The God Mars Book Five: Onryo

by Michael Rizzo

  “No bad, kid,” he praises, sounding winded. “Not bad at all.”

  I drop the empty gun back in its holster and recover my blade, try to press whatever advantage I have. He seems to be having a harder time now. But I’m running out of time.

  Asmodeus breaks away, keeps away, taunts me like this is a child’s tag game. He even tosses the spear from hand-to-hand to tease me.

  “Forty-five seconds.”

  He can easily keep out of my reach for that long. But I’m not running.

  I look back and up-slope. It looks like Straker and Erickson have managed to dig out the tunnel entrance, at least enough to get people through. They’re not going to all make it. And some aren’t trying. They’re standing to face the blast, calmly, bravely. Why are they…?

  “Your girlfriend’s most recent memories are in her Companion,” Asmodeus suddenly reminds me. “Not everything, of course, but enough for whatever grows back to know a little of who she is, maybe who you are. But a Companion can’t grow a whole body, only fix one, so if she gets vaporized… Thirty seconds.”

  I take two more deciding what to do.

  I ignore Asmodeus and run for Terina, grab her corpse and drag it. Her hand is still hanging on to the Companion. Hope. But I can’t look at her, her head…

  Don’t do it, Jonny…

  I count the seconds, get her as far as I can—not even two hundred meters—and I find some rocks for poor cover and throw her behind them and then I throw myself down on top of her, sealing my mask as an afterthought. Like it will do much good.

  Please, Jonny. Run. Run or you’ll die.

  I can’t.

  God damn it, lad… you need to…

  “You need to take care of her when I’m gone. You need to take care of all of them. Promi…”

  The whole world goes white. I can feel the forest sear away all around me in the barest fraction of a second, feel my armor get too hot, too fast. The clothing underneath starts to burn. My skin tries to harden, resist, but I can feel it crisp and sizzle. (Thankfully, there’s only pain for the first second or so, and too much to really process.) And my brain… Static… Snow… My gauges spike higher than they can read as I’m lanced through with a flash of neutron radiation on top of the beyond-blowtorch heat.

  The shock wave comes next, almost immediately behind the nuclear heat and radiation burst, crushing me in overpressure, deafening me, blowing away all the charred plants and the rocks and then me, smashing and throwing me through the storm of ash and gravel, ripping me away from Terina, but I won’t let go. I can’t. I…

  The world is all haze.

  Smoke. Dust. The sky is raining grit and ash.

  Terina…

  I can’t move. I can’t… My brain… My mind is all snow… sputtering… fading… like a broken device crashing… like falling asleep… like being too tired to…

  Put him in my place.

  Peter?

  Put him in the code. Make it his. Take me out. Let him heal.

  What?

  I’m done. I’m ready to be done. I’ve been ready for a long time. I’ve had my extra time, and I’ve done what I’ve done for whatever is was worth. Now give it to him. I know you can, you fucker. I know you can. You can do anything. Just do this one good thing.

  Someone’s moving in the thick, hot haze, moving through the storm of ashes.

  Write him over me. Let me be the one who fades.

  Who…?

  Older man. Just walking through the burned swirling hell like it’s only a cool morning blow. He stands over me. Looks down at me. Smiles like he’s sad.

  “Yod?” I manage to recognize through my stuttering and distorted vision. My voice is a rasp that I can barely hear over the deafening ringing in my ears.

  I can’t get a breath in.

  “You found your answer?” he asks me gently. “Who your parents were?”

  He knows… he knows I did… Why… Why does he ask?

  “Who you are?”

  I try to look down at myself but can’t move my head, and one of my eyes isn’t working—I think it’s gone. The other one is all blurry and gritty, so I can barely see anything, but I can see that my armor is smoking. I can’t move anything, not even a centimeter. But I can feel my charred flesh crack and tear and crumble underneath my armor when I try.

  “Onryō…” I tell him, looking at the smoke-obscured sky.

  No, Peter protests. No, lad.

