The God Mars Book Four: Live Blades, Page 2

  And a sword. It took me a long time to decide upon the ideal design. I chose what appealed, based on the years I’ve spent secretly training, obsessively studying every historical and contemporary martial arts file we had in our libraries (including Colonel Ram’s and the Ghaddar’s sessions with our Guardians), practicing every free moment in the privacy of the tap-core tunnels. I take it from its hiding place under my bed: It’s a hybrid of Chinese and Viking, a medium-length broad double-edged blade with a thick crescent guard and a hand-and-a-half grip capped by a solid “trefoil” pommel, another product of my redirected metallurgical studies. I put it, along with my knives, in the scabbards I’ve made for them, and secure them to my belt where my Tools should be.

  All I have to do now is shut down my interfaces and leave.

  I take a moment to look at myself—my finished product, my transformation—in the mirror in my bedroom. It looks… alien—such a stark contrast to the pervasive order and safety of the world I’ve lived in all my life. For a moment, I almost can’t believe I designed and painstakingly crafted all of this. It’s all gaudy violence, ridiculous to my scientific sensibilities. I would call it a costume, the play-dress of immature fantasy, but every part of it is functional, and completely appropriate, even necessary, for the world I’m about to step into.

  And it strikes me now like a weight much heavier than all the metal I’m wearing: This is it. This is final. I’m going. Outside. And I have no plans to return.

  I look around one last time at the world I’m leaving behind. It’s not a large world, by any means, despite the artificial sunlight and extensive gardens and projected landscapes (a rotating selection of past Mars, current Mars, and the Earth my forefathers knew). The Crèche, even the Station as a whole, is a facility, a contained habitat. It’s big enough for two hundred and forty of us to comfortably live and work and while our extended lives away in, but it’s certainly not a planet. The planet is Outside. And it’s the planet that needs us, needs all of us, very badly. Especially now. I’ll just have to do.

  This, I realize, is the impetus I need: I need to feel the smothering isolation of this place, I need to rage at all the restrictions that our generational leaders have placed on our lives in the name of keeping us “safe” in a world that’s becoming less so by the day. I need to feel disgust at the certainly lethal stupidity of our choices to simply withdraw and hide from the twin threats of the reckless military might of Earth’s new world government and the devastating weapons forged by the supposedly indestructible Syan Chang. I need righteous anger to purge my doubts and my attachments to the only home—the only world—I’ve ever known and shove me Outside.

  But first, a moment of nostalgia, here in my rooms for the last time…

  One thing I know I’ll miss: My grandfather’s books, antique crumbing paperbacks, a selection of classic literature and science fiction and fantasy, expensively brought from Earth, handed down after his death in the years after the Apocalypse, passed to my father, and through him to me. I wonder again if my father, and his father, realized the seeds they were planting: tales of adventure, of heroes, of larger worlds. I pull one of my favorites, from a series by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and drink in the cover art: Muscled warriors and beautiful women bravely facing fierce monsters and detestable villains, set on a Mars that never existed. The protagonist even shares my surname.

  One thing I tell myself I’ll miss: My brother. My only blood family. And I tell myself that Elias will miss me. But there’s no connection, no affection between us, and never has been. All we share is a name, and a father; a father who’s now dead, and the nominal motivator for my mission.

  I look one last time at the obligatory family images on my desktop. The schism between us is clear in every one where both of us appear together, pretending to be family, pretending to be brothers. Hate in the eyes of a child that never fully faded as he grew into an adult. I started my life with him quietly—and sometimes not so quietly—blaming me for the death of our mother, as if a fetus can be responsible for the complications of a difficult pregnancy. I expect he also blamed my father for impregnating her before her age of implantation, but that was back when we still did such things the natural way, because we had to, because our nanites prevent in-utero pregnancy and we hadn’t perfected our synthesized womb-incubators yet, so young fragile Natural mothers did face risks. So Elias should really blame the state of our science. And if not, then himself, as he’d put our mother through just as much risk as I did, as he’s three years my senior, and his complication-free birth probably helped encourage the young couple to repeat the ritual, to increase their family.

  Maybe he was showing his resentment by not volunteering for Guardian service, not even after our father was killed in that service (a calling I was denied when the Council disbanded the force before I was of age). But I expect the stronger reason is that he’s always been so much more invested in science—in his precious particle physics—than family. Or people, as I’ve seen him with neither a lover nor friends his entire life, and seemingly not bothered by that isolation. Maybe not having a mother—or losing a mother so young—did that to him. Or maybe he’s just wired that way. I never knew a mother, and I find that I can’t not care about others, especially those far more vulnerable than we are.

  A clear sign of the chasm between us is that Elias suspects nothing, that he’s never noticed all my preparations: two-and-a-half years’ worth of secret training and crafting, begun when Colonel Ram came to us and made us face the world outside and gave us our mandate to protect the vulnerable. Or if he does suspect, he doesn’t even care to try to stop me from doing something so outrageous. Perhaps he wants me to incur the wrath of the Council, and the subsequent humiliation and ostracism.

