She pulls her mask off, leans in, cups my face in her hands and kisses me. It’s sweet and awkward (and no more ex-girlfriends are made). I subtly plant my tracker, let it work its way in to hide itself in her cellular structure, to sit undetectably inert until her limbic system triggers an emergency signal. Or she gets badly hurt. Or killed.
“That’s it?” she needs to verify, cautiously licking her lips.
“That’s it. Good luck, Lieutenant.”
She puts her mask back on. She’s having trouble making eye contact. (And it could just be the “rose” everyone gets from the thin atmosphere, but she may be blushing.)
“Thank you, Colonel… You, too.”
She gives me a salute. Her fellow Peacekeepers—who have been watching us dutifully—all do the same. I return the gesture.
Bel is already summoning our flyers to carry us “home”.
“Captain Bly,” I call out to our apparently undecided ally. He stops, turns on me like a metal robot.
“No ship, no captain,” his bug-skull mask says, like I’ve unintentionally insulted him.
“Come with us,” I repeat my offer.
“And you’re off back to your little garden?” he condescends.
“Unless you know where we can find Chang?” I try to stoke his desire for some kind of justice, even though none of us are up for the pursuit just yet.
“He abandoned his dock above Tyr. The Unmaker patrols were getting too close to finding it, and then you squatted yourself in Tranquility. By the time he pulled out of Pioneer, I’d made it clear I was no longer in his service.”
“He’s afraid of UNMAC patrols?” I don’t believe.
“The aircraft are the eyes. Chang has reason to believe the ‘makers have satellite weapons ready to rain down on him. He’s not ready to deal with that yet.”
I wonder if this is true, if Burns has been hiding it from everyone on-planet.
“So: No. I don’t know where he’s gone next,” he makes sure I’m clear.
“Then why not come with us?”
“I need to save my own,” he lays it out. “No matter what you think of us. Before there aren’t any left.”
I nod my understanding. He turns and walks away from the makeshift camp, from us. Climbs a rise, stands in the wind. A few seconds later, his flying construct comes for him, looking very much like living mythology, and he rides it away east-northeast.
15 May, 2117:
Bel and I spend the next few days resting and replenishing, and that means eating like gluttons. I feel ashamed that we might be putting an undue burden on the Cast’s harvest, but I won’t scavenge the dead, and Bel seems to respect my limits, even though he has more severe damage. His face healed in a dozen hours once he got fed, but his arm still looks like an anatomy display. He absorbed construction scrap from the dome rebuild project to replace his forearm armor and gauntlet, hiding the sight from curious eyes, but I get a look at it when he comes back to our shared cluster of rooms. If it hurts (and I expect it does), he doesn’t complain.
(Paul took me aside to uncomfortably ask me if we needed to go back and collect Bel’s “lost tissue”. I explained that the most viable “colony” of even the most vaporized body will send a failsafe signal to prevent other clusters from regenerating a full copy, an issue that caused a few high-profile ethical and existential crises in my other timeline before it was legislatively remedied.)
Paul doesn’t seem to need so many edible resources, and eats not much more than his usual sparse diet. I suspect this is because his “tools”—run on replenishing fusion cores—do for him a lot of what our bodily mods do for us, except healing, so he doesn’t burn as much as we do. (He also doesn’t have armor and weapons to restore, just his blue sealsuit and mask.) And he’s back to work before we are: the Lower Dome is already almost half-repaired, and the colony processors are back up to about eighty percent efficiency. (The “Domers” are still wary of him, but willing enough to send a nervous representative when they need something fixed.)
Kali comes regularly to spend time with Bel, caring for him like a dutiful sister, impressively out of character. The two have grown quite close, though the relationship appears to have remained platonic (also impressively out of character for her—it’s not just that Bel really doesn’t have any attraction to women—she hasn’t even tried). Otherwise, she remains surly and impulsive, and particularly frustrated that Paul appears to completely ignore her blatant advances. After each such failure, she will usually turn her attention to me, perhaps to validate herself. I sometimes oblige her, telling myself it’s to give Paul some reprieve. She seems to have backed off on pursuing any of the un-modified males, except for some lazy flirting and innuendo. When I ask, she tells me she doesn’t want to break them. Still, Murphy and Two Gun (and Mak—I think there’s some jealousy there) continue to look nervous in her presence.
