The God Mars Book Four: Live Blades

by Michael Rizzo

  Then the sky does something strange: I see it flash bright, followed by a distant boom that could be cannons or bombs, but it’s coming from above us. Meteor strike? Or is something wrong with the Atmosphere Net? Is it the blades’ doing, or has Earthside done something stupid in response to the threat of the blades’ hack? I think I see massive arcs of electricity in the opaque ceiling of gasses.

  “Lightning,” I hear Elias mutter, staring at the sky in awe with the rest of us. “Thunder.”

  (And again, I’m wishing I’d paid better attention during my Earth history and environment modules. I was only interested in what I thought was practical to me as a war-fighter, and that was Earth technology and tactics, assuming they ever came back. What value was there in understanding their pre-industrial tech, their climate? We’d be fighting on our world, not theirs.)

  I hear the banging again on the port side hull.

  “What is that?” Abbas calls up to Jed. Jed ignores him.

  The banging continues, uneven, intermittent. But now I think I hear scraping as well. Erickson moves tentatively toward the stairs to the top rail.

  “He said not to go near the rail,” Elias scolds. Then he appears to give in to his own curiosity and follows.

  The clawing and clattering sounds like it’s getting higher, louder. Suddenly, the cables that run from the masts and sails to anchor points over the port side of the ship begin to jerk, like something heavy is pulling on them. Then another set of cables gets jerked. The sail yards shift, but correct, compensate—probably Jed’s doing, but he still seems to be ignoring the disturbance.

  I begin to hear chatter in my head. Bot signals.

  “Bugs!” Erickson hears it, too. We both reach for our swords, only to find them still stuck tight in their scabbards. Then, when I try to move, my feet are fused to the deck. I can’t move. Neither can Erickson or Elias, glued in place just before they reached the stairs. They look as panicked as I probably do.

  “We’re stuck!” I tell the others. Jed is still ignoring us, everything.

  The Ghaddar flies past the immobile brothers, and springs up the stairs to the narrow rail deck (I doubt she touched more than three of the steps). Murphy and Bly are right behind her. Abbas, Ishmael, Rashid and Terina are right behind them, at least after Erickson and Elias wave away their offers of help, still afraid of what might happen if we were to touch another living thing. The stairwell and the rail deck get crowded. I remember Jed’s warning, feel the ship rocking under us, see strong winds whip the Ghaddar’s cloak as she looks down over the rail.

  “Bugs!” she confirms as Bly and Murphy join her. She unslings her rifle, aims it down over the side. It won’t fire.

  “Murphy?” she defers.

  “I’m out,” he admits, frustrated. “Ran out yesterday. Just ball ammo left.” And plain ball nines won’t dent a bot. He draws his simple sword, probably hoping to jam it in somewhere vital, gets ready. “Charges? Grenades?” he asks everyone else. They all shake their heads.

  Bly draws his sword, uses one of the lines to climb up into the rigging, trying to get above the…

  There’s a flash. Blinding. I feel the air heat, charge. Then I get hit with a shockwave, get deafened by a blast. When I can see again, Bly hits the deck in front of me with a heavy clatter, his robes charred, his armor smoking. The Ghaddar falls near him, but looks intact, just stunned. I look up on the rail. Murphy is also down on his back, stunned. Some of the cables are smoking, smoldering.

  “Lightning!” Elias names it. “His sword… Armor…”

  “Get down from the rail!” Erickson shouts to the others.

  Rashid and Abbas are dragging Murphy toward the stairs. Terina looks frozen, staring up at the sky that just attacked us with electricity. Bly is convulsing on the deck. I still can’t move. The Ghaddar goes to check him (for whatever good she can do with him sealed in that metal suit).

  One of the damaged cables snaps, sending a sail yard twisting out of sync with the others. It doesn’t seem to affect the ship much.

  Then the Bugs make it up over the rail. They’re hanging on to the cables, climbing by alternately wrapping the lines in their claws, but now they’ve got purchase on the top edge of the hull.

