The God Mars Book Three: The Devil You Are

by Michael Rizzo

  “Already outside. With your friend and three of my fire teams. But we’ve lost Links…”

  Another big blast rains debris down on us. The refugees do an impressive job not panicking.

  “Box?” I guess. She nods, also trying not to panic.

  “Mobile gun platform,” she describes. “Damn near indestructible.”

  “You ready?” I ask Paul.

  “Not really.” But he gives me a weary grin, gets his still-dented mask reset.

  “Try to wait for my signal before you move these people out,” I tell Straker. She looks at me like I’m being overly optimistic, but doesn’t argue. She unzips the inner seal, and air rushes to fill the space between the two fabric “hatches”. Paul and I duck in, wait for her to seal up behind us, then unzip the outer hatch, feel the rush of depressurization, the chill of outside. I put my helmet back on as an afterthought.

  We scramble up the narrow exit tunnel, immediately come up on two bodies. UNMAC H-As. Penetrated by something big enough to leave fist-sized holes through the hardshell. One is missing an arm. The other’s helmet is completely ripped apart, leaving nothing inside but blood and shredded tissue. The wounds steam in the cold. Paul puts a defensive field around us.

  There’s a barrage of heavy weapons fire: chain gun bursts punctuated by some kind of cannon, and the impacts feel like they’re creeping up on us. Dirt gets thrown over us. I wait for a brief pause, then poke my head up. I see another body, or at least most of one. Then movement.

  Bel. He’s running, not very gracefully scrambling over the uneven terrain, trying to keep his head low. He’s coming our way. Almost gets taken out by a blast that leaves a two-meter crater in the regolith just behind him, the concussion throwing him forward. He manages to roll, dive into a depression a few meters from us, then ducks as another blast erupts just above him. A spray of chain gun fire follows, raking his cover and keeping him down.

  He’s a mess. His surcoat is shredded, the reptilian armor underneath pocked and dented like he’s been used for target practice, his face bleeding. He sees us, makes a weak wave with his sword, sighs out

  “…just coming to check on you… yeah… and by the way… turns out… I don’t got this…”

  I hear a familiar whirring scream. Look up. Two Disc drones fly over our heads, taking what seem like random potshots at the ground with their turret guns. I track and lock them, draw my pistol, and before Bel can warn me not to, I pop a shell at each one.

  I get the brief satisfaction of scoring crippling hits, but then I can feel the big shell coming at…

  I barely manage to throw myself back down the tunnel—and on top of Paul—before where I was blows up. We get buried in rubble like someone is trying to fill in our graves. I start struggling, flailing, digging. Then Paul pushes the dirt away with his Sphere.

  “This is exciting,” he snarks as I get off of him. Crawl. Try to keep out of sight of whatever just shot at us. Cloak my armor. Another Disc flies past our position, circles. Doesn’t seem to see me. Bel is still down behind his poor cover. I don’t see Bly.

  Since there’s a lull in the bombardment, I crawl up, poke my helmeted head over the tunnel exit. There’s a lot of dust in my way, but I can see heat: a tight cluster of glowing blips, like hot weapons, moving as a unit. I hear the ground crunching under what sounds like heavy treads. Paul climbs up close to me, but stays out of sight.

  “Some kind of tank?” I whisper a guess. But then I hear a grinding that reminds me of a construction trencher, and the heat cluster starts moving fast over the ground. Tumbling. Spinning. It goes several dozen meters, stops, changes course. Searching for targets. When I finally see it, it initially looks vaguely like a stumpy child’s jack, only the sections spin independently to propel it. When it settles for a moment, I see better: The main body is very box-like, in sections very much like an old puzzle—a Rubik’s Cube. Except there are large metal spherical wheels on each corner, turning on universal joints, and cylindrical treads on the middle edges. It rolls slowly on the round wheels, then the outer sides stay put while the center slab spins, propelling it wildly. When it hits an obstacle or loses traction, it simply tumbles until it can get traction again.

