The God Mars Book Three: The Devil You Are (51 page)

(“You always hold back.”)

Even Richards taking me aside and personally telling
me that he knows everyone that was held on that ship would have
died (and not by Chang’s hand) if it weren’t for my actions (and
those of my friends and allies) doesn’t absolve me.

I should be better prepared for this. It’s certainly
not the first funeral I’ve been to in the last few days.

The Avalon Knights lost twenty-three to Chang’s guns
and Fohat’s murder toys. Abbas buried thirty of his own.

Not even the protection of ETE Sphere fields was
absolute. Seven H-K and thirteen Cast didn’t make it off the
Stormcloud. There weren’t even bodies to bury, having been
vaporized in a nuclear fireball. They just never came home.

Hatsumi Sakura came to the battlefield herself after
the blast cloud had settled down, the late-morning winds starting
to move the fallout westward. We managed to recover nineteen of her
Shinobi, their bodies revealed when their cloaking systems failed.
She wouldn’t say how many were unaccounted for, cut down on the
ship or buried by the barrage on the ground.

We faced each other wordlessly across the sand as her
warriors collected their fallen fellows, and then she flew off to
home territory to face the radiation headed their way.

And despite the price paid, I can’t assume Chang is
gone. He may have bailed off the Stormcloud before it blew. He may
have even rescued Fohat’s remains to regenerate. And I have no idea
what happened to Asmodeus.

I decided to use precious fuel and flew out west to
the blast zone again first thing this morning. I couldn’t take the
direct route with the Green lines all down, so I had to go well out
of my way to the north in order to access the Blue Station lines.
This allowed me to get fresh readings on radiation levels west of
Melas Two, especially in Abbas’ traditional territory. My small
consolation is that the atmosphere loss still poses a far more
serious and immediate threat than the fallout, as long as Abbas’
people don’t journey too far south into the hot zone.

The contamination has created a definite
no-man’s-land across the middle of the valley, still being
elongated east and west by the daily winds. (If the Shinkyo are
lucky, it will continue to pass north of their territory, but I
haven’t managed to get that far around the south of the hot zone to
check myself.)

I made the trip because I needed to get another look
at detonation zero, at the wreckage left of the Stormcloud. And
there isn’t much—the W88 buried in the main hull vaporized
seventy-five percent of the colony-sized ship’s materials. What
remains is melted twisted toxic junk, scattered around the
four-kilometer-diameter crater. The ground all around it is seared,
darkened by ash and shimmering with bits of silicate glass rained
by the nuclear fireball. I saw no sign of any of the scrap
reshaping, regenerating. But my primary reason for coming: I saw no
movement at all in the blast field, though the winds working on the
dust and ash kicked up too much haze to be certain. (I wonder how
the radiation impacts regeneration? And how hard will it be to
restore a body if all of the organic matter is incinerated? Will
their seeds remain dormant, frustrated, until the winds blow them
to better resources, new hosts to overwrite?)

I also checked along the course the ship took from
our battlefield to its detonation. I don’t even find recent
tracks.

My concerns have been increased since Kali decided to
surprise me first thing this morning by jumping me in Fera’s
apartment. I thought at first it was a trick of the dim light, but
she was… blue. Glowing blue. Like a dark, almost indigo neon,
giving the illusion of light coming from somewhere deep under her
skin. She’d left her hair red—a shocking contrast—but her eyes and
teeth almost blazed out of her twilight face. She was clearly
amused at my reaction, and not at all concerned with the
implications, even when she explained to me the effect was from a
partial mod she’d incidentally absorbed from Chang.

I killed the mood by insisting she tell me what else
she’d gotten from her attempt to consume Chang. She raged and
pouted, but finally admitted that she got just a brief flash of
access to his personal memories, felt the trauma driving him
(though it appeared to give her satisfaction instead of pause).
He’d done something stupid and desperate in his previous attempts
to undo our immortality, something that changed him down to a
cellular level, and apparently made him more like Yod than he
wanted to admit. That manifests as his ability to restructure his
body on a cellular scale—he’s far more nanite than organic. (The
“flesh” I saw was only a default facsimile of his former appearance
that he chooses to completely suppress, ashamed to see what he’s
become.) But that implies he’s far more difficult to disable than
any other modded human. Destroying him… Unless he chose to ride
that bomb to the bitter end, he’s still out there. And he probably
doesn’t need organic matter—much less a host body—to regenerate
himself, only raw elements.

