The God Mars Book Six: Valhalla I Am Coming (18 page)

Then silence.

“Hey, sexy,” her unmistakable voice purrs at me as
she steps catlike through the interwoven Graingrass. She’s still
wearing her variation of her body-host’s costume: a snug red
laced-together body suit; shiny plate over her shins, thighs,
shoulders and forearms—the latter sporting flame-like crests of
blades—and partial mail underneath; her collar and belt decorated
with grinning metal skulls. And she’s still got Fera’s wild mop of
flame-red hair, accented by thin braids woven with bone beads. But
her face and exposed skin are the glowing deep neon blue that she’s
recently grown so fond of. It makes her eyes and sharp teeth pop
brightly, like she’s illuminated by black light, as she grins
hungrily at me.

“Calliope,” I also call her by her given name rather
than her codename.

“Fuck you.” (She really hates her given name.)

Lyra pushes through the green behind me as five more
Cast step out of the forest to join us, armed with their simple,
homemade weapons.

“A little young for you, isn’t she?” Kali jealously
assesses, glaring around me at Lyra like she’d rip her throat out
just to find out what her blood tastes like. I don’t bother to
grace her assumption with a reply, but get to my own questions:

“What are you doing out here?”

Kali doesn’t answer me, but walks a half-circle
back-and-forth around me, sizing me up.

“You’ve toned down the look,” she critiques my more
practical armor. “It suits you, I suppose. Tired of tripping over
the ren-fair bathrobe?”

“Who’s protecting Tranquility?” I really need to
know.

“Two-Gun,” she finally gives me a straight answer.
“Don’t worry. He’s got things well in hand.” But there’s something
she isn’t saying.

“Why did you come?” I reword my original
question.

“Not for you, dear,” she mocks. “Sorry to crush your
ego. And not for these Earth fuckholes either…” She gestures with
her claws past me as Horton and the others begin to cautiously join
us.

“Oooohh…” she almost sings, pushing past me to step
up to Horton, who doesn’t give her the satisfaction of giving
ground, not even when she flicks off his cap and pulls aside his
mask with her razor-sharp fingertips. “Now this one…
He
may
have been worth the trip… I miss a good, strong body… square jaw…
high-and-tight haircut… My Cast are all so skinny and long-haired I
feel like I’m fucking an old-timey rock band…” She turns on me.
“And
you
… All you give me when you visit is five minutes of
your precious time, and that just to brief me like I’m one of your
soldiers. I was fingering myself wet for you the whole time—did you
even notice?”

I did, but I ignored it.

“You spent more time with that Hunter-Killer bitch
and her kid, bringing them your so-called ‘ambassador’ friend’s gun
and giving them the ‘I’m sorry for your loss’ shit.
She
wasn’t. She hated him for taking your side against their sick
established order. The whore was banging at least two of his former
brothers-in-arms while he was out giving his life, with their son
in the next room. I know: I watched—they only
think
I fried
their security systems along with their Big Brother AI…”

She gets the hint to stop when she sees the look in
my eye, softens.

“I’m sorry. And I’m sorry about Murphy. I liked the
sexy lunk. I did. He was the only one of those spoiled psychos that
was worth a fuck.”

“Why are you here instead of holding
Tranquility?”

“Because Asmodeus isn’t there. He’s
here
. Or
at least his zombie horde is. And that’s a hard target. One
we
can deal with.
You’re
just wasting your time here,
and that’s what he wants.”

I’m about to protest about how vulnerable the Cast
with her are to infection, when I hear a short burst of gunfire
come at us through the growth. Before I can react, Mak does: She
slides in front of Lyra and Horton, her left hand reaching out at
bullet-speed. I see three darts sink into the palm of her hand. Her
right hand draws one of her knives, and she whips it through the
Graingrass at the source of the darts. It shears leaves and
branches like a buzzsaw as it flies. I can hear it find its target,
hear the body drop. Then she plucks the darts out of her hand,
annoyed. I see the wounds run with liquid silver, knit closed. When
she looks up at me, I realize her dark brown irises are laced with
metallic copper.

