I suddenly become conscious of the fact that I’m consistently having more and more trouble any time I get too close to her (but then the space we’re locked together in isn’t very large). I’m involuntarily distracted, and increasingly aroused. I find my eyes drifting over her, watching her. I keep drinking in her scent. I’m wishing that there was polycarb between us, some kind of solid barrier. I have this overwhelming impulse to touch her. I remember her naked body, her pale skin…
Lisa suddenly chuckling at me snaps me out of it.
“I was just thinking…” she muses at my expense, “did you ever see that old TV show Doctor Who? It ran forever on British television, started when my parents were kids. I just realized you remind me of the main character: Practically immortal, brilliant, charming, eccentric… you even show up with a new face from time-to-time… and he has this disturbing penchant for collecting impressionable young women.”
Lyra blushes, buries her eyes in her screen like she didn’t hear, but I see her fingers tremble as she works the pad. I give Lisa a pained, sarcastic grin, but I’m only pissed because she’s pretty much right on.
“And anywhere he happens to go, some world-threatening horror conveniently strikes, and only he seems to be able to do anything about it,” Jackson’s voice comes over the intercom, letting us know he’s been listening.
“I remember they had an explanation for that on the show,” I deflect.
“They did,” he accepts. “What’s yours?”
“Not many places I can be around here where there won’t be some world-threatening horror.”
I see Lyra smile out of the corner of my eye. And then my eyes drift down the open collar of her jumpsuit, try to make out the curves of her small breasts through the thin fabric. I have to look away.
“Still interrogating?” I prod at Jackson.
“Always,” he tosses back easily. “But actually, I was going to give you the benefit of the doubt about something. Or test your reaction. Specialist Jameson, I need the use of your device.”
Lyra makes room for me to sit next to her on her couch so we can both view the small screen. (I really wish she’d just handed it to me. She smells really good…)
First, I’m looking at aerial footage of a series of craters that look like the Pax bombardment, but in a desert. It takes me several seconds to recognize the surrounding geographic features, and then I have to hold back my desire to punch my way out of this flimsy plastic cell and smash Jackson into a paste.
“You bombarded the City of Industry from orbit,” I accuse him, levelly. The shocked and crushed look in Lisa’s eyes tells me that she didn’t know.
“Two days ago,” he confirms like it’s nothing. “We gave them several clear warnings. When they didn’t respond, we had to assume they had all succumbed to infection.”
“I’m assuming there were no survivors,” I grumble through gritted teeth.
“That’s the confusing part…” He still doesn’t seem to care that he’s killed potentially hundreds of people. The feed shifts to a ground view. The bobbing tells me it’s from a helmet cam. They sent boots in, just like they did at Pax. (And I’m partially hoping I’m going to see a similarly messy outcome.) “There was no sign of any human remains. Not even organic trace. But there was one ‘survivor’…”
Suddenly, in the middle of the devastation, I see a perfectly black figure, a silhouette cut in space. It appeared out of nowhere in a blink, just standing there. I can’t see his face, of course, as he has none visible, but from his posture, I can tell Chang is angry.
The trooper cams zoom in, and I hear them nervously calling for orders. And then the feed goes to pixilated static.
“Twenty-four troopers. Just vanished. Not a trace.” Jackson finally sounds uncomfortable. “The aerial feed blacked out for less than one second, and when it came back up, they were all gone. Right out of their boot-prints.”
The feed shifts. I get combined aerial and ground video of a group of two-dozen troopers in H-A gear, looking dirty and disorganized, moving like they’re in some kind of daze. The surrounding desert has changed. I notice they have no weapons.
“We found them twenty-four hours later, twenty klicks east-southeast from where they were last seen, in the open desert. They have no idea how they got there, no memory of the last day, no video records. And no tracks coming or going. No sign of aircraft landing. And there was nothing on radar or satellite.”
The obvious guess would be Chang, but he didn’t have that kind of power—almost Yod kind of power—the last time I saw him.
