The God Mars Book Five: Onryo (20 page)

They raise their PDWs and fire. I can’t move very
fast in the slick sticky mud, and my back is to the sink. I could
try to swat the bullets, but when I realize they’re only using
standard ball ammo, it seems easier just to plant my feet and let
them batter me.

The brain-gutted men prove to be poor shots, only
managing to hit me a dozen times while emptying their magazines. My
armor absorbs their rounds for future resources.

They don’t attempt to reload. Instead, they charge
me, their mouths gaping unnaturally to extend their injectors. I
can hear their jaws dislocate.

Again, I don’t really need to move. A few sweeps of
the Nagamaki cleaves the tops of their heads off about ear level,
splitting the modules. I can feel bone and meat and then metal and
plastic shear. The bodies stagger and drop.

This is sick. These were his own men.

On cue, I feel Peter’s righteous rage surge again. I
don’t need it to motivate me now. I’m more than eager to
proceed.

I still hear signals, but not from the destroyed
Harvesters. These are incoming signals, command signals, now
unanswered, coming from somewhere down below us. They can’t be
coming from too deep down, as the magnetized rock would interfere.
We decide to go answer them. So I step up to the edge of the sink,
take a deep breath in, and jump.

When my boots hit rock, I slip. There’s a film of ice
from the overnight freeze, preserved in the shadows. But there’s
also sign of activity. Some of the branching tunnels are big enough
to stand upright in, and they look well-traveled.

Once I move out of the column of sunlight that bleeds
down the vertical shaft, my night vision kicks in, but now it’s
fuzzy, snowy, probably from the magnetite messing with my internal
interface. I feel a vague tingling all over.

The tunnels quickly twist into a maze. I hear
dripping water, distorted and echoing through the tunnels. It makes
it difficult to hear other sounds, unnatural sounds. Then I see and
feel it: the stone roof does drip free water, and the rock walls
are wet in places.

I listen. I think I can hear what sounds like
machinery, like I heard at the Unmaker base, faint and hollow.
Heavy equipment. Power tools. Construction. It’s almost impossible
to tell which direction the sounds are coming from, or how far away
their sources are. I have to try a few different paths for several
meters before one sounds more promising than the others. I proceed
into darkness, trying to be a stealthy as possible in all my
armor.

I think I’ve come about a hundred meters, on a
winding path that I can only hope to be able to retrace if I have
to back out in a hurry. I’ve met no resistance, no sentries. The
machine sounds get steadily louder to guide me, and sometimes I
think I see Astarte when I’m unsure which way to go, but only out
of the corner of my eye. When I look, there’s no one there, and no
sound of footfalls on the treacherously uneven stone floor.

Finally, I see light. And hear voices.

“If you’d have met me when I
arrived
, we could
have prepared…”

It’s Thel. He sounds simultaneously annoyed and
afraid.

“We are quite well prepared.” The voice that answers
him is male: deep, confident, proud, almost melodious. “And I’ve
found I’m just not a morning person anymore, not since I’ve been
like this. Procrastination and apathy are definitely the most
seductive curses of immortality. I really could just spend my days
sleeping and eating and fucking and never leave my bed.”

I’ve heard the voice once before, on the
Stormcloud.

“Well done,” the voice booms through the tunnels,
calling out. “You found your way. Well, come on in.”

He’s talking to me. I can hear him in my head as well
as in my ears. I draw the Nagamaki, even though it will be awkward
in these tight spaces, and step into the light.

The chamber I emerge into is massive, as big as a
colony dome and almost as high. The light is daylight, filtering
down through some kind of net or canopy across the open ceiling.
This isn’t a cavern, it’s a big pit, covered, camouflaged. Under
the canopy, filling much of the space, is the unmistakable shape of
a Stormcloud, though smaller than the last and still unfinished,
much of it open frame. I can see the railguns in the bow, two of
them, forming a forked nose. Bots and black uniforms are busy
hauling, welding…

“Okay,
that
is cool…” Asmodeus hums, stepping
into view from a side-tunnel behind me. Long red hair tied back and
matching short beard, high forehead, thick brows over deep-set eyes
and a sharp nose. Wicked, cruel grin. He’s wearing his gaudy
high-polished golden armor and his red cloak. A half-length spear
with a long dagger-like blade hangs lazily in his right hand.
“Eighteenth Century Japanese O-Yoroi, if I’m not mistaken. The
height of the armorer’s art. With a touch of low-brow Memento Mori.
I like it. Reminds me a bit of Skeletor, but I like it. Certainly
cooler than you…”

He turns to Thel, who’s standing behind him, gripping
his Sphere-tipped staff, coiled and ready for me to attack him
again.

