The God Mars Book Six: Valhalla I Am Coming (28 page)

It’s the Warhorse vehicle, freshly painted with a
sloppy forest camo scheme. I can see the nuclear torpedoes in their
launch tubes on either side of the hull, fixed to what looks like
an external gangway that runs around the sides and back of the
vehicle. It strikes me as an excellent way for anybody attacking
them to board the ship and have a nice place to work while they cut
the warheads free and steal them.

“What the hell is that?” Lyra asks, watching the
clumsy spectacle through her binoculars.

“
That
is our ride.”

We spent the morning up on the slopes of the Spine,
watching the new-drop techs prep the Warhorse for its
almost-guaranteed suicide mission. They load supplies, including
large quantities of ammunition and explosives—it looks like enough
to supply the company they just sent into Asmodeus’ last trap. I’m
surprised to see that both the rear and the top of what must be the
vehicle’s main bay opens up, revealing the hull to be reinforced
with thick, layered armor. They check the warheads, and quickly
weld additional armor plating onto the fragile-looking “gangway” to
help protect the launch tubes and treads from small-arms fire from
the flanks.

While we wait, I go gather some fresh edibles from
the surrounding forest. It gives me an excuse to get away from Lyra
for awhile, and I start feeling a reduction in my compulsive urges
to touch her as soon as I’m out of sight-line. But the point of
gathering food was to bring it back to her, and I feel my libido
rise again as soon as I see her.

I set the nuts, seeds and fruits I found on a handy
flat rock, then back away like I’m afraid of her, like she’s the
one that’s dangerous. I severely doubt this “plan” I’ve dragged her
into, or someone has manipulated me into dragging her into, but
thanks to me (in more ways than one), she has no place else to go
now. She can’t return to UNMAC. Her family is dead. Her home—the
UNCORT covert research vessel Circe—has been confiscated as
evidence in an investigation that will never honestly proceed. She
has no other connections on this planet. She may have distant
relatives back on Earth, but, having been born here, she certainly
has never met them, even if that was at all a practical possibility
between the quarantine and her body having developed in Mars
gravity.

She sees what I’m doing, and that brings back her own
fears.

“Is that why you left me with UNMAC?” she calls me
out on my abandoning her. “Because your Seed was targeting me?”

I have to think about that, think back. And

“No. It wasn’t that. But having you with me, with us,
was just too dangerous. Between Earthside trying to end us and the
enemies we were chasing…”

“Yet here we are,” she confronts with impressive
humor.

“With no better choice,” I tell her directly.
“Earthside… UNCORT… have ordered their on-planet agents to ensure
you meet an end that looks like our fault, that we infected
you.”

She takes a moment to digest that, staring at the
rocks between her boots. She hasn’t touched her “breakfast”.

“It shuts me up, makes me go away,” she accepts, “and
gives them another guinea pig to experiment on.” She’s come to
understand their evil in the short time that she’s been with them,
that I’ve left her with them. “But… Why is your Seed targeting me
now
?”

“Either the circumstances triggered it, or Yod did,”
I go ahead and disclose what I’ve been thinking.

“And if it was Yod, from what you say, I don’t really
stand a chance, do I?”

My heart crashes into my guts again. I meet her eyes
through her goggles. She’s trying to come to grips with the
likelihood that she’s going to die, much sooner than later.

Trying to do something normal, she starts to nibble
at the food I brought her, slipping it up under her mask, but she
doesn’t look like she’s able to appreciate it.

“What was it like?” she asks, almost sheepishly. “The
process… Becoming…” Words fail, so she gestures at me.

“I don’t really remember. I was mostly bled out after
Thompson Bly put his sword through my liver.”

That gets an eyebrow raised under her goggles.

“And you two are friends now?”

“Depends on his mood. He’s actually a pretty good
guy.”

She shakes her head like I’m crazy. It lightens the
mood a little, but that certainly doesn’t settle the topic.

“What about the others?” she keeps pressing. “What
was conversion like for them?”

I take a long breath of the thin, chilly air.

