The God Mars Book Five: Onryo

by Michael Rizzo

  All I feel is rage. I want to kill them all. I want to kill them all. But I’m helpless, dying.

  I see the dead faces of Alice and Maria. Eyes staring at nothing. Empty.

  Then the world goes mercifully dark.

  When it’s over, when we come back to the cockpit, the armor is across his chest now, and coming up his legs, plate-by-plate, ring-by-ring, forming out of nothing, lacing together with what looks like flowing blood.

  “They threw us in a hole, like trash, buried us together. I was still alive when they threw my daughter’s body on top of me, when the dirt covered and blinded and choked me. The last thing I saw was Thel, looking down at us like we annoyed him. And his fucking minions, his human dogs…”

  At least he decides to spare me that experience.

  The armor is complete now, except for the helmet. His skin has gone pale. His eyes have turned blood red. They glow like hot metal. He grins.

  “This is how I woke up. Dug myself out of my grave. Our grave.” He chuckles. I can’t imagine what could be funny. He looks down at himself, his armor, his long blade.

  “A few things I really liked growing up: Old samurai movies. And the westerns based on them…”

  He passes the sword to his left hand, and draws the revolver from his hip and cocks it, all in the blink of an eye. He de-cocks it, spins it around his finger by the trigger guard.

  “…and ghost stories. Japanese horror…”

  I look up. He’s wearing the helmet. I didn’t see it happen. The skull mask hangs loose in front of his throat, joined to the neck armor at the chin. He drops the revolver back in its holster, then pushes the mask up. It seals itself to his face. The eye sockets glow red.

  “I think you’re done now, Jonny.” His voice through the mask is an echoing growl. It seems to come from everywhere.

  In a blink, my vision goes red. I’m disoriented. I’m now looking at the open hatch, from the inside. I’m sitting down, in the center chair. No one else is here.

  The Nagamaki in its scabbard is in my left hand, upright like a walking stick. I’m wearing the armor, a mask—the mask—over my face. My breath hisses through it.

  I stand up out of the chair. My body is covered in heavy plate and mail armor, but I feel so light, so strong. Not at all like I’ve been shot. I feel like I can punch my armored fist through the bulkhead. I feel like I can rip a man’s heart out of his chest with my bare hands, and drink his blood through my fingertips.

  I draw the long blade, nearly a meter of Damascus steel with a cloud-like temper line all along its single gently curved edge. I see myself reflected in the mirror-polished blade: Skull grinning beneath a samurai’s kabuto, eyes glowing red.

  I sling the scabbard over my shoulder, adjust the angle of the short sword in my sash, and go out to do what I need to do.

  Chapter 6: Return of the Reaper

  Outside the ship, it’s late in the day. The sky is turning purple as the sun sets over the Planum at the terminus of the South Blade. There’s a slight wind against my armor as I face into it, making a faint whistling between the segmented plates. If it’s getting cold, I don’t feel it. I don’t know if that’s the armor, or whatever else has been done to me.

  I’m also having no trouble at all breathing.

  I take a better look at my armor: all the bullet holes are gone, and there’s no sign of charring. All the plates are pristine, high-polished. The mail and lacing look new, as does the black jumpsuit and boots underneath it. The ammo in the gun belt has also been restored. I count twenty-four rounds of what I somehow know are .454 caliber.

  In addition to the long and shorts swords and the gun, I also have a sizable knife—a tanto—in my sash. There’s a simple brown canvas satchel over my shoulder. Inside is a spare cylinder for the revolver marked as “.45ACP”, a drawstring bag filled with empty casings, a small box of primers, a bullet mold, a powder-horn and a hand-loading press with dies. I flash on memories of using these things, of passing hours painstakingly making shells by hand, even though I know my Mods would happily do it for me. I feel satisfaction in the work, each cartridge representing one more life owed to me, ready to be collected.

  What I don’t find is any food or water, re-breather or oxygen supply. That doesn’t seem to worry me. I know everything else I need, this world provides in abundance. Including revenge.

