The God Mars Book Five: Onryo (36 page)

A quick look around shows me more such corpses,
discarded among the rocks not like battle-fallen, but like
discarded trash. The whole slope reeks of corpse-rot.

Whatever Terina has become takes another charge at
Thel, and they fence brutally, battering and hacking and stabbing.
In the flashes, I see Thel’s eyes lock on me as I advance, and the
instant’s distraction proves costly. Terina puts her Blade through
his left bicep. Thel begins to scream and convulse. He presses the
tip of his Staff into her torso when she won’t release him, and
energy arcs into her, searing. But I don’t smell burning flesh. It
smells like burning plastic.

They’re still locked together in their embrace of
mutual destruction when I run up on them, and, my reflex priorities
what they are, swing my Nagamaki to cleave Thel from clavicle to
groin. He disengages his Staff and blocks my blow, but the impact
throws him back off of Terina’s Blade. He sprawls backwards over
the rocks.

I’m about to press my advantage when Terina screams,
or does something that resembles screaming: It sounds like it’s
coming through a bad link, all buzz and stutter. I look her in the
face. Her face is different, shockingly so: Pale, almost
translucent, and not long like it was. I can barely recognize it as
hers. And her eyes blaze bright white.

She hooks my armor with the tip of her long weapon,
and, using it as a lever, lifts and throws me away like an unwanted
satchel. All I can do is flail helplessly as I fly, and crash
gracelessly over the boulders of the slope.

Thel takes his opportunity, drives his Staff into the
slope between his own feet, and the slope explodes into us in a
storm of dirt and gravel. By the time we recover and can remotely
see again in the resulting dust cloud, he’s gone.

Terina makes another inhuman scream, her jaw gaping
unnaturally, and she turns her blazing eyes on me, points her Blade
at my face.

“Terina!” I try to reach her, pulling my mask down.
“It’s me! It’s
Ishmael
!”

She looks confused, but her face moves so
mechanically, too much like Dee when he drops his human behavior
algorithms to show what he really is. And I have to crawl backwards
as she advances.

“Terina, please!”

In a blur, Ram is up behind her and clamps his hand
on her neck. She convulses and goes limp. Her Blade strikes the
ground, but her hand will not release the long shaft. Ram finds a
spot to ease her down. He doesn’t try to separate her from her
weapon, her Companion, just lays it across her breast.

Practicality and rage makes me do a quick search for
Thel before I join Ram and Erickson in tending to Terina. Ram’s
insisting we gather the human remains and place the most
resource-rich parts around and over her like we’re building a
cairn, burying her in gore. Now that I have time to get a good look
at her, she’s all wrong, her proportions are all wrong. Her limbs,
her torso… Just like her face, they look like the body of someone
who practices weight discipline or has access to an Unmaker
artificial gravity centrifuge. And there’s more muscle to go over
the shorter, stouter bones.

It’s one of the reasons you look different,
lad,
Peter tries to explain.
It’s not me. The Mods are
resetting your body to your DNA, based on an Earth Gravity ideal,
then beefing you up to what they’ve been programmed to see as a
prime physical specimen. It looks like they’ve done the same to
her.

But it’s what’s over the bone and muscle that’s most
shocking. It looks like translucent white rubber, not skin.

“It’s like silicon,” Erickson confirms, touching her
arm.

“Something like it,” Ram says like he knows. “The
radiation probably destroyed her dermis. This is a temporary
substitute. Until she can rebuild.”

“And the rest of her?” Erickson asks when I
can’t.

Ram doesn’t answer. He just keeps piling on
corpse-meat. I see it start to absorb into her.

“You need some too,” he insists, looking at us. Then
he uses his knife to cut free a limb, a leg, and he carries it a
few meters away, turning his back to us as he embraces his horrible
meal to his chest.

Not wanting to take from Terina, I go to gather more.
I find what must have been Thel’s camp, a miserable hole in the
rocks, littered with human bones and broken Harvester modules.
Turning west, I realize it has a good view of the valley that lies
between here and Katar. What was he doing here?

As if in answer, a storm of dust kicks up around us,
and I feel the familiar tingling of increasing EMR. I think I hear
Ram growl “Not now.”

