The God Mars Book Six: Valhalla I Am Coming (8 page)

I use that rage to focus me, turn it like I do so
well, because I
can’t
keep wallowing in this. It is what it
is (unless Yod decides otherwise), and I refuse to accept that I’m
totally helpless. My role may be manufactured, scripted, but I’ve
played such parts before, and I’d like to think I’ve done some
good, or reduced the bad. Saved lives. Protected things worth
protecting. Destroyed things in dire need of being ended.

I’m here. Now. And I need time away from the battle I
can’t win right now (because I can’t let either “side” win),
because I
do
need to heal—that’s the practical reality. I
need to heal this body, because I’m barely in any shape to stand—I
certainly can’t fight. And I need the time to figure out my next
moves before I face friend or foe, carefully, thoughtfully,
objectively, because I’ve made too many deadly mistakes. And that
takes distance. Solitude. Whether I think I can afford it or
not.

(I remember that the words “monastery” and “monk”
come from the same root meaning: to be alone.)

And if I need to be alone and away, this is the
perfect place. maybe more than anyplace else on this planet. First,
because it
is
invisible, to friend and foe alike—only a very
select few know it’s here. And second, because even to those who
know it’s here, it’s unreachable, unless Yod allows it. (I realize
I’m here because he agreed I needed the break, enough to bend his
own rules for the world he’s made and let me cross his protective
boundaries. Again.)

So this is my own personal Fortress of Solitude. By
the grace of Yod.

Lonely, cold, gutted, and full of dust.

I need to stop giggling like a madman. It really
hurts.

So does walking, limping with crushed muscles on
mangled joints, but I’m in no mood to lie down. I lose myself in
the pain, keep plodding one foot in front of the other, and pace
the lonely darkness—an exercise in will over flesh—as I wait for my
Mods to slowly rebuild me.

The massive empty spaces seem to go on forever, a
maze that a shuttle could almost fly through. The sun has gone
down, snuffing out the skylights. The darkness makes it feel even
bigger by hiding its boundaries. Even with my night vision, I can
barely see past the dusty polished stone floor in front of me. The
walls and high ceilings may as well be lost in infinity—I’m
surrounded by overwhelmingly immense space that I know is deep
inside a mountain. I’m reminded of sets from old science fiction
shows: budget-cutting stylized unbounded spaces of pure white
or—like this one—black. (I once saw a public television production
of “Waiting for Godot” that used a similar space—a dead tree
illuminated in the middle of black nothing. Except I don’t have a
tree. Or maybe I
am
the tree.)

In the ghostly enhancement of my Modded vision, I one
thing
can
see very clearly is my own footprints in the dust,
marking a record of the meandering I’ve been doing as I absently
walk my solution to this labyrinth, though my solution is not to
escape. I know the way out: the way I came in. But I can’t go that
way, not yet.

As I limp on, I take inventory of the damage done to
my body by Earth’s latest atrocity (as if we’re all locked in a
competition of atrocities):

All of my limbs feel like they’ve been recently
dislocated and deeply bruised—I’m surprised nothing’s obviously
fractured (or traumatically amputated). My left eye isn’t working
so well. I have no idea how much of my face I still have—I’m afraid
to touch it, but most of it feels like it’s on fire, and sticky
wet. My ribs hurt, my back… I’m having trouble breathing. Things
grind and rattle and slip inside of me.

This is my bill from the blast, from being way too
close to a rail-gun strike, and my subsequent burial when the
mountain turned to rubble and landed on me. I should be grateful
that my limbs are still attached, just considering the shockwave
that hit me. Or that all of my skin didn’t get burned away from the
heat produced by that much kinetic energy. Or that I’m still even
in one piece at all, not shattered to bits. I wonder again if I had
the benefit of Yod’s “grace”, bending the laws of quantum physics
to make sure I wasn’t out of his game too very long.

(Did he give the same consideration to my enemy?)

I know I need more than time to fix all this. I need
resources. I don’t require my internal indicators all glaring red
in the corner of my vision to tell me that. But I’m loathe to do
anything about it, even if it will get me back in the fight
sooner.

