I’ve never been in love, and only had awkward sex once with the daughter of a Trader, an act I interrupted before I risked impregnating her. I’m sure I was disappointing, but she was kind, and discreet. Her name was Sorah. She was gone when they came the next season, likely dead. I didn’t ask, as if I had no right to. I kept my grief to myself, all my imagined happy futures undone. And I swore I’d never let myself feel that way again.
(But then Terina came into my life. And I know whatever might have been between us was likely even more fantasy than what I had with Sorah, but I grieve losing those possible futures as well. Except this time it’s me that didn’t come back. I wonder if she asked what happened to me. I wonder if she grieved.)
When I show these memories to Peter, however unintentionally, I feel his impulse to comfort me, to think fatherly thoughts, reassure me that I will find love again. But then he remembers that I won’t, and he won’t, and our happy memories turn to hopelessness.
Every morning we wake up in what had been Peter’s and Maria’s cabin, in the bed they shared, and I can feel the void gut him fresh as he remembers that she’s gone, they’re gone. Murdered. And the only thing that feels like it will even temporarily fill that void is more murder.
And every morning, it takes me hours to soothe that hunger away, to keep Peter in the moment. Walking. Breathing. Eating. Drinking. Praying. Feeling the sun and wind. Smelling tenacious life all around us, enjoying its simple beauty.
Slaughtering more humans won’t protect that beauty. We have to focus on the real monsters, the ones who can and will destroy it all.
But today, we don’t go back to the ship, back to listening to music while we work. Today, we keep walking, much further than our usual hike. And we don’t turn back.
I realize quickly enough where he’s leading me, even though he doesn’t overtly think it. We’re headed southwest. Up-Canyon.
I know I should try to stop him. I’m not sure why I don’t.
It may have been Peter’s persistent rage that prodded us here, but now my own curiosity pushes me to proceed willingly.
We’ve been circling the colony site for three-quarters of an hour. Watching. Listening. Waiting. We’ve even let ourselves be visible through the growth. I’ve been telling myself that’s all we’re going to do—see and be seen; get a look over the place in daylight and remind the murdering animals that the Reaper is still around. But there’s been no sign of snipers, no chatter on any of the Keeper channels. So we dare an open approach, hoping to instigate a response.
We walk freely into their perimeter, out in the open in full daylight. Still, I see no movement, hear nothing but the rustle of our own armor, the grinding of our boots on the gravel, our breath through the mask, the breeze through the green.
We forgo the outlying hatchways, walk right up to the structure, see the signs of recent cutting, scavenging to feed Asmodeus’ war factory. None of the tool marks look fresher than the last time I was here, but that isn’t necessarily a promising sign. If Asmodeus still wanted the raw materials, he would have come to take them, take the whole colony, and its people…
We go still, listening for the signals of Harvesters, imagining the worst.
(I should have come back sooner.)
Nothing. But I can hear the low hum of the colony’s processors and recyclers, still operating somewhere deep under my feet. I tell myself that’s a good sign, though I expect they’d keep running for awhile even if everyone were dead.
We climb through the rocks and wreckage with the colony schematics overlaid in my vision, until we find a hatchway that should take us down close to the Barracks, a place we recently left full of butchered bodies. The battered airlock depressurizes when we crack it—another good sign. I immediately smell the sour stink of humans, but not rancid death.
“Do they bury their dead?” I ask Peter, remembering how they left their own to rot after the battle outside the DQ. I had to bury them myself, including the desiccated remains of the ones I consumed during my “rebirth”, though Peter insisted they be interred a significant distance away from his wife, child and friend. I put them neatly in a hole, covered them with dirt and rocks, and performed Salat al Janazah—the ritual funeral prayers my father taught me, that we performed for every one of ours we lost. (Even though I had no reason to believe any of the dead Keepers were of the Faithful, I prayed for them just like I prayed for Peter’s family, and for Declan Chance. I reason that if it is the duty of all the Faithful to pray for the souls of the Faithful dead, so it should be the duty of all human beings to pray for the souls of all the dead.)
