“He hasn’t been himself…” Archer finally admits, kneeling beside me, clearly terrified. “He…”
“How long?” I need to know.
“A few days…”
I hear the ping again. I’ve found the source. I try to hack in, to insert myself into whatever’s in Sower’s limbic system. Sower starts fully convulsing, eyes rolled back. He’s having what looks like a grand mal seizure. All I can do is keep him from smashing his brains out on the rock floor.
“I can’t get in,” Lux lets me know she’s having the same problem. “It’s too simple.”
It is: Just a basic nanomachine designed to prod his emotional responses with micro-voltage pulses. It could have been introduced in any of a dozen ways. But now the power is spiking, shorting…
I need to get in, I need to rip it out of his skull, but without nanosurgical tools, I’d just be killing him myself (and for an instant, I feel like I should, that it would be better if I did). But then pyrrhic mercy does it for me: I can feel the device burst in his midbrain like a tiny bomb, as if it was designed to upon discovery. Blood gushes out of Sower’s nostrils, and he goes still, his life gurgling and rattling out of him as we hold him. His wife wails and collapses in the arms of the green-suited Hunters.
I very badly need something to kill right now.
“We need to search the entire facility,” I tell the crushed Archer, jarring him back to action. “We need to do it now. We need to gather everyone and check them.”
He hesitates, but then gets to his duty, rallies his fighters.
“Expect Harvesters,” I tell him as an afterthought.
I ease Sower’s body down onto the cold stone, and close his eyes. Another friend, another good man who trusted me, dead by that sick resurrected motherfucker.
I almost hope Asmodeus has a lot more clones, because I want to enjoy butchering him as many times as I can.
“Fan out,” I tell Lux and Bly, my voice barely more than a growl. “Search deep. The bastard will be hidden deep.”
Under other circumstances, I would be marveling at the neatly cut labyrinth that is the Pax Hold Keep. I’ve wondered if the squared-off tunnels and more naturally-shaped chambers—dug out when the ETE were still actively involved in providing aid to the survivor groups—were excavated by their tapping machinery or by their Tools. (Sower had told us that the Keep was dug decades ago. Did the ETE have the ability to generate selective repulsor fields and manipulate molecular bonding forces that long ago?)
But now, the magnificent shelter has become a dark, eerie place as we advance into the more remote sections. Shifting to my night vision Mod only makes it look more threatening.
(“Abandon hope, ye who enter here,” comes involuntarily to mind as we descend.)
Unwilling to simply give over the protection of their own to strange outsiders, no matter the risk, the Pax Hunters put their metal masks on and lead the way with their spears, bows and crossbows.
“Your target is here,” I remind them needlessly, jabbing a gloved finger straight at the base of my nose, then behind my ear. “Smaller than a man’s fist. And stay away from the mouth.”
But that’s not the only vector anymore, as Asmodeus recently showed us (and at great cost).
“And their guns,” I hear Bly add, accompanying his own recon. “Anyone gets hit by anything other than a bullet, best give mercy quick.”
“And sever the head, or the body will still reanimate,” Lux finishes our grim mission brief.
But the Pax all know this already. Asmodeus has given them too much practical experience.
“Archer,” I take him aside. “Do you know where Sower has been over the last few days? Where does he sleep? Has he been anywhere alone?”
“Hard to say, but I doubt he had reason to go deep. His chamber is not far from Council, and the Council has been staying together since the bots came.” He cocks his masked head back the way we came.
Which means Asmodeus likely got to him in a more populated and traveled section. If so, he could have gotten to a lot more, especially if he’s developed a more subtle form of infection and conversion.
My growing dread is interrupted by shouting and screaming from somewhere up ahead—it’s hard to tell where or how far because of the way the tunnels carry sound, not even with my enhancements. But then people—civilians—come running toward us.
“Contain them!” I try to order. “They need to be checked!”
But the Hunters’ priority is elsewhere. They let the families run through our staggered line, out for the exits, as they ready their arrows for whatever drove the panic. I count nearly two dozen as they flee past me, and know this likely isn’t the only such flight. Soon I hear Bly and Lux in my head, trying to slow more terrified dashes. Unless they’re all coming from the same place, we have threats in multiple locations.
