The God Mars Book Four: Live Blades

  The God Mars

  Book Four: Live Blades

  By Michael Rizzo

  Copyright 2014 by Michael Rizzo

  Smashwords Edition

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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  Table of Contents

  Prologue: “He Must Needs Go that the Devil Drives”

  Part One: Heroes Journey

  Chapter 1: A Fighting Man of Mars

  Chapter 2: Exiles

  Chapter 3: “Not All That Wander…”

  Chapter 4: A Princess of Mars

  Chapter 5: In the Belly of the Beast

  Chapter 6: In the Valley of the Shadow

  Part Two: Companions in Arms

  Chapter 1: My Brother’s Keeper

  Chapter 2: Swords of Mars

  Chapter 3: Secondary Target

  Chapter 4: Siege Engines

  Chapter 5: The Gods of Mars

  Chapter 6: Revelations

  Part Three: That Time the World Forgot

  Chapter 1: The Occasional Lake

  Chapter 2: The People That Time Forgot

  Chapter 3: The Lost Legion

  Chapter 4: Haven

  Chapter 5: The Chessmen of Mars

  Chapter 6: God Out of the Machine

  Chapter 7: Meet Your Maker

  Epilogues: Endings and Beginnings

  Maps of Eastern Coprates and the Western Vajra

  Prologue: “He Must Needs Go that the Devil Drives”

  “Here’s one…”

  Paul is trying to be helpful. I don’t want him to be helpful, not in this.

  So Bel prods me forward.

  “The dead are dead,” he tells me uselessly. “You need to do this for the still-living.”

  The body is half-buried in shredded brush. Bullet-shredded brush. Bullet-shredded body.

  It’s a Pax Hunter-Warrior. Green-dyed leather tunic, breeches, gloves and boots; green-painted hand-hammered facemask. The primitive Mycenaean design tells me he’s an initiated fighter—their distinguished “officers” and trainers wear the more elaborate and finely crafted “Green Man” masks. His bow isn’t far from his hand, his quiver (still half-full of arrows) wedged underneath him as he stares up at the sky, his long, lean limbs twisted like a discarded marionette. His oversized torso is holed in a handful of places. His light partial plate and scale armor was designed to deflect blades and arrows, not 7.65mm armor-piercing shells fired at two-thousand rounds per minute from an electric Gatling gun. His blood is sprayed all over the lush green growth of this place.

  I kneel down over the body, my broken ribs grinding, my lungs still rattling, full of blood. I reach for the edge of his mask with my good arm, gently lift…

  “Don’t…” Bel tries to dissuade me. “Leave it. Just…”

  I don’t listen. I have to see. I lift the mask. The face underneath is pale, thin. A boy, probably no older than eighteen Standard. He looks up at the sky like he saw something unbelievable and froze that way. I lower his mask over his breast, hang on its straps over the heart like the Pax do as a sign of respect to their forebears when the hunt is successful, when the fight is won.

  Is this fight won? We beat the machines again, but they still keep coming. It’s a small consolation that Chang has been going for quantity over quality, churning out more fragile bots, but far too many for us to chase down and stop before they slaughter innocents like this.

  This child never stood a chance against the mass-produced Boxes and Bugs that attacked the small outpost Stead just twenty meters behind me, coming to kill men, women and children for no other reason than they’re easy targets, and trying to defend them will keep us too busy to find and assault Chang’s new base. Even faced with such armored monsters, this boy gave no ground, held his position to try to give his people time to flee, firing his arrows against plating made to resist firearms.

  “Michael,” Bel keeps on me. “Please. You have to. You can’t repair on nuts and berries.”

  I know he’s right. I’ve tried. Even if I absorb the lush bounty of the local flora directly, it doesn’t give me enough to heal properly after a bad fight. My internal indicators have all been sunk below critical for days now. Even if I wasn’t shot up and broken, I’m getting too weak to be of much good (hence how I got so shot up and broken). And there’s not enough of what I need in the bots we’ve neutralized—just a half-kilo or so of brain and nerve tissue spliced into their CPUs using a bastardization of our own nanotechnology, “salvaged” from what used to be men and women, seduced into Chang’ service with promises of power or security.

  Bel finally gets that he’s really not making this easier, and he and Paul walk away, give me space, leave me alone with a dead boy.

  I cough blood up into my mouth, make the mistake of trying to move my still-shattered left arm, look down at the bullet holes in my own torso. I put the fingers of my good hand in the holes, through metal and into meat. I bring them out slick and crimson, then dab my blood on the boy’s forehead like some ritual, the blessing of a false god. Or a small sacrifice in exchange for what I’m about to take.

  I reach out my hand. And can’t.

  I’m pathetic.

  So I sit here, looking down into dead eyes. And apologize:

  “This should never have happened to you. None of this should have happened.”

  I’ve never been any good at funerals. So for lack of profound words I ramble, feeling obligated to at least try to explain to a corpse why he died today.

