The God Mars Book Three: The Devil You Are (46 page)

The gun recharges, and sends another projectile into
the smoking ruin, just to be thorough.

“We will discuss the evacuation of your primary
facility at Melas Two,” Chang says to the roaring wind, “followed
by your withdrawal from your orbital positions. You may take any of
those you have supposedly ‘rescued’ that wish to go. But you will
leave this planet and not return.”

7 October, 2117:

“Do we know what their commander was doing on the
ship?”

Reasonable question for hindsight’s sake, or possibly
Schadenfreude: How could they be so stupid?

It’s Rhiannon Dodds that asks it this time, as it’s
been asked dozens of times over the last three days to no
satisfactory answer. But since she’s new to the table, along with
Jaden Fox, and the two of them have disobeyed the ETE Council to be
here with us, she deserves some kind of reasonable reply.

“Supposedly there was some kind of major breakthrough
from the teams working the wreck,” I give what little I have,
considering Colonel Burns—acting as Planetary CO again—has refused
to communicate with us and is back to minimal traffic on their
channels. “It was big enough to bring down their top mission
specialists, but whatever it was, they’d kept it out of the
transmissions we could crack. I think General Richards just went
along as a show of support, considering the mysterious losses
putting everyone assigned there on edge. He was at least smart
enough to bring Colonel Ava with him.”

“And that gives us potential eyes and ears on the
Stormcloud,” Paul allows, despite the obvious fact that she
couldn’t do much to prevent the capture of twenty-seven assorted UN
personnel, and the deaths of forty one troopers tasked with
security, plus the sixteen lives lost when Chang gutted Melas Three
(five minutes not being long enough to get everyone clear,
especially since Chang’s bots had already destroyed one of the only
three operational ASVs).

“Too bad she hasn’t been able to show us much, being
stuck in that cell,” Jaden laments one of our many frustrations.
(The last thing I saw through Lisa was her getting led into a
mostly-bare vault-like chamber. Her feed died the instant the door
was shut, so Chang took the precaution to shield her cell.)

The two former Guardian Team Leaders show as much
wear-and-tear from what they’ve been thrown into—what they’ve
chosen to do—as Paul. Rhiannon has even incorporated additional
armor into her Green Team sealsuit. Both have dulled their bright
colors to something duller, dirtier. Jaden is carrying an actual
knife in his belt with his “tools”. (I remember Jaden lost a close
friend—Jonah Carter—when his ship was hit by one of the first
test-fires of Chang’s railgun.)

The table we so recently used for a meal of peace has
become an impressive war council: Besides my modified fellows, the
three ETE and Bly, we have Two Gun and Mak of the Cast; Murphy and
Councilor Truman of the H-K; Grandmaster Kendricks and Sir John
Wayne Sutter of the Knights of Avalon; and Abbas, Jon and Sakina
representing the Melas Nomads. I realize this is everyone under
threat in this game except the Shinkyo and of course (and most
frustratingly) the UN.

The last three days have been tense, but not idle,
despite Chang’s warnings not to move against him or forfeit hostage
lives.

Above us, the UN “relief” force has scrambled to move
their ships and space dock project into new orbits to minimize
potential exposure windows to Chang’s gun, even though that keeps
them too far off to effectively support their people on the ground.
They’ve also blacked out all uplink transmissions, suggesting
they’re busily formulating some kind of plan. And Burns has broken
Quarantine protocols and returned to the orbital fleet, despite
what the move does to on-planet morale. What they haven’t done is
move the exposed Shinkyo out of their surface camp—they look like a
mass human shield over Melas Two. (I also count the civilian
population and the PK refugees inside the base as intentionally
left in the line of fire. I almost wonder if Earthside is trying to
drum up public support for military escalation by letting Chang
slaughter the defenseless.)

Nor have they been sending fuel skyward for a burn
homeward, which means they aren’t prepping to leave yet, even
though Chang gave them seven days as of yesterday to begin the
evacuation.

