The God Mars Book Five: Onryo

by Michael Rizzo

  He’s telling me how to defeat Thel, how to kill him. Why?

  “But I’ve mastered ETE technology!” Thel puts the Sphere between them, like he means to threaten Asmodeus with it. What Thel can’t see from his angle is that Asmodeus has shifted his grip on his half-spear, getting ready to strike. But still, he keeps his lazy, cruel grin.

  “And that was cool, but I seem to remember you had a matching phallus to go with that big shiny surrogate testicle the last time you were here trying to impress me. Did you misplace it?”

  Thel doesn’t have an answer. He just glares at me, still keeping Asmodeus between us.

  Asmodeus shakes his head like he’s annoyed, bored.

  “I really don’t have any desire for a toady, especially a whiny little shit who thinks he’ll be able to overthrow me one day and rule this pathetic rock pile… Skeletor, he’s all yours,” he gives me, sliding out of the way with a little bow. Then to Thel: “Gandalf: One more chance to impress me for old time’s sake. Stay alive, and maybe you’re back in. Just don’t wreck my ship, or I’ll scoop your brain out myself. Slowly.”

  Asmodeus steps well back, giving us space, his spear still at the ready in case either of us turns on him.

  A wave of force washes over me, over Asmodeus as well, trying to push us back. The ground begins to liquefy under my feet. Then the rock walls threaten to come down.

  But then it stops, much to Thel’s confusion. From my angle, I see that Asmodeus’ spear isn’t just a spear: it has concealed buttons. It’s some kind of device, and it’s either interfering with the Sphere or Thel’s control over it. Thel realizes it, starts to really panic.

  He’s vulnerable. I could push forward, drive my sword through his skull. But I want Asmodeus to tell me something first.

  “Why are you doing this? Why even let me in here, show me your ship?”

  “Like I said: We have more in common. And I really don’t like him.”

  “Not afraid I’ll bring Ram and the others down on you? Or the Earth military?”

  “You’re not one of Ram’s. From what I’ve seen in your recent hot memory files and his, you like the butchering waaay too much to be one of Ram’s not-so-white hats.”

  “I could still flash what I’m seeing to the Earth forces in orbit.”

  He shakes his head, still grinning dismissively.

  “And I know you’re smarter than that, especially if you’ve just run all this way from the last time Earth got over-excited about our kind.”

  “Then I must be pretty stupid…”

  It’s Straker’s voice, booming from above us. She drops down through the canopy, tearing through it, Blade in hand, landing on her feet between us and the new Stormcloud.

  “…because that’s what I just did while you were busy chatting.”

  Chapter 8: Premature Burial

  I expect Asmodeus to rage, to attack her, but all he does is sigh like he’s mildly disappointed. Then

  “MARINES! WE ARE LEA-VIIIING!!” he sings loud, his voice booming in the covered pit. Up on the Stormcloud’s deck, I see Astarte and another figure in a white cloak and golden armor, wearing a crown and an eye patch that I know are actually bot interfaces. Fohat.

  The concealed hangar swarms with bots—Bugs, Boxes, and his little gun drones—but they ignore us and scramble for the ship. There are some of his black-uniformed soldiers as well, but they don’t seem to move willingly, more like prisoners being herded by the machines, except for a few that stagger in a daze like they’ve been badly beaten. I hear more Harvester signals.

  I can see from the look on Straker’s face that she’s also seen what he’s done to those that chose to serve him, including her former fellows. Her Blade is vibrating in her grip, almost screaming.

  We stand in a rough circle: Asmodeus opposite me, and Straker opposite Thel, but only for a few seconds. Then Asmodeus shakes his head like we’re all being useless and foolish, and he starts walking for his ship like we don’t matter. Straker steps in his way, pointing her sword at his face.

  “You’re okay with us all being blown up together, Red?” he taunts her. “Because two of us will grow back.”

  When she doesn’t budge, his spear expands to full size, and he calmly extends the blade toward her, as if offering her combat. She crosses weapons with him, ready and eager.

