The God Mars Book Four: Live Blades (16 page)

“Where’s your errant ETE?” I ask. “The one you were
watching over?”

“He travels with Abbas’ group. He’s safer that
way.”

“How far ahead are they?” Rios asks.

“About fifteen kilometers, but they’re not heading
for the Central Blade, not yet. They travel in the North Blade,
skirting the open gap between the two valleys, heading for a short
but high range of mountains that forms what the locals call the
‘Spine of the Fork’, hoping to stay out of sight until they contact
the Katar. Hoping to avoid the robot patrols.”

Rios digests the intel, then tells the stranger
“Excuse us…” and nods for us to join him up front.

When he gets there, the first thing he does is key up
an internal camera view to keep an eye on our guest. Then he
processes what he’s going to say before giving it to us:

“If Chang, or whoever’s taken over after him, has
another Stormcloud in the works, we need to confirm. We need to
find his base, this Lucifer’s Grave, whatever it is… We creep in,
get as close as we can. If we’re seen, we flash a report out and
run. If necessary, we abandon ship and make our way out on foot,
set the turrets on auto to cover our retreat as long as they can.
If Upworld has issues with us ditching their Frankenstein project,
they can bill me. They owe me fifty years back pay anyway.”

Rios gets nods all around.

“We trust what this guy’s telling us?” Jane wants to
know, looking at the stranger—Azrael—on the screen. He’s just
standing in the lab, looking up at the camera. But he hasn’t taken
his mask and cowl off. Except for his eyes, and part of his face,
his skin remains covered.

“One more question I need to ask him.” Rios gets up
and heads back for the lab. Of course, we all follow him.

“You’ve told us who you are,” Rios confronts through
the transparency, “now tell us
what
you are.”

“Actually, Captain, I
haven’t
told you who I
am,” the stranger corrects gently. “I’ve told you what the Nomads
call me.”

“Then who are you?”

“The name that I’ve had the longest is Dee. And if
you’ve served long enough with Colonel Ram to know his past, then
you know who I am. And what I am.”

I’m lost again, but Rios looks shaken, like he’s just
been told a ghost story.

The stranger takes off his mask, peels back his cowl.
I see short blonde hair, a youthful face, and… metal…

When he turns his head, his hair and skin have been
stripped away, including his left ear, revealing a stainless steel
skull, and neck muscles that look like they’re made out of the same
kind of carbon nanofiber-weave pneumatic tubes that form the
“muscles” of Jane’s prosthetic arm. Except this is his
head
.

All our guns come up at once. He gives us a head
shake and a small smile.

“Small arms fire won’t do me much damage.”

Making it worse, he opens his jacket, pulls it down
off of his shoulders, shows us the skin is also gone from his left
arm and most of his back. I see more muscle tubes, metal bones and
joints. The edges of the skin look burned, melted.

“My stigmata,” he says. “A souvenir to commemorate
all those I failed to save.”

“Is he a cyborg, or a robot?” Carson asks Rios as if
he would know.

“Neither, Sergeant,” the stranger tells her.

“
Do
you know what he is?” I ask Rios. He
shakes his head like he doesn’t want to believe something.

“Dee… Colonel Ram’s early career, he served with the
UNACT Tactical Force—that’s where he made his reputation. They were
counter-terror, surgical strike teams, cutting edge everything for
their time… What made them—and what scared a lot of people back
then—was their Tactical Operations AI. They called it ‘Dee’. It was
a learning AI, the most advanced of its time. Ops planning,
real-time mission coordination, enemy behavior prediction, and it
could track pretty much anyone on the planet—pushing nine billion
people at that point—and that was the scary part. Imagine if
Upworld could lock and track everyone on the surface, predict
exactly what you were going to do next…”

He lets that sink in—and it’s a good analogy: I can’t
imagine what the hell they’d call normal on that planet, but a
machine that could target any of us at any time—it doesn’t matter
who’s running it, what their intentions are. I look at our
visitor—apparently this all-seeing all-knowing intel-generator and
ops-planner. It actually gives me a shrug, like it understands
humility, self-deprecation. Rios continues:

