The God Mars Book Five: Onryo (24 page)

We walk freely into their perimeter, out in the open
in full daylight. Still, I see no movement, hear nothing but the
rustle of our own armor, the grinding of our boots on the gravel,
our breath through the mask, the breeze through the green.

We forgo the outlying hatchways, walk right up to the
structure, see the signs of recent cutting, scavenging to feed
Asmodeus’ war factory. None of the tool marks look fresher than the
last time I was here, but that isn’t necessarily a promising sign.
If Asmodeus still wanted the raw materials, he would have come to
take them, take the whole colony, and its people…

We go still, listening for the signals of Harvesters,
imagining the worst.

(I should have come back sooner.)

Nothing. But I
can
hear the low hum of the
colony’s processors and recyclers, still operating somewhere deep
under my feet. I tell myself that’s a good sign, though I expect
they’d keep running for awhile even if everyone were dead.

We climb through the rocks and wreckage with the
colony schematics overlaid in my vision, until we find a hatchway
that should take us down close to the Barracks, a place we recently
left full of butchered bodies. The battered airlock depressurizes
when we crack it—another good sign. I immediately smell the sour
stink of humans, but not rancid death.

“
Do
they bury their dead?” I ask Peter,
remembering how they left their own to rot after the battle outside
the DQ. I had to bury them myself, including the desiccated remains
of the ones I consumed during my “rebirth”, though Peter insisted
they be interred a significant distance away from his wife, child
and friend. I put them neatly in a hole, covered them with dirt and
rocks, and performed
Salat al Janazah
—the ritual funeral
prayers my father taught me, that we performed for every one of
ours we lost. (Even though I had no reason to believe any of the
dead Keepers were of the Faithful, I prayed for them just like I
prayed for Peter’s family, and for Declan Chance. I reason that if
it is the duty of all the Faithful to pray for the souls of the
Faithful dead, so it should be the duty of all human beings to pray
for the souls of all the dead.)

Bury, burn, put out to rot… I don’t know. Never cared
to ask. Never stumbled across a graveyard or crematorium. But they
would drag off the ones I killed before I came back, clean up my
“artwork”. Maybe Thel was just in too much of a hurry to play with
your redheaded friend to let his slaves care for their fallen.

(I consider: Maybe they would have eventually, if we
hadn’t attacked them in their homes. Or maybe they just didn’t dare
to come recover the bodies, once they knew the Onryō was no longer
sealed in its tomb.)

The Katar took away their own fallen before I made it
back from the Grave; they secured the stripped bodies and carried
them home for burial as they retreated after their own revenge
raid. The Ghaddar told me that.

She also told me how hard my father searched for my
remains, how he didn’t want to leave Eureka, even knowing that I
must have died from my wounds. He imagined they’d taken my body and
defiled it, or at least took it for study as it had probably been
decades since they’d seen humans with physiology similar to their
own, and that I would never enter heaven whole because they’d
denied me a proper burial. The Pirates did such things to our
people because they knew it would hurt us: they would take our dead
away and supposedly decorate their cliff fortresses with our skins
and bones, or wear our bones and teeth like jewelry, or leave us to
dry and crumble, hung up high out of reach in the thin cold. The
Shinobi mutilated our corpses as a warning to trespassers, but were
kind enough to leave them on their borders for us to collect. Those
that dared the Keeps of Industry or Pioneer simply never
returned.

Bodies are just meat. Whatever they were is long
gone.

“You still tend the graves of your own loved ones,” I
challenge indelicately. “You still pray over their ashes.”

That’s for me. Funerals are for the living, not the
dead.

My father told me something similar, as we buried our
own over the years.

“And will you make a grave for me, even if there’s
nothing to bury?”

I expect I’ll be making a lot of graves, assuming how
long I’m likely to be around. Unless your Yod decides to reset our
little drama again.

We drop down through the inner hatch into a dimly lit
corridor, which my vision illuminates in ghostly green. I don’t see
a living soul, don’t hear a human sound. As far as I can tell, it’s
just us and the automated systems.

I wonder how many times Yod’s done it. Your friend
Colonel Ram suspected that, didn’t he? That Yod’s actually
rewritten the world more than once, because we keep going wrong… Is
anything about us real?

