The God Mars Book Five: Onryo

by Michael Rizzo

  I see his mood go from grief to rage. He wants to kill, to avenge. He takes a firm hold of the big sword scabbard, centers himself, breathes.

  “April 2102. We’d been on-planet for four years. Thel’s drones detected a sudden unexplained drop in the radiation levels in the Hot Zone on the north side of the Chasma from here.”

  “I know it,” I tell him. I don’t tell him all the rest, but somehow I know he could see it for himself if he looked. He’s in my mind. I’m still pretty sure he’s just a hallucination, made more vivid because I’m dying. And I must be dying, my brain shutting down for good. That would explain the old memories, the smells…

  “Thel was sure the radiation from the ruptured reactors was masking a nanotech bloom, a viral colony. Maybe the buggers were even feeding off the old fuel, using it to power and replicate. So we suited up, took the Lancer out—before dawn, so the locals wouldn’t see. When we got to the perimeter of the Zone, the levels dropped even more for some reason, and we started picking up a signal, faint EMR emissions. Thel was sure it was a nanobot colony, reproducing and thriving all these years, independent.

  “The signal was coming from a small mountain, sitting out by itself in the middle of the Zone. It was strikingly odd: oval, with a flat top. Deck said it reminded him of some kind of giant burial mound, a barrow.

  “We uplinked for instructions, but our signals couldn’t get through. We couldn’t even reach the DQ, but then there was at least one mountain range and a nearly Planum-high ridge between us. Your dad thought it was the radiation, messing with our gear, but the reads insisted it was still low, at least tolerable for an EVA. Of course, Thel was sure that it was a nano-intelligence jamming us, and insisted we take a closer look. So we set down on the top of the mound and risked a walk-around.

  “Then we almost lost Declan. He fell through something just under the sand, down a shaft, like a vent. It was artificial, cut down through the rock. Luckily, it was narrow enough for him to catch himself in the low gravity. It dropped down nearly a hundred meters. And that’s where the signals were coming from…”

  More like a dream, I can see it myself now, though through someone else’s eyes and the thick tinted polycarb visor of a pressure suit. I can even hear my breathing (or whoever this is breathing) amplified inside the helmet. I’m taking a cautious walk across what I guess is the top of the Barrow, a few square kilometers of rocky plain surrounded by sky. The distant rims and mountains are masked in haze, but I can still barely make out the distinctive crest of the Spine Range and get my bearings.

  Another suit is setting up a motorized winch at the edge of a hole about a meter across. When I get closer, the hole is a perfect square, definitely manmade.

  “Declan had cracked his visor in the fall, and we needed your dad to have the ship ready to fly in case things turned on us, so that left Thel and I to do the spelunking.”

  Flash-forward: I’m being lowered down a shaft barely big enough to fit through, my helmet lights illuminating the cut-stone walls.

  “It took almost all the line we had, but…”

  I know what I’m going to see before the shaft opens into the cavernous spaces inside the Barrow. But I still get a surprise: When I was here myself only days ago, the entire facility was stripped bare. It isn’t now. Then. I remember this is sixteen Standard years ago. There are massive machines built into the walls, sprouting out of the floor; shiny surfaces of black and white and satin silver. What I don’t see is any sign of visible controls. And everything looks dead, shut down, and covered with dust. There’s a good centimeter thick of it when we get our boots on the deck.

  “We had no idea what this was. It wasn’t on any colony maps, or in any corporate reports, at least none we had access to. We couldn’t call Earth for their input, so we had to assume this was something secret. Or maybe something the ETE had built and then abandoned. Or it could be the base of whoever had been running the Discs, since—as far as we knew—no one had ever figured out who that was. But the sheer size of it… We couldn’t imagine how something like this could have been built during the colonial era without attracting a lot of attention. And all the machinery… We had no idea what it was for, what it did. We couldn’t make any of it work—it was all shut down, either dead or locked. Except for one room.”

