The God Mars Book Five: Onryo (18 page)

I don’t wait for her to obey or argue. I crouch, leap
up through the hole Thel just made, and wind up on what’s left of
the roof of the structure. I don’t see Thel, but from up here I can
see that the Barracks dome has become the scene of a battle.

There are Keeper bodies on several levels, and others
have sunk into makeshift positions to return the fire of a small
force of invaders, dragging out steel panels that they seem to have
kept handy to use as cover. More Keepers are mustering out of the
perimeter hatches, probably right out of their beds as some are
still sealing up their armor. At three separate points across the
dome I see Katar warriors and Nomad cloaks. My father. Rashid.
Others. They’ve come back in greater numbers, for rescue and
revenge. I remember that the Ghaddar carried some very effective
old Unmaker lock-breaking gear, which probably got them in here
with the main systems down, taking their opportunity once they
realized the perimeter sentries were blind, deaf and mute.

The Keepers in this section apparently only have
small arms, so they’re no match in accuracy for our sniper rifles
and the Katar archers. Or the Ghaddar, who leaps from rail to rail,
falling on the Keeper positions from their blind sides and cutting
them apart. I feel a surge of joy from Peter as he watches the
slaughter, tempered by frustration because he’s not doing the
killing himself. But the pressing priority is Thel.

“Abandoning your worshippers, Mage?” Peter taunts as
we scan for sign of him.

In answer, the structure gets ripped out from under
us, dropping us back into what had been Thel’s outer rooms. We
scramble up the twisted wreckage, only to have the Sphere thrust in
our face. I try to grab the shaft, but a pressor wave slams us
back, sending us crashing into the ruin. Not fast enough, though: I
see Thel up on what’s left of the structure, clutching his side
with his mangled hand. Peter managed to stab him in the spleen as
he hit us.

“I should have put you in a proper cage…” he
grunts.

“But instead you left me as a trap, hoping the Drakes
would come back and I would eat them for you,” Peter throws back at
him as we get to our feet. That revelation hits me like ice in my
core, but quickly boils into fresh rage. Thel was hoping to murder
my parents as well, leaving Peter to unconsciously do the deed if
they should ever dare come home, come looking for the friends they
abandoned.

Before we can charge him again, Thel makes the deck
start to give way underneath us.

Straker has dragged Murphy and the Katar clear, but
not far enough, just to the outer catwalk. I hear Murphy weakly
telling her to go, as he and the Katar support each other to limp
and drag for the nearest Nomad/Katar position. Straker moves fast
the other way, toward Thel, to draw his attention. I can hear her
Blade singing. Whatever it took from the Rod has made them both
strong.

The catwalk starts to buck and twist, then the metal
starts to disintegrate, breaking up the entire structure. I try to
scramble back up at him, but the wreckage is crumbling out from
under me. We can’t reach him…

Suddenly there’s something on Thel’s back, big and
rippling, semi-visible. I realize it’s the Ghaddar, putting the
reactive camouflage that Yod gifted her to good use. She drives one
of her stout knives up under his jaw and he chokes on it, but then
he throws her off, turns the Sphere on her, catches her in midair.
I expect her armor to dissolve, but whatever Yod did to it makes it
resistant. But she
is
vulnerable to sheer force. Thel shakes
her like a toy. He’ll break her spine…

Knowing our bullets would never penetrate the Sphere
field, Peter throws the Nagamaki like a javelin, and it pushes
through the field and then through Thel’s torso. He drops the
Ghaddar—I don’t see where she falls. Peter makes the big sword come
back to us, ripping out of Thel’s body. Thel staggers, trying to
hold himself together with his injured hand. We start to throw the
sword again, but Thel manages to knock us back with the Sphere.
Before we can recover, he staggers away and falls off the remaining
structure, down to the floor of the dome.

Peter is roaring with rage. We scramble for the
collapsing rail, throw ourselves over, drop thirty meters to the
main deck…

…and land in the midst of three dozen Keepers.

Despite whatever shock our appearance gives, they
don’t hesitate. They start shooting, not even caring if they’re in
their own crossfire.

