The God Mars Book Five: Onryo (13 page)

“I suppose I should have seen it coming. Your parents
did. That’s why they took you away. I should have taken my family
away when I had the chance. But I couldn’t let go… I still wanted
to go back to Earth one day. And that got them killed.
I
got
them killed.”

He’s playing with the big sword now, standing it up
like a walking staff and turning it in his fingers. I didn’t see
him pick it up—it just appeared in his hand. It’s called a
Nagamaki
. It means “long wrapping” because of the extra-long
hilt. I have no idea how I know that.

I see his mood go from grief to rage. He wants to
kill, to avenge. He takes a firm hold of the big sword scabbard,
centers himself, breathes.

“April 2102. We’d been on-planet for four years.
Thel’s drones detected a sudden unexplained drop in the radiation
levels in the Hot Zone on the north side of the Chasma from
here.”

“I know it,” I tell him. I don’t tell him all the
rest, but somehow I know he could see it for himself if he looked.
He’s in my mind. I’m still pretty sure he’s just a hallucination,
made more vivid because I’m dying. And I must be dying, my brain
shutting down for good. That would explain the old memories, the
smells…

“Thel was sure the radiation from the ruptured
reactors was masking a nanotech bloom, a viral colony. Maybe the
buggers were even feeding off the old fuel, using it to power and
replicate. So we suited up, took the Lancer out—before dawn, so the
locals wouldn’t see. When we got to the perimeter of the Zone, the
levels dropped even more for some reason, and we started picking up
a signal, faint EMR emissions. Thel was sure it was a nanobot
colony, reproducing and thriving all these years, independent.

“The signal was coming from a small mountain, sitting
out by itself in the middle of the Zone. It was strikingly odd:
oval, with a flat top. Deck said it reminded him of some kind of
giant burial mound, a barrow.

“We uplinked for instructions, but our signals
couldn’t get through. We couldn’t even reach the DQ, but then there
was at least one mountain range and a nearly Planum-high ridge
between us. Your dad thought it was the radiation, messing with our
gear, but the reads insisted it was still low, at least tolerable
for an EVA. Of course, Thel was sure that it was a
nano-intelligence jamming us, and insisted we take a closer look.
So we set down on the top of the mound and risked a
walk-around.

“Then we almost lost Declan. He fell through
something just under the sand, down a shaft, like a vent. It was
artificial, cut down through the rock. Luckily, it was narrow
enough for him to catch himself in the low gravity. It dropped down
nearly a hundred meters. And that’s where the signals were coming
from…”

More like a dream, I can see it myself now, though
through someone else’s eyes and the thick tinted polycarb visor of
a pressure suit. I can even hear my breathing (or whoever this is
breathing) amplified inside the helmet. I’m taking a cautious walk
across what I guess is the top of the Barrow, a few square
kilometers of rocky plain surrounded by sky. The distant rims and
mountains are masked in haze, but I can still barely make out the
distinctive crest of the Spine Range and get my bearings.

Another suit is setting up a motorized winch at the
edge of a hole about a meter across. When I get closer, the hole is
a perfect square, definitely manmade.

“Declan had cracked his visor in the fall, and we
needed your dad to have the ship ready to fly in case things turned
on us, so that left Thel and I to do the spelunking.”

Flash-forward: I’m being lowered down a shaft barely
big enough to fit through, my helmet lights illuminating the
cut-stone walls.

“It took almost all the line we had, but…”

I know what I’m going to see before the shaft opens
into the cavernous spaces inside the Barrow. But I still get a
surprise: When I was here myself only days ago, the entire facility
was stripped bare. It isn’t now.
Then
. I remember this is
sixteen Standard years ago. There are massive machines built into
the walls, sprouting out of the floor; shiny surfaces of black and
white and satin silver. What I don’t see is any sign of visible
controls. And everything looks dead, shut down, and covered with
dust. There’s a good centimeter thick of it when we get our boots
on the deck.

