I find bare skin below his right ear—he still has his right ear—if I look at him just from this angle his head still looks mostly whole, he could just be unconscious, fallen asleep in the chair and I’m sneaking up on him like I’m going to pull some juvenile prank—and I shove the end of the vial into his neck. It gets lighter slowly.
I hear boots on metal. Others are coming. Probably a Rescue team. Medics. I use my body to hide what I’m doing until I don’t see shimmering liquid in the vial anymore, then I hide it back in my pocket like a criminal. Let him go. Step back. Make room for the Medics to take him, cut him out of his harness, lift his limp body and try to put him as gently as possible into a trauma pod. Futile. Hopeless.
His blood has poured out across the deck. Drained by gravity as they moved him. Not pumped out under pressure from his wounds because his heart stopped well before I got here. His brain…
I couldn’t look at him.
What did Paul say? The nanites were only meant to kill cancer cells. Not rebuild. Not repair. Because that would be too frightening to us mortals, too unacceptable.
Part of me is still hoping for a miracle. Maybe Paul lied, maybe he put his immortality tech into the vial. Maybe there will still be a Lazarus moment. Maybe not now, but back in Medical. They’ll open up the pod and Matthew will be pissed and scared and he’ll hate me for doing this to him. But he’s hated me before—it doesn’t last.
I start giggling, tearing up. I stuff it down, if only for the sake of my men, all the men who still need me to be a good soldier for them. I stoke my anger.
Nothing is happening.
They seal his body up in the pod and carry him out like pall bearers.
I’m left alone in a wrecked ship full of smoke covered in my best friend’s blood and brains, left with my anger that has no target, at least no target I can properly lash out at. Except Earthside. Our rescuers. My masters.
18 June, 2116:
General Richards sends me what officially passes for an apology. The Security Council regrets the loss of a brave hero and valued asset. They reinstate my command as an afterthought.
I don’t send back a reply.
Lisa flies in from Melas Three. Matthew was family, she says. She only agreed to follow UNMAC’s orders to keep one of us in charge, she says.
I know that. But I don’t have anything to say to her, either.
I help look for Simon’s body. The ETE themselves collect most of it. It’s like a horror movie: The biggest pieces are already trying to regenerate. And they will, Paul tells me, his own body patched enough to walk under his own power. But he won’t tell me the rest of it until they’re satisfied they’ve got as much of him as they can get, all packed up in some kind of portable re-growth tube and ready to fly back home.
“My brother is dead,” Paul finally admits as his people are getting ready to leave. “We can help his body grow back, but the damage… his brain… it won’t be him. It won’t be Simon anymore. A newborn… blank slate… maybe some of his personality traits, his intelligence… but…”
“What will you do?” I know Simon died trying to save my life.
“None of us has ever died before,” Paul tries to make sense of it. “Not since we implanted. Not in thirty years. We considered it when we agreed to fight. But we… I…”
The military recruits young men who don’t believe they can die. I don’t say it out loud.
“I’m sorry about your brother. He was a friend. He was a good man. Let me know what happens.” It’s the best I can say to him.
“I’m sorry about Colonel Burke.”
I watch their ship fly off. It doesn’t make any noise.
Anton regains consciousness.
His lung is patched and re-inflated, but he’s lost a third of it. Ryder managed to save his leg, for whatever good it will do him. He’s paralyzed from the waist down.
He tries to smile with tubes in his nose. He looks very pale.
“We really fucked up, didn’t we?” he says as soon as he sees me.
“’We’ didn’t fuck up,” I remind him as lightly as I can.
“I got some good scans before the thing went live on me…” he tries. “Freaky stuff, Colonel… so advanced… nanotech that looks like it makes itself…”
“I know,” I tell him. “The ETE did some of their own research. We can talk about that more when you’re not so juiced up. You’ve got a lot of healing to do.”
He nods, winces. Then I see his eyes tear up.
“I can’t feel my legs.”
