The God Mars Book Five: Onryo

by Michael Rizzo

  The Ghaddar is also up on her feet now, retreating, though moving slower than I’m used to seeing. She is hurt. But Peter isn’t very forgiving of her, either.

  They’re retreating! They could take this place! They could finish the Keeper force.

  I feel the urge to do it myself, to do it all myself, but we need to find Thel. Thel is priority.

  After a quick frantic search of the lower deck, we find a short “trail” of Keeper bodies that didn’t die by gun or arrow. They’ve been desiccated. Thel killed his own for the resources he needed to start healing.

  Then we find an exit hatch that should still be locked. It could have been left open by the invading rescuers, but the panel logs indicate it had been hacked only moments ago, and from the inside.

  I realize I’m leaving my father and my friends behind, but that’s not important. I can feel Thel. Putting our blade through him left something behind, a tracker that he hasn’t found and disabled yet. It isn’t pin-point, but it gives general direction.

  We follow a corridor north, out into the dug tunnels. Along our way, we find another drained body, this one an unlucky civilian, so desiccated I can’t determine sex or age. What we don’t encounter are any Keepers. Either they all responded to the fight in the Barracks, or Thel ordered any he met to come with him.

  The tunnel begins to slope upwards. I try to guess Thel’s course using the maps in my head, but Peter already seems to know where he’s going, and highlights the map accordingly.

  This one eventually comes out up on the North Divide Slope, a hundred meters above the colony.

  “Why is he going up-slope?”

  We can handle the lower pressure. He’s probably trying to get above where the Rusties and your friends can follow him. I used the trick once myself, trying to get Thel to chase me past where his flunkies could keep up, but he realized what I was doing and was too much of a coward to face me without backup.

  But I have another thought, zooming out on my internal maps, extrapolating…

  “How high can we tolerate?”

  Peter doesn’t answer. He may not know, especially if he spent his entire rebirth-life doing nothing but harassing Eureka.

  Thel is still pinging from somewhere straight north of us, and up—I can feel him getting higher and further away despite our pursuit. If I’m reading the graphics right, he’s somehow moving a lot faster than we can manage in these cramped spaces. I realize he may already be outside, but he would still be climbing over rocks and loose talus, so he should be getting slower, not faster.

  “Do the Keepers have aircraft?” I ask Peter. “Vehicles?”

  Mining machines. Nothing that fast.

  That means he may be using some power of his combined Companion and Sphere to propel him, not unlike what I’ve seen the Jinn do. But if he is, he’s abandoned his so-called loyal subjects. He’s running. Alone.

  The maps in my vision change as I zoom out to take in the bigger picture of the Trident. I thought they resembled my flashcard maps, and now I see that they are my flashcard maps, or I’ve re-created them, including the notes I’ve made during my travels. (I realize I have no idea what happened to the device itself. Was it looted from my body with everything else, or did it somehow get absorbed into me?)

  The only thing straight north of the colony is the ridge that separates the South from the Central Blade. The crest at this point is probably a good thousand meters above the colony, which would be about halfway to Planum level from the elevation of the belly of the Central Blade that the Katar are accustomed to. That makes the crest nearly Jinn Station height, well below the Atmosphere Net but far too thin for most men to manage in just a breather. (This is why the Stations are out of the reach of most non-Jinn: They’re too far up to climb to in a pressure suit with the air one can practically carry, much less get back down from. The trip would be suicide.)

  So Thel may indeed just be trying to get himself up out of reach of the invading force, but he has to know he isn’t out of my reach. He’s got speed on his side, but if he just wanted to outrun us, he’d be faster if he turned and fled along the ridge instead of continuing to climb. He looks like he’s trying to get over the top of the crest. The Central Blade would give him more running room, but does he intend to just run forever?

  Somehow I don’t think so. Looking at the bigger map, assuming he keeps a straight course, I can see what he’s heading almost directly toward.