Within minutes, I cannot so much see but feel
something very large moving almost directly over us from the other
side of the mountain. The EMR levels are numbing, almost
paralyzing. But it heads west, moving slowly but smoothly, ignoring
us. The EMR fades as it goes.

“He’s heading for Katar!” Erickson shouts over the
artificial winds as we’re sandblasted blind. I use my body, my
armor, to shield Terina as best I can.

“Or Pax,” Ram estimates. I hear him try to call out,
to warn the others, but there’s too much interference. “We need to
go.”

“I can’t leave her like this!” I insist as the storm
starts to fade, still moving west away from us.

“Then stay,” Ram agrees easily. He knows we can’t
leave her, and probably don’t dare move her.

“How long will she need?” Erickson wants to know,
sounding torn between priorities.

“I can only guess,” Ram tries formulating a
reasonable answer. “It only took your enhanced Companion less than
an hour to reach critical saturation?”

“About forty five minutes,” Erickson confirms. “But
they used our ETE implants, repurposed them.”

“That cut down on replication time. But still, they
can manage in hours what takes Seed tech days, because they’re
simpler machines. And more aggressive. No safeties.”

“But we didn’t have the kind of injuries she does,”
Erickson worries.

Ram seems to stew on that. I watch him chew his lip,
shake his head as he looks at Terina’s corpse-meat “grave”.

“This is about as resource-rich an environment as we
can give her.” He looks at me. “Still, this could take days.” He
turns his head into Asmodeus’ wake.

“I’ll stay,” I insist. “You go. Just try to leave me
a piece of that son-of-a-bitch.”

“You watch out for Harris,” Ram warns as a way of
saying goodbye. “He still may be close.”

“It’ll help pass the time,” I tell him with murder in
my voice.

“If Yod does want her in this fight, maybe he’ll
speed up the process,” Ram gives poor hope. He and Erickson move to
leave in the dark. I think he’s about to tell me to be careful, but
holds his tongue. Then they take off running.

In a few hours, the sun rises over the mountain at my
back. The sky turns purple as the wind rises, coming down the slope
at me. Looking up, I realize I see fading stars. The pervasive haze
is clearing. What is Asmodeus doing?

If I listen, I can hear chatter from orbit. The
Unmakers have noticed it too. And then their channels are filled
with urgency and alarm. They can
see
the new Stormcloud.

Peter hacks us in as subtly as he can, and gets
optical feed from their satellites. I can see the deck of the
still-skeletal, twin-bowed cross-shaped ship. But worse, I
recognize the landmarks, despite their camouflage. I force a
zoom-out to confirm: he’s hovering his flying fortress almost
directly over the Gate Wall of Katar. His railguns are pointed into
the City.

I look down at Terina. Now that I can see her in real
light, I brush some of the gore and rot away from her face. Her
“skin” looks less pale, but it also looks more transparent,
thinner. And loose. I nudge at her cheek carefully with my gloved
finger, and the rubbery outer layer tears away, revealing slick but
new-looking skin, real skin. But it isn’t dyed red anymore. It’s a
rich tan.

But the structure of her face has changed so much,
just like the rest of her, “reset” by the Companion to how it’s
interpreted her DNA. A perfect version, but a perfect Upworld
version. She’s no longer a creature of this planet. She’s become
exactly what her people despise, what her father…

She’s managed to absorb about half of what we packed
around her, and it looks like she’s taking in raw minerals from the
rocks as well. It’s like I’m watching time itself consume what’s
around her, only in hours instead of years and decades. I gingerly
uncover more of her, careful not to touch her Blade. I can hear it
singing to her, and maybe to me as well, perhaps grateful for the
feast of decomposition.

Her clothing has repaired—it looks pristine under the
gore. I take that as a hopeful sign, that and the shape her
Companion has chosen: The weapon of her people. That must mean
there’s still something left of her. Unless the pattern was set
before the radiation killed too much of her.

But if this isn’t her, what will she be? A blank
slate, an infant, without memory?

I’ve heard some aspects of personality and
temperament are neurological,
Peter tries.
Perhaps those
will still survive.

But everything she knew may be gone. Reset.