“What do you mean?” I’m afraid I know.

Think about it, lad. Yod said he just reset us to an
earlier state. But he didn’t actually rewind time, he just
physically changed everything to match a previous state, changed
us, including our memories. So why not just rewrite history
completely while he was at it? He could give us all entirely false
memories and we’d never know… Or maybe he made us all from scratch,
just like a real God…

I wince at the blasphemy, but I can’t deny I’ve
thought similar things myself. But I can’t think about that
now.

“Why are we talking about this now?”

Just thinking about what a messed-up world this is
that he’s made. Of all the possibilities… Is this really preferable
to whatever we did as immortals? Humans de-evolved to primitives,
savages... It’s just that some of the monkeys have guns.

“And bombs. Nuclear ones.”

I feel him chuckle because I’ve just lumped the
“civilized” Earthmen in with the “savages”.

“What does that make us?”

Monkey gods.

“Sounds like a bad idea.”

Where is everybody?

We find our way easily enough to a main hatch into
the Barracks. It’s unguarded, abandoned like the rest of what we’ve
seen. But now I
do
hear hatches closing and manually locking
in the distance, echoing down the corridors and tunnels. Shuffling.
Whispering.

They’re hiding. From me. And that means they’re still
here, still alive.

On the hatch in front of me are taped slips of paper
with Japanese characters. Laid out across the threshold are small
bowls and trays of various foods, set out like offerings. I reach
out and touch the papers, hoping Peter will recognize the
symbols.

“
O-Fuda
,” the Ghaddar’s voice says from behind
me. She’s come up on me with her usual stealth—I barely felt the
low EMR bleed of her cloaks before she announced herself. Of course
she followed me from the DQ, just like she’s kept her constant
watch on me, probably thinking I need supervision if not combat
support. “Shinto warding spells. Except they name you as Kami of
this place.”

“The only way to appease an Onryō,” I remember what
Peter said. “Make me divine. Worship me.” I nudge the food
offerings with the toe of my boot, half expecting a booby trap.

Now I hear the rustling and shuffling of humans
trying to be quiet, slowly coming closer. Down the corridor past
her, I can see them with my enhanced vision in the poor light:
Civvies, filling the passageway, moving cautiously, fearfully. They
also come from the lateral corridors. They stop when they’re still
several meters out of my reach, freeze for a few seconds showing me
empty hands, and begin dropping to their knees, bowing like they’re
performing
Salat
except they stay down, foreheads almost to
the deck. They drop wave after wave, stretching back as far as I
can see. It’s an awkward act, like something they’ve just recently
learned to do.

It’s called “Dogeza”. Whoever created the O-Fuda…
Maybe the same man who painted the warding symbols on the DQ hatch
and left the grave offerings, maybe a descendant… He probably
taught them how to show respect, how to apologize, how to
submit…

“No one should kneel to me,” I mutter. Then louder:
“Do not kneel to me! You have nothing to fear.”

“You’re not the only thing they fear,” another
familiar female voice comes down the corridor from behind them.
They shift, still on their knees, and make a narrow path for Jak
Straker, her eyes glowing green in the shadows to announce her.

She steps through them, and as she does, I see a few
of the Civvies shyly look up at her, and a very few dare to
cautiously reach out and touch her as she passes, like the contact
will pass something of her to them. She smiles kindly as she goes,
tolerating the attention. But then she clears them and steps up to
me, her face going hard. She stretches out her hand and shows me
that she’s carrying the remains of a Harvester module, sticky with
blood and gore as if torn fresh from a skull.

“Where?” I ask.

“Coming west up the Central Blade. The Katar have
stopped six at their Wall. I just intercepted two that were headed
here. Wearing Chang Black. One had Zodangan tattoos. The other
didn’t—PK Reg.” I can feel that last detail hurt her, but it
doesn’t sound like she recognized her fellow Keeper.

“Scouts? Or vectors?” Peter asks through me. She
shrugs.

