The God Mars Book Six: Valhalla I Am Coming (51 page)

I order a sweep of the entire facility, warn the
troopers to be cautious.

“He’s
really
strong…” Halley adds in, visibly
dazed. “And fast. He could have killed me. And there’s something
else…” She pushes the tech away from her, gets off the exam couch
and starts recalling files on the nearest terminal. “I was running
another exam and saw something on the scans. I took off his facial
patch…”

She finds what she’s looking for: her own head-cam
shot of her peeling back Jackson’s mask. But instead of scar tissue
and patchy grafts over missing bone, there’s fresh pale pink skin.
And an eye where there shouldn’t be one anymore. The fine wisps of
facial hair and eyebrow plastered to the new alien skin are
red
.

“Shit…” I turn to Dee. “Find him.”

“I think I have…” Kastl speaks up. He calls up a
tracking graphic of our recon flights. One of the AAVs has
deviated, peeled off and increased speed. It’s not responding to
hails.

The other pilot—Lieutenant McKay—is asking for orders
when we read a launch from the errant ship. McKay tries to evade,
but he’s been locked. The rocket blows one of his rear tanks, kills
one of his thrust engines. But it doesn’t take him down. I’d like
to think Jackson aimed to cripple rather than kill. He doesn’t fire
again.

“Break off, McKay,” I order. “Limp home while you
can.”

Jackson’s stolen ship passes Liberty Crater on the
south side, and has started turning southeast when we lose remote
radar.

He’s headed for Iving.

From the memory files of Mike Ram:

We set about burying Corso and Jenovec at first
light.

I climb down into the dig and recover Corso’s head
myself. I try not to look at her blank face, her glazed eyes. I
carry it up like a precious relic as Horst and Scheffe wait with
the rest of her. Unfortunately, that gives them a good look in
daylight at the results of my brief but catastrophic loss of
control.

“Some of those… some of those men… are still
moving
…” Scheffe stammers as she also tries not to look at
Corso’s head. Horst holds the body bag open while I place it
inside, roughly from where it was severed, like I can make her
whole again.

“Your point, Specialist?” Horst prods her when I
don’t comment.

“Shouldn’t we…? I mean…”

“I’m not willing to get within striking or grenade
range of a breathing Shinkyo Shinobi to render them aid or comfort,
even if I
was
in a mood to,” Horst shuts her down. Then he
locks eyes with me, as if to absolve me. “In fact, I’m not feeling
generous enough to spend bullets on them.”

Once Corso’s zipped up, I let them carry the bag to
the spot we’ve cleared on the plain near the rig. Jenovec is
already in place in his own bag. Then everyone pitches in, carrying
and placing rocks. When the bodies are solidly covered, we mark the
oblong mounds with their tags.

Horst says a few words over Jenovec, having served
with him the longest. He talks about his sense of humor, and how
under that lazy, carefree façade was a good, hard-working soldier
that he could always count on. And that he was so much braver than
most people thought.

But no one really knew Corso. She kept herself apart,
aloof. And not just from the non-coms. But then, the other officers
on the crew were Sleeper Vets, and she always had that look like
they were trash, vulgar, uncivilized, ungodly. So the kind words
fall to me to concoct.

“She was a good officer…” I stumble over the lie. Try
again. “She believed in what she was doing. She volunteered to come
all the way here, across space, knowing it could mean her death,
that she might never go home again, to do something she thought was
good. Important. She was willing to die for that. She died
bravely…”

It’s pathetic. Empty words in the thin wind.

Then I do better for Hatsumi Sakura.

I tell the others to keep their distance—I’m worried
about infection—but Lyra does get a look at the patches of lizard
skin. I see the look in her eyes: she knows what it means, knows
what it implies. She doesn’t say anything to the others.

I put Sakura in the cockpit of her ship, arrange her
broken body as reverently as I can, and then I set incendiaries,
thermobaric charges. Her wounds are starting to knit, but the new
flesh is all reptilian.

As I watch her burn, I realize I’m giving her a
Viking funeral of sorts. Valhalla, I am coming.

I can still feel the cuts she gave me.

