The God Mars Book One: CROATOAN

by Michael Rizzo

20 September, 2115:

  I don’t even realize anything is amiss, not even when my eyes focus on hers.

  I wonder for an instant if that saved my life: that not jumping up in a start and going for my gun—just laying here like the sight of her in my room is not at all unexpected—keeps her from showing me why she has the reputation she does.

  Zauba’a Ghaddar.

  “Good morning…” I tell her. No demands, no questions about how she got in here or why she did so. I move slowly, no threat, just trying to wake up like it’s any other morning. I don’t even pull my blanket off to let me move more freely—I just shift to sitting a little more up on my pillows. Give my eyes more time to focus, to take in my situation. Get breathing. Get my blood flowing. Warm my muscles up without looking like that’s what I’m trying to do.

  I wonder if I could put up a fight, no longer in my prime even without what fifty years of Hiber-sleep did to me. I consider how I would go about it: with a skilled, strong, armed and armored enemy in a tight space.

  She doesn’t say a word. She just sits still as a stone statue in my desk chair, which she’s turned to watch me as I slept, becoming visible out of the darkness as the “environmental lighting” simulates the coming of daylight inside a windowless concrete bunker. The hatch to my quarters is closed and appears to be locked normally behind her—she sits between me and the door.

  As my eyes finally get focused through their sleep-haze, I see my gun where I left it, sitting in its rig on the shelf just over my head, in easy reach. She must be tracking my gaze, because her hand comes up out of her red robes smoothly, calmly, and she shows me she has the magazine. Then she tosses it to me. I’m impressed that I catch it. It’s still loaded. I set it up on the shelf next to the pistol.

  “You could have killed me in my sleep,” I tell her the obvious, hoping we have an understanding in stating that fact. I can see her knives under her robes—she has at least four of them strapped to the lacquered plate and underlying mail armor that girds her lean body tightly from head to foot. All of her knives are still sheathed. Her gloved hands rest passively on her steel-plated thighs. “Unless you prefer to have me see it coming.”

  Her hands reach up then and unseal her mask. The metal face-plate that covers the breathing gear reminds me of a combination between a European knight’s visor and a Japanese Samurai mempo. She peels it away and lets me see her: She is young—maybe in her late twenties or early thirties. Her face is lean, with somewhat oriental features. Her eyes are large and black. I cannot see hair under her Nomad-style cowl, but she has black, boyish eyebrows.

  Her hands settle back on her thighs, and she just continues to stare at me with what looks like idle curiosity.

  “Is this a message from your master Farouk?” I try, keeping my tone calm and level. But I really don’t feel any sense of hostility from her.

  She pulls a small black card from her robe and holds it up so I can see. It’s a UNMAC-issue lock breaker—it looks like the “covert” model issued to SOF units, which explains how she got inside despite MAI being extra-vigilant for surprise visitors.

  “A prize I took from a group of five men who exchanged fire with my Sharif’s bodyguards,” she tells me, her voice also calm and level. She speaks clearly, somewhat slowly, with a subtle mixed accent. “They wore tribal cloaks and homemade armor, but wore your uniforms underneath.”

  “Where did this happen?” I keep focused on business.

  “One day’s walk from the Southeast Rim, near the ruins of Freedom.” She puts the breaker card back where she got it, pulls out a fairly standard flashcard, shows me a floorplan of this base. “From the Shinkyo archives,” she explains more than one mystery.

  “Could they get in here as easily as you?” I wonder. Her mouth grins just a bit in one corner, letting me know she’s at least capable of feeling a little pride in her accomplishments. She shakes her head.

  “The Shinobi are slaves,” she tells me with a touch of barely-veiled loathing. “They serve. They cannot adapt beyond that.”

  “And you?” I risk goading her a bit.

  “I serve no one unless it serves me in what I seek,” she tells me dully.

  “And what do you seek?” I play. Her face goes dead and doll-like again.

  “I seek to be perfect.” She says it like a machine, like I’m talking to MAI.

  “An impossible quest,” I give her the obvious again.

  “It is the quest that is everything,” she tells me, still mechanical, reciting a rote mantra. I smile and nod. Her eyes regard me like they’re trying to decide something, but I still don’t sense hostility.

  “And how can I help you on that quest?”

  “By being Mike Ram,” she answers, her eyebrows going up just enough to soften her features slightly. “By not being Farouk.”

  “And what is Farouk to you?” I try.

