The God Mars Book Five: Onryo (33 page)

Khan reluctantly nods his agreement.

“One of us should go too,” Erickson insists, speaking
for Straker and his brother. “If she gets to the Companion and it
takes control over her…”

“The radiation may destroy your brain,” I warn him.
“Your Blade will heal your body, but you won’t be
you
anymore.”

“Acceptable risk,” he won’t be discouraged. “Terina
is a friend.” Then he turns to Elias and Straker. “You two need to
stay here, to help protect the City.”

They also reluctantly agree to duty over desire.

“We’ll find her and bring her back,” I assure Khan,
and put my mask back on.

Neither Erickson nor I need light to get through the
tunnel, which bores through the Spine on a lazy curve for what I
estimate is nearly two kilometers. I’m impressed by the
engineering, the accomplishment, but then I remember that the Jinn
have machines that bore many kilometers into solid rock to tap for
deep-underground permafrost as well as minerals. Perhaps they used
one of their “taps” to do this, and milked the mountain for water
and raw materials while they were at it. I catch Erickson caressing
the cut stone now and then, like he’s appreciating the work, or
maybe it’s reminding him of home.

But then I consider that the claustrophobia of the
tunnel presents a fatal flaw: If they were to move large numbers of
people through here, pack them in, there is no noticeable
ventilation. They would suffocate long before making the far
exit.

“Feed Line,” Erickson tells me, possibly reading my
thoughts. Then we come across the tube of one crossing the floor of
the tunnel about mid-point, possibly the same one that runs from
White Station to the western tip of the Spine, forming the Boundary
between the North and Central Blades. Or a branch of it. If a
similar line runs through the southern crest of the Canyon,
providing oxygen for that escape route, it could also be the line
that the Katar tapped to pressurize the “nursery” the sheltered us
in (and refilled our canisters from), though I expect that the Jinn
ran the valve lines through the mountain for them. (If that one is
as far into the mountain as this one, their colony taps would have
to reach a kilometer through solid rock.)

There
is
a valve set into the exposed line,
and the lack of dust on the manual bleed suggests it was recently
used to refresh the oxygen in here, probably by Terina as she
passed. Since this underground Tap Site provides water as well as
oxygen, I suspect fleeing Katar could shelter here in the mountain
for a time, possibly even against another Apocalypse.

As we’ve stopped for a moment, I take the time to
listen, and hear nothing in the tunnel except us. But I think I do
see light far up ahead. We keep moving.

Several hundred meters more and I know what I’m
seeing: A stone door much like the one we came through, but this
one left levered aside.

We come out of the mountain up a few hundred meters
from the green valley floor. This exit is even better hidden in the
rocks than the entrance. Looking over the valley, I recognize the
terrain enough to realize our band passed not far down slope from
here on their way to Katar. (Would Terina have told us of this
shortcut if we were in dire need of getting to Katar sooner, or
would she have kept her people’s secret?)

Visibility in the pervasive haze is poor, making the
whole world look dull and ruddy, but I can see just far enough
across the valley to make out the eastern tip of the Pax Mountain,
about where we camped that night before Yod took us across the
Lake. The mountain itself is hidden, but looking north I can see
far enough to confirm: The Lake is still invisible. All I see is a
scrubby valley, fading into the oppressive haze.

I find Terina’s tracks easily enough. Whatever she’s
dragging leaves its distinctive marks on the rocks and parallel
furrows in the gravel and sand. She isn’t trying to hide her path,
probably sure of her head start. Is she as sure that no one will
dare follow her once she crosses into the Hot Zone? I’d think her
father would have certainly tried if we hadn’t taken this task for
him, as would his warriors, despite the almost-certain
consequences. He may still try, if we don’t return successful and
in a timely fashion. (Would Yod act to prevent them before they
poisoned themselves to death?)

While we’re still on the high ground, still above the
thick green, I shift my vision to read heat, and try zooming in. I
don’t see her. She may have made the boundary already, slipped into
Yod’s illusion.

“We need to move fast,” I state the obvious, and
start running recklessly downhill.

