The God Mars Book Four: Live Blades (8 page)

I have the satisfaction of stabbing to death the
animals that killed them, the monsters who tried to rape my mother
as she bled her life away. It’s ironic: that basic act of vengeance
earned me my new family, when the Nomads came to our aid too late,
and my adoptive father found me covered in the blood of my parents’
murderers, cowering with a knife in each hand. I had attacked them
from hiding, from behind, stabbing first into groin and inner
thighs to bring them down, then into their necks as they tried to
seize me, reach for their weapons. Then I watched them bleed out,
crawling after me with what little life they had left, and I kicked
them in their faces, then fell upon their backs and stabbed their
corpses until I couldn’t feel my arms any more, as I looked into my
mother’s empty eyes. Then I hid and waited for more monsters to
come, and that’s how I was found. I was twelve years old, counted
by the old Earth calendar.

But now I know we did not come from Tranquility. The
Cast Leader Two Gun confirmed that his people never drove away any
of their own: they either became Cast or failed and died there. The
only ones driven away were Siders—outsiders who either stumbled
upon the ruin hoping for shelter, or invaders hoping to pillage it.
And the Cast kept written records—intact after the destruction of
the Tranquility AI and its files—that show there was never a family
named “Drake” at the colony.

So my hope to connect with my past has become a
disturbing mystery. Where did my parents and I come from? And why
did they need to lie about it?

(My memories are all of the refugee camp: moving,
hiding, scavenging, trading the Nomads for food, tapping the Feed
Lines for another day’s necessities. But I have fragments of
earlier memories, of green gardens, and someplace warm with solid
walls and a solid roof over my head. Or they could just be the
dreams of imagination.)

As there is no other population evident between Melas
and Tranquility, I’m thinking my parents must have come from
somewhere
beyond
Tranquility, someplace green. So perhaps
I’ll find some group that knew or had records of them in deeper
Coprates. But all we’ve encountered for the majority of our journey
are the freakish, deadly Silvermen.

We set up sentries, and begin to prepare communal
food from what we’ve gathered along the way, from our risky forays
into the highlands. The winds drop as the sun sets, and the
temperature approaches freezing again. But it
is
easier to
breathe here, and the edible plant life is abundant enough—the
Silvermen shouldn’t need to deny our small group our subsistence
foraging. (And that means their aggression is not about resources
as it would be in Melas. This is about territory. Or just
intolerance.)

We go inside in shifts to eat, to wash, to tend our
wounds and clean our weapons, to perform our evening
Salat
,
and hopefully sleep without being attacked.

I’m not on watch tonight. The gift of sleep is not an
easy one to accept. There’s too much threat beyond the flimsy
rippling walls of our small shelter.

7 May, 2018:

We pass morning
Salat
and breakfast
unmolested. But as we prepare to move cautiously toward Concordia,
the Ghaddar returns from the nearby heights, and tells my father
that we’re being followed. Intentionally or otherwise is unclear.
But our pursuers are
not
Silvermen. There are two, and both
appear to have normal proportions. Both wear Nomad-style cloaks.
And both walk openly across the desert from the west. But they
travel separately, one seemingly following the other at distance,
perhaps far enough back to remain out of the other’s sight line,
but she says the follower does not appear to be trying to hide from
the leader.

I immediately wonder if someone has come from our
people in Melas, to seek after our condition, but it’s unlikely
they would travel solo, and less likely they’d have managed to
catch up if they’d followed our course. The Ghaddar also insists
that the closer one—the one she could see clearer through her
sniper scope—did not look Nomad. Perhaps Knight. But the Knights
wouldn’t expose themselves so blatantly, not even when moving in
force.

That leaves immortal, and the foolhardiness of
walking alone and in plain sight would agree. But Colonel Ram and
his disturbing company had been traveling by personal aircraft when
last we saw them. My father hopes that one of them may have met
with the misfortune of having lost their flyer and therefore forced
to walk back to their new base (assuming they’ve established one),
just to have word of our old friend after all these months. In our
last conversation, Colonel Ram was headed into the Deep Green,
toward what the Jinn call the “Vajra”, a region our maps say lies
yet another hundred and fifty kilometers further east. And that was
the last we saw of them. That was months ago now.

