The God Mars Book Six: Valhalla I Am Coming (15 page)

Unless the shooter and his weapon were Modded.

Asmodeus. The fucker was doing the shooting himself.
Casual murder for his idle amusement, and to keep his targets on
edge enough to play into whatever he has planned.

I feel the crater guns turn on me, lock on me. I’ve
been seen.

My armor shifts automatically from default black to
match the blasted environment behind me, but the guns continue to
track me as I circle the outer edge of the cleared perimeter. So I
show myself, show my empty hands, let them see that I’m not a
corpse drone, and dare them to take a shot. I don’t try to force a
hack to slave the turrets, but I could (unless they’ve simplified
and hard-wired fire control, or actually have live gunners in each
turret).

They don’t shoot, but they don’t do anything else. I
step forward, out onto the crushed and burned forest, and slowly
cross about a third of it as the guns keep tracking me. Then I
stop, well out in the open. And wait.

“What are you doing here, Colonel?” Jackson finally
comes over a common link channel, icy calm.

“I came to ask you that same question,” I send
back.

“And why would I share that with you?”

“Because while I was busy digging myself out of that
crater that used to be the Pax stronghold, I had a bit of an
epiphany,” I decide to throw him a little honesty. “And I’m not
willing to just sit back and let you march a bunch of under-trained
children into whatever trap Asmodeus has been preparing for
them.”

“Was Asmodeus with you at the Pax site?” he ignores
my warning in favor of his own priority.

“He was. Though I expect it was another clone.”

“Did he dig himself out as well?”

“Not that I’m aware of. But if he was a clone, he
might not have bothered.”

“So he may still be there?”

I don’t answer that, but I realize I may have just
stupidly accelerated his timeframe.

“He’s expecting you to send boots in,” I repeat my
warning. “Why do you think he’s given up using aircraft and heavy
bots in favor of what’s clearly an antipersonnel weapon?”

Now I don’t get a reply. But after a few minutes, I
hear engines spinning up. AAVs. The sun has cleared the crest of
the Spine. Dust blasts over the edges of the plateau.

What little chatter I hear is simplified and
coded.

“Colonel Jackson… What are you doing?” I ask like
I’ve caught a child doing something innocently destructive.

He doesn’t answer me until two ships lift off and fly
northeast, fast and low.

“If you’d like a proper look, feel free to get as
close as you like.”

I quickly lose sight of the aircraft, but can hear
their jets get steadily further away. I can easily guess where
they’re going, but I’m worried what they’re…

Blast from the past,
I get that internal voice
again.
They call it “Lights Out”. Not very creative.

All chatter from the base goes silent. In fact, I
feel everything power down—batteries, sentries…

You’ll be fine,
the voice assures as I’m
thinking I should be running.
You may feel a little
tingle.

Six minutes later, I do feel a tingle. It’s a wave of
EMR, washing over me. It barely fuzzes my vision and hearing, but I
expect the effects would have been a lot more profound if I was
standing wherever Zero was. And I’m assuming Zero was the former
Pax Mountain.

EMP,
the voice tells me what I’ve already
figured out.

“Dee?” I guess.

I’m trying a new low-frequency flash comm
system,
he confirms.
They’ve gotten good at detecting our
usual signals. They can even detect us at close range now. That’s
how they knew you were coming, how they tracked you through your
cloak. They locked on as soon as you crossed their perimeter.
Hacking doesn’t help—they’re on a separate hardwired
network.

“What are they doing?”

They learned fast from the sample drone modules. They
can be disabled by a strong EMP, even if you can’t be. They brought
the weapon—a prototype—to test against the ETE, but decided this
was a better first use. They think it will clear the primary
occupied zone in the North Blade of all active Harvesters. Then
they plan to move in, look for Asmodeus.

Idiots.

“No reason to believe that wasn’t a clone.”

They are assuming it may have been. But they’re
hoping to salvage tissue samples to study how he manages it—that’s
been made a top priority. If possible, they’d like to recover an
intact brain module. They hope to be able to use it to hack him,
track him.

