The God Mars Book Four: Live Blades

By Michael Rizzo

The God Mars is a pulp-style science fiction series set in a rich world of varied cultures and colorful characters. The series plays out a partially-terraformed Mars, a half-century after a man-made disaster cut thousands of colonists off from Earth, and the fear of a rampant nanotech plague prevented rescue. Left to survive for generations with few resources, the various groups develop unique new cultures at different levels of technology, ranging from the primitive to the frighteningly advanced. But all are trapped in an escalating war between an oppressive Earth that’s terrified of potentially infectious nanotechnology, and invincible superhumans—both heroes and villains—who claim to be from a nightmare future caused by that technology.

In Book Four: Live Blades, Earthside Command’s reckless use of a nuclear weapon has threatened the lives of those living in Melas Chasma, prompting a local band of Nomads to seek a new home in the more livable—and more dangerous—Coprates Chasma to the east. Among their number, the adopted son of a Nomad Sharif hopes to find out who his birth parents were, as his people face strange and devastating new enemies.
Meanwhile, a young Eternal embarks on a reckless journey to try to prove himself as a hero, a former enemy combatant tries to earn her place in the UN planetary forces, and a terrifying new threat arises from a world that never happened.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michael Rizzo
• Release date: Jul 14, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310944529

Michael Rizzo

In addition to writing dark speculative fiction, Michael Rizzo is a graphic artist (yes, all those covers are his), a martial scientist, a collector and frequent user of fine weaponry, and a pretty good cook. He continues his long, varied and brutal career as a mercenary social services consultant, trying to do good important work while writing about very bad things.His fiction series include Grayman and The God Mars. (The research he’s done for the Grayman series has probably earned him the attention of Homeland Security.)Check out his Facebook pages ("The Grayman Series" and "The God Mars Series") for lots of original art and updates.He causes trouble in person mostly in the Pacific Northwest.

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The God Mars

Book Four: Live Blades

By Michael Rizzo

Copyright 2014 by Michael Rizzo

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Table of Contents

Prologue: He Must Needs Go that the Devil Drives

Part One: Heroes Journey

Chapter 1: A Fighting Man of Mars

Chapter 2: Exiles

Chapter 3: Not All That Wander…

Chapter 4: A Princess of Mars

Chapter 5: In the Belly of the Beast

Chapter 6: In the Valley of the Shadow

Part Two: Companions in Arms

Chapter 1: My Brother’s Keeper

Chapter 2: Swords of Mars

Chapter 3: Secondary Target

Chapter 4: Siege Engines

Chapter 5: The Gods of Mars

Chapter 6: Revelations

Part Three: That Time the World Forgot

Chapter 1: The Occasional Lake

Chapter 2: The People That Time Forgot

Chapter 3: The Lost Legion

Chapter 4: Haven

Chapter 5: The Chessmen of Mars

Chapter 6: God Out of the Machine

Chapter 7: Meet Your Maker

Epilogues: Endings and Beginnings

Maps of Eastern Coprates and the Western Vajra

Prologue: He Must Needs Go that the Devil Drives

Here’s one…

Paul is trying to be helpful. I don’t want him to be helpful, not in this.

So Bel prods me forward.

The dead are dead, he tells me uselessly. You need to do this for the still-living.

The body is half-buried in shredded brush. Bullet-shredded brush. Bullet-shredded body.

It’s a Pax Hunter-Warrior. Green-dyed leather tunic, breeches, gloves and boots; green-painted hand-hammered facemask. The primitive Mycenaean design tells me he’s an initiated fighter—their distinguished officers and trainers wear the more elaborate and finely crafted Green Man masks. His bow isn’t far from his hand, his quiver (still half-full of arrows) wedged underneath him as he stares up at the sky, his long, lean limbs twisted like a discarded marionette. His oversized torso is holed in a handful of places. His light partial plate and scale armor was designed to deflect blades and arrows, not 7.65mm armor-piercing shells fired at two-thousand rounds per minute from an electric Gatling gun. His blood is sprayed all over the lush green growth of this place.

I kneel down over the body, my broken ribs grinding, my lungs still rattling, full of blood. I reach for the edge of his mask with my good arm, gently lift…

Don’t… Bel tries to dissuade me. Leave it. Just…

I don’t listen. I have to see. I lift the mask. The face underneath is pale, thin. A boy, probably no older than eighteen Standard. He looks up at the sky like he saw something unbelievable and froze that way. I lower his mask over his breast, hang on its straps over the heart like the Pax do as a sign of respect to their forebears when the hunt is successful, when the fight is won.

