The God Mars Book Six: Valhalla I Am Coming (14 page)

“What’s happening at the Grave?” I change subjects
back to what we do know.

“They’ve burned and tractor-crushed a swath all
around the crater slope over a hundred meters wide, and they’re
still at it,” Bly fills me in, obviously depressed and frustrated
by the damage done. He shows me long range images. It looks like
the barren hole Asmodeus blasted in the North Blade, only neater,
in terms of it being more intentional. It reminds me of the sad
desolation of clear-cut forest land on Earth.

“There haven’t been any more attacks on the base that
I’ve seen, so they probably believe this is working for them. They
found a few charred drones in the burn zones, which I’m sure helped
justify the environmental damage. They’re also clearing a path
north, heading into the North Blade, which is where they’re still
sending their foot patrols, just more carefully now. Harvester
hunting. I’ve seen them carry back several bodies, and a few still
active in restraints on long poles, so it’s easy to assume they’re
studying the tech. If more of their own have gotten infected in the
process, they’re not chatty about it on-link. But Dee says they’ve
logged three new deaths—two soldiers and one construction tech—no
cause listed.”

“Have they tried heading toward Katar again? Or
Pax?”

“A few small teams, in-and-out fast, just to get a
look and set up remote scanners,” Bly reports. “The locals find ‘em
and smash ‘em promptly. So far there’s been no shooting, but there
was one tense confrontation with a Katar war party. If the Katar
didn’t have the number and terrain advantage, and their command
didn’t have weapons control, there would have been a lot of lives
lost on both sides. The ‘Maker kids are as jumpy as they are
useless.”

He shows me what he saw. It’s infuriating. There are
going to be massacres.

“What about the Pax?”

“The Pax have the questionable advantage of a
Harvester-occupied no-man’s land between them and the Earth force,”
Bel assesses. “But that keeps them separated from the Katar as
well. They can’t reinforce each other, or seek each other for
refuge, not with an unknown number of drones in the body of the
North Blade, not to mention the random trigger-happy Earth Force
patrols.”

“Do we know what the Pax losses were from the Keep?”
I have to ask. Neither Bel nor Bly seem willing to tell me, but Bel
takes a breath and does:

“Too many scattered, so their own leadership—Archer’s
in charge now—can’t be sure. But they’ve had encounters with their
own, converted. So have the Earth patrols. And there were fourteen
infected among the main body of refugees… They took care of it
themselves.”

I allow a few seconds to mourn the dead, then press
on:

“I’m assuming there’s been no luck with a
countermeasure?” I ask without optimism. Bel shakes his head.

“It would take nanobots to fight nanobots… The locals
might eventually be willing to accept such a thing, but the
Earthers… And if Earth ever finds out that we put nanites in the
locals…”

“It would justify their paranoia,” I take it.
“They’re already sure that everything good we’ve done is toward
some sinister purpose, that we’re working hand-in-hand with Chang
and Asmodeus.”

“Chang isn’t a threat,” Bly defends. “Not anymore.
He’s different, now.”

“He’s what he
was
,” Bel clarifies heavily,
“before Yod cast him as the villain. Or closer to, depending on
what having to play that role has done to him.”

“Earthside doesn’t know that,” I give them the bottom
line, “and they wouldn’t care if we could tell them. They wouldn’t
believe it.”

“But they
would
believe that the whole planet
is infected by some super malevolent machine intelligence,” Bel
grumbles.

“Do we have any idea what Earthside’s next move is?”
I need to know. Bel and Bly shake their heads. (I almost expect Dee
to suddenly chime in, inside my head, but he doesn’t.) So I decide:
“Then I need to find out.”

I get up, head back to my sleeping space.

“Now?” Bel sounds surprised. “It’s the middle of the
goddamn night.”

I have to chuckle at that, at myself. I had no idea.
I’d lost track, lost all sense of day and night in these caves.

“Watching what Earthside does is the best way to
anticipate what Asmodeus will do. Then I need to be ready.”

“Don’t move until your enemy moves, then move first,”
Bly recalls the old adage, following behind me.

