The God Mars Book Five: Onryo (46 page)

The ritual itself was done in a variety of languages
that, thanks to my full access to my Mods, I can now recognize as
Japanese, Russian, French and Swedish, as well as Standard English.
Much like our own
Salat Al-Janazah
, the participants pray
for the passage of their dead to a better existence under the
protection of a singular supreme entity, which also seems to be
much like the God I understand. (I expect the faiths of the
Founders have simply been combined over the years, impressively
without obvious conflict.) They also take turns telling stories of
the good deeds of those lost, listing their best qualities in life
for the posterity of the community’s memory.

Because of our service protecting their home, the
Katar award my father, as well as Zayed and Nawaf, our only other
fallen, tombs in a place of honor among their own. And in respect
of our customs, they allow us opportunity to perform our burials on
the first day after the battle, so our loved ones can be laid to
rest as soon as possible, as our own traditions demand.

So we wash and wrap our own, fill our canisters for
the climb, and carry the bodies up through the rocks. We position
them facing the appropriate direction, which I realize is also the
direction of our former homelands in Melas, now so far away. I am
given the honor of leading the
Salat
, though Rashid will now
become our Imam and Sharif.

Colonel Ram has come with us. He speaks the mourner’s
part of the
Salat
as if he is one of the Faithful, and no
one challenges his presence. He was, after all, my father’s
brother.

We seal the bodies up securely, and then head back
down into the City to join the Katar in their own rituals.

I take a moment to enjoy the view from the heights,
take a moment to myself by my father’s grave.

Funerals are for the living far more than the dead.
My father taught me that. As did a man who cared for me like a
father. And I lost both of them on the same day.

Funerals are for the living. It is up to us to come
together, to mourn and remember, and then to keep living.

But for me, that means something entirely different
now. I
will
live. Perhaps whether I choose to or not. I
would say “forever,” but my father was also apt to say: “Whatever
lives, dies.” It’s just that my own death may now be a long way
off, and far from natural.

Right now, I don’t feel very immortal, certainly not
invincible. There’s a hole in me somewhere, a profound emptiness. I
want to stay here forever, like one of these stones, but I know I
can’t. I know I’ll have to come down off this mountainside soon
enough. But for now, it’s very beautiful up here. Peaceful.

The sky has cleared. The thin wind is cold on my
face, but not freezing. From here, I can see the progress already
made in cleaning up the damage to the City. And beyond the Gate
Wall, the green of the greater world, still verdant, still alive
despite the abuses of men and the things men have made themselves
into.

I imagine I may see much change to this place in my
time to come. What will this world become in the next decades,
generations, centuries…?

Colonel Ram once warned against imagining the future,
as we are so prone to try to do as human beings, because it will
never be just as we imagine it, and such is the root of
disappointment.

But Yod said it was the randomness and
unpredictability that made the world beautiful, that even a
functionally omniscient machine treasured chaos in its system.

I miss my father.

I miss Murphy.

I miss Peter.

“Who are you?”

“Jonathan Drake.”

“Then be that.”

Then be that.

I find the Ghaddar and Rashid waiting for me just
above the City when I finally come down. We walk the rest of the
way down together in silence.

The Katar are generous with their food, but the feast
is sedate. This is an act of healing, of community taking care of
its own, of the basic rituals of gathering together and attending
to the basic needs of the living.

The Modded Immortals and Companion-Bound have been
invited to one of the greater meals in a large stone hall not far
from where the Oculus once stood. They are given seats in
conspicuous proximity to the Kings. I was also offered such a seat,
but chose to stay with my people.

The Knights have also been invited, in appreciation
for their defense of Katar. I expect they look very similar to
Nomads to anyone who doesn’t know how to read faction
camo-patterns, except they have much more elaborate armor on under
their cloaks. If the Katar have any residual prejudices to having
even more “stubby” people in their community, they don’t show it.
As I learned in Melas: war makes interesting and unexpected
allies.

