The God Mars Book Five: Onryo

by Michael Rizzo

  No. I have to get control back. I have to. But it isn’t Peter I’m fighting. Peter is just sitting silent, watching my terrible conflict from some corner of my mind, like he needs me to cross this line on my own.

  I want to scream. I want to run away. But there’s too much at stake for too many. I make myself continue. Play my role. Be the Onryō.

  I pick hand-shot face-smashed up the same way, and let him feel my nanites weave their scavenger micro-tubes into his throat. But then I drop him. And tell him:

  “Tell your people: This place is under my protection. You will return those you have taken and never come back here. If you try to defy me, you will pay far more than you have today. Now go. Deliver my message.”

  He tries his link gear and finds I’ve disabled it. I point my blade up-canyon, gesturing for him to deliver my message in person. He finds his legs and runs off, which is what I wanted him to do.

  I give him a good head start before I follow. Sinking my resource-scavenging nanites into him (with a modicum of self-control this time) gave me the opportunity to leave a tracker. He’s smart enough to take a circuitous route, but still heads back to his people, too scared to delay delivering my message. Too bad for him it’s not the message he thinks it is. Too bad for them all.

  I move up slow, up into the rocks near the terminus of the canyon, about two klicks west on the colony. They moved so many people and gear they couldn’t avoid leaving tracks, but I’m frustrated to see that they’ve fanned out, split up. They probably have multiple bunkers dug into the divide slope. But unless they have a good source of oxygen and heat, they won’t go too far up, so I won’t have to do much climbing. I’ll just make an example of the first group I find, leave enough alive to either run for their fellows or send out an alarm call that I can trace, work my way from…

  I hear the sound of gravel grinding under heavy boots, just up in front of me, but I don’t see anything. And then I do: The air ripples, and the long blade of a sword—a katana—appears as if it’s been unsheathed out of nothing. It drops to the side of the shimmering mirage, ready but not threatening. I’m suspecting the Ghaddar, somehow blocking my ability to sense her cloak’s EM bleed. But then the air turns black: black armor, black robes, capped by a long-snouted skull with a pair of long coiling horns made of polished metal. The horns move, coil and uncoil. Through the snout, I hear a long, deep sigh of a breath.

  He’s in my way.

  “Colonel Ram,” I greet through my own mask, dropping my own camouflage. He doesn’t react to the sight of me, like he could see me all along.

  He’s in my way.

  “Ishmael,” the fanciful animal skull greets back, sounding like he’s just been given deeply bad news.

  “Drake,” I correct him impulsively. “My name is Jonathan Drake. And you’re in my way. Colonel.”

  I expect him to raise his sword, to challenge me, to defend the helpless, to play the hero regardless of whether my prey deserves him or not. But he just steps aside, gesturing me to pass with his blade.

  “You know what I’m going to do?” I ask, confused.

  “It’s never enough,” he says absently. It takes me a moment to realize what he means. Then I know exactly what he means. But

  “They just killed a man and left his mutilated body displayed for his family to see.” I’m not sure if Peter is defending our intentions or I am, but I’m not surprised that it feels like me. “They took others as slaves.”

  “I saw,” he says evenly. “I saw you make them pay in blood and fear. I’m sure I would have done the same. But it isn’t satisfying for very long, is it?”

  My silence is my answer.

  “The limitations we had when we were mortal were the only thing that curbed that hunger,” he continues. “Without those limitations, our rage can feed and feed, as long as there’s something left to kill.”

  I know exactly what he means. But

  “We have enemies on multiple fronts, enemies that would slaughter innocents.” My rage becomes reason, or at least a kind of reason he might understand. “We don’t have the luxury of mercy, not even like this.”

  The horned skull nods.

  “If you hold your blade now, anyone they kill in the future is on your conscience.” He does understand. Exactly. But then

  “Why are you here?” I ask a practical question, probably already knowing his impractical reason. “Shouldn’t you be defending the Pax or Katar? Or hunting Asmodeus?”

