The God Mars Book Three: The Devil You Are (9 page)

What can I do with them?

It’s enough to get me up, get me walking.

I make it to the end of the mountains by nightfall,
only because much of it was downhill. I realize I’ve been running a
day-and-a-half on the surface, no water except what I can absorb
out of the thin frost, no food, no heat.

(“Figured out all the upgrades, yet?”)

My helmet apparently will serve as a
moderate-efficiency rebreather and compressor, splitting the CO2 I
exhale and condensing additional O2 out of the existing atmosphere.
It’s taking the strain off whatever tech lives in my lungs, lets me
breathe almost normally. The residual carbon is a building block
for my nano-buggers.

I haven’t peed since Melas Two. I seem to be in some
kind of strict recycle mode. And my skin has “hardened” again.

Bonus: I can apparently draw solar power.

Still, none of these nano-miracles are a substitute
for a good meal and a tall glass of water. But I am starting to not
miss being human.

I dream of Lisa.

Not the one I saw die. This one—the one from the
other time stream—never did. Maybe never will. (Unless this whole
muck-with-time thing
has
erased her, obliterated her.) But
she hates me as much as the other one, though for different
reasons.

Matthew was a big part of that.

I was so angry at him, because he wouldn’t take the
tech. I saw him getting sicker, weaker. Older. And then when the
diagnosis came out… (Funny. Both versions got the same fucking kind
of cancer.) The bastard would rather die—sick and in pain—than
accept what would save him.

I couldn’t watch. That was what Lisa couldn’t deal
with. I abandoned him. In a righteous fucking snit because he was
being so
stupid
, so selfish… It was easier because he’d gone
to Mars, last assignment, security consultant for a big
corporation. (Stupid fucker was working for a company that
made
what could save him, and he wouldn’t put it in
himself.)

And I think it pissed me off worse that he was
happy.

I have an unexpected chuckle now—a crazy idiot
wearing a ram’s skull on his head wandering the desert giggling to
himself—because it took me this long to remember: That Matthew
married Tru Greenlove.

I didn’t even try to go to the funeral, not even
virtually. Or make peace with my fucking best friend on his
deathbed. Because I couldn’t face it. Because he didn’t have to die
at all.

Lisa
really
wouldn’t speak to me after that.
Disappeared from my life entirely, maybe permanently. (But who
knows, when it comes to immortals. Small universe.)

But at least I knew she was alive.

Maybe that’s why I’m not wrapping my head around her
death. It’s like I know she’s not dead, can’t die.
If
that
other time still exists.

And if it doesn’t, it’s more I owe Chang for, an
incalculable amount… It’s not just all the people he killed—tens of
thousands—cutting us off from Earth to keep that future from
happening, but if he’s actually erased—obliterated—everyone in that
time… And the math for all of the descendants the people he killed
here might have had…

No. I
can’t
empathize with Chang. And I can
never make him repay those debts.

It’s just a matter of stopping him from doing more
damage, saving what’s left.

(The irony doesn’t escape: I’ll probably need to do
the same against Earth.)

I’ve actually slept lying down, curled up in my cloak
in a patch of relatively soft sand.

No breakfast. I shake off the dust and walk.

It’s still almost a hundred klicks to
Tranquility.

Now that I’m out of the mountains, I have to cross
the open valley, get to the Datum-high Divide that separates
Coprates Chasma from the narrower parallel Catena that runs along
its southern edge, a thousand kilometers long.

I’m already starting to see wild scrub, hybrid
adapted plants taking hold in the desert, probably wind-spread from
the Tranquility gardens. Life, finding a way on a sterile
world.

I remember the updated maps we got from the Lancer,
the satellite shots: It gets greener as you go east, as Coprates
gets deeper. Five hundred klicks past Tranquility there’s
apparently forest, jungle. And more humans, descendants of Earth
adapted to this new world. Living. Thriving. Defending their homes.
All still ignorant to the twin threats that are coming for
them.

Maybe I’ll go that way, keep going east. They’ll need
me.