Is this fight won? We beat the machines again, but they still keep coming. It’s a small consolation that Chang has been going for quantity over quality, churning out more fragile bots, but far too many for us to chase down and stop before they slaughter innocents like this.

This child never stood a chance against the mass-produced Boxes and Bugs that attacked the small outpost Stead just twenty meters behind me, coming to kill men, women and children for no other reason than they’re easy targets, and trying to defend them will keep us too busy to find and assault Chang’s new base. Even faced with such armored monsters, this boy gave no ground, held his position to try to give his people time to flee, firing his arrows against plating made to resist firearms.

Michael, Bel keeps on me. Please. You have to. You can’t repair on nuts and berries.

I know he’s right. I’ve tried. Even if I absorb the lush bounty of the local flora directly, it doesn’t give me enough to heal properly after a bad fight. My internal indicators have all been sunk below critical for days now. Even if I wasn’t shot up and broken, I’m getting too weak to be of much good (hence how I got so shot up and broken). And there’s not enough of what I need in the bots we’ve neutralized—just a half-kilo or so of brain and nerve tissue spliced into their CPUs using a bastardization of our own nanotechnology, salvaged from what used to be men and women, seduced into Chang’ service with promises of power or security.

Bel finally gets that he’s really not making this easier, and he and Paul walk away, give me space, leave me alone with a dead boy.

I cough blood up into my mouth, make the mistake of trying to move my still-shattered left arm, look down at the bullet holes in my own torso. I put the fingers of my good hand in the holes, through metal and into meat. I bring them out slick and crimson, then dab my blood on the boy’s forehead like some ritual, the blessing of a false god. Or a small sacrifice in exchange for what I’m about to take.

I reach out my hand. And can’t.

I’m pathetic.

So I sit here, looking down into dead eyes. And apologize:

This should never have happened to you. None of this should have happened.

I’ve never been any good at funerals. So for lack of profound words I ramble, feeling obligated to at least try to explain to a corpse why he died today.

"Someone… something… came back from the future, changed things… tried to stop the corporations from developing the technology that made a whole world full things like me… It caused the Apocalypse, destroyed the colonies, cut Mars off from Earth, killed thousands. Back in your grandparents’ day. Back before you were born.

I was there. Human me. Buried by the blasts. Sunk into Hiber-Sleep. Fifty years…

I breathe. Grind ribs. Rattle. The blood’s clearing out of my lungs, the bones trying to knit, but I don’t have what I need—I can barely patch my wounds. What I need is right in front of me. Resources. Raw materials.

"I should have stayed asleep. But I woke up. Called Earth. Brought them back here. Idiot. I started it all again. Earth… They say they’re terrified of the technology that the corporations were working on here. They came back and started trying to round up and quarantine you all to make sure you’re not infected by something leftover. But in secret, they were trying to find that tech, study it, use it.

So the one who stopped them the first time came back, tried to take the planet to make sure it would never be used for that kind of research again, started a war… You’re all just stuck in the middle. With me. Us. I nod in the direction of my few companions like he can see them. "We shouldn’t have happened either.

"We’re not supposed to be here. I’m not supposed to be here. Not like this. This me is from the world that never happened, brought back… I don’t know how… to fight. To protect you all. To stop…"

I have to chuckle at that, cough on my own blood, hurt like hell, deserve it.

Not doing a very good job of it, am I?

(I guess I should be thankful for the little things: Chang’s locked down the Boxes’ big 20mm cannons, afraid any big blasts would be picked up on satellite and bring down another piece of nuclear stupidity from Earthside. Or non-nuclear stupidity, assuming they learned their lesson in Melas.)

I can feel Bel’s eyes on me. My new best friend: the Devil. And Paul (another thing I can’t forgive myself for: what I’ve helped turn him into).

I’m sorry, I finally get around to saying. I’ll make this right. I swear. I’ll do whatever I can to protect your people. I just…

The dead are dead. Needs must…

I can do this through my glove, but I want to feel it—I don’t deserve to be insulated from feeling it. So I will the glove to peel away, exposing my bare hand.

I’m so sorry…

I move his mask aside, then tear open his tunic and the natural fiber shirt underneath, expose smooth pale skin smeared with blood, and press my palm to his sternum like I’m going to perform half-assed CPR.

I hate this part. I hate it.

For an instant, I feel his intact skin, still warm. But then it starts to give way, liquefy, butchered on a cellular level as my scavenger nanites weave their way in. I can feel them, building a temporary network of siphon tubes like a secondary circulatory system, boring deep into his chest, seeking…

I get the initial rush, my nanites feeding me what I need to rebuild, replenish, heal.

