The gun recharges, and sends another projectile into the smoking ruin, just to be thorough.
“We will discuss the evacuation of your primary facility at Melas Two,” Chang says to the roaring wind, “followed by your withdrawal from your orbital positions. You may take any of those you have supposedly ‘rescued’ that wish to go. But you will leave this planet and not return.”
Chapter 8: Suspension of Disbelief
7 October, 2117:
“Do we know what their commander was doing on the ship?”
Reasonable question for hindsight’s sake, or possibly Schadenfreude: How could they be so stupid?
It’s Rhiannon Dodds that asks it this time, as it’s been asked dozens of times over the last three days to no satisfactory answer. But since she’s new to the table, along with Jaden Fox, and the two of them have disobeyed the ETE Council to be here with us, she deserves some kind of reasonable reply.
“Supposedly there was some kind of major breakthrough from the teams working the wreck,” I give what little I have, considering Colonel Burns—acting as Planetary CO again—has refused to communicate with us and is back to minimal traffic on their channels. “It was big enough to bring down their top mission specialists, but whatever it was, they’d kept it out of the transmissions we could crack. I think General Richards just went along as a show of support, considering the mysterious losses putting everyone assigned there on edge. He was at least smart enough to bring Colonel Ava with him.”
“And that gives us potential eyes and ears on the Stormcloud,” Paul allows, despite the obvious fact that she couldn’t do much to prevent the capture of twenty-seven assorted UN personnel, and the deaths of forty one troopers tasked with security, plus the sixteen lives lost when Chang gutted Melas Three (five minutes not being long enough to get everyone clear, especially since Chang’s bots had already destroyed one of the only three operational ASVs).
“Too bad she hasn’t been able to show us much, being stuck in that cell,” Jaden laments one of our many frustrations. (The last thing I saw through Lisa was her getting led into a mostly-bare vault-like chamber. Her feed died the instant the door was shut, so Chang took the precaution to shield her cell.)
The two former Guardian Team Leaders show as much wear-and-tear from what they’ve been thrown into—what they’ve chosen to do—as Paul. Rhiannon has even incorporated additional armor into her Green Team sealsuit. Both have dulled their bright colors to something duller, dirtier. Jaden is carrying an actual knife in his belt with his “tools”. (I remember Jaden lost a close friend—Jonah Carter—when his ship was hit by one of the first test-fires of Chang’s railgun.)
The table we so recently used for a meal of peace has become an impressive war council: Besides my modified fellows, the three ETE and Bly, we have Two Gun and Mak of the Cast; Murphy and Councilor Truman of the H-K; Grandmaster Kendricks and Sir John Wayne Sutter of the Knights of Avalon; and Abbas, Jon and Sakina representing the Melas Nomads. I realize this is everyone under threat in this game except the Shinkyo and of course (and most frustratingly) the UN.
The last three days have been tense, but not idle, despite Chang’s warnings not to move against him or forfeit hostage lives.
Above us, the UN “relief” force has scrambled to move their ships and space dock project into new orbits to minimize potential exposure windows to Chang’s gun, even though that keeps them too far off to effectively support their people on the ground. They’ve also blacked out all uplink transmissions, suggesting they’re busily formulating some kind of plan. And Burns has broken Quarantine protocols and returned to the orbital fleet, despite what the move does to on-planet morale. What they haven’t done is move the exposed Shinkyo out of their surface camp—they look like a mass human shield over Melas Two. (I also count the civilian population and the PK refugees inside the base as intentionally left in the line of fire. I almost wonder if Earthside is trying to drum up public support for military escalation by letting Chang slaughter the defenseless.)
Nor have they been sending fuel skyward for a burn homeward, which means they aren’t prepping to leave yet, even though Chang gave them seven days as of yesterday to begin the evacuation.