The smoke rises up towards the atmosphere net, pushed
westward by the morning wind, carrying some of her incidentally in
the direction of her home. I know it may give away our position,
but I don’t care.

Still, I tell the living to get the rig ready to roll
out.

I take the time to top off Kel’s ammo load. No one
argues with me about it. Then I walk back over to the edge of the
pit, draw my pistol, and carefully put a shell through the head of
every broken mangled body that’s still breathing.

With everyone else sealed inside, I climb up and sit
on top of the rig as we start moving.

“Where to, Colonel?” Smith asks as a formality.

“Last stop. Iving.”

It’s about forty klicks, mostly straight south. We
have to navigate some terracing and fractured terrain which takes
us up out of the green for a few vulnerable hours, but at this
point I doubt there’s a point to trying to reduce our visibility.
Obviously Asmodeus expects us, and Orbit can drop a nuke or a mass
driver on our heads whenever they want to. I’ve heard the
occasional air patrol in the distance, to the east and once to the
south, but nothing close enough to be visible.

By mid-afternoon, we have to deviate a few degrees
west to get around a five-klick-long mountain in our path. After
that it gets much rougher, the landscape ridged and rocky, and that
slows us down, threatens to break our drive train again.

But Kel keeps up easily, sweeping the perimeter with
his repaired guns, protecting us like a silent part of the team.
The rest of the team has been equally silent: No one seems to have
anything to say after last night, so the only chat I have is with
Smith, strictly related to navigation. We don’t even stop to
eat.

Iving sits beyond the eastern tip of a ten-klick
range that’s a parallel fracture-branch of the Divide Rim. This
puts it at the mouth of a large box canyon that cuts back northwest
on the other side of those mountains. The region is very green in
satellite mapping, especially up into the canyon, but not very far
beyond that. Iving sits in the southeast “tip” of the Vajra. Just a
few klicks further east, Coprates turns pretty quickly barren. This
is as far as life has made it.

The colony was an ESA endeavor, devoted to mining and
manufacturing, another support enterprise for what was assumed to
be a continued corporate boom on Mars. Whatever research they did
was purely environmental and geological, at least that we knew
about, aimed toward exploiting Mars’ natural resources for colonial
expansion. But that didn’t save them from a nuclear sterilization.
On the satellite imaging, the site has been blasted to the
foundations, and the foundations have been mostly swallowed up by
the groundcover.

That doesn’t mean there weren’t survivors, aren’t
survivors. The colonies with mining equipment tend to be the ones
that were able to dig in, dig shelters. They’re remote enough to
have avoided contact with other groups, friendly or otherwise, so
it’s not surprising that no one we’ve met knows anything about
their fate.

But the nearest feed line terminates a dozen klicks
away—the network still hasn’t built its way out this far. And odds
are too high that Asmodeus has been there well ahead of us.

I consider making the track wait while Kel and I go
in ahead, but decide dividing is just as bad an idea as rolling
into whatever is waiting for us.

I regret that decision as soon as we get eyes on the
colony through the head-high growth.

“Hold here. Do not leave the vehicle.”

But Smith can see through his periscope, and I know
Simmons and Scheffe have eyes on this through their turret
optics.

I leap down off the hull and walk smoothly forward.
The plant life has been crushed into a path a few meters wide. The
compression looks and feels recent. So is the blood. It’s all been
sprayed with blood. Like a red carpet. Then the wind shifts, and I
get hit by the smell.

Kel grinds behind me, sensor heads spinning to take
this all in, sweeping the tall growth around us as we take the road
that’s been cleared for us, to the display that’s been prepared for
us.

I’d call it art, but it’s the darkest kind of art,
nightmare made real. He’s put bodies up… parts of bodies…
Entangled, interwoven, violated for maximum effect. They’re all
naked, crusted with their own blood. Disemboweled, their entrails
strung in the growth like decorations. Flayed, skins spread like
capes around them. Impaled, kebabed together in chains, mouths to
genitals. Staked fixed into a Kama Sutra’s variation of sexual
positions. Random limbs, heads and torsos. It’s a sculpture garden
of horror, forming a funnel, a corridor of butchery leading into
the overgrown ruin. At points, the gore stretches across overhead
on some kind of framework, forming a canopy.

