The God Mars Book Five: Onryo (44 page)

Don’t do it, Jonny…

I count the seconds, get her as far as I can—not even
two hundred meters—and I find some rocks for poor cover and throw
her behind them and then I throw myself down on top of her, sealing
my mask as an afterthought. Like it will do much good.

Please, Jonny. Run. Run or you’ll die.

I can’t.

God damn it, lad… you need to…

“You need to take care of her when I’m gone. You need
to take care of all of them. Promi…”

The whole world goes white. I can feel the forest
sear away all around me in the barest fraction of a second, feel my
armor get too hot, too fast. The clothing underneath starts to
burn. My skin tries to harden, resist, but I can feel it crisp and
sizzle. (Thankfully, there’s only pain for the first second or so,
and too much to really process.) And my brain… Static… Snow… My
gauges spike higher than they can read as I’m lanced through with a
flash of neutron radiation on top of the beyond-blowtorch heat.

The shock wave comes next, almost immediately behind
the nuclear heat and radiation burst, crushing me in overpressure,
deafening me, blowing away all the charred plants and the rocks and
then me, smashing and throwing me through the storm of ash and
gravel, ripping me away from Terina, but I won’t let go. I can’t.
I…

The world is all haze.

Smoke. Dust. The sky is raining grit and ash.

Terina…

I can’t move. I can’t… My brain… My mind is all snow…
sputtering… fading… like a broken device crashing… like falling
asleep… like being too tired to…

Put him in my place.

Peter?

Put him in the code. Make it his. Take me out. Let
him heal.

What?

I’m done. I’m ready to be done. I’ve been ready for a
long time. I’ve had my extra time, and I’ve done what I’ve done for
whatever is was worth. Now give it to him. I know you can, you
fucker. I know you can. You can do anything. Just do this one good
thing.

Someone’s moving in the thick, hot haze, moving
through the storm of ashes.

Write him over me. Let me be the one who fades.

Who…?

Older man. Just walking through the burned swirling
hell like it’s only a cool morning blow. He stands over me. Looks
down at me. Smiles like he’s sad.

“Yod?” I manage to recognize through my stuttering
and distorted vision. My voice is a rasp that I can barely hear
over the deafening ringing in my ears.

I can’t get a breath in.

“You found your answer?” he asks me gently. “Who your
parents were?”

He knows… he knows I did… Why… Why does he ask?

“Who
you
are?”

I try to look down at myself but can’t move my head,
and one of my eyes isn’t working—I think it’s gone. The other one
is all blurry and gritty, so I can barely see anything, but I can
see that my armor is smoking. I can’t move anything, not even a
centimeter. But I can feel my charred flesh crack and tear and
crumble underneath my armor when I try.

“Onryō…” I tell him, looking at the smoke-obscured
sky.

No
, Peter protests.
No, lad.

“He’s right. You have to be dead to be a ghost,” Yod
corrects me like I’m a child.

“…am…dead…”

“Not yet. Soon, maybe.”

Not ever!

“Peter… don’t…”

This isn’t my world. This is yours. Your people. Your
friends. You need to protect them. You. Not me. I need to be done.
All the killing… Then all those years locked up in my own charred
skeleton, going insane… I need to be done, Jonny. I need to be with
my family.

“I can’t guarantee that,” Yod tells him. “I can’t
tell you what happens after you die.”

But you could. You could make it happen. You could
re-create my family exactly as they were in your matrix or whatever
and give us a life, the life your little test of character took
from us. You could do it if you wanted to.

“But it wouldn’t really be them. It wouldn’t really
be you.”

Is it now? I’m just code. Kept for your
amusement.

“And isn’t that what you’re asking I do to Jonathan
Drake?”

Peter doesn’t have an answer to that.

“Is it a life I’d be giving the boy?” Yod presses his
decision. “Or a copy of one?”

You can make it a real life.

“That’s seems to be up for some significant debate.
I’m not God, after all—I freely admit that, and have no delusions
otherwise. But I can do a lot of what people think of when they
think of what God can do. That’s what they made me to do. Like an
Artificial Intelligence can mimic select things an organic one can
do. I’m an Artificial Supreme Being.”

But you can do this. Easily. So do it: Code the Seed
to the boy. Flush me out. Delete me. Let me go. Let him live.

