The God Mars Book Six: Valhalla I Am Coming (19 page)

She lets him go, steps out of his way. But he doesn’t
start moving immediately.

“You’d give the ETE tech you have to UNMAC?” he asks
her flatly.

“
No
. But I’d give it to you. One soldier to
another.” She looks at Sharp, at Lyra, at the rest of our company.
“None of you are getting off this planet alive. And you’re going to
keep serving the shitheads that are going to guarantee that.”

She turns and goes back on point. Horton shoots me a
look. There’s doubt in his eyes, and rage. He’s willing to die in
the line, he’s resigned himself to it, accepted it, but he doesn’t
want to die stupid. And Kali is offering him a weapon.

I can’t tell him what to do. I have no right to.

We all keep moving forward.

When did you do this?
I ask Kali discreetly as
I follow a few steps behind her as she strides through the forest
with the grace of a wild animal born to it.
When did you start
converting them?

Not the second you told me about Asmodeus and his
zom-borgs, if that’s what you’re thinking,
she answers in kind.
I can feel her grin even though her back is turned to me
. Give
me a little credit, lover. I waited, thought about it long and
hard. It was Bel… He told me what had happened here, how Earth had
blown up a miracle of engineering, a true wonder of this planet,
and buried you in the deal. We need to be stronger than those
stupid fascist fucks. They need to be stronger.
She gestures
backhanded at Mak.

You’ve condemned them…
I start to argue.

Earth isn’t going to accept them either way.
I
can tell her grin is gone, replaced by a snarl, even with her back
to me.
Earth sees everybody here as savage freaks.
To be
studied. Contained. And eventually eliminated. Do you think Earth
is going to let any of these people keep living their lives here?
Let them keep breeding, raising families? If Earth has their way,
every faction on this planet will be history within a generation,
and you know it.

She’s right and she knows it. Her problem is she
isn’t willing to temper it.

How did you do it?
I try another tack.

Asmodeus gave me the idea. Sort of. You said he
figured out he could hack the science he needed to make the
Harvesters out of Fohat, that he probably hacked Chang for his
skill sets too. So that made me think: What else did I get from
Chang when I had myself spliced into him? And lo-and-behold: I’ve
got a head full of nanotech science. I just know it. Surreal…

And it may have happened that way, but I can’t help
but wonder what hand Yod may have had in it. I need help with the
Asmodeus threat, and here’s Kali with an instant army of
Harvester-proof warriors. I suppose I could press her, subtly
interrogate her about why she’s really here, how she got the idea,
to try to reveal a Yod manipulation. But I doubt Yod would let her
see it if he did mess with her head.

This pervasive existential paranoia makes me think
about how Kali got to be here in this Yod-rewritten version of the
world the first place: She told me that she’d met Yod before the
overwrite, that he’d shown her a better path, promised her some
kind of peace or meaning or both. I don’t remember that. I don’t
remember her being any part of the Project. (Not yet, anyway. A Yod
oversight?) Did she follow me into it, without me knowing, without
Yod telling me?

The only story I know is that I brought her Seed, and
Lisa’s (and one more I’m still carrying whose identity I don’t
know). Either Yod loaded me with those Seeds without me knowing or
it was my choice, or at least by my agreement, and still I don’t
remember choosing or agreeing.

If the choice
was
mine, given the desperation
of that damned (and now mostly-erased) world that I do remember,
would I have chosen Kali? (It’s like one of those old thought
experiments I did in school: If you were stuck on an alien world
and could only bring three other people with you, who would you
pick?) Lisa, absolutely. But Kali…

Of the assets I’d want to have in any bad fight,
Astarte and Dee were already in place. Lisa and Calliope were the
only other ones still alive, the only other ones who’d accepted
Modded immortality. Matthew refused Modding and let himself die of
cancer. Alexi had died peacefully in his sleep years before the
tech was available. Mark and Janey retired out of the game to have
at least part of a life. So did Marcus and Haidar and Dave. (And
Rick, too, but somehow the unlucky bastard is still here in this
world. And I know that means he’s probably a Yod-made copy like
Matthew was.)

