The God Mars Book Five: Onryo (9 page)

I help look for any sign of activity, but I find
myself distracted. Something about those names… Just on the edge of
my memory. Familiar, maybe. Or maybe something I read. Or
dreamed.

“Signal?” my father asks Straker.

She listens for a moment, then gestures further up
slope, up through the rocks.

We have to catch up to Straker again. She climbs
better than the long-limbed Katar, even better than the Ghaddar. A
benefit of her Companion modifications, I’m sure.

We find her leaning with her palms on what looks like
rock fall, her head turned like she’s listening.

“This isn’t a natural slide,” Negev assesses,
gesturing over the slope of overgrown boulders we’re facing, a
talus pile nearly two dozen meters wide and half-a-dozen high.
“Someone moved these rocks.”

He’s right: it looks wrong, just a bit too far from
the rim slope behind it, just a bit too “neat”.

“It’s in here,” Straker declares. Then she starts
pulling away boulders. The Katar step back, visibly impressed by
her strength. She works at a single section, creating a kind of
cave mouth in the pile. We try to help her, but two of us can
barely budge a stone that she can lift by herself.

Interestingly, the stones she’s pulling seem to come
away without disturbing the rest of the fall, even when she’s dug
in several meters.

She digs like that for half an hour, while we can’t
manage much more than moving aside the stones she brings out. Then
from inside her mini-cave, she announces:

“Hatch!”

A few of us wedge in behind her. She’s revealed a
marred black surface, curved like a ship’s hull, with a
barely-visible seam that draws a circle just over two meters in
diameter. I’ve seen a circular hatch like this, and the black skin
over it, which I know is radar masking.

“Colonel Ram had a ship like this,” the Ghaddar
remembers. “The Lancer. It came abandoned out of the desert.”

“And he found another one near Tyr,” Straker adds.
“It was a fast recon vessel, paired with a lab ship. Sent by UNCORT
nearly two decades ago, to look for nanotech, to study. They even
experimented on whoever they could lure in.”

“That means Earth knew there were people here decades
before they answered Colonel Ram’s call,” the Ghaddar condemns. She
was close to the Colonel during the time before and after he
contacted Earth, and saw how they treated him. And the rest of us.
Whatever good intentions they profess are not to be believed.

“It looks like no one’s been in or out of here in a
long time,” Murphy refocuses on what’s before us.

“There’s something on the surface…” I point to the
hatch. Straker brushes away the dust and caked-on dirt. There are
more Kanji on the door: two large characters that look like they
were painted in a hurry. The red paint is faded and chipped, but
Negev seems to be able to make sense of it. Still, he doesn’t
translate for a moment.

“Ohn-Ryoh,” he finally says, quietly, like he doesn’t
want to disturb something.

“It means ‘vengeful spirit,” the Ghaddar explains,
like she both does and doesn’t believe. I remember hearing that her
mother’s side was from Shinkyo. “Most spirits—
Yurei
—haunt
those that wronged them, and can be appeased when justice is
served.
Onryō
haunt a place. They seek vengeance
indiscriminately. And they’re much harder to appease or
exorcize.”

“Is it supposed to be a warning?” Murphy wonders,
trying to sound like it’s funny.

“Not a very good one if you have to be able to read
Kanji to understand it,” the Ghaddar criticizes.

“Same paint as on the gravestone?” I ask, hoping for
some clue to this mystery.

“No,” the Ghaddar decides. “And the script is in a
different hand. Someone else marked the hatch.”

“I don’t hear anything from inside,” Straker focuses.
“Just the faded beacon.” She steps back away from the hatch, takes
a breath. “The ship at Tyr used a beacon to lure its test
subjects.”

Apparently deciding to proceed anyway, she draws her
Blade and concentrates.

Nothing happens.

“The lock is pretty effectively encrypted,” she
complains, but keeps trying.

Having another dream-memory moment, I step up to the
hatch. I’m thinking that there should be some kind of concealed
panel, a hatch control. I put my hand on the hull to the right of
the hatchway, feel around.

I get a blast of pressure in my face, just for a few
seconds, spitting dust and grit at me. Everybody but Straker steps
back, almost stumbling over each other in the small passage.

