The God Mars Book Five: Onryo

by Michael Rizzo

  Straker gets slammed backwards. The ground under her comes apart, and she falls into the resulting hole, sand swallowing her up to her knees, slowing her down.

  The dark man lets out a theatrical sigh.

  “Ah, so you’re one of those… We were warned about you. A benefit of our alliance. One of many. It looks like this one just came in quite handy.”

  Straker tries to get out of the shallow pit, but the ground erupts in her face, knocking her back and partly burying her. She tries to get up, but he advances on her, and more dirt and rock gets dumped on her.

  “You would be as strong as me, I expect, but I have one edge. Literally. One edge. That’s a geometry joke: Spheres only have one edge. They’re the only three dimensional shape that does.”

  He’s rambling, all ego. Then he levitates a large stone and flings it at her. She tries to block it, and does, but it seems to hurt her. A bigger stone—almost the size of her torso—follows right behind. This one knocks her Blade out of her grip. The dark one’s levitation power catches it in mid-air, pulls it toward him, out of her reach. Carefully, curiously, he reaches out his empty hand, tries to take hold of the Blade. Then he jerks his hand back—contact with it seems to hurt him. The Blade drops to the ground, landing heavy as a body. He scowls, then sends another rock to smash Straker in the head, knocking her out.

  Things get quiet. The flares begin to die out. Or maybe it’s just my vision, fading.

  “Leave the dead, take the living,” he tells his Keepers, who finally get brave enough to advance. “I have questions to ask. Especially to this one. This one is my toy.”

  I want to kill him. I need to kill him. I have to k…

  I can’t…

  I…

  Jonny?

  Jon-Boy? Is that you, lad?

  I…

  You’ve grown up. Turned into a man.

  …can’t…

  You need to be a man now. Be a man now for me. Show me how strong you are.

  …move… can’t…

  I need you to move, Jonny. Come on…

  I can’t …

  Just a little ways. Come on.

  Rocks feel cool on my face…

  None of that. I need you to move. I’ve managed to patch the big holes, but I can’t fix you. There’s too much lost.

  Shot…

  Yes. Shot. You were shot. Now move. Just crawl. Hand, then leg, then hand… Not far…

  Who…?

  Stories later. No time now. Move. That’s it…

  I realize it’s day. Bright.

  I can barely raise my head. My chest is crushed and on fire. I can’t breathe. My mouth is full of thick, sticky blood.

  My mask is gone. So are my goggles.

  So is my armor, my weapons, my boots…

  Start with a hand…

  I reach, grab ground, pull. It hurts… It hurts so bad…

  That’s it… That’s good…

  I try to move my left leg. It screams in pain. I drop, banging my face into the rocks. The rocks are nice and cool. I want to just lay here.

  I feel a shock go through my body.

  No sleeping, now. No time.

  I push with my other leg, get up on my elbows. Crawl. Every few centimeters feels like a klick. Without oxygen.

  It’s not far. Just over that rock. You can do it. You can…

  I get to the top of the rock, look over…

  There’s a body. A Keeper. I think. He’s been stripped of his heavy armor shell, left in just his shirtsleeves. His skin is pale. Dead. Holes through his torso. Wedged in a rut between rocks.

  They just left him there. Left their own dead like enemy dead.

  That’s it. Just a little more. Get up over the hill and just fall in. Let gravity do the rest.

  I don’t know why I’m doing it—I don’t even know if I’m doing it—but I pull and push and get the impossibly heavy mass of me over the rise that’s barely a third of a meter high and I give one last shove with all I’ve got.

  The short fall batters my already destroyed body. I fall like a corpse. Land on a corpse.

  Well done, lad. Now you can sleep for awhile. You’ve earned it.

  Okay.

  I’m dreaming.

  I’m climbing over rocks, dragging something. I can barely move, but I’m up on my feet. Every step is fire and knives.

  I look down, see the wounds in my chest, the mess of my left leg, see my blood drip on the rocks.

  Don’t worry about that. We’re still leaking a little. I can fix it. Just keep going.

  Where?

