The God Mars Book Six: Valhalla I Am Coming (7 page)

I look at Richards, and I think I do see hope that
Jackson doesn’t speak for everyone on that fucked-up planet, but
there are too many in power to dare resisting.

I remember a sad fact of human history: Fascism may
enforce its will with violence and intimidation, but they tend to
initially come into that power by popular support. Apparently that
hasn’t changed.

“And what about the PK garrison?” I have to ask, just
to make Jackson say it. “They certainly won’t comply without
resistance.”

But Jackson won’t say it. He just looks at me with
his self-righteous self-assured half-smirk.

“We’ll be wasting our time and resources,” Lisa
interjects. “And that’s what Asmodeus wants. He’s all about
manipulation, distraction.”

She calls up footage of the wreck of the second
Stormcloud, holed and broken by an orbital rail-gun strike. It lies
twisted and ripped open across the base slopes of a lone mountain
that I know is a dozen klicks east of Katar. I remember what the
first Stormcloud looked like after it took such a direct strike: it
had a massive hole dead-center through decks and keel, but it was
still together. And then it self-repaired and got airborne again.
All that’s left of this ship is a mangled, shredded skeleton.
There’s not nearly as much metal.

“We’ve gotten a basic look over the wreck. Compared
to the first ship, this one barely had the superstructure to keep
it together,” Richards fills in. “Our engineers say it was amazing
that it stayed in the air as long as it did.”

“Like a theatrical prop.” I’m not surprised.

“The reactor cores were also barely hot,” Richards
continues. “Unless you have some trick for soaking up neutron
radiation and depleting fuel cells, we can’t figure how it was
flying at all.”

Another subject there’s no way I can address because
it means telling them about Yod, so I keep silent, as if I’m giving
the puzzle some thought.

“Asmodeus plays every move knowing what we’ll likely
do in response,” Lisa continues, moving the conversation along. “So
he knows we’ll prioritize removing the locals, and what kind of a
quagmire that will sink us in if we try to.”

“And any bloodshed that causes will not only amuse
him,” I warn, “he’s probably counting on it.”

“Then he takes advantage of the chaos,” Lisa finishes
the thought.

“He’s already threatened to find a way back to
Earth,” Richards considers the worst. “If he’s perfecting a means
to insert himself into any of us, we need to keep our guard up,
minimize his opportunity.”

“Then he’ll do something to draw you out,” I state
the obvious.

“Isn’t that why
you’re
here?” Jackson
accuses.

When I don’t bother to answer, he goes after me
again:

“If I understand, you’re saying that no matter what
we do, it’s what Asmodeus wants us to do. And we’ll lose.
Unless
we do as you say, accept your gracious ‘help.’”

I give him a noncommittal nod, like I don’t care what
he does.

“Then I think we’re done here,” Jackson declares,
looking at Richards.

“We’ll take the intel you’ve provided up the chain,
Colonel,” Richards doesn’t fully shut the door on me. “Hopefully we
can come up with something effective. As for any further
cooperation between us, that isn’t up to me, but I expect it will
be easy enough to contact you when I have our decision.”

“Thank you, General.”

We all stand. Rios opens the hatch and makes room for
me to pass. Lisa doesn’t immediately move away—as we stand, she’s
at my left shoulder. I feel the touch of her fingers on the back of
my forearm armor, just for a second. I don’t react. I offer
Richards my hand again, and he takes it again. I expect he’s
already earned a thorough contamination screening.

As I pass back down the corridor, I catch Lyra’s eyes
on me again through the polycarb viewport. She gives me a nod like
she’s thanking me for what I’ve given her.

“Colonel Ram,” Jackson calls out to me as I’m cycling
into the airlock. “If you are what you say you are, who you say you
are… don’t expect that will carry the weight you think it will. You
were never supposed to be Planetary Commander. That only happened
because Colonel Copeland conveniently disappeared.”

“Colonel Jackson,” Richards calls after him from the
cockpit hatch, reining him in a bit.

