“It won’t be a gun they use,” I warn him back. “Not even a rail-gun. They’ve tried that already.”
“They’ve tried nukes already, too,” Bel worries.
The Siren’s Song is skillfully parked in a steep-cut crevice that’s barely big enough to fit it, one of many ancient fractures in the shear canyon terminus. The launches and landings remind me of an old children’s coordination game called “Operation”, as Azazel has only a few meters off either wingtip down where he cleared a relatively level spot to serve as a landing pad. From above, this semi-natural landing “bay” is hidden by a nano-fiber net that mimics the thick, pervasive green, combined with optical camouflage on the ship’s upper skin. The strong winds that scream up the canyon dawn and dusk help dissipate any telltale exhaust heat, so that’s when we try to do our flying.
When my fellows realized I’d been buried at the Keep, they signaled my flyer, and had it fly itself here, where it’s parked with the rest of our “fleet”. Bel and Azazel have set aside cave entrances to serve as their hangars, just up-slope from the Song’s dock. The caves are the result of ETE tapping, sucking the rims for permafrost and other useful elements. We’ve reinforced them to prevent collapses.
Like my own, the other flyers in their niches look very little like the salvaged Chang Kites that Bel originally cobbled them from. Our nanites have joined us with our individual rides, and have made both functional and aesthetic modifications over time. Bel’s looks dragon-like, in a deep pearlescent blood red. Lux’s is more serpentine and emerald. Bly’s resembles his former “steed”, the nano-swarm hippogriff that Chang had gifted him, lost out from under him in the shockwave that downed the first Stormcloud, in rich metallic reds and coppers.
I climb on my black Gryphon, and spin up the lift fans. The slotted articulated wings shake off the overnight ice. Using the chemical-fuel thruster jets would give me a heat signature, but I can do slow hops on fans alone, and I don’t need to go far.
I kick out into the open sky over the rim slope, turning east, and see my fellows come out to see me off. I give them a nod, and tilt into forward thrust, into the first surges of pre-morning wind.
Lucifer’s Grave is about a dozen klicks east-northeast. The crater and its plateau rim are more than three klicks across, and were easily visible rising above the forest even before they burned their defensive perimeter around it. Now it’s a glaring wound in the center of the forested valley floor. I’m still six klicks away when I start to smell the residual smoke in the air, the stink of burning green. The sun is rising over the far eastern end of Coprates, turning the sky violet. The Grave is still well in the shadow of the Spine Range beyond it, but I don’t need my enhancements to see the ugly cleared hole all around it.
I come in low over the top of the forest canopy, skimming the thickly intertwined growth. It’s mostly Graingrass in the belly of the canyon, interwoven with Bitter Apple, Rustbean and Amarette, though I have found Giant Strawberry, Wild Potato and Sweetroot, with Red Olive and Tealeaf growing at the higher elevations. Flying low not only masks me from any ground radar they may have, but spares me the full view of the destruction. I can’t help but think how many mouths that acreage may have fed.
Green life here is hardy stuff.
The thought just popped into my internal conversation, but it wasn’t a transmission, or didn’t feel like one.
If they don’t keep on top of it, it will grow over them in a few months.
Yod?
I don’t get a reply, but I don’t get any further invasive ideas.
When I’m still two klicks out, I bank and hover and hop off my ride, dropping down into the green, deciding it better to approach the base on foot than to give their batteries a flying target.
But approaching on foot turns out to be a slow, awkward weave of a dance, stepping through and over the growth, and I manage no stealth at it. I think I’m making the forest rustle like a drunken army is stumbling through it. I know a lot of that is my enhanced hearing, but Earthside will have enhanced sensors out here, remote sentries, all around their perimeter.
