The God Mars Book Five: Onryo

by Michael Rizzo

  “Hendricks!” Ram calls on a dedicated channel. “Job done! Get your men down!”

  “The party doesn’t end until we end the demon!” I hear a familiar voice call back. It’s Grandmaster Hendricks of the New Knights of Avalon. I had heard he’d taken a compliment this way in search of his own lost brethren. Apparently Ram has kept in touch with them and called on them in Katar’s hour of need.

  Asmodeus launches his compliment of Discs, but a good quarter of them get holed and crippled by sniper rounds as they try to clear their launch racks, and tumble into the slopes to shatter. Asmodeus spreads the rest against the City and the crests, and they fire at will as they dart and flip. The City “defenders” simply duck for cover behind their Wall, unable to do much against the flying drones with bows and arrows. Our snipers have made sure to pick nests with heavy boulders to hide behind, and the Knights have even better positions: they simply duck below the crest while they’re being fired upon. The Discs try emptying their grenade launchers at them on the next passes, but their shells either blast rock or fly clean over the crest, missing the Knights entirely.

  The Discs get smart, fly up over the crests to try to catch the Knights from behind, but now they have company in the air: Bel, Lux and Bly come over the Spine from the west, riding their flyers, distracting the drones away from the ground positions by offering more tempting targets to their algorithms. So begins an aerial dance of bullets.

  The Discs get drawn back into the bowl of the canyon, away from the hunkering Knights and over the open defensive field, into a circular chase around the Stormcloud. They’re flying so fast that Asmodeus’ turrets can’t keep up, so fire meant for our own manages to lag and accidentally hit a few of the Discs.

  Then, closing the trap, a bigger ship comes flying in behind them: Ram’s Lancer-Class Siren’s Song, restored and up-armed by Azazel, who’s probably also flying her. He uses the ship’s multiple turrets to pepper the Discs as they’re too busy chasing his fellows. And when the survivors turn on him, he ignores them, burning fast and straight at the Stormcloud’s bow, and sinks rockets between the shattered railguns, strafing the deck as he passes over. Then he uses the ship’s superior speed to outrun his pursuers, leading the main force of them away from the City.

  Asmodeus drops bots from his hull—I count two dozen Bugs and about half as many Boxes. They ignore the three of us and charge straight for the Gate Wall to engage the far more vulnerable Katar. Erickson turns reflexively to go after them, but Ram holds up his hand to stop him, to remind him of the larger plan. So we just watch as the Boxes spin and roll through the narrow Gate gaps, banging against the walls as they go, while the Bugs scramble up the Wall itself for the Katar placements. No one tries to fire in resistance. The Bugs make the top of the Wall, while on my satellite view, the Boxes have made it through the gaps and are rolling into positions behind the Katar lines, turning their guns to cut the bow-and-Naginata-armed warriors to pieces.

  But then the bots all stop, hesitate. I hear a wave of coded chatter, almost melodic, followed by silence. One-by-one, the bots turn their guns, turn them upward, and begin firing on their master.

  Well done, Dee.

  Asmodeus concentrates his turret fire on the Wall, on the Katar and the bots alike. I’m hoping that the armored suits I see burst and topple are the ones filled with sticks, not flesh. He also turns some of his guns on the sniper positions, tearing up their nests with a more intensive barrage than his Discs could muster. I fear for my people, feel as helpless watching this as the Katar must, but I know the way to end it, and I will be part of that.

  In the sky, the Discs have given up on trying to chase Azazel and turn on their next-highest-priority targets. Bel, Lux and Bly lead them on another merry chase, drawing their fire back into their own mother ship and even into each other. They also draw them into the Knights’ waiting guns. But it’s inefficient work, and time isn’t a luxury as long as the Stormcloud can still fire. So counter-intuitively, they lead the remaining Discs back toward the City, where a few more fall prey to their formerly-fellow bots guns. But once they fly over the Wall, over the City itself, the bots stop shooting at them, and I hear another song of code. The Discs begin to wobble, slow. A few simply tumble out of the sky and burst into the abandoned structures, but others get themselves back under control, bank and turn, and head back for their now-former master. They add their guns and grenade launchers to our bombardment.

