“They did what they thought they had to,” I defend poorly.
“You don’t believe that bullshit any more than I do. They liked it. They liked their elite fucking lives, being able to kill whoever they wanted and jack up their precious scores… How does that not fit into your definition of evil? Your buddy Murphy was the only one of them I’ve seen who had a fucking soul, and they treated him like freak, a traitor.”
“What did you do?” I confront her, expecting some impulsive atrocity.
“Nothing,” she seems to take satisfaction in assuring me. “They can have their domes. They don’t even realize it’s their cage. The rest of the world…” She gestures to the Cast with her. “…the rest of the world is theirs.”
“The Cast?” I need her to clarify.
“No, you thick dickhead. Everybody who lives here, who’s sweated and bled and died to make a life here since their grandparents were all left for dead. It’s their world—your own words, I believe. And we’re going to help them keep it. Or is that not The Plan anymore?”
“That is still the plan,” I reassure. On camera.
“Good…” She gets a little softer, like she was actually afraid of what my answer would be. “Because without that, all we’ve got is fucking and killing.” She gives me a little lopsided grin. “When you came to tell me about Asmodeus… about…” She glances at the cameraman, and impressively edits herself, discreetly flashing “Yod” into my head instead of saying it out loud. “…you were all business again, like you were before you got Modded. Like you started to get again after you found your purpose, whatever that was, in that other fucked-up world we’d made…”
Yod, I confirm in her head. She nods.
“That’s what took you away from me then,” she admits, the old pain in her chrome eyes. “That’s why I…” She suddenly turns on the cameraman: “Are you getting this, asshole?”
The cameraman looks like he’s completely shit himself. I put up a hand between them, trying to convince him he’s not in immediate mortal danger. I’m sure I failed.
But she’s right: When I became this, became immortal, life devolved into meaningless fucking, just to pass the years. That’s what I used her for. That’s what she used me for. It wasn’t love as much as it was our nano-enhanced hormones. And when I found something better, something more important, I forgot her. And then I got upset when she acted out, trying to get her distractions elsewhere.
I can’t help but think of Lux. It only took maybe a day of feeling immortally useless and I’m back to the old distraction with the nearest willing body. But then, back at Tranquility, I was alternately fucking Kali and then Star, and I had purpose. But I also had time on my hands.
Is that it? Is that what immortality has done to me? Do I only engage in the ultimate expression of human intimacy because I have nothing more pressing to do at the time?
Kali is looking into my eyes, giving me a wordless nod, letting me know I’m not the only one who’s fallen into this trap.
I realize I’m hearing jets.
“Shit!” Horton snaps me out of my selfish self-pity.
We’ve delayed here too long. The ships have come back to pick up the stragglers holding the exfil points.
“We won’t make it in time.”
“It’s ten klicks back to your shithole of a base,” Kali sighs at our group as they start to look panicked, frozen. “In a beautiful alien forest… In one-third gravity… We’ll carry you, for fuck’s sake.”
They don’t need to carry us, but we’re grateful for the escort. I carry Ryan, who’s still in-and-out of sense, mumbling about getting his dailies uploaded, calling for makeup.
We don’t run across any more Harvesters, but when we pass an exfil LZ, we see a handful of bodies left behind wearing H-A shells, all shot through their visors. I consider stopping to make sure they won’t reanimate, but don’t want to take the time when we have wounded.
We’ll come back later, Kali assures in my head. Clean this up. She pauses, turns back to look me over quizzically. So why the new look?
This isn’t the time to be playing dress-up.
I hear her harrumph at that, considering she looks even more outlandish since she decided to use the optical Mod she hacked from Chang to turn herself neon blue.
Where’s your sword? she grunts like I’ve forgotten my pants.
Lost it in the bombing, I go ahead and tell her. Another thing I can’t afford right now. The Harvesters are programmed just like the Bots were: as soon as they detect we’re Modded, they avoid us. Chasing them down to chop them one at a time wastes too much time.
