“So far the only countermeasure is us,” I give him the uncomfortable truth. I look at Jackson. “And yes, I know this fits right into your theory about us, Colonel. The only known protection is conversion, modification, hybridization. But if that was the plan, if we even had the ability to do that at will, why haven’t we offered it to the at-risk locals?”
“Because they’re the bait, the sell,” he comes back fast. “We see what happens to them, and we beg you to ‘save’ us, line up for slaughter.”
“And Asmodeus will happily play into that fear. But the fact is: I’m not contagious. None of those like me are. I have no way to prove that, just like I have no way to make you trust that I wouldn’t convert more people into what I am if I could. I’ve seen that world. I know what it does to us. And you should be terrified of it.”
“There has to be another way,” Lisa hopes.
“We’ve tried to use our tech to surgically hunt down and neutralize all the seeds in a victim through direct contact, but we haven’t been successful,” I risk admitting. I see Jackson lick the inside of his lips, simultaneously squirming and validated, but he already knows we can extend our tech into whatever we can make physical contact with.
“EMR?” Richards guesses, keeping the briefing productive.
“The body shields the seeds too well, and they’re too hardy,” I shoot that down. “You’d have to use so much current that you’d kill the host.”
“What about once they get to the brain stem?” Jackson actually asks a constructive, thoughtful question. “You said they gather there. Can they be extracted micro-surgically at that point?” The last part still managed to sound accusatory.
“Maybe. But it’s invasive, risky. The host would be damaged for life. At that point, they already are. And if you don’t get all the seeds, they’ll replicate and start again.”
“What about the ETE?” Richards changes tacks.
“Also working on a solution.” Or I assume they are. I haven’t heard back from Paul. I think that needs to be my next stop. I can only hope they’ve decided to collectively take their heads out and get back in the fight.
“You gave samples of this technology to the ETE?” Jackson jumps on that like I’ve given them a weapon.
“Either they’re what they say they are, or they’re the engineers of this,” I use Jackson’s own argument. “If they are the latter, then I only gave them what they made.”
But I get another smirk from his partial mouth.
“You may or may not be able to infect others with your technology, but we know the ETE can, and do infect their own children. So if my ‘baseless paranoia’ is right, I’m betting they will conveniently come up with a ‘cure’.”
“And I know none of you will ever accept a cure that entails nanotech implantation, not unless you can be absolutely sure it’s safe,” I give. “That’s why I gave you the samples to study. Hopefully you can come up with your own countermeasure.” I look at Jackson. “And if you don’t believe I’ve given you the real thing, I’m afraid you’ll have plenty of opportunities to get your own soon enough.”
This gets followed by a tense silence as they digest what they’re facing.
“UNMAC Earthside is probably going to insist that we move to evacuate the vulnerable populations in the region,” Richards voices one of my fears before Jackson can celebrate it.
“The Katar and the Pax won’t budge,” I remind them of the obvious. “The Pax are very good at hiding in the growth.”
“And the Katar now have a significant number of captured Chang bots and drones,” Jackson goes right back into strategic paranoia.
“Those bots have been permanently altered,” I update them, not that it will soothe Jackson and his like. “They can no longer be slaved to a remote command signal. They protect Katar by the choice of their organic processing components.”
“’Organic processing components,’” Jackson repeats my choice of wording. “Those would be the human brains Fohat butchered out of their wounded soldiers. So they’re former enemy combatants, suffering God knows what kind of psychological and neurological trauma? And you consider them reliable assets?”
“We can monitor their function,” I keep it vague, not specifying Dee’s role in that equation.
“Which means you control them,” Jackson prosecutes. “So are they there to protect the Katar, or enslave them?”
It’s my turn to smirk.
