The God Mars Book Four: Live Blades (19 page)

“Too late!” Azazel announces, spinning and firing
through the green, first south, then southwest. Lux crouches.
Murphy and the Ghaddar get low. I’m down on my belly behind my
rifle, burrowing to hide in the shredded greenery, despite knowing
that the bots can probably see my heat.

There’s a crushing/rustling sound coming at us, from
multiple directions. Lux springs just as a Bug bot comes flying
through the brush, slashing as it tumbles on its six bladed limbs.
Lux gets sword into one of the heads as he/she flies over the top
of it, then clips off a limb as it tries to turn. Murphy shoots it
in the other head, nailing it with a penetrating HE round. It
starts flailing, blind and broken.

Azazel punches holes in another as it tries to charge
him. He has to sidestep it at the last instant, drawing his stout
blade in the same movement and hacking. But he has to turn because
another is coming. I manage to hit it in the torso, then get my own
head shot as it hesitates, targets me. Azazel blows off the other
head as it comes for me.

The second bot, injured, goes for Murphy, only to
have the Ghaddar leap on its back. She lets it throw her off,
leaving behind a charge that blows the bot in half at one of the
torso joints. Murphy finishes one head as it tries to recover. Lux
stabs the other.

But our breather is brief. Azazel is scanning the
green.

“More! I count six… No… Eight!”

I hear the rustling, get ready… but the sounds pass
us. Headed north.

“What…?” I start asking dumbly.

“Standard tactic,” Azazel explains quickly. “They hit
us, we break a few. So they go looking for anything warm and tender
they can find, make us chase.”

My father. My people.

“How far away was the rest of your group?” Lux lets
me know she/he’s thinking what I’m dreading. My companions look
back the way we came.

“Two klicks,” Murphy guesses, “depending on how fast
they’re moving.”

“Not far enough,” Lux decides darkly. “You still want
to go find your Terraformer?”

Through the brush, I see a swarm of butter-flies
suddenly take to the air, then trees being pushed down. Over the
crushing, I hear the distinctive treads and motors of Boxes,
following behind the charging Bugs at their own slightly more
leisurely pace. Ignoring us. Heading for the western tail of the
Spine Range. I look south, like I have any hope of seeing Erickson
through the green. Or like I’m expecting him to come running,
somehow knowing what trouble we’re in. (Or Azrael. Where has Azrael
gone?)

“We need to go back,” I decide, like I’m in charge.
The others follow me like I am. Running.

From the active journal of Elias Carter:

If I wasn’t on the Ops deck, I wonder if they would
have told me.

“Contact fading,” Technician Sung says like this is
nothing, routine.

“Maybe just a test of the lift engines,” Guerrero—his
Ops-shift partner—guesses too casually for reason.

“Is that what I think it was?” I ask a pointless
question. I know they won’t answer me, and they don’t. It’s like
I’m not here, like they’ve treated me since I arrived two days ago;
like every team has treated me at every Station on every stop I’ve
made. But you’d think they would make an exception, given the
circumstances. “That was a Stormcloud-class maglev ship.”

It’s like I’m not here.

“Have you seen it before?” I interrogate the backs of
their helmeted heads as they stare at their screens. “Did you know
it was there?!”

I’m losing my temper. I tell myself I have reason—I
should be screaming.

“
Did you know it was there?!”

“Stand down, Doctor Carter,” a calm voice comes from
behind me. I turn to see Council White—in physical person, not
Avatar—come in through the airlock hatch. Alone.

“You knew this was out there?” I don’t let it go, but
manage to bring my voice down. Calm. Breathe. Center. “How long
have you known?”

“They arrived just over two months ago, moving their
personnel and equipment into the magnetic crater,” Council tells me
like it’s not important. “This is only the second time they’ve
managed to get the new ship airborne for any length of time.”

“And what are we doing about it?” I start to lose my
calm again, catch myself.

“We are monitoring.”