I’ve tried reaching out to them, but they’ve refused to respond. I even played the stubborn game, camped myself beyond the base perimeter and dared them to use the battery guns they trained on me. They kept me waiting a day and a night, before Jackson (not Burns) gave me a channel to tell me my assistance was neither needed nor wanted. (This was the first time I’d actually seen Colonel Alain Jackson, even if it was on-Link in my head: He’s tall, dark-skinned, with a long square-jawed face and a high forehead, narrow piercing eyes over strong pitted cheekbones. His face shows the lines of age and stress, his short-sheared black hair is frosted with white. And I wondered where he got the hardened career warrior look on a world that supposedly hasn’t seen war in his lifetime.)
What Chang has done is move his fortress to a position about ninety klicks beyond the western tip of the Catena Divide, which puts him fifty klicks west-southwest of Melas Two, giving him a neat shot at the base, while being well out of range of UN guns. It also gives him plenty of warning should they send aircraft his way (and he has more than enough drones to take out their entire on-planet air force). To discourage orbital measures, he’s been blowing an umbrella of ionized dust up against the Atmosphere Net over his head.
It hasn’t escaped our attention that his position also gives him a shot at Tranquility, assuming his railgun can manage accuracy and power at a hundred and sixty kilometers. If he can, he’s also got shots at the ETE Blue, Green and Gold Stations, as well as the likely Shinkyo positions in the Dragon’s Tail, all without moving his ship except to turn it to aim.
As a show of his noble intent, Chang allowed a Med team—bravely led by Doc Halley—to tend the wounded, even allowing them to remove three of the more critically injured. I expect he thinks as long as he has Richards and the senior off-world scientific advisors (many of them probably UNCORT), Earthside Command won’t try anything exceptionally stupid. I expect he’s wrong, so here we meet.
Abbas is having his adopted son give us an inventory of the weapons they still have from the cache I gave them when I was still UNMAC Planetary CO. I initially think I’m just getting tired—and check my resource monitors—because I seem to be zoning out, my mind dragged away to nowhere. I pull it back to the now, but it gets dragged again. And again. To nowhere. I’m staring at a metal bulkhead.
“Colonel Ava. Please forgive the Spartan accommodations. I was not settled enough in my thoughts to have this dialogue. Until now.”
It’s Chang. My view shifts, spins, disorients. I realize it’s turning about a full one hundred and eighty degrees. To face Chang. We’re in a small steel-walled chamber with only one heavy hatch—Lisa’s shielded cell. I see a simple bunk, but it looks barely-used. The hatch is open past him. Star steps in to stand beside him. Then someone else…
I pull back when I realize Jon’s stopped his presentation. The table is staring at me, maybe realizing I’ve gone elsewhere. I hold up a hand. Bel locks eyes on me, links to me, sees what I see, passes it on. Azazel hooks the feed into the tabletop holoscreen he tinkered together to project battle maps and schematics of the Stormcloud. Now everyone can see what I can.
“I expect you know Astarte, or Astaroth, from both of your timelines, if only by reputation,” Chang introduces. The view locks on Star—she’s wearing another one of Chang’s interface tiaras. Then it goes to the other visitor:
Golden hair. Golden beard. Golden armor under white robes with royal purple lining. The right eye is covered by a patch, which at closer scan looks like a multi-faceted insect eye. What I initially thought were scars radiating from it are the shadows of biotech beneath the pale skin. The crown-like circlet he’s wearing also fuses into his flesh and bone. (Are these interfaces with his “toys”?) But I still recognize the underlying features: This used to be Janeway.
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“Fohat,” I realize, and then I hear Lisa’s voice repeat it.
“You’ve heard of me,” one-eye purrs, all ego.
“By reputation,” Lisa allows coolly. “I can’t say I appreciate your work.”
“Anticipating your question, your fellow guests are well,” Chang takes the conversation back. “But I have a question for you: Do you know who sent you here? Your immortal aspect?”
It’s an odd question to open with, especially since I’m pretty sure he already knows the answer.
“Tell him,” I prod when she stays silent.
“I don’t. I don’t remember.” Then I feed her the why: “This version… It’s a backup. It wasn’t updated.”
