The God Mars Book Three: The Devil You Are (7 page)

Yet she’s always stayed close, under the excuse of
choice assignments. And her subsequent relationships (that I’ve
been allowed to see) have been briefer than mine.

“I should hate you,” she mumbles. Her eyes are glassy
with tears.

“You should.”

Despite her turmoil, I’m struck by how attractive she
still is. More weathered, but only a frost of gray in her long dark
hair. She’s fit, lean, like a gracefully aging dancer. The decades
barely show. (I’d consider my perception distorted by my currently
raging hormones, but I know I’ve really never stopped looking at
her.)

“I thought you were dead,” she whispers, letting the
tears go. I feel them like knives in my chest. She looks up at me
like she’s daring me. “What am I to you?”

This is such a bad idea.

I don’t care.

I step into her, take her face in my hands and kiss
her, incidentally pushing her back into the bulkhead, pinning her.
She fights it for an instant, then melts into it, pushes back,
kisses me like she’s trying to devour me. And then we’re pulling
our clothes off like we did when we were in our twenties, back at
the beginning.

I happily discover some things don’t change.

We lay together afterward, just holding each other,
watching each other. She makes a few playful observations about my
unexpected stamina and intensity. I blame it on her effect on me.
(And I hope I didn’t accidentally injure her, but my enhancements
seem to be very controllable.)

“What are we going to do?” she asks me heavily. (And
I get that she’s speaking globally, not about us.)

“I don’t know yet,” I have to tell her. “We’ll figure
something out.”

But I still can’t tell her what I really am, what
I’ve become. I don’t dare.

Somewhere in there we both drifted off, holding each
other. But I’m alone when I wake up. I still smell her in the
sheets, on my fingers, but she’s gone. Her side of the narrow bed
is still warm, so it hasn’t been long. I roll over, glance at my
desk. We never did eat the lunch she brought—it’s still
untouched.

And then my long hair falls obnoxiously in front of
my face.

My…

Shit.

I bolt upright, look down: Lean, smooth skin with
dancer’s muscles. No scars. Hair down around my shoulders.

I spring for the bathroom niche, check the
mirror.

Fuck.

I’m immediately remembering a scene from
The
Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde
, where the
protagonist starts transforming involuntarily when he dozes,
sometimes at very inopportune moments.

“Shit.”

The sentry cameras have been reactivated.

I drag my outfit on as fast as I can. Thankfully,
they even brought me my “scrap armor” after clearing it, maybe
figuring I’d want the souvenir. It starts reshaping as soon as I
put it on.

I hack MAI. There are a lot of tags on both ends of
the corridor right outside.

“Colonel Ram—or whoever you are—step out of the room
slowly, hands visible.”

Burns. Of course.

His tag is out there, standing behind a dozen armored
troopers. Lisa is at the other end, surrounded by her own squad of
armor. I see Rios as Horst are there, too.

Cat’s out of the bag, as it were. I show the cameras
my empty (now gloved) hands, turn to try to convince I’m still not
armed (of course, what they’re terrified of is
me
, not some
gadget I may be carrying). Open the hatch. Step out slowly. Into
over a dozen nervous guns.

“You’re in your own crossfire,” I tell them like
they’d still listen to me. “If you open fire, you risk hitting each
other.”

No one moves.

“I
am
Colonel Ram,” I try insisting. “I’ve
been implanted with nanotechnology, but I am still Colonel Ram. No
one is controlling me. I can help you. I’m here to help you.”

“Lieutenant Horst, neutralize him!” Burns
demands.

“I’m really sorry, sir.” And he steps up with a bulky
contraption of a gun, braces himself, fires.

The corridor around me sparks and arcs, the
micro-lightning quickly gravitating to me. It burns, it shocks, it
stuns, it numbs. But I’m still standing when it’s done (despite the
reek of ozone and singed hair).

“That was unpleasant.”

“It didn’t work, Colonel!” Horst shouts the
apparent.

“Let me guess… EM weapon. Something UNCORT whipped up
to take down the evil ETE?” Who it may or may not work on.
I
seem to be resistant. I expect Chang is, too. Hopefully lesson
learned and back to the drawing board.

