The God Mars Book Two: Lost Worlds (32 page)

I watch Chang’s silhouette dissolve violently, like a
man of mud hit by a fire hose. Chang seems to struggle to stay
together, to stay standing, but Paul just keeps hammering him,
blowing him apart, moving in as he does so. The Shadow Man is smoke
in a windstorm. I see parts reform, only to get blasted away
again.

The other Guardians just stand there. I don’t think
they know what to do about Paul’s aggression, his single-minded
drive to push Chang’s nano-form beyond where it can re-assemble. To
kill him.

Paul doesn’t say a word. The storm goes on for maybe
half-a-minute, then Chang seems to be getting a foothold. I see
legs reform, then arms. Paul’s Rod is discharging. Chang steps into
his attacker, and I see his arm become something like a whip,
lashing out. Paul staggers from the blow. His helmet breaks open,
his goggles shatter. Chang hits him again, sending him to his
knees.

Paul pulls a Sphere from his belt, charges head-first
and thrusts it into Chang’s belly as his silhouette reforms. There
is an explosion of light.

When it passes, only Paul is there.

“Look!” Rios calls, his view showing what looks like
a cloud of black sand or tiny insects, blowing on the wind,
swirling and dancing. It rides with the blowing dust to the west
and vanishes.

Paul drags himself to his feet, rips away his broken
helmet. I watch his bleeding head heal itself. None of the other
Guardians go to help him. They just stand there.

Paul turns, surveys the battlefield. I see him pause,
taking in the bodies, the wounded, strewn about the landscape. Dead
and bleeding all around.

“
Help them!
” I hear him shout to his fellows,
his voice breaking. “Help the injured!”

Tru is already heading for the lock. She can see how
many of her own people are lying out there, blood blending into the
red of the Martian landscape. Halley is sending up as many
trauma-pods as she’s got, but they won’t even dent this.

And I realize we did our jobs too well: Except for
the few light fighters that escaped, none of Chang’s recruits has a
way home. That means we have the burden of their wounded on top of
our own.

“Update Colonel Ava,” I tell Kastl. “Then flash a
preliminary sitrep up to Earthside. Feed them all of our video of
what just happened. I’m going out to do what I can. And I think I
owe our new friends a proper thank you.”

“Colonel, I’ve got another contact,” he stops me,
sounding more confused than urgent. MAI is flashing on something to
the south-southwest. Optics zoom and enhance, and show me a figure
standing on the ridgeline to the south. One figure, just standing,
as if watching the battle and its bloody aftermath.

It’s hard to see details because of an unusual amount
of glare coming off what must be some kind of metallic surface. MAI
does what it can with the filters.

“What…?”

Gold armor. And a helmet in the shape of a hawk’s
head, with a classic Egyptian cowl and collar. There
is
a
bright light—almost too bright for MAI’s filters, like a
sun—hovering just above the helmet.

I saw you before, I try not to say aloud. But I was
sure I was hallucinating then.

“Rios,” I call out. “You have visual?” Despite what
MAI’s feeding me, I need to know other people can see this.

“Affirmative, Colonel. It’s…”

Gone. In a flash of light, nothing is there.

“Man Behind the Curtain? Or did our Shadow Man come
with a nemesis?” Kastl asks.

“I damn well hope it’s number two,” Rios answers him,
then goes back to tending his wounded, checking his dead.

I look at Sakina for any kind of recognition. She can
only shake her head.

The battlefield easily qualifies as one of the worst
I’ve seen.

Of course, I’m used to fighting a kind of war that
usually consisted of surgical strikes, hit-and-fade; brief,
contained skirmishes to eliminate small entrenched forces, and
usually from a position of technological superiority. In that, I
was more assassin than soldier. Enforcer. Executioner.

There have been exceptions that rival this day: The
“end war” against the entrenched extremists in the Philippines.
That unpleasantness with an enclave of militiamen in the
Appalachians. The so-called “Battle of Lancaster”. The
ill-considered mass blitz-attacks on the Eco-held positions shortly
after I arrived on this planet.