If the Knights lost any of their own in the fight,
they have not said. But they heartily enjoy the Katar hospitality,
and formally offer the Kings their continued assistance if they’re
available to give it. Khan in turn offers them shelter within the
City, for whenever and as long as they’d like to stay, but their
Grand Master politely declines him for now, telling him they are
still seeking lost brethren farther east. Khan tells them of
encounters many years past with a gun-armed people some twenty
kilometers east, but describes them as a ragtag group, without
armor or uniforms. As the strangers never attempted incursion into
Katar territory, the Katar chose to return the courtesy, and they
haven’t collided since. Grand Master Kendricks thanks him for the
valuable intel, and the Knights return to feasting and sharing
stories.

As we eat, I catch Khan’s eyes on me from across the
hall. I expect his usual loathing glare, but instead see a deep
sadness, an emptiness in his very soul. His daughter, we have
assured him, is not completely lost. She may one day return to him,
hopefully with what really matters still intact. But that seems to
be no comfort. Nor is the news of how bravely and skillfully she
fought, how she almost single-handedly beat the demon in a contest
of weapons. His daughter remains in stasis in the Siren’s Song,
waiting for the permission of the ETE Council to be taken to White
Station, where she will become an object of study, of
experimentation. He has given his consent for this, for the greater
good, for the hope of a better future, and perhaps mostly that he
may see his daughter again, in some form or other.

Looking at me now… It’s like he’s comparing the boy
he barely knew but loathed on principle to the thing that sits in
his halls and eats with him today; like he’s trying to determine if
I
am
the same person I was, or something else that simply
resembles him. Will he get his daughter back, or will it just be a
kind of machine programmed to say it’s her?

I give him a nod like I can remotely understand what
he’s going through. He simply turns away, staring out across the
room full of his people in mourning.

The Katar lost sixty-nine men, women and children,
including three of their warriors that they later “gave mercy” to
because they’d been infected.

I lost a father. And a surrogate father. And a good
friend.

But I have been returned to my family, at least for
now.

As for Murphy, there was no body to bury. Ram himself
scoured the blast zone for hours looking for trace of him,
something to offer as remains to his people, his wife and son,
until Straker found him and handed him Murphy’s revolver. I didn’t
see her do it, but she’d picked it up as she ran to save the Katar
evacuees, realizing its value to Murphy’s family. Ram took it
reverently, thanked her, and told her he would return it to
Tranquility himself.

But there is more pressing business than essential
rituals.

We meet in the privacy of the Siren’s Song. Even Bly,
who took off after the battle, needing time to himself now that the
fate of likely all of his people was horribly clear. His grief must
be unbearable, but his guilt unimaginable. He had led them to that
fate, by leading them into service with Chang. For power. For
revenge. (Revenge against those who are now his only friends.) And
now he probably thinks all he has is revenge.

Straker tries to comfort him, to be company if
nothing else, because of their shared loss. But Straker was only a
junior officer while Bly was their leader. And Straker managed to
lead some of her people away from Chang with Ram’s help, so at
least a few hundred of her kind survive (even if they remain
de-facto prisoners of the Unmakers). In return, Bly shows her
uncharacteristic tenderness, even affection. I wonder if something
more has come out of their shared loss, or their comradeship in
this war of super-beings.

Unexpectedly, this strikes me as ice in my gut,
because it makes me think about what I’ve likely lost, if I ever
had it at all. If Terina can be “recovered,” her only memories of
me will be from the time she awoke Modded. That moment—trying to
help her come to grips with what she’d become—and the walk back to
Katar… That’s all I’ll be to her, if I was anything at all before
that. If I’m lucky, she’ll know my name, my face, and maybe that
I’m a friend and not an enemy. But there was that too-brief moment
of intimacy…

I’m glad it wasn’t more. If she’d actually told me
that she cared for me, and that was part of what was gone…

If Peter were here, he’d probably say something very
fatherly, like
You can start over, start fresh, fall for each
other all over again.

