The God Mars Book Six: Valhalla I Am Coming (30 page)

So there is some actual talent on this rolling
coffin.

“And Jenovec and I are here to do the shooting when
the big gun can’t get the job done,” Horst tells me aside, only
half-joking, confirming that he understands their reason for being
here.

As we roll on, I soon notice one of the drawbacks to
traveling on primitive tech: There are no screens back here in the
main bay, and since there are also no viewports, I have no idea
where we are or where we’re going. I can feel the vehicle’s
suspension get rocked by whatever it’s rolling over, sometimes
quite sharply (which is even more unsettling since I can’t see it
coming). And the deck shifts with acceleration and deceleration.
The whole effect is nausea-inducing—thankfully I can no longer
physically vomit. But I can see it turn Lyra paler than usual,
though I know she spent weeks riding the Leviathan Three. (Maybe
that much larger vehicle was also more stable?) Even the assigned
crew look like they aren’t used to it yet, so I guess they haven’t
been aboard very long. Hopefully they stocked lots of anti-emetics
along with all the ammo.

Corso sits one section forward, trying to hold down
her own breakfast and pretend that she’s not. She’s left the heavy
hatch between the pressurized sections secured open, possible just
for the sense of “fresh air”. Through the hatchway, I can see a
small chamber that looks like it’s designed to be a combination of
comm room, officer’s quarters and mess. It’s got maybe only four
square meters of floor space, barely big enough to wedge four
people into at a time with the fold-down table in place. I’m more
and more reminded of submarines I’ve been on, and not the bigger
nuclear boats—the cramped old diesel cans, where every cubic meter
of space was used to its maximum potential.

We thump over another big something, and I hit my
head on a roof support. Lyra shoots me a pained grin in sympathy as
she holds on to one of the numerous handrails.

I find myself a place to sit on one of the narrow
benches on the port side. Lyra sits across from me, still careful
to keep her distance even in these tight spaces.

Probably spurred by wanting someone to blame for the
non-existent lump on my head, I start to wonder who’s actually
driving this thing. Looking past Corso, who’s brooding over
laminated hardcopy maps, I see another heavy hatch, this one only
two-thirds high, as if it opens into a lower section, possibly a
cockpit. (Probably a cockpit, as this beast doesn’t have that much
more length.) I ask Horst who our pilot is, as it certainly can’t
be AI. He answers me with a grim look.

I get up, stagger forward like a sailor on the
rolling and jerking deck, and interrupt Corso’s sulk.

“Who’s in there?” I gesture at the hatch.

Corso also doesn’t give me a direct answer, but
reaches over like I’ve annoyed her for no good reason and raps a
coded knock out on the hatch, before pushing a primitive intercom
button.

“Corso to Oldboy. Secure. You have a visitor.”

I feel the vehicle slow and stop under my feet. Then
hear some scraping and bumping from whatever space is forward of
the hatch, and then it groans as it unlocks. Like the other
hatches, it’s heavily reinforced and heavily locked, as if they
built the vehicle expecting it might be taken section by section
(something we experienced with both the Shinkyo and the Zodanga,
back before we contacted Earth). It takes some effort to push it
open, and Corso has to get out of the way in the tight space. But
then I see a familiar face poke through, looking up at me at an
incline as if he was sitting in a century-and-a-half-old space
capsule. The cockpit is only big enough for a pilot’s couch.

“It’s good to see you again, Colonel. Welcome
aboard.”

It’s Wilson Smith. He was our best combat pilot, and
I monopolized him as my personal pilot, before Earthside came and
started flushing my people out of their assignments, replacing them
with their own loyalists.

“What the hell are you doing here, Captain?” I just
blurt out. “This is a tank.”

“Only way they’d let me back in the suck, sir.” He
glances at Corso to catch her squirming at his “uncivilized”
language. “Got tired of riding transports. They won’t let me touch
one of their new fighters, not even the refurbished museum pieces,
even though they know I can fly them a hundred times better than
any of their cherries can. Probably afraid I’d turn and frag.” He
glances at Corso again, this time looking for sign of validation.
She keeps herself nose-down into her maps, pretending to ignore
us.

