The God Mars Book Five: Onryo (34 page)

We wade through the water to shore. Erickson almost
collapses as soon as he’s up on dry sand. I scan for sign of
Terina, up and down the beach, and when I see nothing, I attend
quickly to pressing need, dragging myself up to the green ringing
the base of the mountain and gathering fruits and nuts. I bring
fistfuls to Erickson first, then feed myself, dropping my mask. I
remember the smell of this place.

Ram has taken off his helmet and is looking around
like he’s suspicious of every plant, rock and grain of sand, like
he expects it to attack him. He looks back across the Lake, taking
in Yod’s illusion of a larger world that isn’t anymore. And it
is
a convincing illusion: I have to remind myself that this
world only stretches fifteen or twenty klicks in any direction.

“He really did it,” I hear Ram mutter out loud. He
shakes his head in disbelief, then he tells us, “This is just like
it was.”

“I thought you said you never visited Haven?” I
question.

“Haven, no… Once my friend was… Once he died, there
was no point.” I can hear his guilt crushing him. But then he gets
angry again. He looks at the slope of the Barrow like it’s an
enemy. “But I have been
here
.”

I offer him something to eat, but he shakes his head
in bitter refusal. He steps up to the growth, grabs hold of the
plants and drains them. He almost looks like he’s strangling a
hated adversary.

“Haven is about eight klicks that way,” Erickson
estimates, gesturing east, “across several klicks of water.”

Ram may have no interest, but I
am
curious—I
never got to see Haven when I was here, never got to meet the
people that Yod deemed worthy of preserving from the other
timeline. I suppose that’s what I get for falling off the ship on
the way. And I doubt we’ll have time to see it this trip: Even if
we find Terina alive and healthy, Asmodeus is still planning
something, something devious and cruel and deadly. It’s bad enough
that he attacks the Pax and Katar, civilizations that have little
defense against him. If he should find a way over here…

Fed enough to get my gauges back in the green, I
start heading east down the beach with purpose, to where I know the
Forge hid their ways into the mountain. The others follow.

About five hundred meters along the shore, we find
Terina’s suit. It is indeed a heavy work shell, laden further with
extra canisters that could last the better part of a day. The sand
looks like she dragged herself up out of the water and stripped out
of the suit, abandoning it. My built-in sensors confirm the worst:
The suit is hot, hot enough to be deadly.

“Why aren’t we toxic?” Erickson wonders.

“We are,” Ram corrects flatly. “Our nanites are
scrubbing our tissues and gear. But we’ll need to keep our distance
from the Normals for awhile.”

When I get within a few meters of the abandoned
shell, I’m struck hard by strong, foul odors. Ram prods the suit
open, and confirms the source: She’d vomited inside her helmet, and
soiled herself.

“First signs of acute radiation poisoning,” Erickson
mutters what everyone on this planet is taught in childhood. Part
of me hopes that’s all there is, that Yod is counting on gastric
distress and perhaps some signature skin burns to dissuade
trespassers, and that he didn’t inflict more damage on her. He
did
let her through, after all. But the suit is definitely
hot, and she’s left us a trail across the sand that’s tainted with
radiation.

At least it makes her easy to follow. She’s heading
for where the Forge took her and the rest of our party into the
mountain, through the ring of green and up into the rocks. I wonder
if she’s still hours ahead of us, or if we’ve managed to make up
time, catch up to her.

We find the entrance to the Forge stronghold open,
the heavy rocks concealing it moved aside, just as the Forge had
left it when Yod offered them a way home. Chang seems to have left
it so. (Where’s Chang?)

There’s a faint trail of radiation up through the
rocks to the entrance, tracing her path.

(Chang healed me. And my father. And Bly and Rashid.
Can he heal Terina? She might not need the Companion.)

Once we duck in through the narrow defensive opening,
the tunnels are familiar enough, though strangely melancholy in
their abandoned state. Erickson and I lead Ram quickly and directly
to where the Forge excavated the great wall and hatch of the
Barrow’s secret facilities. The sight gives Ram pause.

