The God Mars Book Six: Valhalla I Am Coming (26 page)

“The one you need to be taking precautions against is
out there, not in here,” I toss back what I’m sure he fully
understands. (I do it for the record, for those that will see this,
not to slap him when he’s already on shit ground.)

“There’s no way we can be sure of that,” he admits
regretfully. “Not even Colonel Ava’s extraordinary cooperation and
compliance is adequate assurance.”

(You raped and tortured her, you pieces of shit, and
I should skin every one of you alive for it… I need to choke that
down, not say it, not show it.)

“So we get to sit in here and enjoy the hospitality
while your field commanders get your people killed trying to fight
someone who hasn’t killed you all yet only because watching the
stupid shit you do amuses him.” I should have pulled that, censored
myself, but I’m just too pissed and stir-crazy. Blame it on the
unnaturally-elevated testosterone. “I’m sorry, General. I know
you’re doing the best you can with what you have to work with. But
what Asmodeus did to you two days ago is just him saying hello.
He’s not running. He’s not hiding. He’s taunting you. Baiting
you.”

“I’m well aware of that, Colonel. But I’m short on
options. And assets.”

“But not short enough to make a deal with the devil,
as it were,” I partially accept. “And what happens when you finally
realize Asmodeus is not an enemy you can defeat, not with anything
you’ve got?”

“We’re not giving up on that yet, Colonel. I’m
sorry.”

Something odd about the way he said that, like he’s
apologizing to me personally.

“I come from a world where people like me, people who
had the full resources of our much more advanced technology, tried
to defeat our product fail safes. To restore our mortality. To give
us back death and vulnerability and human limitations. They all
failed.”

“We can’t take your word for that. You
understand.”

Again, it sounds like he’s trying to tell me
something without telling me something.

I look at Lisa, who looks deeply worried, but not for
herself. And slowly, my boredom and hormone addled mind puts it
together: They plan to figure out how to kill us. And they plan to
use Lisa and I as test subjects.

I think they’ll find I don’t have the same sense of
duty that Lisa does.

“I do understand, General,” I give him back. “And I’m
sorry. I really did try to help.”

On Day Three, they make good on their word and
release Sharp and the others in the ward, having decided that
they’re free of any infection or other tampering. Ryder also lets
me know that they’ve been releasing the troopers in the external
shelters back to duty, except for the ones who were Harvester
infected, and those they’re keeping in induced comas, like
Ryan.

And that gives us fewer witnesses in here, which is
what Dee was apparently waiting for.

After shift change, there’s only one tech left in the
gallery for the night, zoning out as he watches our unchanging
telemetry. He starts to look fuzzier, tries to shake the drowsiness
out of his eyes. His movements get sloppy. Then he tries to get up.
He makes it two steps before he hits the floor. Dee thinned out the
oxygen in the section, silenced the alarms.

Time,
he tells me in my head, and apparently
Lisa’s too, as she wakes up and sits up on her couch, confused.

“We’re leaving,” I tell her quickly. I look up at the
sentry cameras. The lights are still on, but I know Dee’s feeding
them false footage. They expected any hacking attempts to come from
us, not from outside the Iso ward.

The airlocks to our adjacent cells unlock.

“
No
,” Lisa insists. “I can’t.” At least she
doesn’t tell me I can’t. But

“They’re going to use us as test subjects. To figure
out ways to kill us. Her, too,” I indicate Lyra, who’s waking up at
the sound of our hushed argument.

“One of us needs to stay,” Lisa insists.

“
Why?
” I can’t understand.

“Because someone who knows what the fuck she’s doing
may need to take command of this place,” she surprises me. Has she
been working out a separate plan with Dee?

Fuck.

“We’re going,” I tell Lyra. “You’re in danger.
Everybody’s in danger. We need to go.”

She gets her feet on the floor, gestures to the thin
excuse for a garment she’s wearing. Unlike me, she’ll need surface
gear.

Corridor,
Dee hints.
Containment
boxes.

“Just come on. Now.”