  The Stormcloud continues to drop debris on the field as it gets chewed at, but it still has plenty of guns to fire back. And then I can see heat building up in its midsection. There’s a blast and a geyser of what looks like steam from the underbelly, followed by another. My radiation detectors give me an alarm.

  “Coolant,” Ram confirms. “He’s melting down his reactors.”

  “They’ll burst and poison everyone still in the City,” Erickson makes the obvious conclusion. “And contaminate the whole canyon for generations.”

  I draw my Nagamaki.

  “Are we done standing here playing distraction?” I growl.

  “We are,” Ram agrees. He reaches his left arm upwards for the wreckage of the bow of the ship, and blows the grappler of the Unmaker auto-rappelling device that Azazel modified for him. Erickson and I do likewise with the matching devices secured to our forearm armor.

  The hooks trail micro-line cables as they fly, and thankfully find purchase in the blasted superstructure. I feel the motors spin, and I get pulled forward and up by my arm, up into the air. I swing over the wreckage-littered field, into the shadow of the ship, then pendulum back as I get smoothly hauled up.

  Our allies—human and bot—hold fire on the bow while we get pulled into the damaged ship. Once we grab metal, the hooks disengage and retract back into their launch mechanisms, and we’re free to climb.

  As if he knows his way, Ram leads us into what’s still intact enough to look like some kind of reinforced forward viewing gallery between the remains of the rail-guns. The thick polycarbonate transparency that sealed the bunker-like viewport slit has been blown in, letting us crawl through. Inside is a large chamber lined with broken screens and interface panels, dominated by two large pilot’s chairs.

  “Command Bridge,” Ram confirms what I think it looks like. The room isn’t lit and is thickly hazed with smoke, but there’s no sign of occupation. Ram tries the panels and finds the power down in the section. Through the deck under our feet, I can still feel the ship’s batteries firing, and the stronger kick of rockets and grenades answering back. The hull echoes with random blasts and the pervasive rattle of auto-fire.

  Ram pops the apparent main hatch into the ship, and leads us down a long, dark, smoke-filled corridor. I can hear him send out a ping, like he’s trying to link to something. Someone. He moves with more surety, drawing his own sword.

  We climb unstable stairs up into daylight, up onto the top of the ship.

  The upper deck, the same one Asmodeus lounged on and taunted from with his depravities, is now littered with debris and pocked and ruptured from rocket hits. Smoke pours skyward from either broadside and from the remains of the bow guns, obscuring our view of the embattled canyon, but we can hear and feel the ship’s batteries continue to unload in bursts.

  I see the flyers skim in low over the deck, and we’re joined by our fellows, who all seem drawn to the same signal.

  Through the smoke and junk, we quickly find Asmodeus, bloodied and crawling away, tangled in his own cape, leaving a smear-trail of blood. His left leg is missing at the knee and the side of his face and head are torn open.

  Without hesitation, Ram draws his pistol and puts two shells through Asmodeus’ back, penetrating his armor and exploding inside of him. They knock him flat to the deck and send more blood puking out of his mouth in a spray. One shell hit him dead-center of the spine, probably severing it, while the other hit him in the region of his liver. Despite this, he pushes himself up, and using his spear like a crutch, flops over to sit upright,
facing us. He grins at us with blood still flowing out of his mouth like this is all some kind of joke, a fun pretend game for children.

  Cautiously, we semi-surround him, our weapons ready like we all plan to step in and chop him to pieces on cue. Ram has his gun pointed right at Asmodeus’ face, and demands:

  “Where’s Fohat?”

  Asmodeus just spits more blood at him and laughs, chokes.

  “Not here.” It’s Astarte’s voice. She appears, a pristine vision in white and gold, walking out of the smoke. She still wears the black-gemmed diadem. She looks and sounds very distant, aloof.

