“Captain Rios!” I call out. “What do you have coming our way?”
I get static, wonder if it’s the ETE field but doubt it. I can feel Chang getting smaller in my grip as Kali keeps trying to drain whatever he’s made of. Her eyes lock mine. She looks like she’s in agony, but she won’t let go, won’t stop…
“Colonel Ram!” I hear Rick come on, almost in a panic. “You’ve got three AAVs inbound! Carrying…!” Static cuts him off.
“Azazel, I need eyes on!” I order. He assures me he’s on it, and the Siren burns for orbit. “Get me a radiation scan!” I’m assuming the worst.
I look: The hostages are just now loading onto the ETE ships, along with the surviving H-K and Cast. Richards is stubbornly staying behind until the rest of his people are off.
“I’ve got heat!” Azazel tells me after several tense moments, flashing me a positive radiation signature in the cargo module of the center ship. Chang starts thrashing even more desperately. Screaming—it sounds like an angry swarm of bees.
The incoming aircraft break the Atmosphere Net twenty klicks northeast of us. They’ll be on us in seconds.
I make a choice, break contact with Chang.
“What the fuck are you doing?!” Kali demands through clenched teeth.
“Intercept those ships!” I order Azazel. “Try not to destroy them, but keep them off!”
Chang manages to twist loose of Kali and Bel, collapses to the deck as if he’s partly molten, thrashes weakly against the ETE containment field.
You always hold back…
I reach out, hack, force my way in. But they’ve stripped these ships of their networked ware—they’re running manual controls, basic nav. Old school.
The two flanking ships break off, roll, start firing—first at Azazel, then at us as they blow by him. The pilots are good, and determined. I realize they’re aiming for the ETE ships, trying to stop the rescue. The hostages still on deck have to run for cover, stalling the boarding. The ETE shields stop a pair of missiles.
“What are they doing?!” Lisa demands to the sky.
I’m spinning guesses.
“They might be convinced we’re infected,” I hear Richards voice one of them.
“Or your Acting Planetary Commander is trying to remove you,” I give him another. I realize a third is: They’ve got us all in one place, and don’t want to miss the chance.
Or it’s all of the above.
The center ship is bearing straight for us. Azazel tries to target it, but it twists and rolls to duck his turret fire. This pilot is very good.
“…carrying an old W88 warhead…” Rick somehow shouts through on Rios’ channel.
I remember the W88 from my early military career. It was the common payload of the Trident Missile. Four-hundred and fifty kiloton yield. They called it the “Peacekeeper”. The nuclear fireball alone will swallow two-thirds of a klick in seconds. The shockwave…
Azazel doesn’t need the history lesson. He flips in behind the AAV, starts chewing at the fuel tanks, the engines. The pilot still does a damn good job of evading him, but then starts losing control, aims for the Stormcloud. He’s making this a suicide run.
“For my planet, you monsters!!” I hear Jackson shouting, reminding me too much of a hundred suicidal fanatics I’ve had to kill in my career. “We only have ONE God!! MY God!!!” He’s bringing the payload himself.
“Take him out!!” I tell Azazel needlessly, helplessly. He’s tearing at the ship’s hull with his guns, trying to close. The stray shots ping the Stormcloud’s decks all around us. The ETE are packing their holds as fast as they can, but the other two AAVs are coming back around for another run at us.
“Fuck this,” Lux announces, summons her flyer and goes after Jackson’s wingmen, spraying them with the nose guns Azazel tuned for the fight. Star gets herself between the incoming fighters and the ETE ships, focuses, and sends a blinding beam of light at the attacking aircraft. They weave. One loses part of a wing to an ETE pressor blast.
“Drop the field,” I tell Paul. They hesitate, but see the desperation in my face, lower their tools.
Chang gets himself together enough to take control of his ship back, uses what guns and drones he has left, ignoring us. But there’s no stopping Jackson, even with Azazel burning full to catch him. Azazel blows the Siren’s nose EMP at the suicidal ship, but it’s pretty much a missile at this point. He burns harder—I think he’s trying to crash the ships in mid-air. The best he does is clip Jackson’s tail, send the AAV tumbling, pumping more rounds through it in hopes of breaking the nuke, but there’s no time.