“…
you
look like some sad LARPing nerd at a
Con, but your costume’s not quite finished. You need a long white
beard and a pointy hat and you could be racially-sensitive Gandalf.
Or maybe just do away with the nose and go full Voldemort.”

He’s speaking gibberish, but I feel Peter get a
chuckle out of the insult, whatever it means.

“We need to contain him!” Thel insists urgently.

“I was thinking about
talking
to him,”
Asmodeus counters casually, “considering you’ve been withholding
some rather critical intel.” He turns to me. “For some reason, my
good friend Thelonious never mentioned you. Thankfully, some of his
Peace Keepers proved to be a bit more chatty in his absence,
especially when they thought honesty would stop the Harvester
nanites from eating their brains—I admit, I misled them a bit about
that. They call you the ‘Reaper’, which isn’t terribly imaginative.
And ‘Onryō,’ which is cooler but just doesn’t roll of the tongue.
We’ll have to come up with a better name for you.

“Anyway, they were sure their ‘wizard’ had taken care
of you a long time ago, but apparently you made a hell of an
impression on them before he ‘destroyed’ you. Revenge for the wife
and kids, eh? I understand that. Revenge is an old and honorable
motivation. Unlike half-assed brain cancer Gandalf here: He’s just
an obsessive narcissist. And there’s nothing more obnoxious than an
immature geek diva. No social skills at all…”

Underneath his cavalier attitude, Asmodeus’ own
measured rage seethes out of him like a seduction. He’s trying to
connect with us on that level.

“You need me,” Thel defends himself, not effectively
hiding his rising panic.

“I needed you to be fucking
honest
with me!”
Asmodeus snaps at him. Then he tells me: “He told me he just found
his Companion, in the ruins of the original Pax colony. Happy
accident. Made me waste my time searching through the overgrown
junk, dodging the arrows of those hippie ninja tree-humpers, trying
to figure out how it got there. I’m curious like that. I’d believe
one of the Super Friends might have misplaced it, but Oz The Great
and Powerful here says he’s had it for over a decade, and that’s
before their time. Which leaves Chang. Who knows what he left lying
around during the fifty years he was sulking and self-flagellating
over causing the so-called Apocalypse. Dear Astarte, for example,
skittering around half-formed and abandoned like an unwanted pet.
Too bad he isn’t around anymore to ask, having had an intimate
moment with a four hundred and fifty kiloton nuke, trying to be
noble. Long story. Stupid ending. But here we are. And here
you
are, all sexy badness.”

I can feel him reaching out, trying to connect with
my tech, trying to get into my head. Peter resists.

“You’re like
me
!” he decides cheerfully.
“You’re from back home! But you’ve been here longer than the Super
Friends, just like Cancer Gandalf’s magic stick. Or at least your
Seed has, since apparently you
were
just a plain old family
man before you went all Samurai Skeletor. And that’s weird,
assuming the back story of how any of us got here is even remotely
accurate. I can see Chang tossing a Companion during his Lonely
Martyr phase, but not a fully-loaded non-imprinted Seed for one of
the monkeys to stumble upon. I mean, releasing Astarte into the
wild is one thing—the girl can take care of herself, even when
she’s only part of herself—but a free ticket to godhood…” He shakes
his head, confused but clearly intrigued. “We really should
talk.”

“He’s not going to talk!” Thel is panicking, whatever
lie he told Asmodeus unraveling. “All he does is kill!”

“See?” he tells me like he expects us to be good
friends. “We
do
have a lot in common. Did you know I was
originally trained to be an assassin? Too bad for my bosses I wound
up liking the work way too much to stick to the script. And I
also
died messily and got brought back from the dead, stuck
in one of these walking theme parks. Surprise.”

