The God Mars Book Four: Live Blades (23 page)

RECONSTRUCTION. COPY.

“No need to go there,” he scolds.

“You can hear the blade?” I freeze.

“Of course I can hear it. How do you think I know
your name, silly child?” He’s using the distraction to back up
further, casually hopping from rock to rock; getting distance,
getting his balance back, setting up his next attack. I don’t let
my guard down, and the sword keeps calculating his potential moves,
flashing them in my vision like ghosts of possible futures. “That
thing you’ve gotten yourself connected to is broadcasting. It’s
using you to try to hack your planetary network. Nice plan, by the
way. The question is: what do you plan to do when you have control
of the terraforming stations? Or is it the atmosphere net you’re
after?”

I realize he’s speaking directly to the sword. If
he’s telling the truth…

He takes my hesitation, and does something the sword
hasn’t foreseen: He runs. He runs for the inner edge of the
crescent and leaps far out into space. Chasing after him, I stop at
the edge of Lucifer’s Grave: a steep-walled crater, dropping down
hundreds of meters and well over a kilometer across. It looks less
like an impact crater and more volcanic, or sink. There are a
number of even deeper sinkholes down in its well, some visibly
bottomless, like the ground has given way to significant melt. The
crater bowl is all laced and carpeted with verdant green.

What I
don’t
see is any sign of a base, a
ship. It’s either well-camouflaged or down in one of the larger
sinkholes. (But none of the sinks I can see look big enough to hide
something Stormcloud-class.)

I watch Asmodeus plummet, armor gleaming and bright
red cape fluttering. I expect the fall won’t hurt him. And that
makes me angry.

He’s left his soldiers behind, cowering behind their
guns, their line divided on either side of me. The sword wants
them. They’re smart enough not to try to shoot me.

“
RUN!!!
” I yell at them. Then I run and leap
into the abyss.

I realize as I’m falling that he’s sent his machines
after my friends—I should be heading the other way, running to help
them. But I’ve got him in sight. He’s landed in the open bowl of
the crater, and has turned to face me, waiting for me, spear down
at his side as if daring me to make the first move.

My leap has taken me an impressive distance into the
crater, almost as far as his, and my apparently re-modified body
absorbs the landing with minimal discomfort—the worst part is that
I wind up stumbling gracelessly, my boots sunk deep in… Is this
mud
? Despite the thick dust over everything from the
manufactured storm, the patch of sand I’m in is
wet
beneath
the waist-high ground-clinging growth, like the model “wetlands” in
our Station gardens. There’s a lot of water in the soil here—I
would expect more plant life, richer, at least as dense as the
forest all around, but there’s just crawling ground-cover and a
scattering of random squat shrubs, little of it reaching more than
a meter tall. I wonder if that’s due to the quality of the soil, or
something else. The visible sand is dark and marbled with gray, and
there’s a lot of black rock mixed in, some of it in octahedral
crystal form. Magnetite. Through the sword, I can feel the
electromagnetic radiation all over this place, like an invisible
fog. I feel slightly drugged, fuzzy. The world has become less
sharp.

Asmodeus lets me get my bearings, patient, amused. He
led me here intentionally.

“Interesting device you’ve got there,” he appraises.
“Or it’s got
you
—I think that’s more accurate. How
did
you two collide?”

“That’s not important,” I fail to think of a smarter
comeback. “Call your machines back!”

“It still lets you care about the lesser meat.” I’m
not quite sure what he’s implying. “How thoughtful. Unless that’s
useful, something to keep you motivated.”

“Call off the bots!!” I advance, sword in both hands,
boots sinking almost to the ankle with each step to make
maneuvering difficult.

“What fun is that?” he taunts.

The sand erupts to my left and right. Box bots churn
themselves out of the ground, spinning their cubic sections. They
rotate electric cannons at me.

“Fine…” I have time to hiss before they start
shooting. My weapon has already got enough of a hack into them to
predict them, and shows me where to go. They have me in a “V”
crossfire. I run into it, faster than they can track despite the
mud, drawing their guns at each other. One of the bots it quick
enough to figure out what’s going to happen and pauses fire. Too
bad for it that its twin is slower to react—it gets chewed up by
friendly fire.

