The God Mars Book Five: Onryo (29 page)

Once a section has been “neutralized,” brief hands-on
contact with the manual weapons introduces a temporary fusing of
their actions that I expect can be undone once we deliver the
bounty to Katar. Then we carry the useless weaponry and whatever
ammo we can find back to our original entry point, filling a handy
supply crate. We soon have a nice little arsenal to gift to my
former people.

After several raids each, we meet to share our
“scores”, in the form of a simple flash of data between our minds.
Then we go out again. Our combined count reaches thirty-seven
disarmed and unconscious Keepers within just over half-an-hour. Not
a single round has been fired back at us. I find the challenge to
be fun, exhilarating, like a child’s game. And I remind Peter how
humiliated and helpless the Keepers will be for our efforts, which,
for them, may very well be a punishment worse than death.

As we go further, we find stocks of old preserved
rations that look like they’ve been stashed here since the tunnel
network was built. Precious food, hidden away in anticipation of
some future disaster. There’s also survival gear, portable heaters,
even old pressure suits.

We eventually come upon a team in shirtsleeves
working on a pair of mining “Moles”, either doing maintenance or
restoring their function. The rock walls here look freshly cut,
suggesting the former. If my internal maps are correct, they appear
to be burrowing deeper into the divide. I almost wonder if they
were planning on cutting all the way through to the Central Blade,
to make themselves a secret pass out of their canyon, if that’s
even possible. Following Ram’s example, we stun and drag the Keeper
technicians out, then Ram sets the charges he’d taken to collapse
the roof of the tunnel in, intending to bury the Moles (but not
destroy them, perhaps seeing future usefulness).

Ram then lets me “see” something Dee’s sent him: The
signals from the Keeper links and weapons have given us a decent
map of their locations. We’ve cleared this set of tunnels, but the
blips show what look like two more networks, further west on the
slopes. Including the sentry snipers, I count sixty eight more
Keepers we haven’t dealt with, and those are just the ones wearing
their gear. I remember: They have families, children. And kidnapped
Civvies, still unaccounted for.

We move our case of confiscated weapons into the
green down slope, then decide it’s time to begin removing the
sentries, which becomes just a matter of sneaking up on them before
they can raise enough of a commotion to be seen by their nearest
comrade, since they can neither shoot nor call out. We clear five
nests each as we work west. My satchel is soon filled with
confiscated ammo and grenades (the snipers don’t have pistols).

We meet up in the rocks above the entries to the next
tunnel complex, and Ram decides to trigger the charges he set to
bury their mining machines. The blasts are a dull rumble through
the slope beneath us, but I expect it’s enough to get the desired
attention. When their link calls get no responses, I see them start
to come out in small fire teams, carefully.

I show Ram my stash of grenades. He shows me he has
his own collection inside his robes. He flashes me a graphic of
what he’s thinking—coincidentally exactly what I was thinking—and
we begin to casually toss grenades in proximity to the Keeper
teams; close enough to make them take cover without seriously
injuring them. They try to fire blindly back up where they think we
are, only to find their guns won’t cooperate.

Ram flashes me the hatch locations, and we each jump
down for a separate one, while Dee fakes a retreat order. This
time, we just pop the airlocks and depressurize the tunnels, adding
a little hypoxia to our advantages, and rush in to repeat our
stun-and-disarm dance.

This time, they’ve had enough warning to set
explosive traps for us, but without their links working, they can’t
detonate them. I manage to get shot a few dozen times by manual
weapons, which is just painful enough to be irritating, and I wind
up breaking more bones.

The worst I do is throw a Keeper into a wall when he
tries to dive and manually trigger the tunnel charges. He hits hard
enough to shake rock down from the ceiling, and drops like a
child’s fabric doll. I want to run him through or split his skull
just on principle, but just tear out the detonators and walk away
with him still breathing.

