The God Mars Book Six: Valhalla I Am Coming (9 page)

“The Council still won’t engage Asmodeus directly.
According to Elias Carter, they were just sitting up here watching
him build his base at Lucifer’s Grave, watching him send his bots
to slaughter the Pax and Katar.” His face hardened again, back into
the warrior I made him. “I never thought I’d say this, but I’m
ashamed
to be one of them. I don’t care what their larger
agenda is… I can’t even tell you if they’re seriously working on
the Harvester issue at all.”

I nearly impulsively asked what the fuck they are
working on, what this “larger agenda” is that he hinted at, but I
realized he was intentionally not elaborating, not daring to. And I
wanted to laugh then, because it was ridiculous: As if Yod has to
hear
someone say it to know that the ETE are probably trying
to figure out a viable defense, a way to resist a being that can
manipulate matter at the sub-atomic level, a being that remade two
worlds and every living soul on them.

“So in the meantime, they get to milk you for all the
fuel they need to ramp up their on-planet operations, and fuck the
obvious long-term consequences of that,” I criticized out loud,
hoping the Council was listening. “I’m sure they’ll keep
negotiating with a smile right up until they blow your hatches
open.”

“Do they have a weapon that will disable us?” he
asked practically, knowing where I’d just been.

“They have more nukes.”

“They won’t use them against the Stations,” he tried
to be sure. “They can’t.”

“But we both know they’re working on
something
. They’ve had Colonel Ava to study this whole time.
I’m sure they haven’t wasted a minute of it.”

Silence. I could hear him breathing as we watched
Terina. Her eyelids would flutter from time-to-time, like she was
dreaming.

“Maybe the Harvesters are a blessing,” he partly
joked. “We’ll see what they do to them before they try it on
us.”

And that made me feel ill, guilty. Again.

“And I just stoked that fire,” I admitted. “I
provided them samples of the modules, the results of our exams. I
was hoping for good faith, but I didn’t realize how completely
paranoid they were. So all I did was reinforce what Asmodeus did:
Scare them. Provoke them. And now they’ll jump for him and do
exactly what he wants them to. Blindly. Stupidly.”

And your people are giving them the fuel to do it—I
didn’t say it. It was clear he already understood that.

“What are you going to do?” he asked.

I lied to him, told him I didn’t know yet. He would
have wanted to come with me, would have insisted, would have
followed me if I’d refused, just for a shot at ending this
horror.

So maybe I was anticipating what came next. Maybe I
saw it coming.

And I walked right into it anyway.

The Siren’s Song was waiting on the Station pad when
Paul led me out. I’d called them before I went into the Station,
told Azazel I needed to meet them. I didn’t anticipate that they’d
run to meet me here, risk exposing themselves to the UN satellites,
give the Earthside paranoiacs one more reason to believe we were in
a conspiracy with the ETE.

“What’s the play?” Bel asked me at the hatch.

I didn’t answer him. I cycled into the ship, headed
straight for the aft section. For Fohat.

The Toymaker was still sealed in his containment
tube, his recently-exploded head grown back to the point that his
skull was intact again, though not his hair (except for a few
random blonde wisps). There was so little flesh on it that he
resembled a desiccated mummy, only with pale, baby-like skin tight
over the bone. Stripped of his golden armor, his body was similarly
wasted, having to consume itself to repair his injuries, to
re-create his brain and most of his head from about the nose up.
Murphy’s last act of service.

“Is he back to consciousness?” I asked Bel urgently,
the first words I spoke to him.

“Partially. I still haven’t been able to sift
anything useful from his visual memory, just more images of cut
caves that could be the Pax Keep. But now we know it is. We know
that’s where he went.”

I dropped the fields, opened the container. Bel
sealed the hatch behind us, turned up the scrubbers to make sure no
part of Fohat could try to make a run for it. Then he sat to
monitor while I interrogated the old fashioned way.

“Where did he go?” I asked the paper-skinned skull.
“Asmodeus. After Pax, what was the fall-back?”