The sword gives me their weakness: They’re better at
rotating guns horizontally. Rotating sections vertically drags
against the ground and tips their sensor heads away because they’re
on the same axis. So I leap, launching myself high into the air,
and come down on the intact Box just as it gets its gun up, my
sword taking the fire as it hacks down into the offending cannon.
Then I drive the blade into the turret, let it drink…

The other Box recovers, decides not to bother sparing
its twin anymore, rotates an intact cannon at me. But now my blade
has it hacked, has its frequency over the EM fog. I—we—make it turn
its weapons on Asmodeus.

But it won’t fire.

“You were right. This
is
impressive.” Another
voice comes from behind me, deeper than Asmodeus’, older. I turn.
There’s another suit of golden armor, but this time the hair and
beard are golden, the cloak white with a royal purple lining. And
he’s wearing a golden crown, with a facetted patch over his right
eye. He’s got what I recognize as a war hammer held lazily across
his thighs.

Fohat. The toymaker himself.

“Do you recognize it?” Asmodeus asks him.

“Possibly a Companion. But the only ones I’ve ever
seen this strong or this smart were…” He trails off, his face
dropping like he’s just realized he’s in some kind of trouble. Then
he forces a smile. “Oh. This could be a problem.”

“Something you should have told me?” Asmodeus presses
him, annoyed.

“Something that shouldn’t be here,” he doesn’t
explain.

“None of us should be here,” Asmodeus throws
back.

I catch a flash-stream. Data. Encrypted. Fohat is
feeding something to Asmodeus. I can’t catch what…

“Well, isn’t that interesting,” Asmodeus purrs. The
feed has stopped.

“
Where’s Chang
?” I change the subject.
Asmodeus gives me a lazy lopsided grin, shrugs.

“No idea, actually,” he tells me lightly. “Maybe
getting intimate with a four hundred and fifty kiloton nuke finally
gave him his wish. Of course, given how suicidal he was before he
found his ‘mission’, you’d figure he’d have thought of trying that,
tried it. But back to the topic at hand…” He raises his voice,
calling out in mock song: “
Oh, sweetie
…”

“I’m here,” a female voice answers without
enthusiasm. (They seem to keep appearing out of thin air.) A blonde
in white and gold. Astarte. She’s wearing a diadem with big black
gems. The Guardian files suggested this is technology that Chang
used to monitor her actions, perhaps even control her.

“Anybody we know pack a Companion?” Asmodeus asks
her. “One of the Pets?”

“Not that I’m aware of,” she says flatly. But her
voice hesitates and her facial expression shows definite fear—and
recognition—as she looks at the blade.

“They were pretty unstable on a good day,” Fohat
still sounds worried. “This one, though… Oh,
my
… I have to
keep rotating encryptions…”

“It’s still trying to hack into his Station network,”
Asmodeus updates. “I’m tempted to let it succeed, just to see what
it has in mind.”

My anger is building. And with it, so is the sword’s.
I can feel it. I can feel it
feel
.

I force control over the Box, turn the guns on its
maker, its controller. I watch him struggle with me over it—he
seems confused, unsure, like we’re playing some invisible strategy
game. And I’m winning. I make the Box fire.

The bullets go right through him. He’s not there.
He’s just an avatar, a hologram.

“That really
is
impressive,” Asmodeus praises
almost honestly. “Do you have any idea what you got your hands on,
little boy?”

“Don’t really care…” I growl at him. I turn the Box’s
guns, fire. He runs, dashes in a big circle, fast enough the stay
ahead of the Box. But I can see where he’s going. I leap, charge in
to intercept him…

…and the ground heaves up under my feet, throwing me.
I lose control of the Box, and its guns go silent. I land in a
shower of damp sand and gravel and torn vines. Erupting out of the
crater is a geyser of black metallic… something. It’s fluid, but
shifts, moves with purpose, lands, forms into a rough man-shape.
Chang? No, I can see reflection, shimmering on its shifting
surfaces, like high-carbon lube oil. It takes a shuffling step
toward me, reaches out, then goes fluid again. I have to roll to
avoid a gusher of it that gouges deep into the ground. The figure
flows into its own strike, partially re-forms at the point of
impact.

