The God Mars Book Six: Valhalla I Am Coming (20 page)

“Horton!” I hear Lyra shout. “Your six!”

I see them both shooting back down slope the way they
came, but not for long. Then they go back to trying to cover the
vulnerable evacuees. They’ve formed up on the bulldozed berm pushed
up as a shield wall to keep jetwash off the base structures. Some
have resorted to side arms, since their main battle weapons are
still being stubbornly useless. A few try grenades, but get shouted
down because more of their own are still running to their line,
caught out in the open.

Kali and I get between that line and the approaching
drones. A lot of them have been shot to the point that I can’t
imagine how they’re still walking. Curious, I use up a few precious
shells trying to hit major long-bones, only to hear my rounds ping
off metal inside the meat.

“He’s upgraded them!” I warn. The nanites must be set
to armor the skeleton, maybe even build a secondary motor system to
take over when the muscles fail. The conversion would take time,
but these drones have been buried in the ground for a few weeks
now.

But it’s not all of them: Most still blow apart like
flesh and bone. (I remember Asmodeus saying that he had several
different “grades” for his own peripheral clones, from disposable
meat to near-immortal full-Mod. Maybe he’s done that same with his
“soldiers”.) And he hasn’t armored the skulls, not enough to stop
UNMAC-issue ball alloy. (Not yet. I expect we’ll see that soon
enough.)

There’s shouting and screaming from behind me.
Harvesters are coming over the top of the base structures, having
somehow gotten through the battery defenses, and they’re dropping
down behind the line, between the troopers and the barred
airlocks.

I’m out of ammo. So is Kali. We lock eyes for a
fraction, and dash for the berm. We leap over, rip the nearest ICW
out of the nearest stunned trooper’s hands, and hack into the
targeting system. But this time, I’m not just releasing the weapon
to manual. We each aim for the brainstem of a Harvester, lock in
the target on the weapon’s standard body graphic, and send the code
as an update to every other ICW on the line.

Kali doesn’t wait the few seconds for the update to
take. She starts popping heads. I get the load confirmation, and
shout over the troopers’ link channel:

“
Targeting recalibrated! Weapons free!
”

A few get the hint when they see me fire without
sights and pop a Harvester clean through the nose. As soon as those
troopers are scoring hits, others join in. Then all I have to do is
call targets, make sure they don’t let any slip in on our
flanks.

Now that the new-drops are all instant sharpshooters,
it doesn’t take long to secure the area.

I start giving orders to clear the rest of the
perimeter when I start seeing guns turn on me. And on Kali, who’s
up on the bunker roof. It’s not every trooper—some outright refuse
to point their weapons at us—but it’s enough to prove that saving
their asses changed very little.

“Ungrateful motherfuckers,” Kali growls at them,
dropping her borrowed ICW like so much worthless junk. Her skin
shifts back to blue. This gets the guns on her to back up a few
centimeters. I can almost hear their armor rattle, they’re shaking
so badly. “Next time, I’m just going to watch you stupid shits get
yourselves slaughtered.”

Right in front of them, she fades away, leaving her
silver eyes and her bright fangy grin as the last parts of her to
stay visible, Cheshire Cat style. Then she’s gone like she
vaporized into thin air. I try my enhancements, but can’t read her
on heat, motion or EMR. Apparently she also got upgraded camouflage
Mods from her contact with Chang. There’s not even sound or any
visible disturbance of the terrain to reveal her movements.

One of the troopers gets the nerve to skittishly step
forward and prod the barrel-array of his weapon into the empty
space where she was. I almost expect him to lose a hand (or worse),
but even swinging his gun and then his weak arm around, he bumps
into nothing but air. A few other armor suits join him in the
bizarre blind man’s dance, to equal lack of result. She’s gone.

Once the troopers get over this freshest moment of
panic that the scary blue monster just vanished in the middle of
them like a hologram turned off, the guns that were pointed at her
add to the guns pointed at me.

Ungrateful motherfuckers.