Kali also continues to vent her spleen at Star in absentia, taking even random opportunities to call her creatively vile names and criticize her role and motivation in this game of immortals, or just slandering her character in general. The problem is, Kali’s prosecutorial evidence (and my lack of defensive evidence) is increasing with every day we continue not to hear anything from her. Star hasn’t attempted contact since before I arrived here, and the issue of Chang’s whereabouts and plans remains critical, especially if Chang now has Fohat and who-knows-who-else supporting him. As for me, I can’t help but worry that something has happened to her, a fear I’ve suffered dozens of times when she was still mortal, when she’d disappear for months on some shady “mission”. It was that habit that forced me to stop caring for her, not that I was ever entirely successful. But after she was indestructible, I had no reason to worry. I find that’s changed, given the circumstances.
Lacking Star’s first-hand intel, I have to press my only other source. Bel still insists he has no idea how many of our kind Chang may have brought back with him, but seems confident it can’t be more than a few. Yet, he didn’t seem terribly shocked when he heard Fohat was here. And he’s remained evasive about listing Chang’s other allies, at least those he knew about in the other timeline. When he’s feeling better, I feel less hesitant in grilling him.
“How many could he have brought with him?” I start with speculation. When Bel only shrugs, I challenge with the existing data: “We know he brought you and Star and Fohat. And somehow Star was carrying me. And I had three more. We’re talking code for entire entities, not to mention assorted bots, gear. What were the limits of his technology?”
“It’s really not as much as you’d think,” he discounts, sounding lazy and more than a bit dazed. “I mean, you’re still mostly you because you got your own seed. Same with Parvati. It’s not just the DNA match—it’s only a small fraction of the chain that makes you who you are. The memory files that tell you who you are are the biggest load, so we kept them basic, just the essentials. I’m actually more Abdullah Rashid than I’m comfortable admitting, DNA and otherwise. The only reason I don’t have his full memories is because Chang killed off a lot of his brain before my seed finished taking. Fohat was probably remade the same way. And Kali has almost all of Fera in her—that’s the part that probably gets her fucking you even when she’s otherwise hating you.”
“I was wondering about that,” I try to lighten, and fail, stewing on the implications (for both of them).
“Over time, I’ll become more me, as I keep repairing and regenerating this body, reasserting my original physiognomy. Rashid will fade to a few choice memories. Same thing will happen to the other resource bodies.”
“But not me,” I know.
“No,” he confirms. “That’s because besides the compatible DNA, you have a full set of compatible memories—the old and new fit together, minimal conflict, no overwriting. So you get to keep it all, whether you want it or not. Just younger and prettier. You used to have a scar, didn’t you? When you were pre-mod?” He draws a diagonal line down across his own eye.
“Several.”
“I miss scars. Real scars. You could fake one, of course, using the basic cosmetic mod. But it’s not the same.”
I let him wallow in his existential melancholy for a while, sharing the silence. He brings himself back to my question eventually.
“The base tech is pretty universal. He could rebuild a lot with the right selection of key pieces. Like DNA: over 99% is what we have in common. Your friend Bly, for example: His tech is made of core bits of our mods, tinkered into a simplified version of us. Easily replicated.”
“But there has to be a limit,” I try reason. “Chang couldn’t send a whole world through on a sub-atomic connection…” I feel doubt as I say it.
Bel stews on that, seems to zone out for a moment, then gives me a lopsided smile.
“The good news is that if anyone could, it’s Yod. Which means there might be a lot more on our side than Chang’s. But what’s sent is sent. Done. Door closed. And what was on the other side is all gone.”
“Unless some other future pulls the same trick,” I give him one of my scary thoughts.
