The God Mars Book Six: Valhalla I Am Coming (2 page)

“You kill our
children
!” he comes up out of
his seat, slamming his fist on the polished stone table between
us.

Staged or not, I can’t help but feel a chill sink in
my gut. And I’m not even sure which deaths he’s blaming us for,
there have been so many, first by bot and now by this—a nanotech
infection that turns a man (or a woman or child) into a walking
corpse whose only purpose is to kill the living, to make more of
its kind.

I can’t speak. His rage has found a target because I
do
feel guilty. Guilty for failing to protect the vulnerable
from Asmodeus. Guilty for having to kill the infected, because we
still haven’t managed a “cure”. If we could just find an effective
countermeasure…

“We’re trying to
save
your children!” Bly
can’t stay silent any longer, having lost probably
all
of
his own people to this war.

“Asmodeus has gone to ground somewhere,” Lux tries
reason, shifting into his female aspect. “We have reason to believe
he may be
here
, hidden in your cave network. Please let us
search, let us help
you
search.”

“You. Will.
LEAVE
.” Sower is beyond adamant,
beyond reasoning with. His face has gone bright red, his mouth
almost foaming. I…

I hear a ping. The briefest flash of signal. Subtle.
Then gone, silent.

I’ve been hearing it since we were ushered through
the defensive maze and down here, but can’t get a lock. It’s too
brief, too long between. It’s not a bot signal, not even a
Harvester signal. Just a simple short string of gibberish code.

“Asmodeus fielded Harvesters against the Katar
evacuees three days ago. Several of them had been converted from
your people,” I back up Lux’s claim—the reason we came here today,
along with some fragments of images gleaned from the recovered
memories of our most-unwilling “guest”—but I’m almost too
distracted to focus on the argument anymore. “Did they come from
here? Or were they from outlying Steads that hadn’t sheltered here?
Who among you is unaccounted for?”

I can’t offer bodies to identify. They were vaporized
by the Asmodeus clone’s suicide bomb.

“
Archer!
Escort them out!” Sower screeches.
“Out beyond the Gate! Out beyond our borders!”

Archer has to know he can’t make us leave unless
we’re willing, and I don’t know how willing I can be with so many
lives on the line. But I’m sure that’s not what Archer is looking
so nervous about. When I look him in the eye, he’s willing to show
me his trepidation. He wants my help, but he can’t…

I hear the ping again. It’s like when I was young,
back on Earth, when a smoke detector battery got low: There would
be a beep from somewhere, then not another for several minutes,
leaving you to try to figure out which detector needed attention.
And it always seemed to happen in the middle of the fucking
night.

“I can hear a signal,” Lux says out loud. “Somewhere
nearby.”

“Intermittent,” I confirm. “Brief flash.”

“Is that what that was?” Bly asks, relieved that he
wasn’t hallucinating, until the weight of the implication hits him:
“We
can’t
leave. They’re here!”

“
Nothing
is here!” Sower insists, pulling back
just a bit from raving. He takes in a deep, ragged breath. “You.
Just
you
. All of this is
you
!” But then I see his
face contort: a flash of a grin, then a giggle, stifled, like he’s
trying not to laugh. Then he fights himself under control
again.

Dementia? Or…

The Companion-Bound said their Blades could
influence them by prodding at their emotions,
Bly reminds in my
head.
Is there a technology that can do that without a
Blade?

Oh no. No. I feel sick.

We need Bel,
Lux answers him urgently, though
matching his discretion by keeping our conversation where no one
else can hear.

But now I’m staring at Sower like I could actually
see into his brain. He locks my eyes like this is a contest. His
trembling gets much worse, to the point that he’s almost
convulsing.

“Has he been injured lately?” I ask Archer sideways,
not breaking eye contact with Sower. “An unexplained sore?
Headaches?”

“He…” Archer starts to answer, but stops himself. I
see him shake his head, but it isn’t a denial.

The other Council members start to get up, to go to
Sower, to support, concerned.

“I’d stay away from him,” Lux warns as lightly as she
can.