“We had no idea what this was. It wasn’t on any
colony maps, or in any corporate reports, at least none we had
access to. We couldn’t call Earth for their input, so we had to
assume this was something secret. Or maybe something the ETE had
built and then abandoned. Or it could be the base of whoever had
been running the Discs, since—as far as we knew—no one had ever
figured out who that was. But the sheer size of it… We couldn’t
imagine how something like this could have been built during the
colonial era without attracting a
lot
of attention. And all
the machinery… We had no idea what it was for, what it did. We
couldn’t make any of it work—it was all shut down, either dead or
locked. Except for one room.”

I see it: It’s a comparatively small space, sealed
behind a pair of red-labeled hatches. (It’s
not
the chamber
of the Companion Blades—I was worried that was what I was going to
see. But the warning symbols on the hatches are the same.) What it
looks like is a kind of secure storage area. There are racks of
tubes of various sizes along the walls.

“Thel, don’t…”

I hear Peter’s voice inside the helmet with me, see
the other suit cautiously touch one of the racks, then try to pry a
canister free. They don’t budge, locked in place. They all seem
inert.

“Over here,” Peter says, turning to a single tube
that’s sitting out by itself, locked in a device that looks like
it’s intended to prepare it for something. The tube is transparent,
half-a-meter long. It’s the same kind of tube that the Companion
Blades were locked in, only about half the size, and it isn’t a
Blade that I see inside. It’s strange and beautiful, a mesmerizing
shifting mass of what looks like metal. Sometimes it looks liquid,
sometimes crystalline, sometimes like blowing sand.

It doesn’t seem to react to our presence. I hear no
siren’s seduction in my head.

“Nanotech...” Peter assumes. Thel doesn’t answer
him—I can’t even see his face because his helmet is turned away
from me—but he goes to the case like a man who’s discovered
treasure, touches it like he’s touching a lover.

“Thel…”

The device unlocks, releasing the tube. The shifting
mass inside stops shifting, forms in the blink of an eye into a
faceted sphere about ten centimeters in diameter, and drops to the
bottom of the tube as if inert.

“I think you killed it,” Peter says, half joking,
half terrified.

“No. It was just interfacing with this other
device.”

I know the voice. I have the sudden urge to drive a
sword through the back of his suit, but I have neither sword nor
control of this body. I’m just a passenger, in events that
supposedly happened when I was three years old.

Thel sets the canister aside, struggles with the
device it was mounted in like he’s trying to take that as well, but
it won’t budge. He tries so hard he knocks the tube over. Peter
lunges in to catch it, afraid of what would happen if it broke.
Thel turns on him and snatches the tube away like a greedy
child.

I see his face now. Dark, pitted skin, sharp bones,
green-brown eyes full of anger and suspicion. I expect him to
snarl, but he just takes his prize and appraises it with a thin
smile.

It’s the robed man with the white staff and the
Sphere, the one that disarmed Straker, took her. Only he’s missing
the big scars.

“The man with the funny name,” I mutter.

“Thelonious Monk Harris,” Peter tells me, from
outside the memory. “His parents were apparently Jazz fans.”

Jazz, I know, is a kind of music, but otherwise I
have no idea what that means.

I watch and listen as Peter and Thelonious heatedly
discuss the wisdom of taking the tube with them to study. They have
no way to get Earth’s advice or orders. Thel successfully argues
that the radiation levels are likely to rise again, making them
retreat from the region for who knows how long, maybe years; and
both the Lancer and the Don Quixote have containment facilities for
this very contingency. It
is
why they came to Mars to begin
with, after all. And this could get us home. Them home. Back to
Earth.

Peter gives in.

Watching their oxygen gauges, they make visual
records of everything. Thel doesn’t let the tube out of his hands
the whole time.

“Huh…” Peter mumbles. On one of the wall racks, among
a line of much smaller tubes, one of them appears to have come
loose, or not been properly locked in to begin with. This tube is
opaque, no telling what mystery it hides. Thelonious greedily grabs
it up too.

“Time to go, kids,” I hear my father’s voice over
their helmet links. “Radiation’s spiking up here again. Almost too
hot for your suits.”

Apparently Thelonious was right. The two reluctantly
hurry back to their lines, and take turns getting hauled up the
shaft.