“That ship can
fly
,” I confront. “If it has a
railgun like the last one did…”

“Then we will be a target.” Council walks around me,
up to the screen array—his window on his corner of our world, our
only direct window on the Vajra. With a thought, he calls up a file
video, zooms in on the crater-sink that’s known as Lucifer’s Grave
by the locals. Up on the raised rim that circles two-thirds of the
crater’s circumference is a man-shape, but absolutely black. The
time-stamp is four weeks ago.

“Chang,” I name out loud. “You’ve been watching
him—just watching him—all this time. Doing nothing? Watching?”

“His perimeter is protected by his machines.” He
shows me video images I recognize as Boxes, Bugs, and variations
thereof, moving through the dense greenery.

“Our Guardian forces could break through, destroy his
ship. We could alert our allies, the anomalous immortals…”

“We are alerting no one,” Council insists, not
turning to look at me. “Our communications may be monitored. What
do you expect would happen if the UNMAC Command had this
information?”

He calls up other images: Maps of the region. Human
populations are highlighted.

“Won’t they see for themselves?” I criticize,
holding.

“They have not seen, not yet. Chang is using the
natural magnetic field of the region coupled with our own
Atmosphere Net to mask him from EMR scans. He is otherwise visually
camouflaged inside the sink.”

“They won’t see him until he moves to attack,” I
guess. “Assuming this Station isn’t his first target.”

“We will act when the time is right,” he fails to be
convincing.

I hide my seething behind my practiced stoicism. I
have, after all, had more reason to practice hiding my rage over my
lifetime than many of my fellows.

“And what if my brother is out there?”

I get no answer.

I let myself out.

I go back to my assigned quarters, my plain guest
suite. The bare walls and simple furnishings are soothing. I don’t
bother to activate a landscape wall, not caring for artificial
distraction—not even a file view of the valley below this Station,
however edited to promote a sense of serenity (obviously, it
wouldn’t show me signs of Chang’s sinister activities).

I sit on the tall-backed sofa, balance, and try to
systematically let go of my frustrations, release the past, settle
in the current moment. I find the process gets more difficult each
day I’ve been on this so-called search.

I can’t help but recount the days: Fifty now, since
the Council finally gave me its permission to pursue my brother, to
leave the security of the Station. But security has been the rule
ever since, blocking all effective progress in that endeavor. I
have been flown by shuttle from Station to Station, and only at
night, traveling up over the Planums, with random intervals of days
in between, in assumed hope of convincing the ever-watchful and
paranoid Earth that we are not scheming some imagined horror. But
at each Station stop, I am allowed to do nothing but watch
passively from Ops, as if my brother would simply walk out in front
of our remote eyes.

And now here I am: The end of the road, the end of
our world. White Station. Our greatest facility, on the far eastern
edge of our network. Custodian of the Vajra, our proudest
achievement: Deep, rich, lush. With additional Atmosphere Net
reinforcement and a wealth of local resources to tap and process.
And at least two functioning, thriving civilizations, now developed
to the tipping point of evolving from violent competitors to
cooperative trade partners.

But Chang is here, too. And Chang is a true scourge.
He will strip this land, enslave and slaughter its people. (There’s
no choice in that: they’ll be killed if they resist or if they
join, their homes destroyed to feed his mad obsession.)

For some reason, we don’t seem to be very concerned
about that. This despite the fact that we’re still repairing Green
Station from the devastation dealt by his railgun, and the damage
to the environment in Melas Chasma may take decades to undo
(assuming Earth—or Chang—lets us). Instead, I and many of my
fellows have been kept busy with bizarre projects, ordered by the
Council (specifically Council Blue), that have nothing to do with
creating a defense against our twin enemies, or even repairing the
destruction they’ve done.

Allowing myself to get distracted (having nothing
else to do but meditate), I brood over the various assignments
again, attempting to see a pattern, a reason for all the
unexplained demands:

Our geologists and chemists have been made to run
deep core samples in hundreds of locations throughout our tap
network, comparing them against surface regolith, looking for any
structural inconsistencies down to the sub-atomic level, and
especially comparing the temporal isotope markers. So far finding
nothing remarkable, they’ve recently been ordered to go far beyond
the current reach of our Taps, and missions have been sent to
sample the Planums, away from the terraformed valleys.

