The God Mars Book Five: Onryo

by Michael Rizzo

  Ram then lets me “see” something Dee’s sent him: The signals from the Keeper links and weapons have given us a decent map of their locations. We’ve cleared this set of tunnels, but the blips show what look like two more networks, further west on the slopes. Including the sentry snipers, I count sixty eight more Keepers we haven’t dealt with, and those are just the ones wearing their gear. I remember: They have families, children. And kidnapped Civvies, still unaccounted for.

  We move our case of confiscated weapons into the green down slope, then decide it’s time to begin removing the sentries, which becomes just a matter of sneaking up on them before they can raise enough of a commotion to be seen by their nearest comrade, since they can neither shoot nor call out. We clear five nests each as we work west. My satchel is soon filled with confiscated ammo and grenades (the snipers don’t have pistols).

  We meet up in the rocks above the entries to the next tunnel complex, and Ram decides to trigger the charges he set to bury their mining machines. The blasts are a dull rumble through the slope beneath us, but I expect it’s enough to get the desired attention. When their link calls get no responses, I see them start to come out in small fire teams, carefully.

  I show Ram my stash of grenades. He shows me he has his own collection inside his robes. He flashes me a graphic of what he’s thinking—coincidentally exactly what I was thinking—and we begin to casually toss grenades in proximity to the Keeper teams; close enough to make them take cover without seriously injuring them. They try to fire blindly back up where they think we are, only to find their guns won’t cooperate.

  Ram flashes me the hatch locations, and we each jump down for a separate one, while Dee fakes a retreat order. This time, we just pop the airlocks and depressurize the tunnels, adding a little hypoxia to our advantages, and rush in to repeat our stun-and-disarm dance.

  This time, they’ve had enough warning to set explosive traps for us, but without their links working, they can’t detonate them. I manage to get shot a few dozen times by manual weapons, which is just painful enough to be irritating, and I wind up breaking more bones.

  The worst I do is throw a Keeper into a wall when he tries to dive and manually trigger the tunnel charges. He hits hard enough to shake rock down from the ceiling, and drops like a child’s fabric doll. I want to run him through or split his skull just on principle, but just tear out the detonators and walk away with him still breathing.

  The worst they do is throw grenades into a space while I’m taking down three of their own. The bodies in my way keep me from reaching all of them in time. I wind up swatting one back the way it came, but two others blow. One winds up being absorbed by one of the poor bastards I’d just knocked out as he incidentally falls on it. The other slams me hard, knocking me into the wall. I could feel my armor locking up and my skin hardening in the split-second before the blast, but the shockwave is still brutal. I feel red-hot spikes stab the inside of my left thigh and my right triceps where frag managed to find gaps in my plate, and my tech races to make repairs. Thankfully, throwing the one grenade back seems to have kept them from throwing more while they had the opportunity, but they killed their own for it: Mangled and bloody bodies are being poorly buried by a partial collapse of the ceiling. Perhaps they thought their fellows were already dead, that we’ve been killing instead of stunning this whole time.

  “Are you okay?” Ram asks in my head.

  “Funny… With all these marvelous modifications, they didn’t bother installing one to kill pain…”

  “When we had that option, we were worse,” he tells me. “Pain was the only thing that reminded us we were at all human.”

  I stagger through the haze-filled tunnel to where I threw the grenade, and find two more bloodied bodies, one still alive. I disarm them and leave him. As I move forward, I take more fire because I’m slowing down. My gauges are showing depletion. I could go back to the dead men and replenish myself, but don’t want to take the time. They have Civvies in here somewhere.

  I find their children first. They’ve built a shelter, a bunker secured behind a blast hatch, where they’ve gathered them with sufficient supplies and their recycling gear. They try to lock the hatch against me, but forcing it is easy enough. Then I’m met by a pair of women with pistols and grenades ready, their young cowering behind makeshift barricades of crates and bedding and spare armor. I’m not sure if they intend the grenades for me, or to spare their children from me.

