The God Mars Book Five: Onryo

by Michael Rizzo

  But then I do see a figure, and I’m sure it wasn’t there an instant ago because of how prominently it stands out against the dark sand and scrub, unless it was camouflaged. My eyes automatically zoom in like binoculars as I try to focus on her, an effect that’s briefly disorienting. It’s a woman, blonde hair and pale skin, wearing a pure white gown over partial golden armor and chain mail.

  It’s Astarte. And she appears to be wearing a diadem of black “gems” like the one that Chang had used to monitor her and communicate through her. She’s looking up at me from the edge of one of the sinks, a few hundred meters out into the bowl, just standing there. Waiting.

  The hike down to her is as frustrating and clumsy as the climb up. The inner slopes are just as slippery and treacherous as the outer ones, and leave me just as exposed. I’m surprised no one tries to take even one more shot at me. But if they decided to… I’m getting a good sense of how ideal a defensive position this really is: If any attacking force didn’t get cut to pieces trying to climb the crater, they’d be totally vulnerable if they tried to enter it.

  Astarte is still there when I get to the floor of the bowl. I step in some sand, and my boots squish into the surface like I’ve just stepped in feces. I have to look down to see that it’s only sand and dirt saturated with water. There’s a lot of water in this crater, as if a major vein of permafrost has melted for some reason. It reminds me of the “shore” of The Lake, all that saturated sand.

  With all the available water, I’d expect there to be a lot more green than there is, Peter plays scientist in my head, letting himself get distracted by our surroundings, by our boots sinking into the mushy soil. The soil may not be hospitable enough.

  But then I see evidence of cutting, done carefully so that it’s not immediately obvious, either harvesting or removing potential cover.

  When I look up, Astarte is gone.

  I trudge through what Peter calls “mud” to where I last saw her. I edge up to the sink, which is about five meters across, and look down into darkness. Using my enhanced vision, I see it drop straight down twenty meters before opening up into lateral caves. I remember the immortals talking about how Asmodeus had drawn them into a maze of tunnels that apparently laces the entire crater and entombed them there to fight his bots while trapped in close quarters. It took them weeks to find their way out.

  I think I can hear faint sounds down deep, but as I’m trying to listen I hear sucking noises from behind me. I turn around in time for the mud to erupt in three separate places semi-surrounding me. I expect bots, but see men: Chang’s black uniforms caked in the damp dirt, expressionless faces under breathing gear and goggles. The eyes are corpse eyes, and I can hear what I expect Straker heard: signals coming from inside their skulls. They’re so strong this close that they show up as targeting graphics in my visual field, letting me roughly “see” the Harvester units through flesh and bone and brain.

  They raise their PDWs and fire. I can’t move very fast in the slick sticky mud, and my back is to the sink. I could try to swat the bullets, but when I realize they’re only using standard ball ammo, it seems easier just to plant my feet and let them batter me.

  The brain-gutted men prove to be poor shots, only managing to hit me a dozen times while emptying their magazines. My armor absorbs their rounds for future resources.

  They don’t attempt to reload. Instead, they charge me, their mouths gaping unnaturally to extend their injectors. I can hear their jaws dislocate.

  Again, I don’t really need to move. A few sweeps of the Nagamaki cleaves the tops of their heads off about ear level, splitting the modules. I can feel bone and meat and then metal and plastic shear. The bodies stagger and drop.

  This is sick. These were his own men.

  On cue, I feel Peter’s righteous rage surge again. I don’t need it to motivate me now. I’m more than eager to proceed.

  I still hear signals, but not from the destroyed Harvesters. These are incoming signals, command signals, now unanswered, coming from somewhere down below us. They can’t be coming from too deep down, as the magnetized rock would interfere. We decide to go answer them. So I step up to the edge of the sink, take a deep breath in, and jump.

  When my boots hit rock, I slip. There’s a film of ice from the overnight freeze, preserved in the shadows. But there’s also sign of activity. Some of the branching tunnels are big enough to stand upright in, and they look well-traveled.

  Once I move out of the column of sunlight that bleeds down the vertical shaft, my night vision kicks in, but now it’s fuzzy, snowy, probably from the magnetite messing with my internal interface. I feel a vague tingling all over.