  There’s a bright flash and a crack. A bolt of energy arcs from the head of the spear into her chest, throwing her backwards. I smell ozone and charred synthetics, flesh and hair.

  “Never pose in front of a real opponent, silly girl,” Asmodeus chastises like he’s her sword teacher, then keeps walking away. On her back on the damp stone, Straker looks like she’s in paralyzing pain, wind knocked out of her, convulsing as she tries to get up. There’s a fist-sized hole burned into the breast of her armored uniform.

  The Stormcloud’s engines come alive with a deep thrumming, and I feel even more numb and tingly all over. We’re too close to the big ship’s mag-lev field, which is probably playing off all the magnetite in here. The ship starts to lift, and the canopy above it simply dissolves like it was just an illusion (but I heard Straker tear it). Then worse, the hangar pit begins to fill with intense winds and dust. (Where is the dust coming from if everything is so wet?) I start to get sandblasted, blinded. I can see black particles adhering to my armor—the sand is full of magnetite.

  I want to help Straker, but Peter takes control, turning on Thel while he’s hesitating in indignant shock for being betrayed and abandoned. We quickly thrust our Nagamaki at his face, taking Asmodeus’ advice to go for the brain. Thel manages to block us with his staff, then tries to push us off with a Sphere field, but his control over it is still weakened by whatever Asmodeus did. Peter wants to chop the staff out of his hands, preferably with his hands still attached, but Thel is too strong; the staff easily resists us.

  I get a flash of inspiration, take control, turn the blade edge back toward me and make a quick cut back and up the staff, slicing the Sphere free with a flash of energy that makes me lose sight of Thel for an instant. In my head, Peter shouts with joy.

  Thel curses and slams me with the shaft of the staff, finally using it as a weapon. When it makes contact with my shoulder armor, it feels like all of me rattles under the impact, and the blow deforms my plate. Then he shows me how fast he really is, hammering me with either end of the staff alternately, driving me back, keeping me on the defensive. If I was still mortal, still Normal, I’m sure each blow would easily shatter my bones.

  He takes a leg out from under me with a sweeping action. I take a blind slash as I fall, feel my blade hit meat and bone, hear Thel shriek over the noise of the Stormcloud.

  Visibility is almost zero with all the dust, but the beating stops and I can see Thel limping away, back down the tunnel I came through. I have no idea where his Sphere went, but I doubt he had time to recover it.

  The Stormcloud lifts up out of the crater, partially blocking the sunlight. In the thick haze I manage to find Straker, drag her up.

  “We need to get out of here!” she insists the obvious. She staggers, still hurt—I can’t see how badly. I pull her for the tunnel. Peter is still hoping to catch Thel rather than escaping.

  “You called the Unmakers?” I condemn, though I also understand. Desperation. Rage. Seeing what Asmodeus has done here, what he’s done to people—her people—she doesn’t care what she brings down. She was probably willing to die in whatever’s coming. But I’m not. We still have killing to do, and I want to be around for it, I want to see Thel die, I want to see Asmodeus cut to pieces.

  I lead her through the narrow dark maze as fast as we can move, my EMR-fuzzed visual graphics trying to show us the way. I manage to beat both of us up colliding with the rock walls, stumbling, even hitting her head on the roof at one point. I’m surprised she doesn’t stick her sword in my back.

  We finally find the column of light of the shaft I dropped down through. The sky above us is brown with dust, the artific
ial winds howling across the gap like a primitive flute. But then a shadow moves above us. It’s Thel.

  He uses his staff to send the rock walls down on us. No matter how hard Peter wants to try, I know we’ll never make it up that way, so I pull us on, down another tunnel, trying to get us away.

  And that’s when I hear an echoing crack from far overhead, followed a split-second later by a deafening boom that shakes the ground out from under our feet and then drops the tunnel roof on us, just before a pressure wave comes at us through the tunnels from behind, slamming and crushing us and turning the rock all around us to rubble. I hear Peter in my head thinking the word “liquefaction” as the tunnel completely collapses on us, battering and crushing and burying. I think I can hear a storm raging somewhere over us.

