The God Mars Book Five: Onryo

by Michael Rizzo

  Erickson doesn’t look like he’s remotely willing to retire from the pursuit. So Ram lets him know:

  “We all have significant cell damage. We could get meat from the Katar or the Pax. Or we need to play ghoul.”

  “Terina’s in worse shape than we are,” I remind them needlessly.

  “I’ll be fine,” Erickson insists, however unconvincingly.

  We continue to follow the trail on the dark.

  The overnight cold is burning more energy than we can spare—we have to keep slowing to forage. But Ram’s right: no matter how much of the plants we consume, there’s something missing, a dire need un-sated.

  After a four kilometer hike, Terina’s ping has stopped keeping ahead of us. She seems to have stopped. I call up my maps in the dark. Another klick up ahead is a low mountain, two klicks wide, four long and about five hundred meters high at a trio of sharp peaks. It sits out by itself in what would be the “stem” of the double-ended fork of the Vajra. The ping looks like it’s coming from the near western slope, only a few hundred meters upslope. But there’s something wrong with our tracking: It looks like there’s an echo, a second ping almost on top of the first.

  I begin to see flashes of light in the sky above the green in that direction. Each visible flash is paired with a burst of interference in my head, distorting Terina’s tracking, but in the after-echoes, I begin to see and hear a familiar signal.

  Thel.

  Not waiting for the others, I start running as fast as I can.

  We come upon the epicenter of the light and EMR storm just far enough upslope to be above the thicker growth. The action is lit in arc-weld-bright flashes, interfering with my night vision, making it hard to see what’s happening. But I do see two distinct figures, circling each other on the treacherous ground. One is definitely Thel, his Staff blazing with plasma as he holds off the other with a flurry of blows. That other I can barely make out, much less recognize.

  “Terina!!” I shout, but get no response.

  She’s moving more like one of the Bug bots than a human, low to the rocks, limbs flexing and extending unnaturally. And it’s hard to tell in the alternating flares and darkness, but her skin looks pale and strangely glossy. In her hands is a stylized version of her people’s Naginata, but I know it’s more than that. It twirls and cuts the air as she moves, so fast I can hear the air ripping. She’s facing away from me, her long dark hair a wild mess, so I can’t see her face.

  I climb the slope, and stepping between rocks, my boot sinks in something that both crunches and squishes, and I’m hit by the stink of death. I look down, ramping up the illumination. I’m standing in the torso of a partially-desiccated corpse. The face has been smashed in and split open to reveal the remains of a Harvester module, inert.

  A quick look around shows me more such corpses, discarded among the rocks not like battle-fallen, but like discarded trash. The whole slope reeks of corpse-rot.

  Whatever Terina has become takes another charge at Thel, and they fence brutally, battering and hacking and stabbing. In the flashes, I see Thel’s eyes lock on me as I advance, and the instant’s distraction proves costly. Terina puts her Blade through his left bicep. Thel begins to scream and convulse. He presses the tip of his Staff into her torso when she won’t release him, and energy arcs into her, searing. But I don’t smell burning flesh. It smells like burning plastic.

  They’re still locked together in their embrace of mutual destruction when I run up on them, and, my reflex priorities what they are, swing my Nagamaki to cleave Thel from clavicle to groin. He disengages his Staff and blocks my blow, but the impact throws him back off of Terina’s Blade. He sprawls backwards over the rocks.

  I’m about to press my advantage when Terina screams, or does something that resembles screaming: It sounds like it’s coming through a bad link, all buzz and stutter. I look her in the face. Her face is different, shockingly so: Pale, almost translucent, and not long like it was. I can barely recognize it as hers. And her eyes blaze bright white.

  She hooks my armor with the tip of her long weapon, and, using it as a lever, lifts and throws me away like an unwanted satchel. All I can do is flail helplessly as I fly, and crash gracelessly over the boulders of the slope.

  Thel takes his opportunity, drives his Staff into the slope between his own feet, and the slope explodes into us in a storm of dirt and gravel. By the time we recover and can remotely see again in the resulting dust cloud, he’s gone.