I got nothing for several seconds. I grabbed him by
what hair I could get my fist around and shook him until I could
hear his neck grind. His jaw flopped open, like he was insensate.
But then the thin lips twisted up into a grin, exposing the budding
teeth of an infant poking out of his upper gums, while his lower
jaw still had most of its adult set. The contrast was deeply
disturbing to look at.

“Sometimes… I remember Janeway… You remember
Janeway…?” It took him a lot of effort to speak with his
underdeveloped unbalanced mouth, and his words slurred, rasped.

I looked to Bel. He shrugged.

“It’s the rebuilding brain, digging up fragments,
apparently finding leftovers of the body his Seed took over.”

“I remember Janeway,” I decided to confirm. “You ate
him alive. Took his body for your own. That’s him, haunting you for
it.”

He chuckled dryly, weirdly with his mismatched mouth,
and opened his sunken eyes. The left one was too small for the
socket. The right one was just a cluster of metal contacts, like a
multi-pin plug, where his hardware implant used to be, the
cluster-eye linked to his creations, letting him see through all
their eyes, letting him watch them murder. I want to rip the rest
of that linkage out of his head, slowly. But instead, I focus on
what’s pressing, lever:

“Asmodeus. He left you. He’s done with Pax,” I lied
more than assumed. “Where did he go then? Where was he going to go
after he was done there?”

The baby/mummy head shook, the eyes closed.

“He
left
you,” I kept selling. “He milked you
for your all your precious knowledge, downloaded everything of
value without you even knowing it, then he left you to us… He took
all your skills, and all your toys. Now they’re his.
All
his. No more toys. No more toy making. Just this. You in a cage
with us. Until we get bored torturing you. And there’s long line
waiting to get a turn.”

If the desiccated skull could manage tears, I expect
he would have cried. But he just kept weakly shaking his head.

I drew my knife, grabbed his right wrist, started
cutting. He screamed himself hoarse in his restraints, lopsided
mouth gaping and twisting so far open it looked dislocated. I saw
Bel give me a look, then look away, keeping his eyes on his
screens.

I cut the hand free at the elbow, and put it in a
small containment cylinder, where it would begin to disintegrate
having almost instantly gotten the master signal that the rest of
his body is intact elsewhere (a handy safety so that every bit that
we lose doesn’t grow a new one of us). Then I wiped my knife on his
dirty robes, and let him watch as my blade and glove absorbed what
blood was left, my Mods neutralizing his, breaking them down and
consuming them as raw material.

I let him stew on how much more he would starve
replacing that hand. But all he did was whimper like a child and
shake his head. I looked at Bel. He shook his own head, telling me
my questions were triggering nothing useful on the memory hack he
was running. Fohat really didn’t know. He knew about Pax, but
nothing else. Asmodeus
had
kept him in the dark, knowing he
would be disposing of him soon. And Fohat didn’t think beyond
making his killing toys, beyond the joy he got from watching them
slaughter men, women and children.

“Fine.”

Before Bel could protest (assuming he would), I drew
my pistol and put a timed explosive round through Fohat’s new
forehead. Then I slammed the container shut before his skull blew
all over the inside of it. What it’s going to cost him to grow
that
back again gave me a moment’s satisfaction, but only a
moment’s.

I let myself out of the ship without saying another
word, got on my flyer, and threw myself into the sky to go ask my
questions to the right person. And I knew he’d be happy to chat.
The fucker always is.

Now I’m sitting in the wind, on the rock ledge just
outside the Forge-dug entrance into the mountain, overlooking the
seemingly endless expanse of the Lake below me. I don’t remember
getting here. Too tired. Too hungry. Too damaged. Too lost in
thought, my abused, addled brain endlessly replaying the last
twenty-four hours as if anything I could have done or not done
would have resulted in a different outcome.