“I know,” I admit as gently as I can. Then Doc Ryder steps in my way to check his sutures.
“Doctor Staley needs rest, Colonel,” she suggests. “Maybe you could come back later.”
I nod, give Anton a pat on the arm, a pathetic comfort, and turn to walk away. He catches me, his hand gripping my sleeve.
“Did anyone else get hurt, sir?”
I don’t answer him.
I stop by and see Lieutenant Jane. Ryder couldn’t save his arm—or more accurately she could, given multiple surgeries and a flight back to Earth to finish the job, which would most likely leave him with an arm that barely worked anyway, so Jane took the amputation option, hoping to get back to some kind of duty with a prosthesis instead of being indefinitely convalescing. Luckily we still have a small supply of prosthetics on base, and he could be rehabbing in a few weeks.
His spirits are remarkably good, considering. But the longer I talk with him, the more his anger is noticeable under the surface. I promise him I’ll find some way to keep him in the fight, and he promises me he’ll learn how to fly an ASV with one arm.
I don’t bother with spin-time or dinner. I go up to see Metzger in the AirCom Tower. The techs are still patching the place, and it looks like it took more of a beating that the Command Tower. There are large cracks in the reinforced concrete, chunks of sealant broken away, shattered plexi (enough to keep half the blast shields still in place, and the crew keeps masks handy just in case the place springs more leaks).
Metzger’s got a cut high up on her forehead in the middle of a good purple lump, and an eye blacked enough to rupture the blood vessels in her cornea—apparently one of the blasts knocked a chunk of the roof into her, not that she let anybody know in the middle of the firefight. She just wiped the blood out of her eyes and kept shooting until the Discs took out her turrets.
She’s got her dark bobbed hair down to cover the wound in her forehead, and she doesn’t make eye contact so the bloodshot eye isn’t so noticeable. Despite a mild concussion, she’s been watching the radar all day.
“Still quiet, Colonel,” she tells me before I can ask.
“You going to sit here watching those screens indefinitely?”
“If that’s what it takes.”
I take a chair next to her, stare into the radar maps that show nothing moving but blowing dust for a hundred miles.
“I could be awhile,” I tell her. “Theory is that the Discs need time to pop out another batch. Maybe a few months.”
“We’ll need it,” she says after thinking about it for a few moments (though she doesn’t stop watching the screens). “We’re a bit short on guns. And ships.”
“Did Morales get a chance to look at the Lancer?” I ask her—and my brain flashes on blood and brains and Matthew my friend without a face…
“Thomasen plans to use a pair of tracks to lift it and tow it in tomorrow. Smith wanted a shot at trying to get it hovering under its own power, but the jets took a beating—Morales doesn’t want to try it until she can eyeball the underside. She thinks she can make it fly, though it won’t be pretty. And it will be minus some cannon. Probably even that EMP gun.”
I appreciate the distraction, talking about how we’re going to dig ourselves out of this clusterfuck. But we are running out of guns: the Discs cost us four AP and two main turrets. And two ships, one of which is unquestionably scrap.
“It could have been worse,” she reminds me like she kno
ws what I’m thinking.
It didn’t have to happen at all. I don’t say it out loud.
“It could have been worse,” she repeats.
Only one dead (and another functionally dead) and two severe injuries. That’s what the math going back to Earth is: Only two dead and two crippled. Not very expensive at all.
“Get some rest, Captain,” I order softly. “Anybody can burn their eyes staring at a screen. I want you fresh if we need to go another round.”
“Yes, sir.”
I go outside—I have to go outside.
The sun is setting, the sky turning a bloody purple. And it’s getting cold fast.
Still, I walk out across the main yard and out through the east gate, just to walk. I stop when I see the wreck of the Lancer, surrounded by spotlights, suited techs still working to dig it out by hand enough that Thomasen can try lifting it. I realize after I’ve been staring for awhile that one of the techs isn’t a tech, but wearing a pilot’s pressure suit. Smith is trying to dig out his own ship. Despite internal injuries and head trauma. I should have him escorted back to Medical.
