To my left, the battered Box bot sits, again almost like a loyal dog watching over me.
I lift my head. I’m still lying flat out on my back, limbs splayed like I’m making a snow angel. I should be covered in ash, but my armor is pristine black. Gone are all the dents and tears from being shot countless times. I expect my face is equally unmarked.
The world immediately around me is not. I’ve scavenged the plant life for nearly two meters all around me, surrounding me in a circle of desiccation. My very existence is death to this place—Earthside is a poor rival in that.
I’m stiff, I ache, but rage goes a long way as an analgesic. I sit up. Horst takes a reflexive step back, well outside of the scavenged circle.
I see the ‘Horse, about where it was when the blast hit. It is covered in ash—a fine cloud blows my way, carried on the breeze. There’s an H-A suit standing by the rear lock, armed but at ease, as if waiting. I can’t tell who it is from here. (I could zoom in and read the name plate, but I really don’t give a shit.) Another suit is checking over the track—that’s probably Simmons. It moves like Simmons.
“Should you two be out here without rad suits?” I greet them sourly.
Horst shows me the radiation badge on the breast of his jacket. My own systems confirm that the toxicity is acceptable for short periods.
I wonder where the wind will carry the fallout? Will it head for Katar, or pass them by, headed straight back toward those who sent it? No, the world isn’t that just, never has been. Yod’s made sure to preserve that for authenticity.
“We need to go, sir,” Horst prompts me gently but urgently.
“Continue the mission…” I mutter to no one.
“What they said at Liberty… If that was Asmodeus… He came from the direction of Alchera…” Horst reminds me like he’s walking a minefield. I expect I look like the kind of thing that would murder the world right now.
I don’t bother to tell him what he knows: That Alchera is certainly another trap. I also don’t bother to tell him what he doesn’t know (but probably suspects): That the whole point of me being here is to walk right into those traps, and bring these poor loyal soldiers along with me. They’re window-dressing. Here to try to convince my enemy that I’m somehow not properly anticipating him. Because I would never put vulnerable innocents in the line of fire, use them to draw fire (or the man I used to be would never do that). If Asmodeus knows that, it won’t change the outcome: He’ll spring his trap anyway, always too tempted to inflict hurt on a handy victim, always happy to hurt me by hurting others.
I look at Lyra. I’m tempted to convert her, to use my last Seed. But not because I’m involuntarily aroused. I’m thinking she’ll be dead anyway if we keep going (and I have to keep going). I could make it more merciful than the demon would. I could…
I shake it off, push the toxic darkness out of my mind, push myself up on my feet.
“Okay.”
It’s Corso in the shell standing guard at the rear of the track. She greets me with a stony glare through her visor. I can’t tell if she’s trying to find a way to blame me for this as well or if she’s finally having to face that her leaders are a bunch of genocidal psychopaths. Or maybe the problem is that she’s a genocidal psychopath, too, and now they’ll be no hiding behind righteous intentions anymore.
“Any word from Specialist Scheffe?” I ask her flatly.
“She’s inside,” she lets me know with equal curtness.
I cycle in with Horst and Lyra as Corso prompts Simmons to wrap it up so we can roll.
Inside the bay, Scheffe has stripped down to shirtsleeves, her short-cut hair wet and smelling like she’s just been through decon. She looks pale, which makes her facial cuts stand out starkly. Her bloodshot, swollen eyes stare at the deck, hands limply on her knees. Her breath shudders like she’s been crying.
There’s a delay before she looks up at me, like she’s drugged or in shock. She tries to say something to me, but can’t seem to, can only shake her head. Then her eyes are back on the deck.
