The God Mars Book Six: Valhalla I Am Coming (34 page)

“Like the ones you turned at Katar,” Horst concludes,
not knowing it was Dee that did the turning.

“That’s…
horrible
…” Scheffe lets me know she
has no intention of following my orders to stay put, coming out of
the green behind me. “There’s really a human
brain
in there?
Cut out of a living
person
? Who… What kind of monster would
do
something like that?”

“The human kind,” I throw back in her indignation.
“This technology is based on a popular consumer product from my
timeline.”

“A
what
?” I get Horst’s incredulity.

“In our immortal boredom, someone decided to sell us
a kind of ‘pet’, a plaything to amuse, use and abuse,” I admit
sourly. “Some were practical service designs, but realistic animal
or human analogues were the big sellers.”

“You mean androids?” Lyra guesses.

“And gynoids. Mechanical women. Or children,
depending on the customer’s tastes. Anatomically accurate and
functional, of course.”

“What… uh…
ohhh
…” Horst figures my meaning.
“
Eewww…
”

So does Lyra, from the disgusted look under her mask
and goggles. Scheffe just stares at me blankly, like I’m speaking a
language she doesn’t understand.

“We’d already mastered neuro-tech interfacing with
our own Mods, so this kind of thing was relatively simple. And a
device with an organic brain was in some ways more responsive than
a mechanical AI. Plus it had the added novelty of being technically
alive. It didn’t take long before bots with
human
brain
components became the biggest sellers, because they gave a wider
range of emotional responses, learned better and were able to
process verbal language. We used cloned brains, of course, but that
didn’t make it less sick. In fact it made it worse. People started
requesting
specific
cloned brains, so they could have a toy
made out of the DNA of a favorite celebrity, a dead loved-one, an
ex-lover, a crush… There was a rich black market for stolen
DNA.”

“You mean…?” Scheffe tries to grasp, then recoils
from whatever ideas she’s gelling.

“I mean I could buy a sex-bot that looks exactly like
you with a genetic copy of your brain inside of it and do whatever
sick sadistic things I wanted to it,” I lay it out bluntly. She
looks like she’s getting ill inside her helmet.

“And they couldn’t resist, rebel?” Lyra tries
hopefully. I crush it:

“Command override, just like this poor
whoever-they-were. Though some owners wouldn’t bother. Since we
were invincible, our pets couldn’t harm us, and a lot of owners
enjoyed punishing and torturing their property into compliance
instead of using programmed controls. Fohat, for instance, became
famous for specializing in making clone-cyborg bots for so-called
‘live-gaming’, so the player could have something really
challenging to fight, something that would be absolutely lethal to
a non-immortal and give an immortal a real run for their worthless
money. They were designed to destroy and to be destroyed. For
fun.”

We stand around the damaged, tormented thing for a
few moments in silence. In the world I was a part of making, this
was a
toy
.

“You said ‘dead loved-one’,” Lyra recalls softly
aside. “Is that how Asmodeus was recreated?”

“Full cloning with digital memory reconstruction
started coming out shortly before the end,” I tell her.

“Makes Chang sound like a fucking hero for ending
that shit,” Horst decides. And of course I’m thinking that Horst
was a part of that world and just can’t remember his own sins.

“But why did he bring…
things
… like
this
… back with him if he wanted it all
gone
?”
Scheffe argues reason, barely holding it together. At least she
didn’t point to me when she said it.

“To show us why we could never go down that road,”
Lyra tells her, artfully keeping our secret despite her
revulsion.

“You should kill it…” Scheffe prompts me very
sheepishly. “You should put it out of its misery. Please…” I see
tears welling inside of her visor.

I take a breath, step forward, and reach out my hand
to touch the battered cyborg. It recoils, backs away from me.

“It wants to
live
?” Horst doesn’t believe.

I try again, get the same reaction.

“So what do we do with it?” Lyra wonders.

“Go to Katar!” I tell it, pointing west. “Fifteen
klicks that way. There are others like you there. We can repair
you, if you want to help us fight back.”

From the lack of response, I’m wondering if it’s able
to understand—or even hear—anything I’m saying. I turn to
Horst.

