I relive flashes of those moments: Getting suckered into traps, getting beaten back, hurt bad, having to flee, sometimes dragging the dead to consume later. But that only made me—Peter—more determined. It had become a game…
After three years of whittling away at them, Thel finally started to suspect what I was and checked the ship, found the gravestones I’d made. He’s smart. He figured out my weaknesses and set a real trap. He met me face-to-face at the ship after one of my forays, drew me into the DQ’s cockpit, kept me distracted so I didn’t see how many of his pets had infiltrated the ship while I was gone. He had them open fire on me with big guns in a tight space, chewed me up bad while his staff ate the bullets that flew his way. Then he burned as much of me as he could, before sealing me up so my nanites couldn’t get what they needed to rebuild me. Cruel bastard—that hadn’t changed. He left me stuck in a barely-aware half-life, starving and helpless. For twelve years. I should have killed him when I had the chance.
I had him once in the bunkers—he came out to face me, to prove himself to his minions. I gave him those scars—apparently his tech doesn’t heal as well as ours does—and I beat him, but I wanted him to suffer, I wanted to save him for last.
We are stronger than he is, faster and tougher, but his stick has tricks. Apparently it’s learned a few more, or he has.
I flash on what little I know of Terraformer tech, their tools. I can feel him stew on that.
“The Spheres can’t hurt the other immortals,” I offer. “They can push through the force fields. Their gear doesn’t disintegrate.”
But the devices can kick them around, like your friend Red. We’ll need to take it away from him before we get close and finish things.
“And what about my friends? I know he took prisoners.”
I don’t get an answer.
We sit and wait beyond their perimeter until the middle of the night, about the time their sentries start getting complacent. Phobos crosses over our heads, a bright blob in the starry sky. It’s so strange just to be able to sit here and watch the sky like this, and not be hunkered freezing under cloaks on night watch.
I’m slowly starting to feel a little less sick in my own skin, despite being unable to stop imagining the millions or billions of microscopic machines moving beneath it, busily trying to make me into something else, someone else. (And these things had been part of someone else.)
Competing with that intimate horror, one crushing, thrilling realization is also sinking in, becoming real: This is what it’s like to be an immortal, like Ram and the others, to walk this planet without concern for cold or lack of air or scarce food and water. To be so much more than what I was.
But I also know I’m not an immortal. Peter is. He’s taken my body, infected every part of it, and he’s only letting me hang on because he remembers the boy that I don’t. He’s not the ghost come back from the dead. I’m the ghost in my own body.
I can feel Peter, staring up at the sky through my eyes. Getting angry again. But now his target is Earth, the Unmakers.
I can’t believe they finally came back, and are building up there again, after all these years. I can hear them. Listen…
And I can: Faint chatter, mostly routine communications, but then the occasional burst of an encrypted flash message beamed back to Earth. I can hear the Unmakers in orbit…
I want to crack in. I want to scream at them. They sent us here and left us to die. And they still hang on to the lies, after all this time. They’ve known what was really here for twenty years. Maybe more. But they keep their secrets, just so they can keep control of their world, keep the population in line with fear.
“Do you want to kill them, too?” I try not to sound completely snarky.
His chuckle comes out through my mouth.
That’s a lot of killing, lad.
But that wasn’t a denial.
Peter knows where the old access points were. Given where we find sentries, they don’t seem to have changed their layout much in twelve years. But then, I don’t suppose they’ve had reason to, once they thought they’d finished off their “Reaper.” I try to imagine what it’s been like for them: Generations without facing an outside threat, then a few years hopelessly trying to fight something they knew they couldn’t kill. (I wonder: Does that include Thelonious as well?) And after whatever celebration they allowed themselves for entombing Peter, twelve more years of standing sentry against nothing. Until we showed up with a unit of Katar warriors and gave them something to shoot at that they could actually kill. I almost feel sorry for them. They exist to be soldiers, but they’ve only faced external threats two or three times in three generations. Unless I include the threats that come offering them “gifts”…
Thelonious. And now Asmodeus, Peter follows my thoughts, incidentally letting me know I’ll have no more privacy, not even in my own mind. And that makes me want to claw my own brain out.
I try to focus on the moment, why we’re here (why Peter is here—my body is just his vehicle).
We move up around behind a sentry, get past him without him seeing or hearing us. But then Peter advances toward him, long blade ready.
“We could slip past him,” I argue practical mercy. “Get in. Find Thelonious.” See if my friends are still alive.
I can’t believe you’re reluctant to kill these animals. You saw. They’re not following Thel’s orders because they’re afraid of him. They enjoy it. They’ve been raised to think they’re elite warriors, and everyone else is trash. Their only problem is they never get to leave their holes, they never get to fight the battles of their dreams. So any time they get to go out and encounter any other living thing, they slaughter like it’s a party, and tell themselves they’re being brave and take home trophies to brag over.
He comes right up behind the sentry, stands over the Heavy Armor shell for several seconds—I can feel him enjoying the moment—then scrapes his blade on the rocks. The man turns on us with his gun, and Peter lets him get a good look and start to scream in his helmet before we cut the man through diagonally downward from collar bone to liver. Then we use the blade like a prod to toss the upper half away from the lower, to leave a bigger mess. Peter’s “art”.