I hear ASV jets incoming, and look north in time to see Acaveda’s ASV coming in for a landing, back from her run (along with Sergeant Horst and a squad of armor) to drop our Zodangan prisoners in the desert in what should be walking distance to their active territory. I didn’t get actual permission from Earthside, but I don’t want extra bodies to worry about in the cleanup, or if we get hit again—bad enough the already-burdened medical staff had to patch up a few flesh wounds sustained when stray Disc rounds punched through our makeshift Gitmo (at least the Nomad camp was out of the firing line). And I figured the Air Pirates should get first-hand intel that they’ve got new (or actually very old) competition in “their” skies. Perhaps their release might grease a mutual non-aggression pact of sorts, given what might be a mutual threat. But I won’t count on it.
I watched the security video of the captured pirates during the Disc attack: The pirates were remarkably stoic during the shooting, even when two of their own got bloodied and they had to help patch the atmosphere breaches in their group cell. I’m not sure if I expected terror or at least a few enthusiastic cheers that someone was pasting us, but even when we showed them the video records of the Discs in action, they didn’t give us so much as a smirk.
Sakina also showed very little actual emotion in the aftermath of the attack. She was there to help recover Matthew’s body (but she stayed back in the shadows, didn’t let me know she was there until I finally decided I was done sulking in my friend’s blood enough to attend to my responsibilities with the living). She was there to help us find every bit of Simon Stilson that could be found. Then she went back to our quarters, where she’s sat in meditation for the last few hours. I wonder if she’s thinking about how she—the perfect close-quarters fighter—will deal with a threat like a Disc drone. Right now I’m just thankful that when Rick helped repair her armor, he incorporated some of our best nano-materials.
I expect I’ll have to convince her to let me teach her how to shoot.
I slip on some loose rock, not paying any real attention to where I am. I manage to catch myself before I wind up on my ass. It shouldn’t be anything—no one can walk on this shit gracefully—but I get slapped by a surge of full-on rage, and it takes me a few breaths to get myself to accept I just don’t have anyone or anything to hit back at, not now.
And I realize the rage isn’t about being an old man who trips over his own boots. I’ve been playing head games with myself, trying to focus on the job, the duty. Keeping busy. Playing the role allotted to me. Trying to think about anything but the one thing I really can’t get out of my head, the one thing I still see every time I close my eyes.
Matthew. Just dead meat in a chair. Another inert corpse in a long list of corpses I’ve made out of living people. I couldn’t even recognize him, even if I had the nerve to look at him. I can still smell his blood and flesh and bone.
He should have had some last words, some kind of goodbye. Maybe that’s why I wanted the nanites to bring him back for me—and it was for me, not for him. He would have wanted the exciting death.
But he should have been allowed to say goodbye. I’ve had enough people alive and then just dead just like that—I should be used to it. But Matthew was always there my whole life, even when I wasn’t. Keeping me together. Watching my back. Showing me how to survive the life. Keeping me from sinking so far down into myself there’d be no coming back. Always there with a joke or attitude or just a wake-up to get out of my own shit and get moving. Someone to stand against the darkness with.
He brought me into this, so many, many years ago. I wouldn’t be Mike Ram without him. I’d probably be dead. Dozens of times dead.
So I tell myself that he’d rather die in a fight than sick in a bed. (But he didn’t have to die sick in a bed—I had what he needed to avoid that fate, at least for a few more years, in my pocket all that fucking day and I didn’t even tell him.) I remind myself he took the ship instead of me because he knew the risks, put me ahead of himself because I’m somehow more important to the Big Picture than he ever was. Because it was his job.
But Simon… Simon threw himself in the way of a Disc to save my life. He knew it would explode. He had to have known it would explode.
No last words. No goodbyes.
A friend gives up their life for you, you should at least get to say goodbye.
Selfish.