Peter draws the short sword with his left hand and we
become a whirlwind of steel, blade in each hand, swatting bullets
and cutting men. What rounds get through to our armor do little but
annoy us. I realize I’m giggling like a child inside the skull mask
as bodies come apart as fast as I can hit them, and I’m
fast
. Just like with the bullets, my perception slows them
down until they look like they’re video run on one-tenth speed.
They don’t stand a chance.

When we’ve cut down everyone we can reach, Peter
plants the Nagamaki in the deck, draws the revolver, and we pick
off a few unfortunate souls of opportunity, until the cylinder runs
empty. The click of the hammer on a spent chamber spares one
fleeing man’s life, but I only feel disappointment at his
miracle.

Thel is nowhere to be seen. The blood of our work
soaks into us as we pause to reload.

Above us, I can see Straker: she’s stopped to watch
us from the collapsing rail, certainly wondering what the hell we
are, how we came to be in this game of the no-longer-human, and
where we fit in Yod’s schemes. She gives me a nod of thanks and
then goes to help Murphy and the Katar get to their rescuer force,
using her Blade to take any bullets fired their way. When they
encounter a small group of Keepers in their path, Straker runs into
them first, and strikes them down with what I realize is the flat
of her Blade, stunning but not killing. I share Peter’s displeasure
with her restraint.

The Ghaddar is also up on her feet now, retreating,
though moving slower than I’m used to seeing. She
is
hurt.
But Peter isn’t very forgiving of her, either.

They’re retreating! They could take this place! They
could finish the Keeper force.

I feel the urge to do it myself, to do it all myself,
but we need to find Thel. Thel is priority.

After a quick frantic search of the lower deck, we
find a short “trail” of Keeper bodies that didn’t die by gun or
arrow. They’ve been desiccated. Thel killed his own for the
resources he needed to start healing.

Then we find an exit hatch that should still be
locked. It could have been left open by the invading rescuers, but
the panel logs indicate it had been hacked only moments ago, and
from the inside.

I realize I’m leaving my father and my friends
behind, but that’s not important. I can
feel
Thel. Putting
our blade through him left something behind, a tracker that he
hasn’t found and disabled yet. It isn’t pin-point, but it gives
general direction.

We follow a corridor north, out into the dug tunnels.
Along our way, we find another drained body, this one an unlucky
civilian, so desiccated I can’t determine sex or age. What we don’t
encounter are any Keepers. Either they all responded to the fight
in the Barracks, or Thel ordered any he met to come with him.

The tunnel begins to slope upwards. I try to guess
Thel’s course using the maps in my head, but Peter already seems to
know where he’s going, and highlights the map accordingly.

This one eventually comes out up on the North Divide
Slope, a hundred meters above the colony.

“Why is he going up-slope?”

We can handle the lower pressure. He’s probably
trying to get above where the Rusties and your friends can follow
him. I used the trick once myself, trying to get Thel to chase me
past where his flunkies could keep up, but he realized what I was
doing and was too much of a coward to face me without backup.

But I have another thought, zooming out on my
internal maps, extrapolating…

“How high
can
we tolerate?”

Peter doesn’t answer. He may not know, especially if
he spent his entire rebirth-life doing nothing but harassing
Eureka.

Thel is still pinging from somewhere straight north
of us, and up—I can feel him getting higher and further away
despite our pursuit. If I’m reading the graphics right, he’s
somehow moving a lot faster than we can manage in these cramped
spaces. I realize he may already be outside, but he would still be
climbing over rocks and loose talus, so he should be getting
slower, not faster.

“Do the Keepers have aircraft?” I ask Peter.
“Vehicles?”

Mining machines. Nothing that fast.

That means he may be using some power of his combined
Companion and Sphere to propel him, not unlike what I’ve seen the
Jinn do. But if he is, he’s abandoned his so-called loyal subjects.
He’s running. Alone.