“Wherever Asmodeus is, UNMAC can’t see him,” she
tells me what I’ve been discreetly listening in on for the last
week. “He’s probably got another visual net over his ship, wherever
he’s camped.” Then she chews at her scarred lip, tells me what I
haven’t heard: “Harvesters have attacked the Pax, infected some of
their Steaders and Hunters. Thankfully Ram and his team made it to
Hold Keep in time to stop it from spreading, but they lost fourteen
to infection first, including two children. Ram, Lux and Bly are
trying to hold a defensive perimeter while Bel, Azazel and Dee work
on countermeasures, maybe a cure. Paul Stilson and the Carters took
a ‘specimen’ up to White Station yesterday, to try to get the ETE
involved. We haven’t heard back from them yet.”

“No one’s told the Unmakers about the Harvesters?” I
ask because there’s been no link chatter about the Harvesters, no
panic. Unless they’re keeping it quiet…

“Ram sent word to Colonel Ava,” Straker admits.
“She’s waiting for his team to learn more before setting up a
briefing with General Richards. We want to be able to offer them
some effective countermeasures so hopefully they won’t… overreact.
Luckily, so far no drones have been seen beyond the Trident.”

“But if Asmodeus gets Harvesters past Ram’s thin
line, they could infect the Forge, then Tranquility.”

“Kali is at Tranquility,” she reminds me
needlessly.

“And Asmodeus knows that. So what if they bypass
Tranquility, infect the Food Traders, and through them the Melas
Nomads?” I worry about my own people. “Or the surface refugee camp
at Melas Two? The Unmakers wouldn’t be able to ignore it then.
They’d probably start bombing immediately, even their own base. Or
worse: What if he offers the technology to the Shinkyo? They’re
certainly stupid enough to accept it, to try to use it themselves.
Then we’d be fighting Harvesters coming at us from two sides.”

She doesn’t have an answer for me. I can see her pain
behind her metallic eyes: Any of her people who were still with
Asmodeus are either animated corpses or slaves likely soon to be
turned into animated corpses.

I turn away from her, turn away from the still bowing
Civvies, put my hand on the blast hatch. We reach out, infect the
lockwork, and after several seconds I hear the mechanisms give way.
We push the heavy barrier aside and repeat the process with the
inner door, ready to draw either sword or revolver. The Ghaddar
shifts out of the way of potential fire. The Civvies lower
themselves into the deck even further. Only Straker doesn’t budge,
like she doesn’t care if we get greeted by violence, or knows
nothing’s coming.

Nothing comes.

We cautiously step through onto a gangway overlooking
the interior of the dome. I smell rotting corpse on top of the
human stinks, but the Barracks looks deserted. No attempt has been
made to clear the wreckage of Thel’s former Governor’s Suite across
from me, but I see no bodies. On the main deck below, where I know
I personally slaughtered dozens, someone has made an attempt to
clean up the blood, but there are still smears on the sheet
metal.

We take a walk around the upper walkway, sensing
neither heat nor movement in the suites that ring the dome. We
force one of the hatches and get hit by the reek of death, strong.
I find two bodies in Keeper uniforms laid out side-by-side on a
neatly made bed. One has a poorly bandaged gut wound. Smears of
dried blood across the floor from the hatch suggest he was dragged
in after being wounded, probably in the battle. I remember Peter
saying they no longer had skilled physicians. A thin pillow has
been used to cover his face. There’s a single, powder-burned bullet
hole where his forehead should be.

The other body—a short-haired adult female—has a
messy knee wound. It looks like she laid down next to the first,
put a pistol in her mouth, and blew the back of her own head
off.

There’s a side room. I find two more bodies in there.
Children, maybe five and seven Standard years old. They look like
they were shot in their sleep, once each in the head.

“They suffered over fifty percent losses that night,”
Straker tells me from the hatchway. “Your father and the Katar were
even more ruthless than you were. The only reason they withdrew
before finishing it was that the PK were falling back to defensive
positions, and we had wounded of our own to evac. But the Garrison
is broken. They no longer have their ‘wizard’. They know seeking
Asmodeus is no option. And their remaining numbers are insufficient
to manage their Civvies, much less secure their perimeter,
especially with their security grid crashed. They didn’t have the
tech skillsets to undo what you did to the mainframe. So those that
could, packed what they could, and pulled out. The ones that
couldn’t travel… Well, if they were taught the same as I was,
suicide is both honorable and vastly preferential to being taken
alive by one’s enemies.”