I figure I’m still a hundred meters from the edge of the clearing when I come across that electronic perimeter. Carefully hacking in, it feels like their sensitivity has been set to a threshold to ignore the giant insect life (no matter how scary raptor-sized genetically engineered bugs must be to them), but not low enough, I’m guessing, just to detect the jerky staggering of a Harvester-run corpse. That means they want warning of other potential enemies approaching, which is understandable given Bly’s report of their encounters with the Pax and Katar. (And Dee mentioned sniper attacks, which is curious because I can’t imagine any of the Harvesters I’ve seen having the muscle control for that. They can barely shoot straight at close range.)
I tweak the remotes to ignore me, and plod on.
I’m hit fresh with the stink of old burn just before I push through into the defoliated zone. Close up, I can see how much of the growth resisted the thermobaric blasts, needing to be crushed down by tractors. If they haven’t sprayed any kind of herbicide, I do expect the soil to bounce back richer for what they’ve incidentally plowed into it, but I still don’t fully forgive the insult to the environment, however many lives it may have saved.
Looking at it, I wonder how much of my viewpoint is skewed by my Modded immortality. If I was still in fear of my own life, or the lives of those under my command, would I have ordered the same thing if I was tasked to establish and hold a base in this green place? Functionally invulnerable, I have the luxury of an objectivity that the Normal men serving here can’t afford.
I look across the cleared zone, up the slopes of the crater. The slopes alone buy them several hundred meters, most of which wasn’t thickly overgrown to begin with, plus the high-ground advantage. Then the west rim of the crater, where they built their base and airfield, has a good kilometer wide of open plateau atop it. It’s an excellent place to build a fortress, especially against ground assault. And I’ve certainly had opportunity to test that: My fellows and I made multiple attempts to assail that crater when Asmodeus held it. Despite all of our Modded abilities, he always had more than enough warning to greet our approach, though his usual greeting was to send dozens of bots racing toward the nearest human settlements, forcing us to give up the assault and give chase. Defending the plateau and the crater beyond against anything less vulnerable than us would be a simple matter. Of course, his stronghold was ultimately vulnerable to an orbital rail-gun, but clearing some forest isn’t any protection against that, assuming Asmodeus builds another one of his own.
Up on the outer edge of the plateau, I can see another perimeter of remote batteries, fortifying the heights from all directions. I don’t have the sight-line from here to see the actual facilities, so I can’t imagine how a sniper could get a shot at anyone from a position down here in the valley floor, not even if they were up in the canopy. Either the personnel that were targeted were working on the perimeter clearing or the batteries, or their attackers had much higher ground. The nearest is the Spine, and that’s at least three klicks out, a nearly impossible shot even with the lower gravity.
Unless the shooter and his weapon were Modded.
Asmodeus. The fucker was doing the shooting himself. Casual murder for his idle amusement, and to keep his targets on edge enough to play into whatever he has planned.
I feel the crater guns turn on me, lock on me. I’ve been seen.
My armor shifts automatically from default black to match the blasted environment behind me, but the guns continue to track me as I circle the outer edge of the cleared perimeter. So I show myself, show my empty hands, let them see that I’m not a corpse drone, and dare them to take a shot. I don’t try to force a hack to slave the turrets, but I could (unless they’ve simplified and hard-wired fire control, or actually have live gunners in each turret).
They don’t shoot, but they don’t do anything else. I step forward, out onto the crushed and burned fo
rest, and slowly cross about a third of it as the guns keep tracking me. Then I stop, well out in the open. And wait.
“What are you doing here, Colonel?” Jackson finally comes over a common link channel, icy calm.
“I came to ask you that same question,” I send back.
“And why would I share that with you?”
“Because while I was busy digging myself out of that crater that used to be the Pax stronghold, I had a bit of an epiphany,” I decide to throw him a little honesty. “And I’m not willing to just sit back and let you march a bunch of under-trained children into whatever trap Asmodeus has been preparing for them.”
“Was Asmodeus with you at the Pax site?” he ignores my warning in favor of his own priority.
“He was. Though I expect it was another clone.”
“Did he dig himself out as well?”
