The God Mars Book Four: Live Blades (3 page)

I make my way deep downslope—beyond the security
perimeter of our surface sensors—before I find my ultimate exit. I
found this way out over a year ago, digging through a few meters of
collapse where this Tapline got too close to the surface. Then I
placed a makeshift “airlock” across it to hide the breach from
pressure sensors. The passage is barely a meter wide and high—I
have to crawl. I carefully open the inner shelter fabric “hatch” I
glued across the gap, and seal myself beyond it.

The tunnels—even this far out—are warm from the
Cores, so I’m hit by a shocking blast of sub-zero air the instant I
rip away the fabric outer hatch, the pressure equalizing in a rush.
I can feel the cold through my suit, through my mask and helmet,
even as my onboard heater struggles to compensate.

I crawl gracelessly out into the night, out under the
open sky, and promptly almost lose my balance when I try to stand
up on the loose rock of the Southwest Rim slopes. There’s a thin
glaze of ice on the rocks, and already forming on my armor. My
systems tell me it’s negative twenty degrees Celsius. The
atmospheric pressure up here is only 0.17, three points lower than
it should be, despite our best efforts to undo the damage that the
Earth commanders did in their desperation to destroy beings like
us. Their overkill bomb created a pulse strong enough to crash most
of the Melas Atmosphere Net, bleeding years of our efforts into
space before we could repair the damage. Add to that the fallout,
bolstered by the fissile material in Chang’s reactors, which cooked
a toxic swath across the middle of the valley. Compounding the
tragedy is that they probably didn’t even succeed in finishing
Chang, despite the price paid by everyone who calls the valley
home.

But I am Outside. I take a moment to appreciate the
crossing of that threshold, to look up at the starry sky and feel
the winds blast me with fine sand. Then I move before any
long-range eyes see me.

My first course is down, as there are still thousands
of meters to the beginning of the valley floor. My eyes boost the
faint starlight into a hazy glow, enough to find my footing. I have
six hours until sunrise to get myself out of physical sight of my
home. I look back up-slope once, but can barely see the Station’s
towers rising above me against the Rim cliffs. All I can see is
their output, the eternal columns of steam and oxygen and
Greenhouse gasses billowing up to flatten and spread against the
Net ceiling as they have done since the reactors went online more
than sixty years ago, diminished not at all by my absence.

As I trudge my boots downhill, keeping hold of my
sword hilt so that the scabbard doesn’t catch on the rocks behind
me, I begin to feel the extent of the path that stretches before
me: hundreds upon hundreds of kilometers (and so far I am only able
to count my progress in the hundreds of
meters
), east all
the way across Melas Chasma and then deep into Coprates. I will
pass by the territory of the Shinkyo, pass the Earth base Melas
Two, go outwards to Tranquility—my heroes’ former home—and beyond.
I’m following them, though I know not where they’ve gone. East.
Just east. To protect those fleeing the disaster Earth has wrought
here in Melas. To seek the peoples of legend that live in the deep
green.

Mike Ram. Paul Stilson. Belial. Lux. Azazel. Astarte.
Thompson Bly.

None of them have been seen or heard from in six
months.

I will find them. I will offer my life and my sword
in their great service. And if Syan Chang did indeed survive that
nuclear fireball, I will make myself part of finding a way to
destroy him with finality, for the sake of everyone on this
planet.

8 April, 2118:

It’s taken me a week to travel only one hundred and
fifty kilometers.

Being eager but not foolish, I’ve gone somewhat out
of my way to the north in order to give Shinkyo territory a wide
berth. Their Shinobi have well-deserved reputations as devastating
opponents, even to large forces of fully-equipped Guardians, and
they’re certainly still hungry for any opportunity to take our
bodily technology. Even keeping ninety kilometers between myself
and their likely base of operations in the Dragon’s Tail (their
original colony is still sitting abandoned since their ill-advised
“surrender” to Earth forces nine months ago), I take the extra
precaution of wearing my father’s cowl to cover my distinctive
helmet, hoping to pass for a Nomad or a Knight, or perhaps
something much more frightening.