Our astronomers have been tasked with re-mapping the
cosmos, calculating galactic, stellar and planetary body movement,
with the odd challenge of comparing their findings to old (and
often non-scientific anecdotal) data, to re-create a cosmic clock
from scratch, and then test it for errors.

My fellows and I in Physics have been assigned across
these projects, analyzing everything from the matter of the planet
to the spectrography of space. Looking for what, exactly, is
unclear. “Inconsistencies” is all we’re told. We’ve also been
tasked with developing a new method to date matter based on
temporal marker isotopes. The crushing caveat is that the Council
doesn’t want dating in terms of eons, millenia or even centuries.
The challenge has been to track age in decades, years.

And then there’s the oddest project: A select team of
materials engineers, nanotech specialists and physicists (including
me, until I started on this endless quest to find my idiot brother)
have been engaged in the seemingly pointless task of using our
field technology to break down simple objects—so far, common
rocks—and then develop a technique to rebuild them in similar form,
so that they appear natural to all possible tests. It would be far
simpler to manufacture such objects from raw materials, but the
order is to only use the
original
matter, a ridiculously
painstaking process, and so far barely successful.

The Council has given no reason for any of these
high-resource projects, but I’ve made my own assumptions (as, I’m
sure, have many of my collegues). The Council’s madness appeared
along with the anomalous immortals, their impossible (and it
is
impossible) tale of retrograde time travel and successful
violation of the Novikov Self-Consistency Principle. I suspect that
the Council is looking for hard evidence to prove or disprove the
fantasy, perhaps by trying to determine if the claimed changing of
the time line left any trace evidence. One unlikely possibility
(inside an overlying ridiculous paradigm) is that the effects of
the incursion only affected specific parts of our universe—i.e. the
regions impacted by human actions, whereas the larger universe
would show no significant impact by the actions of human history
and activity, thereby be somehow unaffected by changes to the
causal chain. In that theoretical model, the rest of the universe
is still running on the original fixed timeline, and only our
personal world has been altered.

The far better alternative (and one that I support)
is that the Council is just going to obsessive lengths to
definitively debunk the entire time-travel story as some kind of
subterfuge, a barely-convincing “big lie” to distract from some
underlying agency or agenda. This would be supported not only by
the most common sense logic, but by the anomalous immortals own
self-reports that their nanotechnology is capable of creating
entire personalities and memory sets in the host body—the immortals
themselves may be oblivious pawns, fictional constructs serving
some unknown master.

However, none of our projects appear to be geared
directly to revealing this agency or its mechanisms, which would
seem to be the most practical approach: Instead of trying to
disprove an impossible fiction, simply prove the truth behind Chang
and his apparently manufactured “opponents”. (This approach is also
supported by Occam’s Razor: The underlying truth would certainly be
much simpler than some theoretically and practically impossible
tale of sub-atomic retrograde time travel accomplished through
quantum teleportation.)

And, if the Council
is
confident that the
time-travel tale is a lie, why not say so? (Unless they don’t want
to influence the outcome of our experiments.)

One thing (among many) that’s specifically bothering
me: When the “converted” Colonel Ram came to Green Station to first
tell us his version of the tale, we took the opportunity to scan
him in detail. While this served to prove that the sheer amount of
data that would need to be sent back through the alleged quantum
temporal “splice” just to create his modifications would be
impossible to accomplish by any conceivable sub-atomic stream (much
less to make nine more like him), we have not yet invested in
seriously studying his technology—this has in fact been banned by
Council order. Such a study might yield practical answers as to the
origin of that technology, and therefore its true source. It might
also provide us with useful breakthroughs to advance our own
technology, including the fact that these nanotech modifications
can apparently re-create entire memory sets for identity formation,
as well as entire bodies just from DNA coding.