More disturbing: She’d detected more than one DNA
sequence in his coding. It wasn’t an overwriting of a host—it was
in his seed core. Somehow he’s made of more than one person.

But as far as Kali was concerned, being able to turn
herself a shocking blue was just an amusing bonus, and a fitting
tribute to the depictions of the goddess she’s named after. (She
could be any color at will, and demonstrated several options in
turn, including optical reactive camo, blending perfectly with the
background.) She even showed me a new demon mask—patterned after
classical Hindu art—that she’d made to wear into future battles (as
if she was looking forward to it). And—her words—the blue showed
off her body much better than the ginger-pale (no matter how fond
I’d been of her freckles). Then she demonstrated by showing me all
of her (almost all of her—she left on the flame-bladed arm guards
and the boots with the knee-high greaves), eager to get me back on
topic.

Needless to say, I had more urgent matters on my
mind, and when she failed to distract me, she stormed off (still
mostly naked) in the direction of our spaceport “base”, sure that
Lux would happily “grow one” for her.

After I’d not really satisfied myself with my tour of
the blast site, I had to head back north to refuel so I could make
the funeral. I passed within distant view of Blue Station, which
made me think of Paul. And Simon, his brother, blown to bits by a
self-destructing Disc; his remains painstakingly gathered, taken
home, allowed to regenerate into a full body, only to be left in
stasis because the mind is a blank slate, infantile innocence, the
Simon they knew erased.

I have pangs of regret for telling Paul what Asmodeus
told me about how he was re-created despite having been dead for
decades. I admit I was planting an idea, offering him an option: If
his people could analyze what they scanned of my tech,
reverse-engineer my memory restoration mods, they could possibly
recreate Simon, or a close approximation. Assuming we are just
neural-wired personality and experience, backstory…

He would be a copy, of course (and I expect he would
have to deal with knowing that, just like my time-flung fellows
and—to a lesser extent—myself). But Paul and his father would have
an option, rather than perpetually store a sleeping cipher.

I took one more detour, made one more visit on my way
to my old base.

Abbas has had to move his encampment closer to the
feedlines, which also takes him north away from the hot zone, but
puts him in more vulnerable ground. He no longer has to worry about
the Zodanga, but he’s closer to Melas Two, under the UNMAC patrol
routes to Industry and Pioneer. Richards has generously and
gratefully offered him—and Hassim—fresh pressure gear, portable
atmosphere processors and shelters to help weather the Net failure,
but the gesture was declined—there’s too much fear Unmaker gifts
will be traceable from orbit.

“Hassim has chosen to hold his lands, though he’s
moved even further west and north, toward the Station of the Purple
Jinn, which puts him out beyond Keeper territory,” Abbas told me.
“Hopefully far enough from the Unmakers.”

The look on his face—and the faces of his people—made
me ask the next questions:

“And what will you do? Will you stay here?”

“I think I once told you we would never leave our
desert…” he began sadly. “The bulk of our people will hold camp
here. The rest… I will be leading a pilgrimage to the east, into
Coprates, to search for better lands. We will continue to maintain
the old Food Trade routes to Tranquility as long as we can, but
because of the radiation and the air loss… We must think of our
children.”

I remind him of the evidence we’ve found of other
peoples already entrenched in the region, the war stories told by
the Cast and Domers. He doesn’t once ask me for help, for
protection. He appears to have confidence in his fighters. And
Sakina will be going with him.

We embrace like brothers.

Flying away, I hope this won’t be the last I see of
him.

“You understand why I have to stay?”

Lisa’s giving me the Duty and Greater Good speech,
winding up to telling me goodbye again. Everyone else has gone back
inside, though I expect there are still plenty of eyes on us.