  Looking around, I realize I have no idea what day this is. It could be the same day as when I was shot, but I doubt it. I decide I need to have a look around, even though every cell in my body wants to go walking west, toward Eureka.

  In short order, I find a few Katar bodies, dead of gunshot and blast trauma, but only a few. Neither Negev nor Cousteau are among them. That should make me happier than it does. Their weapons and helmets have been taken, likely as trophies. I’ll make sure they’re paid for.

  I find the last spot I saw Murphy. I think he’d been hit, yelling for the rest of us to leave him. I don’t find his body, but there is a sizable patch of dried blood in the dirt, smears on the rocks. Looking closer, I find his revolver, wedged under a rock in the underbrush as if he’d hidden it there, like he didn’t want it taken as a prize. Semi-buried with it are a few empty loaders and the “self-filling” ammo box that Yod gave him as a gift. I shake the dirt off of these items and put them in my satchel. If I can’t return them, I’ll certainly use them to avenge their owner.

  I go looking for my father, for the Ghaddar or Rashid, but don’t find sign of them either. That also should make me happier than it does, but it isn’t the fear that they’ve been captured that’s simmering in my chest. I’m angry. I feel abandoned. Those that could, ran—I shouldn’t fault them for that, given how outgunned they were, but I do. Especially my father. I was shot and he left me. My daughter was shot and I…

  What?

  “Uncle Peter?”

  I’m here.

  The voice is in my head, like my own internal dialogue, but it isn’t me.

  “What’s happened to me?”

  I don’t get an answer for a few seconds. Then:

  I’m sorry, kid. It was the only way I could save your life. When you came into the cockpit, when you touched what was left of me, what was left of me infected you. It needed resources to rebuild me. Thel was careful. He burned away all my organic tissue and left me sealed up. Still half-alive, but unable to regenerate. For so, so long…

  “I cut myself. On your sword.”

  That made an opening, gave my Seed tech a way in. Sweet blood and flesh… My tech jumped at it, starving for it, and started the conversion. It took me awhile to even realize who you were—I got that from the DQ’s security. It let you in, recognized your DNA. Thel left it running, thinking maybe your dad and mom might come back here someday. He set up an alarm to let him know when they did.

  “Jak Straker told me that,” I remember.

  The redhead. I saw. I see her in your memories. She’s got something similar to what changed Thel. A Companion. We didn’t know what it was called. Or the thing that changed me.

  “Seed,” I guess. My memories flash on Colonel Ram and his immortals, what little I know of them and how they came to be, what they are.

  That’s a good name for it.

  “But the immortals… Their Seeds contain their personalities, their memories. They over-write the bodies they take, unless the body is the same from… from the other timeline…”

  No need to keep up the Big Lie, kid. I see everything that’s in your head. Something—Yod—changed the whole world, pushed the big “reset”, because everyone was just like Thel. And me. Monsters. I get it. Unbelievable. But I get it.

  But he doesn’t: I can feel what he feels. I felt it myself just a few days ago. Terror. Shock. Disbelief. A sense that the very ground underfoot can’t be trusted anymore. Because Yod can be in it, in all of it, and he can change it at a whim. He can change me…

  I also see what happened at the Barrow.

  My head fills with sick laughter. It spill
s out of me. I start laughing inside my mask. But I’m not doing it. Peter… He’s realizing…

  This must all be a joke to him. To Yod. To whatever it is. He let us in there. Lured us in. Led us right to the treasure. He even picked out what we took with us, pretty much threw it at us. Then I’m betting he was the one that cut us off from Earth. It makes sense… Sick sense. Like what he did to the Forge, the Lost Legion. Or to your friends, letting the Companions get out and latch onto them. We were just another experiment. To see if the meat was worthy of being gods again… heh… And I thought UNCORT was bad…

  I’m on fire with rage. I want to kill Yod. I want to kill his whole world.

  My head tilts up and I scream my rage at the sky, but it’s not me… I’m not…

  Whatever it is lets me go, lets me breathe.

  Sorry... This shouldn’t have happened to you. Not to you.

  “What’s happening to me? To us?”

