He looks up at us. His hair is dirty and ragged, his face pale and gaunt with dried blood crusted on it. His eyes are milky like a corpse’s. And the smell rising at us is definitely the smell of death.
Other than staring up at us with his obviously blind eyes, he does nothing, makes no expression.
“Do you recognize his uniform?” Khan asks us, asks Straker because of the apparent similarities.
Straker steps up to the pit. She looks down at him, looks like she’s trying to hear something. She draws her Blade, and before Khan or the guards can stop her, she jumps into the hole.
She lands with impressive surety, but before she can recover herself, the man lunges at her. She stops him easily enough, putting out her free hand and holding him by the throat. He tries to claw at her with his bare hands, tries to take her sword, and seems oblivious as it cuts his fingers to the bone.
“Beware his mouth!” Khan warns, and the reason becomes clear. The man in the pit opens his jaws as if to bite her, but unnaturally wide. I think I can hear the pop of his jaw dislocating. Then something mechanical thrusts several centimeters out of his mouth in the blink of an eye. Straker dodges it. It looks probe-like, needle-tipped. It continues to jab at her in short, quick strokes.
She keeps holding him, twisting his head like she’s examining him. Then she thrusts her Blade up under his jaw, and pushes it in.
Fire and smoke bursts out of his mouth and eyes. The body jerks and goes limp, but she doesn’t let go, doesn’t let him fall.
“What is it?” my father needs to know.
“I can see it. Inside him. There’s a machine fused to the base of his brain. It’s got…” She uses the tip of her sword surgically, scoops away one of the burned eyes to reveal what looks like a simple sensor cluster. “It was watching us through him. Controlling his muscles.”
“A corpse?” my father doesn’t want to accept.
“Yes… and no… His heart was still beating, or trying to. It didn’t sound right. And his chest was moving, but I didn’t hear breathing, just wet rattling. Until I fried the control unit. Then it stopped. But…”
I remember that her hearing has been enhanced by her Modding. All of her senses have.
She turns his head sideways for us to see. There’s a gunshot wound in his right temple, with powder burns and the jagged star-shaped tearing that betrays a contact shot.
“He tried to kill himself,” she puts together grimly. “Probably as this thing ate through his brain, shoved its sensor stalks out through his eyes…”
“But it kept him alive?” Murphy doesn’t accept.
“Just the body. Probably to preserve it for use.” I can hear her voice begin to tremble as she speculates. She’s just as sickened as we are. Being Modded as she is certainly hasn’t blunted her humanity.
“Using him like a bot?” I’m understanding but not wanting to.
Straker eases the body down, stands over it.
“It’s worse than that,” she tells us urgently. “I heard signals. Like bot signals. He was transmitting.”
I manage to feel even sicker.
“He’s seen us, seen this place,” the Ghaddar decides, managing to think tactically in the face of this horror.
“Then so has his master,” my father concludes.
“Where was he found?” Straker asks upwards.
“East-southeast of the Grave” Khan tells her. “By a scouting party. He was walking toward the Gap into the South Blade. He had a weapon, a gun, but he emptied it.”
Straker bends down over the body, and tears a set of patches off of the uniform.
“He’s a Peace Keeper,” she announces what she’s found. “He’s from Eureka Colony. There was a garrison there. Before the Bang. We managed to keep in communication with them for a number of years, but we lost contact, long before my time.”
“It seems they’re still out there somewhere,” I figure.
“And Asmodeus and his toy maker have been using them for their sick experiments,” my father grumbles. “That means they may have made the mistake of joining him, just like your own people joined Chang.”
Straker shakes her head, confused.
“He’s still wearing his generational uniform. The first thing Chang did was make us wear his black.”
“Maybe they’re rebelling,” Murphy tries. “Like you did.”
I hear her breathing down in the pit, feel her rage. She’s never met these people, but they’re still a kind of kin to her. But then she looks distracted, turns her head as if she’s trying to hear…
“I’m still hearing a signal.”