As promised, we find containment boxes out in the
corridor, where they had Lyra strip. They contain Lyra’s L-A
uniform and surface gear, and her rifle. I turn my back so she can
get changed. In another box, I find my knife, pistol and gun belt.
Without proximity to my body or another source of the necessary
building blocks, the magazines haven’t generated new ammo yet. But
Dee has been thoughtful enough to unlock the armory cabinet, and I
help myself to a bundle of ICW magazines to get the process
rolling.

With no one in sight, and access cleared through the
external airlock, we stop and “requisition” a cold oversuit for
Lyra, as well as a pack-sized portable shelter, to protect her from
the freezing night. And rations and water.

Then we let ourselves out and sneak away like
thieves, across the plateau, down the crater slope and across the
cleared zone into the forest beyond the perimeter.

We leave tracks going north-northeast, like we’re
headed back toward the Pax Keep, but turn east for the Spine Range
after a few hundred meters.

After weaving our way through four klicks of forest
like something is chasing us, we climb up the foothills, just high
enough to give us a view of the place we just fled, but low enough
to still have the concealment of the growth. I find a place out of
sight-line in the rocks and help Lyra set up and inflate the
shelter, then cover it with plants to keep it from being easily
seen from orbit.

“You should come inside,” she offers. The shelter is
barely big enough for two bodies to wedge into.

“Someone needs to keep watch,” I excuse. “I don’t
need to sleep like you do,” I lie. She seems to know it, but does
what I ask.

Then I wait for sunrise, alone on a rock, for the
shit to hit.

If alarms are sounding, they aren’t projected
outside. In fact, I don’t see any unusual activity at all, but I
expect even Burns is too smart to send boots out looking for me
(us).

He also hasn’t re-activated the uplink to send a
report to orbit, either too embarrassed that I simply walked out
through whatever precautions he’d taken or afraid Asmodeus is
waiting to send another “documentary” to Earth. I can only imagine
what his last show might have stirred up back “home”, but I’m sure,
in this age of righteousness and compliance, the kickback isn’t
remotely what it would have been in my time.

(“My time”? Even thinking those words leaves me
feeling lost.
Which
time am I referring to? The one where I
became this, or the one Yod created where I didn’t, then I
did?)

But I don’t really care about any of that right now.
I care about Lisa, and what they might try to do to her because of
my necessary exit (what she might let them do to her).

As the sun rises beyond the eastern tip of the Range,
Lyra crawls out of her shelter, bundled in her cold suit, and joins
me where I’m hunkered in the ice-frosted rocks. That she needs
binoculars to see the base is something I find endearing, something
we immortals have lost. We’ve taken all of our tools and shoved
them into ourselves. (I’m sure if Matthew was here, he’d make some
crack about Inspector Gadget, and ask me where I keep my bottle
opener.)

“What?” Lyra catches me smiling at a time when that
would look insane.

“Just thinking about an old friend.”

She’s shivering despite her cold weather gear. My
instinct is to cuddle up close, but I know that would be both
stupid and potentially lethal.

Even in the bulky suit, I still can’t keep my eyes
off what little exposed skin I can see—just a few centimeters of
her cold-and-pressure rosy cheeks between mask, goggles and
hood—and I catch myself trying to get some of her scent again.

I realize I have to face this: I don’t think I can
guarantee I won’t slip and do something stupid and lethal,
especially with my own tech (and/or Yod) actively working against
me. So I need to take this risk:

“Listen… Lyra… I… I don’t want you to worry… but I
need you to… uh… keep some distance between us… make sure you don’t
touch me for any reason…” As I say it, I can’t imagine how it
wouldn’t
scare the shit out of her.

“
Are
you contagious?” she really needs to know
(but she doesn’t jump and back away as much as I expect her to—I
don’t think she believes it).

“I’m carrying another Seed,” I decide to just admit
(I decide she deserves it). “Like the one that converted Colonel
Ava... Like the one that made Kali... I had
three
. I have
one left... I don’t even know who it’s for, who it’s designed to
re-create. But I’m getting the impression it might have detected…
compatibility…”

“With
me
?” she puts together what I’m doing so
badly at telling her, her big eyes going even wider under her
goggles. Now she moves back a little bit more.

