I watch the base batteries lock and shred a few of the drones they can get a clear shot at in the panic. It’s definitely not surgical, and burns a lot of ammo chewing the corpse bodies apart until they can’t fight anymore. Some of the aircraft manage similar but even sloppier barrages with their turrets.
The broken trooper force is fleeing in a widespread stampede from the airfield to the nearest bunker airlock. Thankfully, some have the bravery left to carry wounded, or try to hold ground long enough to cover their fellows, but they’re still not shooting straight enough. However Asmodeus hacked their AI targeting, it must be proving tough to undo.
I’m halfway to them, spending my remaining ammo sparingly on the highest-threat targets (first those with launchers; then those getting in slop-shot range of the largest clusters of troopers, or to those lugging casualties), when I see fresh panic: The airlocks have been locked-down from inside, probably by command order. They’re not letting anyone in.
Rifle fire comes from behind me, picking off more drones. I turn just long enough to see that Horton and Lyra have made the plateau rim, and are hunkered into the rocks.
“Watch your backs!” I warn them over their links. “He’s got these things buried all over!”
Kali, without a gun, charges into the nearest Harvester and sinks her claws up under jaw and rips its head off. Then she takes its weapon, only to throw it down in frustration.
“Empty!”
Good to know the drones still free-fire until they piss themselves dry. But if they can get within injector-range…
I pop one a dozen meters away from her, and she’s on it before it falls, grabs that weapon. And smashes it into the rocks with a scream of rage.
“Darts! Fuck!”
She gets lucky on a third drone—it still has some actual ammo left, if only because a lucky shot shattered its trigger arm. She jerks the gun away, and the arm almost comes off at the elbow. She puts one round into the skull at muzzle-contact range, just to make sure it’s effective, then starts shooting at whatever she can get a line on.
“Horton!” I hear Lyra shout. “Your six!”
I see them both shooting back down slope the way they came, but not for long. Then they go back to trying to cover the vulnerable evacuees. They’ve formed up on the bulldozed berm pushed up as a shield wall to keep jetwash off the base structures. Some have resorted to side arms, since their main battle weapons are still being stubbornly useless. A few try grenades, but get shouted down because more of their own are still running to their line, caught out in the open.
Kali and I get between that line and the approaching drones. A lot of them have been shot to the point that I can’t imagine how they’re still walking. Curious, I use up a few precious shells trying to hit major long-bones, only to hear my rounds ping off metal inside the meat.
“He’s upgraded them!” I warn. The nanites must be set to armor the skeleton, maybe even build a secondary motor system to take over when the muscles fail. The conversion would take time, but these drones have been buried in the ground for a few weeks now.
But it’s not all of them: Most still blow apart like flesh and bone. (I remember Asmodeus saying that he had several different “grades” for his own peripheral clones, from disposable meat to near-immortal full-Mod. Maybe he’s done that same with his “soldiers”.) And he hasn’t armored the skulls, not enough to stop UNMAC-issue ball alloy. (Not yet. I expect we’ll see that soon enough.)
There’s shouting and screaming from behind me. Harvesters are coming over the top of the base structures, having somehow gotten through the battery defenses, and they’re dropping down behind the line, between the troopers and the barred airlocks.
I’m out of ammo. So is Kali. We lock eyes for a fraction, and dash for the berm. We leap over, rip the nearest ICW out of the nearest stunned trooper’s hands, and hack into the targeting system. But this time, I’m not just releasing the weapon to manual. We each aim for the brainstem of a Harvester, lock in the target on the weapon’s standard body graphic, and send the code as an update to every other ICW on the line.
Kali doesn’t wait the few seconds for the update to take. She starts popping heads. I get the load confirmation, and shout over the troopers’ link channel:
“Targeting recalibrated! Weapons free!”
A few get the hint when they see me fire without sights and pop a Harvester clean through the nose. As soon as those troopers are scoring hits, others join in. Then all I have to do is call targets, make sure they don’t let any slip in on our flanks.