To which Ram’s words remind me not to count on
whatever future I can imagine.

Bel lets me see her, kept asleep, sealed in her
couch. Her Companion has already made good progress in healing her
physical body, restoring her facial bones, but that side of her
face is covered with that translucent silicon-based polymer “skin”
again. I remember a childhood tale of a maiden asleep in a glass
coffin, waiting for her true lover to awaken her. With a kiss. Or
maybe, in this case, with the memory of one, preserved in her
living Blade, still hugged to her chest like a precious
treasure.

Then Bel lets us see Fohat, sealed in his own glass
coffin, back in the aft lab. His head is trying to regenerate,
slowly weaving a skull and growing skin, but his brain is barely
formed and exposed. The rest of him looks sick, like a starving
man.

“Sealed in here, without resources to rebuild, his
body has to scavenge from itself,” Bel explains, with just a hint
of glee. “We could keep him like this, repeatedly destroying his
brain, watching him eat himself to re-grow it. Or we can let him
rebuild enough to return to a half-life, barely conscious, and try
to tap his memories for intel.”

“I’m sure if he knew where Asmodeus was and what he
was up to, Asmodeus has already changed his plans,” Paul Stilson
discounts, opting: “You should keep him unconscious.”

“But then we don’t get to torture him,” Lux pouts.
“You are just never any fun, are you?”

Stilson ignores her.

“What about Astarte?” Straker wonders more
practically.

“Not a word,” Ram admits heavily. “And that’s
bad.”

“And we’re sure she hasn’t turned on us?” Bly has to
ask. Surprisingly, Ram doesn’t even give him a hard glare.

“She’s still playing her role,” Dee insists. “And
that means she has to.”

“Assuming that was
her
we saw, and not another
DNA copy,” Erickson suggests. “Or a holographic trick.”

“She brought women—
my
women—to that monster
like some brothel procuress, let them be raped to death, and did
nothing
to stop it,” Bly won’t forgive.

“Then it wasn’t her, or she had a damn good reason,”
Ram finally defends, his voice a growl. “Both possibilities should
scare us shitless.” He looks at Fohat’s body for several seconds,
the tells Bel: “Let him come back. Just a little bit.” Then to Lux:
“You can torture him all you like.”

But the way he says it… Lux doesn’t even smile.

Straker suddenly looks ill, like she’s done something
stupid.

“Sir…” she addresses Ram. “That report you were
having me compose… I don’t think I mentioned… When the Harvesters
attacked us, some of them were Pax.”

Now it’s Ram’s turn to look sick. And he’s far from
alone in it.

“Asmodeus,” I remember. “On the ship. He described
the Pax Keep.”

“A dark, damp, dreary dungeon…” Bel repeats the words
Asmodeus used.

“He’s
been
there,” Straker decides, horrified.
“He was trying to tell us…”

“It’s all about the real estate,” Ram repeats another
thing Asmodeus said on the ship.

“He drew us away,” Dee puts together quickest, of
course.

“We need to get to the Pax,” Stilson decides
quickly.

“He also mentioned Eureka,” I remember further,
having my own gut-sinking.

“We need to divide,” Ram tempers our urge to go
charging somewhere.

“Anything Asmodeus does, he’ll have thought three
moves past,” Dee warns. “He may have drawn us here to attack either
of the places he mentioned, or somewhere else entirely. Or he may
be trying to draw us away from here because he
does
want
this place for some reason. The Harvesters in Pax clothing may have
been to get us to go running there.”

“The Pax Keep…” I consider, “…it’s more defensible.
Orbit wouldn’t be able to see what he’s doing.”

“So is Eureka,” Straker counters.

“Eureka can be more easily bombarded from orbit,” I
argue back.

“We need to make sure,” Erickson votes. “We need to
go looking for him. Now.”

“Anybody remember those old horror film where the
good guys would decided to split up, even though they knew there
was a monster stalking them?” Bel cautions.

“He’ll have a plan for anything we do,” Dee sums up
the trap we’re in.