  I try showing them my open hands, then use what speed I’ve got left to dash forward and shove them together, grabbing the grenades from their hands, taking their point-blank fire as I take the time to disable the fuses. Then I snatch their guns away, crush them to uselessness, grab them by their uniforms again and spin them around to do a quick search for more weapons. When I’m reasonably convinced that they’re disarmed, I push them out of my way and do a rough search through the supplies for more weapons. One of the adults jumps on my back and tries to stick a knife in my neck, proving my search wasn’t thorough enough. I resist the urge to crush her wrist, then take the blade and throw her off me. I show her my open hands again, and go back to my search, ignoring the young until one—who looks like a ten year old boy—points a gun at me with shaking hands. I take it away as gently as I can.

  Finally, convinced they can do no more significant mayhem to me or themselves, I close the hatch and fuse it, sealing them in. Safe.

  I’m definitely tiring by the time I find what I’ve come for. And they’ve had plenty of time to prepare: They’ve got the kidnapped Civvies lined up as a human shield, five Keepers with pistols to their heads and grenades in their other hands, while three behind them level manual large-bore sniper rifles on us. For whatever good it will do, Ram has arrived just ahead of me from another tunnel. He’s showing them empty hands.

  “Who’s your CO?” he asks them. He gets no answer, except the fact that they haven’t just opened fire. I suspect that means they have no confidence of victory, but are hoping to lever us into withdrawing. I recognize the Keeper I sent with my message among those holding guns and grenades on unarmed victims.

  “Those people are under my protection,” I repeat my warning. “If you harm one of them, I will kill every single one of you.”

  “He will,” Ram surprisingly supports my extremity. “And he can. And I would have already done it for him, but I’m hoping you’ll realize we have mutual enemies. All the peoples of Mars are under the same threat. You need to stand together.”

  His ideal seems to fall on deaf ears. I try a harder sell:

  “Your wizard has sold you to a demon, like us, except he’ll infect you all with nanotechnology that will slowly eat your brains and make you into drones of rotting meat. And even if you manage to avoid that fate, Earth has returned, and they see you all as primitive brutal animals that need to be rooted out, rounded up and controlled. If you resist, they will bomb you out.”

  “Your brother colonies—Industry, Frontier and Pioneer—were depopulated to feed the demon’s war machine, then the latter two were completely stripped for scrap, gone,” Ram adds. “Many hundreds died. After the demon moved on, Earth ‘reached out’ to the surviving holdouts. When they resisted, when they tried to keep their homes, Earth bombarded them with missiles. They will do the same to you. They will not meet you face-to-face. You will never get to return fire.”

  We stand like that, each side holding, while they digest this news. But during this knife-edge silence, Ram flashes me images: The Keeper formation, with the four on my side highlighted, along with carefully calculated lines of fire. I give him a slight nod to let him know I got the message.

  The Keepers start to get shakier as they try to hold their standoff. As for me, my wounds appear temporarily patched, but between them and resource depletion, I’m not sure how fast I can be when the moment requires.

  The moment is brought on by neither side. One of the hostages—an older woman—looks up at me with tears in her eyes and screams
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  “You have to kill them all!!!”

  She reaches up, grabs for the grenade held by her left ear, and tries to wrench it free of her captor’s grip. I credit him for not just shooting her in the head, but he loses control enough that the “spoon” springs free.

  Ram lunges forward, reaching for the grenade. The Keeper is quick enough to get his intention and tosses it to him. Ram catches it, crushes the spherical charge and tosses the remaining fuse core down one of the tunnels where it pops and flares harmlessly. And I’m thinking we may have just come to a point of understanding when one of Keeper officers reverts to habit, aims his rifle at the back of the woman’s head and blows her brain out through her face, spraying me and Ram with gore.

  The Keeper holding her lets her drop, his blood-spattered face frozen in horror.