  It settles again. I can see an armored dome—much like one of Bug’s heads—pop up from the center of the upper face, its scanning eyes sweeping around. On the centers of two opposite sides are the turrets for what look like short-barreled chain guns. On a third side is the maw of a cannon that looks like it might run through the axis of the thing. The surfaces are all dull metal, scarred by its scuttling spinning motion, pocked by small-arms fire. There are hack-marks that may have come from either Bel’s or Bly’s swords.

  I do a quick inventory: My broken and cracked bones have mostly re-knitted, and my dislocated joints have popped back in place. But my left lung is still being drained of fluid and re-inflated, and my spleen is “offline”. My graphics flash on something under me, and I realize I’m lying on the half-buried body of one of the fallen PK. I start getting “resource assessments,” as my mods try to convince me to cannibalize the corpse (and probably what it’s wearing).

  I shift to my weapons: I still have three full mags of shells, and most of a fourth in the gun, preset for armor-piercing high explosive. But the best they did was wound Bug. Box looks a lot sturdier.

  I see Box spin its horizontal center, just as a rocket comes flying in at it. It catches the projectile on one of its edges, and the blast looks like it dislocated one of the tread cylinders. But the section pivots back and the main gun lobs a shell back at its attackers, blowing away a rise about fifty meters off. It starts moving that way, and gets about halfway there when another rocket comes at it from the right flank. It pivots again, using its already damaged section as a kind of shield. The blast barely moves it, but the tread is mostly broken off. The big gun pivots to answer back…

  And then a figure in black bursts up out of the sand just to its left, leaps on the cube. It’s Bly. He plants a demo charge, wedges it into the scanner array before the head can retract, and then gets thrown off when the sections spin. It’s shooting at him before he hits the ground, but his charge blows. I see the head dome fly.

  The sections rotate, bringing up another head on the opposite side, and the big gun starts turning toward Bly. Small arms start pinging off the thing, and it ignores Bly to turn a chain gun back into the incoming fire.

  It can be distracted.

  I pop up, lock, and fire. Two shells hit the barrel of the chain gun that rotates toward me as the opposite one starts firing on the PK. The head—and then the gun section—spins back on me, and I fire again. Do damage to the sensor array before it can retract. I duck down to avoid the cannon as it turns on me, but the shell goes high, misses (but still close enough that I can feel it pass overhead). Then the remaining chain gun is spraying my position.

  I barely hear a roar over the gunfire, and get enough of a reprieve to look. Bly has managed to get back on top of the thing and is digging between the sections with his sword like a wrecking bar. The sections spin, try to knock him off. Then the whole thing tries to roll over on him when he hangs on. He has to tumble clear, but leaves his sword stuck in the monster.

  Bel is up and running at it. It turns the chain gun on him and starts spraying. It’s sloppy now, possibly blinded, but Bel takes a hammering despite his charged armor, staggers.

  “Shoot!” Paul yells at me, scrambling up out of our hole. I take the shot I’ve got, try to hurt the gun that’s hammering Bel, try to shoot into the gaps between the sections. I get its attention back. Paul gets a field up, but it barely stops the incoming fire. I fire back into the chain gun. It spins away, and the big cannon locks on us…

  …and Bel is on it. Unarmed. But he’s picked up a big rock and rams it down the barrel of the cannon. It blows up in his face. I see him fly back. He looks limp and broken. His left arm…

  Box is in convulsions, trying to roll, trying to get a gun working, smoke pouring
out of every seam. The head I shot still looks about half operational, and one of the chain guns sounds like it’s still spinning, but it rattles instead of firing.

  Bly—battered and torn up—throws himself at the thing, finds his sword still stuck in it, pulls it out and starts stabbing into the remaining head. I’m up and moving in, Paul behind me. I think I see blood on Bly’s sword. I send rounds into the damaged gun barrels, hoping something will do more than defang the thing, and when that doesn’t seem to be working, I draw my sword to help Bly’s task. But before I get to it, Box lets out a scream like a turbine, and Bly throws himself off of it, shouting at us to get down.

  Three seconds later, Box blows itself apart, its sections becoming devastating projectiles.