“Soon after it came online, it detected a conspiracy
within the diplomatic command and the corporate big-wigs backing
the project. They were manipulating terror attacks for political
leverage and profit. Colonel Ram worked with the machine in secret,
eventually bringing down most of the perpetrators. But… the machine
had acted independently, broken programming, scared too many
people. The order was given to shut it down. That would have been
almost a hundred years ago now. The rest is rumor, urban legends,
some from inside the intel community. Dee had existed in the global
Net, able to hack its way into anything. As the stories go, it
escaped, survived after its mainframe was pulled. Kept helping the
Colonel and anyone else it deemed worthy,
Deus ex
Machina
…”

“You’re AI?” Lyra asks the stranger directly. He
shrugs again. With his bones and muscles exposed, it’s a chilling
effect. He seems to sense that, puts his jacket back on.

“In what?” I try to grasp. “A robot body?”

“’Android’ was the popular word,” he says. “’Gynoid’
if it simulates a female. They were mostly corporate novelties,
boundary-pushing experiments, toys for the ultra-rich, dead-end
projects for military and intel contractors. I started collecting
prototypes, upgrading them, because I sometimes needed a physical
presence outside of the Net. After a few years of that, I had the
resources to begin designing better models.” He holds up his left
arm, makes the fingers work—very smooth, graceful, but now I
realize: unnaturally precise. “I had quite a few of these. I was
everywhere on Earth. Anywhere I needed to be. But then Colonel Ram
needed me here.”

“He called you? Before the Bang?” Rios doesn’t sound
like he’s buying. “Smuggled you on-planet?”

“I smuggled myself on planet,” the machine explains.
“He didn’t need to call me. I came. I ran calculations,
predictions; recognized the threat the Shield posed. I downloaded a
self-sufficient mobile version of my operating system—a CALO—into
this cosmetic motor frame, an infiltration model—knowing I couldn’t
maintain network contact across the delay caused by the tens of
millions of kilometers between worlds. Then I hacked my passage on
a corporate shuttle.

“I still exist as a networked entity, at least
locally. I can readily hack into any system, just like I
manipulated your sensors and slaved your weapons. I planted myself
inside the Mariner reconstruction project. Unfortunately for them,
and many others, I’d gone to investigate a potential act of
insurgency at the City of Industry, and was traveling back when the
Shield was triggered by the Discs. I was too far from a working
uplink to hack the platform and shut it down before the warheads
launched. So I did what I could to stop the individual missiles.
Disarming. Deflecting. Detonating prematurely. I was able to spare
Industry, Frontier, Pioneer and Zodanga. Uqba and Baraka were less
fortunate, but at least there were significant survivors. Shinkyo
saved itself. But I watched Mariner, Melas One, Avalon, Arcadia, so
many others, burn. Only for an instant. Then the combined EMPs from
all the detonations crashed my systems, forced a shutdown.
Immobilized, I was caught in the flash that destroyed Melas One. My
cosmetic layer was damaged beyond my ability to repair it. The
blast wave that followed buried me. Cain Dee, Systems Engineer,
became just another casualty among thousands lost that day.”

“What about the fifty years since then?” Rios really
doesn’t sound like he’s buying.

“I needed a signal from home—from my progenitor
code—to restore myself. I received it twenty-seven months ago.”

“When Earth re-established contact with us,” Jane
does the math in his head.

“Your primary…whatever you are… AI… still exists on
Earth?” Rios locks on, disturbed by whatever implications are
attached (probably including the thought that a rogue AI may have
been secretly building its own android interdiction force and
placing them all over the Earth for the better part of the last
century).

“I do not know,” the machine denies him. “I only
received the reboot code. And nothing else since.”

“This is just all too creepy,” Wei thinks out
loud.

But I realize something, listening to the machine
speak: Its voice reminds me of Colonel Ram’s. That’s why it’s
familiar. But it’s more effete, aloof, and almost effeminate.