  “Not my master.” Her voice stays cool, but now she’s not looking me in the eye. Her head rolls lazily to the side and I can hear her breathe deep. She’s gone somewhere else. “No one is my master. Farouk was convenient, useful for a time. He gave me opportunities to perfect myself.”

  “Against the PK?” I try. She gives a slight nod, her eyes still idly elsewhere.

  “Against the other tribes. Against their best.” The little smile comes back for an instant, but then looks like she’s been disappointed.

  “Against the Shinkyo?” I press.

  “Not to my satisfaction,” her head snaps back and her eyes lock mine again, her voice betraying an edge of some deep frustration, perhaps even pain.

  “I will not go out of my way to make war with the Shinkyo,” I tell her.

  “I know,” she softens again, her eyes probing mine again. “But they will make war with you. And you will meet them in kind. You will meet them all in kind. You will have no other choice. They will come against you. You will not back down.”

  “A fair assessment,” I allow, “especially given that we’ve only just met.”

  “You serve something greater,” she tells me as easily as she might tell me my eye color.

  “Do I?” I raise my eyebrows at her.

  “It is what you are.” Again, she does not make this sound like any kind of praise, just like she’s stating simple, obvious fact.

  I shake my head. “I’m just an old man.”

  “And you have been on the same path as I am now. I have studied you for many years, learned from you without meeting you.” Her flashcard spins through clips of mission files, public appearances, even training videos from my UNACT days (and at least one now-embarrassing clip of my impulsive use of a sword in public).

  I catch earnestness in her eyes, reaching out. She has made herself both fan and student.

  “And now you’ve laid eyes on the legend. I assume I did not fully disappoint?”

  She doesn’t answer. She tries to stay inside her stoic, disciplined shell, but I can feel her discomfort: confronting the fantasy.

  “I have seen you both old and young,” she defends. “You are still Mike Ram. You are still what you are.”

  “I’m a tired old man on a bed, too rusted to notice an assassin breaking into his bedroom,” I tell her levelly, even though I’m probably taking my life in my hands.

  She shakes her head, smiles with what may be genuine warmth.

  “You deny what you have become. Your body is no longer young, you feel it is failing you, but it has taken you where it has. My body will do the same in its time. But what you are now is greater than what you were when your body was at its prime. What you are now, you can master this world. You can make it what it should be.”

  I look in her eyes now and see age beyond her physical years, and serenity—she isn’t flattering me: she believes in what she’s saying. (And she’s managed to touch the issue at the core of my pervasive dread—that I need to somehow fix this world before I dare bring Earth back to it—despite never really meeting me before this.)

  “I’m no
t even a part of this world,” I deny.

  “Farouk’s words,” she tosses back at me. “You know better. You are here when you are here. You are what you are. That is all that matters.”

  “And why are you here?” I confront her coolly.

  “I am here because I believe we can serve each other’s purpose. Because we each have a path. Not the same path, but they travel together, at least for a time.” She measures out each word like she’s rehearsed her lines.

  “And how far will that be?”

  She smiles. “We will both know when the time comes.”

  I give her a few moments of silence. She doesn’t move to leave.

  “What do I call you?” I ask her finally.

  Her body settles back in the chair. Her eyes look far away again.

  “My grandfather was an engineer, from Baraka,” she begins as if she’s remembering something uncomfortable. “The Shinkyo Corporation had contracted him to help them establish their colony’s resource-mining operations. He was still there when the Apocalypse came, and he could not return home. So he stayed with them, helped them rebuild what had been damaged in the bombing, then helped them bury themselves and build their new fortress-city.

  “He was also a soldier, a warrior, and their warriors initially embraced him. Their warriors taught him their sciences. He even married one of them, and had a child. He made a life with the Shinkyo, and he was happy. But when Hatsumi took Nawa’s seat as Daimyo, the Shinkyo became intolerant, racist, trying to breed purity. My grandmother was murdered by Hatsumi’s ‘police’ for breeding with a ‘sand-dog.’ My grandfather took his daughter—my mother—out into the desert, back to Baraka, but Baraka was gone. So he used his skills and they made their lives in the desert, hiding from the Shinkyo and the other human predators, and he raised my mother to survive. He taught her what he knew, and then he taught me in turn. But he also taught me I would have to teach myself, to become greater, to walk the path. He wanted me to be greater than the Shinkyo Shinobi, so that I would fear no other man, so that I would survive. But I learned that the path is more important than survival, more important than power. The path is what you become.”

  I nod, letting her know I understand.