I know I shouldn’t tell this monster anything, but
the urge to diminish Thel in the eyes of his new “partner” is just
too tempting.

“The nanotech being called Yod led us to a cache of
your technology,” I combine Peter’s story with my own. “That cache
is long gone now. Yod just wanted us to take enough to see what we
would do with it: one Seed, one Companion. We’re just another one
of his sick experiments. Just like you are.”

I see shock wash over Thel’s face. He was hoping to
go back to the Barrow some day, to take more of this terrible
technology for his own petty, ruthless use.

But as for Asmodeus, I can see him digest the
implications behind his eyes. Slowly but surely, his thin mouth
twists into a grin, then a smile. He starts chuckling, then
laughing out loud, hysterically, shaking his head like what I’ve
told him is both crushing and hilarious.

“Have you ever heard the old argument?” he starts
when he finally gets his wind and his sense back enough to speak.
“If God is all powerful and created everything, didn’t He also
create evil? Doesn’t He, in fact, have total control over evil?” He
sounds ecstatic about this, like something he’d always believed had
just been proven, no matter how horrible.

“A test for humanity,” I regurgitate the lessons of
my faith. He shakes his head.

“As if such a being doesn’t already know
exactly
what you’re going to do,” he confronts, his wicked
grin coming back, his focus. “You know what it really is? It’s just
good entertainment. It makes a better
story
. Manufactured
drama. Scripted reality. The crisis that drives the narrative.”

He shakes his head again, but then seems to brighten.
Realizes

“But that means Yod
is
here, in
this
timeline. So maybe Chang wasn’t raving when he said he didn’t
really manage any of this, that this Yod had done it all. Too bad I
never really got read in on the details of that stupidity, the
so-called God Project…” Then he locks his eyes on me. “But how
would
you
know about Yod?” He glares at Thel. “Did
you
know about Yod?”

Thel shakes his head in confused denial, still trying
to manage his panic.

“No, you
didn’t
,” Asmodeus accepts, intrigued.
Then to me: “So how did
you
?”

“And how do you know the cache is gone?” Thel demands
to know, not caring that he’s admitting what he withheld.

“Because I’ve been there.”

I reach up with my free hand, disengage my mask,
lower it so they can see my face.

“
Who the hell are you?
” Thel starts. Asmodeus
seems freshly amused by his confusion.

“Just another pawn.”

Asmodeus’ eyes seem to go blank for a moment. I can
see them subtly scan back-and forth, like he’s looking through
files we can’t see. Then he locks on something.

“I’ve
seen
you before. Or my toys have—a
benefit of this fun new body. You were with that band of refugees
from Melas that wandered into one of my little diversion raids
about a week ago.”

The rage that surges now is all mine.

“That ‘little diversion’ killed my adoptive mother
and fifteen of my people, my friends.”

“So
I’m
the target of your noble crusade?” he
realizes like it’s just another joke. Then more sympathetically:
“Waste of time, newbie. You’ll find we really can’t hurt each
other. And after a while, you’ll learn there’s no point mourning
the mortal meat, shortly after you realize whatever you think you
are is just transcripted data. The real you died… well… apparently
sometime in the last week.”

“He must have been with the Rusties that attacked
us,” Thel tries to put together. “He must have found where I buried
the Reaper’s remains.” I notice how he carefully avoids mention of
the DQ, still deceiving his “partner”. I decide not to reveal him
this time, if only to keep Asmodeus away from the ship.

“And that’s curious,” Asmodeus sounds intrigued,
“because if this is the Seed of the same ‘Reaper’ that chopped up
the Eureka PK all those years ago, that Seed should have
overwritten him with the original’s personality as it rebuilt him.
Maybe it just hasn’t had time to yet, which is bad news for you,
kid, even if you aren’t really you. Or maybe the Seed lacks the
personality preservation core. Or it was damaged. I’m not really
sure how the tech works, considering it was developed several
decades
after
I died. So maybe you
will
get to stick
around for awhile, Blondie. Forever, actually. I can’t say that’s
particularly good news either, I’m afraid.”