  Paul has a field up around us as we hug ground. A piece of Box the size of an oven digs a trench not two meters from us. The smaller frag dissolves in a fireworks show against Paul’s field, but the shockwave is still punishing as it rolls over us. If we were human…

  Bel is still down, the glow of his armor fading. The left side of his face looks like it’s taken a shotgun blast—I can see the teeth in his exposed jaw, and his ear is gone. And his left hand has been ripped away mid-forearm, leaving broken bones protruding from his torn armor. But I can already see the wounds trying to close, the bone ends growing. He rolls over like he can barely move at all, sees me with one intact eye, gives me a weak grin that looks like something out of a horror movie with his face half-gone. Looks at his stump. Grimaces (which looks even scarier).

  “…isss it lunch time yet…?” he manages to rasp. Raises his head enough to get a quick look at the remains of Box before he can’t hold it up anymore. I’m thinking about those dead bodies again. Resources.

  Brave men and women who died for their people.

  No, it’s not lunchtime yet.

  “Those were just prototypes,” Bly tells us, staggering our way. His armor is reshaping, repairing, but it’s clear he’s hurt, needing to heal. I wonder if he can absorb resources like Bel and Kali and I can. I also wonder if Chang’s “gift” to him just replaces his damaged body parts with dead cybernetics, like it did with Brimstone—Harper. Will he eventually be all machine?

  There is blood on his sword. He sees me looking.

  “Bug was an ‘it’, Box was a ‘him’. Cyborg. If there was enough of a man to call it that. Just the brain and nervous system of one of mine—pilot named Julian—too shot up to be of any other use but not too shot up for Chang to let us bury. Just parts for the sick toy shop.”

  “Janeway?” I follow. He shakes his helmet.

  “Not Janeway. Just his corpse. Squatted in by some one-eyed butcher. Calls himself ‘Foe Hat’.”

  “’Fohat’,” Bel corrects weakly, sounding like his day just got worse.

  I know it from both my memories, my fondness for mythology: Obscure term for the creative force of the universe, possibly Tibetan. Not the creator, but his creative power.

  But my alternate memories put a face to the name, and a reputation. He could indeed be called a toymaker, a creator of engines of flamboyant destruction for bored and indestructible customers, like the extreme challenges of a VR game, only live. I don’t think he ever made anything that wasn’t designed for outrageous violence. And Chang brought him—or remade him—here.

  “There’ll be more of these things,” Paul states, not making it a question. Bly nods.

  “He had the prototypes close by, figuring you’d be coming this way when you heard he was stripping Pioneer and the Keepers were fighting back.”

  “So this was a test?” I assume, looking at the wreckage, still feeling my residual damage, my critical need to replenish.

  The remaining Disc runs a recon buzz on us. I shoot it down as an afterthought.

  “We’re going to need more help,” Paul calculates darkly.

  “…funny…” we hear Bel rasp, still on his back in the dirt. “…funny you should mention that…”

  Unfortunately, he passes out before he can elaborate.

  Straker leads her refugees out and away from the colony through an arroyo that provides reasonable cover. She lost eleven of her soldiers to Box. One is barely hanging on with an abdominal wound. Another lost a leg. Both are being carried on makeshift stretchers, and are in need of better medical attention than we can provide in the field, much less on the move.

  Pursuing snipers get a few shots at them. Paul stops all but two incoming rounds, costing the refugees two more lives, both civilians. But each time they shoot, I get a target, and pay them back with a high explosive round. After I silence five of their riflemen, they stop pursuing us.

  We walk with the refugees a klick and a half south into the open Melas valley. Bel is managing to stagger, dead on his feet, his mangled limb wrapped up in what’s left of his surcoat, still a stump pending better resources. At least his face has healed enough that he’s not showing skull.

  Bly is visibly limping, but remains completely stoic underneath his helmet. He keeps his distance from me and mine, doesn’t say a word to anyone. The refugees eye him as if they’re beginning to re-assess how much of a monster he is.

  Paul and I just drag as if we’ve just lost a bad fight. My internal readouts are still screaming for replenishment. If I was mortal, the organ damage I’m waiting to repair would have killed me.

