few seconds later, the platform convulses with an explosion. The elevator blows into a million pieces.

Except for Sarge, Alpha Team is dead.

“Who is soft now?” Mahindra makes a slashing motion across the throat, and her feed is broken.

“No!” Lyme yells. He turns to Riacin and screams. “Extract Alpha One! Bring him back to base! Now!”

CHAPTER 39

Outpost Fisher Four

West Approach

ANNOS MARTIS
239. 2. 19. 03:58

 

 

The furnaces of Fisher Four are no longer cold. The smokestacks tower into the sky, cone-shaped monoliths that belch foul-smelling black and tan smoke into the air. As Vienne, Jenkins, and the Koumanovs ride through a mountain, the smoke blocks out the whole of the valley that flows into the mines. The air gags them, both with its stink and with its thickness.

It's night when they stop on a ridge overlooking Fisher Four. As Nikolai and Yakov study the electrostat maps, Vienne ties a scarf over her mouth. It isn't much protection, but it's better than nothing. From here she can see the heat ripples rising from the fiery maws of massive blast ovens. Behind the furnaces, Manchester mine vehicles stop at a wide sluice gate and dump guanite into hoppers three stories high.

“It wasn't like this when I left,” Jenkins says, his turbo bike parked next to Vienne's borrowed Gorgon. “The ovens weren't going.” He points to the Manchesters. “Them machines was still parked out behind the tipple. Somebody's started them up again.”

“Somebody's started the whole mine up again.” Vienne follows the track of Manchesters across the ridge. There's no sign of any laborers.

“Hey,” Jenkins says, a little quiver in his voice. “Do you figure Fuse might be one of them we've been hired to rescue?”

Vienne had thought of that possibility herself. “Is that going to be a problem if he is?”

Jenkins spits on the frozen ground. His sputum is full of guanite ash. “Domesticated or not, Fuse is my cobber, right? Ain't enough thuggish Sturmnacht on this planet to stop me from setting him free.”

Vienne gives his chunky shoulder a shove. “A poxer could do worse than have you as a friend, Jenkins.”

“Really?” he says. “Like who?”

“Who what?”

“Who could be a worse friend?”

“It's a figure of speech, Jenkins.” Vienne shakes her head. It's useless to explain it to him. “Know what? Never mind. Let's see what Koumanov's up to.”

Nikolai whistles and points down the hill. He starts slowly down the rocky path, and the others follow. Vienne brings up the rear, keeping an eye on Nikolai. Something has been off. It's nothing huge, just little things like conversations that change when she's within earshot or a quick look away when she makes eye contact. Even the annoying little squink Pushkin has shut his yap.

A few minutes later, the crew reaches the road and cuts across it to an access trail. At last, they pull up to the electrified security fence surrounding the outpost. The air is thick with the odor of sulfur, and they hide their bikes in the brush and move out on foot.

“Fan out,” Nikolai tells them in a low voice. “Report back in ten minutes.”

Jenkins follows the brothers.

Vienne lags behind. “What are we looking for here?” she asks.

“Miners,” he says curtly, turning away.

As if Vienne didn't know that. “This is a working mine. I assume there are miners everywhere. Which specific ones did Mother Koumanov want us to find? She sent us ahead to do reconnaissance, correct?”

In the frost, Nikolai draws a circle with an x through it. “Look for symbol on coats.”

“Kind of obvious, isn't it?” she says. “Maybe it's a trap of some kind? We go in to rescue miners with a big X on them, and instead we get ambushed?”

“Is not trap.” Nikolai scans the fence, still refusing to look at her. “Not in such conditions as these.”

Enough of this crap. “Nikolai,” she says, “you've got something to say? Spit it out.”

“Is nothing to spit out,” he says. “Go do job you were paid to do.”

“You don't always get what you pay for.” Vienne brushes the hair out of her face and tucks it into the cowl of her symbiarmor. She puts on her helmet but keeps the visor up. The wind makes her cuffs flap.

“Mother does,” he says.

“Your mother never met me before.” She takes her omnoculars and follows the perimeter. She passes the brothers without speaking, even to Jenkins, and finds a covered spot with a perfect view of the ovens below.

Vienne settles in and waits.

An hour later, there is still no sign of any miners. Only Manchesters and the ovens. The operation seems completely mechanized, as if workers are no longer needed to run the mines. Vienne lowers her omnoculars and spots Yakov coming up the trail.

When he reaches her position, he says, “You are very good at hiding.”