  I see it: It’s a comparatively small space, sealed behind a pair of red-labeled hatches. (It’s not the chamber of the Companion Blades—I was worried that was what I was going to see. But the warning symbols on the hatches are the same.) What it looks like is a kind of secure storage area. There are racks of tubes of various sizes along the walls.

  “Thel, don’t…”

  I hear Peter’s voice inside the helmet with me, see the other suit cautiously touch one of the racks, then try to pry a canister free. They don’t budge, locked in place. They all seem inert.

  “Over here,” Peter says, turning to a single tube that’s sitting out by itself, locked in a device that looks like it’s intended to prepare it for something. The tube is transparent, half-a-meter long. It’s the same kind of tube that the Companion Blades were locked in, only about half the size, and it isn’t a Blade that I see inside. It’s strange and beautiful, a mesmerizing shifting mass of what looks like metal. Sometimes it looks liquid, sometimes crystalline, sometimes like blowing sand.

  It doesn’t seem to react to our presence. I hear no siren’s seduction in my head.

  “Nanotech...” Peter assumes. Thel doesn’t answer him—I can’t even see his face because his helmet is turned away from me—but he goes to the case like a man who’s discovered treasure, touches it like he’s touching a lover.

  “Thel…”

  The device unlocks, releasing the tube. The shifting mass inside stops shifting, forms in the blink of an eye into a faceted sphere about ten centimeters in diameter, and drops to the bottom of the tube as if inert.

  “I think you killed it,” Peter says, half joking, half terrified.

  “No. It was just interfacing with this other device.”

  I know the voice. I have the sudden urge to drive a sword through the back of his suit, but I have neither sword nor control of this body. I’m just a passenger, in events that supposedly happened when I was three years old.

  Thel sets the canister aside, struggles with the device it was mounted in like he’s trying to take that as well, but it won’t budge. He tries so hard he knocks the tube over. Peter lunges in to catch it, afraid of what would happen if it broke. Thel turns on him and snatches the tube away like a greedy child.

  I see his face now. Dark, pitted skin, sharp bones, green-brown eyes full of anger and suspicion. I expect him to snarl, but he just takes his prize and appraises it with a thin smile.

  It’s the robed man with the white staff and the Sphere, the one that disarmed Straker, took her. Only he’s missing the big scars.

  “The man with the funny name,” I mutter.

  “Thelonious Monk Harris,” Peter tells me, from outside the memory. “His parents were apparently Jazz fans.”

  Jazz, I know, is a kind of music, but otherwise I have no idea what that means.

  I watch and listen as Peter and Thelonious heatedly discuss the wisdom of taking the tube with them to study. They have no way to get Earth’s advice or orders. Thel successfully argues that the radiation levels are likely to rise again, making them retreat from the region for who knows how long, maybe years; and both the Lancer and the Don Quixote have containment facilities for this very contingency. It is why they came to Mars to begin with, after all. And this could get us home. Them home. Back to Earth.

  Peter gives in.

  Watching their oxygen gauges, they make visual records of everything. Thel doesn’t let the tube out of his hands the whole time.

  “Huh…” Peter mumbles. On one of the wall racks, among a line of much smaller tubes, one of them appears to have come loose, or not been properly locked in to begin with. This tube is opaque, no telling what mystery it hides. Theloni
ous greedily grabs it up too.

  “Time to go, kids,” I hear my father’s voice over their helmet links. “Radiation’s spiking up here again. Almost too hot for your suits.”

  Apparently Thelonious was right. The two reluctantly hurry back to their lines, and take turns getting hauled up the shaft.

  “We barely got out of there before toxic exposure,” Peter continues. “The radiation came back with a vengeance, like it was trying to chase us away. Thel was frustrated, but he had his two prizes for study, and all the video we took.

  “Once we were clear, we managed to get one call out to Earth, to let them know we’d found what we thought were nanotech samples, and were heading back to the DQ to start tests. We never got a reply back, so we don’t even know if they received. That was the last time we were able to contact Earth.