  “What happened to your family?”

  “My grandfather left us,” she says after a pause, like she’s having trouble putting her story in words. “He said there was a great evil in the land—something old and more dangerous than even the Shinkyo, something that had been sleeping since the Apocalypse, but was waking up again. He disguised my mother and I as Uqba refugees, left us with Hassim’s father’s tribe. He said he would return for us, but his path did not let him. Years later, my mother was killed in the fighting against Farouk. I had no reason to remain. My path took me back into the desert, to train, to test myself. But alone, I was only scavenging, pitting myself against scouts, not champions.”

  “You joined Farouk’s band?” I ask her as non-judgmentally as I can.

  “The Nomads fight, compete for what little there is—it is not important that my mother was killed by Farouk’s warriors. It is simply the way it is, and I will not be possessed by their endless blood-debt feuds. My mother died as a warrior does.

  “But Farouk is foolish, impulsive. And he was eager to employ me, once I showed him how far my path had taken me. It was easy to use him, since I do not care if he succeeds or fails, lives or dies. In his service, I could train properly.”

  “By fighting meaningless battles?” I criticize objectively.

  “Training needs experience. I have heard you speak of Musashi, who wandered his country and fought sixty duels on his own path to perfection. How many died for no other reason than to test his skills?”

  “He quit that path,” I remind her.

  “When he was done with it,” she completes my point.

  “Are you done with it?” I ask her, locking her eyes.

  “I expect we both have more killing to do,” she returns easily.

  I nod solemnly.

  “You still haven’t told me your name,” I remind her.

  “Do you accept me into your service?” she gets to what she wants.

  “Yes,” I answer impulsively, surprising myself.

  She gives me a small, brief smile, almost looking like a shy young girl, but just for an instant. Her hero has accepted her.

  “What do I call you?”

  “To all others I am the Zauba’a Ghaddar. I will give you my name, but it is only for you. No one else,” she says with the nervous earnestness of a girl in love. I nod my agreement. She looks down for a moment, as if deciding if she can trust me with something precious. Then she smiles again, but there is pain behind her smile. “My mother named me Sakina.”

  “I’m glad to have met you, Sakina, even under such odd circumstances,” I tell her gently. Then I smoothly shift myself until my feet are under me, give her back her grin, which I realize is actually the nervous smile of a bizarre kind of courtship. “Can I get you something? Coffee?”

  “I would like that very much,” the lost little girl inside the desert demon tells me.

  “Holy shit…”

  It’s about all Matthew can say as she hits us again.

  On the Link, I can hear Rios’ squad shouting, cursing. ICWs bark, but they only spray rock. She’s gone like she was never there. And two more of Rios’ men are “dead.”

  Three seconds later, before Rios’ remaining soldiers can even get their bearings, she’s on them again, and they never saw her coming. On the Link feed I can just make out the blur of her red cloak as I hear metal slam H-A laminate plating. Two armor video feeds go static. Another is tumbling. There’s more ICW fire. More shouting. Optical arrays scan the rocky terrain, and MAI tries to lock them any kind of target. Fails.

  “Nobody’s that fast…” Matthew grumbles to himself as he watches the feed, refusing to believe what he’s seeing. But he knows Rios—the Lieutenant is more than competent in the field. Only she’s been eating him alive like he’s academy green.

  Dust from their own fire is reducing visibility, more with every desperate spray they take at her. Rios shouts at them again to discipline their fire, then tries to get what’s left of his team regrouped, tries to get a clear field of fire around them so she can’t jump them again. MAI is trying to give him tactical solutions, trying to model how she may be using the terrain for cover, trying to anticipate her next move. But MAI can’t find her on sound, motion, heat or Terahertz scans, nor can the AI extrapolate her attack pattern. She’s invisible. And she’s unpredictable.

  Nine remaining H-A suits—Rios started with twelve this time—crunch boots on the gravel, crawl forward behind their weapons, carefully fanning out. Rios signals them into a paired staggered skirmish line, warns them again not to rush forward, to stay clear of the deeper ravines until they can be systematically swept. MAI suggests grenades to secure some of the more obvious blind spots, but Rios isn’t willing to waste ordnance blasting at nothing, especially if it will only kick up more dust. I watch through his optics as he surveys his suits as they get low, trying not to make easy targets of themselves, and take the terrain yard-by-yard, rock-by-rock, ditch-by-ditch. Then I watch his gaze turn forward just in time to catch a dark blur come flying right at his face. Even without the bulk of his armor, I doubt he could duck it—the “torpedo” hits him square in the face plate with enough force to send him reeling. I’m surprised it doesn’t crack. His video feed jars as he goes down on his butt.

