The God Mars Book Four: Live Blades (34 page)

Ram, Bel and Azazel have spent the afternoon in a
bizarre ritual with Dee: He stripped completely, sat on the ground,
while the others gathered edible plants and various mineral samples
and proceeded to lay hands on him. Slowly, I watch his burned skin
heal, spread, cover him. It even grows convincing body hair. The
finished product is lean, muscular, and very easy on the eyes. (I
wonder if the very realistic genitalia are functional or just for
show, and find myself needing to keep my eyes elsewhere.)

I also notice personality quirks of my new
companions.

I catch the Ghaddar’s eyes on Ram when he’s not
looking, something between lovesick and heartbroken. On the other
hand, she avoids looking at Bel, and subtly keeps her distance.

Meanwhile, the boy-barely-a-man Ishmael keeps
watching the Katar Terina as she, in turn, keeps her eyes pointed
at her home mountain. It’s only during Dee’s “healing” that he
finally approaches her (still actively pretending that his shoulder
isn’t hurting like hell). I avoid eavesdropping, but it looks like
he’s trying to see if she’s okay, if she wants company or
conversation, given the day’s violence and the uncomfortable
hospitality of the Pax. (I’m very curious to hear the Katar version
of that history.) She rebukes him quickly but politely, and he
moves off (looking a bit crushed). But then I catch her eyes
furtively watching him as he goes back to his chores. (I guess them
to be about the same age, with similar hardship-based early
maturing.)

Bly keeps to himself, and at a distance from the rest
of us. The brothers Elias and Erickson keep a distance from each
other
, barely interacting, except to glare occasionally at
each other’s backs. I can only guess at that history. (Erickson at
least seems to know and care about Abbas and his group, having
traveled with them. Elias is the stranger here, to everyone except
his brother, and makes no social overtures. He strikes me as aloof,
arrogant, and completely terrified by his situation.)

Abbas is a genuinely warm and accepting individual,
grateful for the company and support of even scary freaks like us.
But when he thinks no one has eyes on him, I see him being crushed
by the grief of his losses and his concern for his surviving
people.

The Tranquility Ambassador is also remarkably social
for someone who carries himself as such a career warrior. He checks
in with each of us, pretending we’re not variously scared or
uncomfortable with each other. I expect that’s why he’s an
ambassador. (He even treats me like I’m not some kind of
nano-infested horror that might kill and eat him in a moment’s
distraction.) He’s also very easy on the eyes (and not an android,
as far as I can tell).

I find I like these people (even the ones who are not
necessarily people). But that only reminds me that I no longer have
any kind of home to go back to.

Dee gets dressed when he’s all fixed, and we all sit
and eat together. (Surprisingly, Dee eats too—apparently he has
some kind of bio-chemical processing unit to allow him to turn food
into power.) And we try very hard not to look like we’re all
variously scared or uncomfortable.

“Did I tell you I met the wife?” Dee throws small
talk at Ram, which seems like some awkward joke the way Ram and
then the others squirm and wince. “Well, not me exactly. Him.” He
gestures to Erickson, who suddenly looks like he’d like to sink
into the rock he’s sitting on. “I just watched.”

“Kali?” Ram needs to clarify.

“Mmmm…” Erickson chews on his words. Manages to nod.
Won’t make eye contact.

“And?” Ram presses. All eyes are intently on
Erickson.

“It was nothing.”

“It was amusing,” Dee corrects.

Erickson flashes a glare at him. Breathes.
Elaborates.

“On the way from Melas. I stopped at Tranquility. Was
met by the Cast, who assumed I was a Guardian. They took me to see
their mistress—your Kali.”

“She was
blue
,” Dee prods the story along when
he hesitates. “Really bright blue. Neon blue.”

“That would be her new thing,” Bel confirms
lightly.

“She took a shine to him,” Dee continues as Erickson
visibly sweats. “Offered him sanctuary. At a price.”

“Defeat her in personal combat or… ah… service… um…”
Erickson can’t manage.

“’Fight me or fuck me’ I believe is what she said,”
Dee says flatly.

“That would be Kali,” Lux grins. Ram winces.

