The God Mars Book Six: Valhalla I Am Coming

by Michael Rizzo

  I back up—I need to look her in the eye for this.

  “Everything that lives will die. We… My kind… We just made it a lot harder. Hard enough that we can’t manage it ourselves.”

  “Our kind,” she corrects me after taking that in for a second, trying to stop crying. “You said ‘my kind’.”

  I nod, accepting it, accepting this gift.

  She smiles for me.

  “Are you going to teach me… I don’t know… everything… how to use this…?”

  “I’ll do my best. I think I’m still figuring this out myself.”

  That makes her chuckle. But I can hear how nervous she is, how afraid.

  “It’s all… I have to figure out how to move, how to walk. I feel like if I didn’t, I’d take a step and fly off into space or something. Everything’s different. Weird. I can think so fast, slow things down, hear you in my head—I knew where you were.”

  “You get used to it. Sort of.”

  “How do I even look? I mean… I’m so much bigger than I was before…” She looks down at herself. She does have a lot more tone under her t-shirt, like an Earth-grav athlete. “Where did all the extra muscle tissue come fr…?” I see it hit her, see her face sink. “Oh… Oh…” She doubles over, hands on knees, and her mouth falls open like she’s trying to vomit. She stays like that for several moments, but, of course, nothing happens.

  “I want to be sick… Why can’t I be sick?” she pants at her boots.

  “Antiemetic Mods,” I let her know. “Basic accessory. You vomit because you’re poisoned…”

  “There’s a region of the brain where the blood-brain barrier is just permeable enough to detect toxicity,” she reminds me that she’s very well educated.

  “But nothing can poison you anymore. Up to and including neutron radiation. So that leaves other things the body may interpret as signs of poisoning. Vestibular. Sensory. Emotional.”

  She looks up at me sideways like I’ve told her something insane in a world of insane. (That part’s starting to sink in.)

  “Not many people actually enjoy puking,” I reason, hoping the chatter will partially take her mind off her building distress. “Not without some kind of pathology. And I suppose if someone really wanted to, they could purchase a custom Mod on the black markets.”

  She shakes her head. Tries to get her breath back.

  “Fucked up world you come from…” she pants. “I guess I come from there now, too, huh?”

  “No. You just got the deluxe accessory package.”

  “Not really funny… Not right now…”

  “What else do you feel?” I’m hoping for some kind of distraction.

  She chuckles again, more breathless this time; shakes her head, still bent over.

  “Horny!” she spits out with an embarrassed laugh, making herself stand back up. “Sorry, but that’s the word for it. As soon as I laid eyes on you. I just want to jump on you, devour you…”

  “That would be your Mods messing with your…”

  She doesn’t let me finish. As if the libido Mod was specifically designed to distract from the downsides of artificial immortality, she gives in to it, lunging at me, wrapping her arms around me and slamming her face into mine in a ravenous kiss. And my own responds in kind before I bother to think about what I’m doing.

  I haven’t kissed anyone like this since I was a very young man, a teenager. It’s like she’s trying to force herself as far inside me as she can get, and get me as far inside her as she can. She’s got hold of my back with both her arms, and I feel a hand grab my hair as she wraps a leg around me as well.

  “You’ve gotten better at that,” I break for air. She grabs me by the face and says

  “Shut up…” And then she’s back to breathlessly devouring me, grinding herself against me.

  I open my eyes again just in time to see the air shimmer behind her, see him become visible. I feel her jerk as I feel the spear punch through my armor, stab into my chest through hers. Her eyes go wide with shock, and something else…

  “Sorry, I couldn’t resist,” Asmodeus purrs as he twists his weapon through us, pinning us together, spearhead buried in my solar plexus. “Saw something like this in one of those bad old horror movies, the ones with the unkillable killer… Anyway, he spears these two kids together while they were doing it. Talk about your blatant symb…”

  Rage. Indignant rage. She’s roaring with it as she spins herself around, snapping the spear off inside her (and leaving the blade still stuck in me after giving it a good wrench). The mechanisms inside the shattered shaft spark and flare. Asmodeus gets a few tenths of a second to be surprised before she draws both of her pistols, shoves them up under his jaw, and blows his brains out through the top of his head. Then, as he staggers and falls backwards, she sticks a muzzle in each eye and blows the rest of his brains through the back of his skull.

