The God Mars Book Five: Onryo (10 page)

Straker moves forward past the body to check out the
rest of the cockpit. Murphy joins her, moving around the other side
of the burned armor. There aren’t any more bodies, just him.
(Her?)

I’m still getting crushed by the sense that I know
this place. I can see in my mind a vague picture of what it must
have looked like when it was intact. But in my mind it was bigger
than this, so maybe I really am just having some kind of bad-food
hallucination, given detail by the rides I took in the Lancer, and
then in an ETE shuttle when we attacked the Stormcloud.

I check my forehead—I am sweating.

“Every panel is smashed, and not just by gunfire,”
Straker reports. “No way to access the systems, at least not from
up here.”

I focus on the body, the armor. Even shot up and
burned up, I can see how finely crafted it is. I bet it was
beautiful. And there are weapons…

Wedged into what’s left of the belt is a gently
curved short sword, not unlike what the Katar have. The lacing on
the hilt is burned, but still hanging on. Slung from the right hip
is a stainless steel revolver, but not like my father’s or
Murphy’s. This one is bigger in the cylinder, and a different
shape. It reminds me of the “cowboy” guns from old Earth videos.
The remains of shells are stuck in little slots in the belt.

I know better than to take it to use. The fire would
have done too much damage to it. And to the blade.
Blades
…

“Wow…” I can’t help but whisper. Across the suit’s
back is slung a long sword. A
very
long sword. The laced
hilt alone is probably over sixty centimeters. The blade in its
scabbard reaches to the floor. It’s remarkably intact. The
surviving fixtures are gorgeous. On the disk-like guard is the
relief-image of some kind of creature with wings and a long thin
neck.

I impulsively reach out, pop the sword loose from the
scabbard mouth, ease the blade out a few inches. The steel looks
pristine, finely polished with a damascened grain. The edge…

“
Don’t touch it!
” the Ghaddar snaps at me. I
jerk my hand away, feel the bite of razor-sharp steel through the
meat of my thumb, deep, as the blade drops back into its scabbard.
I try to hide my stupidity. I can already feel my blood oozing out
of the wound as I pinch my fingers shut to apply pressure.

“Did it cut you?” Straker needs to know, rushing
over.

“No… I…”

“Let me see,” she insists.

Reluctantly, I show her my hand. The thumb pad of my
glove is cut through. She pries into the slice to check…

“Is he hurt?” Murphy asks, sounding like he’s
concerned for more than just my thumb. I feel stupid. And
scared.

“No,” Straker finally concludes. I get my hand back,
take a look myself. “It just got his glove.”

No wound. No blood. Lucky. Just my imagination
playing with me some more.

“Are you picking up any signals from it?” Murphy asks
Straker, pointing to the body.

“Nothing. I…” She stops, looks around, then closes
her eyes, listens. “The beacon stopped.”

“We may have killed it when we let ourselves in…” My
father has come in, with Negev behind him. “The lights… It looks
like everything is shorting out.”

My father smirks at the burned armor display when he
sees it, but I see Negev’s eyes go wide.

“One of yours?” the Ghaddar asks him.

“No,” he denies easily enough. “But the armor is
O-Yoroi
. Great Armor. Japanese style. We modeled our armor
and weapons on the Japanese style, modified… This looks like
something perfectly out of the records. Except the
mempo
—the
mask. And this part, the
maidate
…”

He points to the crest on the forehead of the helmet.
It’s a small skull, surrounded by stylized flames.

He reaches out to touch the helmet.

“It may not be safe,” Murphy warns him before he can
make contact. He withdraws his hand.

“The only thing we know of that someone would need to
go so far to destroy is a nano-modded human,” my father concludes,
taking in the scene.

“You should call Colonel Ram,” Murphy prods Straker.
She nods.

“You think this is one of his?” the Ghaddar wants to
know.

“Or one of theirs,” Murphy counters. “I still don’t
get Yod’s game.”

I see Negev lock on the name, but he doesn’t demand
an explanation now. He seems in a hurry to be leaving.

“We can make camp for the night in the rocks nearby,”
he offers.

“The ship is probably toxic,” my father agrees with
him. “All this ash in the air. Old corpse.”