You really are on-mission, aren’t you? she grumbles, and accelerates her pace, leaving me behind, putting forest between us.
“How are you handling this, Mak?” I ask discreetly as we walk.
She shrugs, idly wiping the gore from the knives she took the time to recover.
“It is a gift,” she’s almost convincing. “Time will show it better, like any living thing.”
The cameraman is still filming. I should erase his drives. If Earthside learns that the Cast are “infected” by ETE tech, and that one of my kind did it, can do it… But I can’t erase the human witnesses. Won’t.
He catches my eye on him, tries not to look terrified, like he does expect me to kill him (or do something worse that UNCORT’s programmed him to imagine). I can hear him sigh in relief when I ignore him, let him be.
I suppose by letting him keep his video record, I’m probably sparing them all some kind of enhanced interrogation when they get “home”. Earthside will certainly seize everything he’s recorded, and UNCORT will be able to see and hear it all for themselves. What I expect I’m not sparing them is the invasive exams they’ll all get just for being in proximity to us.
And Ryan and Horton…
“You’re infected,” Kali identifies Horton’s condition, having been hovering around him like a hungry cat for the last three klicks.
Horton doesn’t confirm, but Lyra and Sharp look crushed.
Kali puts herself in front of him.
“I can fix it. I can fix you.”
She winds up walking backwards as he ignores her and keeps marching. She puts her hand on his shoulder, stops him, goes nose-to-blue-nose with him.
“I was a soldier, and operator, just like you,” she tells him. “I’m offering you a weapon, sergeant. To keep you in this fight. To help you in this fight. Are you going to refuse it, because of a duty to idiots who are going to get all of you killed?” She sniffs him like an animal. “You’re not new-drop. I can smell it on them…” She jerks her head at Sharp. “…the vegan shit they eat, the self-righteous purity, the pathetic submissiveness, the paralyzing fear of pretty much everything…” Then she nods her head sideways at me. “You’re one of his. I can smell that on you.”
She lets him go, steps out of his way. But he doesn’t start moving immediately.
“You’d give the ETE tech you have to UNMAC?” he asks her flatly.
“No. But I’d give it to you. One soldier to another.” She looks at Sharp, at Lyra, at the rest of our company. “None of you are getting off this planet alive. And you’re going to keep serving the shitheads that are going to guarantee that.”
She turns and goes back on point. Horton shoots me a look. There’s doubt in his eyes, and rage. He’s willing to die in the line, he’s resigned himself to it, accepted it, but he doesn’t want to die stupid. And Kali is offering him a weapon.
I can’t tell him what to do. I have no right to.
We all keep moving forward.
When did you do this? I ask Kali discreetly as I follow a few steps behind her as she strides through the forest with the grace of a wild animal born to it. When did you start converting them?
Not the second you told me about Asmodeus and his zom-borgs, if that’s what you’re thinking, she answers in kind. I can feel her grin even though her back is turned to me. Give me a little credit, lover. I waited, thought
about it long and hard. It was Bel… He told me what had happened here, how Earth had blown up a miracle of engineering, a true wonder of this planet, and buried you in the deal. We need to be stronger than those stupid fascist fucks. They need to be stronger. She gestures backhanded at Mak.
You’ve condemned them… I start to argue.
Earth isn’t going to accept them either way. I can tell her grin is gone, replaced by a snarl, even with her back to me. Earth sees everybody here as savage freaks. To be studied. Contained. And eventually eliminated. Do you think Earth is going to let any of these people keep living their lives here? Let them keep breeding, raising families? If Earth has their way, every faction on this planet will be history within a generation, and you know it.
She’s right and she knows it. Her problem is she isn’t willing to temper it.
How did you do it? I try another tack.
