The God Mars Book Six: Valhalla I Am Coming (12 page)

“He’s in one piece,” Lux reports as I sprawl across
the jagged rocks like they’re the plushest of beds. “He looks like
he’s been through a garbage disposal, he’s filthy and he stinks
like corpse, but all the major bits are where they should be.”

“We have an hour before first flyover,” I hear Azazel
warning in my head. “No time for a nap, Colonel.”

“The Unmakers have been buzzing the site multiple
times per day, starting as soon as they can get the ice off after
sunrise,” Bly tells me. “We’ve had to search at night,
heat-cloaked.”

“How…” I cough out a mouthful of dirt. “How…
long…?”

“Six days,” I hear Bel. “We thought we’d be finding
pieces, considering…”

I turn my battered body, flop over onto my elbows and
knees, feeling my ribs and spine grind, but I have to get a look
around, and I can’t do that on my back. The glow of the sunrise is
my only real bearing. The Pax Mountain has been turned into a
series of massive craters. Only short sections of the original
crest remain intact. Everything else is shattered rock, like a
blasted quarry, just like what I remember “seeing” from my apparent
hallucination of the Barrow. (Was that really Yod, seeding my
delirium with reality while he took his opportunity to speak with
me?)

“Here…” Bly hands me something from his satchel,
urgently shoving it in my face. I smell roasted meat, but old,
getting rancid. “It was better when it was fresh. We found some of
the Pax live stock…”

It’s a chunk of muscle the size of a holiday roast,
roughly butchered. I don’t argue with the quality, I just grip it
with both of my broken hands and let my nanites start digesting it,
processing the desperately needed protein. I assume the charring
wasn’t from cooking, but from the heat-energy of a rail-gun
strike.

I should be in the same shape as this unlucky cow.
How am I in one piece?

The answer is painfully obvious: Yod did more than
fuck with my head while I was buried. But while he was at it, why
didn’t he just heal all of my injuries? Or is he assuming I’d want
the pain, as penance for my stupidity? (And he would be right, of
course.)

I try standing, but instantly wind up sitting,
freshly popping joints. Lux rushes to support me. As I grip the
meat for dear life, I do a quick inventory: My surcoat has been
torn away, my armor battered and abraded. My gun is still in its
holster on my thigh, though thoroughly caked with dirt, as is my
armor. My sword…

“My sword…”

Lux goes digging in the hole they pulled me out of as
Bly nervously scans the lightening sky. I can see the Siren’s Song
coming in to land.

“You’ve missed a bit, Captain Colonel,” Bly says
ominously.

“Catching up later,” Azazel prompts from the ship.
“Can he walk, or do I need to come out and carry him?”

“I’d like to see that myself,” Bel tries to joke,
“like Richard Gere carrying Debra Winger in ‘An Officer and a
Gentleman’.”

I hear Lux purring like the thought is inspiring. But
then she stops digging, bends down, and slowly pulls a much smaller
object than my sword out of my grave.

“What the fuck is this?” She holds it up so I can see
it.

It’s the bottle of beer Yod gave me.

“Explains how you’re not in bits,” Bly concludes what
I’m already sure of, as Lux tentatively smells the dusty but intact
beer bottle, then nods approvingly.

“Any sign of Asmodeus?” I ask what I consider most
urgent, especially if we need to be leaving before the next UNMAC
flyover.

“Nothing,” Bly admits, frustrated.

“Any idea where your sword went?” Lux is still
worried about that.

“Stuck through Asmodeus’ head, last I had it… Then
everything went boom.”

I don’t care about the sword. The sword is too
slow.

“Can you walk?” Bly offers his hand, but I force
myself to get up on my own. I probably look like a drunk who’s been
hit by a bus (and dragged under it for several blocks), but I can
already feel the meat helping.

Azazel’s landed on a relatively level patch of blast
crater several dozen meters away, the Song’s stealth skin providing
visual camouflage. The morning wind kicking up from the east will
help hide our dust. Hiking to the ship over the loose rubble is a
trial in itself, especially with my hands still busy with the chunk
of unfortunate cow.