“Is that your excuse, or his?” Chang confronts, moving closer, filling her vision with a perfect void. I get disoriented again. “Of course I know he can hear and see me through you. That’s the whole point of this conversation, leaving the hatch open to break your cage. I need to talk to him.”
I tell her to confirm it. “He’s on.” Then: “He says he was also a backup. He doesn’t know. But he’s been told it was Yod.”
I think I hear Chang actually sigh, like he knew but didn’t want to hear that answer.
“This is getting tedious. Forgive me the intimacy, Colonel Ava, but playing this primitive telecommunications game is unnecessarily frustrating…”
The blackness fills her vision, my vision, fills the holoscreen. Takes shape on the tabletop. Then Chang is standing here with us. He looks around, as if he can see us. But then he sits on the table cross-legged, facing me, leaning into me intimately. He fiddles with his hands like he’s not sure how to proceed. Bel has to reach out to reassure himself it’s just a projection. Chang ignores him, his posture finally showing something like decision.
“I’ve been mulling this since you appeared, Destroyer,” he tells me like I’m a confidante. “But then when I saw there were more and more of you… I didn’t believe it, initially, but it doesn’t matter—just seeing that you and Parvati are what you appear to be… What’s the story? That Yod managed to piggy-back you all onto my splice? It makes sense on the surface—one splice, one paradox, one shot to change the past—but… it can’t have happened that way. I’ve been running it through my head for months, and the answer is always the same: There’s no way. Do you have any idea…? Even with all the short-cuts I made in the seeds I sent—essential DNA sections, memory files and simple core mods only—the data density was in the hundreds of billions… I brought four. Four. Then you being here lets me know I brought five. Six if Ra is a complete conversion, wherever he is. Seven now that I’ve had the time to check that Parvati is authentic… If the other three are what they seem… That means I really brought ten—six more than I thought I did, assuming you’re it…”
He trails off, shaking his head like it’s hurting him, then gestures his incredulity with open hands:
“That makes no sense. None. The power I had to draw just to manage what I thought I was accomplishing, and then the time it was going to take to do all the writing, given the bandwidth of the splice and the speed of my equipment… At the very least, I would have noticed what was happening, noticed the data load had more than doubled. Doubled! You can’t hide that… The real me, the one from our time, there’s no way I wouldn’t have seen it. But then my equipment, my power resources, there’s no way they could have managed more than double their maximum capacity…”
I feel my discomfort building. I think I know where this is going. Bel and Azazel are getting the same look. Then Lux and Kali start to realize…
“There’s no way it could have been a parallel splice?” Jaden tries to follow. “That you were just sent at the same time from another location?”
“One splice: one change: one shot,” Bel sums the paradox. “Whichever one initiated the change first would have nullified any other attempts.” But his tone is distant, like his mind is elsewhere.
Chang holds up his index finger. I’m not sure if he’s crediting Bel’s description or halting the interruption to his jumbled, pressured train of thought.
“So I’ve been asking myself…” he continues, and he does sound honestly troubled, scrambled, worse than when I first met him, almost near panic. “…I—the so-called real me from the other time, the one that supposedly did this—I know I would have seen Yod’s hack. I couldn’t possibly miss it. And I’d have plenty of time to catch it, while all the data wrote through… So why didn’t I stop it?”
The question hits all of us hard (I think Bel, Lux, Azazel and Kali harder than I because they supposedly remember Yod’s plan). What we’ve been told doesn’t make sense. Or it only makes sense one way.
“There’s only one answer,” Chang gets to it, his voice actually shaking. “Part of me just didn’t want to admit, but I have to…”
“Yod didn’t let you,” I make the first step of his conclusion when he won’t say it himself.
“And that means he killed me,” Chang finishes heavily. Shakes his head again, but this time like he’s lost. “He could. If anything could. He did.”
Bel’s face drains. The others spin on the implications of where this is going. I see shock dawning…
“He could have stopped you at any time,” I say it. “He let you do this.”
