The God Mars Book Four: Live Blades (4 page)

“I am Barak Hassim al-Fadil,” he finally introduces
himself, “and you are a long way from home, Jinn. Assuming you
are
Jinn.” His head moves as if still assessing me. “You
wear the suit and helmet of the Red Station, but that’s a long way
from here. And you have none of your shiny magicks. Only a sword.
Unless it’s more than it appears?”

I only answer by taking my hand from the hilt, but I
have subtly drawn my legs up under me, ready to spring.

“Are you lost, strange Jinn?” he keeps interrogating
as if he needs to fill the space between us with conversation,
however one-sided. “Are you Guardian, separated from your fellows?
Was there a fight? A crash? Or perhaps you’re on some secret
mission? But then, there have been no Guardian missions, not in
many months now… Are you a runaway then? Like some of the others?
Come to save us poor mortals with your Jinni powers, as if you do
God’s work? Is that why you have no shiny magicks?”

He stands, walks over to the dead Shinkyo, considers
the corpse for a few seconds as if he regrets the death, then prods
the head with his fabric-wrapped boot like it’s just some
interesting junk.

“In exchange for saving your life, you could at least
tell me your name, and how you came to be here in such odd attire,”
he scolds me paternally. Then he picks up the Shinkyo rifle,
looking it over like it’s a novel curiosity. “And we
did
save your life. This weapon is designed to kill you, despite your
magicks.”

He shoulders the weapon and aims at the landscape.
Fires. The weapon’s blast is muffled to a sound like a soft mallet
on stone. The shell buries itself in a dune, its spinning action
digging its way in like a sloppy drill drone, visibly shedding
stages as it goes. Then it explodes, blowing nearly a cubic meter
of regolith back over us. I feel the shock of implication: the
Shinkyo had been developing multi-stage projectiles that included
organic layers to bore through our defensive fields.

Hassim looks the weapon over again, gives a nod like
he approves, and hands it off to one of his people. Then he goes
digging in the Shinobi’s pack, pulling out a forearm-sized cylinder
that I realize is designed for live nano-containment, and tosses it
in the sand in front of me. I feel ill, numb. Failing to capture
one of us whole, the Shinkyo have been content to take pieces as
prizes, and—given some of what we’ve seen—have managed to use the
stolen nanites to engineer their own crude tech.

Hassim continues to remain non-threatening, so I
decide to give in to his queries:

“My name is Erickson Carter, third generation Red
Team ETE. Son of Jonah Carter. Guardian Force. Killed by Syan
Chang.”

Hassim nods, accepts, digests.

“The avenging of a father is an honorable pursuit,
young Jinn, though you may be late to that end, God willing.” He
nods in the direction of Ground Zero.

“That is not my purpose. My purpose is to help…” I
catch myself before I accidentally insult. But Hassim turns on
me.

“Help who? People like
us
? Fragile mortals?”
He chuckles at my expense. “You can’t even protect yourself.”

I stand cautiously, as smoothly as I can manage. I
don’t reach for my sword, but prepare to. His men read my
intention, raise their weapons again. The archer Azrael steps
forward, between me and their guns, as if challenging me
personally.

“I am capable of defending myself.” But I don’t feel
like it. I feel nervous, shaky. My adrenalin betrays me, tries to
announce: This is the first time I’ve been in a real fight. I
remember the lesson of “The Tea Master and the Samurai”, that
sometimes appearances can win a battle before it begins.

“Azrael?” Hassim prompts. The assassin shakes his
head.

“No.” His voice is surprisingly soft, though almost
completely flat, as if mechanical. “He’s Third Generation. They
were too young to be allowed into the Guardian teams.” He knows a
remarkable amount about us.

“Have you even trained with a proper teacher?” Hassim
doubts me.

“Yes,” I insist, confident in my virtual
instruction.

“Show us,” Hassim insists. But before I can even
decide to draw my sword, Azrael charges forward in a flash, darts a
strike at my face that I realize too late is a feint, and catches
my arms as I try to simultaneously block and draw, then tangles me
up across myself.

He’s strong, stronger than he should be. And smart. I
try to back up, but he follows right with me, and I quickly run
into the rocks at my back, almost go over them. When I struggle
forward, he just uses my defense against me, spins, and takes me
over his hip. The final insult is that he actually catches me
before I hit the ground. He drops me the last few inches and steps
back, leaving me my sword as if I’m harmless.