  Again he doesn’t answer immediately, letting me know the news is bad enough that he needs to figure out how to tell me.

  The bad news is: You’re right. The Seed I swallowed, it probably ruptured in my gut and started converting me as I died. But it was apparently a blank, no loaded personality or memories like you’ve seen. It makes sense now, if this was all some kind of experiment: Give the monkey power and see what he does with it… But now the Seed is programmed, imprinted. With me. It should have just erased you, used you as raw materials. That’s what it did to my wife and my little girl, lying in that grave with me: It ate them. There was nothing left but husks…

  Having control of my body back, I head down-slope, down to where I was shot. I find blood. I see the rocks I fought so hard to climb over, barely a few meters that felt like hundreds, my dried blood leaving a clear trail. But when I get to the rut I fell into, on top of the Keeper body, I find remains that look like they’ve been left here for decades. Desiccated. Crumbing. Like the dead plant-fall underfoot. Like what a Modded can do to organic matter on contact, to feed.

  I remember I dragged two bodies back into the ship. I didn’t see any sign of them, not even blood trace.

  I remember hearing what the Ghaddar told my father, about watching Colonel Ram’s change. He’d been run through, gutted, bled out, dying. Astarte gave him his Seed, then brought him dead bodies, laid them on him like blankets, and the Ghaddar watched them dissolve.

  I wouldn’t let it take you, boy. I couldn’t do that to you. Not you.

  “But the Seed is still yours,” I conclude, feeling like I felt when my blood flooded up my throat, struck down by the inevitable…

  I can control it. I can. But you need to know: If you get hurt bad, especially your brain, it won’t rebuild you as you. I’ll live. You won’t. You’ll be gone.

  Now I start chuckling like a madman.

  I’m so sorry, Jonny. It should never have been you.

  But I was the only one left alive who could have opened that hatch.

  And I was the fool who couldn’t leave it be, that had to know where his parents came from.

  I need to think about something else.

  “What happened when you woke up? After you were buried?”

  This. I woke up like this, armor and weapons and all. I didn’t know what I was, but I knew I was strong, found out I was fast and could hack directly into technology. Then I found out I could see bullets coming, dodge or absorb them. And absorb other things.

  I see flashes of violence. Keepers getting cut to pieces (literally) with the big blade, or their brains blown out with a quick shot.

  The .454 makes a hell of a mess. It doesn’t even need nano-modding.

  “You went after them, after the Keepers.”

  They killed my wife and my little girl. Just because Thel told them to. I don’t care what he offered them or threatened them with. Anyone who can do that isn’t human.

  But then I went to Eureka, saw how they lived, saw how they treated their civilians. I watched them execute a woman just for stepping on one of their shadows. And they laughed about it. People like that… They’re not people anymore. They’re not. They just need to die.

  “They’re not all bad,” I try.

  I know. Your redhead. Straker. We’ll call her the exception. But you didn’t see. Even seeing my memories, it isn’t the same. You need to see for yourself. Right now.

  It’s a short walk, two klicks, and neither the dark nor the cold are any obstacle. I can see just fine, the whole world glowing better than the night vision of my binoculars or scope could do. I feel simultaneously amazed and sickened—these things are inside my eyeballs. But then, they’re inside every part of me, changing every part of me, including my brain. I can almost feel them moving under my skin. I want to rip them out, cut them out…

  You get used to it. Soon you won’t be able to imagine going back to what you were.

  That’s no comfort, but then my “infection” does its own seduction, showing me even more that it can do for me:

  I can feel their scopes before they can see me, my enhanced vision picking up on details I didn’t consciously notice. Then my eyes light them up for me, no matter how well they’re hidden in the rocks and growth. If I had my rifle, I could pick them all off from here, and somehow the thought of them shooting back doesn’t worry me.