  The tunnels quickly twist into a maze. I hear dripping water, distorted and echoing through the tunnels. It makes it difficult to hear other sounds, unnatural sounds. Then I see and feel it: the stone roof does drip free water, and the rock walls are wet in places.

  I listen. I think I can hear what sounds like machinery, like I heard at the Unmaker base, faint and hollow. Heavy equipment. Power tools. Construction. It’s almost impossible to tell which direction the sounds are coming from, or how far away their sources are. I have to try a few different paths for several meters before one sounds more promising than the others. I proceed into darkness, trying to be a stealthy as possible in all my armor.

  I think I’ve come about a hundred meters, on a winding path that I can only hope to be able to retrace if I have to back out in a hurry. I’ve met no resistance, no sentries. The machine sounds get steadily louder to guide me, and sometimes I think I see Astarte when I’m unsure which way to go, but only out of the corner of my eye. When I look, there’s no one there, and no sound of footfalls on the treacherously uneven stone floor.

  Finally, I see light. And hear voices.

  “If you’d have met me when I arrived, we could have prepared…”

  It’s Thel. He sounds simultaneously annoyed and afraid.

  “We are quite well prepared.” The voice that answers him is male: deep, confident, proud, almost melodious. “And I’ve found I’m just not a morning person anymore, not since I’ve been like this. Procrastination and apathy are definitely the most seductive curses of immortality. I really could just spend my days sleeping and eating and fucking and never leave my bed.”

  I’ve heard the voice once before, on the Stormcloud.

  “Well done,” the voice booms through the tunnels, calling out. “You found your way. Well, come on in.”

  He’s talking to me. I can hear him in my head as well as in my ears. I draw the Nagamaki, even though it will be awkward in these tight spaces, and step into the light.

  The chamber I emerge into is massive, as big as a colony dome and almost as high. The light is daylight, filtering down through some kind of net or canopy across the open ceiling. This isn’t a cavern, it’s a big pit, covered, camouflaged. Under the canopy, filling much of the space, is the unmistakable shape of a Stormcloud, though smaller than the last and still unfinished, much of it open frame. I can see the railguns in the bow, two of them, forming a forked nose. Bots and black uniforms are busy hauling, welding…

  “Okay, that is cool…” Asmodeus hums, stepping into view from a side-tunnel behind me. Long red hair tied back and matching short beard, high forehead, thick brows over deep-set eyes and a sharp nose. Wicked, cruel grin. He’s wearing his gaudy high-polished golden armor and his red cloak. A half-length spear with a long dagger-like blade hangs lazily in his right hand. “Eighteenth Century Japanese O-Yoroi, if I’m not mistaken. The height of the armorer’s art. With a touch of low-brow Memento Mori. I like it. Reminds me a bit of Skeletor, but I like it. Certainly cooler than you…”

  He turns to Thel, who’s standing behind him, gripping his Sphere-tipped staff, coiled and ready for me to attack him again.

  “…you look like some sad LARPing nerd at a Con, but your costume’s not quite finished. You need a long white beard and a pointy hat and you could be racially-sensitive Gandalf. Or
maybe just do away with the nose and go full Voldemort.”

  He’s speaking gibberish, but I feel Peter get a chuckle out of the insult, whatever it means.

  “We need to contain him!” Thel insists urgently.

  “I was thinking about talking to him,” Asmodeus counters casually, “considering you’ve been withholding some rather critical intel.” He turns to me. “For some reason, my good friend Thelonious never mentioned you. Thankfully, some of his Peace Keepers proved to be a bit more chatty in his absence, especially when they thought honesty would stop the Harvester nanites from eating their brains—I admit, I misled them a bit about that. They call you the ‘Reaper’, which isn’t terribly imaginative. And ‘Onryō,’ which is cooler but just doesn’t roll of the tongue. We’ll have to come up with a better name for you.

