The God Mars Book Three: The Devil You Are (41 page)

“Automated,” I tell Bly he doesn’t have a proper
target for his rage.

Lux pops all the hatches.

“Something’s still live…” He scans, gestures for the
aft section. In the Lancer, that’s where the nanotech labs were. I
proceed cautiously.

All the containment equipment has been smashed.
Pulverized. Something or someone really strong had a tantrum in
here, and they were thorough about it.

“Systems are all burned out in here,” I read.
“Except…”

There’s a small device pinned to the roof. It looks
very much like one of the black “jewels” in the diadem Chang made
Star wear.

“That’s Chang tech,” Bly confirms warily.

“Sending out a signal, maybe triggered by…”

Star is standing by the hatchway. She’s giving me the
same sad look she gave me before we left Tranquility.

“What are you doing here?” I blurt out. Bly turns and
looks, turns back—even without a visible face, I can tell he’s
confused. Lux comes back, passes through Star, oblivious.

She’s projecting. And only to me.

“The operating AI is back up on basic function,” Lux
announces. “It’s low on fuel, but this wreck can fly. What?” She
realizes I’m looking past him. Turns and sees nothing unusual.
Looks at me and narrows her eyes. Scans. Figures it out.

“Chang left the beacon to let him know if anyone else
stumbled in here,” Star tells me, sounding like I’ve just uncovered
a painful secret. “He’s in no condition to listen. I am.”

“You knew we’d find this place,” I confront. “Why
didn’t you tell me?”

“Who are you talking to?” Bly asks with patient
incredulity.

“Astarte,” Lux tells him, points to the sensor.

“She knew we’d find the ship,” I pass along.

“I heard that part.” He’s losing patience. “
I
didn’t know we’d find this. What is this?”

Star doesn’t answer. I go forward, and the others
follow me into the cockpit. I hack in, take inventory. The AI tells
me the ship is called Siren’s Song. The mainframe and its files
appear to be intact, giving me launch and arrival dates in 2098,
and listing a crew compliment of six: four men and two women,
ranging from twenty-five to forty. The system’s last authorized
access was only three weeks ago.

Also intact and operational is the uplink transmitter
that was missing from the Lancer, though it’s been re-tasked to jam
nearby comms. And programmed to send a signal, a beacon of its own,
once its trap was sprung.

“Who is it calling?” I want to know. Now I see Star
back by the airlock. She looks at me heavily and glides
outside.

Star glides like a ghost up-slope, leading us like an
elaborate pointer.

“Can’t be far,” Lux hopes, I’m not sure for himself
or Bly, who trudges behind her heavily. “The signal wouldn’t have
reached much past its own jamming field.”

The bright glowing phantom stays about twenty meters
ahead of us as it leads me (since it’s just projected in my visual
field), pausing when we lag on the severe terrain. She looks like
we’re in a funeral procession.

She finally stops by an outcropping of
larger-than-man-size boulders, points to a narrow gap between them.
Then she vanishes when we get up to it. The gap hides a tunnel that
would make the Shinkyo proud, just less than two meters high and a
meter wide. It drops down a mild angle into the slide slope, and we
quickly meet an airlock hatch—round, like the Siren’s Song’s—only
this one has been blown, smashed.

It immediately smells like a mass grave I found in
the Philippines. And stale charred flesh.

Lux wrinkles his nose, gives me a disgusted look like
I shouldn’t expect him to go inside.

I’m about to go in first when Bly pushes past,
examines the damaged hatch.

“One of Fohat’s toys did this,” he deduces from the
scars. When he turns back to us, his skull-socket mask-eyes become
spotlights, tracking down the tunnel the way we came. He traces
telltale scrapes on the rocks. I’m reminded of our encounter with
the prototype “Bug”.

The ship beyond that hatch is much bigger than the
narrow tube-like Siren’s Song, perhaps the size of a small
transport. I try to bring up the operating system, but get only
emergency lighting and some basic diagnostics.

“Circe,” Lux mutters from the hatchway, doing her own
hack. “It’s called Circe. Looks to be the mothership that carried
the other one here.”

Then apparently made landfall, got well-hidden, and
set up its smaller partner to play tempting trap for whoever might
wander by.

