The God Mars Book Four: Live Blades (42 page)

“But we’re here,” Straker protests. “That would be
pretty validating.”

I realize we’re being distracted. I push us back to
the second half of Murphy’s question:

“And no one has ever come through from the
outside?”

Now they really don’t seem to know what to say.

“There
has
,” I decide.

“There was the Doctor…” Cal admits sheepishly. Some
of the others—including Jane—glare him down. “He…” But he doesn’t
finish the thought.

We glare back at them, waiting for what I consider
very necessary intelligence…

…but then Straker taps my arm, gets my attention.

“Bly…”

I hadn’t noticed. He seems to have gone still inside
his armor, his helmet tilted back against the back of the chair,
arms on the armrests.

“Bly?”

Straker shakes him. She could be shaking an empty
suit of armor. His helmet rolls sideways, his arms dropping limply
off the rests.

Murphy jumps up and goes to help. Our hosts all rise,
anxious, helpless.

“He’s out,” Murphy decides after some prodding and
listening. “I can barely hear his heart. We need to lay him
down.”

Straker and I help get him to the floor. It’s like
lifting a Bot.

“He’s been fused to his armor,” Straker tells our
hosts, frustrated. “It doesn’t come off. A ‘gift’ from one of your
Moddeds.”

“He was hit by lightning on the ship,” I fill in.

“We don’t know how badly he’s hurt,” Murphy focuses.
“He doesn’t heal as well as the immortals.”

“If there’s anyone here that knows anything about
this kind of technology…” I plead.

Again, Cal is the first one to spill their apparent
secret.

“There’s the Doctor. Doc Long.”

“He isn’t far,” Jane finally allows. She sends Cal to
fetch him.

Jonathan Drake:

The water is impossibly cold… so cold it hurts like
knives as it soaks in through my clothing. Freezing. It should be
ice. How is it not ice?

I’m being pulled deep into it. Down, like I’m falling
very slowly. I try to breathe through my mask, but it floods, and I
choke on it. I remember Jed said not to breathe it. I hold my
breath and flail under the water, my arms getting tangled in my
cloaks, my feet kicking against thick nothing. The water is hard to
move in, and it crushes me from all sides. My vision is badly
blurred, but I see daylight through the surface above me, and a big
shadow that may be the ship—it looks so far away. My lungs are
burning—I’m using my oxygen too fast…

I rip the tube out of my mask and try sucking oxygen
straight from the feed. Choke again because I get water in through
my nose.

I’m getting pulled deeper every second. I can feel
myself fall, see the light getting further away, feel the water get
heavier and heavier, crushing me, the pressure stabbing into my
ears. It’s so cold I can barely move. I pinch my nose closed when I
inhale through the tube, blow out through my nose. I need to think,
use my brain against my fear, just like I do in battle. I can do
this. But I’m going numb. Too cold…

In the dark, something moves—I feel it through the
water. Then I feel hands on me, fumbling with my clothing, my
armor. I can’t see who it is. A hand jerks at my chest, and there’s
a hissing. The vest Jed gave each of us swells rapidly around my
neck. I feel myself pulled upwards, but it’s not enough. I’m still
trapped under the water, being pulled in two directions by the vest
and my body. No, not my body: What I’m wearing.

The hands on me work furiously. I try to feel what
they’re doing, get jabbed by a knife. Straps get cut, and my gear
drops from me. Then I feel my armor start to fall away in sections.
With every piece of steel that drops, I feel myself rise. My
rescuer stays with me. I think I see cloaks. The light gets
brighter. I’m falling gently up…

My head breaks the surface, and I reflexively gasp,
start coughing, losing my breathing tube. Another head bobs up
right in front of me, thrashing, gasping, inflated vest swollen
around his own neck and shoulders. My father. He reaches out,
shakes me. He’s calling my name, but I can barely hear him over our
thrashing against the surface.

I try to turn in the water by pushing against it,
look around. I see the rear of the ship already far away, the wind
carrying it away from us, leaving us behind.

I turn. See land. A big flat-topped mountain, rising
up above the water. Too far away.

