The God Mars Book Six: Valhalla I Am Coming (21 page)

Then things get uncomfortable very quickly. Lyra is
directed to a heavy hatch that connects to this apparent staging
area. The hatch bears various bio and nano warning symbols. Without
further directive or much hesitation, she begins stripping off her
L-As, and placing them in a containment box next to the hatch. She
then pauses only briefly before beginning to strip out of her
underwear as well. She does her best to keep her back to us, eyes
turned down to the metal deck, with the troopers’ guns and eyes on
her slim, pale body the whole time. Only Jackson, who cycled in
right behind us with a pair of his own guards, makes a show of
averting his eyes. Once she’s completely naked, the hatch opens for
her, and she steps in. Through the thick, layered polycarb
viewport, I can see her stuck in a small airlock-like chamber,
where she endures some kind of high-pressure decontamination
shower, followed by a blasting air-dry that also probably functions
to sniff the air for contaminants.

That done, she steps through the far hatch,
shivering. Still dressed and armored, I get gestured into the
decontamination cell next, and they seal me in. I don’t get hosed,
but I do sense scans going over me. Through the next viewport, I
can see Lyra in a larger and brighter chamber, still naked,
passively cooperating with a quick medical exam by someone in a bio
suit. They seem to be especially looking for any kind of wound or
skin puncture, searching and prodding every inch of her, but they
also take blood and scan her with what I guess is the very gear for
detecting nanotech that she helped them develop.

Now it’s my turn to avert my eyes when I realize I‘m
staring, reminding myself that she’s barely nineteen and any
arousal I’m feeling is being automatically enhanced by my Mods
(because fucking is how we immortals pass our pointless time).
Finally, she’s allowed to put on a plain light jumpsuit and
slippers. She looks back at me then through the polycarb, and I
pretend I’ve been studying the scanning tech in my cell rather than
her.

When I get through the second hatch to join Lyra, the
technician who examined her has already left through another
decontamination airlock. We’re in an Iso room, with a pair of exam
couches and two transparent walls. One wall opens onto a small
viewing gallery, equipped with terminals to monitor us. The other
transparency divides us from a second Iso room, smaller, with one
couch. Beyond that, through another transparency, I can see a
series of somewhat larger Iso chambers, all in a row, each with
several couches, like a hospital ward. There are also stasis tubes
in these bigger chambers, lining the walls. Several look to be
occupied—likely the victims of previous infections.

After a few minutes of nothing happening, the hatch
to the immediately adjoining Iso opens, and Lisa comes through it.
She’s wearing her Mars desert-camo uniform pants, an old pre-Bang
UNMAC t-shirt and boots. Her bomb collar is thankfully absent. She
looks at me with a mix of gratitude and anxiety in her eyes.

“You saw the battle?” I ask verbally rather than try
a discreet transmission.

“They let me see the feed,” she admits sadly, her
voice muffled by the layered barrier between us, “in case I had
some useful insight.”

The way she says it lets me know that they doubt
anything she tells them as much as they doubt me, despite her
demonstrated dedication to duty. (I wonder if they use her as a
hostile resource, doing exactly the opposite of anything she
advises?)

“They would have lost the whole company without him,”
Lyra comes to my defense again.

“Possibly,” I hear Burns before I see him. He comes
into the viewing gallery with a pair of uniformed techs I’ve never
seen before. “Possibly that would have been a mercy, given the
alternative.”

He looks more weathered and weary since the last time
I saw him. Older. And already missing significant muscle mass. I
take some small comfort in what the job is costing him. But

“Not all of those people outside have been struck by
Harvester darts,” I confront him with what should be obvious.
“Check them.”

“That’s not the only threat,” he turns quickly
accusatory, “and I think you’re well aware of that.”

“Our tech isn’t contagious,” Lisa repeats our
assurances. “I think I’ve given you plenty of opportunities to
prove that.”

“Your tech defies all attempts to extract and
preserve for study,” Burns rewords. “But your very existence proves
it can be passed willfully from one host to another. I
saw
it happen to you.”

“And we’ve
explained
that to you,” she keeps
fighting the madness, exasperated. “There were a limited number of
coded ‘seeds’ sent from that other reality.”

