The God Mars Book Five: Onryo (12 page)

I don’t know why I’m doing it—I don’t even know
if
I’m doing it—but I pull and push and get the impossibly
heavy mass of me over the rise that’s barely a third of a meter
high and I give one last shove with all I’ve got.

The short fall batters my already destroyed body. I
fall like a corpse. Land on a corpse.

Well done, lad. Now you can sleep for awhile. You’ve
earned it.

Okay.

I’m dreaming.

I’m climbing over rocks, dragging something. I can
barely move, but I’m up on my feet. Every step is fire and
knives.

I look down, see the wounds in my chest, the mess of
my left leg, see my blood drip on the rocks.

Don’t worry about that. We’re still leaking a little.
I can fix it. Just keep going.

Where?

I look uphill. I’m headed for the entrance to the
ship.

I look back. What I‘m dragging is a body. Another
Keeper, a different Keeper, but stripped like the other one was. A
big ragged wound through his neck leaves his head flopping like
it’s going to fall off.

I look behind me on the other side. There’s another
Keeper body.

I’m dragging a body with each hand.

Just a little further. Inside. The hatches are
already open.

The world swims and goes purple.

I think I blacked out for awhile. I’m inside the
ship. Dragging bodies down the corridor. The lights flicker. I want
to vomit, but it hurts too much…

Almost there, Jonny.

You lied. The hatches aren’t open… The cockpit
hatch…

Just put your hand on the panel. Like before. I just
need to be sure.

I have to drop one of the corpses. I flail blindly,
manage to slap my bloody hand on the panel on my second try as I
fall forward into the bulkhead. The lights turn green.

“DNA ACCEPTED. WELCOME, JONATHAN DRAKE.”

It is you, Jonny. Welcome home, boy.

The hatch pops open, almost knocking me over. For
some reason, it’s important that I pick up the second body,
drag…

Looking at me through the open hatchway is a bright
white skull in a suit of black samurai armor. Waiting for me.

Now let’s finish fixing you up, okay?

“What’s on your mind, lad? Your coffee’s getting
cold…”

What?

Dreaming again: I’m sitting at a table in a bright
room. The table is too tall—it’s up to my armpits. In front of me
is a plastic cup full of coffee. With dried creamer and sugar. It
was a special treat. When I was little.

I look at my hands. I have child’s hands. A child’s
body. My feet don’t touch the metal deck from the chair I’m in. I’m
wearing a gray jumpsuit, the knees worn and dirty.

“I’m sorry I was hard on you before. People sometimes
don’t realize what kind of trouble they’re getting themselves into.
They can’t see it. It happens to everybody.”

I look across the table. A man smiles at me. Roundish
face. Asian features. Short black hair. Kind eyes. A much neater
gray jumpsuit.

Uncle Peter?

“It’s good to see you again, lad. I thought I never
would.”

I’m in the ship. It’s all bright and clean. A woman
comes in, blonde. She gets herself some coffee, stops to kiss me on
the head.

“Are you okay, Jonny?” she asks.

Mom?

She leaves. She’s busy. She has her work.

“I should have made them go with you,” the man across
the table tells me, like he’s telling me a secret. But I can tell
he’s upset. He sounds like he’s done something very bad. “My wife
and Alice. Do you remember Alice?”

Suddenly there’s a little girl at the table with us,
her black hair in two long braids, tanned skin and partially Asian
features.

“She really missed you when you left. I had to lie to
her, tell her you were coming back.” This seems to make him
profoundly sad.

“What is this?” I demand. My voice is all wrong,
high-pitched…

“You’re safe, now. Well, for now, anyway. You got
hurt, Jonny. Bad. I’m afraid that was my fault. I didn’t know… I
wasn’t conscious enough to recognize you. I only recognized
them
. And
him
.”

“Who are you?”

“You know,” he tells me with his warm smile. “I can
see it in your memories. Here are mine…”

In a blink, I’m across the table, looking down at a
blonde little boy, maybe three or four Standard years old.

“You were three when I last saw you. Such a beautiful
boy. Smart. But sometimes too curious for your own good. Do you
remember this day? I caught you eating some wild nuts. They were
probably safe, but there were protocols.”

