The God Mars Book Two: Lost Worlds (40 page)

More laughter—now far less audible with all the
ringing in my ears—and more blasts: Harper begins throwing grenades
wide, bouncing them off the ceiling and walls, getting them around
the ETE’s attempts to block them. The ones the ETE miss punch holes
in the dock between us and the ship, threatening our retreat.
Another volley goes high and starts taking the roof down on us in
big chunks, making the ETE direct their fields into a protective
umbrella so we don’t all get crushed. They can’t move, can’t
advance.

Then I see Tetsu get hit with grenade, and it blows
almost square in his gut. But his body doesn’t disintegrate in the
blast like meat and bone should. He flies back, tumbles. Bounces on
the cut-stone deck. Heavy—enough to gouge the stone as he lands and
skids. Like he’s made of metal.

I see him flail, almost in slow motion. Try to get
up. Scream. His left hand has been ripped away. But I don’t see
blood. What I do see is
metal
: much of his sealsuit uniform
has been disintegrated by the blast. What’s underneath looks like a
bronze statue, scarred and gouged. The ragged stump of his wrist
looks like it’s trying to re-knit, make a new hand, but doesn’t
have the material to work with.

“What the hell…?” I hear Horst mutter as he sees
it.

“Oh…
No
…” I hear Paul.

“Oh
fun
!!” I hear Harper cackle.

“Who the hell do I shoot at?” Horst needs me to tell
him. I lock eyes with Sakura, but all I see are her mask and
goggles. She’s crouched low, ready for a fight, her claws out but
down at her sides. Waiting for my answer.

“Harper,” I tell Horst. “Priority is Harper.”

“
Not Harper anymore!!!
” I hear her scream like
I’ve hurt her. And Harper—or what she’s become—comes at us.
Running. Sort of.

On long, almost canine and clearly mechanical legs
that give her a bounding stride like she’s on spring stilts. Her
torso is big and bulky, with a kettle-style helmet and lots of
torso armor like the early heavy construction pressure suits. She
looks like she still has her left arm, though heavily armored, but
her right terminates in an automatic grenade launcher, belt-fed
from a big backpack. Her gun belt is also stocked with grenades. I
can’t actually see any flesh with all the metal (her visor is only
thin eye-slits), but it’s clear she’s cyborg at least from the
waist down, her pelvis barely a frame sprouting a pair of oversized
ball-socket joints. Not girl anymore.

“
BRIMSTONE!!!
” she howls, cycling her
launcher, pounding the ETE fields, the shockwaves starting to
compromise the whole cave system. “
BRIMSTONE!!
”

Horst’s squad doesn’t hesitate. Their guns open fire,
and the ETE seem content to let their bullets through. But it looks
like we’re using small arms to shoot at a tank. Harper barely
staggers, whatever her armor is made of only dinging under the
barrage. One of our snipers tries something higher caliber, which
manages to almost make her lose her footing and does punch a hole
through her chest plating, but then I watch it reshape, heal.

“She’s got nanotech…” I state the obvious.

“She’s not the only one…” I hear Horst state the
other obvious, just as the mangled Tetsu gets up and tries to
tackle Harper, pummeling her helmet with his remaining hand and
even the stump of his ruined one. She plants her thick claw-like
feet, spinning her torso back and forth, trying to shake him off.
She gets desperate when her helmet starts to cave in, points her
launcher and blows a grenade into his midsection that throws them
both in opposite directions.

Tetsu’s metal body looks even more abstract than
before, concave where his spleen should be, his left leg now almost
separated from him at the hip. Harper’s armor looks amazingly
little the worse for wear, probably built to withstand her own
weapons (and apparently most of ours), but her grenade launcher has
been smashed, its belt feed ripped away. But she rolls like someone
in a big metal can, scrambles to get her robot legs under her
again. I see her look briefly at her wrecked gun (or so I assume as
she brings it up in front of her eye-slits), then she draws a
stubby rifle-style launcher from her gun belt with her left hand.
Pops off a single shell. It catches Tetsu under the jaw and blows
his head off. The metal body falls back with a heavy clang and
doesn’t move.

Something picks Harper up and throws her back, slams
her into the cave wall. I already see her right hand grenade
launcher trying to rebuild itself. Her helmet has already reshaped
itself.

