I do what I can do, which is send another flight out looking for them now that the sun’s back up. (Would they have kept moving if they could? Would they have continued the mission despite what had happened?)
While we wait for the ships to de-ice and spin up, while we listen to otherwise dead air, I see Richards take the moment to approach Dee as he stands statue-still watching the screens. (Is he actually watching the feed, or is he just plugged directly into it?)
“Were you… Are you really the same AI from the original UNACT?”
“My core code is from that original digital entity, General,” Dee responds evenly, not changing gaze or expression. “And I do have memories of your grandfather. He was a good man, a good leader.”
“He was that and more,” I add, and my own memories of Thomas Richards flash through my head with the perfect clarity that tells me they’re digital, not organic. (Did they download when I was upgraded? Or did my upgrades enhance my existing memories? Or is there even a distinction, since I know the story of some other me in some other time is bullshit?)
We watch the AAVs launch and head east.
Colonel Ava?
Voice in my head. I know it, but had no reason to expect it. Dee turns to face me, telling me that he’s receiving as well.
“Is this Bel?” I reply out loud, which immediately gets Richards’ and Kastl’s attention.
“Have him patched through on one of our channels,” Richards allows.
I heard. Give me a second.
“Give me a second,” Dee repeats.
Then we get not only audio, but video as well. Bel looks like he’s inside their salvaged UNCORT ship, the twin of the Lancer.
“Mr. Shaitain,” Richards greets him formally if awkwardly.
“Just Bel, really. The rest is from a bit of a phase I’d rather forget.”
“Bel,” Richards accepts.
“We’ve had a few bad turns here,” I downplay.
“Nicely understated, Colonel. And yes, we’ve been monitoring. Please know that none of what’s happened was your fault. Or yours, General. We’ve all been out-maneuvered by the same monster more times than we’d like to count, and people have died each time.”
“And if you can’t beat him, what hope do we mere mortals have?” Richards confronts.
“We’re working on that, General,” he tries to assure, though not very convincingly. Then his rather elfish brow knits. “But there’s been… well… a bit of a wrinkle.”
“Do I want to know what you’d call a ‘wrinkle’?”
Bel takes a breath. I realize he looks shaken, is trying not to look shaken.
“Beginning at the whatever… You should know that we managed to take the Toymaker Fohat into custody after the attack on Katar and contained him…” He shows us footage of a wasted, skeletal figure trapped in some kind of Iso unit, restrained. One of his arms is barely skin over bone that looks like little more than fine twigs. Even his skull looks disproportionally small. They must be starving him, keeping him weak. “Not pretty, I know, but some would argue the fucker deserves worse. Most would argue the fucker deserves worse.”
“Have you been able to learn anything from him?” Richards keeps to business, ignoring Bel’s pervasive irreverence.
“Asmodeus kept him in the dark, stole his technical expertise, then manipulated him into our hands,” Bel regrets. “But that’s not why I’m calling. I thought you’d like to see this, considering…”
We get video that shows the whole linear section of the ship, probably from a security camera above the forward hatch. Bel is sitting at one of the ship’s science stations, either dozing or lost in thought. The lights flicker, static sparks over the screen, and he starts alert a fraction of a second before the screen goes black. No: It floods with black. He plays it slower, showing a pure black wave bursting into the ship and knocking him back, swallowing everything. The timestamp counts off twelve seconds, and the blackness recedes as fast as it came, as if sucked out. Bel is stunned, thrown back into the bulkhead. The containment unit is broken open, but Fohat isn’t gone, not exactly. What remains in the couch he was strapped to is a desiccated skeleton. It looks charred, as if thoroughly incinerated.
I see Azazel come running in, staggering, looking like he’d also just been hit by something. Bel drags himself up, gets to the Iso, and cautiously touches the skeleton. It crumbles like burned paper.
“I don’t think it was a trick,” Bel says, now sounding fully unnerved. “Fohat was neutralized. Completely destroyed. There’s nothing left of him viable.”
