The God Mars Book Six: Valhalla I Am Coming

by Michael Rizzo

  “That’s a lot of ground to cover, Major,” Smith pipes in from his cockpit seat, letting us know he’s listening. “A lot of it this beast can’t get to.”

  “They’re coming back!” Simmons announces, having taken periscope watch. Corso pulls down another viewer, while Horst moves to share the one Simmons was using.

  “They’re passing north of us this time,” Horst eventually confirms, slowly tracking. “North of the mountain… North of the crater…”

  “Wide formation,” Corso describes. “Three klicks out.”

  “Just a show, or did something go bad?” I wonder out loud. I get no answer.

  “Should we try calling them?” Lyra asks nervously.

  “We can’t,” Simmons tells her, then looks to Corso like he may have broken protocol by telling her, telling me. She ignores him, so he decides to continue. “We don’t have a long range transmitter. We pulled it before we left. We can receive, but we can’t call out past gear-link range.”

  “They were afraid Asmodeus could use the uplink if he captured the vehicle,” Horst clarifies.

  “If he captures the vehicle, he’ll have four nuclear weapons,” I point out the insane obvious.

  “Which he can’t use on anything except surface targets,” Horst grumbles, looking to Corso to censor him. She looks away from her viewfinder long enough to give him a good glare. Lyra finishes what she assumes he was going to say:

  “And everything on the surface is expendable, as long as nothing gets off this planet and back to Earth.”

  “So if it is a real search, what are they looking for?” Scheffe dares ask a reasonable question. “The enemy, or us?”

  “Maybe something happened to the base uplinks,” Horst worries professionally, listing my own fears. “Or Orbit’s downlinks. Or the satellites. Maybe they can’t see us anymore. Maybe they’re trying to see if we’re still here.”

  “Maybe they’re trying to recall us because something went bad,” Lyra says what he avoided saying.

  “Maybe something happened to them,” Simmons goes darker. “The base personnel. The pilots.”

  “You confessed that Asmodeus had technology that can influence a human mind without consuming it?” Corso accuses like the act was my own. “If we missed something in the quarantine after the battle, the base could have been compromised.” She doesn’t seem to care if she’s scaring her crew—or maybe that was her intention: to keep them on-mission and afraid of me and anything like me.

  “He was able to ramp up emotions into irrational actions, paranoia, but he couldn’t direct specific actions or thoughts,” I try to explain, but it doesn’t change the fact that we’re talking about invasive tech inside people’s brains.

  “Not that you know of,” Corso doesn’t let up, sounding like she’s sure I’d lie.

  “Scaring them might be enough,” Horst offers. “Fear—planted in the right people—could make them do stupid sh… Act irrationally.”

  “Or he could have bots in those ships,” Scheffe goes for the catastrophic. “Like that cyborg-thing outside. Or a Harvester. He could have overrun the base, taken those AAVs.”

  Corso doesn’t try to chill her out.

  “So what’s the move?” Horst finally asks, trying for direction.

  “We keep to the mission,” Corso insists after a deep breath and some lip-chewing. “We stay silent until we have a target.”

  “I thought we couldn’t call out at all?” I question, having little confidence in these people.

  “Isotope smoke,” Simmons tells me. “Projectors all around the hull. On the rover, too. We can mark ourselves or anything else for Orbit or a fly-by to see. Different colors for different codes.”

  I nod, almost appreciatively. They thought this part through pretty ingeniously, though it relies on support having eyes on us.

  “Liberty?” Horst wants confirmation.

  Corso seems to debate that internally.

  “Return flight…” Simmons reports from his periscope. Corso looks. “Still north.”

  I can hear the engines through the hull as they pass. They’re closer this time.

  “If they are looking, they still haven’t seen us,” Simmons figures.

  “Was there a protocol if they needed to change your orders?” I ask Corso (or anyone else willing to answer).

  “General Richards gave us code sets, and software to analyze the messages for authenticity,” Corso lets me know, though she sounds less than confident.

