The God Mars Book Six: Valhalla I Am Coming

by Michael Rizzo

  “I don’t see any weapons,” Lyra says, almost hopefully.

  “He unleashed a swarm of insect bots on Melas Two,” I tell her, king of shitty timing.

  “I should have stayed in the rig,” she admits.

  I notice metal in the corpses. At first, I think it’s what we saw at the Grave: The Harvesters slowly reinforcing the rotting body, replacing decomposing tissue with simple bot equivalents to keep going longer. But the mechanisms I’m seeing don’t match up with the human skeleton. It could be just the structure that’s holding this horrible display together, but it’s not just a framework of scrap iron. They’re like thick cables, made out of uniform hexagonal sections, with what look like sockets on each face. They remind me of a child’s building toy. I reach into one of the displayed torsos, tear away some of the stinking flesh while Lyra looks at me like I’ve lost my mind. Then I tear into another body. And another.

  The cables don’t just run through the bodies. They run between them, connecting them, connecting them all.

  “You should have stayed in the rig.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I see a flash of white. I look down the path. Surrounded by mangled bodies stands Star. Golden hair. Pale skin. Shimmering mail under her pure white gown. She gives me a look of warning and deep sorrow. She’s still wearing the control diadem. She has a sheathed sword in her hand. It looks like mine.

  “Run back to the vehicle,” I tell Lyra. “Right now.”

  “But you haven’t seen the best part yet!” a corpse-head complains.

  Lyra hesitates for a second, then turns and runs.

  “Fine!” the head pouts. “Be that way!!”

  The entire display of bodies convulses in waves, strung together, conjoined by the hidden cable system. Then it contracts. Each side of the path starts pulling together, the modular cables extending, reaching for each other, making new connections.

  Horst raises his weapon to cover Lyra’s dash through the suddenly animated gauntlet, but he has no idea where to aim. The bodies and parts of bodies are joining into writhing, amorphous masses, forming a monstrous fluid gore-sheathed bot—no, bots. Each side of the path is creating a different machine.

  “Get back in the rig!” I shout at him. “Roll out of here! Fast!!”

  I draw my pistol and glance back at Star. She tosses the sword at me, then reaches up, grabs hold of the diadem with both hands, and starts pulling it apart, ripping it off. It takes her skin with it, and then more: She’s pulling fine wires out of her skull, out of her brain. She grits her teeth and makes a low keening moan that builds into a roar of rage. By the time she gets free of it, her head is a bloody partially-skinned mess. She staggers, collapses to her knees, her body convulsing.

  As if in contrast, the monster corpse-bots rise up, the modular cables having formed maybe a dozen limbs each comprised of several entire bodies woven together, while what passes for a main “body” bristles with multiple heads, dangling entrails and flaps of skin. The way they move reminds me of Fohat’s sectional, many-limbed multi-directional Bugs, but much more flexible—there are no rigid sections, no discernible torso or core. And each one is larger than the ‘Horse.

  Part of the one on the right undulates like a whip, lashes out and catches Lyra before she can get clear, slamming her so hard she flies through the air. I hear bones break and I can’t tell if they’re hers of the monstrosity’s. Horst opens fire on whatever he can hit, and then so do the ‘Horse’s turrets. And so does Kel, blazing in multiple directions, shredding meat away from the underlying mechanism, but that’s about all it does. Shooting the meat, even the heads, has no effect.

  I finally get in the fight, punching HE rounds into what I guess are key structural linkages, but it’s hard to see through the flesh and bone layered over them. And when one of us does manage to sever the underlying cable structure, the parts just rejoin in some other way, seeking the nearest connection point.

  Kel gets batted around like a toy by the right-side monster, but keeps shooting. Horst tries to get to Lyra, but has to dodge the left monster as it comes after him. As I’m shooting that one, part of the other one hits me in the back, sending me sprawling. I lose the sword in the blood-sprayed growth. It tries to impale me into the ground with its corpse-strung tentacles, but I roll clear and shoot up into it, aiming for about where the tentacles join. Rancid blood rains down on me as its sheath of bodies bursts. I see fine wires, a mesh through the meat holding it to the individual modules. The corpse heads all grin like they’re laughing at me.

