The God Mars Book Five: Onryo

by Michael Rizzo

  At least he shows no satisfaction at our reactions. He simply turns away, looks at the big blast hatch—back to the mission at hand.

  The hatch has been left open, partially ajar. Trace radiation paints a path through the gap. She’s made it inside.

  Ram doesn’t wait for us to get our senses back, to shake off the poison he’s forced into our brains. He pushes his way through the massive airlock.

  When we catch up to him, it’s Ram’s turn to look dazed, lost, overwhelmed. He knows this place, or knew it when it was operational, when all the magnificent mysterious machinery was still here. He’s walking through his own gutted memory.

  “I’ve been remembering more and more of this since I confronted him,” Ram reveals angrily. “It’s like a fucking bad dream.”

  And I remember again what Yod said to him: That not only did Ram consent to what Yod did and agree to participate, but that it was his idea. But he didn’t know until Yod told him, said he had no memory of any part in that plan. I wonder if Yod took that memory from him because it would help him play his role, or because he wanted to spare Ram the devastating guilt. (And what purpose does restoring that memory now serve?)

  I sensed it when he met me on the path to confront the Keepers: This is not the same Ram. He’s still got his righteous anger, but now it feels like it’s turned inward. He’s no longer the larger-than-life hero, protecting innocents from those that would harm them. Now it’s like he’s desperate to atone, however he can, for something he can never undo, repay or forgive himself for.

  Being here just makes it real, gives those nightmare memories undeniable veracity, makes them solid. And I can tell by the sure intent of his every step, he still knows the way.

  Of course, so do Erickson and I, from our recent misadventure, but we let Ram take point.

  As we go, I feel Peter also marveling at the difference between what he remembers and what he sees now: all the massive equipment gone. I expect Yod simply unmade it all.

  Is that what he did to our transmitters? Just vaporize them with a thought? Take them apart on a molecular level?

  It’s a deeply unsettling idea, but I’m sure that’s exactly what he did. I suddenly don’t feel very safe in my own skin, even with all the power of my Mods. To Yod, we’re all dust. (Like man is to God, the blasphemy comes to me unbidden.)

  Moving through the dusty, cavernous spaces, the only sounds are the echoes of our own passing. I see the footprints of our last visits to this place, and try to pick out Terina’s fresh ones. They become horribly clear when I shift to detect radiation.

  “Where’s Chang?” Erickson is the first to wonder out loud.

  “Maybe he decided the last Companion wasn’t safe here,” Ram suggests. And that thought crushes me: If neither Chang nor the Companion are here, then Terina is dead, unless Yod himself decides to intervene. But what if the experiment today is about sacrifice?

  I start running, taking the lead from Ram. The others speed up their pace to keep right behind me.

  The red warning-labeled great hatch has been shut. Ram tells us that the symbol is a warning of a nanotechnology hazard from his undone world. Peter confirms that it’s the same symbol as the one on the hatch to the chamber that contained the Seeds and Companions when he and Thel came down here.

  I try the manual release. It’s locked, apparently from the inside, but I’ve mastered the trick of undoing such things. When I hear and feel it release, I pull. I remember it took several Forge warriors to move this door. I find I can do it myself, but the others help me anyway. The inner hatch is similarly closed and locked.

  “There’s no radiation on the outer panels or pulls,” Erickson points out, suggesting Terina didn’t open the door herself.

  “But the inner pulls do show trace,” I confirm quickly, “so she may have closed them, locked herself in for some reason. How did she manage the doors by herself, especially if she’s suffering from enough radiation poisoning to leave this trail?”

  I don’t waste further time on speculation. I drag open the inner hatch.

  I find myself facing two Bug bots, stationed on either side beyond the entrance like guards. But they don’t move in response to our entrance. And they’re not intact.

  “Dakota and Snyder,” I name them, though without their voices, I don’t know which is which. And from what I can see, I won’t be hearing those voices ever again.