“Better to learn the lesson with friends instead of
enemies,” Hassim tries to reassure me. As I get up, I fully expect
his men to be laughing, but they don’t. I get the impression that
this Azrael scares them as much as he just terrified me.

Azrael crouches over the Shinkyo he’s killed, digs
something out from under the body, stands and tosses it to me
casually. I hope I impress him by catching it. It’s a pistol,
probably colony security issue: polymer framed, self-oxidizing nine
millimeter rounds, its matte finish worn off the edges of the slide
from half-a-century of use. An ugly, practical tool. It’s heavier
in my hands than I’d expected. And more seductive…

“You should consider carrying a gun,” he advises
dully. I answer him by tossing it back. He catches it with a quick,
precise hand.

I stare at Azrael, consider saying out loud what I
think: That he can’t be a Normal. He locks my eyes through his
goggles—he shouldn’t even be able to see my eyes through the
reflective lenses. His eyes are completely calm, expressionless,
pale blue against pale skin (though most of his features are hidden
by his mask, cowl and scarves). Is he one of us, an ex-Guardian out
here in defiance of the Council? But he kills readily,
efficiently…

“And where were you headed, young Jinn?” Hassim
thankfully moves on from the subject of my incompetence.

“East,” I tell him, still shaken from my thrashing.
“Into Coprates. To aid in the exodus. To seek the immortals. To
offer my help, for whatever it’s worth. Better than hiding in my
Station.”

Hassim seems to appreciate that.

“My brother-in-law Abu Abbas and my sister Sarai have
gone that way,” he tells me, “to find better lands for his people.
Though he has re-established our food trade with Tranquility, there
has been no news in several months.” He’s looking east, over the
horizon, into the sunrise, into the wind.

I consider my next words carefully, then voice my
offer:

“Perhaps that’s how I can repay my life-debt to you.
I can seek your family. Send you news. Give them my service.”

He smiles, chuckles under his breath.

“Come!” he insists. “We must get away from this place
now. You are my guest.”

23 April, 2118.
From the personal log of First Lieutenant Jacqueline Straker,
former City of Industry Peace Keeper Force, reassigned to UNMAC
Long Range Recon Vehicle Leviathan-3:

“And then you landed on the
same
leg?”

“Thirty five meters. Thankfully the combined
hammering had spun the ship in low when Chang swept us all off the
deck. Still: Broke the damn leg in two places. Compound fracture.
Plus the bullet wound. So I’m face-up in the dirt, can’t move,
watching the bastard fly away.”

Captain Rios is a good story teller, and happy to
pass the time, which needs passing as we crawl along our
grid-search of a thirteen-hundred-klick-long and
hundred-plus-klick-wide valley at a top speed of ten klicks per
hour. It’s Day Six, and we’re only now coming up on Nike (or where
Nike was), three-hundred-twenty klicks east of Tranquility, and not
likely to find anything more here than we did at Tyr. (Or than
Leviathan One found at Baraka and Uqba, or Two found at Avalon and
Freedom. At least they had shorter ops. But that’s why we’re
A-Team. That’s why we got the Big Beast.)

I catch Rios looking back at Specialist Sharp, our
token Upworld Cherry, to see how much she’s flinching at his
“obscene” language. I give him credit: he at least tries to filter.
But these New-Drops apparently come from a world where saying
“damn” and “hell” makes you some kind of godless pervert, and I
have no patience for smug self-righteousness, especially when it’s
completely un-earned.

“
Fuck
,” I give him back. And watch Sharp go
pale. Rios gives me a flash of a friendly warning to ease up. We’re
in enough trouble as-is.

I expect Sharp’s compiling her latest report in her
head. We got her from the latest “relief” flight (no thank you),
and it’s no secret that she got stuck with us as a UNCORT
“compliance” agent. Apparently they think our moral character, or
lack thereof, makes us more susceptible to nanotech contamination
or whatever else they’re so terrified of. (Terrified enough to try
to drop a nuke on their own people just because Chang had hold of
them for several days unsupervised.) It certainly gets a girl stuck
on a slow-tank to BFC. (That would be Butt-Fuck Coprates, in honor
of the kind of language my Academy DI felt was necessary for a real
soldier’s education.)