  Terina makes another inhuman scream, her jaw gaping unnaturally, and she turns her blazing eyes on me, points her Blade at my face.

  “Terina!” I try to reach her, pulling my mask down. “It’s me! It’s Ishmael!”

  She looks confused, but her face moves so mechanically, too much like Dee when he drops his human behavior algorithms to show what he really is. And I have to crawl backwards as she advances.

  “Terina, please!”

  In a blur, Ram is up behind her and clamps his hand on her neck. She convulses and goes limp. Her Blade strikes the ground, but her hand will not release the long shaft. Ram finds a spot to ease her down. He doesn’t try to separate her from her weapon, her Companion, just lays it across her breast.

  Practicality and rage makes me do a quick search for Thel before I join Ram and Erickson in tending to Terina. Ram’s insisting we gather the human remains and place the most resource-rich parts around and over her like we’re building a cairn, burying her in gore. Now that I have time to get a good look at her, she’s all wrong, her proportions are all wrong. Her limbs, her torso… Just like her face, they look like the body of someone who practices weight discipline or has access to an Unmaker artificial gravity centrifuge. And there’s more muscle to go over the shorter, stouter bones.

  It’s one of the reasons you look different, lad, Peter tries to explain. It’s not me. The Mods are resetting your body to your DNA, based on an Earth Gravity ideal, then beefing you up to what they’ve been programmed to see as a prime physical specimen. It looks like they’ve done the same to her.

  But it’s what’s over the bone and muscle that’s most shocking. It looks like translucent white rubber, not skin.

  “It’s like silicon,” Erickson confirms, touching her arm.

  “Something like it,” Ram says like he knows. “The radiation probably destroyed her dermis. This is a temporary substitute. Until she can rebuild.”

  “And the rest of her?” Erickson asks when I can’t.

  Ram doesn’t answer. He just keeps piling on corpse-meat. I see it start to absorb into her.

  “You need some too,” he insists, looking at us. Then he uses his knife to cut free a limb, a leg, and he carries it a few meters away, turning his back to us as he embraces his horrible meal to his chest.

  Not wanting to take from Terina, I go to gather more. I find what must have been Thel’s camp, a miserable hole in the rocks, littered with human bones and broken Harvester modules. Turning west, I realize it has a good view of the valley that lies between here and Katar. What was he doing here?

  As if in answer, a storm of dust kicks up around us, and I feel the familiar tingling of increasing EMR. I think I hear Ram growl “Not now.”

  Within minutes, I cannot so much see but feel something very large moving almost directly over us from the other side of the mountain. The EMR levels are numbing, almost paralyzing. But it heads west, moving slowly but smoothly, ignoring us. The EMR fades as it goes.

  “He’s heading for Katar!” Erickson shouts over the artificial winds as we’re sandblasted blind. I use my body, my armor, to shield Terina as best I can.

  “Or Pax,” Ram estimates. I hear him try to call out, to warn the others, but there’s too much interference. “We need to go.”

  “I can’t leave her like this!” I insist as the storm starts to fade, still moving west away from us.

  “Then stay,” Ram agrees easily. He knows we can’t leave her, and probably don’t dare move her.

  “How long
will she need?” Erickson wants to know, sounding torn between priorities.

  “I can only guess,” Ram tries formulating a reasonable answer. “It only took your enhanced Companion less than an hour to reach critical saturation?”

  “About forty five minutes,” Erickson confirms. “But they used our ETE implants, repurposed them.”

  “That cut down on replication time. But still, they can manage in hours what takes Seed tech days, because they’re simpler machines. And more aggressive. No safeties.”

  “But we didn’t have the kind of injuries she does,” Erickson worries.

  Ram seems to stew on that. I watch him chew his lip, shake his head as he looks at Terina’s corpse-meat “grave”.

  “This is about as resource-rich an environment as we can give her.” He looks at me. “Still, this could take days.” He turns his head into Asmodeus’ wake.

  “I’ll stay,” I insist. “You go. Just try to leave me a piece of that son-of-a-bitch.”

  “You watch out for Harris,” Ram warns as a way of saying goodbye. “He still may be close.”

  “It’ll help pass the time,” I tell him with murder in my voice.