  I look uphill. I’m headed for the entrance to the ship.

  I look back. What I‘m dragging is a body. Another Keeper, a different Keeper, but stripped like the other one was. A big ragged wound through his neck leaves his head flopping like it’s going to fall off.

  I look behind me on the other side. There’s another Keeper body.

  I’m dragging a body with each hand.

  Just a little further. Inside. The hatches are already open.

  The world swims and goes purple.

  I think I blacked out for awhile. I’m inside the ship. Dragging bodies down the corridor. The lights flicker. I want to vomit, but it hurts too much…

  Almost there, Jonny.

  You lied. The hatches aren’t open… The cockpit hatch…

  Just put your hand on the panel. Like before. I just need to be sure.

  I have to drop one of the corpses. I flail blindly, manage to slap my bloody hand on the panel on my second try as I fall forward into the bulkhead. The lights turn green.

  “DNA ACCEPTED. WELCOME, JONATHAN DRAKE.”

  It is you, Jonny. Welcome home, boy.

  The hatch pops open, almost knocking me over. For some reason, it’s important that I pick up the second body, drag…

  Looking at me through the open hatchway is a bright white skull in a suit of black samurai armor. Waiting for me.

  Now let’s finish fixing you up, okay?

  Chapter 5: Dead Man’s Memories

  “What’s on your mind, lad? Your coffee’s getting cold…”

  What?

  Dreaming again: I’m sitting at a table in a bright room. The table is too tall—it’s up to my armpits. In front of me is a plastic cup full of coffee. With dried creamer and sugar. It was a special treat. When I was little.

  I look at my hands. I have child’s hands. A child’s body. My feet don’t touch the metal deck from the chair I’m in. I’m wearing a gray jumpsuit, the knees worn and dirty.

  “I’m sorry I was hard on you before. People sometimes don’t realize what kind of trouble they’re getting themselves into. They can’t see it. It happens to everybody.”

  I look across the table. A man smiles at me. Roundish face. Asian features. Short black hair. Kind eyes. A much neater gray jumpsuit.

  Uncle Peter?

  “It’s good to see you again, lad. I thought I never would.”

  I’m in the ship. It’s all bright and clean. A woman comes in, blonde. She gets herself some coffee, stops to kiss me on the head.

  “Are you okay, Jonny?” she asks.

  Mom?

  She leaves. She’s busy. She has her work.

  “I should have made them go with you,” the man across the table tells me, like he’s telling me a secret. But I can tell he’s upset. He sounds like he’s done something very bad. “My wife and Alice. Do you remember Alice?”

  Suddenly there’s a little girl at the table with us, her black hair in two long braids, tanned skin and partially Asian features.

  “She really missed you when you left. I had to lie to her, tell her you were coming back.” This seems to make him profoundly sad.

  “What is this?” I demand. My voice is all wrong, high-pitched…

  “You’re safe, now. Well, for now, anyway. You got hurt, Jonny. Bad. I’m afraid that was my fault. I didn’t know… I wasn’t conscious enough to recognize you. I only recognized them. And him.”

>   “Who are you?”

  “You know,” he tells me with his warm smile. “I can see it in your memories. Here are mine…”

  In a blink, I’m across the table, looking down at a blonde little boy, maybe three or four Standard years old.

  “You were three when I last saw you. Such a beautiful boy. Smart. But sometimes too curious for your own good. Do you remember this day? I caught you eating some wild nuts. They were probably safe, but there were protocols.”

  “You yelled at me,” I remember. I… “Uncle Peter?”

  I’m back across the table, back in my own body. But now it is my body, my adult body. My cloak and gear and weapons and Forge-made armor are gone, and there are holes in my jacket, the fabric stiff with dried blood.

  My right hand tingles. I look, see the hole sliced in the thumb of my glove, and look inside. I see light. Bright light.

  “It’s all right, Jonny,” Uncle Peter reassures, sounding a little more like he’s talking to an adult now. “I’m fixing you. I just needed you to get to the necessary resources.”