Smarter. But still…

“And how are they going to find him in that mess,
assuming there’s anything left to find?”

But I think he already told me that.

If he’s regenerating, or still connected to his
primary, they think he’ll be detectable with their new equipment,
but so far it only works within a hundred meters, less if he’s
buried. So they’re moving in a full company to do a grid sweep.
They’re hoping numbers combined with air support will keep them
safe.

Fuck.

Since they just saw that you managed to dig
yourself out, they figure they have a very small window to catch
him, assuming he didn’t beat you out,
he lets me know my
earlier guess was right.

“I dug out three days ago,” I argue.

It’s taken them this long to get the detection gear
working and portable, and to stage the necessary ships and
personnel. In the meantime, they’ve been monitoring the site by
satellite, but obviously that’s limited to heat and visual. That’s
how we were able to go looking for you in the dark just by masking
our heat and blending in with the rocks. But starting two days ago,
they’ve been risking sending out recon parties to planting their
detectors closer in. If they’d managed it sooner, they might have
caught our rescue efforts.

“If they’d managed it sooner, they might have
detected Asmodeus digging himself out,” I grumble.

We were on-site every night since the
bombardment,
Dee gives me the same reassurance that Bel and Bly
and Lux and Azazel have.
We didn’t detect any sign of him. We
were lucky we found you.

I expect Yod had something to do with that.

“More likely he
was
a clone, then.
Disposable.”

Then they may have a shot at finding what they’re
looking for. Once they pick up on anything promising, they’ll fly
in digging equipment.

A company of troops, support aircraft and skilled
technical personnel, all in one spot, all out in the open.

I get hit by a very bad thought. Asmodeus bad.

“When is the ground force inserting?” I need to
know.

Right now.

I feel the base systems come back online now that the
EMP has done its work. I hear more coded chatter that I assume are
go orders. I hear engines spin up, blasting dust over the edges of
the plateau.

“I think I know what those tubes are for.”

I start running northwest.

More aircraft lift off from the crater base behind
me: Old and new gen ASVs and AAVs, and something like an AAV that
looks modified to hold more of either cargo or troop capacity. I
notice some have been roughly repainted to match the green rather
than the rust and ochre desert. They blow up a storm of dust and
exhaust steam that crosses over my head, turning the forest into a
tropical jungle for a few seconds, then leaving me well behind. I
find myself chasing that heat trail as fast as I can run.

I don’t dare use my flyer, for fear they’d just shoot
me down. In the green, I have a chance of coming up on them unseen,
especially if Dee’s right (Dee is almost always right) and they can
only detect my Mods within a hundred meters. I’m afraid that by the
time I get there and cross their detection threshold, they’ll
already be too busy to give me much attention.

My armor shifts schemes to match the forest as I
run.

It’s more than twelve klicks to the Pax Mountain (now
more appropriately the Pax Crater), to where the entrance to the
approach canyon used to be. I quickly find the plowed “road” that
Earthside’s been building for their patrols. I assume they would
have used it for this mission, saved some of the fuel that the ETE
have been doling out by marching the troops in instead of flying
them, but I put them in a hurry as soon as I showed my face and
proved that someone had dug out of their latest attempt to slay the
monsters of their nightmares. I don’t dare use that road myself as
it will make me more visible, but I run parallel to it for awhile,
just staying clear of the tangle of uprooted rotting growth that’s
been shoved to either side of the five-meter-wide swath.

In five klicks, I round the western tip of the Spine
Range, officially crossing the boundary into the North Blade,
roughly marked by the rise of a buried Feed Line. It’s taken me
fifteen precious minutes, slowed by the weaving and jumping I have
to do to get through the thick foliage. (The overgrown Graingrass
here reminds me less of bamboo and more like the crabgrass I used
to weed out of my parents’ gardens when I was a kid, assuming I’m
about ant-sized in relative scale.) A small consolation is that I
haven’t heard any gunfire or explosions up ahead. Yet.