I’m flooded with a storm of emotions: Rage. Terror. Disgust. And giddy satisfaction. I feel sick and shaky but I also feel unbelievably good, better than I’ve ever felt (better than the thrill that Terina might have feelings for me). I’m not sure if it’s Peter or me that’s giggling like a madman under this mask. I feel so strong, invincible. But it’s not enough, not yet. The rage quickly becomes dominant again, unsatisfied, never satisfied.
We have our way in clear, but Peter doesn’t take it. I can hear the nearest sentry calling to check on the man we killed. We send back gibberish, like the man’s link is just fuzzed.
“Peter, we don’t…”
We move fast and smooth over the rocks, the Nagamaki slicing the green out of our way. It makes enough noise for the next man to be facing us when we come charging up on him. He starts to get a call out, screaming “It’s the Reaper! The Reaper is back!!” but we jam his link. Then we lock the man’s weapon when he tries to fire it still set on target-assist. Peter cuts the useless rifle in half, then the return swing takes off the top of the man’s helmet. And his skull. The armor suit drops limp, spewing blood out its open top. I get the rush again as rage shifts to sick pleasure, then too-quickly reverses, demanding more of this. More.
We look around, listen. There’s chatter. The other sentries are nervous, calling to each other, trying to reach the dead men through choppy links, trying to see them through scopes blurred with static. But none are particularly close, so I manage to get us turned around and heading back for the concealed hatch.
Whatever lock it has yields to our touch without setting off any alarms. We drop down into dim light, and tight spaces that Peter warned me about but doesn’t seem worried about now. We run through the rough-dug tunnels like he knows where he’s going.
The light—which comes from old survival lanterns strung sparingly along the cut-rock walls—let’s me see that we’ve been sprayed in blood from our opportunistic slaughter, but as I watch, it absorbs into us, like the lacing is drinking it. I feel a rush of satisfaction, satiation. I tell myself I can’t really taste the blood, that it’s just my imagination.
We come upon a side-chamber where they store their armor. A teenage boy is hard at work cleaning the camo-painted laminate plating, scrubbing the crevices like his life depends on it. He wears a work suit that’s barely suitable for rags. His pale skin is stained and crusty with old dirt, and he looks chronically malnourished. He has very little muscle mass, like he’s barely more than a skeleton inside his clothes.
Only the Keepers get access to their G-Sim centrifuges and PT machines. They want them weak and fragile. Easier to control.
He looks up and sees us and freezes, but doesn’t make a sound after an initial gasp. He’s missing several teeth.
They’re slaves. Do you know what slaves are, lad?
My answer gets interrupted by the sounds of running and orders barked from down the tunnel. It’s a pair of sentries in Keeper soft armor, armed with PDWs. They stop so short when they see us that they almost slip on the dirt floor. They raise their weapons in panic, but then hesitate, eyes wide, mouths open, unwilling to believe what they’re seeing. Peter cuts their links, then just stands put, spreads our arms as if welcoming them, and lets them open fire.
Everything slows down—I can see the rounds coming. And I know I could easily dodge them, but Peter plants our feet and lets their bullets ping into our armor. They deform, fragment, and stick. I watch the copper and alloy soak into us like the blood did. What pitiful dents they made in the plate quickly reshape. My armor is barely smudged for the abuse.
He even lets one of them throw a grenade at us, only to catch it. I can feel our tech interrupt the fuse. He lets the two men realize their device isn’t going to go off, then he sets the Nagamaki against the wall and draws the revolver, both in an eye-blink, and puts a shell through each man’s forehead. The revolver kicks like it’s firing rifle rounds, the flame blinding in the dim spaces. The grip of the gun slams back into the web of my hand as if I’ve been struck in the palm by a baton. It makes me giggle involuntarily. The gun is back in its holster before they even begin to fall.
“Get out of there,” we growl at the boy, who edges past us, gripping his ears against the gunfire, trembling and wide-eyed. Then he runs like a terrified child, leaping over the dead Keepers. Peter tosses the grenade into the armory, and steps us aside to avoid the worst of the blast. The shockwave that hammers us through our armor is deeply satisfying, just like the recoil of the revolver. I want more. I want to blow it all up.
We take the time in the storm of dust that floods the tunnels to replace the two empty casings in the gun with fresh shells from the belt, saving the empties in our satchel. Then Peter reaches out his hand, and the Nagamaki flies to us as if tossed.
“Links jammed or not, they’ll have heard that,” I try to warn.
They rely too much on their links. Even if I let them talk to each other, it takes them time to prepare a proper ambush for me, and they’re twelve years out of practice. Plus, they’re spread thin in the outer sections, everywhere except in their Barracks. Their tunnel complex is vast, much bigger than the original colony was.
“How do we know where to go?”
I know Thel.
