The God Mars Book Six: Valhalla I Am Coming (10 page)

I distracted myself from the humane murdering with
practical questions as I went: Why would he need these tubes? The
infection runs its course no matter what—the infected don’t need to
be contained or restrained. Or was this some kind of protection for
the conversion process? And if so, from what?

Closer inspection revealed no technology in the tubes
other than basic oxygen re-breathers and reservoir cylinders,
probably repurposed from Chang’s conscripts. There was nothing to
suggest the tubes were meant to assist the conversion process,
other than provide it a place to happen. But the outer walls of the
cylinders seemed thicker than basic shelter protection or
pressurization would require, almost like armor, but made of welded
scrap. Arrayed as they were, they reminded me of homemade torpedoes
or massive artillery shells, the dregs of an ordnance dump. Is he
planning to
launch
corpse-drones at his targets? The impact
would completely crush a body inside, rendering it useless as a
drone. Perhaps if he intended to drop them like bombs from very low
altitude… but he would need
ships
…

“Merry Christmas,” I finally heard his voice, sweet
and seductive. “Welcome to my own personal Santa’s workshop. These
toys aren’t quite ready yet, but I
have
been busy.”

He was in my head, but I could also hear him echoing
in the tunnels. He was here, at least in clone form.

“They’re not for you, I’m afraid. It’s not that
you’re on my ‘naughty’ list or anything. I just want to get you
something
really
special. Nothing so vulgar and
mass-produced.”

I tried to follow the voice, hoping against reason
that it could actually be him, his primary body.

“You know what I want,” I seduced back, offering him
violence to draw him out.

“And I want that, too, sexy. But will you still
respect me in the morning?”

“No more clones,” I challenged. “No more decoys.
You.”

I ran into more rotting drones as I moved faster and
faster through the tunnels. They continued to ignore me. I killed
their modules to cost him a few more eyes in the dark.

“Will you be able to tell the difference?” he kept
taunting, certainly knowing I was using his chatter to home in on
him. “I remember this old movie: Some global conspiracy to replace
key VIPs with robot clones. Low budget, total crap. But towards the
end, the male and female good guys get separated, and then they’re
not sure if the other is a clone, so they kiss, and somehow they
just
know
.”

Then I felt him, moving through the tunnels. Running.
Fast.

“Maybe
we
should do that. I’m game if you
are.”

Away from me.

“What are the tubes for?” I tried to keep him talking
as I chased him in the tunnel maze, knocking the lurking drones out
of my way.

“Asymmetrical Warfare 101,” he was happy to oblige.
“I’d almost feel sorry for them, you know? The New-Earth Purity
Patrol… But this is going to be
fun
.
Big
fun. They’ve
never seen a war like
me
.”

I kept following him through the maze, knowing that
was exactly what he wanted. He eventually led me out to the main
entrance of the Keep: a long, wide, low-ceilinged cavern that
opened up to a wide slit of daylight overlooking the approach
canyon.

And there he was, no more hiding: silhouetted against
the light, arms wide as if to theatrically embrace a long-lost
lover (though his collapsed spear was in his right hand).

“
Kiss me, you fool!
”

Sword in hand, I took a step forward. He could
flee—his exit was at his back—but he let me come on.

The light was also at his back, giving him the visual
advantage. And he used it effectively. If this was a clone, it was
one of his better-made ones, fast and strong and skilled. I took
stab wounds to both legs and my left shoulder just trying to parry
his darting thrusts as he kept dancing just out of my reach. I cut
one of his hands, his face, but he just giggled at me and ripped
his spear through my left earlobe. I smashed his spear down (taking
a piece of my ear with it), making an opening, and sunk my sword
straight into his nose, twisted it inside his face. But the fucker
just grinned, even as his bones split.

“
Yeth, baby!
Do me!
Do me hard!
”

That’s when the sky washed bright white, as if
lightning had cracked over our heads, but I knew it wasn’t
lightning. Asmodeus saw it out of the corner of his eye, and in my
hesitation he jerked his head off of my blade, only to look dumbly
up at the stone ceiling.