“She said the Knights got away in time,” Horst tells me quietly. “Into their rim bunkers. But not all of them. Some stayed behind, tried to convince the Sons to get the hell out of there, offered them shelter…”
“…it was so… loud…” she mutters. “So loud. It shook the whole planet… Then the wind outside… When we came out, when it was safe enough to get me out… there was nothing… nothing left…”
“They gave her a cloak and cowl to get her home, keep the fallout off of her. We canned what she was wearing, scrubbed her down just in case. She’s okay, but…”
He doesn’t bother to finish. I understand. Sort of. I understand what it’s like to witness atrocity. I’ve been doing that all my life. What I can’t imagine anymore is what it’s like to do so as an innocent.
She volunteered to come here, to Mars. One-way ticket, given the Quarantine. She had every reason to believe there was something here that would kill her horribly, but she came anyway. Because the mission was to save people, to help people. Righteous cause.
“Righteous cause…” I grumble out loud. Horst and Lyra give me questioning, worried looks, but let it go. I can see they’re dealing with their own stew of doubt and rage.
Corso cycles in with Simmons, pulls off her helmet and starts to rack her armor.
“Secure to roll,” she orders, almost absently, not looking at any of us.
“Shouldn’t we try to help those people?” Lyra protests. “At least check for survivors?”
“We can’t risk it,” I say before Corso can. “And nothing we have on board will do those people any good, even if they don’t just shoot us on sight.”
“The Colonel’s right,” Corso grimly agrees with me—I think she actually appreciates me letting her off the hook. “If there are survivors, Orbit will see them, send it Upworld to decide on the best course…”
But I hear real doubt in her voice, I think for the first time.
“Now, secure to roll,” she repeats her order, trying not to let us hear her uncertainty.
“Respectfully, Major,” Simmons speaks up. “We still have the same terrain issue. And no rover bot to test the ground ahead of us.”
“I can do it,” I throw out. “I could use the fresh air.”
Corso doesn’t send anybody out with me this time, but I’m not alone. The Box rolls on beside me as I lead the ‘Horse forward. It actually proves useful in this chore: Its mass on its treads and wheels give me a good sense of the soil without needing to scan it meter-by-meter. When it hits a treacherous patch, its rotating sections spin it out, and it finds a way around. This lets us make better time than anticipated, and soon gets our back to the still-smoking Liberty site as we turn south.
The Knights’ intel that there’s been no enemy activity inside the crater lets us keep that pace. Corso doesn’t seem in the mood to doubt it, so she doesn’t order us to stop to recon the lowlands and uplift monoliths. We just take a few cursory scans, and I look for signs of the nano-nets we use to hide big things. And we move along. Maybe she just wants to get as far away from Liberty as possible. The remains of the mushroom cloud still loom behind us, like the ghosts of all those who died in it, and the suffering of potentially more gruesomely injured or poisoned by it.
I can’t help but feel that sky-high ghost is accusing me for unintentionally painting the site, despite my intention being to save lives. I brought Jackson right down on them. The fact that no military command officer—no human being—should drop any bomb on a target without verifying it is no real absolution.
It takes two hours to make it south across the eastern side of crater bowl. Simmons and Smith identify a possible exit: a pass through the southeast of the crater rim that will take us out just to the south of the mountains to the east of the crater. Once we get around those mountains, we’ll turn straight east-northeast, and have a fairly level path to Alchera, thirty-five klicks across the Coprates main valley to the foothills of
the mountains at the base of the great North Rim slope. There’s some terracing in the valley floor, geologic signs that have been taken to indicate that this part of Marineris was once a great lake.
If we keep making time like this, we could be approaching the colony site by nightfall.
But crossing the valley puts us out in the open. I haven’t been out that far east, haven’t had the chance to go sightseeing thanks to Asmodeus’ relentless attacks. I don’t even know if the invisible Lake stretches far east enough to be between us and Alchera. (Though I suppose if it did, Asmodeus wouldn’t have been able to hike from Alchera to Liberty disguised as a wandering madman, assuming he actually did hike the whole way. His airships, however, would have flown this part of the valley, shuttling scrap back to the Grave.)