“I’m sorry.” Pathetic thing to say. “I would have
told you earlier, but obviously I couldn’t discuss it while we were
in Iso. I’m sure they would have tried to force its transfer.”

“And it just takes
contact
?” She’s starting to
show appropriate panic. I can see her spinning on how long we were
just stuck barely a meter from each other.

“Well… No… I’m… I’m not sure. The last two…” I
believe I must be turning bright red.

“You had sex with them,” she blurts out flatly. I’m
both relieved and a bit flabbergasted by her candor. “I know. It’s
in the files they had on you. And her—Colonel Ava.” Something about
mentioning Lisa shifts her expression from appropriate apprehension
to another kind of discomfort. “I saw something…” She hesitates,
not sure if she should say, but then does: “They did experiments,
tried to replicate the… event.” She’s stammering worse than I was.
“On Colonel Ava. They put her out, and had a volunteer… Um…”

“Sexually assault her,” it’s my turn to be blunt. “I
know. Something else I owe them for.”

“I’m sorry,” she offers.

“Desperate, fearful,
stupid
people,” I
grumble. “But their volunteer should count himself lucky that while
she was unconscious her nanites didn’t start automatically
consuming him for resources. Starting at, say, the point of most
intimate contact.
That
would have been a hell of a
surprise.”

She chuckles inside her breather mask, getting my
meaning.

Looking at her now, I realize I’ve been seeing her
through my own assumptions. When I found her, she had been recently
orphaned, her family killed by Chang in a fit of rage because of
the experiments they’d been a part of, leaving her alone on a
strange and dangerous world. She’s certainly resourceful enough,
having been trained to protect herself and survive by the mission’s
military security. And she’s brilliant, educated by her scientist
parents, who were probably top in their fields. But I’ve always
seen a lost young girl, probably because I never bothered to
look.

And here I am doing it again.

“There’s something else you deserve to know,” I
decide to change the subject to something nuclear enough to
guarantee libido distraction. “And I think I can trust you with it.
The time travel story… That we came back in time to stop Chang who
came back in time to stop humanity from becoming what we are… It
is
just a story.”

It hits her like a slap, far worse than telling her
I’m a direct threat to her life solely by being here.

“Then they’re right…” she assumes, sounding like I’ve
disappointed her more than when I turned her over to UNMAC. “You
are
from this time. You
are
part of some conspiracy!”
But she doesn’t quite accuse, doesn’t quite reject.

“Yes and not exactly,” I try to condense an
explanation that won’t terrify her. “Let’s just say it’s not the
conspiracy Earth thinks it is.” Then I warn: “And they can
never
know the truth of it—you need to understand that.
Knowing what I’m about to tell you would make them crazy, crazier
than they are now. I’m not even sure you’re going to want to know
what I’m about to tell you, but if you’re going to come with me on
this exceptionally stupid adventure…”

I actually see her brighten. I fumble for words.
Why the hell did I just say that?
Why did I just tell her
she could come with me? She
can’t
come with me. It’s too
dangerous by far, and not only because of Asmodeus.

And I’m thinking about Lisa’s goddamn Doctor Who
analogy and blaming my fucking hormones when I hear Dee in the back
of my head:

She should go with you. There’s something here that
needs to play out, some kind of plan. You two getting pushed
together like this, and your last Seed imprinting on her, defies
the odds of causal projections past the extent that I can
calculate.

You’re saying this is too convenient,
I
translate.

Something is subtly altering events and
decisions,
he sums his calculated suspicions, implying that Yod
is
up to something here.
Besides, you may need her. Her
expertise may be key to developing a countermeasure that Earthside
will accept. And that statement may be evidence that I too have
been manipulated.

Not comforting,
I grouse internally, giving
myself a headache.
But you’re implying that if I resisted this
course, events would be tweaked to ensure that I can’t.