“Twenty meters back!” one of the women stops just long enough to tell Archer. “Sick! Eyes glowing! Tried to bite, but…”
“Did anyone get hurt?”
“It’s Tammer Cutter… And Sil…” she breathlessly rattles off names. “More… I couldn’t see…”
“Gather your family and the others out in the courtyard,” Archer orders her. “Check everyone for wounds, even small ones.”
She swallows her fear and does what she’s told.
We move forward, cautiously.
The Harvester control modules build themselves from their injected seeds using the victim’s brain, bone and blood as raw materials, and there’s one small blessing to that horror: It means they aren’t metal-cased, aren’t armored, so a well-placed arrow or blade can destroy their operating mechanisms. But even disabled, the seeds that they in turn produce to infect others stay viable in their injector magazines, posing a lasting hazard until the heads are carefully severed and burned (or the whole body is).
I have no doubt that the Pax Hunter Warriors could deal with a Harvester attack in the open forest, but these tunnels are another matter. And if the Harvesters are armed with seed launching guns like they were against the Katar, this could be a slaughter—there’s no cover, and the Pax wear very little armor.
Worse, the sleek, long-limbed Pax don’t move nearly as gracefully in these tight spaces. I doubt they’ve had much practice. This is supposed to be their safest place, the Hold they naturally fell back to when the bots—and then the Harvesters—began attacking their Steads in the open forest. The haven we promised we’d help protect. But somehow the monster has found his way in.
We pass a large, long chamber that has narrow slit openings to daylight. It smells musty, like a wetland back on Earth, and it’s filled with manmade pools of standing water. I see random movement intermittently disturb the otherwise still surface. These must be the dragonfly breeding facilities I’ve heard of—another marvel of their science and engineering for the benefit of everyone living here, now reduced to just one more sinister dark space by these circumstances.
The Pax do a quick and thankfully uneventful sweep, and we move on.
As I follow closely behind Archer’s point fighters, this is a special hell for me, because the Harvesters pose absolutely no danger to me or any of the other Modded, but the slightest nick of a seed injector or dart guarantees a slow agonizing death for these people, unless someone spares them with a quicker one. But—as always—they won’t run, won’t let us do their fighting for them. I have to respect their bravery, their sense of honor, but that doesn’t make stomaching their deaths any easier (especially since Asmodeus is only killing them to make me suffer).
The first attack comes as a blur. I’d let myself get distracted, wallowing in my toxic rage. It’s a woman in plain work-greens. She lunges out of a side-chamber like she’s been thrown, trying to tackle one of the leader Hunters. He’s quick, and blocks her with his bow, holds her off while he hesitates long enough to make sure that this isn’t just another panicked civilian. But when her jaw dislocates to jab the injector array at him as if she’s vomiting it, he
uses the arrow he had nocked to stab up under her jaw.
It has no effect, other than to spray him with her blood. While an arrow fired from a thirty to forty kilo draw weight bow should be able to penetrate the cellulose shell of a Harvester module, an arrow stabbed by hand at close range might not be able to do the job. Thankfully, one of the other Hunters responds with his own bow, and sinks a shaft into her ear.
The woman’s skull shorts and pops, and she convulses for a few seconds before dropping like a cut marionette.
Now that I can see her better, she was perhaps forty Standard, weathered and lean. Her jaw is still forced open way too wide by the injector that protrudes from her mouth. Her blank eyes glow dimly red for a moment, then fade.
“Cass Sower,” Archer mourns, recognizing. His mask looks up at me. “The Leder’s daughter.”
Was she the vector that infected him? I shift my vision to T-wave and scan, but the cruel machine in her skull looks just like all the others I’ve seen.
“Check him!” Archer is already ordering his men to examine the one she attacked. I play back my visual memory. It doesn’t look like the injector made contact. And blood, as far as we know, isn’t a vector—the infection is injected mechanically. Or it has been so far.
I hear a sickeningly familiar shuffle, and another shape comes at us from down the tunnel. I dash past the Pax line, sword ready, but also hesitate to be sure of my target. I see the red glow in the eyes, hear the faint command signal, smell death, bring my blade down. The skull splits, the module bursts, the body drops at my feet. I don’t stop to look. I can hear more coming, see the staggering ghostly shadows in my night vision.