Now that the new-drops are all instant sharpshooters, it doesn’t take long to secure the area.
I start giving orders to clear the rest of the perimeter when I start seeing guns turn on me. And on Kali, who’s up on the bunker roof. It’s not every trooper—some outright refuse to point their weapons at us—but it’s enough to prove that saving their asses changed very little.
“Ungrateful motherfuckers,” Kali growls at them, dropping her borrowed ICW like so much worthless junk. Her skin shifts back to blue. This gets the guns on her to back up a few centimeters. I can almost hear their armor rattle, they’re shaking so badly. “Next time, I’m just going to watch you stupid shits get yourselves slaughtered.”
Right in front of them, she fades away, leaving her silver eyes and her bright fangy grin as the last parts of her to stay visible, Cheshire Cat style. Then she’s gone like she vaporized into thin air. I try my enhancements, but can’t read her on heat, motion or EMR. Apparently she also got upgraded camouflage Mods from her contact with Chang. There’s not even sound or any visible disturbance of the terrain to reveal her movements.
One of the troopers gets the nerve to skittishly step forward and prod the barrel-array of his weapon into the empty space where she was. I almost expect him to lose a hand (or worse), but even swinging his gun and then his weak arm around, he bumps into nothing but air. A few other armor suits join him in the bizarre blind man’s dance, to equal lack of result. She’s gone.
Once the troopers get over this freshest moment of panic that the scary blue monster just vanished in the middle of them like a hologram turned off, the guns that were pointed at her add to the guns pointed at me.
Ungrateful motherfuckers.
I look across the plateau, see Lyra and Horton standing in the rocks where they’d been shooting from. Lyra looks paler than usual under her mask, her big eyes wide with worry. Horton gives me a look of pure disgust, and makes a show of dropping his weapon like it’s covered in shit. He gives me a nod, then he turns and walks off without a word, back down slope, back towards where the Cast are waiting, tearing his link gear out of his L-As and throwing it away.
I scan the shivering suits of armor aiming guns at me like that gives them any kind of power in this situation, and I decide to forgo the more “demonstrative” lessons I could teach them in favor of a subtler one: I hack and disable their smart guns, using the algorithm that Dee had given me to hopelessly lock them. I know this leaves them vulnerable if there’s still an active threat nearby, but like Kali, I find I’m not caring about that so much anymore.
They all see the malfunction alerts flash in their HUD sight graphics, but several try pulling their useless triggers anyway. More than one tries shaking or slapping the gun like that will have any effect. When they finally realize that they’re suddenly mostly unarmed, they start nervously backing away from me, almost tripping over each other as they do. But they’re still locked out of their own base—they have no place to go, no shelter.
“He’s not going to hurt you!” Lyra shouts at them in my defense, barely reining in her disgust. “He just saved all of us!”
Escalating the madness, the base turrets turn on me next, even though their own people are in the line of fire. I try a quick hack attempt, confirming that the base defenses have all been taken off network, hardwired to their human operators, so someone like me can’t do exactly what I’m trying to.
“This is Colonel
Burns,” his sickening voice comes over the trooper channels. “You will all stand down, surrender your weapons, and wait to be processed and cleared.”
And then it hits me: The troopers aren’t just incidentally in the way of the turret guns that are aimed at me. The turrets are aiming at them as well. Because they could all potentially be infected, compromised.
I hear the junior officers protest that they have wounded, that they need medics and trauma pods. They get no response.
“Colonel Burns,” I dare intrude on the channel. “The Harvester infection isn’t contagious until the modules form and activate. That gives you three days before any of these people who may have been injected becomes a threat. Contain them until you clear them, but get the wounded triaged.”
“Colonel Burns, he’s telling the truth,” Lyra stands up for me again.
But I know what Burns and his like are thinking: I only saved these troopers from slaughter so they could come home and infect their fellows.
“That’s not the only risk, Colonel Ram,” he comes back at me. I can almost see him smirk. “I think you know what I’m talking about.”
