“Ange apparently started as the teacher, the intellectual, the charming charismatic leader, but the same people who trained and conditioned me shaped him into a soldier, then an assassin. And he discovered that he liked it, that he was wired to enjoy it, so he started doing it for himself, steadily discarding any human restraints he may have had. He raped. He tortured. He murdered. For fun. And shock value. And to prove he could. And that’s the Ange that was brought back: the one with memories of the monster and the wiring to enjoy it. What I used to be, once. And still have the potential to be.”
She shakes her head, chews her lip. She won’t look at me now.
“And this is your Supreme Intelligence’s solution to keep us from becoming monsters: Watch the two of you fight it out. And lay waste to this place doing it.”
“It’s probably more complicated than that. But yes. Basically.”
“Idiot!” she shouts at the sky again.
I’d worry about her outbursts giving our position away, but there’s already noise rising to drown us out: Aircraft. Coming this way from the west. I initially assume they’re sending fighters to look for us, but they’re coming too slow. When I get eyes-on, magnify, I can see why: It’s a pair of pre-Bang AAVs lifting something that’s somewhat larger than their hulls are, slung from cables. But instead of delivering it to the airfield, they drag it over the base, then set it down in the cleared zone to the east of the crater. They wind up dropping it clumsily. I can hear it bounce on its treads, suspension and frame groaning, crushing the regolith underneath it with its weight.
It’s the Warhorse vehicle, freshly painted with a sloppy forest camo scheme. I can see the nuclear torpedoes in their launch tubes on either side of the hull, fixed to what looks like an external gangway that runs around the sides and back of the vehicle. It strikes me as an excellent way for anybody attacking them to board the ship and have a nice place to work while they cut the warheads free and steal them.
“What the hell is that?” Lyra asks, watching the clumsy spectacle through her binoculars.
“That is our ride.”
Part Two: As I Walk Through This Wicked World
Chapter 1: Masquerading as a Man with a Reason
We spent the morning up on the slopes of the Spine, watching the new-drop techs prep the Warhorse for its almost-guaranteed suicide mission. They load supplies, including large quantities of ammunition and explosives—it looks like enough to supply the company they just sent into Asmodeus’ last trap. I’m surprised to see that both the rear and the top of what must be the vehicle’s main bay opens up, revealing the hull to be reinforced with thick, layered armor. They check the warheads, and quickly weld additional armor plating onto the fragile-looking “gangway” to help protect the launch tubes and treads from small-arms fire from the flanks.
While we wait, I go gather some fresh edibles from the surrounding forest. It gives me an excuse to get away from Lyra for awhile, and I start feeling a reduction in my compulsive urges to touch her as soon as I’m out of sight-line. But the point of gathering food was to bring it back to her, and I feel my libido rise again as soon as I see her.
I set the nuts, seeds and fruits I found on a handy flat rock, then back away like I’m afraid of her, like she’s the one that’s dangerous. I severely doubt this “plan” I’ve dragged her into, or someone has manipulated me into dragging her into, but thanks to me (in more ways than one), she has no place else to go now. She can’t return to UNMAC. Her family is dead. Her home—the UNCORT covert research vessel Circe—has been confiscated as evidence in an investigation that will never honestly proceed. She has no other connections on this planet. She may have distant relatives back on Earth, but, having been born here, she certainly has never met them, even if that was at all a practical possibility between the quarantine and her body having developed in Mars gravity.
She sees what I’m doing, and that brings back her own fears.
“Is that why you left me with UNMAC?” she calls me out on my abandoning her. “Because your Seed was targeting me?”
I have to think about that, think back. And
“No. It wasn’t that. But having you with me, with us, was just too dangerous. Between Earthside trying to end us and the enemies we were chasing…”
“Yet here we are,” she confronts with impressive humor.
“With no better choice,” I tell her directly. “Earthside… UNCORT… have ordered their on-planet agents to ensure you meet an end that looks like our fault, that we infected you.”