“This wasn’t buried before,” he tells us. “There were
tunnels out through the mountain, big enough for large cargo. Yod
must have buried it to keep people out.”

“Then why let the Forge dig it open again?” I ask
what I’m sure I already know the answer to.

“I’m sure Yod saw it as a ‘benign’ experiment, a
controlled way to test our character.”

“Is that what I was?” Peter hisses. “Is that what my
family was?
A benign experiment?
”

Ram has no answer for him.

“What would my world have been like, if Yod hadn’t
interfered with our history?” Peter continues to rail.

“It would have been mine, so I’ve seen it,” Ram
confronts.

And he flashes us a sampling of his memories, as fast
as our systems can process. More than the images of that Modded
world, I feel the hopelessness, the apathy, the madness. Mankind
given everything they could possibly wish for as fast as they could
wish for it, and then made invulnerable to the consequences of
anything they did. Forever. But it didn’t take forever. It took
only years, decades, for the human race to lose its soul and its
mind. Asmodeus is only a pale shadow of that world, sane and
reserved in comparison.

The most shocking flash I get is deeply personal to
Ram: Kali, his “wife”… he caught her engaging in something called
“live guro”, taking sexual satisfaction in the extreme torture and
mutilation of the human body, masturbating in gore, her “victims”
perfectly willing and eager to participate, just to
feel
something, to dance with their long-lost mortality…

I feel sick. I want to vomit. Peter’s reeling worse,
horrified, crushed, shaken down to his soul. Erickson looks like
he’s staring at a vision of hell. And in the depth of this shared
nightmare I manage enough sense and sanity to wonder: Is Ram trying
justify what Yod did, by showing us what he
undid
, by
showing us that the alternative was indeed so much worse than all
the violence and madness of
this
world? That the
thousands—tens of thousands—of lives taken in this lie are indeed a
cheap price to restore our humanity?

At least he shows no satisfaction at our reactions.
He simply turns away, looks at the big blast hatch—back to the
mission at hand.

The hatch has been left open, partially ajar. Trace
radiation paints a path through the gap. She’s made it inside.

Ram doesn’t wait for us to get our senses back, to
shake off the poison he’s forced into our brains. He pushes his way
through the massive airlock.

When we catch up to him, it’s Ram’s turn to look
dazed, lost, overwhelmed. He knows this place, or knew it when it
was operational, when all the magnificent mysterious machinery was
still here. He’s walking through his own gutted memory.

“I’ve been remembering more and more of this since I
confronted him,” Ram reveals angrily. “It’s like a fucking bad
dream.”

And I remember again what Yod said to him: That not
only did Ram consent to what Yod did and agree to participate, but
that it was
his
idea. But he didn’t know until Yod told him,
said he had no memory of any part in that plan. I wonder if Yod
took that memory from him because it would help him play his role,
or because he wanted to spare Ram the devastating guilt. (And what
purpose does restoring that memory now serve?)

I sensed it when he met me on the path to confront
the Keepers: This is not the same Ram. He’s still got his righteous
anger, but now it feels like it’s turned inward. He’s no longer the
larger-than-life hero, protecting innocents from those that would
harm them. Now it’s like he’s desperate to atone, however he can,
for something he can never undo, repay or forgive himself for.

Being here just makes it real, gives those nightmare
memories undeniable veracity, makes them
solid
. And I can
tell by the sure intent of his every step, he still knows the
way.

Of course, so do Erickson and I, from our recent
misadventure, but we let Ram take point.

As we go, I feel Peter also marveling at the
difference between what he remembers and what he sees now: all the
massive equipment gone. I expect Yod simply unmade it all.

Is that what he did to our transmitters? Just
vaporize them with a thought? Take them apart on a molecular
level?

It’s a deeply unsettling idea, but I’m sure that’s
exactly what he did. I suddenly don’t feel very safe in my own
skin, even with all the power of my Mods. To Yod, we’re all dust.
(Like man is to God, the blasphemy comes to me unbidden.)

