The God Mars Book Five: Onryo

by Michael Rizzo

  He’s right: it looks wrong, just a bit too far from the rim slope behind it, just a bit too “neat”.

  “It’s in here,” Straker declares. Then she starts pulling away boulders. The Katar step back, visibly impressed by her strength. She works at a single section, creating a kind of cave mouth in the pile. We try to help her, but two of us can barely budge a stone that she can lift by herself.

  Interestingly, the stones she’s pulling seem to come away without disturbing the rest of the fall, even when she’s dug in several meters.

  She digs like that for half an hour, while we can’t manage much more than moving aside the stones she brings out. Then from inside her mini-cave, she announces:

  “Hatch!”

  A few of us wedge in behind her. She’s revealed a marred black surface, curved like a ship’s hull, with a barely-visible seam that draws a circle just over two meters in diameter. I’ve seen a circular hatch like this, and the black skin over it, which I know is radar masking.

  “Colonel Ram had a ship like this,” the Ghaddar remembers. “The Lancer. It came abandoned out of the desert.”

  “And he found another one near Tyr,” Straker adds. “It was a fast recon vessel, paired with a lab ship. Sent by UNCORT nearly two decades ago, to look for nanotech, to study. They even experimented on whoever they could lure in.”

  “That means Earth knew there were people here decades before they answered Colonel Ram’s call,” the Ghaddar condemns. She was close to the Colonel during the time before and after he contacted Earth, and saw how they treated him. And the rest of us. Whatever good intentions they profess are not to be believed.

  “It looks like no one’s been in or out of here in a long time,” Murphy refocuses on what’s before us.

  “There’s something on the surface…” I point to the hatch. Straker brushes away the dust and caked-on dirt. There are more Kanji on the door: two large characters that look like they were painted in a hurry. The red paint is faded and chipped, but Negev seems to be able to make sense of it. Still, he doesn’t translate for a moment.

  “Ohn-Ryoh,” he finally says, quietly, like he doesn’t want to disturb something.

  “It means ‘vengeful spirit,” the Ghaddar explains, like she both does and doesn’t believe. I remember hearing that her mother’s side was from Shinkyo. “Most spirits—Yurei—haunt those that wronged them, and can be appeased when justice is served. Onryō haunt a place. They seek vengeance indiscriminately. And they’re much harder to appease or exorcize.”

  “Is it supposed to be a warning?” Murphy wonders, trying to sound like it’s funny.

  “Not a very good one if you have to be able to read Kanji to understand it,” the Ghaddar criticizes.

  “Same paint as on the gravestone?” I ask, hoping for some clue to this mystery.

  “No,” the Ghaddar decides. “And the script is in a different hand. Someone else marked the hatch.”

  “I don’t hear anything from inside,” Straker focuses. “Just the faded beacon.” She steps back away from the hatch, takes a breath. “The ship at Tyr used a beacon to lure its test subjects.”

  Apparently deciding to proceed anyway, she draws her Blade and concentrates.

  Nothing happens.

  “The lock is pretty effectively encrypted,” she complains, but keeps trying.

  Having another dream-memory moment, I step up to the hatch. I’m thinking that there should be some kind of concealed panel, a hatch control. I put my hand on the hull to the right of the hatchway, feel around.

  I get a blast of pressure in my face, just for a few seconds, spitting dust and grit at me. Everybody but Straker steps back, almost stumbling over each other in the small passage.

  “You did it,” Murphy praises Straker. She looks unsettled.

  “I’m not sure I did anything.” Then she asks me: “Did you?”

  I shake my head, unsure. I feel around on the hull, still can’t find any kind of mechanism, anything I may have triggered. But the hatch is unsealed. Straker grabs hold of an edge and pulls it open, revealing an airlock. Dusty. And there are smoke stains, as if there was a fire. They flow from inside.

  “I’m going in first,” Straker insists.

  “Good plan,” Murphy agrees, hand on the butt of his revolver.

  I notice our Katar “escorts” have moved back. They actually look more nervous than they did around the Harvester-infected.