  I remember dragging the bodies. I close my eyes, get a flash of me lying on a bed of corpses. They’re dissolving…

  “Don’t look,” Peter warns. “Stay here. We’ve got a lot to talk about.”

  I’m back at the table. With my coffee. I can smell it. Taste it. It brings back memories.

  “Well, the good news is, those nuts were just nuts. We could probably start eating them ourselves.” Male voice. I know it. Tall man, sandy hair and a scruffy beard. It’s my dad.

  “You sick of the foil-food already?” another man jokes with him. He’s big and tanned, dark hair and beard neatly sheared short, square jawed and weathered. Uncle Deck?

  “I was sick of it three years ago.” That’s my mom. They’re all coming in. It’s time for supper. The little girl comes in and gives me a playful kiss on the cheek (for an instant, I’m a little boy again). I don’t like it. Her mom—tan with her black hair tied tight back—leads her away from me, distracts her by having her help bring food packs to the table, then shows her how to self-heat them. Mine is a hearty split-pea soup—I remember the smell, how it tasted.

  Someone’s missing.

  “Thel being anti-social again?” Alice’s mom—Aunt Maria—asks like she knows better than to bother.

  “Still studying the latest from the Hot Zone,” my father excuses. “He thinks there may be something in there.”

  “Besides thirty-five-year-old reactor debris from orbit?” Uncle Deck discounts. My father shrugs.

  “Do you remember this place?” Uncle Peter asks me directly.

  I find a name.

  “Donkey Oaty.”

  He chuckles. “That’s what you called it. You couldn’t pronounce Don Quixote.”

  “The ship…”

  “Lab Ship. And the Lance. Our recon vessel. Lance-R. You called it ‘Lancer’, so we renamed it. Is it still around?”

  My head spins. Like a bad fever. Like shock.

  “Do you remember it?”

  Apparently I don’t, not like this. If we’re talking about the same ship… I’ve ridden in it with Colonel Ram. I didn’t have any idea I’d known it before. This can’t be real.

  “Your parents took you away in it, got out when they had the chance, got away. What happened to it? What happened to your parents?”

  Before I can answer, the memories come flooding, my memories: The refugee camps, the wandering and scavenging, trading. Fighting off raiders from other groups. Then the night the pirates came, the Zodanga… Watching them rape and murder my mother while I hid under a table—she told me to hide and not move and not make a sound… But I couldn’t… I took my knife, stabbed the dirty, stinking thing hurting my mom… I stabbed him up through the groin, up through the ass, inside his thigh… When his partner grabbed for me, tried to take my knife, I cut his hand and stabbed him through the eye, then in the throat, twisted the blade as he tried to grab it, ripped it out through his fingers. Then I stabbed the other one’s neck as he folded over screaming. I kept out of reach, dodging their attempts to slash at me, hacking at their hands as they poured their lives out. And then I kicked their ugly tattooed faces when they couldn’t stay on their feet anymore, breaking bones and knocking out teeth. But even then, I didn’t let them die easy. I jumped on them and started stabbing, again and again, grabbing another knife—one of theirs—to stab with both hands. I kept stabbing long after they’d stopped moving. Their blood was all over, all over me.

  But my mom was dead. They stabbed her when she resisted. Her blood was all mixed in with theirs. Her dead eyes didn’t see me. She was gone. Just gone.

  I needed her. I needed her not to be dead.

  I could barely see. I wasted my rage stabbing the dead pirates until I couldn’t hold the knives anymore…

  Other men came, but they fought the pirates, killed them, chased them back to their flyers. They found me. One of them felt for me, saw something in me that broke his heart. He took me very gently in his strong arms and held me, carried me away. I saw my father’s body on the way out of there. There were a lot more bodies—everybody I knew…

  “I’m so sorry, lad,” Peter says after a few moments. He sounds like he’s suffering my loss with me—I hear his voice catch like he’s trying not to cry. “I guess it wouldn’t have mattered if I’d sent them with you. My Maria. My Alice. This planet… It’s just full of vicious, brutal animals.”

  He gets up from the table. I’m following him, but it’s more like I’m floating. I don’t seem to have a body. We’re going to the cockpit, the command deck.