  “If Yod does want her in this fight, maybe he’ll speed up the process,” Ram gives poor hope. He and Erickson move to leave in the dark. I think he’s about to tell me to be careful, but holds his tongue. Then they take off running.

  In a few hours, the sun rises over the mountain at my back. The sky turns purple as the wind rises, coming down the slope at me. Looking up, I realize I see fading stars. The pervasive haze is clearing. What is Asmodeus doing?

  If I listen, I can hear chatter from orbit. The Unmakers have noticed it too. And then their channels are filled with urgency and alarm. They can see the new Stormcloud.

  Peter hacks us in as subtly as he can, and gets optical feed from their satellites. I can see the deck of the still-skeletal, twin-bowed cross-shaped ship. But worse, I recognize the landmarks, despite their camouflage. I force a zoom-out to confirm: he’s hovering his flying fortress almost directly over the Gate Wall of Katar. His railguns are pointed into the City.

  I look down at Terina. Now that I can see her in real light, I brush some of the gore and rot away from her face. Her “skin” looks less pale, but it also looks more transparent, thinner. And loose. I nudge at her cheek carefully with my gloved finger, and the rubbery outer layer tears away, revealing slick but new-looking skin, real skin. But it isn’t dyed red anymore. It’s a rich tan.

  But the structure of her face has changed so much, just like the rest of her, “reset” by the Companion to how it’s interpreted her DNA. A perfect version, but a perfect Upworld version. She’s no longer a creature of this planet. She’s become exactly what her people despise, what her father…

  She’s managed to absorb about half of what we packed around her, and it looks like she’s taking in raw minerals from the rocks as well. It’s like I’m watching time itself consume what’s around her, only in hours instead of years and decades. I gingerly uncover more of her, careful not to touch her Blade. I can hear it singing to her, and maybe to me as well, perhaps grateful for the feast of decomposition.

  Her clothing has repaired—it looks pristine under the gore. I take that as a hopeful sign, that and the shape her Companion has chosen: The weapon of her people. That must mean there’s still something left of her. Unless the pattern was set before the radiation killed too much of her.

  But if this isn’t her, what will she be? A blank slate, an infant, without memory?

  I’ve heard some aspects of personality and temperament are neurological, Peter tries. Perhaps those will still survive.

  But everything she knew may be gone. Reset.

  Then I consider: Asmodeus had been dead for many years, many years before the invention of Modding. If the story is true, he was remade just from a sample of his DNA kept for nefarious purposes. (By Yod?) His memories are nothing more than a convincing copy, compiled from old files, like someone writing a story about someone from history. Could that be done for Terina? The possibility gives more hope. But would that be Terina, or another being that simply thinks it’s Terina but knows it’s not?

  She won’t open her eyes. I could be looking down at another corpse, but I can hear her breathing, hear her heart beating, see her warmth. I wish there was something more I could give her. I wish there was anything more I could do.

  I shift my attention back to Asmodeus. He’s still just sitting there, silent. He’s not even trying to kick up any kind of dust cloak or EMR interference. He wants to be seen, right where he is.

  Does he want us all to watch him blast Katar into nothing?

  Suddenly I hear a grating blast of static and feedback overwhelming multiple frequencies. It’s not just on Unmaker channels, it’s on ours as well, and probably those used by the Terraformers and the Keepers and the Shinkyo and anyone else with the technology to hear.

  “GOOD MORNING CO-PRAY-TEES!!” Asmodeus’ voice booms in a strangely joyful song. “And how is everyone on this lovely morning? Probably planning various spectacular acts of stupidity, I’m sure. But while I do love to watch stuff blow up real good, I figure I should make the cost of the show clear to the accounting team.

