I look behind the vehicle. The crush-path we leave in our wake actually closes up fairly quickly, especially at the canopy-level. The Graingrass and other adaptive plants are exceptionally hardy—hardy enough to bounce back from being driven through and over, even by several tons of metal. After all, they were engineered to withstand the extreme temperature shifts of this place, as well as provide more than food: The Graingrass “wood” and plant fibers especially have great tensile strength. The locals have put them to good use in everything from textiles to building materials.
I wonder if the AAVs are looking for us for some reason, expecting our trail to be visible enough to pick up and follow from the air. I look around, consider how we’re planted in the growth—the vehicle itself would actually be pretty hard to see from a distance, provided it isn’t moving. But that doesn’t make sense: We would certainly still be visible from orbit, assuming they have a satellite on us, and I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t, considering what we’re carrying. Therefore the pilots should have our exact location, silent running or not.
Unless Orbit isn’t sending that tracking down-link, afraid Asmodeus can hack in and zero us—same reason Corso would never reply if the flights tried to hail us. They’d have to spot us and chat in some much-lower-tech fashion.
Or maybe something’s happened in orbit. Or with the uplink. Maybe Asmodeus has made another devastating move while I’ve been riding this sluggish can.
Bottom line: There’s no reason aircraft should be looking for us, not unless something’s gone wrong, that the mission’s either changed or been scrubbed.
The aircraft themselves aren’t sending out any calls, not even back to base, unless they’re using a secure direct laser link. That means they’re observing the same signal silence we are, so that threat hasn’t changed.
If Corso’s seen or heard them from inside, she isn’t trying to reply. I’m tempted to rap on the hull, to get her attention, but something doesn’t feel right. I’m tempted to try reaching out and forcing a hack, assuming any of the aircrafts’ tech is still hackable, to see if they are sending on a laser system, to find out what’s going on. But it isn’t worth the drama it will stir if I get detected—if I can force my way in, they’ll know Asmodeus can too, and then they’ll be afraid to use any kind of digital tech. UNMAC will devolve themselves a hundred and fifty years back to analog, like the first days of putting men in space. And that would make Asmodeus ecstatic.
Besides: If something serious had happened, serious enough to derail the mission, I’m sure Dee would have contacted me.
Unless he can’t.
I watch the flights disappear to the east.
The AAVs pass back after twenty minutes. They still aren’t trying to signal us, aren’t sending any signals I can hear at all. But they aren’t on the same tack as they were on the way out, so they do look like they’re searching, might indeed be searching for us, running a sloppy-wide grid because fuel is still precious even with the deal they made with the ETE. (Wide grid also implies they’re looking for something fairly large.)
I remember this detour around the mountain wasn’t planned. We’re off-course. They could have no idea we’ve deviated north, especially if Orbit isn’t updating them.
I consider how much thickly-forested ground they’d have to cover if they weren’t sure where we were or how far we’d gotten. The valley between the mountain and the Catena Divide Rim to the south is only about seven klicks wide here, but we’re already out a lot further east than I expect they’ve been yet, except for the quick flyover.
Technically we’re not even in the Central Blade anymore—this is now the “shaft” of the Vajra. Slow as we’re moving, we’re already two-thirds of the way to where Liberty Colony used to be, or we would be if there wasn’t a massive crater—renamed for the colony—directly in our path: eight klicks across with a thousand meter high crest all around it. Unless this thing climbs a lot better than it looks like it would, we’ll have to go around. The shortest route from here is around the north side of the crater, maybe fifteen klicks if we stay to the lowlands, keeping a course wide enough to stay down in the green. (That way, of course, will also take us close to Yod’s boundary zone, the invisible shore of the invisible Lake, guarded by convenient radiation and insidious perceptual barriers.)