“Cal Copeland died bravely, General,” I let him know,
honoring the memory of a good man. “Looking for survivors,
searching for signals. He got in trouble out in the open desert,
too far from home. Alone.”

“And you know this
how
?” Jackson continues to
be universally suspicious.

“A good friend of mine found his body,” I tell him
another sanitized partial truth.

“Abu Abbas?” Jackson assumes, saying the name with
more than a little contempt—another primitive who wouldn’t
obey.

“Abu Abbas is dead,” I say icily. “He also died
bravely, fighting for strangers that had no reason to trust
him.”

I see the news hit Lisa hard. And Rios. I’m
immediately sorry they had to hear it like this.

“Colonel,” Jackson won’t quit, but his tone is a
little softer now. “I’m willing to give you the benefit of this one
doubt: Maybe you really
don’t
know the agenda you serve.
Maybe you’ve just been programmed to believe you’re doing what you
say you are, at least until the time comes for your real
programming to be activated. Maybe you all are.”

And that shakes me. I try not to show it, try not to
show any response at all. But I can’t deny that his doubt is a
simpler version of my own, because I know Yod remade me, remade us
all, body and mind, to serve his agenda, his plan, whatever that
is. He made Chang believe he was a villain, so completely that his
choices may not have been his own at all.

“Fair enough.”

I hike back to my flyer, take back my gun and sword,
but don’t bother with my helmet. Other than confirming how
immovable their fears are, I can’t help but feel my effort here was
wasted. They’ll never trust us, no matter what we do—they see
everything though the lenses of their confident righteousness and
paranoia. And while they might manage an effective detection
system, they probably won’t be able to develop an effective “cure”
for Harvester infection, because the only viable one will be a
nanotech counter-agent, and they’re irrationally terrified of
biological nanotechnology.

Asmodeus knows that.

Asmodeus could probably have predicted every paranoid
angle Jackson just spewed at me, and he’ll be happy to feed that
madness.

But as I’m about to spin up and lift off, I feel
something, a signal interfacing with me, downloading on a
sympathetic frequency. I search for the source, and realize it’s in
physical contact with me, with my left arm.

Lisa used her brief touch to leave a nano-drive,
circumventing their monitoring for signals between us. She’s been
mastering her Mods. (Though it’s telling that she didn’t pass the
drive until after our meeting went to hell, like she was hoping she
wouldn’t need to commit this act of treason.)

I sift through the files. She’s given me updates on
Earthside’s progress toward re-establishing a foothold on this
planet, the resources they’ve recently dropped on-planet and what’s
building up in orbit, and what she expects is imminently
incoming.

It’s a staggeringly massive list, with sub-manifests
earmarked for restoring and expanding Melas Two, rebuilding Melas
Three, expanding the orbital facilities, and then defending them:
Guns, ordnance, aircraft, and personnel. Despite the Quarantine
keeping this a one-way trip, they’ve already brought over two
thousand “volunteers” to Mars, and have nearly twice that many on
the way.

And the most revealing detail is that the vast
majority are listed as
military
, not medical teams or
construction crews. I feel a chill to my core.

It’s worse than I thought: Earth is escalating.
They’re gearing up for war, a war Mars has never seen, not even at
the height of the Disc attacks and Eco conflicts.

I look back at the Leviathan, at the ASVs and the
soldiers guarding them. These people have never fought a war in
their lifetimes, not one like they’re facing. They have no idea
what they’re doing, what they’re about to march and fly into. The
only ones who do are some of the local factions and the personnel
and former Ecos that slept alongside me at Melas Two through the
long decades, and none of them are trusted by Earthside
Command.

This is going to be a meatgrinder.

I shouldn’t be here. I know that. It eats at me with
every second I’m wasting.

I should be back in the fight, back out in the “real
world”, not in this pocket of preserved memory, this morbid
keepsake of a nostalgic false god.

But then,
here
shouldn’t be here. The place
and I have that in common.

