The God Mars Book Three: The Devil You Are (50 page)

“Captain Rios!” I call out. “What do you have coming
our way?”

I get static, wonder if it’s the ETE field but doubt
it. I can feel Chang getting smaller in my grip as Kali keeps
trying to drain whatever he’s made of. Her eyes lock mine. She
looks like she’s in agony, but she won’t let go, won’t stop…

“Colonel Ram!” I hear Rick come on, almost in a
panic. “You’ve got three AAVs inbound! Carrying…!” Static cuts him
off.

“Azazel, I need eyes on!” I order. He assures me he’s
on it, and the Siren burns for orbit. “Get me a radiation scan!”
I’m assuming the worst.

I look: The hostages are just now loading onto the
ETE ships, along with the surviving H-K and Cast. Richards is
stubbornly staying behind until the rest of his people are off.

“I’ve got
heat!
” Azazel tells me after several
tense moments, flashing me a positive radiation signature in the
cargo module of the center ship. Chang starts thrashing even more
desperately. Screaming—it sounds like an angry swarm of bees.

The incoming aircraft break the Atmosphere Net twenty
klicks northeast of us. They’ll be on us in seconds.

I make a choice, break contact with Chang.

“What the fuck are you doing?!” Kali demands through
clenched teeth.

“Intercept those ships!” I order Azazel. “Try not to
destroy them, but keep them off!”

Chang manages to twist loose of Kali and Bel,
collapses to the deck as if he’s partly molten, thrashes weakly
against the ETE containment field.

You always hold back…

I reach out, hack, force my way in. But they’ve
stripped these ships of their networked ware—they’re running manual
controls, basic nav. Old school.

The two flanking ships break off, roll, start
firing—first at Azazel, then at us as they blow by him. The pilots
are good, and determined. I realize they’re aiming for the ETE
ships, trying to stop the rescue. The hostages still on deck have
to run for cover, stalling the boarding. The ETE shields stop a
pair of missiles.

“What are they doing?!” Lisa demands to the sky.

I’m spinning guesses.

“They might be convinced we’re infected,” I hear
Richards voice one of them.

“Or your Acting Planetary Commander is trying to
remove you,” I give him another. I realize a third is: They’ve got
us all in one place, and don’t want to miss the chance.

Or it’s all of the above.

The center ship is bearing straight for us. Azazel
tries to target it, but it twists and rolls to duck his turret
fire. This pilot is very good.

“…carrying an old W88 warhead…” Rick somehow shouts
through on Rios’ channel.

I remember the W88 from my early military career. It
was the common payload of the Trident Missile. Four-hundred and
fifty kiloton yield. They called it the “Peacekeeper”. The nuclear
fireball alone will swallow two-thirds of a klick in seconds. The
shockwave…

Azazel doesn’t need the history lesson. He flips in
behind the AAV, starts chewing at the fuel tanks, the engines. The
pilot still does a damn good job of evading him, but then starts
losing control, aims for the Stormcloud. He’s making this a suicide
run.

“
For my planet, you monsters!!
” I hear Jackson
shouting, reminding me too much of a hundred suicidal fanatics I’ve
had to kill in my career. “
We only have ONE God!! MY God!!!
”
He’s bringing the payload himself.

“Take him out!!” I tell Azazel needlessly,
helplessly. He’s tearing at the ship’s hull with his guns, trying
to close. The stray shots ping the Stormcloud’s decks all around
us. The ETE are packing their holds as fast as they can, but the
other two AAVs are coming back around for another run at us.

“Fuck this,” Lux announces, summons her flyer and
goes after Jackson’s wingmen, spraying them with the nose guns
Azazel tuned for the fight. Star gets herself between the incoming
fighters and the ETE ships, focuses, and sends a blinding beam of
light at the attacking aircraft. They weave. One loses part of a
wing to an ETE pressor blast.

“Drop the field,” I tell Paul. They hesitate, but see
the desperation in my face, lower their tools.

Chang gets himself together enough to take control of
his ship back, uses what guns and drones he has left, ignoring us.
But there’s no stopping Jackson, even with Azazel burning full to
catch him. Azazel blows the Siren’s nose EMP at the suicidal ship,
but it’s pretty much a missile at this point. He burns harder—I
think he’s trying to crash the ships in mid-air. The best he does
is clip Jackson’s tail, send the AAV tumbling, pumping more rounds
through it in hopes of breaking the nuke, but there’s no time.

