The God Mars Book Six: Valhalla I Am Coming (42 page)

I get the Box’s attention with a gesture, and wave
for it to leave, to head with me for the gap. It takes one last
small circle around the wreck of the rover, as if to challenge
anyone to take a shot at it, then it spins after me.

“Kendricks, Baker…” I call on their channel, hoping
the Sons are listening in. “That smoke I used will paint the site
as a target for UNMAC. I hope they decide to take a good look
before they blow it to hell, but you better get your people away,
get to the other side of the crater rim. I already warned the
Liberty leader, but he’s being stubborn.”

“Can you call it off?” Kendricks asks
desperately.

“I’m going to try to signal them, but they cut all of
their long-range comms after Asmodeus used their uplinks for
cyber-attack. I may have better luck if I can make it back to the
track in time.”

Silence. Then:

“Good luck, Colonel,” he wishes me honestly.

As I run up-slope, scramble over rocks in the dark
with the random round smacking near me, I listen… I can hear Orbit
now, but all I get are brief coded pulses. I either don’t have the
software to crack it or I need a much larger sample to work out a
decryption. Maybe there’s an algorithm in the ‘Horse’s comm
systems.

“This is Colonel Ram, calling UNMAC Planetary
Command,” I try anyway, sending on every channel I know they’ve
used. “The target marker northeast of Liberty Crater is painting a
colonial group that stole our rover. They are
not
aligned
with Asmodeus. They’re just people. Do not fire on them.
Do not
fire
.”

I don’t hear any change in the signals overhead.
Either they didn’t hear or they’re shutting me out. I set the
message to repeat like a mantra in the back of my mind.

My gauges are all dipping into the red. I’m depleted,
dehydrated, hurting. I need resources and water and time. I’m not
even sure if I have enough power to transmit to Orbit, and with the
uplinks down, I have no way to bounce a signal to the Grave Base
without sight-line.

Maybe we can push a message from the ‘Horse through
whatever aircraft they send for recon (assuming they send aircraft
first, and not just hit from orbit), hopefully one they’ll listen
to. Maybe Corso can get them to listen, maybe she has recognition
codes that they’ll accept, or at least a smoke code for an
abort.

I’m falling over myself by the time I get over the
hump of the narrow pass. I’ve been ripping up fistfuls of plants as
I go, sucking them dry, but it’s barely enough to keep me going.
The Box is following behind me, as if watching over me. I can hear
the Knights from time-to-time above me, ordering fall-back. But I
also hear one other signal: It’s Baker, calling on a spread of
channels, trying to convince the Sons to evacuate. His voice fades
and breaks the farther down the gap I get, telling me he’s stayed
behind, not giving up.

I shout for him to get out of there, but I doubt I
have enough energy left to make him hear. Not that he’d listen
anyway.

I don’t catch up to Horst and Lyra. That tells me
they’re staying on-mission, not waiting for me. But that also tells
me I’m too impaired to overtake a pair of battered, exhausted
Normals.

It takes me hours to get back through the gap and
down into the bowl of the crater. The sun will be coming up in a
few more. And that means flyo…

I hear the roar of AAV engines. They echo in the
crater bowl, distorted. I can’t see them against the night sky, not
even switching to a heat scan, which means they’re out of sight,
but they sound like they’re coming closer.

I look back over the rim, back toward Liberty. Shift
spectrums. I see the glowing haze of the isotope smoke, billowing
thinly but visibly up toward the atmosphere net. It could be
detectable for dozens of kilometers with the right sensor gear.

The engine noise passes south of the crater. I
run.

I’m trying to make sense out of what I don’t know as
I run in the dark. If Orbit saw the smoke—and they certainly did—if
they thought it meant Asmodeus had the ‘Horse and its nukes, they
would have hit it from space as soon as they could load, aim and
charge a mass driver. Unless they wanted a closer look first,
risking a night flight.

But if what Dee (or Yod) told me yesterday morning is
true, and links with Orbit are still all cut, then Grave Base must
have seen the smoke as it rose, maybe on a remote sentry, and that
means this is Jackson sending out his own high-risk low-altitude
night recon with no satellite eyes on the target zone. (But that
also means Orbit may have taken their look and chosen to hold
fire.)

