The God Mars
Book Five: Onryō
By Michael Rizzo
Copyright 2015 by Michael Rizzo
Smashwords Edition
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Table of Contents
Part One: Dead Men Tell Tales
Chapter 1: The Invisible City
Chapter 2: Harvester
Chapter 3: Heroes Quest
Chapter 4: Die to Live
Chapter 5: Dead Man’s Memories
Chapter 6: Return of the Reaper
Chapter 7: Wizard and Demon
Chapter 8: Premature Burial
Part Two: Time of Death
Chapter 1: Local God
Chapter 2: Duty
Chapter 3: Purpose
Chapter 4: Yod’s Will
Chapter 5: Weaponized
Chapter 6: The Battle of Katar
Chapter 7: Fates Worse Than Death
Chapter 8: End In Fire
Epilogue: The Importance of Ritual
Map of the Western Vajra
Part One: Dead Men Tell Tales
Chapter 1: The Invisible City
From the Diary of Jonathan Drake:
“Abu Abbas of the Northeast Melas Nomads, tell your life.”
The deep commanding voice of the War King of Katar booms in the massive cut stone and rammed-earth chamber.
As bidden, my father steps up to the Speaker’s Podium, standing directly under the circle of open sky that is the apex of the Oculus dome. After a brief moment of silence to finish gathering his thoughts, he looks out at our fantastic audience as if he can make eye contact with every one of them. He takes a last deep breath through his mask, and then loosens it to hang over his chin so that he can be heard better, relying on the passive oxygen bleed to keep him from getting light-headed in the thin but actually breathable air here.
And then he honors the tradition of our hosts, as strangers who come in peace are expected to: He tells the story of his life, of our people.
“My name is Abu Abbas, son of Yusuf. I was born in Twenty Sixty-Four by the old Earth calendar, a Standard Year after my father brought his family to Mars. He was an engineer, and a skilled near-vacuum welder. He worked hard out in the cold and what was then one-percent atmosphere to construct Baraka Colony in the belly of Melas Chasma. He helped build the first Holy Mosque on this planet. Then he served as its Imam. He was a good man. A brave man…”
His voice, as usual, is soothingly deep and rich, and echoes off the walls of the great circular space, rivaling the War King’s.
“I was not even a year old when the Apocalypse came, but I remember pieces of it like an old nightmare. Alarms. People running, panicking, faced—I realize now—with the unthinkable. My father took us into the shelters, dug deep under the colony, but the shock and the noise of the bomb through the bedrock of the planet… By the will of God we were spared, some of us, because the missile that was meant to sterilize our colony was knocked off course before it detonated. A miracle… But the blast wave shattered and crushed and burned the above-ground structures, the Mosque, all of my father’s work.”
I notice something: Our hosts have all closed their eyes and lowered their faces in unison, all the same, like a ritual, just at the moment my father mentioned the nuclear bombardment.
“Those of us that survived sheltered in place for as long as we could. There was no word from the outside, no rescue, no relief. The surface was too hot from all the fallout to go out and explore, but within three months we had no choice, because our water and air recyclers had begun to fail, and the Feed Line to the colony had been cut by the blasts. We packed surface gear, shelters, rations, and hiked in pressure suits for the nearest intact Line. My father and the other engineers welded the first Taps to draw what we needed: Oxygen. Water. Hydrogen fuel for our heaters and cook stoves and generators. We made our home in the open desert. And out of fear of those who had dropped bombs on us, we painted our shelters to match the terrain, made these cloaks to keep us warm and shield us from the sun’s radiation and hide us when we moved. Unseen, they would believe us all to be dead, and not send more bombs to finish the task. And so, by the mercy of God, we lived.”
The story having passed the nuclear stage, our hosts open their eyes and look up, look at my father with the same dispassion they’ve universally shown since we were escorted through their great Gate Wall, as if the coming of strangers is no more than a routine annoyance.
As I stand here on the chamber floor with my too-few surviving family and friends, my eyes can’t help but scan our strange and amazing audience. The Oculus is easily big enough for the several hundred citizens present, most of whom sit on the tiers of benches that climb the walls all around us like stairs—I feel like I’m standing in the bowl of a steep crater, the inner slopes of which are made out of these incredible environmentally-adapted human beings.
The adults are almost universally a full head taller than we are, with long thin limbs and oversized rib cages. But what’s most impressive when they gather in such numbers is their homogenous color palate: The apparent civilians wear a variety of simple hand-made clothes, all patterned with the same abstract rust and green and ochre patterns as the armor of their warriors, as if constant camouflage is as much a rule for them as it has been for us. The effect of so many of them sitting so close together is that they visually begin to blend into each other when they’re still. Then when they all move—like they did to lower their gazes—it almost makes me dizzy.