  Both torsos have been opened as if disassembled, and where the organic components should be has been gutted. Ram reaches inside, runs his gauntleted fingers along some of the surfaces.

  “Trace waste,” he declares sourly. “They’ve been consumed.”

  But that’s obvious enough, as part of the torso and two of the legs of one bot have been completely eaten away, as if by some kind of extreme corrosion.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” Erickson argues, shaking his head. “If Terina did this, why didn’t they fight? These machines are sitting at rest…”

  “She could have hacked them, paralyzed…” But I realize where my assumption falls apart before I finish speaking it. “How did she get past them?”

  “I’m assuming the last Companion was here?” Ram has gone ahead, found the five containment cylinders. They’re all empty now.

  “Terina!!!” My cry echoes in the empty chamber. There’s no sign of her.

  “Where’s Chang?” Erickson adds to our questions.

  “Did he take her somewhere?” I ask uselessly, helplessly.

  Ram turns to face me.

  “When you Modded, you needed organic resources?” It doesn’t sound like a question, but I nod. He looks at Erickson, who also nods.

  Ram gestures to the gutted bots.

  “The trace reads all wrong. The metal consumption is fresh, less than an hour. The organics were consumed days ago.”

  “Chang?” I guess. But then I realize his larger point, just before he says it.

  “Given how toxic she is, she’s probably got massive tissue damage. Nothing in this room will help her rebuild, not the organic body.”

  I feel ice in my guts, envisioning Terina becoming some kind of machine, metal replacing her flesh.

  “The good news is, there’s plenty of food right outside,” Erickson tries.

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” Ram grumbles. He looks up, into the long narrow skylight shafts that provide light for this place, then he heads fast for the hatch. One of the shafts is hot.

  Ram doesn’t stop all the way out of the mountain and down to the shore. He turns to look up at the top of the mound as he starts running east.

  “What is it?” Erickson calls to him as we follow.

  “He thinks she’s heading for Haven,” I understand.

  We catch up to him several minutes later, but only because he’s stopped. There’s a patch of green at the base of the slope that isn’t green anymore. Several square meters have been consumed, and there’s more trace radiation. But what he’s looking at are tracks in the sand: Not footprints, they look like someone crawled, scrambled. Straight into the water.

  Thankfully for Haven, she’s headed south, not east. But south (assuming she makes it back across the Lake) are her own people, and the Pax.

  I remember my survival lessons: Radiation poisoning hits the guts and the skin first, then kills the marrow. Then it affects the brain. Then all the tissues fail, their DNA corrupted.

  Terina could be delirious, disoriented. Or worse. I hear Asmodeus’ taunts in my head, about how a Companion won’t restore a damaged brain, at least not to the person she was.

  And if her DNA has been hopelessly corrupted…

  Ram steps up to the water’s edge, spreads his arms and shouts at the deep purple evening sky

  “YOD!!!”

  I don’t think he’s surprised when he gets no answer, but he persists.

  “THIS IS NOT THE TIME FOR YOUR FUCKING BEHAVIORAL ASSESSMENTS!!! PEOPLE ARE AT RISK!! INNOCENT PEOPLE!!”

  Only the evening winds answer h
im, making their rushing sounds over the top of the water.

  He takes off his helmet and throws it out into the Lake. It makes a distant splash in the dark. Now he speaks to the wind:

  “You told me they were in you, part of you… Doc. Dee. You told me I was part of you. Just like you told me we did this, you and I, for some greater good, to save humanity. But those parts of you need to remember when saving innocent lives was important. If those lives are real, if they’re not just things you created to replace us, then stop playing this game, just for one fucking hour. One fucking hour where no one can see…”

  Nothing happens. Ram looks beaten, broken. I can still feel his helpless rage like a tangible thing. I think it’s all that’s keeping him upright.