  “Anyway, they were sure their ‘wizard’ had taken care of you a long time ago, but apparently you made a hell of an impression on them before he ‘destroyed’ you. Revenge for the wife and kids, eh? I understand that. Revenge is an old and honorable motivation. Unlike half-assed brain cancer Gandalf here: He’s just an obsessive narcissist. And there’s nothing more obnoxious than an immature geek diva. No social skills at all…”

  Underneath his cavalier attitude, Asmodeus’ own measured rage seethes out of him like a seduction. He’s trying to connect with us on that level.

  “You need me,” Thel defends himself, not effectively hiding his rising panic.

  “I needed you to be fucking honest with me!” Asmodeus snaps at him. Then he tells me: “He told me he just found his Companion, in the ruins of the original Pax colony. Happy accident. Made me waste my time searching through the overgrown junk, dodging the arrows of those hippie ninja tree-humpers, trying to figure out how it got there. I’m curious like that. I’d believe one of the Super Friends might have misplaced it, but Oz The Great and Powerful here says he’s had it for over a decade, and that’s before their time. Which leaves Chang. Who knows what he left lying around during the fifty years he was sulking and self-flagellating over causing the so-called Apocalypse. Dear Astarte, for example, skittering around half-formed and abandoned like an unwanted pet. Too bad he isn’t around anymore to ask, having had an intimate moment with a four hundred and fifty kiloton nuke, trying to be noble. Long story. Stupid ending. But here we are. And here you are, all sexy badness.”

  I can feel him reaching out, trying to connect with my tech, trying to get into my head. Peter resists.

  “You’re like me!” he decides cheerfully. “You’re from back home! But you’ve been here longer than the Super Friends, just like Cancer Gandalf’s magic stick. Or at least your Seed has, since apparently you were just a plain old family man before you went all Samurai Skeletor. And that’s weird, assuming the back story of how any of us got here is even remotely accurate. I can see Chang tossing a Companion during his Lonely Martyr phase, but not a fully-loaded non-imprinted Seed for one of the monkeys to stumble upon. I mean, releasing Astarte into the wild is one thing—the girl can take care of herself, even when she’s only part of herself—but a free ticket to godhood…” He shakes his head, confused but clearly intrigued. “We really should talk.”

  “He’s not going to talk!” Thel is panicking, whatever lie he told Asmodeus unraveling. “All he does is kill!”

  “See?” he tells me like he expects us to be good friends. “We do have a lot in common. Did you know I was originally trained to be an assassin? Too bad for my bosses I wound up liking the work way too much to stick to the script. And I also died messily and got brought back from the dead, stuck in one of these walking theme parks. Surprise.”

  I know I shouldn’t tell this monster anything, but the urge to diminish Thel in the eyes of his new “partner” is just too tempting.

  “The nanotech being called Yod led us to a cache of your technology,” I combine Peter’s story with my own. “That cache is long gone now. Yod just wanted us to take enough to see what we would do with it: one Seed, one Companion. We’re just another one of his sick experiments. Just like you are.”

  I see shock wash over Thel’s face. He was hoping to go back to the Barrow some day, to take more of this terrible technology for his own petty, ruthless use.

  But as for Asmodeus, I can see him digest the implications behind his eyes. Slowly but surely, his thin mouth twists into a grin, then a smile. He starts chuckling, then laughing out loud, hysterically, shaking his head like what I’ve told him is both crushing and hilarious.

  “Have you ever heard the old argument?” he starts when he finally gets his wind and his sense back enough to speak. “If God is all powerful and created everything, didn’t He also create evil? Doesn’t He, in fact, have total control over evil?” He sounds ecstatic about this, like something he’d always believed had just been proven, no matter how horrible.

  “A test for humanity,” I regurgitate the lessons of my faith. He shakes his head.

  “As if such a being doesn’t already know exactly what you’re going to do,” he confronts, his wicked grin coming back, his focus. “You know what it really is? It’s just good entertainment. It makes a better story. Manufactured drama. Scripted reality. The crisis that drives the narrative.”

  He shakes his head again, but then seems to brighten. Realizes

  “But that means Yod is here, in this timeline. So maybe Chang wasn’t raving when he said he didn’t really manage any of this, that this Yod had done it all. Too bad I never really got read in on the details of that stupidity, the so-called God Project…” Then he locks his eyes on me. “But how would you know about Yod?” He glares at Thel. “Did you know about Yod?”