The Stormcloud bucks and turns. Chang is trying his own evasive action, but there’s no…
Jackson’s ship slams into the bow. A fraction before impact, I think I see the cockpit blow, eject manually—so much for self-sacrifice. Whatever’s left in the tanks goes up, but I realize: Chang turned the ship to spare the evacuees—Jackson’s crash would have hit them almost directly.
Two seconds later, we’re all still here. But whatever’s left of Jackson’s AAV and its payload are buried deep in the Stormcloud’s fore-hull. I have to assume the nuke is still active, but not reachable in time.
“Get the mortals off my ship…” Chang tells me, his voice still a distorted buzzing. “Get them to cover… go…” He looks like he’s melting into the deck, trying to form legs to stand. The Stormcloud continues to turn, creaking and groaning. Turns west. “…get them off…”
I order everyone to move, and I’m freshly regretting allowing so many to fight with us. The Shinobi, Knights and Nomads sink lines and rappel off, just as the ETE dust off with the last of the hostages and Tranquility fighters.
I see too many bodies left on the decks with broken robots. I don’t have time to look…
Lux comes back around—Jackson’s wingmen have run for it, knowing what’s coming—and he scoops up Star. Kali, Bel and Bly have their own flyers. I call mine, grab Lisa. She hesitates, looks at what’s left of Chang. (And I realize I have no idea what happened to Asmodeus.)
“Get off my ship!!!” Chang screams at us. Beneath us, his engines start to burn.
I get Lisa out of there—she ditches her hijacked robots.
Chang is maxing his reactors, pushing his ship out into the bowl of Melas Chasma, away from us. Away from likely habitation. Toward the Shinkyo no-man’s land.
The ETE ships aim themselves at a handy patch of real-estate and use their nose “guns” to blast out a deep trench. Those of us that can fly start herding the warriors on the ground to it. Bodies go tumbling into what I hope won’t be a mass grave. The majority of the Guardians that came with us—minus only those needed to fly their ships—drop into the trench with them, get ready to erect a shield over them. The ships carrying people burn away east as fast as they can. Our flyers reluctantly follow.
I’m looking back as I flee, watching the Stormcloud move as fast as it can, blowing its cooling systems, popping apart. I’m counting seconds, estimating the range of the W88 in this atmosphere against Chang’s desperate progress. In Earth conditions, he’d need to get at least fourteen klicks away.
Five klicks.
Ten.
Fif…
A new sun forms in the bowl of the valley.
Expands. Rises.
The pulse it generates takes down my all feeds, makes my head scream, my body lock up for an instant before my mods compensate. I feel the heat of the thermal flash, but not enough to burn. The people in the trench should be okay.
I see the initial shockwave ripple over the trench. The overpressure knocks the wind out of me, crushes my sinuses, but I’ve had worse as a mortal and walked away. The secondary blast wind hits seconds later, blowing a storm over the makeshift ETE bunker. Then it hits us in the back, threatens to rip the wings off my flyer, sandblasting us with sharp silicate. A hurricane crammed into a few seconds. Lisa hugs into my back as we ride it out.
I look back. The mushroom cloud where the Stormcloud
used to be hits the Atmosphere Net, starts an electrostatic thunderstorm, then rises through it.
I get the ETE channels back, hear the urgent news that the blast fried the Net. And worse, the shockwave finished the job Chang started on Green Station. The jerky feed I get shows that the massive generator complex has slid a hundred meters down slope, shearing the tap cores and breaking it free of the deeper complex in the cliff. Dozens of Green Team personnel are unaccounted-for, buried, maybe crushed.
I turn, fly back around to check the shelter trench. Through the thick haze, I see the mixed colors of ETE sealsuits climbing out of the big ditch, dusted red but otherwise intact. They look toward the blast cloud, look toward their damaged Station. Down in the bottom of the hole, I see red cloaks celebrating, waving, embracing. (Even a few of the stoic Shinobi get hugged, and manage to tolerate it politely.)
Circling, I see Abbas, Jon, and Sakina among the survivors. The Knights are harder to tell apart in their heavy armor, but I get a wave I assume is from Grandmaster Kendricks.