The engine noise has circled the crater
counter-clockwise. If I’m tracking right, they’ve made one pass
over the colony site by now. If the Sons of Liberty haven’t gone to
ground, their heat will be visible, but there will be no easy way
to tell live human being from animated corpse in the dark,
especially if the Sons are stubborn enough to shoot at the
perceived threat.

I’m still sending my hold-fire message, still
receiving no reply.

I also still haven’t caught up to Horst and Lyra.
I’ve been scanning for their heat—I don’t think I passed them. I
start imagining bad possibilities on top of a bad situation.

I run past where they were originally taken, then
over the rise to where I left the…

The Warhorse is gone.

Starving for every resource I have a meter for, I run
around in a panic, and find tracks. Corso didn’t stay put. She kept
the rig moving forward.

I’ve wasted precious time and resources. I scream a
stream of obscenities at nothing and no one as I run following the
tracks. It’s more of a stagger—I can barely keep my legs moving.
I’m feeling every injury, every bullet I took like I’ve been worked
over by a gang wielding hammers.

The ‘Horse is following the course we’d planned, east
and a few degrees south-southeast. Lyra had taken Liberty link
gear—she or Horst may have been able to re-tune it to the ‘Horse
and guide them home.

“Corso! Lyra! Horst!” I call out on every
channel.

The engine noises have been circling back and forth
roughly over Liberty. If there’s been any shooting, the rim between
us is damping the gunshots. At least I haven’t heard
explosions.

I see the faint heat of the ‘Horse a few hundred
meters ahead of me, which in my current condition feels like a few
hundred klicks.

“Corso! Horst! Ram to Warhorse! If you can hear me,
we need to…”

The engine noise changes, gets louder. Much louder.
The AAVs have come over the rim, heading straight west, burning
fast for home. They whip over my head in seconds and keep going.
They’ve dropped low into the bowl, low enough to put the crater rim
between them and…

“
RAM TO JACKSON!!! ABORT!!!”

I’m shouting on every channel at the AAVs as they
leave me behind.

“
ABORT!!! ABORT!!! THOSE ARE…”

The sky over the northeast rim of the crater goes
bright white, lighting up the whole world. I feel the tingle of EMP
in every cell, and my enhancements go fuzzy. But even impaired, my
neuro-processing automatically speeds up, so I see it happen in
slow motion. The sun-like ball of brilliant white swells, rises
skyward. Only my built-in filters keep me from being blinded.

I can see the shockwave rolling at me, hot and angry,
scouring everything in its path. It takes several seconds to get
here, even in realtime. It washes over the ‘Horse first, then hits
me with a shotgun spray of sand, gravel and plant matter. I don’t
try to duck and cover—I take it face-on, too angry to care about
self-preservation.

The barrier of the rim has taken most of the punch
out of it, as has the three or four klicks between me and zero.
There’s minimal heat, minimal overpressure. Still, in my depleted
state, it kicks the wind out of me and knocks me down.

I spin the calculations of hope in my addled
brain:

If the Knights had pulled back, had gotten on this
side of the rim, had deep caves, they may have survived.

If the Sons had listened to me, had run for the
mountains or whatever shelters they had, some might…

Some.

Flat out on my back, too beaten and battered to move
anymore, I watch the blazing billowing cloud of nuclear fire rise
up into the atmosphere net, push through. Then it expands rapidly
in the much lower pressure, forming a blazing umbrella more than a
kilometer across, lighting up the world.

Under it, at the base of its surging stem of
incinerated matter, there were people. Men. Women. Children.

Asmodeus knew this would happen. Or something like
it. He knew.

But I’m not blaming him for this.

I hear a bang echoing from somewhere behind me, from
the west. I turn my head with effort to look, and see another
fireball in the dark, this one much much smaller and shorter-lived.
It looks like a fuel explosion, about five or six klicks away,
which puts it at the far rim of the crater. I’m guessing one of the
offending aircraft either miscalculated in the dark or got
destabilized by the dissipating blast wave or EMP and hit the rim.
They were flying so fast, I doubt they had enough warning to
eject.