There have been no further recon flights all day. Either they’ve shocked themselves into temporary inaction, or they’re convinced they’ve destroyed the track and what it carries. And that gets me back to their failure to confirm their target before they dropped a fucking thermonuclear weapon on it. So I spend the hike brooding over whether I’m dealing with genocidal incompetence or genocidal hubris. Given the common denominator in those possibilities, I know I am going to have to take my war to them as soon as I’m done with Asmodeus—that wasn’t my rage talking in the immediate aftermath of atrocity. It’s the only way to ensure the survival of everyone left on this planet. There’s no denying that now.
The irony of it brings a sick grin that I’m glad no one in the ‘Horse can see. I’m going to have to do exactly what Chang set out to do (what he even asked me to join him in doing): Chase Earth away from Mars and keep them away. For once I’m thankful for my functional immortality, because I’m going to have to fight that fight until the peoples of Mars can somehow do it themselves. Or until the human race is done or evolves into something that doesn’t exterminate itself.
A hundred permutations of that argument fill my walk.
We make the climb up to the pass with minimal slippage. The way through is initially smooth, but then we get a jarring descent over man-sized boulders for over a klick on the way down the other side, threatening to undo all of Simmons’ (and my) repairs. Only the Box handles it with impressive grace by design.
There’s another roadblock as we wind around the southernmost mountain beyond the crater: a jagged but low crest of rock that forms a kind of tail or tentacle out from the mountain. It would add nearly ten klicks to our trip to go all the way around, so we decide to nudge ourselves gingerly over it. This, more than any other ordeal we’ve been through, reminds me of one of the pointless and potentially disastrous stunts I used to see off-road competitors put their insane vehicles to on Earth. Only the Warhorse is five times the size of the biggest “monster truck,” and, of course, loaded with nukes.
That cleared, Simmons comes out to take a quick check of our drive train, tightens down a few of his earlier repairs, and deems us fit to continue.
We still haven’t seen or heard sign of an air patrol. They haven’t even sent anybody out to look at what they’ve done.
We’re soon back down in green that’s tall enough to mostly hide the rig, but the scan I got from the high-ground of the crest let me know that the growth will thin back to scrub again as we cross the open valley. Any aircraft passing within a few klicks then will likely spot us. What I should be more concerned about is that Asmodeus—assuming he’s at Alchera—will be able to see us coming long before we get there. But then he knows we’re coming anyway: If he hasn’t been keeping eyes on us, then Liberty getting vaporized has let him know exactly how close we are.
Over the mountains, the nuclear cloud has dissipated to the point that it looks like a dying forest fire. The blast zone is probably still hot, littered with smoldering plants and smoldering bodies. (The ones I can’t stop thinking about are those who may have been badly burned by the heat flash of the blast. Other than UNMAC, no one has facilities to deal with that kind of trauma. They’ll die slow, miserable deaths. Followed by an even larger number with critical radiation poisoning.)
(Will Earthside try to help them? I expect they’ll make an effort, once the terrible weight of what they’ve done becomes clear, though it will likely be too late for too many before they get around to realizing—and admitting—the atrocity they’ve committed.)
(And how will any such help be received?)
As I try to estimate the fallout spread again, I’m struck by another wicked irony: With sunset, the wind will blow the residual contamination right across our path. That means we’ll either need to stop and wait out the night here, still south of the projected swath, or make the run and hope we get north of it before it hits. I’m guessing we’d need to roll more than fifteen klicks within the next four hours.
I pass this back to the crew through Simmons before he goes back inside. He looks warily at the radioactive storm, nods in his helmet and cycles back inside. After ten minutes of arguments that I didn’t get to (or care to) listen to, Corso gives the order to make the run.