  “Someone… something… came back from the future, changed things… tried to stop the corporations from developing the technology that made a whole world full things like me… It caused the Apocalypse, destroyed the colonies, cut Mars off from Earth, killed thousands. Back in your grandparents’ day. Back before you were born.

  “I was there. Human me. Buried by the blasts. Sunk into Hiber-Sleep. Fifty years…”

  I breathe. Grind ribs. Rattle. The blood’s clearing out of my lungs, the bones trying to knit, but I don’t have what I need—I can barely patch my wounds. What I need is right in front of me. Resources. Raw materials.

  “I should have stayed asleep. But I woke up. Called Earth. Brought them back here. Idiot. I started it all again. Earth… They say they’re terrified of the technology that the corporations were working on here. They came back and started trying to round up and quarantine you all to make sure you’re not infected by something leftover. But in secret, they were trying to find that tech, study it, use it.

  “So the one who stopped them the first time came back, tried to take the planet to make sure it would never be used for that kind of research again, started a war… You’re all just stuck in the middle. With me. Us.” I nod in the direction of my few companions like he can see them. “We shouldn’t have happened either.

  “We’re not supposed to be here. I’m not supposed to be here. Not like this. This me is from the world that never happened, brought back… I don’t know how… to fight. To protect you all. To stop…”

  I have to chuckle at that, cough on my own blood, hurt like hell, deserve it.

  “Not doing a very good job of it, am I?”

  (I guess I should be thankful for the little things: Chang’s locked down the Boxes’ big 20mm cannons, afraid any big blasts would be
picked up on satellite and bring down another piece of nuclear stupidity from Earthside. Or non-nuclear stupidity, assuming they learned their lesson in Melas.)

  I can feel Bel’s eyes on me. My new best friend: the Devil. And Paul (another thing I can’t forgive myself for: what I’ve helped turn him into).

  “I’m sorry,” I finally get around to saying. “I’ll make this right. I swear. I’ll do whatever I can to protect your people. I just…”

  The dead are dead. Needs must…

  I can do this through my glove, but I want to feel it—I don’t deserve to be insulated from feeling it. So I will the glove to peel away, exposing my bare hand.

  “I’m so sorry…”

  I move his mask aside, then tear open his tunic and the natural fiber shirt underneath, expose smooth pale skin smeared with blood, and press my palm to his sternum like I’m going to perform half-assed CPR.

  I hate this part. I hate it.

  For an instant, I feel his intact skin, still warm. But then it starts to give way, liquefy, butchered on a cellular level as my scavenger nanites weave their way in. I can feel them, building a temporary network of siphon tubes like a secondary circulatory system, boring deep into his chest, seeking…

  I get the initial rush, my nanites feeding me what I need to rebuild, replenish, heal.

  I feel sick. I watch his body begin to desiccate. His face…

  My ribs pop back into place. My gunshot wounds seal over. My lungs and liver patch and begin to regenerate. My left arm snaps and grinds into shape. It hurts. I’m glad it hurts. It should hurt.

  I’m a fucking cannibal. A ghoul.

  I cough the last of the thick blood out of my lungs, then take a deep breath of the thin, chill air, smell the green (and under it: blood and death and gunsmoke). My fingers are sunk into his ribs. I feel his lungs shrivel, his heart dissolve.

  My indicators rise back toward green. I start to feel strong again. Invincible. Immortal.

  In my head, I can hear the bots’ command signals. There’s another wave, headed for some nearby Steads that haven’t been evacuated yet, the Pax too stubborn to give up their homes, their ancestral lands.

  Time to go fulfill my promise. Again.

  Part One: Heroes Journey

  Chapter 1: A Fighting Man of Mars

  1 April, 2118.

  From the War Journal of Erickson Carter:

  April First. This is the day I will begin my journey.

  The date I have chosen is particularly appropriate. On Earth, it was called “April Fool’s Day,” apparently a day dedicated to celebrating friendship and love by humiliating friends and loved ones with cruel pranks. I wonder if it’s still observed as such, if the new puritanical regime controlling every aspect of human life on that world allows for such abusive folly. Perhaps they have a law against it now. They seem so intolerant of so many things, or at least that’s the face they’ve shown us since they came back here. The new United Nations World Government consistently presents like obsessively overly-protective (and overly-religious) parents, afraid of anything (real or imagined) that might lead their people into danger, insurrection, or even poor health. In some aspects, they aren’t terribly unlike our Council of Elders. But I blame neither for my decision to do this, no matter how the circumstances that they helped shape put me on this path to the exclusion of arguably better judgment.

  And perhaps I am just a fool. I’m sure many of my own people will call me various synonyms of that derogation when they find out what I’ve done. I suppose it’s appropriate enough, in the very definition of the word. After all, in modern usage it refers to someone who fails to make wise or careful choices. I truly can’t say my choices will be wise, and they certainly won’t be careful.