The maps in my vision change as I zoom out to take in
the bigger picture of the Trident. I thought they resembled my
flashcard maps, and now I see that they are my flashcard maps, or
I’ve re-created them, including the notes I’ve made during my
travels. (I realize I have no idea what happened to the device
itself. Was it looted from my body with everything else, or did it
somehow get absorbed into me?)

The only thing straight north of the colony is the
ridge that separates the South from the Central Blade. The crest at
this point is probably a good thousand meters above the colony,
which would be about halfway to Planum level from the elevation of
the belly of the Central Blade that the Katar are accustomed to.
That makes the crest nearly Jinn Station height, well below the
Atmosphere Net but far too thin for most men to manage in just a
breather. (This is why the Stations are out of the reach of most
non-Jinn: They’re too far up to climb to in a pressure suit with
the air one can practically carry, much less get back down from.
The trip would be suicide.)

So Thel may indeed just be trying to get himself up
out of reach of the invading force, but he has to know he isn’t out
of my reach. He’s got speed on his side, but if he just wanted to
outrun us, he’d be faster if he turned and fled along the ridge
instead of continuing to climb. He looks like he’s trying to get
over the top of the crest. The Central Blade would give him more
running room, but does he intend to just run forever?

Somehow I don’t think so. Looking at the bigger map,
assuming he keeps a straight course, I can see what he’s heading
almost directly toward.

We finally come to another recently used hatch, this
one an airlock sealed into the tunnel rock. Oddly, there’s no blast
of decompression when we force it. Whoever went out this way didn’t
care that they left the section depressurized, even knowing it
would impair those left behind. Amusingly, I realize I didn’t
notice the drop in pressure, any more than I had difficulty hiking
here from the DQ. I don’t feel at all hypoxic despite my
exertion.

We emerge into a trench thickly overgrown with vines.
Even in midnight darkness, I can see that the vines have been torn
by someone passing through in a hurry, unconcerned with
stealth.

We follow the easy trail, and begin climbing. I can
still feel Thel somewhere straight ahead of us and now definitely
well up-slope. He’s still not turning. He’s just going higher.

He is headed all the way up and over the crest. And
straight beyond that…

“I know where he’s going,” I tell Peter, and light up
Lucifer’s Grave on my map.

He’s not just running away from us. He’s running
to
someone he thinks can do a better job of protecting him
from us.

He said he knew who this Asmodeus was, that he’d
talked to him, maybe made some kind of deal with him.

“He also didn’t seem too surprised when he was told
at least one of his Keepers had been brain-gutted and used as a
flesh-and-blood drone.”

Looks like we’ll be dealing with Asmodeus ourselves,
then. Sooner rather than later.

This thought only spurs Peter on. And me.

I can feel things happen to me as we climb.

My skin (assuming I still have skin under all this
armor) starts losing sensation. It’s not like peripheral hypoxia.
It’s like my skin is getting thicker, tougher. Hardening.

We’re up above the growth now. The rocks are slick
with ice-film. It’s definitely well below freezing, but I barely
feel cool. Somewhere in the back of my head I get these vague
impressions of digital gauges telling me how warm I am and how much
energy, oxygen and hydration I’ve got. Everything seems like it’s
still in the safe range, but dropping slowly.

My eyes automatically shifted back to night vision
from the moment we emerged from the Keeper tunnels, letting me see
the world in fuzzy green in the faint starlight, where it should be
almost pitch black at this time of night. The graphics—maps,
tracking, gauges—keep popping up like digital hallucinations if I
track my eyes just right. This makes me feel sick and dizzy again
as it reminds me the tech is inside me, inside my head,
inside
my brain
. Wired into everything I am.

But most profound (and scary) are my lungs.
Something’s definitely happening inside them as the air thins. I
feel the urge not to breathe regularly, just a shallow breath a few
times a minute. I don’t feel any distress from this, despite
lugging all this metal I’m wearing and carrying up a steep incline
faster than most men could run on level ground. And converse to the
thinning of the atmosphere around me, my lungs actually feel like
they’re
pressurizing
, like they’ve been turned into
canisters. Or re-breathers: I can feel something—thousands of
somethings—processing deep inside them, churning away in my
chest.