Moving through the dusty, cavernous spaces, the only
sounds are the echoes of our own passing. I see the footprints of
our last visits to this place, and try to pick out Terina’s fresh
ones. They become horribly clear when I shift to detect
radiation.

“Where’s Chang?” Erickson is the first to wonder out
loud.

“Maybe he decided the last Companion wasn’t safe
here,” Ram suggests. And that thought crushes me: If neither Chang
nor the Companion are here, then Terina is dead, unless Yod himself
decides to intervene. But what if the experiment today is about
sacrifice?

I start running, taking the lead from Ram. The others
speed up their pace to keep right behind me.

The red warning-labeled great hatch has been shut.
Ram tells us that the symbol is a warning of a nanotechnology
hazard from his undone world. Peter confirms that it’s the same
symbol as the one on the hatch to the chamber that contained the
Seeds and Companions when he and Thel came down here.

I try the manual release. It’s locked, apparently
from the inside, but I’ve mastered the trick of undoing such
things. When I hear and feel it release, I pull. I remember it took
several Forge warriors to move this door. I find I can do it
myself, but the others help me anyway. The inner hatch is similarly
closed and locked.

“There’s no radiation on the outer panels or pulls,”
Erickson points out, suggesting Terina didn’t open the door
herself.

“But the inner pulls do show trace,” I confirm
quickly, “so she may have closed them, locked herself in for some
reason. How did she manage the doors by herself, especially if
she’s suffering from enough radiation poisoning to leave this
trail?”

I don’t waste further time on speculation. I drag
open the inner hatch.

I find myself facing two Bug bots, stationed on
either side beyond the entrance like guards. But they don’t move in
response to our entrance. And they’re not intact.

“Dakota and Snyder,” I name them, though without
their voices, I don’t know which is which. And from what I can see,
I won’t be hearing those voices ever again.

Both torsos have been opened as if disassembled, and
where the organic components should be has been gutted. Ram reaches
inside, runs his gauntleted fingers along some of the surfaces.

“Trace waste,” he declares sourly. “They’ve been
consumed.”

But that’s obvious enough, as part of the torso and
two of the legs of one bot have been completely eaten away, as if
by some kind of extreme corrosion.

“It doesn’t make sense,” Erickson argues, shaking his
head. “If Terina did this, why didn’t they fight? These machines
are sitting at rest…”

“She could have hacked them, paralyzed…” But I
realize where my assumption falls apart before I finish speaking
it. “How did she get
past
them?”

“I’m assuming the last Companion was here?” Ram has
gone ahead, found the five containment cylinders. They’re all empty
now.

“
Terina!!!
” My cry echoes in the empty
chamber. There’s no sign of her.

“Where’s Chang?” Erickson adds to our questions.

“Did he take her somewhere?” I ask uselessly,
helplessly.

Ram turns to face me.

“When you Modded, you needed organic resources?” It
doesn’t sound like a question, but I nod. He looks at Erickson, who
also nods.

Ram gestures to the gutted bots.

“The trace reads all wrong. The metal consumption is
fresh, less than an hour. The organics were consumed
days
ago.”

“Chang?” I guess. But then I realize his larger
point, just before he says it.

“Given how toxic she is, she’s probably got massive
tissue damage. Nothing in this room will help her rebuild, not the
organic body.”

I feel ice in my guts, envisioning Terina becoming
some kind of machine, metal replacing her flesh.

“The good news is, there’s plenty of food right
outside,” Erickson tries.

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Ram grumbles. He looks
up, into the long narrow skylight shafts that provide light for
this place, then he heads fast for the hatch. One of the shafts is
hot.

Ram doesn’t stop all the way out of the mountain and
down to the shore. He turns to look up at the top of the mound as
he starts running east.

“What is it?” Erickson calls to him as we follow.

“He thinks she’s heading for Haven,” I
understand.

We catch up to him several minutes later, but only
because he’s stopped. There’s a patch of green at the base of the
slope that isn’t green anymore. Several square meters have been
consumed, and there’s more trace radiation. But what he’s looking
at are tracks in the sand: Not footprints, they look like someone
crawled, scrambled. Straight into the water.