“…do the… do the thing… change me… don’t let me just die if I can still…”
“Your last Seed... It’s targeted her,” Star says like she knows, like she can hear it, feel it. And it’s there, it’s back: despite all this blood and pain and death, all I want to do is kiss her. Just once. Before she dies.
It’s sickening.
“Do it,” Star insists. “Before she dies, and maybe the new whoever-it-is will still have some of her.”
“But it won’t be her!” I protest the obvious; what, I realize, is the inevitable. Yod’s plan. All along.
Lyra pulls at me, tries to pull us together, with the last of her strength.
“Now, asshole!” Star chides me. “Just kiss her!”
I roar out something incoherent, railing against the best choice I have in a world where I probably have no fucking choice at all.
“…never…” Lyra mutters through blood, trying to smile. “…never kissed a boy bef…”
I do it. There’s nothing sweet or romantic about it. It’s desperate, agonizing. I taste her blood as I rub our lips together, our nuzzling more like a collision, an act of violence. Then I try to seal our mouths together. Fail. She’s too weak to respond.
“It’s done,” Star grants me mercy. Lyra’s still looking at me when I release her, and actually does manage a smile.
“One more thing…” Before I know what she’s doing, Star pries an injector out of a nearby corpse mouth, comes back and stabs it into Lyra’s neck.
“What the fuck was that?!!” I sputter at her as Lyra’s eyes go wide. Her weak shaky fingers try to feel the wound but can’t even reach her neck. I take her hands and squeeze.
“Necessary,” Star insists. “I can interface with her as she converts, study how her Seed reacts to the invading tech as the two collide and fight over territory, maybe reverse-engineer a basic nano-antigen that will be able to target Harvester and similar nano-vectors without taking any other action, and then be readily extractible if the host is still squeamish about having the tech inside them.”
She’s talking about a working, acceptable countermeasure, a cure. But
“How do you know how to do that?”
She looks at me like I’m an adorable idiot.
“Same way Ange can. I detected him hacking Chang and Fohat for their expertise, and duplicated his technique. I figured it might come in handy, considering what Ange was likely to do with his new knowledge.”
She stares at me as I gape dumbly at her, then shakes her head and grins.
“Remember back on the first Stormcloud when I made a cosmetic clone out of a handy corpse and blew it up to try to convince Chang I wasn’t Ra? You never thought to ask me how I managed that?”
“I…” I really didn’t. “I guess I just thought you’d used some of Chang’s tech.”
“I used some of Chang,” she corrects me. “And Fohat. It was easy. And amazing. I just know all this stuff. Science. Technology. Just like that, like I’ve always known it. If you’re good, maybe I’ll show you ho…”
Lyra rasps one last time, long and slow, and goes limp in my grip. Her eyes stare blankly at the sky. Dead.
She’s dead. I wasn’t even looking at her, wasn’t paying attention.
“We need to do this right now,” Star prods me.
I’m numb. I lift her, carry her, follow Star though I have no idea what I’m doing.
She finds us a cut in the foundation, conveniently grave-like, probably an old vent or wiring trunk. Star piles gore into it, throwing in shredded corpse. Then she lays down inside, settling in just like she’s easing herself into a bath of rotten meat, and gestures for me to pass Lyra down to her. They wind up spooned together, Star embracing her, and Star tells me to cover them up.
Horst starts to help me carry limbs and guts to the hole, but I warn him again:
“Don’t. The bodies are Harvesters. There may be live injectors.”
He takes a deep breath and tells me
“It’s a little late for that.” He turns his head, shows me the puncture just below the base of his skull, surrounded by a nasty bruise that tells me he got stung when a tentacle hit him. “I can already feel it. Or maybe it’s my imagination.”
My body gives out from under me. I was kneeling, putting parts into the hole, but now I’m down on my ass, holding myself upright with my hands. I can’t speak. I can barely see.
“I may need a favor…” he starts to say.
