The God Mars Book Six: Valhalla I Am Coming (43 page)

“Contacts,” Kastl lets us know, but we can see it on
the fuzzy video feed from the AAV nose and under-hull cams: Heat
blips, faint, small, on the ground. They’re spread out in the
lowlands between the mountain range that is the crater’s northeast
rim and the mountains up against that rim. On the maps, it’s not
far from where Liberty Colony used to be.

The center of one of those lowland areas—a depression
maybe forty by seventy meters across—is glowing on the isotope
scans. When the spotlights sweep it, it’s filled with a psychedelic
haze that’s spread out and columned up toward the atmosphere net.
There are heat blips in that cloud, spread in a rough semi-circle
that arcs toward the rim side, like a thin perimeter. A few of them
move, as if shifting positions at our arrival, which to them would
be anonymous lights and the sound of our engines, unless they also
have infrared gear.

“They could be colonial survivors,” Halley
defends.

“Maybe are, maybe
were
, if the demon has been
here,” Jackson denies.

“Are you willing to fire without confirmation?” I
challenge him levelly, even though I know he is.

“Crater One, get a spot on the targets, and put me
through on PA,” he surprises me by relenting, though he sounds
annoyed to have to do so.

On our screens, the spotlights lance down and light
up the active areas. Mostly this just illuminates the pastel fog of
the residual smoke, but we start to see details through it.

“There’s the rover bot,” Kastl confirms.

“Looks pretty thoroughly smashed,” Anton
assesses.

“And what could do that?” Jackson wonders out loud,
then shoots an accusatory look my way. I don’t grace him with a
response.

“Look there!” Kastl zooms in until ground details
start to clarify through the haze. There are distinctive tracks all
over the clearing.

“Box bot,” I have to admit. Jackson’s half-mouth
curls into a satisfied grin, like this is the best news he’s had in
weeks.

Michael’s message is still repeating, but it’s much
weaker now. He’s not here.

The spotlight shakily plays over the heat blips as
the AAVs hover a few hundred meters off the deck, revealing people.
Some run from the light, others hunker down behind rocks for cover.
They wear assorted colony gear, all in poor repair, and carry
UNMAC-issue weapons, which they point up at the aircraft. Most of
the guns have been fitted with a kind of long bayonet.

“THIS IS COLONEL JACKSON OF THE UNMAC PLANETARY
FO…”

He gets just that far in his amplified announcement
when pretty much every person on the ground starts firing up at our
ships. Jackson orders them to cut the lights, climb, pull back.

He gives them another chance, repeating his message
from greater distance, ordering them to stand down, lay down their
weapons and stand out in the open. They don’t stop shooting. Now
almost all of the heat blips in the small valley are taking shots
at the pair of AAVs, lighting them up with flares. Over the link, I
can hear the occasional bullet ping off a wing or hull. The ships
pull back farther, higher.

“I think that’s pretty clear,” Jackson decides,
leaning over Kastl’s console. “Go dark and light ‘em up, Gold.”

“They’re wearing masks!” Halley protests. “Harvester
drones wouldn’t need masks and goggles!”

“Live humans wouldn’t be stupid enough to shoot small
arms at aircraft,” he argues. He orders the ships weapons free, and
to fire for effect.

Turrets start blazing tracer rounds back at the heat
blips, which are now lit bright by their own muzzle flashes.

“Colonel! Stop!” I try. “We need to assess this in
daylight!”

“And give Asmodeus even more time to run off with our
nukes?”

“There’s no sign of the ‘Horse, sir,” Kastl points
out. “It’s just the follow-along…”

“They probably have it hidden nearby,” Jackson is
determined. “The pulse will take out any drones we can’t burn. Gold
Leader, deliver your package. Zero on the rover.”

“
NO!!
” I yell at him. Guns get pointed in my
face.

“
Human beings would run from that!
” he barks
back at me, pointing to the gunfire being exchanged on the camera
feeds. “Those
things
aren’t budging!”

“Confirm, Base,” Gold Leader insists on getting. Gold
Leader would be Lieutenant Colonel Stark, Jackson’s flight wing XO
in the cockpit of Crater One.

“Send confirmation, Captain,” Jackson icily orders
Kastl. When Kastl doesn’t budge, Jackson repeats the order. Kastl
just glares up at him. I can hear him breathing.

