The God Mars Book Three: The Devil You Are (38 page)

“For awhile. My connection with Chang is severed. I
can blame it on the blast. But when he comes back…”

She knows he’ll be back. I can only guess how much
damage he took, depending on how close he was to the impact. But
Bel’s tactical nuke didn’t keep him down long. Earth has to
realize…

I know they were hoping to blow us up, too. (Would
they have dropped a nuke if they saw us in the target? At least the
railgun doesn’t spew fallout. But it doesn’t require expensive
warheads either.)

I try reaching Lisa, but she’s not on. Did Burns
confine her when the trap sprung? Did she try to stop it when she
realized?

I think about the “gift” Sakura gave me. What else
does she expect me to do with it? And how does she hope I’ll repay
her?

Star looks up when she realizes I’m not flying
straight away from the blast zone. I’m circling. But not to
appraise the damage. I’m looking for

“Bly!”

I find him sprawled in a shallow crater he’s made in
a dune. He doesn’t respond as we quickly land and run to him. Star
keeps looking skyward, expecting another shot. Thankfully there’s
still a lot of dust in the air.

At least he looks like he’s in one piece, though it’s
hard to tell through his armor. I roll him over face up and he
begins to move, very weakly and sloppily. I can’t hear or see him
breathing. I try to pry his helmet off, remove his monstrous
facemask, but it won’t budge, and now he’s struggling, trying to
stop me.

“Don’t,” Star insists, putting a hand on my arm to
stop me. She looks upset. “You don’t understand… The armor… It’s
fused
to him, part of him… When he quit, rebelled against
Chang, Chang locked it to him. So he’d never get his old life back.
He can’t take it off.”

I’m calculating if my flyer can carry three of us
when I see Paul coming back.

“He can’t eat, can’t… everything is done by the
suit…” Star laments, a soothing hand on Bly’s chest plate. “He
can’t even feel. Only pain. Or see except through those lenses. Or
smell…”

Paul lands. I pick Bly up and carry him—he’s
incredibly dense, almost like he’s solid metal—and ease him onto
Paul’s flyer. Then I find his sword.

In orbit, I can hear them cheering. Then I hear
aircraft coming in fast, probably to check the wreckage, possibly
to look for us. Paul lifts off and flies away with Bly. I take Star
and follow.

23 June, 2117:

The landings go off without a hitch. I watch from the
hills as they bring down more supplies, weapons, equipment,
aircraft—more than we’ve had since the Apocalypse. And manpower.
Most of them soldiers, too few medics and techs.

Richards stays in orbit to oversee the operations
from a safe distance. No mention is made of Lisa, or us, in any of
their uplink or downlink coms. I expect they’re being careful with
their chatter, and I get no further word flashed from Anton.

The Shinkyo camp remains disconnected from the main
bunker structures, and anyone who comes or goes is under battery
guns until they pass an intensive checkpoint. Hatsumi Oda continues
to insist the break-in and attempted sabotage was all Sakura’s
doing, that she had snuck some of her agents into the “peaceful
population”, and that the Shinkyo refugees would remain vigilant
for any further “criminals”. Sakura makes a convenient villain, a
part I expect she enjoys playing.

Recon to the downed Stormcloud has so far found no
survivors, but plenty of remains. The ship is so vast, so badly
damaged and so dangerously unstable that many sections haven’t been
accessed, but there’s no sign of life or activity on all scans.
Video from better vantage than I had shows Chang in his usual
posture on the foredeck, with hundreds of his men in ranks ready to
land or launch. Then the railgun “bullet” hit them, and the blast
vaporized everything before it buckled and crashed the ship.
Nano-specialists have been scraping the deck where Chang was, and
claim to have found residue they expect is whatever he’s made of,
inert. No one is estimating how many people they killed in the
process. The official report upworld is that Chang was taken down
with no friendly casualties incurred.

Piles of supplies are left at the highest-traffic
tapsites as a show of goodwill. I expect they will remain
untouched. The food may be safe to eat, but the packaging and
everything else is probably densely tagged for tracking.