  We wait for further explanation, but get none. Astarte simply steps up close to Asmodeus’ back as he tries to stand, but he only manages to get up on his remaining knee, leaning on the spear. He’s still leaking, leaving a spreading mess of himself on the deck, his nanites apparently not managing to fully stop his hemorrhaging yet. Still he won’t stop grinning at us like a madman. He tries to pull himself to standing but fails—his gloved hands are almost too slick with blood to hang on to his spear, and his remaining leg looks dead under him. But he doesn’t quit. He looks us over like he’s sizing us up and finding us all wanting, like we still can’t hurt him, like he can still beat us.

  “You’re lucky he’s here…” he rasps at us, nodding to Ram. “You all need the advantage…” He looks down at his stump, wipes some of the blood out of his beard before locking eyes with Ram. “You were the only one who could ever hold your own with me in a fight… The rest of you…” He nods to Bel. “…a scientist…” To Lux: “…a gamer…but at least you’re fuck-able… half the time…” To Bly: “…and the Pirate King… all brood and no bite since you lost your ships and your crews and got glued into a suit of armor… At least the suit was badass… Now you look like a wannabe Jedi…” Then he looks at me. “Now you… You at least look interesting, whatever you’re supposed to be… Did anyone ever tell you that you look like Skeletor? Heh… you probably don’t even know what that is…”

  Something’s wrong.

  He looks lazily at Erickson.

  “And you… I have no idea who you’re supposed to be either. Sorry. Can I guess? He-Man? Nope… Needs to be blonde and showing more skin… Prince Valiant? Nah… Haircut’s wrong… You look like a mishmash of John Carter and Major Matt Mason… I guess I’ve lost touch with the hot cosplay… I give up… So who are you supposed to be again?”

  “Something’s wrong,” Erickson voices what I’m thinking, then clarifies. “We’ve met. We’ve fought. He knew my name.”

  “Modded memory is hardware-backed,” Bel confirms, confused. “Eidetic. He shouldn’t be able to forget anything.” Then Bel looks like he’s listening. I think I hear a signal, faint, encrypted, coming from Asmodeus. “He’s searching for signals, requesting backup. Refresh.”

  “And he’s not healing properly,” Lux adds, disturbed.

  “You haven’t seen my best trick…” Asmodeus chuckles through blood, his teeth stained disturbingly red. I see him finger the controls on his spear.

  I lunge forward, and with all I’ve got, cleave with my Nagamaki. The blade cuts armor and flesh and bone all the way through from left shoulder to out through his right lower ribs before he can even get his guard up. I manage to cleave the spear shaft as well, and there’s a flash and pop of energy. The butt-end on the spear goes skittering away and over the side of the ship. Asmodeus wobbles in place for a fraction, then falls apart, splitting into two pieces as he hits the deck.

  Astarte barely reacts, her face blank, but I see her subtly pointing her left hand rightward across her body at waist height, pointing northwest. Then she flickers and fades. She was never here.

  Neither, I fear, was Asmodeus.

  I use my blade to split Asmodeus’s skull about halfway through the side, then stomp down to smash his head open. And then I have to scream in frustrated rage. Inside, wired through his brain, is a module not unlike a Harvester, only more advanced, more complex and elegant.

  “What is it?!” Bly demands to know.

  “Clone,” Bel guesses. “Or some poor victim whose DNA was jacked to morph his appearance. The module probably provides the rest, mimicking the original. Memories. Personality…”

  “And why not?” we hear Asmodeus again. He steps through the smoke toward us, whole and unhurt, spear held casually like a hiking stick. “What am I, after all, but a stack of files that pretend to be memories, loaded into a clone body?”

  Ram raises his pistol and fires again, but Asmodeus’ head only shimmers for an instant as the round passes through. Asmodeus shrugs, then looks down at the mess I’ve made of his stand-in, and makes a show of pouting over it.

  “Well, at least he got thoroughly laid before you ended him. And I get the benefit of the uploads. Or should I say ‘we’?”

  There’s more than one copy. Or he wants us to think so.

  “I got the idea from an old Bond villain,” he rambles. “Do you remember Bond movies? I loved them growing up. Especially the villains. Is that wrong? So now I should say something snappy, I suppose.” He makes a show of concentrating, then shrugs again. “Huh. Nothing comes to mind. You might want to get off my ship, though. We’re about to have a Chernobyl moment. Then once the Barbie City is too hot for human habitation, maybe I’ll move in, build myself a nice condo. It is rather pretty. Marvelous engineering. And the whole camo-scheme is just so cool… It’s why I came here, you know. It’s all about the real estate. The Pax Bunker is such a dark, damp, dreary place. You’d think it was a dungeon. And the Eurekans live in a hole that smells like a sewer.”