  Abbas draws his revolver—it won’t fire. Neither will Ishmael or Rashid’s weapons. Then Rashid gets a desperate idea, charges one of the Bugs, tries to shove one of its legs off the rail while its other limbs are busy in the cables. He actually succeeds (and doesn’t get killed). The bot slips. Abbas throws himself at the other bot, wrestles with it. But they’re still holding fast to the lines.

  Ishmael sees what to do, starts climbing the rigging (despite what just happened to Bly), gets above the Bugs, draws his sword and starts hacking. A cable snaps. A bug almost falls. He quickly starts cutting the other line it’s hanging onto. Abbas sees what he’s doing, coordinates his pushing. The next cable snaps, and the Bug falls. I hear what I think is a loud splash. Abbas and Rashid are cheering in the wind. Ishmael is slinging his way over to the remaining bot.

  Murphy’s managed to join the effort as Ishmael hacks at another line. Then Terina. Human against bot, they wrestle in the storm.

  The line Ishmael is cutting snaps, but it recoils, whips up into him, knocking him loose. He loses his sword as he falls. Stunned and desperate, he grabs whatever he can to stop his tumble, and winds up hanging from the remaining bot’s back as it flails at him. I hear Abbas scream, and he starts hacking the Bug with his blade, trying to keep its attention so it won’t go after his son. Rashid tries to climb the machine to get Ishmael, but gets thrown off—he lands on the main deck on his back with a thud that sounds like it beat the wind out of him. Then Murphy gets smacked by a flailing arm. Terina drags him out of reach.

  Ishmael’s got himself better purchase, has climbed up on top of the Bug and grabbed a line, then goes right back to hacking what the bot is holding onto. Abbas yells at him to stop, but the line snaps. The bot drops out from under him, and he’s still there. But then more sail yards start swinging sloppy, and he gets swung on the line he’s hanging onto. He rides it for dear life as his father tries to grab him. Terina rushes to help, but then he gets thrown into another set of taut cables and knocked loose. I see him tumble, trying to grab anything, failing.

  Abbas doesn’t hesitate. He dives after his son as he’s falling, one of the cut lines wrapped around his wrist. They both disappear over the side as Terina watches helplessly. I see the cable Abbas was connected to jerk, but then go slack. I hear them hit the water.

  “Jed!” I’m screaming at our oblivious or uncaring driver. Terina is bent over the rail, stretching out her arm like she could reach them.

  “JED!!”

  He finally disengages with his wheel. But what he does next… He walks over to the side rail, gathers up some of the severed lines, then climbs into the rigging to reach their other ends, bringing them together. The ends fuse together as soon as they’re reconnected. He’s repairing his fucking ship.

  I still can’t move.

  The Ghaddar’s made it back up to where Abbas and Ishmael disappeared. I see her searching over the side, searching the water. It doesn’t look like she sees anything.

  She gets in Jed’s way as he goes about his repairs, puts a hand on his chest to stop him. Withdraws it, like whatever she felt gave her pause.

  “Where are they?!” she manages to demand as if she’s having trouble speaking.

  “Well behind us by now.” He says it like it’s nothing important. He doesn’t even bother to look.

  “Turn the ship!” Rashid wails, trying to get up. “Turn us around!!”

  “It would take far too long to be a practical rescue.”

  “Then send one of your small craft!” The Ghaddar insists.

  Jed gestures aft. At the square stern-end of the ship, a pair of the crane-arms is lowering one of the little transfer craft over the side in our wake.

  “Will it reach them?” Murphy needs to know. Jed merely shru
gs, then he casually looks over the port side as a bloodied Murphy joins Terina at the rail.

  “They’ll be fine,” Jed reassures badly. “Look. We’re almost there.”

  Chapter 2: The People That Time Forgot

  Erickson Carter:

  “Come and see.”

  I can move again.

  The thick clouds have dissipated over our heads, scattering into truly beautiful Earth-like patterns against a deep blue sky. The effect is so much more than our scenery projections and VR immersions could hope to depict—just like being outside for the first time, so… Big. Open. Breathtaking. Dizzying.