“Lisa was technically dead—she just woke up
converted. Kali’s host was also dead. And Lux’s and Azazel’s. But
Bel and Fohat… Their hosts were alive, conscious. I get the
impression it isn’t a much better fate than getting eaten by a
Harvester.”

It’s not any comfort, but I don’t want it to be. I
need
her to be afraid, to be cautious, if she is going to
have any chance at all. Yod aside, I certainly know I can’t trust
myself to protect her from what’s inside me. I’m already back to
feeling like a horny teenage boy on a date. I can barely keep my
distance, barely keep my eyes off of her. I watch her pull aside
her mask to eat…

…and I get this sudden rush of terror: Did I
unintentionally pass the Seed into the food?

I shake it off. I expect if I had, I wouldn’t still
be thinking and feeling the things that I am—there’d be no point.
Odd comfort: as long as I’m still feeling the urge to make an
inappropriate advance on her, she’s okay.

“But you and Colonel Ava…” she continues, “you’re
still… well… yourselves.”

“Maybe,” I confess my pervasive existential angst. “I
have my memories, like she does, but they’re arguably just digital
files. They may even have been falsified—Jackson isn’t wrong to
think so. They could have been. To further Yod’s agenda.”

“But you still
feel
like you,” she defends my
identity for me. “So does Colonel Ava. I’ve heard her say so.”

I chuckle involuntarily, shake my head.

“If I could rebuild you, cell-by-cell, make a perfect
copy including all of your memories—or what convincingly seems like
all of your memories—would you be you? What if I systematically
tore apart the original you to do it, consumed that you, replacing
you one cell at a time? At what point does that original person
die, replaced by a copy that just thinks it’s the same as the
original?”

The image I’ve drawn visibly unsettles her. She
shivers inside her cold suit.

“But you’ve still got the benefit of doubt,” she
tries, spinning through denial. “Who’s to say what we really are,
what makes us?”

“And how does that help you?” I confront that denial,
as if I need her to get through mourning her own death before we
can proceed with the mission ahead of us.

She struggles. I can see the question in her eyes. I
can see that she doesn’t want the answer I’ll have to give her.

“You said you don’t know who the Seed you still have
belongs to, who it contains… If it targeted me… is it possible…? I
mean, could it be… um…
mine
? Some other version of me that
doesn’t replace me? Like yours and Colonel Ava’s?”

I need another long breath.

“When Yod reset everything, he made everyone mortal
again. That was something like seventy years ago. Those people
lived normal lives. Most of them are dead by now, or very old, so
you can’t be one of them. You’re one of their grandchildren. The
only ones left from that time on this planet are the first and
second generation ETE and the thousand-odd survivors of Melas Two
that got sunk into Hiber-Sleep fifty-plus years ago when this place
got bombed. That’s why Lisa and I were still around to receive our
Seeds, which, come to think of it, was very likely another one of
Yod’s convenient but barely believable ‘coincidences’. That’s how
he works: He manipulates things, but not enough to really reveal
his hand in it. My meeting you to begin with was probably his
doing. He may have planned the Seed for you even before that. Maybe
from the day you were born, for all I know.”

I expect the overwhelming fatalism could well break
her, but I can see her still denying, reasoning through it.

“But doesn’t you warning me, telling me this, damage
that plan, whatever it is?”

That gives me a chuckle, and I expect she thinks I’m
laughing at her hope, but I’m really laughing at my own glimmer of
it: the idea that I might be able to beat Yod simply by being my
usual stubborn self.

“Welcome to my reality,” I tell her.

We pack up and hike down the slope, down into the
jungle-like valley floor, but straight south—not back toward the
base. Lyra doesn’t question my seemingly pointless direction, not
even when we stop after several klicks in the middle of overgrown
nowhere. She takes the time to collect more edibles, checks her
remaining water supply, peels off and stows her cold suit, then
adjusts her load of gear. From time-to-time, I catch her trying to
do without her mask, seeing if she can adjust to the thin air like
the Pax and Katar have. I’m about to be encouraging, to let her
know how the Melas Nomads—newcomers to this region—have already
managed to reduce their supplementation, when we get interrupted by
the roar of jets.