“Where are you?” I ask urgently. Then correct for the sake of his security: “Where were you when this happened?”
“Let’s just say we’re local to you,” he’s not trusting enough to give up his location. “That was two hours ago. I didn’t want to call until I’d run some tests. It is Fohat. Was Fohat. And he’s dead. Dead dead. Not only merely dead, but really most sincerely dead.”
I feel a chill. I suppose Bel and Azazel and the others are feeling variations of the dual implications: If this is what it looks like, then Chang can kill Asmodeus. But he can also kill anyone like us. And if he can kill us…
But there’s another, more immediate implication:
“If that was Chang, he’s here,” I decide, “in the Trident.”
“Unless he’s already moved on,” Dee considers with truly stunning detachment. (He must not be bothering to mimic emotional responses, not now.)
“It was Chang,” Bel insists heavily, sounding certain. “He… He spoke to me. He told me he was going to make things right.”
“Then I think I know where he’s going,” I make a fairly obvious conclusion. I’m just surprised he hasn’t busted in here, dealt with Jackson, considering what Jackson’s done in Asmodeus’ thrall (or not).
“Can we track…?” Richards starts to ask. But then an alert siren goes off and Kastl interrupts us.
“We have a situation in Medical!”
“Colonel Ava, this is Ryder,” he patches her in. “I just found Doctor Halley down… She’s a little beat up, minor cuts… But Colonel Jackson got loose. It looks like he tore out of his restraints and smashed his way out of Iso. Right through the reinforced polycarb…”
We see the mess, see one of the med techs tending to Halley’s bloody forehead. There are two H-A troopers with them.
“He’s masking himself,” Dee discovers, unable to locate him using the base sentry systems.
I order a sweep of the entire facility, warn the troopers to be cautious.
“He’s really strong…” Halley adds in, visibly dazed. “And fast. He could have killed me. And there’s something else…” She pushes the tech away from her, gets off the exam couch and starts recalling files on the nearest terminal. “I was running another exam and saw something on the scans. I took off his facial patch…”
She finds what she’s looking for: her own head-cam shot of her peeling back Jackson’s mask. But instead of scar tissue and patchy grafts over missing bone, there’s fresh pale pink skin. And an eye where there shouldn’t be one anymore. The fine wisps of facial hair and eyebrow plastered to the new alien skin are red.
“Shit…” I turn to Dee. “Find him.”
“I think I have…” Kastl speaks up. He calls up a tracking graphic of our recon flights. One of the AAVs has deviated, peeled off and increased speed. It’s not responding to hails.
The other pilot—Lieutenant McKay—is asking for orders when we read a launch from the errant ship. McKay tries to evade, but he’s been locked. The rocket blows one of his rear tanks, kills one of his thrust engines. But it doesn’t take him down. I’d like to think Jackson aimed to cripple rather than kill. He doesn’t fire again.
“Break off, McKay,” I order. “Limp home while you can.”
Jackson’s stolen ship passes Liberty Crater on the south side, and has started turning southeast when we lose remote radar.
He’s headed for Iving.
&nbs
p; From the memory files of Mike Ram:
We set about burying Corso and Jenovec at first light.
I climb down into the dig and recover Corso’s head myself. I try not to look at her blank face, her glazed eyes. I carry it up like a precious relic as Horst and Scheffe wait with the rest of her. Unfortunately, that gives them a good look in daylight at the results of my brief but catastrophic loss of control.
“Some of those… some of those men… are still moving…” Scheffe stammers as she also tries not to look at Corso’s head. Horst holds the body bag open while I place it inside, roughly from where it was severed, like I can make her whole again.
“Your point, Specialist?” Horst prods her when I don’t comment.
“Shouldn’t we…? I mean…”
“I’m not willing to get within striking or grenade range of a breathing Shinkyo Shinobi to render them aid or comfort, even if I was in a mood to,” Horst shuts her down. Then he locks eyes with me, as if to absolve me. “In fact, I’m not feeling generous enough to spend bullets on them.”