Asmodeus gave me the idea. Sort of. You said he figured out he could hack the science he needed to make the Harvesters out of Fohat, that he probably hacked Chang for his skill sets too. So that made me think: What else did I get from Chang when I had myself spliced into him? And lo-and-behold: I’ve got a head full of nanotech science. I just know it. Surreal…
And it may have happened that way, but I can’t help but wonder what hand Yod may have had in it. I need help with the Asmodeus threat, and here’s Kali with an instant army of Harvester-proof warriors. I suppose I could press her, subtly interrogate her about why she’s really here, how she got the idea, to try to reveal a Yod manipulation. But I doubt Yod would let her see it if he did mess with her head.
This pervasive existential paranoia makes me think about how Kali got to be here in this Yod-rewritten version of the world the first place: She told me that she’d met Yod before the overwrite, that he’d shown her a better path, promised her some kind of peace or meaning or both. I don’t remember that. I don’t remember her being any part of the Project. (Not yet, anyway. A Yod oversight?) Did she follow me into it, without me knowing, without Yod telling me?
The only story I know is that I brought her Seed, and Lisa’s (and one more I’m still carrying whose identity I don’t know). Either Yod loaded me with those Seeds without me knowing or it was my choice, or at least by my agreement, and still I don’t remember choosing or agreeing.
If the choice was mine, given the desperation of that damned (and now mostly-erased) world that I do remember, would I have chosen Kali? (It’s like one of those old thought experiments I did in school: If you were stuck on an alien world and could only bring three other people with you, who would you pick?) Lisa, absolutely. But Kali…
Of the assets I’d want to have in any bad fight, Astarte and Dee were already in place. Lisa and Calliope were the only other ones still alive, the only other ones who’d accepted Modded immortality. Matthew refused Modding and let himself die of cancer. Alexi had died peacefully in his sleep years before the tech was available. Mark and Janey retired out of the game to have at least part of a life. So did Marcus and Haidar and Dave. (And Rick, too, but somehow the unlucky bastard is still here in this world. And I know that means he’s probably a Yod-made copy like Matthew was.)
So I suppose I would have picked her, given that limited choice. (And I was certainly pissed enough with her to drag her ass into this.)
But then, who’s my third Seed? I can’t even manage a guess. Unfortunately, there’s apparently only one way to find out, and my curiosity isn’t worth anyone’s life.
As I push through the interwoven forest in Kali’s wake, I reflect on how much walking I’ve been doing on this planet since I was re-Modded, and walking consistently keeps sending me into these useless broodings. Despite all the time I’ve spent in meditation, I just can’t seem to stay in the moment anymore. Not even here. This forest is far more beautiful than it is dangerous (especially to me), a miracle of life and science. (And so were the partially-terraformed deserts of Melas and western Coprates, which I’ve also put a lot of under my boots.) I try to enjoy it now—we’re not under immediate attack—simply exist in the few cubic meters of lush, hardy green that’s immediately all around me; smell the life in the thin, cool air; be in the fucking moment…
But I can’t. Within two seconds, I’m thinking about how much lusher this forest was before Yod’s rewrite. Not that I’d ever actually visited this part of the planet before the so-called “Event”, but in that version of reality we’d landed massive chunks of comet ice in the valleys, created standing lakes; we’d built up a thick, stable atmosphere. But in resetting the planet to the way it was sixty or seventy years before, Yod had to turn all of it back into a near-airless barren wasteland, disintegrating everything that had managed to grow here just for the sake of a theatrical deception, undo everything that we—and life itself—had made.
That makes me freshly angry. And makes me chuckle like a madman because I’m suddenly wanting to avenge a bunch of plants.
Kali turns her head back my way briefly to shoot me a grin. Either she’s been reading my train of thought or simply sharing in my pervasive sense that all of this is so completely insanely fucked.
“What?” Lyra wants to know what’s making me snicker, edging up close.
“Maybe I’ll tell you later.” Of course, I know my promises are worth shit to her. I hear her sigh in frustration under her breath as she falls back behind me.
“So she’s your wife?” Horton starts an even less comfortable subject, on my other side, keeping his weapon on the forest on our flank. I’m assuming he’s asking because of Kali’s propositions.