  “Or Thelonious Harris?” he takes my thought. Then he lets me know: “He tried to attack White Station, probably looking to acquire more ETE tools. He didn’t realize the ETE had hardened their networks against Companion tech, and his Companion isn’t as strong as the others. The Carter brothers sent him on his way, discouraged and with a few new scars.”

  “But he still lives,” I hiss on Peter’s behalf. “Because they let him live, he’ll keep trying. Or he’ll try to enslave some other group of people. He’ll torture and kill and terrorize whoever he meets. So will the Eureka Keepers.”

  “I know.”

  “So have you come to help me kill them, or do you have some other solution?”

  Smoothly and gracefully, he sheathes his blade. He takes off his helmet, and it collapses into a flat slab of metal that slips into his robes. His long dark hair is tied back, pulled back from his pale, angular (and unnaturally youthful) features. His dark metallic eyes look weary, frustrated, defeated—not unlike my father’s at the end of our bloody journey.

  “I’m sorry this had to happen to you,” he says pointlessly.

  “It was fate,” I tell him what I’ve decided over the last several days, accepted. “In my search for the origin of my birth parents, I would have eventually found the ship, would have been infected by the ghost within. It was waiting for me, and I was looking for it. Fate.”

  “But fate in this case could be the plan of a machine.” He also blames this on Yod, all of it.

  “Still fate,” I also accept, but not without bitterness. “Unless you’ve figured out a way to defy that plan?”

  I hear the crushed sigh again, and he shakes his head ever-so-slightly.

  I look upslope, wonder if the Keepers are watching us: two monsters deciding their fate. Assuming the decision is ours.

  “So is it Yod’s plan that I kill the Keepers?” I have to ask. And in asking, my rage goes wrong, loses focus. I’m just an instrument. A playing piece on a game board. My rage lets Yod move me as he desires.

  Did Yod make those animals kill my family? Kill you? Torture your friends? Butcher that man back there?

  “Don’t assume Yod can’t control flesh and blood,” Ram cautions, apparently hearing Peter.

  “So do we let the animals do as they please, just because it might be part of that machine’s grand plan?” Peter argues through me. Then I reassert control. “You knew this thing, this AI. Would it make men kill against their will? Or does it just choose to let them? And then expect us to stop them?”

  He thinks on that for a few moments, shakes his head again.

  “You’re right. We’re spread too thin, whether that was Yod’s intent or if the random chance that he loves so much got the better of his plans.”

  “So either he’s making it happen or he’s letting it happen,” I distil. “Is this another one of his experiments? Will we slaughter weaker beings for the greater good? Or will we try to prove we’re somehow better than that, even if it costs innocent lives?”

  He turns and looks upslope with me. I can almost feel his own internal conflict, spinning losing options against each other. I try to listen in on his thoughts, but have no idea how. Either that, or he’s blocking me. Apparently all the other Modded are better at this than I am.

  Eventually, I see the corner of his mouth twist into a grin.

  “We may have another solution.”

  It’s easy enough to re-acquire the Keeper I’m tracking. He has indeed rushed back to his fellows to report. I hear their link channel
s come alive with more code. It sounds like they’re smart enough to expect me to be following. I don’t bother to jam their signals, so maybe they’ll believe I didn’t pursue, if just for a few moments longer.

  Ram finds a path around and above their sniper sentries. We move slowly to avoid making noise—this also keeps our optical camouflage from shimmering as it projects what’s on the opposite side of us.

  When we find their tunnels, they’ve done a good job of hiding their hatches in the slope-fall rocks. They’ve also done a good job of hiding explosives designed to intercept unwanted visitors, specifically me. Thankfully, Ram is skilled at finding both. Disabling the trigger devices for the traps is simple enough, but then Ram carefully takes a few of the charges and puts them inside his robes.

