The God Mars Book Four: Live Blades

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Prologue: “He Must Needs Go that the Devil
Drives”

Part One: Heroes Journey

Chapter 1: A Fighting Man of Mars

Chapter 2: Exiles

Chapter 3: “Not All That Wander…”

Chapter 4: A Princess of Mars

Chapter 5: In the Belly of the Beast

Chapter 6: In the Valley of the Shadow

Part Two: Companions in Arms

Chapter 1: My Brother’s Keeper

Chapter 2: Swords of Mars

Chapter 3: Secondary Target

Chapter 4: Siege Engines

Chapter 5: The Gods of Mars

Chapter 6: Revelations

Part Three: That Time the World Forgot

Chapter 1: The Occasional Lake

Chapter 2: The People That Time Forgot

Chapter 3: The Lost Legion

Chapter 4: Haven

Chapter 5: The Chessmen of Mars

Chapter 6: God Out of the Machine

Chapter 7: Meet Your Maker

Epilogues: Endings and Beginnings

Maps
of Eastern Coprates and the Western Vajra

“Here’s one…”

Paul is trying to be helpful. I don’t want him to be
helpful, not in this.

So Bel prods me forward.

“The dead are dead,” he tells me uselessly. “You need
to do this for the still-living.”

The body is half-buried in shredded brush.
Bullet-shredded brush. Bullet-shredded body.

It’s a Pax Hunter-Warrior. Green-dyed leather tunic,
breeches, gloves and boots; green-painted hand-hammered facemask.
The primitive Mycenaean design tells me he’s an initiated
fighter—their distinguished “officers” and trainers wear the more
elaborate and finely crafted “Green Man” masks. His bow isn’t far
from his hand, his quiver (still half-full of arrows) wedged
underneath him as he stares up at the sky, his long, lean limbs
twisted like a discarded marionette. His oversized torso is holed
in a handful of places. His light partial plate and scale armor was
designed to deflect blades and arrows, not 7.65mm armor-piercing
shells fired at two-thousand rounds per minute from an electric
Gatling gun. His blood is sprayed all over the lush green growth of
this place.

I kneel down over the body, my broken ribs grinding,
my lungs still rattling, full of blood. I reach for the edge of his
mask with my good arm, gently lift…

“Don’t…” Bel tries to dissuade me. “Leave it.
Just…”

I don’t listen. I have to see. I lift the mask. The
face underneath is pale, thin. A boy, probably no older than
eighteen Standard. He looks up at the sky like he saw something
unbelievable and froze that way. I lower his mask over his breast,
hang on its straps over the heart like the Pax do as a sign of
respect to their forebears when the hunt is successful, when the
fight is won.

Is
this fight won? We beat the machines again,
but they still keep coming. It’s a small consolation that Chang has
been going for quantity over quality, churning out more fragile
bots, but far too many for us to chase down and stop before they
slaughter innocents like this.

This child never stood a chance against the
mass-produced Boxes and Bugs that attacked the small outpost Stead
just twenty meters behind me, coming to kill men, women and
children for no other reason than they’re easy targets, and trying
to defend them will keep us too busy to find and assault Chang’s
new base. Even faced with such armored monsters, this boy gave no
ground, held his position to try to give his people time to flee,
firing his arrows against plating made to resist firearms.

“Michael,” Bel keeps on me. “Please. You have to. You
can’t repair on nuts and berries.”

I know he’s right. I’ve tried. Even if I absorb the
lush bounty of the local flora directly, it doesn’t give me enough
to heal properly after a bad fight. My internal indicators have all
been sunk below critical for days now. Even if I wasn’t shot up and
broken, I’m getting too weak to be of much good (hence how I got so
shot up and broken). And there’s not enough of what I need in the
bots we’ve neutralized—just a half-kilo or so of brain and nerve
tissue spliced into their CPUs using a bastardization of our own
nanotechnology, “salvaged” from what used to be men and women,
seduced into Chang’ service with promises of power or security.

Bel finally gets that he’s really not making this
easier, and he and Paul walk away, give me space, leave me alone
with a dead boy.

I cough blood up into my mouth, make the mistake of
trying to move my still-shattered left arm, look down at the bullet
holes in my own torso. I put the fingers of my good hand in the
holes, through metal and into meat. I bring them out slick and
crimson, then dab my blood on the boy’s forehead like some ritual,
the blessing of a false god. Or a small sacrifice in exchange for
what I’m about to take.

I reach out my hand. And can’t.

I’m pathetic.

So I sit here, looking down into dead eyes. And
apologize:

“This should never have happened to you. None of this
should have happened.”

I’ve never been any good at funerals. So for lack of
profound words I ramble, feeling obligated to at least try to
explain to a corpse why he died today.

“Someone… some
thing
… came back from the
future, changed things… tried to stop the corporations from
developing the technology that made a whole world full things like
me… It caused the Apocalypse, destroyed the colonies, cut Mars off
from Earth, killed thousands. Back in your grandparents’ day. Back
before you were born.

“I was there. Human me. Buried by the blasts. Sunk
into Hiber-Sleep. Fifty years…”

I breathe. Grind ribs. Rattle. The blood’s clearing
out of my lungs, the bones trying to knit, but I don’t have what I
need—I can barely patch my wounds. What I need is right in front of
me. Resources. Raw materials.