“Over here,” Khan indicates with a jerk of his head.
Straker is up out of the pit with a zigzagging of springs off the walls. The warriors reflexively step back at this brief demonstration of what her Companion has done for her. Then they make room for us to follow Khan over to a neighboring pit. I didn’t think to notice it until now because there were no guards around it, but now I realize: the warriors are reluctant to approach it. So is Terina.
(I’ve never seen her like this, not in the face of torture and death, not in the face of an endless army of killer bots. She’s horrified, barely managing to stay put and maintain her regal façade.)
Down in the second pit is a Katar warrior. Same staring up at us. Same dead eyes. But he’s not nearly as decayed. He’s breathing—I see his chest moving.
“The mouth device injected something into him,” Khan tells us grimly. “It took time. He chose the pit when he felt it taking him. He didn’t scream. He didn’t ask for death. He wanted us to be able to study him. Learn.”
Straker steps to the edge of the pit, but doesn’t leap in. Instead, she holds her Blade up in front of her face, closes her eyes, concentrates. I don’t see anything obvious happen, but then the machine-possessed warrior lowers his gaze, just stares into the pit wall.
“I disabled the transmitter,” she lets us know.
“Is this technology like yours?” Khan asks her directly, nodding at her Blade.
“No. It’s much more primitive. As far as I can tell, all it does is seek a target and build the neuro-control module, the sensor stalks to see with and the injector to pass the starter seed to another body.”
“To replicate itself,” I follow into the horror. “To reproduce.”
First Fohat used the brains of his fallen pawns to wire his bots. Now he’s doing the opposite: gutting men of their brains to make drones out of flesh and bone. I surprise myself by seeing the wisdom in it: It’s cheaper in resources, requires no factory, no base, and self replicates by infecting and consuming whoever it encounters. Brilliant evil.
“Harvester…” Straker mutters. Then she puts away her Blade. “I can hear it, read its code. It’s called a Harvester.”
Straker assures us that the body of the Keeper is safe, and the guards lower lines to bring it up out of its prison. They easily take Straker up on her offer to go back down into the pit and secure the body herself, and then keep their distance from it when it’s hauled up. From the haunted looks in their eyes, I suspect these warriors watched their comrade succumb to the thing that consumed his brain.
I expect Khan to send his daughter away, but he just looks at her once as the violated body is laid out on the stone. She stands strong, and he seems to leave the issue at that.
A small delegation of civilians comes across the field to meet us. They all wear similar odd canopy headdresses. In their midst is their Science King, Gempei Akinaga, who takes a long silent look at the body (from several meters away), and then addresses Khan directly.
“A lab-room has been prepped. If the device is inert, we need to examine it.”
“And him,” Straker speaks up. She pulls the badges she took from the body from her pocket. Now that I can see closer, one of them is a name patch. “His name was Forbusco. J. He was a sergeant.”
Akinaga nods, as if remembering this scary curiosity was a man. But Khan holds up a hand before Akinaga�
�s people can approach the corpse. He looks across the field, back to his colony.
“Do it here. Set up a shelter.”
Akinaga doesn’t argue. Runners are sent to acquire what’s needed.
In the interim, Straker starts her own examination.
“Your man’s organs are still working, at least his heart and lungs. Was this man still breathing when you encountered him.”
“Cousteau,” Khan commands one of his warriors, a brown-haired female with greenish-brown eyes and muscles like cables. She steps forward.
“We do not know. We saw him. He fired at us. We returned.”
Straker prods at the soft armor uniform jacket with her gloved fingers, finds a large number of cut holes in the torso. I see more in the thighs and upper arms. Some look like sword thrusts; some are smaller, more likely arrows. (I’m surprised they risked retrieving those arrows from the walking corpse-weapon, but they’re likely precious.)
“He was a poor shot. Only Glaiveman Hines was hit, a meat wound to his arm.”
“We released Hines from isolation after a few days,” Akinaga tells us. “His wound was simple. Just a bullet.”