  We finally come to another recently used hatch, this one an airlock sealed into the tunnel rock. Oddly, there’s no blast of decompression when we force it. Whoever went out this way didn’t care that they left the section depressurized, even knowing it would impair those left behind. Amusingly, I realize I didn’t notice the drop in pressure, any more than I had difficulty hiking here from the DQ. I don’t feel at all hypoxic despite my exertion.

  We emerge into a trench thickly overgrown with vines. Even in midnight darkness, I can see that the vines have been torn by someone passing through in a hurry, unconcerned with stealth.

  We follow the easy trail, and begin climbing. I can still feel Thel somewhere straight ahead of us and now definitely well up-slope. He’s still not turning. He’s just going higher.

  He is headed all the way up and over the crest. And straight beyond that…

  “I know where he’s going,” I tell Peter, and light up Lucifer’s Grave on my map.

  He’s not just running away from us. He’s running to someone he thinks can do a better job of protecting him from us.

  He said he knew who this Asmodeus was, that he’d talked to him, maybe made some kind of deal with him.

  “He also didn’t seem too surprised when he was told at least one of his Keepers had been brain-gutted and used as a flesh-and-blood drone.”

  Looks like we’ll be dealing with Asmodeus ourselves, then. Sooner rather than later.

  This thought only spurs Peter on. And me.

  I can feel things happen to me as we climb.

  My skin (assuming I still have skin under all this armor) starts losing sensation. It’s not like peripheral hypoxia. It’s like my skin is getting thicker, tougher. Hardening.

  We’re up above the growth now. The rocks are slick with ice-film. It’s definitely well below freezing, but I barely feel cool. Somewhere in the back of my head I get these vague impressions of digital gauges telling me how warm I am and how much energy, oxygen and hydration I’ve got. Everything seems like it’s still in the safe range, but dropping slowly.

  My eyes automatically shifted back to night vision from the moment we emerged from the Keeper tunnels, letting me see the world in fuzzy green in the faint starlight, where it should be almost pitch black at this time of night. The graphics—maps, tracking, gauges—keep popping up like digital hallucinations if I track my eyes just right. This makes me feel sick and dizzy again as it reminds me the tech is inside me, inside my head, inside my brain. Wired into everything I am.

  But most profound (and scary) are my lungs. Something’s definitely happening inside them as the air thins. I feel the urge not to breathe regularly, just a shallow breath a few times a minute. I don’t feel any distress from this, despite lugging all this metal I’m wearing and carrying up a steep incline faster than most men could run on level ground. And converse to the thinning of the atmosphere around me, my lungs actually feel like they’re pressurizing, like they’ve been turned into canisters. Or re-breathers: I can feel something—thousands of somethings—processing deep inside them, churning away in my chest.

  The nanotech is scrubbing the carbon straight out of your alveoli, and condensing the little oxygen we are taking in. It can use the raw carbon waste as building blocks rather than expelling it.

  Peter’s voice is all wonder as he explains the process. It’s just incredibly fascinating science to him, and I think he’s hoping it is to me, too; but that doesn’t make me any less disturbed by having it inside me, freely making changes to my body and mind.

  As if t
o distract me, Peter changes the topic of our internal conversation:

  I remember playing this game when I was a kid. Board game with little two-sided disks, black and white. The idea was to trap your opponent’s pieces between yours, which would flip them over to your color, make them yours. Whoever had the most pieces when there were no more moves left was the winner.

  This Harvester weapon made me think of that. Usually war is about competing attrition, destruction; the winner is whoever’s lost the least when it’s done. But this… Every one they kill could make them another drone. The more lives they take, the stronger this Asmodeus’ corpse army gets. Human beings, murdered horribly and turned into machines of rotting meat with no other purpose than to kill to reproduce themselves before they fall apart…

  “And Thelonious doesn’t care.”