I notice she doesn’t use the word “timeline”. Has she
figured out what Yod did? Did someone slip the news to her? (Maybe
Dee?) She does shoot me a brief look that seems to confirm that she
knows the truth behind the lie, that she picked her words to let me
know that. (I imagine the Iso is wired to detect any discreet
communication between us.)

“And that still isn’t what we’re talking about,”
Jackson joins us in the gallery, his helmet now tucked under his
arm.

“I remember you giving me the benefit of the doubt,
Colonel,” I play him. “Accepting that maybe I—we—really don’t know
about whatever evil plan we’re supposedly a part of. So enlighten
me: Tell me what we’re talking about. Then you can gauge my
reaction.”

I hear him sigh. Then he reaches over one of the
techs and keys up some images from the wreckage of Asmodeus’ second
Stormcloud.

“I told you we analyzed the wreckage. We also
recently found remains. Pieces of the clone. Tissue only, but
enough to see how the process worked, how he changed an innocent
victim into a sick copy of himself. You said he managed it with a
combination of nanotech implantation and DNA ‘hacking’. And that’s
true: the DNA did show traces of alteration, of gene replacement.
But that wasn’t accomplished by the mechanical nanotechnology we’ve
seen. What we isolated was on a molecular scale, no bigger than a
virus. The structure and function was also very much like a virus.
It went from cell to cell, replicating and spreading exponentially,
knocking out the key sequences of the host DNA with targeted
nuclease and splicing in a recombinant sequence. The effected cells
are then forced to replicate to match what the new DNA is
programmed for. And from what we’ve seen, there are none of the
so-called ‘safeties’ on this agent. It can transfer from host to
host freely. It just needs to be introduced into the bloodstream.
The victim’s immune system has no chance at all against it.
According to our models, within five to seven days after the
initial infection, all traces of the original host’s DNA have been
irrevocably rewritten.”

It is a shocking thought. And it confirms that
Asmodeus must have stolen Chang’s knowledge to pull it off. He
couldn’t have gotten the skills to do this from Fohat. But…

“That would only make someone start to
look
like Asmodeus,” I kill the fantasy. “They wouldn’t
be
him.
They might eventually have a few of his personality traits, maybe
his intelligence, but not his memories, not what made him the
monster he is.” And I have to chuckle. “Asmodeus does have a
massive ego, but not even
he
would want to give everybody
his face, not even for the laugh.”

Then I see the look of horror on Lyra’s face.

“If Asmodeus can create a virus-like machine that can
attack your DNA…” Burns starts running with it.

“He can create a virus-like machine that can kill
you,” I intercept. “Or do any of a number of other unpleasant
things. But it still has to have a vector to infect. You said this
one requires introduction into the blood—that means it can’t
transfer without mechanical introduction. Your troopers were all
sealed in H-A shells. If nothing penetrated their suits, they’re
fine. But even if he unleashed something airborne, your
decontamination protocols would detect it, especially now that you
know what to look for.” I remember the sniffers in the decon
airlock we came in through.

“But if it’s spread by nanotech transportation, armor
and MOPP gear would be no protection,” he voices the crux of their
fear. “It could even penetrate our facility seals.”

“But you could still detect it. And you have the
technology to contain free nanotech,” I counter, gesturing at the
layered, charged transparency between us.

If he has something to admit about their protective
protocols, he isn’t willing to reveal anything I might decide to
exploit, so he just gives up their easy targets:

“We had supports in the field without shells…” Burns
nods to Lyra. “And a team of embedded journalists.”

As if on cue, the airlock in one of the far Iso wards
opens, and a trauma pod is wheeled in. Two med techs in bio suits
transfer Ryan out of it onto a table and begin working on his
gunshot wound.

“He was hit with a Harvester dart,” I go ahead and
read them his death sentence.

“Gil Ryan is a celebrity back home,” Jackson tells me
heavily. “Given your own history, I’m sure you have a sense of what
that means. And what it means if we lose him to this.”

“He was
your
responsibility,” I toss the
obvious back at them, feeling impulsively malicious. “This won’t go
over well back home.”

