The Katar are already preparing a campsite about thirty meters away, on a spot that should be visibly hidden from the lower ground down-slope. Their shelters are small, barely big enough to lie down inside of.
“How far is Eureka from here?” Murphy asks, seeing Straker’s look of frustration, her eyes gazing far away up-canyon (though I doubt she could see far through the growth, even with her mods).
“Two kilometers yet,” Negev answers without checking. He nods his helmet in the direction Straker is staring. “It will be dark before we reach it. The leaves will close and the rocks will begin to ice.”
“We should wait for first light before we move in,” my father agrees with Negev’s holding plan. “We can get a safer look in the morning.”
“Still not picking up any signals?” Murphy asks Straker.
“Nothing since the beacon died. But we may be too far away to get short-range link chatter.” She chews at her scarred lower lip. “Let’s just hope that’s all it is.”
I’m sure she’s imagining Eureka overrun by Harvesters, stripped bare by Asmodeus, the population slaughtered or pressed into service…
I feel dizzy now, shaky. My hand is tingling up to my forearm. I check my breather—it seems to be working. I shouldn’t be hypoxic. I drink some water.
“Are you okay, lad?” Murphy catches me, but asks quietly.
“I think the Dragonfly Jerky might be trying to make an escape,” I joke, shaky.
“I know what you mean.”
Straker tries to call out to Colonel Ram, but there’s too much interference between the divide and, beyond it, the EMR fuzz of Lucifer’s Grave to get a clear transmission to Pax. She’d have to bounce off the Unmaker satellites, which might be detected. She decides to wait rather than hike out to a better location, as the discovery of another lab ship and the years-old remains of a possibly Modded human aren’t as important as finding out what’s happened at Eureka.
We find our own spot to set up our shelters, and set our heaters to warming them for the night. The Katar don’t carry hydrogen fuel units. They make a small circle of hand-sized rocks, fill it with a pile of dried plant matter, then light it on fire with sparks made from scraping a knife against what I assume is some kind of flint. They do this under the cover of a layered canopy that deflects the resulting smoke and probably keeps the heat from being easily seen from space. Once it’s all burnt down to glowing embers, they each carefully take a heated stone, wrap it in a cloth of some kind, and carry them into their micro-shelters.
We decide to sleep in our masks rather than waste the few canisters we’re carrying on pressurizing them. Murphy takes first watch, even though the Katar have their own sentries posted.
As our shelters warm up, I consider their thin fabric walls, and think about the ship. If we could get the life support systems back online, we could use it as a secure shelter, sniper-proof. But then I think about the man or woman in the cockpit, cornered and killed in there.
We go outside before it gets too cold to perform Salat, with the Katar silently observing our ritual. Then, since the Dragonfly I ate hasn’t forced an exit, I try to pad it out with familiar food. It turns out I’m hungry.
I also take the time to pull off my sliced glove and double-check my thumb. There isn’t a mark. I must have felt the glove get cut as I pulled away. I lie back on my roll, my father next to me, and Rashid on his other side. Staring up at the shelter roof, I find I’m still disturbed by the sound of wind through the greenery. It’s interrupted my sleep every night since we came to the Trident, with the exceptions of the night spent in the Barrow with the Forge, and at Katar. But tonight, it actually starts to become soothing, familiar, like the sound that the wind made over the open desert of home. Maybe I’m finally adjusting.
But then, as I start to doze, I have a kind of semi-dream between waking and sleep, just a flash: I’m being shot. There’s a force of fighters—Unmakers—wedged into a doorway, a hatchway, hammering me with large caliber weapons. I feel my body coming apart, shells tearing through me, through my armor, too much… if I could just reach…
I realize I’m just imagining, putting myself in the place of that body in the ship for some reason. I’m probably just feeling helpless here, potentially under Keeper guns. In my dream, I even made my killers Keepers.
I shake it off, try to let the rustle of the green outside lull me into proper sleep.