All five Guardians that were out of the ship are now
advancing, trying to surround her, apparently convinced that they
have an opportunity while her main launcher is down to leave us
less protected. Her armor visibly ripples as they try to take her
apart, but it doesn’t dissolve. Nor does further Rod battering seem
to do anything more but get her laughing again.

Paul converts his modified Rod into a gun, and I
watch him pound her center-of-mass. This seems to stun her, caving
in her armor, but it quickly reshapes. Then he does something I
doubt his people would approve of, even here: He uses his “tool” to
scoop up rocks and other debris from the cavern and propel them at
Harper like bullets, tearing up her legs, punching holes in her
plating. She plants herself against the bombardment. I think I see
blood, but she doesn’t look like she minds.

But then something does hurt her. I see the big
helmet jerk, spin, and I hear a scream. There’s one of Sakina’s
torpedoes sticking deep in her eye-slit.

And then something else chews her up.

Small spinning blades come flying out of nowhere,
sink into Harper’s torso, her arms, her legs, cutting her armor
like it’s made of wood. Then something heavy chops into her left
shoulder, making it deep through plate, almost dismembering her. I
realize I’m seeing a sword, but no wielder.

Or no
visible
wielder. Something roughly
human-shaped ripples, barely visible, like a mirage. I see it drive
the sword into her other eye slit, then bury it into the tight gap
between helmet and neck armor. Another blade (and another mirage)
hits her from the other side, chopping into her right leg, trying
to disable her. Then the second blade tries to punch through her
torso plates.

Harper is down on her mechanical knees, still
flailing, but manages to understand her predicament enough to act.
Her main gun is still down, but I realize she has a “hand” on that
arm, though made of three heavy flat “fingers” the size of digging
tools. She punches out, and I see blood. And a trail of it, leaking
out of one mirage as it falls off of her. Leaving its short sword
stuck in her. She tries to swing at the other mirage, which is on
her back, but doesn’t seem to be finding anything soft.

Mirage Number Two is bleeding a pool on the cave
floor, but I see more of those small blades fly—I realize they’re a
kind of
shaken
(what the uninitiated call “ninja stars”).
But despite their ability to cut whatever she’d made of, they only
wound, annoy (at least someone as heavily armored as Harper—they
would likely cut clean through even our H-A suits).

Then another of Sakina’s torpedoes hits Harper under
the left armpit, sinking deep into her torso. I realize Sakina’s
been keeping to the shadows, using the maze of smaller tunnels to
move around the threat, size it up, find her best targets.

I see a blur in my peripheral vision that I realize
is Sakura, trying to charge into the fight, hands ready to draw her
sword. I instinctively reach out and grab her robes, stopping her.
She turns on me, but I look into her goggles and shake my head,
hopefully convincing her I’m looking out for her safety. She holds,
however reluctantly.

The ETE have had to hold their attack to keep from
harming what I assume are Sakura’s “scouts”, apparently enhanced by
stolen nanotech, just not in the same way that the apparently dead
Tetsu was.

(“Invisible ninja and iron giants,” I hear Matthew in
my head again. “This just gets better and better…”)

Harper flails, trying to hit or at least throw off
her mostly invisible attacker. She gets smart and uses her “claw”
to grab the shinobi’s sword when he tries to get it through her
armor again, and she’s strong enough to break it.

And then I realize: her main gun has
self-repaired.

Despite the belt being gone, she had at least one
round in the chamber, and wisely blows it into the ground almost
between her feet. At the same time, her legs spring her upwards
like a grasshopper, hard and high enough that she almost bounces
off the hangar ceiling, getting her clear of the explosion so she
doesn’t damage herself much again. But Paul manages to clip her
with his Rod-gun in midair, and it sends her tumbling. She comes
down on her back with a dense clang, and doesn’t get up
immediately.

As the dust begins to clear, I see she’s not alone:
two bodies writhe on the deck within a few meters of where she’d
been, seen mostly by the grit frosting them, but they soon start
flickering—their camouflage is failing. Not that it matters:
Sakura’s scouts both look hurt, likely badly, probably mortally,
caught close by Harper’s grenade.

Worse, Harper slams her gun against the side of her
pack, and it comes away with a fresh feed belt of grenades and she
manages to get her feet back under her.