“Choke point! Here!” I order them to hold the position like I have the authority to, then run ahead.
In my head, Bly and Lux and reporting encounters from their sections as well. If fully-converted Harvesters take three days from infection to module completion, that means Asmodeus may have started this as he was launching his attack on Katar, using that as a distraction to draw us away from here. Or perhaps he was here even before that, since he did have several converted Pax in the ranks of Harvesters he threw at the Katar as they fled from his rail-gun.
Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to cull much intel from Fohat since we contained his fallen body and let his blasted brain start to rebuild itself. So far Bel’s only managed to recover just enough from his digitized backup memories to bring us here. But even if we allowed Fohat’s brain to fully regenerate, let him regain consciousness, I doubt Asmodeus would have let him know anything truly useful, or he wouldn’t have left his body for us to take.
Another drone comes running at me sloppily in the dark. I know that the sensor stalks that penetrate into their eyes can see beyond the visual spectrum; that they probably lock on heat and motion, then a preset attack algorithm is triggered when they detect a vulnerable target. In my own night vision, this one looks like a young boy. His eyes glow red and his mouth gapes wide as he throws himself at me. I impale his skull on the tip of my blade, and twist until the module shatters. I don’t have time to grieve what I’ve done. I can only let his body drop free of my sword, step over him and meet two more.
The tunnel here is almost too narrow for long swords, so I have to thrust, twist, repeat.
Small blessing: the drones we’ve seen so far don’t have guns, but I expect the reason for that is they’ve all been converted from the Pax, who have no guns as far as I’ve seen. We still haven’t seen a single drone wearing Chang’s black uniforms, no sign of a potential non-Pax “Vector Zero,” unless an infected Pax brought this back home, either unknowingly or under Asmodeus’ control.
I wish I had a proper map of this maze. Maybe I could find Asmodeus’ access point, guess where he might be holed up (assuming he’s even here at all). Lux and Bly send me enough data to get a rough sense of where the Harvesters are being encountered, but this is still a blind labyrinth for us. They could well slip in behind us, a…
I hear it as I’m thinking about it: Sounds of violence from behind me, bows and swords against flesh and bone. I shouldn’t have left the Hunters. I turn back to…
You shouldn’t have left them.
It’s Asmodeus, in my head. I reach out, try to find his signal.
“But then you never were a team player, not when you were being honest.”
That wasn’t in my head. That was in my ears, echoing in the tunnels. But it doesn’t sound right. Raspy. Weak. Like he’s hurt.
“That’s right, sweet thing,” he taunts as I run toward the sound. “This way… I have another present for you.”
I find a chamber with a shaft of light lancing down through the middle of it. There’s a table in the glow, and sitting up on it is a male in Pax Hunter gear, mask and all. A shaky hand reaches up and lowers the hand-hammered Mycenaean-style mask of a journeyman warrior. The room is thick with the stink of death.
“You’re early. I’m not done yet.”
It’s… It’s Asmodeus, but it isn’t. I can see him in the face, a definite resemblance, but not really him—like he’s part someone else. And the hair and beard don’t match. And his eyes glow red—corpse eyes with Harvester stalks.
“Still, you get the idea.”
I charge forward, run my blade up under his jaw and out the back of his skull, twist, then rip upwards until I split his head apart, flinging his mask into the stone ceiling. Then I chop down quick into the remains of the module, so hard my blade winds up halfway down through his sternum. I get washed in blood that smells like rotten meat. I step back, and the split body sprawls back across the table.
“Hey! I spent days on that…” he complains like I’ve just ruined an idle art project. But his voice still isn’t in my head. It’s behind me, now sounding small and higher-pitched. I spin, only to face a straw-haired little girl, maybe seven Standard. Her face is corpse-blank, her eyes glow, but she doesn’t try to attack me.
“Okay, I didn’t really spend days on it. I just program it and it makes itself.”
His voice—distorted and disturbingly childlike—is coming out of her mouth, which just hangs open limply. He’s not making her speak, he’s got a speaker inside of her. He’s just digitally mimicking a child’s voice.