The Ghaddar says that the one she got a decent look
at bore no resemblance to any of the immortals that we know (though
others may have arisen). The other possibility is a Jinn, a
Terraformer. They’ve been known to travel the valleys on foot,
relying on their wondrous Tools to protect them. But Paul Stilson
told us that his leaders were placing extreme restrictions on his
kind to keep them confined to their remote Stations. (And then he
defied them again, in favor of his friendship with Colonel Ram, of
his higher calling to put his talents to the service of
others.)

The Ghaddar insists that they are still too far out,
more than two klicks back, around the eastern tail slopes of the
last mountain of the Lesser Divide, and therefore not able to have
seen us yet. My father chooses to ignore them for the time being,
to see if they follow us to Concordia, and keeping an eye behind us
to see if they draw enemy attention in our wake.

We pack quickly and move out, south-southwest, for
Concordia, five klicks away.

Unwilling to risk any more of our numbers to idle
curiosity, we get within half a kilometer of the colony site and
find high ground to observe. The colony sat just east and south
around the point where the valley widens out, though we can see now
that the slide-slopes reach most of that into the valley floor,
forming a cluster of low rocky mountains that rise up out of the
decline just east of the point, probably left by erosion. The
nearest of these mountains forms a narrow perpendicular side canyon
to the main valley between its western slopes and the southeasterly
curving of the much higher Divide Rim to its west. The resulting
depression—only a few hundred meters wide at the bottom—slopes
gently upwards toward the Rim, probably cut by either rimfall or
ancient permafrost melt or both. It eventually snakes up and around
behind the mountain maybe eight klicks in, but the colony is just
inside the mouth of this lopsided canyon. Many colony sites were
placed at the bases of such “drainage” cuts, likely in hopes of
accessing water and exposed mineral deposits. The UASP—the founders
of Baraka and Uqba—were among the few that chose the open valley
floor rather than build up against rim slope. (And while that
spared our ancestral homes from slides, it left them exposed to
nuclear blast waves.)

I assume the location must also provide some relief
from the evening winds that blow from the west, the rim point and
the mountains we have just come around acting as a break, but the
colony is not far back enough into the canyon to be fully protected
from the morning winds.

Now, the terrain proves itself a rich support for
plant life: Graingrass, Rustbean, Amarette, Tealeaf and even Red
Olive are growing well out into the valley floor, while the belly
of the side canyon is deep green as far as the eye can see down it
and hundreds of meters up-slope on either side. There’s plenty of
food within a canister’s walk for our whole band.

But the Ghaddar quickly finds signs of gathering,
picking, stripping, and pruning. It’s been done carefully, spread
out and at random, to not appear obvious to the casual visitor.
They’ve also been careful to conceal their tracks.

“This is that different print again,” Murphy
announces, managing to find a barely-visible detail, partially
hidden by the growth, and amazingly before the Ghaddar does.

“Lighter foot,” the Ghaddar repeats her prior
assessment, gently moving the Grass vines aside for a better look
at what Murphy has found. “No damage to the plants. No cleat
marks.”

“Thinner, too,” I try. She seems to ignore me, as she
always does.

Crouching down, I realize the growth here is thick
and tall enough to hide in if one stays low.

The Ghaddar shifts her attention. My father is
signaling her. He’s lying prone at the crest of the low ridge with
a good view of the colony and its canyon. We climb to join him,
staying low, trying to avoid whatever eyes may be watching us.

I settle next to him and pull out my own
binoculars.

After a moment’s scanning, I can see the colony
foundations, mostly buried by slides and dunes and masked in
ground-clinging over-growth, but still visible. Other than the
richer greenery, it looks like Tyr, like Nike, like Gagarin. Gone.
Blasted away, buried. And stripped. Nothing left but the concrete,
and even that looks stripped of reinforcing metals.