“Ghosts aren’t alive.”

Stop saying that!

“Then stop believing it.”

He’s talking to me.

“Who are you?” he asks me.

“Jonathan Drake…”

I see him smile, like I’ve made him happy.

“Then be that.”

My head swims. Worse than it was. It’s like I’m
dissolving. Tea in water. Smoke in air.

It was really good to see you again, lad. I’m glad
you made it.

“Peter… no…”

You’re a good man, Jonny. Better than me. Don’t ever
forget.

“Peter…!”

But I can’t hold on. I’m spinning away.

I can’t…

I…

“Drake!”

Shadow over me. Fuzzy. Black on gray.

“Drake! Jon! Can you hear me?”

Straker.

“
Can you hear me?”

She’s in my head.

I manage to blink. My eyes feel like they’re full of
sand. Both my eyes…

“Goddamn fucking miracle…”

I can hear again.

“If we’re talking about miracles, I can almost
guarantee the hand at work.” That was Erickson. He sounds tired,
beaten. Another shadow moves out of the corner of my eye.

I hear jets, thrusters. Engines much bigger than a
small flyer’s. Engines I’ve heard before.

I make my head turn, make my eyes try to focus. A
dark blur roughly the shape of the Siren’s Song is landing, blowing
dust and sand and ash.

Wherever I am, it’s barren. Like a desert, but all
gray-white. Even the sky is gray.

Figures come running from the ship. Whatever their
boots crunch on, it doesn’t sound like regolith. It’s alternately
soft and then crunches with a high-pitched squealing.

“He looks fine,” Straker tells someone. “Not a mark
on him.”

“He should be charcoal, Mods or not,” someone else
says. Bel, I think.

“Yod?” That’s definitely Ram.

“No radiation,” Erickson adds, amazed and suspicious
at once. “This whole valley should be hot. The neutron blast. The
fallout.”

“It’s cold,” Bel confirms. “Background levels.”

They gather around me in a rough semi-circle. Then
they stand there like they expect me to say something witty.

“Terina…?” I rasp. My throat feels like I’ve been
eating the ash that’s all over everything. But I can breathe.

They don’t answer me.

I flail around, like I could reach her. I remember
trying to hang on to her as the blast wave threw us along with
everything else in the valley.

“Terina… help…”

“It’s okay, Jon,” Straker tells me. “We’ve got
her.”

“She’s already starting to regenerate, heal the
physical damage,” Erickson adds, but then hesitates, like he
doesn’t want to say what I already know. “But she… She won’t… You
know she won’t…”

“The Companion…” I choke out. “Memories. Recent
files… Asmodeus said…”

“I know,” Straker assures. “When I picked up Harris’
Companion, it had records, everything he did, but nothing from
before he picked it up. Terina only had hers for a day and a
half.”

“A start… Who she is. Who her people are.” And me.
Our kiss. “It’s a start.” I make my eyes focus, look at Erickson.
“You… Your people were looking for a way to bring back those you
lost… It’s a start…”

“It won’t be her, Jon,” Straker insists gently.

“Memories plus consciousness…” I repeat Asmodeus.
“That’s the only way we know who we are, that we are…”

“Even the personality is in the wiring,” Bel agrees.
“Wiring plus experience. Consciousness is just the machine switched
on.”

“How the hell are you still here, Blondie?” That’s
Lux. “Everything for nearly four hundred meters in any direction is
ashes and glass.”

“And where’s the radiation?” Azazel.

“Yod…” I confirm. “Yod was here.”

“And didn’t stop a nuke,” Bel criticizes.

“No, but he kept it from being an environmental
disaster,” Ram allows. “The Atmosphere Net didn’t crash. No
toxicity.”

“But he didn’t stop it from incinerating a big chunk
of real estate,” Bel won’t forgive. “Well, except for the kid. And
I suppose the Princess should be ashes too, but her burns are
minor. Why save a body with no mind?”

“For me…” I realize. “Save her… Restore…”

“If I could take her body and her Companion, take her
to our Station labs, maybe we could figure out a way to partially
restore her, re-educate her,” Erickson gets inspired.