There are fruit, seed and nut-bearing plants just
outside—they grow in a ring all around the base of the mountain,
between the rock slopes and the narrow beach of the lake that
surrounds it (making it an invisible island in the middle of an
invisible lake). But I would need to consume quite a bit of it, and
still probably not have what I need to completely heal. I know what
would provide I need, of course, but I can’t bring myself to do it,
not now, not yet. I’d like to think not ever again, but I know
necessity will drive me, sooner or later… But if anything is
stripping me of my humanity, it’s this more than anything else: I’m
sick to my core of being a ghoul, a cannibal, drawing my sustenance
from handy corpses. That I’ve never actually tasted the flesh, that
my nanites do the extracting for me at a sustained touch, doesn’t
make it more palatable. I’m still a cannibal.

(How the fuck did it come to this?)

I’d rather be in pain. Broken. Barely knitted
together by the nanotech in every cell.

My dragging footfalls echo in the caverns of the
Barrow, no matter how softly I try to walk. Even without
enhancements, I can hear the grinding inside of me. But more than
pain, every step, every time I force a leg forward, feels like I’m
waist-high in molasses. I’ve barely got enough left just to keep
moving.

I distract myself by appreciating Yod’s thoroughness.
The whole facility is indeed gutted of every single piece of
technology from that other world, cleanly stripped to the cast and
cut floors, walls and columns. Only the hatchways are left, though
they have to be opened manually (and some of them are monolithic).
I still see no sign that any of the equipment was physically moved,
of course. No heavy lifting necessary—Yod just thought it all out
of existence.

(From what Jon Drake showed me of Peter Nagasawa’s
memories, it was done between ten and fifteen Standard years ago,
between two of Yod’s idle behavioral experiments, letting humans
from the outer world in here to see what they would do. So did he
gut it all because what happened to Nagasawa and Harris went so
ugly, or was he simply done with it?)

My left eye still won’t open all the way. Of all my
injuries, this is the one that’s bothering me the most for some
reason. It doesn’t really hurt, especially compared to the rest of
me, but it feels like something is pressing into it. I could have a
chunk of mountain—or a chunk of Asmodeus—stuck in my face. Assuming
I still have all (or any) of my face. I get the odd impression that
it’s not just squeamishness that’s keeping me from reaching up and
touching it and finding out for sure. It’s like I somehow know if I
try, there’ll be something palpable in my way, though it’s probably
just knowing that the damage to my muscles and joints will prevent
me from raising my arms that high, or make the act more unpleasant
than it’s worth.

In the dark, I remember the Pax Keep, or the rubble
that was the Pax Keep, like I can see it now. The whole fucking
mountain… Not so much a mountain anymore. That marvelous, amazing
complex… the dragonfly nurseries… the livestock pens…

Rubble. Like a blasted quarry.
The whole
mountain.

How many times did they hit it? I wasn’t counting. I
think I remember four or five impacts. I was well-buried after the
first one. The rest just kept pounding and crushing through the
rocks and dirt of my impromptu grave, a few minutes between each
world-scarring blast as they recharged and reloaded up in orbit.
(Was it just the one mass driver that did all that? Or do they have
more now? The files Lisa flashed me had plans and manifests, but no
indication of what they’d already managed to cobble together and
get online in terms of orbital weapons systems—I expect that’s the
secret they’re keeping most guarded.)

I feel a flash of blame, of anger at the ETE. Did the
“deal” they made help fuel the orbital construction efforts? Would
I have had more time if they hadn’t have been so unbelievably
stupid, thinking they could actually bargain with these people?

“You shouldn’t have come.”

The darkness and space is fucking with my memories.
Or maybe it’s a head injury. I probably finally passed out. Either
that, or my Modded body has an autopilot. But I’m suddenly just
back in the moment, another moment, yesterday, right after my
infuriating meeting with Jackson: Flying to White Station. Waiting
stubbornly in the cold thin outside their airlocks.

Paul. Paul came out to meet me. Alone. Of course he
was alone.