  “Code sets only he knew,” Horst addends. “If anything happened to him up in orbit, Ground wouldn’t have a code we’d accept.”

  “I can’t imagine anything that could have happened which would override our mission,” Corso stands firm. “Asmodeus is still out there—best evidence says he’s east. We need to find him. We need to track him down and we need to burn him to nothing.” She waits for argument, gets none, not even from me. I give her a nod.

  “Prepare to move out!” she orders. “I want to make Liberty by sundown.”

  “Course, Major?” Smith calls back as Scheffe, Simmons and Jenovec head for their stations.

  “We may have an issue,” Horst cautions, pointing to the map and tracing a path around the north side of the crater. “This will take us out into thinner growth. If something has gone bad wrong and we don’t want to be seen, maybe we should take the south route.”

  “It’s twice as long,” Corso compares. “And we still come up pretty thin here where the valley narrows between the crater and the Divide slopes.” She’s right: It’s a narrow pass, and takes us up over a thousand meters.”

  She studies the map thoughtfully.

  “Simmons,” she calls back. He promptly climbs down out of the turret to join us. “Can this thing climb that rim?” She points to the western rim of the crater. He shakes his head, but takes a close look.

  “Maybe through this pass here, where the crater rim is fractured…” he points to a narrow fissure on the crater’s northwest side. “The run up to it doesn’t look too steep if we take it from the north, but there’s no guaranteeing the terrain. The bigger risk is inside the bowl—I’m assuming you intend to cross it, sir?”

  “It’s a straighter route, one that wasn’t on our original mission briefs, and it will give us a look inside the crater…” She looks up at me. “…since we know your friend has a liking for building bases inside craters.”

  I keep my mouth shut, but I think the disdain on my face is sufficient.

  “If we make it down the inner slope to here, then cut straight east toward the colony site, we might be okay,” Simmons continues to trace. “If we go any farther south inside the bowl, the crater sinks pretty fast—the southern two-thirds get down over a klick lower than the valley floor out here, and it’s really rough down in the bottom: monolith-sized rocks, craters-within-craters…”

  “Sounds like an ideal place to hide,” Corso decides.

  “But the only way we’d get in there is on foot, and there’s a good thirty square klicks of difficult terrain to search,” Simmons tries to caution her.

  “How much time do you want to spend on this?” Horst keeps an open mind. “We could do short recons, grid search, but it could take a week or more.”

  “We need to be sure,” Corso insists. “But I want to get a look at the colony first.”

  “That could also be problematic, sir,” Simmons keeps giving bad news. “The rim between the bowl and the colony goes up a sharp two klicks. There may be small passes, too small for the ‘Horse, but if not, it’s a hell of a climb. And we’d be out of link range as soon as we topped the crest.”

  “We might be better off if we hit the bottoms first, then climbed out here,” Horst draws us a course clockwise around the worst of the bottoms to the southeast rim of the crater.

  “But then we’d have to double-back north and northwest,” Corso complains, plotting, “through these mountains on the crater’s northeast quadrant, or the long way around them, to get to where Lib
erty was.”

  “Those mountains also make great places to hide,” Horst counters smoothly. “We need to be sure.”

  I get the impression Corso was hoping to get this mission over with quickly, and not just because of its urgency. A couple of days out and then back to the relative comfort of base. She doesn’t seem at home in the field (and we haven’t even been out a day yet). But she also doesn’t want to crawl home empty-handed. She’s probably hoping to earn herself a commendation big enough to lever a promotion, and to score a win big enough to take the heat off of her UNCORT handlers. I’m tempted to tell her that she and her crew would do better to fail, because if they succeed in finding Asmodeus, I expect I’ll be the only one walking away.

  I wonder what the fuck she thinks is going to happen. Does she really believe she’s going to find the sick shit (the real sick shit) and pound him with nuke after nuke, scrape his ashes into a containment tube and roll back to base to a hero’s welcome?

  Unfortunately, I really think she does.

  “How long can we stay out?” I ask Horst.