Jackson’s free hand goes to his sidearm, but then he
decides on expedience, shoving Kastl out of his chair and punching
in the code himself.

“Colonel!
No!!
” Halley screams at him,
stepping forward. He wheels around, raises the detonator where
everyone can see.

On the screens, we see the AAV’s telemetry confirm
weapon arming and payload drop. In the gunfire-strobing darkness,
we can only see it fall on the night vision of the AAV’s underbelly
cam, distorted and unreal. It goes nose-down, aimed by unfolding
stabilizers like a blooming flower. It seems to fall very slowly,
but that’s probably my modded neuro-processing. It plants itself in
the ground like a spike only a few meters from the smashed rover.
Then the view pulls away. Stark and his wingman are burning out of
there fast as they can. Their nose-cam night vision shows us the
rim of the crater coming up, then they’re over it in seconds,
barely clearing the crest. They’re trying to stay low to protect
themselves from the blast. The timer on the device only had sixty
seconds on it.

I step up to Jackson, right up in his face, glare
into his eye for an instant, then reach for the console. The fucker
actually pushes his button.

Of course, nothing happens. I disabled this fucking
thing shortly after the first time they put it on me. Now I reach
up, rip it in half.

“Shoot her!!” Jackson orders.

My collar may have made a poor defense, but now I put
it to offense, whipping the halves at two of the guards, hitting
them in the visors hard enough to crack the polycarb and stagger
them back into the bulkhead. But I still have two more ICWs pointed
my way, and panicked fire in here is likely to hit innocents, so I
lunge into Jackson, get my left arm around his neck while my right
pulls and twists his right wrist, and hold him between me and the
terrified guns on me.

“Those weapons can’t hurt me,” I remind them.

“
Shoot them…!!
” Jackson stubbornly gurgles out
as I squeeze his windpipe, waving his free left arm sloppily at
Rick, Anton and Halley. And I think they may be about to when Kastl
dashes forward, grabs Jackson’s sidearm out of his holster, and
points it at them.

“Stay behind me, Captain!” I advise him to use me
(and Jackson) as a shield, but my other friends are still at the
mercy of panicked trigger fingers.

The heavy blast hatch suddenly unseals behind the
guards, and almost instantly gets shoved into them so hard and fast
they look like they’ve been hit by a truck.

“Sorry I’m late,” Dee apologizes, then steps into the
chamber, and very quickly and smoothly disarms all four
troopers.

“Captain! Enter the abort code!” I refocus the
stunned Kastl. Keeping the pistol shakily on the guards with one
hand, he types with the other. But…

“It’s not working…” He sounds sick. He keeps trying.
“It’s not…”

Anton rolls up to help him.

“Signal interference?” Rick wonders.

“He’s disabled the warhead’s detonator override,”
Anton confirms, horrified.

“The warhead was armed through its hardwired
connection to the aircraft…” Jackson grunts out with a victorious
grin.

I tighten down on his neck. I could rip his fucking
head off, or crush his goddamn skull. The sick piece of shit is
giggling at me.

“We’d need to be there to disarm it,” Rick confirms
our defeat.

“
RAM TO JACKSON!!! ABORT!!!”

It’s Michael again, now loud and clear, knowing
what’s coming, begging for mercy, for sanity, for humanity.

I can’t do a damn thing to…

“
ABORT!!! ABORT!!! THOSE ARE…”

The screens wash over white.

“…Crater Two is down… hit the rim…”

It’s Stark, when the feed comes back.

Telemetry confirms: one of our aircraft is down, no
ejection registered.

Rick and Kastl are holding our former guards at
gunpoint. The techs on the lower level and Sweet up on this one are
all quiet, shell-shocked by what they’ve seen and been a part of,
but they’re not protesting or resisting my pyrrhic
insurrection.

I’ve still got Jackson in a choke hold. He makes an
effort to struggle now and then, and I discourage him with a
squeeze. At least he’s stopped giggling at me.

But then I hear a ping.

My face is right up against the back of his skull. It
sounded—felt—like it came from
inside
of his head, just for
the briefest instant.

“Did you hear it, too?” Dee asks me, stepping up
close enough to be nose-to-nose with Jackson.