  I’m still stewing on the revelation that Chang brought Fohat with him. It makes perfect sense: the “toymaker” excelled in making products designed to thrill the invincible, and that meant dangerous enough to do impressive damage to an immortal superhuman. That tells me Chang was either expecting the possibility of needing to build a robot arsenal—one even more powerful than his Disc drones—to meet whatever human resistance his righteous mission might encounter, or he was expecting us. Or something like us.

  So was he anticipating failure—that he wouldn’t be able to completely stop the modding of humanity, and have to face early hybrids? Or did he suspect that his impossible jump might have stowaways? (Or maybe he just suspected that Bel and Star might turn on him. But what if Fohat turns on him?)

  But the worst part is what Straker pointed out: If Fohat’s creations can give us this kind of a run, they’ll tear through anyone and everyone else with minimal effort. Fohat will engage UNMAC—and any survivor faction that tries to resist Chang—like a sadistic child declaring war on an anthill.

  (And if Bly hadn’t come to help when he did…)

  Straker calls a rest. We’re still hours from the nearest tapsite. I consider offering our flyers to make refill runs. But we need a longer term solution. These people can’t last long in emergency shelters on the open desert. And neither Abbas nor Hassim have the resources to take in hundreds of extra bodies, even if there weren’t generations of blood spilled between the Nomads and the PK.

  I’ve been stewing another option. I take Straker aside.

  “The best chance for your people is to surrender to the UNMAC commander.”

  She starts to protest, looking at me like I’ve asked for their souls.

  “I still have friends there,” I explain. “And there are enough unused sections to house all of you. There’s food and medical care. UNCORT will put all of you into quarantine, put you through exams to ensure you’re not carrying anything they might be afraid of. But you can play into their egos. Let them ‘save’ you and have a victory they can play up back home. Then you can offer them your skills. You have UNMAC training, you know the gear and the procedures. They could use the on-planet manpower, especially if you play cooperative. You’ll have to give up your guns for awhile…”

  “What’s the plan?” she cuts to it.

  “I don’t know yet,” I have to admit. “But I’d like to have more people I can count on close to zero if UNMAC pulls something lethally stupid. Until then, your people will be safe and you might even get a shot at hitting Chang back. Who knows: If you impress them enough, you might be able to take your homes back.”

  “Under the
ir command,” she discounts.

  “There are too many people living here,” I sell a dream. “Mars won’t stay under Earth rule forever. But that’s not going to come out of a lot of isolated factions trying to hold their little patches of ground. And it’s not going to come while Earth is afraid of Chang.”

  “And you,” she doesn’t pull punches. Nods toward my ragged companions. “And them.”

  “Which is why you need to make the call. Contact UNMAC on their channels. Tell them you were driven out of your colony for trying to resist Chang.”

  “Forget to mention you and yours?” she gets it. Seems to buy in. But then chews her lip under her mask. “And what if we need you? What if things go too wrong?”

  I immediately think of what Kali did to Murphy, planting a tracker. I impulsively reach out, put my hand around the back of her armored collar. She tenses, but doesn’t try to back away. She’s trying to trust me. But…

  “Bel?” I call out. “Are you with me?”

  “No hard questions…” he grumbles.

  “I need to give the Lieutenant a tracker UNMAC won’t detect.”

  “I know you haven’t forgotten how to kiss a girl… I did walk in on you and dear Kali that one time… It was quite the show…Okay, two times… You really need to learn how to lock a door…”

  His inappropriate sense of humor is intact, even if it does make Straker go even tenser.

  “I’m carrying an unknown seed,” I remind him.

  “Unless you’re planning on taking the pretty Lieutenant behind a dune for my romance novel fantasy, we won’t be meeting any more of your ex-girlfriends…”

  (Now Straker really does look scared.)

  “Kiss her…” he prods, whining histrionically. “I’m tired. I’m hungry. I want to go home… This isn’t fun anymore…”

  “Anton Staley,” I let Straker off the hook, letting go of her. “He’s one of my friends. He’s got a secret flash Link to me. He’ll let me know what…”