I dream of my birth parents, as I occasionally still do. Sometimes the dreams are memories of the traveling camps. Sometimes they’re nightmares of that final attack by the pirates, of my mother’s blood all over me, and the blood of the pirates that killed her but it’s not enough, I want more, I want all of their blood, every single one of them, but they flew away like cowards when the Nomads came, when my new father came.
Tonight I dream a fantasy: good times in bright, clean spaces. Running through a younger version of a forest like this one in a mask and goggles too big for me, watched over by my parents. Playing games on large screens. Eating rations together on a clean table under bright white light. There are others there, like there are in some of my dreams: A tall, strong man with short dark hair and a short trimmed beard. A friendly man with Asian features, a darker woman I think is his wife, and a little girl in long black braids that I play with sometimes, and sometimes try to get away from. And another man, dark-skinned and very thin, with a shaved head and intense eyes. He has a funny name, I know, but I can never remember it. All the other adults are nice to me, take care of me, though they sometimes scold me when I do something dangerous. Like eating some of the wild nuts. Only the dark man ignores me—he’s always too busy with his work. Sometimes my parents are, too, but I have the others to keep me company. Like a family. They all call me “Jonny” or “Jon-Boy”.
I see the ship again in my dream: bigger, cleaner. It’s still buried under rocks, but everything looks so new, yet lived-in. Like a home. My home.
I know my dreams do this: splice fragments of waking memory into fantastic, scrambled narratives in bizarre alternate worlds. I even tend to see the same kinds of places over and over—my father called these “dream lands”, a set of places we go back to repeatedly when we dream, unique to the dreamer.
It’s funny, though: I usually don’t really know I’m dreaming when I’m dreaming. If I ever figure it out, I usually just
“Wake up!”
A blast of cold hits me across the face.
“Come on! We need to move!”
Fuzzy. I’m being shaken. Hard.
It’s still dark, but I recognize Straker’s voice, which is probably what keeps me from jumping when I see her green eyes glowing in the dark.
Rashid is already up, jerking his boots on. My father is a little slower. And I… I can’t seem to shake off sleep. I feel numb, drugged, sloppy. I figure I may be hypoxic from sleeping in a mask, if it slipped loose.
“Leave the shelters,” Straker insists quietly but urgently. “Get cover in the rocks. We need to back out of here. Fast!”
I get my boots on, seal my coat, grab my cloaks and my gear and my rifle. I fumble like a child.
“What’s happening?” my father asks.
“I couldn’t sleep, so I went back in the ship,” Straker explains quickly. “The beacon—it didn’t come from the ship’s transmitters. The ship doesn’t have any—they’ve been pulled. Someone had wired link gear through the ship’s array. It was rigged to the cockpit hatch. Opening it is what shut it off.”
“Alarm,” Rashid understands.
“Subtle,” Straker excuses, probably feeling the most stupid of all of us. “It didn’t send an alarm, it just stopped sending.”
“We just assumed the power failed,” my father remembers his own guess, sounding like he feels foolish for it.
“Whoever’s listening has had eight hours to respond,” she calculates unhappily.
We’re up and moving. Out of the shelter in the dark, heat signatures masked under our cloaks, keeping low
until we find rocks big enough to hide behind (though we can’t be sure which direction attack is coming from). I can barely see, but I think what movement I can see is the Katar, fanning out into the green. I have no idea where the Ghaddar or Murphy are.
We hunker down in the cold. The rocks are slick with a glazing of ice.
Nothing happens.
While we sit in the silence, I look up. I can see more stars in the sky through the green now than I could when we went to bed. The leaves of many of the species do close up at night to resist freezing. And that means whatever visual cover the forest provides has gotten more transparent. But an enemy would still need night vision to…
I hear the distinctive whistle of a bullet, followed by an impact on metal, followed by a clattering thud, somewhere to my right. Someone got hit, probably a Katar. The muffled twang of a bow answers back, then another.
