The God Mars Book Five: Onryo (15 page)

I’m on fire with rage. I want to kill Yod. I want to
kill his whole world.

My head tilts up and I scream my rage at the sky, but
it’s not me… I’m not…

Whatever it is lets me go, lets me breathe.

Sorry... This shouldn’t have happened to you. Not to
you.

“What’s happening to me? To us?”

Again he doesn’t answer immediately, letting me know
the news is bad enough that he needs to figure out how to tell
me.

The bad news is: You’re right. The Seed I swallowed,
it probably ruptured in my gut and started converting me as I died.
But it was apparently a blank, no loaded personality or memories
like you’ve seen. It makes sense now, if this was all some kind of
experiment: Give the monkey power and see what he does with it… But
now the Seed is programmed, imprinted. With me. It should have just
erased you, used you as raw materials. That’s what it did to my
wife and my little girl, lying in that grave with me: It ate them.
There was nothing left but husks…

Having control of my body back, I head down-slope,
down to where I was shot. I find blood. I see the rocks I fought so
hard to climb over, barely a few meters that felt like hundreds, my
dried blood leaving a clear trail. But when I get to the rut I fell
into, on top of the Keeper body, I find remains that look like
they’ve been left here for decades. Desiccated. Crumbing. Like the
dead plant-fall underfoot. Like what a Modded can do to organic
matter on contact, to feed.

I remember I dragged two bodies back into the ship. I
didn’t see any sign of them, not even blood trace.

I remember hearing what the Ghaddar told my father,
about watching Colonel Ram’s change. He’d been run through, gutted,
bled out, dying. Astarte gave him his Seed, then brought him dead
bodies, laid them on him like blankets, and the Ghaddar watched
them dissolve.

I wouldn’t let it take you, boy. I couldn’t do that
to you. Not you.

“But the Seed is still yours,” I conclude, feeling
like I felt when my blood flooded up my throat, struck down by the
inevitable…

I can control it. I can. But you need to know: If you
get hurt bad, especially your brain, it won’t rebuild you as you.
I’ll live. You won’t. You’ll be gone.

Now
I
start chuckling like a madman.

I’m so sorry, Jonny. It should never have been
you.

But I was the only one left alive who could have
opened that hatch.

And I was the fool who couldn’t leave it be, that had
to know where his parents came from.

I need to think about something else.

“What happened when you woke up? After you were
buried?”

This. I woke up like this, armor and weapons and all.
I didn’t know what I was, but I knew I was strong, found out I was
fast and could hack directly into technology. Then I found out I
could see bullets coming, dodge or absorb them. And absorb other
things.

I see flashes of violence. Keepers getting cut to
pieces (literally) with the big blade, or their brains blown out
with a quick shot.

The .454 makes a hell of a mess. It doesn’t even need
nano-modding.

“You went after them, after the Keepers.”

They killed my wife and my little girl. Just because
Thel told them to. I don’t care what he offered them or threatened
them with. Anyone who can do that isn’t human.

But then I went to Eureka, saw how they lived, saw
how they treated their civilians. I watched them execute a woman
just for stepping on one of their shadows. And they laughed about
it. People like that… They’re not people anymore. They’re not. They
just need to die.

“They’re not all bad,” I try.

I know. Your redhead. Straker. We’ll call her the
exception. But you didn’t see. Even seeing my memories, it isn’t
the same. You need to see for yourself. Right now.

It’s a short walk, two klicks, and neither the dark
nor the cold are any obstacle. I can see just fine, the whole world
glowing better than the night vision of my binoculars or scope
could do. I feel simultaneously amazed and sickened—these things
are inside my
eyeballs
. But then, they’re inside every part
of me, changing every part of me, including my brain. I can almost
feel them moving under my skin. I want to rip them out, cut them
out…

You get used to it. Soon you won’t be able to imagine
going back to what you were.

That’s no comfort, but then my “infection” does its
own seduction, showing me even more that it can do for me:

I can
feel
their scopes before they can see
me, my enhanced vision picking up on details I didn’t consciously
notice. Then my eyes light them up for me, no matter how well
they’re hidden in the rocks and growth. If I had my rifle, I could
pick them all off from here, and somehow the thought of them
shooting back doesn’t worry me.