“Colonel Burns, this is Colonel Halley,” I hear a welcome voice before I can solve what exactly he’s accusing me of. “I’m willing to take the risk. I can set up shelters, a field hospital.”
There’s another long silence on the link. Finally:
“Go ahead, Colonel Halley,” Burns agrees with little enthusiasm. “But no one enters the secure facilities until after they’ve cleared the established quarantine period.”
And that means he intends to leave these people out here for three days, AP guns pointed at them, so he can see how many of them he needs to have killed.
I have a wicked, sick thought: If Asmodeus thought this far ahead, he would have simply pre-programmed the Harvester seeds to stay dormant, to hide and wait out the quarantine. And if he decided to use tech similar to what he put in Leder Sower, it could go undetected indefinitely…
…and I was stupid enough to tell them such nightmares exist. (Is that what Burns was implying I knew about?) I’m suddenly sure they’re imagining an army of truly mind-controlled sleeper agents infiltrating the UNMAC ranks, secretly spreading themselves, furthering their master’s declared agenda to get himself to Earth. And how far will they go to protect themselves—to protect everyone on Earth—from that potentially very real threat? Will they simply kill anyone they even suspect has been compromised? Will they just sterilize the planet with the nukes they’ve been hauling across space?
Lyra pushes her way through the paralyzed, helpless, beaten line to join me, demonstrating her lack of fear by standing by my side as we wait for Doc Halley’s med team to arrive. From where I am, I count barely eighty troopers lucky enough to have made it back from what I’m sure is going to get spun in history as the Battle of Pax Mountain, and nearly a third of those are being cared for with gunshot, frag and blast trauma. (Any hit with darts may not be showing obvious injury—Horton didn’t—and may not be eager to reveal their condition, having seen the fate of their fellows, despite the unavoidable alternative.)
“How many deployed to the Pax Mountain?” I ask Lyra off-channel, my wrath wanting a proper accounting of what Burns’ and Jackson’s incompetence (and Earthside’s) has cost.
“A full company, plus supports. About a hundred and eighty personnel, not including the flight crews.”
My heart sinks into my gut. Unless they flew some out to Melas Two, my count here says they lost more than half of the ground force they fielded today, plus six ships that I personally saw go down.
(And if I wasn’t here today, if I’d stayed sulking in my cave, how many more would be dead?)
I scan across the field of wounded and beaten, a still-burning AAV collapsing into itself on its pad behind them, and I spot Corso, standing over a sobbing trooper, apparently uninjured herself, glaring at me like this is my fault. And in this perfect, terrible moment, I know that I can’t save these people, because they’d rather die than let me.
Asmodeus’ gleeful words echo in my head:
“They’ve never seen a war like me.”
Chapter 7: Empty Rituals
I go ahead and unlock the troopers’ weapons. They don’t bother to try to raise them against me again. But I do hear intermittent bursts of gunfire in the distance, probably cleaning up any remaining drones wandering the perimeter.
While we wait, the troopers do their best to stabilize their wounded. The ragtag group that Lyra, Horton and I led out of the massacre comes dragging up the crater slope to join us. It takes both of the surviving civilian aids to carry Ryan, and then they actually expect someone will give him priority treatment, protesting like spoiled, entitled, sheltered elitists, oblivious to the suffering of the dozens of more seriously wounded around them. One of the troopers finally graces them with a spare survival blanket so Ryan doesn’t have to be lain down on bare gravel.
I consider going to help with first aid, but I figure none of the new drops will let me anywhere near them, much less lay hands on them. They continue to keep their distance, keep a nervous eye on me as the turrets stay pointed at us all.
It takes forty agonizing minutes for Halley’s flight to arrive. She doesn’t wait for confirmation that the area is clear. She and her team jump out of her AAV the instant it touches down, and start triage as soon as they can run to the wounded. She sees me and shoots me a quick look through the visor of her bio suit that I can’t read, but she doesn’t greet me or say anything to me, just gets to working on the more seriously hurt. Others start unloading portable shelters, and finding ground on our side of the protective berm to stake down and inflate them.