I’ve tried reaching out to them, but they’ve refused
to respond. I even played the stubborn game, camped myself beyond
the base perimeter and dared them to use the battery guns they
trained on me. They kept me waiting a day and a night, before
Jackson (not Burns) gave me a channel to tell me my assistance was
neither needed nor wanted. (This was the first time I’d actually
seen Colonel Alain Jackson, even if it was on-Link in my head: He’s
tall, dark-skinned, with a long square-jawed face and a high
forehead, narrow piercing eyes over strong pitted cheekbones. His
face shows the lines of age and stress, his short-sheared black
hair is frosted with white. And I wondered where he got the
hardened career warrior look on a world that supposedly hasn’t seen
war in his lifetime.)

What Chang has done is move his fortress to a
position about ninety klicks beyond the western tip of the Catena
Divide, which puts him fifty klicks west-southwest of Melas Two,
giving him a neat shot at the base, while being well out of range
of UN guns. It also gives him plenty of warning should they send
aircraft his way (and he has more than enough drones to take out
their entire on-planet air force). To discourage orbital measures,
he’s been blowing an umbrella of ionized dust up against the
Atmosphere Net over his head.

It hasn’t escaped our attention that his position
also gives him a shot at Tranquility, assuming his railgun can
manage accuracy and power at a hundred and sixty kilometers. If he
can, he’s also got shots at the ETE Blue, Green and Gold Stations,
as well as the likely Shinkyo positions in the Dragon’s Tail, all
without moving his ship except to turn it to aim.

As a show of his noble intent, Chang allowed a Med
team—bravely led by Doc Halley—to tend the wounded, even allowing
them to remove three of the more critically injured. I expect he
thinks as long as he has Richards and the senior off-world
scientific advisors (many of them probably UNCORT), Earthside
Command won’t try anything exceptionally stupid. I expect he’s
wrong, so here we meet.

Abbas is having his adopted son give us an inventory
of the weapons they still have from the cache I gave them when I
was still UNMAC Planetary CO. I initially think I’m just getting
tired—and check my resource monitors—because I seem to be zoning
out, my mind dragged away to nowhere. I pull it back to the now,
but it gets dragged again. And again. To nowhere. I’m staring at a
metal bulkhead.

“Colonel Ava. Please forgive the Spartan
accommodations. I was not settled enough in my thoughts to have
this dialogue. Until now.”

It’s Chang. My view shifts, spins, disorients. I
realize it’s turning about a full one hundred and eighty degrees.
To face Chang. We’re in a small steel-walled chamber with only one
heavy hatch—Lisa’s shielded cell. I see a simple bunk, but it looks
barely-used. The hatch is open past him. Star steps in to stand
beside him. Then someone else…

I pull back when I realize Jon’s stopped his
presentation. The table is staring at me, maybe realizing I’ve gone
elsewhere. I hold up a hand. Bel locks eyes on me, links to me,
sees what I see, passes it on. Azazel hooks the feed into the
tabletop holoscreen he tinkered together to project battle maps and
schematics of the Stormcloud. Now everyone can see what I can.

“I expect you know Astarte, or Astaroth, from both of
your timelines, if only by reputation,” Chang introduces. The view
locks on Star—she’s wearing another one of Chang’s interface
tiaras. Then it goes to the other visitor:

Golden hair. Golden beard. Golden armor under white
robes with royal purple lining. The right eye is covered by a
patch, which at closer scan looks like a multi-faceted insect eye.
What I initially thought were scars radiating from it are the
shadows of biotech beneath the pale skin. The crown-like circlet
he’s wearing also fuses into his flesh and bone. (Are these
interfaces with his “toys”?) But I still recognize the underlying
features: This used to be Janeway.

“Fohat,” I realize, and then I hear Lisa’s voice
repeat it.

“You’ve heard of me,” one-eye purrs, all ego.

“By reputation,” Lisa allows coolly. “I can’t say I
appreciate your work.”

“Anticipating your question, your fellow guests are
well,” Chang takes the conversation back. “But I have a question
for you: Do you know who sent you here? Your immortal aspect?”

It’s an odd question to open with, especially since
I’m pretty sure he already knows the answer.

“Tell him,” I prod when she stays silent.

“I don’t. I don’t remember.” Then I feed her the why:
“This version… It’s a backup. It wasn’t updated.”