  I want to cut him down again so badly, but there’s nothing really here to cut. So where is he?

  “Drake,” he names me as an afterthought, just to show he can. “And Erickson Carter. I suppose I should have backed up the files better, but I didn’t know there’d be a quiz. Ah, well.”

  I realize the others—Ram, Bel and Lux—are ignoring him, concentrating. I feel the ship shift, move. It begins to slide east, away from the colony. The guns have all gone silent.

  “Impressive,” Asmodeus allows. “But too slow, I’m afraid. Especially if you plan to get off before what we all know happens next.”

  “Go!” Ram orders the other three of us. “This is a distraction! He’s doing something else. Something worse.”

  Asmodeus grins in confirmation, satisfied.

  “See, old friend? Just like it used to be: You and me, and everybody else just meat in the crossfire. And you really should get off the ship.”

  Asmodeus vanishes, but the three Seed-Immortals don’t budge. Ram has to yell “Go!” at us one more time before Bly, Erickson and I listen, though it takes Erickson grabbing me by the arm to get me moving. And what he tells me next, with his voice only so that Asmodeus can’t hear:

  “He’s going after the evacuees!”

  We run and jump over the side of the doomed ship, which is now outside the fork of the Canyon. We come down in the thick green of the forest, crashing through the green, and land badly, battered more by what broke our fall than the fall itself.

  The trees also obscure our view of the smoldering wreck as it keeps heading too-slowly east, back the way it came, still dropping junk and bleeding radioactive steam.

  “General Richards,” I hear Ram broadcast. “Prepare to fire. We’ll be clear of the colony in five minutes.”

  “You need to be clear yourselves,” the Unmaker General insists.

  “Hell of an opportunity you’re passing up,” Ram almost jokes. “Three of us in your sights. You could be risking your command. I would know.”

  “You would. But given the current threats, the hardliners will just have to accept the lesser evils. Right now, you’re an asset.”

  I remember the great feast at Tranquility, the Unmaker delegation eating with the Cast, the Domers, the Knights, and my people. And the Modded, who terrify them beyond sanity just by existing. I remember the General, brave enough to come down from orbit
and eat in the company of such horrors. He seemed like a good man, a reasonable man, but he also seemed like the minority among his kind.

  I have no time to concentrate on any of this. I’m thinking I have several kilometers to run, when I hear the rush of flyer jets, and the immortals’ three converted “Kites” drop down into a hover a few meters away from us, rider-less. But if they’re here to carry us, I’m wondering how their owners—and Ram—plan to get off the Stormcloud before Richards unleashes whatever they’ve planned, when I see Azazel fly the Siren’s Song down low over the smoking deck and brake for landing.

  Bly runs and jumps on one of the flyers and takes off with only the briefest look back at us, burning southwest. Erickson is heading fast for another when he realizes I’m not.

  “I don’t know how to fly one!” I spit out, frustrated. He jumps on, puts his hands on the controls, and after a few precious seconds reassures me:

  “I set the auto pilot to follow! Just get on!”

  So I do, tentatively. I jump up, grab hold, and climb on, the small winged machine wobbling under my weight. As soon as I manage to straddle the seat, the thing lifts under me on its fans and jets, matching Erickson’s. Then we get thrown into the air, through the air, with Erickson leading the way northwest. The wind batters me, and the forest passes like a blur under me, the plants buffeted by our jets and fans. Looking ahead, we’re banking around the north side of the mountain range. It’s dizzying, thrilling, terrifying. I remind myself that falling off or crashing won’t kill me, but it could take me out of the fight, and that’s what I really don’t want.

  Erickson keeps us uncomfortably close to the slopes, possibly thinking it will be harder for whatever we’re rushing for will see us coming. I can also feel him try to contact Straker and Terina. He gets no reply.