“I've had lots of practice.” She stares into the darkness, trying to make out his face. “How did you spot me?”

“A quiet man sees many things,” he says. “It makes me good at finding.” After a pause, he adds, “Back at refugee camp, you did the right thing. With Nikolai.”

“Tell him that.”

“I have.” He looks back in his brother's direction. “Nikolai confuses pride with passion. Only his pride is hurt. It will pass. But be careful of him until it does. Such things are important to a romantic like him.”

That sounds like a warning. Or maybe a plea to be kind to someone who's wounded. “I don't find him very romantic,” she says.

“Not romantic like that. I mean not pragmatic. He goes where his heart carries him. Of us all, he is the most likely to tilt at windmills.”

“You're nothing like your brothers.”

“Yes, different, I know,” he says. “The Brothers Koumanov are brothers in spirit but not in blood. I joined the Ferro after Rangers burned down my town looking for, ironically, agents of the Ferro. I have traveled with one or another of them since.” He tosses a chunk of ice. “Sometimes, it is better to join the ones you choose.”

She nods. “I see what you mean.”

Yakov hands her a stack of wafers from his rucksack. “Nikolai sent these.”

She eyes them warily. “What are they?”

“Take them,” he says. “It will fix your appetite.”

She nibbles the thin biscuit, then makes a face. “Tastes like dung.”

“Because it is.”

She spits it out. “You gave me dung?”

“See?” he says. “Now you are not hungry. Feel better?”

She flips the remaining wafer off the tip of his nose. “Now I do!”

He smiles. That's a first, Vienne thinks, then she sees a glint of something in the corner of her eye. She holds a finger to her lips to shush him.

“On the ridge,” she whispers. “Movement.”

She focuses her omnoculars on a figure in brown coveralls and a heavy jacket. He walks the edge of the ridge until he reaches the westernmost silo. Soon, several other figures appear and follow the same path. She zooms in tight on their bodies. On each is a white circle. There's an X through it.

“We've found our miners,” she says. “Now all we have to do is sneak them out under the Sturmnacht's noses.”

CHAPTER 40

Outpost Fisher Four

West Approach

ANNOS MARTIS
239. 2. 19. 06:44

 

 

“Welcome back to hell, cowboy.”

“Thank you, Mimi. I really missed this place,” I say. “Like a boil after it's been lanced.”

It's almost dawn when I push my bike out of the storage car at the TransPort station at Fisher Four. The last time I was in this station, it was desolate. No other passengers. No lights. No heat. Just a bunch of wind and a skinny, malnourished miner with an acid tongue wanting to take us to fight a pack of ravenous cannibals. This time, the station is lit, fairly warm, and packed to bursting with Sturmnacht troops on their way south and the vendors who have set up shop to fleece them of their last bit of pay.

Personally, I prefer dealing with the cannibals. At least we were allowed to shoot them.

“I concur,” Mimi says.

It takes the better part of an hour to get clear of the station and to sneak around the checkpoints outside, so that by the time I'm on the open road, the sun is cresting the mountains to the east. The nights are long on the south pole.

Instead of taking the two-lane highway to the mines, I elect to take the high road, a winding path that loops along the ridges above the road. Below, I watch a steady crawl of loader trucks moving away from the mines. They are guarded by the occasional Sturmnacht patrol. I can't imagine that any criminal would be interested in hijacking a load of foul-smelling ore.

Fisher Four is a relic of another Mars. A freak catastrophe sank Fisher Two, and Fisher Three was drowned by terraformed seas. The last outpost is still standing more than a century later, once populated by a clan of miners, a pesky group of humans who wouldn't leave the mines even under the threat of death. Which isn't a bad thing, really, because the miners are the single most ornery group of human beings I've ever encountered.

“Present company excluded,” Mimi says.

“Are you calling me ornery?”

“No, cowboy, I would never call you that.”

When I get to the edge of the ridge, I have to park my bike. I'll be hoofing it the rest of the way. I grab the bag with the pigeon in it, along with my armalite, and move down the ridge to an area with good cover.

With my omnoculars, I check the lay of the land. That trucker I hitchhiked with wasn't lying—the Fisher Four mines have reopened and they are being worked with a vengeance. The proof is not only in the loaders, but also in the blast furnaces choking the sky.

“What is the plan?” Mimi asks.

“Well, it
was
to drive straight to Hell's Cross and drop this pigeon into the abyss. Now it looks like we need a Plan B.”