Once Corso’s zipped up, I let them carry the bag to the spot we’ve cleared on the plain near the rig. Jenovec is already in place in his own bag. Then everyone pitches in, carrying and placing rocks. When the bodies are solidly covered, we mark the oblong mounds with their tags.
Horst says a few words over Jenovec, having served with him the longest. He talks about his sense of humor, and how under that lazy, carefree façade was a good, hard-working soldier that he could always count on. And that he was so much braver than most people thought.
But no one really knew Corso. She kept herself apart, aloof. And not just from the non-coms. But then, the other officers on the crew were Sleeper Vets, and she always had that look like they were trash, vulgar, uncivilized, ungodly. So the kind words fall to me to concoct.
“She was a good officer…” I stumble over the lie. Try again. “She believed in what she was doing. She volunteered to come all the way here, across space, knowing it could mean her death, that she might never go home again, to do something she thought was good. Important. She was willing to die for that. She died bravely…”
It’s pathetic. Empty words in the thin wind.
Then I do better for Hatsumi Sakura.
I tell the others to keep their distance—I’m worried about infection—but Lyra does get a look at the patches of lizard skin. I see the look in her eyes: she knows what it means, knows what it implies. She doesn’t say anything to the others.
I put Sakura in the cockpit of her ship, arrange her broken body as reverently as I can, and then I set incendiaries, thermobaric charges. Her wounds are starting to knit, but the new flesh is all reptilian.
As I watch her burn, I realize I’m giving her a Viking funeral of sorts. Valhalla, I am coming.
I can still feel the cuts she gave me.
The smoke rises up towards the atmosphere net, pushed westward by the morning wind, carrying some of her incidentally in the direction of her home. I know it may give away our position, but I don’t care.
Still, I tell the living to get the rig ready to roll out.
I take the time to top off Kel’s ammo load. No one argues with me about it. Then I walk back over to the edge of the pit, draw my pistol, and carefully put a shell through the head of every broken mangled body that’s still breathing.
With everyone else sealed inside, I climb up and sit on top of the rig as we start moving.
“Where to, Colonel?” Smith asks as a formality.
“Last stop. Iving.”
It’s about forty klicks, mostly straight south. We have to navigate some terracing and fractured terrain which takes us up out of the green for a few vulnerable hours, but at this point I doubt there’s a point to trying to reduce our visibility. Obviously Asmodeus expects us, and Orbit can drop a nuke or a mass driver on our heads whenever they want to. I’ve heard the occasional air patrol in the distance, to the east and once to the south, but nothing close enough to be visible.
By mid-afternoon, we have to deviate a few degrees west to get around a five-klick-long mountain in our path. After that it gets much rougher, the landscape ridged and rocky, and that slows us down, threatens to break our drive train again.
But Kel keeps up easily, sweeping the perimeter with his repaired guns, protecting us like a silent part of the team. The rest of the team has been equally silent: No one seems to have anything to say after last night, so the only chat I have is with Smith, strictly related to navigation. We don’t even stop to eat.
Iving sits beyond the eastern tip of a ten-klick range that’s a parallel fracture-branch of the Divide Rim. This puts it at the mouth of a large box canyon that cuts back northwest on the other side of those mountains. The region is very green in satellite mapping, especially up into the canyon, but not very far beyond that. Iving sits in the southeast “tip” of the Vajra. Just a few klicks further east, Coprates turns pretty quickly barren. This is as far as life has made it.
The colony was an ESA endeavor, devoted to mining and manufacturing, another support enterprise for what was assumed to be a continued corporate boom on Mars. Whatever research they did was purely environmental and geological, at least that we knew about, aimed toward exploiting Mars’ natural resources for colonial expansion. But that didn’t save them from a nuclear sterilization. On the satellite imaging, the site has been blasted to the foundations, and the foundations have been mostly swallowed up by the groundcover.
That doesn’t mean there weren’t survivors, aren’t survivors. The colonies with mining equipment tend to be the ones that were able to dig in, dig shelters. They’re remote enough to have avoided contact with other groups, friendly or otherwise, so it’s not surprising that no one we’ve met knows anything about their fate.