Burns it paralyzed, completely unsure of what to do
next. I let him have his meltdown, turn and look for Lisa. She’s
indeed surrounded by armor, still partially undressed, and looking
absolutely horrified.

“It’s
me
,” I keep protesting. “Our first real
date: Sushi. I kissed you in the parking garage.
It’s still
me.
”

I can almost feel Burns come to his next
conclusion.

“Colonel Ava! Were you just…
intimate
… with…?
Captain Rios! Take Colonel Ava into custody and escort her
immediately to Isolation. If she resists, use deadly force!”

Rios hesitates. His troopers—my troopers—all
hesitate. I can’t help but grin. But Lisa looks like she’s going to
scream.

“Burns has a dedicated uplink in his quarters,” I
decide to bust him in a public way. “He’s been communicating with
Earthside Command in secret. That means he doesn’t want any of you
to know what they’re planning.”

“
Rios!
Escort Colonel Ava out of here! That’s
a direct order! MOVE!!”

The dickhead has his sidearm pointed at me, still
hiding behind a wall of armor suits.

“That is not a good idea…” I try to warn him, still
keeping my hands up.

He shoots me anyway. I swat the round into the
bulkhead.

“
He’s contaminated!!
” he pretty much screams.
“
Open fire! OPEN FIRE!!!
”

I risk scaring them further, hack their interfaces
and shut down their ICWs, their targeting.

“Weapons are offline!” Rios confirms as his troopers
try to get their guns to work.

“Manual!” Burns spits. “Switch to Manual! Free to
fire!”

It takes them all barely a second to break the seals
on their overrides. I realize I’ve just made this worse. They don’t
have MAI’s fire control…

“You’ll hit each…!” I’m trying to warn, but Burns
starts emptying his pistol, and a few of the troopers in front of
him decide to play along and join him.

My armor shifts, hardens—the splints in my mail
armguards flow together and expand into shields—and I’m holding off
a storm of metal, protecting my face, miraculously managing to keep
my feet. But on freefire and full auto, not all of the rounds hit
me. Behind me, I feel troopers go down, hear Rios shouting for
holdfire, pulling his men back. A few rounds smack me in the back
before Rios controls them.

He’s still yelling for holdfire when Burns and his
obedient guns expend their mags and have to pause for reload. The
corridor is full of gunsmoke. I realize my armor is peppered with
deformed shells. Then those shells melt into me, dissolved.
Absorbed. Raw materials. Burns is ghost-pale and slick with sweat,
his hands almost shaking too much to reload. (I can’t see the
troopers’ faces through their heavy visors.)

“
Colonel!
” Rios shouts. I turn. He’s down over
what I realize is Lisa. Her T-shirt is rapidly soaking with bright
blood. “Get her to Medical!!”

I try to push through to her but they put guns in my
face. Her eyes are open. She tries to look at me. They go blank.
There’s much too big a puddle already under her.

I turn back on Burns. I feel how strong I am.

I am going to fucking put my fist through his chest
and let him feel my hand on his heart. I…

“Colonel Ram!!
Don’t!
” It’s Rios.

Horst steps in front of me.

“
Please
, sir… We’ll do what we can…” It’s an
empty promise. It’s already too late. Her body is limp as they drag
it off. The son-of-a-bitch killed her.
He killed her.

“Get out of my way.”

I’m sure he’s looking into eyes of black metal.

But someone’s taken Burn’s gun away. They’re keeping
him from running, taking him into custody, however temporarily. I
realize other troopers have been shot by his impulsive
stupidity.

He needs to die. Right now.

“Colonel. Please.” Rios. Right behind me.

Earthside will absolve him. Probably give him a
fucking medal. I can’t let that happen.

“You
can’t
, sir,” Rios pleads gently, like
he’s reading my mind.

“
Take him!
” Burns is screaming, found his
voice again. “
Take him down! Don’t let him…!!
”

I hack MAI. Kill all the lights. Send a signal that
fries their heat and night vision. Then in the darkness I can see
perfectly well in, I move through them, move close. I want him to
feel my breath on him, smell him sweating. But instead of what I
want to do, I tell him clearly:

“If you can’t hurt me, you can’t hurt Chang. I’m the
only hope you’ve got. And you owe me your fucking worthless life,
nothing less. Be grateful I still care about these people.”