Looking up, I watch Phobos fly across the night sky
on one of its four rounds per day, close enough to see the craters
that pock its surface. But I don’t see the new UNMAC base on its
surface, not even with my enhancements. Nor do I see the orbital
station or any of the satellites, including the mass driver (or
drivers) that tried to vaporize me. But then I wouldn’t, not from
here, since the sky here is Yod’s illusion, as is the horizon of
low mountains barely visible in the distance across the Lake. It’s
all a virtual projection, a panorama of the world Yod erased, like
a convincing scene painting all round this human game preserve, for
the benefit of the residents (prisoners?) of Haven, and anyone else
Yod lets in here. The Lake, combined with Yod’s cognitive barriers,
keep those living here from reaching it, from defeating the
illusion, though I’m sure they suspect that’s what it is,
especially since they’ve recently had visitors from the “real”
world, the outside world.

The Lake itself is peaceful now that the evening
winds have died down, its gently rippling surface sparkling in the
faint moonlight, soothing. If I wasn’t in so much pain, and so
angry, I could happily let it lull me to sleep.

Instead I just stare in a daze across kilometers of
water that very few people beyond this preserve know is here (even
though it’s right under UNMAC’s satellite eyes), appreciating the
perfection, the beauty of the illusion. But then I fix on something
that destroys it for me: From
this
side of the Lake, the Pax
Mountain is still there, still intact, not demolished by chunks of
scrap metal accelerated to meteor velocities and hurled down from
space.

And I loop into second-guessing myself again, my
choices. It is my fault? Would the Hold Keep still be there if I
hadn’t gone running back? I doubt it. I may have added another
tempting target to the field of fire, but I’m sure Earthside would
have pulverized the site anyway, as soon as they’d confirmed the
Harvester infestation.

The Harvester infestation that
I
reported to
them. In good faith.

I remember the flyover: Two of the sleeker new-drop
AAVs screamed over my head from the west just after I’d dropped
from my flyer onto the crest of the long, low mountain. I
habitually activated my visual camo, and risked a subtle hack to
ensure I wasn’t seen. But if Earthside had been tracking me at all,
it was an easy guess where I’d gone after I went radar-invisible
(and then visible invisible), especially if they believe that
Asmodeus and I are in some conspiracy together.

Let them think whatever they want, I remember
thinking. Then I went to find the son-of-a-bitch, or at least take
some satisfaction in butchering whatever Harvesters were left in
the Keep. I’d kill them all, I told myself. I’d kill them faster
than he could make new ones, before they had a chance to infect and
replicate.

I didn’t meet any resistance at all climbing down to
the cliff entrances of the Keep. Then I didn’t meet any resistance
when I actually
met
Harvesters, spread through the tunnels
to lurk like sleepwalking sentries. They simply ignored me.

I took small comfort that some were wearing Chang
Black (as if being former enemy combatants justified such a
horrific fate), but now even the animated bodies of the Pax were
carrying guns.

Putting my sword through a skull and taking a rifle
to examine, I confirmed it had been modified to fire seed rounds.
But even that act of violence brought no reaction from the drones.
Nor did splitting the skulls of several more. Every drone I
encountered completely disregarded me like I was of no consequence
whatsoever.

But close, I could hear signals. Their eyes were his
eyes.

“Are you here?” I asked the artificially-animated
dead. “Or do you plan to keep wasting my time and your drones?”

I didn’t get an answer, not right away. I found my
way in the shadows back to where I’d destroyed his last cloning
attempt, hoping I’d find another one brewing, or sign of any
equipment he might be using to accomplish the deed. But I knew he
was probably doing his copying trick using only nanotech,
introduced as a seed into an unfortunate body. There would be no
manufacturing assets to destroy, only the finished products or
half-formed works-in-progress.

And then I did find equipment. Hardware. Of a
sort.

Stacked sloppily as if for disposal in a shop-sized
chamber were a number of body-sized metal cylinders. On closer
examination, they looked like rough-cobbled versions of Hiber or
trauma pods. As I tried to hack into any internal mechanism,
slide-away panels sprung open at the right touch. The first few
were empty, just insulated metal coffins. But then I started
finding bodies inside. Pax. In restraints, gagged, some convulsing
in the throes of conversion, others just staring blankly, sensor
stalks glowing faintly behind their eyes. The ones that were still
suffering I gave efficient mercy, stabbing my knife through their
foreheads and into the growing module core, trying not to absorb
very much of their blood and tissue as I did so.