  I get up, jump up, wrap myself around a section and embrace it, crushing through rotting flesh and bones until I reach cable, and then I start twisting it apart. I realize I’ve got my face pressed up against naked corpse ass, something Asmodeus I’m sure is finding hilarious. The thing tries to shake me off, and finally winds up coming apart, or decides to come apart, leaving me wrestling a multi-limbed section twice my size while the rest lopes toward the ‘Horse. I start pumping shells into the larger part while the smaller bucks me like a rodeo bot. My pistol runs dry, and I can’t reload while I’m hanging on to the piece I’ve got. Worse, I’ve barely slowed the larger mass. Bullets are having very little effect on the modular cables—when one hockey-puck-sized unit gets destroyed, the others simply shed it and rejoin, barely diminished. We’d have to bull’s-eye thousands of these things.

  Smith is starting to back up when the partial monster gets on top of the rig. It starts by mangling the turrets. The limbs made by the modular cables are stronger than a Bug bot’s, and—thanks to all the bodies—they have a lot more mass to hit with.

  The bigger beast joins it, grabbing the port side of the rig, rocking the whole vehicle, threatening to tip it as the treads spin, then stop with a groan.

  “Smith!” I shout over the link channel. “Get out of here!”

  “Trying!” he shouts back, clearly shaken. “Something’s jammed in the tracks!”

  Then I hear metal shear, and see one of the AP turrets get popped off. A tentacle of metal and corpses slams its way inside the resulting hole, as if burrowing for food. I hear screaming. It’s Scheffe. The screaming dies in a grunt and gurgle.

  Flooded with rage, I wrench with all I’ve got and tear the thing I’m riding in half. But as I drop to the ground soaked and slimed with rot and gore, I see it start to act as two separate units. They circle me, lash at me with meat-covered tentacles that I now see are tipped with injectors as well as claw-like blades.

  I see the sword lying in the undergrowth, and realize Star brought it to me for a reason. I roll and catch it up, draw it, and meet the two bots with nanomorphic blade. It chops them apart, chops through the animated cables like green bamboo. It takes effort, but eventually I’ve cut the things into parts that seem too small to reform into anything effective. All they can do is wriggle sickeningly, like chopped-up worms. That’s its weakness: if the module-groups are severed into sections too small to move enough to attack or to reach and join other sections, it’s done.

  Star is dragging herself to her feet. She’s hurt, damaged, dazed, but she draws a short sword from her belt—the sickle-bladed Khopesh she used as Ra. She heads for the monsters, but she’s slow.

  I charge the ‘Horse. The smaller of the two monstrosities turns to meet me, abandoning its attack on the rig, grinning at me with a dozen heads and slashing at me with tentacles made of bodies. I hack whatever I can hit, whittling it down, working my way in. It flips itself and throws me into the shrubbery.

  As I get up, I see the other one, the larger one, pry into the Horse’s rear airlock. Horst and Kel are peppering it with everything they’d got. Their fire chisels at the thing, blasts away massive chunks of the flesh and bone covering it, but does little to the serpentine hive-bot underneath. It ignores them as it rips the outer hatch away. I try to run to it, but the other one runs at me, tumbling to keep me from getting a good target. The force of its wild motion starts throwing the human body parts free, making it a flaying chaos
of limbs, heads and guts.

  As I start chopping away at the smaller one to get it off me, I see the bigger one break through into the bay, and shove part of itself inside. I hear small arms fire, hear Simmons cursing and screaming. I get slammed by a whip made of metal-reinforced corpse-legs, and a skull fractures over mine. Then I hear an explosion from inside the rig, inside the bay. Then more, a chain of what sound like muffled grenade blasts set off in sequence. The monster convulses with each one, then drags itself out of the bay, stripped of a lot of its meat-sheath and missing significant parts of its limbs. At least Simmons took some of it with him.

  Star starts hacking the one that’s dogging me, but gets swatted away in short order. I try to break away and get to the bigger one again, even though I know I’m too late for Scheffe and Simmons.