“And none of them were harmed?” I ask, incredulous.
“They’re still undergoing tests, but they have no obvious injuries, other than the missing time.” Jackson’s trying to stay casual, objective, clinical, but I can tell he’s deeply unsettled. “Any ideas?”
“None,” I shake my head. But something does strike me: Why did Chang leave them where he left them? Why east-southeast? Was he simply dropping the troops in the general direction of their home base so they’d be more easily found? Or… was he headed there, to exact revenge?
“Any further sign of Chang?” I wonder out loud.
“Negative.” Now he sounds frustrated. “Not at the site. And we’ve increased patrols and sentry remotes, assuming he might be headed for Melas Two.” So he’s already thought of that.
But I consider the bigger picture: Chang didn’t harm those that bombed the home of his former minions, the home I’d assumed he’d left the Barrow to go protect. So the Earth Force may not be his concern. If he is heading east-southeast, he could be coming here, to Coprates.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t be of any help. I’m afraid I’ve never seen anything like this.”
Lisa gives me a deeply worried look, probably imagining what’s headed our way (on top of everything else, real or paranoid fantasy).
The only reaction I get from Jackson is Lyra’s pad resetting back to what she’d been working on. He doesn’t say another word, but I’m sure he’s still watching and listening.
Chapter 8: Apocrypha
I sleep very poorly. It’s not because I’m unaccustomed to the contours of the exam couch—I’ve certainly spent enough time in Melas Two Medical after doing something stupid. It’s because of who I’m having to sleep in such close proximity to. No matter how much I try to ignore her, I keep smelling her—she hasn’t had a shower since before the battle and she either doesn’t wear or hasn’t been issued deodorant. The accumulated pheromones in her sweat are driving me increasingly crazy.
The only way I manage to keep myself under control is to stay angry: angry at myself, angry at Yod, angry at Earthside for sticking me in this pointless, time-wasting situation when I’m trying to save their fucking lives. But then, as soon as I let myself relax, her presence distracts me again. I spend the night in an exhausting cycle of horniness and rage.
I also keep reminding myself of the obvious risk, keep that in the front of my consciousness: If my arousal is being triggered by the last Seed I’m carrying, suddenly urgent for a host or somehow locking on Lyra as the ideal choice, I could destroy her with a touch. She’s only nineteen, maybe twenty. She could still have a whole wonderful life ahead of her, assuming she survives this war. This planet may do it’s best to try to take it from her, Asmodeus might try to take it from her, Earthside might try to take it from her, but I won’t. I refuse. I refuse. And I will do whatever I can to make sure she has that life.
I could be wrong, I know: It may have nothing to do with the anonymous Seed. This could very well just be my Mods ramping up my libido because I’m sitting here with nothing better to do, a meter away from a very attractive very young very…
Stop it. Stop. It.
She’s mortal. She’s mortal. She’s vulnerable. I need to protect her. From things like me.
And I can’t help but worry about what Asmodeus would do to her if he got the chance, and even that gets me aroused, and that makes me sick… Sick. Stay sick…<
br />
Hang on to sick.
It gets us both through the night intact.
Before they bring us breakfast, Doc Ryder makes a surprise appearance, to give me an exam and let me know I’ve got one more old friend and former teammate sitting on a nuke to keep me in line.
Thankfully, she doesn’t make me strip all the way, just my armor and my tunic. She jumps back when I unhook it all with a thought and pull it away like some kind of neat stripper trick.
I quickly realize that I’m not used to being this exposed in proximity to “Normals”, and the last two times I was—with Lisa and then with Fera—I wound up converting them. Ryder and her nurse-tech are in bio-gear, relatively safe (I assume), but Lyra is barely a meter-and-half away, so close…
“You’re in amazing shape for a seventy-three year old,” she jibes as she scans and prods. “I’d say I’m jealous, but I’m sure that’d get me in trouble.” She jerks her head up at the always-watching cameras. She has her own flashcard, but she asks the techs out in the gallery turn their screens so she can see them through the transparency, possibly because she wants me to see as well.