The grind across the valley is mostly uneventful. The terrain is overall very flat for great expanses, except for a few smallish monoliths standing against the wind. It reminds me of a dried old lakebed blown over with sand, and it’s fairly hard underfoot (and under tread). But that also makes it less hospitable to green life. Only the stubbornly tenacious Graingrass and a few scattered Tealeaf shrubs grip the soil against the twice-daily wind battering that keeps the exposed hard-packed soil scoured into hypnotic micro-formations, a chaotic Zen garden that our crushing treads distinctively scar. (For my own part, I find myself trying to walk as lightly as possible, avoiding even stepping on the plants whenever I can manage, even though my lumbering bot companion can’t help but pulverize them.)
Smith keeps us on a course that holds us to the lowest elevations and avoids any significant climbing. But the growth here is indeed barely higher than our drive wheels at best. The only camouflage it affords is that we may still visually blend in to the terrain at great distances, assuming the rig’s shadow and what dust it kicks up don’t mark us an easy target.
I occasionally look back westward, monitoring the still-dissipating cloud. I find I’ve become sick of brooding on it, sick of brooding over Earth, shifting my bloodlust back to idle and ultimately pointless fantasies of what I’ll do to Asmodeus when I finally catch up to him (when he finally lets me catch up to him). After a few hours of that, even my most cruel imaginings become mindless and boring.
Intermittently, I try to enjoy the scenery, try to be in the moment, just be here and give my mind a break from its exhausting spinning and stewing. But the thought-train into hate gets sent spiraling again at the slightest trigger. Unfortunately, my silent loyal companion is such a trigger by his very existence.
“Why do you follow me?” I ask pointless questions as we walk. I’m not sure if he (or she, I still don’t know) can even understand me. “Do you just need human companionship? Purpose? Do you think I can help you? Help you how? Restore you? Or just give this existence meaning?
“Why do you keep going? How do you keep going? What is it like to be bundle of raw nerves inside metal, everything else that was you—body, limbs, your face—cut away?
“Do you wonder how long you’ll live like this, how long that machine will keep your brain alive? Do you even feel alive? You must, I suppose, enough to not want me to end you. Or is that just reflex, instinct?
“And who were you? PK? Zodanga? Or is that unfair, that I immediately lump you in with an entire group? Who were you? Did you have family? Do you still? Did…”
I finally get a reaction, a gesture, as it spins its broken secondary gun around at me and seems to glare at me with its sensor head.
“I’m sorry.”
The gun rotates away, as does its eyes.
“I wish you could tell me. If there was someone… If I could help you, help them…
“If I could just know your name…”
It does somet
hing I haven’t seen a Box do before. It flops itself ahead of me, rotating sections until it stabs its broken gun cluster into the dirt. Then it uses what’s left of the aiming system, combined with its section motors, to carve something. It’s a jerky, almost furious act, and I can feel the frustration in it. But when it rolls back, I can see a few sloppy, jagged letters.
KEL
“Pleased to meet you, Kel. And very grateful for your company.”
The evening wind only reads as mildly hot at our backs. It fills the valley in front of us with a thin haze of dust.
The approach to Alchera is open, plains all around except for the mountain slopes behind it, but even when we risk getting within a klick, we can’t see anything there. No heat, no movement, not even any above-ground ruins, even though our recent satellite maps show signs of foundations and framework.
I also have 3D images of the original colony in my memory: habs, fabs, storage facilities. I lay the model graphic in my vision over the empty terrain. Even blasted by a close nuke, there would be something still standing, even just a few twisted scraps of structural frame. Nor has the terrain obviously been built up to bury it as other colonies have done to hide. Did Asmodeus strip it all, down to and including the foundations? And if so, how did Orbit not see that?
The Sons of Liberty said they hadn’t seen anyone come from that way in several decades, but that means there were survivors at one point. The distance between the two colonies would have been hard to cross on foot with only canisters. There is a feed line in proximity to both sites, but nothing in between across the open valley, no oasis of precious air, fuel and water for the intrepid traveler.
The God Mars Book Six: Valhalla I Am Coming Page 34