  I suddenly hear the scream of AAV engines, coming at us fast and low, then breaking into a hover. Turret fire sprays the bigger monster from somewhere over the trees, chewing it up. Then I have to dive and grab ground as a rocket bursts the ground between its “legs”. It shifts, staggers. A second rocket blows in its midsection, sending tentacles flying. Meat and blood rains from the sky.

  The AAV hovers, targets the other mass. It doesn’t seem to care if I’m in the line of fire, bound and determined to destroy the mechanical nightmares. But while it’s focused on the one, the other starts piecing itself back together: Whatever sections are still viable scramble to re-connect to the bits that flail uselessly, systematically rebuilding itself.

  Horst pops a few grenades at the growing mass, but they do very little to even slow it. At most, the blasts scatter the random parts. The AAV turns and starts in on it again. First turrets, then more rockets.

  In the chaos I catch sight of Lyra. She’s down in the undergrowth, trying to move, trying to get up. She’s too battered to even raise her weapon. Blood streams from her nose and mouth. I see her choke on it. Her eyes look at me plaintively. Then I lose her as a rocket throws a storm of Mars over us.

  There’s a grinding and a screeching as the ‘Horse breaks free and moves fast in reverse, plowing over the top of the rebuilding enemy. Smith shifts gears, rolls over as many of the tentacles as he can. It tears them apart, crushes some of the modules, but the sections quickly start re-linking. Soon it’s strong enough to stop the rig, lifts it, starts to tip it.

  The AAV slides in close, shredding at the bot on the rig, either not caring that he’s hitting the rig or counting on the armor to save anyone still inside. But the warhead tubes aren’t nearly as sturdy as the hull—the AAV bombardment seems to be trying to avoid them, so the pilot knows what we’re carrying, but rounds hit nerve-rackingly close.

  The AAV’s turrets run dry, so it fires the last of its rockets, one at each surviving cluster. Unfortunately, I’m in close proximity to one, proving the pilot doesn’t care about hitting me. Thankfully, Mars eats most of it, directing the blast upwards into the bot, dismembering it.

  Empty, the AAV slides off, descending as if looking for a place to land. I lose sight of it beyond the treeline.

  Horst is up on his feet before Star and I are. He systematically shoots apart sections as they try to wriggle together and rejoin, but then he’s out too.

  “Don’t go near the rig!” I warn him as he heads to check for survivors. Then I call on the link: “Smith! Stay put. Keep yourself sealed in. If that thing left any of itself viable in the bay, you’ll be stepping through injectors.”

  “Thankfully there’s a head in here,” he tries to lighten. But can’t: “Anybody else make it?”

  I run and check the bay myself.

  “Simmons and Scheffe are down,” I have to tell him. Then I have to run to check on Lyra.

  Star’s made it to her first. She’s on her back in the growth, coughing up blood. She looks at me like she can barely see me, tries to mouth something, chokes. Star raises her head a little, very carefully.

  She’s busted up bad, Star tells me in my head. Massive internal trauma.

  My heart sinks.

  She doesn’t have long.

  I hear a skittering behind us. There’s a section of bot that’s managed to reassemble enough of itself to create a kind of spinning octopus-like shape that’s sweeping up and absorbing the random bits. As it forms, now stripped of most of its corpse-shield, the cables braid themselves together, forming thicker, stronger bundles. Horst grabs up Lyra’s weapon and starts shooting at it, but the new structure is definitely much tougher than the last. It dances around the track, building itself up, growing, and finally plants itself on top of the rig. One of the few corpse-heads left attached gets elevated to the pinnacle of the writhing mass. The sensor eyes blaze at me, and through the dislocated jaw Asmodeus shouts gleefully

  “RELEASE THE KRAKEN!!!”

  “Shut up!!” another voice answers it, just before a burst of ICW fire splatters the head.

  It’s Jackson. He comes marching out of the green in his black flight suit, popping grenades into the core of the thing that burst off the ‘Horse’s abused hull, advancing right at it as he sprays, shouting “Shut up! Shut up! SHUT! UUUUP!!”

  He spends a mag, slaps a new one in, spends that one too. The limbs get chewed at, lose individual modules, but the tentacles almost-instantly re-knit themselves. He walks right up on it, and the limbs recoil to strike, but just when I’m sure he’s about to be pulverized, he isn’t. The thing ignores him. And heads for us.