“Did you find what you were looking for?” I nod over
the rise toward the wreckage.

“Yes and no,” he reports vaguely, like he’s not sure
if he’s free to speak.

“Then we should get moving.”

I gesture for the bot to stay put as we back away,
then point it to go west again.

We cycle back into the bay, and while Horst and
Scheffe help each other out of their shells, I head forward.

“Did you pick up any signals from those AAVs that
flew past?” I ask Corso like I don’t already know. I notice she
hasn’t bothered to ask anyone for a report.

“No, but then that’s protocol. Just like they’d know
we wouldn’t try to ping them, not until our mission objective was
complete.” She’s trying to act like everything is sit-norm, but I
can hear nervousness.

“And nothing from Orbit about why they were out
here?” I press, really just to see how she responds. She gives me
her usual icy glare.

“It could be keeping up appearances,” Horst offers.
“Show search. Asmodeus knows we’ll be looking for him, searching
the Eastern Vajra. He sees them, he may not be looking for us.”

That would also explain why their flight plan stayed
well-clear of us.

I pull one of the laminated maps across the little
fold-out table, trace the estimated flight paths down the length of
the valley. It does look like they were running a search pattern,
which fits Horst’s theory, but…

“You think they were looking for us?” Lyra does a
good job of reading my mind without Mods, standing over my
shoulder. She discreetly backs away when she sees how close she’s
put herself to me.

“Makes no sense they would,” Horst argues, pointing
at the roof. “Sat-eyes are on us twenty-five/seven.”

“Mission report, Lieutenant,” Corso prods him to
debrief.

“No signals. No sign of activity since the crash
except our own techs. And that busted bot, but it doesn’t seem to
have a working link in or out. But we did confirm: We matched the
scrap to materials on the Pre-Bang manifests for
both
Iving
and Alchera.”

“So he’s been there,” Corso makes the easy
conclusion. “Or has been. May still be, or may have a base in
staging range. Nothing from Liberty?”

“Nothing we could see in the canister-time we had,”
Horst apologizes. “But the wreckage is pretty spread.”

“That may be intentional,” I warn, tracing lines on
the map with my finger. “Running from the Grave to the outer
colonies, he’d pass Liberty, at least check it out…”

“So either there was nothing there of value, or he
didn’t scrap there intentionally,” Horst sees where I’m going.

“The ship was for show,” Lyra remembers. “A
distraction. He expected it to be shot down.”

“And picked over,” Corso gets on board, taking a
close look at Liberty and the mountainous terrain on that side of
its namesake crater. “He could have a base anywhere along this rim.
Or in the crater itself—he’s certainly done that before.”

“That’s a lot of ground to cover, Major,” Smith pipes
in from his cockpit seat, letting us know he’s listening. “A lot of
it this beast can’t get to.”

“They’re coming back!” Simmons announces, having
taken periscope watch. Corso pulls down another viewer, while Horst
moves to share the one Simmons was using.

“They’re passing north of us this time,” Horst
eventually confirms, slowly tracking. “North of the mountain… North
of the crater…”

“Wide formation,” Corso describes. “Three klicks
out.”

“Just a show, or did something go bad?” I wonder out
loud. I get no answer.

“Should we try calling them?” Lyra asks
nervously.

“We
can’t
,” Simmons tells her, then looks to
Corso like he may have broken protocol by telling her, telling me.
She ignores him, so he decides to continue. “We don’t have a long
range transmitter. We pulled it before we left. We can receive, but
we can’t call out past gear-link range.”

“They were afraid Asmodeus could use the uplink if he
captured the vehicle,” Horst clarifies.

“If he captures the vehicle, he’ll have four nuclear
weapons,” I point out the insane obvious.

“Which he can’t use on anything except surface
targets,” Horst grumbles, looking to Corso to censor him. She looks
away from her viewfinder long enough to give him a good glare. Lyra
finishes what she assumes he was going to say:

“And everything on the surface is expendable, as long
as nothing gets off this planet and back to Earth.”

“So if it is a real search, what are they looking
for?” Scheffe dares ask a reasonable question. “The enemy, or
us?”