“We barely got out of there before toxic exposure,”
Peter continues. “The radiation came back with a vengeance, like it
was trying to chase us away. Thel was frustrated, but he had his
two prizes for study, and all the video we took.

“Once we were clear, we managed to get one call out
to Earth, to let them know we’d found what we thought were nanotech
samples, and were heading back to the DQ to start tests. We never
got a reply back, so we don’t even know if they received. That was
the last time we were able to contact Earth.

“The next morning, Deck woke us up to tell us our
uplink transmitter had gone down sometime during the night. But it
hadn’t gone down. It was missing. Someone had pulled it. We
couldn’t find it anywhere. There was no sign of unauthorized entry.
My wife—our operations security officer—pulled up the security
video, but it had been tampered with. One frame showed the
transmitter still intact; the next it was just gone. So we
transferred over to the Lancer, only to find that transmitter had
been taken as well. Someone had cut us off from Earth.
Intentionally.”

He continues to absently spin the Nagamaki in his
fingers.

“Everyone suspected Thel, and he suspected the rest
of us. But given our orders and how secretive and illegal the whole
mission was, we really couldn’t trust anyone. Only two
possibilities made sense: Someone on the crew didn’t want us
reporting whatever we learned, or someone—probably Thel—didn’t want
Earth’s orders getting in the way of studying the samples. Either
way, we were totally cut off from home, with something potentially
very deadly in our labs. And we had children.”

He grips the scabbard near the mouth and uses him
thumb against the guard to pop the blade free, exposing the brass
blade collar and a few centimeters of steel, losing his gaze in
it.

“Thel became even more obsessive than before. We
started to suspect he was losing his mind. He didn’t sleep, barely
ate, stayed away from us, kept himself locked up in the labs with
the samples.

“Opening the cylinders in containment did
nothing—they didn’t try to interact with anything inorganic. So we
tried plant matter. Still nothing. If this was a life-eating
plague, it wasn’t hungry, at least not for veggies. And that’s when
Thel showed us his own, encrypted orders, code-stamped by UNCORT
before we left Earth:

“We were directed to use the locals as test subjects
if necessary. It proved that UNCORT knew there were survivors here
before we found them, and they were willing to risk their lives for
the sake of ‘research’. The thought made us sick, but the terms
specified that we would not be cleared to return to Earth if we
failed to complete our mission to the best of our ability. So we
gave in, hoping that UNCORT would send us a new transmitter with
the next supply drop when they didn’t hear from us, figuring we’d
just had a malfunction.

“Maria and Deck took care of the hard part, went
hunting. Your mom mixed them up some tranquilizers. Approaching the
Eurekans was almost guaranteed suicide, since they had snipers with
military rifles on every approach, but the Rusties only had bows
and arrows. They used the Lancer, found a gathering party, set down
and waited for one of them to wander away from the group, and took
him quietly. He was kid, barely a teenager. We kept him out, and
your mom ran exams. She was ecstatic to have a subject to study up
close, to see what two or three generations living wild on this
world could do to a human body. He was remarkably healthy, but so
different… She gave Thel blood and tissue samples, thinking that’s
what he had in mind.

“We caught him that night… He’d locked our sleeping
guest in a containment lab with the samples, unsecured. Thank God
nothing happened. But we had to point guns at Thel to get him to
unlock the hatch and stand down. Your mom checked out our guest,
made sure he was clean, and we flew him out and dropped him off in
home territory first thing in the morning. He slept through the
whole horrible episode.”

He looks at me now, takes a deep breath.

“That’s when your mom and dad decided to leave. They
couldn’t be part of something like this, and Thel was getting
scarier. Maria found weapons missing from the armory. One night
your dad caught Thel trying to get into your room while you were
sleeping—I thought he was going to beat Thel to death. Considering
what happened, maybe he should have. It would have prevented a lot
of suffering and death. Maybe I should have.”

His thumb caresses the edge of the sword, but it
doesn’t cut him.

“He asked me to come with him, your dad did, saying
we’d never be going home anyway. He was Mission Commander, and he
didn’t want to be part of it anymore. He said we could find a
place, maybe integrate with one of the survivor groups, have a
life, have a life for our kids. Maria was pregnant…”