“I thought this was Plan B.”

“My Plan B needs a Plan B. We'll call it B-plus.”

“Or B-minus.”

The terrain is a mix of high, jagged hills covered with snow and low-lying stretches of frozen soil. I pan past the furnace chimneys to the east, and I spot the biggest carking hole ever. Over a kilometer square, made of a progression of trenches like an inverted pyramid, each one twenty meters high. Massive Manchester harvesters are driving around the square, level by level, hauling guanite to a series of sluice gates on the west side. If there is a bottom, I can't see it.

“Mimi,” I ask. “Was that big fugly thing there before?”

“You mean the strip mine?” she says. “No, it is new. How could you forget such a thing?”

“Just checking.” This is definitely not the Fisher Four I knew and loved escaping from.

“That's new,” I say, focusing on two lines of workers dressed in brown overalls and heavy coats. They file along from sluice gate to sluice gate, sweeping away accumulated ore and making sure the gates swing freely. Sturmnacht guards are everywhere. They prod the workers with the butt of their rifles or with swift kicks to the backs of their legs.

“Nice guys,” I say. “Still wish I could shoot them.”

I need a better look at the workers. So sticking to the shadows and catching a ride from an Armageddon rock truck, I make my way down into the deeper level of the mine, where the workers are busting bedrock.

There are about five crews working, but I notice that one crew has a cross and circle symbol chalked onto their shoulders. The guards are giving this crew the hardest time, kicking and punching them and barking out orders.

“Cowboy,” Mimi tells me as I duck beneath a Manchester, whose treads are tall enough to stand behind. “I have picked up a familiar biosignature.”

“Out here on the surface?” I say. “Who is it?”

“It's the Regulator who calls himself Fuse.”

“Fuse?” I ask for his coordinates and dial them into my omnoculars. “I'll be tossed. There that little piker is!”

I watch Fuse push a hopper from the back of the trencher down a track to where it dumps into a hauler, which takes the ore to the sluice gates. Fuse dumps his ore into the gates, runs back down the track, and gets in line to do it again.

“I need to talk to Fuse.”

“This is an ill-advised decision,” Mimi says.

“Then let's call it Plan C-plus.”

“I give it a C-minus at best.”

“Oh ye of little faith.”

From the Manchester, I work my way around to the sluice gates. I hunker next to a latrine guarded by a sleeping Sturmnacht solider, intending to catch Fuse when he finishes his next round.

The guard is kicked back on a camp stool. His hat is pulled down over his eyes, and his battle rifle is resting against the latrine wall.

“Can you believe this fossiker?” I say to Mimi. “He's going to freeze to death.”

“I believe he already has,” she replies.

“Aw crap.” I slip up next to him, crouched to avoid attention. I check for a pulse. None. His wrist is a brick of ice. “How long's he been dead, Mimi?”

“Indeterminate. In this weather, there is no way to gauge loss of body heat and other factors.”

“Hope it was quick then.” I pull back his cap. Frostbite has destroyed his nose. His eyes are frozen open. His features are delicate. He's young. Probably a conscript pulled away from his home and made to fight a war that has nothing to do with him. This death is on you, Lyme, I think. How many thousands are on your ledger now?
I try to close his eyes. The lids won't budge, so I cover his face with the cap again and return to my cover to wait.

Finally, the crew of miners I spotted before comes slumping along.

And there's Fuse, bringing up the rear.

As he passes, I yank him into one of the latrines.

“What the blowie bludger is mmm-mmm-mmm.”

I clap a hand over his mouth. He bites my finger, which does him no good and probably is the first clue that I'm not the garden-variety Sturmnacht.

“Shut it,” I hiss. “They can hear you whining all the way down in Hell's Cross.”

Fuse stops struggling, and I turn him loose.

“Chief! You're finally here!” he says, and throws his arms around me.

His coat stinks of guanite and body odor, a scent so powerful, I also almost ralph.

Fuse looks different. Before, he had buzzed ash hair, thin sideburns, ears a skosh too long, and one bicuspid missing. Now the hair is long and shaggy. He's missing two teeth as well. His ears still look too big for his head.

“You got your ears lowered!” Fuse says. “And you're wearing the ugliest outfit I've ever seen!”

“I travel a thousand kilometers, and you criticize my fashion?” I say. “What's this about me being finally here? How did you know I was coming?”

“How did I know?” Fuse slaps me on the shoulder. “You big lug! I hired you!”