  Rock is pressing down on me, trying to squash my armor and soft tissues and break my bones. There’s no air to breathe even if I could manage to inhale.

  I still have Straker by the wrist, and she grabs mine in turn. I think I can hear the scream of her Blade through the rockfall, and the bigger rocks begin to crack, crumbling to gravel. We’re still being crushed and smothered, but we can move, push, crawl. The weight on our bodies must be enough to flatten a Normal. There must be twenty meters of Mars on top of us. I can only hope that parts of the tunnel are still intact somewhere ahead.

  It seems to take hours, and my gauges are all reading in the red, when the ground ahead and above me starts to give. I get my arm out into open air, then my head, get a breath of stale air to partially replenish my oxygen. I push my battered body halfway out of my grave, then pull Straker for the gap. She’s limp, unconscious. I remember my aid training, and though I’m not sure if it will work on us, I drop my mask, tilt her head and blow my precious little breath into her mouth. I feel her lungs expand, and she gasps herself awake, flailing, nearly chopping me as her Blade comes free. I have to restrain her, resetting my mask as an afterthought. I don’t want her to see me.

  It’s pitch dark, but my fuzzy night vision still lets me see her. She coughs, looks up at me, grins, and then pulls my mask away.

  “It’s good to see you, kid,” she rasps, cupping my face in her hand. “We thought you were dead.”

  “I am,” I correct her bitterly. “This would be what my father calls ‘borrowed time’.”

  No time or desire to explain, I look around the tight space we’re in, and see that the “roof” over our heads is metal, and a familiar pattern. It confirms my suspicions by trying to move with a whirring and grinding. Sectional legs push and struggle on either side of us.

  Bug. We’re underneath a Bug bot.

  I remember Dakota and Snyder. I reach out, jam the bot’s fading command signals, then wait for it to panic without instructions, its stolen organic brain reasserting control of its body.

  “It’s okay… Your name… What’s your name?” I try to focus it.

  It takes minutes we can’t really afford, but through a storm of gibberish code I hear

  “Batak… Cheng… Zodanga…”

  “You’re free, Batak Cheng,” I try to be reassuring. “No more Fohat. No more Asmodeus. They’ve gone. You can live or die now. And I’ll help you do either. But I need you to help me first.”

  “So dark… So much pain… The Toymaker, he… he cut… he… horrible… my…”

  “I know…” And I do. This is so much worse than it was with the bots across the Lake. They could only talk to me. But now, I’m in his head, or what violated thing is left of his head. I don’t feel any pain, but I can feel his horror, his unbearable despair, see his memory files. His body is gone, his human life. He’s just a preserved brain and nervous system, and that’s been slaved to a brutal machine. And Fohat let him see his gutted body when he woke up in this shell, proud of his work, grinning.

  I look down at Straker, still under me. I see the same horror and pain in her eyes—she can link into him just like I can. I’m grateful this isn’t someone she actually knew.

  “Batak,” I focus him. “I know you can dig. With this metal body. It’s made to tunnel. You also probably know the nearest vertical shaft, the shortest way up and out…”

  He answers by moving. I use my hands to help dig out his bladed legs, and he starts to shovel. I get Straker free of the rubble over her own legs, and we cling together, crawling under the small shelter of Batak’s body and he works his way forward. We, in turn, push away the dirt he scoops under himself. And together, we move.

  Batak doesn’t take us up, but after about thirty meters, we make it to a section of intact tunnel, giving us some more needed oxygen and much easier progress. The bot leads us on—I’m guessing east—where we dig through two more shorter collapses. We find a few bodies in black Chang uniforms, crushed in the rubble, and when I check them I can see the Harvester units in their heads. Straker looks freshly sick. She drops on each of them and used her fists to crush their skulls, smashing the modules inside. Her hands shake as her gloves absorb the gore. She crawls away from the corpses, staying down on all fours like she might vomit, but doesn’t.