I signal for her to sit low in the embracing
undergrowth and be still. The flight comes after a few minutes,
passing just south of our position, heading east from the base
roughly along the axis of the Central Blade: Two fully-armed AAVs,
cruising at recon speed, their lifters battering the forest canopy.
I can only see them for a brief interval with the green in my way,
but I can hear their engines fade in the east, sounding like
they’re flying well past Katar, out into unknown territory—the
eastern “fork” of what the ETE call The Vajra. I notice they’re
flying too high to get a good look down into the growth, probably
still in fear of surface-to-air ordnance, so at best they’re doing
a quick look. A preliminary scout.

We sit put and quiet until we hear them come back,
only half-an-hour later, which tells me they only flew out maybe
seventy-five klicks or less, either out of caution or
fuel-conservation. Calling up the memory of a map like a tactical
graphic in my vision, I roughly calculate that they could have
gotten far enough for a quick look over the ruins of the
farthest-east colonies: Liberty, Alchera and Iving. They’re
probably looking for any obvious sign of recent activity,
specifically Asmodeus-type activity, and they have to know he’d
never do anything that visible unless he wanted them to see it.

I haven’t picked up on any chatter, any transmissions
on the UNMAC frequencies other than dirt-simple flash code,
probably basic check-ins. They’re doing their best to keep to radio
silence.

We sit until midday, both of us keeping a good three
meters between us. My eyes are still drawn to her every time I let
myself get distracted, but I don’t feel the intense impulses to
act, at least not at the moment. Staying focused on-mission may be
helping in that area, even though we’re playing the waiting game,
waiting for Dee (or is it Yod?) to come through.

In the long interim, I wonder what my fellows are
doing, if they’ve made any progress with countermeasures, or if
they’ve had to run to the defense of the locals. And that makes me
worry about the locals, about everyone living on Mars, because I
can’t trust that torturing Earthside will keep Asmodeus’ full
attention.

My isolation over the last few days may have kept me
oblivious to any number of atrocities, both known and evolving
threats. And I have to keep myself in that isolation. I don’t dare
try to signal my fellows given Earthside’s improved ability to
detect us. I’m sure my nearly-effortless exit from their supposedly
secure containment has ramped up the priority for neutralizing me
and mine. I don’t think I can even safely initiate a call out to
Dee, so I have to wait for him to carefully signal me. And until
someone gets me news of the world, my brain is happy to concoct
nightmares.

I’m also worried about more than just monsters and
idiots. Anyone on-planet able to receive signals will have seen
Asmodeus’ “documentary”. The lower-tech groups—the Pax and Katar
specifically—may have observed the battle through scouts. Asmodeus
has just demonstrated how easily the so-called “superior” force can
be beaten. I wonder what that will inspire, especially if there is
any resentment (and I’m sure there is plenty of resentment) over
the impulsive destruction of the Pax Keep. (If nothing else, Earth
has proven that they will bombard the planet from space if they
decide they have anything to fear that they can justify shooting
at, and that’s a hell of a gun to live under.)

(Would they have fired on the Keep if Asmodeus had
hostages?)

“Where did you just go?” Lyra catches me
dwelling.

“Nowhere good,” I deflect.

“Do you think we’ll find him?” she looks for hope
again. “Asmodeus. Do you think we can stop him?”

I very unhelpfully shrug.

“He’d have to make a hell of a mistake to leave
himself that vulnerable. But I have to try. I can’t not.”

She nods her understanding.

Then I signal her to keep silent, keep still.

I hear it first, of course, but her ears pick it up
seconds after mine: A crushing sound, coming closer. Something
heavy squishing and pushing through the forest. I’m impressed that
I don’t hear much more than that—there’s very little motor
noise.

I gesture for Lyra to follow behind me as I weave
through the growth, into the path of what I hear advancing steadily
toward us. We don’t have to go far before we hear the oncoming
machine slow, then turn toward us.