She takes a moment to digest that, staring at the rocks between her boots. She hasn’t touched her “breakfast”.
“It shuts me up, makes me go away,” she accepts, “and gives them another guinea pig to experiment on.” She’s come to understand their evil in the short time that she’s been with them, that I’ve left her with them. “But… Why is your Seed targeting me now?”
“Either the circumstances triggered it, or Yod did,” I go ahead and disclose what I’ve been thinking.
“And if it was Yod, from what you say, I don’t really stand a chance, do I?”
My heart crashes into my guts again. I meet her eyes through her goggles. She’s trying to come to grips with the likelihood that she’s going to die, much sooner than later.
Trying to do something normal, she starts to nibble at the food I brought her, slipping it up under her mask, but she doesn’t look like she’s able to appreciate it.
“What was it like?” she asks, almost sheepishly. “The process… Becoming…” Words fail, so she gestures at me.
“I don’t really remember. I was mostly bled out after Thompson Bly put his sword through my liver.”
That gets an eyebrow raised under her goggles.
“And you two are friends now?”
“Depends on his mood. He’s actually a pretty good guy.”
She shakes her head like I’m crazy. It lightens the mood a little, but that certainly doesn’t settle the topic.
“What about the others?” she keeps pressing. “What was conversion like for them?”
I take a long breath of the thin, chilly air.
“Lisa was technically dead—she just woke up converted. Kali’s host was also dead. And Lux’s and Azazel’s. But Bel and Fohat… Their hosts were alive, conscious. I get the impression it isn’t a much better fate than getting eaten by a Harvester.”
It’s not any comfort, but I don’t want it to be. I need her to be afraid, to be cautious, if she is going to have any chance at all. Yod aside, I certainly know I can’t trust myself to protect her from what’s inside me. I’m already back to feeling like a horny teenage boy on a date. I can barely keep my distance, barely keep my eyes off of her. I watch her pull aside her mask to eat…
…and I get this sudden rush of terror: Did I unintentionally pass the Seed into the food?
I shake it off. I expect if I had, I wouldn’t still be thinking and feeling the things that I am—there’d be no point. Odd comfort: as long as I’m still feeling the urge to make an inappropriate advance on her, she’s okay.
“But you and Colonel Ava…” she continues, “you’re still… well… yourselves.”
“Maybe,” I confess my pervasive existential angst. “I have my memories, like she does, but they’re arguably just digital files. They may even have been falsified—Jackson isn’t wrong to think so. They could have been. To further Yod’s agenda.”
“But you still feel like you,” she defends my identity for me. “So does Colonel Ava. I’ve heard her say so.”
I chuckle involuntarily, shake my head.
“If I could rebuild you, cell-by-cell, make a perfect copy including all of your memories—or what convincingly seems like all of your memories—would you be you? What if I systematically tore apart the original you to do it, consumed that you, replacing you one cell at a time? At what point does that original person die, replaced by a copy that just thinks it’s the same as the original?”
The
image I’ve drawn visibly unsettles her. She shivers inside her cold suit.
“But you’ve still got the benefit of doubt,” she tries, spinning through denial. “Who’s to say what we really are, what makes us?”
“And how does that help you?” I confront that denial, as if I need her to get through mourning her own death before we can proceed with the mission ahead of us.
She struggles. I can see the question in her eyes. I can see that she doesn’t want the answer I’ll have to give her.
“You said you don’t know who the Seed you still have belongs to, who it contains… If it targeted me… is it possible…? I mean, could it be… um… mine? Some other version of me that doesn’t replace me? Like yours and Colonel Ava’s?”
I need another long breath.