“New toy,” Asmodeus is explaining, now watching from
the higher ground of the crater slope. “Fohat calls it ‘Boogie’, as
in Boogieman. He’s got kind of a ‘B’ theme going. It’s deviously
simple, really—just a reprogramming of a nanoswarm—but it’s been
giving my fellow exiles quite the run…”

The thing forms tentacles, lashes out.

I duck one swipe, then block, cut. The sword gets
stuck in the “limb”, and everything goes electric. The thing
convulses, the limb I’ve cut into seems to lose its fluidity,
begins to crumble. It strikes at me with another liquid limb, tries
to wrap itself around me, constrict me, but the sword meets it,
cuts deep. The first appendage I cut is trying to recover, but it’s
losing parts of itself, breaking down into what look like little
crystals. It throws its whole body into me, collides with the
sword, tries to flow around it. But it’s not immune to the sword’s
ability to feed, to draw resources. Everywhere the sword makes
contact, the thing goes brittle, begins falling apart. It
disengages, circles me, moving like an injured cephalopod.

“Huh…” I hear Asmodeus mutter as he watches.

“You have another problem,” I hear Astarte tell him
with casual satisfaction. She nods her head up to the crest of the
crater rim. “You got distracted. They’re out.”

“And I expect they’re rather cross with me,” he
pretends to pout. He looks up to the top of the crater rim. Three
figures appear, looking like they’ve come a long way through
exhausting difficulty.

I recognize two from our files: Colonel Ram, in his
younger, immortal version—all black armor and robes, long dark hair
whipping in the breeze, katana in hand; and Bel, in more
reptilian-looking black plate, covered by a blood-red cloak, his
long black hair curling up into cosmetic horns at the corners of
his hairline.

The third… I think may be Doctor Stilson. I see what
may remain of his sapphire blue sealsuit, but so much else has
changed. He’s wearing sections of armor over it, not unlike the
samurai-style of the Katar I’d just fought. His dark hair is a
short-cropped disarray. And the expression on his face—even from
here—is all battle-weary rage.

Asmodeus turns to his damaged construct, and jerking
his head uphill, orders it: “Go greet our guests.”

The thing goes fluid again, rushes up-slope as a
tumbling, thrashing chaos.

Ram lets it get within a handful of meters of him,
then draws his big pistol and pumps two rounds into the center of
the mass. The shells explode, bursting the monster, staggering it.
Stilson pulls something from his belt that I initially assume to be
one of his Spheres, but he tosses it into the flailing mass,
resulting in another explosion, this one significantly larger.

“I suppose it was more challenging in the tunnels,”
Asmodeus sighs, his monster badly shredded, struggling to recover.
“Maybe not so much out in the open like…”

There’s a loud bang and he gets slammed in the chest,
then knocked off his feet as whatever projectile sunk into his
armor explodes. I look uphill. Through the dissipating blast-smoke,
Stilson has a rifle on him, having shot through the cover of the
explosion. Asmodeus lands and slides in the gravel, tries to get
up. Then his lower jaw gets blown halfway off by another shot.

He groans more in frustration than pain, holds his
face together as he bleeds into the sand. He waves a hand at his
“Boogie,” and it shifts and makes a dash just as Bel is descending
on it with his sword, his armor glowing red-hot. It gathers itself
together and vanishes past them over the crest. Heading for my
friends.

Asmodeus takes the distraction to run and leap into
one of the deep sinks. I run to the edge and look down, but see no
sign of him. The abyss branches in multiple directions. He’s
vanished into a subterranean maze.

I look for Astarte. She’s giving Ram a conspiratorial
nod, then she dissolves. She was also a hologram.

The three look at me like they don’t know what to
make of me, hesitating.

The wounded but still functionally lethal “swarm” bot
is still headed for my friends, as are an unknown number of Boxes
and Bugs. Even down in this hole, I can still hear the echoes of
gunfire and explosions, far away.

I bound up the slope, past Ram and his companions,
leaping over the crest. No time for introductions.

“
People are in danger!
” I yell as I fly.

I don’t get winded. I don’t get tired. If my energy
levels start to flag, I hack at the green as I go, giving the sword
something to feed me. Us. I have no time to question. And I
realize: I don’t want to, at least not right now. Because right now
I feel exhilarated, more alive than I’ve ever felt.