I manage to get a deck plan. The ship has cargo bays,
a number of sealed lab spaces, larger crew accommodations, even a
small G-simulator centrifuge, big enough for two crew members at a
time—whoever rode it here wanted to be sure to keep their Earth
legs, their bone and muscle density.

The actual exploration quickly becomes gruesome. We
find what’s left of four bodies, hacked and torn apart by something
large and strong and vicious, long-dried blood sprayed on the walls
and coating the deck like tar. Two are in different corridors. One
is in a crew section. The last is on the command deck, the
reinforced hatch smashed in like the entry airlock.

Lux tries to ignore the gore, concentrates on
interfacing with the ship’s AI.

“There’s just some surge damage. I think I can get it
working…”

I realize Bly’s gone off on his own.

“Hmmm…” I hear Lux in my head as I work my way aft
toward the lab sections. “Personnel files have been erased,
including personal logs. Looks like it happened right before the
systems fried. Probably the last thing this poor bastard did before
he repainted the place.”

The lab hatches have been forced open. Like the
smaller ship, all the nano-research equipment has been destroyed,
but there are also what looks like burned samples, some of which
include telltale bone fragments, etched and laced as if they’d been
nano-enhanced. But there’s no live nanotech anywhere. It’s all been
cooked, pulsed, broken down. Whoever did this was exceptionally
thorough.

In the third lab I find bodies, only more than
expected. One is on the deck, torn apart and incinerated. But there
are three more on what look like exam tables, beyond a shattered
Iso wall. These have been torched to charcoal. (I think I see the
remains of restraints on the tables.)

The next lab contains six med-grade stasis pods, all
torn open, all holding the remains of cremated bodies. I expect I’m
seeing the fates of previous victims of the Siren’s Song.

There are six more pods in the final lab. Four had
people in them. And I think I’ve found the last of the crew, but
this one’s been left on display, crucified to the bulkhead with
found wire and random hand tools. The body is desiccated, with what
look like claw-punctures in the mummified face. Like Palmer. Fed on
by a modded being, probably while still alive.

I find Bly in one of the cargo holds. It looks like a
museum’s storeroom. There are collections of clothing, surface
gear, handcrafted armor, manufactured and homemade weapons. I find
the armor and weapons of three of Kendrick’s missing knights (but
only three—barely one scout team). And designs I haven’t seen
before: intricately-laced red-lacquered pieces that look like
whoever wore them had to be child-slim, except for the torso
plates, which look oversized. The limb pieces are also unusually
long. Other sets are of heavy steel and iron armor, hand-forged,
thick and squat. I remember the cave illustrations Bel showed me.
I’d assumed the drawings were exaggerated, but neither of these
distinct sets of armor would fit a normally-proportioned human (or
at least an Earth-born human). I also remember what Murphy told me
about the “Sider” groups that attacked the Cast over the years:
“Red Men” and “Silver Men”.

I find arrows and spears that may match the
triangular wounds to Chang’s slain minions. One particular spear
design reminds me of a Roman pilum: a long narrow spearhead on a
stout shaft. On closer inspection it appears modular—the head snaps
off the shaft, resembling a heavy arrow. It’s packed with an SRF
charge, triggered by a demolition cap, with a plunger striker in
the shaft to ignite it, designed to launch the head like a missile.
There are a number of spare heads without shafts.

I realize Bly is picking through pieces with Zodangan
markings, including jewelry, probably unique enough to ID the
owners.

I count sets of belongings here for more than
two-dozen people.

Bly punches the bulkhead with a roar of rage. The
heroes have come too late to save anyone.

I turn and see Astarte in the hatchway.

“Chang found this place, combing the aerial surveys,
a week before he went for your Melas Three base.” She sounds like
she’s come to deliver tragic news, hesitant, gentle, deeply
regretful. “He flew into a rage, said it was proof of Earth’s true
intentions. He slaughtered the scientists and crew, burned their
samples and their test subjects—that part was almost mercy…”

“What is she saying now?” Bly demands, recognizing
the look on my face. I give him the basic details.