Assuming we don’t find what we’re looking for at Liberty (and I hope we don’t, if the firearm-toting strangers that the Katar say they’ve run into out this way are the descendants of that colony), we still have two other sites to search further out: Alchera is about twenty klicks east-northeast of Liberty, across Coprates Main in the foothills of the fracture-mountains at the base of the North Rim (and, if I remember correctly from maps of the old world, well east of the Lake so we shouldn’t run into any of Haven’s defenses). And Iving is twenty-five klicks southeast, close to the base slopes of the Catena Divide.
Asmodeus did likely get the scrap to build his show-Stormcloud from one or more of those sites. If he found people at any of them…
All I’ve got for hope is that so far I’ve only seen Harvesters converted from Chang’s former army, and a number of unfortunate Pax. That could mean there’s no one out there, or he hasn’t found them yet, or that he simply hasn’t unleashed the drones he’s made out of their corpses yet. Unfortunately, the latter possibility is far too likely: He’d absolutely hold an unknown asset in reserve. There’s no way to know until we get there.
The one thing that gives me any hope of success is my reasonable certainty that he has been to at least one of those three colony sites, if only because he’d be curious—he wouldn’t be content to just send his minions out salvaging and not go exploring himself. And the ships he used to carry that scrap have to be somewhere. Even if they also got scrapped, there would be remnants, possibly at a base he’s still using. I doubt he’d be obvious enough to make that base at one of the colony sites, but if he was salvaging and processing that much metal, he might have set up in proximity.
(Or he could be hell-and-gone away from any place that makes sense to look.)
(But he’d want to be close enough to watch us chase his shadow.)
I should have asked Jackson if they’d analyzed the Stormcloud 2’s wreckage to trace any of its materials to a specific site, something my own “team” couldn’t do because we didn’t have the old construction manifests to tell us what may have come from where. (Asmodeus also wasn’t sloppy enough to leave any obvious colony markings on his build, knowing it would get shot down and picked apart.)
I’m spinning in my impatient helplessness, sitting on a nuclear warhead and watching the AAV’s pass out of sight-line back west, when I hear gunfire echoing off the mountain slopes. But it’s just a few short bursts that sound like a single ICW. I don’t hear Horst or Lyra’s heavier guns, nor do I hear the rover turret.
I scan the green and the slopes beyond for telltale heat and motion, and don’t see anything. This does nothing to ameliorate my instinct to go running and rescuing, but as soon as my butt is up off the nuke, I’m thinking whatever this is could just be a ploy to get me away from the Warhorse. In any case, I draw my freshly-reloaded gun, get ready…
I see their retreat: First Scheffe, running for the ship in what looks like a breathless panic, clumsy in her bulky armor. Her ICW barrel glows hot in my enhancements, answering the question of who was firing. She’s definitely new-drop: not used to the 0.38 G gravity, she scurries over the rocks with the awkward waddle of a toddler. She tries looking back over her shoulder every few meters, and this causes her to trip and tumble forward down the rocky slopes. I’m surprised she doesn’t smash her visor, but she does have to scramble after her dropped weapon, which goes skittering down the talus. Then she’s up and flies into the green between us.
As Scheffe comes rustling through the growth making more noise than the rover bot, Lyra and Horst retreat back over the crest with a lot more discipline, slowly and carefully leapfrogging, alternately covering each other as if
something is chasing them, just not very quickly.
Scheffe is shouting at me through her helmet just as I hear the familiar tread noise.
“Bot, Colonel! Box bot!!”
Then I see it, climbing over the rise, slowly pursuing Horst and Lyra. Part of its sluggish pace is likely from what looks like significant battle damage: The battered cubic sections don’t rotate freely, and neither do some of the edge treads and corner wheels. One of the two electric cannons is missing, and the main 20mm gun is visibly bent. I listen for signals, for attempts to contact its absent masters. Nothing.
I scan the area, still see no other movement, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t surrounded by buried Harvesters.
“Hold here,” I order a breathless Scheffe when she finally makes it back through the tangle to the rig, then I risk abandoning the vehicle and its payload long enough to get a closer look at the Box, and take off running through the seventy-five-odd meters of jungle between me and the mountain.
