I’m sitting in the middle of a circle of death. The plant life for several meters all around me has been drained to dry husks, crumbling, disintegrating. I expect this is the sword’s doing, feeding itself so it could do whatever it’s done to me.
I try to get a better look around, listen. The world floods me, disorienting. My senses have all been amplified, sharpened even beyond the work of my nanites.
I can hear gunfire in the distance. I remember the bots…
The sword is still in my hand. I finally get a proper chance to examine it. It’s of the same style and size as my own, but so much finer, stronger. The surface of the blade is marbled like Damascus steel, but the patterns swirl, liquid, as does the scrollwork on the heavy crescent-shaped guard. I remember hearing that the immortals have weapons like this, able to change shape, cut through almost anything, indestructible. But those are passive tools. I never heard anything about their weapons having their own intelligence, acting of their own motivation. Nor have I heard that those weapons harvest their surroundings for replenishment resources (though the immortals themselves seem to be able to do that just through physical contact).
“What are you?”
And what have you done to me?
I look down at my body. My sealsuit has been completely repaired, all my wounds now fully healed throught Stage Four—not even the dull ache that usually lingers for hours or days until the Scar is re-absorbed. And my armor has been… improved. It’s now what I imagined it would be rather than what I managed to manufacture. It gleams, polished stainless steel, all scars and dents (and peeling paint) gone. Most amusing, my worn rag-covered boots have been replaced, and by what looks like something out of one of my literary fantasies: I’m now wearing black leather-like hip boots, folded over swashbuckler-style.
My helmet and facemask are missing (as is my homemade sword), but I’m not bothered by the chill or the thin air. I look around for them in the crumbling dead matter, but they’re nowhere to be found. Then I realize my hair has grown out to shoulder-length as it falls over my face—another apparent concession to my romantic imagination. (“I will make you everything you want.”)
But then I do find something within the circle of death: lying among the organic debris is what looks like a Bug bot, except it’s not all there. It’s been partially disintegrated, innards gutted, as if consumed.
PROXIMITY ALERT. HOSTILE FORCES.
Looking around, I can “see” through the surviving green. Back the way I came, back up-slope, there’s heat, motion, dozens of ghostly shapes arrayed up on the crest. I look back at the half-consumed bot. It probably stumbled across whatever was happening to me, fell prey to the sword and however it feeds itself, feeds me. Chang’s bots are networked. He likely knows what happened. The only reason his army is holding back is he must not know what he’s dealing with. Or maybe he does, and he’s afraid of it. Of me.
I’m flooded with a sense of satisfaction, of righteous rage, prodding me up, up the slope.
I look at the sword again—the steel is swirling more energetically. I alternate hands gripping it. I can release my grip on it, I’m not fused physically to it, not visibly, but I don’t want to let it go. (Maybe our connection requires physical contact, and I’m being influenced not to break that contact.)
“What are you?” I try asking it again.
WE ARE ONE. WE ARE INTERFACED.
The voice is in my head, wired into my sensory cortex like my nanite link, maybe through my nanite link. It’s using my own implants…
RESOURCES REQUIRED. ENGAGE THREAT.
The enemy targets blaze bright inside my skull, impossible to ignore, screaming for me to deal with. My hands tighten involuntarily around the sword hilt. I feel profoundly, unbearably hungry.
ENGAGE THREAT.
My memory flashes on my earlier promise, that I had someone in mind to kill.
“Fine. Maybe we should see what you can do.”
I give in to the drive burning my nervous system, turn and march up the slope. I almost hope my new companion is not up to the task at hand.
He’s waiting for me, standing up at the top of the crest, flanked by a dozen of his black-uniformed human troops, and two of his Bug bots.
“Chang!” I call out as I approach directly, the sword content to hang low at my side. “Send your meat and your toys away! Face me yourself!” (I hope the sword doesn’t understand my ploy: that I’m trying to get the fragile Normals out of reach of the blade. Enemy or no, I won’t be consuming a human being.)