  I catch her by the shoulders as she stumbles back, convulsing, but her body is already absorbing the spear shaft, bypassing her cardiac system, sealing her wounds, just like mine is. She looks down at the center of her chest and watches it happen, her pistols still in her hands.

  “I’m fine… I’m FINE!” she shakes me off.

  Asmodeus’ body twitches on the ground. I leave her side long enough to check him.

  “Fuck.”

  I find the remains of a module network in the remains of his skull.

  “Nice moves…” I hear him calling happily. He’s about twenty meters away, standing on top of the foundations, grinning like the smug fuck that he is. “Do I know this one? Or is this one of the ones you started fucking after you killed me?”

  I’m actually about to answer him when Lyra does, with her pistols. He dodges the first two shots aimed at his head, but she predicts his moves, or leads them, and he gets hit just below the left eye with the fourth round.

  “Ow…” He rubs at the wound like it’s a minor blemish. This version is certainly tougher than the last one.

  Still, he jumps back for the cover of the blood-stained foundation when Lyra proves she can repeat her trick, making him dodge into rounds that slice his ear, smack him in the plate over his balls and burst off of his teeth. But then the foundation he was hoping to hide behind starts getting blown apart, knocking him backwards, making him scramble to try to run and hide behind something else. It’s Kel, pounding with his repaired 20mm.

  Selfish in my own rage, I pull the spearhead out of my chest, draw my blade and charge at Asmodeus, leaping over a foundation wall, aiming to intercept. He limbos backward to avoid my cut, and sweeps his spear into my legs as I land. I stumble to get my footing back and he takes a swing at my head. I block his weapon and counter-cut at his hands. He parries me and thrusts at my face, going for the eyes, giving me a bloody grin through a torn lip with broken teeth that are already reforming. I grab his spear shaft with my left hand and chop his right knee before he can free it with a twist that lays my cheek open to bone.

  “See, now, I miss this,” he hisses at me, spitting blood as his lip knits back together, “even if it is pointless.”

  I hammer him with a relentless series of cuts, ignoring the minor jabs he’s able to give back as he blocks me. But the chest wound his clone gave me is slowing me down, which means he’s started this game in better shape than I did.

  “You never said…” he keeps chattering as we hack and stab at each other. “Did you like my new toy? It was a design Fuckhead was working on… never got a chance to try it… I was thinking of giving it to the Ninjas, but they’re such a bunch of stick-asses, they’d never do anything really fun wi…”

  He gets slammed by a 20mm round in the torso armor, under his right arm. The blast knocks me back as it throws him sideways. I see his plate caved halfway into his lung. Kel had moved into position for the shot while I kept him busy.

  Still, he’s recovered enough before I can get up that he clocks me upside the head with a long, one-handed swing of his spear, so fast that it cracks t
he air like a whip. Then he kicks a cloud of dust in my face.

  I expect him to come charging through it, but when I can see again, he’s up on top of Kel, about to drive his spear down into his bio-core. But before he can strike, he has to dodge more of Lyra’s bullets. He gets hit in the left knee, partially dropping him, but only grins.

  I feel him send out a hacking signal through physical contact, taking control over Kel using the bot command codes as his tech starts to restore the link systems. He forces the main gun around at Lyra, and starts pumping explosive shells at her as she runs to keep from being an easy target. But this takes just enough of his attention for me to draw my pistol and put my own shell right into his spine just below the base of his skull.

  He flops face-first, paralyzed, sprawled across Kel’s hull, losing his spear into the green. The command signal stops, and so does Kel.

  I run, jump up on top of Kel, on top of Asmodeus, pinning him down to finish him off. But then he jerks his head sideways unnaturally—I can hear his shattered cervical vertebrae grind. He’s gritting his teeth in pain. And now I can see there’s no exit wound—even if this clone was as tough as Bly, my shell should have come out thr…

  “Give me a second…” he grunts through clenched, bloody teeth. His lip has already healed. So have the other wounds Lyra gave him.