“You’ve probably figured out that I gave you Fuckhead, left his spectacularly-lobotomized body for you to collect. Nothing sinister. I just couldn’t stand the guy anymore. Can you blame me? I mean, what a self-obsessed dick. No social skills whatsoever. And impressively stupid for a smart guy. He was easy. All I had to do was give him ideas, and watch him work. He had no idea I was downloading all of his nanotech skills. I wonder why Chang never thought of that? We could have ditched the asshole ages ago. Maybe he just wanted the company. Not that Fuckhead was ever any kind of good company. He just made you want to rip off his head and shove it up his ass, every time he opened his mouth. Did I mention no social skills? Or social smarts: After I’d milked him for everything he knew, I just idly dropped the hint that maybe he should get out there and have some fun in person for a change; get out of the lab, get back on the horse, get the fuck over when your girlfriend filled him full of his own bots’ bullets. I was like his own personal Doctor Phil. Remember Doctor Phil? Anyway, the stupid shit had no idea I was setting him up—he went with a fucking smile. If one of your Super Friends didn’t take him out, my decoy nuke would have left his bones for you to recover and play with. You’re welcome. I hope you’re having fun hurting him. Maybe you can flash me some video. It’s not like we get any Sat or Net TV on this rock. I miss my Stories.”
It’s sick, even for him: using a little girl’s corpse as a radio.
“So back to the game in progress: As you can see, I’m a lot more creative than he was with those skills. These Harvester things have sooo much potential, especially when you add in select features from our Mods. They don’t even need to eat the brain to take over the body, as you saw with the King of All Hippies back there. That was just a simple medial-temporal in
terface, something to let me poke his limbic system. On the other hand, the one you just took your famous anger management issues out on was much more advanced. As you probably noticed, I was hacking his DNA, making him into another Mini-Me. Well, more like a satellite office.”
“And where are you?” I ask the obvious question, hoping against hope that he’ll bite just to toy with me in person.
“That’s the real beauty of all this, old friend: I don’t have to be anywhere anymore! I’m just a made-up memory set, not really much different than what’s walking around in that Aryan action-figure that thinks it’s Dee. Or any of the rest of you, for that matter. Digital memories implanted in a DNA-jacked meat suit, then stuffed full of Super Friends upgrades. It’s just that my memories are so unconvincing that I can’t fool myself. I know I’m not a real boy, just a cheap copy. So why hang on to that pathetic illusion? I’m really nothing more than hardware and software walking around inside cloned meat, right? And hardware and software can be copied, upgraded… I mean, that’s what we do—planned obsolescence and all… You need the newest model every few years… I just needed the know-how. Turns out, that was also just software. I just had to hack the files out of Fuckhead’s head. And Chang’s, before he went boom with his ship. Easy-peasy. Instant multiple PhD. And not one dollar wasted on tuition. How cool is that?”
I hope he’s bluffing, but I know he’s not. The thought—the potential—that he has all of Fohat’s and Chang’s knowledge of our science and engineering is crushing. But if he has the potential…
“So why this?” I try appealing to his ego. “Little games with meaningless meat? When you could do so much more? Or so you say.”
“Because it’s fun,” he answers like he was hoping for the question. (The effect of his childlike rant is especially creepy coming out of the mouth of a dead child, which I’m sure is intentional.) “And fun is definitely in my programming. All over it, in fact. It’s my mission statement. Fucking. Killing. Destruction and general mayhem. Shocking the shit out of the so-called moral high-ground. And you. Fucking with you is apparently my prime directive. Somebody made me just for that purpose. I have no idea who. I honestly don’t think it was Chang—he certainly had the skills, and he was a crazy-ass megalomaniac, but I’m out of his league. I always got the impression I was a gift he wasn’t crazy about accepting. And it definitely wasn’t Fuckhead—I’ve been all over that sick fuck’s memory files, and he didn’t make me either. So who? Yod, maybe? Granted, I don’t know much about that particular mad-scientist’s wet dream, but I heard you two were best buds… Why would he-she-it-whatever do me to you?”
The God Mars Book Six: Valhalla I Am Coming Page 2