I follow her tracks down slope, and then across the
North Blade, about four and a half kilometers to where we
encountered the “beach”. I still see traces of our various tracks
from that fateful morning, but of course there’s no water, just the
scrub-covered belly of Coprates that my internal gauges insist is
deadly. Terina’s much fresher footprints and drag-trails lead me to
her abandoned sledge. Whatever was on it is gone, but now her
tracks are big, heavy, and show the striations of traction soles.
They appear to go straight north from here, but the haze has
thickened so I can’t see very far. Visibility is maybe only a few
hundred meters.

“Pressure suit,” Erickson confirms, examining her
prints. “Possibly a heavy work suit. It will give her some
protection from the radiation.”

“Not enough for what lies between here and there,”
Peter tells him dourly. My internal gauges insist that the
radiation in that direction is very real.

I hear footfalls on the gravel, but from the wrong
direction. I turn and see the distinctive silhouette of Colonel
Ram, approaching us through the haze from the west.

“Are you expecting we’ll need your help?” I greet him
as lightly as I can, given the urgency of the situation.

“I need to see what’s over there,” he tells us
flatly. I can hear rage simmering under his mask.

“We’re glad for the company, Colonel,” Erickson gives
him. I suppose I am, too, as long as his recon doesn’t slow us
down.

The radiation plays hell with my systems as I go, and
I’m quickly registering cell damage, toxicity. Erickson and Ram
also move with greater discomfort. But Erickson and I are the ones
at most risk. Like Chang, Ram’s nanites will rebuild him from
almost nothing. As will Peter’s.

I think I hear Ram talking to someone, but the signal
is too corrupted. The dialogue could well be internal, but he
sounds like he’s angry at whoever he’s talking to. Determined.
Defiant. Demanding. Is he trying to speak to Yod?

As if in answer, the air all around us starts feeling
strangely thick, and hard to move through. Then it becomes heavy,
like I’m being squeezed from all sides. I’m remembering feeling
like this once before, just as my mask seals my airway and my
nanites take over internal recycling. My skin hardens like it did
at high altitude, but that’s not what this is. And despite the
strange weight on my body, I feel lighter. But it’s not from a
reduction in gravity. It’s actually harder to move. Much harder. My
movements get slowed, everything slows, even the dust kicking up as
we step through it. Is this the radiation, poisoning me,
interfering with my Mods?

There’s a rushing in my ears and the world gets much
darker, but the radiation levels drop to normal. It takes me a
moment to realize the rushing sound isn’t coming from outside—I can
barely hear anything beyond my helmet. My footfalls and the now
super-slowed but strangely exaggerated flapping of my armor
sections (like I’m running, but I’m barely managing to walk) only
make faint hollow sounds. I immediately think of how there’s no
sound in vacuum, but this feels like the opposite. I bring my hand
up through the resistance and knock on my helmet. I can hear it,
but the sound is blunted.

It’s water,
Peter recognizes, amazed.
We’re
under water.

I wave my arms through the strange thickness and know
he’s right: It’s just like when I fell from the Charon and was
pulled down deep into the Lake by the weight of my armor. Only this
time, I’m not sinking helplessly down through it. I’m standing on
the surface beneath the water. I look up, and see a faint
shimmering light where the sun should be.

My instinct is to drop my armor now, to push myself
to the surface and try to swim—Peter knows how to swim—but then I
hear Ram clearly in my head:

“Don’t drop your armor. Use it to keep you on the
bottom. Walk. Use your arms to push you forward…” He demonstrates,
his robes moving like in a strong wind but in very slow motion, and
we emulate his movements, pushing our arms back against the
resistance of the water as we push our legs forward, step by step.
It’s strange, slow and fatiguing, but it works.

“Your Mods will start processing oxygen out of the
water as you need it,” he explains as we trod on. “Once, I was so
depressed that I just let myself sink in a lake like this… I stayed
down for days, hiding from the world we’d made, hiding from what
life had become. I told myself I wouldn’t come up again until I was
ready to do something about it all, no matter what that cost me.
Star—Astarte—was waiting for me when I did. She took me to meet
Doc, only Doc wasn’t Doc anymore. He’d made himself part of his
work.”