“When Yod reset everything, he made everyone mortal again. That was something like seventy years ago. Those people lived normal lives. Most of them are dead by now, or very old, so you can’t be one of them. You’re one of their grandchildren. The only ones left from that time on this planet are the first and second generation ETE and the thousand-odd survivors of Melas Two that got sunk into Hiber-Sleep fifty-plus years ago when this place got bombed. That’s why Lisa and I were still around to receive our Seeds, which, come to think of it, was very likely another one of Yod’s convenient but barely believable ‘coincidences’. That’s how he works: He manipulates things, but not enough to really reveal his hand in it. My meeting you to begin with was probably his doing. He may have planned the Seed for you even before that. Maybe from the day you were born, for all I know.”
I expect the overwhelming fatalism could well break her, but I can see her still denying, reasoning through it.
“But doesn’t you warning me, telling me this, damage that plan, whatever it is?”
That gives me a chuckle, and I expect she thinks I’m laughing at her hope, but I’m really laughing at my own glimmer of it: the idea that I might be able to beat Yod simply by being my usual stubborn self.
“Welcome to my reality,” I tell her.
We pack up and hike down the slope, down into the jungle-like valley floor, but straight south—not back toward the base. Lyra doesn’t question my seemingly pointless direction, not even when we stop after several klicks in the middle of overgrown nowhere. She takes the time to collect more edibles, checks her remaining water supply, peels off and stows her cold suit, then adjusts her load of gear. From time-to-time, I catch her trying to do without her mask, seeing if she can adjust to the thin air like the Pax and Katar have. I’m about to be encouraging, to let her know how the Melas Nomads—newcomers to this region—have already managed to reduce their supplementation, when we get interrupted by the roar of jets.
I signal for her to sit low in the embracing undergrowth and be still. The flight comes after a few minutes, passing just south of our position, heading east from the base roughly along the axis of the Central Blade: Two fully-armed AAVs, cruising at recon speed, their lifters battering the forest canopy. I can only see them for a brief interval with the green in my way, but I can hear their engines fade in the east, sounding like they’re flying well past Katar, out into unknown territory—the eastern “fork” of what the ETE call The Vajra. I notice they’re flying too high to get a good look down into the growth, probably still in fear of surface-to-air ordnance, so at best they’re doing a quick look. A preliminary scout.
We sit put and quiet until we hear them come back, only half-an-hour later, which tells me they only flew out maybe seventy-five klicks or less, either out of caution or fuel-conservation. Calling up the memory of a map like a tactical graphic in my vision, I roughly calculate that they could have gotten far enough for a quick look over the ruins of the farthest-east colonies: Liberty, Alchera and Iving. They’re probably looking for any obvious sign of recent activity, specifically Asmodeus-type activity, and they have to know he’d never do anything that visible unless he wanted them to see it.
I haven’t picked up on any chatter, any transmissions on the UNMAC frequencies other than dirt-simple flash code, probably basic check-ins. They’re doing their best to keep to radio silence.
We sit until midday, both of us keeping a good three meters between us. My eyes are still drawn to her every time I let myself get distracted, but I don’t feel the intense impulses to act, at least not at the moment. Staying focused on-mission may be helping in that area, even though we’re playing the waiting game, waiting for Dee (or is it Yod?) to come through.
In the long interim, I wonder what my fellows are doing, if they’ve made any progress with countermeasures, or if they’ve had to run to the defense of the locals. And that makes me worry about the locals, about everyone living on Mars, because I can’t trust that torturing Earthside will keep Asmodeus’ full attention.
My isolation over the last few days may have kept me oblivious to any number of atrocities, both known and evolving threats. And I have to keep myself in that isolation. I don’t dare try to signal my fellows given Earthside’s improved ability to detect us. I’m sure my nearly-effortless exit from their supposedly secure containment has ramped up the priority for neutralizing me and mine. I don’t think I can even safely initiate a call out to Dee, so I have to wait for him to carefully signal me. And until someone gets me news of the world, my brain is happy to concoct nightmares.
