The God Mars Book Six: Valhalla I Am Coming (33 page)

The idle also time lets my mind spin in pointless
directions again. This brooding break, I find myself stuck on an
idea that’s been bothering me since the Big Reveal: I really don’t
know how this technology works. Maybe it doesn’t work at all. Maybe
everything I think my Mods can do is really Yod. Inside the
magazines, making bullets for me. Inside me…

But the theory doesn’t hold up—it’s just my
existential paranoia. If my memories of that other reality are
real, then I know the technology did work, and it worked before
there was a Yod. And if those memories are false, then we didn’t
have the tech, so why did we need to make a Yod?

And that makes me worry that maybe something even
worse than that hell world happened, something that also got erased
from all of our memories.

I shut it out. It’s pointless. It doesn’t matter. In
any case, things are what they are, they work the way Yod’s decided
they do, and I can only do what I can do, in
this
here, in
this
now. Losing myself in these flights of catastrophic
what-ifs is only impeding me, exhausting me, sapping my will along
with my confidence. If I believe that these lives in this now are
real, I have to be able to act to save them. I can’t keep
paralyzing myself. I can’t.

Inventory done, I settle into keeping a close eye on
the forest, and the mountain above it. I reach over the skirt
plating and grab a thick seed-cluster from the Graingrass we’re up
over our roof in, and idly start shucking and nibbling on the
seeds. It reminds me of eating wild oats back home, only heartier.
It also makes me miss the grainy bread the Nomads used to give us,
and that makes me think of Abbas. And Jon. I wonder how he’s
dealing with his adoptive father’s death. I wonder how he’s
adjusting to what he’s become, to being one of us now. I wonder how
he’s dealing with knowing that Yod did it to him, or at least set
it up to happen. Jon isn’t from that world—he made no pact with
Yod. Nor was he an immortal in that reality if Yod is telling the
truth about those born since he changed everything. He’s an
innocent, dragged into this game, remade as a playing piece. Like
Jak Straker. Like the Brothers Carter. Like Thompson Bly. Good
people. Robbed of their humanity, as the saying goes, “by hook or
by crook.”

Does Lyra have to be next?

Snapping me out of my addictive despair, I hear jets
in the distance, west of us around the south side of the mountain,
probably coming from the base, coming closer. Within about a
minute, I see them fly by to the south of us, passing three klicks
away: a pair of new-gen AAVs. They seem to be flying low and slow,
lower and slower than the flight I saw preceded the Warhorse that I
assumed was an advanced scout. And they’re flying in a wide
formation, as if searching the valley floor. I wonder if something
came up on satellite, or if they’d picked up signals worth checking
out. Or maybe something else has happened, something Asmodeus has
done.

I look behind the vehicle. The crush-path we leave in
our wake actually closes up fairly quickly, especially at the
canopy-level. The Graingrass and other adaptive plants are
exceptionally hardy—hardy enough to bounce back from being driven
through and over, even by several tons of metal. After all, they
were engineered to withstand the extreme temperature shifts of this
place, as well as provide more than food: The Graingrass “wood” and
plant fibers especially have great tensile strength. The locals
have put them to good use in everything from textiles to building
materials.

I wonder if the AAVs are looking for
us
for
some reason, expecting our trail to be visible enough to pick up
and follow from the air. I look around, consider how we’re planted
in the growth—the vehicle itself would actually be pretty hard to
see from a distance, provided it isn’t moving. But that doesn’t
make sense: We would certainly still be visible from orbit,
assuming they have a satellite on us, and I can’t imagine why they
wouldn’t, considering what we’re carrying. Therefore the pilots
should have our exact location, silent running or not.

Unless Orbit isn’t sending that tracking down-link,
afraid Asmodeus can hack in and zero us—same reason Corso would
never reply if the flights tried to hail us. They’d have to spot us
and chat in some much-lower-tech fashion.

Or maybe something’s happened in orbit. Or with the
uplink. Maybe Asmodeus has made another devastating move while I’ve
been riding this sluggish can.

Bottom line: There’s no reason aircraft should be
looking for us, not unless something’s gone wrong, that the
mission’s either changed or been scrubbed.