“Trying to give me that headache of yours?” he tries to joke it away, but he’s probably thought of that himself.
“So what would you send through?” I play into his hopes. “If you had one tiny window to remake your world?”
“Or make it the way you want it to be?” he reflects. But I’m not sure he’s talking about Chang.
He goes inside himself then, considering something, maybe something he needs to tell me. He looks at his healing hand, makes the still-scarred and almost-skeletal fingers work.
“Something I need you to see,” he says after some hesitation. “It’s about time. Don’t worry—you’ll like it. Well, I think you’ll like it.”
He calls for Kali, and we walk out beyond the dome, down by where the old spaceport used to be before it got wiped away and buried. The site is thoroughly overgrown, mostly in the tenacious Graingrass (which looks like a hybrid of bamboo and a giant version of crabgrass), with some of the tuber-producing Sweetroot and climbing Rustbean woven in.
He won’t explain where we’re going or why, even when Kali threatens to hurt him (to which he playfully tries to convince her that he’d enjoy it). But there’s a barely-detectible path through the growth. Soon, we’re so deep in we’re out of daylight, and we come to a partially buried hatchway (that, on close examination, looks like it was until recently fully buried).
He makes light for us as we go inside. It’s musty, dusty, much worse than the sealed base I’d woken up to after fifty years in Hiber. And then we start smelling life. Or death. Rot. Moisture. Compost.
“I’m surprised you never got suspicious enough to follow me on one of my idle nature walks,” he says over his shoulder.
We drop down a level on creaky stairs. There are conduits, tanks, valves. We must be under the dock, in what’s left of shuttle refueling. He takes us through another hatch—this one smooth and quiet like it’s been maintained—and into what looks like a pilot or passenger lounge. There are couches, lockers, chairs and tables, all well-dusted, unused for half a century since the Big Bang. I see daylight again, just a sliver. An observation port has been smashed through, but beyond it, it looks like the place is indeed well-buried, inaccessible (at least to anything human sized—the fissure bringing us light probably looks like an innocuous gap in the rock from the surface).
There are drag-marks on the deck, boot prints in the dust. Bel’s.
It looks like he’s planted a garden in the room: Piles of soil, living plants. The source of the smells. I realize the dirt mounds look like someone tried to make graves on top of the deck. And the graves are open. I remember the rut I woke up in as we climb up, following Bel, for a better look.
“Are you awake yet?” he says gently to the open graves. He reaches into one. I hear a gasp, like a drowning man making the surface. Limbs thrash. Armored limbs.
“It’s okay. You’re okay. It’s me. Long story. Just breathe…”
He moves over to the other open hole, repeats. Something—someone—screams. It sounds like a combination of pain, shock and thrill. Kali and I move in close to look:
In the first “grave” is an impossible vision, like something out of Arthurian legend. Or a Tolkien pseudo-legend. Laying in the rut is a beautiful young man—or maybe woman—with long golden hair, wearing a suit of highly-polished silver armor, similar to Bel’s, and a pure white surcoat (despite being half-buried in compost). Unnaturally deep blue eyes blink and look up at us like she’s (he’s?) no more than mildly confused by his predicament. But he (she?) stays put, like the situation is reasonably normal, and gives us a charming little smile.
Which is when the other grave erupts. Something—someone—big sits up like a sleeper out of a nightmare. I can see the tendrils of resource “roots” retracting back into the bulky dark armor it wears, including a heavy sallet-style visored helmet. I remember the trauma and confusion of my own awakening. Gauntleted hands reach up and pull off the helmet like it’s suffocating. The head underneath is maned in shaggy black hair and a thick beard, with matching thick eyebrows. The face is tanned, strongly boned, angular.
Bel is still repeating assurances as dark eyes look around. See us.
The other—the graceful androgyny—sits up casually. A silver hand reaches over and pats the bigger one on the forearm. Chuckles and shakes her (his?) head like he’s (she’s?) trying to digest either bad or unbelievable news.