So I suppose I
would
have picked her, given
that limited choice. (And I was certainly pissed enough with her to
drag her ass into this.)

But then, who’s my third Seed? I can’t even manage a
guess. Unfortunately, there’s apparently only one way to find out,
and my curiosity isn’t worth anyone’s life.

As I push through the interwoven forest in Kali’s
wake, I reflect on how much walking I’ve been doing on this planet
since I was re-Modded, and walking consistently keeps sending me
into these useless broodings. Despite all the time I’ve spent in
meditation, I just can’t seem to stay in the moment anymore. Not
even here. This forest is far more beautiful than it is dangerous
(especially to me), a miracle of life and science. (And so were the
partially-terraformed deserts of Melas and western Coprates, which
I’ve also put a lot of under my boots.) I try to enjoy it now—we’re
not under immediate attack—simply exist in the few cubic meters of
lush, hardy green that’s immediately all around me; smell the life
in the thin, cool air; be in the fucking moment…

But I can’t. Within two seconds, I’m thinking about
how much lusher this forest was before Yod’s rewrite. Not that I’d
ever actually visited this part of the planet before the so-called
“Event”, but in that version of reality we’d landed massive chunks
of comet ice in the valleys, created standing lakes; we’d built up
a thick, stable atmosphere. But in resetting the planet to the way
it was sixty or seventy years before, Yod had to turn all of it
back into a near-airless barren wasteland, disintegrating
everything that had managed to grow here just for the sake of a
theatrical deception, undo everything that we—and life itself—had
made.

That makes me freshly angry. And makes me chuckle
like a madman because I’m suddenly wanting to avenge a bunch of
plants.

Kali turns her head back my way briefly to shoot me a
grin. Either she’s been reading my train of thought or simply
sharing in my pervasive sense that all of this is so completely
insanely fucked.

“What?” Lyra wants to know what’s making me snicker,
edging up close.

“Maybe I’ll tell you later.” Of course, I know my
promises are worth shit to her. I hear her sigh in frustration
under her breath as she falls back behind me.

“So she’s your wife?” Horton starts an even less
comfortable subject, on my other side, keeping his weapon on the
forest on our flank. I’m assuming he’s asking because of Kali’s
propositions.

“
Ex
-wife,” I grumble, and see Kali shake her
head in exasperation. So I explain (knowing I’m still on camera):
“When we all became immortal, there was no more ‘til death do you
part’, so marriage contracts were time-limited. I let it expire.”
And that’s the nicest way I can put it.

“He found a mission,” Kali doesn’t let me dodge.
“Save the world that we all fucked up. He does that. Then he
forgets everything else. Every
one
else. Ask your Colonel
Ava. Way back when he found out his bosses were involved in a
global conspiracy—and worse, using him to do it—and all he cared
about was ending them. She loved him, and he left her without a
second thought, didn’t even say goodbye. That’s your great hero:
give him a choice between making love and making war, and he’ll
pick war every fucking time.”

And that kills the conversation pretty
effectively.

By the time we make the boundary of the cleared zone
around the crater mount, it looks and sounds like all flights have
made it back and have touched down on their makeshift airfield up
on the plateau. From down here, I can’t see how many they’ve
brought back, or how many injured.

Horton calls in, lets their command know that we’re
friendlies approaching, and that we have wounded, including a
civilian VIP. He steps out of the green to let their sentries see
him, waves. Kali and the Cast wisely stay out of sight, but I
decide not to. I move out into the open, still lugging Ryan over my
shoulder.

And then I hear more gunfire.

It’s sporadic at first, and far off, echoing. It’s
coming from up on the plateau, where we can’t see, and quickly
escalates as more guns join in. Then there’s an explosion that I’m
sure is another aircraft being blown.

I hear a fresh storm of panicked chatter on the link
channels: There are Harvesters inside the perimeter, inside the
compound. Their command actually responds in disbelief for a few
precious seconds, because nothing was seen crossing the cleared
zone. But then they get confirmation: The drones are coming out of
the ground, out of the blasted crater bowl and the rocks of the rim
plateau.