The route makes me do some climbing, up over the
elevated slide plains and rolling hills of western Melas, finally
dropping down into the central lowlands as I come up on the ruins
of Baraka. From the crest of the uplands I can see the near-miss
crater that proved too near, destroying much of the colony and
rendering the rest uninhabitable. What remained was squatted in for
a time, until the first-generation Nomads—joining with their UASP
brethren to the north at Uqba—packed up every piece of emergency
survival equipment they could salvage and headed out into the open
desert, living off ingenious taps they spliced into our Feed Lines,
moving regularly to avoid competitors for precious resources. And
thriving.

I stop several times to check the radiation counts. I
still appear to be keeping north and west of the fallout
drift-pattern that roughly bisected the valley after the Earth
commanders recklessly detonated a four hundred and fifty kiloton
yield nuclear weapon inside a flying fortress powered by several
re-tasked and modified colony fusion reactors. The destruction of
Chang’s flagship—the Stormcloud—was certainly an urgent priority,
but their method proved disastrous, and was probably planned and
ordered without a thought for consequences. That one bomb is what’s
responsible for the toxicity of almost twenty percent of the
valley—a swath two hundred and fifty kilometers from east to west
and almost fifty kilometers wide—as well as the critical failure of
the Atmosphere Net, bleeding off nearly a decade’s worth of
enriched atmosphere and dropping the pressure below what’s livable
for too many of the local peoples, and sending generational
cultures on an exodus into unknown and likely dangerous lands to
the east just to survive.

I’ve considered risking a journey to ground zero, to
see what’s hopefully the end of Syan Chang for myself, to poke
through the shards of molten wreckage to assure myself that my
father’s murderer—and the murderer of so many thousands of
others—is indeed incinerated and disintegrated beyond recovery. But
I know I couldn’t manage the distance on foot. Even the shortest
route, twenty-five kilometers in that hot zone (and back), could do
me irreparable damage. I doubt I would survive the first leg of the
trip. So I’ll have to delay my “closure” until I have the luxury of
some kind of aircraft.

But that’s assuming Chang is actually dead. I’ve
obsessively studied the video records of the rebel Guardians that
joined the attack on his ship that day, then raced to protect the
more-vulnerable humans from the blast as Chang, for no clear
reason, chose to pilot his doomed fortress away from them before it
was consumed in the nuclear fireball. Chang appeared to be injured,
weakened by the combined assaults of Colonel Ram, Paul Stilson and
the unknown hybrids Belial and Kali. Perhaps he finally saw that he
was beaten, that he could no longer fight an enemy willing to throw
nuclear warheads at their own people and allies, that he hoped
those he was saving could do better in that endeavor. Or perhaps he
simply used the time and distance to get himself off the ship,
along with his own hybrid allies Fohat and Asmodeus, before the
explosion. If so, I have no reason to visit Ground Zero—we will all
be facing Chang again soon enough. (Is it a sign of some pathology
of my own that part of me does hope for the opportunity?)

I stop now on a rise overlooking the Baraka ruin,
still five or six kilometers away. I’ve already decided not to set
foot there, thinking the discretion would be a show of respect to
the Nomads, and to the holy ground that once held the first Mosque
on Mars. I have no idea if any of them are even watching to
appreciate my act, though I have detected movement and heat from
time-to-time on the far periphery of my scanning range.

Behind me, the sun is setting over the long parallel
valleys of Ius and Tithonium. The evening wind “tide” is battering
my back, as if pushing me forward to the ruin. But this is as far
as I go until tomorrow. Traveling at night, in the deep cold, has
been putting too much demand on my limited resources (and the
ground gets slick with the glaze of frost that forms). And from
here, I can see approach from all directions.

I find some rocks to partially shield me from the
cyclic winds, risk lifting my mask to sip precious water and nibble
from my rations, feeling the bite of the cold on my skin as I do
so. I dig a shallow hole with my hands, clear a relatively smooth
place to sit—regretting that one thing I failed to pack was a
simple entrenching tool—and settle in to sleep sitting up with my
back propped against stone.

