The God Mars Book Six: Valhalla I Am Coming (32 page)

“Can I get playback?” I ask Kastl. “Feed on the
courtyard?”

On his own screens, he spins the nightmare in
reverse. I see civilians tearing their shelters open, see them
thrashing inside… It seems to start from one outlying shelter, but
then a second in another quadrant comes under attack. I don’t see
anything outside. The drones only start piercing shelter skins once
they’ve broken out of the original sections.

“It looks like it came from
inside
,” he
confirms what I think I’m seeing.

“The Shinkyo may have been compromised,” I decide
heavily. “By their own. It wouldn’t be the first time.”

“But this… If it’s Harvester, they’re all dead,” he
protests.

“Then somebody must have decided the price of
whatever they’re hoping to get out of this is worth paying,” I
grumble, knowing that somebody is likely Hatsumi Sakura herself,
and that she must have made a devil’s bargain with Asmodeus. I can
only imagine what he promised her, and try not to grin thinking
about the fucking she’s going to get for doing business with the
sick piece of shit. But right now, innocent people are dying so
that…

“He’s trying to isolate the base,” I decide,
confronting Jackson. “He doesn’t need to take it, he just needs to
trap us inside.”

“His bugs are cutting their way in,” Jackson
argues.

“Do you have another EMP onsite?”

“Orbit,” he confirms. “We could drop it, but it will
take time to position.” He goes ahead and makes the call uplink.
Then he turns and faces me. “That will only kill the drones. Once
the buggers are inside meat, they don’t fry so easily.” He sounds
like he’s accusing me.

“You think this is another ploy to get you to let us
infect you?”

“Convenient timing, don’t you think: waiting until
the General was onsite?”

“I was thinking about the hundreds of civilians and
personnel exposed.” But he’s right: Asmodeus could have hit the
camp at any time. I can’t believe this just happened to be his
earliest opportunity to unleash his newest delivery system.

All we can do is watch helplessly from six hundred
and sixty klicks away. It will take over two hours for our aircraft
to get there, and they won’t have much fuel left by the time they
do—they’ll almost immediately have to divert to the Wellspring
fueling station if it still isn’t safe to land. Orbit will have the
EMP in place and ready to drop in an hour and twenty, but at three
hundred klicks up, it’ll take nearly half an hour to fall.

In the horrible meantime, a mix of our own security
personnel who were guarding and monitoring the refugees and quite a
few of their own get their heads back, get organized, and get
breathing gear and cold suits to as many people as they can. A lot
of them have to share, huddling together, until the shelters can
get patched and re-pressurized. The only good news is that once a
target has been “stung,” the micro-drones stop attacking.
Apparently they’ve stung everyone outside, over three hundred
people.

But there at still twelve hundred people sealed
inside the bunkers. Richards has ordered everyone non-essential to
the lower decks, deep underground, putting as many heavy hatches
between them and the breached outer sections as he can. So far, the
emergency patches they’ve welded haven’t let anything further
in.

“What’s that?” Jackson barks, pointing at one of the
screens. “Zoom! Zoom in…”

The Melas personnel oblige, tracking their topside
cameras as directed, up onto the main bunker roof, up on the
Command Tower, and in on the main uplink. The tower doesn’t look
right. It looks like it’s vibrating.

It’s covered in bug drones, like a beehive.

“They’re swarming it,” Kastl confirms what we’re
seeing, makes sure Melas Ops is seeing it too.

“They’re doing something to the uplink!” Jackson
starts to panic. “General Richards! You need to blow it! You need
to take down the tower now!”

I expect him to protest. But he knows Asmodeus has
him—all of them—in a trap. If he does nothing, Asmodeus may be able
to commandeer an antenna strong enough to punch a signal back to
Earth, or at least disrupt all of our communications. If we destroy
the tower, the base goes silent. No more calls in or out, no status
reports, no sentry feed. The only way we’ll have to talk to them
then is if we get a ship close enough to hear their personal link
gear, and if they’ve sealed themselves down in the lower
levels…

I see views of base turrets turning, aiming at the
tower.

“You’re in command, Alain,” Richards gives Jackson
reluctantly. “This is Melas Two, signing off.”

The screens all go black an instant after the guns
start firing.

