The God Mars Book Two: Lost Worlds (22 page)

I realize I’ve still got the vial Paul gave me in my
pocket.

My fingers close around it. And I can move again.

And I know I’m doing something illegal, something he
wouldn’t want, and worse: something I know is futile but I have to
try. I can’t just let this be. I have to try.

“Get away from him!” I hiss at the troopers, and they
don’t hesitate. They shuffle back to the airlock without argument,
without a word. Let them think I need some time with my dead
friend, when what I’m really doing is something either hopeless or
monstrous. Because he can’t be dead. I won’t let him be dead.

I pop the cap off the vial. My hands are shaking
badly—I have to hold on tight so I don’t drop it to the deck.

Then the worst part: I have to touch him.

Bastard, coward, I leave my gloves on. I try not to
look, but I have to find someplace to make the injection. His
neck.

His head flops to the side easy—too easy—and I’m
getting his blood all over me. Slick. So much of it. And not just
blood. I don’t look at him.

I can’t see anyway. I have to shake my head to clear
the tears because I can’t wipe them away because my gloves are
covered in his blood.

I realize I’m starting to feel sick. I shouldn’t feel
sick. I’ve personally killed hundreds of people—at least
hundreds—intimately enough to have their blood and worse on me. All
over me.

I remind myself to get angry. Anger fixes everything.
My
anger fixes everything.

I find bare skin below his right ear—he still has his
right ear—if I look at him just from this angle his head still
looks mostly whole, he could just be unconscious, fallen asleep in
the chair and I’m sneaking up on him like I’m going to pull some
juvenile prank—and I shove the end of the vial into his neck. It
gets lighter slowly.

I hear boots on metal. Others are coming. Probably a
Rescue team. Medics. I use my body to hide what I’m doing until I
don’t see shimmering liquid in the vial anymore, then I hide it
back in my pocket like a criminal. Let him go. Step back. Make room
for the Medics to take him, cut him out of his harness, lift his
limp body and try to put him as gently as possible into a trauma
pod. Futile. Hopeless.

His blood has poured out across the deck. Drained by
gravity as they moved him. Not pumped out under pressure from his
wounds because his heart stopped well before I got here. His
brain…

I couldn’t look at him.

What did Paul say? The nanites were only meant to
kill cancer cells. Not rebuild. Not repair. Because that would be
too frightening to us mortals, too unacceptable.

Part of me is still hoping for a miracle. Maybe Paul
lied, maybe he put his immortality tech into the vial. Maybe there
will still be a Lazarus moment. Maybe not now, but back in Medical.
They’ll open up the pod and Matthew will be pissed and scared and
he’ll hate me for doing this to him. But he’s hated me before—it
doesn’t last.

I start giggling, tearing up. I stuff it down, if
only for the sake of my men, all the men who still need me to be a
good soldier for them. I stoke my anger.

Nothing is happening.

They seal his body up in the pod and carry him out
like pall bearers.

I’m left alone in a wrecked ship full of smoke
covered in my best friend’s blood and brains, left with my anger
that has no target, at least no target I can properly lash out at.
Except Earthside. Our rescuers. My masters.

18 June, 2116:

General Richards sends me what officially passes for
an apology. The Security Council regrets the loss of a brave hero
and valued asset. They reinstate my command as an afterthought.

I don’t send back a reply.

Lisa flies in from Melas Three. Matthew was family,
she says. She only agreed to follow UNMAC’s orders to keep one of
us in charge, she says.

I know that. But I don’t have anything to say to her,
either.

I help look for Simon’s body. The ETE themselves
collect most of it. It’s like a horror movie: The biggest pieces
are already trying to regenerate. And they will, Paul tells me, his
own body patched enough to walk under his own power. But he won’t
tell me the rest of it until they’re satisfied they’ve got as much
of him as they can get, all packed up in some kind of portable
re-growth tube and ready to fly back home.

“My brother is dead,” Paul finally admits as his
people are getting ready to leave. “We can help his body grow back,
but the damage… his brain… it won’t be
him
. It won’t be
Simon anymore. A newborn… blank slate… maybe some of his
personality traits, his intelligence… but…”

“What will you do?” I know Simon died trying to save
my life.