I look across the plateau, see Lyra and Horton
standing in the rocks where they’d been shooting from. Lyra looks
paler than usual under her mask, her big eyes wide with worry.
Horton gives me a look of pure disgust, and makes a show of
dropping his weapon like it’s covered in shit. He gives me a nod,
then he turns and walks off without a word, back down slope, back
towards where the Cast are waiting, tearing his link gear out of
his L-As and throwing it away.

I scan the shivering suits of armor aiming guns at me
like that gives them any kind of power in this situation, and I
decide to forgo the more “demonstrative” lessons I could teach them
in favor of a subtler one: I hack and disable their smart guns,
using the algorithm that Dee had given me to hopelessly lock them.
I know this leaves them vulnerable if there’s still an active
threat nearby, but like Kali, I find I’m not caring about that so
much anymore.

They all see the malfunction alerts flash in their
HUD sight graphics, but several try pulling their useless triggers
anyway. More than one tries shaking or slapping the gun like that
will have any effect. When they finally realize that they’re
suddenly mostly unarmed, they start nervously backing away from me,
almost tripping over each other as they do. But they’re still
locked out of their own base—they have no place to go, no
shelter.

“
He’s not going to hurt you!
” Lyra shouts at
them in my defense, barely reining in her disgust. “
He just
saved all of us!
”

Escalating the madness, the base turrets turn on me
next, even though their own people are in the line of fire. I try a
quick hack attempt, confirming that the base defenses have all been
taken off network, hardwired to their human operators, so someone
like me can’t do exactly what I’m trying to.

“This is Colonel Burns,” his sickening voice comes
over the trooper channels. “You will all stand down, surrender your
weapons, and wait to be processed and cleared.”

And then it hits me: The troopers aren’t just
incidentally in the way of the turret guns that are aimed at me.
The turrets are aiming at them as well. Because they could all
potentially be infected, compromised.

I hear the junior officers protest that they have
wounded, that they need medics and trauma pods. They get no
response.

“Colonel Burns,” I dare intrude on the channel. “The
Harvester infection isn’t contagious until the modules form and
activate. That gives you three days before any of these people who
may have been injected becomes a threat. Contain them until you
clear them, but get the wounded triaged.”

“Colonel Burns, he’s telling the truth,” Lyra stands
up for me again.

But I know what Burns and his like are thinking: I
only saved these troopers from slaughter so they could come home
and infect their fellows.

“That’s not the only risk, Colonel Ram,” he comes
back at me. I can almost see him smirk. “I think you know what I’m
talking about.”

“Colonel Burns, this is Colonel Halley,” I hear a
welcome voice before I can solve what exactly he’s accusing me of.
“I’m willing to take the risk. I can set up shelters, a field
hospital.”

There’s another long silence on the link.
Finally:

“Go ahead, Colonel Halley,” Burns agrees with little
enthusiasm. “But no one enters the secure facilities until after
they’ve cleared the established quarantine period.”

And that means he intends to leave these people out
here for three days, AP guns pointed at them, so he can see how
many of them he needs to have killed.

I have a wicked, sick thought: If Asmodeus thought
this far ahead, he would have simply pre-programmed the Harvester
seeds to stay dormant, to hide and wait out the quarantine. And if
he decided to use tech similar to what he put in Leder Sower, it
could go undetected indefinitely…

…
and I was stupid enough to tell them such
nightmares exist.
(Is that what Burns was implying I knew
about?) I’m suddenly sure they’re imagining an army of truly
mind-controlled sleeper agents infiltrating the UNMAC ranks,
secretly spreading themselves, furthering their master’s declared
agenda to get himself to Earth. And how far will they go to protect
themselves—to protect everyone on Earth—from that potentially very
real threat? Will they simply kill anyone they even suspect has
been compromised? Will they just sterilize the planet with the
nukes they’ve been hauling across space?

Lyra pushes her way through the paralyzed, helpless,
beaten line to join me, demonstrating her lack of fear by standing
by my side as we wait for Doc Halley’s med team to arrive. From
where I am, I count barely eighty troopers lucky enough to have
made it back from what I’m sure is going to get spun in history as
the Battle of Pax Mountain, and nearly a third of those are being
cared for with gunshot, frag and blast trauma. (Any hit with darts
may not be showing obvious injury—Horton didn’t—and may not be
eager to reveal their condition, having seen the fate of their
fellows, despite the unavoidable alternative.)

