The God Mars Book Six: Valhalla I Am Coming (39 page)

“The Colony took the worst of a near-miss, the
blast-wave ripping through the gap between the mountains and up the
crater rim,” Kendricks gives me a history lesson as we hike the
trail with purpose. “Liberty was a US corporate nanotech producer,
but given the threat of the bombs over their heads, they started
digging shelters into the mountains nearly a year before the
Apocalypse.”

“But Liberty had a Spec-Ops garrison,” I point out
the origin of the local Order of Knights.

“Those soldiers agreed to keep the colonists’ secret
from Earthside, in defiance of their own orders. Then they helped
them evac, helped them get through what came next, working in
desperate conditions with the colony scientists and engineers.”

Baker doesn’t bother to comment or add to Kendricks’
narrative, but I can’t help but grin at the thought of the
operators’ small but vital act of rebellion, especially since those
men were my contemporaries (in this version of reality,
anyway).

“How long until things went bad?” I have to dig into
the wound.

“Nearly thirty years,” Baker finally chimes in over
his shoulder. “Things were hard in the beginning, but the
first-gens made do, were even able to raise families, but we all
had to maintain hard discipline. Resources were delicately thin,
and our rigged habitats were always on the edge of failure. We
became the enforcers of that discipline. The civvies resented that,
despite the necessity of it, especially as it started to get slowly
but steadily easier over the decades. We’d tapped the nearest ETE
feed line and risked running regular supply runs at the edge of our
surface range to keep the survivors alive. We surveyed the geology
and sank wells by hand into the deep permafrost to supplement our
water. We managed hydroponic gardens that also supplemented our
oxygen, obsessively monitored to keep the balance of gasses from
tipping into catastrophic combustibility. We kept the recyclers
running even when they’d been repaired so much that they bore no
resemblance to their original specs. But the greening of the planet
was both blessing and curse.

“The air eventually got thick enough to start
compressing the O2 out of. Then the spread of wild plants took the
pressure off our gardens and recyclers. Thirty years after we
should have all been dead, the colony—as it was—had plenty. But
that plenty started tipping the civvies against us. They didn’t
need us anymore. And there was pervasive fear, left over from the
Apocalypse, passed down through the generations, kept alive.
Distorted. We were UN. We were the soldiers of what tried to kill
them, and then we were their oppressors, the ones that had made the
hard rationing decisions, the ones that had forced dangerous work
for the survival of all. We’d kept them alive, given them the
future that their children and grandchildren enjoy, but they
started to forget that. And all we were at that point was the
enemy.”

He gets interrupted when I have to catch Scheffe as
she takes a bad slip on some loose rock. I think I impress the
Knights by hauling her back up by one hand like she’s no heavier
than a small pack. She mutters a thank-you between terror and
embarrassment, and keeps moving like nothing happened.

“The colonists had stockpiled colony security
weapons, and supplemented their arsenal by secretly breaking into
caches we’d buried,” Baker continues bitterly, like this had all
just happened. “There were incidents. Lives lost needlessly,
stupidly. We didn’t want to perpetuate the slaughter, so when it
came to a head, we withdrew. They took it as a victory, and
emboldened, started making raids. They were smart, smarter than we
expected, and patient. They took more of our weapons caches. Twelve
years ago, they found and destroyed our hidden transmitters,
cutting us off from our distant brothers in Melas. We moved up
higher, trying to keep out of reach—we had the better survival
gear. But they had the resources, the numbers. We let them have the
valley—there was no way we could take back control over the new
colony without a slaughter, and maybe not even then. So we kept out
of sight, let them think they’d beaten us, watching over them as
they spread out, thrived. And went mad.”

He goes silent. I’m not sure if he’s letting that
sink in or struggling to find the words. He just keeps moving
forward, his face turned away and hidden by cowl and mask.
Kendricks doesn’t take over the tale, just gives me a look to
confirm that this is a painful subject, and has been for
generations now.