More bullets come our way. I can see muzzle flashes in the dark, giving me a sense of their positions. Straker steps out of cover, stands up in plain view, her Blade in front of her. I expect she can easily see whoever’s shooting at us with her Modded eyes. And she can do another trick. First one bullet, then another, bursts and flares against her Blade. I’ve seen this before: If something’s coming her way, her Blade will draw it in, consume its energy and materials. That means behind her is a pretty safe place to be.
“Rashid, Ishmael, fire past me,” she orders. “Targets in the rocks, sixty meters…”
We get our rifles up, switch our scopes to night vision, scan the forest. It takes Straker eating four more rounds, but then I catch a glimpse of Unmaker Heavy Armor in the rocks about where Straker said they’d be. I find a reasonably exposed helmet, send a shot, miss. Rashid scores one. I aim again, and see something amazing: my target gets hit by an arrow that finds a gap in his plate at the neck. It hit him at a fairly extreme angle, as if lobbed over a high trajectory, catching him over top of his own rocky cover.
But there are a lot more to keep firing back. I see at least two dozen armor shells, and they’ve had plenty of time to set up their positions.
Straker makes her eyes glow bright. She’s intentionally making herself a tempting target. But the Unmakers—Keepers—are smart enough to stop wasting ammo on whatever she is and pick at targets that are more vulnerable.
I hear the distinctive bang and see the flash of Murphy’s revolver, see him rolling away from his position as soon as he fires to keep from being targeted by the flash. An enemy helmet bursts from an HE round. I hear a much larger caliber gun bang from our line—that would be the Ghaddar. She’s somewhere way up-slope and forward, firing down on our attackers.
Another of my targets gets taken by an arrow first.
Then our shelters explode. Grenade.
I shift my scope down-slope, see a fire team of Keepers moving up on us. I put a round through one, but then another lobs a grenade at us. Straker manages to swat it back at them.
“Move back!” she orders us. “Now! I can cover you!”
No.
That’s the first thing that flashes through my head. I don’t want to go anywhere. I’m already locking another Keeper, and shoot him clean through the visor. And another. I’m totally clear, totally focused, but also totally flooded with rage and I don’t know why. But running is no option. Every one of these animals has to die. Every one…
“Run!” Straker is yelling at me. My father tries to reach me, but Rashid is pulling him back, firing for cover. I hear him scream my name over gunfire, but I don’t care.
I empty the rest of my magazine, kill six more Keepers—it’s like my gun is doing it for me. They start pulling back, dropping down under cover. Cowards.
Straker swats a sniper round headed my way.
“Fuck!” she’s shouting at me. “MOVE IT, YOU DUMB SHIT!!”
Good idea.
I get up and run and leap, forward, down-slope, bounding off rocks on the way down. They fire back at me—I can see it coming—and I drop behind a boulder, reload, let them waste a few bullets against stone. Then I reach down, lift, pry, and send the boulder and a few of its fellows tumbling at them as a slide. I run sideways while they’re busy with that, picking off an animal that tries to run (wielding my rifle with one hand!). I’m laughing, giddy. One of them gets his legs pinned under my landslide and screams. I like them screaming, but I put a round in his back anyway.
“MURPHY!” I hear Straker shout. I think I hear him yelling back, something about leaving him and getting the others out. I know I should care, but I don’t. I don’t care about anything but killing these monsters.
I turn, punch a round through another armored suit. I barely feel something hit me in the chest, smacking my armor hard and sharp below my heart; feel a shockwave like an explosion in my ribcage, kicking the air out of me. I don’t stop. I leap for one of them before he can look up and see me coming, tackle the suit of armor, tossing my rifle and drawing my sword and stabbing it between his helmet and neck guard, twisting it in meat and bone. My body feels shaky, electric, almost like when I grabbed the Companion Blade at the Barrow.
I cough. Taste blood. A lot of blood. I can’t get a full breath in. My chest is full of fire and knives. Spots form in my vision.
I don’t care.