  “The next morning, Deck woke us up to tell us our uplink transmitter had gone down sometime during the night. But it hadn’t gone down. It was missing. Someone had pulled it. We couldn’t find it anywhere. There was no sign of unauthorized entry. My wife—our operations security officer—pulled up the security video, but it had been tampered with. One frame showed the transmitter still intact; the next it was just gone. So we transferred over to the Lancer, only to find that transmitter had been taken as well. Someone had cut us off from Earth. Intentionally.”

  He continues to absently spin the Nagamaki in his fingers.

  “Everyone suspected Thel, and he suspected the rest of us. But given our orders and how secretive and illegal the whole mission was, we really couldn’t trust anyone. Only two possibilities made sense: Someone on the crew didn’t want us reporting whatever we learned, or someone—probably Thel—didn’t want Earth’s orders getting in the way of studying the samples. Either way, we were totally cut off from home, with something potentially very deadly in our labs. And we had children.”

  He grips the scabbard near the mouth and uses him thumb against the guard to pop the blade free, exposing the brass blade collar and a few centimeters of steel, losing his gaze in it.

  “Thel became even more obsessive than before. We started to suspect he was losing his mind. He didn’t sleep, barely ate, stayed away from us, kept himself locked up in the labs with the samples.

  “Opening the cylinders in containment did nothing—they didn’t try to interact with anything inorganic. So we tried plant matter. Still nothing. If this was a life-eating plague, it wasn’t hungry, at least not for veggies. And that’s when Thel showed us his own, encrypted orders, code-stamped by UNCORT before we left Earth:

  “We were directed to use the locals as test subjects if necessary. It proved that UNCORT knew there were survivors here before we found them, and they were willing to risk their lives for the sake of ‘research’. The thought made us sick, but the terms specified that we would not be cleared to return to Earth if we failed to complete our mission to the best of our ability. So we gave in, hoping that UNCORT would send us a new transmitter with the next supply drop when they didn’t hear from us, figuring we’d just had a malfunction.

  “Maria and Deck took care of the hard part, went hunting. Your mom mixed them up some tranquilizers. Approaching the Eurekans was almost guaranteed suicide, since they had snipers with military rifles on every approach, but the Rusties only had bows and arrows. They used the Lancer, found a gathering party, set down and waited for one of them to wander away from the group, and took him quietly. He was kid, barely a teenager. We kept him out, and your mom ran exams. She was ecstatic to have a subject to study up close, to see what two or three generations living wild on this world could do to a human body. He was remarkably healthy, but so different… She gave Thel blood and tissue samples, thinking that’s what he had in mind.

  “We caught him that night… He’d locked our sleeping guest in a containment lab with the samples, unsecured. Thank God nothing happened. But we had to point guns at Thel to get him to unlock the hatch and stand down. Your mom checked out our guest, made sure he was clean, and we flew him out and dropped him off in home territory first thing in the morning. He slept through the whole horrible episode.”

  He looks at me now, takes a deep breath.

  “That’s when your mom and dad decided to leave. They couldn’t be part of something like this, and Thel was getting scarier. Maria found weapons missing from the armory. One night your dad caught Thel trying to get into your room while you were sleeping—I thought he was going to beat Thel to death. Considering what happened, maybe he should have. It would have prevented a lot of suffering and death. Maybe I should have.”

  His thumb caresses the edge of the sword, but it doesn’t cut him.

  “He asked me to come with him, your dad did, saying we’d never be going home anyway. He was Mission Commander, and he didn’t want to be part of it anymore. He said we could find a place, maybe integrate with one of the survivor groups, have a life, have a life for our kids. Maria was pregnant…”

  He raises his left hand, looks at it, flexes it. Something starts to form around it, like it’s growing. It’s the hand and forearm armor from the suit, chain mail and metal scales, red lacing, with a bright blue glove under it.

  “I should have gone. I was afraid. Too bad I was afraid of the wrong thing.