  Thel shakes his head in confused denial, still trying to manage his panic.

  “No, you didn’t,” Asmodeus accepts, intrigued. Then to me: “So how did you?”

  “And how do you know the cache is gone?” Thel demands to know, not caring that he’s admitting what he withheld.

  “Because I’ve been there.”

  I reach up with my free hand, disengage my mask, lower it so they can see my face.

  “Who the hell are you?” Thel starts. Asmodeus seems freshly amused by his confusion.

  “Just another pawn.”

  Asmodeus’ eyes seem to go blank for a moment. I can see them subtly scan back-and forth, like he’s looking through files we can’t see. Then he locks on something.

  “I’ve seen you before. Or my toys have—a benefit of this fun new body. You were with that band of refugees from Melas that wandered into one of my little diversion raids about a week ago.”

  The rage that surges now is all mine.

  “That ‘little diversion’ killed my adoptive mother and fifteen of my people, my friends.”

  “So I’m the target of your noble crusade?” he realizes like it’s just another joke. Then more sympathetically: “Waste of time, newbie. You’ll find we really can’t hurt each other. And after a while, you’ll learn there’s no point mourning the mortal meat, shortly after you realize whatever you think you are is just transcripted data. The real you died… well… apparently sometime in the last week.”

  “He must have been with the Rusties that attacked us,” Thel tries to put together. “He must have found where I buried the Reaper’s remains.” I notice how he carefully avoids mention of the DQ, still deceiving his “partner”. I decide not to reveal him this time, if only to keep Asmodeus away from the ship.

  “And that’s curious,” Asmodeus sounds intrigued, “because if this is the Seed of the same ‘Reaper’ that chopped up the Eureka PK all those years ago, that Seed should have overwritten him with the original’s personality as it rebuilt him. Maybe it just hasn’t had time to yet, which is bad news for you, kid, even if you aren’t really you. Or maybe the Seed lacks the personality preservation core. Or it was damaged. I’m not really sure how the tech works, considering it was developed several decades after I died. So maybe you will get to stick around for awhile, Blondie. Forever, actually
. I can’t say that’s particularly good news either, I’m afraid.”

  “Then why is he after me?” Thel needs to know.

  “You said there was a raiding party,” Asmodeus guesses. “Did you kill him? Or his friends? That would certainly piss me off, if I still remembered what it was like to be mortal.”

  I don’t bother to resolve the mystery. Asmodeus keeps looking at me like I’m some curiosity, like he can know everything about me just by looking. But then I think I feel him again: he’s managed to subtly find his way inside my head, his tech interfacing with mine as he distracted me with his theatrics. We push back, try to block him, shut him out, but he’s already…

  “Who’s Peter?”

  “The original… The host… My research partner…” Thel stammers. “The one he should be!”

  “Huh,” Asmodeus tries to make sense of whatever he’s hacked. “He’s still in there. Two of them, in the same loaf. Or maybe one in the meat brain and one in the code. Timesharing? Or has Peter just not eaten you yet?”

  I don’t answer. I just put the mask back on, ready to kill them both.

  “Ah, well… Whichever one you are, here’s a little secret, just because I dig the outfit,” Asmodeus pretends to be gracious. “Like I said: You can’t kill me any more than I can kill you, and believe me, trying will get boring, a lot quicker than you’d think. But you can kill him.” He nods sideways at Thel, who looks freshly horrified, betrayed.

  “We made a deal!” Thel almost screams. “I can help you! You said I can help you!”

  “That was last week,” Asmodeus corrects dully. “This week, I have better prospects. He has Seed tech. You only have a Companion, and a basic commercial model at that—I happen to know there are at least three hotter custom-deluxe models walking around attached to much prettier and less useless hosts. But just taking into account my current choices, Seed beats Companion any day. I’m not sure if anything short of a nuke at bad-breath range can kill a Seed-Modded. But if you get separated from your gadget, you’re killable. If he scoops your brain out of your skull with that really ridiculously big sword of his, it won’t grow back as you. And if you lose your toy, it passes to whoever comes along next, and they still get to be them. Maybe they’ll make better use of it.”