But there are also people in Melas Chasma, back the
way I came. Nomads. The Knights. Even the Shinkyo and the remaining
PK. And those I left at Melas Two and Three. I remember Tru talking
about how her civilian refugee community—a lot of them ex-Ecos—were
starting to consider an exodus from the UNMAC facilities to find
their own way, and that was before Burns descended on them, before
they got a better taste of what Earthside had in mind as “rescue
and relief”.

And I start laughing at myself again. Because despite
all my godlike super powers, I’m still only one guy. I can’t be
everywhere. Not even Superman could be everywhere. And
I’m
stuck getting around by walking.

There’s more plant life as I walk. The ridged slopes
of the Catena get slowly larger as I trudge over rock. The
branching ridges have formed (and reformed) over the millennia with
the shifting seasons, as the summers warm frozen subsurface water
and CO2, sublimating it into the thin air, causing micro-slides,
dry gullies down the steep slopes, eroding the Catena. The effect
is similar along the long northern rim of Coprates, speaking to
similarities in geology. The rims are unstable, but their more
regular instability has avoided the mega-slides that devastated
some of the Melas Chasma colony sites (triggered by careless
mining, and then by nuclear bombardment).

Eighty klicks further east on the Catena slopes,
nestled in one of the older slide-ravines, is Tranquility Colony,
in whatever condition it survives in today.

The space and time and my recent memory dreams of
Lisa make me recall the Lisa of this world, a quiet memorial in a
wasteland. One mourner.

I miserably calculate that despite knowing her for
more than forty years (ninety, if I decide to add the decades we
spent in oblivious Hiber Sleep), we only had about five happy ones,
or at least passionate ones.

I remember meeting her, when I was recruiting for the
new UNACT Tactical Force at Fort Bragg. Barely able to keep my eyes
off her even in a crowd of fellow boots, even performing, showing
off the then-bleeding-edge interface armor and weapons. Then
running an impromptu “war game”, playing suicide attacker making a
run on her barracks in the middle of the night—but she’d seen me
pull a similar play against another platoon the previous night, and
she had her unit waiting for me. She took me down herself. In her
underwear. The most profound thing I could say with her sitting on
my chest was “You’re hired.”

She took a prime gig at NetCom, our Infowar division
(her division—she made it what it would become), despite her scores
on the Tactical course (my course), and we started
not-too-discreetly flirting. Then impulsively consummating our
relationship, daring the Uniform Code (she was a lieutenant, and I
was a major, and then her indirect CO). But we were in a war that
made us targets everywhere, kept us locked down (potentially for
life), so accommodations were made. And we took comfort in each
other through those dark days, nested in our bunker “homes”, made a
part-time life almost like a real couple. Happy.

But the ugliness of the job, and the realization that
some of our masters had been playing both sides for their own
benefit, steadily dragged me away from her. No. I wasn’t dragged. I
ran. Because my rage was more important. I needed to fix it (and
fixing it meant killing and destroying a lot of powerful people).
And I deployed myself to that fight—and away from her—without a
second thought. When I came back—when I tried to come back—it was
too little, too late. She couldn’t be second priority to my
righteous rage, no matter how much she still loved me.

So we managed to be civil, friendly compatriots,
working our jobs: She continuing to impress, me continuing to make
trouble. I started seeing Star, and not secretly enough that Lisa
didn’t figure it out. Lisa had her own romances, my jealousy stoked
enough each time to prove there was no closure between us. Still
looking at each other when we thought the other wasn’t looking,
trying not to show anything more than civility, the friendship of
professionals.

All the way up to the day I got her killed.

I will never forgive myself the wasted time. And now
I apparently have immortality to punish myself in.

I avoid stepping on a shoot of Graingrass, weaving
between the rocks, searching for nutrients, water; freeze-proof
narrow leaves open to collect sunlight.

Life.

I have a thought that scares me: If I fail to stop
what’s coming, it may just be me and the plants left. Maybe not
even the plants.

Forever.

