The God Mars Book Five: Onryo (5 page)

Khan heads for a section of Wall on the south end, a
spot that looks like it’s being guarded by a dozen warriors
arranged in a rough circle. They each wear a small light canopy of
painted material over their helmets, either as sun-screening or
camouflage or both. As we get closer, we see that they’re actually
standing around a roughly circular sheer-walled pit sunk into the
rock. I also realize that one of them isn’t a warrior, it’s Terina.
I see fear in her eyes when she looks up at me. I don’t think I’ve
ever seen Terina afraid of anything, and considering all we’ve been
through…

The pit is about three meters across and five deep.
Down in the bare dirt bottom is a single figure, dressed in what I
immediately recognize is an Unmaker uniform, similar to Straker’s,
except it doesn’t shift pixel patterns to match its surroundings
like Straker’s can since it was Modded by her Blade. It’s just
standard-issue UN soft armor, in the original Pre-Bang desert-camo
scheme. It looks well-worn but well-cared-for, just as Straker’s
did before her Blade restored and modified it. But the man wearing
it…

He looks up at us. His hair is dirty and ragged, his
face pale and gaunt with dried blood crusted on it. His eyes are
milky like a corpse’s. And the smell rising at us is definitely the
smell of death.

Other than staring up at us with his obviously blind
eyes, he does nothing, makes no expression.

“Do you recognize his uniform?” Khan asks us, asks
Straker because of the apparent similarities.

Straker steps up to the pit. She looks down at him,
looks like she’s trying to hear something. She draws her Blade, and
before Khan or the guards can stop her, she jumps into the
hole.

She lands with impressive surety, but before she can
recover herself, the man lunges at her. She stops him easily
enough, putting out her free hand and holding him by the throat. He
tries to claw at her with his bare hands, tries to take her sword,
and seems oblivious as it cuts his fingers to the bone.

“Beware his mouth!” Khan warns, and the reason
becomes clear. The man in the pit opens his jaws as if to bite her,
but unnaturally wide. I think I can hear the pop of his jaw
dislocating. Then something mechanical thrusts several centimeters
out of his mouth in the blink of an eye. Straker dodges it. It
looks probe-like, needle-tipped. It continues to jab at her in
short, quick strokes.

She keeps holding him, twisting his head like she’s
examining him. Then she thrusts her Blade up under his jaw, and
pushes it in.

Fire and smoke bursts out of his mouth and eyes. The
body jerks and goes limp, but she doesn’t let go, doesn’t let him
fall.

“What is it?” my father needs to know.

“I can see it.
Inside
him. There’s a machine
fused to the base of his brain. It’s got…” She uses the tip of her
sword surgically, scoops away one of the burned eyes to reveal what
looks like a simple sensor cluster. “It was watching us through
him. Controlling his muscles.”

“A corpse?” my father doesn’t want to accept.

“Yes… and no… His heart was still beating, or trying
to. It didn’t sound right. And his chest was moving, but I didn’t
hear breathing, just wet rattling. Until I fried the control unit.
Then it stopped. But…”

I remember that her hearing has been enhanced by her
Modding. All of her senses have.

She turns his head sideways for us to see. There’s a
gunshot wound in his right temple, with powder burns and the jagged
star-shaped tearing that betrays a contact shot.

“He tried to kill himself,” she puts together grimly.
“Probably as this thing ate through his brain, shoved its sensor
stalks out through his eyes…”

“But it kept him
alive
?” Murphy doesn’t
accept.

“Just the body. Probably to preserve it for use.” I
can hear her voice begin to tremble as she speculates. She’s just
as sickened as we are. Being Modded as she is certainly hasn’t
blunted her humanity.

“Using him like a bot?” I’m understanding but not
wanting to.

Straker eases the body down, stands over it.

“It’s worse than that,” she tells us urgently. “I
heard
signals
. Like bot signals. He was
transmitting
.”

I manage to feel even sicker.

“He’s seen us, seen this place,” the Ghaddar decides,
managing to think tactically in the face of this horror.

“Then so has his master,” my father concludes.

“Where was he found?” Straker asks upwards.