Lisa is still hugging me tightly from behind. I don’t ruin the moment by saying anything, but I can’t help but feel my heart sink in the midst of this victory. Because I know it was Chang that chose to save these people, for whatever reason. And it was UNMAC—or their on-planet commanders—that tried to kill them all (including their own). With a nuclear weapon. Just like the descendants of the survivors of the Apocalypse have always feared they would.
Chapter 10: Exodus
11 October, 2117:
Under the relative warmth of the noonday sun, Captain Margo Thomas joins her fallen fellows on Pyramid Ridge above Melas Two.
She was the only UNMAC casualty of the raid on Chang’s ship. I can only hope Earthside Command appreciates that, especially considering how many lives paid for that day (and how many more still may).
General Richards expresses some of his own appreciation by allowing me to attend the funeral, at least the surface internment. He even gives his permission to wear my old uniform for the occasion, but I choose my plain black armor. It would have made little difference: I would have been the only one wearing a uniform. Everyone else outside is consigned to H-A cans or pressure suits, rendering them unrecognizable from any distance. As it is, I have to wear a rebreather for comfort. (Obviously, wearing a big metal skull on my head would be grossly inappropriate for this solemn occasion.)
My internal gauges tell me the atmospheric pressure has dropped below 0.20. I know the ETE are still struggling to restore the Melas Net, fried by the EMP of a 450 kiloton nuke augmented by the fuel in Chang’s reactors. Until then, the painstakingly thickened atmosphere will continue to slowly but steadily bleed off until it reaches its pre-terraforming equilibrium of 0.01. Even if the Net is back online today, it could take years to get the pressure back. And that’s with a full complement of Stations online. Green Station is still down—literally—and is taking almost all the ETE’s combined resources to figure out a means to re-anchor it and repair the tap cores. (All the “rebel” Guardians, including Paul, ran to their highest duty as soon as the rescued hostages were delivered home.) In the interim, they’ve dropped a “seal net” like the one across the Candor Gap between Melas and Coprates to minimize the impact to the peoples east.
The impact on life in Melas valley has already been catastrophic, compounded by the loss of fuel, oxygen and water throughout southeast Melas and western Coprates that was supplied by Green’s feed lines. And then there’s the threat of all the fallout still being blown back-and-forth with the daily winds. Within one Martian day of the blast, the readings UNMAC was willing to report (based on what their satellite detectors are mapping) were dangerously hot in an almost one hundred kilometer long and thirty wide swath from north-northeast of Shinkyo territory to just short of the western tip of the Catena Divide. (This includes the territory that Aziz’s former band fled into.)
Semi-hidden inside their heavy gear, my closer friends dare Earthside’s ire to stand with me: Rick, Anton, Tru, Kastl, Smith, Morales, Halley and Ryder. Rios and Horst are on honor guard.
Lisa stands conspicuously (despite also being mostly-hidden inside new-model H-A armor she really has no need of) with Richards, another risky statement I hope is promise of changes to come. And that’s assuming Richards doesn’t get himself removed from command because of his pattern of decisions. Burns and Corso (who actually seems angry that Lux and I saved her life) stand tensely behind him.
Very few other of his newcomer force have bothered to come out. Most of those that stand here are those that slept here through the decades, including a heartening number of the civilian contingent, and a half-dozen representatives of the onsite PK (including Lieutenant Straker). It also takes me too long to realize that one of the pressure suits among the mourners is Lyra—I catch her watching me through her visor, but she turns her eyes down when I look.
Richards himself says what he can over the UN Flag-draped body bag before it gets entombed in Martian rock. He admits he did not have much time to get to know Thomas, but gives the usual praises of exceptional service and brave sacrifice.
I find it hard to concentrate on the ceremony, wallowing too much in guilt and self-loathing. Though I have immeasurable rage at both Chang and Earthside for the larger devastation of that day, this one death is mine. It doesn’t matter that Chang pulled the trigger. I was too slow, too late, too predictable. Thomas served me exceptionally and bravely, and I failed her.
(“You always hold back.”)
