The layered cloaks of the Nomads are an ingenious thing: Alternating insulation and radiation protection, with a hand-dyed camouflage pattern unique to each artist. Some of the layers contain air bladders that can be inflated with the exhale-bleed from a standard survival mask, proving additional insulating effect as well as a backup supply of breathable air if needed (as Normal lungs aren’t very efficient—what they expel is still fairly oxygen rich). Huddled under them, half-buried in the sand, a Normal might survive a Martian night if caught without a heated shelter. Given my sealsuit and its heating system, the effect becomes downright cozy, assuming I sleep either sitting up with my legs pulled up close or fetal. I’ve found the former more practical for several reasons, though it took some getting used to.
As I watch the evening gusts begin to bury my legs in sand again, I look up at the sky, across the expanse of the valley, back across the distance between here and home, and I’m struck again by how far—how much farther—I’ve come from the relative safety of my Station. I’m truly out in the wilderness, sleeping in sand, the stars for my ceiling. Alone. Vulnerable.
There’s another interpretation for my condition, however. It strikes me that I may have made myself more instead of less safe; because my former home, our Stations, are under threat. Even if Chang is gone, Earth has made their agenda clear, as well as their implacability. They will take our Stations by force even if it makes the planet unlivable for everyone; strip all of us of our technology even if it kills us. In their stupid fear, they will accept no compromise. My Council choosing to withdraw, to hide away in our facilities, will not forestall what’s coming for very long. (And they must certainly realize that.)
Again, I have trouble sleeping, and it has nothing to do with being wedged up against a rock in sub-zero and too-thin air over a hundred and fifty kilometers from home.
I sleep sitting up, hiding under my cloak and cowl, with my hand on the hilt of my sword.
9 April, 2118:
“It’s hard to tell if he’s awake or still asleep, under that mask.”
These are the words that I wake to, a melodic voice, though filtered through a breather mask.
“Ahhh… It stirs.”
I see a shape I don’t immediately recognize, a blob-like mass on the edge of the hill-slope just meters in front of me. Everything is still shadows under the dawn sky.
I reach for my sword.
“Ah!” the voice scolds me, raising a hand to gesture caution. Suddenly several more such blobs rise up out of the landscape around me. I realize I’m looking at heavily cloaked figures, crouching, squatting. I also realize that crossbows and firearms are pointed at me. Then something large and heavy gets dropped in front of my feet from over my head, from behind me. I realize sickly that it’s a body. I recognize a Shinkyo surface suit. Its adaptive camo is still functioning, so the outer skin quickly takes on the coloring of the patch of ground it’s lying on. There’s an arrow sticking out of the back of its hooded head. A long rifle is then tossed across the unresponsive form.
“He was too busy hunting you to notice us,” the original mass explains, still crouched, looking me over like the curiosity I must be, “or, at least, too busy to notice Azrael. But then, no one Azrael hunts ever does.”
A figure steps around from behind me, treading almost completely silently on the gravel, and casually pulls the arrow from the skull. He wipes it on the body’s clothing, inspects it, and returns it to his full quiver. I can see that he carries a recurve bow that looks handmade, several knives and a short machete-like sword.
“Don’t worry,” the speaker tries to soothe, nodding at the corpse. “He carried the surface gear of a long-range scout, so he was likely alone. There were no signs of others. Though this one may have alerted his mistress to your presence before he died. He may have been tracking you for days.”
He absolutely fails to soothe me, and not only because he’s poor at giving reassurances, however friendly he sounds. A man has been killed because of me, for my benefit, while I was sleeping out in the open in plain sight.
The archer—Azrael—barely looks at me as he steps smoothly to stand at his apparent master’s side.
As the light comes up, so does the wind, whipping dust and sand at me from the direction of the speaker as if he’s personally sending it my way. They’ve all placed themselves upwind from me, so I have to face into the grit while they have their cloaks to shield them. But I can begin to see the speaker’s face: Under his cowl he’s wearing an emergency pressure suit, likely because the mask and goggles that used to suffice on the surface are no longer doing so for any length of time since the atmosphere loss. Through the UV-filtering acrylic faceplate, he has dark skin and dark eyes and a close-cropped black beard frosted gray. There’s a deep gash scar across the bridge of his nose. He wears heavy handcrafted armor over the suit, under his layered cloaks. He has an old colony PDW—a short, light select-fire weapon—held lazily in his hands.