“Huh… This is amazing. Your muscles… your bones… They’re much much denser even than they’d be at Earth gravity… There’s no sign of injury, no scarring…”
This is weird. She has her hands on me, but I don’t feel the urge to take her. She’s certainly an attractive woman. Is it the bio-suit? Or is it the Seed—has it indeed “imprinted” on Lyra? I glance over at her. She’s trying not to look like she’s looking at my ridiculously toned torso, and blushes when I catch her. And that makes me think about what I want to do to her. Again.
(Sick.)
“If he’s anything like Colonel Ava…” I hear a welcome voice. Another bio-suit cycles through the lock. It’s Rick. Probably sent to assess my potential as a weapon. “…and I expect he is, his bones and connective tissues will have the tensile strength of titanium and nano-carbon.”
And now I’m wondering how they determined that. I look through the plexi at Lisa, who’s also been watching this process. She subtly shakes her head like she’s telling me not to ask those questions.
“There’s no overt sign of technology in his body on conventional scans,” Rick continues. It’s now clear he’s narrating for someone else’s benefit. “But there are definite physiological changes, if you look here: The lungs have doubled the number of alveoli for increased efficiently—not that they needed to, since we know they’re capable of converting carbon dioxide back into oxygen in an oxygen-starved environment. His circulatory system is also more elaborate. And his spine…” He points to the parts on me as he describes, and they highlight on the screens. “This is a much stronger structural design. The vertebrae actually interlock…”
I wonder if he’s still in a relationship with Ryder. I look for signs, see him discreetly touching her arm, her shoulder in passing; see her not try to move away when he gets inside her personal space. And I see worry in his eyes that’s not just for himself, especially when he looks at her when she’s not looking back.
“Where it visibly shows most is in the eyes,” he continues doing the job he was sent to, though with little enthusiasm. “Besides the obvious cosmetic changes to the irises, his lenses and retinas are no longer purely organic. I believe, as Colonel Ava has previously reported, that they allow him to see in multiple spectrums, increase magnification both telescopically and microscopically, and provide a kind of tactical heads-up feed. And no: We can’t replicate the eyes without the CNS conversion as well.”
So that’s it: In hopes of creating a weapon they can use, they’re trying to determine if any of what I am can be replicated without requiring being what I am.
“We also can’t replicate his dermal reactions to extreme temperatures and pressures. Or his wound-management. Or the enhancements to his nervous system that allow him to react so quickly.
“I’m sorry,” he officially apologizes to the cameras. “None of the technology is stand-alone. It’s all an intimate bio-nanotech hybridization. It’s beautiful, brilliant design, but it’s all built on a cellular and molecular level. What we can replicate using bulkier conventional technology, we already have.”
“And that includes his resistance to the nanotech infections?” Burns speaks through the sentry cams.
One of the techs goes to retrieve a containment box from a sealed pass-through, and brings it to Ryder. When she opens it, I see an injector assembly from a Harvester. I understand what they have in mind. When Ryder reaches for it, I hold up a hand to stop her.
“It may not be safe, even with the suit,” I warn. Then I get permission to pick up the unit myself. Ryder puts a hand-held scanner on my forearm, and I stab myself with the injector. It still functions, shoots a seed-cluster “shell” into my flesh.
On the screens at high magnification, we watch the seed-clusters break free of their delivery capsule as they enter my bloodstream, but they only get a few centimeters before contact with pretty much anything—vessel walls, corpuscles—disintegrates them. Increasing the magnification, we can see eye-blink changes to my cells, like something inside them is coming alive and attacking; but even on high-speed, it’s over and done before we can really get a good look at the process. The nanotech works faster than their scanning gear.
“And there’s no way to extract that without… well… the rest of it?” Burns tries.
“We can’t extract any of it,” Ryder reminds him. “Just like Colonel Ava’s, his tech has fail safes. It deactivates and breaks down to raw elements as soon as it’s no longer part of the bodily unit.”