  But what he doesn’t realize: I welcome that. I would consider myself in good company, along with Doctor Paul Stilson, his brave brother Simon—brothers that truly loved each other, and the people of this planet, above themselves—and all the other Guardians who tried to continue the fight against Council orders to withdraw, until the Council forced compliance by remotely deactivating all of their Tools. And especially Paul Stilson, who refused to quit even when he was disarmed, and who follows Colonel Ram to this day (assuming he still lives).

  My resolve bolstered by these non-fictional heroes, I confidently go now to join them. I can only hope they will accept me into their esteemed number, and allow me to be part of their good service.

  I gather the last few practical things I may need: A few canteens to carry precious water, and a small pack of assorted nutritive bars to supplement my nanites’ recycling abilities.

  Finally, I use the manual disconnect code to shut down all of my interfaces, all of my connections with my fellows and what they’ve wrought. And just like that, with a trigger thought, my head goes silent, back the way it was before I was implanted. I am alone within myself.

  I set my desk to simulate my presence here, hopefully convincing until someone (Elias?) comes to physically look for me. I’ve already stripped the tag-ware from my suit and gear. I am invisible.

  Then I sneak away, in the dark of night, like a thief, like a Shinkyo Shinobi.

  I’ve planned my exit route to avoid both living and machine eyes, using the conduit access tunnels from the housing section to get underneath Life Support, then around the Reactor Cluster shielding, and climb down in what should be blind darkness (my enhancements make everything glow ghostly green) into the constantly thrumming and hissing abyss that is the Station’s Tap Well.

  I make too much noise despite my practice climbs, because now I’m wearing the extra armor, and the awkward protrusion of my sword scabbard refuses to cooperate. With my enhanced hearing, every scrape and bump echoes loud as a gunshot even over the music of the always-working Tap Cores, but no one (or thing) seems to notice. I’ve picked the hour well, before the leaner nocturnal shift begins making their maintenance checks.

  I find the lateral branch tunnel I need, created dec
ades ago by the Core Drillers. This one is long unused since their automated tentacles bored and sucked this section of cliff rock practically dry before moving on to richer strata. These tireless machines have been cutting and mining permafrost veins and useful mineral deposits for more than half a century now, leaving a labyrinth of tunnels like the root-patterns left by some giant tree, reaching dozens of kilometers outward from the Station’s foundations. Even with a map, getting lost here, deep in the Rim, is almost guaranteed. But I have spent decades exploring at every opportunity, if for no other reason than to escape my brother’s company. Then I made these abandoned spaces my training monastery, perfecting my skills far away from critical eyes.

  I make my way deep downslope—beyond the security perimeter of our surface sensors—before I find my ultimate exit. I found this way out over a year ago, digging through a few meters of collapse where this Tapline got too close to the surface. Then I placed a makeshift “airlock” across it to hide the breach from pressure sensors. The passage is barely a meter wide and high—I have to crawl. I carefully open the inner shelter fabric “hatch” I glued across the gap, and seal myself beyond it.

  The tunnels—even this far out—are warm from the Cores, so I’m hit by a shocking blast of sub-zero air the instant I rip away the fabric outer hatch, the pressure equalizing in a rush. I can feel the cold through my suit, through my mask and helmet, even as my onboard heater struggles to compensate.

  I crawl gracelessly out into the night, out under the open sky, and promptly almost lose my balance when I try to stand up on the loose rock of the Southwest Rim slopes. There’s a thin glaze of ice on the rocks, and already forming on my armor. My systems tell me it’s negative twenty degrees Celsius. The atmospheric pressure up here is only 0.17, three points lower than it should be, despite our best efforts to undo the damage that the Earth commanders did in their desperation to destroy beings like us. Their overkill bomb created a pulse strong enough to crash most of the Melas Atmosphere Net, bleeding years of our efforts into space before we could repair the damage. Add to that the fallout, bolstered by the fissile material in Chang’s reactors, which cooked a toxic swath across the middle of the valley. Compounding the tragedy is that they probably didn’t even succeed in finishing Chang, despite the price paid by everyone who calls the valley home.

  But I am Outside. I take a moment to appreciate the crossing of that threshold, to look up at the starry sky and feel the winds blast me with fine sand. Then I move before any long-range eyes see me.

  My first course is down, as there are still thousands of meters to the beginning of the valley floor. My eyes boost the faint starlight into a hazy glow, enough to find my footing. I have six hours until sunrise to get myself out of physical sight of my home. I look back up-slope once, but can barely see the Station’s towers rising above me against the Rim cliffs. All I can see is their output, the eternal columns of steam and oxygen and Greenhouse gasses billowing up to flatten and spread against the Net ceiling as they have done since the reactors went online more than sixty years ago, diminished not at all by my absence.

  As I trudge my boots downhill, keeping hold of my sword hilt so that the scabbard doesn’t catch on the rocks behind me, I begin to feel the extent of the path that stretches before me: hundreds upon hundreds of kilometers (and so far I am only able to count my progress in the hundreds of meters), east all the way across Melas Chasma and then deep into Coprates. I will pass by the territory of the Shinkyo, pass the Earth base Melas Two, go outwards to Tranquility—my heroes’ former home—and beyond. I’m following them, though I know not where they’ve gone. East. Just east. To protect those fleeing the disaster Earth has wrought here in Melas. To seek the peoples of legend that live in the deep green.