“I am Barak Hassim al-Fadil,” he finally introduces himself, “and you are a long way from home, Jinn. Assuming you are Jinn.” His head moves as if still assessing me. “You wear the suit and helmet of the Red Station, but that’s a long way from here. And you have none of your shiny magicks. Only a sword. Unless it’s more than it appears?”
I only answer by taking my hand from the hilt, but I have subtly drawn my legs up under me, ready to spring.
“Are you lost, strange Jinn?” he keeps interrogating as if he needs to fill the space between us with conversation, however one-sided. “Are you Guardian, separated from your fellows? Was there a fight? A crash? Or perhaps you’re on some secret mission? But then, there have been no Guardian missions, not in many months now… Are you a runaway then? Like some of the others? Come to save us poor mortals with your Jinni powers, as if you do God’s work? Is that why you have no shiny magicks?”
He stands, walks over to the dead Shinkyo, considers the corpse for a few seconds as if he regrets the death, then prods the head with his fabric-wrapped boot like it’s just some interesting junk.
“In exchange for saving your life, you could at least tell me your name, and how you came to be here in such odd attire,” he scolds me paternally. Then he picks up the Shinkyo rifle, looking it over like it’s a novel curiosity. “And we did save your life. This weapon is designed to kill you, despite your magicks.”
He shoulders the weapon and aims at the landscape. Fires. The weapon’s blast is muffled to a sound like a soft mallet on stone. The shell buries itself in a dune, its spinning action digging its way in like a sloppy drill drone, visibly shedding stages as it goes. Then it explodes, blowing nearly a cubic meter of regolith back over us. I feel the shock of implication: the Shinkyo had been developing multi-stage projectiles that included organic layers to bore through our defensive fields.
Hassim looks the weapon over again, gives a nod like he approves, and hands it off to one of his people. Then he goes digging in the Shinobi’s pack, pulling out a forearm-sized cylinder that I realize is designed for live nano-containment, and tosses it in the sand in front of me. I feel ill, numb. Failing to capture one of us whole, the Shinkyo have been content to take pieces as prizes, and—given some of what we’ve seen—have managed to use the stolen nanites to engineer their own crude tech.
Hassim continues to remain non-threatening, so I decide to give in to his queries:
“My name is Erickson Carter, third generation Red Team ETE. Son of Jonah Carter. Guardian Force. Killed by Syan Chang.”
Hassim nods, accepts, digests.
“The avenging of a father is an honorable pursuit, young Jinn, though you may be late to that end, God willing.” He nods in the direction of Ground Zero.
“That is not my purpose. My purpose is to help…” I catch myself before I accidentally insult. But Hassim turns on me.
“Help who? People like us? Fragile mortals?” He chuckles at my expense. “You can’t even protect yourself.”
I stand cautiously
, as smoothly as I can manage. I don’t reach for my sword, but prepare to. His men read my intention, raise their weapons again. The archer Azrael steps forward, between me and their guns, as if challenging me personally.
“I am capable of defending myself.” But I don’t feel like it. I feel nervous, shaky. My adrenalin betrays me, tries to announce: This is the first time I’ve been in a real fight. I remember the lesson of “The Tea Master and the Samurai”, that sometimes appearances can win a battle before it begins.
“Azrael?” Hassim prompts. The assassin shakes his head.
“No.” His voice is surprisingly soft, though almost completely flat, as if mechanical. “He’s Third Generation. They were too young to be allowed into the Guardian teams.” He knows a remarkable amount about us.
“Have you even trained with a proper teacher?” Hassim doubts me.
“Yes,” I insist, confident in my virtual instruction.
“Show us,” Hassim insists. But before I can even decide to draw my sword, Azrael charges forward in a flash, darts a strike at my face that I realize too late is a feint, and catches my arms as I try to simultaneously block and draw, then tangles me up across myself.