  His body comes alive with a violent convulsion, then he shoves up into me, buys himself enough room to twist around, and as he does, he connects with the side of my head, first with an armored backhand, then with a roundhouse as his other hand follows. Both blows sound (and feel) like a sledge hammer against rock, stunning, splitting my face open. He’s strong, as strong as I am.

  I block his next blows, try to hold him. He only grins up at me.

  “Hi, sexy. Yup, it’s really me. Well, not all of me, of course, but you have to park the vessel someplace, right?”

  I fight the hope that he’s throwing at my feet, that he was really confidently stupid enough to show up in his primary body. But I can’t pass up the chance.

  I hit him back with everything I’ve got, slam his head into Kel’s armor, then I focus on his right wrist and shove it into one of Kel’s mid-edge section wheels, a metal cylinder serrated with longitudinal “teeth” like a reaming bit, wedging his hand deep between the wheel and Kel’s armored body. Kel gets the idea, spins the wheel, dragging Asmodeus’ hand in deeper. I can hear it start to crush before the wheel jams, and Asmodeus gives me a satisfying scream. I’m about to hit him again when he kicks me off of him. But then Kel takes it, rotating sections to throw Asmodeus under him, then rolls his full weight over Asmodeus, crushing him into the ground. The sections reverse directions, and Kel backs over him, before kicking into high speed, rolling the demon over and over. It looks almost cartoonish, slapstick.

  “Really?” Asmodeus complains indignantly between crushings. He finally gets his footing enough on a flip-over to pull with all he’s got and free his hand. But he doesn’t get all of it back. The flesh has been ripped off, leaving him a bloodied skeletal extremity as he falls backwards on his ass.

  “GOD DAMN FUCKING SHIT THAT HUUUUURTS!!!” he howls, looking at his flayed limb. Then he actually manages a weak smile. “Heh… I look like one of my meat toys…” He wiggles the fingers, fascinated that he still can.

  Star appears then, and tries to nail him to the ground with his own spear while he’s distracted, but he rolls, scissors his legs, and sweeps the spear out of her grip. But by the time he gets back on his feet, Lyra is shooting at him again, and he has to run to give her a poor target, keeping his head down and hugging his mangled hand to his chest.

  “Time out! Time out you trigger-happy bitch!!” he complains like a child. She tags him across the forehead and in the hip. “Fuck!!”

  Then Kel blows the ground out from under him. Impressively, he rolls with it, sets his spear into a guard position, and starts sending his overrides at Kel again, turning the 20mm at…

  “You didn’t think I just let you take that spear from me?” Star taunts him.

  I see him look down at it just a spit second before it explodes in his hands.

  He actually manages to stay on his feet, but both of his hands are now mangled messes and his face has been shredded by the blast. I can’t see his eyes through the gore. He’s blind. Still, he grins at us like this is all fucking hilarious.

  I run into him and hack, chopping right across that madman’s grin, sinking my blade deep into his facial bones just above his teeth. He twists his face off my blade, tries to say something I’m sure is supposed to be witty but just comes out as incoherent. I chop his skull again. And again. He gets his wrecked left arm up in the way, staggers back. And I can’t help myself: I kick him in the balls as hard as I can.

  The fucker just starts laughing at me, like he’s won something, like he’s truly enjoying this. I need to contain him, chop off his fucking limbs and get a call out to Bel, or just leave him with a nuke shoved up his…

  “MICHAEL! LOOK OUT!!!” Star screams.

  I look up in time to see the wave coming at me, the pure blackness, knocking aside the growth like a storm, like a flood, like an avalanche. Then it hits me, sends me flying through the air, through the brush, bouncing over the foundations. But then it leaves me, lets me go. It starts to shrink. Condense. Swirl.

  I hear Asmodeus screaming, his cries gurgling out through his mutilated face, but I can’t see him. He’s inside the black storm. It spins around him like a dust devil, continuing to shrink, to solidify, until it assumes a man-shape. The shape has Asmodeus by the throat. But it isn’t Asmodeus anymore. It’s a desiccated skeleton wearing his armor. When the black silhouette finally lets it go, it falls to the ground and shatters apart.

