The God Mars Book Six: Valhalla I Am Coming (53 page)

“That! Was!
AWESOME!!!
” Asmodeus cheers out of
the mouth of a discarded corpse-head. Jackson staggers up to it and
starts stomping the head into mush. I’m about to warn him to be
careful about the Harvester injector in its mouth, when I realize
he has no reason to care.

As if he needs to show me, he turns to me in the
winded, gasping, gore-covered aftermath and rips away his facial
patch. Where I expected a missing eye and facial bones is an eye
and an intact face, but it doesn’t match the rest of him. It hasn’t
fully matured yet, but I can tell its Asmodeus.

He advances on me. I instinctively point my blade at
him.

“
Do it!!!
” he screams at me. “You need to do
it!!
He’s in me!
He’s in my
brain!
His
filth
is in my blood!
My DNA!!
”

He draws his sidearm and tries to point it at his own
head, but can’t. He loses control of his muscles when he tries. So
he points the pistol at me at starts emptying it.

“
DO IT!!! KILL ME!!!
”

I duck a few rounds but take the rest. The weapon
locks open and he throws it at me in his mindless rage, then he
walks right up on the tip of my blade, presses it up under his jaw,
but something won’t let him go any further.

“
Please
…” he growls through gritted teeth. (I
swear the Asmodeus half of his face is grinning at me.) “I’ve
waited… He was supposed to be here… I could
feel
him here… I
waited all day… I’m losing myself…
his filth is inside me
…
PLEASE!!!
”

Before I can react, Star snatches my pistol from its
rig and shoots from over my shoulder. The HE round goes through his
brow and blows most of his skull away. She steps back, as if I’m
going to attack her for it, as his body falls among the rest of the
gore.

Horst is looking at us dumbfounded.

Lyra…

I run back to her. She’s barely conscious, but she
must know I’m here. She squeezes my hand back, and manages to speak
in a rasp.

“…do the… thing…”

“No…” I protest weakly.

“…know I’m dead anyway… it’s okay… it’s all…” She
coughs more blood—I think she’s drowning in it. “…do the thing…
make something… make me something… someone who can…”

“
Where is Asmodeus?!!
” I shout at Star, like
this is her fault, focused on my rage, on revenge, rather than the
broken young girl breathing her last in my arms.

“He’s not here,” Star tells me, still trying to get
her breath back, my pistol still hanging from her hand. “He’s
working on something, something he’s kept me shut me out of. But he
will
be.”

“How can you be sure?” I don’t believe.

“Because I pretended to slip, showed him what I did
know as I was ripping that fucking thing off my head. He’ll
come.”

Lyra reaches up weakly, grabs me by the hair to get
my attention back.

“…do the… do the thing… change me… don’t let me just
die if I can still…”

“Your last Seed... It’s targeted her,” Star says like
she knows, like she can hear it, feel it. And it’s there, it’s
back: despite all this blood and pain and death, all I want to do
is kiss her. Just once. Before she dies.

It’s sickening.

“Do it,” Star insists. “Before she dies, and maybe
the new whoever-it-is will still have some of her.”

“But it won’t be
her!
” I protest the obvious;
what, I realize, is the inevitable. Yod’s plan. All along.

Lyra pulls at me, tries to pull us together, with the
last of her strength.

“Now, asshole!” Star chides me. “Just kiss her!”

I roar out something incoherent, railing against the
best choice I have in a world where I probably have no fucking
choice at all.

“…never…” Lyra mutters through blood, trying to
smile. “…never kissed a boy bef…”

I do it. There’s nothing sweet or romantic about it.
It’s desperate, agonizing. I taste her blood as I rub our lips
together, our nuzzling more like a collision, an act of violence.
Then I try to seal our mouths together. Fail. She’s too weak to
respond.

“It’s done,” Star grants me mercy. Lyra’s still
looking at me when I release her, and actually does manage a
smile.

“One more thing…” Before I know what she’s doing,
Star pries an injector out of a nearby corpse mouth, comes back and
stabs it into Lyra’s neck.

“What the fuck was that?!!” I sputter at her as
Lyra’s eyes go wide. Her weak shaky fingers try to feel the wound
but can’t even reach her neck. I take her hands and squeeze.