“Only the mouth-stinger…” Cousteau continues, hesitant now, pointing at the body’s gaping mouth and the charred injector that still protrudes from it. “It ran out of ammo and charged us. We had already put four arrows in it. Alistair tried his blade, but…” She nods toward the other pit. “It grabbed him and looked like it was trying to bite. Then the stinger struck him in the neck. A minor wound, it seemed, at first. The creature… It should have been dead. We stabbed it and held it back on our Naginata.” She semi-demonstrates by thrusting her sword-lance at the body. The weapons would let them keep the thing—the former Sergeant Forbusco—out of reach (certainly out of reach of his mouth). But if he had arrows and multiple blades like that stuck in him…
“It did not falter. It should have fallen, but it kept on its feet all the way here, driven by our Naginata. We thought to chop it apart and leave it, but I decided it better to study, to learn…”
Khan gives her a reassuring nod, validating her difficult decision. Straker does the same, for whatever a fellow warrior’s appreciation is worth. Then she turns back to the body, rips open his soft-armor jacket.
The blade and arrow holes do indeed penetrate the soft armor, leaving deep open wounds, some of which that show the slicing and tearing of weapons twisting. His belly is open in places, his insides still inside only because of the fit of his jacket. The smell is of many days of decomposition, overwhelming. The Science King’s entourage is pushed back by it. But there’s dried blood all over the torso, soaked into the jacket lining.
“His heart was still beating when these wounds were made,” the Ghaddar decides.
“And continued trying to, even bled mostly out from his wounds and with both lungs punctured,” Straker reports, trying to remain objective.
“He was breathing,” one of the other warriors speaks up, sounding as haunted as Cousteau. “When we took him… I heard… He choked on his blood and stopped, but did not fall, did not stop fighting.”
“The module is wired into his nervous system,” Straker seems to be looking into him again, through flesh and bone. “It can control his muscles with electrical impulses as long as the tissues are still viable enough to respond. It probably also keeps the heart and lungs going as long as it can to try to keep feeding oxygen to the body, to increase the longevity of the drone…” She bites her lip. “That’s what this is. Just a convenient, disposable platform…” She puts her hand on the head, almost tenderly cradles it. “You’ll find the brain destroyed. Consumed and starved. Unnecessary.”
“How long since you captured him?” Murphy asks.
“Three days,” Cousteau answers.
“And it was still moving,” my father states the terrifying obvious.
“How long can they keep going?” I wonder out loud.
Straker gets up and walks over to the second pit, looks down at the infected Katar. Alistair. He’s still standing there, staring at the wall, wobbling slightly on his feet. Looking closer now, I see a gash on his forehead, and more in his dark braided hair, crusted with blood. There’s blood smeared on the pits walls, about head-height. I also see that food had been lowered down to him, but it’s only partially eaten, the rest scattered as if thrown. There are stains of vomit in the dirt by the wall.
“How long did it take him to get like this?” the insensitive question comes out of me.
“Two days,” Khan answers heavily, “before he stopped screaming and trying to bash his own skull open. After that, he just stared at us.”
Akinaga’s people set up a camouflaged tent, and defer to Straker to put the body on an old folding table. The Katar science team put on breathing masks and goggles that they probably haven’t needed for much of their lives, and the gloves from light surface suits. And so armored, they begin their autopsy, with Straker and her Companion close by, just in case.
They quickly confirm what Straker was able to scan using her modifications, but also make other discoveries, more mundane but perhaps critical.
“Signs of malnutrition, dehydration and decomposition are all recent. The man was otherwise developmentally healthy and reasonably well fed, but maintained the physiology of an early colonial: Squat and thick-boned, lungs stunted by supplements and pressurized spaces.” Akinaga sounds clearly disdainful of those that haven’t strived to adapt their bodies. “Wind and sun burns on his face show he was wearing a mask and goggles like you, but none were found on him when he was taken. Also, his sidearm holster was empty. The wound in his temple is consistent with a self-inflicted pistol shot. Unfortunately, it missed the device in his brain.”