“NO!” I shout at him. “And don’t do anything stupid! I will fix this! I swear! We’ll have a cure! Three days!”
“I don’t think I have that, sir,” he says heavily.
“Then I’ll fix you myself! Just… just trust me! You are not dying like that! Do you hear me? You are not…” I get myself together, get myself up. “I’m not letting you die. You are going to get through this. That’s an order, Lieutenant. Do you hear me?”
“Yes, sir.” But he doesn’t sound relieved.
We finish “burying” Lyra and Star.
“We need to start clearing the bay so Smith can get out of there safely,” I give my next order, figuring he’s safe enough pulling guts out of the track. “Then we need to give Simmons and Scheffe a proper burial. And Colonel Jackson.”
“He said Asmodeus was in his brain,” he wants the truth.
“Asmodeus has used more than just Harvesters. He has subtler tech that can alter your brain chemistry, manipulate your mood.”
“He kept saying ‘shut up,’ like he could hear…”
I shrug. “Maybe that, too. An implant to communicate with him, or to listen through him. Too small to detect with the usual exams.”
“Like the corpses, talking with the fucker’s voice?”
“No, Lieutenant. That was just primitive tech.”
“But Asmodeus is supposed to be networked, spread out. Couldn’t… I mean, his face…”
“Cloning tech. Viral. Probably replaced the injured tissue first.”
“So he would have become him… a copy?”
“Maybe. But I doubt it would have gotten that far. Jackson was a fighter. I’m sure he fought it tooth and nail as soon as he realized. Explains why he was so blindly desperate to burn the son-of-a-bitch…”
He nods.
“I’ll get started on the bay,” I offer. “Do a perimeter sweep, make sure none of those severed sections are getting back together. I’ll call you when I need help with our own.”
“Yes, sir.”
I’m trying to get what’s left of poor innocent Scheffe gently into a bag when I hear the shot.
I find him well away from the track, well away from the carnage, out in the green. Lying on the ground in front of him is a live flashcard with photos that must be family.
He did a good job. He sat down, propped his weapon in his mouth, and triggered it on burst-fire.
“Fuck you… I told you not to do anything stupid… I told you… I told you…”
Chapter 11: Dei ex Machinis
Yod may have named me a student of religions, but I have not been much of an adherent to any in my time, with a very few notable exceptions. One of the first of which came when I chose to pick up a sword, because it was so traditionally intertwined with the Japanese military arts, its rituals in every aspect; and I quickly grew to appreciate its lovely simplicity, as well as its particular take on morality.
Shinto does not personify the divine, nor regulate it, but simply sees its presence in all aspects of creation, both natural and manmade. There isn’t even an adequate translation for their word for the divine. But their concept of “sin” is even simpler: They see it as a stain, a wound, an impurity that soils perpetrator and victim and place. To harm another, to murder, for instance, is “evil” because it is a messy, offensive, destructive thing—and that should be clear in its very nature; one does not need the commandments of deity to declare it so. It is a violation of creation.
Their response to such violations is equally practical
: Everyone and everything touched by the “stain” must be made somehow clean again. Order restored. Damage repaired. Wounds healed. Spirits cleansed. The world put back right. Even if only ritually.
Ritual is important.
So I spend the next few days “cleaning up.”
There are practical as well as therapeutic aspects to the ritual: The first thing I do is find every intact cable-module I can and crush it. I lose count after the first few thousand. It takes me the better part of the night and the next day, working non-stop, alone except for Kel. I collect them all in a handy pit left from one of Jackson’s rocket hits, then salt them with thermite from the ‘Horse’s stores, just to be sure. I don’t care who sees the smoke or the heat from the resulting white-hot blaze.
I do the same thing to all the body parts. Whoever these people were, they deserve better than to keep rotting. Several bodies have Zodangan ink, and three have Liberty flags. I also see a number of old battle scars, and signs of varying degrees of depravation. I arrange the bodies and limbs as neatly as I can, but it still looks like an abattoir’s waste dump. The fire of their pyre burns well past sunset.