  “We can run indefinitely,” he tells me, like he knows the idea makes his CO squirm. “We’re sitting on a nuclear power plant, with O2 condensers and water recyclers, food for three months and after that we can forage…”

  The thought of eating the local engineered plants makes the new-drops shudder. I’m sure they’ve been warned that the slightest taste will mutate them into organic jelly or consume them from the inside-out, despite the fact that all of the survivor descendants as well as over a thousand people at Melas Two have been eating the stuff without ill-effect.

  “The only things we have to worry about are running out of ammo or needing medical evac,” Simmons concurs. “This is a Long Range Recon.”

  Corso keeps her eyes on the map, but I can feel her coil.

  “Smith,” she calls forward, “make best time for the pass through the crater rim. Get us in close and we’ll do a scout through to make sure it’s clear.”

  “Yes, Major,” he accepts from his pilot’s seat.

  “The rest of you: secure for travel.”

  Chapter 4: Charlie Foxtrot

  Looking over the battered and twisted wreckage, it seems appropriate to say something cliché about best-laid plans, but everything I’ve seen about this mission insists that there was barely any planning involved, too inexperienced and too desperately focused on the target.

  In any case, we didn’t get very far today.

  First came two hours of relentless jarring over rough terrain, a lot of climbing and dropping, all endured blind, sealed up inside the hull of the ‘Horse. Finally, the climb began to become more consistent, less snail-crawl roller coaster ups and downs, but I could feel us slowing even painfully further, until I could feel every individual boulder grind under our treads.

  Then I could feel us change direction, turn south, and our angle of attack got increasingly steeper, until we either had to strap into harnesses or hang on tight or tumble into the rear bulkhead of the bay. I assume that meant we were heading into the questionable pass through the crater rim.

  It quickly became clear that the pass might possibly be too steep for the rig, as we would slip and slide backwards every few minutes without warning, which was a new kind of torture. And then we would suddenly dip sideways, one set of treads or another abruptly dropping into a pitfall. More than once, the deck listed so far I thought we might tip over, but Smith would wrestle us back to some semblance of upright before that happened (though I could hear him cursing even through the hatches).

  After nearly another two hours of that abuse, we came to a dead stop, and Horst came back from the midsection on visibly shaky legs to announce that we needed to secure the rover because it couldn’t manage the terrain anymore. While he went outside with Simmons and Jenovec in shells, I got hold of one of the ‘scopes long enough to take a good look around. We were wedged in a tight sheer-walled ravine, climbing over car-sized boulders, with what I guessed was the crater rim rising on either side of us. Ahead, it looked like we still had a long way to climb before cresting this pass, assuming it was really even passable. If it wasn’t, I couldn’t imagine how much fun it would be to back us all the way out of here.

  Enjoying having a view, I turned the ‘scope aft and watched our EVA team hoist the rover up with a hull-mount winch and strap it to our rear deck just next to the aft lock, it’s gun stuck out and pointed up at the sky. And what narrow strip of the sky I could see was already looking late in the day. The evening winds were starting to whip dust across the pass behind us. And then I saw other motion, deliberate, sixty or seventy meters down the pass in our wake.

  “We have company, Major,” Horst called in on his short-range link. “It’s that busted bot from the crash site.”

  “Following us like a dog…” Jenovec decided, incredulous. Horst prodded him back to work.

  “Orders, Major?” Horst asked.

  Corso brooded into her own ‘scope for a good long minute.

  “It is likely to give away our position?” she asked back.

  “Less so than what it would take to disable it,” Horst calculated.

  The bot stopped on its own, as if hearing our debate to destroy it, about sixty meters from our tail.

  “What’s it doing?” Corso wondered out loud.

  I had my theories, but decided not to share.

  We were moving again in twenty minutes, but the climb seemed even slower and rougher now. Horst broke out rations, but most of us were in no mood for food (especially new-drop MREs) with all the jarring, so we stuck with hydration. Only Jenovec seemed to have an appetite. When Scheffe asked him how he did, he shrugged and guessed it was because he’d already done time on Long Range Recon, riding the Leviathan Three. He said that while that rig was bigger and had better suspension, the pressure hull sat up a lot higher, and that made for more sway.