  Jed’s gesturing us to come up to the port rail, to the narrow catwalk we boarded on, where we just lost two of our own, and he’s just showing us the scenery like nothing happened. I’m not sure if he’s really childlike, if he’s just acting like it, or maybe he’s not alive at all—he described his ship and being a living biological nanotech construct, something from the immortals’ alt-world, and we saw him merge physically with it. He may be some kind of machine, manufactured. (Perhaps a manifestation of an AI like our swords? He does seem to be able to control them—and through them, us—or maybe they’re just cooperating with him to further their unknown agenda.)

  “Bly…” Straker reminds us. He’s gone still on the deck, but at least he’s stopped smoking. If the apparent lightning that hit him was anywhere near as powerful as what occurred on Earth…

  He stirs. Sits up. Shakes off Straker’s help.

  “We lost Abbas and Ishmael,” Straker tells him.

  “Overboard,” Bly grumbles, sounding ragged. “I saw.”

  “Come…” Jed prompts us again.

  We climb the stairs and join the others. The view…

  The surface of the water—the lake—glimmers with gentle sunshine. The water is a mossy green, betraying rich biological content. It smells vaguely musty. We can finally see some more of the boundaries of the lake, which does seem to stretch for dozens and dozens of kilometers in every direction, perhaps as far as the North Rim. And the Rim—starting to become visible in the distance—looks greened well up its crenellated slopes, the upper cliffs frosted white with ice. This world—if it is another world—is much wetter than the Mars I know. But I have seen this: In simulations, projections of what our terraforming could accomplish in another half-century (assuming Earth doesn’t continue attempting to destroy our efforts).

  There’s land in the water: Off our port side, only a few kilometers away, is what looks like a long oval mesa; flat-topped, sloped sides, perhaps seven kilometers long and a thousand meters high, rising up out of the water with a minimal lush “shore-line” around it. It almost looks like it could be floating—a ship, like this one, only much more massive—but I know that’s just the illusion of our own momentum. Its slopes are dotted with scrub and a few small tree-size specimens—most of the growth is down by the water.

  “The Barrow,” Jed names it.

  “Our destination?” I want to know, losing patience with him.

  “No. Of course not. That is the one place you must never go. We are going to The Peninsula.”

  He gestures ahead of us. Several kilometers beyond the eastern end of the Barrow I see more land, some low mountains, hills, rich green like we left in the Vajra. It may indeed be a promontory, a peninsula, reaching out into the body of the lake from the Rim.

  My fellows and I, however, are not enjoying the view. We still search the surface of the water, looking behind us instead of where we’re headed, looking for our lost friends. But even enhanced, I see nothing but the gentle wind-driven waves, the roiling wake we make as we cut the water’s surface. I can’t even see the small boat Jed sent looking for them.

  I realize darkly: Abbas and Ishmael were wearing copious amounts of heavy armor and gear, even though they dropped several packs on the deck before they went to fight the bots. They would have sunk to the bottom, like the bots. Whatever inflatable safety device Jed’s given each of us couldn’t possibly compensate.

  “I don’t see them…” Rashid sounds heartbroken, panicked and in tears.

  Terina, I realize, is also deeply affected by the loss. She grips the rail of the ship, her big eyes scanning urgently for any sign.

  “They’re fine,” Jed repeats his empty assurances. “Just far from our established course. They have their own path.”

  I try to estimate how fast the ship is moving, but it’s difficult to gauge in water, and I have only my people’s transports as reference. It’s certainly not moving as fast as any aircraft (except for a Dutchman-Class Zodangan airship). I look back to the retreating horizon, try to recognize the landmarks from where we boarded, but that shore has disappeared below the near-perfect horizon line formed by the surface of the Lake. I think I can still partially see the low range of the Pax Keep, the higher Spine behind it. They look to be maybe twelve or fifteen kilometers away. I think we’ve been traveling for thirty five or forty minutes…

  Abbas and Ishmael could be hundreds of meters further behind us just while I’ve been thinking about it. And that’s assuming the lake is static.

  “Are there currents?” I ask Jed.

  “Of a sort,” he doesn’t answer.

  “Oh, good,” Elias snaps. “More pseudoscience. Have they been sucked back through your time-splice? Flushed out of your dimensional bubble-universe?”

  “What do you see?” Jed challenges him calmly. “Look around. What do you see?”

  “An illusion,” Straker speaks first. “Generated by the swords. We’re probably still back at camp. Or wandering around in a daze.”