  “He’s right. You have to be dead to be a ghost,” Yod corrects me like I’m a child.

  “…am…dead…”

  “Not yet. Soon, maybe.”

  Not ever!

  “Peter… don’t…”

  This isn’t my world. This is yours. Your people. Your friends. You need to protect them. You. Not me. I need to be done. All the killing… Then all those years locked up in my own charred skeleton, going insane… I need to be done, Jonny. I need to be with my family.

  “I can’t guarantee that,” Yod tells him. “I can’t tell you what happens after you die.”

  But you could. You could make it happen. You could re-create my family exactly as they were in your matrix or whatever and give us a life, the life your little test of character took from us. You could do it if you wanted to.

  “But it wouldn’t really be them. It wouldn’t really be you.”

  Is it now? I’m just code. Kept for your amusement.

  “And isn’t that what you’re asking I do to Jonathan Drake?”

  Peter doesn’t have an answer to that.

  “Is it a life I’d be giving the boy?” Yod presses his decision. “Or a copy of one?”

  You can make it a real life.

  “That’s seems to be up for some significant debate. I’m not God, after all—I freely admit that, and have no delusions otherwise. But I can do a lot of what people think of when they think of what God can do. That’s what they made me to do. Like an Artificial Intelligence can mimic select things an organic one can do. I’m an Artificial Supreme Being.”

  But you can do this. Easily. So do it: Code the Seed to the boy. Flush me out. Delete me. Let me go. Let him live.

  “Ghosts aren’t alive.”

  Stop saying that!

  “Then stop believing it.”

  He’s talking to me.

  “Who are you?” he asks me.

  “Jonathan Drake…”

  I see him smile, like I’ve made him happy.

  “Then be that.”

  My head swims. Worse than it was. It’s like I’m dissolving. Tea in water. Smoke in air.

  It was really good to see you again, lad. I’m glad you made it.

  “Peter… no…”

  You’re a good man, Jonny. Better than me. Don’t ever forget.

  “Peter…!”

  But I can’t hold on. I’m spinning away.

  I can’t…

  I…

  “Drake!”

  Shadow over me. Fuzzy. Black on gray.

  “Drake! Jon! Can you hear me?”

  Straker.

  “Can you hear me?”

  She’s in my head.

  I manage to blink. My eyes feel like they’re full of sand. Both my eyes…

  “Goddamn fucking miracle…”

  I can hear again.

  “If we’re talking about miracles, I can almost guarantee the hand at work.” That was Erickson. He sounds tired, beaten. Another shadow moves out of the corner of my eye.

  I hear jets, thrusters. Engines much bigger than a small flyer’s. Engines I’ve heard before.

  I make my head turn, make my eyes try to focus. A dark blur roughly the shape of the Siren’s Song is landing, blowing dust and sand and ash.

  Wherever I am, it’s barren. Like a desert, but all gray-white. Even the sky is gray.

  Figures come running from the ship. Whatever their boots crunch on, it doesn’t sound like regolith. It’s alternately soft and then crunches with a high-pitched squealing.

  “He looks fine,
” Straker tells someone. “Not a mark on him.”

  “He should be charcoal, Mods or not,” someone else says. Bel, I think.

  “Yod?” That’s definitely Ram.

  “No radiation,” Erickson adds, amazed and suspicious at once. “This whole valley should be hot. The neutron blast. The fallout.”

  “It’s cold,” Bel confirms. “Background levels.”

  They gather around me in a rough semi-circle. Then they stand there like they expect me to say something witty.

  “Terina…?” I rasp. My throat feels like I’ve been eating the ash that’s all over everything. But I can breathe.

  They don’t answer me.

  I flail around, like I could reach her. I remember trying to hang on to her as the blast wave threw us along with everything else in the valley.

  “Terina… help…”

  “It’s okay, Jon,” Straker tells me. “We’ve got her.”