“You yelled at me,” I remember. I… “Uncle Peter?”

I’m back across the table, back in my own body. But
now it
is
my body, my adult body. My cloak and gear and
weapons and Forge-made armor are gone, and there are holes in my
jacket, the fabric stiff with dried blood.

My right hand tingles. I look, see the hole sliced in
the thumb of my glove, and look inside. I see light. Bright
light.

“It’s all right, Jonny,” Uncle Peter reassures,
sounding a little more like he’s talking to an adult now. “I’m
fixing you. I just needed you to get to the necessary
resources.”

I remember dragging the bodies. I close my eyes, get
a flash of me lying on a bed of corpses. They’re dissolving…

“Don’t look,” Peter warns. “Stay here. We’ve got a
lot to talk about.”

I’m back at the table. With my coffee. I can smell
it. Taste it. It brings back memories.

“Well, the good news is, those nuts were just nuts.
We could probably start eating them ourselves.” Male voice. I know
it. Tall man, sandy hair and a scruffy beard. It’s my dad.

“You sick of the foil-food already?” another man
jokes with him. He’s big and tanned, dark hair and beard neatly
sheared short, square jawed and weathered. Uncle Deck?

“I was sick of it three years ago.” That’s my mom.
They’re all coming in. It’s time for supper. The little girl comes
in and gives me a playful kiss on the cheek (for an instant, I’m a
little boy again). I don’t like it. Her mom—tan with her black hair
tied tight back—leads her away from me, distracts her by having her
help bring food packs to the table, then shows her how to self-heat
them. Mine is a hearty split-pea soup—I remember the smell, how it
tasted.

Someone’s missing.

“Thel being anti-social again?” Alice’s mom—Aunt
Maria—asks like she knows better than to bother.

“Still studying the latest from the Hot Zone,” my
father excuses. “He thinks there may be something in there.”

“Besides thirty-five-year-old reactor debris from
orbit?” Uncle Deck discounts. My father shrugs.

“Do you remember this place?” Uncle Peter asks me
directly.

I find a name.

“Donkey Oaty.”

He chuckles. “That’s what you called it. You couldn’t
pronounce Don Quixote.”

“The ship…”

“Lab Ship. And the Lance. Our recon vessel. Lance-R.
You called it ‘Lancer’, so we renamed it. Is it still around?”

My head spins. Like a bad fever. Like shock.

“Do you remember it?”

Apparently I don’t, not like this. If we’re talking
about the same ship… I’ve ridden in it with Colonel Ram. I didn’t
have any idea I’d known it before. This can’t be real.

“Your parents took you away in it, got out when they
had the chance, got away. What happened to it? What happened to
your parents?”

Before I can answer, the memories come flooding, my
memories: The refugee camps, the wandering and scavenging, trading.
Fighting off raiders from other groups. Then the night the pirates
came, the Zodanga… Watching them rape and murder my mother while I
hid under a table—she told me to hide and not move and not make a
sound… But I couldn’t… I took my knife, stabbed the dirty, stinking
thing hurting my mom… I stabbed him up through the groin, up
through the ass, inside his thigh… When his partner grabbed for me,
tried to take my knife, I cut his hand and stabbed him through the
eye, then in the throat, twisted the blade as he tried to grab it,
ripped it out through his fingers. Then I stabbed the other one’s
neck as he folded over screaming. I kept out of reach, dodging
their attempts to slash at me, hacking at their hands as they
poured their lives out. And then I kicked their ugly tattooed faces
when they couldn’t stay on their feet anymore, breaking bones and
knocking out teeth. But even then, I didn’t let them die easy. I
jumped on them and started stabbing, again and again, grabbing
another knife—one of theirs—to stab with both hands. I kept
stabbing long after they’d stopped moving. Their blood was all
over, all over me.

But my mom was dead. They stabbed her when she
resisted. Her blood was all mixed in with theirs. Her dead eyes
didn’t see me. She was gone. Just gone.

I needed her. I needed her not to be dead.