I’m also worried about more than just monsters and idiots. Anyone on-planet able to receive signals will have seen Asmodeus’ “documentary”. The lower-tech groups—the Pax and Katar specifically—may have observed the battle through scouts. Asmodeus has just demonstrated how easily the so-called “superior” force can be beaten. I wonder what that will inspire, especially if there is any resentment (and I’m sure there is plenty of resentment) over the impulsive destruction of the Pax Keep. (If nothing else, Earth has proven that they will bombard the planet from space if they decide they have anything to fear that they can justify shooting at, and that’s a hell of a gun to live under.)
(Would they have fired on the Keep if Asmodeus had hostages?)
“Where did you just go?” Lyra catches me dwelling.
“Nowhere good,” I deflect.
“Do you think we’ll find him?” she looks for hope again. “Asmodeus. Do you think we can stop him?”
I very unhelpfully shrug.
“He’d have to make a hell of a mistake to leave himself that vulnerable. But I have to try. I can’t not.”
She nods her understanding.
Then I signal her to keep silent, keep still.
I hear it first, of course, but her ears pick it up seconds after mine: A crushing sound, coming closer. Something heavy squishing and pushing through the forest. I’m impressed that I don’t hear much more than that—there’s very little motor noise.
I gesture for Lyra to follow behind me as I weave through the growth, into the path of what I hear advancing steadily toward us. We don’t have to go far before we hear the oncoming machine slow, then turn toward us.
“They’ve picked up your signature,” Lyra tells me what I’ve assumed. I stand out in a small clearing and wait for them to decide what to do.
They apparently feel secure enough in their armored beast to come right up on me, right up close where they can see me. The sloppily camo-painted armored “plow” on the nose of the vehicle shoves through the Graingrass trees, threatening to run me over and crush me under tread, but then it doesn’t. It stops two meters in front of me. (I still can only barely hear the motors.)
The big main turret turns, lowers and locks on me. I’m looking straight up the barrel of the 20mm gun. I gesture Lyra to step well aside, for whatever good it would do—I have to trust in Dee.
An upper hatch unseals, and an H-A shell pops up out of it, leveling a heavy rifle as if the big turret guns need help against me. I show them empty hands.
“Come around the back, sir,” I hear an old friend’s voice through the helmet.
“Lieutenant Horst,” I gree
t with less enthusiasm than I should. Another loyal compatriot under the gun because of me.
“Walk wide of the sides, please,” he keeps it business, then gestures his weapon at Lyra. “You, too, Specialist.”
I nod to Lyra and we do as bidden. When we get behind the machine, it’s left a narrow but painfully obvious crush-trail, tracing its course all the way back to base. I can only hope they took the time to do tests, to see how long it would take the forest to bounce back, but I’m sure anyone with eyes above the canopy will have no trouble at all tracking this monstrosity. But then I see that the crushed path isn’t completely incidental: There’s a follow-along rover bot lumbering behind in the Warhorse’s wake, riding on the same set of flex-treads that we built Anton’s chair out of, weighted down with what looks like makeshift armor and crowned with a remote battery gun: a cluster of a chain-gun, a 20mm belt-fed cannon, and a multiple grenade launcher. (It also still has its standard array of manipulator arms and tools, so it’s not just for killing.)
The heavy rear hatch unseals, and two angled armored doors swing out. There’s another H-A suit in the small airlock behind those doors, armed with an ICW.
“Inside, sir,” I get prompted. “Both of you.” I know the voice. The nameplate confirms: JENOVEC, A. He sounds absolutely terrified.
“You’re safe, son,” I try to reassure, complying slowly. “Andre. Though I will be annoyed if you shoot me.”
He doesn’t appreciate the attempted levity. I see the follow-along’s guns turn on us as well.
Between the three of us and Lyra’s gear, it’s a tight fit inside the closet-sized lock. Jenovec struggles to close it on us. When he succeeds, I feel the pressure rush to equalize. The inner hatch opens, and we get let into the main bay, which manages to make an ASV’s bay look roomy. It doesn’t help that it’s lined with supply lockers, including the grid floor. The longer sides are mounted with benches that look like they double for narrow racks for the crew.
The God Mars Book Six: Valhalla I Am Coming Page 21
