Shadow on the Sun (14 page)

CHAPTER 27

The Barrens

Noctis Labyrinthus

ANNOS MARTIS
239. 2. 15. 08:14

 

 

So Rosa Lynn has a robotic security guard. I'm impressed, even though the thing could saw me in half if I weren't wearing symbiarmor. Maybe Rosa Lynn isn't as welcoming as I thought.

“I told you so,” Mimi says. “People do change.”

“Can you gloat later, like when a minigun isn't aimed at me? How about some of that advice you usually spout?”

“You have a choice,” Mimi says. “You may surrender or you may try to disarm the gun before it expends enough ammunition to overwhelm the capacity of your suit.”

“I'm feeling pretty spry,” I say. “I can take out one deadly robot.”

On cue, five more trapdoors open, and five more mechanical arms take aim.

“Oh, cowboy?” Mimi says.

“Don't even bother to tell me the odds. I don't hanker to tangle with a whole crew of robots.” I lift my arms. “I surrender. You win, Rosa Lynn.”

A freckled face appears on the screen. “Ha! Got you, you poxer! Come on in, but wipe your feet first!”

“How's that for a greeting?” I ask as a pneumatic hatch opens. “You should've gloated when you had the chance.”

“There will be plenty of other chances,” Mimi says.

The interior of Rosa Lynn's bunker looks like the orbital space station where we went to Battle School. The hallways are low corridors lit with white light, the floors are tiled, and the walls are lined with brushed metal, probably aluminum.

“No,” Mimi says. “It is an alloy that shields electronic communications.”

“Spiffy.” I run my hand down the metal wall. It feels warm.

“Metal is a conductor,” she says. “It is not always cool to the touch.”

“Knew that,” I say.

Not only are the walls warm, but the light is diffused and soothing. The air's temperature feels perfect, and it's tinged with the scent of citrus. I could curl up here and sleep for days.

“ ‘But quits his house, his country, and his friends,' ” Mimi recites. “ ‘The three we sent, from off the enchanting ground, we dragg'd reluctant, and by force we bound.' ”

“Why are you reciting
The Odyssey
again?”

“No reason,” she says. “Just a reminder not to get too comfortable.”

“Not a chance.” I reach the security door. “There's only one thing on my mind—finding out what the HVT really is.”

A robotic scanner arm pops out of the wall. It reads my retina and beeps, then announces in a voice that sounds eerily like Dolly's synthesized speech, “Identity not found. Access denied.”

“Denied?” I say. “Did Lyme wipe my records or something?”

“Try the other eye,” Mimi says.

“Oh. Yeah.” I turn my left eye, the nonbionic one, to the robot.

The voice says, “Identity confirmed. Access allowed. Welcome to the club, Mr. Stringfellow.”

The security door slides open. I walk into a cavernous room. Stretching from floor to ceiling is a thick stalk of multinet monitors and cables like jungle vines as thick as my legs woven through them and trailing into the floor. I shield my eyes from the blinding light of dozens of flickering monitors, which must be displaying every channel on every feed that Lyme's government and military broadcast.

“Not just Lyme's feeds,” Mimi says. “I calculate that this facility is drawing from every civilian and military channel available on the planet.”

A track encircles the stalk, and mounted to it is a custom-made chair that's part cradle and part workstation. Sitting in the chair and bathed in the monitors' light is a diminutive redhead wearing an old Battle School flight suit. Dwarfed by the electronics, she looks unkempt and fragile—until she stands and her height reaches almost two and a half meters. Her legs account for most of that height. They are made of metal, not flesh, and they look suspiciously like the robotic security guns.

“Jake!” Rosa Lynn says. “Welcome to my little fortress of solitude!”

“Also?” I say to Mimi. “She's still an extrovert.”

“Do not be so quick to judge.”

“I'm flattered,” Rosa Lynn continues, crossing her legs with a metallic clink, “that the most popular jack on Mars decided to visit little ol' me.”

“Popular?” I say, scratching my neck and taking in the layout of the ten-by-fifteen room. “What are you talking about?”