“Yod,” Erickson names in our heads. Ram’s helmet nods
(though it bobbles oddly in the water).

Dust and debris swirl and cloud around us. My gauges
tell me I’m getting cold, and Peter says it’s how the water
conducts heat faster than air. I remember being so cold when I fell
in the Lake, and even after I’d gotten to the shore of the Barrow,
my clothes soaked through. But I don’t feel wet now. My armor and
under-suit must be sealing it out. Or my skin is refusing to feel
it.

Erickson is the only one of us without a helmet. He
looks bizarrely uncomfortable, like a man in pain in a strong wind,
squinting and grimacing, his long black hair floating every which
way around his head. I remember not being able to see clearly the
last time I was under, my vision badly blurred. I don’t know if
it’s my mask lenses or my modified eyes that are letting me see
this strange underwater world now.

I realize Peter is almost giddy from the experience
of walking under water.

I used to swim, to dive and snorkel, back on
Earth.

I’m not sure what those words mean to him, so he
shows me his memories: I’m gracefully moving through water like
this, but not a world like this. There are many strange, brightly
colored things that I remember from my studies are alive. Fantastic
plants sway lazily. Other things—“fish”—glide and dart. It’s
indescribably beautiful.

But this place has none of that, just sand and rock.
I think maybe it would have had it someday, if Yod had given the
world more time before rewriting it and isolating this little
piece, preserved but arrested. And maybe it will have one day, if
he wills it, if he makes it so. But I think that would cheapen it,
because it wouldn’t be the work of a real God, just a man-made
thing gone wrong. Fake creation by a fake deity.

I also realize we no longer have our trail of tracks
to follow. The water swirls the sand as we step and mostly erases
our imprints, and it seems to have done the same to Terina’s. Also,
we can’t see very far, like being lost in a dust storm, just
without the wind. Peter calls the haze in the water “murky.”
Compounding it, our positioning systems, our internal compasses,
seem to be malfunctioning. And, of course, we can no longer see any
of the geographic landmarks. I have to trust our basic sense of
direction, anchored by the faint sun shimmering over our heads
through the surface of the Lake. But I also know Yod would lead the
people of Haven astray if they tried to cross the Lake, disorient
them so that they floated in circles for days before winding up
back where they started.

After six interminable hours, the almost-liquid mud
that is the ground underneath our feet begins to slowly but
steadily rise, the surface above us starts looking closer rather
than further away, and there’s more sunlight. In the meantime, my
Mods have indeed been processing oxygen out of the water, and, of
course, have been keeping me well-hydrated. What I’m lacking is
food energy, and I’ve expended a lot of energy getting this
far.

About twenty minutes later, my helmet breaks the
surface. The sky overhead is a deep blue, with wisps of white
clouds. The sun is low in what I assume is the west, tinting that
part of the sky near the horizon shades of purples and oranges. The
air is clear, no haze, so I can see we are indeed headed straight
for the familiar flat-topped mountain of the Barrow. I feel Peter’s
surge of recognition, but also his marvel at what’s different.

It’s so green now. And so much water…

“Stage Three Terraforming,” Ram explains, hearing
him. “They needed more water, so they snagged a chunk of a passing
comet, dragged it here and sent it down in pieces. One benefit of
the Modding of the human race was that it made us much better
suited for space travel. We could do things safely that we would
never dare before. We could handle vacuum, extremes of temperature
and acceleration, radiation, zero G, and use far less resources
during a flight. We could even retreat into our own internal
virtual worlds to stave off the boredom.”

“Did you ever go out beyond Mars?” Peter asks,
becoming the scientist once more.

“We got as far as the moons of Jupiter and Saturn in
my time, before… Well, before everything got reset. Who knows? Some
of us may still be out there, building new societies, oblivious to
what’s happened here.”

“Like Haven?” Erickson compares.

“I never visited Haven,” Ram admits. “But I had a
good friend who lived there.” There’s suddenly a profound sadness
in his voice.