“I should have stayed asleep. But I woke up. Called
Earth. Brought them back here. Idiot. I started it all again.
Earth… They say they’re terrified of the technology that the
corporations were working on here. They came back and started
trying to round up and quarantine you all to make sure you’re not
infected by something leftover. But in secret, they were trying to
find that tech, study it, use it.

“So the one who stopped them the first time came
back, tried to take the planet to make sure it would never be used
for that kind of research again, started a war… You’re all just
stuck in the middle. With me. Us.” I nod in the direction of my few
companions like he can see them. “We shouldn’t have happened
either.

“We’re not supposed to be here. I’m not supposed to
be here. Not like this.
This
me is from the world that never
happened, brought back… I don’t know how… to fight. To protect you
all. To stop…”

I have to chuckle at that, cough on my own blood,
hurt like hell, deserve it.

“Not doing a very good job of it, am I?”

(I guess I should be thankful for the little things:
Chang’s locked down the Boxes’ big 20mm cannons, afraid any big
blasts would be picked up on satellite and bring down another piece
of nuclear stupidity from Earthside. Or non-nuclear stupidity,
assuming they learned their lesson in Melas.)

I can feel Bel’s eyes on me. My new best friend: the
Devil. And Paul (another thing I can’t forgive myself for: what
I’ve helped turn him into).

“I’m sorry,” I finally get around to saying. “I’ll
make this right. I swear. I’ll do whatever I can to protect your
people. I just…”

The dead are dead. Needs must…

I can do this through my glove, but I want to feel
it—I don’t deserve to be insulated from feeling it. So I will the
glove to peel away, exposing my bare hand.

“I’m so sorry…”

I move his mask aside, then tear open his tunic and
the natural fiber shirt underneath, expose smooth pale skin smeared
with blood, and press my palm to his sternum like I’m going to
perform half-assed CPR.

I hate this part. I hate it.

For an instant, I feel his intact skin, still warm.
But then it starts to give way, liquefy, butchered on a cellular
level as my scavenger nanites weave their way in. I can feel them,
building a temporary network of siphon tubes like a secondary
circulatory system, boring deep into his chest, seeking…

I get the initial rush, my nanites feeding me what I
need to rebuild, replenish, heal.

I feel sick. I watch his body begin to desiccate. His
face…

My ribs pop back into place. My gunshot wounds seal
over. My lungs and liver patch and begin to regenerate. My left arm
snaps and grinds into shape. It hurts. I’m glad it hurts. It should
hurt.

I’m a fucking cannibal. A ghoul.

I cough the last of the thick blood out of my lungs,
then take a deep breath of the thin, chill air, smell the green
(and under it: blood and death and gunsmoke). My fingers are sunk
into his ribs. I feel his lungs shrivel, his heart dissolve.

My indicators rise back toward green. I start to feel
strong again. Invincible. Immortal.

In my head, I can hear the bots’ command signals.
There’s another wave, headed for some nearby Steads that haven’t
been evacuated yet, the Pax too stubborn to give up their homes,
their ancestral lands.

Time to go fulfill my promise. Again.

1 April, 2118.
From the War Journal of Erickson Carter:

April First. This is the day I will begin my
journey.

The date I have chosen is particularly appropriate.
On Earth, it was called “April Fool’s Day,” apparently a day
dedicated to celebrating friendship and love by humiliating friends
and loved ones with cruel pranks. I wonder if it’s still observed
as such, if the new puritanical regime controlling every aspect of
human life on that world allows for such abusive folly. Perhaps
they have a law against it now. They seem so intolerant of so many
things, or at least that’s the face they’ve shown us since they
came back here. The new United Nations World Government
consistently presents like obsessively overly-protective (and
overly-religious) parents, afraid of anything (real or imagined)
that might lead their people into danger, insurrection, or even
poor health. In some aspects, they aren’t terribly unlike our
Council of Elders. But I blame neither for my decision to do this,
no matter how the circumstances that they helped shape put me on
this path to the exclusion of arguably better judgment.

And perhaps I am just a fool. I’m sure many of my own
people will call me various synonyms of that derogation when they
find out what I’ve done. I suppose it’s appropriate enough, in the
very definition of the word. After all, in modern usage it refers
to someone who fails to make wise or careful choices. I truly can’t
say my choices will be wise, and they certainly won’t be
careful.

But I prefer to consider a much older and less common
meaning of the word: Wanderer. A soul on a path of exploration
without direction. He risks stumbling blindly into catastrophe. But
he is the protagonist of his own story.

Except I
do
have a direction, a destination in
mind. I just don’t know how to get there from here. But I do know
how to start.

Step One: I must leave here. I must break the
law.

I have fully recovered from my implantation. The
Ceremony is now a week behind me, the mandated gift for my
twenty-seventh birthday (delayed two frustrating years due to the
recent “protection” amendments). And I didn’t have to modify the
process much: The Council, out of fear for the safety of their
children in the face of Earth’s devastating actions as well as
potentially more terrible enemies, has decided that all “adults”
shall receive full Guardian-level nanotechnology (even though they
have eliminated the Guardian force). All I needed to covertly add
into the loading program was the code that will let me manually
sever all connections to our network when the time is right, and
disable any tracking signals (ostensibly designed to bring rescue
in case of emergency, but more likely used by the Council to keep
track of our activities, and I certainly can’t have that).