“
What have you done?
” I accuse Kali.

“I had a weapon,” she tells me defiantly. “I used it.
This is a fucking war.”

I step up to Mak, look close into her eyes, then grab
her left hand and examine the already-fading punctures.

“An ETE came to Tranquility,” Kali decides to
explain. “A few months back. Cocky kid. Red suit. Out for a
happy-ass adventure. He even had a
sword
…” She’s talking
about Erickson Carter. I’ve heard his—and Dee’s—side of this story.
“Very cute, in a dorky sort of way, but as prudish as the rest of
them. He wouldn’t play with me, so I cut him…” She wiggles her
claws in front of my face. “Got me a sample of his nanotech. I
managed to stabilize it, keep it from self-destructing.”

“And you replicated it,” I conclude, feeling sick.
“Implanted it in these people.”

“I had a weapon,” she repeats. “I used it. When you
told me what we were facing.”

I realize that one of the civvies with us has
activated his video rig. He’s recording this. I could jam him, hack
him, erase his data, but I don’t. Not yet.

“How many?” I need to know.

“Just a few. My elite guard. A gift from their
goddess.”

“We’re
not
gods,” I hiss.

“We are in every sense of those old fairy-stories,”
she’s convinced herself. “Demi-gods, at least. And these…” She
gestures to her retinue with flair. “…are my faithful.”

“Two-Gun?” I really need to know.

“You should see him shoot now,” she admits with a
satisfied grin. “You think he was fast before…”

“And the Domers?” I press.

“
Fuck
the Domers,” she spits. “They hunted my
people for fucking sport. They mutilated and murdered the first
sweet young love of the girl whose body I’ve remodeled, took parts
of her for trophies. Or did you forget that?”

“
One
man…” I try.

“
All of them!
” she rails. “So
brave
behind their precious guns, so proud of the murder they did,
teaching their children to follow in their bloody footsteps.
Killing their own so they could keep living cushy in their safe
little world.”

“They did what they thought they had to,” I defend
poorly.

“You don’t believe that bullshit any more than I do.
They
liked
it. They liked their elite fucking lives, being
able to kill whoever they wanted and jack up their precious scores…
How does that
not
fit into your definition of evil? Your
buddy Murphy was the only one of them I’ve seen who had a fucking
soul, and they treated him like freak, a traitor.”

“What did you do?” I confront her, expecting some
impulsive atrocity.

“Nothing,” she seems to take satisfaction in assuring
me. “They can have their domes. They don’t even realize it’s their
cage. The rest of the world…” She gestures to the Cast with her.
“…the rest of the world is
theirs
.”

“The Cast?” I need her to clarify.

“
No
, you thick dickhead. Everybody who
lives
here, who’s sweated and bled and died to make a life
here since their grandparents were all left for dead. It’s
their
world—your
own
words, I believe. And we’re
going to help them keep it. Or is that not The Plan anymore?”

“That is still the plan,” I reassure. On camera.

“Good…” She gets a little softer, like she was
actually afraid of what my answer would be. “Because without that,
all we’ve got is fucking and killing.” She gives me a little
lopsided grin. “When you came to tell me about Asmodeus… about…”
She glances at the cameraman, and impressively edits herself,
discreetly flashing “
Yod
” into my head instead of saying it
out loud. “…you were all business again, like you were before you
got Modded. Like you started to get again after you found your
purpose, whatever that was, in that other fucked-up world we’d
made…”

Yod
, I confirm in her head. She nods.

“That’s what took you away from me then,” she admits,
the old pain in her chrome eyes. “That’s why I…” She suddenly turns
on the cameraman: “Are you getting this, asshole?”

The cameraman looks like he’s completely shit
himself. I put up a hand between them, trying to convince him he’s
not in immediate mortal danger. I’m sure I failed.

But she’s right: When I became this, became immortal,
life devolved into meaningless fucking, just to pass the years.
That’s what I used her for. That’s what she used me for. It wasn’t
love as much as it was our nano-enhanced hormones. And when I found
something better, something more important, I forgot her. And then
I got upset when she acted out, trying to get her distractions
elsewhere.