Bel, Lux and Azazel have gone to the North Rim across
the valley to search for signs of where Chang may have been holing
up and repairing. There may or may not be loyalists waiting for his
return, but there may be a hidden facility, someplace we can move
to, dividing our ranks to reduce the target-value of Tranquility.
(Kali will certainly stay, I expect. I’m not sure about Bel or
Paul, who still has work to do. But Azazel and Lux are antsy to
explore, adventurize.)

Bly has been healing slowly (it’s hard to tell). He
can absorb rudimentary resources through his mask, though he looks
like a rutting monster as he does it. I wonder if Chang expected
him to live by killing, feeding off blood and bodies like we can.
He says very little, almost entirely withdrawn inside his
nightmarish shell. Star cares for him as much as he’ll let her, and
I spend time with him in quiet, patient attendance. (I hope Bel and
his “team” find at least one camp of Zodangans still alive.)

I don’t grill Star on whatever she’s been part of or
seen transpire since we last spoke, or even since her awakening in
this timeline. She seems to appreciate that.

After three nights, she comes to me and we make love.
It’s very much like I remember it, like I remember her, but somehow
her body is different, not quite her. I remember what Bel said
about residual DNA, wonder who played host to her seed, but I don’t
have the nerve to ask.

We make love again in the morning, and she surprises
me by bringing us a fresh breakfast. Naked, she could very well be
a normal, mortal young girl. Except for the eyes.

“What?” she wants to know.

“Nothing. Just enjoying the view. Thinking about old
times.”

She hums her appreciation, lays back, stretches,
exposes herself fully. Smiles at me. Then pouts a little.

“You haven’t said anything… I know you’ve noticed…
I’m not the same.”

I lay down next to her, roll on my back. She rolls
over me and holds me. Her skin is very warm. She puts her head on
my chest.

“I was the next to wake up, after Chang,” she starts
to tell me, her voice hesitant, like she’s not ready to talk about
this but needs to, needs to tell someone. “But not really, not all
at once, not all the way… I’d started to rebuild, out of raw
materials, but without organic matter or a full DNA sequence to
replicate on. So my mods started before me—I don’t know why. Maybe
Chang did it, desperate for a companion… But I was more of a
machine, a partial metal skeleton, non-organic brain. Memories.
Basic conscious awareness, not enough to question what or where I
was…

“I remember Chang letting me go, like he was trying
to lose an unwanted pet. I guess he thought he had won, mission
accomplished, so he didn’t need me. Or maybe seeing what I was
reminded him we’re not real, not the people we were, just
mechanical copies. I think I remember wandering the desert for a
long time. I remember being very spider-like. I couldn’t feel
anything. It was like a long dream. Endless rock and sand.
Skittering metal legs. Searching…”

Her fingers play on my chest as if she’s acting out
her nightmare journey. She tells the story like she is relating a
dream, reciting a story, detached. But she knows it isn’t a dream.
This was her. Or at least the her that’s here now—the only one, now
that the original is gone with that timeline. (And I’ve wondered
what happened to the Star in this time. I expect she died while we
slept—old age or misadventure—but I no longer have access to Earth
records to satisfy my curiosity. I’m not sure I would have the
nerve to…)

“Maybe that’s what it’s like to be an insect—basic
awareness, driven by simple programming… One day I found a man. In
the sand. In a suit. He had these rovers with him, but the power
was dead when I touched them. He wasn’t doing much better. What I
was scared him, of course it did, but he was too weak to move. He
was low on air, all his tanks empty. He probably thought I was a
hallucination. He could barely wave me away. I remember how he kept
staring at me through his visor, his pale blue eyes. He looked like
a castaway in that helmet, all grizzled, like in an old movie. I
remember waiting, watching him die. I wanted to help him, but I was
just a bug-thing, and I knew that if I touched him I would hurt
him, maybe kill him… So I just sat there with him. I could see
myself in his visor…”

I feel her tense. She holds me tighter.

“The last thing he did was beg me to help him, to at
least tell someone his name, let someone know what had happened to
him…”

I feel my guts sink, my heart surge. I’m afraid I
know what she’s going to say.

“Cal. He said his name was Cal. Copeland.”

She lets that hit me, then sits partially up to look
me in the eye. Her eyes are glassy with forming tears. She knows
what it means to be telling me this.