  Straker steps into the lock, her sword leading. Nothing happens. She reaches out with her free hand, tries the inner hatch controls. They don’t respond. After several seconds of nothing happening Murphy steps in behind her. Then, impulsively, so do I, realizing as I do that if this is a trap, we’ve just given it three of our number.

  As if confirming it, there’s a flicker of lights. And another blast of pressure, longer and stronger this time. Now it’s our turn to almost fall over each other as we back away. I’m hit with a stale smell, dusty, but also like old smoke, and something else.

  “And you didn’t do that either?” Murphy nervously asks Straker.

  “I have no idea,” she admits, now sounding shaken. Then she looks back at me, her brow furrowing.

  “I didn’t touch anything,” I defend. But the timing is definitely suspicious: I step in, and the lights power up and the inner hatch blows.

  Like she’s unwilling to touch the ship directly, Straker uses her Blade to nudge open the inner hatch. The corridor beyond it is empty. But then along its length, the ship’s lighting comes on, though only barely, flickering.

  From what little I can see, this ship—if that’s what it is—is much bigger than the Lancer, or the Siren’s Song. Wider. The corridor goes forward several meters, then branches in four directions. There are more smoke-stains on the bulkheads and ceilings. There was a fire in here somewhere, but I don’t see its source.

  Straker tells us to stay put, and takes a cautious walk down to the junction with her Blade leading. She looks down the side branches, listens, then comes back, shaking her head to tell us she’s seen and heard nothing. Murphy flashes me a brave grin, shrugs, and steps through into the corridor. Still nothing happens, so they move further into the ship. I step in behind them, the Ghaddar right behind me. And I feel…

  I know this place.

  I don’t know how. The shapes and spaces. I remember them being brighter, cleaner. And more occupied. It’s probably just my imagination, but I’ve had flashes like this, starting as early as I can remember. When I was young, before I was taken in by Abu Abbas, before my birth parents were killed by pirates, before we were refugees, I remember bright spaces, clean spaces. Like a colony. But the only colonies still like that are Shinkyo and Tranquility that we know of, and we were from neither of those (certainly not Shinkyo, and I checked the Cast records at Tranquility). So I discounted it as a child’s fantasy, dreams of a better life never had.

  It certainly wasn’t this burned, dark place.

  (Maybe my parents told me stories of living in one of the pre-Bang colonies? No, they were too young. Grandparents? I don’t remember grandparents, and I don’t remember my parents ever talking about their parents, or any other family.)

  “This way,” I prod us left when we pause at the junction. “Bridge.”

  “And how do you know that?” Straker questions.

  “I…”

  I look up and down the corridors again. Somehow I know which way is fore and which is aft. I know where the crew quarters are, the dayroom, the labs, the engine access… I have no idea how.

  “The… Um… Just a guess…” I point at the ceiling and down the corridor. “But the smoke marks seem to be coming from somewhere down there.”

  I can tell from the look on her face that she doesn’t believe me, but she doesn’t know what to think. Murphy and the Ghaddar look equally suspicious.

  Now I feel weird. This ship feels too small for some reason, all wrong. Is this claustrophobia? I’ve never felt this way before, like parts of me want to scr
eam and get out, but I’ve slept and lived just fine in shelters a lot smaller than this corridor. Maybe it’s some kind of toxic reaction from eating Dragonfly Jerky, combined with the smells in here. My gut feels like I’m falling.

  Still, little details—fixtures, hatchways—all look so familiar, but just in pieces. Obviously, if I have been this far east before, I don’t remember it; and I’m pretty sure if we’d ever been on a ship like this, my parents would have told me. But then, they never really talked about where we came from, except to tell the other refugees that we were from Tranquility. (That was a lie, and I still don’t know why.)

  I shake it off, try to clear my head and breathe to keep my strange lunch down where it belongs. I tell myself I’m just spooked and tired and a little ill and my brain is splicing in what I know from being on a Lancer-class ship with Colonel Ram.

  (But did I somehow open the hatches?)

  Straker pushes past me in the narrow corridor, heading for the heavy hatch that’s probably the ship’s bridge. (If I’m wrong, and we actually end up in the engine section, I’ll have a good internal laugh and shake off what will be decisively proved as my brain playing tricks on me.)