Bury, burn, put out to rot… I don’t know. Never cared to ask. Never stumbled across a graveyard or crematorium. But they would drag off the ones I killed before I came back, clean up my “artwork”. Maybe Thel was just in too much of a hurry to play with your redheaded friend to let his slaves care for their fallen.
(I consider: Maybe they would have eventually, if we hadn’t attacked them in their homes. Or maybe they just didn’t dare to come recover the bodies, once they knew the Onryō was no longer sealed in its tomb.)
The Katar took away their own fallen before I made it back from the Grave; they secured the stripped bodies and carried them home for burial as they retreated after their own revenge raid. The Ghaddar told me that.
She also told me how hard my father searched for my remains, how he didn’t want to leave Eureka, even knowing that I must have died from my wounds. He imagined they’d taken my body and defiled it, or at least took it for study as it had probably been decades since they’d seen humans with physiology similar to their own, and that I would never enter heaven whole because they’d denied me a proper burial. The Pirates did such things to our people because they knew it would hurt us: they would take our dead away and supposedly decorate their cliff fortresses with our skins and bones, or wear our bones and teeth like jewelry, or leave us to dry and crumble, hung up high out of reach in the thin cold. The Shinobi mutilated our corpses as a warning to trespassers, but were kind enough to leave them on their borders for us to collect. Those that dared the Keeps of Industry or Pioneer simply never returned.
Bodies are just meat. Whatever they were is long gone.
“You still tend the graves of your own loved ones,” I challenge indelicately. “You still pray over their ashes.”
That’s for me. Funerals are for the living, not the dead.
My father told me something similar, as we buried our own over the years.
“And will you make a grave for me, even if there’s nothing to bury?”
I expect I’ll be making a lot of graves, assuming how long I’m likely to be around. Unless your Yod decides to reset our little drama again.
We drop down through the inner hatch into a dimly lit corridor, which my vision illuminates in ghostly green. I don’t see a living soul, don’t hear a human sound. As far as I can tell, it’s just us and the automated systems.
I wonder how many times Yod’s done it. Your friend Colonel Ram suspected that, didn’t he? That Yod’s actually rewritten the world more than once, because we keep going wrong… Is anything about us real?
“What do you mean?” I’m afraid I know.
Think about it, lad. Yod said he just reset us to an earlier state. But he didn’t actually rewind time, he just physically changed everything to match a previous state, changed us, including our memories. So why not just rewrite history completely while he was at it? He could give us all entirely false memories and we’d never know… Or maybe he made us all from scratch, just like a real God…
I wince at the blasphemy, but I can’t deny I’ve thought similar things myself. But I can’t think about that now.
“Why are we talking about this now?”
Just thinking about what a messed-up world this is that he’s made. Of all the possibilities… Is this really preferable to whatever we did as immortals? Humans de-evolved to primitives, savages... It’s just that some of the monkeys have guns.
“And bombs. Nuclear ones.”
I feel him chuckle because I’ve just lumped the “civilized” Earthmen in with the “savages”.
“What does that make us?”
Monkey gods.
“Sounds like a bad idea.”
Where is everybody?
We find our way easily enough to a main hatch into the Barracks. It’s unguarded, abandoned like the rest of what we’ve seen. But now I do hear hatches closing and manually locking in the distance, echoing down the corridors and tunnels. Shuffling. Whispering.
They’re hiding. From me. And that means they’re still here, still alive.
On the hatch in front of me are taped slips of paper with Japanese characters. Laid out across the threshold are small bowls and trays of various foods, set out like offerings. I reach out and touch the papers, hoping Peter will recognize the symbols.
“O-Fuda,” the Ghaddar’s voice says from behind me. She’s come up on me with her usual stealth—I barely felt the low EMR bleed of her cloaks before she announced herself. Of course she followed me from the DQ, just like she’s kept her constant watch on me, probably thinking I need supervision if not combat support. “Shinto warding spells. Except they name you as Kami of this place.”