Even though I’ve only been in the region for less
than a year now, I feel like I’ve been running through this tangled
mesh of growth for decades. It seems like all we’ve been
doing—running from fight to fight, unable to use our flyers in
proximity to any shooting for fear that Earthside may target us
from orbit. The only significant “break” we had from that was
during the nearly two weeks that Asmodeus had us trapped in the
natural cave maze that permeates the base slopes of the Grave
crater. Or used to, before the UN orbital rail-gun gutted the
crater—from up-close personal experience, I expect most of those
tunnels were collapsed by the shockwave. If not, Earthside still
has a viable tunnel network right under their new base, something
Asmodeus may be able to exploit in the future. I would certainly
hope they thoroughly scanned the site before they started building
on it, but now I get a whole new sinking in my gut. And then I’m
freshly angry, wondering how long I’m going to be having to protect
the ungrateful small-minded monsters from their own stupidity.

I should be better at moving through this living mesh
by now. If I had my sword, I could hack a path, but then their
aircraft might see the forest giving way, giving me away.

I get distracted enough by dwelling on the wishes and
what-ifs that I get whacked in the face by a branch, hard enough to
clothesline me backwards. My boots slip out from under me on the
slick undergrowth and I go skidding on my armored ass. I’ve got
just enough objectivity left under my rage that I get a good laugh
at my own expense, though anybody watching would probably think I’d
lost the last of my sanity.

Then I drag myself up and start running again.

After another fifteen minutes, I’m running up the
rise of a hill in my path. It gets me above the taller green, so I
have to stay low, but it gives me a view of the blasted
mountain.

The entrance to the approach canyon is still there,
with some of the “wall” of piled stone across it intact, enough to
recognize what it used to be. But the approach canyon approaches
nothing now, just rolling barren rubble dug out from a series of
four or five discernible giant craters that scooped out the middle
of the spine of what was a ten-klick-long mountain. Rock and gravel
looks like it flowed and flooded the approach canyon all the way
out to the wall, which was partly blown away by the blast waves.
All the green that had been on the mountain slopes and in the
canyon has been erased. It reminds me of a series of explosive
volcanic craters, somehow all detonated in a relatively straight
chain. (I can’t help but think of a child’s game of “Battleship”.)
But even the worst they could do didn’t entirely erase the
mountain, as if Mars is defying them. (So did deeper or more
peripheral sections of the Keep survive? And if so, does Asmodeus
still have a base somewhere under this devastation?)

I can also see eight ASVs perched up on whatever
reasonably-level high ground they could find, roughly surrounding
the center of the site, covering it with their gun turrets and
missiles, as if they’re certain that Asmodeus is buried in one of
the middle craters. (And they would be right, if he’s still there
in any form at all.) They’re keeping their engines spinning, but
have set down to conserve fuel. And out in front of the “gates” of
the broken and half-buried approach wall are parked a line of a
half-a-dozen AAVs and what I now see are definitely troop ships, as
they’ve discharged their cargo: I see maybe a few hundred soldiers,
most in H-A shells that have been painted over in greens like their
ships. A squad’s worth of troops are holding their main landing
zone, while a too-thin line is spread out over a klick from west to
east just on their south side to hold the still-forested perimeter.
The rest—about a hundred suits—are moving north-northwest, through
the “gate” gap and onto the talus surface that’s replaced the lush
canyon floor. They fan out and slowly advance, scanning the rubble
underfoot with whatever gear’s been designed to detect Mods like
mine. They look like they’re minesweeping, covered by the guns of
the surrounding aircraft. It seems like they’re being cautious
enough, but I know better.

I get back to running, gaining speed by the grace of
the downhill. Only a few more klicks…

I’m starting to see the green get thin, starting to
see the remains of the mountain again, when my systems flash a
proximity alert and a figure steps out in front of me, holding up a
hand for me to