“Erickson Carter,” he greets me as I come at him, almost singing my name like it sounds funny to him. “Yes, I know who you are. I’m just not terribly sure what you’ve gotten yourself into.”
“Still finding that out,” I tell him bravely, like it isn’t important, bringing the sword up between us as I close within striking range.
I know from studying him that he can’t be harmed by conventional weapons. Whatever technology that lets him absorb all light also allows him to break down into some kind of pure nanotech form, able to reshape at will, become fluid. He’s been blown apart and reassembled himself (and apparently survived a nuclear blast). But the immortals were able to hurt him by hacking into him with their own technology, using physical contact to affect his technology and drain his resources. I’m hoping my new blade can do the same, given what it’s done already, and the blade seems very eager to try.
“Then let’s do,” he purrs at me, stepping back. His human troops fall back into a respectably large semicircle around us, guns leveled at me. He’s letting me come up rather than use the high ground against me. The top of the crest is actually fairly level but terraced, rocky, a crescent-shaped mesa partly around a roughly circular depression—it is a crater, a big one. The mesa stretches at least several kilometers, and looks to be over a kilometer wide in places. But here, near its northern tip, it’s less than fifty meters across, broken by potentially treacherous crevices. A challenging battlefield. He wants to see what I can do.
His Bugs come alive, spring at me. Each one is almost twice my size and reach, able to slash and stab with all six limbs, tumbling so that they constantly interchange. And they’re more than fast enough to give Guardian or Immortal a good fight.
But somehow I can track them, their movements leaving trails across my vision that translate into predictions of future movement. I simply have to meet them. And cut.
The sword screams through the air, moving too fast to see. Each blow strikes like an explosion, snapping through metal, taking off arms. I alternate between them as they come, tumble, pass—each time leaving more of themselves behind. At my leisure, I go for the heads, the bodies. They don’t manage to land a single blow.
The sword is singing in my hands—each cut drained power out of its target. And it wants more. I want more.
“All right. I’m impressed,” Chang gives me, finding a suitable place to plant his feet to receive me: a wide flat rock on slightly higher ground. I don’t keep him waiting. I leap across the narrow gap between us. Charge. Cut.
But he doesn’t dissolve, doesn’t go fluid. Instead, he just evades, quick and smooth, his body staying in human form. He’s at least as fast as I am, and moves with a dancer’s grace. Then a weapon comes out from his cloak, blocks the sword, tries to slash and stab through my guard. It’s a spear.
Our weapons lock together. He should be stronger than I am, but I’m able to keep him from pushing me off. I ride him as he tries to weave and wind, keeping us glued together as I keep him from getting the spear tip on me. Our conjoined weapons begin to arc, blazing with plasma—immortal weapons are not only nanomorphic, they sometimes contain additional devices, hidden weaponry. Whatever the spear is, it’s able to charge itself with energy, and my sword takes the opportunity to drain it.
Frustrated, he tries to kick me, to knock me off our elevated arena. I block him with my left arm, catch his leg, throw him back—he almost goes over the opposite edge. I think it surprises h
im. But my surprise is that his leg is solid, armored. I swat his smoking spear aside, keep close on him, keep him on the defensive.
“You aren’t Chang.”
“Sorry to disappoint.” The figure springs off the rock and retreats out of my easy reach, and the absolute blackness melts away. Now he’s wearing golden armor, a crimson cloak. Red hair and beard. Strong sharp nose. Hungry, evil eyes under a thick brow.
“Asmodeus,” I recognize from the Guardians’ record of the final battle on the Stormcloud. But so does my sword. It flashes me what it knows of him, and it knows quite a lot: Immortal. Ally of Chang, brought through from the other timeline. Old enemy of Ram’s. Assassin. Sadistic killer. Brilliant strategist. Ruthless sociopath. But he was killed long before any of the people in that timeline became immortal. Someone took his DNA and his files and made themselves a
RECONSTRUCTION. COPY.
“No need to go there,” he scolds.
“You can hear the blade?” I freeze.