“This!” Rosa Lynn types in a code on a keypad, and the stalk monitors switch to the same feed. A talking head in the corner of the screen, along with a photo of me in dress blues. Behind that, a vid of me attacking the transport truck plays. I'm amazed at the speed of the attack, and the viciousness of it, too. My stomach churns as I watch myself pull the driver out of the cab and drag him along the pavement.

“That was Alpha Dog,” Mimi says. “Not you. Remember that.”

“Easy to say,” I say. “But think about how easily Lyme turned me into that.”

Rosa Lynn taps the monitor with a knuckle. “The back channels are rocking with bulletins about you, hombre. I've seen your image pop up in dozens of communiqués. You must've done something to tick Lyme off bad, so I thought you might need a place to hide out. Voila, here you are. It's an easy deduction for the susie who practically invented the multinets. Wait, I
did
invent the multinets.”

“Cowboy,” Mimi says. “I can detect no biorhythmic signs of deception, and yet her welcome seems too . . . welcoming.”

“Hang on a sec,” I tell her as Lyme's face appears on the screen. He is standing behind a lectern, giving a speech to a mess hall full of Sturmnacht regulars. Alpha Team is behind him, with Sarge taking my place as leader. Good for him and good riddance to Alpha Team.

“That's enough truth for one day.” Rosa Lynn hits a keypad on the arm of her chair, and the stalk goes dark. “I'm starting to get a headache.”

“Truth?” I say. “That was all propaganda.”

“Cowboy,” Mimi says. “Does she not seem overeager to you?”

“She's just lonely,” I tell her. “Why can't you take her at face value?”

“You are such a
male
,” Mimi says.

“Propaganda, yes,” Rosa Lynn says, stretching, “but if you stare at the feeds long enough, you start to see the subliminals that they can't hide.” She claps her hands together. “Look at me running on at the mouth. What a rotten host I am. You look wrung out. Need some grub? A nap? Access to the best programming Mars has to offer?”

“Actually,” I say, “I need access to someone brilliant, inquisitive, and with a certain disregard for the law.”

Rosa grins and throws her arms wide. “Then you came to the right place. What do you think of my lair?”

“I think you're very tall.” I look up at her. “And I think that soon, I'm going to get a crick in my neck.”

She lifts a robotic leg and pats the brushed metal. “You like? They're my own design. Carbon fiber and titanium alloy exoskeletal prosthetics that take signals from a chip in my brain stem.” She flips the red curls from her neck to show me a bare patch on the back of her head. “It's nothing so fancy as the nanobot technology in your system, but it beats rolling around in a wheelchair all day, getting my butt chapped.”

“Fancy,” I say, because what do you tell a two-and-half-meter-tall woman with metal legs, while avoiding the subject of chapped butts?

“Please discuss chapped butts,” Mimi says. “I dare you.”

“Not on your life,” I say.

“You think that's fancy?” Rosa says. “Watch this!” With a release of air, the legs lower themselves until she stands eye to eye with me. “Pneumatic pistons! Lets me adjust my height up to two meters.”

“Impressive.”

“Enough with the chitchat,” she says. “Why do you need someone brilliant?”

“Right.” I slip the case from my shoulder and offer it up to Rosa Lynn. “I brought you something.”

“For
moi
?” She takes the case. “What is it?”

“A surprise.”

“I love surprises.” She inspects the case closely. Then hands it back. “In my educated opinion, it's an attaché case.”

“I know it's a case,” I say. “But what's
inside
the case?”

“Your lunch?” She smirks. “If this is a game of twenty questions, you're not very good at it.”

“Seriously, Rosa.” I push it back at her. “It's important. That's why I came here, you know, after all these years.”

“Kuso
,
”
she says, and looks me straight in the eye. “I thought it was to visit me, you know, after all these years. Give it here, you wanker, and follow me to the lab.”

She leads me down the corridor to the next room. It's a twenty-by-twenty-square space lined with the same metal skin. The walls are lined with worktables piled high with circuit boards, soldering rigs, hand tools, a press, and a laser saw. I nod, impressed by the layout. With a lab like this, she could manufacture her own battle tank.