I strip off my robes as I go, not caring about
modesty. My armor, still piled in a heap on the stone floor where I
dropped it days ago, begins to reassemble itself around me as soon
as I get to the crypt-like chamber that I’ve wasted too much time
hiding in. I look at my helmet, left propped in a niche in the cave
wall—the ugly chrome stylized ram’s skull—and shake my head like it
can see me. There will be no flash, no theater.

“Sword?” Bel offers again. Bly’s come in with him.
And Lux and Azazel.

“No,” I insist. “That’s where I went wrong. A sword
is a personal weapon. Up close and personal. That’s the fight
Asmodeus wants me to fight, but it’s not the war we’re in.”

I take back my pistol, my gun belt full of
regenerating ammo mags, and strap it on.

“Well… that’s… different,” Lux mutters, sounding both
confused and disappointed.

I look down at myself. I wasn’t paying attention to
getting “dressed”, too focused on getting out of here. My armor is…
different. But familiar. It’s lost some of its stylized medieval
quality. It’s just plain black plate and mail (in fact more plate
and less mail, especially in my arm guards), and instead of a long
robe-like surcoat over it, there’s just a simple black tunic. It’s
gone tactical, practical, allowing me freer movement and better
protection where I’m more likely to need it if people (and former
people) are going to be shooting at me. In that sense, it vaguely
reminds me of the early laminate body armor I wore when I was with
UNACT, on Earth, fighting the Terror War.

“It suits you, Colonel Cap’n.” Bly compliments.

“And what are we doing while you’re walking into the
idiots’ den?” Bel calls after me as I head for the cliff-side exit,
feeling the night chill on my face for the first time in days.

“What you do,” I tell him. “Watch over the locals.
Find a cure they’ll accept.”

“And watch your back in case the ‘Makers decide to
shoot you in it,” Bly warns.

“It won’t be a gun they use,” I warn him back. “Not
even a rail-gun. They’ve tried that already.”

“They’ve tried nukes already, too,” Bel worries.

The Siren’s Song is skillfully parked in a steep-cut
crevice that’s barely big enough to fit it, one of many ancient
fractures in the shear canyon terminus. The launches and landings
remind me of an old children’s coordination game called
“Operation”, as Azazel has only a few meters off either wingtip
down where he cleared a relatively level spot to serve as a landing
pad. From above, this semi-natural landing “bay” is hidden by a
nano-fiber net that mimics the thick, pervasive green, combined
with optical camouflage on the ship’s upper skin. The strong winds
that scream up the canyon dawn and dusk help dissipate any telltale
exhaust heat, so that’s when we try to do our flying.

When my fellows realized I’d been buried at the Keep,
they signaled my flyer, and had it fly itself here, where it’s
parked with the rest of our “fleet”. Bel and Azazel have set aside
cave entrances to serve as their hangars, just up-slope from the
Song’s dock. The caves are the result of ETE tapping, sucking the
rims for permafrost and other useful elements. We’ve reinforced
them to prevent collapses.

Like my own, the other flyers in their niches look
very little like the salvaged Chang Kites that Bel originally
cobbled them from. Our nanites have joined us with our individual
rides, and have made both functional and aesthetic modifications
over time. Bel’s looks dragon-like, in a deep pearlescent blood
red. Lux’s is more serpentine and emerald. Bly’s resembles his
former “steed”, the nano-swarm hippogriff that Chang had gifted
him, lost out from under him in the shockwave that downed the first
Stormcloud, in rich metallic reds and coppers.

I climb on my black Gryphon, and spin up the lift
fans. The slotted articulated wings shake off the overnight ice.
Using the chemical-fuel thruster jets would give me a heat
signature, but I can do slow hops on fans alone, and I don’t need
to go far.

I kick out into the open sky over the rim slope,
turning east, and see my fellows come out to see me off. I give
them a nod, and tilt into forward thrust, into the first surges of
pre-morning wind.

Lucifer’s Grave is about a dozen klicks
east-northeast. The crater and its plateau rim are more than three
klicks across, and were easily visible rising above the forest even
before they burned their defensive perimeter around it. Now it’s a
glaring wound in the center of the forested valley floor. I’m still
six klicks away when I start to smell the residual smoke in the
air, the stink of burning green. The sun is rising over the far
eastern end of Coprates, turning the sky violet. The Grave is still
well in the shadow of the Spine Range beyond it, but I don’t need
my enhancements to see the ugly cleared hole all around it.