“Yeah. Inroads.” I say what she wants to hear, but
can’t remotely sell it. And we have to have the conversation out in
the abrasive wind, since they still won’t let me inside the
base.

“You’ve made a difference,” she tries to reassure.
“You saved lives. Richards is starting to come around, to see us as
something other than scary monsters. I don’t think he’s the only
one.”

But he hasn’t done anything obvious about Burns, even
though it was likely Burns that ordered Jackson’s botched suicide
bombing. Or Jackson—I’ve heard chatter that he’s being played up as
a hero for his “brave sacrifice”, however misguided and
catastrophic. My only consolation—and it’s a small one—is that he
isn’t walking away unscathed:

Rescue flights found his cockpit module nine hours
after the blast. They were initially sure he was dead: penetrating
rounds—most likely from Azazel’s attempt to stop him—lanced through
the armored cockpit, blew away the right side of his face,
including his right eye and ear. There wasn’t enough left to
reconstruct, just graft closed, especially given the limited
on-planet resources. The impact also cracked his cervical spine and
left him with some dangerous swelling on the brain that Ryder had
to relieve, but his latest prognosis is promising. A miracle from
his God. (I find myself hoping that his God decides he deserves the
gift of significant pain for the rest of his life, a small reward
for putting his holy mission above the lives and welfare of
everyone living here. Trying to kill me, I can accept. In fact, I
hope he heals enough to be able to try again. I look forward to
it.)

“We’ll see,” I allow her.

At least she let me take her to Tranquility, let me
show it to her, before taking her back to endure “processing” with
her fellow hostages, which included decontamination, invasive
exams, isolation, and brutal debriefings to try to ensure Earthside
that none of them had been “tampered with,” infected. (I assume
Earthside is just as nervous that the ETE messed with them on the
ride home after their rescue as much as they feared Chang did
during their days of captivity, or that the whole thing was a
charade to give the ETE the time to alter the hostages, maybe even
replace them with convincing clones.)

She also decided to tell me why she and Richards were
on the Stormcloud to begin with: The UNCORT team had supposedly
made a breakthrough, discovered technology Chang had to control all
of our mods, even disable them from a distance. (The fact that
they’d since tried using this “weapon” on us multiple times from
orbit and we never even noticed is proof that Chang was just being
tempting with his bait.) Richards was indeed smart enough to take
Lisa with him for added protection, though he apparently told his
UNCORT chaperones that it was so they could test the tech on her up
close.

I’m struck by how little I have to say to her. She’s
heard my concerns, weathered my protests. And I can’t argue with
the spirit of her decision, what she’s hoping to do no matter what
it puts her through. She was always a better soldier than I was,
did her job when I was off on my own righteous crusades.

“I’ll keep in touch,” she gives me, “update you
whenever I can.”

“Call me if you need me,” I give back the obvious.
She just nods, chews her lip looking for anything else to say.
Decides to risk giving me a hug in front of everyone watching
us.

I hold her for a handful of seconds longer than is
comfortable. I don’t tell her I miss her. I don’t tell her I still
love her. (I try not to let her hear me chuckle at the irony: When
her mortality was breaking me, when I thought she was dead, all I
could think of was what I didn’t do and say when I had the chance.
Now that she’s as indestructible as I am, there’s no urgency.
Again.)

She lingers, holding my hand, still not sure this is
an adequate farewell. I give her a nod to let her know I
understand. Then I make myself walk away.

“What will you do now, Colonel?” Richards took the
time to face-to-face with me right after the funeral, disregarding
his uncomfortable and impatiently waiting entourage.

“Make your life easier by getting myself a more
comfortable distance away from here,” I barely joked, then
specified: “Some of the Melas peoples are migrating into Coprates,
looking for more livable real estate, at least until things improve
here.” I wondered if he caught that I wasn’t just talking about the
air, feedline and radiation issues. He seemed to, the way he nodded
thoughtfully in his helmet. “I figure I could help reduce the
potential bloodshed when they collide with whatever locals are
established there.”