We get into the ship—climbing up into the airlock was
a special agony—and lift off. Azazel flies us off toward “Base”, a
hiding spot for the ship he’d found in the narrow shear-walled
“tip” of the Central Blade. He’s done a good job restoring the
ship’s original radar masking skin, and added a good visual
camouflage Mod to it, but we still put out heat and kick up dust
when we fly. It’s easy enough to hack the UNMAC satellites to make
them not see us, but we can’t get away with it for long without
risking detection, so we have to keep our flights short.

I settle my battered body into one of the cockpit
flight couches (more like fall into it), and wave off Bel when he
comes to check my injuries. I do accept water and one of his
nutrient blends (now that the chunk of beef has crumbled to dust in
my grip, bone and all). He’s actually getting better at making his
concoctions palatable.

No one is speaking. Everyone has the same dour look,
and I don’t think it’s about my condition, or even the loss of the
Keep. There’s something else.

I’m about to ask what I missed when the screens light
up. A massive patch of the forest erupts in an incendiary
chain-reaction not far off our port wing, out in the belly of the
Central Blade Valley. I watch several acres of lush growth dissolve
in fire in a matter of seconds, smaller blazes spreading from a
central detonation point like a giant firework. I’m thinking we’re
under attack, but the blast doesn’t send much of a shockwave our
way. It does, however, send a lot of thick dark smoke into the
sky.

I get my bearings on the landmarks, and quickly
realize the target of the detonation, despite how little sense it
makes: The incendiary chain scorched a section of growth just to
the north of Lucifer’s Grave, probably right at the foot of the
crater slope.

“Thermobaric,” Azazel scans. “Metal and oxidizer,
probably dispersed as a mist.”

“Local materials,” Bel appraises darkly. “Smart.”

“Smart
what
?” I’m not following, but I think I
can assume who the perpetrator was from a very short list. “What
are they aiming at?”

“The forest,” Bel grimly explains. “They’re clearing
it. Defoliating.”

In my addled brain, “they” not “he” means

“Earthside?” I’m sure but still don’t understand.

Azazel zooms our portside cameras, gives me a view of
the recently rail-gun-blasted crater, another of UNMAC’s recent
targets. (At least that one was a bona-fide Asmodeus base. Too bad
he’d already left before they could get their mass driver loaded
and aimed.) On the crescent plateau that forms the west and
southwest rim of the crater are a number of new structures that
look modular, chained together. There’s also sign of recent
excavation: several rectangular areas have been cleared, flattened,
packed; and a rough barrier wall has been pushed up between them
and the nearby structures. It looks like makeshift airfield, but I
don’t see any aircraft. I do see signs of buried fuel tanks, and
another dig that looks like a reactor has been planted.

“They dropped and assembled this in a hurry, while
you were…” Bel doesn’t bother to dig for a proper word to describe
where I’ve been for the last week.

“It’s a forward base,” Dee comes over our links.
“Glad to have you back above ground, Colonel,” he digresses to
greet me, then continues telling me what he’s probably been
monitoring. “They’ve changed plans, shifted priorities, based on
recent revelations. They’re actively establishing a presence in the
Trident, where they assume the action is going to be. But it’s more
than that, given the manifests Colonel Ava gave you. Remember, you
have to view whatever they launched through the lens of what was
happening when they launched it, and most of this new surge got
shot our way nearly a year ago. But by the time they can get
anything here across space…”

“…they’re in a different fight,” I finish what’s
become the rule of Earth’s best efforts to get back control of this
planet. I try to remember what we were facing a year ago. The first
Stormcloud had just been taken down for good (a “victory” I’m sure
Jackson took full credit for), and we believed—until recently—that
Chang may have been gone with it. But there were still holdouts:
Chang’s remaining army, his hidden base, and Fohat and Asmodeus
were unaccounted for.

“So it would be reasonable to assume they sent what
they sent expecting they’d still be in a straight-up fight with
Chang and his allies.” For a machine, Dee’s gotten very good at
mimicking human conversation, including subtle non- and sub-verbal
cues. I can tell he’s setting up his real point. He flashes the
manifests that I’d sent him after the infuriating Jackson meet on
our screens. He’s had nearly a week to process them, to model his
outcomes, which must be like decades to his AI. (I expect he
actually finished processing them shortly after he received them,
and has been waiting all these days to report to me. I also suspect
I was only found because Dee modeled the explosion down to the last
pebble. I wonder if he knows where my sword went. Or Asmodeus.)