The Stormcloud bucks and turns. Chang is trying his
own evasive action, but there’s no…

Jackson’s ship slams into the bow. A fraction before
impact, I think I see the cockpit blow, eject manually—so much for
self-sacrifice. Whatever’s left in the tanks goes up, but I
realize: Chang turned the ship to spare the evacuees—Jackson’s
crash would have hit them almost directly.

Two seconds later, we’re all still here. But
whatever’s left of Jackson’s AAV and its payload are buried deep in
the Stormcloud’s fore-hull. I have to assume the nuke is still
active, but not reachable in time.

“Get the mortals off my ship…” Chang tells me, his
voice still a distorted buzzing. “Get them to cover… go…” He looks
like he’s melting into the deck, trying to form legs to stand. The
Stormcloud continues to turn, creaking and groaning. Turns west.
“…get them off…”

I order everyone to move, and I’m freshly regretting
allowing so many to fight with us. The Shinobi, Knights and Nomads
sink lines and rappel off, just as the ETE dust off with the last
of the hostages and Tranquility fighters.

I see too many bodies left on the decks with broken
robots. I don’t have time to look…

Lux comes back around—Jackson’s wingmen have run for
it, knowing what’s coming—and he scoops up Star. Kali, Bel and Bly
have their own flyers. I call mine, grab Lisa. She hesitates, looks
at what’s left of Chang. (And I realize I have no idea what
happened to Asmodeus.)

“
Get off my ship!!!
” Chang screams at us.
Beneath us, his engines start to burn.

I get Lisa out of there—she ditches her hijacked
robots.

Chang is maxing his reactors, pushing his ship out
into the bowl of Melas Chasma,
away
from us. Away from
likely habitation. Toward the Shinkyo no-man’s land.

The ETE ships aim themselves at a handy patch of
real-estate and use their nose “guns” to blast out a deep trench.
Those of us that can fly start herding the warriors on the ground
to it. Bodies go tumbling into what I hope won’t be a mass grave.
The majority of the Guardians that came with us—minus only those
needed to fly their ships—drop into the trench with them, get ready
to erect a shield over them. The ships carrying people burn away
east as fast as they can. Our flyers reluctantly follow.

I’m looking back as I flee, watching the Stormcloud
move as fast as it can, blowing its cooling systems, popping apart.
I’m counting seconds, estimating the range of the W88 in this
atmosphere against Chang’s desperate progress. In Earth conditions,
he’d need to get at least fourteen klicks away.

Five klicks.

Ten.

Fif…

A new sun forms in the bowl of the valley.

Expands. Rises.

The pulse it generates takes down my all feeds, makes
my head scream, my body lock up for an instant before my mods
compensate. I feel the heat of the thermal flash, but not enough to
burn. The people in the trench should be okay.

I see the initial shockwave ripple over the trench.
The overpressure knocks the wind out of me, crushes my sinuses, but
I’ve had worse as a mortal and walked away. The secondary blast
wind hits seconds later, blowing a storm over the makeshift ETE
bunker. Then it hits us in the back, threatens to rip the wings off
my flyer, sandblasting us with sharp silicate. A hurricane crammed
into a few seconds. Lisa hugs into my back as we ride it out.

I look back. The mushroom cloud where the Stormcloud
used to be hits the Atmosphere Net, starts an electrostatic
thunderstorm, then rises
through
it.

I get the ETE channels back, hear the urgent news
that the blast fried the Net. And worse, the shockwave finished the
job Chang started on Green Station. The jerky feed I get shows that
the massive generator complex has slid a hundred meters down slope,
shearing the tap cores and breaking it free of the deeper complex
in the cliff. Dozens of Green Team personnel are unaccounted-for,
buried, maybe crushed.

I turn, fly back around to check the shelter trench.
Through the thick haze, I see the mixed colors of ETE sealsuits
climbing out of the big ditch, dusted red but otherwise intact.
They look toward the blast cloud, look toward their damaged
Station. Down in the bottom of the hole, I see red cloaks
celebrating, waving, embracing. (Even a few of the stoic Shinobi
get hugged, and manage to tolerate it politely.)