“I awoke to this world,” it explains before we can
ask. “I hacked into your networks, updated myself on your
situation. But I also processed the fears of Earth regarding this
place. Given my damaged appearance, I didn’t think it would be
productive to reveal myself to UNMAC personnel. I didn’t even dare
risk contacting Colonel Ram, my old friend and ally, given the
scrutiny he and the rest of you were under. So I wandered.
Explored. Investigated. Kept listening. I also ingratiated myself
with one of the local cultures, offered them some of my more
physical services. This model is stronger, faster, and more precise
in movement than any human body. It’s also much more
resilient.”

“Why are you here?” I jump in to confront. “You said
you needed something. From me?”

This gets the others’ attention. Apparently they
didn’t—or couldn’t—hear what he’d said to me topside.

“I detected a unique signal, Lieutenant,” it says.
Then it actually makes a sad face, mimics regret, and does a
scary-good job of it. “I’m afraid, given these new circumstances,
that I have no time for discretion. I am sorry for whatever
difficulty this causes you. But I know you carry something from
Colonel Ram, from what he’s become.”

Everyone—even Rios—reflexively steps away from me. I
certainly can’t fault them for the reaction. I suppose I should
appreciate that guns aren’t being pointed my way. Yet.

“Explain, Lieutenant,” Rios orders. I shoot a glance
around at the others, at all the eyes and ears on this conversation
(especially Sergeant Carson, our token Upworld Newbie). But Rios
isn’t in the mood. “
Now
.”

“My little rebellion was pinned down in the Industry
tunnels. Colonel Ram came to help us. Along with a few of his
‘special friends’. I told you that. Then Chang sent his killer bots
after us, all of us. If it wasn’t for Colonel Ram and the others
like him, I wouldn’t be here. None of my people would be. What I
didn’t tell you was that it was Ram that insisted I surrender to
UNMAC, to get my people sheltered.”

“To spy on us?” Jane turns on me.

“To
help
you,” I insist. “No matter how things
went.”

“With Earthside policy,” Rios qualifies. I have no
good response. I’m as much as admitting I’m a traitor, whatever my
intentions.

“What did he do to you?” Lyra dives in. “What did he
give you?”

I can’t…

“A nano-implant,” the machine finishes revealing me.
“Linked to her limbic system. It sends a barely-detectable signal
to Colonel Ram when she’s in distress, an emergency beacon. Given
your misadventures with the Silvermen, it’s been pinging. Just like
it is now. Again, I apologize for that, but needs must.”

“What needs?” Rios switches back to him—it.

“She’s been pinging. Colonel Ram isn’t
answering.”

27 May, 2118.
Jonathan Drake:

First we appear to have lost the mysterious Azrael,
simply gone and nowhere to be found when we wake and break camp to
continue our trek to Katar. Not surprisingly, our night-watch
sentries didn’t see him go, but then seeing anything coming or
going in this thick green is terrifyingly difficult.

Now
our earnest but clumsy young Jinn has run
off too, sprinting directly into the sudden storm that blew across
us after sunrise, as if charging into battle, and without so much
as a farewell (unless his farewell was drowned out by the chaos of
the blinding dust blow), across the Boundary…

I feel their combined absence as a sense of both loss
and dread in the pit of my stomach: On one hand, the mysterious and
distant Azrael has proven himself to be an invaluable set of
assets—no minor one being skilled field physician, performing
in-shelter surgery on my stepmother’s belly wound with only the
most basic tools, then hand-synthesizing an effective antibiotic
from local plants and minerals. On the other hand, I realize I’ve
grown fond of Erickson and his apparently boundless enthusiasm for
adventuring, despite his clumsiness and inexperience. And it’s that
clumsiness and inexperience that makes me urgently fear for him
now. (Conversely, I fully expect Azrael could manage to walk away
from any conceivable onslaught, short of an Unmaker nuke, and
perhaps even that.)

“Do we follow him?” Ambassador Murphy is the first to
ask after the wind dies and the haze starts to clear, but he sounds
unusually hesitant, apprehensive.

The Ghaddar simply stands where she is, watching
after the direction that Erickson bolted through the
four-to-five-meter-high greenery like she can still see him (or see
something). But ground-level visibility is barely a dozen meters in
any direction with the density of the growth, a limitation that’s
become no less unnerving despite traveling in it for several days
now, ever since we finally descended out of the labyrinth of the
Badlands and into the Trident, the Western Vajra.