He’s strong, stronger than he should be. And smart. I try to back up, but he follows right with me, and I quickly run into the rocks at my back, almost go over them. When I struggle forward, he just uses my defense against me, spins, and takes me over his hip. The final insult is that he actually catches me before I hit the ground. He drops me the last few inches and steps back, leaving me my sword as if I’m harmless.
“Better to learn the lesson with friends instead of enemies,” Hassim tries to reassure me. As I get up, I fully expect his men to be laughing, but they don’t. I get the impression that this Azrael scares them as much as he just terrified me.
Azrael crouches over the Shinkyo he’s killed, digs something out from under the body, stands and tosses it to me casually. I hope I impress him by catching it. It’s a pistol, probably colony security issue: polymer framed, self-oxidizing nine millimeter rounds, its matte finish worn off the edges of the slide from half-a-century of use. An ugly, practical tool. It’s heavier in my hands than I’d expected. And more seductive…
“You should consider carrying a gun,” he advises dully. I answer him by tossing it back. He catches it with a quick, precise hand.
I stare at Azrael, consider saying out loud what I think: That he can’t be a Normal. He locks my eyes through his goggles—he shouldn’t even be able to see my eyes through the reflective lenses. His eyes are completely calm, expressionless, pale blue against pale skin (though most of his features are hidden by his mask, cowl and scarves). Is he one of us, an ex-Guardian out here in defiance of the Council? But he kills readily, efficiently…
“And where were you headed, young Jinn?” Hassim thankfully moves on from the subject of my incompetence.
“East,” I tell him, still shaken from my thrashing. “Into Coprates. To aid in the exodus. To seek the immortals. To offer my help, for whatever it’s worth. Better than hiding in my Station.”
Hassim seems to appreciate that.
“My brother-in-law Abu Abbas and my sister Sarai have gone that way,” he tells me, “to find better lands for his people. Though he has re-established our food trade with Tranquility, there has been no news in several months.” He’s looking east, over the horizon, into the sunrise, into the wind.
I consider my next words carefully, then voice my offer:
“Perhaps that’s how I can repay my life-debt to you. I can seek your family. Send you news. Give them my service.”
He smiles, chuckles under his breath.
“Come!” he insists. “We must get away from this place now. You are my guest.”
Chapter 2: Exiles
23 April, 2118.
From the personal log of First Lieutenant Jacqueline Straker, former City of Industry Peace Keeper Force, reassigned to UNMAC Long Range Recon Vehicle Leviathan-3:
“And then you landed on the same leg?”
“Thirty five meters. Thankfully the combined hammering had spun the ship in low when Chang swept us all off the deck. Still: Broke the damn leg in two places. Compound fracture. Plus the bullet wound. So I’m face-up in the dirt, can’t move, watching the bastard fly away.”
Captain Rios is a good story teller, and happy to pass the time, which needs passing as we crawl along our grid-search of a thirteen-hundred-klick-long and hundred-plus-klick-wide valley at a top speed of ten klicks per hour. It’s Day Six, and we’re only now coming up on Nike (or where Nike was), three-hundred-twenty klicks east of Tranquility, and not likely to find anything more here than we did at Tyr. (Or than Leviathan One found at Baraka and Uqba, or Two found at Avalon and Freedom. At least they had shorter ops. But that’s why we’re A-Team. That’s why we got the Big Beast.)
I catch Rios looking back at Specialist Sharp, our token Upworld Cherry, to see how much she’s flinching at his “obscene” language. I give him credit: he at least tries to filter. But these New-Drops apparently come from a world where saying “damn” and “hell” makes you some kind of godless pervert, and I have no patience for smug self-righteousness, especially when it’s completely un-earned.
“Fuck,” I give him back. And watch Sharp go pale. Rios gives me a flash of a friendly warning to ease up. We’re in enough trouble as-is.
I expect Sharp’s compiling her latest report in her head. We got her from the latest “relief” flight (no thank you), and it’s no secret that she got stuck with us as a UNCORT “compliance” agent. Apparently they think our moral character, or lack thereof, makes us more susceptible to nanotech contamination or whatever else they’re so terrified of. (Terrified enough to try to drop a nuke on their own people just because Chang had hold of them for several days unsupervised.) It certainly gets a girl stuck on a slow-tank to BFC. (That would be Butt-Fuck Coprates, in honor of the kind of language my Academy DI felt was necessary for a real soldier’s education.)