“Necessary,” Star insists. “I can interface with her
as she converts, study how her Seed reacts to the invading tech as
the two collide and fight over territory, maybe reverse-engineer a
basic nano-antigen that will be able to target Harvester and
similar nano-vectors without taking any other action, and then be
readily extractible if the host is still squeamish about having the
tech inside them.”

She’s talking about a working, acceptable
countermeasure, a cure. But

“How do you know how to do that?”

She looks at me like I’m an adorable idiot.

“Same way Ange can. I detected him hacking Chang and
Fohat for their expertise, and duplicated his technique. I figured
it might come in handy, considering what Ange was likely to do with
his new knowledge.”

She stares at me as I gape dumbly at her, then shakes
her head and grins.

“Remember back on the first Stormcloud when I made a
cosmetic clone out of a handy corpse and blew it up to try to
convince Chang I wasn’t Ra? You never thought to ask me how I
managed that?”

“I…” I really didn’t. “I guess I just thought you’d
used some of Chang’s tech.”

“I used some of
Chang
,” she corrects me. “And
Fohat. It was easy. And amazing. I just know all this
stuff
.
Science. Technology. Just like that, like I’ve always known it. If
you’re good, maybe I’ll show you ho…”

Lyra rasps one last time, long and slow, and goes
limp in my grip. Her eyes stare blankly at the sky. Dead.

She’s dead. I wasn’t even looking at her, wasn’t
paying attention.

“We need to do this right now,” Star prods me.

I’m numb. I lift her, carry her, follow Star though I
have no idea what I’m doing.

She finds us a cut in the foundation, conveniently
grave-like, probably an old vent or wiring trunk. Star piles gore
into it, throwing in shredded corpse. Then she lays down inside,
settling in just like she’s easing herself into a bath of rotten
meat, and gestures for me to pass Lyra down to her. They wind up
spooned together, Star embracing her, and Star tells me to cover
them up.

Horst starts to help me carry limbs and guts to the
hole, but I warn him again:

“Don’t. The bodies are Harvesters. There may be live
injectors.”

He takes a deep breath and tells me

“It’s a little late for that.” He turns his head,
shows me the puncture just below the base of his skull, surrounded
by a nasty bruise that tells me he got stung when a tentacle hit
him. “I can already feel it. Or maybe it’s my imagination.”

My body gives out from under me. I was kneeling,
putting parts into the hole, but now I’m down on my ass, holding
myself upright with my hands. I can’t speak. I can barely see.

“I may need a favor…” he starts to say.

“
NO!
” I shout at him. “And don’t do anything
stupid!
I will fix this!
I swear! We’ll have a cure! Three
days!”

“I don’t think I have that, sir,” he says
heavily.

“Then I’ll fix you myself! Just… just trust me! You
are
not
dying like that! Do you hear me? You are not…” I get
myself together, get myself up. “I’m not letting you die. You are
going to get through this. That’s an order, Lieutenant. Do you hear
me?”

“Yes, sir.” But he doesn’t sound relieved.

We finish “burying” Lyra and Star.

“We need to start clearing the bay so Smith can get
out of there safely,” I give my next order, figuring he’s safe
enough pulling guts out of the track. “Then we need to give Simmons
and Scheffe a proper burial. And Colonel Jackson.”

“He said Asmodeus was in his brain,” he wants the
truth.

“Asmodeus has used more than just Harvesters. He has
subtler tech that can alter your brain chemistry, manipulate your
mood.”

“He kept saying ‘shut up,’ like he could hear…”

I shrug. “Maybe that, too. An implant to communicate
with him, or to listen through him. Too small to detect with the
usual exams.”

“Like the corpses, talking with the fucker’s
voice?”

“No, Lieutenant. That was just primitive tech.”

“But Asmodeus is supposed to be networked, spread
out. Couldn’t… I mean, his
face
…”

“Cloning tech. Viral. Probably replaced the injured
tissue first.”

“So he would have become him… a copy?”

“Maybe. But I doubt it would have gotten that far.
Jackson was a fighter. I’m sure he fought it tooth and nail as soon
as he realized. Explains why he was so blindly desperate to burn
the son-of-a-bitch…”

He nods.