“You did it,” Murphy praises Straker. She looks
unsettled.

“I’m not sure
I
did anything.” Then she asks
me: “Did
you
?”

I shake my head, unsure. I feel around on the hull,
still can’t find any kind of mechanism, anything I may have
triggered. But the hatch is unsealed. Straker grabs hold of an edge
and pulls it open, revealing an airlock. Dusty. And there are smoke
stains, as if there was a fire. They flow from inside.

“I’m going in first,” Straker insists.

“Good plan,” Murphy agrees, hand on the butt of his
revolver.

I notice our Katar “escorts” have moved back. They
actually look more nervous than they did around the
Harvester-infected.

Straker steps into the lock, her sword leading.
Nothing happens. She reaches out with her free hand, tries the
inner hatch controls. They don’t respond. After several seconds of
nothing happening Murphy steps in behind her. Then, impulsively, so
do I, realizing as I do that if this
is
a trap, we’ve just
given it three of our number.

As if confirming it, there’s a flicker of lights. And
another blast of pressure, longer and stronger this time. Now it’s
our turn to almost fall over each other as we back away. I’m hit
with a stale smell, dusty, but also like old smoke, and something
else.

“And you didn’t do that either?” Murphy nervously
asks Straker.

“I have no idea,” she admits, now sounding shaken.
Then she looks back at me, her brow furrowing.

“I didn’t touch
anything
,” I defend. But the
timing is definitely suspicious: I step in, and the lights power up
and the inner hatch blows.

Like she’s unwilling to touch the ship directly,
Straker uses her Blade to nudge open the inner hatch. The corridor
beyond it is empty. But then along its length, the ship’s lighting
comes on, though only barely, flickering.

From what little I can see, this ship—if that’s what
it is—is much bigger than the Lancer, or the Siren’s Song. Wider.
The corridor goes forward several meters, then branches in four
directions. There are more smoke-stains on the bulkheads and
ceilings. There
was
a fire in here somewhere, but I don’t
see its source.

Straker tells us to stay put, and takes a cautious
walk down to the junction with her Blade leading. She looks down
the side branches, listens, then comes back, shaking her head to
tell us she’s seen and heard nothing. Murphy flashes me a brave
grin, shrugs, and steps through into the corridor. Still nothing
happens, so they move further into the ship. I step in behind them,
the Ghaddar right behind me. And I feel…

I
know
this place.

I don’t know how. The shapes and spaces. I remember
them being brighter, cleaner. And more occupied. It’s probably just
my imagination, but I’ve had flashes like this, starting as early
as I can remember. When I was young, before I was taken in by Abu
Abbas, before my birth parents were killed by pirates, before we
were refugees, I remember bright spaces, clean spaces. Like a
colony. But the only colonies still like that are Shinkyo and
Tranquility that we know of, and we were from neither of those
(certainly not Shinkyo, and I checked the Cast records at
Tranquility). So I discounted it as a child’s fantasy, dreams of a
better life never had.

It certainly wasn’t this burned, dark place.

(Maybe my parents told me stories of living in one of
the pre-Bang colonies? No, they were too young. Grandparents? I
don’t remember grandparents, and I don’t remember my parents ever
talking about their parents, or any other family.)

“This way,” I prod us left when we pause at the
junction. “Bridge.”

“And how do you know that?” Straker questions.

“I…”

I look up and down the corridors again. Somehow I
know which way is fore and which is aft. I know where the crew
quarters are, the dayroom, the labs, the engine access… I have
no
idea how.

“The… Um… Just a guess…” I point at the ceiling and
down the corridor. “But the smoke marks seem to be coming from
somewhere down there.”

I can tell from the look on her face that she doesn’t
believe me, but she doesn’t know what to think. Murphy and the
Ghaddar look equally suspicious.

Now I feel weird. This ship feels too small for some
reason, all wrong. Is this claustrophobia? I’ve never felt this way
before, like parts of me want to scream and get out, but I’ve slept
and lived just fine in shelters a lot smaller than this corridor.
Maybe it’s some kind of toxic reaction from eating Dragonfly Jerky,
combined with the smells in here. My gut feels like I’m
falling.