We back out of the ship. I find I don’t want to. I
want to explore, see if any of the other sections match up with my
fever dream-memories. I see Rashid and a pair of Katar warriors
coming up from the aft section. The Katar keep having to duck and
stoop to keep from banging their helmets on the ceiling beams. They
look supremely uncomfortable and ungraceful in these tight spaces
made for Earth-style bodies. Their long pole arms are pretty
unwieldy in here as well.

“Everything is locked,” Rashid reports. “What isn’t
has been stripped bare. Nothing useful.”

I’m thinking I could probably open those hatches, but
don’t offer to try, not with everyone looking at me like they don’t
know what to make of me. So I head out into the quickly fading
daylight, with Straker right behind me as if she wants to make sure
I do leave. She calls out to check that the ship is clear, no
stragglers, and then shuts the airlock hatches behind us as we last
two exit.

The Katar are already preparing a campsite about
thirty meters away, on a spot that should be visibly hidden from
the lower ground down-slope. Their shelters are small, barely big
enough to lie down inside of.

“How far is Eureka from here?” Murphy asks, seeing
Straker’s look of frustration, her eyes gazing far away up-canyon
(though I doubt she could see far through the growth, even with her
mods).

“Two kilometers yet,” Negev answers without checking.
He nods his helmet in the direction Straker is staring. “It will be
dark before we reach it. The leaves will close and the rocks will
begin to ice.”

“We should wait for first light before we move in,”
my father agrees with Negev’s holding plan. “We can get a safer
look in the morning.”

“Still not picking up any signals?” Murphy asks
Straker.

“Nothing since the beacon died. But we may be too far
away to get short-range link chatter.” She chews at her scarred
lower lip. “Let’s just hope that’s all it is.”

I’m sure she’s imagining Eureka overrun by
Harvesters, stripped bare by Asmodeus, the population slaughtered
or pressed into service…

I feel dizzy now, shaky. My hand is tingling up to my
forearm. I check my breather—it seems to be working. I shouldn’t be
hypoxic. I drink some water.

“Are you okay, lad?” Murphy catches me, but asks
quietly.

“I think the Dragonfly Jerky might be trying to make
an escape,” I joke, shaky.

“I know what you mean.”

Straker tries to call out to Colonel Ram, but there’s
too much interference between the divide and, beyond it, the EMR
fuzz of Lucifer’s Grave to get a clear transmission to Pax. She’d
have to bounce off the Unmaker satellites, which might be detected.
She decides to wait rather than hike out to a better location, as
the discovery of another lab ship and the years-old remains of a
possibly Modded human aren’t as important as finding out what’s
happened at Eureka.

We find our own spot to set up our shelters, and set
our heaters to warming them for the night. The Katar don’t carry
hydrogen fuel units. They make a small circle of hand-sized rocks,
fill it with a pile of dried plant matter, then light it on fire
with sparks made from scraping a knife against what I assume is
some kind of flint. They do this under the cover of a layered
canopy that deflects the resulting smoke and probably keeps the
heat from being easily seen from space. Once it’s all burnt down to
glowing embers, they each carefully take a heated stone, wrap it in
a cloth of some kind, and carry them into their micro-shelters.

We decide to sleep in our masks rather than waste the
few canisters we’re carrying on pressurizing them. Murphy takes
first watch, even though the Katar have their own sentries
posted.

As our shelters warm up, I consider their thin fabric
walls, and think about the ship. If we could get the life support
systems back online, we could use it as a secure shelter,
sniper-proof. But then I think about the man or woman in the
cockpit, cornered and killed in there.

We go outside before it gets too cold to perform
Salat
, with the Katar silently observing our ritual. Then,
since the Dragonfly I ate hasn’t forced an exit, I try to pad it
out with familiar food. It turns out I’m hungry.

I also take the time to pull off my sliced glove and
double-check my thumb. There isn’t a mark. I must have felt the
glove get cut as I pulled away. I lie back on my roll, my father
next to me, and Rashid on his other side. Staring up at the shelter
roof, I find I’m still disturbed by the sound of wind through the
greenery. It’s interrupted my sleep every night since we came to
the Trident, with the exceptions of the night spent in the Barrow
with the Forge, and at Katar. But tonight, it actually starts to
become soothing, familiar, like the sound that the wind made over
the open desert of home. Maybe I’m finally adjusting.