  Even better: I can hear them, hear their signals, hear the energy signatures of their gear buzzing deep in my ears. Then, with a thought, I can send back my own signals, fuzzing out their electronics, their scopes and links. I selectively blind their sentry snipers, then chop their communications so they can’t hear each other clearly—I can let through just the fragments I want, making them miss each other’s warnings, letting them believe their gear is just breaking down, or there’s natural interference like a solar flare. With practice, I can even select the words and phrases I want, so I can make them hear completely different messages. I have to chuckle in my helmet because it’s fun, a silly game. But then I remember the object of that game.

  See? It’s easy… You can walk right up on them and they won’t see you, won’t hear you, won’t be able to warn each other. It took me a few nights to master it, then I could hit them at will.

  I’m wondering what that means, what he did, when he tells me:

  At first I just picked off their sentries, one or two at a time, leaving what was left of them in creative arrangements to keep them spooked.

  I see flashes of what look like nightmares, but I know they’re memories: Bodies chopped apart, gutted, dismembered, decapitated, mutilated, gore spread out over the rocks and hung up in the trees like a child’s messy artwork, or like some horrible celebration decoration.

  Then I wouldn’t come back for a few weeks; let them sweat in their holes. Sometimes I let them see me, let them take their shots, let them see they couldn’t hurt me. We can dodge their bullets, but we don’t have to.

  That also flashes in my head, like a lesson: Being able to see rounds incoming, slowed down like they’re being thrown, slow enough get out of the way of. Or not: Small arms just smack off our armor—I can feel what it feels like, like being beaten, but all it does is ache a little. Heavier round make it through, but I can feel the tech race to close the wounds, keep the body working while they rebuild. It hurts, it shocks, and I get hungry—I need resources, and that makes me want to kill for another reason…

  I see myself—Peter—sucking bodies dry with his hands. Sometimes they’re not dead yet.

  They started to think I was some kind of ghost, which I was. They started calling me the Reaper, as in Grim Reaper, because they saw me one night up on their structures standing with my Nagamaki across my shoulders and they thought it was a scythe, saw my skull mask.

  I can’t think about this now. I can’t think about any of this. I want to scream, want to dig these microscopic things out of me but I know I can’t. I want them out of me.

  Peter lets me be for a few minutes, making me take deep breaths. He finds us a rock to sit down on. But
it isn’t just a place to relax: He’s picked a spot where we can see over the colony site.

  Through the night-closed green, Eureka Colony is almost completely buried, with only the twisted skeletons of a few structures exposed. It looks like almost every other colony ruin we passed on the journey from Melas, only more of it is left above ground. From what I know of the Melas PK Keeps, this is a decoy, a deception. The real colony is underground, spread out through a maze of tunnels dug with mining machines.

  There was a lot more before, when I was here last. Some of the exposed structures are gone, or cut down.

  “Scavenged,” I tell him what he’s probably already seen in my memory. “By Asmodeus. To build his new war ship.”

  Another one like me. Like us. A monster. We’ll need to kill him, too.

  I give no argument. Suddenly I’m a little more comfortable with my “infection”.

  I can still see the snipers: an even dozen of them, covering all approaches. Otherwise, the colony looks deserted. But if I listen, I think I can hear the low thrum of what may be recyclers, air and water processors, deep underground.

  And I know I could probably sift through his memories like he can access mine, but it’s still easier to just ask him:

  “How long… How many of them did you kill?”

  Not enough. Thirteen, over that first year. It was hard, at first… It made me sick. It did. But I got used to it. It got easier and easier. It… It got good to me, lad. I don’t know how to explain it.

  I’ve killed. I know the thrill of victory, of survival. And I know the rage to avenge, to protect those you care for from those that would harm them. But I can already sense it will be different now. I have so much power. It will be like fighting children with toy weapons. I’ll be able to slaughter at a whim, and they won’t stand a chance against me.

  I eventually got bold enough to enter the tunnels. That let me kill more at a time, but it was also the biggest danger. The civilians would just let me pass, but the thugs were smart enough to set traps, ambushes in choke-points where I couldn’t dodge. They didn’t even care if their civvies were caught in the crossfire. We are vulnerable to their large caliber armor-piercers, and explosives. They can hurt us. Slow us down. Make us run away to heal. That encouraged them, made things more challenging, but it didn’t stop me.