Then I consider: Asmodeus had been dead for many
years, many years
before
the invention of Modding. If the
story is true, he was remade just from a sample of his DNA kept for
nefarious purposes. (By Yod?) His memories are nothing more than a
convincing copy, compiled from old files, like someone writing a
story about someone from history. Could that be done for Terina?
The possibility gives more hope. But would that
be
Terina,
or another being that simply thinks it’s Terina but knows it’s
not?

She won’t open her eyes. I could be looking down at
another corpse, but I can hear her breathing, hear her heart
beating, see her warmth. I wish there was something more I could
give her. I wish there was anything more I could do.

I shift my attention back to Asmodeus. He’s still
just sitting there, silent. He’s not even trying to kick up any
kind of dust cloak or EMR interference. He wants to be seen, right
where he is.

Does he want us all to watch him blast Katar into
nothing?

Suddenly I hear a grating blast of static and
feedback overwhelming multiple frequencies. It’s not just on
Unmaker channels, it’s on ours as well, and probably those used by
the Terraformers and the Keepers and the Shinkyo and anyone else
with the technology to hear.

“
GOOD MORNING CO-PRAY-TEES!!
” Asmodeus’ voice
booms in a strangely joyful song. “And how is everyone on this
lovely
morning? Probably planning various spectacular acts
of stupidity, I’m sure. But while I
do
love to watch stuff
blow up real good, I figure I should make the cost of the show
clear to the accounting team.

“First of all, to all the nice clean religious folks
from back home: Yes, I have you hacked. So I expect you’re busy
frantically shutting down all your networked gadgetry and going old
school, which means you’ll barely be able to fly, much less target
me from farther away than I can vaporize you back. And if you
decide to throw another one of your Kamikaze-for-Jesus faithful out
of the sky at me with a nuke strapped to his ass, you may want to
watch my little Nat-Geo documentary film first…”

Now I’m getting video on every channel: Close-up pans
over Katar, from angles that defeat their camouflage and show the
extent of their City. And their people: their warriors haplessly
stationed on their now useless Wall, and the civilian population
come out to stare at the monstrosity in their sky in frozen terror.
Among them I see some of my people, my father, Straker, Elias, Dee,
Paul Stilson…

“This is Katar. Population one-thousand four hundred
and sixty seven. Minus a few I killed in the last week or so. A
rich and beautiful culture of art, science, trade and engineering,
perfectly adapted to the environment. A new form of humanity, one
could argue. Evolution at work. Oh, sorry. I expect that’s a
naughty word for you Scripture-Literalists…”

I realize his signal has hacked through the Unmaker
firewalls and is broadcasting through their uplinks and satellites.
It’s going all the way back to Earth, so they’ll all see what’s at
stake.

“…it’s not that I don’t like you God-Wads. Okay, I
despise you. You’re just all so fundamentally vacuous. Every time
I’d walk into a church back home, back when I was a Real Boy, I’d
feel like the place was trying to lobotomize me. What
is
it
with those pastel cut-felt banners, anyway?
And
here I am
digressing… Nostalgia and all… What was I saying?

“Oh yes: No bombs for God. Colonel Jackson, this
means you, too. Especially you. Let’s not do that again, or I’ll
personally make sure you lose the other half of your face, along
with some parts you probably swear you never touch. Same-same if
you try another vertical railgun dump on my deck from orbit. All of
these pretty savages will get vaporized in the deal, and I’m sure
you’ll all feel very bad about that. Plus, I do believe
slaughtering God’s innocent creatures—even the funny-looking
heathens—is still one of those go-straight-to-Hell offenses. Mortal
sin. Whatever.”

The camera view suddenly spins, sweeping across the
defensive clearing beyond the Wall and to the edge of the forest,
where it zooms in on two lone figures: Ram and Erickson. Ram glares
his rage into the camera.

“Oh, look who’s here, kids: a bona fide historical
figure! And thank
God
he isn’t wearing that hideous helmet…
Don’t believe the feel-good revisionist history, though. He really
is quite the nasty piece of work. I should know: We went to the
same school for psychopaths. Still, since we’re such old friends, I
did make him something nice…”