Sons of the Gods

by James Von Ohlen

  Free of the collar for the first time in months, he had run his hands around his own neck for several minutes. Feeling all of it as though he was a child and it was a new toy given to him.

  Eric had not gotten the same talk as he had not been a direct slave of Anhur. Only by proxy through Torsten, it would seem.

  After his initial exposure to the halo and the knowledge it brought, Eric had remained silent for a while. His reaction was much the same as Torsten’s. Initial disbelief, then anger, and then a sense of purpose. A sense of a new mission given and gladly accepted.

  Eric had been eager to be armed and sent on the warpath. But first Torsten showed him the officer’s baths. Still functioning after all these years with fresh hot water, shaving kits, clean clothing, and most importantly, light. Even rations that made the best meals back in The Kingdom look like swill produced at the hands of incompetent buffoons.

  An officer’s grooming unit was still functioning and Eric rose from his bath, the first since the night of the massacre, to settle into it. A minute or so later he emerged, hair cut to regulation and facial hair removed. He looked in a mirror and stared at his reflection. He’d grown much leaner on the trail, but had seemed to retain the strength gained during his intense drilling at Fort Pleasant.

  “Like a prisoner.” He said as he ran his hands over the stubble on his head with a grin. Prisoners in The Kingdom were often forced to cut their hair short, to make them easier to identify should they escape. Though they both knew that the short haircut was a matter of hygiene, they both laughed anyway.

  Modi had appeared to help outfit the newest recruit as well. There were a dozen or so suits of security armor to choose from. All seemed identical and too large until he tried one on. Something inside of it buzzed and it constricted, fitting his form perfectly. He flexed his arm, feeling the strength there as his own natural muscle was augmented by bundles of synthetic muscle nanofibers that also served as an integral part of the defensive wall of the armor. Not only did they make him stronger, but they kept out things like bullets.

  Torsten couldn’t help but grin as Eric had turned his attention to the weapons further back in the armory. The young soldier was virtually drooling as he laid eyes on them. Torsten knew he would have to deal with some disappointment. Many of the weapons relied on power sources that had been exhausted and that the infrastructure of the installation was too damaged to renew.

  Among them, advanced beam weapons, coil guns, rail guns, rifles firing self-propelled armor piercing caseless ammunition from an electric firing mechanism at thousands of rounds per minute, and assault rifles based on purely mechanical and chemical action. Eric’s eyes fluttered rapidly as he searched through the data streams of each weapon provided by the armor’s interface unit. He picked up each weapon he saw, visibly disappointed when it was confirmed that the weapon lacked a usable power source or ammunition supply.

  But there were still enough new toys to go around. No fancy ray-guns were functional, but there were more than a few weapons that fired what were known as hard-rounds. Known as bullets, in languages old before the Ancients had built this place.

  “I’m sorry, but this is all we have at this location. This installation was never intended to house combat soldiers.” Modi’s melodic voice almost sang to them as Eric inspected the weapons. The implication that there were other locations with better weapons struck him as the most incredible thing he’d ever heard. Even better than if she had told him that his new armor could give him head.

  “Oh, and you’ll need that battery.” She had said, pointing to a silver cylinder sitting on a table top. Torsten had picked it up. Surprisingly, it still held a charge after nearly a thousand years.

  The same battery Torsten had just placed in the beacon. He punched the activation key and the beacon began emitting its signal. It didn’t take long to get a response. Torsten and Eric were shielded against orbital observation, but they could still feel the buzzing sensation as Anhur’s battle station flared to life and the War God’s sensors swept the area.

  The buzzing stopped as the interference field erected by Modi and Vidar kicked in. But Anhur still had time to download his orders to Torsten’s crew. They were no doubt scrambling over the rubble that used to be Andersonville, but it would be a few minutes before they arrived.

  Torsten’s thoughts wondered for the moment. Everything he had seen in the Hall of Iron. He wasn’t sure if he ever believed it, ascending to the home of the War God and being armed by him to strike down his enemies. But now it had been revealed as little more than illusion. Several suggested data streams popped into his subconscious and he scanned through them, bringing the information they contained to the front of his mind.

  The first was the dossier of one General David Kasabian. Codenamed “Anhur”. Former UN Spec Ops soldier and commander of UN ground forces during their attempted conquest of Veldt. The information had been gathered by AI spies infiltrating UN fleet computers and reporting their pilfered secrets back to the planetary defense forces.

  Other sources included information gained through interrogation of captured UN soldiers. Questioning was considered outdated and torture held by most to be distasteful. So information was gathered by the halos. The same instrument that had been able to implant knowledge directly into Torsten’s brain apparently worked in both directions. It could also be used to extract information from human brains. Living and even dead, so long as they hadn’t decomposed too badly.

  Many UN soldiers had been captured or killed in action during the fighting on Veldt. Before the complete collapse of the planetary defense forces, there had been ample opportunities to collect data through the halos. In some instances the halos were unnecessary. With high ranking UN and Coalition soldiers the Veldt planetary defense forces had begun to find advanced hard drives for data storage connected directly to the central nervous system, like some auxiliary organ that had grown there. Usually on the spine.

