The God Mars Book Four: Live Blades (39 page)

“Bly…” Straker reminds us. He’s gone still on the
deck, but at least he’s stopped smoking. If the apparent lightning
that hit him was anywhere near as powerful as what occurred on
Earth…

He stirs. Sits up. Shakes off Straker’s help.

“We lost Abbas and Ishmael,” Straker tells him.

“Overboard,” Bly grumbles, sounding ragged. “I
saw.”

“Come…” Jed prompts us again.

We climb the stairs and join the others. The
view…

The surface of the water—the lake—glimmers with
gentle sunshine. The water is a mossy green, betraying rich
biological content. It smells vaguely musty. We can finally see
some more of the boundaries of the lake, which does seem to stretch
for dozens and dozens of kilometers in every direction, perhaps as
far as the North Rim. And the Rim—starting to become visible in the
distance—looks greened well up its crenellated slopes, the upper
cliffs frosted white with ice. This world—if it is another world—is
much wetter than the Mars I know. But I have seen this: In
simulations, projections of what our terraforming could accomplish
in another half-century (assuming Earth doesn’t continue attempting
to destroy our efforts).

There’s land in the water: Off our port side, only a
few kilometers away, is what looks like a long oval mesa;
flat-topped, sloped sides, perhaps seven kilometers long and a
thousand meters high, rising up out of the water with a minimal
lush “shore-line” around it. It almost looks like it could be
floating—a ship, like this one, only much more massive—but I know
that’s just the illusion of our own momentum. Its slopes are dotted
with scrub and a few small tree-size specimens—most of the growth
is down by the water.

“The Barrow,” Jed names it.

“Our destination?” I want to know, losing patience
with him.

“No. Of course not. That is the one place you must
never go. We are going to The Peninsula.”

He gestures ahead of us. Several kilometers beyond
the eastern end of the Barrow I see more land, some low mountains,
hills, rich green like we left in the Vajra. It may indeed be a
promontory, a peninsula, reaching out into the body of the lake
from the Rim.

My fellows and I, however, are not enjoying the view.
We still search the surface of the water, looking behind us instead
of where we’re headed, looking for our lost friends. But even
enhanced, I see nothing but the gentle wind-driven waves, the
roiling wake we make as we cut the water’s surface. I can’t even
see the small boat Jed sent looking for them.

I realize darkly: Abbas and Ishmael were wearing
copious amounts of heavy armor and gear, even though they dropped
several packs on the deck before they went to fight the bots. They
would have sunk to the bottom, like the bots. Whatever inflatable
safety device Jed’s given each of us couldn’t possibly
compensate.

“I don’t see them…” Rashid sounds heartbroken,
panicked and in tears.

Terina, I realize, is also deeply affected by the
loss. She grips the rail of the ship, her big eyes scanning
urgently for any sign.

“They’re fine,” Jed repeats his empty assurances.
“Just far from our established course. They have their own
path.”

I try to estimate how fast the ship is moving, but
it’s difficult to gauge in water, and I have only my people’s
transports as reference. It’s certainly not moving as fast as any
aircraft (except for a Dutchman-Class Zodangan airship). I look
back to the retreating horizon, try to recognize the landmarks from
where we boarded, but that shore has disappeared below the
near-perfect horizon line formed by the surface of the Lake. I
think I can still partially see the low range of the Pax Keep, the
higher Spine behind it. They look to be maybe twelve or fifteen
kilometers away. I think we’ve been traveling for thirty five or
forty minutes…

Abbas and Ishmael could be hundreds of meters further
behind us just while I’ve been thinking about it. And that’s
assuming the lake is static.

“Are there currents?” I ask Jed.

“Of a sort,” he doesn’t answer.

“Oh, good,” Elias snaps. “More pseudoscience. Have
they been sucked back through your time-splice? Flushed out of your
dimensional bubble-universe?”

“What do you see?” Jed challenges him calmly. “Look
around. What do you see?”

“An illusion,” Straker speaks first. “Generated by
the swords. We’re probably still back at camp. Or wandering around
in a daze.”