Still, little details—fixtures, hatchways—all look so
familiar, but just in pieces. Obviously, if I have been this far
east before, I don’t remember it; and I’m pretty sure if we’d ever
been on a ship like this, my parents would have told me. But then,
they never really talked about where we came from, except to tell
the other refugees that we were from Tranquility. (That was a lie,
and I still don’t know why.)

I shake it off, try to clear my head and breathe to
keep my strange lunch down where it belongs. I tell myself I’m just
spooked and tired and a little ill and my brain is splicing in what
I know from being on a Lancer-class ship with Colonel Ram.

(But
did
I somehow open the hatches?)

Straker pushes past me in the narrow corridor,
heading for the heavy hatch that’s probably the ship’s bridge. (If
I’m wrong, and we actually end up in the engine section, I’ll have
a good internal laugh and shake off what will be decisively proved
as my brain playing tricks on me.)

“The hatch has been welded shut,” she declares after
a quick examination. Then she uses the tip of her Blade to slice
through the welds like she’s carving soft plastic. Unfortunately,
then she turns to me. “That should do it. Want to see if you still
have the touch?”

Not really, but I don’t say so. I step up past her,
put my palm on the lock’s scanning plate. Nothing happens for a
moment, and I’m about to breathe a sigh of relief, but then I get a
green light and hear the locks open with a grinding clunk.

My stomach does a flop on me, and I feel flushed.

“Okay, we are officially inside weird,” Straker tries
to lighten the shock I’m feeling.

“And you’ve never been here before?” Murphy wants me
to confirm. All I can manage to do is shake my head.

Straker takes point again, and eases the hatch open
with her Blade ready. Both Murphy and I have our weapons leveled
over each of her shoulders. The lights flicker unhelpfully as the
hatch groans on its hinges.

“
Ack
…” Straker complains. We get hit by a
cloud of fine ash. Straker probably isn’t at risk, but Murphy, the
Ghaddar and I quickly make sure our masks and goggles are properly
sealed.

Flickering lights barely illuminate the section in
front of us. Straker makes her sword glow, bathing everything is a
ghostly light. I can’t see past her, but I feel her start,
freezing.

“
Hellloooo
…” she sings, covering whatever
scare she just got. “Okay… that is just…
not
okay…”

We manage to get a look past her. The room is indeed
a control room, probably a cockpit, with heavy swivel chairs for a
number of operators. A lot of the operating surfaces look smashed
and melted. Every surface looks like it’s been charred. But that’s
not what made her jump:

The central chair is swiveled toward us, facing the
door. Sprawled in it is a body, or I assume it’s a body, as all I
see is a suit of heavy armor, similar to what the Katar wear:
overlapping sections of plate laced together, helmet with a wide
sectional flange over the neck. Even burned, I can tell the plate
is supposed to be black. The lacing (remarkably, it’s mostly
intact) is blood red. But the most striking part is the facemask: A
bright white human skull grins at us.

It takes me a moment to realize it
is
a
facemask, as it’s out of proportion and position for a real skull
wearing the helmet. Straker confirms this by nudging at it with her
Blade. As her light comes close, I can see that the dark pits of
the eye sockets are actually lenses.

She prods the body with her Blade, and I hear a dry
rustling, not quite hollow. She carefully pries the mask aside,
revealing a real skull, this one burned, with only bits of
carbonized flesh still sticking to it. The rest of the armor
appears loose, like it’s also just covering a skeleton.

“Who were you?” Straker wonders out loud.
“
What
were you?”

I get a closer look: There are a lot of bullet holes
in the armor, large caliber. I also see bullet holes throughout the
cockpit, though they all look like they came from this direction,
from the hatchway. The chair that the suit is in has been shot
through so much it’s almost falling apart.

“Someone cornered this guy in here, hammered him with
AP rounds, then set him on fire somehow,” Murphy sums what I’m
thinking.

“Looks like a chemical incendiary, high heat,”
Straker assesses, looking at the burn patterns over everything. The
deck around the chair and the frame of it show signs of melting,
the padding totally charred. “They didn’t just want him burned.
They wanted him incinerated.”