I could barely see. I wasted my rage stabbing the
dead pirates until I couldn’t hold the knives anymore…

Other men came, but they fought the pirates, killed
them, chased them back to their flyers. They found me. One of them
felt for me, saw something in me that broke his heart. He took me
very gently in his strong arms and held me, carried me away. I saw
my father’s body on the way out of there. There were a lot more
bodies—everybody I knew…

“I’m so sorry, lad,” Peter says after a few moments.
He sounds like he’s suffering my loss with me—I hear his voice
catch like he’s trying not to cry. “I guess it wouldn’t have
mattered if I’d sent them with you. My Maria. My Alice. This
planet… It’s just full of vicious, brutal animals.”

He gets up from the table. I’m following him, but
it’s more like I’m floating. I don’t seem to have a body. We’re
going to the cockpit, the command deck.

I start seeing smoke-stains on the clean surfaces,
there and then gone. And blood sprayed. Dripped on the deck. I hear
gunfire, deafening in the tight spaces, but there’s nothing there
when I look.

Peter opens the hatch. The cockpit is intact,
operational, but I expect this is just another memory. He swivels
the center chair around. It’s empty—no skull-faced armor suit. He
sits in it, facing me.

I’m a little boy again, so small. He leans forward,
makes himself smaller for me, like he’s going to tell me bad
news.

“I guess it’s my turn, now.”

“You wouldn’t remember a lot of it—you were too young
to understand.

“We were sent from Earth in 2097. It was a classified
mission. High risk. No fixed end-date. We knew we might never get
to come home, depending on what we found. And we knew that what we
expected to find could easily kill us all.

“We arrived on planet in 2098. Picked this canyon. It
was greening even then, a young forest on a planet that shouldn’t
support one. There was enough atmosphere to go out in just survival
masks.

“We sent out probes, micro-drones, and found
people
. Whole groups of them, still alive. There wasn’t
supposed to be anyone here. We were sure they were all long dead.
It was unbelievable… We studied them from a distance, sent reports,
but that’s not what our bosses seemed interested in. They sent us
here to look for nanotech, biotech, contamination. Evolution. And
that was all they were interested in. We found
survivors
,
the descendants of survivors, and they didn’t care. They didn’t
even sound surprised, like they already knew. And all they cared
about was the mission.

“We took samples everywhere we could reach, but the
only things we found were the engineered plants and the oversized
insects. They were all stable, safe. There was nothing here that
was really dangerous, except maybe the people, but we had our ships
and their defenses. If anything went wrong, we could fly out, camp
somewhere else. No one else on the planet seemed to still have
working ships. Only one group we saw still had guns.”

“The Keepers,” I name them.

“Peace Keepers. UN personnel. Or at least their
children. Living in the wreckage of Eureka Colony. We asked our
command if we should try to contact them, get their cooperation in
exchange for supplies or even evac, but we were given strict
no-contact orders. Observe and report only. Stay invisible. That’s
why we stayed here: the green men and the rusty skins all roamed
their territories, patrolled, but the Eurekans stayed put, holed up
in their buried shelters. And so things stayed peaceful. And safe
enough that we didn’t worry too much about bringing you and Alice
into this world, raising you here, since we didn’t seem to be
getting orders to leave. In fact, I started to think that was the
plan from the beginning: They never intended to give us a recall
order. Once on planet, they’d keep us stuck here, quarantined,
afraid we’d bring something back that would kill the whole planet.
But there was nothing like that, and no sign there ever had
been.

“You and Alice were born just a few months apart,
about a year after we landed. And we were happy, even in this
strange and scary place. We even started to think we could make
lives here, good lives. It would be hard, but the planet was
becoming more hospitable even in the few years we’d been here. We
could gather to supplement our ration drops and recycle, pull
oxygen out of the air. As scientists, there was so much to study,
so much to learn beyond what the ones that sent us wanted to know.
I was a microbiologist. Your mother was an anthropological
biologist, in addition to being our flight physician. And Thel…

“Well, Thel was just all about the nanotech. He’d
been sanctioned on Earth, by UNCORT, for his work in banned
technologies. The irony of his life is that UNCORT turned around
and hired him, sent him here, to a world where his wildest dreams
and scariest nightmares supposedly thrived everywhere. It was
either that, or face life sentenced to a Spiritual Camp, so he
didn’t hesitate. But then he gets here and finds nothing. Just
natural beauty he couldn’t appreciate and the miracle of human
persistence that he didn’t care about.