The aircraft themselves aren’t sending out any calls,
not even back to base, unless they’re using a secure direct laser
link. That means they’re observing the same signal silence we are,
so that threat hasn’t changed.

If Corso’s seen or heard them from inside, she isn’t
trying to reply. I’m tempted to rap on the hull, to get her
attention, but something doesn’t feel right. I’m tempted to try
reaching out and forcing a hack, assuming any of the aircrafts’
tech is still hackable, to see if they are sending on a laser
system, to find out what’s going on. But it isn’t worth the drama
it will stir if I get detected—if I can force my way in, they’ll
know Asmodeus can too, and then they’ll be afraid to use any kind
of digital tech. UNMAC will devolve themselves a hundred and fifty
years back to analog, like the first days of putting men in space.
And that would make Asmodeus ecstatic.

Besides: If something serious had happened, serious
enough to derail the mission, I’m sure Dee would have contacted
me.

Unless he can’t.

I watch the flights disappear to the east.

The AAVs pass back after twenty minutes. They still
aren’t trying to signal us, aren’t sending any signals I can hear
at all. But they aren’t on the same tack as they were on the way
out, so they do look like they’re searching, might indeed be
searching for us, running a sloppy-wide grid because fuel is still
precious even with the deal they made with the ETE. (Wide grid also
implies they’re looking for something fairly large.)

I remember this detour around the mountain wasn’t
planned. We’re off-course. They could have no idea we’ve deviated
north, especially if Orbit isn’t updating them.

I consider how much thickly-forested ground they’d
have to cover if they weren’t sure where we were or how far we’d
gotten. The valley between the mountain and the Catena Divide Rim
to the south is only about seven klicks wide here, but we’re
already out a lot further east than I expect they’ve been yet,
except for the quick flyover.

Technically we’re not even in the Central Blade
anymore—this is now the “shaft” of the Vajra. Slow as we’re moving,
we’re already two-thirds of the way to where Liberty Colony used to
be, or we would be if there wasn’t a massive crater—renamed for the
colony—directly in our path: eight klicks across with a thousand
meter high crest all around it. Unless this thing climbs a lot
better than it looks like it would, we’ll have to go around. The
shortest route from here is around the north side of the crater,
maybe fifteen klicks if we stay to the lowlands, keeping a course
wide enough to stay down in the green. (That way, of course, will
also take us close to Yod’s boundary zone, the invisible shore of
the invisible Lake, guarded by convenient radiation and insidious
perceptual barriers.)

Assuming we don’t find what we’re looking for at
Liberty (and I hope we don’t, if the firearm-toting strangers that
the Katar say they’ve run into out this way are the descendants of
that colony), we still have two other sites to search further out:
Alchera is about twenty klicks east-northeast of Liberty, across
Coprates Main in the foothills of the fracture-mountains at the
base of the North Rim (and, if I remember correctly from maps of
the old world, well east of the Lake so we shouldn’t run into any
of Haven’s defenses). And Iving is twenty-five klicks southeast,
close to the base slopes of the Catena Divide.

Asmodeus did likely get the scrap to build his
show-Stormcloud from one or more of those sites. If he found people
at any of them…

All I’ve got for hope is that so far I’ve only seen
Harvesters converted from Chang’s former army, and a number of
unfortunate Pax. That could mean there’s no one out there, or he
hasn’t found them yet, or that he simply hasn’t unleashed the
drones he’s made out of their corpses yet. Unfortunately, the
latter possibility is far too likely: He’d absolutely hold an
unknown asset in reserve. There’s no way to know until we get
there.

The one thing that gives me any hope of success is my
reasonable certainty that he
has
been to at least one of
those three colony sites, if only because he’d be curious—he
wouldn’t be content to just send his minions out salvaging and not
go exploring himself. And the ships he used to carry that scrap
have to be somewhere. Even if they also got scrapped, there would
be remnants, possibly at a base he’s still using. I doubt he’d be
obvious enough to make that base
at
one of the colony sites,
but if he was salvaging and processing that much metal, he might
have set up in proximity.

(Or he could be hell-and-gone away from any place
that makes sense to look.)