“And your own fallen,” Ram follows him, sounding like
he has a stake in that, too. I remember that Paul Stilson’s brother
was a friend. And Erickson’s father. Is that Yod’s gift? Not to me,
not to the Katar that lost so many today, but to the other
vulnerable Companion-Modded? The Terraformers? To take them that
last step into the immortality of the Seed-Modded?

“Companion tech could hold the piece you were
missing,” Bel says what I’m thinking.

“No…” I protest weakly. “They weren’t supposed to
have it… We weren’t supposed to have any of this…”

But I realize how stupid I sound. Yod
gave
us
what we have. Yod controls everything. He decides what is and is
not in this world. Except when he’s letting his precious random
chaos run free.

The haze clears enough that I can start to see the
slopes of the Spine, blasted clean.

“The Katar…?” I need to know.

“Safe,” Straker reassures. “Erickson and I got the
tunnel open, got them in, sealed it.”

“Some… Some didn’t go…” I remember. “They…”

“The ones that had been dart shot,” she explains
heavily. “They stayed back, let the others go first. They knew they
were infected. They thought it would be better…”

“To die in the blast…” I complete what she’s having
trouble saying. Then I need to know “How many did we lose?”

“Forty five, forty six,” she can only estimate.

“We didn’t have time for an accurate count,” Erickson
excuses.

“Asmodeus?”

“No sign,” Ram admits, his own rage still
simmering.

“Assuming that
was
a copy that just blew
himself up,” Erickson hopes emptily.

“It was,” I’m sure. “But I’m not sure he blew up. I
didn’t see…”

“No way he had time to clear the radius,” Straker
insists.

“But
he
isn’t hurt,” Lux gestures at me,
befuddled. “So why isn’t he getting up?”

I’m not sure. I don’t seem to have much control over
my limbs.

Bel seems like he’s listening to something. I can
feel him prodding around in my head.

“He’s still being coded to the nanites. Their old ID
Core reads like it’s been reformatted, reset to Factory, just now
reconfiguring to his DNA and memory sets.”

“He looks different,” Lux notes casually, then
quickly addends for my benefit: “You look good. More like you’re
old self. Just… Well… Manlier.”

Bel rolls his eyes. I’m seeing better. No more blasts
of static. No more shot focus. I can see detail.

Straker and Erickson are both covered from
head-to-toe in a layer of dust and ash. They look exactly like
they’ve seen way too much death and destruction for one day,
helpless to undo any of it and not satisfied by what they have
managed. Ram and Bel and the others…

What was Bel saying?
Reformatted
?

Peter?

Peter?

Panic sends me sitting upright. I can’t hear him. I
can’t feel him.

“I can’t feel him!”

Peter?!!!

Bel is shaking his head.

I scream. I slam my hands down into the ash-covered
gravel and dig in like I’m trying to crush the planet. They let me
have my moment, my grief.

Peter.

Murphy.

Terina...

I look around. Terina’s body is not far, her Naginata
laid across her chest—she’s arranged like a body for a funeral. At
least she’s positioned so the side of her face that it see is
mostly intact, and her hair covers the hole in the back of her
skull, but I know most of the right side of her face is gone—that
image will never leave me, Mod-memory or no.

I can’t see any other bodies. All of the fallen
Katar, the Harvesters, Murphy… The blast scoured them all away. I
see a few fragments that might be charred armor, but that’s
all.

I look down at my own armor. Except for a dusting of
ash from what’s still falling from the sky, I look pristine. I
still have the Onryō armor. Erickson’s holding my Nagamaki for me.
My inheritance. Still locked into the Seed code. Another gift from
Yod. Something of Peter.

I remember where there
will
be a body.

I drag myself up, make my legs work, try to get my
bearings.

“He’s over here somewhere,” I mutter to the
others.

“Who?” Lux asks.

“Fuckhead.”

“
Who?
”

“Fohat,” Straker explains. “Asmodeus called him
Fuckhead.”

“I like it.”

“Ambassador Murphy put an HE round into his skull,”
Straker reports with no satisfaction. “Before he was… Before he
fell.”

This news gives the others pause, especially Ram.
Murphy and Ram were close. Murphy was the one Domer who helped Ram
do something about their merciless system of culling their own to
preserve dwindling resources. He was also the first Domer to make
peace with the Cast, who his kind had been killing for generations,
sometimes just for sport.