And even more striking than that is their dyed skin: The ruddy mineral compound they use to protect themselves from solar UV leaves a permanent rust red tint, under which can still be seen a variety of ethnic tones ranging from pale to tan to dark. It’s like I’m looking at them through crimson-tinted goggles.
They all sit and listen to the story of a stranger (who must look as strange to them as they do to us) in perfect polite disciplined silence. The only sound in the domed chamber during my father’s pauses is the whisper-howl of wind across the open circle of the single apex skylight—it produces a low tone that makes me think of an ocarina, almost hypnotic. This gives the space a palpable sense of sanctity.
Watching them, I decide to correct my initial impression of these people: What I’m seeing is not a lack of interest in the proceedings, but practiced, ingrained serenity. And it’s being exercised in the face of what must certainly be terrifying times.
The cold hardened stoicism is what I feel from their Council of Kings, sitting at their curved stone table on the chamber floor, facing the carved-stone Speaker’s Podium (and behind it, the rest of us), symbolically forming a thin line between the stranger and their people. Five pairs of eyes glare from faces that could also have been cut from stone: full of hard experience, loss, and difficult decisions. And here we are: one more difficult decision. Or maybe not so difficult. Maybe they’ve already made up their minds about us.
My father continues our history:
“We were not the only ones spared by God’s will, of course. Soon we encountered more of our own, refugees from Uqba. And a very few random others. But food was becoming scarce, and there were those that were not interested in sharing. We risked scavenging the ruins of the other Melas colonies, sometimes finding precious rations, or
useful supplies, medicine. Because of those who would not share, we also began scavenging metal, making weapons, because our precious few guns had precious little ammunition, and when it was gone, all we would have left were poor clubs. So we made knives and swords and spears, bows and crossbows, and armor…”
He touches the lamellar on his breast, even though it isn’t our manufacture—a fine gift from the Forge-Men (and an impressive prize for a traveler to be wearing in this place). Since they have let us keep our weapons—likely because they outnumber us several-hundred-to-one—he also gestures to his prized revolver and his Forge-made sword, then raises his cloaks to show them the rest of his load: tools, canteens, breather gear, travel rations, med kit, spare clothing; prayer rug and Holy Quran in their battered protective cases…
“We wear all this metal, carry all this weight, because we lost our colony centrifuges, and our parents wished us to keep as much of the bone density and muscle of Earth-Gravity as we could,” my father digresses as if he needs to explain, and explain tactfully, since our hosts have obviously chosen the opposite path: They’ve long-since embraced the conditions of this world, strived to adapt to it as completely as possible, letting their bodies develop unburdened in the .38 Gravity. Compared to them, we’re almost as squat and thick-bodied as the Children of the Forge.
“Even long after all hope of ever returning to Earth had faded, we kept the practice. Tradition.”
He’s holding back. The real reason we keep Weight Discipline is that my father—our Sharif and Imam, as his father before him—reminds us that we were made in God’s image, and should strive to stay so. Of course, saying that would likely sound like an insult to our hosts, who have been gracious enough to let us into their fortified homeland and not just kill us when we approached their great defensive wall.
“As the years passed, we traveled and scavenged, and sometimes encountered new groups. Our armor and weapons and concealment tactics became essential to our survival and success. To the southwest, Shinkyo Colony had become a hidden fortress, defended by stealthy warriors. To the northwest, the City of Industry, which was made to look like an abandoned ruin, was protected by equally deadly soldiers, former Unmakers who still call themselves Peace Keepers… I will let my good friend Lieutenant Straker tell you of them in her own tale, as she is from there.”
He nods to Jak Straker, who gives a polite but clearly uncomfortable smile. Apparently even the power of a Companion Blade does not overcome the inherent terror of public speaking.
“To the northeast… From there came the Zodanga in their crafty flyers and air ships, calling themselves ‘pirates’ and raiding and killing for what they needed, striking from their fortress in the Rim.
“We wandered, kept moving to avoid our enemies, and divided our band into three factions, each taking a quarter of Melas to seek their resources and fend off our mutual enemies, and sometimes each other as need drove us to compete against former brothers. Living and moving on the surface became easier as the air thickened, but as it did, the scavenging became thin, the preserved food began to run out, and our meager shelter hydroponic gardens could not provide for all.
“But just as we were succumbing to malnutrition and starvation, God again showed us His mercy. From the east came food: A few brave travelers had managed trade with Tranquility in Western Coprates—I will let my dear companion Ambassador Murphy tell you of them. They brought us precious fresh and dried fruits, vegetables, beans and grains. And so by God’s will we lived, had children and grandchildren, occasionally fought with competitors and buried loved ones for it.
“But then came the return of the Unmakers. And the coming of the Shadowman.”