Even better: I can hear them, hear their signals,
hear the energy signatures of their gear buzzing deep in my ears.
Then, with a thought, I can send back my own signals, fuzzing out
their electronics, their scopes and links. I selectively blind
their sentry snipers, then chop their communications so they can’t
hear each other clearly—I can let through just the fragments I
want, making them miss each other’s warnings, letting them believe
their gear is just breaking down, or there’s natural interference
like a solar flare. With practice, I can even select the words and
phrases I want, so I can make them hear completely different
messages. I have to chuckle in my helmet because it’s fun, a silly
game. But then I remember the object of that game.

See? It’s easy… You can walk right up on them and
they won’t see you, won’t hear you, won’t be able to warn each
other. It took me a few nights to master it, then I could hit them
at will.

I’m wondering what that means, what he did, when he
tells me:

At first I just picked off their sentries, one or two
at a time, leaving what was left of them in creative arrangements
to keep them spooked.

I see flashes of what look like nightmares, but I
know they’re memories: Bodies chopped apart, gutted, dismembered,
decapitated, mutilated, gore spread out over the rocks and hung up
in the trees like a child’s messy artwork, or like some horrible
celebration decoration.

Then I wouldn’t come back for a few weeks; let them
sweat in their holes. Sometimes I let them see me, let them take
their shots, let them see they couldn’t hurt me. We can dodge their
bullets, but we don’t have to.

That also flashes in my head, like a lesson: Being
able to see rounds incoming, slowed down like they’re being thrown,
slow enough get out of the way of. Or not: Small arms just smack
off our armor—I can feel what it feels like, like being beaten, but
all it does is ache a little. Heavier round make it through, but I
can feel the tech race to close the wounds, keep the body working
while they rebuild. It hurts, it shocks, and I get hungry—I need
resources, and that makes me want to kill for another reason…

I see myself—Peter—sucking bodies dry with his hands.
Sometimes they’re not dead yet.

They started to think I was some kind of ghost, which
I was. They started calling me the Reaper, as in Grim Reaper,
because they saw me one night up on their structures standing with
my Nagamaki across my shoulders and they thought it was a scythe,
saw my skull mask.

I can’t think about this now. I can’t think about any
of this. I want to scream, want to dig these microscopic things out
of me but I know I can’t. I want them out of me.

Peter lets me be for a few minutes, making me take
deep breaths. He finds us a rock to sit down on. But it isn’t just
a place to relax: He’s picked a spot where we can see over the
colony site.

Through the night-closed green, Eureka Colony is
almost completely buried, with only the twisted skeletons of a few
structures exposed. It looks like almost every other colony ruin we
passed on the journey from Melas, only more of it is left above
ground. From what I know of the Melas PK Keeps, this is a decoy, a
deception. The real colony is underground, spread out through a
maze of tunnels dug with mining machines.

There was a lot more before, when I was here last.
Some of the exposed structures are gone, or cut down.

“Scavenged,” I tell him what he’s probably already
seen in my memory. “By Asmodeus. To build his new war ship.”

Another one like me. Like us. A monster. We’ll need
to kill him, too.

I give no argument. Suddenly I’m a little more
comfortable with my “infection”.

I can still see the snipers: an even dozen of them,
covering all approaches. Otherwise, the colony looks deserted. But
if I listen, I think I can hear the low thrum of what may be
recyclers, air and water processors, deep underground.

And I know I could probably sift through his memories
like he can access mine, but it’s still easier to just ask him:

“How long… How many of them did you kill?”

Not enough. Thirteen, over that first year. It was
hard, at first… It made me sick. It did. But I got used to it. It
got easier and easier. It… It got good to me, lad. I don’t know how
to explain it.

I’ve killed. I know the thrill of victory, of
survival. And I know the rage to avenge, to protect those you care
for from those that would harm them. But I can already sense it
will be different now. I have so much
power
. It will be like
fighting children with toy weapons. I’ll be able to slaughter at a
whim, and they won’t stand a chance against me.

I eventually got bold enough to enter the tunnels.
That let me kill more at a time, but it was also the biggest
danger. The civilians would just let me pass, but the thugs were
smart enough to set traps, ambushes in choke-points where I
couldn’t dodge. They didn’t even care if their civvies were caught
in the crossfire. We are vulnerable to their large caliber
armor-piercers, and explosives. They can hurt us. Slow us down.
Make us run away to heal. That encouraged them, made things more
challenging, but it didn’t stop me.

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.