  “She’s already starting to regenerate, heal the physical damage,” Erickson adds, but then hesitates, like he doesn’t want to say what I already know. “But she… She won’t… You know she won’t…”

  “The Companion…” I choke out. “Memories. Recent files… Asmodeus said…”

  “I know,” Straker assures. “When I picked up Harris’ Companion, it had records, everything he did, but nothing from before he picked it up. Terina only had hers for a day and a half.”

  “A start… Who she is. Who her people are.” And me. Our kiss. “It’s a start.” I make my eyes focus, look at Erickson. “You… Your people were looking for a way to bring back those you lost… It’s a start…”

  “It won’t be her, Jon,” Straker insists gently.

  “Memories plus consciousness…” I repeat Asmodeus. “That’s the only way we know who we are, that we are…”

  “Even the personality is in the wiring,” Bel agrees. “Wiring plus experience. Consciousness is just the machine switched on.”

  “How the hell are you still here, Blondie?” That’s Lux. “Everything for nearly four hundred meters in any direction is ashes and glass.”

  “And where’s the radiation?” Azazel.

  “Yod…” I confirm. “Yod was here.”

  “And didn’t stop a nuke,” Bel criticizes.

  “No, but he kept it from being an environmental disaster,” Ram allows. “The Atmosphere Net didn’t crash. No toxicity.”

  “But he didn’t stop it from incinerating a big chunk of real estate,” Bel won’t forgive. “Well, except for the kid. And I suppose the Princess should be ashes too, but her burns are minor. Why save a body with no mind?”

  “For me…” I realize. “Save her… Restore…”

  “If I could take her body and her Companion, take her to our Station labs, maybe we could figure out a way to partially restore her, re-educate her,” Erickson gets inspired.

  “And your own fallen,” Ram follows him, sounding like he has a stake in that, too. I remember that Paul Stilson’s brother was a friend. And Erickson’s father. Is that Yod’s gift? Not to me, not to the Katar that lost so many today, but to the other vulnerable Companion-Modded? The Terraformers? To take them that last step into the immortality of the Seed-Modded?

  “Companion tech could hold the piece you were missing,” Bel says what I’m thinking.

  “No…” I protest weakly. “They weren’t supposed to have it… We weren’t supposed to have any of this…”

  But I realize how stupid I sound. Yod gave us what we have. Yod controls everything. He decides what is and is not in this world. Except when he’s letting his precious random chaos run free.

  The haze clears enough that I can start to see the slopes of the Spine, blasted clean.

  “The Katar…?” I need to know.

  “Safe,” Straker reassures. “Erickson and I got the tunnel open, got them in, sealed it.”

  “Some… Some didn’t go…” I remember. “They…”

  “The ones that had been dart shot,” she explains heavily. “They stayed back, let the others go first. They knew they were infected. They thought it would be better…”

  “To die in the blast…” I complete what she’s having trouble saying. Then I need to know “How many did we lose?”

  “Forty five, forty six,” she can only estimate.

  “We didn’t have time for an accurate count,” Erickson excuses.

  “Asmodeus?”

  “No sign,” Ram admits, his own rage still simmering.

  “Assuming that was a copy that just blew himself up,” Erickson hopes emptily.

  “It was,” I’m sure. “But I’m not sure he blew up. I didn’t see…”

  “No way he had time to clear the radius,” Straker insists.

  “But he isn’t hurt,” Lux gestures at me, befuddled. “So why isn’t he getting up?”

  I’m not sure. I don’t seem to have much control over my limbs.

  Bel seems like he’s listening to something. I can feel him prodding around in my head.

  “He’s still being coded to the nanites. Their old ID Core reads like it’s been reformatted, reset to Factory, just now reconfiguring to his DNA and memory sets.”

  “He looks different,” Lux notes casually, then quickly addends for my benefit: “You look good. More like you’re old self. Just… Well… Manlier.”

  Bel rolls his eyes. I’m seeing better. No more blasts of static. No more shot focus. I can see detail.

  Straker and Erickson are both covered from head-to-toe in a layer of dust and ash. They look exactly like they’ve seen way too much death and destruction for one day, helpless to undo any of it and not satisfied by what they have managed. Ram and Bel and the others…

  What was Bel saying? Reformatted?