I should feel the weight of the loss—not that many
months ago, they would have been my pilots, my people. But all I
feel through my mindless rage is the slightest warmth of cruel
satisfaction.

I stare up at a night sky on fire, and realize that
certain doors are now forever closed to me. I know I should have
felt this way months ago, when I became this and they chased me out
of my own base at gunpoint. Or when Jackson personally tried to
drop a nuke on me and hundreds of good people whose only sin was to
fight beside me (to rescue UNMAC personnel, no less). Or when they
raped Lisa “for science” or planned to murder Lyra.

I watch the radioactive pyre of who-knows-how-many
hundreds of human beings, and know I’m finally done with Earth. A
few good, honorable souls can’t redeem them.

And then I start giggling like a madman.

Because they’ve never seen a war like me.

From the memory files of Lisa Ava, 6 June 2118:

“This is Colonel Ram, calling UNMAC Planetary
Command. The target marker northeast of Liberty Crater is painting
a colonial group that stole our rover. They are
not
aligned
with Asmodeus. They’re just people. Do not fire on them.
Do not
fire
.”

The message is scratchy through the link we’re barely
maintaining with our recon flight, chained through remote
repeaters, but it’s definitely him.

“This is Colonel Ram, calling UNMAC Planetary
Command. The target marker northeast of Liberty Crater is…”

“Ignore him,” Jackson orders, almost growling.

Kastl turns to look at him long enough to get glared
down, then reluctantly sends the coded signal to the pilots to
continue mission.

The message continues to drone in the background of
our feed. It’s automated—no telling how long it’s been since he
started sending. Probably about the time we scrambled a response to
the bloom of isotope gasses we detected rising over the far side of
Liberty Crater.

The signal fades in and out as the AAVs fly, with
Kastl tracking them roughly based on calculating course and speed
since we have no contact with our orbital eyes, putting blips on
the map on one of the big tactical screens. It’s all very
old-school, like we’re pretending this is the mid-twentieth
century, like a historical reenactment. But we’ve put ourselves in
this predicament—or Jackson has—even though the after-action
reports will certainly use Asmodeus to justify blowing both the
Melas uplink and our own, then systematically tearing the
long-range transmitters out of all of our aircraft, limiting us to
short-range links barely boosted by whatever planted listening
posts that the Katar—or Asmodeus—haven’t found and disabled.

But as the flights round the crater, we get rim in
the way, and Jackson doesn’t want them higher, doesn’t want an
enemy to see them coming. That makes the flying extra-risky, of
course. Without Orbit watching over, they have to rely on radar,
map navigation and night vision to keep themselves from flying into
a rise. And they’re headed into mountainous territory.

Worse: As far as I know, neither of the new-drop
pilots has had any experience flying their ships in the dark, and
probably very little time flying manually. But then none of the
new-drop pilots had
any
experience flying these ships beyond
a simulator before they got here.

Jackson still won’t let any of the Sleeper-Vet pilots
fly combat, not even in a critical situation like this (maybe
especially
not in a critical situation like this). I can’t
help but feel he deserves to have this go badly wrong on him, but
those pilots certainly don’t deserve to die stupid because their CO
is.

I know I should act now. I know I should do something
other than stand here and watch. But I don’t. And it isn’t because
he’s put the collar back on me or brought more of my friends to Ops
to “consult,” making the price of any disobedience on my part clear
enough.

The upper deck is packed, a full house for his little
show of decisive response: They’ve brought Rick and Anton in, as
well as Doc Halley. And four guards in H-As to watch over me (or
anyone else who tries an impulsive act of reason). Kastl, for his
part, is admirably not sweating despite the bomb less than two
meters from his back, but his shift-partner—a new drop named
Sweet—looks scared to death, hands trembling over her console. The
half-dozen techs on the deck below don’t look any more
comfortable.

I can’t ignore the math: The only one in this sealed
secure space I would consider blowing up with me is Jackson, and he
keeps fingering the detonator in his left fist like he’s eager to
prove his willingness to die for his “duty”.
My
duty is
keeping me from demonstrating the flaw in his plan.