By the time I push through to the base slopes, our rover has also come back into view, following the Box so we have it in a triangular crossfire, though the battered bot’s still shown no hostile intent. It’s only following after Lyra and Horst as they back away, almost as if it wants something from them. It grinds to a halt when I get in its path. Shifts. Scans me with a scarred sensor head.
“I thought Asmodeus dropped his full complement of bots at Katar?” Horst asks me, his gun on the machine.
I look it over more closely as it continues to hold position.
“Some of this damage looks older than the rail-gun hit that took down the ship.” I point to holes made by armor-piercing rounds, cleaves from long blades in the heavy plate. “I think we did this—these cuts are from a nano-blade. It must have been sent to attack the locals—one of Asmodeus’ distraction raids—and managed to limp home.”
Why can’t I hear it? Its comm systems may also be damaged.
“Why isn’t it shooting at us?” Lyra wonders about something more practically pressing, her rifle aimed at the exposed sensor head.
“Only one gun looks operable, and it may be dry, but I suspect it has no reason to,” I guess. “Once the command signals are severed, the organic brains reassert control of the mechanical systems. They usually do so in a heavily traumatized state. The ones I’ve seen freed… They tend to want to die. Or get a shot at hurting the monsters that hurt them, assuming they can get close enough to do it without getting slaved again—keeping that from happening usually takes significant alterations to their systems.”
“Like the ones you turned at Katar,” Horst concludes, not knowing it was Dee that did the turning.
“That’s… horrible…” Scheffe lets me know she has no intention of following my orders to stay put, coming out of the green behind me. “There’s really a human brain in there? Cut out of a living person? Who… What kind of monster would do something like that?”
“The human kind,” I throw back in her indignation. “This technology is based on a popular consumer product from my timeline.”
“A what?” I get Horst’s incredulity.
“In our immortal boredom, someone decided to sell us a kind of ‘pet’, a plaything to amuse, use and abuse,” I admit sourly. “Some were practical service designs, but realistic animal or human analogues were the big sellers.”
“You mean androids?” Lyra guesses.
“And gynoids. Mechanical women. Or children, depending on the customer’s tastes. Anatomically accurate and functional, of course.”
“What… uh… ohhh…” Horst figures my meaning. “Eewww…”
So does Lyra, from the disgusted look under her mask and goggles. Scheffe just stares at me blankly, like I’m speaking a language she doesn’t understand.
“We’d already mastered neuro-tech interfacing with our own Mods, so this kind of thing was relatively simple. And a device with an organic brain was in some ways more responsive than a mechanical AI. Plus it had the added novelty of being technically alive. It didn’t take long before bots with human brain components became the biggest sellers, because they gave a wider range of emotional responses, learned better and were able to process verbal language. We used cloned brains, of course, but that didn’t make it less sick. In fact it made it worse. People started requesting specific cloned brains, so they could have a toy made out of the DNA of a favorite celebrity, a dead loved-one, an ex-lover, a crush… There was a rich black market for stolen DNA.”
“You mean…?” Scheffe tries to grasp, then recoils from whatever ideas she’s gelling.
“I mean I could buy a sex-bot that looks exactly like you with a genetic copy of your brain inside of it and do whatever sick sadistic things I wanted to it,” I lay it out bluntly. She looks like she’s getting ill inside her helmet.
“And they couldn’t resist, rebel?” Lyra tries hopefully. I crush it:
“Command override, just like this poor whoever-they-were. Though some owners wouldn’t bother. Since we were invincible, our pets couldn’t harm us, and a lot of owners enjoyed punishing and torturing their property into compliance instead of using programmed controls. Fohat, for instance, became famous for specializing in making clone-cyborg bots for so-called ‘live-gaming’, so the player could have something really challenging to fight, something that would be absolutely lethal to a non-immortal and give an immortal a real run for their worthless money. They were designed to destroy and to be destroyed. For fun.”