  Before I can do anything myself, Ram answers in kind, shooting the offending officer in the face as he tries to raise his rifle. Then Ram shoots down the other two riflemen, so fast I can barely differentiate the two shots.

  I’ve drawn my own pistol, but haven’t used it. The remaining five Keepers—four still with hostages—cower and shake.

  “Release them now,” Ram growls through his mask, eyes glowing, horns coiling, “or I will kill every single one of you myself.”

  The Keeper I’d sent with my message is the first one to set down his gun and replace the pin in his grenade. The others follow suit, though one at a time. I feel the urge to shoot the last one to surrender, just to make an example, but I don’t. Ram collects their weapons, tells the remaining four Civvies to head for the nearest hatch and wait for him, then he faces me.

  “Give them your terms,” he tells me. I can feel his rage, and under it, his anger at himself. He turns and walks out. I realize this is his curse, and mine now: For all our power, we can’t always save the people we want to. But we’re very good at killing.

  I repeat my warning about returning to Eureka. But I also let them know that their links are slaved to us, so if they should need our help, they need only call. I also remind them of the threat of Asmodeus and his Harvesters, and tell them how best to fight them (at least until they change tactics). Then I remind them that Earth is right over their heads, and they aren’t going anywhere.

  I look down at the dead woman, her blood making a thick puddle on the cut stone floor. Again, I suppress my urge to end this the way Peter wants (though he isn’t pushing me that way right now for some reason). I leave them to make whatever choice they’re going to, and I go find Ram.

  Chapter 3: Purpose

  I find Ram outside the tunnels down-slope, pointing the way home for those we rescued.

  In my head, I can hear the Keepers’ links restored. I hear them asking for updates, orders. I hear a shaky voice telling them to stand down, to not fire on us or the Civvies, to let us pass. It may be Dee faking it, but I don’t think so this time.

  “I’ll ask Jak Straker to check up on them when she can,” Ram tells me absently, looking back up where the Keeper stronghold is hidden.

  “They won’t sit put for long,” I assume the worst.

  “Would your people, if another power had just disarmed you and threatened your families?” Ram reflects.

  “We were a lot kinder than Asmodeus would have been. Or Earth.”

  “Threats they’ve only heard about from us,” he discounts. “They won’t believe until they face them.”

  “At which point, it may be too late.”

  As I look up at their positions, my graphics pick them out. They’re slowly pulling back into their tunnels, probably to consider their situation, and then to plan their next moves. I have an ugly thought.

  “We could use Chang’s strategy,” I tell Ram, almost joking. “Offer them power and protection if they serve us.”

  “And then we’d be using them as our cannon fodder,” Ram isn’t amused. I get the impression he’s wrestled with the temptation already. “No. They can’t serve us. They have to stand together when they face Earth, by themselves and for themselves.”

  “And where are we on that day?” I think I know the necessary answer.

  “Somewhere hell-and-gone away from them.”

  Wordlessly, I follow him to recover the crate of confiscated weapons. We add what else we’ve collected. Just as I’m thinking he’s going to ask me to carry it back to Katar with him, I hear him signal, and his flyer comes from over the crest with a rush of turbines. We load and secure the crate, and he gets on his machine. He doesn’t ask me to come with him. Straker must have told him why I don’t want to see my people, my father. Or he’s read it in my thoughts.

  “You did well, today Ishmael—Jonathan,” he praises me as prepares to fly. “Better than I did. Take care of yourself. And call me if you need me.”

  I hear an echo in my head as he says it, where I usually hear Peter, but it’s Ram’s voice. He’s telling Peter to take care of me.

  I let him go without a word, without telling him that I don’t know how to call him, and watch him disappear back over the crest.

  So that was Mike Ram, Peter muses in my head. Living history. He still lives up to the legend, even like that.

  I start walking back toward Eureka.