  “Stay down, Lieutenant,” I tell him. “You’re dead.” MAI agrees and silences his feed to his remaining teammates. I expect he’s spitting some choice words into his helmet.

  “Hold!” Sergeant Hendricks tries to take over as the other suits spray stunner simmunitions and lob stun grenades at the most likely origin point of the thrown torpedo, raging to “avenge” their Lieutenant. They do damage to a lot of rock and sand. Waste ammo. “Line discipline!”

  One of the video feeds—this on
e from Specialist Embry, who was on left flank—suddenly jerks straight down and I see the blur of the cloak before something slams her in the faceplate. MAI declares her another “casualty.” But this time the cloaked blur doesn’t simply drop out of sight, fading into the haze and terrain. It leaps high over their line like a bird of prey and lands in the midst of them, and then it whirls. Torpedoes slam two more suits down, almost simultaneously. Then she’s got a hold of two more. She tosses the heavy H-A suits around like they’re empty plastic, throwing one into another, turning their weapons on each other, using them as shields. I hear bodies in armor grunt and gasp for lost wind and curse in protest as MAI declares kill after kill.

  Hendricks is the last to go. She’s sitting on his chest with one of her “knives” wedged into the gap between his helmet and neck armor. I get a good look into her eyes through her goggled demon-mask. She looks like she’s smiling. She also looks like she’s barely breathing hard. Hendricks offers her his open hands in surrender, but she takes her time letting him up.

  “Game over,” Matthew admits wearily. “Signal end of exercise.”

  Sergeant Horst, playing field observer, calls it.

  “How many does that make?” I ask Matthew idly. He knows I’ve been keeping count.

  “Four different simulations, same outcome,” Horst confirms as we sit around the conference table barely an hour later, the holo-screen replaying MAI’s reconstructions. “She gets inside the perimeter unseen, breaches the base without making so much as a hiccup on our security sensors, does damage to a variety of critical targets, steals essential gear, neutralizes whatever resistance that can respond, gets out before we know she’s out, then neutralizes her ground pursuit. All without the benefit of a firearm. All without taking one confirmed hit.”

  “Scary bitch,” Matthew mutters sideways. Then to me specifically: “You still sure it’s wise to let her shack up with you?”

  MAI’s feed shows her back in my quarters—now that the internal security feeds have been restored since her initial entry this morning—sitting cross-legged on my bed, perfectly still. Her mask is off, but her cloaks and body armor are still on. And she’s got her real weapons back, not the blunted “practice” pieces Morales quickly machined for our little war games.

  “I checked with Abbas,” I try to reassure him. “He confirms it’s tradition for a tribal lord’s chief bodyguard to sleep near his bed.”

  “None of your officers are even remotely comfortable with this,” he reminds me, “even if you two have got this creepy bond or whatever going,” he rewords what I’d tried to explain to him to convince him not to try to arrest her or evict her by force, even though she not only broke into the base undetected, but found her way into my bedroom. “I see it now,” he half-sarcastically agrees, watching her on the feed. “She reminds me of you, when you were that age.”

  On the feed, her face turns up and looks into the camera. She smiles her half-smile.

  “She could not have heard me,” Matthew protests in a whisper. “Definitely reminds me of you.”

  I catch Lisa’s eyes locked on me from across the table. She’s worried—probably terrified—but she won’t tell me so, not even as my Operations Commander. And there’s something else… Jealousy? She seems to catch the question in my eyes and looks away.

  (Bad thoughts: Sakina does resemble Lisa. And both got my attention by getting the drop on me. I shake off the implications.)

  “We just gave her the parameters and let her go,” Anton tries to process, his awe almost overshadowing how unsettled he sounds. “She ran her attack four times four different ways with barely ten minutes between entries to prep. How does anybody do that?”

  “I can’t wrap my head around this either,” Rick protests. “You’re sure she’s not nano-enhanced?”

  “She willingly gave us blood and a tissue sample,” Halley confirms, calling up the results. “She even seemed offended at the suggestion.”

  I nod. “I think she needs to prove she can be better than a nano-hybrid with what nature gave her.”

  “Granola Girl of Death,” Matthew jokes darkly. “Might want to keep her away from the Blues Brothers.” But then he goes quiet quick when he sees the look in my eyes—we haven’t heard a word from the ETE about Paul or Simon since the Shinkyo tore them up with that nuke. That was six days ago.