“I’ll get started on the bay,” I offer. “Do a
perimeter sweep, make sure none of those severed sections are
getting back together. I’ll call you when I need help with our
own.”

“Yes, sir.”

I’m trying to get what’s left of poor innocent
Scheffe gently into a bag when I hear the shot.

I find him well away from the track, well away from
the carnage, out in the green. Lying on the ground in front of him
is a live flashcard with photos that must be family.

He did a good job. He sat down, propped his weapon in
his mouth, and triggered it on burst-fire.

“Fuck you… I told you not to do anything stupid… I
told you… I
told
you…”

Yod may have named me a student of religions, but I
have not been much of an adherent to any in my time, with a very
few notable exceptions. One of the first of which came when I chose
to pick up a sword, because it was so traditionally intertwined
with the Japanese military arts, its rituals in every aspect; and I
quickly grew to appreciate its lovely simplicity, as well as its
particular take on morality.

Shinto does not personify the divine, nor regulate
it, but simply sees its presence in all aspects of creation, both
natural and manmade. There isn’t even an adequate translation for
their word for the divine. But their concept of “sin” is even
simpler: They see it as a stain, a wound, an impurity that soils
perpetrator and victim and place. To harm another, to murder, for
instance, is “evil” because it is a messy, offensive, destructive
thing—and that should be clear in its very nature; one does not
need the commandments of deity to declare it so. It is a violation
of creation.

Their response to such violations is equally
practical: Everyone and everything touched by the “stain” must be
made somehow clean again. Order restored. Damage repaired. Wounds
healed. Spirits cleansed. The world put back right. Even if only
ritually.

Ritual is important.

So I spend the next few days “cleaning up.”

There are practical as well as therapeutic aspects to
the ritual: The first thing I do is find every intact cable-module
I can and crush it. I lose count after the first few thousand. It
takes me the better part of the night and the next day, working
non-stop, alone except for Kel. I collect them all in a handy pit
left from one of Jackson’s rocket hits, then salt them with
thermite from the ‘Horse’s stores, just to be sure. I don’t care
who sees the smoke or the heat from the resulting white-hot
blaze.

I do the same thing to all the body parts. Whoever
these people were, they deserve better than to keep rotting.
Several bodies have Zodangan ink, and three have Liberty flags. I
also see a number of old battle scars, and signs of varying degrees
of depravation. I arrange the bodies and limbs as neatly as I can,
but it still looks like an abattoir’s waste dump. The fire of their
pyre burns well past sunset.

The next morning, I give Horst, Simmons and Scheffe
better funerals. Having reverently bagged their remains (or as much
of their remains as I could separate from the rest of the gore in
the bay), I carried them well away from the desecrated ruin—the
soiled place—and built the neatest cairns over them that I could
manage, each carefully placed stone its own act of respect, of
mourning.

Jackson I have to burn, just to be sure. I make him a
pyre fit for a warrior out of dried branches surrounded by
stones.

I don’t say any words. Kel sits beside me as I linger
over the graves in silence.

After that, I clean up the bay as best I can, but the
blood is caked deep and thick into every crevice. But at least I
can ensure that the rig, and the surrounding area, are free of
Harvester seeds.

“It’s clear,” I tell Smith through the hatch. He’s
been stuck in his cockpit for almost two days now. “It doesn’t
smell very good, but you can come out.”

He unseals the lock slowly. I step well back, give
him room. He’s wearing a breather mask. He recoils when the stink
hits him in spite of it.

“You weren’t kidding,” he gasps. Then he shakes his
head, taking in the damage, and worse: the emptiness, now that
everyone else is gone.

“What did you… What did you do with them?” he
asks.

He puts on a cold weather suit and I take him out to
the graves as the sun sets over the Rim. We stand there in silence
for awhile, then I leave him alone in the evening wind. Kel keeps
watch over him from a distance.

I walk back to the ruin. Lose myself in the
desolation of it, the waste, the dried blood. I can’t clean all of
this. Maybe the planet can, in time, weathering it away, growing
over it. Or I could burn it all, but that would leave its own
scars.