31 March, 2117:

Tranquility was comprised of three large bio domes
stagger-stacked up the slope of the ravine cut in the Coprates side
of the Catena Divide. Now only the ruptured lower dome is visible,
the Divide having slid down and buried the upper two, either shook
loose by the nuclear bombardment of the Apocalypse or knocked loose
on purpose to hide the colony from Earth, making it look lost and
dead.

The new slopes are covered in thick scrub, at least a
dozen different species, that pour out of the broken-open remaining
dome and spread up the slopes almost a third of the way to Datum,
down and out into the valley floor, and laterally across the jagged
terrain of the Divide slopes. The dome itself is webbed with
climbing greenery, like a jungle ruin slowly being overgrown.

There is no obvious sign of human life. The wind
howls like an army of ghosts through the big holes in the dome,
like the place is screaming at me, warning me away.

This is the first time I’ve seen it up close. The
only other time was by ASV cam and then by armor Link feed. When I
watched the people that live here kill two of my men.

There has been sign of human activity on the way
here, but only because I’ve been looking for it close-up. Faint
trails, but packed and worn enough to be well-traveled. Probably
the secret routes of the Food Traders who’ve been bringing the
bounty of Tranquility back to the Melas Nomads. I even found an
apparent “oasis” on the way here: a deep cistern in the ridges with
actual mud in the bottom of it, and markings on the stone that
suggest there is sometimes standing water.

I also got to see close-up other signs of free
water—either condensation dense enough to form runoff, or actual
rain from the clouds the ETE Stations spew up: there are shallow
gullies, soil packed into dried and cracked mud. And plants.

And plants mean I actually got to eat: grain and nuts
and even a few meager blood strawberries plucked from between the
rocks. (Unfortunately, “drinking” was a matter of laying my hands
on the silt mud in the cistern and absorbing enough to
rehydrate.)

I camp out just over a ridge from the colony ruin,
out of sight.

In the frozen dark of night, I climb up to the
ridgeline and take another look, but the locals are careful, at
least to a point. There are no visible lights, nothing that would
reveal them to eyes in orbit or Earthbound telescopes. But I can
see heat: small pockets deep inside the green of the stadium-sized
dome, well-masked but definitely cooking. Probably small hydrogen
heating units—not a central colony system. But there are maybe a
hundred of them in there.

I crawl back out of sight (and relatively out of the
wind), pull my cowl around me, and tip up my helmet to nibble on
the pocket full of seeds I’d collected on the way.

I’m assuming since there’s no sign of Chang, and the
dome looks just like it did on our disastrous first-contact
attempt, that he hasn’t come yet. It would be nice to know when to
expect him.

I consider sneaking down now, having a look in the
dark when no one is likely to notice me. But I expect the locals
stay on continuous alert for unwanted visitors, given the bounty
they have to protect in a hungry world, and especially given that
there’s another group we’ve seen apparently hunting them. If I’m
caught skulking in the middle of the night, I’ll likely be even
more poorly received.

So I get to spend another night brooding under the
starry sky, hardened numb against the sub-freezing temperatures, my
idle mind rerunning the dual movies of my lives.

But it’s the two really important things I still
can’t
remember that are eating at me. Why can’t I remember a
damn thing about this great plan I supposedly signed on for? And
why can’t I remember who sent me? (Star kept saying “he” and “him”.
But no name. No sense of who “he” is or how or why he put this
little impossible jaunt together.)

Looking up at all the stars, I gel an answer that
disturbs me. Star said the reason I’d keep my this-world memories
despite being almost completely remade was a failsafe, so if my
mind had to be restored from some kind of “backup” in case of
catastrophic damage, any interim memories still intact wouldn’t be
lost. Maybe the “seed” that remade me was a version loaded before I
got told the plan, or even met its engineer, which strikes me as a
remarkably stupid oversight.

Unless I never did meet the engineer. Maybe somebody
just stole my “backup”, press-ganged a restore-file version of me
into this circus, either without my knowledge or against my
will.