Sower begins to scream, and reaches up to tear at his
thin white hair like he wants to open up his own skull. The scream
becomes laughter, then rage, then an insane storm of both. He
pushes himself out of his seat, pulls a stout knife from his belt
and lunges at me across the stone table like an animal.

I receive him easily enough, and try to be gentle,
but his thrashing as I take him down is battering him to the point
that he may break his own bones and dislocate his own joints—I
think the only reason that doesn’t happen is that the Pax
skeletons, like the neighboring Katar, are more flexible than
Earth-gravity bones.

Archer and some of the other Hunters rush in to help
me restrain him. Archer orders the Chamber cleared, and a doctor to
be sent for. An older woman tries to push her way through the crowd
and has to be restrained by the Hunters, begging to go to him—I
recognize her as Sower’s wife. I’m sure the look on my face gives
her no comfort.

Sower’s emotional storm keeps shifting, too fast to
follow: Rage, sobbing, laughing, then something that looks like
sexual arousal, then back again, second-by-second.

“He hasn’t been himself…” Archer finally admits,
kneeling beside me, clearly terrified. “He…”

“How long?” I need to know.

“A few days…”

I hear the ping again. I’ve found the source. I try
to hack in, to insert myself into whatever’s in Sower’s limbic
system. Sower starts fully convulsing, eyes rolled back. He’s
having what looks like a grand mal seizure. All I can do is keep
him from smashing his brains out on the rock floor.

“I can’t get in,” Lux lets me know she’s having the
same problem. “It’s too simple.”

It is: Just a basic nanomachine designed to prod his
emotional responses with micro-voltage pulses. It could have been
introduced in any of a dozen ways. But now the power is spiking,
shorting…

I need to get in, I need to rip it out of his skull,
but without nanosurgical tools, I’d just be killing him myself (and
for an instant, I feel like I should, that it would be better if I
did). But then pyrrhic mercy does it for me: I can feel the device
burst in his midbrain like a tiny bomb, as if it was designed to
upon discovery. Blood gushes out of Sower’s nostrils, and he goes
still, his life gurgling and rattling out of him as we hold him.
His wife wails and collapses in the arms of the green-suited
Hunters.

I very badly need something to kill right now.

“We need to search the entire facility,” I tell the
crushed Archer, jarring him back to action. “We need to do it now.
We need to gather everyone and check them.”

He hesitates, but then gets to his duty, rallies his
fighters.

“Expect Harvesters,” I tell him as an
afterthought.

I ease Sower’s body down onto the cold stone, and
close his eyes. Another friend, another good man who trusted me,
dead by that sick resurrected motherfucker.

I almost hope Asmodeus has a lot more clones, because
I want to enjoy butchering him as many times as I can.

“Fan out,” I tell Lux and Bly, my voice barely more
than a growl. “Search deep. The bastard will be hidden deep.”

Under other circumstances, I would be marveling at
the neatly cut labyrinth that is the Pax Hold Keep. I’ve wondered
if the squared-off tunnels and more naturally-shaped chambers—dug
out when the ETE were still actively involved in providing aid to
the survivor groups—were excavated by their tapping machinery or by
their Tools. (Sower had told us that the Keep was dug decades ago.
Did the ETE have the ability to generate selective repulsor fields
and manipulate molecular bonding forces that long ago?)

But now, the magnificent shelter has become a dark,
eerie place as we advance into the more remote sections. Shifting
to my night vision Mod only makes it look more threatening.

(“Abandon hope, ye who enter here,” comes
involuntarily to mind as we descend.)

Unwilling to simply give over the protection of their
own to strange outsiders, no matter the risk, the Pax Hunters put
their metal masks on and lead the way with their spears, bows and
crossbows.

“Your target is here,” I remind them needlessly,
jabbing a gloved finger straight at the base of my nose, then
behind my ear. “Smaller than a man’s fist. And stay away from the
mouth.”

But that’s not the only vector anymore, as Asmodeus
recently showed us (and at great cost).

“And their guns,” I hear Bly add, accompanying his
own recon. “Anyone gets hit by anything other than a bullet, best
give mercy quick.”

“And sever the head, or the body will still
reanimate,” Lux finishes our grim mission brief.