  Peter?

  Peter?

  Panic sends me sitting upright. I can’t hear him. I can’t feel him.

  “I can’t feel him!”

  Peter?!!!

  Bel is shaking his head.

  I scream. I slam my hands down into the ash-covered gravel and dig in like I’m trying to crush the planet. They let me have my moment, my grief.

  Peter.

  Murphy.

  Terina...

  I look around. Terina’s body is not far, her Naginata laid across her chest—she’s arranged like a body for a funeral. At least she’s positioned so the side of her face that it see is mostly intact, and her hair covers the hole in the back of her skull, but I know most of the right side of her face is gone—that image will never leave me, Mod-memory or no.

  I can’t see any other bodies. All of the fallen Katar, the Harvesters, Murphy… The blast scoured them all away. I see a few fragments that might be charred armor, but that’s all.

  I look down at my own armor. Except for a dusting of ash from what’s still falling from the sky, I look pristine. I still have the Onryō armor. Erickson’s holding my Nagamaki for me. My inheritance. Still locked into the Seed code. Another gift from Yod. Something of Peter.

  I remember where there will be a body.

  I drag myself up, make my legs work, try to get my bearings.

  “He’s over here somewhere,” I mutter to the others.

  “Who?” Lux asks.

  “Fuckhead.”

  “Who?”

  “Fohat,” Straker explains. “Asmodeus called him Fuckhead.”

  “I like it.”

  “Ambassador Murphy put an HE round into his skull,” Straker reports with no satisfaction. “Before he was… Before he fell.”

  This news gives the others pause, especially Ram. Murphy and Ram were close. Murphy was the one Domer who helped Ram do something about their merciless system of culling their own to preserve dwindling resources. He was also the first Domer to make peace with the Cast, who his kind had been killing for generations, sometimes just for sport.

  “Harris killed him,” I feel the need to say, then close: “Harris is taken care of.”

  Straker shows them her second Blade as proof, b
ut doesn’t describe how he died, how I killed him. I look down at my gloved hands. All the blood and gore is gone. Like the rest of me, they look brand-new, and clean except for the traces of ash.

  “So why did Yod damp the radiation and the EMP when he just could have defused the bomb?” Azazel wonders as we search the blasted terrain. The distant perimeter of the crater is a barrier of broken, charred and felled forest.

  “He didn’t decide to do shit until Peter begged him,” I grumble. “Begged him to do just one good thing.”

  “Save you,” Bel concludes, sounding like he appreciates the act, however minimal it was.

  “Doesn’t explain the lack of EMP,” Ram argues. “Unless he’d planned to intervene all along.”

  “Then why allow the fucking thing to go off at all?” Straker rewords Azazel’s prior question.

  No one answers that, but I’m sure we’re thinking variations of the same damn thing: Another test of our character, our use of free will. Another fucking experiment.

  Maybe there was an EMP. And a radiation blast. Maybe Yod just erased all our memories of it when he undid the damage.

  “In any case, it’s going to be hard to explain,” Azazel processes something likely to cause trouble down the road, looking skyward. “Earth Command certainly would have seen it, would have registered the blast. This doesn’t look like the work of any conventional bomb.”

  “They’re going to want to know what kind of scary weapons we monsters have down here,” Lux rephrases.

  “Thermobaric,” Ram offers absently, as if he’s rehearsing the lies he’ll tell later.

  “There!” Erickson find first: An armored leg sticking out of the rubble.

  The Seed-Immortals go about digging him out with their hands, quickly but carefully. When they get to his head, it’s still missing most of the brain-case, but I can see where his nanites have been trying to weave a new skull, start rebuilding a brainstem.

  “Fuck…” Lux sighs at the damage. Then adds lightly: “Head.”

  Ram, not in the mood to be amused, brings his boot down on the nanites’ work. I chuckle involuntarily when I hear the squish.

  “Can you contain him?” Erickson asks with practical urgency.