“The only way to appease an Onryō,” I remember what Peter said. “Make me divine. Worship me.” I nudge the food offerings with the toe of my boot, half expecting a booby trap.
Now I hear the rustling and shuffling of humans trying to be quiet, slowly coming closer. Down the corridor past her, I can see them with my enhanced vision in the poor light: Civvies, filling the passageway, moving cautiously, fearfully. They also come from the lateral corridors. They stop when they’re still several meters out of my reach, freeze for a few seconds showing me empty hands, and begin dropping to their knees, bowing like they’re performing Salat except they stay down, foreheads almost to the deck. They drop wave after wave, stretching back as far as I can see. It’s an awkward act, like something they’ve just recently learned to do.
It’s called “Dogeza”. Whoever created the O-Fuda… Maybe the same man who painted the warding symbols on the DQ hatch and left the grave offerings, maybe a descendant… He probably taught them how to show respect, how to apologize, how to submit…
“No one should kneel to me,” I mutter. Then louder: “Do not kneel to me! You have nothing to fear.”
“You’re not the only thing they fear,” another familiar female voice comes down the corridor from behind them. They shift, still on their knees, and make a narrow path for Jak Straker, her eyes glowing green in the shadows to announce her.
She steps through them, and as she does, I see a few of the Civvies shyly look up at her, and a very few dare to cautiously reach out and touch her as she passes, like the contact will pass something of her to them. She smiles kindly as she goes, tolerating the attention. But then she clears them and steps up to me, her face going hard. She stretches out her hand and shows me that she’s carrying the remains of a Harvester module, sticky with blood and gore as if torn fresh from a skull.
“Where?” I ask.
“Coming west up the Central Blade. The Katar have stopped six at their Wall. I just intercepted two that were headed here. Wearing Chang Black. One had Zodangan tattoos. The other didn’t—PK Reg.” I can feel that last detail hurt her, but it doesn’t sound like she recognized her fellow Keeper.
“Scouts? Or vectors?” Peter asks through me. She shrugs.
“Wherever Asmodeus is, UNMAC can’t see him,” she tells me what I’ve been discreetly listening in on for the last week. “He’s probably got another visual net over his ship, wherever he’s camped.” Then she chews at her scarred lip, tells me what I haven’t heard: “Harvesters have attacked the Pax, infected some of their Steaders and Hunters. Thankfully Ram and his team made it to Hold Keep in time to stop it from spreading, but they lost fourteen to infection first, including two children. Ram, Lux and Bly are trying to hold a defensive perimeter while Bel, Azazel and Dee work on countermeasures, maybe a cure. Paul Stilson and the Carters took a ‘specimen’ up to White Station yesterday, to try to get the ETE involved. We haven’t heard back from them yet.”
“No one’s told the Unmakers about the Harvesters?” I ask because there’s been no link chatter about the Harvesters, no panic. Unless they’re keeping it quiet…
“Ram sent word to Colonel Ava,” Straker admits. “She’s waiting for his team to learn more before setting up a briefing with General Richards. We want to be able to offer them some effective countermeasures so hopefully they won’t… overreact. Luckily, so far no drones have been seen beyond the Trident.”
“But if Asmodeus gets Harvesters past Ram’s thin line, they could infect the Forge, then Tranquility.”
“Kali is at Tranquility,” she reminds me needlessly.
“And Asmodeus knows that. So what if they bypass Tranquility, infect the Food Traders, and through them the Melas Nomads?” I worry about my own people. “Or the surface refugee camp at Melas Two? The Unmakers wouldn’t be able to ignore it then. They’d probably start bombing immediately, even their own base. Or worse: What if he offers the technology to the Shinkyo? They’re certainly stupid enough to accept it, to try to use it themselves. Then we’d be fighting Harvesters coming at us from two sides.”
She doesn’t have an answer for me. I can see her pain behind her metallic eyes: Any of her people who were still with Asmodeus are either animated corpses or slaves likely soon to be turned into animated corpses.