“You knew him. He was your CO. He couldn’t take the
waiting, went looking for survivors, anyone. One day he went too
far. He was so sorry no one would know what happened to him, that
he’d left you all, that his wife would never know…” She’s crying
now, trying not to. “I touched him. I went inside him. I knew his
last thoughts. His pain. Fear. Regret. Then he was gone, just meat,
and I needed the meat. The DNA to complete myself. And everything
else…”

I lay there frozen, numb. Mystery solved. Be careful
what you wish for. I knew Cal was probably dead, long dead. And
probably died doing just what she described, looking for other
survivors. But…

“Finding him… I needed him so I could finish
rebuilding… But the memories I saved, they let me know what
happened here, and more importantly for me, they let me know
you
were here, asleep in your base. I watched over you, all
those years. Kept the opportunistic scavengers away. Waited.
Watched this world change.”

It explains a lot. Except for one thing:

“What about Paul? He made it into the base. More than
once.”

Asking a practical question takes me out of it a
little, lets me be objective…

“I knew the ETE meant no harm. If anything, they
could help you, did help you, in ways that I didn’t dare to. I
altered your sleep systems, tampered with your AI, all to keep you
safe, but the ETE presence gave it an explanation that didn’t
reveal my part.”

I sit up, push away from her.

“Why keep us asleep so long?” I need to know. I’m
grilling her, interrogating her in this moment of vulnerability.
Selfish. Bastard. But it also shifts the topic, moves her through
it.

“Because you
were
safe. The planet was in
chaos, and still toxic. The few survivors were savage. I could hear
Earth, hear their fear, knew what they would do if they came back
to that. And Chang was still here, somewhere. But I could see the
valleys terraforming, see cultures evolving—it was beautiful.”

“And us waking up did bring Earth back, and Chang,
and here we are anyway,” I have to point out, regretting saying it
but unable to stop myself. It’s what I do, what I’ve always done:
hammered by emotions, conflicted, locked up and torn—what processes
through first is always anger. Anger is safe.

“But now we have a world
worth
saving,” she
insists earnestly, forced to defend herself from me. And I’m trying
to imagine what her experiences did to her: Coming to consciousness
in a nightmare world in a nightmare form. Taking another’s body
(and feeling what he felt as he died, probably without the filters
to cope with it). Then waiting for decade after decade, alone and
afraid of whatever inevitable outcome. And then whatever she saw or
did in Chang’s service.

I’ve already played the same guessing game she must
have countless times: What would have happened if we’d been
awakened after a few months, a few years, a decade, two. Too early,
and Chang’s drones would have slaughtered any relief effort. And
even if they came prepared, what would have happened between any
rescue and the equally terrified survivors? Life was much more
fragile before the terraforming progressed. And there was no proof
that the planet wasn’t contaminated…

But she actually had to make the choices, alone.

She wants my understanding so badly—I can see her
desperation in her eyes—but my head and heart reel. I’m looking at
a beautiful woman that I’ve loved on-and-off in two realities for
much of my life, but I’m also seeing Cal Copeland all too clearly
in the subtle changes to those so-familiar features. And I
understand what she was trying to do for me—for this world—all
those years alone, but I can’t help but second-guess her (and
reflexively condemn her for her pride in making the decision for so
many), just like I did with the ETE for their part in keeping us
under, letting the world evolve as it has.

I can’t help her. I can’t give her what she needs.
Not now. I can’t…

I get up, turn away, prompt my armor to reform around
me, become the warrior, insulated in my shell. But I can still feel
her behind me, naked and on her knees, crushed, crying…

“I can’t judge you. I wasn’t there.” It’s poor
absolution, muttered at a cold steel wall. Then I make it all about
me. Selfish. Bastard. “I don’t even remember why I came here, why I
agreed to this.”

“That was between you and Yod, just like my reasons
were,” she whispers back, going cold, allowing me to wallow in
myself, probably having expected a reaction like this, maybe worse.
But it still hurts. So she diminishes me: “Maybe it’s better you
don’t remember. How much of a god can any of us pretend to be when
touched to our core by a being that can be part of everything, all
at once, and show us what that’s like? I can’t tell you. I don’t
have words. Maybe it’s better you don’t remember. I expect it’s
simpler… And now He’s gone anyway…”