The layered cloaks of the Nomads are an ingenious
thing: Alternating insulation and radiation protection, with a
hand-dyed camouflage pattern unique to each artist. Some of the
layers contain air bladders that can be inflated with the
exhale-bleed from a standard survival mask, proving additional
insulating effect as well as a backup supply of breathable air if
needed (as Normal lungs aren’t very efficient—what they expel is
still fairly oxygen rich). Huddled under them, half-buried in the
sand, a Normal might survive a Martian night if caught without a
heated shelter. Given my sealsuit and its heating system, the
effect becomes downright cozy, assuming I sleep either sitting up
with my legs pulled up close or fetal. I’ve found the former more
practical for several reasons, though it took some getting used
to.

As I watch the evening gusts begin to bury my legs in
sand again, I look up at the sky, across the expanse of the valley,
back across the distance between here and home, and I’m struck
again by how far—how much farther—I’ve come from the relative
safety of my Station. I’m truly out in the wilderness, sleeping in
sand, the stars for my ceiling. Alone. Vulnerable.

There’s another interpretation for my condition,
however. It strikes me that I may have made myself
more
instead of less safe; because my former home, our Stations, are
under threat. Even if Chang is gone, Earth has made their agenda
clear, as well as their implacability. They will take our Stations
by force even if it makes the planet unlivable for everyone; strip
all of us of our technology even if it kills us. In their stupid
fear, they will accept no compromise. My Council choosing to
withdraw, to hide away in our facilities, will not forestall what’s
coming for very long. (And they must certainly realize that.)

Again, I have trouble sleeping, and it has nothing to
do with being wedged up against a rock in sub-zero and too-thin air
over a hundred and fifty kilometers from home.

I sleep sitting up, hiding under my cloak and cowl,
with my hand on the hilt of my sword.

9 April, 2118:

“It’s hard to tell if he’s awake or still asleep,
under that mask.”

These are the words that I wake to, a melodic voice,
though filtered through a breather mask.

“Ahhh… It stirs.”

I see a shape I don’t immediately recognize, a
blob-like mass on the edge of the hill-slope just meters in front
of me. Everything is still shadows under the dawn sky.

I reach for my sword.

“Ah!” the voice scolds me, raising a hand to gesture
caution. Suddenly several more such blobs rise up out of the
landscape around me. I realize I’m looking at heavily cloaked
figures, crouching, squatting. I also realize that crossbows and
firearms are pointed at me. Then something large and heavy gets
dropped in front of my feet from over my head, from behind me. I
realize sickly that it’s a body. I recognize a Shinkyo surface
suit. Its adaptive camo is still functioning, so the outer skin
quickly takes on the coloring of the patch of ground it’s lying on.
There’s an arrow sticking out of the back of its hooded head. A
long rifle is then tossed across the unresponsive form.

“He was too busy hunting you to notice us,” the
original mass explains, still crouched, looking me over like the
curiosity I must be, “or, at least, too busy to notice Azrael. But
then, no one Azrael hunts ever does.”

A figure steps around from behind me, treading almost
completely silently on the gravel, and casually pulls the arrow
from the skull. He wipes it on the body’s clothing, inspects it,
and returns it to his full quiver. I can see that he carries a
recurve bow that looks handmade, several knives and a short
machete-like sword.

“Don’t worry,” the speaker tries to soothe, nodding
at the corpse. “He carried the surface gear of a long-range scout,
so he was likely alone. There were no signs of others. Though this
one
may
have alerted his mistress to your presence before he
died. He may have been tracking you for days.”

He absolutely fails to soothe me, and not only
because he’s poor at giving reassurances, however friendly he
sounds. A man has been killed because of me, for my benefit, while
I was sleeping out in the open in plain sight.

The archer—Azrael—barely looks at me as he steps
smoothly to stand at his apparent master’s side.

As the light comes up, so does the wind, whipping
dust and sand at me from the direction of the speaker as if he’s
personally sending it my way. They’ve all placed themselves upwind
from me, so I have to face into the grit while they have their
cloaks to shield them. But I can begin to see the speaker’s face:
Under his cowl he’s wearing an emergency pressure suit, likely
because the mask and goggles that used to suffice on the surface
are no longer doing so for any length of time since the atmosphere
loss. Through the UV-filtering acrylic faceplate, he has dark skin
and dark eyes and a close-cropped black beard frosted gray. There’s
a deep gash scar across the bridge of his nose. He wears heavy
handcrafted armor over the suit, under his layered cloaks. He has
an old colony PDW—a short, light select-fire weapon—held lazily in
his hands.