“A ping,” I confirm. “Someone sending simple
flash-code. From inside this room.”

Dee looks like he’s doing a quick scan, his eyes
focused on Jackson with a bland curiosity like he’s never seen
anything like him before.

“Colonel Ava, would you please hurt him for me?” he
asks like he’s asking me to hand him a pen.

I happily oblige, putting pressure on the arm I’m
holding barred across my hip. I hear the elbow start to give. Then
I hear another ping. Jackson starts twisting like an animal in my
grip, even though it’s only doing him more hurt.

“It’s inside his head,” Dee decides.

“Colonel Ram talked about this,” Rick remembers.
“Nanotech implants that can manipulate thought processes,
behavior…”

“Emotions,” Dee finishes.

“Who—or what—is
that
?” Halley finally gets the
nerve to ask about Dee.

“Friend from the old days,” Rick gives her the short
version. “Sort of.”

“My name is Dee,” he introduces himself without
looking at her, still staring at Jackson like he’s something
strange we just found under a rock, then coolly refocuses on the
priority in my grip: “And
he
has a nano-device in his brain.
A very sophisticated one, designed to avoid any detection
technology you currently possess. It would even be difficult for a
nanotech hybrid to detect. I only heard it because Colonel Ava did.
Colonel Ava likely only heard it because she was centimeters away
from the device when it pinged.”

“
When?
” I demand in Jackson’s ear, as if he
was complacent in his own compromising. I feel his struggling
change. He’s panicking, terrified. He doesn’t know, but the
revelation is shattering him: his greatest nightmare, planted deep
in his own brain, violating his very mind. He starts to whimper
through clenched teeth.

“He was unaccounted for,” Rick calculates, keeping
his distance. “For days. After he crashed his ship into the first
Stormcloud.”

“Then Asmodeus has been playing a very long game
indeed,” Dee estimates coolly as the implications sink in.

“He’s had this tech for
months
longer than we
knew about,” Rick puts together one of those implications, but
certainly not the most crushing one: Asmodeus has been able to
subtly manipulate a UNMAC command officer for nearly eight
months.

“And how much has he used it—
him
—to manipulate
our decisions in that time?” Halley voices my horror, pointing a
shaky finger at Jackson.

“He’s probably only been intermittently using the
device to increase Colonel Jackson’s inherent paranoia and
intolerance,” Dee estimates clinically.

“Which means he just prodded Jackson to do what he
wanted to do anyway,” Anton condemns. Dee gives him a nod.

“To what end?” Halley wants to understand.

“Asmodeus thrives on humiliating those he decides to
target,” I give them what history I know. “Manipulating them.
Defeating and destroying them on every level. Preferably in the
most cruel and bloody way possible. He enjoys watching people
suffer—the more the better, both in quantity and quality…”

I take a ragged breath as it hits me:

“He’s just made us into the monsters, made us commit
atrocities that can never be forgiven. Don’t forget, it’s not just
us he’s declared war on. His real target is Earthside Command, the
UN World Government. That’s who he wants to hurt most, maybe even
more than Michael—Colonel Ram. We’re just a painpoint, something he
can grab hold of and twist.”

“But we’ve cut off his ability to launch cyberwar
attacks,” Anton tries.

“We’ve cut
ourselves
off,” I crush that
“victory”. “Don’t you think he could build his own uplink?”

“He’s only letting you think you cut him off, so
you’ll keep your own uplinks down,” Dee concurs.

“But as soon as we re-establish, he’ll use them
against us again,” Kastl grouses, still holding Jackson’s pistol on
the disarmed guards, who are kneeling back against the bulkhead
with their hands behind their helmets. “So how
do
we beat
this bastard?”

“When he was human, it came down to predicting his
next move, meeting him there, then relying on his desire to hurt
you in person to draw him into a fight,” Dee explains. “Then you
out-maneuver and outgun him when he thinks he has you where he
wants you.”

“And kill him,” I finish. “Without hesitation,
without mercy.”

“But this one is unkillable,” Rick has to point out.
“Even if we get a shot, we can’t be sure it’s him. Or the
only
him.”

“We need to crack his network,” Dee concludes. “Get
in, isolate and target his peripherals then systematically destroy
every aspect of him.”