But the nearest feed line terminates a dozen klicks away—the network still hasn’t built its way out this far. And odds are too high that Asmodeus has been there well ahead of us.
I consider making the track wait while Kel and I go in ahead, but decide dividing is just as bad an idea as rolling into whatever is waiting for us.
I regret that decision as soon as we get eyes on the colony through the head-high growth.
“Hold here. Do not leave the vehicle.”
But Smith can see through his periscope, and I know Simmons and Scheffe have eyes on this through their turret optics.
I leap down off the hull and walk smoothly forward. The plant life has been crushed into a path a few meters wide. The compression looks and feels recent. So is the blood. It’s all been sprayed with blood. Like a red carpet. Then the wind shifts, and I get hit by the smell.
Kel grinds behind me, sensor heads spinning to take this all in, sweeping the tall growth around us as we take the road that’s been cleared for us, to the display that’s been prepared for us.
I’d call it art, but it’s the darkest kind of art, nightmare made real. He’s put bodies up… parts of bodies… Entangled, interwoven, violated for maximum effect. They’re all naked, crusted with their own blood. Disemboweled, their entrails strung in the growth like decorations. Flayed, skins spread like capes around them. Impaled, kebabed together in chains, mouths to genitals. Staked fixed into a Kama Sutra’s variation of sexual positions. Random limbs, heads and torsos. It’s a sculpture garden of horror, forming a funnel, a corridor of butchery leading into the overgrown ruin. At points, the gore stretches across overhead on some kind of framework, forming a canopy.
“I can smell it through my mask…”
It’s Lyra complaining. She’s behind me, walking with her rifle sweeping the dead. She has no idea where to point it.
“I told you to stay in the rig.”
“Horst and Smith may still follow your orders out of old loyalty, and Simmons and Scheffe follow them, but when I signed up for this, you weren’t in my chain of command, so I don’t actually have to listen to you.”
She’s different, gone harder even than the girl who survived on her
own after Chang massacred her family. What I’ve shown her…
“It’s safer in the rig.”
“It wasn’t last night,” she cuts me to the core. I don’t think she’s just talking about getting taken prisoner (again), nearly getting killed (again). It was seeing what “rescued” her.
I look back at the ‘Horse. Horst is out, too, in an H-A shell minus the helmet, hauling a chain-gun, covering us.
“Is this for you, or for us?” Lyra asks me, barely above a whisper, as if the dead can hear us.
I don’t answer her, but I realize the dead aren’t just dead: as we walk down the gauntlet of dead bodies and partial bodies, their heads turn to follow us. Their cloudy eyes glow from behind. They’re Harvesters, but most of them look far too mangled to be effective as fighting drones. This is all just for the sake of display, for shock. I count over a hundred corpses, and those are just the heads and torsos.
“Don’t get close,” I warn Lyra, but she’s already seen.
“Maybe we should be backing out,” she suggests quietly.
I’m about to agree with her, when one of the corpses speaks with Asmodeus’ voice, a demon’s ventriloquist dummy:
“Awww… Come on! I worked hard on this… I tried to do a Clive Barker meets Hieronymus Bosch kind of thing, but I know: It’s more like those guys who used to go crazy decorating their yards for Halloween—zombies and corpses and body parts and all that. Except mine’s got the authentic smell. And I went for the X-rating while I was at it. That part was for the God-wads: A little horror-porn for the uptight Sunday School Soldiers. Did you bring any? Or did they all get killed on the way here?”
He should know. He should be able to see. Or is this some kind of automated message?
“How did tea with the Dragon Lady go, by the way?”
Or is he just playing dumb?
“He doesn’t want us to go back the way we came,” Lyra understands. Horst has stepped forward, into the corridor of gore. I give him a subtle sign to back up, but there are nearly a hundred sets of “eyes” on us.
The God Mars Book Six: Valhalla I Am Coming Page 38