“Aircraft. Battery guns. Missiles. Satellites,” I
list what makes sense, still having a lot of trouble concentrating.
“The modular sections to repair and expand the bases.”

“And that makes sense,” Dee mirrors my thoughts.

“But not all the troops,” I say like I’m trying to
beat him to it, gelling what it implies.

“Troops are no good in that fight,” Bly concludes
from his own tragic experience. “Not against ships and bots. Flesh
against machine.”

Chang’s own human troops didn’t last long in that
fight, Bly’s people, Straker’s… Our own allies have managed to make
do because they had no other choice, but their losses were
terrible. And personal. Abbas. Murphy.

“Troops are for occupation,” Bel calculates
morosely.

“Aircraft and satellites won’t work for rooting out
the locals,” I clarify.

“Or taking control of the ETE Stations,” Lux adds.
“Assuming they figure out how to beat ETE tech.”

“And ours,” Bel worries, but barely.

But it’s painfully obvious. The military threat Chang
presented was only one priority on Earthside’s target list.

There’s us, of course, no matter how many times we
prove ourselves allies and assets in the real fight. Plus the ETE,
still stubbornly (smartly) refusing to turn over their technology
and surrender their Stations, but, in doing so, daring Earth to
take them by force. Taking down all of us would require some tech
advantage, but Lux is right on: Earthside will need to occupy those
Stations, gut them of their “forbidden” technology. But that won’t
take thousands of soldiers.

Except for the Shinkyo offering up a batch of
civilian refugees to cover their real agendas, and the
three-hundred-odd “rebels” Jak Straker took to Melas Two for
shelter when they fled Industry, none of the other local factions
has complied with UNMAC’s demands to relocate to a quarantine site
for examination, clearance and “relief”. That makes them a scary
unknown in Earthside’s eyes, potentially infected by some
non-existent world-ending plague. And worse, I think, as far as
this new Earth world government is concerned: They don’t obey, they
don’t comply, they don’t live and eat and think and worship the way
they’re supposed to.

“But that’s not the fight they’re in anymore,” I
reflect back.

“Asmodeus just gave them a new one,” Bly concurs.

But then the sick brilliance of it hits me.

“Asmodeus
knew
what they would send,” I say
it, trying very hard not to laugh like a madman.

I watch as the shock hits my fellows.

“So he cultivated a weapon that would specifically
wreak havoc on a troop presence, on personnel on-planet,” Azazel
makes it clinical, tactical, almost like he’s appreciating the
genius. (He’s not the only one, hence my urge to start
laughing.)

“And gruesomely,” Bel gives the ugly twist. “The fear
of infection will hit them harder than whatever lives the
Harvesters take.”

“And then they’re fucked any way they play,” Lux
takes it. “If they try to pursue their mission objective, round up
the locals, they’ll have to expose themselves. If they don’t, if
they pull back, they’ll soon be under pressure to rescue the locals
from Harvester attack. Asmodeus will make sure of it.”

The obvious solution is Earth needs to let us handle
it, but that plays right into their conspiracy paranoia. I wonder
if Asmodeus knows that, and is playing on that too. Knowing him,
I’m pretty sure that he is.

“And if it gets too bad, too scary, they’ll cut their
losses and burn this place from orbit,” Bly concludes, reflexively
looking skyward.

“Asmodeus will make sure of it,” I repeat Lux’s
conclusion. “But not before he figures out a way to pass his
nanotech through their quarantine.”

“He’ll leave this place a cinder and head for Earth,”
Bel sums.

“They’ve already sent foot patrols out,” Dee
continues my briefing, letting me know they’ve already fallen into
Asmodeus’ game. “Dropped from ASVs or staged from the Grave base.
Boots on the ground. Upworld Cherries all—they still don’t trust
your former personnel. A few got picked off by Pax that were still
defending their Steads. Fire was returned, but no confirmed
kills—if the Pax took casualties, they carried them off. But then
more got ambushed by Harvesters, same bury-and-wait tactics we’ve
seen. There’ve also been sniper attacks on the construction, the
shells loaded with seeds. They’ve already got eight men—kids—in
stasis, trying to slow the conversion process with regular jolts of
current, like ECT.”