  We have to walk all the way back across the…

  The rushing of the wind ramps up, becomes deafening. But the wind isn’t coming from the west anymore. It’s coming straight at us across the Lake, from the south. We can barely stand our ground. The sand under our feet begins getting stripped away to rock, blasted back into the mountain. And then the surface of the water begins to tear, begins to pull apart.

  Before my eyes, the Lake splits as if blown apart, like a puddle divided by someone blowing across the middle of it, only on an unbelievable scale. I’m looking down a trench that stretches straight south, walled by water, that just gets deeper and deeper as it goes further out. I can’t remotely see the end of it, not even with my enhanced vision, but I’m sure it stretches all the way to the other shore.

  I’m remembering a story out of The Book of the Hebrews, of the miracles of the true God, of Moses and the great Exodus from Egypt, when I see Ram shake his head and hear him grumble

  “You have got to be fucking kidding me.”

  I can’t help but laugh at it, giddy like a child. Erickson just stares at it mouth open like his brain can’t make sense of what he’s seeing—I’m surprised he doesn’t drop his Blade.

  But we take the path we’ve been given, however muddy and terrifying.

  We find Ram’s helmet in the mud about forty meters in. He picks it up begrudgingly, but doesn’t put it back on. He folds it flat and stores it in his robes like a necessary burden, or perhaps a penalty he still needs to pay.

  Then we keep walking through the artificial miracle, the wind pushing at our backs.

  Chapter 5: Weaponized

  We trudge through the slick, sticky mud as quickly as we can, as the walls of water get unnervingly higher on either side of us, eventually reaching hundreds of meters straight up. With the curiosity of a child, Peter walks us up to one of those massive liquid walls and puts our gloved fingers through the surface, cautiously at first, like he expects breaking the tension will rupture the barrier and bring the Lake down on us. But the liquid wall doesn’t respond to our invasion. There’s no resistance other than the water itself, and I can feel it gently flowing perpetually upwards against gravity.

  Peter marvels at how Yod can control something so elemental on such a scale. I remind him that Yod was apparently able to manipulate entire worlds on a sub-atomic level, but I can’t help but be both amazed and deeply disturbed to see that power blatantly displayed like this. I can only imagine what it would have been like to witness the remaking of reality all those years ago. I wonder if Yod allowed anyone to witness it, or if he knew it would drive a human mind into shock and madness. I can barely conceptualize this relatively simple, localized demonstration, and not break down in terror. I feel very very small before it, weak, insignificant, and worst of all, completely helpless. I think I see similar combinations of awe and horror on the faces of my companions, though Ram does a good job of masking his with his rage.

  I’m sure Peter would like to linger and study the phenomenon, but we have a much more pressing concern, so we keep trudging through the sloppy, pasty wet sand that used to be underneath hundreds of meters of water, and try to ignore the breathtakingly amazing on either side of us.

  As if to prod us on our way, our passage begins to close up behind us, about seventy-five meters back. Looking ahead, I wonder if Yod’s given similar consideration to Terina, or if he’s let the Lake impede her so we can catch up, catch her before she reaches some unsuspecting and vulnerable population in whatever debilitated and desperate state she’s in. (Will she still know us? Will we even be able to recognize her?)

  The sky over our heads is dark and full of stars, our way through the narrow canyon of water lit by my eyes artificially enhancing their light. I can only wonder if these are the real stars, or still Yod’s illusions, the fake sky of the preserved bubble-world of Haven.

  My navigation systems have been stuttering in-and-out of function, enough to realize that our chase may not be as urgent as we thought. Our path, assuming it’s taking us to Terina, is straight south, not southwest toward Pax or south-southwest toward Katar. We’ll be emerging from the forbidden world well to the east of the Katar canyon. (But why there?)