The worst they do is throw grenades into a space
while I’m taking down three of their own. The bodies in my way keep
me from reaching all of them in time. I wind up swatting one back
the way it came, but two others blow. One winds up being absorbed
by one of the poor bastards I’d just knocked out as he incidentally
falls on it. The other slams me hard, knocking me into the wall. I
could feel my armor locking up and my skin hardening in the
split-second before the blast, but the shockwave is still brutal. I
feel red-hot spikes stab the inside of my left thigh and my right
triceps where frag managed to find gaps in my plate, and my tech
races to make repairs. Thankfully, throwing the one grenade back
seems to have kept them from throwing more while they had the
opportunity, but they killed their own for it: Mangled and bloody
bodies are being poorly buried by a partial collapse of the
ceiling. Perhaps they thought their fellows were already dead, that
we’ve been killing instead of stunning this whole time.

“Are you okay?” Ram asks in my head.

“Funny… With all these marvelous modifications, they
didn’t bother installing one to kill pain…”

“When we had that option, we were worse,” he tells
me. “Pain was the only thing that reminded us we were at all
human.”

I stagger through the haze-filled tunnel to where I
threw the grenade, and find two more bloodied bodies, one still
alive. I disarm them and leave him. As I move forward, I take more
fire because I’m slowing down. My gauges are showing depletion. I
could go back to the dead men and replenish myself, but don’t want
to take the time. They have Civvies in here somewhere.

I find their children first. They’ve built a shelter,
a bunker secured behind a blast hatch, where they’ve gathered them
with sufficient supplies and their recycling gear. They try to lock
the hatch against me, but forcing it is easy enough. Then I’m met
by a pair of women with pistols and grenades ready, their young
cowering behind makeshift barricades of crates and bedding and
spare armor. I’m not sure if they intend the grenades for me, or to
spare their children from me.

I try showing them my open hands, then use what speed
I’ve got left to dash forward and shove them together, grabbing the
grenades from their hands, taking their point-blank fire as I take
the time to disable the fuses. Then I snatch their guns away, crush
them to uselessness, grab them by their uniforms again and spin
them around to do a quick search for more weapons. When I’m
reasonably convinced that they’re disarmed, I push them out of my
way and do a rough search through the supplies for more weapons.
One of the adults jumps on my back and tries to stick a knife in my
neck, proving my search wasn’t thorough enough. I resist the urge
to crush her wrist, then take the blade and throw her off me. I
show her my open hands again, and go back to my search, ignoring
the young until one—who looks like a ten year old boy—points a gun
at me with shaking hands. I take it away as gently as I can.

Finally, convinced they can do no more significant
mayhem to me or themselves, I close the hatch and fuse it, sealing
them in. Safe.

I’m definitely tiring by the time I find what I’ve
come for. And they’ve had plenty of time to prepare: They’ve got
the kidnapped Civvies lined up as a human shield, five Keepers with
pistols to their heads and grenades in their other hands, while
three behind them level manual large-bore sniper rifles on us. For
whatever good it will do, Ram has arrived just ahead of me from
another tunnel. He’s showing them empty hands.

“Who’s your CO?” he asks them. He gets no answer,
except the fact that they haven’t just opened fire. I suspect that
means they have no confidence of victory, but are hoping to lever
us into withdrawing. I recognize the Keeper I sent with my message
among those holding guns and grenades on unarmed victims.

“Those people are under my protection,” I repeat my
warning. “If you harm one of them, I will kill every single one of
you.”

“He will,” Ram surprisingly supports my extremity.
“And he can. And I would have already done it for him, but I’m
hoping you’ll realize we have mutual enemies. All the peoples of
Mars are under the same threat. You need to stand together.”

His ideal seems to fall on deaf ears. I try a harder
sell:

“Your wizard has sold you to a demon, like us, except
he’ll infect you all with nanotechnology that will slowly eat your
brains and make you into drones of rotting meat. And even if you
manage to avoid that fate, Earth has returned, and they see you all
as primitive brutal animals that need to be rooted out, rounded up
and controlled. If you resist, they will bomb you out.”