We hike another klick-and-a-half before we come to a
stop and hunker down in the rocks, crawling forward until we can
see down into the valley. Baker points out positions in the rocks
all along the slopes beneath us where they know sentries are
nested, then points out where the bigger shelters are dug. One of
the Knights offers me a pair of binoculars, but I wave him off,
assuring him I can see just fine.

And I can. There is faint heat, not enough to be seen
from any great distance, but there’s a lot of it, spread all around
the lowlands in thin broken lines, possibly betraying cave
facilities of various sizes. It looks like a buried village,
habitats around natural “squares” or plazas. There could be
hundreds of people living down there, maybe thousands. I’d take the
time to ask about demographics, but I have my priorities.

“Any idea where they have my people?”

Either Baker’s eyes are better than mine or he has
scout intel, because he points out the rover, hidden by vines
thrown over it, down in the bottoms, roughly dead-center of a
semi-circle of heat. There are no obvious guards out in the
open.

“They’ll be questioned,” Baker gives me the news I
expect. “Tortured. Then executed as threats to the colony, out in
the open for our benefit. We still lose a scout now-and-then to
carelessness or the boldness of our enemies. If they take our
people alive, they use their suffering to try to draw us out, get
us to reveal our positions so they can have something to prove
their bravery by shooting at. I suppose if we gave them more
opportunity, they’d be out of ammo by now.”

“But you’re still hoping for a more reasonable
solution,” I allow. I see him shake his head under his cowl.

“There was a man, a colony leader… Getting old,
suffering the madness of age and isolation… But he was charismatic.
He convinced people of his fantasy, enough to do the damage... He
was a patriot. He was sure that the United States had fallen—that
was the only possible explanation why rescue was never sent. The
United States would never give up on its people unless there was no
United States anymore. The UN must have overthrown their
government, enslaved their people, or that the United States as
we’d known it had been destroyed in the resulting war. He
thought—and he wasn’t alone—that if the UN could bomb Mars, they
would do the same to Earth. As the years passed without contact,
without rescue, that nightmare became the accepted truth… The one
star on their flag: they honestly believe they’re the last of the
United States of America. The Last Colony…”

“Now they’ve seen
you
,” Kendricks takes over
when Baker falls silent. “UNMAC patrol flights. Then your scouting
party, your armored vehicle… They’ve seen it. They’ll try to take
or destroy it once they decide they’re not afraid of it. They have
RPGs.”

I think I know why Asmodeus left them be. He left
them in our path, in UNMAC’s path, knowing there’d be a ready-made
bloodbath. The beauty of it is that he wouldn’t have to lift a
finger to make it happen. He just drew us out this way, expecting
to find enemies. All he has to do now is sit back and watch.

“That track is carrying four tactical warheads,” I
decide to tell them. “It’s hoping to deliver them to Asmodeus’ base
and burn him off the planet. Earthside has eyes on it from orbit,
but otherwise it’s silent running to keep Asmodeus from hearing it.
They will defend it with everything they have. Or destroy it to
keep it from falling into enemy hands. If they see an unknown
quantity attack the vehicle, they’ll assume the worst. They won’t
hold fire.”

I can feel Kendricks, Baker and the other Knights
tense and simmer on that news, frustrated, helpless. The only thing
they can do will shed an unacceptable amount of blood.

“Neither will the Sons of Liberty,” Kendricks
confirms miserably. “You have to get your vehicle far away from
here. Leave your people. Two lives against the hundreds more that
may be lost.”

“Even if I was willing to do that, we’re at a crawl
in this terrain.”

“We could try to hold the Sons back, give you time to
get away,” Baker offers.

“I appreciate that, but I’m not leaving friends of
mine to be tortured to death. You know my history. I’m stubborn
like that.”

I think I see Kendricks grin inside his armored
mask.

“We can get in after dark, slip through their lines,”
Baker gives me. “But we’ll have to take lives to get your people
out, assuming we even get the chance. More than two lives,
certainly.” He says it like he’s leaving the decision to me, but
it’s clear he’s not eager to kill colonists, despite all they may
have done, all of his own people they may have killed.

“Stay here,” I tell them.