I drag up the armor suit I’ve just killed, and use it as a shield as they shoot at me. It should be too heavy for me to lift, especially if I’ve taken a bullet through my left lung, but it isn’t. I feel rounds smack into the laminate suit, then feel one tear at my left calf, making my leg go numb and dead halfway below the knee. I almost fall, then throw the armored body at them, keeping its weapon, and empty first the magazine of AP shells and then the grenade cylinder. I realize I’m screaming even though I can barely breathe. I throw away the empty weapon, get my sword back from the neck of my kill, head…
I get slammed in the upper right chest, feel fragments from my chest plating tear into my face, feel it hit and shatter off the armor on my back on the way out. It takes what’s left of the wind out of me, leaves me gasping like I’m in near vacuum, unable to fill my lungs. Now all my limbs become liquid. My legs go completely, then the rest of me. Still I try to keep going, keep running forward, but crash face-first into the rocks before I manage one more step. My own blood surges up my throat, sickening and final. I know I’m dead. I know it.
“KID!!!” Straker screams. From where I’m sprawled, weak and broken and useless, I see her fly down into the rest of them, see her do what I couldn’t: Hack and hack and fly, so fast. Her Blade cleaves them like nothing, just like my Nagamaki would. If I only had my Nagamaki. Or even my Sixgun… I’d…
There’s a flash of bright light. Flares. Lots of flares. They light up the forest, let me see my kills. Let me see the rest running, retreating. They’re still cowards. That hasn’t changed. I see a few taken by the skinny natives’ arrows. That makes me happy…
Sorry, kid…
Voice in my head. Maybe. But I can tell it’s not sorry, not at all. Neither am I. Except that I didn’t finish it.
I can’t get any air into my lungs. It feels like they’ve been crushed and set on fire. My mask is full of blood.
Then I feel the wave, washing over top of me. It surges. I see it catch one of the Katar, up in the rocks, watch it strip his armor off of him, crumbling it to dust along with his weapons.
The fucker would do the same thing to his flesh if he could figure out how to break the safeties on the thing…
The vulnerable Katar gets shot in the chest and head.
He’s here.
What…?
Someone is coming, walking towards us out of the forest, casual like there isn’t a battle going on, like he’s not stepping over dead men.
He never cared about them. The animals are still too stupid to see it.
My vision is blurring, spotting over as I go into shock, but I can see him: Wearing a long black robe, carrying a bright white staff. Thin. Dark skin over a face as sharp-boned as a skull. Short stu
bble of frosted hair cleaved by scars. I know him. How do I know him?
He has a funny name.
His eyes glow like Straker’s, only golden. On the top of his staff is a ball, shiny metal, the size of a… Sphere. He has a Jinn Sphere.
Arrows fly at him, but dissolve in midair before they get within a meter.
Straker steps in his way, sword ready.
Idiot. Why is she just standing there? She needs to cut him down now. Cut him down NOW!
“And what are we?” the dark scarred man sings. “Are we like me?”
He points his staff at her, and she seems to engage it, even from a distance of several meters, struggling.
“First Lieutenant Jak Straker, City of Industry Peace Keepers,” she declares herself, holding her ground. The dark man grins like this is amusing.
“She’s one of yours,” he calls back over his shoulder. “Distant cousin, anyway. Sister in arms. You should throw her a party.” He looks at Straker with his glowing eyes, seems to be able to push her with his staff. “Me, I don’t care who you are. It’s what you have that interests me. Where did you get yours, girl?”
“You have a Companion,” she decides. “How do you have a Companion?”
“I do. And I didn’t actually know what they were called, so thank you for that. But I did ask my question first, so I should get my answer first. And I have more than a Companion.”
He pushes. I see her uniform ripple, as if under a strong wind, but it doesn’t dissolve. This seems to impress him.
“It’s changed more of you than just your body and mind,” he declares. “You’ll have to teach me the trick. If you are Peace Keeper, we’re on the same side. I’m sure we can do amazing things together.”
“I’m here to warn Eureka!” she ignores his offer, calling past him to the Keepers who are holding back to the shadows. “Asmodeus, the immortal: he’s a monster! He’s infected at least one of your people already, Sergeant Forbusco, with something that ate his brain and took his body! He’s…”
The God Mars Book Five: Onryo Page 8