“Ex-wife,” I grumble, and see Kali shake her head in exasperation. So I explain (knowing I’m still on camera): “When we all became immortal, there was no more ‘til death do you part’, so marriage contracts were time-limited. I let it expire.” And that’s the nicest way I can put it.
“He found a mission,” Kali doesn’t let me dodge. “Save the world that we all fucked up. He does that. Then he forgets everything else. Everyone else. Ask your Colonel Ava. Way back when he found out his bosses were involved in a global conspiracy—and worse, using him to do it—and all he cared about was ending them. She loved him, and he left her without a second thought, didn’t even say goodbye. That’s your great hero: give him a choice between making love and making war, and he’ll pick war every fucking time.”
And that kills the conversation pretty effectively.
By the time we make the boundary of the cleared zone around the crater mount, it looks and sounds like all flights have made it back and have touched down on their makeshift airfield up on the plateau. From down here, I can’t see how many they’ve brought back, or how many injured.
Horton calls in, lets their command know that we’re friendlies approaching, and that we have wounded, including a civilian VIP. He steps out of the green to let their sentries see him, waves. Kali and the Cast wisely stay out of sight, but I decide not to. I move out into the open, still lugging Ryan over my shoulder.
And then I hear more gunfire.
It’s sporadic at first, and far off, echoing. It’s coming from up on the plateau, where we can’t see, and quickly escalates as more guns join in. Then there’s an explosion that I’m sure is another aircraft being blown.
I hear a fresh storm of panicked chatter on the link channels: There are Harvesters inside the perimeter, inside the compound. Their command actually responds in disbelief for a few precious seconds, because nothing was seen crossing the cleared zone. But then they get confirmation: The drones are coming out of the ground, out of the blasted crater bowl and the rocks of the rim plateau.
Asmodeus must have buried some there, maybe in whatever tunnels did survive, maybe just below the surface, anticipating that UNMAC might find and hit his base, and then—just like at the Pax mountain—they’d put boots on the ground to mop up. The fact that they actually built a base there instead probably made him ecstatic. And now he’s timed the drones he’d salted there to hit them just as they’r
e limping home from the deadly humiliation he just dealt them.
“Stay!” I order Kali and the others. And run. (More running.) Across the cleared zone. I’m already scrambling up-slope when I realize Kali is right behind me, catching up fast.
“Get back to the trees!” I repeat my order over my shoulder.
“You haven’t been my CO since you got young and started fucking me,” she throws back, actually passing me, loping on all fours like an animal.
“They think we’re all part of some conspiracy to infect Earth,” I explain as succinctly as I can as I chase her. “They think anything we do for them is just a way to manipulate them.”
“Then why are you bothering?” she challenges over her shoulder, knowing the answer. She sends rocks sliding down into my path, probably on purpose.
“You can’t let them see the Modded Cast,” I insist.
“They’re back watching the wounded, your entourage,” she assures poorly.
“Your presence isn’t helping, Kal,” I have to stop her. “They see you like that, they’ll…”
But as I’m saying it, her skin shifts from blue back to its original pale and freckled.
“Explains why you decided to go frumpy today,” she criticizes. “Dressing down for the neo-puritan fuckwads.” But I’m grateful for the gesture.
There’s another explosion before we make it to the top. From the color and size of the flash-brief mushroom fireball, I’d guess a fuel reservoir just got burst.
We make the plateau, take a quick scan, and thankfully don’t get shot at. But then the Earth force is too busy: I can see Harvesters climbing up out of the crater bowl, digging themselves out of the recent construction on the plateau, coming up the western and southern slopes. There are already a few dozen inside the base perimeter. Most are concentrating on the debarking evacuees. The aircraft have to launch before they’re clear to avoid the shoulder-fired rockets that a few of the drones are lugging. (The rockets are probably set to fire automatically as soon as they scan and lock a target—Asmodeus wouldn’t waste precious heavy ordnance relying on the drones’ poor aim.)
The God Mars Book Six: Valhalla I Am Coming Page 14