“Is that your excuse, or his?” Chang confronts,
moving closer, filling her vision with a perfect void. I get
disoriented again. “Of course I know he can hear and see me through
you. That’s the whole point of this conversation, leaving the hatch
open to break your cage. I need to talk to him.”

I tell her to confirm it. “He’s on.” Then: “He says
he was also a backup. He doesn’t know. But he’s been told it was
Yod.”

I think I hear Chang actually sigh, like he knew but
didn’t want to hear that answer.

“This is getting tedious. Forgive me the intimacy,
Colonel Ava, but playing this primitive telecommunications game is
unnecessarily frustrating…”

The blackness fills her vision, my vision, fills the
holoscreen. Takes shape on the tabletop. Then Chang is standing
here with us. He looks around, as if he can see us. But then he
sits on the table cross-legged, facing me, leaning into me
intimately. He fiddles with his hands like he’s not sure how to
proceed. Bel has to reach out to reassure himself it’s just a
projection. Chang ignores him, his posture finally showing
something like decision.

“I’ve been mulling this since you appeared,
Destroyer,” he tells me like I’m a confidante. “But then when I saw
there were more and more of you… I didn’t believe it, initially,
but it doesn’t matter—just seeing that you and Parvati are what you
appear to be… What’s the story? That Yod managed to piggy-back you
all onto my splice? It makes sense on the surface—one splice, one
paradox, one shot to change the past—but… it
can’t
have
happened that way. I’ve been running it through my head for months,
and the answer is always the same: There’s no way. Do you have any
idea…? Even with all the short-cuts I made in the seeds I
sent—essential DNA sections, memory files and simple core mods
only—the data density was in the hundreds of billions… I brought
four.
Four
. Then you being here lets me know I brought
five
. Six if Ra is a complete conversion, wherever he is.
Seven now that I’ve had the time to check that Parvati is
authentic… If the other three are what they seem… That means I
really brought
ten
—
six
more than I thought I did,
assuming you’re it…”

He trails off, shaking his head like it’s hurting
him, then gestures his incredulity with open hands:

“That makes no sense.
None
. The power I had to
draw just to manage what I thought I was accomplishing, and then
the time it was going to take to do all the writing, given the
bandwidth of the splice and the speed of my equipment… At the very
least, I would have noticed what was happening, noticed the data
load had more than
doubled
.
Doubled!
You can’t hide
that… The real me, the one from our time, there’s no way I wouldn’t
have seen it. But then my equipment, my power resources, there’s no
way they could have
managed
more than double their maximum
capacity…”

I feel my discomfort building. I think I know where
this is going. Bel and Azazel are getting the same look. Then Lux
and Kali start to realize…

“There’s no way it could have been a parallel
splice?” Jaden tries to follow. “That you were just sent at the
same time from another location?”

“One splice: one change: one shot,” Bel sums the
paradox. “Whichever one initiated the change first would have
nullified any other attempts.” But his tone is distant, like his
mind is elsewhere.

Chang holds up his index finger. I’m not sure if he’s
crediting Bel’s description or halting the interruption to his
jumbled, pressured train of thought.

“So I’ve been asking myself…” he continues, and he
does sound honestly troubled, scrambled, worse than when I first
met him, almost near panic. “…I—the so-called real me from the
other time, the one that supposedly did this—I know I would have
seen Yod’s hack. I couldn’t possibly miss it. And I’d have plenty
of time to catch it, while all the data wrote through…
So why
didn’t I stop it?
”

The question hits all of us hard (I think Bel, Lux,
Azazel and Kali harder than I because they supposedly remember
Yod’s plan). What we’ve been told doesn’t make sense. Or it only
makes sense one way.

“There’s only one answer,” Chang gets to it, his
voice actually shaking. “Part of me just didn’t want to admit, but
I have to…”

“Yod didn’t let you,” I make the first step of his
conclusion when he won’t say it himself.

“And that means he killed me,” Chang finishes
heavily. Shakes his head again, but this time like he’s lost. “He
could. If anything could. He did.”

Bel’s face drains. The others spin on the
implications of where this is going. I see shock dawning…