  As we can’t crack their hatches without alerting the guards we hear just inside, we wait in our functionally invisible state until a shift of sentries comes out for relief. This turns out to be a five hour exercise in patience, something else I seem to be better at than Peter, who’s eager to just get to hacking and shooting.

  When a pair of snipers in Unmaker Heavy Armor pop the hatch, Ram is able to drop down on them before they can close it behind them, and then drops them both with a touch that pumps a burst of current into their bulky suits. He then twists their rifles into uselessness. (I wince at this waste of valuable weaponry, but then remember I have little use for such things anymore.) This lets us into the airlock space, which is barely big enough for the two of us. Ram then transmits a signal on their link channels that’s a garbled mix of their prior transmissions, choppy to make it sound like an equipment malfunction. When we cycle the lock and pop the inner hatch, the guards inside are barely suspicious, and then confused when the lock appears to be empty at first glance.

  The air ripples as Ram charges into the three sentries stationed just inside the cut stone tunnel. He makes quick work of them as well, but again only to render them unconscious and destroy their weapons. I feel Peter bristle at this mercy, but looking down at the unconscious faces, I see teens years younger than I am. Was.

  Ram spares one of their ICWs and appears to meditate over it.

  “Dee, I need a hack,” I hear him talk to no one. I’m slow to realize he’s not speaking. He’s transmitting, in my head. His reply is a burst of dense code. That code then goes out over the Keeper’s link channels.

  “Just like old times…” I hear him mutter inside his helmet with his actual voice. Then the metal skull turns to me. “The Filipino Escrimadors call it ‘defanging the snake,’” he explains. Peter flashes memories in my head of things I barely remember from my lessons: Earth creatures. Bizarre tubes of muscle that undulate and coil and spring at eye-blink speed, attacking with pairs of long needle-like teeth set in gaping jaws. These ‘fangs’ carry deadly poison, making the ‘snake’ a fearsome opponent. Removing these teeth, I suppose, would reduce the creature to no more than a fascinating curiosity. (The creatures are oddly beautiful.)

  “We take away their weapons,” I follow.

  “The line troops and sentry snipers have only been issued their original pre-Bang UNMAC smart weapons,” Ram explains. “I expect it’s all they’ve been trained on, in order to conserve what ammo they have for this long, so I doubt many of them could shoot straight without the computerized targeting systems.”

  I remember my own marksmanship training, how every bullet was a precious treasure, so I did much more aiming than shooting, and every poor shot was a personal shame.

  “Other than side arms, only the officers and vet instructors have weapons with free manual triggers,” Ram continues. “They thought they were being smart enough by isolating their wired guns from the UNMAC AI, but with the right set of codes, Dee’s just locked their weapons using the old protocols that keep enemies from using your weapons against you. The triggers are hard locked, and so are the actions. They can’t even disassemble the weapons to disable the locks without breaking key parts, which would need to be re-machined from scratch.”

  I remember he explained something like this to my people when he provided us Unmaker guns during his time as Melas Two Commander. His gunsmiths had already removed the offending hardware, but left us the “smart sights” that would only fire when the target was assured—a feature that quickly spoiled even our most experienced marksmen. Now I wonder if he suspected how bad things would go when Earth returned, and made sure we wouldn’t find ourselves disarmed. (I wonder if his own people knew what he was preparing for.)

  “That’s just killed seventy or eighty percent of their arsenal,” he estimates.

  “If you leave them too helpless, they’ll be Harvester fodder,” I hear Azrael—Dee—caution in my head. I find it’s good to hear his voice. And I find his being pure machine disturbs me much less in my current condition.

  “Firearms and grenades aren’t terribly effective against Harvesters anyway,” Ram repeats Straker’s earlier assessment. I remember they’ve had practical experience fighting the things since, and learned some hard lessons. “Besides, we’re just putting on a child lock. If there’s honest need, and they agree to play well with others, maybe we’ll let them have their toys back. Conditionally.”

  “What about their non-networked weapons?” I want to know, Peter still hoping for a proper fight.

