The God Mars Book Five: Onryo (19 page)

The nanotech is scrubbing the carbon straight out of
your alveoli, and condensing the little oxygen we are taking in. It
can use the raw carbon waste as building blocks rather than
expelling it.

Peter’s voice is all wonder as he explains the
process. It’s just incredibly fascinating science to him, and I
think he’s hoping it is to me, too; but that doesn’t make me any
less disturbed by having it inside me, freely making changes to my
body and mind.

As if to distract me, Peter changes the topic of our
internal conversation:

I remember playing this game when I was a kid. Board
game with little two-sided disks, black and white. The idea was to
trap your opponent’s pieces between yours, which would flip them
over to your color, make them yours. Whoever had the most pieces
when there were no more moves left was the winner.

This Harvester weapon made me think of that. Usually
war is about competing attrition, destruction; the winner is
whoever’s lost the least when it’s done. But this… Every one they
kill could make them another drone. The more lives they take, the
stronger this Asmodeus’ corpse army gets. Human beings, murdered
horribly and turned into machines of rotting meat with no other
purpose than to kill to reproduce themselves before they fall
apart…

“And Thelonious doesn’t care.”

Oh, no. I’m sure he cares. I’m sure he’s totally
fascinated by the idea. I’m sure he offered up his expertise in
developing this horror. I’m sure he “volunteered” that poor man you
saw as a test subject. And probably more like him. He was broken
like that to begin with. No empathy. That part of him is just
missing. The Companion tech just freed him of whatever constraints
he still had.

I find myself looking up at the stars, listening for
the faint whispers of Unmaker chatter.

“If they were to spread…” I start spinning
nightmares. “If they were to infect the Unmakers, get drones up
there, try to take shuttles back to Earth…”

Earth would nuke this planet again in a
heartbeat,
Peter validates, feeling like he’s finally starting
to realize what we’re in is a lot bigger than his personal desire
to get revenge for his wife and child.
They wouldn’t wait for it
to materialize. They’d launch missiles the second they imagined the
possibility of spread. This is exactly what they’re afraid of.
Worse, maybe, because it’s being driven by human intent, and human
malice.

I climb faster. I don’t care if I’m causing small
avalanches in my wake.

We only pause when we get to the top. The crest is
narrow, jagged, icy, and the wind cuts across it like it wants to
push us off, down back the way we came. But the view…

I wish I could see it in daylight. I could stay,
wait. Sunrise is only a few more hours.

In my night vision, I can see the Spine, over the
Spine, across where the Lake should be. Fifty Klicks. I’m looking
over the whole of the Trident. This is the kind of view only the
Jinn get from their Stations.

But I can also see the dark crater of Lucifer’s
Grave, closer, out in the middle of the Central Blade. Ten klicks
away. And according to my tracking, Thel has already reached it.
His signal starts to fuzz out, then I lose it entirely.

The crater is rich in magnetite. The background EMR
always played havoc on our drones.

“Will it affect us?”

No idea. But if Thel’s been there before… He would
never do anything that would interfere with his power.

We can’t linger. We start the long climb down.

The sun has risen over the Central Blade before we
get where we’re going. By now, Thel’s already had hours to meet
with Asmodeus and prepare for us, thanks to whatever advantage his
combination of Companion and stolen Jinn Sphere gave him, and that
makes every stride I make in pursuit a fresh source of frustration.
I may be a lot stronger and faster than I was, but I’m still on
foot, first having to climb a sheer and treacherous thousand meter
ridge, and then fight through dense growth.

Thankfully, we don’t tire, don’t run short of
oxygen—I can even breathe almost normally again down here in the
lower elevations. When I get thirsty (which feels less like thirst
and more like a dip in my internal gauges), I pause long enough to
grab hold of a lush bundle of green. I watch it shrivel in my
armored grip, and a few of my gauges rise. Then we keep moving.

Keeping focused on my rage, on the priorities at
hand, keeps me from dwelling so much on what the nanotech has done
to me. If I didn’t have that distraction, I’m sure I’d probably
collapse in shock. So every time I start to think about what’s
inside me, I make myself think about what it can do, what I need to
do with it.