Only then does anyone come out of the base: A squad of fresh H-A shells files out of the nearest airlocks, immediately pointing manual weapons at their own people, ordering them to begin surrendering their guns. The troopers who can still stand queue up to do so reluctantly, looking over their shoulders for further attack (and this would be an excellent time for another wave of Harvesters to hit, assuming Asmodeus has any left). Once disarmed, they get herded into rough parade ranks, to wait for the next step in whatever “protocol” they need to endure.
As that gets well underway, another figure steps out through the locks, this one in a black and gold pilot’s pressure suit. I see colonel’s birds. I don’t need to read his name-badge to know who it is. He steps up to Lyra and I, but stops at what he must have been told is a “safe distance”.
“Colonel Ram, you will come with me,” Jackson orders. I expected him to be more smug about it, but he’s tense, curt. Then he turns to Lyra. “You, too, Specialist Jameson.”
The confirmation that she has indeed enlisted in this circus of an army makes me freshly sick. I wonder what she was thinking, what she felt she needed to do. Or did they give her no choice?
Lyra surrenders her rifle to the guard squad as we pass through the space they make for us. No one moves to take my pistol and knife until we get to the airlock, and then one of the H-A suits produces a containment box to put them in. Then we get cycled through the airlock, just Lyra and I. More guns are waiting for us on the other side, also sealed in H-As.
So far, from what I can see of the facility, it’s far more cramped than the Melas bunkers, and has the same kind of odd internal structure as the Leviathan vehicle we’d used to meet in. I realize the structures are modular, probably designed to be part of their orbital facilities, repurposed out of pressing need.
Then things get uncomfortable very quickly. Lyra is directed to a heavy hatch that connects to this apparent staging area. The hatch bears various bio and nano warning symbols. Without further directive or much hesitation, she begins stripping off her L-As, and placing them in a containment box next to the hatch. She then pauses only briefly before beginning to strip out of her underwear as well. She does her best to keep her back to us, eyes turned down to the metal deck, with the troopers’ guns and eyes on her slim, pale body the whole
time. Only Jackson, who cycled in right behind us with a pair of his own guards, makes a show of averting his eyes. Once she’s completely naked, the hatch opens for her, and she steps in. Through the thick, layered polycarb viewport, I can see her stuck in a small airlock-like chamber, where she endures some kind of high-pressure decontamination shower, followed by a blasting air-dry that also probably functions to sniff the air for contaminants.
That done, she steps through the far hatch, shivering. Still dressed and armored, I get gestured into the decontamination cell next, and they seal me in. I don’t get hosed, but I do sense scans going over me. Through the next viewport, I can see Lyra in a larger and brighter chamber, still naked, passively cooperating with a quick medical exam by someone in a bio suit. They seem to be especially looking for any kind of wound or skin puncture, searching and prodding every inch of her, but they also take blood and scan her with what I guess is the very gear for detecting nanotech that she helped them develop.
Now it’s my turn to avert my eyes when I realize I‘m staring, reminding myself that she’s barely nineteen and any arousal I’m feeling is being automatically enhanced by my Mods (because fucking is how we immortals pass our pointless time). Finally, she’s allowed to put on a plain light jumpsuit and slippers. She looks back at me then through the polycarb, and I pretend I’ve been studying the scanning tech in my cell rather than her.
When I get through the second hatch to join Lyra, the technician who examined her has already left through another decontamination airlock. We’re in an Iso room, with a pair of exam couches and two transparent walls. One wall opens onto a small viewing gallery, equipped with terminals to monitor us. The other transparency divides us from a second Iso room, smaller, with one couch. Beyond that, through another transparency, I can see a series of somewhat larger Iso chambers, all in a row, each with several couches, like a hospital ward. There are also stasis tubes in these bigger chambers, lining the walls. Several look to be occupied—likely the victims of previous infections.
The God Mars Book Six: Valhalla I Am Coming Page 15