I couldn’t recognize them. Just meat and bone.
For nothing. It didn’t have to happen. But Earthside overrode me. Arrested me.
I’m only getting angrier, and still with nothing to strike back at but the rock and sand and the thin cold air. I turn and
I’m hallucinating.
The sky and everything has gone bright, bright as a summer’s day on the beach. And coming towards me is a figure all in gold. With the head of a bird.
It’s an Egyptian thing—like their pictures of their gods with animal’s heads. I used to remember what the bird-gods were called, when I was a kid and I thought Egyptology was cooler than dinosaurs. Horus? Thoth? Ra…
It’s a helmet. A golden falcon’s head. The eyes are light. The sun-disk on its head is light. It’s all light.
“I’m so sorry,” I hear a voice come out of the light. Soft and gentle and caring like it knows me and it knows I’m hurt. “He wasn’t supposed to die. Not that way.”
“What…?” Most profound thing I can manage to say to a glowing Egyptian god.
The golden falcon god holds out its palm, and something folds open out of nothing, and now it’s holding a big ram’s skull (I’m wondering if that’s supposed to be funny) like I’m supposed to take it.
“You aren’t supposed to die, either,” the voice tells me like it’s really important that I know that. The voice almost sounds familiar, but I can’t place it.
But then it’s all gone and I’m back in the cold in the sand and the sunset sky is a bruised purple and it’s getting darker and colder by the minute.
I look at the sand. No footprints but mine.
“Kastl? You on?”
“Yes, Colonel,” he comes back prompt.
“MAI have eyes on me?”
“Yes, sir. Problem?”
“Anything odd on the playback, last few minutes?”
He feeds it to me. Nothing but me walking, slipping. Then standing out here sulking. Alone. Nothing on the wider view. Nothing but our own people on any view.
“Probably just a trick of the light,” I discount. “All the scrap metal. Sunset. Either that or I’m getting a pressure headache.”
“I’ll keep my eyes on the screens just in case, sir. Maybe someone came by to check out all the excitement. Or take advantage of it.”
Part Two: What Is and What Should Never Be
Chapter 1: Post Traumatic
20 October, 2116:
“Wait for the kill box graphic, Jon,” I remind Drake, even th
ough I doubt he needs me to after how attentive he was during all of his prior practice sessions. He’s taking to the new technology with the ease of youth, which is apparently still alive and well despite the relative privation and hardship of his life. “Then squeeze and hold. The AI control will cycle the rounds when you have the best shot. It takes a little getting used to.”
The training drone comes around fast, almost as fast as the real thing. Drake rolls in the sand, keeping his profile low, letting the landscape shield him as the drone spits a few sim-rounds his way for effect. I watch his feed on my own goggles, watch as MAI feeds him firing solutions through his ICW sighting interface while trying to anticipate the drone’s apparently random maneuvers. Then one of his tribe pops up and fires a few “feint” rounds in the drone’s path, triggering a dodge. Drake takes his cue and sprays where he anticipates the drone will flip, but he guesses wrong.
His partner—a young Nomad named Yassi—“closes the back door” and puts a few rounds in the opposite direction. He manages to clip the training drone, but gets fired upon for his trouble. His Link “scores” him as wounded, and I hear some choice Arabic on their channel.
“Not bad,” I try to reassure.
“Odds are against you on the first volley,” Rios adds, a patient coach. “Even the AI can only give you best guess on what a Disc is likely to pull. The rest is luck and instinct. Sometimes you just have to override the AI aim and go for it.”
“It’s a lot like trying to hit a fly or a mosquito in midair,” Anton offers, using his joystick to shift his “chair” on the rocky hilltop to follow the action. The six wheels of what used to be a “follow-along” bot-rover (before Thomasen “re-tasked” it) dig and crunch in the gravel. “Not that’d you’d know what those are,” he corrects himself sheepishly after a moment’s thought.
The God Mars Book Two: Lost Worlds Page 17