“This is a rolling target, you know that,” I chastise
him, aggravated that another one of my friends has been levered
into danger. “A big, slow one.”

“Everything on this planet is a target, sir,” he
downplays. “At least this one is resistant to squad-level arms. And
you can’t shoot it down.” And he’s been shot down before, twice
just that I know of.

I look past him into his tight working space. He can
“see” what’s around us through a mix of simple hardwired screens
and shielded periscopes. There are similar but less complete eyes
in the comm section. I imagine there are screens and/or scopes in
the gun turrets as well. Only the troop bay is blind.

But all of the ship is deaf except for one very basic
radio in the comm section, wired to nothing but its own antenna.
The intercoms are hardwired and dedicated.

“It’s quite the antique, Captain.”

“So are we, Colonel,” he jokes. “But this makes me
feel like I’m in an old World War Two VR.”

“I’m getting that myself,” I tell him.

“We need to keep the pace, Captain,” Corso prods him.
“We can’t lose our window.”

I see a flash of doubt and frustration in Smith’s
eyes, as if he wants to say “What target? What window?” But he
holds his tongue, gives her a curt “Yes, Major,” and slides back
into his couch behind his mechanical controls. Corso closes and
relocks the hatch like she’s locking him away out of my reach.

I go back and sit down across from Lyra. She sees the
simmering perturbation in my eyes, but doesn’t ask. We just hang on
to the benches and ride the bucking lumbering can.

From the memory files of Lisa Ava, 4 June 2118:

With all the chaotic drama caused by Asmodeus’
infowar tactics, Burns and Jackson haven’t been able to properly
address whatever part they’re sure I’ve had in Michael and
Specialist Jameson’s unauthorized exit. I fully expected they’d put
the ridiculous bomb collar back on me, and/or find me an
even-less-hospitable hole to wile my helplessly unproductive time
away in. But by the time anyone remembers I’m still being good and
sitting all by myself in Iso, things have gone bent.

“Burns has been relieved,” Ryder whispers too softly
for the sentry systems to hear when she comes for her routine
rounds. “Confined to quarters pending court martial. Jackson is
livid
. The General is taking a shuttle down to Melas Two to
take over command of planetary ops in person.”

I make myself not smile at the news, since Earthside
Command is already sure that Asmodeus and I are somehow in this
together. And I see that I’m being watched by more than just the
cameras: In addition to the two H-A troopers they’ve stationed in
the gallery since they discovered Michael and his new “companion”
gone, one of the new techs keeps looking at me through the
transparency like I’m some kind of curiosity. When I lock his pale
blue eyes, he forces a brief awkward smile and looks back down at
his screens.

I realize I haven’t seen him on duty before. He may
be some new specialist sent in to discreetly crack how we managed
the vanishing act despite all the steps they took. But he doesn’t
look like he’s looking to fix anything or find anything, just
keeping watch on the feeds like every other shift before him. In
fact, he doesn’t look like much at all: Maybe late twenties, pale
blonde skinny kid. Boyishly pretty, if I was into that sort of
thing. He reminds me of an old catalogue model, all perfect bland
and fake smiles.

“Clear the room, doctor,” I hear Jackson just before
he storms into the gallery. Ryder collects her gear and lets
herself back out through decon like she’s happy to be away from
him. Then Jackson glares at me for several seconds— he’s exhaling
so hard I can see his breath on the polycarb—before giving me his
own bad news.

“You’ve been ordered released and returned to limited
duty. This comes direct from General Richards. I’ve already filed a
formal protest. You will be escorted to secure quarters and given
limited access to operations feed, though I warn you… No. It
doesn’t matter. You won’t be able to do any significant damage if
you tried. The orbital uplink has been taken offline. So has the
planetary uplink. We’re using simple laser code messages to a
geosynchronous satellite, all manual. The on-planet links have been
separated from the base mainframes. And every message is being run
through redundant authentication. Still, if you do decide to be
combative or otherwise sabotage our operations, remember what we’re
sitting on top of. I’d rather lose a facility than everything we’ve
got here. I’d absolutely give my life rather than let any of you
get one centimeter closer to Earth.”