  “The hatch has been welded shut,” she declares after a quick examination. Then she uses the tip of her Blade to slice through the welds like she’s carving soft plastic. Unfortunately, then she turns to me. “That should do it. Want to see if you still have the touch?”

  Not really, but I don’t say so. I step up past her, put my palm on the lock’s scanning plate. Nothing happens for a moment, and I’m about to breathe a sigh of relief, but then I get a green light and hear the locks open with a grinding clunk.

  My stomach does a flop on me, and I feel flushed.

  “Okay, we are officially inside weird,” Straker tries to lighten the shock I’m feeling.

  “And you’ve never been here before?” Murphy wants me to confirm. All I can manage to do is shake my head.

  Straker takes point again, and eases the hatch open with her Blade ready. Both Murphy and I have our weapons leveled over each of her shoulders. The lights flicker unhelpfully as the hatch groans on its hinges.

  “Ack…” Straker complains. We get hit by a cloud of fine ash. Straker probably isn’t at risk, but Murphy, the Ghaddar and I quickly make sure our masks and goggles are properly sealed.

  Flickering lights barely illuminate the section in front of us. Straker makes her sword glow, bathing everything is a ghostly light. I can’t see past her, but I feel her start, freezing.

  “Hellloooo…” she sings, covering whatever scare she just got. “Okay… that is just… not okay…”

  We manage to get a look past her. The room is indeed a control room, probably a cockpit, with heavy swivel chairs for a number of operators. A lot of the operating surfaces look smashed and melted. Every surface looks like it’s been charred. But that’s not what made her jump:

  The central chair is swiveled toward us, facing the door. Sprawled in it is a body, or I assume it’s a body, as all I see is a suit of heavy armor, similar to what the Katar wear: overlapping sections of plate laced together, helmet with a wide sectional flange over the neck. Even burned, I can tell the plate is supposed to be black. The lacing (remarkably, it’s mostly intact) is blood red. But the most striking part is the facemask: A bright white human skull grins at us.

  It takes me a moment to realize it is a facemask, as it’s out of proportion and position for a real skull wearing the helmet. Straker confirms this by nudging at it with her Blade. As her light comes close, I can see that the dark pits of the eye sockets are actually lenses.

  She prods the body with her Blade, and I hear a dry rustling, not quite hollow. She carefully pries the mask aside, revealing a real skull, this one burned, with only bits of carbonized flesh still sticking to it. The rest of the armor appears loose, like it’s also just covering a skeleton.

  “Who were you?” Straker wonders out loud. “What were you?”

  I get a closer look: There are a lot of bullet holes in the armor, large caliber. I also see bullet holes throughout the cockpit, though they all look like they came from this direction, from the hatchway. The chair that the suit is in has been shot through so much it’s almost falling apart.

  “Someone cornered this guy in here, hammered him with AP rounds, then set him on fire somehow,” Murphy sums what I’m thinking.

  “Looks like a chemical incendiary, high heat,” Straker assesses, looking at the burn patterns over everything. The deck around the chair and the frame of it show signs of melting, the padding totally charred. “They didn’t just want him burned. They wanted him incinerated.”

  Straker moves forward past the body to check out the rest of the cockpit. Murphy joins her, moving around the other side of the burned armor. There aren’t any more bodies, just him. (Her?)

  I’m still getting crushed by the sense that I know this place. I can see in my mind a vague picture of what it must have looked like when it was intact. But in my mind it was bigger than this, so maybe I really am just having some kind of bad-food hallucination, given detail by the rides I took in the Lancer, and then in an ETE shuttle when we attacked the Stormcloud.

  I check my forehead—I am sweating.

  “Every panel is smashed, and not just by gunfire,” Straker reports. “No way to access the systems, at least not from up here.”