I come in low over the top of the forest canopy,
skimming the thickly intertwined growth. It’s mostly Graingrass in
the belly of the canyon, interwoven with Bitter Apple, Rustbean and
Amarette, though I have found Giant Strawberry, Wild Potato and
Sweetroot, with Red Olive and Tealeaf growing at the higher
elevations. Flying low not only masks me from any ground radar they
may have, but spares me the full view of the destruction. I can’t
help but think how many mouths that acreage may have fed.

Green life here is hardy stuff.

The thought just popped into my internal
conversation, but it wasn’t a transmission, or didn’t feel like
one.

If they don’t keep on top of it, it will grow over
them in a few months.

Yod?

I don’t get a reply, but I don’t get any further
invasive ideas.

When I’m still two klicks out, I bank and hover and
hop off my ride, dropping down into the green, deciding it better
to approach the base on foot than to give their batteries a flying
target.

But approaching on foot turns out to be a slow,
awkward weave of a dance, stepping through and over the growth, and
I manage no stealth at it. I think I’m making the forest rustle
like a drunken army is stumbling through it. I know a lot of that
is my enhanced hearing, but Earthside will have enhanced sensors
out here, remote sentries, all around their perimeter.

I figure I’m still a hundred meters from the edge of
the clearing when I come across that electronic perimeter.
Carefully hacking in, it feels like their sensitivity has been set
to a threshold to ignore the giant insect life (no matter how scary
raptor-sized genetically engineered bugs must be to them), but not
low enough, I’m guessing, just to detect the jerky staggering of a
Harvester-run corpse. That means they want warning of other
potential enemies approaching, which is understandable given Bly’s
report of their encounters with the Pax and Katar. (And Dee
mentioned sniper attacks, which is curious because I can’t imagine
any of the Harvesters I’ve seen having the muscle control for that.
They can barely shoot straight at close range.)

I tweak the remotes to ignore me, and plod on.

I’m hit fresh with the stink of old burn just before
I push through into the defoliated zone. Close up, I can see how
much of the growth resisted the thermobaric blasts, needing to be
crushed down by tractors. If they haven’t sprayed any kind of
herbicide, I do expect the soil to bounce back richer for what
they’ve incidentally plowed into it, but I still don’t fully
forgive the insult to the environment, however many lives it may
have saved.

Looking at it, I wonder how much of my viewpoint is
skewed by my Modded immortality. If I was still in fear of my own
life, or the lives of those under my command, would I have ordered
the same thing if I was tasked to establish and hold a base in this
green place? Functionally invulnerable, I have the luxury of an
objectivity that the Normal men serving here can’t afford.

I look across the cleared zone, up the slopes of the
crater. The slopes alone buy them several hundred meters, most of
which wasn’t thickly overgrown to begin with, plus the high-ground
advantage. Then the west rim of the crater, where they built their
base and airfield, has a good kilometer wide of open plateau atop
it. It’s an excellent place to build a fortress, especially against
ground assault. And I’ve certainly had opportunity to test that: My
fellows and I made multiple attempts to assail that crater when
Asmodeus held it. Despite all of our Modded abilities, he always
had more than enough warning to greet our approach, though his
usual greeting was to send dozens of bots racing toward the nearest
human settlements, forcing us to give up the assault and give
chase. Defending the plateau and the crater beyond against anything
less vulnerable than us would be a simple matter. Of course, his
stronghold was ultimately vulnerable to an orbital rail-gun, but
clearing some forest isn’t any protection against that, assuming
Asmodeus builds another one of his own.

Up on the outer edge of the plateau, I can see
another perimeter of remote batteries, fortifying the heights from
all directions. I don’t have the sight-line from here to see the
actual facilities, so I can’t imagine how a sniper could get a shot
at anyone from a position down here in the valley floor, not even
if they were up in the canopy. Either the personnel that were
targeted were working on the perimeter clearing or the batteries,
or their attackers had much higher ground. The nearest is the
Spine, and that’s at least three klicks out, a nearly impossible
shot even with the lower gravity.