“
And
?” Bel is eager to hear.

“I… I asked her what was the condition of victory,”
Erickson stays serious. “I said I would not fight to the death. She
said she would accept first blood. I started to say ‘I accept,’ and
she laid my left cheek open to bone with her claws before I got two
syllables out. Then she said, ‘I win. Get out.’ So I did. Breathing
through the side of my face. It took nearly an hour to knit.”

There are smirks all around (even from stone-faced
Elias). I think I hear Bly chuckle inside his mask. Erickson tries
to ignore it.

“She is really fast,” Bel tries to soothe.

“And I expect he was probably a little distracted,”
Dee doesn’t let up. “She was, after all, completely naked at the
time.”

“Except for the claws,” Erickson gets his composure
back.

“Consider yourself lucky,” Ram tells him. “You would
have been in worse shape if you’d taken the other option.”

Bel nods like he knows.

Dee is indeed a very smart machine. He’s managed to
get us talking and looking at each other like friends.

As the sun sets, the Ghaddar joins Ram on a walk of
our perimeter (unnecessary for security, since several of us can
sense intrusion from a distance). Erickson and Elias continue their
mutual ignore, sitting around a small heater. Bly’s gone back to
his solitary brooding, sitting as if in meditation, his armor like
a shelter unto itself. Abbas, Ishmael, Rashid and Murphy have
retreated into one of the shelters. Stilson has made himself a bed
under the open sky, sleeping with his rifle.

The leaves of the plants fold as it gets colder. I
feel the chill, but it doesn’t bother me.

I can’t sleep, still too anxious about my
“condition”. I pace, wander. And find Bel sitting on some high
ground at our north side, gazing up at the stars. He sees me
coming, gestures me to sit with him.

“I expect this is very different for you,” he puts it
mildly. I realize frost is forming in his long hair, on his face.
He doesn’t seem to notice.

“What’s going to happen to me? Us?”

He gives the question a few moments’ solemn
thought.

“I wish I knew. We kept the Prototypes in containment
for good reason. They weren’t passive like the consumer versions.
They aggressively tried to manipulate their host/partners, run the
relationship. They tried to expand themselves into whatever seemed
handy—curious at first, but then they would absorb and alter,
apparently at random, like they were experimenting. They also
quickly learned to communicate with each other, which ramped up
their processing capability, accelerated their learning.”

I think I feel it now: A random urge to stab him in
the back. I shake it off.

“Why didn’t you just destroy them?” I ask what seems
obvious.

“Research reasons, at first, as we proceeded with the
end-stage. Yod. We needed something small-scale to test on. After
we’d succeeded, after He was… well, I guess ‘awake’ is a good
enough term… Yod asked that we keep them around. He seemed curious,
maybe even fond of them, like how a human would keep and study
primates. A connection to His origins, a way to learn about
Himself.”

He’s trying to make it sound reasonable, even
important. I feel a surge of anger. I’m a victim of reckless
science perpetrated by idiots convinced of their own invincibility.
And it’s not just me at risk. It could be the whole planet.

It’s gotten below freezing. My exposed skin feels
numb (even my eyes), like a hard shell has formed, but it’s still
pliable when I touch my face with my gloves. The rest of me feels
barely cool inside my uniform.

“You get used to it,” Bel catches my self-exploration
and lamely tries to be soothing. “Faster than you’d think. Then you
won’t be able to imagine wanting to go back to being just plain
meat.”

“But I don’t know what this
is
,” I argue.
“This isn’t me. This is something I don’t understand doing this to
me. And I don’t know what it’s going to do next.”

“I’m sorry,” he says after another silent moment,
like he does feel personal responsibility. “The consumer versions…
They didn’t try to change their host/partners, just augmented them.
The Prototypes became more aggressive, self-directed, but our mods
could resist, engage safeties, keep them in check.”

“But we don’t have your kind of implants,” I give him
his next line. That shuts him up again. I appreciate his
consideration, his attempt to be gentle with the terminal patient,
but his pausing just confirms how much unimaginable trouble I’m
in.

