The God Mars Book Six: Valhalla I Am Coming (3 page)

It has no effect, other than to spray him with her
blood. While an arrow fired from a thirty to forty kilo draw weight
bow should be able to penetrate the cellulose shell of a Harvester
module, an arrow stabbed by hand at close range might not be able
to do the job. Thankfully, one of the other Hunters responds with
his own bow, and sinks a shaft into her ear.

The woman’s skull shorts and pops, and she convulses
for a few seconds before dropping like a cut marionette.

Now that I can see her better, she was perhaps forty
Standard, weathered and lean. Her jaw is still forced open way too
wide by the injector that protrudes from her mouth. Her blank eyes
glow dimly red for a moment, then fade.

“Cass Sower,” Archer mourns, recognizing. His mask
looks up at me. “The Leder’s daughter.”

Was she the vector that infected him? I shift my
vision to T-wave and scan, but the cruel machine in her skull looks
just like all the others I’ve seen.

“Check him!” Archer is already ordering his men to
examine the one she attacked. I play back my visual memory. It
doesn’t look like the injector made contact. And blood, as far as
we know, isn’t a vector—the infection is injected mechanically. Or
it has been so far.

I hear a sickeningly familiar shuffle, and another
shape comes at us from down the tunnel. I dash past the Pax line,
sword ready, but also hesitate to be sure of my target. I see the
red glow in the eyes, hear the faint command signal, smell death,
bring my blade down. The skull splits, the module bursts, the body
drops at my feet. I don’t stop to look. I can hear more coming, see
the staggering ghostly shadows in my night vision.

“Choke point! Here!” I order them to hold the
position like I have the authority to, then run ahead.

In my head, Bly and Lux and reporting encounters from
their sections as well. If fully-converted Harvesters take three
days from infection to module completion, that means Asmodeus may
have started this as he was launching his attack on Katar, using
that as a distraction to draw us away from here. Or perhaps he was
here even before that, since he did have several converted Pax in
the ranks of Harvesters he threw at the Katar as they fled from his
rail-gun.

Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to cull much
intel from Fohat since we contained his fallen body and let his
blasted brain start to rebuild itself. So far Bel’s only managed to
recover just enough from his digitized backup memories to bring us
here. But even if we allowed Fohat’s brain to fully regenerate, let
him regain consciousness, I doubt Asmodeus would have let him know
anything truly useful, or he wouldn’t have left his body for us to
take.

Another drone comes running at me sloppily in the
dark. I know that the sensor stalks that penetrate into their eyes
can see beyond the visual spectrum; that they probably lock on heat
and motion, then a preset attack algorithm is triggered when they
detect a vulnerable target. In my own night vision, this one looks
like a young boy. His eyes glow red and his mouth gapes wide as he
throws himself at me. I impale his skull on the tip of my blade,
and twist until the module shatters. I don’t have time to grieve
what I’ve done. I can only let his body drop free of my sword, step
over him and meet two more.

The tunnel here is almost too narrow for long swords,
so I have to thrust, twist, repeat.

Small blessing: the drones we’ve seen so far don’t
have guns, but I expect the reason for that is they’ve all been
converted from the Pax, who have no guns as far as I’ve seen. We
still haven’t seen a single drone wearing Chang’s black uniforms,
no sign of a potential non-Pax “Vector Zero,” unless an infected
Pax brought this back home, either unknowingly or under Asmodeus’
control.

I wish I had a proper map of this maze. Maybe I could
find Asmodeus’ access point, guess where he might be holed up
(assuming he’s even here at all). Lux and Bly send me enough data
to get a rough sense of where the Harvesters are being encountered,
but this is still a blind labyrinth for us. They could well slip in
behind us, a…

I hear it as I’m thinking about it: Sounds of
violence from behind me, bows and swords against flesh and bone. I
shouldn’t have left the Hunters. I turn back to…

You shouldn’t have left them.

It’s Asmodeus, in my head. I reach out, try to find
his signal.

“But then you never were a team player, not when you
were being honest.”

That
wasn’t
in my head. That was in my
ears
, echoing in the tunnels. But it doesn’t sound right.
Raspy. Weak. Like he’s hurt.