“I wouldn’t celebrate that, Colonel,” Jackson
confronts my apparent callousness. “If he dies here of a nanotech
infection, opinions will sway. The people will stop caring about
the few thousand who live on this planet. The World Government will
be forced to act to ensure public safety.”

“And that would make Asmodeus
ecstatic
,” I
condemn. I wonder how many warheads they’ve brought to Mars,
disguised in their manifests. Enough, I’m sure. Certainly more that
the Shield dropped on us half-a-century ago.

“We need a cure,” Burns gives the bottom line. “A
defense. An effective one.”

“An
acceptable
one,” I distill. And nod my
agreement.

“I’m glad you’re so understanding,” Burns throws back
at me, clearly holding back his own panic at the position he’s in.
If Earthside orders the planet sterilized, I’m sure they’ll insist
he burn with it, that everyone who volunteered for this mission
burn with it. “Especially since you’re one of the only ones with
nothing to lose. Assuming you really
are
nuke-proof.”

“Now, Colonel,” Jackson eases Burns, “give Colonel
Ram more credit than that. I’m sure he doesn’t see things so
nihilistically. But we can prove it...”

He sends a signal, and the hatch to the viewing
gallery opens again. This time, more welcome faces come through (or
they would be more welcome in other circumstances): Rick, Anton,
Tru…

“They’re using my civvies for construction,” Tru
tells me her excuse for being brought here from Melas Two. I’m sure
the others have perfectly reasonable orders requiring their
presence.

“And Doctor Halley, of course,” Jackson reminds me,
before clarifying his threat: “This base is armed with a
sterilizing warhead. I have no qualms about confronting my own
death. The others who volunteered for this mission knew the risks.
So the question is yours, Colonel Ram: Do you have something to
lose here?”

I don’t answer him. But I don’t need to.

“Then I expect we’ll have your full cooperation.”

“And what do you expect me to do?” I want to
know.

“We need to wait out the established incubation
period,” Burns explains clinically. I can hear the fear in his
voice: Jackson may be ready to die, but he’d rather not.
“Specialist Jameson has already been exposed to you, so she will
continue to be, so we can monitor her for signs of infection. In
the meantime, we’ll do our best to stabilize Ryan and the other
confirmed infected. Obviously we failed to collect samples of the
Asmodeus clone at the Pax site, but the bodies of the disabled
drones and their weapons are being secured for study. Maybe we can
get some more insight into their replication systems, determine if
they’ve been modified to deliver a more insidious agent. Specialist
Jameson…” he addresses Lyra as her CO. “…you will be given access
to work on the problem from here until you’re cleared.”

“Thank you, sir,” she gives him with honest
enthusiasm.

“Maybe your friend—or his friends—can be of some real
assistance,” Burns prods me through her.

“Ops to Colonel Burns,” I hear Kastl’s voice over the
link—so he’s here too, sitting on a bomb with the rest of my former
command team.

“What is it, Captain?” He sounds annoyed at the
interruption.

“We’ve detected a hack, sir. A massive one.”

“Target?” Jackson takes it when Burns visibly
freezes.

“Mission video. Suit and aircraft cams. Even the
civilian journalists’ gear… It’s being cracked through the uplinks,
flashed through to Earth… Same thing Asmodeus did when he parked
over Katar… Earthside won’t be able to filter it incoming…”

I have to force myself not to smile. Asmodeus wants
Earth to see the fucking he’s just given their military
mission.

“Shut it down!” Burns tries, finding his voice
again.

“It’s too late, sir. It’s gone out. I’m sending an
order to jam it on the other end, but it’ll get there first, get
through to the public networks before we can warn Earthside it’s
incoming. I… Oh shit—sorry, sir. You should see this.”

“Hello, boys and girls,” I hear Asmodeus’ voice
syrupy through the terminal speakers. Jackson turns one of the
monitors so I can see the monster: blank background, leaned in to
the camera with a smile on his face like he has a sick joke to
tell. “This is your Uncle Ange again. Sorry, no porn this time.
Just another one of my attempts at making an award-winning
documentary film, but I think you’ll find this one even more
exciting than my last effort. Those with sensitive dispositions
should probably leave the room. Or close your eyes, cover your ears
and go…” He demonstrates. “
LALALALALA!
”