“How many deployed to the Pax Mountain?” I ask Lyra
off-channel, my wrath wanting a proper accounting of what Burns’
and Jackson’s incompetence (and Earthside’s) has cost.

“A full company, plus supports. About a hundred and
eighty personnel, not including the flight crews.”

My heart sinks into my gut. Unless they flew some out
to Melas Two, my count here says they lost more than half of the
ground force they fielded today, plus six ships that I personally
saw go down.

(And if I wasn’t here today, if I’d stayed sulking in
my cave, how many more would be dead?)

I scan across the field of wounded and beaten, a
still-burning AAV collapsing into itself on its pad behind them,
and I spot Corso, standing over a sobbing trooper, apparently
uninjured herself, glaring at me like this is my fault. And in this
perfect, terrible moment, I know that I can’t save these people,
because they’d rather die than let me.

Asmodeus’ gleeful words echo in my head:

“They’ve never seen a war like me.”

I go ahead and unlock the troopers’ weapons. They
don’t bother to try to raise them against me again. But I do hear
intermittent bursts of gunfire in the distance, probably cleaning
up any remaining drones wandering the perimeter.

While we wait, the troopers do their best to
stabilize their wounded. The ragtag group that Lyra, Horton and I
led out of the massacre comes dragging up the crater slope to join
us. It takes both of the surviving civilian aids to carry Ryan, and
then they actually expect someone will give him priority treatment,
protesting like spoiled, entitled, sheltered elitists, oblivious to
the suffering of the dozens of more seriously wounded around them.
One of the troopers finally graces them with a spare survival
blanket so Ryan doesn’t have to be lain down on bare gravel.

I consider going to help with first aid, but I figure
none of the new drops will let me anywhere near them, much less lay
hands on them. They continue to keep their distance, keep a nervous
eye on me as the turrets stay pointed at us all.

It takes forty agonizing minutes for Halley’s flight
to arrive. She doesn’t wait for confirmation that the area is
clear. She and her team jump out of her AAV the instant it touches
down, and start triage as soon as they can run to the wounded. She
sees me and shoots me a quick look through the visor of her bio
suit that I can’t read, but she doesn’t greet me or say anything to
me, just gets to working on the more seriously hurt. Others start
unloading portable shelters, and finding ground on our side of the
protective berm to stake down and inflate them.

Only then does anyone come out of the base: A squad
of fresh H-A shells files out of the nearest airlocks, immediately
pointing manual weapons at their own people, ordering them to begin
surrendering their guns. The troopers who can still stand queue up
to do so reluctantly, looking over their shoulders for further
attack (and this would be an excellent time for another wave of
Harvesters to hit, assuming Asmodeus has any left). Once disarmed,
they get herded into rough parade ranks, to wait for the next step
in whatever “protocol” they need to endure.

As that gets well underway, another figure steps out
through the locks, this one in a black and gold pilot’s pressure
suit. I see colonel’s birds. I don’t need to read his name-badge to
know who it is. He steps up to Lyra and I, but stops at what he
must have been told is a “safe distance”.

“Colonel Ram, you will come with me,” Jackson orders.
I expected him to be more smug about it, but he’s tense, curt. Then
he turns to Lyra. “You, too, Specialist Jameson.”

The confirmation that she has indeed enlisted in this
circus of an army makes me freshly sick. I wonder what she was
thinking, what she felt she needed to do. Or did they give her no
choice?

Lyra surrenders her rifle to the guard squad as we
pass through the space they make for us. No one moves to take my
pistol and knife until we get to the airlock, and then one of the
H-A suits produces a containment box to put them in. Then we get
cycled through the airlock, just Lyra and I. More guns are waiting
for us on the other side, also sealed in H-As.

So far, from what I can see of the facility, it’s far
more cramped than the Melas bunkers, and has the same kind of odd
internal structure as the Leviathan vehicle we’d used to meet in. I
realize the structures are modular, probably designed to be part of
their orbital facilities, repurposed out of pressing need.