“Your brother colonies—Industry, Frontier and
Pioneer—were depopulated to feed the demon’s war machine, then the
latter two were completely stripped for scrap, gone,” Ram adds.
“Many hundreds died. After the demon moved on, Earth ‘reached out’
to the surviving holdouts. When they resisted, when they tried to
keep their homes, Earth bombarded them with missiles. They will do
the same to you. They will not meet you face-to-face. You will
never get to return fire.”

We stand like that, each side holding, while they
digest this news. But during this knife-edge silence, Ram flashes
me images: The Keeper formation, with the four on my side
highlighted, along with carefully calculated lines of fire. I give
him a slight nod to let him know I got the message.

The Keepers start to get shakier as they try to hold
their standoff. As for me, my wounds appear temporarily patched,
but between them and resource depletion, I’m not sure how fast I
can be when the moment requires.

The moment is brought on by neither side. One of the
hostages—an older woman—looks up at me with tears in her eyes and
screams

“
You have to kill them all!!!
”

She reaches up, grabs for the grenade held by her
left ear, and tries to wrench it free of her captor’s grip. I
credit him for not just shooting her in the head, but he loses
control enough that the “spoon” springs free.

Ram lunges forward, reaching for the grenade. The
Keeper is quick enough to get his intention and tosses it to him.
Ram catches it, crushes the spherical charge and tosses the
remaining fuse core down one of the tunnels where it pops and
flares harmlessly. And I’m thinking we may have just come to a
point of understanding when one of Keeper officers reverts to
habit, aims his rifle at the back of the woman’s head and blows her
brain out through her face, spraying me and Ram with gore.

The Keeper holding her lets her drop, his
blood-spattered face frozen in horror.

Before I can do anything myself, Ram answers in kind,
shooting the offending officer in the face as he tries to raise his
rifle. Then Ram shoots down the other two riflemen, so fast I can
barely differentiate the two shots.

I’ve drawn my own pistol, but haven’t used it. The
remaining five Keepers—four still with hostages—cower and
shake.

“Release them now,” Ram growls through his mask, eyes
glowing, horns coiling, “or I will kill every single one of you
myself.”

The Keeper I’d sent with my message is the first one
to set down his gun and replace the pin in his grenade. The others
follow suit, though one at a time. I feel the urge to shoot the
last one to surrender, just to make an example, but I don’t. Ram
collects their weapons, tells the remaining four Civvies to head
for the nearest hatch and wait for him, then he faces me.

“Give them your terms,” he tells me. I can feel his
rage, and under it, his anger at himself. He turns and walks out. I
realize this is his curse, and mine now: For all our power, we
can’t always save the people we want to. But we’re very good at
killing.

I repeat my warning about returning to Eureka. But I
also let them know that their links are slaved to us, so if they
should need our help, they need only call. I also remind them of
the threat of Asmodeus and his Harvesters, and tell them how best
to fight them (at least until they change tactics). Then I remind
them that Earth is right over their heads, and
they
aren’t
going anywhere.

I look down at the dead woman, her blood making a
thick puddle on the cut stone floor. Again, I suppress my urge to
end this the way Peter wants (though he isn’t pushing me that way
right now for some reason). I leave them to make whatever choice
they’re going to, and I go find Ram.

I find Ram outside the tunnels down-slope, pointing
the way home for those we rescued.

In my head, I can hear the Keepers’ links restored. I
hear them asking for updates, orders. I hear a shaky voice telling
them to stand down, to not fire on us or the Civvies, to let us
pass. It may be Dee faking it, but I don’t think so this time.

“I’ll ask Jak Straker to check up on them when she
can,” Ram tells me absently, looking back up where the Keeper
stronghold is hidden.

“They won’t sit put for long,” I assume the
worst.

“Would your people, if another power had just
disarmed you and threatened your families?” Ram reflects.

“We were a lot kinder than Asmodeus would have been.
Or Earth.”

“Threats they’ve only heard about from us,” he
discounts. “They won’t believe until they face them.”

“At which point, it may be too late.”