It’s pretty clear I have no respect, and it’s not just that I’m local-born, Third-Gen Industry Peace Keeper, set in my ways and values despite agreeing—with few choices—to Colonel Ram’s plan to “surrender” to Earthside so we’d have a place to run to with air, heat, food and a decent medical bay after the “deal” my superiors made with Chang unsurprisingly went lethally sour.
The new meat from Earth are just pathetic. Apparently they also have this aversion to weapons and fighting on that fucked-up world, so none of these so-called soldiers had ever touched a gun until halfway through whatever piss-poor training they got, much less ever had to deal with anything more life-threatening than a common flu-variant.
Thankfully, Sharp’s the only lame-ass Upworlder on our team, which means I’ve got me and five other people in this can that I can count on in a bad fight, including (especially) one-armed Lieutenant Jane—our driver, until recently a pilot, grounded from flying by the new stick-ass Upworld Airwing Commander because of his “handicap”—and little Lyra Jameson, our new enlistee “nanowar specialist” (and actually impressively kick-ass for a cherry), another exile because her very existence is a testimony to Earth’s hypocrisy.
And exiles are what we are.
I got this gig because I’m a former enemy combatant, even though they officially call us “displaced refugees” as part of our terms of surrender, and don’t completely treat us like prisoners. But they do keep us all locked down on D-Deck “for our own safety”, and fill our days with continuous debriefings and medical workups (which they insist is just to get a better understanding of what multiple generations living on this planet has done to us, but what they’re really looking for is something to confirm their fears about us). Thankfully, they let a few of us out to serve, as long as we’ve been “cleared” and have what they’ve deemed useful on-planet skillsets. Of course, they assign us to postings they consider non-critical and easy to supervise closely, and that’s understandable. (What’s not so understan
dable is why I’m the only one assigned off-base, unless the intent was to separate me—the surviving ranking PK officer—from my people.)
Lyra’s obviously just too much of a political liability, being living proof that UNCORT ordered secret flights here as long as two decades ago looking for nanotech, even ordering experiments on the locals (experiments her own parents were pressured into carrying out, and died ugly paying for). Being out here makes her unavailable to anyone who might keep pushing the investigation (assuming there really is an investigation happening), and removes a visible morale-breaker as even the Upworld cherries aren’t all too stupid or too indoctrinated not to question the bullshit they’re being fed, especially if the evidence is walking around among them.
Jane is officially here because he’s “too disabled” to fly, despite the fact that he was flying—in combat—even after getting his arm shot off by a Disc, right up until the Righteous Brigade showed up and took over. Unofficially, he’s a Mike Ram loyalist with no tolerance for the Upworld bullshit. And he’s far from the only one among the Sleeper Vets, but scut says he protested his grounding a little too loudly (to the point of pushing a court martial for almost assaulting a superior).
Sergeant Horton and Tommy Wei also bought their postings with attitude and history: both are Sleeper Vets with too much Mike Ram “contamination” not to grumble at the orders they’ve been fed from a “home” planet they can’t even recognize anymore, through cherry commanders that clearly don’t know this world at all. (And Wei’s missing part of a finger to remind him who really fought for this planet.)
And then there’s Juan Rios…
Excellent company commander, completely professional despite all the chaos and bitterness of the command change. But the general feel is he served too close and too long under Colonel Ram. And Ram kept him close, even during some of his more questionable operations (such as his “advising” of the ETE). The new brass (Colonel Burns specifically, I gather) just couldn’t sit with keeping someone with potentially divided loyalties in a significant command role, especially as they advance whatever their agenda is for this planet. (And given that they’ve already dropped one nuke regardless of who was in the kill zone, no one who actually lives here trusts that agenda, no matter how many times they say they’re here to help.) So Rios lost his platoon and got handed bad and worse choices. Worse was a transfer to orbit, to Logistics, overseeing troop and supply arrivals, a glorified clerk. Bad was this: Long Range Recon.
The God Mars Book Four: Live Blades Page 3