Need.

I
need
to be this. I need to stop the
monsters. That means I need to be a monster.

But what I can’t shake off, what still bothers me
with every stride, is thinking how I’m heading
away
from my
father. I left him
in the middle of a battle
. He came to
avenge me and I didn’t stop to let him know that I’m still alive
(or whatever this is).

He’s not your father,
Peter feels the need to
invade my private thoughts again.
I knew your father. He was a
great man. He gave up everything to keep you safe. So did your
mother.

“Abu Abbas raised me as his own, taught me how to
survive, how to fight,” I hiss back inside the mask. “I wasn’t
blood, but he made me his son.”

Replacing his own lost boy. Two wives, and he
couldn’t father another son. What does that tell you?

I really don’t want to hear this garbage, but I can’t
shut Peter out of my head. I don’t know how. I doubt it’s even
possible. But I can fight, for whatever it’s worth.

“He came to save us from the pirates.”

He came to kill pirates. You were his opportunity for
revenge. He used you as bait. I’m sure he probably waited while
they attacked you, waited until they killed any of you that put up
a fight and landed to take their prizes before he ambushed them. He
let your father die. He let those men get to your mother.

“That’s a lie,” I keep defending, feeling my blood
rise. But worse by far: I actually start to doubt. “He wouldn’t do
that. I know what kind of man he is.”

You also know his tactics. And I can see your
memories. Apparently I can see things you won’t. He didn’t just
happen upon your camp under attack. He was already there. Hiding.
Waiting.

Like a fresh wave of fire in my blood, I start to
hate Abu Abbas, the man who raised me as his own child. I start to
hate my people…

It’s not me, it’s Peter. He’s making me doubt,
driving a wedge in everything I know is true, driving a wedge
between me and my old life. And part of me can’t seem to help but
fall into it.

I remember Straker saying that the Companion tech
could stoke and twist emotions to control thinking and behavior, to
drive its host like leading an enemy. Considering that every time
Peter’s rage rises I feel it and lose control, I suspect he can do
that to me. It’s one more lever he has over my body and mind, or
what used to be my body and mind.

“Is there anyone you don’t hate?” I snap, pushing
back against him, foregoing stealth to hack my way through a thick
tangle of vine, venting the rage into the innocent plant life.

They’re all dead.

“Including me?”

He doesn’t answer.

We cut our way through the belly of the Blade to the
steep rocky slope that climbs up nearly five hundred meters to the
top of the crater. The green starts to thin after the first few
hundred meters, and I can see the ground is seeded with crystals of
a black mineral. Magnetite. Blown out of a natural vein by a meteor
strike, probably thousands of years ago.

I start to feel funny, fuzzy.

EMR. Ignore it. It’s only interfering with your finer
new senses. You’re still strong and fast enough to do what we need
to do.

What
we
need to do…

The climb up out of the green is still slow, the
talus loose and refusing to stay put under my boots in places, much
more difficult than climbing the divide crest. Between the sliding
and the incline, I have to use my hands as well as my legs,
crawling.

We’re soon up out of the thick growth, which means
we’re exposed. If the crater is like this all around, it’s an ideal
defensive position. (On my internal maps, the rim is lower on the
east quadrant, but there’s nearly a klick of pretty barren ground
approaching it.)

Thankfully, it turns out I’m not as visible as I
thought. I see it first on my arms as I crawl: My armor isn’t black
anymore. The surfaces have taken on a shifting blend of dark
ochres, trying to blend into the rocks, much like Straker’s
uniform, or the Ghaddar’s modified cloaks and armor.

But rocks don’t crawl uphill, leaving obvious
mini-avalanches in their wake. I’m barely halfway to the top when
the enemy lets me know I’m visible despite my armor’s best efforts
at camouflage. But instead of bots, sniper rounds come my way from
two directions. I’m on lousy ground to dodge, so I have to swat
them away with my forearm armor—it seems to harden itself to take
the large caliber impacts, though I still feel them down to the
bone. As usual, the dented plates quickly reform, absorbing the
fragments that they manage to catch. But the flailing makes me slip
and start sliding down slope. So I brace myself and just let the
next few shots pound me. Nothing penetrates, but each one
hurts.