  “I’d guess her to be between twenty-five and thirty,” Halley summarizes her initial exam. “Excellent health, considering the environment. No UV damage, no sign of radiation sickness. Good hydration. Development shows exceptional nutrition—if she lived on the surface, she kept fed, most likely with access to supplements. Passive scans show somewhat unusual bone and muscle development, but not low-G wasting. If anything, she’s built like a young Olympic gymnast. It may reflect what the Nomads told us about their weight-bearing discipline—she’s wearing what would easily be more than her body weight in armor, and she moves in it like it’s nothing. She told Colonel Ram she’s been ‘training’ obsessively since she was a small child. We’d speculated over the years as to what the human body could achieve biomechanically given this low-gravity environment. Even after two generations on-planet, she still has the genetics to build muscle and bone enough to handle Earth gravity, and it appears she’s gone to extreme lengths to maximize what she’s got naturally. It’s like the best of both worlds. I’d guess she’s probably at least twice as strong as any of us, pound-for-pound, with the speed and coordination to match.”

  “And she knows how to use it,” Rios assesses, still visibly smarting from getting his armored ass kicked four times in a row.

  “Imagine what she could do if she took off all that metal,” Anton considers, watching her on his screen, then catches himself with a blush: “That probably didn’t sound right.”

  “She can throw her big knives hard and fast enough to crack our armor,” Rick repeats what we’ve seen. “And she’s accurate enough to hit between the plates even at twenty meters. And those big metal spikes of hers—her ‘torpedoes’—weigh enough to break your neck or cave your chest in even if they didn’t just punch right through you like a bullet. And then there’s her garrote…” He calls up a diagram of two short blades that connect pommel-to-pommel, but spin apart, with a thin wire spooled inside to connect them. “…the monofilament line is nano-manufacture, possibly a Shinkyo device. She gets this around you, it could take your head or arm or leg off in one jerk.”

  “Her breaking gear is SOF issue,” Matthew confirms. “Inventoried to a unit stationed at Freedom Colony.”

  “She said the men she took it from looked like Nomads but wore our uniforms,” I repeat.

  “PK?” Horst wonders.

  “Too far from any confirmed ‘Keep’,” I discount.

  “Either descendants of our people or raiders who scored our gear,” Matthew reasons.

  “It’d be nice to believe the former,” Halley hopes.

  “Your girl have any other intel on the subject?” Matthew asks, then realizes he probably just added to the general discomfort by calling her “my girl”.

  “Farouk displaced other indigenous groups when he moved into the area,” I relay Abbas’ version. “No sense that any of those tribes were ex-UNMAC.”

  “Could have been assimilated,” Lisa offers.

  “An explanation for CROATOAN?” Matthew reaches.

  “Her base plans were from classified construction blueprints,” Anton changes topics when speculation dries up, calling up the files downloaded from her flashcard. “If she says she got them from Shinkyo, it would explain how our ninja visitors knew their way around so well.”

  “Is she Shinkyo?” Lisa confronts. “Some new ruse to get in?”

  “If she was Shinkyo, I’d think she’d have taken us apart by now,” I defend, despite how practical my team is being. “Or they would have before this, because they’d have more like her.”

  “You said yourself, the bastards always have multiple motives for anything they
do,” Matthew reminds me.

  “She’s definitely better at what she does that they were,” Rios readily agrees, “despite how scary that thought is. But if the Shinkyo ninja can do a fraction of what she can, we need to rethink our defenses.”

  “You think she’s really here to help us?” Lisa asks me directly. I glance across the table at Tru, who hasn’t said a word. She won’t meet my eyes now. I finally answer with a shrug.

  “Is she here on Farouk’s orders?” Lisa tries another likely tack.

  “Farouk strikes me as greedy and impatient, if not dangerously foolhardy. He would have sent her to break us open, leave us for the taking. Again: She could have done that already.”

  “And she wouldn’t just show us how she could,” Rios tries.

  “Unless she’s trying to intimidate,” Matthew counters, “show us she lives up to her mythical reputation.”

  “Or playing with us is part of the plan,” Lisa follows. “In which case, we need to figure out the plan.”

  On the security feed, I watch her sit in my room, perfectly still, her body settled, her face peaceful. Like she’s at home.

  “She’s a valuable asset,” I assess flatly. “She’s worth some risk. But that doesn’t mean we let our guard down.”