“Maybe something happened to the base uplinks,” Horst
worries professionally, listing my own fears. “Or Orbit’s
downlinks. Or the satellites. Maybe they can’t see us anymore.
Maybe they’re trying to see if we’re still here.”

“Maybe they’re trying to recall us because something
went bad,” Lyra says what he avoided saying.

“Maybe something happened to them,” Simmons goes
darker. “The base personnel. The pilots.”

“You confessed that Asmodeus had technology that can
influence a human mind without consuming it?” Corso accuses like
the act was my own. “If we missed something in the quarantine after
the battle, the base could have been compromised.” She doesn’t seem
to care if she’s scaring her crew—or maybe that was her intention:
to keep them on-mission and afraid of me and anything like me.

“He was able to ramp up emotions into irrational
actions, paranoia, but he couldn’t direct specific actions or
thoughts,” I try to explain, but it doesn’t change the fact that
we’re talking about invasive tech inside people’s brains.

“Not that you know of,” Corso doesn’t let up,
sounding like she’s sure I’d lie.

“Scaring them might be enough,” Horst offers.
“Fear—planted in the right people—could make them do stupid sh… Act
irrationally.”

“Or he could have bots in those ships,” Scheffe goes
for the catastrophic. “Like that cyborg-thing outside. Or a
Harvester. He could have overrun the base, taken those AAVs.”

Corso doesn’t try to chill her out.

“So what’s the move?” Horst finally asks, trying for
direction.

“We keep to the mission,” Corso insists after a deep
breath and some lip-chewing. “We stay silent until we have a
target.”

“I thought we couldn’t call out at all?” I question,
having little confidence in these people.

“Isotope smoke,” Simmons tells me. “Projectors all
around the hull. On the rover, too. We can mark ourselves or
anything else for Orbit or a fly-by to see. Different colors for
different codes.”

I nod, almost appreciatively. They thought this part
through pretty ingeniously, though it relies on support having eyes
on us.

“Liberty?” Horst wants confirmation.

Corso seems to debate that internally.

“Return flight…” Simmons reports from his periscope.
Corso looks. “Still north.”

I can hear the engines through the hull as they pass.
They’re closer this time.

“If they are looking, they still haven’t seen us,”
Simmons figures.

“
Was
there a protocol if they needed to change
your orders?” I ask Corso (or anyone else willing to answer).

“General Richards gave us code sets, and software to
analyze the messages for authenticity,” Corso lets me know, though
she sounds less than confident.

“Code sets only
he
knew,” Horst addends. “If
anything happened to him up in orbit, Ground wouldn’t have a code
we’d accept.”

“I can’t imagine anything that could have happened
which would override our mission,” Corso stands firm. “Asmodeus is
still out there—best evidence says he’s east. We need to find him.
We need to track him down and we need to burn him to nothing.” She
waits for argument, gets none, not even from me. I give her a
nod.

“Prepare to move out!” she orders. “I want to make
Liberty by sundown.”

“Course, Major?” Smith calls back as Scheffe, Simmons
and Jenovec head for their stations.

“We may have an issue,” Horst cautions, pointing to
the map and tracing a path around the north side of the crater.
“This will take us out into thinner growth. If something has gone
bad wrong and we don’t want to be seen, maybe we should take the
south route.”

“It’s twice as long,” Corso compares. “And we still
come up pretty thin here where the valley narrows between the
crater and the Divide slopes.” She’s right: It’s a narrow pass, and
takes us up over a thousand meters.”

She studies the map thoughtfully.

“Simmons,” she calls back. He promptly climbs down
out of the turret to join us. “Can this thing climb that rim?” She
points to the western rim of the crater. He shakes his head, but
takes a close look.

“Maybe through this pass here, where the crater rim
is fractured…” he points to a narrow fissure on the crater’s
northwest side. “The run up to it doesn’t look too steep if we take
it from the north, but there’s no guaranteeing the terrain. The
bigger risk is inside the bowl—I’m assuming you intend to cross it,
sir?”

“It’s a straighter route, one that wasn’t on our
original mission briefs, and it will give us a look inside the
crater…” She looks up at me. “…since we know your friend has a
liking for building bases inside craters.”