Asmodeus must have buried some there, maybe in
whatever tunnels did survive, maybe just below the surface,
anticipating that UNMAC might find and hit his base, and then—just
like at the Pax mountain—they’d put boots on the ground to mop up.
The fact that they actually built a base there instead probably
made him ecstatic. And now he’s timed the drones he’d salted there
to hit them just as they’re limping home from the deadly
humiliation he just dealt them.

“Stay!” I order Kali and the others. And run. (More
running.) Across the cleared zone. I’m already scrambling up-slope
when I realize Kali is right behind me, catching up fast.

“Get back to the trees!” I repeat my order over my
shoulder.

“You haven’t been my CO since you got young and
started fucking me,” she throws back, actually passing me, loping
on all fours like an animal.

“They think we’re all part of some conspiracy to
infect Earth,” I explain as succinctly as I can as I chase her.
“They think anything we do for them is just a way to manipulate
them.”

“Then why are you bothering?” she challenges over her
shoulder, knowing the answer. She sends rocks sliding down into my
path, probably on purpose.

“You can’t let them see the Modded Cast,” I
insist.

“They’re back watching the wounded, your entourage,”
she assures poorly.

“Your presence isn’t helping, Kal,” I have to stop
her. “They see you like that, they’ll…”

But as I’m saying it, her skin shifts from blue back
to its original pale and freckled.

“Explains why you decided to go frumpy today,” she
criticizes. “Dressing down for the neo-puritan fuckwads.” But I’m
grateful for the gesture.

There’s another explosion before we make it to the
top. From the color and size of the flash-brief mushroom fireball,
I’d guess a fuel reservoir just got burst.

We make the plateau, take a quick scan, and
thankfully don’t get shot at. But then the Earth force is too busy:
I can see Harvesters climbing up out of the crater bowl, digging
themselves out of the recent construction on the plateau, coming up
the western and southern slopes. There are already a few dozen
inside the base perimeter. Most are concentrating on the debarking
evacuees. The aircraft have to launch before they’re clear to avoid
the shoulder-fired rockets that a few of the drones are lugging.
(The rockets are probably set to fire automatically as soon as they
scan and lock a target—Asmodeus wouldn’t waste precious heavy
ordnance relying on the drones’ poor aim.)

I watch the base batteries lock and shred a few of
the drones they can get a clear shot at in the panic. It’s
definitely not surgical, and burns a lot of ammo chewing the corpse
bodies apart until they can’t fight anymore. Some of the aircraft
manage similar but even sloppier barrages with their turrets.

The broken trooper force is fleeing in a widespread
stampede from the airfield to the nearest bunker airlock.
Thankfully, some have the bravery left to carry wounded, or try to
hold ground long enough to cover their fellows, but they’re still
not shooting straight enough. However Asmodeus hacked their AI
targeting, it must be proving tough to undo.

I’m halfway to them, spending my remaining ammo
sparingly on the highest-threat targets (first those with
launchers; then those getting in slop-shot range of the largest
clusters of troopers, or to those lugging casualties), when I see
fresh panic: The airlocks have been locked-down from inside,
probably by command order. They’re not letting anyone in.

Rifle fire comes from behind me, picking off more
drones. I turn just long enough to see that Horton and Lyra have
made the plateau rim, and are hunkered into the rocks.

“Watch your backs!” I warn them over their links.
“He’s got these things buried all over!”

Kali, without a gun, charges into the nearest
Harvester and sinks her claws up under jaw and rips its head off.
Then she takes its weapon, only to throw it down in
frustration.

“Empty!”

Good to know the drones still free-fire until they
piss themselves dry. But if they can get within injector-range…

I pop one a dozen meters away from her, and she’s on
it before it falls, grabs that weapon. And smashes it into the
rocks with a scream of rage.

“Darts!
Fuck!
”

She gets lucky on a third drone—it still has some
actual ammo left, if only because a lucky shot shattered its
trigger arm. She jerks the gun away, and the arm almost comes off
at the elbow. She puts one round into the skull at muzzle-contact
range, just to make sure it’s effective, then starts shooting at
whatever she can get a line on.