  But I prefer to consider a much older and less common meaning of the word: Wanderer. A soul on a path of exploration without direction. He risks stumbling blindly into catastrophe. But he is the protagonist of his own story.

  Except I do have a direction, a destination in mind. I just don’t know how to get there from here. But I do know how to start.

  Step One: I must leave here. I must break the law.

  I have fully recovered from my implantation. The Ceremony is now a week behind me, the mandated gift for my twenty-seventh birthday (delayed two frustrating years due to the recent “protection” amendments). And I didn’t have to modify the process much: The Council, out of fear for the safety of their children in the face of Earth’s devastating actions as well as potentially more terrible enemies, has decided that all “adults” shall receive full Guardian-level nanotechnology (even though they have eliminated the Guardian force). All I needed to covertly add into the loading program was the code that will let me manually sever all connections to our network when the time is right, and disable any tracking signals (ostensibly designed to bring rescue in case of emergency, but more likely used by the Council to keep track of our activities, and I certainly can’t have that).

  One week on, and I’m still fascinated by the changes to my body: to be suddenly so much stronger, faster, resilient, and to be able to heal most wounds in minutes to hours. I could drive a blade or a bullet through my heart (assuming my reinforced bones didn’t simply stop the penetration like hardened steel), and my nanites would initiate a circulatory backup system while they knitted the tissues back together, then stimulated new cell growth to heal the wound without any scarring. And I won’t get any older than I am now, at least not biologically.

  I spent the last days with purpose, getting used to my new muscles, my new nervous system, learning how to move again. Any other one of us would have months to do this, but I can’t risk my modifications being detected in routine exams. The longest I can put off the post-implantation checks is one week, so one week is what I had. I got myself back on my feet as soon as I could manage, wrestled control over unfamiliar muscles, and learned to filter the heightened senses. Then, when I could move around safely and focus on what I was doing, I systematically ran through all of my secret training routines, just to see what I can do now, amazed by what I can do now. I know I’m physically ready for this.

  But then there are the changes to my mind: I’m suddenly fully interfaced with our networks, with our libraries, with all of us. And with our Tools: they respond to my thoughts like extensions of my body and brain. Finally, after twenty-seven Standard years, I am part of everything that we are—it’s all just a mental command away, manifesting as new sound and new vision and new power. I am Connected. I am part of our community. I am a full “adult.”

  It’s no small sacrifice that I’ll be deactivating all of these interfaces tonight, but I know I have no choice.

  I gather the things I will need, the items I’ve so painstakingly collected and crafted for my mission, my new life:

  Modified survival systems to allow me to walk the surface without freezing or slowly suffocating. I built them secretly, from equipment originally designed for pre-implant apprentices when they were still allowed to work outside, before all vulnerable “juveniles” were restricted to the Crèches. They plug into and supplement the standard-issue sealsuit, adding minimal bulk to slow me down. If I could use our Tools on my journey, I would not need these. I could generate a shelter field as needed. But the new edicts have put locks on our Spheres and Rods: they will no longer operate beyond our Stations, not without specific Council approval, a measure to try to ensure that no more former Guardians try to go off and return to their higher callings.

  Armor, to partially compensate for my lack of defensive fields. I modeled the pieces from my studies of medieval technology, but made them from modern laminates (I’m sure my instructors would agree this was a poor use of my studies in Materials Engineering). Then I artfully hard-polycoated them with a rust and ochre camouflage scheme to blend into the terrain. Chest, back, shoulders, neck, groin, and forearms. They should help me resist small arms and shrapnel, as well as edged weapons, but the coverage is far from complete because I will also n
eed to move. I strap the articulated plates on over my sealsuit, just like I’ve done dozens of times while I crafted and fitted them, and dozens more times to try training—moving and fighting—in them. It all feels much lighter now, of course, but somehow much heavier.

  A cowl and cloak, to conceal what I am, to help me fade into the landscape if needed, and to better weather the elements. It’s a multi-layered Nomad garment, a souvenir of my father’s Guardian service, a gift from grateful allies after the First Battle of Melas Two. Even though the Guardians were late to that fight, they did help finalize Chang’s defeat, and they were instrumental in helping the injured. My father would die only two months later, along with four of his fellows, their ship becoming target practice for Chang’s railgun.

  A knife and a daggar. Colonel Ram himself—in the indispensible trainings he provided, along with the legendary Zauba’a Ghaddar, to our first Guardians—insisted on the necessity of having a good knife, for survival, utility, and combat. And while both he and the Ghaddar strongly recommended and carried plain sturdy single-edged tools, Ram historically favored a stout double-edged dagger for close-quarters combat. So I made myself one of each, painstakingly researching the ideal alloy for edge retention and resilience, even at significantly sub-zero temperatures. Then I spent months teaching myself how to use them, since we have so spoiled ourselves with our technology that even such basic skills as cutting with a physical knife are alien to us. I found the primal experience surprisingly exhilarating. These are the tools my ancestors—my species—have used since long before the beginning of recorded history.