  I watch over the freed Civvies until they get safely home. Between their wasted physiques and the lack of breathers (probably confiscated by the Keepers to discourage escape), they struggle and drag, and are staggering and stumbling by the time the make the perimeter hatches and let themselves in, helping each other down into their poor sanctuary.

  I don’t stay to let them thank me or be part of their celebration and mourning. I know I can’t keep them safe. I can only be their instrument of vengeance. Their Onryō.

  But I didn’t slaughter. I wonder if I’ll be made to regret that choice.

  I should be proud of myself, that I did the better thing today, but all I can think about is that two innocents died, and that the lives I took and didn’t take won’t make a difference.

  As I hike back to the DQ, I consider whether I should try to call Ram (or ask the Ghaddar to, assuming she does have the ability to), and offer myself to his cause for what little time I have left (and maybe Peter will continue for me after I finally fade). Then I consider that Ram is one of Yod’s pawns, set either to keep balance in the nightmare reality he’s created, or to further some agenda he doesn’t want to show his hand in directly; insufficient hero or unwitting tool. I wonder if that’s what I am as well. I expect so.

  I can see why the Jinn withdrew, why their Council pulled their warriors from the field. They’re refusing to play Yod’s game, no matter the cost.

  I remember Chang, exiled in Haven, doubting that anything that he’d done (or is) was really him at all, that Yod had simply invented and used him. Or worse: That he’d agreed to it. Then I remember Ram confronting Yod, and Yod telling him that he’d agreed to it as well; that he’d, in fact, inspired Yod to do what he did. Assuming anything Yod says is the truth, and not just more manipulation.

  I’m back at the ship before I know it.

  The Ghaddar, anticipating my needs (and apparently when I’d be back), has set out food and water in the galley. But I have a more pressing need. I find her in the cockpit, monitoring the drone feed. She pretends not to care what I’ve just been up to.

  “Why are you here?” I ask her directly, taking off my helmet.

  She swivels her chair to face me, pulling aside her own cowl and mask so I can see her face, her intense black eyes, her long dark hair. There’s a deep sadness in her eyes.

  “I promised your father that I would protect you with my life.”

  “You failed. You live.” It came out crueler than I’d intended, but I’m sure she’s been thinking this every day since I got myself shot. Then I make it worse. “I’m fading. You can see it. Maybe not as fast as your father, when Chang made Bel’s Seed take him. But I’ll be like that soon enough: A few lingering memories in Peter’s head, traces of me in his face, just enough to r
emind you…”

  Stop it, lad.

  “What will you do then? When there’s none of me left? Will you go back to Ram, tell him I’m gone and he’ll be dealing with Peter from now on, forever?”

  She doesn’t answer. Neither does she give ground. So I push the essential part of my question:

  “Are you here to watch me on Ram’s behalf? Is that why he was here today? Is that why Straker was at Eureka so coincidentally?”

  What betrays her is that she shows no reaction to me telling her that Ram was here. I’ve always seen her uncomfortable around him. She tries to hide it, but never succeeds. (Did she love him? And then watched him turn into something else.)

  “I’m here because I promised your father I would protect you,” she repeats flatly. “You’re still alive.”

  “But I have no need of your protection, do I?”

  “My help, then.”

  “And the true nature of that help? Keeping an eye on me so I don’t do anything truly irredeemable? Or making sure I have at least some human companionship so I don’t fully let go of what I was?”

  Again, she doesn’t answer. Her silence, I realize, always tells me more than her words. But this time, I get something unexpected: I actually see doubt in her eyes.

  “You really don’t know.”

  I suppress a chuckle. Everything about this is ridiculous. No man would dare talk to the Zauba’a Ghaddar like I am, except perhaps Ram. But I have no reason at all to fear her. And she probably doesn’t remember what’s it’s like to face a man who she can’t intimidate—she’s devoted her entire life to being terrifying. But to me, she’s just another Normal.