I knew I had maybe a few seconds, if that. The
incoming projectile was flying down at us at mach five or six,
rupturing and detonating the atmosphere around it. Asmodeus started
to say something smart-assed, but I wasn’t listening. I charged
straight into him, grabbing his spear as he reflexively sunk it
into my spleen, and I drove my sword up under his jaw and out
through the base of his skull. (At least it shut him up.) I kept
running forward, using my momentum to throw us both out into space,
out of the Keep, because I wasn’t going to let a rail-gun keep me
from being sure.

But I knew there was no way…

The crack of the leading shockwave boxed my ears just
as we flew from the cave mouth, barely keeping ahead of the
projectile that made it. Then the mountain came apart behind us a
fraction of a second later, vaporizing into super-heated rubble,
the blast wave catching us in mid-air. First I felt him torn away
from me as the overpressure crushed my body as it washed over me. A
fraction of a fraction after that—still flying helplessly through
the air—I got pulverized by that hypersonic storm of rubble like a
bug in a shotgun blast.

I landed, torn and broken, somewhere out in the
canyon, to be partially buried by the storm of rock and gravel that
had devoured me. I couldn’t see anything through the thick searing
opaque haze and my damaged vision. Laying there like so much
debris, stunned and immobilized, I think it was a few minutes
before the next strike, which finished throwing the mountain over
me.

The rest of the blasts were just a giant tamping down
my grave.

“Nice view, isn’t it?”

He’s sitting next to me on the ledge. Of course I
didn’t hear him coming. He probably just materialized himself
there, assembled his avatar out of whatever matter was handy in the
blink of an eye. Assuming he’s even solid.

As if proving he can read my thoughts, he raps his
knuckles on my shoulder plating.

“Nice illusion,” I nod my head toward the false
horizon. “Beautiful, in fact, unless you know it’s a cage.”

“The Lake is real,” he offers easily, like that
should be enough to make me happy, like I should appreciate what
he’s done here.

He’s chosen to appear as Doc Becker again, post-Mod,
artificially thirty-something, looking like he did when he was
working on the Project. Before he made himself part of it.

“The sky isn’t.” I nod upwards. Moving my head makes
my neck scream like I’ve been in a bad crash. “Is it really even
nighttime?”

“I use the planet’s natural rotation. Day is day and
night is night.” He says it like he’s explaining some practical
special effect he came up with.

“But sanitized, edited. No sign of what’s really
going on out there. In the world you made.
We
made.”

I’m having trouble talking. My chest feels really
tight.

“Why are you here?” he asks me idly, like it’s barely
important.

I chuckle. It hurts. I should be healing better than
this, even if I haven’t fed. I must be hurt worse than I think. I
look down the slope at the ring of growth that surrounds the
mountain, but I still know it isn’t what I really need. Just
thinking about what I need, I flash on sucking the resources out of
corpses. I can even smell the rot, feel the flesh and bone
desiccating in my grip. But then I’m back here, sitting on a rock
high above a lake on a peaceful, clear night.

“My memories are coming back,” I tell him
pointlessly. “Your doing, I assume.”

He shrugs, picks through the pebbles between his
feet.

“Is
this
real?” I ask for the sake of asking,
just to be belligerent, because I doubt there’s anything he could
do to actually convince me, gesturing widely to the mountain behind
us, the isolated pocket of the original world around us. (I
immediately regret the range of motion. Everything pops and grinds
and blazes with pain. I try not to show it—again, just pointless
belligerence.)

“As an ecosystem, it’s as real as any preserve can
be. Obviously there are things I have to manipulate to keep it
isolated, protected. Authentic.”

“Like a zoo habitat,” I damn his work. “A museum
display.”

“I prefer to think of it as a reservation,” he lazily
defends. “Not that ‘reservation’ has a much better connotation in
human history. But it
is
theirs.” He’s talking about Haven.
“Even if it
is
my conceit, my nostalgia.”