He also knows his way, at least through the tunnels that look better established. We do meet some resistance along the labyrinthine path: a few unfortunate soldiers coming to look for the source of the gunfire and grenade blast. Peter doesn’t take the time to butcher the bodies, just deals with them with a surgical pistol shot or blade thrust, the Nagamaki’s geometry letting it serve as an effective spear as well as a sword.
Otherwise, the Keepers holding seem to be spaced out as section guards, or the random rotating patrol, usually in pairs. And they haven’t seemed to coordinate any kind of significant response yet, most defaulting to holding their posts until they receive orders, which Peter is blocking. That makes them easy to take out, but Peter seems disappointed with the slow accumulation of kills, like a starving man being fed only one bite at a time.
We pass several small caves that serve as living spaces for their civilian workers. They live in cramped, dark, filthy conditions, stinking of old human waste and sweat and garbage. They all look universally deprived. And not a single one moves to recover a dropped weapon from a dead guard and raise it against us, not at all, as if the idea is unthinkable to them.
My own rage floods me now, adding to Peter’s unquenchable blood thirst. This isn’t the deserts of Melas. Food is plentiful here. Water mists down from the sky—the Katar collect it using homemade devices. The air is livable—the Katar and the Pax have proven that. The plants provide fuel for heat and materials for building and weaving. All of these people could live healthy, comfortable lives.
But that wouldn’t serve their masters, now would it?
Peter’s right. There’s only one way to deal with the Keepers.
I have a sickly satisfying thought: The Cast showed us how good corpses are at making plants grow lush and bountiful.
I hear Peter chuckling in my head, appreciating my practical bloodlust.
As if I have my flashcard maps in my head, I can see the layout of the underground aspect of Eureka take shape as we go, and see the overlay of the original colony habs, fabs and support facilities, adjusted for damage and what stripping we saw. Peter’s aiming us on a circuitous route for what used to be a colony habitat dome, one that apparently survived mostly intact, but was then buried to hide it as we’ve seen done at other colony sites. I imagine a hidden paradise of clean, comfortable living, like the Tranquility Upper Domes.
The corridors become concrete, though cracked and patched over the decades. There are still steel hatches between sections and sealing side chambers, but they’re chipped and corroded. The lighting is barely brighter than it was in the civilian sections. But it smells less rotten—mostly just the reek of chemical toilets and poorly maintained recyclers. And there are more Keepers.
Deciding on a modicum of stealth to avoid bringing them all down on us at once, and being too focused on the primary target of his vengeance to dally with butchery anymore, Peter picks off the Keepers we run into very cleanly now, but not with the revolver. Instead, he uses steel spikes the size of a pen stylus—shuriken—which he can throw with the force and speed of a crossbow bolt. Through a skull or a throat, they’re very effective. They’re also reusable and easy to carry in quantity in small pockets hidden in our armor.
As we go, as we kill, I feel more and more like a passenger in my own body. Peter’s single-minded rage is locking me out of controlling my own muscles.
Stop fighting me, Jonny, Peter tries to calm me, even though he can barely contain his insatiable desire for slaughter as he does. I’m sorry. Just trust me. I know where we need to go. I know what we need to do. I promise I’ll give you control when this is done.
We come upon a main hatch that’s being held by a squad of Keepers in heavy armor, and Peter moves to avoid them before they see us in the dim lighting, ducking out of sight at a junction.
“Isn’t that what you wanted?” I question in my head. “More targets?”
We’re too close to Thel. I don’t want to give him the chance to run.
So we double back and around, following the old plans until we find a sealed access panel, which he neatly rips open. We slip into a service trunk and climb. It’s barely big enough to squeeze through in our armor.
“How many Keepers are there?” I ask a practical question inside my head as we go.
Only a few hundred, depending on how they’ve been breeding since I was last here. They need to keep their numbers to how many suits and guns they have. Without those, they’re just privileged civvies, and that’s only one step above the shit
as far as they’re concerned.
I’m surprised by his choice of word. I thought Upworlders didn’t use obscenities anymore; that they looked down on us that did.
I’m not an Upworlder anymore, am I?
After about twenty meters, we carefully pop another access panel and ease out. We come out onto a balcony that rings the interior of the hab dome near the top, so I have a good view. The dome is much smaller in diameter than the Tranquility domes, but there are similarities to the construction, the engineering. And just like those buried structures that were not built to be buried, this one’s roof sections are also shored up with makeshift beams.
But this is no clean, luxurious mini-utopia. It’s all gray and dingy, and manages to feel oppressive—even more so than the bunkers of the Melas Two Unmaker base—despite the great open space that dominates the middle of it, several decks deep.
The facility is in poor repair, and it doesn’t look like anyone’s tried to seriously restore it over the decades, or even maintain it. It looks stripped, patched, abused. The lighting is just as dim as the corridors coming up on it. The paint is chipped and scuffed. It smells of poor recycling. And there’s no sign of indoor gardening. It strikes me as a place to hide, not for a people to live and thrive.
This is it, Jonny. They call it The Barracks. Home of the elite. Heh. It’s actually managed to look worse over the years. I guess Thel isn’t a very good governor.
The God Mars Book Five: Onryo Page 12