(But he’d want to be close enough to watch us chase
his shadow.)

I should have asked Jackson if they’d analyzed the
Stormcloud 2’s wreckage to trace any of its materials to a specific
site, something my own “team” couldn’t do because we didn’t have
the old construction manifests to tell us what may have come from
where. (Asmodeus also wasn’t sloppy enough to leave any obvious
colony markings on his build, knowing it would get shot down and
picked apart.)

I’m spinning in my impatient helplessness, sitting on
a nuclear warhead and watching the AAV’s pass out of sight-line
back west, when I hear gunfire echoing off the mountain slopes. But
it’s just a few short bursts that sound like a single ICW. I don’t
hear Horst or Lyra’s heavier guns, nor do I hear the rover
turret.

I scan the green and the slopes beyond for telltale
heat and motion, and don’t see anything. This does nothing to
ameliorate my instinct to go running and rescuing, but as soon as
my butt is up off the nuke, I’m thinking whatever this is could
just be a ploy to get me away from the Warhorse. In any case, I
draw my freshly-reloaded gun, get ready…

I see their retreat: First Scheffe, running for the
ship in what looks like a breathless panic, clumsy in her bulky
armor. Her ICW barrel glows hot in my enhancements, answering the
question of who was firing. She’s definitely new-drop: not used to
the 0.38 G gravity, she scurries over the rocks with the awkward
waddle of a toddler. She tries looking back over her shoulder every
few meters, and this causes her to trip and tumble forward down the
rocky slopes. I’m surprised she doesn’t smash her visor, but she
does have to scramble after her dropped weapon, which goes
skittering down the talus. Then she’s up and flies into the green
between us.

As Scheffe comes rustling through the growth making
more noise than the rover bot, Lyra and Horst retreat back over the
crest with a lot more discipline, slowly and carefully
leapfrogging, alternately covering each other as if something
is
chasing them, just not very quickly.

Scheffe is shouting at me through her helmet just as
I hear the familiar tread noise.

“
Bot, Colonel! Box bot!!
”

Then I see it, climbing over the rise, slowly
pursuing Horst and Lyra. Part of its sluggish pace is likely from
what looks like significant battle damage: The battered cubic
sections don’t rotate freely, and neither do some of the edge
treads and corner wheels. One of the two electric cannons is
missing, and the main 20mm gun is visibly bent. I listen for
signals, for attempts to contact its absent masters. Nothing.

I scan the area, still see no other movement, but
that doesn’t mean we aren’t surrounded by buried Harvesters.

“Hold here,” I order a breathless Scheffe when she
finally makes it back through the tangle to the rig, then I risk
abandoning the vehicle and its payload long enough to get a closer
look at the Box, and take off running through the seventy-five-odd
meters of jungle between me and the mountain.

By the time I push through to the base slopes, our
rover has also come back into view, following the Box so we have it
in a triangular crossfire, though the battered bot’s still shown no
hostile intent. It’s only following after Lyra and Horst as they
back away, almost as if it wants something from them. It grinds to
a halt when I get in its path. Shifts. Scans me with a scarred
sensor head.

“I thought Asmodeus dropped his full complement of
bots at Katar?” Horst asks me, his gun on the machine.

I look it over more closely as it continues to hold
position.

“Some of this damage looks older than the rail-gun
hit that took down the ship.” I point to holes made by
armor-piercing rounds, cleaves from long blades in the heavy plate.
“I think
we
did this—these cuts are from a nano-blade. It
must have been sent to attack the locals—one of Asmodeus’
distraction raids—and managed to limp home.”

Why can’t I hear it? Its comm systems may also be
damaged.

“Why isn’t it shooting at us?” Lyra wonders about
something more practically pressing, her rifle aimed at the exposed
sensor head.

“Only one gun looks operable, and it may be dry, but
I suspect it has no reason to,” I guess. “Once the command signals
are severed, the organic brains reassert control of the mechanical
systems. They usually do so in a heavily traumatized state. The
ones I’ve seen freed… They tend to want to die. Or get a shot at
hurting the monsters that hurt them, assuming they can get close
enough to do it without getting slaved again—keeping that from
happening usually takes significant alterations to their
systems.”