It’s not just that it’s such a glaring oversight, no
matter how intentional, in Yod’s remaking of the world, of
two
worlds. It’s that it still being here, left as-was when
everything and everyone else was reshaped on a molecular level,
seems to serve no purpose at all other than to remind a
functionally omnipresent omniscient and omnipotent manufactured
entity where he came from, where he was “born”. (And I only
habitually call him “he” rather than “it” because so far he’s
consistently appeared as a male avatar to interact with us lesser
beings, always wearing the face of a trusted old friend.) It’s hard
enough to believe that such a being, something that supposedly
turned out to be so far beyond the petty humans who made him, would
be petty (be
human
) enough hang onto such an empty memento.
That makes its continued existence essentially unbelievable,
unnecessary. But far worse: Its presence, no matter how
well-hidden, is insanely dangerous, an absolutely unacceptable
risk. Should this place ever be discovered by Earthside (and it’s
hidden right under their satellite noses), it’ll be proof of what
Yod did. Big lies about time travel and quantum teleportation and
pocket dimensions won’t hold up at all if they ever find this
place. It’s the booth for the-man-behind-the-curtain. Any good look
at anything here and it all falls apart.

I can understand preserving Haven, even though it’s
not much more than a human zoo, a living museum to hang on to the
one part of the erased past that was (according to Yod) worth
saving. But this place? This is just an empty tomb; a monument to
our mistakes, and to the unspeakable atrocity we committed in our
desperation to undo them.

The Barrow. It’s even named for a type of grave, a
primitive monument to the dead. Did they know that’s what it would
be when they named it? Or did they just name it for the shape of
the mountain? Or the tomblike quality of the research facility they
built inside of it, like some old serial villain’s secret lair?

(And does that make me a barrow-wight, haunting it
now?)

I think it’s even more morose now that it’s been
stripped bare like a scavenged derelict—Yod’s doing, I assume, just
in case anyone does make it through his physical and cognitive
barriers without permission. Can’t have the humans getting their
hands on something they could make a higher life form with. I
expect he just disintegrated it all, unmade it on a molecular level
and found some relatively harmless use for the raw elements. Just
like that. Because he can do that, just like that.

It’s not that I have any use for the missing
technology, the tools of our super-secret god-making workshop. I’m
glad it’s all gone. But despite what we did here, what we did with
that better-off-vaporized equipment, the magnified emptiness of its
absence feels like everything that was good and promising about
what we
tried
to do here—what we meant to do here, with good
but reckless intention—packed up and moved out; leaving a dirty,
cold, empty catacomb, haunted by bad memory.

But all that, as it turns out, does make it an
appropriate place for me to be right now, given my current mood and
condition. I’ve been back here once, barely a handful of days ago,
but didn’t have time to linger, to really drink it in. Being
here—walking the halls, feeling the concrete under my boots,
hearing my footfalls echo through the cathedral-like
corridors—gives veracity to the memories that have been slowly
coming back (that Yod is slowly
giving
me back). And I need
to face this place, however damning. I was a part of what happened
here; a willing, eager participant. I conspired—in my own despair
and desperation—to create a being we could not understand
or
contain. I may or may not have inspired it to rewrite the world,
reset it to a time before we’d irrevocably doomed ourselves, but I
do believe I did give it the idea to insert manufactured villains
into that new reality, to scare humanity away from going down that
same path again, to make them proceed with caution into the future
this time around. And I’m sure I would have agreed to be thrown
into the role I’ve been cast in—the long-suffering antihero, the
well-meaning monster—just because I would need to be appropriately
punished for my part in all of this.

Bel once told me that he believed that damned souls
were not consigned to hell, not imprisoned there, but kept
themselves there voluntarily, whether they knew it or not, because
on some level they felt they deserved to be there. (Under that
logic, I wonder if a true sociopath—completely devoid of
remorse—would therefore freely enter heaven?) I certainly accept
that we make our own hells—I’ve done it to myself most of my life,
so why not have an all-powerful reality-engineer make me a custom
deluxe version?

The thought brings a chuckle that stokes my pain,
followed by a fresh wave of self-loathing because, if I did design
my personal hell, I’ve dragged all of humanity down into it with
me.