“My father still won’t see me. The excuse is network
vulnerability. But the others…” His face wrinkled up, like a
broken-hearted child, and I saw a ghost of the innocence I thought
he’d lost (thanks to me). “They won’t share a space with me. I’m
unclean
, and not just because I have Mars all over me. And
death.”

He hadn’t traded his battle-worn armor-patched
sealsuit for a fresh one, hadn’t bothered to try to fit in with his
neat and uniform brethren. He didn’t even bother with a helmet and
mask. And of course, he was carrying his rifle—the rifle I gave him
and taught him how to use—not his people’s Tools.

I realized I could smell him, that he smelled human.
I don’t think I ever smelled an ETE in all my time working with
them, even staying in their Stations. They’re that obsessive about
sterility.

They didn’t stop him from letting me in, didn’t post
visible guards, but he was right: any time we entered a section
that had white suits, they quickly left, not saying a word and
barely glancing at him. Us. It was like they’d all been issued a
mandate.

Without me asking, he took me to a containment
chamber, through multiple containment walls, to a regeneration tube
that looked like a beefed-up version of their implantation
couches.

Inside I could see Kah-Terina Sher-Khan. Asleep.
Unconscious. Her Companion—still in its Naginata form—was embraced
across her chest like she was on-guard. She was still in her Modded
form: Her original long-limbed broad-chested Katar adaptive
physiology overwritten by an Earth-grav athletic ideal, her
people’s pervasive rust-dyed skin cleared to a rich olive-tan, all
thanks to her Companion’s default settings. She looked healthy and
intact, except for the face over her right eye: Her massive head
wound was mostly healed, her skull and facial bones re-grown
(probably helped by the rich nutrient media she was being fed), but
the part of her face that had been blown away by the explosive
round was still that glossy, translucent silicate—the same
artificial “skin” that had covered all of her after she’d received
devastating radiation burns desperately fighting her way through
Yod’s barriers to the Barrow.

“Progress?” I asked.

He shrugged.

“Our bio-nanotech teams are intrigued by the
Companion interface. Drake was right: There
is
potential for
at least partial memory reconstruction. But recreated memories, no
matter how detailed…”

“Won’t be the same,” I agreed. “Might not even be
convincing.”

“Like Asmodeus,” he said it before I could. “And will
that be her fate, too? The madness of knowing?”

“Asmodeus was insane to begin with,” I tried to be
comforting. “The only real difference is the reduced impulse
control, the emotional lability. The original version—the mortal
version—was a little more reserved.”

We stood there watching her heal, trying to imagine
what she would be when she finally woke. I could tell: There was
something Paul was reluctant to tell me. I gave him the time he
needed to get up the nerve, to find the words:

“The Council… They’ve been in talks with UNMAC.
Trying to forestall their demands that we turn over all of our
technology and surrender the Stations.”

“And?” I could tell the news wasn’t anything I wanted
to hear.

“They’ve agreed to partial cooperation, to provide
fuel and oxygen. UNMAC has landed a depot facility in Melas, hooked
it up to a Feed.”

(I would find reference to it later in the files Lisa
gave me. They called it “Project Wellspring”.)

“They’re gearing up for war,” I told him what he had
to already know, what they all had to already know. “They need the
fuel for all their new fighters, shuttles. They’re using you until
they have the foothold to take your Stations by force. In the
meantime, they’ll use the range that fuel gives them to hunt down
the locals, round them up for relocation, or hit them from the air
if there’s resistance. They won’t work with us. They won’t believe
a goddamn thing we say or do. They’re still convinced that your
people were behind the Discs, or actively collaborating with
whoever was. And because of that, they now think you’re behind
us
, that you made us to be your agents in a long con, so
everything good we’ve done they’re sure is just to lure them into
some kind of a trap so we can infect them, infect Earth. They see
everything we do through that lens. I’m sure they’re testing all
the fuel you send them for viral nanotech.”

“I should slip some in,” he partly joked. “But the
Council thinks this is the only way to back them off, to buy us
time.”

“Time for
what
?” I almost spat. Paul just
shrugged again and shook his head.