  I start seeing smoke-stains on the clean surfaces, there and then gone. And blood sprayed. Dripped on the deck. I hear gunfire, deafening in the tight spaces, but there’s nothing there when I look.

  Peter opens the hatch. The cockpit is intact, operational, but I expect this is just another memory. He swivels the center chair around. It’s empty—no skull-faced armor suit. He sits in it, facing me.

  I’m a little boy again, so small. He leans forward, makes himself smaller for me, like he’s going to tell me bad news.

  “I guess it’s my turn, now.”

  “You wouldn’t remember a lot of it—you were too young to understand.

  “We were sent from Earth in 2097. It was a classified mission. High risk. No fixed end-date. We knew we might never get to come home, depending on what we found. And we knew that what we expected to find could easily kill us all.

  “We arrived on planet in 2098. Picked this canyon. It was greening even then, a young forest on a planet that shouldn’t support one. There was enough atmosphere to go out in just survival masks.

  “We sent out probes, micro-drones, and found people. Whole groups of them, still alive. There wasn’t supposed to be anyone here. We were sure they were all long dead. It was unbelievable… We studied them from a distance, sent reports, but that’s not what our bosses seemed interested in. They sent us here to look for nanotech, biotech, contamination. Evolution. And that was all they were interested in. We found survivors, the descendants of survivors, and they didn’t care. They didn’t even sound surprised, like they already knew. And all they cared about was the mission.

  “We took samples everywhere we could reach, but the only things we found were the engineered plants and the oversized insects. They were all stable, safe. There was nothing here that was really dangerous, except maybe the people, but we had our ships and their defenses. If anything went wrong, we could fly out, camp somewhere else. No one else on the planet seemed to still have working ships. Only one group we saw still had guns.”

  “The Keepers,” I name them.

  “Peace Keepers. UN personnel. Or at least their children. Living in the wreckage of Eureka Colony. We asked our command if we should try to contact them, get their cooperation in exchange for supplies or even evac, but we were given strict no-contact orders. Observe and report only. Stay invisible. That’s why we stayed here: the green men a
nd the rusty skins all roamed their territories, patrolled, but the Eurekans stayed put, holed up in their buried shelters. And so things stayed peaceful. And safe enough that we didn’t worry too much about bringing you and Alice into this world, raising you here, since we didn’t seem to be getting orders to leave. In fact, I started to think that was the plan from the beginning: They never intended to give us a recall order. Once on planet, they’d keep us stuck here, quarantined, afraid we’d bring something back that would kill the whole planet. But there was nothing like that, and no sign there ever had been.

  “You and Alice were born just a few months apart, about a year after we landed. And we were happy, even in this strange and scary place. We even started to think we could make lives here, good lives. It would be hard, but the planet was becoming more hospitable even in the few years we’d been here. We could gather to supplement our ration drops and recycle, pull oxygen out of the air. As scientists, there was so much to study, so much to learn beyond what the ones that sent us wanted to know. I was a microbiologist. Your mother was an anthropological biologist, in addition to being our flight physician. And Thel…

  “Well, Thel was just all about the nanotech. He’d been sanctioned on Earth, by UNCORT, for his work in banned technologies. The irony of his life is that UNCORT turned around and hired him, sent him here, to a world where his wildest dreams and scariest nightmares supposedly thrived everywhere. It was either that, or face life sentenced to a Spiritual Camp, so he didn’t hesitate. But then he gets here and finds nothing. Just natural beauty he couldn’t appreciate and the miracle of human persistence that he didn’t care about.

  “I suppose I should have seen it coming. Your parents did. That’s why they took you away. I should have taken my family away when I had the chance. But I couldn’t let go… I still wanted to go back to Earth one day. And that got them killed. I got them killed.”

  He’s playing with the big sword now, standing it up like a walking staff and turning it in his fingers. I didn’t see him pick it up—it just appeared in his hand. It’s called a Nagamaki. It means “long wrapping” because of the extra-long hilt. I have no idea how I know that.