“None of us has ever died before,” Paul tries to make
sense of it. “Not since we implanted. Not in thirty years. We
considered it when we agreed to fight. But we… I…”

The military recruits young men who don’t believe
they can die. I don’t say it out loud.

“I’m sorry about your brother. He was a friend. He
was a good man. Let me know what happens.” It’s the best I can say
to him.

“I’m sorry about Colonel Burke.”

I watch their ship fly off. It doesn’t make any
noise.

Anton regains consciousness.

His lung is patched and re-inflated, but he’s lost a
third of it. Ryder managed to save his leg, for whatever good it
will do him. He’s paralyzed from the waist down.

He tries to smile with tubes in his nose. He looks
very pale.

“We really fucked up, didn’t we?” he says as soon as
he sees me.

“’We’ didn’t fuck up,” I remind him as lightly as I
can.

“I got some good scans before the thing went live on
me…” he tries. “Freaky stuff, Colonel… so advanced… nanotech that
looks like it makes itself…”

“I know,” I tell him. “The ETE did some of their own
research. We can talk about that more when you’re not so juiced up.
You’ve got a lot of healing to do.”

He nods, winces. Then I see his eyes tear up.

“I can’t feel my legs.”

“I know,” I admit as gently as I can. Then Doc Ryder
steps in my way to check his sutures.

“Doctor Staley needs rest, Colonel,” she suggests.
“Maybe you could come back later.”

I nod, give Anton a pat on the arm, a pathetic
comfort, and turn to walk away. He catches me, his hand gripping my
sleeve.

“Did anyone else get hurt, sir?”

I don’t answer him.

I stop by and see Lieutenant Jane. Ryder couldn’t
save his arm—or more accurately she could, given multiple surgeries
and a flight back to Earth to finish the job, which would most
likely leave him with an arm that barely worked anyway, so Jane
took the amputation option, hoping to get back to some kind of duty
with a prosthesis instead of being indefinitely convalescing.
Luckily we still have a small supply of prosthetics on base, and he
could be rehabbing in a few weeks.

His spirits are remarkably good, considering. But the
longer I talk with him, the more his anger is noticeable under the
surface. I promise him I’ll find some way to keep him in the fight,
and he promises me he’ll learn how to fly an ASV with one arm.

I don’t bother with spin-time or dinner. I go up to
see Metzger in the AirCom Tower. The techs are still patching the
place, and it looks like it took more of a beating that the Command
Tower. There are large cracks in the reinforced concrete, chunks of
sealant broken away, shattered plexi (enough to keep half the blast
shields still in place, and the crew keeps masks handy just in case
the place springs more leaks).

Metzger’s got a cut high up on her forehead in the
middle of a good purple lump, and an eye blacked enough to rupture
the blood vessels in her cornea—apparently one of the blasts
knocked a chunk of the roof into her, not that she let anybody know
in the middle of the firefight. She just wiped the blood out of her
eyes and kept shooting until the Discs took out her turrets.

She’s got her dark bobbed hair down to cover the
wound in her forehead, and she doesn’t make eye contact so the
bloodshot eye isn’t so noticeable. Despite a mild concussion, she’s
been watching the radar all day.

“Still quiet, Colonel,” she tells me before I can
ask.

“You going to sit here watching those screens
indefinitely?”

“If that’s what it takes.”

I take a chair next to her, stare into the radar maps
that show nothing moving but blowing dust for a hundred miles.

“I could be awhile,” I tell her. “Theory is that the
Discs need time to pop out another batch. Maybe a few months.”

“We’ll need it,” she says after thinking about it for
a few moments (though she doesn’t stop watching the screens).
“We’re a bit short on guns. And ships.”

“Did Morales get a chance to look at the Lancer?” I
ask her—and my brain flashes on blood and brains and Matthew my
friend without a face…

“Thomasen plans to use a pair of tracks to lift it
and tow it in tomorrow. Smith wanted a shot at trying to get it
hovering under its own power, but the jets took a beating—Morales
doesn’t want to try it until she can eyeball the underside. She
thinks she can make it fly, though it won’t be pretty. And it will
be minus some cannon. Probably even that EMP gun.”