The next morning, I give Horst, Simmons and Scheffe better funerals. Having reverently bagged their remains (or as much of their remains as I could separate from the rest of the gore in the bay), I carried them well away from the desecrated ruin—the soiled place—and built the neatest cairns over them that I could manage, each carefully placed stone its own act of respect, of mourning.
Jackson I have to burn, just to be sure. I make him a pyre fit for a warrior out of dried branches surrounded by stones.
I don’t say any words. Kel sits beside me as I linger over the graves in silence.
After that, I clean up the bay as best I can, but the blood is caked deep and thick into every crevice. But at least I can ensure that the rig, and the surrounding area, are free of Harvester seeds.
“It’s clear,” I tell Smith through the hatch. He’s been stuck in his cockpit for almost two days now. “It doesn’t smell very good, but you can come out.”
He unseals the lock slowly. I step well back, give him room. He’s wearing a breather mask. He recoils when the stink hits him in spite of it.
“You weren’t kidding,” he gasps. Then he shakes his head, taking in the damage, and worse: the emptiness, now that everyone else is gone.
“What did you… What did you do with them?” he asks.
He puts on a cold weather suit and I take him out to the graves as the sun sets over the Rim. We stand there in silence for awhile, then I leave him alone in the evening wind. Kel keeps watch over him from a distance.
I walk back to the ruin. Lose myself in the desolation of it, the waste, the dried blood. I can’t clean all of this. Maybe the planet can, in time, weathering it away, growing over it. Or I could burn it all, but that would leave its own scars.
I walk farther, past the recently stripped foundations. I find graffiti, names carved into the foundations that may be a roster of survivors. Most of the names are well-weathered, old.
Out beyond the ruin, to the east just inside the canyon, I find the “cross ships” we’ve been looking for: Three of them, sitting side-by-side, hidden by nano-mesh camouflage nets, cold and abandoned. I figure I know what happened to the crews.
There’s been no sign of Asmodeus. Star was wrong. If he was afraid she did have critical secrets to share with me, he’d have come by now.
Before it gets dark, I go back to the graves, then the ‘Horse, but I can’t find Smith. When I finally do, tracking him by sound, he’s found Jackson’s AAV.
“She’s still got enough fuel to make it back to the forward base,” he tells me when I poke my head into the cockpit. “And I think I can get a call out. It looks like they’ve planted repeaters.” But then he looks to me for permission.
I shake my head.
“Not yet. Guaranteed that sick fuck is listening. Let’s keep him guessing.” As far as he knows, it’s only me and Star left. But he should have come by now. Unless he’s waiting for something, our next move.
Let’s give him one.
“Do you have the codes for the warheads?”
He’d seen Corso stash a small paper journal. It has the codes Richards gave her to signal Orbit, and the arming sequences for the nukes. I make Smith stay inside the AAV as I work through the night, pulling one of the warheads from its tube, and setting it up on a pillar foundation in the heart of the stripped, bloodied ruin.
It reminds me of an altar, I realize. I remember an old science fiction film, with a post-apocalyptic society that worshipped a world-killing bomb. At the end, the “heroes” decided to detonate it, because they’d personally decided that the world wasn’t worth saving. I remember asking myself who would make that kind of decision, to destroy an entire world just because you can’t see any hope in it. But then, apparently, a small group of us did just that.
I finish setting the warhead so that I can trigger it myself. I have no intention of doing so, I tell myself. This is just a show to convince the bastard that he’s made me that desperate, so he’ll come and egg me into doing it. But I know I would probably push the button if he actually does show up in his primary body and I can’t manage to contain him any other way, even if Star, Lyra (whoever she’s going to be) and Smith are in radius. If nothing else, it will buy this planet some time until he can reassemble himself (assuming that is possible, and Chang’s return wasn’t just Yod doing whatever Yod wants), maybe give my fellows the opportunity to be ready for him when he does.