He punctuates these revelations with a dramatic pause. I know our hosts have had their own intelligence of these turns, some of it at tragic cost, so I expect this is the part of the story that they’ve really been waiting to hear, far more than my father’s life story as a testament to his—and our—character and quality.
“At first it was just the few: The Unmaker Base Melas Two, on the eastern border to Coprates. They had all been asleep, kept safe in chemical hibernation after they were buried by the bombing…”
The Katar again all close their eyes and lower their heads. It’s definitely a ritual gesture.
“Fifty years, they had slept. These were good people. Soldiers and civilians, some of them former enemies, now a great family. They made allies of the Jinn, who you call Eternals—the Terraformers. And then they became our friends, after some unfortunate bloodshed. Their leader, Colonel Ram, the great Peacemaker, became my brother. Together, we built a grand greenhouse, traded precious supplies, even fought side-by-side.
“But Colonel Ram was bound by duty to call his leaders, to call Earth. When Earth answered that call, they were not the world—the people—he expected. They had been changed by events, events we did not know about. Most of us here believed that the Apocalypse came…” (Eyes close again on cue.) “…because Earth believed that the corporate labs had been breached, that contamination was rampant. We on the surface knew this was a lie, an act of unthinkable sabotage designed to murder us all just to destroy what the corporations were producing here. What we did not know is that the same drones that triggered the failsafe alarms also attacked everything in orbit: Destroyed ships, the space dock, the base and fuel depot on Phobos. All destroyed, thousands dead in the vacuum of space. Then the Disc drones attached themselves to the few surviving shuttles that managed the return flight, and destroyed Earth’s orbital facilities as well. Then signals were broadcast from the surface of Mars: chatter and EMR to convince Earth that the planet was hopelessly contaminated. All to keep Earth from ever coming back here.
“But after fifty years of living with the guilt of what had been done with their so-called ‘failsafe’ and the fear of what they thought was here, Colonel Ram called them and told them that there was no contamination, no nano-plague ravaging the surface, and that they had left behind survivors all those years ago. This moved them to come back, but they remain fearful, and perhaps they have reason. Because their return has raised the Shadowman, Syan Chang, and his armies of Black Clothes and machines; armies you have fought here, that the Pax have fought.”
I can feel their questions now—so many urgent questions—but they keep them in, let my father tell his tale in his own way.
“The drones that triggered the failsafe, the bombing…” My father has already gotten into the habit of pausing for the closed-eye ritual. “…they belonged to Chang. And Chang does not belong to this world. Not this world… He says he comes from a future where the corporations succeeded in their research and development here unmolested. The technology you have seen the Eternals wield, this is only a fraction… In Chang’s world, men had become like gods, made themselves gods. Immortal. Superhuman. And because they weren’t ready for such power, they destroyed their world, made it an unimaginable hell. Syan Chang said he came back through time to stop it all from happening, to stop the research that was going on here and scare Earth so that they would never try again. He thought he had succeeded with the Apocalypse…” Eyes close. “…but when Earth came back, he raised his own army to drive them away: the Black Clothes, recruited from the Peace Keepers and the Zodanga, their colonies razed to build his flying fortress and his robots—and his robots are run by the brains of his fallen soldiers. But Chang himself is invincible, indestructible, powerful. And he brought others like him.
“By God’s mercy, another power has sent others back from that world to resist Chang, to protect us. You have seen some of these heroes: they fight for you now against the machines that attack your homes. But because of what they are, because of the technology that makes them what they are, Earth fears them as much as Chang. We fought a great battle together against Chang in Melas, in our homeland, and defeated him, but then the Unmakers used a nuclear weapon in hopes of destroying both Chang and the heroes. Four hundred and fifty kilotons yield…”
My father p
auses, but this time the eye-closing is brief. They are all too riveted by his tale.
“This bomb damaged the Atmosphere Net in Melas, bled the air too thin even for our masks, and the radiation made the middle of the valley toxic. I swore I would never leave my desert, the home of my father where God had blessed us with life, but I have taken my people here, all the way here through hardship and loss, seven hundred kilometers to find a home away from the Unmakers and their war with Chang. And now… I find Chang’s army here—Chang is gone, but another has taken his place, a greater villain. His name is Asmodeus.
“If you accept us… We came here seeking a safe place to live. But if you accept us, we will help you fight. We will pledge you our guns and our swords and our lives to protect this place, to help you fight the machines and the Black Clothes and the monsters that command them. That is my promise. That is my tale.”
He bows. Receives no response other that the slight head-bows of the Council. Stands nervously in their midst (the rest of us behind him, but all of us surrounded by hundreds of Katar, and waiting beyond the chamber, hundreds more of their warriors).
In the tense waiting, I consider the things my father didn’t tell them: That Chang really didn’t come back through time, and in fact isn’t ultimately responsible for the Apocalypse. But the truth of it…
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