We wait, blind and pacing, for our flights to get
eyes-on. We get decent visual when they’re still twenty klicks out,
and Jackson calls for them to hold and hover, even though it will
burn precious fuel. But what we can see…

The base looks like a flood has broken over it—a
flood of black. Pure black. Flowing. Undulating. Swirling. The
bunker structures still seem intact, in terms of their shapes, but
we have no way of telling if they’ve been breached. As for the
shelter camp, we can’t see it at all. It’s like the flood swallowed
it.

“What in His Holy Name is that?” I hear one of the
techs below gasp.

I look close, zooming in on Kastl’s screen. The
liquid living black is completely non-reflective.

“It’s Chang,” I mutter, not really believing it
myself. He’s become
massive
…

Jackson’s hands crush and twist the rail in front of
him.

“All flights: Lock target. Weapons free. Fire
everything you’ve got on my mark.”

“
No!
” I protest. “Nothing those fighters are
carrying will hurt him at all, but they
will
kill our
own.”

“You’re assuming they’re still alive in that!” he
hisses back.

“He didn’t kill your recon team at Industry,” I put
together in a hurry. “For all we know, he’s there to help.”

“Help
who
?” he spins on me. “Asmodeus? Chang’s
the enemy, Colonel. How many times has he attacked us? Odds are
he’s there to finish what the bug drones started.”

“And you’re killing our own if you’re wrong!” I
confront, not backing down, even though I’m sure he’s sure I’m in
on whatever this is. I’m the enemy he’s been ordered to treat like
a friend. (I’m also painfully aware that the one who gave that
order is now locked down and cut off, possibly even dead.)

“Better quick than the alternative,” he growls.

“You’ve already bought enough bad press to bring down
the government you think you’re serving,” I decide to play the
infowar game with him. “If it
is
hopeless, wait until you’re
sure. Drop a quarantine zone around the base. Watch and wait.”

“I’m going to do more than wait,” he defies. He
reminds me of an angry, self-righteous teenager, refusing to accept
the earned wisdom of his elders (though I do look ten years younger
than he does now). I decide to hold my tongue while he updates
Orbit using the laser-link, and orders another “Lights Out”
dropped. I don’t bother to remind him: That won’t hurt Chang
either, not really. But when it doesn’t, I expect he’ll try to drop
a nuke next.

I take a step back, breathe myself down; remind
myself what I told Michael: I may have to take command. I may have
to take it by force. Though when I said it, I thought it was an
extreme option, and absolute last resort. Now I find I need to
start planning for it. It may be happening any time now.

From the Memory Files of Mike Ram:

We’ve been grinding and crunching slowly onward for a
few hours when I feel us come to a stop. The crew back in the bay
with us all look confused, so this may be unplanned. After a few
minutes of just sitting, Corso comes back into the bay, glances at
me with barely-veiled disdain, and turns to Lyra.

“Specialist Jameson, since we have you on board, we
could use your skills.”

Horst, who had been in the Comm Section, comes back
and starts to unpack what I recognize as detection gear—plug-ins
designed to fit standard link and HUD gear—the same kind they were
using at the Keep.

“Jenovec,” Horst calls, pulling his own H-A
shell.

“Take Scheffe,” Corso corrects him before Jenovec can
get up. Scheffe snaps-to nervously and goes to get her shell. I’m
not sure of Corso wants her to get field time or wants a loyal
new-drop to watch over him.

“I don’t have an H-A, sir,” Lyra points out.

“You shouldn’t need one,” Corso downplays poorly. “We
haven’t seen any enemy activity in this area.” I immediately
suspect Corso may be in on the plan to get Lyra killed, and I hope
the look I give her the next time she locks my eyes make that
clear. She shakes it off and turns to head back forward.

“And ‘this area’ is
where
?” I prod. She
ignores me, but Horst nods to me to come forward as he’s sealing up
his shell. He reaches up into the access for the smaller portside
forward gun turret and pulls down a periscope.

I take a pan around. I can barely see anything
through the canopy, which reaches up a few meters above our roof,
but I can see one familiar landmark over the top of it: The peak of
the lone mountain that sits about twelve klicks east of the end of
the Spine Range, east of Katar. Asmodeus hid his Stormcloud in a
small box canyon on the northeast slope. It’s also where we pushed
it so that UNMAC could shoot it down, blow it apart from orbit. And
where they supposedly found remains of the clone he used to decoy
us.