“Then your friends are unhurt, because they were
never here,” Jed actually taunts her, though he sounds vaguely like
some kind of teacher or Zen master giving an experiential
lesson.

“Or they could be dead,” Elias attacks, insensitive
to those so freshly mourning. “Maybe that’s your definition of
‘fine’.”

“Drowning requires water. If you believe they are
dead, then you believe the Lake is real. But you have never seen
the Lake in your world. How can that be?”

Elias locks up, trapped. The conundrum isn’t lost on
the rest of us: Either this is all some kind of illusion (and then
we have to question which if us, if any others, are actually
sharing the experience) or we actually
are
on a massive body
of water that isn’t visible from either the surface or orbit. And
that means we either can’t trust our own minds or are dealing with
something powerful that we can’t understand.

So we us stew in silence, still helplessly looking
for sign of our friends, believing they’re well-lost, hoping that
they aren’t dead. Murphy looks crushed, his face bloodied from the
bot fight, guilt in his eyes like he somehow failed, blaming
himself. The Ghaddar just stoically scans the horizon, her gaze
hard as metal, coiled under her robes. I expect she also feels a
sense of failure, the loss of someone she’d sworn to serve and
protect. Rashid is still inconsolable, while Terina looks lost,
helpless (a word I didn’t think I would ever use to describe her).
Bly is a metal statue, unreadable as always. (Though I’m not sure
how he’s still on his feet at all—I recall that terrestrial
lightning produced hundreds of megajoules of energy. Even if his
armor somehow conducted the ionic surge around him so it didn’t
destroy his tissues, the heat generated would have burned him
badly, just as it seared his nonconductive robes. He doesn’t even
seem to be in pain.)

I exchange looks with my brother and Jak Straker.
It’s clear we’re especially suspicious of all of this. I do trust
Elias, at least in his understanding of physics. If the entire
explanation of the time-splice is dubious at best, what we’re being
shown here has to be inconceivable, at least by any science we
understand.

So what is this?

The wind has died down to a gentle breeze, cool and
moist.

“Ghaddar…” Murphy has been staring at her. He reaches
for her mask. Her hand beats him to it, finds what he’s seen: her
breathing hose has been torn loose.

He pulls off his mask, takes a deep breath. Another.
Waits for signs of hypoxia.

“It’s rich, dense…” he assesses.

The Ghaddar loosens her own mask, breathes. I’d
gotten used to whatever the sword did to my nanites compensating
for the atmosphere, but I take a deep breath now. It
is
thicker, with enough oxygen to not need recycling. (And again, I’m
thinking of the future we’d projected for this planet. If this is
illusion, is that what it’s based on? My people’s hopes?)

Rashid cautiously takes off his mask, while Terina
takes a deep breath as if she’s tasting the air. It seems to make
her dizzy—Murphy has to partially catch her to keep her upright.
She quickly shakes off his help.

Feeling more and more helpless by the moment myself,
I look forward, where we seem to be going. The Barrow (and whatever
mystery it holds) is well behind us across the water, but the
Peninsula is getting closer. I see a broad shore-line that rises
gently back into hills and low rocky mountains, all thickly
overgrown, lush and green. Far beyond it all, still partially
masked by a milky haze, towers the altered North Rim.

“We’re here,” Jed announces after another few
minutes. We’ve come within sixty or seventy meters of the new
shore. The sails roll up, slowing the Charon. Then the heavy chain
uncoils down into the water again. The massive grapple on its end
seems to catch on something—likely the rocks of the original
surface underneath the Lake, and the ship comes to a creaking
stop.

Rashid silently and reverently collects the survival
gear that Abbas and Ishmael left behind on the deck when they went
to fight the bots. Added to his own, it’s an impressive burden, but
he refuses offers of help carrying it.

Jed gestures us back into the small boats, and we get
lowered down to the water and silently cruise back to the land,
aiming for a fairly wide and fairly barren patch. It’s a more
somber trip than our last transfer, as we are two less, and none of
us seem to be holding faith in any of Jed’s assurances. If Jed
senses our extreme distrust of everything he’s had to say, he
doesn’t show it, perhaps doesn’t care. (Or maybe he’s just a simple
manifestation of his ship, an AI too stupid to read and respond to
human behavior.)