The ETE coordinate to get a field around her as she
starts pumping high explosives at us. But the shockwaves—however
contained—are shaking the caves. The dock creaks, threatens to give
way. The Lancer will have to risk coming into the equally unstable
caves to pick us up. Or the ETE will have to carry us.

And the ETE are busy.

Harper, at least, seems to be suffering now. Her
armor may be proof against shrapnel and crushing, but the pressure
waves of her blasts should jelly the innards of a human being at
the ranges she’s been willing to throw them. Her nanotech must heal
her (or whatever’s left of her inside that can) as well as her
armor and weapons. I idly wonder if it regenerates her flesh or
simple replaces it with more machine.

“Paul,” I call into my Link, hoping he’s listening,
“time for bigger guns…”

The Lancer lifts, turns 90 degrees to nose into the
hangar cavern. The ETE hold position until the last moment.

“Horst, Zauba’a, make a hole. It’s time to go…” I
order into my link. Then I turn to Sakura. “You too. We’ll talk
later…”

Sakura gives me no argument or response, but she
doesn’t appear eager to flee either. Horst is already coordinating
his troops with the ETE to split our numbers and clear the
centerline of the hangar cave, giving the Lancer an open sight-line
to where Harper is barely pinned. I hear a hum, feel my skin crawl
with electricity, and then the air feels like it’s got a strong
ocean current flowing through it. Not wind—it feels like water. And
it gets stronger, fast. We move as quickly as we can to get out of
its way.

ETE “artillery” dug up the entire Shinkyo colony in
minutes. Whatever they’ve loaded into the Lancer is somewhere
between that and their personal tools. I see Harper thrown back
into the deeper caves, and then I see the cavern start to strip,
ceiling and floor crumbing and pouring into a hurricane of rock and
dirt and scrap and crashing after her. Then the deeper cave tunnels
start collapsing as well.

I turn back in time to see that Sakura is no longer
behind me, which is more annoying than surprising.

“Time to go,” Paul repeats my order, and the ETE
cover our passage to the Lancer’s underbelly locks. I realize five
of my troopers are being carried.

The Lancer backs out and continues to blast away at
the hangar cave until the whole section of cliff falls in on it—a
waste of human ingenuity, sweat and blood, no matter what use it
had been put to. Part of me wishes we had the opportunity to study
the site, learn more about the Zodangan culture (or at least what
they were working toward). But the ETE are eager to get us away
from there, away from Harper (assuming she survived being buried
under hundreds of tons of rock). And we have wounded to tend.

And, I realize heavily, dead to bury.

21 November, 2116:

Specialists Sheykzadeh, Shaw and Murphy.

Three more funerals. Three more markers on our Boot
Hill. Three more names for our monument. Three more “selfless
heroes” for Earthside to mourn and celebrate.

“Your initiative in planning and carrying out this
mission is highly commendable, Colonel Ram,” Richards actually
sounds like he means it. “I would rather you did not put yourself
at so much personal risk, but I understand your reasoning, as well
as the temptation…”

And
none
of you—sitting safely back on
Earth—have ever been to war, if I believe what you all keep telling
us about this utopia that sprung from our devastation.

“You were absolutely correct in attempting a
pre-emptive strike against the Zodangan aircraft factories. Despite
your apparent failure, your mission did yield invaluable
intelligence. The threat of these new nanotech-enhanced enemies is
a terrifying priority. Our best and brightest are working around
the clock on potential countermeasures. I know it will be
unacceptably long before we can get any new technology to you, but
we’re hoping we can make a breakthrough that you can build
yourselves with your existing resources.

“It was also very enlightening to see the ETE in
combat, to appreciate their abilities and dedication…”

This part feels especially fake. I expect what he’s
not willing to say is: “We’ve seen how they fight, and we’ve seen
what it might take to beat them.”

“UNCORT has attempted to discuss the apparent
nano-hybridization of the Shinkyo special operators with Hatsumi
Oda. His official reply is that he only just learned that sister
Sakura had been running a rogue research operation, wanting to
develop their own countermeasures against the ETE, whom they see as
a threat for obvious reasons. He promises that he will shut down
any further work in this direction, and will share their research
into ETE technology with UNCORT.”