We stand around the damaged, tormented thing for a few moments in silence. In the world I was a part of making, this was a toy.
“You said ‘dead loved-one’,” Lyra recalls softly aside. “Is that how Asmodeus was recreated?”
“Full cloning with digital memory reconstruction started coming out shortly before the end,” I tell her.
“Makes Chang sound like a fucking hero for ending that shit,” Horst decides. And of course I’m thinking that Horst was a part of that world and just can’t remember his own sins.
“But why did he bring… things… like this… back with him if he wanted it all gone?” Scheffe argues reason, barely holding it together. At least she didn’t point to me when she said it.
“To show us why we could never go down that road,” Lyra tells her, artfully keeping our secret despite her revulsion.
“You should kill it…” Scheffe prompts me very sheepishly. “You should put it out of its misery. Please…” I see tears welling inside of her visor.
I take a breath, step forward, and reach out my hand to touch the battered cyborg. It recoils, backs away from me.
“It wants to live?” Horst doesn’t believe.
I try again, get the same reaction.
“So what do we do with it?” Lyra wonders.
“Go to Katar!” I tell it, pointing west. “Fifteen klicks that way. There are others like you there. We can repair you, if you want to help us fight back.”
From the lack of response, I’m wondering if it’s able to understand—or even hear—anything I’m saying. I turn to Horst.
“Did you find what you were looking for?” I nod over the rise toward the wreckage.
“Yes and no,” he reports vaguely, like he’s not sure if he’s free to speak.
“Then we should get moving.”
I gesture for the bot to stay put as we back away, then point it to go west again.
We cycle back into the bay, and while Horst and Scheffe help each other out of their shells, I head forward.
“Did you pick up any signals from those AAVs that flew past?” I ask Corso like I don’t already know. I notice she hasn’t bothered to ask anyone for a report.
“No, but then that’s protocol. Just like they’d know we wouldn’t try to ping them, not until our mission objective was complete.” She’s trying to act like everything is sit-norm, but I can hear nervousness.
“And nothing from Orbit about why they were out here?” I press, really just to see how she responds. She gives me her usu
al icy glare.
“It could be keeping up appearances,” Horst offers. “Show search. Asmodeus knows we’ll be looking for him, searching the Eastern Vajra. He sees them, he may not be looking for us.”
That would also explain why their flight plan stayed well-clear of us.
I pull one of the laminated maps across the little fold-out table, trace the estimated flight paths down the length of the valley. It does look like they were running a search pattern, which fits Horst’s theory, but…
“You think they were looking for us?” Lyra does a good job of reading my mind without Mods, standing over my shoulder. She discreetly backs away when she sees how close she’s put herself to me.
“Makes no sense they would,” Horst argues, pointing at the roof. “Sat-eyes are on us twenty-five/seven.”
“Mission report, Lieutenant,” Corso prods him to debrief.
“No signals. No sign of activity since the crash except our own techs. And that busted bot, but it doesn’t seem to have a working link in or out. But we did confirm: We matched the scrap to materials on the Pre-Bang manifests for both Iving and Alchera.”
“So he’s been there,” Corso makes the easy conclusion. “Or has been. May still be, or may have a base in staging range. Nothing from Liberty?”
“Nothing we could see in the canister-time we had,” Horst apologizes. “But the wreckage is pretty spread.”
“That may be intentional,” I warn, tracing lines on the map with my finger. “Running from the Grave to the outer colonies, he’d pass Liberty, at least check it out…”
“So either there was nothing there of value, or he didn’t scrap there intentionally,” Horst sees where I’m going.
“The ship was for show,” Lyra remembers. “A distraction. He expected it to be shot down.”
“And picked over,” Corso gets on board, taking a close look at Liberty and the mountainous terrain on that side of its namesake crater. “He could have a base anywhere along this rim. Or in the crater itself—he’s certainly done that before.”
The God Mars Book Six: Valhalla I Am Coming Page 25