There are so many things I could say to him, so many
things Michael would say if he were here, but I swallow them all
down, and just tell him “I understand, Colonel.”

He stands there seething for a few more breaths, then
turns on his heel and marches out.

It takes several more minutes for Ryder to
“discharge” me and let me back out through decon. The first thing I
do when I get locked back in the cramped closet-sized quarters they
assigned me is find a uniform, a set of issue L-As, and then pour a
cool tumbler of water from the recycle tap. I look up into the
in-room sentry camera as I drink it, savor it, pretending I’m just
like anybody else taking care of my body’s essential needs even
though I can see my hydration indicators shifting behind my eyes.
And I’m slapped again by knowing this is
never
going
away—that this shit is always going to be in my body, in every
fucking cell, making me feel like I’ve turned into one of those
novelty devices that were so popular back home, loaded full of
random trivial applications. But I know my applications aren’t
trivial—some of them are devastating. These people aren’t terrified
of me just out of idle paranoia. Some of them know what I can do,
Jackson included. He knows he has to threaten me with a nuke stuck
under the few people that still admit they’re my friends because
nothing he has on planet can physically contain me. And I can kill
him with a fucking touch. Or less.

It strikes me as actually kind of funny that the
first thing I did with my very limited “freedom” was put on body
armor. Old habit—it doesn’t matter if it’s pointless. This is what
I wear to work. It’s normal, like nothing has changed. Or maybe I
just need to wear the costume, so I can pretend I’m still what I
was.

What twists me the most is knowing that I
chose
this, chose to become this freakish thing, at least
once in my life. The memories of that other world/other life have
been coming back slowly. Or not really
coming
back. It’s
more like I’m uncovering them, discovering them like lost mementos
in a dusty old attic. And the more I get back, the more I wonder if
my losing them to begin with was my own doing, my own choice.
Because I really don’t want to remember that world.

I remember not believing Michael (not even believing
Michael was Michael) when he came back from the “dead” changed,
when I went to bed with the man I knew and woke up with a young
long-haired action figure. The story he told was unbelievable: the
story of time travel to undo a doomed future, of a different
horrible reality erased, history rewritten, and only a few random
bits of it—a few random altered people—leftover in the process. It
was the same story Chang told, and Chang sounded batshit crazy.

And then I died. And woke up in my own grave. Like
this. Again, apparently.

Even when the memories started coming unbidden,
starting with those first fragments and flashes after I woke up in
that grave, I was still sure none of it was real. Memories of that
hopeless nightmare world. Memories of volunteering… Memories of
becoming Codename: Parvati; immortal super-soldier because Michael
insisted that I needed to do it, that I needed to change like he
had, that it was
important
… We needed to stay ahead of the
future because of what was happening, what could happen…

I was sure it had to be some kind of tampering, false
memories digitally implanted along with the neuro-interface tech,
put in my head to manipulate me. Assuming I
was
me. The new
body wasn’t mine—too young, too fit, too strong, and arguably more
tech than flesh. So why would the mind be? And how would I even
know? (I did whatever I could think of to check, to test myself
during my idle days and months while they studied me like I was
either a plague or a weapon or both. I asked everyone who knew me
if I was talking and acting like the person they knew. I checked my
history files. But the personality and memories could be convincing
fakes, convincing even to me.)

(I need to stop now, shut this doubt out of my mind
before I lose myself in it again.)

But the memories are convincing. That world was real,
feels real, as real as any memory can be: The world where we all
went wrong. I don’t want to look, I don’t want to see it, but I
know
it happened. I can’t ignore it. I know I was a part of
it, that I made decisions, that I went wrong along with it.

But we did it, we became what we are now—I did it—for
a good reason. Didn’t I? So we could be ready for what could go
wrong. So we could save the world when it went wrong.