“Not that I’m aware of. But if he was a clone, he might not have bothered.”
“So he may still be there?”
I don’t answer that, but I realize I may have just stupidly accelerated his timeframe.
“He’s expecting you to send boots in,” I repeat my warning. “Why do you think he’s given up using aircraft and heavy bots in favor of what’s clearly an antipersonnel weapon?”
Now I don’t get a reply. But after a few minutes, I hear engines spinning up. AAVs. The sun has cleared the crest of the Spine. Dust blasts over the edges of the plateau.
What little chatter I hear is simplified and coded.
“Colonel Jackson… What are you doing?” I ask like I’ve caught a child doing something innocently destructive.
He doesn’t answer me until two ships lift off and fly northeast, fast and low.
“If you’d like a proper look, feel free to get as close as you like.”
I quickly lose sight of the aircraft, but can hear their jets get steadily further away. I can easily guess where they’re going, but I’m worried what they’re…
Blast from the past, I get that internal voice again. They call it “Lights Out”. Not very creative.
All chatter from the base goes silent. In fact, I feel everything power down—batteries, sentries…
You’ll be fine, the voice assures as I’m thinking I should be running. You may feel a little tingle.
Six minutes later, I do feel a tingle. It’s a wave of EMR, washing over me. It barely fuzzes my vision and hearing, but I expect the effects would have been a lot more profound if I was standing wherever Zero was. And I’m assuming Zero was the former Pax Mountain.
EMP, the voice tells me what I’ve already figured out.
“Dee?” I guess.
I’m trying a new low-frequency flash comm system, he confirms. They’ve gotten good at detecting our usual signals. They can even detect us at close range now. That’s how they knew you were coming, how they tracked you through your cloak. They locked on as soon as you crossed their perimeter. Hacking doesn’t help—they’re on a separate hardwired network.
“What are they doing?”
They learned fast from the sample drone modules. They can be disabled by a strong EMP, even if you can’t be. They brought the weapon—a prototype—to test against the ETE, but decided this was a better first use. They think it will clear the primary occupied zone in the North Blade of all active Harvesters. Then they plan to move in, look for Asmodeus.
Idiots.
“No reason to believe that wasn’t a clone.”
They are assuming it may have been. But they’re hoping to salvage tissue samples to study how he manages it—that’s been made a top priority. If possible, they’d like to recover an intact brain module. They hope to be able to use it to hack him, track him.
Smarter. But still…
“And how are they going to find him in that mess, assuming there’s anything left to find?”
But I think he already told me that.
If he’s regenerating, or still connected to his primary, they think he’ll be detectable with their new equipment, but so far it only works within a hundred meters, less if he’s buried. So they’re moving in a full company to do a grid sweep. They’re hoping numbers combined with air support will keep them safe.
Fuck.
Since they just saw that you managed to dig yourself out, they figure they have a very small window to catch him, assuming he didn’t beat you out, he lets me know my earlier guess was right.
“I dug out three days ago,” I argue.
It’s taken them this long to get the detection gear working and portable, and to stage the necessary ships and personnel. In the meantime, they’ve been monitoring the site by satellite, but obviously that’s limited to heat and visual. That’s how we were able to go looking for you in the dark just by masking our heat and blending in with the rocks. But starting two days ago, they’ve been risking sending out recon parties to planting their detectors closer in. If they’d managed it sooner, they might have caught our rescue efforts.
“If they’d managed it sooner, they might have detected Asmodeus digging himself out,” I grumble.
We were on-site every night since the bombardment, Dee gives me the same reassurance that Bel and Bly and Lux and Azazel have. We didn’t detect any sign of him. We were lucky we found you.
I expect Yod had something to do with that.
“More likely he was a clone, then. Disposable.”
Then they may have a shot at finding what they’re looking for. Once they pick up on anything promising, they’ll fly in digging equipment.
A company of troops, support aircraft and skilled technical personnel, all in one spot, all out in the open.