I can’t help but think of Lux. It only took maybe a
day of feeling immortally useless and I’m back to the old
distraction with the nearest willing body. But then, back at
Tranquility, I was alternately fucking Kali and then Star, and I
had
purpose. But I also had time on my hands.

Is that it? Is that what immortality has done to me?
Do I only engage in the ultimate expression of human intimacy
because I have nothing more pressing to do at the time?

Kali is looking into my eyes, giving me a wordless
nod, letting me know I’m not the only one who’s fallen into this
trap.

I realize I’m hearing jets.

“Shit!” Horton snaps me out of my selfish
self-pity.

We’ve delayed here too long. The ships have come back
to pick up the stragglers holding the exfil points.

“We won’t make it in time.”

“It’s ten klicks back to your shithole of a base,”
Kali sighs at our group as they start to look panicked, frozen. “In
a beautiful alien forest… In one-third gravity… We’ll
carry
you, for fuck’s sake.”

They don’t need to carry us, but we’re grateful for
the escort. I carry Ryan, who’s still in-and-out of sense, mumbling
about getting his dailies uploaded, calling for makeup.

We don’t run across any more Harvesters, but when we
pass an exfil LZ, we see a handful of bodies left behind wearing
H-A shells, all shot through their visors. I consider stopping to
make sure they won’t reanimate, but don’t want to take the time
when we have wounded.

We’ll come back later,
Kali assures in my
head.
Clean this up.
She pauses, turns back to look me over
quizzically.
So why the new look?

This isn’t the time to be playing dress-up.

I hear her harrumph at that, considering she looks
even more outlandish since she decided to use the optical Mod she
hacked from Chang to turn herself neon blue.

Where’s your sword?
she grunts like I’ve
forgotten my pants.

Lost it in the bombing,
I go ahead and tell
her.
Another thing I can’t afford right now. The Harvesters are
programmed just like the Bots were: as soon as they detect we’re
Modded, they avoid us. Chasing them down to chop them one at a time
wastes too much time
.

You really are on-mission, aren’t you?
she
grumbles, and accelerates her pace, leaving me behind, putting
forest between us.

“How are
you
handling this, Mak?” I ask
discreetly as we walk.

She shrugs, idly wiping the gore from the knives she
took the time to recover.

“It is a gift,” she’s almost convincing. “Time will
show it better, like any living thing.”

The cameraman is still filming. I should erase his
drives. If Earthside learns that the Cast are “infected” by ETE
tech, and that one of my kind did it,
can
do it… But I can’t
erase the human witnesses.
Won’t.

He catches my eye on him, tries not to look
terrified, like he does expect me to kill him (or do something
worse that UNCORT’s programmed him to imagine). I can hear him sigh
in relief when I ignore him, let him be.

I suppose by letting him keep his video record, I’m
probably sparing them all some kind of enhanced interrogation when
they get “home”. Earthside will certainly seize everything he’s
recorded, and UNCORT will be able to see and hear it all for
themselves. What I expect I’m
not
sparing them is the
invasive exams they’ll all get just for being in proximity to
us.

And Ryan and Horton…

“You’re
infected
,” Kali identifies Horton’s
condition, having been hovering around him like a hungry cat for
the last three klicks.

Horton doesn’t confirm, but Lyra and Sharp look
crushed.

Kali puts herself in front of him.

“I can fix it. I can fix you.”

She winds up walking backwards as he ignores her and
keeps marching. She puts her hand on his shoulder, stops him, goes
nose-to-blue-nose with him.

“I was a soldier, and operator, just like you,” she
tells him. “I’m offering you a weapon, sergeant. To keep you in
this fight. To help you in this fight. Are you going to refuse it,
because of a duty to idiots who are going to get all of you
killed?” She sniffs him like an animal. “You’re not new-drop. I can
smell it on them…” She jerks her head at Sharp. “…the vegan shit
they eat, the self-righteous purity, the pathetic submissiveness,
the paralyzing fear of pretty much everything…” Then she nods her
head sideways at me. “You’re one of
his
. I can smell that on
you
.”