Ambassador Murphy is on his back next to me, taking a
radiation level from the soil. There’s the background “glow” of an
old hit, a ghost of the Apocalypse.

Looking back the way we came, back out across the
valley, I realize I’m seeing the scarred land of a nuclear
airburst, a great shallow crater that we’re on the edge of, slowly
being erased—healed—by dune drift and new life. I recognize it
because similar blasts burned and smashed my adopted people’s
ancestral homes, Baraka and Uqba, killing many hundreds and
destroying the first Holy Mosque built on this planet. My new
father took me to the Baraka ruin many times—his home, when he was
a small child—to stand on sacred ground, so I would know what was
lost and why we still face toward a stripped ruin when we pray. And
we prayed on the barren foundations, praising God who allowed His
children to live through the Unmakers nuclear fire and all that
came after, and through His bounty, to thrive in what lesser men
would see as a wasteland.

I dig my gloved fingers into the sand under me, find
shards of telltale silicate glass rained by the nuclear blast,
fifty three Earth years ago.

I look back at the colony site. It would have been
beyond the actual nuclear fireball, but certainly too close to the
inferno of the resulting flash and the shattering blast wave. But
if the colonists had shelters, or deep mines, like the Faithful at
Baraka and Uqba…

I recheck the notes I made in my journal, from the
old datafiles I studied before we left Melas. Concordia was a
bio-engineering facility. As was Gagarin. No indication they did
any deep digging, though they may have prepared shelters, expecting
the fate that Earth placed in the sky over their heads to fall one
day. But without deep caves to protect them from the radiation, and
access to the Jinn’s precious Feed Lines for water, air and fuel,
they wouldn’t have been able to stay here. (Likely, they would have
sought shelter in the shadow of one of the nearer Terraforming
Stations, for heat and feed, until the valleys warmed and the air
thickened enough to seek better lands. Assuming any survived.)

But Tyr and Nike
did
have mining equipment.
And maybe it’s still in service, maintained by the Silvermen to
live and move below ground, through the slopes and mountains, to
mine their metal.

So maybe here, at Concordia, we’re finally close to
being beyond the reach of the Silvermen. But now there are new
footprints. A new enemy? Have we just wandered from one hostile
territory into another?

“Heat,” my father announces heavily. Ambassador
Murphy and I slide up and join him, following his binoculars with
our own, shifting over to infrared.

Heat. Faint, but there. Almost a klick into the
canyon in front of us, just beyond the colony ruin, above it in the
jagged Divide slopes. But there’s no sign of movement or shelter,
nothing visible on the surface, just the scrub shivering the
wind.

“Caves?” Murphy wonders.

“It’s not like the Silvers to leave an open tunnel,”
my father considers our experience.

We sit and watch for a full hour. The heat radiating
out of the rocks doesn’t diminish. Nor is there any sign of
activity. I offer the possibility that we may be seeing bleed from
the Jinn’s resource mining, as their robotic deep taps bore through
the ridge rock seeking underground permafrost to thaw. Occasionally
a slide opens one of the resulting tunnels to the surface. It’s an
innocent possibility, but Ambassador Murphy points out that such
tunnels, though highly unstable, do present tempting shelter. If
there are locals foraging this area…

“We should pull everyone back,” the Ghaddar suggests
heavily. She isn’t one to choose retreat lightly.

“You don’t want to know what’s over there?” Murphy
dares, hoping she recognizes his challenge is just playful
humor.

“Of course I do,” she tells him flatly and without
looking at him. “But we have wounded. A small recon would be
best.”

My father agrees with her advice. He is very wise, a
great warrior and a great leader of our people. But the Ghaddar is
legend
, Champion of more than one Sharif in her time, even
bodyguard to the great Mike Ram (when he was still mortal and
needed such service), and now—thanks to a recent difficult
revelation—she’s known as the Daughter of the Devil as well.

(Her eyes—the only part of her she shows any man—are
both terrifying and beautiful. I can’t help but stare when I think
I can do so unobserved, but she catches me every time.)