“What are you going to do?” Kendricks wants to know,
but already does.

“Try to earn my reputation.”

I get up and start marching down the slope.

My camo gets me through their lines, but I can’t be
sound-stealthy on the steep talus slopes and make good time. I hear
their link chatter as they communicate back-and-forth, trying to
get eyes on whatever’s making the trickling rockslide down into
their territory. They speak in gibberish that I can’t tell is code
or shattered English or a mix of both. Even in their midst, I can
barely see them—their sentry nests are like hidden pillboxes, dug
artfully into the slopes. The Sons of Liberty are almost as good at
being invisible in their home ground as the Nomads or the Pax or
the Katar. I should have asked Baker just how many SOF weapons
they’d stolen, not that it would have made a difference in my
impulsive decision to throw myself into their midst.

I pick up more faint heat signatures as I get closer
to the bottom of the pocket valley, aiming for the rover. My
stealth thankfully improves (through no skill of my own) as I
crunch and slide less and less on the gravel and rock as I get
lower. This is not just due to the rapidly-thickening growth
providing a slick carpet of sorts. It’s also because the stones
underneath the ground-clinging vines are getting well-worn from
decades of human traffic, the soil compacted. This place is
lived-in, has been lived in, no matter how wild it still looks from
a distance.

I’m drawn immediately to the rover, hoping to find
some kind of tracks, sign of where Horst and Lyra may have been
taken. I’m in the middle of a stone-age village square, heat
leaking out of the shuttered slit-like windows and small doorways
of over a dozen structures that now look like a combination of dug
cave and built-up false cave. But there’s no visible light: there
must be sealed shutters and hatches in place, but the way the rocks
are cut and placed make the gaps look almost natural, enough to be
invisible from the heights, certainly from orbit.

The camouflage engineering would impress the Katar.
Where it fails is in the smell: The place reeks of old piss, shit
and garbage, but I’m reminded somewhat less of a latrine or
landfill and more of the Tranquility gardens, fed by composted
waste. Still, it’s an undeniably human stink. A lot of people live
here, and have lived here for a long time.

The rover has been torn apart, but skillfully. Servos
have been pulled but the guns and launchers preserved, as if
someone is trying to convert the bot into a manual gun platform.
The homemade sledge it was dragged here on lays in the shin-high
Graingrass next to the wheelbase. The plants are mashed by foot
traffic all around, and radiating out in several directions.

A closer look shows me they’ve pried a few grenades
out of the cluster launchers, then cast them aside, probably
disappointed that they’re smoke and not high explosive.

I’m thinking I need to search each shelter
systematically when I hear the low thrum of several compressors,
followed by the hiss of blown seals. Airlock. Light blazes out of
pillbox slits as shutters are raised all around me. Then a trio of
doors open on one side of the “square”, washing me with more warm
light, which I now see is produced by simple handcrafted combustion
lanterns. Bodies start filing out toward me—it looks like they may
all be coming out of the same long underground room, maybe a
community space.

I initially assume that they’re coming out to either
greet or attack me (all bets on the latter), that they’ve seen
through my visual cloak, but they seem to move oblivious to me.
They’re simply pouring out into the square in solemn, silent
discipline. I count over a hundred adult-sized shapes (and get hit
by a fresh wave of stink). Only a select few have lanterns, but all
of them have weapons that range from rifles and pistols to bows and
crossbows. All of the long guns have been fitted with bayonet
blades. They also all carry at least one non-projectile weapon in
the form of a sword, hatchet or sizeable knife.

They’re dressed in combinations of multiply-patched
colony gear and fabrics that may have been woven of processed
Graingrass fibers. Each adult wears what appears to be one either
decorative or semi-functional piece of armor, slung from their
necks like the ornamental gorgets of the Napoleonic era. What
they’re made out of looks like random pieces of H-A shells or what
may be New Knight hand-forged plate, regardless of original
function: some may wear whole breast plates, but most wear shoulder
pauldrons, shin greaves, tassets, vambraces or other random pieces.
I imagine there may be status or trophy value to them.