I turn and take my rage out of there, weaving
smoothly through the blinded troopers. To the nearest airlock. Hack
it. Let myself out into the cold desert.

The sun’s gone down. It’s below freezing, but I don’t
feel it. I realize I left my rebreather behind. I don’t care. I
don’t breathe. And I don’t need a disguise anymore, I don’t need to
pretend I’m still human. I’m not.

I climb back to the ridge, reclaim my weapons, unfold
and put on the ugly fucking helmet, stand in the cemetery and look
back over the base. Just a few lights in the dark. Dark as far as
the eye can see.

More light as two of the pads go live, open, push up
a pair of AAVs, heating up for fast launch in billows of steam
exhaust.

Burns is looking for me.

I don’t go anywhere. I watch the ships spin up, lift
off, circle. They stream spots onto the barren ground, begin
sweeping.

But I don’t want to hurt these men. (Just Burns.) So
when their spots sweep the ridge, I look down at myself in the
bright white light and see my armor and cloak has turned into a
perfect simulation of Martian terrain. The lights pass over me,
move on, urgent.

I’m still hacked into MAI enough to know I’m not
showing up on perimeter sentries. No heat, no motion. I remember
many decades ago, when I was “intimate” with the tactical AI
running UNACT operations: the machine would hack the myriad
tracking tools of that wired world and let me move invisibly,
because we were trying to take down a conspiracy high up in our own
leadership. I remember how free that felt. How superior,
satisfying. I was a ghost. An avenging ghost. And I set the world
right. (Or at least I ended that particular batch of villains.)

Now here I am, hiding from my own people in plain
sight again.

But this time, I’ve lost too much.

Lisa is dead. MAI tells me so. Ryder tried to save
her, bring her back, but her wounds were too severe.

I killed her. I should never have come back. I should
have hid up here and hacked in to get the intel I needed and been
gone like a thief. I knew what would happen. I knew they’d find me
out if I stayed.

I’ve lost the two people closest to me, the two
people who came here because of me. I let them both die senseless
deaths.

I don’t deserve to be human anymore.

I pick a direction away from here—east, into
Coprates—and I start walking.

It’s a combination of exhaustion and a low oxygen
warning that makes me find a place to sit down and rest. I don’t
know how far I’ve gone in the dark. I’m somewhere up in the
mountains that run just south and east of the base. Climbing.
Sliding. Stumbling. My armor is sparkling with frost under the
faint light of the larger moon.

I look at the moon, the irregular blob in the night
sky. Up there—on Phobos—we had a base before the Discs killed it.
Doc Ryder’s husband died up there with hundreds of others, probably
exposed to vacuum when the habitats were holed. Now Richards is
leading a mission to restore that base, and our orbital docks, to
create a foothold for more humans and machines to come here.

I can almost embrace Chang’s mission, assuming he
really does intend to preserve any of this planet for those that
live here. But I still can’t accept his methods, not even now in my
blinding rage: his willingness to wipe out thousands of lives, to
get the world he wants. In that sense, he’s as bad as this new
Earthside/UNMAC/UNCORT agenda. And Earthside is as bad as
Chang.

If the survivor factions don’t comply with mandatory
disarmament and relocation, Earthside will use force, and a lot
more people will die. Maybe all of them in some cases, rather than
leave.

Sitting in the rocks, pulling my cloak over me like a
mini-shelter to ride out the frozen night, my body hardens,
conserves energy, starts to distill more oxygen out of the thin air
as I take slow, careful breaths. I even absorb the sparse
condensation. My new body is a miracle of survival engineering. I
almost wonder if I could survive—or maybe the better word is
“function”—outside of the terraformed valleys, in the planet’s
original near vacuum.

But that’s assuming I want to run away.

Not yet. I can still help these people. That’s why
Star saved me.

Yet here I am, hell-and-gone from human habitation,
having a camp-out in an environment that could kill a human being
without survival gear in minutes.

I’m dreaming again of the other world, the other time
other me.