  “Those we’ll have to take away a little more personally,” he lets me know there will indeed be some violence involved. “Your father can certainly use whatever old-school weapons and ammo we can confiscate to help defend Katar.”

  “And if they have hidden caches?” I worry.

  The fanciful skull looks up at me. The lenses in the eye sockets glow red. The horns writhe like they’re alive.

  “Then we’ll have to convince them that there will be consequences if they try to break the deal we’re about to make them.”

  Before we can move, a pair of Keepers walks up on us. They can’t really see me, because I’ve still got my camo running, but they do see the black-armored monster with the horned skull for a head crouching over their friends on the tunnel floor. They raise their ICWs and try to fire, but as promised, their weapons won’t cooperate. Neither will their links to call for help. The time it takes for them to decide to drop their primary weapons and reach for their side arms lets Ram walk up on them leisurely, snatching their weapons from their hands as they draw them, then stripping them of their grenades before they try something suicidal. He does look like he’s dealing with ill-behaved children. One of the Keepers ridiculously draws a knife, visibly shaking as Ram gives no ground, barely reacting. I decide to reveal myself as well. The Keepers see me and fall over each other trying to flee in the tight space. Ram glides after them and stuns them with a touch.

  “This may take awhile,” he seems to feel the need to apologize to me.

  “I have nothing better to do today,” I tell him.

  The tunnel network looks uniformly cut, probably by the same mining machines that cut the colony tunnels. The rock is aged enough to tell me the work is probably decades old. If it predates the coming of the Katar, I wonder what enemy they felt they needed a fall-back against. Earth, possibly. The tunnels look like they go deep into the slope rock, maybe deep enough to survive another Apocalypse. (Would they have left their Civvies outside to burn if the bombs fell again?)

  We divide to cover the complex faster, Ram apparently trusting me to stick to his plan and not massacre. With their channels full of falsified routine coded chatter (I assume thanks to Dee), we move unannounced from section to section, using our camouflage to get close to the Keepers we find, then use the delay of their weapons lockup to rush in and stun them.

  I have to hold back Peter’s urges to inflict more injury than is needed. This is most challenging when we encounter officers with manual weapons (conveniently highlighted in my visual graphics by their lack of interface signal). I quickly decide the best strategy is to take them out first, before they can fire, while their underlings are struggling with their lo
cked guns. I think I manage to break one jaw, a few arms and several ribs before I get control over my baser urges.

  Once a section has been “neutralized,” brief hands-on contact with the manual weapons introduces a temporary fusing of their actions that I expect can be undone once we deliver the bounty to Katar. Then we carry the useless weaponry and whatever ammo we can find back to our original entry point, filling a handy supply crate. We soon have a nice little arsenal to gift to my former people.

  After several raids each, we meet to share our “scores”, in the form of a simple flash of data between our minds. Then we go out again. Our combined count reaches thirty-seven disarmed and unconscious Keepers within just over half-an-hour. Not a single round has been fired back at us. I find the challenge to be fun, exhilarating, like a child’s game. And I remind Peter how humiliated and helpless the Keepers will be for our efforts, which, for them, may very well be a punishment worse than death.

  As we go further, we find stocks of old preserved rations that look like they’ve been stashed here since the tunnel network was built. Precious food, hidden away in anticipation of some future disaster. There’s also survival gear, portable heaters, even old pressure suits.

  We eventually come upon a team in shirtsleeves working on a pair of mining “Moles”, either doing maintenance or restoring their function. The rock walls here look freshly cut, suggesting the former. If my internal maps are correct, they appear to be burrowing deeper into the divide. I almost wonder if they were planning on cutting all the way through to the Central Blade, to make themselves a secret pass out of their canyon, if that’s even possible. Following Ram’s example, we stun and drag the Keeper technicians out, then Ram sets the charges he’d taken to collapse the roof of the tunnel in, intending to bury the Moles (but not destroy them, perhaps seeing future usefulness).