  “First of all, to all the nice clean religious folks from back home: Yes, I have you hacked. So I expect you’re busy frantically shutting down all your networked gadgetry and going old school, which means you’ll barely be able to fly, much less target me from farther away than I can vaporize you back. And if you decide to throw another one of your Kamikaze-for-Jesus faithful out of the sky at me with a nuke strapped to his ass, you may want to watch my little Nat-Geo documentary film first…”

  Now I’m getting video on every channel: Close-up pans over Katar, from angles that defeat their camouflage and show the extent of their City. And their people: their warriors haplessly stationed on their now useless Wall, and the civilian population come out to stare at the monstrosity in their sky in frozen terror. Among them I see some of my people, my father, Straker, Elias, Dee, Paul Stilson…

  “This is Katar. Population one-thousand four hundred and sixty seven. Minus a few I killed in the last week or so. A rich and beautiful culture of art, science, trade and engineering, perfectly adapted to the environment. A new form of humanity, one could argue. Evolution at work. Oh, sorry. I expect that’s a naughty word for you Scripture-Literalists…”

  I realize his signal has hacked through the Unmaker firewalls and is broadcasting through their uplinks and satellites. It’s going all the way back to Earth, so they’ll all see what’s at stake.

  “…it’s not that I don’t like you God-Wads. Okay, I despise you. You’re just all so fundamentally vacuous. Every time I’d walk into a church back home, back when I was a Real Boy, I’d feel like the place was trying to lobotomize me. What is it with those pastel cut-felt banners, anyway? And here I am digressing… Nostalgia and all… What was I saying?

  “Oh yes: No bombs for God. Colonel Jackson, this means you, too. Especially you. Let’s not do that again, or I’ll personally make sure you lose the other half of your face, along with some parts you probably swear you never touch. Same-same if you try another vertical railgun dump on my deck from orbit. All of these pretty savages will get vaporized in the deal, and I’m sure you’ll all feel very bad about that. Plus, I do believe slaughtering God’s innocent creatures—even the funny-looking heathens—is still one of those go-straight-to-Hell offenses. Mortal sin. Whatever.”

  The camera view suddenly spins, sweeping across the defensive clearing beyond the Wall and to the edge of the forest, where it zooms in on two lone figures: Ram and Erickson. Ram glares his rage into the camera.

  “Oh, look who’s here, kids: a bona fide historical figure! And thank God he isn’t wearing that hideous helmet… Don’t believe the feel-good revisionist history, though. He really is quite the nasty piece of work. I should know: We went to the same school for psychopaths. Still, since we�
�re such old friends, I did make him something nice…”

  The view cuts to other cameras that show me—us—the framework of the Stormcloud’s hull. It’s bristling with what look like bot guns, and there are dozens of Disc drones in launch racks.

  “Now, some of you already know I’ve been playing around with making zombies, and how cool is that? I mean, everybody likes zombies. Well, maybe not when they’re real and trying to eat your brains. Which they do, sort of, just really really slowly. Anyway, just to keep with the classic meme, I built them to infect by basically biting. But then it hit me: Maybe I could take the little nanotech bugger that eats your brain and turns you into a walking corpse for my amusement and stick it inside a special bullet thingy and just shoot it at you, which would be less sporting but much more efficient. So I did. And it is. Now, I admit I haven’t converted all of these guns into zombie-makers—most of them are just plain-old boring dead-body-makers—but quite a few of them are. Well, some are. You get to guess which ones. Or I could just make it clear if you—Yes, I’m talking to you, old friend—or any of your Super Friends decide to try to do anything silly. One hit on a fragile mortal, even a minor wound, and fun shall ensue…”

  Now we see what looks like a recording, viewed on time-lapse: A soldier in a Eureka Keepers’ uniform—probably chosen because they look like Unmakers—is seen in a cell. Screaming. Panicking. Weeping. Convulsing. Trying to smash his skull open against the steel bulkhead and clawing at his own eyes. Then he’s standing still, bloodied and pale, face blank, milky eyes glowing red from within. The only sound he makes is a raspy panting.

  “It takes about three days,” Asmodeus explains lightly, as if it’s nothing. “Oh, and FYI, only the Super Friends and my little Brotherhood of Evil are immune, so we’ll be the only ones left while the rest of you shuffle mindlessly until you rot and fall apart. And that’s really gonna stink up the planet. So maybe let’s not, okay?”

  The view changes again, thankfully, but now it shows Asmodeus himself, sitting in a chair in what I assume is the bridge of his ship, slouching like he’s bored.