I take a breath of the cold night as I check my work. The fucker has got me twisted this far, that I’d blow my own toxic hole in the goddamn planet just to hurt him back, even if it takes me and a few friends along with it. But then I touch the blood soaked into the concrete, smell the lingering stink in the air. And I think maybe I should push the button, scour this place clean, erase the last traces of his latest atrocity, even if it is trading one stain for another.
I sit down, back up against my apocalyptic altar, and curl up against the cold. Sitting down… I haven’t stopped moving in days. Even a concrete wall makes a good pillow…
I dream of pressing that button, over and over. Shoving the warhead down his grinning throat and vaporizing the world. You and me, you sick fuck… We’re going out together…
Just like it should be. Just like it needs to be.
“Uh… Hey…”
It’s morning.
It’s Lyra. She’s up, out of her hole. Standing over me like she’s half-asleep herself.
I look around through my own shocked-awake haze. There’s no sign of Star. Just…
Except for a little dirt, she’s clean, no blood, no stink of corpses. She’s still wearing the L-A trousers, shin-armored boots, and the t-shirt she was in when I “buried” her, but all in better condition now, new-looking. The most obvious change to her wardrobe is that she’s wearing forearm guards very similar to mine, as if copied in homage. She also has a new double gun belt loaded with magazines, with a UNMAC-issue-type sidearm slung on each hip. And that’s it. Otherwise, she looks very much as she did—same face, same hair—only healthier, stronger. And her eyes betray her, of course: metallic blue.
I don’t recognize this whoever-it-is from my lost-world memories. All I see is Lyra. (Maybe the cosmetic changes haven’t begun yet. Am I to be tortured by being made to watch her slowly fade, punished for my sins through her?)
She blinks like she’s having trouble focusing, like she’s confused, disoriented.
“Am I…? Am I done?” she stammers, looking down at her hands. She also looks like she’s having trouble just standing up. Shaky, wobbly, like a new fawn taking its first tentative steps. “I mean… I’m still… I’m still me.”
What?
I get up and step toward her tentatively. She puts out her hands like she really can’t see very well, and I end up catching her. I can feel the tech inside her, hear her signals screaming, chaotic, conf
used. She has been converted, fully Modded, but…
“I feel you… in my head…” She closes her eyes, flinches at the barrage of new sensations. When she opens them again, she stares blankly, as if blind.
I take her by the wrists, look into her eyes. She winces and blinks like she’s looking into the sun. But she sees me. On multiple spectrums.
“My eyes… So much, so clear… and there’s graphics, like on a heads-up, but they’re inside my eyes, inside my head…” She tries to shake it away, fails, shuts her eyes tight again. “Is this what it’s like for you?”
“Who are you?” I need to know.
“Me... Still me… Lyra… I think…” She looks at me again as if I can see her soul and know. “When does it happen? When do I…?” I can feel her fear. Her blue eyes tear up. “When do I stop being me?”
I grab her head with both hands, make her look at me, try to interface.
“You… You are in my head… I can hear you… I can…”
Her head. There’s no one else in there, no other code.
Laughing with joy, I wrap my arms around her, hug her tightly. She struggles for a moment, confused, then starts to steadily return the embrace.
“What?” she whispers in my ear, wanting and not wanting to know. “What is it?”
“Blank Seed,” I tell her, starting to cry myself now. “It’s not coded to anyone. No DNA. No memory set. Factory blank.”
I took a blank with me—or Yod sent it with me—for some worthy soul, someone from this timeline. All this time, I could have given it to anyone, without erasing them. But it—or I—or Yod—chose her.
“Does that… Does that mean what it sounds like?” She’s crying into my shoulder armor.
“Exactly what it sounds like.”
She holds me tighter.
“Does that mean… Does that mean I can’t…?” Now she starts laughing through her tears. “I won’t ever die?”
The God Mars Book Six: Valhalla I Am Coming Page 40