  “Then your friends are unhurt, because they were never here,” Jed actually taunts her, though he sounds vaguely like some kind of teacher or Zen master giving an experiential lesson.

  “Or they could be dead,” Elias attacks, insensitive to those so freshly mourning. “Maybe that’s your definition of ‘fine’.”

  “Drowning requires water. If you believe they are dead, then you believe the Lake is real. But you have never seen the Lake in your world. How can that be?”

  Elias locks up, trapped. The conundrum isn’t lost on the rest of us: Either this is all some kind of illusion (and then we have to question which if us, if any others, are actually sharing the experience) or we actually are on a massive body of water that isn’t visible from either the surface or orbit. And that means we either can’t trust our own minds or are dealing with something powerful that we can’t understand.

  So we us stew in silence, still helplessly looking for sign of our friends, believing they’re well-lost, hoping that they aren’t dead. Murphy looks crushed, his face bloodied from the bot fight, guilt in his eyes like he somehow failed, blaming himself. The Ghaddar just stoically scans the horizon, her gaze hard as metal, coiled under her robes. I expect she also feels a sense of failure, the loss of someone she’d sworn to serve and protect. Rashid is still inconsolable, while Terina looks lost, helpless (a word I didn’t think I would ever use to describe her). Bly is a metal statue, unreadable as always. (Though I’m not sure how he’s still on his feet at all—I recall that terrestrial lightning produced hundreds of megajoules of energy. Even if his armor somehow conducted the ionic surge around him so it didn’t destroy his tissues, the heat generated would have burned him badly, just as it seared his nonconductive robes. He doesn’t even seem to be in pain.)

  I exchange looks with my brother and Jak Straker. It’s clear we’re especially suspicious of all of this. I do trust Elias, at least in his understanding of physics. If the entire explanation of the time-splice is dubious at best, what we’re being shown here has to be inconceivable, at least by any science we understand.

  So what is this?

  The wind has died down to a gentle breeze, cool and moist.

  “Ghaddar…” Murphy has been staring at her. He reaches for her mask. Her hand beats him to it, finds what he’s seen: her breathing hose has been torn loose.

  He pulls off his mask, ta
kes a deep breath. Another. Waits for signs of hypoxia.

  “It’s rich, dense…” he assesses.

  The Ghaddar loosens her own mask, breathes. I’d gotten used to whatever the sword did to my nanites compensating for the atmosphere, but I take a deep breath now. It is thicker, with enough oxygen to not need recycling. (And again, I’m thinking of the future we’d projected for this planet. If this is illusion, is that what it’s based on? My people’s hopes?)

  Rashid cautiously takes off his mask, while Terina takes a deep breath as if she’s tasting the air. It seems to make her dizzy—Murphy has to partially catch her to keep her upright. She quickly shakes off his help.

  Feeling more and more helpless by the moment myself, I look forward, where we seem to be going. The Barrow (and whatever mystery it holds) is well behind us across the water, but the Peninsula is getting closer. I see a broad shore-line that rises gently back into hills and low rocky mountains, all thickly overgrown, lush and green. Far beyond it all, still partially masked by a milky haze, towers the altered North Rim.

  “We’re here,” Jed announces after another few minutes. We’ve come within sixty or seventy meters of the new shore. The sails roll up, slowing the Charon. Then the heavy chain uncoils down into the water again. The massive grapple on its end seems to catch on something—likely the rocks of the original surface underneath the Lake, and the ship comes to a creaking stop.

  Rashid silently and reverently collects the survival gear that Abbas and Ishmael left behind on the deck when they went to fight the bots. Added to his own, it’s an impressive burden, but he refuses offers of help carrying it.

  Jed gestures us back into the small boats, and we get lowered down to the water and silently cruise back to the land, aiming for a fairly wide and fairly barren patch. It’s a more somber trip than our last transfer, as we are two less, and none of us seem to be holding faith in any of Jed’s assurances. If Jed senses our extreme distrust of everything he’s had to say, he doesn’t show it, perhaps doesn’t care. (Or maybe he’s just a simple manifestation of his ship, an AI too stupid to read and respond to human behavior.)