  And I’m all done with it.

  I take it head-on, hacking with all I’ve got. At one point, it grabs up one of the ‘Horse’s turrets and tries to swat me with it like a massive frying pan. I chop that limb away.

  It’s hard. Each braided limb takes multiple hits to chop through, and if I’m slow, it re-knits before I’m done. But I don’t stop.

  I’m keeping it busy enough that Kel can get a bead on the central hub, enough to pump 20mm HE rounds into it. Two limbs come off at the base, try to lash at me like massive snakes, but I hack them apart. Unfortunately, the distraction lets the main body collect bits from what I just severed, so I have to be quick, be careful to knock the pieces I chop free out of reach, and then keep the core bot from getting to them, like some sick lethal game.

  Star gets what I’m doing and adjusts her own tactics accordingly, but she’s still a lot slower and weaker than I am from whatever tearing off the diadem cost her.

  Kel gets his own idea, and rolls full-out at the nearest supporting limb, running through it and tearing a piece off it to crush under his mass, his spinning sections grinding it apart. The beast swats at him, but his armor holds. He gets one more 20mm shot up into the belly of it before a tentacle rips away the big gun barrel. Then he runs down another limb.

  Jackson has made it over to Horst and Lyra, where they take the last of her ammo and spend it trying to help us, or at least distract. The beast lashes at Horst any time he gets too close, but it still ignores Jackson, so he can get right up point-blank and shoot sections apart.

  Together, it takes what feels like an eternity, but we manage to chop apart and scatter the bits enough that it’s finally helpless, unable to re-assemble.

  “That! Was! AWESOME!!!” Asmodeus cheers out of the mouth of a discarded corpse-head. Jackson staggers up to it and starts stomping the head into mush. I’m about to warn him to be careful about the Harvester injector in its mouth, when I realize he has no reason to care.

  As if he needs to show me, he turns to me in the winded, gasping, gore-covered aftermath and rips away his facial patch. Where I expected a missing eye and facial bones is an eye and an intact face, but it doesn’t match the rest of him. It hasn’t fully matured yet, but I can tell its Asmodeus.

  He advances on me. I instinctively point my blade at him.

  “Do it!!!” he screams at me. “You need to do it!! He’s in me! He’s in my brain! His filth is in my blood! My DNA!!”

  He draws his sidearm and tries to point it at his own head, but can’t. He loses control of his muscles when
he tries. So he points the pistol at me at starts emptying it.

  “DO IT!!! KILL ME!!!”

  I duck a few rounds but take the rest. The weapon locks open and he throws it at me in his mindless rage, then he walks right up on the tip of my blade, presses it up under his jaw, but something won’t let him go any further.

  “Please…” he growls through gritted teeth. (I swear the Asmodeus half of his face is grinning at me.) “I’ve waited… He was supposed to be here… I could feel him here… I waited all day… I’m losing myself… his filth is inside me… PLEASE!!!”

  Before I can react, Star snatches my pistol from its rig and shoots from over my shoulder. The HE round goes through his brow and blows most of his skull away. She steps back, as if I’m going to attack her for it, as his body falls among the rest of the gore.

  Horst is looking at us dumbfounded.

  Lyra…

  I run back to her. She’s barely conscious, but she must know I’m here. She squeezes my hand back, and manages to speak in a rasp.

  “…do the… thing…”

  “No…” I protest weakly.

  “…know I’m dead anyway… it’s okay… it’s all…” She coughs more blood—I think she’s drowning in it. “…do the thing… make something… make me something… someone who can…”

  “Where is Asmodeus?!!” I shout at Star, like this is her fault, focused on my rage, on revenge, rather than the broken young girl breathing her last in my arms.

  “He’s not here,” Star tells me, still trying to get her breath back, my pistol still hanging from her hand. “He’s working on something, something he’s kept me shut me out of. But he will be.”

  “How can you be sure?” I don’t believe.

  “Because I pretended to slip, showed him what I did know as I was ripping that fucking thing off my head. He’ll come.”

  Lyra reaches up weakly, grabs me by the hair to get my attention back.