But then Chang starts chuckling sickly, shaking his featureless head violently.
“Let me? Don’t you see? I DIDN’T DO THIS AT ALL!!”
He stands up on the table. I’m up out of my chair, sending it to the floor.
“I couldn’t do this!” Chang insists. “Even with the most advanced nano-writers on the planet, the fastest splice uploading we could manage, every compression shortcut, I could barely pull off what I thought I did, and I had to pull enough power to crash the entire planetary grid to do it! Bringing all of you here—it’s not just that it would have overloaded my equipment—it would have taken more power than the whole planet could produce… Only one thing could have… and He’d have to convert the mass-equivalent of a mountain range into energy to do it…”
Way in the back of my mind, I’m wondering if this is part of what spooked Mark Stilson so badly, the impossibility of the numbers (and I’m sure they ran the numbers)… but the rest of me is putting together something even more world-shattering:
“Yod did this.”
Chang spreads his arms like he’s embracing the sky, his silhouette doing a drunken spin on the table.
“This is Yod’s better world! This!!!”
Bel is shaking his head, not believing, not able to. Lux is also shaking her head in denial. Kali’s eyes are wide with horror. Azazel looks like he’s been shot. The others just look confused, disturbed.
“YOD! DID! THIS!!!” Chang shouts at the sky.
He finally seems to gather himself, as if making the declaration has forced some measure of sanity on reality. He looks down at me.
“So be it, then. Ragnarok: Come meet me in three days time. Prepare in any way you see fit. With me or against me, we will give Yod the world He wants.”
He’s gone in a blink, even from Lisa’s vision as I feel her collapse on the deck, released. Star and Fohat look as stunned as we do. But then Fohat grins evilly, turns and exits.
Star crouches over Lisa to see if she’s okay, her hands shaking badly, chewing her lip as her eyes fill with tears. She looks like she’s trying to say something. To Lisa. To me. But then she pulls away, stands up, turns away and leaves. The hatch slams behind her, and I lose Lisa’s feed.
Bel gets up and leaves in a hurry without saying anything. Lux shoots me a look of pain and concern and goes after him. Azazel is trying to stay stoic in his bulky armor. Kali has a look of absolute horror on her face.
I walk around the table, get close to Paul and his companions, tell them:
“You need to warn your people. Think of the worst thing you can imagine. I don’t care if your Council is having some kind of existential crisis. We’re going to need you.”
I turn to Abbas.
“Your people are the most vulnerable in the firing line. We need to find someplace to move them, to…”
“No, my friend,” he cuts me off. “This is our world, our land. We will fight for it, even against a demon.” Jon and Sakina look as determined as he is. I want to argue with him, but have to accept. I lock forearms with him, then embrace like brothers.
“We’ll be ready,” Kendricks says before I can ask. Two Gun and Murphy give me nods.
Azazel and I go looking for Bel. Kali follows close behind, but doesn’t say anything. She feels like a coil wound to breaking.
We find him up on top of the garden dome. He’s got his armor charged, making himself look like he’s on fire, red-hot. He’s facing west, toward Chang.
“I should have seen this,” he hisses as I approach. “I’m a scientist. I pride myself on being able to fucking think. Even if I don’t know the tech, didn’t build it… I should at least have some common fucking sense… Why didn’t I see this?”
Lux is sitting a supportive but cautious distance away. There are tears in her eyes. Azazel goes and comforts him.
Bel turns to face me, getting cooler. He’s also crying.
“Why didn’t I see this? Why didn’t I question? Obvious fucking questions… I was there. I remember I was there, when Chang set this up. He told me what his capacities were. I knew. And I never even questioned how Yod was going to send so much more on the same splice. It’s basic math. Except I never once asked about the numbers… I’ve just been sitting here all this time accepting it: I sneak in two more whole beings. Star sneaks in you and three more. And all your toys. Double Chang’s load. Double. No question. Not one…”
The God Mars Book Three: The Devil You Are Page 35