  Oh, no. I’m sure he cares. I’m sure he’s totally fascinated by the idea. I’m sure he offered up his expertise in developing this horror. I’m sure he “volunteered” that poor man you saw as a test subject. And probably more like him. He was broken like that to begin with. No empathy. That part of him is just missing. The Companion tech just freed him of whatever constraints he still had.

  I find myself looking up at the stars, listening for the faint whispers of Unmaker chatter.

  “If they were to spread…” I start spinning nightmares. “If they were to infect the Unmakers, get drones up there, try to take shuttles back to Earth…”

  Earth would nuke this planet again in a heartbeat, Peter validates, feeling like he’s finally starting to realize what we’re in is a lot bigger than his personal desire to get revenge for his wife and child. They wouldn’t wait for it to materialize. They’d launch missiles the second they imagined the possibility of spread. This is exactly what they’re afraid of. Worse, maybe, because it’s being driven by human intent, and human malice.

  I climb faster. I don’t care if I’m causing small avalanches in my wake.

  We only pause when we get to the top. The crest is narrow, jagged, icy, and the wind cuts across it like it wants to push us off, down back the way we came. But the view…

  I wish I could see it in daylight. I could stay, wait. Sunrise is only a few more hours.

  In my night vision, I can see the Spine, over the Spine, across where the Lake should be. Fifty Klicks. I’m looking over the whole of the Trident. This is the kind of view only the Jinn get from their Stations.

  But I can also see the dark crater of Lucifer’s Grave, closer, out in the middle of the Central Blade. Ten klicks away. And according to my tracking, Thel has already reached it. His signal starts to fuzz out, then I lose it entirely.

  The crater is rich in magnetite. The background EMR always played havoc on our drones.

  “Will it affect us?”

  No idea. But if Thel’s been there before… He would never do anything that would interfere with his power.

  We can’t linger. We start the long climb down.

  The sun has risen over the Central Blade before we get where we’re going. By now, Thel’s already had hours to meet with Asmodeus and prepare for us, thanks to whatever advantage his combination of Companion and stolen Jinn Sphere gave him, and that makes every stride I make in pursuit a fresh source of frustration. I may be a lot stronger and faster than I was, but I’m still on foot, first having to climb a sheer and treacherous thousand meter ridge, and then fight through dense growth.

  Thankfully, we don’t tire, don’t run short of oxygen—I can even breathe almost normally again down here in the lower elevations. When I get thirsty (which feels less like thirst and more like a dip in my internal gauges), I pause long enough to grab hold of a lush bundle of green. I watch it shrivel in my armored grip, and a few of my gauges rise. Then we keep moving.

  Keeping focused on my rage, on the priorities at hand, keeps me from dwelling so much on what the nanotech has done to me. If I didn’t have that distraction, I’m sure I’d probably collapse in shock. So every time I start to think about what’s inside me, I make myself think about what it can do, what I need to do with it.

  Need.

  I need to be this. I need to stop the monsters. That means I need to be a monster.

  But what I can’t shake off, what still bothers me with every stride, is thinking how I’m heading away from my father. I left him in the middle of a battle. He came to avenge me and I didn’t stop to let him know that I’m still alive (or whatever this is).

  He’s not your father, Peter feels the need to invade my private thoughts again. I knew your father. He was a great man. He gave up everything to keep you safe. So did your mother.

  “Abu Abbas raised me as his own, taught me how to survive, how to fight,” I hiss back inside the mask. “I wasn’t blood, but he made me his son.”

  Replacing his own lost boy. Two wives, and he couldn’t father another son. What does that tell you?

  I really don’t want to hear this garbage, but I can’t shut Peter out of my head. I don’t know how. I doubt it’s even possible. But I can fight, for whatever it’s worth.

  “He came to save us from the pirates.”

  He came to kill pirates. You were his opportunity for revenge. He used you as bait. I’m sure he probably waited while they attacked you, waited until they killed any of you that put up a fight and landed to take their prizes before he ambushed them. He let your father die. He let those men get to your mother.