“We can keep playing this game of faith, Colonel: I have no other way to prove my intentions than by my actions, and you can interpret those actions any way you like. But isn’t that the nature of alliance in war? We use each other out of necessity. Maybe that leads to a lasting relationship of mutual benefit. Maybe one side turns on the other. History certainly has enough examples of either. What’s the saying? ‘Hope for the best…’”
“’…prepare for war,’” he mixes sentiments. “Would you trust you, if you were in my position?”
“No,” I readily admit. “But I would use an asset. With precautions.”
“And you keep saying we have no precautions against you. Unless you’re willing to show us how to destroy you?”
I don’t grace that trap with an answer, even when the answer is that the last man who tried ended up a walking silhouette, broken with grief. As far as I know, the only thing that can destroy us is Yod.
I’m sure my silence on the matter is being interpreted through Jackson’s paranoia.
“Can we kill Asmodeus?” Richards redirects our ‘negotiations’ back to the practical again, however dead-ended. But since I almost trust him:
“You can damage his body, but if anything at all survives, he can regenerate,” I give them the ultimate challenge. “And at that point, he will be infectious. His nanites will seek whatever or whoever is handy for resources to rebuild.”
“The only ones safe in that situation are others like us,” Lisa finishes.
“So we have to ultimately trust you with the disposition of the enemy,” Jackson joyfully criticizes.
“We need to get those people out of harm’s way,” Richards again refocuses. “If they won’t relocate, they at least need to accept protection, military assistance.”
“That puts your people at risk,” I warn, though I’m certainly not refusing the help.
“And creates a potential vector back to our main force,” Jackson extrapolates.
“Then we need an effective way to detect infection,” Lisa gives Richards a fresh priority. I catch that she’s still referring to herself as part of UNMAC. He gives her a nod of agreement.
“What’s the status of Eureka Colony?” Jackson asks like he would actually believe what I tell him, looking at the map.
“It was a PK-held site, similar to Industry and the others, but smaller. A recent battle with the Katar decimated the local PK force and drove the survivors to fall-back positions, leaving their civilian population behind.” I’m editing out Drake’s part of that action. And that I introduced a virus written by Dee that disabled all the PK smart weapons to keep them from preying on their own civilians, since it’s a tactic I could—and might have to—use on the UNMAC forces if things go that wrong.
“We could evacuate the civilians,” Jackson suggests like he’s already decided. “They’re used to obeying a military authority, so they’re likely to comply. Resistance should be minimal.”
My slow measured exhale sounds like a growl. He really doesn’t hear himself—it’s too much what he is. But it confirms exactly the kind of people I’m dealing with.
Lisa shoots me a look that says don’t push it, that there’s no point and it will only make it worse. But these bastards are absolutely comfortable with taking away the freedom of others “for their own good,” and doing it by force is only a small annoyance to them.
I look at Richards, and I think I do see hope that Jackson doesn’t speak for everyone on that fucked-up planet, but there are too many in power to dare resisting.
I rem
ember a sad fact of human history: Fascism may enforce its will with violence and intimidation, but they tend to initially come into that power by popular support. Apparently that hasn’t changed.
“And what about the PK garrison?” I have to ask, just to make Jackson say it. “They certainly won’t comply without resistance.”
But Jackson won’t say it. He just looks at me with his self-righteous self-assured half-smirk.
“We’ll be wasting our time and resources,” Lisa interjects. “And that’s what Asmodeus wants. He’s all about manipulation, distraction.”
She calls up footage of the wreck of the second Stormcloud, holed and broken by an orbital rail-gun strike. It lies twisted and ripped open across the base slopes of a lone mountain that I know is a dozen klicks east of Katar. I remember what the first Stormcloud looked like after it took such a direct strike: it had a massive hole dead-center through decks and keel, but it was still together. And then it self-repaired and got airborne again. All that’s left of this ship is a mangled, shredded skeleton. There’s not nearly as much metal.
“We’ve gotten a basic look over the wreck. Compared to the first ship, this one barely had the superstructure to keep it together,” Richards fills in. “Our engineers say it was amazing that it stayed in the air as long as it did.”