“The little fuck did it…” She (he?) says absently. The voice is even more androgynous than Bel’s. I still can’t tell if I’m looking at a very pretty boy or a slightly boyish young woman.
The bearded one just looks dazed, numb. I see him begin to process his situation behind his eyes.
“Michael… Ragnarok…” Bel begins introductions, starting with the blonde, “this is Samael Lucif…”
“Lux,” the blonde quickly corrects him. Then to me, smiling seductively: “Call me Lux.”
“Kali,” she introduces herself like she needs to defend me.
“Beautiful…” the blonde purrs back at her, now sounding somewhat more male. Looks around curiously. “Why am I sleeping in compost in a post-apocalyptic cliché?”
“Been there,” Kali bites back. “Been worse. Deal.”
Lux show-pouts. Reaches an armored hand to me for assistance. I pull him (her?) to her (his?) feet.
“A handsome knight to rescue me?” Lux flirts.
“I saw him first,” Bel claims.
“I married him first,” Kali corrects, testily.
“Azazel Armeros,” Bel diffuses by introducing the other one.
I know both names, at least by reputation.
“Where are we?” Azazel skips the social rituals. His voice is deep, authoritative. He climbs up out of his rut like he weighs a ton.
“Tranquility Colony. Mars. Pretty much the same as the one we knew, except this is 2117, and it’s seen better days,” Bel explains.
“Chang?” Lux assumes, getting serious.
“Triggered a nuclear sterilization,” I take it. “Fifty years ago. Cut the planet off from Earth, kept it that way by convincing them the place was contaminated.” This seems to disturb.
“Survivors?” Lux seems to care.
“Quite a few,” Bel reports cheerfully. “Made their own little civilizations.”
“But now Earth is back, and Chang is fighting them for the planet,” I summarize. (I find I‘m getting tired of trying to retell this story.)
“And neither seems to care what happens to anyone living here,” Kali condemns.
They digest the news. Lux finally chuckles under her (his?) breath again.
“The little fuck really did it, didn’t he?”
“What about Yod?” Azazel wants to know.
“No sign,” Bel laments. “Maybe gone with our world when the timeline unraveled.”
“I wouldn’t count Him out,” Lux considers, maybe hope
fully. Then looks at Bel. “Is there any place nicer to be on this planet?”
Bel smiles, satisfied. I’m really not sure if I should kiss him or shoot him.
Chapter 4: The Chess Masters of Mars
15 June, 2117:
She keeps me waiting for a full three hours this time, a test of my patience or surface endurance.
“You can’t sneak up on me like you used to,” I tell her and her soldiers, not bothering to move from where I’m sitting on the scoured and scarred concrete topside of one of the unburied colony structures. The winds have been shifting the sands to try to take Shinkyo back, but the job could take years. I watch the sand blow across the now-abandoned micro-civilization, remembering how the ETE dug it all up in a matter of minutes.
“Indeed impressive, Colonel Ram,” I recognize Hatsumi Sakura’s voice through her mask, regal, self-assured. Polite discipline with a pervasive undertone of menace. And seduction. “Or should I be calling you by another name, now?”
I unfold myself from my formal kneeling posture, stand and turn smoothly. I haven’t bothered to wear my helmet. I suspect she’s watched me intently all this time, studying me from the safety of distance and concealment while I breathe air too thin to sustain a human being for more than a few minutes. I know she knows what it’s like to try.
She’s still wearing her signature mask and eye pieces, but I don’t know if this is still a constant necessity or just because we’re outside. She also wears her usual black robes, her sword, her clawed hands hidden in her generous sleeves. But her long hair is down, blowing in the wind.
She stands flanked by six of her shinobi, in a semi-circle around me at what would usually be a safe distance, or at least far enough away to react defensively, yet still have an old-fashioned conversation. Her guards carry swords and PDWs. She has to realize this is only for show.
“Colonel Ram will do fine, Lady Sakura. You look well.”
The God Mars Book Three: The Devil You Are Page 25