  “That’s a lie,” I keep defending, feeling my blood rise. But worse by far: I actually start to doubt. “He wouldn’t do that. I know what kind of man he is.”

  You also know his tactics. And I can see your memories. Apparently I can see things you won’t. He didn’t just happen upon your camp under attack. He was already there. Hiding. Waiting.

  Like a fresh wave of fire in my blood, I start to hate Abu Abbas, the man who raised me as his own child. I start to hate my people…

  It’s not me, it’s Peter. He’s making me doubt, driving a wedge in everything I know is true, driving a wedge between me and my old life. And part of me can’t seem to help but fall into it.

  I remember Straker saying that the Companion tech could stoke and twist emotions to control thinking and behavior, to drive its host like leading an enemy. Considering that every time Peter’s rage rises I feel it and lose control, I suspect he can do that to me. It’s one more lever he has over my body and mind, or what used to be my body and mind.

  “Is there anyone you don’t hate?” I snap, pushing back against him, foregoing stealth to hack my way through a thick tangle of vine, venting the rage into the innocent plant life.

  They’re all dead.

  “Including me?”

  He doesn’t answer.

  We cut our way through the belly of the Blade to the steep rocky slope that climbs up nearly five hundred meters to the top of the crater. The green starts to thin after the first few hundred meters, and I can see the ground is seeded with crystals of a black mineral. Magnetite. Blown out of a natural vein by a meteor strike, probably thousands of years ago.

  I start to feel funny, fuzzy.

  EMR. Ignore it. It’s only interfering with your finer new senses. You’re still strong and fast enough to do what we need to do.

  What we need to do…

  The climb up out of the green is still slow, the talus loose and refusing to stay put under my boots in places, much more difficult than climbing the divide crest. Between the sliding and the incline, I have to use my hands as well as my legs, crawling.

  We’re soon up out of the thick growth, which means we’re exposed. If the crater is like this all around, it’s an ideal defensive position. (On my internal maps, the rim is lower on the east quadrant, but there’s nearly a klick of pretty barren ground approaching it.)

  Thankfully, it turns out I’m not as visible as I thought. I see it first on my arms as I crawl: My armor isn’t black anymore. The surfaces have taken on a shifting blend of dark ochres, trying to blend into the rocks, much like St
raker’s uniform, or the Ghaddar’s modified cloaks and armor.

  But rocks don’t crawl uphill, leaving obvious mini-avalanches in their wake. I’m barely halfway to the top when the enemy lets me know I’m visible despite my armor’s best efforts at camouflage. But instead of bots, sniper rounds come my way from two directions. I’m on lousy ground to dodge, so I have to swat them away with my forearm armor—it seems to harden itself to take the large caliber impacts, though I still feel them down to the bone. As usual, the dented plates quickly reform, absorbing the fragments that they manage to catch. But the flailing makes me slip and start sliding down slope. So I brace myself and just let the next few shots pound me. Nothing penetrates, but each one hurts.

  I remember a trick I’ve seen Colonel Ram do with his pistol. I draw the revolver. The graphics in my vision almost instantly calculate trajectory and wind, locking the locations of the shooters based on the report of their rifles. I line up the gun with the graphics. Fire.

  I can almost feel the bullet fly, feel it find its first target. Then I wait for the other shooter to try again, figuring he’ll be smart enough to move his nest, seeing what’s happened to his partner.

  But no further shots come.

  As if realizing I’m done with stealth, my armor returns to black.

  No further resistance comes at all, not all the way up to the wide terraced plateau that runs about two-thirds of the circumference around top of the crater, not all the way across the seventy or so meters of open bare rock to look down into the deep bowl, which is over a klick in diameter and hundreds of meters deep.

  The bottom of the bowl is dark soil laced with ground-clinging green, nothing taller than a man. There are dozens of what look like sinkholes of various sizes, some deep enough to look bottomless from here. What I don’t see is any sign of a base or a warship factory, or any activity whatsoever.