  “The few I saw that still looked alive looked like prisoners,” she describes what little I managed to see of the Stormcloud construction. She likely got a better look at it while she was targeting it for the Unmakers. “All of the sentries I encountered were lobotomized. All of them…”

  It makes sick sense. They’re all networked. And managed from a single hub. Makes for better security and no more risk of rebellion.

  I don’t say out loud what Peter is thinking.

  We finally see daylight, but have to clear more rubble to squeeze out into it. Based on the landmarks, we’ve come out on the east rim of the Grave, overlooking a rocky plain that eventually slopes down into forest. We can barely see the nearest mountains: The Spine to the northeast and the South Blade Divide to the south. The Central Blade Valley is filled with a ruddy gray haze. But behind us, the crater spews a massive column of dust and smoke that flattens as it reaches the atmosphere net.

  Fresh air starts recharging my oxygen levels, but I need water, food. I expect Straker is in worse shape. Her uniform is still charred by Asmodeus’ energy discharge—no telling what kind of tissue damage it did. She’s having trouble standing up straight. I should get her to the forest, into the green, but I need to see…

  I climb back up the slope to the crater rim, and look across. The heat and blast wave of whatever hit us has stripped and charred the green from the bowl of the Grave, re-sculpted the landscape and left Asmodeus’ hidden base a gapping pit—the source of the smoke column. As there’s no radiation, I assume I’m seeing the result of a railgun strike, fired down from orbit. I can see several broken bodies and bots in the outer blast zone. A Box bot tries to wheel itself away, but looks hopelessly wrecked. More disturbing, a few of the human bodies also try to move, despite being visibly crushed, burned, torn and dismembered. I can hear their Harvester units pinging for their master, unanswered.

  What I don’t see is any sign of the new Stormcloud, not even wreckage. I remember the last one—the original—took a similar strike dead-center. It punched a hole through it that almost broke it in half and brought it down, killing everyone human on board. This was a miss. Asmodeus got away.

  I stand up on the crest, listening for signals, any sign of which way he may have gone. I hear only the background static of the magnetite, and realize from the color of the haze that Asmodeus may have just salted the entire valley with it, helping him hide from satellites. All he’d have to do is maintain visual camouflage.

  I also don’t see or feel any sign of Thel. I try to estimate where he was when the blast wave hit, but that area has all been stripped away, reshaped. He’s either dead or made his own escape. I have to assume the latter. My rage demands it.

  Batak crawls up to me, holding out one of his bladed limbs, then makes a stabbing gesture at his own torso. I can scan through his shell enough to see the heat that I assume is his power core, and maybe his organic brain.<
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  I nod my understanding, unsheathe my Nagamaki, but then consider

  “Straker!” I call down to her. “You need this more than I do.”

  She drags herself up-slope to see what I’m talking about, but then her features sink when I gesture to Batak with my sword. She doesn’t want to.

  “He’s in pain,” I prod. “And worse. You can feel it.”

  She reluctantly steps up to the bot. Batak doesn’t back away, doesn’t try to defend himself.

  “I’m sorry,” she tells him, then plunges her Blade into his core.

  I can feel her feed, reaping energy and raw materials as well as the nutrients of the organic components. The bot settles on its limbs as if deactivated. I no longer hear its signals, his voice.

  When she draws her Blade out, I can see the motion of her technology under the skin of her face. Her uniform is patching itself. Her color is partly restored.

  She sheaths her Blade, and gingerly unfastens her armored jacket, opens it, exposing her chest. The flesh over her sternum looks charred down to the bone, but it starts regenerating in from of my eyes. She makes a little grunt of disgust, and carefully closes her jacket over the wound.

  I hear new signals, and the roar of engines. Two Unmaker aircraft come from the northwest, through the Boundary between the North and Central Blades, and do a flyover of the blast zone. I worry about being seen, but then I look at Straker and see that her uniform has changed color and pattern to perfectly match the terrain. Looking down, I see that my armor is doing a similar trick. Again.