  Mike Ram. Paul Stilson. Belial. Lux. Azazel. Astarte. Thompson Bly.

  None of them have been seen or heard from in six months.

  I will find them. I will offer my life and my sword in their great service. And if Syan Chang did indeed survive that nuclear fireball, I will make myself part of finding a way to destroy him with finality, for the sake of everyone on this planet.

  8 April, 2118:

  It’s taken me a week to travel only one hundred and fifty kilometers.

  Being eager but not foolish, I’ve gone somewhat out of my way to the north in order to give Shinkyo territory a wide berth. Their Shinobi have well-deserved reputations as devastating opponents, even to large forces of fully-equipped Guardians, and they’re certainly still hungry for any opportunity to take our bodily technology. Even keeping ninety kilometers between myself and their likely base of operations in the Dragon’s Tail (their original colony is still sitting abandoned since their ill-advised “surrender” to Earth forces nine months ago), I take the extra precaution of wearing my father’s cowl to cover my distinctive helmet, hoping to pass for a Nomad or a Knight, or perhaps something much more frightening.

  The route makes me do some climbing, up over the elevated slide plains and rolling hills of western Melas, finally dropping down into the central lowlands as I come up on the ruins of Baraka. From the crest of the uplands I can see the near-miss crater that proved too near, destroying much of the colony and rendering the rest uninhabitable. What remained was squatted in for a time, until the first-generation Nomads—joining with their UASP brethren to the north at Uqba—packed up every piece of emergency survival equipment they could salvage and headed out into the open desert, living off ingenious taps they spliced into our Feed Lines, moving regularly to avoid competitors for precious resources. And thriving.

  I stop several times to check the radiation counts. I still appear to be keeping north and west of the fallout drift-pattern that roughly bisected the valley after the Earth commanders recklessly detonated a four hundred and fifty kiloton yield nuclear weapon inside a flying fortress powered by several re-tasked and modified colony fusion reactors. The destruction of Chang’s flagship—the Stormcloud—was certainly an urgent priority, but their method proved disastrous, and was probably planned and ordered without a thought for consequences. That one bomb is what’s responsible for the toxicity of almost twenty percent of the valley—a swath two hundred and fifty kilometers from east to west and almost fifty kilometers wide—as well as the critical failure of the Atmosphere Net, bleeding off nearly a decade’s worth of enriched atmosphere and dropping the pressure below what’s livable for too many of the local peoples, and sending generational cultures on an exodus into unknown and likely dangerous lands to the east just to survive.

  I’ve considered risking a journey to ground zero, to see what’s hopefully the end of Syan Chang for myself, to poke through the shards of molten wreckage to assure myself that my father’s murderer—and the murderer of so many thousands of others—is indeed incinerated and disintegrated beyond recovery. But I know I couldn’t manage the distance on foot. Even the shortest route, twenty-five kilometers in that hot zone (and back), could do me irreparable damage. I doubt I would survive the first leg of the trip. So I’ll have to delay my “closure” until I have the luxury of some kind of aircraft.

  But that’s assuming Chang is actually dead. I’ve obsessively studied the video records of the rebel Guardians that joined the attack on his ship that day, then raced to protect the more-vulnerable humans from the blast as Chang, for no clear reason, chose to pilot his doomed fortress away from them before it was consumed in the nuclear fireball. Chang appeared to be injured, weakened by the combined assaults of Colonel Ram, Paul Stilson and the unknown hybrids Belial and Kali. Perhaps he finally saw that he was beaten, that he could no longer fight an enemy willing to throw nuclear warheads at their own people and allies, that he hoped those he was saving could do better in that endeavor. Or perhaps he simply used the time and distance to get himself off the ship, along with his own hybrid allies Fohat and Asmodeus, before the explosion. If so, I have no reason to visit Ground Zero—we will all be facing Chang again soon enough. (Is it a sign of some pathology of my own that
part of me does hope for the opportunity?)

  I stop now on a rise overlooking the Baraka ruin, still five or six kilometers away. I’ve already decided not to set foot there, thinking the discretion would be a show of respect to the Nomads, and to the holy ground that once held the first Mosque on Mars. I have no idea if any of them are even watching to appreciate my act, though I have detected movement and heat from time-to-time on the far periphery of my scanning range.

  Behind me, the sun is setting over the long parallel valleys of Ius and Tithonium. The evening wind “tide” is battering my back, as if pushing me forward to the ruin. But this is as far as I go until tomorrow. Traveling at night, in the deep cold, has been putting too much demand on my limited resources (and the ground gets slick with the glaze of frost that forms). And from here, I can see approach from all directions.

  I find some rocks to partially shield me from the cyclic winds, risk lifting my mask to sip precious water and nibble from my rations, feeling the bite of the cold on my skin as I do so. I dig a shallow hole with my hands, clear a relatively smooth place to sit—regretting that one thing I failed to pack was a simple entrenching tool—and settle in to sleep sitting up with my back propped against stone.