“It’s not a voluntary command, if that’s what you’re thinking,” I head off what I assume he’s hoping.
“But you made her,” Burns implies Lisa. “And there are others like you out there that weren’t there before.”
“We’re each made from a dedicated nano-cluster Seed,” I repeat. “Like the Harvesters, but much more elaborate. It builds all the Mods, provides the memory set, alters the DNA if it doesn’t match the coded target…”
“Which means it has that same virus-like component,” Burns locks on.
“I really don’t know how it works.” But I suspect it doesn’t work like we’ve been told it does. There may, in fact, be no such thing as a Seed. It could all just be Yod’s cover-story—he probably made each of us at his whim, in his own time, for whatever his big-picture grand plan is. But if that’s true, I have no third Seed. The only threat to Lyra is Yod. And I can’t protect her from that.
“There’s something you’re not telling us, Colonel Ram,” Burns picks up on.
I really have to stop brooding where they can see me.
“There’s probably a lot of scary shit I’m not telling you,” I intentionally salt my language to unsettle his repressive morality. “Or not programmed to tell you. Or whatever you believe. And that would be the problem with belief: It’s all based on second and third hand information, or pure fuck-all imagination. And because you believe, you stop looking for the truth. You blind yourselves.”
“Man lives by faith, Colonel,” Burns defends, persecuting the subtle blasphemy. “His faith defines him. Are you really saying we’d be better off without it?”
“I’m saying it’s better to know.”
Though there are a few things I know that maybe I’d be better off not knowing. But I also know I’d always choose the knowing over blissful ignorance, no matter how much the knowing fucks me up.
Burns seems to stew on my heresy for a moment, then comes back with video that takes over the med-screens. It shows what I recognize as the video from the journalist’s camera rig. Of Kali. And Mak and the other modded Cast.
“The blue one… She’s like you,” Burns starts his prosecution. “Quite the piece of work, isn’t she? And you call her an ally?”
“Apparently I used to call her my wife,” I joke badly. “Thankfully, that reality has been erased.”
Lisa looks like she�
��d punch me through the barrier between us if there weren’t so many critical eyes on us.
“Calliope Tostig,” Burns lets me know they know her real name. Then he lets me know what else they know. “You introduced her to General Richards at Tranquility. So we did some checking. There was a Calliope Tostig on Earth, a Captain with the old United States Army Special Forces, attached to UNACT—your former command.” He puts her file up on Lyra’s screen. “She resigned her commission and became a security contractor, or more accurately, a mercenary. She was supposedly killed during a weapons-recovery operation gone bad in Pakistan in 2068, after we lost Mars and the world fell apart.”
I’m surprised that I feel the pain of her death, or the death of that version of her, even though she’s obviously still walking around (or a very convincing copy of her is).
“We could assume that was a cover, that she came to Mars as part of whatever conspiracy made you,” Burns spins their theories, “but her facial markers don’t match up.” He demonstrates by putting a still of the current Kali up with her deceased this-world self. And I can’t help but see Fera.
“Her Seed overwrote the body of a Cast warrior,” I explain. “Some of her physiognomy is still left.” Like Sakina still being able to see her father in Bel, or Fohat looking like Janeway. It makes sense now. I’d assumed the appearance changes were at least part mechanical, like a micro-scale plastic surgery, but if it’s also partly done by systematically replacing cellular DNA, it relies on the altered cells replicating, replacing the originals. Even artificially accelerated, it would take quite some time, and some cells don’t replace themselves as quickly as others. Especially brain cells, and that may explain the personality and memory remnants.
I don’t bother to share my theories with Burns, and he moves on with his agenda, focusing on Mak.
“We have also identified this one. She was at the Tranquility Summit attended by General Richards. Mackenzie James. A member of the Cast tribe. But she certainly wasn’t like that when the General met her. Or any of the others with them.”
The God Mars Book Six: Valhalla I Am Coming Page 18