“Come!” my father shouts, sounding winded, ragged,
like he’s been choking himself. “Like this!” He flails his arms in
unison, pushes against the water. Again. It moves him. “Like
this!”

But it’s too cold. I can barely move except to
shiver. It doesn’t look like my father’s doing much better.

I see how the inflated vests keep us near the
surface, and get an idea: I find my breathing line, hook it into
the pneumatic insulation layer of my cloaks (thankful I took the
time to patch the bullet holes last night), open the valve to
inflate it. It rises around me, all around me. I reach out, grab my
father’s cloak with fingers that barely work, find his cloak valve
and repeat the trick. Then I crawl up on top of the inflated layer.
It sinks into the icy water under my weight, but it holds more of
me up above the water, and the air isn’t so icy.

My father twists and rolls on top of his own inflated
cloak. He’s visibly shivering.

I stab my arms into the water over the edge of my
cloak, push back to try to move forward. My father does the same.
The exertion begins to make me warmer, but it’s exhausting.

I realize it’s only been a very few minutes since I
first hit the water.

The land—the mountain in the middle of the Lake—is
still a long way away, perhaps a kilometer. It could take us hours
to get there like this. But if we can’t make it, the cold will take
us soon, or the water when we can’t keep our heads above it
anymore.

Then, like a gift from God (or more accurately, a
gift from Jed), one of the open water craft that carried us to the
ship appears, sliding up close enough to reach up and grab the top
of the hull. I drag myself up into it, fall into its bowl-like
interior, then drag myself over to where my father has his own
hold, and use what’s left of my strength to help pull him up.

Our clothing is heavy with the water it’s soaked up.
We both collapse in the belly of the craft, shivering violently
under the gray sky. We pull our wet cloaks over us for blankets,
curl fetal embracing each other, and wait for our body heat to
start warming us. My father coughs raggedly.

I get a vague sense of motion.

The clouds break apart, revealing deep blue sky. I
realize I’m breathing comfortably without my mask. I put it back
on, not trusting that I really am. Then I fall back, let the gentle
rocking of the craft lull me…

I snap awake with a bump and a scraping.

Sore, spent and still icy numb in my extremities, I
make myself sit up, look over the edge of the craft.

The flat-topped mountain towers in front of me. The
top looks to be a few thousand meters up, with very evenly sloping
sides. It stretches off in either direction, like a great sloped
wall, at least several kilometers long.

Behind me is the Lake. I can see almost all the way
across it, though the far mountains are masked in haze. There’s no
sign of Captain Jed’s tall ship anywhere, just seemingly endless
glistening rippling water, bright under the sun, beautiful and
terrifying.

The water and the mountain are separated by a sloping
boundary of sand and rock, overgrown in places by the finer-leafed
variation of Graingrass we saw on the other side, encroaching a few
meters out into the water here-and-there. This “shore” is only a
dozen meters wide at its widest, and then a thick band of green
growth forms a kind of more-than-head-high wall between it and the
mountain.

My breath is stale inside my mask. I check my
canisters, find the gauges on Empty. My spares—along with the
rebreather that Azazel fixed for us—are gone with my dropped armor
and other gear. But I feel fine. I take off the mask, breathe
deeply. The air is like being inside, only it smells of water and
green. And it’s warm—midday summer season warm.

I rouse my father. He wakes up coughing, rises with
difficulty to look around.

“We’re across the Lake,” I tell him what’s obvious.
“Wherever that is.” Then I show him the air is rich enough to not
need his mask.

Sitting together in the belly of the open craft, we
take inventory. I’ve lost my rifle and my sword. And my tools and
survival gear. All I have is my knives and a small hatchet tool. I
find my flashcard in my pocket, but it doesn’t work. But I still
have my binoculars.

My father’s fared better: he still has his pistol,
but precious little ammo.

Our clothing and cloaks are still very damp, but
we’re not as soaked as we were. I stand up, look around, use my
binoculars, but there isn’t much to see. The mountain curves gently
away in either direction, so we have no sense of how long it really
stretches, and the boundaries of the Lake are either lost in haze
or somewhere over its unnervingly flat horizon line.