It’s pretty clear I have no respect, and it’s not
just that I’m local-born, Third-Gen Industry Peace Keeper, set in
my ways and values despite agreeing—with few choices—to Colonel
Ram’s plan to “surrender” to Earthside so we’d have a place to run
to with air, heat, food and a decent medical bay after the “deal”
my superiors made with Chang unsurprisingly went lethally sour.

The new meat from Earth are just pathetic. Apparently
they also have this aversion to weapons and fighting on that
fucked-up world, so none of these so-called soldiers had ever
touched a gun until halfway through whatever piss-poor training
they got, much less ever had to deal with anything more
life-threatening than a common flu-variant.

Thankfully, Sharp’s the only lame-ass Upworlder on
our team, which means I’ve got me and five other people in this can
that I can count on in a bad fight, including (especially)
one-armed Lieutenant Jane—our driver, until recently a pilot,
grounded from flying by the new stick-ass Upworld Airwing Commander
because of his “handicap”—and little Lyra Jameson, our new enlistee
“nanowar specialist” (and actually impressively kick-ass for a
cherry), another exile because her very existence is a testimony to
Earth’s hypocrisy.

And exiles are what we are.

I got this gig because I’m a former enemy combatant,
even though they officially call us “displaced refugees” as part of
our terms of surrender, and don’t completely treat us like
prisoners. But they do keep us all locked down on D-Deck “for our
own safety”, and fill our days with continuous debriefings and
medical workups (which they insist is just to get a better
understanding of what multiple generations living on this planet
has done to us, but what they’re really looking for is something to
confirm their fears about us). Thankfully, they let a few of us out
to serve, as long as we’ve been “cleared” and have what they’ve
deemed useful on-planet skillsets. Of course, they assign us to
postings they consider non-critical and easy to supervise closely,
and that’s understandable. (What’s not so understandable is why I’m
the only one assigned off-base, unless the intent was to separate
me—the surviving ranking PK officer—from my people.)

Lyra’s obviously just too much of a political
liability, being living proof that UNCORT ordered secret flights
here as long as two decades ago looking for nanotech, even ordering
experiments on the locals (experiments her own parents were
pressured into carrying out, and died ugly paying for). Being out
here makes her unavailable to anyone who might keep pushing the
investigation (assuming there really is an investigation
happening), and removes a visible morale-breaker as even the
Upworld cherries aren’t all too stupid or too indoctrinated not to
question the bullshit they’re being fed, especially if the evidence
is walking around among them.

Jane is officially here because he’s “too disabled”
to fly, despite the fact that he
was
flying—in combat—even
after getting his arm shot off by a Disc, right up until the
Righteous Brigade showed up and took over. Unofficially, he’s a
Mike Ram loyalist with no tolerance for the Upworld bullshit. And
he’s far from the only one among the Sleeper Vets, but scut says he
protested his grounding a little too loudly (to the point of
pushing a court martial for almost assaulting a superior).

Sergeant Horton and Tommy Wei also bought their
postings with attitude and history: both are Sleeper Vets with too
much Mike Ram “contamination” not to grumble at the orders they’ve
been fed from a “home” planet they can’t even recognize anymore,
through cherry commanders that clearly don’t know this world at
all. (And Wei’s missing part of a finger to remind him who really
fought for this planet.)

And then there’s Juan Rios…

Excellent company commander, completely professional
despite all the chaos and bitterness of the command change. But the
general feel is he served too close and too long under Colonel Ram.
And Ram kept him close, even during some of his more questionable
operations (such as his “advising” of the ETE). The new brass
(Colonel Burns specifically, I gather) just couldn’t sit with
keeping someone with potentially divided loyalties in a significant
command role, especially as they advance whatever their agenda is
for this planet. (And given that they’ve already dropped one nuke
regardless of who was in the kill zone, no one who actually lives
here trusts that agenda, no matter how many times they say they’re
here to help.) So Rios lost his platoon and got handed bad and
worse choices. Worse was a transfer to orbit, to Logistics,
overseeing troop and supply arrivals, a glorified clerk. Bad was
this: Long Range Recon.