We find signs of habitation in the clearing of packed
damp sand: an empty shelter of sorts, made out of what looks like
dried cut plant matter; and a small boat similar to the ones that
have transferred us, but much rougher made and showing signs of
long hard use. It sits on the ground, bottom-up.

“Two kilometers inland,” Jed tells us, nodding to
indicate direction. “Haven. The last of the old world.”

“Your world?” Straker wants to know, but Jed only
shrugs again.

“You said this was a place for normal humans,” the
Ghaddar presses. “Are there no immortals here?”

He answers by looking at Elias, Straker and me. It’s
a sad look, sympathetic. I wonder how voluntary his mission to
bring us here was, and what he must expect will happen next. If
this place is all vulnerable fragile survivors, and now us and our
blades…

“The path will take you there,” Jed gestures to a
break in the foliage where the sand slopes upwards over a low rise.
Then he goes back to one of his two transfer boats, and slips back
across the water to his ship. No further explanations or
instructions. No goodbyes.

Straker is already heading in the indicated
direction, but waits for the rest of us at the foot of the path as
we decide to join her, one-by-one. (Rashid is the most reluctant to
leave the shore, even as the Charon’s sails expand and the ship
moves slowly away. Murphy puts a comforting hand on his shoulder—I
can’t hear what passes between them over the sounds of wind and
water, but Rashid finally chooses to join us, still insisting on
lugging his triple load.)

Beyond the wet and then soft dry sand, the path
becomes firmly packed as it passes through the rich growth, as if
by many years of heavy foot traffic. (The path isn’t much more than
a meter wide, and shows no sign of use by wheeled vehicles.) It
ascends gently as it winds, but that prevents us from seeing too
far ahead, other than to catch glimpse of the tops of a few low
mountains in the distance.

The going is easy, possibly due to the rich
atmosphere. I assume we’re headed in the proper direction for our
“mission”, because my blade remains quiet at my side. No… Not
quiet. Content? It’s not talking to me, but I realize I’m being
flooded with vague feelings of serenity, wellbeing. I try to shake
it off, unable to trust my own internal experience.

The Ghaddar finds us samples of fruits and nuts close
to the path, mostly familiar from either the surface hybrids we
know or from the ETE gardens, but they’re larger and richer than
those.

The air also warms as we move away from the Lake,
making our layered gear overheating. We all begin to unfasten,
open.

“Why aren’t you buying what Jed said about this
place?” I decide to pass the time by asking my brother, hoping I
sound like I respect his expertise in matters of his specialty.

He chuckles under his breath—probably at the thought
that I would even speak to him so—but gives me a thoughtful
answer.

“The explanation for the so-called time-splice has
been an active theory in quantum physics for well over a hundred
years. It’s based on quantum teleportation, which can be used to
manipulate matter at distance, but in this case using the
relativistic properties of certain sub-atomic particles that can
move close to or even faster than light to create effect
before
causation. The phenomenon has been observed several
times, so it
is
plausible. But only on a
particle-by-particle scale. Using quantum teleportation to
re-create things as complex as what’s been claimed is unthinkable,
assuming you’re using a few sub-atomic particles to somehow
manufacture what you need on the other end.”

“I thought they only needed to manufacture a nanotech
seed to replicate and create the rest?”

“But the complexity of what’s been created requires
data.” He’s being impressively patient with me. “Besides the
various tech-making nanites and the immortals’ DNA patches, the
immortals have entire memory sets, personalities. It would take
quadrillions of years to transfer that much data through a quantum
bridge, and probably the energy of a star. So what these ‘people’
claim happened couldn’t have in any plausible way.”

“That’s according to
our
science,” Straker
engages him. “According to what Bel told me, this Yod is infinitely
more intelligent and powerful than all of humanity combined ever
was, and had mastered operating on a quantum scale. Maybe he
re-wrote the rules?”

This seems to cause my brother some vague pain.

“There are some rules…” he tries. “It’s like one of
those stories my brother likes so much—science fiction. The author
starts with a plausible theory, but then twists it into
ridiculousness to fit some contrived tale.”