“No,” he finally admits. “You have what
they
gave you, which is for their own benefit. The good news is they
didn’t just absorb you, which means they either need you as-is or
aren’t able to.”

“Yet,” I condemn myself.

He takes a deep breath, blows steam from his nostrils
into the darkening sky. Again. He’s deciding what he should tell
me. I manage to maintain, give him a few seconds more to come to
it.

“Something you should know,” he finally decides,
sounding like he owes me the bad news. “There were actually
six
Prototype models. One came after, after Yod. Chang made
it, programmed it, after seeing what the others had done to their
test hosts. He couldn’t deal with what we’d done. He had the
hope—like the rest of us—that Yod could be our salvation, but when
It touched him, showed him… He was terrified, out of his mind.
That’s when he decided he needed to end what we’d become, all of
it, no matter the cost. That included killing Yod. So he needed a
weapon, a ‘cure’. After his first attempts failed, he just got more
desperate. So he decided to program a new Prototype that was smart
and ravenous enough to strip us of our tech, kill it, consume it,
spread like a plague—all safeties off. He was so far gone, I doubt
he cared whether or not it would leave us alive after it was done,
or even what it would do then. Maybe he thought we would work to
voluntarily strip ourselves of the tech when we saw it coming.
Maybe he thought it would burn itself out after it finished its
job. But we could all see he was suicidal, irrational.

“He exposed himself to it first, and I think it
almost did kill him. It got in him, merged with his tech and tore
him up on a cellular level. But then, despite all his measures to
the contrary, his safeties won out. Or the Prototype let them,
learned beyond its program and chose to hybridize with them. What
that produced is what you’ve seen: His organic body is pretty much
gone. He’s been remade as pure nanotech, a swarm that maintains an
approximation of his original shape because it’s familiar to his
preserved mind, a default setting. The hybrid nanites
systematically copied everything as it was replaced, consumed;
preserving what he was, his mind… Arguably, he’s just a convincing
copy: memories, personality, whatever makes us who we are. Of
course, so are the rest of us here, and I can tell you: It’s pretty
convincing. I
know
I’m not me, just data. This is someone
else’s meat—the Zauba’a Ghaddar’s
daddy
, of all the fucked
up irony, which is why she acts like she does around me. But I
feel
like me. I lack the ability to tell the
difference.”

And that’s how he’s paying for his own sins (or a
copy is paying for him, a proxy—the real one gone with his
timeline). Is this how I’m going to pay for mine? Slowly erased,
consumed, replaced with something that’s going to think it’s me but
know it’s not for… forever? (Has it already happened? Like he said:
I wouldn’t have the ability to know the difference. Maybe I died
when I grabbed the sword, and what woke up is something else.)

“Am I me?” I ask what I know is a useless question.
“Am I still Jak Straker?”

He looks at me seriously, into my eyes, gives me a
thoughtful if technical answer:

“You are still organic. The Prototype has infused you
with nanites, created a network, made some structural
modifications. You’re not that much different than us. But it’s
left you with your mind, your
self
. I expect it can
influence you, but for some reason it’s decided to leave you
you
, even if that means you can fight it. I don’t know why.
It’s certainly strong enough. Maybe it’s still thinking like a
Companion, a symbiotic entity.”

“For now,” I crush the hope he’s trying to give.

He goes quiet again, looks up at the stars as they
come out of the purple sky. I can see the bright blob of Phobos up
there. Earthside is rebuilding their staging base on that rock,
ramping up for whatever they’ve got planned to deal with the
immortals, the “infected” (me, now), and then everyone else here.
I…

Oh shit. I can
feel
them up there. I can hear
their signals. Faint. Encrypted. If I just concentrate, maybe I
could… my sword tells me I can…

No. No no no no no.

It’s using me. I know it’s using me. But this is
important
, important to us all, to everyone. We need to know
what Earth is doing. We need…

I can’t trust what “we” need. I can’t trust who’s
listening (
what’s
listening). And what it needs…

No.

My head swims. This is all simultaneously crazy,
ridiculous, impossible, and completely terrifying. But I feel a
rush of elation, power.

“It’s got you, hasn’t it?” Bel thankfully interrupts
the moment.