  The black melts away then, revealing an underlying human form, naked: male, short black hair with random blonde streaks, Asian features—though when he turns to look at me, one of his eyes doesn’t match, like it’s been spliced from another body—that eye is blue and looks almost female. I know exactly why it does.

  He smiles a little, seems to remember that he’s naked, and a plain light gray jumpsuit forms over him.

  “Colonel,” Adam Chang greets me.

  “What did you…?” Star starts to ask. I step over to the crumbling bones, reach out, feel… nothing.

  “What I always wanted to be able to do,” he tells us, sounding deeply sad. “Funny I should get my wish now, after everything.”

  “Is he…?” I really need to know.

  “Completely,” he assures calmly, taking a long, deep breath. “I isolated him from his network, burned out his peripherals, then broke down all of his nanotech, consuming his organics in the process. I did the same to Fohat. There’s nothing viable left. Nothing to come back. It’s the least I can do, I suppose, for my part in this.”

  “You weren’t exactly yourself at the time,” I try to absolve him.

  “I still had consciousness. I still had free will, or what felt like it. I still remember everything I did. And it felt like I did it by my own choice.”

  “How…?” Star still can’t wrap her head around what she’s seen.

  I realize Lyra’s circling him, keeping her pistols pointed at his face. And I know it’s not because she isn’t willing to accept. It’s because she isn’t able to forgive. He gives her a bitter, tortured, guilty thin smile—facing one more sin he can never atone for—then answers Star:

  “Just like you—and he…” He nods down at Asmodeus’ ashes. “…learned some tricks from me and Fohat, I guess I learned some new tricks from Yod. Or, more likely, he gave them to me.”

  He turns and walks over to Kel, holds out his hand like he’s trying to approach a frightened animal. Kel does shift nervously, recognizing his former master. But then he lets Chang touch him, lay hands on his armored sections.

  “Some other good I can do, while I’m at it…”

  Before I can react, Kel is swallowed in blackness, emanating in a flash from Chang’s ha
nds. The massive cube of the bot shifts, shudders. I hear metal complain, then snap, crush. I step forward to stop it (no idea how or if I even could), but Star grabs my arm, holds me back. Lyra looks like she isn’t sure if she should shoot or not, but doesn’t.

  The blackness starts to compress, as if compacting Kel, steadily swirling from a thrashing mass into a neatly fluid ball much smaller than the bot. After nearly a full minute of this, the blackness withdraws. Where the bot was is another naked human form, curled fetal on the ground, with long ruddy hair. It’s a girl, a wire-lean young woman. She looks up tentatively. Her face—her skin—is deeply tanned, and she has big, dark eyes.

  Chang offers his hand, helps her stand, shivering. Then he waves his hands over her shoulders, and a black cloak covers her as if he put it on her. It changes into a thick, warm robe, complete with matching boots. She falls into his arms like she’s forgotten how to stand. Then she starts weeping into his shoulders, looking at her own hands, not believing that she’s seeing them. Finally, still shaking, she looks at me, and smiles shyly through her tears.

  “Kelaryn Cortez-King of Zodanga,” Chang names her, then apologizes. “Sorry I couldn’t re-create your ink.”

  He helps her stand on her own. She gives me a little bow of greeting, still sobbing. The joy of the moment is agonizing.

  “And you just made her a new body, just like that?” Lyra isn’t buying, confronting the same monster she saw murder her family. (At least she’s lowered he weapons.) “Regenerated her in seconds?”

  Chang shakes his head, looking small, inadequate, unworthy.

  “No,” he apologizes. “I just spun her an organic synthetic analog based on her DNA. The body will function like a human body, preserve her CNS, process oxygen and water and food nutrition, eliminate, simulate all senses, respond to her motor nerves. The design represents the height of our lost prosthetic and android science. But it isn’t a human body. It won’t show age, and if damaged will require mechanical repair. But I hope it will suffice until I can clone her a true body.”