While I grab a chair, she takes a seat at a table. After putting the case on a mat to hold it still, she swings a hi-def camera around. It magnifies the three locks.

Rosa Lynn gives me a withering look. “You tried to pick these?”

“Maybe.” I shrug. “So I was curious.”

“Curiosity kills the cat.” She wags a finger at me. “Luckily, you're not a cat.”

“Why lucky for me?” I peer over her shoulder. “I screwed something up?”

“That would be an affirmative,” she says. “These are Nobel locks, a specialty of the intelligence service of Mahindra Corporation. Each of the pins is connected to a small detonation device. Use the wrong key or pick the wrong tumbler and boom! Say
arrivederci
to your hand all the way up to the shoulder.”

I hold up a symbiarmor glove. “Not me.”

“Right.” Her voice turns frosty. “Don't tell me about the wonders of symbiarmor, okay?”

Oops. I stepped in it again. I glance at her titanium legs and feel like crawling into a hole.

“I'm sorry about that, Rosa.”

“No sweat. Ancient history, and you did save my life and all.” She waves me off. “You're right—that fancy underwear would protect you from the first ba-ba-doom, but I suspect that the next one would really rock your socks.”

“Next one?”

“Yup.” She picks the case up and rolls her chair around to a portable imaging device. She puts the case under the scanner, drops the safety screen, and points to the results on the monitor. “This here is your standard issue plasma/termite bomb. Fairly stable. Requires an explosion as an ignition source. Thus, the lock bombs. So if you had succeeded in picking it, the whole case would've exploded, and then the thermite would have evaporated whatever's inside.”

I clear my throat. “What did you say about an interior case?”

She swings a monitor to me. “Forget that. It's the cylinder inside the case that is the real prize. That's your maguffin, Jake.”

“Can you tell what is inside?”

“Not without opening it.”

“
Can
you open it?”

“Not without blowing us to smithereens. Weren't you listening?” She switches off the machine, then whirls, arms crossed. “Now it's your turn.”

“My turn?” I say, confused. “For what?”

“Tit for tat.” She leans forward. “I let you waltz right into my fortress with your highly explosive mystery case. Now, I want to know how you got it.”

“I stole it.”

“Natch,” she says. “I didn't think you
made
it. You had a gift for languages in Battle School, but you were a complete piker with munitions. Who'd you steal it from?”

I clear my throat. “First, I stole it from General Mahindra
for
Lyme. And then, I stole it
from
Lyme. He thinks whatever's in that case can win the war.”

“Greedy
rotter,” Rosa Lynn says. “Stealing the AI from your brain and porting it into his multinet isn't enough of an advantage? How many toys does one tyrant need?”

How is that possible? Project MUSE is the most top-secret project in Lyme's government. “You—you
know
about that?” I ask.

“Hello?” Rosa Lynn raps my head. “Inventor of the multinets. Think I wouldn't leave a backdoor to keep an eye on things?”

“What,” Mimi says, “does she mean by ‘keep an eye on things'?”

I don't know, so I ask, “What do you mean by that? You're telling me that you know everything that happens?”

“Not everything! I didn't know about the case, for example,” she says. “But I was aware you've been through an, ahem, rough patch. You're looking a lot better than I thought you would.”

“You were expecting me?” I ask, not masking my surprise.

“As if,” Mimi says, “you are ever able to mask your surprise.”

“Oh yeah,” Rosa Lynn says. “You've been in the wilderness a long time, Jake. I'm surprised you didn't come sooner.”

“I was sort of busy.”

“Oh yeah, you were real busy,” she says. “Whatever happened to that susie from Battle School you used to snog? Eceni, wasn't it?”

Meaning Eceni, the murderous queen of the Draeu who tried to kill both me and Vienne. “You know how it is,” I say. “People grow apart.”

“Anybody else take her place?” she says with a coy edge to her voice.

“Yeah,” I say, uncomfortable with the way this conversation is going. “But we got separated. A while ago.”

“Uh-huh,” she says, and pauses, searching my face. “Like I said, ancient history. Let's find out what's in that cylinder.”

“But you said you couldn't tell what's inside.”