“Of course I can hear it. How do you think I know your name, silly child?” He’s using the distraction to back up further, casually hopping from rock to rock; getting distance, getting his balance back, setting up his next attack. I don’t let my guard down, and the sword keeps calculating his potential moves, flashing them in my vision like ghosts of possible futures. “That thing you’ve gotten yourself connected to is broadcasting. It’s using you to try to hack your planetary network. Nice plan, by the way. The question is: what do you plan to do when you have control of the terraforming stations? Or is it the atmosphere net you’re after?”
I realize he’s speaking directly to the sword. If he’s telling the truth…
He takes my hesitation, and does something the sword hasn’t foreseen: He runs. He runs for the inner edge of the crescent and leaps far out into space. Chasing after him, I stop at the edge of Lucifer’s Grave: a steep-walled crater, dropping down hundreds of meters and well over a kilometer across. It looks less like an impact crater and more volcanic, or sink. There are a number of even deeper sinkholes down in its well, some visibly bottomless, like the ground has given way to significant melt. The crater bowl is all laced and carpeted with verdant green.
What I don’t see is any sign of a base, a ship. It’s either well-camouflaged or down in one of the larger sinkholes. (But none of the sinks I can see look big enough to hide something Stormcloud-class.)
I watch Asmodeus plummet, armor gleaming and bright red cape fluttering. I expect the fall won’t hurt him. And that makes me angry.
He’s left his soldiers behind, cowering behind their guns, their line divided on either side of me. The sword wants them. They’re smart enough not to try to shoot me.
“RUN!!!” I yell at them. Then I run and leap into the abyss.
I realize as I’m falling that he’s sent his machines after my friends—I should be heading the other way, running to help them. But I’ve got him in sight. He’s landed in the open bowl of the crater, and has turned to face me, waiting for me, spear down at his side as if daring me to make the first move.
My leap has taken me an impressive distance into the crater, almost as far as his, and my apparently re-modified body absorbs the landing with minimal discomfort—the worst part is that I wind up stumbling gracelessly, my boots sunk deep in… Is this mud? Despite the thick dust over everything from the manufactured storm, the patch of sand I’m in is wet beneath the waist-high ground-clinging growth, like the model “wetlands” in our Station gardens. There’s a lot of water in the soil here—I would expect more plant life, richer, at least as dense as the forest all around, but there’s just crawling ground-cover and a scattering of random squat shrubs, little of it reaching more than a meter tall. I wonder if that’s due to the quality of the soil, or something else. The visible sand is dark and marbled with gray, and there’s a lot of black rock mixed in, some of it in octahedral crystal form. Magnetite. Through the sword, I can feel the electromagnetic radiation all over this place, like an invisible fog. I feel slightly drugged, fuzzy. The world has become less sharp.
Asmodeus lets me get my bearings, patient, amused. He led me here intentionally.
“Interesting device you’ve got there,” he appraises. “Or it’s got you—I think that’s more accurate. How did you two collide?”
“That’s not important,” I fail to think of a smarter comeback. “Call your machines back!”
“It still lets you care about the lesser meat.” I’m not quite sure what he’s implying. “How thoughtful. Unless that’s useful, something to keep you motivated.”
“Call off the bots!!” I advance, sword in both hands, boots sinking almost to the ankle with each step to make maneuvering difficult.
“What fun is that?” he taunts.
The sand erupts to my left and right. Box bots churn themselves out of the ground, spinning their cubic sections. They rotate electric cannons at me.
“Fine…” I have time to hiss before they start shooting. My weapon has already got enough of a hack into them to predict them, and shows me where to go. They have me in a “V” crossfire. I run into it, faster than they can track despite the mud, drawing their guns at each other. One of the bots it quick enough to figure out what’s going to happen and pauses fire. Too bad for it that its twin is slower to react—it gets chewed up by friendly fire.
The sword gives me their weakness: They’re better at rotating guns horizontally. Rotating sections vertically drags against the ground and tips their sensor heads away because they’re on the same axis. So I leap, launching myself high into the air, and come down on the intact Box just as it gets its gun up, my sword taking the fire as it hacks down into the offending cannon. Then I drive the blade into the turret, let it drink…
The other Box recovers, decides not to bother sparing its twin anymore, rotates an intact cannon at me. But now my blade has it hacked, has its frequency over the EM fog. I—we—make it turn its weapons on Asmodeus.