But the Pax all know this already. Asmodeus has given
them too much practical experience.

“Archer,” I take him aside. “Do you know where Sower
has been over the last few days? Where does he sleep? Has he been
anywhere alone?”

“Hard to say, but I doubt he had reason to go deep.
His chamber is not far from Council, and the Council has been
staying together since the bots came.” He cocks his masked head
back the way we came.

Which means Asmodeus likely got to him in a more
populated and traveled section. If so, he could have gotten to a
lot more, especially if he’s developed a more subtle form of
infection and conversion.

My growing dread is interrupted by shouting and
screaming from somewhere up ahead—it’s hard to tell where or how
far because of the way the tunnels carry sound, not even with my
enhancements. But then people—civilians—come running toward us.

“Contain them!” I try to order. “They need to be
checked!”

But the Hunters’ priority is elsewhere. They let the
families run through our staggered line, out for the exits, as they
ready their arrows for whatever drove the panic. I count nearly two
dozen as they flee past me, and know this likely isn’t the only
such flight. Soon I hear Bly and Lux in my head, trying to slow
more terrified dashes. Unless they’re all coming from the same
place, we have threats in multiple locations.

“Twenty meters back!” one of the women stops just
long enough to tell Archer. “
Sick!
Eyes glowing! Tried to
bite, but…”

“Did anyone get hurt?”

“It’s Tammer Cutter… And Sil…” she breathlessly
rattles off names. “More… I couldn’t see…”

“Gather your family and the others out in the
courtyard,” Archer orders her. “Check everyone for wounds, even
small ones.”

She swallows her fear and does what she’s told.

We move forward, cautiously.

The Harvester control modules build themselves from
their injected seeds using the victim’s brain, bone and blood as
raw materials, and there’s one small blessing to that horror: It
means they aren’t metal-cased, aren’t armored, so a well-placed
arrow or blade can destroy their operating mechanisms. But even
disabled, the seeds that they in turn produce to infect others stay
viable in their injector magazines, posing a lasting hazard until
the heads are carefully severed and burned (or the whole body
is).

I have no doubt that the Pax Hunter Warriors could
deal with a Harvester attack in the open forest, but these tunnels
are another matter. And if the Harvesters are armed with seed
launching guns like they were against the Katar, this could be a
slaughter—there’s no cover, and the Pax wear very little armor.

Worse, the sleek, long-limbed Pax don’t move nearly
as gracefully in these tight spaces. I doubt they’ve had much
practice. This is supposed to be their safest place, the Hold they
naturally fell back to when the bots—and then the Harvesters—began
attacking their Steads in the open forest. The haven we promised
we’d help protect. But somehow the monster has found his way
in.

We pass a large, long chamber that has narrow slit
openings to daylight. It smells musty, like a wetland back on
Earth, and it’s filled with manmade pools of standing water. I see
random movement intermittently disturb the otherwise still surface.
These must be the dragonfly breeding facilities I’ve heard
of—another marvel of their science and engineering for the benefit
of everyone living here, now reduced to just one more sinister dark
space by these circumstances.

The Pax do a quick and thankfully uneventful sweep,
and we move on.

As I follow closely behind Archer’s point fighters,
this is a special hell for me, because the Harvesters pose
absolutely no danger to me or any of the other Modded, but the
slightest nick of a seed injector or dart guarantees a slow
agonizing death for these people, unless someone spares them with a
quicker one. But—as always—they won’t run, won’t let us do their
fighting for them. I have to respect their bravery, their sense of
honor, but that doesn’t make stomaching their deaths any easier
(especially since Asmodeus
is
only killing them to make me
suffer).

The first attack comes as a blur. I’d let myself get
distracted, wallowing in my toxic rage. It’s a woman in plain
work-greens. She lunges out of a side-chamber like she’s been
thrown, trying to tackle one of the leader Hunters. He’s quick, and
blocks her with his bow, holds her off while he hesitates long
enough to make sure that this isn’t just another panicked civilian.
But when her jaw dislocates to jab the injector array at him as if
she’s vomiting it, he uses the arrow he had nocked to stab up under
her jaw.