  The hard disks were essentially unlimited in memory and it was unclear what they were being used for. In the final days of the war the planetary defense forces had cracked their encryption and begun to extract information from them. Several sub-streams of data were suggested by the halo interface in Torsten’s armor. He selected one that seemed interesting.

  UN Spec Ops teams. The cursory description revealed what superficially appeared to be kindred spirits. Men who were specially trained to work in small units, often in unofficial capacities with the goal of eliminating high priority enemy personnel, conducting sabotage missions behind enemy lines, abducting enemy personnel, and defense against enemy units trained in the same. Men similar to him it would appear. Until he delved into the data stream detailing events haloed from the minds of captured UN operators.

  Torsten initially recoiled at the distorted and mangled images. He did a quick function check of the halo in his suit and saw that it was working properly. It was the memories themselves that were broken. A nightmarish mishmash of machine thoughts and rapidly diminishing humanity. What little remained that was recognizable as human seemed that of some comic book villain.

  A penchant for committing war crimes. The only time coherent thoughts came to the fore of the scanned memories were when someone was being tortured and murdered. These were not karmic justice being meted out to the enemies of nation and people. They were simple murder and mutilation of people who had no hope of defending themselves.

  He felt sick for a moment and remembered with shame the acts Anhur had committed through him. The slaughter of the Mountain Men in their village on the road behind him. The murder of the women. The joy that had flooded through his mind from Anhur as he stomped repeatedly on a child until she was dead.

  Modi had told him after his initial halo session that the halos could be used to remove the memory from his mind if he felt too much distress over it. Such had been a treatment approve for the victims of particularly psychologically damaging crimes in the past as well as for soldiers suffering from post-tra
umatic stress disorder. He had declined the offer, instead wanting to keep a reminder of who and what he was fighting. No matter how unpleasant that reminder was.

  That was what it meant to become one of those mechanical monstrosities. It meant to lose your humanity and eventually your mind. Side data streamed in, detailing past experiments carried out by Veldt defense forces with producing full conversion cyborgs. The experiments had been abandoned centuries before the UN and Coalition had gone to war when the psychological impact on the test subjects was seen.

  In the days before the war came to Veldt, the full conversion bodies were only used in the rarest instances to temporarily house the still intact brain of a badly wounded person. Until a new body could be grown for them based on their own DNA. Modi had promised him that they would be able to replace his lost hand with his own flesh and blood someday soon. Likely with a variation of the same technology.

  Torsten shut the data stream for UN Spec Ops and hesitantly opened the data stream for Coalition Spec Ops. The operators involved in similar duties from the Coalition typically retained most of their humanity, though full conversion cyborgs were used as well. During the course of the war they seemed to have begun to fall behind the UN operators in tactics and success.

  To combat this, they had begun to produce a wider variety of specialized units. One in particular struck Torsten as ill-suited to special operations. A unit called a “Titan”. He began scanning through a data stream detailing what was known about the unit.

  Less information was available than on most other topics. The Titan units had only been deployed on Veldt on rare occasions. Most contact with them had been as heavy defensive units protecting vital areas of Coalition ships that planetary defense forces were attempting to seize control of. A sub-stream detailing ship-to-ship boarding methods was suggested. Torsten dismissed it after marking it for later perusal.

  The Titan unit consisted of what amounted to a walking tank run by a central computer system that integrated a human brain into its processor. It was unknown whether the brain retained any of its original personality or if it just became part of the machine. None had been captured intact enough for examination.

  The form of the unit was massive. Roughly humanoid and easily three meters tall and two and a half across. Each unit boasted an armament of several different weapons. Though there was variation in armament seen, there seemed to be at least two standard weapons. A huge retractable claw not unlike that of a crab, surrounded by a series of projected force fields that allowed it to cut through almost anything, and a 30mm cannon that fired armor piercing rounds.

  The utility of the last weapon struck Torsten as somewhat questionable in a situation where the monster might be defending a ship’s bridge. A single misfire and the ship’s crew were going for an unplanned spacewalk.

  Torsten’s thoughts returned to Anhur and the data stream of the War God’s dossier returned to the forefront of his mind. It was difficult to think of him as a man named David Kasabian. Then again he was at least a partial conversion cyborg and likely retained little of his humanity. The name, Anhur, was that of an old Earth war god from antiquity. There was no mention why that was chosen as the General’s code name during his days as an operative.

  Old Earth. A data stream popped up, detailing the birthplace of humanity. Though he knew it to be fact, it still struck Torsten as particularly incredible that the stars in the sky were other suns like his own and around some of them there were planets with other humans living on them. All of them descended from the same stock from some far away world. Even most of the animals he knew had originated there.

  Dogs, cows, wolves, deer. The data stream detailed humanity bringing them to the stars. Torsten remembered scrubbing pigeon shit off of a statue of some long dead soldier in front of his barracks during basic training. Scanning through the data he saw that the birds weren’t native to Veldt and had been brought there from Old Earth stock as was well. If only he could put his hands around the neck of the son of a bitch that had decided to bring those sky rats… He shook his head and laughed to himself.