Even Richards taking me aside and personally telling me that he knows everyone that was held on that ship would have died (and not by Chang’s hand) if it weren’t for my actions (and those of my friends and allies) doesn’t absolve me.
I should be better prepared for this. It’s certainly not the first funeral I’ve been to in the last few days.
The Avalon Knights lost twenty-three to Chang’s guns and Fohat’s murder toys. Abbas buried thirty of his own.
Not even the protection of ETE Sphere fields was absolute. Seven H-K and thirteen Cast didn’t make it off the Stormcloud. There weren’t even bodies to bury, having been vaporized in a nuclear fireball. They just never came home.
Hatsumi Sakura came to the battlefield herself after the blast cloud had settled down, the late-morning winds starting to move the fallout westward. We managed to recover nineteen of her Shinobi, their bodies revealed when their cloaking systems failed. She wouldn’t say how many were unaccounted for, cut down on the ship or buried by the barrage on the ground.
We faced each other wordlessly across the sand as her warriors collected their fallen fellows, and then she flew off to home territory to face the radiation headed their way.
And despite the price paid, I can’t assume Chang is gone. He may have bailed off the Stormcloud before it blew. He may have even rescued Fohat’s remains to regenerate. And I have no idea what happened to Asmodeus.
I decided to use precious fuel and flew out west to the blast zone again first thing this morning. I couldn’t take the direct route with the Green lines all down, so I had to go well out of my way to the north in order to access the Blue Station lines. This allowed me to get fresh readings on radiation levels west of Melas Two, especially in Abbas’ traditional territory. My small consolation is that the atmosphere loss still poses a far more serious and immediate threat than the fallout, as long as Abbas’ people don’t journey too far south into the hot zone.
The contamination has created a definite no-man’s-land across the middle of the valley, still being elongated east and west by the daily winds. (If the Shinkyo are lucky, it will continue to pass north of their territory, but I haven’t managed to get that far around the south of the hot zone to check myself.)
I made the trip because I needed to get another look at detonation zero, at the wreckage left of the Stormcloud. And there isn’t much—the W88 buried in the main hull vaporized seventy-five percent of the colony-sized ship’s materials. What remains is melted twisted
toxic junk, scattered around the four-kilometer-diameter crater. The ground all around it is seared, darkened by ash and shimmering with bits of silicate glass rained by the nuclear fireball. I saw no sign of any of the scrap reshaping, regenerating. But my primary reason for coming: I saw no movement at all in the blast field, though the winds working on the dust and ash kicked up too much haze to be certain. (I wonder how the radiation impacts regeneration? And how hard will it be to restore a body if all of the organic matter is incinerated? Will their seeds remain dormant, frustrated, until the winds blow them to better resources, new hosts to overwrite?)
I also checked along the course the ship took from our battlefield to its detonation. I don’t even find recent tracks.
My concerns have been increased since Kali decided to surprise me first thing this morning by jumping me in Fera’s apartment. I thought at first it was a trick of the dim light, but she was… blue. Glowing blue. Like a dark, almost indigo neon, giving the illusion of light coming from somewhere deep under her skin. She’d left her hair red—a shocking contrast—but her eyes and teeth almost blazed out of her twilight face. She was clearly amused at my reaction, and not at all concerned with the implications, even when she explained to me the effect was from a partial mod she’d incidentally absorbed from Chang.
I killed the mood by insisting she tell me what else she’d gotten from her attempt to consume Chang. She raged and pouted, but finally admitted that she got just a brief flash of access to his personal memories, felt the trauma driving him (though it appeared to give her satisfaction instead of pause). He’d done something stupid and desperate in his previous attempts to undo our immortality, something that changed him down to a cellular level, and apparently made him more like Yod than he wanted to admit. That manifests as his ability to restructure his body on a cellular scale—he’s far more nanite than organic. (The “flesh” I saw was only a default facsimile of his former appearance that he chooses to completely suppress, ashamed to see what he’s become.) But that implies he’s far more difficult to disable than any other modded human. Destroying him… Unless he chose to ride that bomb to the bitter end, he’s still out there. And he probably doesn’t need organic matter—much less a host body—to regenerate himself, only raw elements.
The God Mars Book Three: The Devil You Are Page 38