To better access the site, we’ve passed the mountain
on its south side, then turned north around its eastern slopes.
It’s a small diversion if we’re heading toward Liberty—only a few
klicks off course—but then we’ve only managed to come about
forty-five klicks since we got aboard. The growth must be a major
deterrent to something this large. I could have run here in
significantly less time.

On the slopes above the tree-line, I can see some of
the wreckage of the second Stormcloud, sections of twisted frame
blown clear, giant trash sculptures scattered over the
mountainside. Much of it is wedged in the little side canyon,
especially in the narrow cut between the eastern tail of the main
crest and an almost needle-like butte—a monolith—sticking up like a
fishtail.

Horst checks Scheffe’s shell and Lyra’s surface gear,
then has Lyra (not Scheffe) check his own seals. He unlocks one of
the armory cabinets and checks out a belt-fed SAW, and hands
Scheffe an ICW. Lyra already has her own rifle and side arm. Horst
signals Corso that they’re ready.

“I’m going along,” I tell Corso. “If the mission is
signal detection, I’m better at it than your new equipment.”

“You can also interfere with our equipment,” Corso
accuses.

“Whether you intend to or not,” Lyra diffuses. “You
emit the same signatures we’d be looking for.”

“You can stay topside, keep eyes on us,” Horst
offers. Corso looks like she’s about to countermand that, but stays
quiet.

We have to cycle out through the rear lock in twos. I
go out with Scheffe after Horst and Lyra are already through.
Scheffe is visibly nervous to be stuck in a small space with me,
even inside her pressurized Heavy Armor shell. I try to make it
easier by ignoring her, staring at the hatch. Thankfully, the
atmospheric pressure here is nearly twenty percent higher than it
is in Melas, which, in addition to the more obvious benefits, also
makes for quicker lock cycling.

To have a decent eye-line on where they’re headed,
Horst suggests I sit up on the flank catwalk, or better: on the
roof up against the main turret. Then he shoots me a quick salute
before he leads his team out. Lyra gives me a nod and follows him,
with Scheffe and the rover-bot bringing up the rear, providing even
more firepower should they need it. But the possibility that they
will
need it makes me hate agreeing to stay behind. I
suppose they’ll only be a short run if they need me, but even a
short run will take precious minutes.

Within a handful of steps, they disappear into the
adapted jungle, though I can still hear them rustle and crush on.
My enhancements manufacture tracking graphics in my vision built
from heat, sound and motion so I can track their progress.
Thankfully, they’re the only things lit up that I can see.

I climb up on the vehicle’s flank. I wind up finding
a good seat, ironically enough on top of the launch tube for the
upper portside torpedo. It lets me see up over the top of the skirt
armor, without being in an easy position for any of the turrets to
impulsively turn on me. It also reminds me of my priorities: No
matter how much I want to keep Lyra and Horst safe, I need to stay
with this slow, clunky vehicle and its load of warheads. I can’t
let Asmodeus get his twisted hands on them, and I also can’t let
Earthside or any of their terrified on-planet agents use them
catastrophically.

The heat/sound/motion blips have faded to faint foggy
impressions within less than fifty meters—there’s too much growth
between us. Thankfully, I get visual-spectrum eyes on them again
when they get above the thicker, taller growth about seventy-five
meters from where they stepped into the green. Lyra turns to wave
back. They keep their links down to avoid detection, but I know
they still may become targets because Asmodeus’ monsters see
roughly the same way my enhancements do. As long as they’re warmer
than the background and/or moving, they’re lit up.

As I sit up on the side of the Warhorse and watch
them hike up into the slopes, I take the time and relative privacy
to check the progress of my pistol loads. I used a handy shortcut,
shoving caseless ICW ammo I’d appropriated from the base down into
my mags, letting their nanotech reshape them into the rounds I
need. Thanks to that, I’m nearly full again. I figure I can repeat
the trick with what’s on the vehicle if needs must. Without that
resource, I’d have to extract the necessary building blocks from
myself and the soil, which is conveniently high in perchlorates if
you know where to look, but that could take days rather than
hours.