But I’ve never personally killed this many people in
one day (except, perhaps, for that Appalachian incident). The fact
that I didn’t actually fire a shot doesn’t distance me from that
responsibility.
I
pulled the trigger. These people are dead
and wounded because of my choice, no matter Chang’s threats.

Looking at the bloody, smoking aftermath, I can’t
help but realize that this is
exactly
what I’d hoped to keep
from ever happening on this planet. Standing on the ground under
the pale sky, without the plexi and concrete and blast doors and
scanners that had kept me separated from it, all I can see is the
wreckage of people and machines littering the once-pristine desert,
almost as far as the eye can see. The stink of it leaks into my
mask no matter how many times I adjust the seal.

The collapsed and ruptured wrecks of the Zodangan
airships are still burning, pushing thick columns of smoke into the
morning sky so high they anvil outward over our heads like storm
clouds when they hit the atmosphere net. The bodies of our would-be
enemies are scattered across the barren landscape, literally rained
from the sky. Shot to pieces. Blown to pieces. Incinerated. There
may be well over a hundred of them, maybe two hundred, but it will
be awhile before we can get into the smoldering airframes to do a
proper count. And I expect we’ll have to do the morbid ritual of
counting body parts—reassembling butcher shop puzzles of meat and
bone—to get any kind of accurate number. (Did they believe in
Chang’s purported mission? Did they believe they were serving a
greater good, protecting their homeworld, saving humanity? Or did
they just want the power he promised them? I suddenly very much
want to know what they all thought was worth dying—or at least
killing—for.)

So far Rios and his troopers have managed to find
barely two dozen of Chang’s “recruits” that are still alive: an
assortment of air pirates (still identifiable by their tattoos
despite the new black uniforms and military haircuts) and what are
probably PK (better hygiene, better health and no tattoos). All are
in dire need of medical attention that we can’t spare.

As for Chang’s “flagship”, there are no survivors.
His ship was far sturdier than his people. Its shredded remains are
just twisted metal and burning meat.

Only Chang got out unscathed. Or at least he did
until Paul got him in his sights. I can only hope that Paul at
least hurt him. (Assuming Chang was telling the truth about his
nanotech “immortality”, will it take him months or moments to
regenerate from being blasted to dust? Or did Paul manage to damage
him permanently?)

It’s almost an hour after the last shots were fired,
and we’re still focused on bringing in our own. MAI counts
sixty-two confirmed dead: forty-one of my troopers and twenty-one
of Tru’s volunteers. And there are over one hundred of our
people—my people—wounded, most badly enough to need a human
surgeon. The triage teams will be backed up tending to the
bleeding, stabilizing what they can, well into tomorrow.

Our main medical facility was on Phobos. Halley,
Ryder and Shenkar were only intended to run an on-planet front-line
trauma center in the aftermath of a bloody fight, and otherwise
generally attend to the routine injuries of living and working in a
hostile environment. Injuries we couldn’t patch-up down here were
airlifted in traumapods. The worst (who survived long enough) were
sunk into Hiber-Sleep and sent home. But now what we have is all we
have, and it isn’t nearly enough.

“You’ve never seen anything like this, have you?” I
project upon Sakina as she walks out to the north ridgeline with
me. She doesn’t answer. Her only focus seems to be staying close to
me, remaining vigilant for any remaining threat to what must be the
only thing she really cares about. (And I wonder what she would
have done if Chang’s forces overwhelmed the base. Dragged me away
into the desert to fight another day? Or made a stand in the deeper
levels of the base, where the enemy couldn’t use their air power?)
She’s more out of her depth than I am—at least I
have
seen
the work of aircraft and artillery. And I wonder if she even
remotely considered something like this when she threw herself in
behind me as the one to save the planet.

“Colonel Ram,” Anton comes over my Link. “I sent
Earthside all the video and tactical—return time is at least
forty-five minutes given planetary positions. I also had MAI run
the images of whoever or whatever that was we saw out on the south
ridge.”

He flashes the image of the golden figure onto my
goggle HUD.