  At least the same people had seen fit to bring tobacco with them. Damn, I could use a cigar about now, he thought. It had been way too long since he’d had a good one. His last had been smoked the night before he led his crew to The Western Fringe.

  Continuing, he saw that rarely was a live animal brought along to a new world. Usually just the DNA coding necessary to build one from scratch. Combined with some type of incubator, they could be built like machinery at their final destination. They were brought to wherever humans lived and the environment would allow the terrestrial animals to thrive as well. In some instances, planets had been seeded with these plants and animals in hopes they would spread and multiply to provide a source of food for future human settlers.

  He smiled at the thought of a planet overrun with wild pigs, waiting for the day people showed up to eat them. Other worlds had been determined to be of low native biological value, whatever that meant, and had been seeded with as many species as possible from Old Earth. To act as a repository against extinction. Extinction events like those that had actually happened on Old Earth. Nuclear warfare had a tendency to kill off just about everything, intentionally or otherwise.

  He perused the data stream and his smile died, seeing what the planet that had birthed mankind had become over the passing years. A cosmic garbage dump populated only by those not rich enough or smart enough to leave. Of course that data was outdated by about a thousand years. Who knew to what depths the planet had sunk in the passing years? A shame, really.

  A warning flashed in Torsten’s field of view. He had perused the data available to him at the speed of thought, but he’d gotten so caught up in it that he lost track of passing time. Sensors warned him that something was approaching.

  This time he stifled his discomfort and spoke to Eric mind to mind through the relays built into their suits. Both activated their optical camouflage, becoming nearly invisible as they moved to their positions. Torsten’s crew was approaching.

  To their credit, they stuck to what they knew. Approaching rapidly yet silently. Moving from cover to cover, attempting to remain concealed. Ed signaled commands to the three others by hand and they advanced as a unit. That movement pattern was the effect of Anhur’s implants. Torsten recognized the pattern of advance as one designed for the stationary men to provide covering fire to the moving man if needed. But they had no firearms to provide that cover with.

  Still, he couldn’t help but take some small measure of pride in his soldiers. And there was no doubt in his mind that they were in fact his soldiers. He had trained them, turned them into men who could claim to be Scouts of The Kingdom. They would be free from the War God soon enough and together they would settle the matter of this ongoing war.

  Torsten watched as the four men closed on the beacon. They searched the area around them carefully, looking for threats. Seeing none, they stood closer. Gathered around the source of the signal that had caught Anhur’s attention.

  “What the fuck is that?” Pier was the first to speak.

  “Don’t know. But Anhur wants it. How do we take it back to him with all the other shiny shit we found?” Ragnald spoke that time.

  “I believe he intends to bring us back to his hall. The same way we went there last time.” Styg answered.

  “On a huge fucking beam of light?” Pier laughed.

  Torsten began to blink and his halo unit suggested a description of the teleportation method used by UN military forces. Intrigued, he looked it over for a fraction of a second. It was not a true teleportation in that it didn’t disassemble matter, move it through space and reassemble it molecule by molecule at its destination. UN scientists hadn’t figured that one out before they brought their war to Veldt.

  Torsten couldn’t help but be glad.

  Disassembly of the matter that constituted his body would undoubtedly kill him. Even if that same matter was reassembled in the same wa
y at a new point, it would only produce a copy of himself, not the original. It was oddly comforting to know that he had not died when Anhur had taken him.

  Instead the UN teleporters worked by warping space between an object and its destination. So technically they weren’t teleporters, but warp transporters. They only worked short range and in line of sight, unlike the version used to bring ships across the emptiness between the stars. They also required a great deal of power. There was a sub-stream that popped up but then disappeared before he could open it.

  An afterthought took its place. It simply said CLASSIFIED. He would have to ask Modi about that later.

  He finished blinking and the data streams paused. Allowing him to concentrate on the situation before him. Four men that he needed to subdue without alerting Anhur, and preferably without hurting or maiming them. He sent his order to Eric and the man obeyed.

  There was a hollow thump that sounded as Eric launched a gas canister amidst the four men of Torsten’s crew. Before it even hit the ground they were in action, seeking cover and searching for the source of the attack. The narcotic gas sprayed around them by the canister seemed to barely have an effect at first. A thin cloud formed, obscuring everyone’s vision.

  Two of the men slumped visibly, almost falling as they inhaled the gas. The other two moved quickly to escape the cloud, eyes glowing fierce red. Torsten felt a twinge of fear as he saw them. The fear generating effect of the War God’s collars. Something activated within his suit and the feeling was gone. They were still just his soldiers. With glowing red eyes.

  The two who had seemed to about to succumb to the attack surged to their feet almost simultaneously and stormed out of the cloud in Eric’s direction, seeking their attacker.

  Shit, Torsten thought. I guess we have to do this the hard way. He issued an order to Eric as well as the other soldier’s suit. Non-lethal force levels only. It would be a dangerous situation for Eric on his own against the weapons that Torsten’s crew were still armed with. But with Torsten quickly closing on them from behind it should be over quickly enough.