“…had been capturing people, locals, initially to
study. They’d trap them, deplete their oxygen until they passed
out, then kept them unconscious while they ran tests. They’d use
chemicals to dump their short-term memory of their capture, and
when they were done testing they’d leave them somewhere far away,
catch and release. Then they captured an ETE from the nearby
Station, about ten years ago. They managed to take live samples,
preserve them, get them to reproduce. To study. Then they fried him
severely with EMR, left him to regenerate and return home with no
memory, no evidence… But when things started going bad here, when
Chang let you see him, they got new orders. They were forced to
begin human trials, implanting the nanites they’d been working on.
A lot of the first subjects died. Some had to be euthanized because
of the damage done. But then a few started to take. Just not…
properly. There were random modifications, mutagenic effects, but
they sent back promising reports…”

“Sent them back where?” I demand. “To whom?”

“UNCORT. A top-secret cabal of military scientists.
Their first priority was to find a means to disable the ETE. Then
it turned to creating weapons against Chang. And then the rest of
us, once you stumbled back into your old base and scared them past
crazy.”

“That means Earth—or somebody on Earth—knew there
were people here
decades
ago,” I grumble the first most
damning piece. I can see Bly start and stiffen in his armor. Lux is
chuckling sickly in my head.

“They’d been keeping it secret until they were sure
they could come back safely,” Star tries to reason it. “Most of the
early exams were just to clear people, see what life here had done
to them, if there was any sign of infection…”

“And there wasn’t,” I almost spit.

“Until they snagged a Terraformer,” Star
confirms.

“And then they started ordering experiments on
innocent victims.”

“I have a question,” Lux interrupts my rage. “If
Captain Gooey Mess up here—or Doctor Gooey Mess as the case may
be—was part of something so fucking evil and had time to erase the
evidence, why did he erase the personnel records instead?”

Good question. It’s not like any of them made it out
of here. Perhaps there was something in their logs that named names
back home. Names I want, for whatever good it will do me.

“Is the ship viable?” I ask Lux.

“It’ll fly. It even comes with a dozer tractor to
move the rock off the roof.”

“Why did Chang leave it here?” I ask Star. “Why
didn’t he just blow it up?”

“It was his proof that he was right. Earth had jumped
right back into nanotech research, no matter the motive, and damn
the consequences to anyone in the path of that progress. They were
treating the locals as lab rats, less than human, objects for
study. Any talk of rescue from the on-planet team got shot down by
the research agenda.”

At least some of the on-planet researchers were human
enough to consider humanitarian relief over experimentation, just
not enough to refuse their orders. I expect what they were learning
was just too tempting.

“Is there enough in the files to incriminate UNCORT,
or UNMAC?” I ask Lux.

“You know this game better than I do,” she defers.
“Political skullduggery was always your thing, wasn’t it?”

“Let’s see about moving this thing,” I decide.

I head back out through the lock, start down the
tunnel with Bly right behind me, and realize almost too late that
something is amiss. There’s a trigger signal, and something wedged
in the rocks ahead of us that wasn’t there before.

Antipersonnel mine.

I spin, harden, shield Bly just out of courtesy, and
get slammed in the back by shock and frag. Bly catches me as I
stagger into him, my surcoat shredded. The back of my head burns
where shrapnel bit me. Rock falls, partially blocking our way out,
and the daylight beyond is obscured by a thick haze of dust.

“That was unfriendly,” Bly deadpans. I shake off,
start pushing rock out of my way.

I get out under the sky, do a quick scan, but almost
immediately have to dodge a sniper round: high caliber, high
explosive. I turn on the shooter—he’s somewhere upslope and east. I
duck another shot. See him move, change positions. Smart.

I debate firing back, but I want to know who’s
shooting at us, want to know what they know. With the jamming field
down, I can summon my flyer, jump to meet it as another shell comes
at me. Bly is out of the cave, sword drawn, calling his own
ride.

I weave to make a poor target, see my own target
panic and start running, scrambling over rockfall: slight figure in
a light surface suit, wearing a red cloak and hood. As I get
closer, the figure switches the long sniper rifle for an ICW, pops
a grenade at me, then sprays, pinging my wings and hull. I send my
ride on without me, jump off and down at the shooter, drawing my
own blade.