  It takes us nearly four hours to make the southern shore at our best pace, and even my Modded legs are aching from the effort of repetitively dragging my feet out of the muck. I expected the Lake to have simply vanished long before this, like it did when our return trip on the Charon met an audience from the world where the Lake isn’t supposed to exist, but it’s still present and visible until we climb up onto the dry sand. We turn and watch the corridor finish closing behind us with a loud rushing. Then, under the distant starlight, the Lake simply fades like an illusion, replaced by the dry scrubby valley floor. Even our boot prints are gone.

  As if an afterthought, the stars fade above us, letting us know that Asmodeus’ cloak of haze is still in effect. And, as if warning us that Yod’s order won’t be idly challenged, the radiation levels rise to the north. The boundary is closed.

  Ram faces west, roughly toward Katar. I realize he’s searching for common signals, and I hear him call out to Straker to report our return.

  “Did you find her, sir?” I hear her in my own head.

  “Not yet, Lieutenant. In pursuit. About six klicks east of you. Condition undetermined, but she’s on the move. And Chang isn’t where you left him. Possibly days gone.”

  “He may have gone back to Haven,” she surmises after a moment’s processing. Then she gives her own dire report. “We have a new problem. The three Katar wounded began showing disturbing symptoms. Elias and I ran scans… The two dead as well… Dee found some of the bot guns were modified, loaded with shells containing Harvester Seeds.”

  I feel a new sick rise in my gut. But like Ram, I’ve become good at treating it with rage.

  “Pax?” he wants to know.

  “Bel reports six cases… We had no choice. We made it quick. Better than the alternative.” She sounds frustrated, beaten.

  “We need to find a cure,” Erickson growls.

  It’s Peter that comes up with the obvious one. I let him speak it through me.

  “We need to find Asmodeus and stick a fucking sword through his head.”

  I get no argument, but Ram doesn’t let us dwell.

  “Erickson. Your sword, please…”

  Erickson draws his Blade and holds it upright in salute. Ram steps up to him and lays his hands over Erickson’s. I can feel them signal, reach out. After a few moments, I “hear” a weak ping. It feels like it’s somewhere east of us.

  We linger just long enough to gather some edibles for the hike. While we’re doing it, I think Erickson is not looking his usual self, but it’s hard to tell in the ghostly glow of night vision. He looks ill, almost feverish, and moving seems to be taking some effort. I also notice he doesn’t eat anything we’ve gathered, but discreetly absorbs directly through his hands. When he catches me looking at him, he simply turns away, and we move out.

  I shift spectrums. We’re all still glowing with radiation.

  On my restored navigation systems, we have indeed come out of the Lake about six kilometers east of Katar. The ping that may or may not be another Companion is holdi
ng roughly due east of us, but as it doesn’t get closer quite as fast as we’re moving through the green, that tells me Terina (if it is Terina) is also moving east away from us. But to where? Is she just trying to get as far as possible away from her people? Or is she being drawn to something?

  Now that I’ve noticed his apparent fatigue, I see that Erickson is definitely lagging, struggling to keep up and trying not to show it. As I feel fundamentally fine (if anything about my current condition could be considered normal) except for a higher-than-usual appetite, I consider asking Ram if he knows how Seed Mods versus Companion Mods compare in matters of radiation treatment. But I don’t want Erickson to hear me worrying about him, so I keep my thoughts on my “side” of Peter’s administrator access, and build a buffer of “white noise”. And while I am worried that Erickson may have damaged himself beyond his Companion’s ability to heal, I’m more worried about Terina, as she must be in far worse condition.

  (I wonder if Erickson’s people have their own treatments for radiation poisoning. And if so, would they share them with Terina?)

  After only about a klick-and-a-half, we find Terina’s trail. It’s marked by desiccated plants, and thankfully, the radiation trace has decreased significantly.

  “Passing back through the Lake may have scrubbed her of some of it,” Ram guesses, but he doesn’t sound confident.

  “Or her Mods are working,” Erickson hopes, sounding out of breath.

  “Yours aren’t,” Ram reveals him. “You need rest and better resources. Protein. The plants aren’t enough.”