I remember a trick I’ve seen Colonel Ram do with his
pistol. I draw the revolver. The graphics in my vision almost
instantly calculate trajectory and wind, locking the locations of
the shooters based on the report of their rifles. I line up the gun
with the graphics. Fire.

I can almost feel the bullet fly, feel it find its
first target. Then I wait for the other shooter to try again,
figuring he’ll be smart enough to move his nest, seeing what’s
happened to his partner.

But no further shots come.

As if realizing I’m done with stealth, my armor
returns to black.

No further resistance comes at all, not all the way
up to the wide terraced plateau that runs about two-thirds of the
circumference around top of the crater, not all the way across the
seventy or so meters of open bare rock to look down into the deep
bowl, which is over a klick in diameter and hundreds of meters
deep.

The bottom of the bowl is dark soil laced with
ground-clinging green, nothing taller than a man. There are dozens
of what look like sinkholes of various sizes, some deep enough to
look bottomless from here. What I don’t see is any sign of a base
or a warship factory, or any activity whatsoever.

But then I
do
see a figure, and I’m sure it
wasn’t there an instant ago because of how prominently it stands
out against the dark sand and scrub, unless it was camouflaged. My
eyes automatically zoom in like binoculars as I try to focus on
her, an effect that’s briefly disorienting. It’s a woman, blonde
hair and pale skin, wearing a pure white gown over partial golden
armor and chain mail.

It’s Astarte. And she appears to be wearing a diadem
of black “gems” like the one that Chang had used to monitor her and
communicate through her. She’s looking up at me from the edge of
one of the sinks, a few hundred meters out into the bowl, just
standing there. Waiting.

The hike down to her is as frustrating and clumsy as
the climb up. The inner slopes are just as slippery and treacherous
as the outer ones, and leave me just as exposed. I’m surprised no
one tries to take even one more shot at me. But if they decided to…
I’m getting a good sense of how ideal a defensive position this
really is: If any attacking force didn’t get cut to pieces trying
to climb the crater, they’d be totally vulnerable if they tried to
enter it.

Astarte is still there when I get to the floor of the
bowl. I step in some sand, and my boots squish into the surface
like I’ve just stepped in feces. I have to look down to see that
it’s only sand and dirt saturated with water. There’s a lot of
water in this crater, as if a major vein of permafrost has melted
for some reason. It reminds me of the “shore” of The Lake, all that
saturated sand.

With all the available water, I’d expect there to
be a lot more green than there is,
Peter plays scientist in my
head, letting himself get distracted by our surroundings, by our
boots sinking into the mushy soil.
The soil may not be
hospitable enough.

But then I see evidence of cutting, done carefully so
that it’s not immediately obvious, either harvesting or removing
potential cover.

When I look up, Astarte is gone.

I trudge through what Peter calls “mud” to where I
last saw her. I edge up to the sink, which is about five meters
across, and look down into darkness. Using my enhanced vision, I
see it drop straight down twenty meters before opening up into
lateral caves. I remember the immortals talking about how Asmodeus
had drawn them into a maze of tunnels that apparently laces the
entire crater and entombed them there to fight his bots while
trapped in close quarters. It took them weeks to find their way
out.

I think I can hear faint sounds down deep, but as I’m
trying to listen I hear sucking noises from behind me. I turn
around in time for the mud to erupt in three separate places
semi-surrounding me. I expect bots, but see men: Chang’s black
uniforms caked in the damp dirt, expressionless faces under
breathing gear and goggles. The eyes are corpse eyes, and I can
hear what I expect Straker heard: signals coming from inside their
skulls. They’re so strong this close that they show up as targeting
graphics in my visual field, letting me roughly “see” the Harvester
units through flesh and bone and brain.