  “You and your parents were gone one morning, no goodbyes. They either disabled their tracking implants or removed them, and did the same to the Lancer, so we couldn’t chase them down, not that we had the fuel to spare. But you three were the only ones gone. Apparently Deck had also refused your dad’s offer. Maria, too. This was their ship, their home, and they didn’t want to leave it to Thel and whatever he might do. But they didn’t have the stomach to do what should have been done. And then it was too late.

  “Thel waited until January, I have to give him that. He actually had us thinking he was getting reasonable again. I was wishing we had a way to contact your dad, to get you to come back. But then we found Thel, locked in his lab, sprawled on the floor. We checked the security feed: In the middle of the night, he’d opened the bigger cylinder, put his hand in it, his bare hand, and grabbed the object. It wasn’t as inert as it had been pretending to be all those months. It looked like it killed him on the spot, electrocuted him or something. His tracking implant telemetry was down, so we couldn’t read his vitals remotely. We no longer had our doctor, and none of us were willing to open the hatch to check him. From what we could see, the object was gone, like it had absorbed into him.

  “He laid there like a corpse for two days. His body would jerk sometimes, but it was more like his muscles were being shocked by something. He never responded, didn’t wake up. Then, on the third day, he just got up and let himself out.

  “He had this stick in his hand, like walking stick, or one of those wizard staffs. Maria and Deck tried to corral him, tried to get him back into isolation, but he was strong. Really strong. And fast. He knocked them around—I thought he was going to kill them. So I shot him. It barely seemed to hurt him. And when I shot him again, the bullet hit his staff and just broke up. I emptied the magazine. Every shot burst off his stick, no matter where I aimed.

  “I woke up half an hour later. Apparently he’d shocked me with his staff, knocked me cold. Deck said he wandered the ship for awhile with this sick grin on his face, then shook his head and left. Just left.

  “We found out later that he went to Eureka. He used whatever power he’d gotten to impress them into accepting him, following him. He came back after two days with his new army, the stupid kids and grandkids of the former Peace Keepers, still wearing their ancestors’ uniforms and armor. He demanded we give him the ship and leave. We could either become ‘civvies’ of the Keepers—not much more than slaves—or go try to live with the Rusties, the Katar. Or the Pax. But he said they would probably just kill us, especially if they learned we were from Earth.

  “We tried to seal ourselves in, use the ship’s batteries for defense, but he was able to shut us down remotely, pop the hatches. Deck die
d first. The animals shot him. He never raised his weapon. He was just trying to talk to them, reason… Maria and I saw it on the monitors. We grabbed Alice and ran, tried to find a place on the ship hide, maybe seal up in the secure hold or the labs, but I knew that Thel could get to us no matter what with the technology he had in him. So I figured we needed some kind of leverage, something to bargain with. I detoured for the lab and grabbed the other cylinder, the smaller one, and opened it… Inside was something that looked like a pill. It had always been inert during the tests, but I know Thel valued it, wanted to keep studying it, and probably could do something with it now that he’d become whatever he was. I put on a pair of gloves and took it.

  “I could hear them, rifling through the lab, searching for it for him. They found us in the hold, trying to open an access hatch to get into the maintenance spaces, and dragged us out… Alice was screaming… I panicked, swallowed the thing before they saw I had it. Thel demanded to know what we’d done with it.”

  The black and red armor has grown up to his shoulder. Now his other hand is getting covered.

  “He was sure Maria had it—she was the strong one. So he had one of his thugs shoot me in the gut so she could watch me die, so Alice could… She was screaming… My little girl… I couldn’t move, but I could see. Then he beat my wife half to death, used his staff or whatever it was to throw her around like a ragdoll, broke her body. All she did was beg for Alice’s life. So he had one of his animals shoot her in the head. Shot them both in the head. And they did it: killed a child and her mother just because he said to. Killed a child in front of her mother… Like it was nothing to them.”

  He makes me see it through his eyes. It’s brutal, cold, completely merciless. And I can’t look away or close my eyes because he didn’t. He tries to scream, but he can’t get a breath—he’s choking on his own blood. I know how that feels. I know what it’s like to realize what it means.