“Like a theatrical prop.” I’m not surprised.
“The reactor cores were also barely hot,” Richards continues. “Unless you have some trick for soaking up neutron radiation and depleting fuel cells, we can’t figure how it was flying at all.”
Another subject there’s no way I can address because it means telling them about Yod, so I keep silent, as if I’m giving the puzzle some thought.
“Asmodeus plays every move knowing what we’ll likely do in response,” Lisa continues, moving the conversation along. “So he knows we’ll prioritize removing the locals, and what kind of a quagmire that will sink us in if we try to.”
“And any bloodshed that causes will not only amuse him,” I warn, “he’s probably counting on it.”
“Then he takes advantage of the chaos,” Lisa finishes the thought.
“He’s already threatened to find a way back to Earth,” Richards considers the worst. “If he’s perfecting a means to insert himself into any of us, we need to keep our guard up, minimize his opportunity.”
“Then he’ll do something to draw you out,” I state the obvious.
“Isn’t that why you’re here?” Jackson accuses.
When I don’t bother to answer, he goes after me again:
“If I understand, you’re saying that no matter what we do, it’s what Asmodeus wants us to do. And we’ll lose. Unless we do as you say, accept your gracious ‘help.’”
I give him a noncommittal nod, like I don’t care what he does.
“Then I think we’re done here,” Jackson declares, looking at Richards.
“We’ll take the intel you’ve provided up the chain, Colonel,” Richards doesn’t fully shut the door on me. “Hopefully we can come up with something effective. As for any further cooperation between us, that isn’t up to me, but I expect it will be easy enough to contact you when I have our decision.”
“Thank you, General.”
We all stand. Rios opens the hatch and makes room for me to pass. Lisa doesn’t immediately move away—as we stand, she’s at my left shoulder. I feel the touch of her fingers on the back of my forearm armor, just for a second. I don’t react. I offer Richards my hand again, and he takes it again. I expect he’s already earned a thorough contamination screening.
As I pass back down the corridor, I catch Lyra’s eyes on me again through the polycarb viewport. She gives me a nod like she’s thanking me for what I’ve given her.
“Colonel Ram,” Jackson calls out to me as I’m cycling into the airlock. “If you are what you say you are, who you say you are… don’t expect that will carry the weight you think it will. You were never supposed to be Planetary Commander. That only happened because Colonel Copeland conveniently disappeared.”
“Colonel Jackson,” Richards calls after him from the cockpit hatch, reining him in a bit.
“Cal Copeland died bravely, General,” I let him know, honoring the memory of a good man. “Looking for survivors, searching for signals. He got in trouble out in the open desert, too far from home. Alone.”
“And you know this how?” Jackson continues to be universally suspicious.
“A good friend of mine found his body,” I tell him another sanitized partial truth.
“Abu Abbas?” Jackson assumes, saying the name with more than a little contempt—another primitive who wouldn’t obey.
“Abu Abbas is dead,” I say icily. “He also died bravely, fighting for strangers that had no reason to trust him.”
I see the news hit Lisa hard. And Rios. I’m immediately sorry they had to hear it like this.
“Colonel,” Jackson won’t quit, but his tone is a little softer now. “I’m willing to give you the benefit of this one doubt: Maybe you really don’t know the agenda you serve. Maybe you’ve just been programmed to believe you’re doing what you say you are, at least until the time comes for your real programming to be activated. Maybe you all are.”
And that shakes me. I try not to show it, try not to show any response at all. But I can’t deny that his doubt is a simpler version of my own, because I know Yod remade me, remade us all, body and mind, to serve his agenda, his plan, whatever that is. He made Chang believe he was a villain, so completely that his choices may not have been his own at all.
“Fair enough.”