But it won’t fire.
“You were right. This is impressive.” Another voice comes from behind me, deeper than Asmodeus’, older. I turn. There’s another suit of golden armor, but this time the hair and beard are golden, the cloak white with a royal purple lining. And he’s wearing a golden crown, with a facetted patch over his right eye. He’s got what I recognize as a war hammer held lazily across his thighs.
Fohat. The toymaker himself.
“Do you recognize it?” Asmodeus asks him.
“Possibly a Companion. But the only ones I’ve ever seen this strong or this smart were…” He trails off, his face dropping like he’s just realized he’s in some kind of trouble. Then he forces a smile. “Oh. This could be a problem.”
“Something you should have told me?” Asmodeus presses him, annoyed.
“Something that shouldn’t be here,” he doesn’t explain.
“None of us should be here,” Asmodeus throws back.
I catch a flash-stream. Data. Encrypted. Fohat is feeding something to Asmodeus. I can’t catch what…
“Well, isn’t that interesting,” Asmodeus purrs. The feed has stopped.
“Where’s Chang?” I change the subject. Asmodeus gives me a lazy lopsided grin, shrugs.
“No idea, actually,” he tells me lightly. “Maybe getting intimate with a four hundred and fifty kiloton nuke finally gave him his wish. Of course, given how suicidal he was before he found his ‘mission’, you’d figure he’d have thought of trying that, tried it. But back to the topic at hand…” He raises his voice, calling out in mock song: “Oh, sweetie…”
“I’m here,” a female voice answers without enthusiasm. (They seem to keep appearing out of thin air.) A blonde in white and gold. Astarte. She’s wearing a diadem with big black gems. The Guardian files suggested this is technology that Chang used to monitor her actions, perhaps even control her.
“Anybody we know pack a Companion?” Asmodeus asks her. “One of the Pets?”
“Not that I’m aware of,”
she says flatly. But her voice hesitates and her facial expression shows definite fear—and recognition—as she looks at the blade.
“They were pretty unstable on a good day,” Fohat still sounds worried. “This one, though… Oh, my… I have to keep rotating encryptions…”
“It’s still trying to hack into his Station network,” Asmodeus updates. “I’m tempted to let it succeed, just to see what it has in mind.”
My anger is building. And with it, so is the sword’s. I can feel it. I can feel it feel.
I force control over the Box, turn the guns on its maker, its controller. I watch him struggle with me over it—he seems confused, unsure, like we’re playing some invisible strategy game. And I’m winning. I make the Box fire.
The bullets go right through him. He’s not there. He’s just an avatar, a hologram.
“That really is impressive,” Asmodeus praises almost honestly. “Do you have any idea what you got your hands on, little boy?”
“Don’t really care…” I growl at him. I turn the Box’s guns, fire. He runs, dashes in a big circle, fast enough the stay ahead of the Box. But I can see where he’s going. I leap, charge in to intercept him…
…and the ground heaves up under my feet, throwing me. I lose control of the Box, and its guns go silent. I land in a shower of damp sand and gravel and torn vines. Erupting out of the crater is a geyser of black metallic… something. It’s fluid, but shifts, moves with purpose, lands, forms into a rough man-shape. Chang? No, I can see reflection, shimmering on its shifting surfaces, like high-carbon lube oil. It takes a shuffling step toward me, reaches out, then goes fluid again. I have to roll to avoid a gusher of it that gouges deep into the ground. The figure flows into its own strike, partially re-forms at the point of impact.
“New toy,” Asmodeus is explaining, now watching from the higher ground of the crater slope. “Fohat calls it ‘Boogie’, as in Boogieman. He’s got kind of a ‘B’ theme going. It’s deviously simple, really—just a reprogramming of a nanoswarm—but it’s been giving my fellow exiles quite the run…”
The God Mars Book Four: Live Blades Page 17