“That’s right, sweet thing,” he taunts as I run
toward the sound. “This way… I have another present for you.”

I find a chamber with a shaft of light lancing down
through the middle of it. There’s a table in the glow, and sitting
up on it is a male in Pax Hunter gear, mask and all. A shaky hand
reaches up and lowers the hand-hammered Mycenaean-style mask of a
journeyman warrior. The room is thick with the stink of death.

“You’re early. I’m not done yet.”

It’s… It’s Asmodeus, but it isn’t. I can see him in
the face, a definite resemblance, but not really him—like he’s part
someone else. And the hair and beard don’t match. And his eyes glow
red—corpse eyes with Harvester stalks.

“Still, you get the idea.”

I charge forward, run my blade up under his jaw and
out the back of his skull, twist, then rip upwards until I split
his head apart, flinging his mask into the stone ceiling. Then I
chop down quick into the remains of the module, so hard my blade
winds up halfway down through his sternum. I get washed in blood
that smells like rotten meat. I step back, and the split body
sprawls back across the table.

“Hey! I spent
days
on that…” he complains like
I’ve just ruined an idle art project. But his voice still isn’t in
my head. It’s behind me, now sounding small and higher-pitched. I
spin, only to face a straw-haired little girl, maybe seven
Standard. Her face is corpse-blank, her eyes glow, but she doesn’t
try to attack me.

“Okay, I didn’t really spend days on it. I just
program it and it makes itself.”

His voice—distorted and disturbingly childlike—is
coming out of
her
mouth, which just hangs open limply. He’s
not making her speak, he’s got a speaker inside of her. He’s just
digitally mimicking a child’s voice.

“You’ve probably figured out that I
gave
you
Fuckhead, left his spectacularly-lobotomized body for you to
collect. Nothing sinister. I just couldn’t stand the guy anymore.
Can you blame me? I mean, what a self-obsessed dick. No social
skills whatsoever. And impressively stupid for a smart guy. He was
easy
. All I had to do was give him ideas, and watch him
work. He had no idea I was downloading all of his nanotech skills.
I wonder why Chang never thought of that? We could have ditched the
asshole
ages
ago. Maybe he just wanted the company. Not that
Fuckhead was ever any kind of good company. He just made you want
to rip off his head and shove it up his ass, every time he opened
his mouth. Did I mention no social skills? Or social smarts: After
I’d milked him for everything he knew, I just idly dropped the hint
that maybe he should get out there and have some fun in person for
a change; get out of the lab, get back on the horse, get the fuck
over when your girlfriend filled him full of his own bots’ bullets.
I was like his own personal Doctor Phil. Remember Doctor Phil?
Anyway, the stupid shit had no idea I was setting him up—he went
with a fucking smile. If one of your Super Friends didn’t take him
out, my decoy nuke would have left his bones for you to recover and
play with. You’re welcome. I hope you’re having fun hurting him.
Maybe you can flash me some video. It’s not like we get any Sat or
Net TV on this rock. I miss my Stories.”

It’s sick, even for him: using a little girl’s corpse
as a radio.

“So back to the game in progress: As you can see, I’m
a lot more creative than he was with those skills. These Harvester
things have sooo much
potential
, especially when you add in
select features from our Mods. They don’t even need to eat the
brain to take over the body, as you saw with the King of All
Hippies back there. That was just a simple medial-temporal
interface, something to let me poke his limbic system. On the other
hand, the one you just took your famous anger management issues out
on was
much
more advanced. As you probably noticed, I was
hacking his DNA, making him into another Mini-Me. Well, more like a
satellite office.”

“And where are
you
?” I ask the obvious
question, hoping against hope that he’ll bite just to toy with me
in person.

“That’s the real beauty of all this, old friend: I
don’t have to be
anywhere
anymore! I’m just a made-up memory
set, not really much different than what’s walking around in that
Aryan action-figure that thinks it’s Dee. Or any of the rest of
you, for that matter. Digital memories implanted in a DNA-jacked
meat suit, then stuffed full of Super Friends upgrades. It’s just
that my memories are so unconvincing that I can’t fool myself. I
know
I’m not a real boy, just a cheap copy. So why hang on
to that pathetic illusion? I’m really nothing more than hardware
and software walking around inside cloned meat, right? And hardware
and software can be copied,
upgraded
… I mean, that’s what we
do—planned obsolescence and all… You need the newest model every
few years… I just needed the know-how. Turns out, that was also
just software. I just had to hack the files out of Fuckhead’s head.
And Chang’s, before he went boom with his ship. Easy-peasy. Instant
multiple PhD. And not one dollar wasted on tuition. How cool is
that?”