He shows us the opened skull. The machine is only half the size of a man’s fist, sitting under the brain. The bullet that ended his conscious suffering would have passed over it. The brain itself
“The brain itself is decayed, traumatized by the bullet, but a significant amount of medial tissue is missing, as if consumed, as are parts of the skull and spine. It looks as if something has been eating him on a very small scale, like the way a Butterfly larva nibbles at leaf-matter.”
The smell at this point is blinding. I’m grateful for the breeze blowing through the tent to partially clear it. But it doesn’t just smell like corpse-rot. Something’s been done to the brain tissue.
“The nanotechnology that made this thing needed resources to build itself,” Straker assumes. Akinaga nods.
Straker looks sick. I expect she’s wondering if her own resource-scavenging technology does this to a defeated enemy. It looks like someone’s been inside this man’s head with a micro-drill and a very small spoon. I feel a shiver just thinking what he must have suffered before putting his own gun to his head.
Without asking permission, Straker reaches in and partially pulls the device from the skull, snapping it from the spine. I see the stalks of the sensors spearing forward through the eye sockets.
“It isn’t nanotech,” Straker confirms. “But it was built by nanotech. Just like the bots.” She pries and twists until the thing comes fully free. The last parts to be pulled from the body are a cluster of what look like fine wires that were running down the spine, and the tube-like injector that runs into the mouth. She examines it for a moment, then pinches her fingers into the thick base shaft of the injector, snapping a piece out. It reminds me of an ammo magazine, only gelatinous and very small.
“More seeds,” she identifies. “I can feel them.”
“I thought you fried this thing?” Murphy needs to know.
“I thought so, too. This module seems to give the seeds some protection.”
“Can they be stopped after they enter a body?” Khan wants to know.
“Each seed is a set of pre-programmed nanobuilders that scatter through the bloodstream after injection, then gather at the brainstem. Stopping one probably won’t stop the process. You’d need to find and kill all of them
. The current required to fry them would be lethal to the host.”
“How many are there in one…?” Murphy doesn’t know the proper word, so he just points to the tiny deadly thing in Straker’s fingers.
“That depends…” She turns it in her hand, looking from different angles, her eyes glowing green. “They reproduce in this module. It takes time, but there are already six more here.” She looks at Akinaga. “I take it you don’t have any kind of nano-containment technology?”
Akinaga shakes his head.
“Shit…” Straker hisses. The “magazine” has broken open, the contents oozing out—no, crawling out. She draws her Blade, stabs the tip into the cluster of seeds. They flare, burn and disintegrate.
Akinaga and his science team have stepped as far back away from her as they can and still be in the tent.
“It’s okay,” she tries to reassure. “The tech is a lot more primitive than mine. Not even at the level of what the ETE have. That makes me immune.”
But we’re not. And her Blade didn’t kill these things on the first try. If she hadn’t been here when Akinaga and his team performed their autopsy…
“How long could one of these things keep moving—keep infecting—before its body failed?” I ask what immediately strikes me as priority.
“I doubt the body would have lasted much longer, with the lungs and circulatory system so badly compromised,” Akinaga estimates, trying to use reason to cover how shaken he is. “The muscle tissue was decaying, starving. Still, it should have only been viable for hours after circulation failed, not days.”
“The device may have provided some kind of preservation,” one of the scientists guesses, also sounding terrified.
“We will study his tissues and fluids to confirm this,” Akinaga orders, steeling himself.
“And how long is your man Alistair likely to keep being ‘viable’?” my father tables a darker topic.
“He stopped eating and drinking just before he stopped responding,” Akinaga makes the grim calculations. “His body should be weakening by now, failing. But we don’t yet understand how this decaying corpse was maintained as long as it was, so I can only hypothesize if the tissues are still being oxygenated. Days. Weeks, maybe.”
The God Mars Book Five: Onryo Page 4