“I can smell it through my mask…”

It’s Lyra complaining. She’s behind me, walking with
her rifle sweeping the dead. She has no idea where to point it.

“I told you to stay in the rig.”

“Horst and Smith may still follow your orders out of
old loyalty, and Simmons and Scheffe follow them, but when I signed
up for this, you weren’t in my chain of command, so I don’t
actually have to listen to you.”

She’s different, gone harder even than the girl who
survived on her own after Chang massacred her family. What I’ve
shown her…

“It’s safer in the rig.”

“It wasn’t last night,” she cuts me to the core. I
don’t think she’s just talking about getting taken prisoner
(again), nearly getting killed (again). It was seeing what
“rescued” her.

I look back at the ‘Horse. Horst is out, too, in an
H-A shell minus the helmet, hauling a chain-gun, covering us.

“Is this for you, or for us?” Lyra asks me, barely
above a whisper, as if the dead can hear us.

I don’t answer her, but I realize the dead aren’t
just dead: as we walk down the gauntlet of dead bodies and partial
bodies, their heads turn to follow us. Their cloudy eyes glow from
behind. They’re Harvesters, but most of them look far too mangled
to be effective as fighting drones. This is all just for the sake
of display, for shock. I count over a hundred corpses, and those
are just the heads and torsos.

“Don’t get close,” I warn Lyra, but she’s already
seen.

“Maybe we should be backing out,” she suggests
quietly.

I’m about to agree with her, when one of the corpses
speaks with Asmodeus’ voice, a demon’s ventriloquist dummy:

“Awww…
Come on!
I worked
hard
on this…
I tried to do a Clive Barker meets Hieronymus Bosch kind of thing,
but I know: It’s more like those guys who used to go crazy
decorating their yards for Halloween—zombies and corpses and body
parts and all that. Except mine’s got the authentic smell. And I
went for the X-rating while I was at it. That part was for the
God-wads: A little horror-porn for the uptight Sunday School
Soldiers. Did you bring any? Or did they all get killed on the way
here?”

He should
know
. He should be able to see. Or
is this some kind of automated message?

“How did tea with the Dragon Lady go, by the
way?”

Or is he just playing dumb?

“He doesn’t want us to go back the way we came,” Lyra
understands. Horst has stepped forward, into the corridor of gore.
I give him a subtle sign to back up, but there are nearly a hundred
sets of “eyes” on us.

“I don’t see any weapons,” Lyra says, almost
hopefully.

“He unleashed a swarm of insect bots on Melas Two,” I
tell her, king of shitty timing.

“I should have stayed in the rig,” she admits.

I notice metal in the corpses. At first, I think it’s
what we saw at the Grave: The Harvesters slowly reinforcing the
rotting body, replacing decomposing tissue with simple bot
equivalents to keep going longer. But the mechanisms I’m seeing
don’t match up with the human skeleton. It could be just the
structure that’s holding this horrible display together, but it’s
not just a framework of scrap iron. They’re like thick cables, made
out of uniform hexagonal sections, with what look like sockets on
each face. They remind me of a child’s building toy. I reach into
one of the displayed torsos, tear away some of the stinking flesh
while Lyra looks at me like I’ve lost my mind. Then I tear into
another body. And another.

The cables don’t just run through the bodies. They
run between them, connecting them,
connecting them all
.

“You should have stayed in the rig.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I see a flash of white.
I look down the path. Surrounded by mangled bodies stands Star.
Golden hair. Pale skin. Shimmering mail under her pure white gown.
She gives me a look of warning and deep sorrow. She’s still wearing
the control diadem. She has a sheathed sword in her hand. It looks
like mine.

“Run back to the vehicle,” I tell Lyra. “Right
now.”

“But you haven’t seen the best part yet!” a
corpse-head complains.

Lyra hesitates for a second, then turns and runs.

“
Fine!
” the head pouts. “
Be that
way!!
”

The entire display of bodies convulses in waves,
strung together, conjoined by the hidden cable system. Then it
contracts. Each side of the path starts pulling together, the
modular cables extending, reaching for each other, making new
connections.