I hope he’s bluffing, but I know he’s not. The
thought—the potential—that he has all of Fohat’s and Chang’s
knowledge of our science and engineering is crushing. But if he
has
the potential…

“So why
this
?” I try appealing to his ego.
“Little games with meaningless meat? When you could do so much
more? Or so you say.”

“Because it’s
fun
,” he answers like he was
hoping for the question. (The effect of his childlike rant is
especially creepy coming out of the mouth of a dead child, which
I’m sure is intentional.) “And fun is definitely in my programming.
All over it, in fact. It’s my mission statement. Fucking. Killing.
Destruction and general mayhem. Shocking the shit out of the
so-called moral high-ground. And
you
. Fucking with you is
apparently my prime directive. Somebody made me just for that
purpose. I have no idea who. I honestly don’t think it was Chang—he
certainly had the skills, and he was a crazy-ass megalomaniac, but
I’m out of his league. I always got the impression I was a gift he
wasn’t crazy about accepting. And it definitely wasn’t
Fuckhead—I’ve been all over
that
sick fuck’s memory files,
and he didn’t make me either. So who? Yod, maybe? Granted, I don’t
know much about that particular mad-scientist’s wet dream, but I
heard you two were best buds… Why would he-she-it-whatever do me to
you?”

The accusation hits like ice, because I’ve already
suspected it’s true.

Asmodeus makes the little girl grin at my doubt.

“Interesting…” he purrs, sounding vaguely distracted.
“But I do love a mystery, so I’m not about to let this one go, even
though it ironically puts me in the same boat with the
sickeningly-vapid God-Wads: What’s my purpose in life? What’s my
Creator’s plan for me? Well, at least I know the answer to one of
those questions, so that puts me ahead of the game, doesn’t
it?”

“If your purpose is me, then bring it to me,” I
demand levelly.

The little corpse does an exaggerated shrug and
eye-roll.

“You
know
it doesn’t work that way,” he
chastises me, pretending to be exasperated. “I can’t hurt you. You
can’t hurt me. So what have we got? Your compassion and my
Schadenfreude. I had compassion once. It sucked. It got me killed,
or so I’m told. Won’t make that mistake again. Can’t, in fact. But
you… I can stick hot pokers in you by hurting these pathetic little
creatures we used to be.”

He’s right, and there isn’t a fucking thing I can do
about it. Unless I become what he is. And I think that’s what he
really wants, that’s what he’s always wanted: to prove we’re the
same. Brothers in sociopathy.

The corpse-girl grins at my fuming.

“Don’t worry. I’m sure I’ll move on when I get bored.
I mean, the whole zombie meme has been done to death, after all—no
pun intended. Okay, maybe a little pun intended. But then it does
still have some untapped potential… And it seems to upset you in a
new and unique way, so I must be doing
something
right.”

I’m getting distracted by the sounds of battle
echoing in the tunnels. He’s wasting my time here.

“Speaking of upsetting you in new and unique ways…
I’ve never been into little girls myself, but since I’m here, and I
do
like to watch, shall we see if you are?”

He makes the dead girl start to undress.

I feel a surge of shame and disgust and rage. It
propels my sword through her skull. It releases her body from his
control, but somehow I can still hear him:

“Mission accomplished. You are just
too
easy…”

I get back to the Pax, running. Asmodeus’ voice
echoes triumphantly in the tunnels.

“Was it the pedo or the necro? Ah, well, maybe next
time… I’ll try to get someone more your type. And maybe a little
less
ripe
…”

We need to contain this. We need to evacuate the Pax,
take away his Harvester fodder, even if it does mean putting them
back out in the open. We’ll need to get them out of his easy reach,
take away his fun, at least for awhile, long enough to clear the
Keep and seal up any sections we can’t secure.