I appreciate the distraction, talking about how we’re
going to dig ourselves out of this clusterfuck. But we
are
running out of guns: the Discs cost us four AP and two main
turrets. And two ships, one of which is unquestionably scrap.

“It could have been worse,” she reminds me like she
knows what I’m thinking.

It didn’t have to happen at all. I don’t say it out
loud.

“It could have been worse,” she repeats.

Only one dead (and another functionally dead) and two
severe injuries. That’s what the math going back to Earth is: Only
two dead and two crippled. Not very expensive at all.

“Get some rest, Captain,” I order softly. “Anybody
can burn their eyes staring at a screen. I want you fresh if we
need to go another round.”

“Yes, sir.”

I go outside—I have to go outside.

The sun is setting, the sky turning a bloody purple.
And it’s getting cold fast.

Still, I walk out across the main yard and out
through the east gate, just to walk. I stop when I see the wreck of
the Lancer, surrounded by spotlights, suited techs still working to
dig it out by hand enough that Thomasen can try lifting it. I
realize after I’ve been staring for awhile that one of the techs
isn’t a tech, but wearing a pilot’s pressure suit. Smith is trying
to dig out his own ship. Despite internal injuries and head trauma.
I should have him escorted back to Medical.

I hear ASV jets incoming, and look north in time to
see Acaveda’s ASV coming in for a landing, back from her run (along
with Sergeant Horst and a squad of armor) to drop our Zodangan
prisoners in the desert in what should be walking distance to their
active territory. I didn’t get actual permission from Earthside,
but I don’t want extra bodies to worry about in the cleanup, or if
we get hit again—bad enough the already-burdened medical staff had
to patch up a few flesh wounds sustained when stray Disc rounds
punched through our makeshift Gitmo (at least the Nomad camp was
out of the firing line). And I figured the Air Pirates should get
first-hand intel that they’ve got new (or actually very old)
competition in “their” skies. Perhaps their release might grease a
mutual non-aggression pact of sorts, given what might be a mutual
threat. But I won’t count on it.

I watched the security video of the captured pirates
during the Disc attack: The pirates were remarkably stoic during
the shooting, even when two of their own got bloodied and they had
to help patch the atmosphere breaches in their group cell. I’m not
sure if I expected terror or at least a few enthusiastic cheers
that someone was pasting us, but even when we showed them the video
records of the Discs in action, they didn’t give us so much as a
smirk.

Sakina also showed very little actual emotion in the
aftermath of the attack. She was there to help recover Matthew’s
body (but she stayed back in the shadows, didn’t let me know she
was there until I finally decided I was done sulking in my friend’s
blood enough to attend to my responsibilities with the living). She
was there to help us find every bit of Simon Stilson that could be
found. Then she went back to our quarters, where she’s sat in
meditation for the last few hours. I wonder if she’s thinking about
how she—the perfect close-quarters fighter—will deal with a threat
like a Disc drone. Right now I’m just thankful that when Rick
helped repair her armor, he incorporated some of our best
nano-materials.

I expect I’ll have to convince her to let me teach
her how to shoot.

I slip on some loose rock, not paying any real
attention to where I am. I manage to catch myself before I wind up
on my ass. It shouldn’t be anything—no one can walk on this shit
gracefully—but I get slapped by a surge of full-on rage, and it
takes me a few breaths to get myself to accept I just don’t have
anyone or anything to hit back at, not now.

And I realize the rage isn’t about being an old man
who trips over his own boots. I’ve been playing head games with
myself, trying to focus on the job, the duty. Keeping busy. Playing
the role allotted to me. Trying to think about anything but the one
thing I really can’t get out of my head, the one thing I still see
every time I close my eyes.

Matthew. Just dead meat in a chair. Another inert
corpse in a long list of corpses I’ve made out of living people. I
couldn’t even recognize him, even if I had the nerve to look at
him. I can still smell his blood and flesh and bone.