“The theme is definitely Egyptian, though pretty
theatrical, like a bad cosplay with good effects,” he tries to
distill it into sensibility. “Given the falcon’s head on what I’m
assuming is a showy helmet and not its actual head, that would be
Horus or Ra. The sun disk—characteristically cradled in long ox
horns—that repeats on both the helmet crest and the abdomen leans
toward Ra. The sun god. Which makes a certain twisted sense since
our Shadow Man was kind of the opposite.”

“Colonel,” Kastl comes on, “I rechecked the south
ridge sentry feeds. It looks like this Ra or whoever showed up just
as we started shooting, then stood there the whole time, watching.
MAI didn’t target because there was no apparent threat. And I guess
we were too occupied to notice.”

“And as far as we can tell, Birdman didn’t assist
Chang.” Anton assesses. “At least not that we can see. But then, he
didn’t assist us either.”

I try to remember exactly what it was this—what? Fake
dead god? Hybrid? Egyptophile wearing a theatrical
special-effect?—said to me when I thought I was hallucinating, when
Matthew died.

It said Matthew wasn’t supposed to die like he did.
And I wasn’t…

Chang said he rewrote all of our futures. Assuming he
isn’t lying or delusional…

“For all we know, shiny-bird-head was projecting
Chang as some kind of sophisticated remote avatar,” I hear
Rick—sounding very angry and very weary—coming on to add his
opinion. “The Chang we saw may have been a mobile nano-generated
hologram or construct to convince us he was here and real when he
wasn’t. Chang might not even exist. The real bad guy could have
been safely somewhere else the whole time.”

“And the walking black hole is just a
Wizard of
Oz
thing to impress the minions?” Anton allows. “Or us?”

But if I was controlling a show-stopping avatar, why
would I show up dressed like a pseudo-Egyptian fantasy? Why would I
show myself at all? Unless “Ra” is part of some other game.

“Start analyzing whatever you can on Chang’s ship,
his tech,” I refocus them on the pressing priority. “We need to
know how to fight him before he comes back for another round.”

Rick and Anton sign off, probably as eager as I need
them to be to get to work. No one says the obvious: If there
is
another round, we have very little left to do anything
about it.

I won this battle—in the terms that winning any
battle is simply a matter of who loses least—but I know I was
driven by my rage, my pride. And those things have served me well
enough in the battles that I’m used to, when my orders were to go
in and kill and then come home. But now I have to hold the field. I
have to take care of over a thousand people. And I’m wondering if
there was any other way, some option that never occurred to me
because I wanted to hit back at the self-righteous piece of shit
that so calmly admitted to murdering tens of thousands of people
(and one very dear to me) and maybe actually believed I would just
happily fall in behind him.

And I know a better leader would not have these
doubts.

A better leader would not have acted as if he were
acting alone.

I have to push these thoughts away now.

I’ve made the slippery climb up the north ridge, up
to the ground where our unknown rescuers made their stand in our
behalf. But getting there, I almost step on the body of someone I
don’t know:

It’s one of our unidentified allies. There’s a lot of
handcrafted plate armor, like a medieval knight. Or more like those
renaissance-fair re-enactors who lovingly rivet and weld their own
jousting gear. But under it all is the familiar red-camo of UNMAC
Light Armor. Or rather the MA—the medium armor—suits of the Special
Operations troops we’d sent to hold certain embattled colony sites,
or to liberate others, striking ahead of the main force.

Under the cage-style visor is a standard set of mask
and goggles. The eyes that stare dead at the sky are young, strong.
His weapons are an issue PDW and a long stout straight sword—both
have been adorned with decorative scrollwork. In fine calligraphy I
can see the word “Avalon,” mixed with fragments of Latin I can’t
understand.
Latin.
The scrollwork has a Celtic feel.

I don’t linger, despite this man who I don’t know
coming to die to help me and mine. Because I can finally see what’s
left of Chang’ ship with my own eyes. And Paul.

He’s taken his helmet off—like he came to us at
Abbas’ camp—so I can easily tell him apart from his anonymous
fellows. He’s poking about the wreckage with his Rod-weapon, as if
looking for any new target. It’s not just “mopping up”. He looks
very much—even from here—like he’s looking for something else to
blast apart, someone to pay for his brother. His fellows still give
him a wide berth, spread about the field, helping to tend to the
wounded.