I get hit by a very bad thought. Asmodeus bad.
“When is the ground force inserting?” I need to know.
Right now.
I feel the base systems come back online now that the EMP has done its work. I hear more coded chatter that I assume are go orders. I hear engines spin up, blasting dust over the edges of the plateau.
“I think I know what those tubes are for.”
I start running northwest.
Chapter 5: A War Like Me
More aircraft lift off from the crater base behind me: Old and new gen ASVs and AAVs, and something like an AAV that looks modified to hold more of either cargo or troop capacity. I notice some have been roughly repainted to match the green rather than the rust and ochre desert. They blow up a storm of dust and exhaust steam that crosses over my head, turning the forest into a tropical jungle for a few seconds, then leaving me well behind. I find myself chasing that heat trail as fast as I can run.
I don’t dare use my flyer, for fear they’d just shoot me down. In the green, I have a chance of coming up on them unseen, especially if Dee’s right (Dee is almost always right) and they can only detect my Mods within a hundred meters. I’m afraid that by the time I get there and cross their detection threshold, they’ll already be too busy to give me much attention.
My armor shifts schemes to match the forest as I run.
It’s more than twelve klicks to the Pax Mountain (now more appropriately the Pax Crater), to where the entrance to the approach canyon used to be. I quickly find the plowed “road” that Earthside’s been building for their patrols. I assume they would have used it for this mission, saved some of the fuel that the ETE have been doling out by marching the troops in instead of flying them, but I put them in a hurry as soon as I showed my face and proved that someone had dug out of their latest attempt to slay the monsters of their nightmares. I don’t dare use that road myself as it will make me more visible, but I run parallel to it for awhile, just staying clear of the tangle of uprooted rotting growth that’s been shoved to either side of the five-meter-wide swath.
In five klicks, I round the western tip of the Spine Range, officially crossing the boundary into the North Blade, roughly marked by the rise of a buried Feed Line. It’s taken me fifteen precious minutes, slowed by the weaving and jumping I have to do to get through the thick foliage. (The ove
rgrown Graingrass here reminds me less of bamboo and more like the crabgrass I used to weed out of my parents’ gardens when I was a kid, assuming I’m about ant-sized in relative scale.) A small consolation is that I haven’t heard any gunfire or explosions up ahead. Yet.
Even though I’ve only been in the region for less than a year now, I feel like I’ve been running through this tangled mesh of growth for decades. It seems like all we’ve been doing—running from fight to fight, unable to use our flyers in proximity to any shooting for fear that Earthside may target us from orbit. The only significant “break” we had from that was during the nearly two weeks that Asmodeus had us trapped in the natural cave maze that permeates the base slopes of the Grave crater. Or used to, before the UN orbital rail-gun gutted the crater—from up-close personal experience, I expect most of those tunnels were collapsed by the shockwave. If not, Earthside still has a viable tunnel network right under their new base, something Asmodeus may be able to exploit in the future. I would certainly hope they thoroughly scanned the site before they started building on it, but now I get a whole new sinking in my gut. And then I’m freshly angry, wondering how long I’m going to be having to protect the ungrateful small-minded monsters from their own stupidity.
I should be better at moving through this living mesh by now. If I had my sword, I could hack a path, but then their aircraft might see the forest giving way, giving me away.
I get distracted enough by dwelling on the wishes and what-ifs that I get whacked in the face by a branch, hard enough to clothesline me backwards. My boots slip out from under me on the slick undergrowth and I go skidding on my armored ass. I’ve got just enough objectivity left under my rage that I get a good laugh at my own expense, though anybody watching would probably think I’d lost the last of my sanity.
Then I drag myself up and start running again.
After another fifteen minutes, I’m running up the rise of a hill in my path. It gets me above the taller green, so I have to stay low, but it gives me a view of the blasted mountain.
The God Mars Book Six: Valhalla I Am Coming Page 11