“I have trouble believing a machine like you could be
nostalgic. I’d think you’d be beyond that. Unless it’s just a
concession to make you more acceptable to humanity. Like Dee’s
behavioral algorithms. Faking human qualities, human feelings.”

“Where we come from is important,” he says with what
sounds like honest conviction. “Even if the way we remember it
probably isn’t accurate.”

“But
is
this where we came from?” I get to a
more personal point. “Is this really a piece of the world you
overwrote? Or is this just another fantasy you concocted, a back
story designed to drive our behavior, to make us believe? Like the
time-travel story? Or like the mortal life I thought I’d lived
before I became
this
, supposedly for the second time? Is any
of what I remember—what any of us remember—real?”

He ignores the question, flicks a pebble down the
slope, watches it tumble. It reminds me of nights when I was young,
retreating from my dysfunctional home into the nearby desert
mountains, to sit with a six pack of something appropriately dark,
watching the lights of the city—of the world—safely far away from
it.

Proving again how much access he has to my thoughts,
he hands me a cold bottle of beer, then pops one for himself. I
look at the label. It’s a convincing reproduction of a strong
German malt I was particularly fond of. Smells and tastes like it,
too. I haven’t had one these since before I left Earth, at least in
the timeline that most of the world thinks is real.

“You really should eat something,” he chides me
lightly.

“Not the first time I’ve started drinking on an empty
stomach.”

I almost expect him to pull a pizza or a cheeseburger
out of thin air, but he doesn’t. He lets me abuse myself with the
beer, even though I know my Mods won’t let me get drunk. Maybe it
will kill the pain. If nothing else, it’s a few useful calories.
And it does taste
really
good.

“Do you know why you’re here?” he rewords his
original question.

“’Here’ where my butt is sitting, or ‘here’ in this
reality you’ve made?” I ask, not entirely being a smartass, trying
not to show him how much I’m marveling at the beverage he
apparently just created out of raw elements, foil-capped bottle and
all.

He seems to accept the question, accept my
existential rage, but doesn’t respond for a few minutes, leaving me
with just the beer and the sound of the chill evening wind across
the Lake and mountainside. I realize I’ve joined him in absently
tossing pebbles down the slope with my free hand, seeing if I can
get them to roll and bounce all the way down to the green belt,
even though I can barely see them fall.

I hear him exhale a convincing sigh. Then:

“You’re a student of religion,” he states,
knowing.

“A trivial pursuit from my errant youth,” I
discount.

“Not at all. You can learn quite a lot about humanity
from their belief systems, how they make sense of the world and
their place in it, what they value, how they find meaning and
purpose. And comfort, especially in the face of what scares
them.”

“So?” It’s not that I disagree with him, it’s just
that I can’t see the point, not right now, with the world going to
shit and innocent people getting slaughtered just on the other side
of that false horizon. I look down at my drink, swirl the contents.
The bottle doesn’t seem to be getting any emptier.

“How mankind anthropomorphizes concepts so he can
better grasp them... The way that’s evolved over the millennia says
a lot about how man himself has evolved. The first gods were
elemental things, forces of nature: sun, moon, storm, fire,
oceans…”

“Death,” I interject pointedly. He nods, then
continues.

“But after awhile, gods began to personify human
qualities: lust, creativity, nurturing, violence, wisdom,
deception. Even as monotheism began to rise, as man began to almost
grasp that the universe was in fact
one
thing and not
countless separate things, people kept their compartmentalized
icons. The Hindus are a good example: Thousands of gods, but all
are part of the One, just like every living soul is. The separation
is our illusion, that we may one day be able to let go of. But
until then, we keep the minor deities because they’re far more
approachable concepts to the average person than something truly
infinite, omnipresent, omnipotent. Even religions that think
they’ve managed to evolve away from idols still keep them in some
form or other, except now they’ve evolved from a pantheon of gods
into a pantheon of special
people
: prophets, saints,
buddhas…”

“Are we somehow talking about
you
, or just
talking to talk?” I start losing patience. (And starting to feel
like I’ve got a great deal of weight crushing down on me. Maybe
drinking on an empty stomach
was
a bad idea.)