Despite being mostly unarmed, I hike up to where the
growth starts to get thick. I only recognize some of the plants,
but there are sweet red-purple berries on thorny vines, and some
kind of tall fine grass with rich seed clusters—like Graingrass but
not—that might be gathered and pulped. It’s not much, but it’s
food, and we may find more if we go looking.

Back in the craft, my father has stripped off his
cloaks, stretching them out over the sides of the small vessel.
Then he carefully unwraps his old boots, takes them off, drains
water out of them. Instead of putting them back on, he climbs out
of the craft, sets his bare feet in the packed-down wetted sand,
then wiggles his toes in it like the sensation amuses him.

“Do we stay here?” I ask him something practical. “Or
do we look around?”

He looks across the water.

“It appears we’ve been left,” he accepts.

“You think they’ll come back for us?”

He thinks about it, doesn’t answer for awhile, looks
around.

“We could leave markers,” he finally suggests.

There are strange long staves in the craft, like
pipes, only made of material I don’t know, and flaring out into
spatula-like blunt blades on one end. My father takes one, ties his
boots to one end and hangs his still-damp cloaks over it, then
plants the other end in the sand like a walking stick. Satisfied
with the result, he wraps his feet in the cover strips from his
boots.

“You should take off some of your wet things, let
them dry,” he tells me. “Like laundry.”

He tosses me a spatula-staff, and I hang my cloak on
it, but decide to leave my boots on, just removing the wrappings.
We appear to be ready to go.

But to where? The slope of the mountain and its
shield-wall of green look daunting. Stuck between that barrier and
the water, we only have two directions to choose from along the
“shore”. As the ship seemed to be heading east, we decide east.

We walk for about a kilometer, opportunistically
foraging as we go. The walking is hard: the slope of the “shore”
forces a lopsided gait, and the sand is slick and gooey in places.
Plus, the ‘Grass-like growth comes in waist-high patches we must
push through. But we do find more berries, and something like
Bitter Apple, only larger, sweeter, moister. We’ve soon got our
pockets stuffed with fruit for our efforts.

The sky has gotten clearer, the clouds having blown
away. The color of the sky is different here: a brighter, paler
blue.

I’m lost in the beauty of this place—especially the
stunningly vast expanse of free water that ripples and glistens
hypnotically—when my father stops me with a hand across my
chest.

There are deep prints in a stretch of exposed sand,
from the water across to the green barrier. Since the sand is wet
and packed, they still hold their shape like a casting: sharp
edged, angular.

Bots. Two distinct sets, moving parallel. But they
appear to wander, stagger.

We look around. Other than the green, there’s no
place to hide, no cover. Unless there are rocks or caves
up-slope…

The growth rustles, snaps. Over the wind and water, I
hear familiar motors. My father puts his hand on his pistol, for
whatever good it will do. The best I have is my hatchet, and the
long blunt staff.

But they don’t attack. They come at us slowly,
tentatively—the same two bots from the ship, from the far side of
the Lake, their blade arms modified with guns. Since we have
nowhere to run, we try holding still, as if not appearing like a
threat will give us any chance. They stop a few meters from us,
scan us with their sensor heads. They seem… confused?

I reach out an empty hand, try to make a gesture of
peace, or at least mercy. The bots hesitate, shift on their limbs,
then lower themselves, like they’re bowing.

I hear a sputter of sound out of my flashcard,
fragments of words. I pull it from my pocket. It seems to be
working again, at least partially. Somehow the bots are trying to
transmit to it.

“Can you understand speech?” I try. I get more broken
noise, but then words. Flat. Synthesized.

“COMMAND SIGNAL… COMMAND SIGNALS LOST… COMMAND LOST…
LOST… NO TRACKING… NO REFERENCE… NO REFERENCE… HELP… HELP… HELP
PLEASE… PLEASE HELP…”

“You’ve been severed from your network,” I reword
what Jed told us.

“NO COMMAND SIGNAL… NO TRACKING… NO REFERENCE…
HELP…”

I risk stepping closer, keep showing open hands. My
father tries to pull me back, but I whisper that it’s okay—or I
hope it will be, hope I have an opportunity here…