  Then Horst had a misadventure with the locker-sized head, thanks to an ill-timed jolt, so we all got to stifle a laugh at his expense.

  We stopped dead again after forty-five minutes.

  Corso went forward through the Comm section and had Smith pop the cockpit hatch. I could hear him quietly warning her about what was ahead, but it sounded like our only option was to roll backwards down the way we came, assuming that didn’t wreck us, and take the long way around, which also meant no look inside the crater. After a few tense minutes, Corso sealed the cockpit, came back and ordered everything secured and everyone into harnesses, including herself. That done, she gave Smith a go.

  I felt us grind forward, then tip forward, start to teeter. Smith yelled back for everyone to hang on to something like he was about to take us on a real coaster ride.

  And then we did.

  And then it became a car wreck.

  We seemed to be fighting to slow our slide down a slope as steep as the one we’d just come up, but now with very little to no traction. The loose regolith roared under our treads as we skidded and skied on it. Smith would manage to decelerate us for a few seconds at a time, but as soon as we hit another slick patch, we’d accelerate again.

  Within hellish minutes, we started to fishtail. I realize now that Smith was intentionally turning us to port despite how fast we were sliding, trying to turn us out of going straight downhill into the crater bowl. The deck listed again, starboard out of the turn. Horst, Jenovec and Lyra had been looking alternately nervous and grinning at each other as if to takes turns at reassuring their crewmates, while Scheffe was white-knuckled into her seat, eyes wide. Simmons had been impressively stoic, but when the turn got tighter and the hull tipped just a bit further, he went as tight as Scheffe, and that was a bad sign.

  The ‘Horse creaked, groaned and then tumbled over on its starboard side, slamming us all in our harnesses. I could feel the welded-on flank armor crunch and scrape on rock like a massive sled, bearing weight it was never designed to, and we started to twist and slide downhill tail-first. I was worrying about the tw
o warheads on that side of the hull when we hit something big and hard, broke it (or us), and rolled all the way over.

  And over. And over. (I lost count after the third flip.)

  Scheffe was screaming all the while we tumbled, right up until we came to a stop with a sharp jolt, miraculously landing with a bounce on our treads. I could hear sand and gravel pouring off the hull, but we didn’t move anymore.

  “Is anybody hurt?” Horst wanted to know after we’d gotten our senses back.

  Lyra gave him a breathless “I’m good,” Jenovec did a thumbs-up and Simmons a jerky nod. Scheffe looked like she was in shock.

  “Specialist!” Horst tried barking her out of it, and she finally came around, looked at him and gave him a quick nod.

  Corso popped the Comm section hatch and came staggering out, gripping the handholds like we were still listing (even though we were remarkably level). Smith was calling back, asking if we were all okay.

  “We need a damage report,” Corso ordered, still hanging on for dear life. “Jenovec: Check the hull integrity. Scheffe: inventory. Check the supplies and gear, make sure we didn’t smash anything important. Horst, Simmons, outside. I want to know how much of a beating we just took. Bring a kit to check the warheads.”

  “I can help,” Lyra offered. Corso nodded, chewing her lip.

  “You may need some muscle,” I offered Horst (not Corso). Corso didn’t argue.

  When we cycled outside, it was getting dark, and darker because we were down in the bowl of the crater, the rim towering up a klick-plus all around us. We weren’t all the way down into the bowl, not by a long way, but we’d slid and tumbled over a klick from where I’m guessing we passed through the rim. It looked like Smith tried to ride a talus slope at a reasonable decline southeast, but miscalculated the unknown ground and wiped out sideways over a much steeper drop that he must have been turning to try to avoid. Thankfully we didn’t lose it higher up, or we would have done a lot more tumbling, and then flew rather than rolled over the drop. As it was, we got relatively lucky: after a about a hundred meters of skidding and (mostly) rolling down the sharper decline, the bowl leveled out, and the regolith was soft enough to “catch” us, thankfully topside-up.