“East-southeast of the Grave” Khan tells her. “By a
scouting party. He was walking toward the Gap into the South Blade.
He had a weapon, a gun, but he emptied it.”

Straker bends down over the body, and tears a set of
patches off of the uniform.

“He’s a Peace Keeper,” she announces what she’s
found. “He’s from Eureka Colony. There was a garrison there. Before
the Bang. We managed to keep in communication with them for a
number of years, but we lost contact, long before my time.”

“It seems they’re still out there somewhere,” I
figure.

“And Asmodeus and his toy maker have been using them
for their sick experiments,” my father grumbles. “That means they
may have made the mistake of joining him, just like your own people
joined Chang.”

Straker shakes her head, confused.

“He’s still wearing his generational uniform. The
first thing Chang did was make us wear his black.”

“Maybe they’re rebelling,” Murphy tries. “Like you
did.”

I hear her breathing down in the pit, feel her rage.
She’s never met these people, but they’re still a kind of kin to
her. But then she looks distracted, turns her head as if she’s
trying to hear…

“I’m still hearing a signal.”

“Over here,” Khan indicates with a jerk of his
head.

Straker is up out of the pit with a zigzagging of
springs off the walls. The warriors reflexively step back at this
brief demonstration of what her Companion has done for her. Then
they make room for us to follow Khan over to a neighboring pit. I
didn’t think to notice it until now because there were no guards
around it, but now I realize: the warriors are reluctant to
approach it. So is Terina.

(I’ve never seen her like this, not in the face of
torture and death, not in the face of an endless army of killer
bots. She’s horrified, barely managing to stay put and maintain her
regal façade.)

Down in the second pit is a Katar warrior. Same
staring up at us. Same dead eyes. But he’s not nearly as decayed.
He’s breathing—I see his chest moving.

“The mouth device injected something into him,” Khan
tells us grimly. “It took time. He chose the pit when he felt it
taking him. He didn’t scream. He didn’t ask for death. He wanted us
to be able to study him. Learn.”

Straker steps to the edge of the pit, but doesn’t
leap in. Instead, she holds her Blade up in front of her face,
closes her eyes, concentrates. I don’t see anything obvious happen,
but then the machine-possessed warrior lowers his gaze, just stares
into the pit wall.

“I disabled the transmitter,” she lets us know.

“Is this technology like yours?” Khan asks her
directly, nodding at her Blade.

“No. It’s much more primitive. As far as I can tell,
all it does is seek a target and build the neuro-control module,
the sensor stalks to see with and the injector to pass the starter
seed to another body.”

“To replicate itself,” I follow into the horror. “To
reproduce.”

First Fohat used the brains of his fallen pawns to
wire his bots. Now he’s doing the opposite: gutting men of their
brains to make drones out of flesh and bone. I surprise myself by
seeing the wisdom in it: It’s cheaper in resources, requires no
factory, no base, and self replicates by infecting and consuming
whoever it encounters. Brilliant evil.

“
Harvester
…” Straker mutters. Then she puts
away her Blade. “I can hear it, read its code. It’s called a
Harvester.”

Straker assures us that the body of the Keeper is
safe, and the guards lower lines to bring it up out of its prison.
They easily take Straker up on her offer to go back down into the
pit and secure the body herself, and then keep their distance from
it when it’s hauled up. From the haunted looks in their eyes, I
suspect these warriors watched their comrade succumb to the thing
that consumed his brain.

I expect Khan to send his daughter away, but he just
looks at her once as the violated body is laid out on the stone.
She stands strong, and he seems to leave the issue at that.

A small delegation of civilians comes across the
field to meet us. They all wear similar odd canopy headdresses. In
their midst is their Science King, Gempei Akinaga, who takes a long
silent look at the body (from several meters away), and then
addresses Khan directly.

“A lab-room has been prepped. If the device is inert,
we need to examine it.”

“And him,” Straker speaks up. She pulls the badges
she took from the body from her pocket. Now that I can see closer,
one of them is a name patch. “His name was Forbusco. J. He was a
sergeant.”

Akinaga nods, as if remembering this scary curiosity
was a man. But Khan holds up a hand before Akinaga’s people can
approach the corpse. He looks across the field, back to his
colony.