But then, as I start to doze, I have a kind of
semi-dream between waking and sleep, just a flash: I’m being shot.
There’s a force of fighters—Unmakers—wedged into a doorway, a
hatchway, hammering me with large caliber weapons. I feel my body
coming apart, shells tearing through me, through my armor, too
much… if I could just reach…

I realize I’m just imagining, putting myself in the
place of that body in the ship for some reason. I’m probably just
feeling helpless here, potentially under Keeper guns. In my dream,
I even made my killers Keepers.

I shake it off, try to let the rustle of the green
outside lull me into proper sleep.

I dream of my birth parents, as I occasionally still
do. Sometimes the dreams are memories of the traveling camps.
Sometimes they’re nightmares of that final attack by the pirates,
of my mother’s blood all over me, and the blood of the pirates that
killed her but it’s not enough, I want more, I want all of their
blood, every single one of them, but they flew away like cowards
when the Nomads came, when my new father came.

Tonight I dream a fantasy: good times in bright,
clean spaces. Running through a younger version of a forest like
this one in a mask and goggles too big for me, watched over by my
parents. Playing games on large screens. Eating rations together on
a clean table under bright white light. There are others there,
like there are in some of my dreams: A tall, strong man with short
dark hair and a short trimmed beard. A friendly man with Asian
features, a darker woman I think is his wife, and a little girl in
long black braids that I play with sometimes, and sometimes try to
get away from. And another man, dark-skinned and very thin, with a
shaved head and intense eyes. He has a funny name, I know, but I
can never remember it. All the other adults are nice to me, take
care of me, though they sometimes scold me when I do something
dangerous. Like eating some of the wild nuts. Only the dark man
ignores me—he’s always too busy with his work. Sometimes my parents
are, too, but I have the others to keep me company. Like a family.
They all call me “Jonny” or “Jon-Boy”.

I see the ship again in my dream: bigger, cleaner.
It’s still buried under rocks, but everything looks so new, yet
lived-in. Like a home. My home.

I know my dreams do this: splice fragments of waking
memory into fantastic, scrambled narratives in bizarre alternate
worlds. I even tend to see the same kinds of places over and
over—my father called these “dream lands”, a set of places we go
back to repeatedly when we dream, unique to the dreamer.

It’s funny, though: I usually don’t really know I’m
dreaming when I’m dreaming. If I ever figure it out, I usually
just

“
Wake up!
”

A blast of cold hits me across the face.

“Come on! We need to move!”

Fuzzy. I’m being shaken. Hard.

It’s still dark, but I recognize Straker’s voice,
which is probably what keeps me from jumping when I see her green
eyes glowing in the dark.

Rashid is already up, jerking his boots on. My father
is a little slower. And I… I can’t seem to shake off sleep. I feel
numb, drugged, sloppy. I figure I may be hypoxic from sleeping in a
mask, if it slipped loose.

“Leave the shelters,” Straker insists quietly but
urgently. “Get cover in the rocks. We need to back out of here.
Fast!”

I get my boots on, seal my coat, grab my cloaks and
my gear and my rifle. I fumble like a child.

“What’s happening?” my father asks.

“I couldn’t sleep, so I went back in the ship,”
Straker explains quickly. “The beacon—it didn’t come from the
ship’s transmitters. The ship doesn’t have any—they’ve been pulled.
Someone had wired link gear through the ship’s array. It was rigged
to the cockpit hatch. Opening it is what shut it off.”

“Alarm,” Rashid understands.

“Subtle,” Straker excuses, probably feeling the most
stupid of all of us. “It didn’t send an alarm, it just stopped
sending.”

“We just assumed the power failed,” my father
remembers his own guess, sounding like he feels foolish for it.

“Whoever’s listening has had eight hours to respond,”
she calculates unhappily.

We’re up and moving. Out of the shelter in the dark,
heat signatures masked under our cloaks, keeping low until we find
rocks big enough to hide behind (though we can’t be sure which
direction attack is coming from). I can barely see, but I think
what movement I can see is the Katar, fanning out into the green. I
have no idea where the Ghaddar or Murphy are.