I hike back to my flyer, take back my gun and sword, but don’t bother with my helmet. Other than confirming how immovable their fears are, I can’t help but feel my effort here was wasted. They’ll never trust us, no matter what we do—they see everything though the lenses of their confident righteousness and paranoia. And while they might manage an effective detection system, they probably won’t be able to develop an effective “cure” for Harvester infection, because the only viable one will be a nanotech counter-agent, and they’re irrationally terrified of biological nanotechnology.
Asmodeus knows that.
Asmodeus could probably have predicted every paranoid angle Jackson just spewed at me, and he’ll be happy to feed that madness.
But as I’m about to spin up and lift off, I feel something, a signal interfacing with me, downloading on a sympathetic frequency. I search for the source, and realize it’s in physical contact with me, with my left arm.
Lisa used her brief touch to leave a nano-drive, circumventing their monitoring for signals between us. She’s been mastering her Mods. (Though it’s telling that she didn’t pass the drive until after our meeting went to hell, like she was hoping she wouldn’t need to commit this act of treason.)
I sift through the files. She’s given me updates on Earthside’s progress toward re-establishing a foothold on this planet, the resources they’ve recently dropped on-planet and what’s building up in orbit, and what she expects is imminently incoming.
It’s a staggeringly massive list, with sub-manifests earmarked for restoring and expanding Melas Two, rebuilding Melas Three, expanding the orbital facilities, and then defending them: Guns, ordnance, aircraft, and personnel. Despite the Quarantine keeping this a one-way trip, they’ve already brought over two thousand “volunteers” to Mars, and have nearly twice that many on the way.
And the most revealing detail is that the vast majority are listed as military, not medical teams or construction crews. I feel a chill to my core.
It’s worse than I thought: Earth is escalating. They’re gearing up for war, a war Mars has never seen, not even at the height of the Disc attacks and Eco conflicts.
I look back at the Leviathan, at the ASVs and the soldiers guarding them. These people have never fought a war in their lifetimes, not one like they’re facing. They have no idea what they’re doing, what they’re about to march and fly into. The only one
s who do are some of the local factions and the personnel and former Ecos that slept alongside me at Melas Two through the long decades, and none of them are trusted by Earthside Command.
This is going to be a meatgrinder.
Chapter 3: Dire Maker
I shouldn’t be here. I know that. It eats at me with every second I’m wasting.
I should be back in the fight, back out in the “real world”, not in this pocket of preserved memory, this morbid keepsake of a nostalgic false god.
But then, here shouldn’t be here. The place and I have that in common.
It’s not just that it’s such a glaring oversight, no matter how intentional, in Yod’s remaking of the world, of two worlds. It’s that it still being here, left as-was when everything and everyone else was reshaped on a molecular level, seems to serve no purpose at all other than to remind a functionally omnipresent omniscient and omnipotent manufactured entity where he came from, where he was “born”. (And I only habitually call him “he” rather than “it” because so far he’s consistently appeared as a male avatar to interact with us lesser beings, always wearing the face of a trusted old friend.) It’s hard enough to believe that such a being, something that supposedly turned out to be so far beyond the petty humans who made him, would be petty (be human) enough hang onto such an empty memento. That makes its continued existence essentially unbelievable, unnecessary. But far worse: Its presence, no matter how well-hidden, is insanely dangerous, an absolutely unacceptable risk. Should this place ever be discovered by Earthside (and it’s hidden right under their satellite noses), it’ll be proof of what Yod did. Big lies about time travel and quantum teleportation and pocket dimensions won’t hold up at all if they ever find this place. It’s the booth for the-man-behind-the-curtain. Any good look at anything here and it all falls apart.
I can understand preserving Haven, even though it’s not much more than a human zoo, a living museum to hang on to the one part of the erased past that was (according to Yod) worth saving. But this place? This is just an empty tomb; a monument to our mistakes, and to the unspeakable atrocity we committed in our desperation to undo them.
The God Mars Book Six: Valhalla I Am Coming Page 5