“Do it here. Set up a shelter.”

Akinaga doesn’t argue. Runners are sent to acquire
what’s needed.

In the interim, Straker starts her own
examination.

“Your man’s organs are still working, at least his
heart and lungs. Was this man still breathing when you encountered
him.”

“Cousteau,” Khan commands one of his warriors, a
brown-haired female with greenish-brown eyes and muscles like
cables. She steps forward.

“We do not know. We saw him. He fired at us. We
returned.”

Straker prods at the soft armor uniform jacket with
her gloved fingers, finds a large number of cut holes in the torso.
I see more in the thighs and upper arms. Some look like sword
thrusts; some are smaller, more likely arrows. (I’m surprised they
risked retrieving those arrows from the walking corpse-weapon, but
they’re likely precious.)

“He was a poor shot. Only Glaiveman Hines was hit, a
meat wound to his arm.”

“We released Hines from isolation after a few days,”
Akinaga tells us. “His wound was simple. Just a bullet.”

“Only the mouth-stinger…” Cousteau continues,
hesitant now, pointing at the body’s gaping mouth and the charred
injector that still protrudes from it. “It ran out of ammo and
charged us. We had already put four arrows in it. Alistair tried
his blade, but…” She nods toward the other pit. “It grabbed him and
looked like it was trying to bite. Then the stinger struck him in
the neck. A minor wound, it seemed, at first. The creature… It
should have been dead. We stabbed it and held it back on our
Naginata.” She semi-demonstrates by thrusting her sword-lance at
the body. The weapons would let them keep the thing—the former
Sergeant Forbusco—out of reach (certainly out of reach of his
mouth). But if he had arrows and multiple blades like that stuck in
him…

“It did not falter. It should have fallen, but it
kept on its feet all the way here, driven by our Naginata. We
thought to chop it apart and leave it, but I decided it better to
study, to learn…”

Khan gives her a reassuring nod, validating her
difficult decision. Straker does the same, for whatever a fellow
warrior’s appreciation is worth. Then she turns back to the body,
rips open his soft-armor jacket.

The blade and arrow holes do indeed penetrate the
soft armor, leaving deep open wounds, some of which that show the
slicing and tearing of weapons twisting. His belly is open in
places, his insides still inside only because of the fit of his
jacket. The smell is of many days of decomposition, overwhelming.
The Science King’s entourage is pushed back by it. But there’s
dried blood all over the torso, soaked into the jacket lining.

“His heart was still beating when these wounds were
made,” the Ghaddar decides.

“And continued trying to, even bled mostly out from
his wounds and with both lungs punctured,” Straker reports, trying
to remain objective.

“He
was
breathing,” one of the other warriors
speaks up, sounding as haunted as Cousteau. “When we took him… I
heard… He choked on his blood and stopped, but did not fall, did
not stop fighting.”

“The module is wired into his nervous system,”
Straker seems to be looking into him again, through flesh and bone.
“It can control his muscles with electrical impulses as long as the
tissues are still viable enough to respond. It probably also keeps
the heart and lungs going as long as it can to try to keep feeding
oxygen to the body, to increase the longevity of the drone…” She
bites her lip. “That’s what this is. Just a convenient, disposable
platform…” She puts her hand on the head, almost tenderly cradles
it. “You’ll find the brain destroyed. Consumed and starved.
Unnecessary.”

“How long since you captured him?” Murphy asks.

“Three days,” Cousteau answers.

“And it was still moving,” my father states the
terrifying obvious.

“How long
can
they keep going?” I wonder out
loud.

Straker gets up and walks over to the second pit,
looks down at the infected Katar. Alistair. He’s still standing
there, staring at the wall, wobbling slightly on his feet. Looking
closer now, I see a gash on his forehead, and more in his dark
braided hair, crusted with blood. There’s blood smeared on the pits
walls, about head-height. I also see that food had been lowered
down to him, but it’s only partially eaten, the rest scattered as
if thrown. There are stains of vomit in the dirt by the wall.

“How long did it take him to get like this?” the
insensitive question comes out of me.