Circling, I see Abbas, Jon, and Sakina among the
survivors. The Knights are harder to tell apart in their heavy
armor, but I get a wave I assume is from Grandmaster Kendricks.

Lisa is still hugging me tightly from behind. I don’t
ruin the moment by saying anything, but I can’t help but feel my
heart sink in the midst of this victory. Because I know it was
Chang that chose to save these people, for whatever reason. And it
was UNMAC—or their on-planet commanders—that tried to kill them all
(including their own). With a nuclear weapon. Just like the
descendants of the survivors of the Apocalypse have always feared
they would.

11 October, 2117:

Under the relative warmth of the noonday sun, Captain
Margo Thomas joins her fallen fellows on Pyramid Ridge above Melas
Two.

She was the only UNMAC casualty of the raid on
Chang’s ship. I can only hope Earthside Command appreciates that,
especially considering how many lives paid for that day (and how
many more still may).

General Richards expresses some of his own
appreciation by allowing me to attend the funeral, at least the
surface internment. He even gives his permission to wear my old
uniform for the occasion, but I choose my plain black armor. It
would have made little difference: I would have been the only one
wearing a uniform. Everyone else outside is consigned to H-A cans
or pressure suits, rendering them unrecognizable from any distance.
As it is, I have to wear a rebreather for comfort. (Obviously,
wearing a big metal skull on my head would be grossly inappropriate
for this solemn occasion.)

My internal gauges tell me the atmospheric pressure
has dropped below 0.20. I know the ETE are still struggling to
restore the Melas Net, fried by the EMP of a 450 kiloton nuke
augmented by the fuel in Chang’s reactors. Until then, the
painstakingly thickened atmosphere will continue to slowly but
steadily bleed off until it reaches its pre-terraforming
equilibrium of 0.01. Even if the Net is back online today, it could
take years to get the pressure back. And that’s with a full
complement of Stations online. Green Station is still
down—literally—and is taking almost all the ETE’s combined
resources to figure out a means to re-anchor it and repair the tap
cores. (All the “rebel” Guardians, including Paul, ran to their
highest duty as soon as the rescued hostages were delivered home.)
In the interim, they’ve dropped a “seal net” like the one across
the Candor Gap between Melas and Coprates to minimize the impact to
the peoples east.

The impact on life in Melas valley has already been
catastrophic, compounded by the loss of fuel, oxygen and water
throughout southeast Melas and western Coprates that was supplied
by Green’s feed lines. And then there’s the threat of all the
fallout still being blown back-and-forth with the daily winds.
Within one Martian day of the blast, the readings UNMAC was willing
to report (based on what their satellite detectors are mapping)
were dangerously hot in an almost one hundred kilometer long and
thirty wide swath from north-northeast of Shinkyo territory to just
short of the western tip of the Catena Divide. (This includes the
territory that Aziz’s former band fled into.)

Semi-hidden inside their heavy gear, my closer
friends dare Earthside’s ire to stand with me: Rick, Anton, Tru,
Kastl, Smith, Morales, Halley and Ryder. Rios and Horst are on
honor guard.

Lisa stands conspicuously (despite also being
mostly-hidden inside new-model H-A armor she really has no need of)
with Richards, another risky statement I hope is promise of changes
to come. And that’s assuming Richards doesn’t get himself removed
from command because of his pattern of decisions. Burns and Corso
(who actually seems angry that Lux and I saved her life) stand
tensely behind him.

Very few other of his newcomer force have bothered to
come out. Most of those that stand here are those that slept here
through the decades, including a heartening number of the civilian
contingent, and a half-dozen representatives of the onsite PK
(including Lieutenant Straker). It also takes me too long to
realize that one of the pressure suits among the mourners is Lyra—I
catch her watching me through her visor, but she turns her eyes
down when I look.

Richards himself says what he can over the UN
Flag-draped body bag before it gets entombed in Martian rock. He
admits he did not have much time to get to know Thomas, but gives
the usual praises of exceptional service and brave sacrifice.

I find it hard to concentrate on the ceremony,
wallowing too much in guilt and self-loathing. Though I have
immeasurable rage at both Chang and Earthside for the larger
devastation of that day, this one death is mine. It doesn’t matter
that Chang pulled the trigger. I was too slow, too late, too
predictable. Thomas served me exceptionally and bravely, and I
failed her.