  I focus on the body, the armor. Even shot up and burned up, I can see how finely crafted it is. I bet it was beautiful. And there are weapons…

  Wedged into what’s left of the belt is a gently curved short sword, not unlike what the Katar have. The lacing on the hilt is burned, but still hanging on. Slung from the right hip is a stainless steel revolver, but not like my father’s or Murphy’s. This one is bigger in the cylinder, and a different shape. It reminds me of the “cowboy” guns from old Earth videos. The remains of shells are stuck in little slots in the belt.

  I know better than to take it to use. The fire would have done too much damage to it. And to the blade. Blades…

  “Wow…” I can’t help but whisper. Across the suit’s back is slung a long sword. A very long sword. The laced hilt alone is probably over sixty centimeters. The blade in its scabbard reaches to the floor. It’s remarkably intact. The surviving fixtures are gorgeous. On the disk-like guard is the relief-image of some kind of creature with wings and a long thin neck.

  I impulsively reach out, pop the sword loose from the scabbard mouth, ease the blade out a few inches. The steel looks pristine, finely polished with a damascened grain. The edge…

  “Don’t touch it!” the Ghaddar snaps at me. I jerk my hand away, feel the bite of razor-sharp steel through the meat of my thumb, deep, as the blade drops back into its scabbard. I try to hide my stupidity. I can already feel my blood oozing out of the wound as I pinch my fingers shut to apply pressure.

  “Did it cut you?” Straker needs to know, rushing over.

  “No… I…”

  “Let me see,” she insists.

  Reluctantly, I show her my hand. The thumb pad of my glove is cut through. She pries into the slice to check…

  “Is he hurt?” Murphy asks, sounding like he’s concerned for more than just my thumb. I feel stupid. And scared.

  “No,” Straker finally concludes. I get my hand back, take a look myself. “It just got his glove.”

  No wound. No blood. Lucky. Just my imagination playing with me some more.

  “Are you picking up any signals from it?” Murphy asks Straker, pointing to the body.

  “Nothing. I…” She stops, looks around, then closes her eyes, listens. “The beacon stopped.”

  Chapter 4: Die to Live

  “We may have killed it when we let ourselves in…” My father has come in, with Negev behind him. “The lights… It looks like everything is shorting out.”

  My father smirks at the burned armor display when he sees it, but I see Negev’s eyes go wide.

  “One of yours?” the Ghadda
r asks him.

  “No,” he denies easily enough. “But the armor is O-Yoroi. Great Armor. Japanese style. We modeled our armor and weapons on the Japanese style, modified… This looks like something perfectly out of the records. Except the mempo—the mask. And this part, the maidate…”

  He points to the crest on the forehead of the helmet. It’s a small skull, surrounded by stylized flames.

  He reaches out to touch the helmet.

  “It may not be safe,” Murphy warns him before he can make contact. He withdraws his hand.

  “The only thing we know of that someone would need to go so far to destroy is a nano-modded human,” my father concludes, taking in the scene.

  “You should call Colonel Ram,” Murphy prods Straker. She nods.

  “You think this is one of his?” the Ghaddar wants to know.

  “Or one of theirs,” Murphy counters. “I still don’t get Yod’s game.”

  I see Negev lock on the name, but he doesn’t demand an explanation now. He seems in a hurry to be leaving.

  “We can make camp for the night in the rocks nearby,” he offers.

  “The ship is probably toxic,” my father agrees with him. “All this ash in the air. Old corpse.”

  We back out of the ship. I find I don’t want to. I want to explore, see if any of the other sections match up with my fever dream-memories. I see Rashid and a pair of Katar warriors coming up from the aft section. The Katar keep having to duck and stoop to keep from banging their helmets on the ceiling beams. They look supremely uncomfortable and ungraceful in these tight spaces made for Earth-style bodies. Their long pole arms are pretty unwieldy in here as well.

  “Everything is locked,” Rashid reports. “What isn’t has been stripped bare. Nothing useful.”

  I’m thinking I could probably open those hatches, but don’t offer to try, not with everyone looking at me like they don’t know what to make of me. So I head out into the quickly fading daylight, with Straker right behind me as if she wants to make sure I do leave. She calls out to check that the ship is clear, no stragglers, and then shuts the airlock hatches behind us as we last two exit.