I turn away from her, turn away from the still bowing Civvies, put my hand on the blast hatch. We reach out, infect the lockwork, and after several seconds I hear the mechanisms give way. We push the heavy barrier aside and repeat the process with the inner door, ready to draw either sword or revolver. The Ghaddar shifts out of the way of potential fire. The Civvies lower themselves into the deck even further. Only Straker doesn’t budge, like she doesn’t care if we get greeted by violence, or knows nothing’s coming.
Nothing comes.
We cautiously step through onto a gangway overlooking the interior of the dome. I smell rotting corpse on top of the human stinks, but the Barracks looks deserted. No attempt has been made to clear the wreckage of Thel’s former Governor’s Suite across from me, but I see no bodies. On the main deck below, where I know I personally slaughtered dozens, someone has made an attempt to clean up the blood, but there are still smears on the sheet metal.
We take a walk around the upper walkway, sensing neither heat nor movement in the suites that ring the dome. We force one of the hatches and get hit by the reek of death, strong. I find two bodies in Keeper uniforms laid out side-by-side on a neatly made bed. One has a poorly bandaged gut wound. Smears of dried blood across the floor from the hatch suggest he was dragged in after being wounded, probably in the battle. I remember Peter saying they no longer had skilled physicians. A thin pillow has been used to cover his face. There’s a single, powder-burned bullet hole where his forehead should be.
The other body—a short-haired adult female—has a messy knee wound. It looks like she laid down next to the first, put a pistol in her mouth, and blew the back of her own head off.
There’s a side room. I find two more bodies in there. Children, maybe five and seven Standard years old. They look like they were shot in their sleep, once each in the head.
“They suffered over fifty percent losses that night,” Straker tells me from the hatchway. “Your father and the Katar were even more ruthless than you were. The only reason they withdrew before finishing it was that the PK were falling back to defensive positions, and we had wounded of our own to evac. But the Garrison is broken. They no longer have their ‘wizard’. They know seeking Asmodeus is no option. And their remaining numbers are insufficient to manage their Civvies, much less secure their perimeter, especially with their security grid crashed. They didn’t have the tech skillsets to undo what you did to the mainframe. So those that could, pack
ed what they could, and pulled out. The ones that couldn’t travel… Well, if they were taught the same as I was, suicide is both honorable and vastly preferential to being taken alive by one’s enemies.”
“Where did they go?” the Ghaddar asks before I can.
“They have caves in the Divide slope, close to a Feed.” She doesn’t specify a location, or how exactly she knows this.
Our first overwhelming impulse is to ask her exactly where they are, to demand that information, so we can pursue and finish them in their holes, but we don’t. I’m not sure if that’s me or Peter.
We spend the next hour searching the Barracks without urgency. We find fifteen more bodies, mostly all wounded that were put out of their misery, or put themselves out of their misery. I notice their non-fatal wounds are from bullets, arrows and conventional blades. Apparently I was mercifully efficient: anyone I cut or stabbed or shot either died instantly or succumbed before they took away the battle dead, which are nowhere to be found.
I wonder out loud where those dead are, and Straker tells me they were probably given quick burials by laying them out in a peripheral tunnel section and collapsing the roof down on them. The badly wounded were mercifully executed a few days later, as the last of them prepared to withdraw. Those that were able, likely did the deed themselves. Then a few that we found without other obvious wounds apparently chose suicide rather than leave their stronghold, their generational home. Thankfully the two children I found first were the only two that their parents decided to take with them to the grave. Straker told me those were of high rank, Company Commanders, and probably could not bear the shame of their defeat, or were blamed for it, so their children would have been “career blacklisted”, condemned to lives of abuse and miserable duties.
Despite Peter seething like he’s been robbed of his vengeance, I feel a sense of gratitude that the Keepers decided to just abandon their Civvies rather than kill them or force them to evacuate with them. But
The God Mars Book Five: Onryo Page 18