I feel sick. I watch his body begin to desiccate. His face…

My ribs pop back into place. My gunshot wounds seal over. My lungs and liver patch and begin to regenerate. My left arm snaps and grinds into shape. It hurts. I’m glad it hurts. It should hurt.

I’m a fucking cannibal. A ghoul.

I cough the last of the thick blood out of my lungs, then take a deep breath of the thin, chill air, smell the green (and under it: blood and death and gunsmoke). My fingers are sunk into his ribs. I feel his lungs shrivel, his heart dissolve.

My indicators rise back toward green. I start to feel strong again. Invincible. Immortal.

In my head, I can hear the bots’ command signals. There’s another wave, headed for some nearby Steads that haven’t been evacuated yet, the Pax too stubborn to give up their homes, their ancestral lands.

Time to go fulfill my promise. Again.

Part One: Heroes Journey

Chapter 1: A Fighting Man of Mars

1 April, 2118.

From the War Journal of Erickson Carter:

April First. This is the day I will begin my journey.

The date I have chosen is particularly appropriate. On Earth, it was called April Fool’s Day, apparently a day dedicated to celebrating friendship and love by humiliating friends and loved ones with cruel pranks. I wonder if it’s still observed as such, if the new puritanical regime controlling every aspect of human life on that world allows for such abusive folly. Perhaps they have a law against it now. They seem so intolerant of so many things, or at least that’s the face they’ve shown us since they came back here. The new United Nations World Government consistently presents like obsessively overly-protective (and overly-religious) parents, afraid of anything (real or imagined) that might lead their people into danger, insurrection, or even poor health. In some aspects, they aren’t terribly unlike our Council of Elders. But I blame neither for my decision to do this, no matter how the circumstances that they helped shape put me on this path to the exclusion of arguably better judgment.

And perhaps I am just a fool. I’m sure many of my own people will call me various synonyms of that derogation when they find out what I’ve done. I suppose it’s appropriate enough, in the very definition of the word. After all, in modern usage it refers to someone who fails to make wise or careful choices. I truly can’t say my choices will be wise, and they certainly won’t be careful.

But I prefer to consider a much older and less common meaning of the word: Wanderer. A soul on a path of exploration without direction. He risks stumbling blindly into catastrophe. But he is the protagonist of his own story.

Except I do have a direction, a destination in mind. I just don’t know how to get there from here. But I do know how to start.

Step One: I must leave here. I must break the law.

I have fully recovered from my implantation. The Ceremony is now a week behind me, the mandated gift for my twenty-seventh birthday (delayed two frustrating years due to the recent protection amendments). And I didn’t have to modify the process much: The Council, out of fear for the safety of their children in the face of Earth’s devastating actions as well as potentially more terrible enemies, has decided that all adults shall receive full Guardian-level nanotechnology (even though they have eliminated the Guardian force). All I needed to covertly add into the loading program was the code that will let me manually sever all connections to our network when the time is right, and disable any tracking signals (ostensibly designed to bring rescue in case of emergency, but more likely used by the Council to keep track of our activities, and I certainly can’t have that).

One week on, and I’m still fascinated by the changes to my body: to be suddenly so much stronger, faster, resilient, and to be able to heal most wounds in minutes to hours. I could drive a blade or a bullet through my heart (assuming my reinforced bones didn’t simply stop the penetration like hardened steel), and my nanites would initiate a circulatory backup system while they knitted the tissues back together, then stimulated new cell growth to heal the wound without any scarring. And I won’t get any older than I am now, at least not biologically.

I spent the last days with purpose, getting used to my new muscles, my new nervous system, learning how to move again. Any other one of us would have months to do this, but I can’t risk my modifications being detected in routine exams. The longest I can put off the post-implantation checks is one week, so one week is what I had. I got myself back on my feet as soon as I could manage, wrestled control over unfamiliar muscles, and learned to filter the heightened senses. Then, when I could move around safely and focus on what I was doing, I systematically ran through all of my secret training routines, just to see what I can do now, amazed by what I can do now. I know I’m physically ready for this.

But then there are the changes to my mind: I’m suddenly fully interfaced with our networks, with our libraries, with all of us. And with our Tools: they respond to my thoughts like extensions of my body and brain. Finally, after twenty-seven Standard years, I am part of everything that we are—it’s all just a mental command away, manifesting as new sound and new vision and new power. I am Connected. I am part of our community. I am a full adult.

It’s no small sacrifice that I’ll be deactivating all of these interfaces tonight, but I know I have no choice.

I gather the things I will need, the items I’ve so painstakingly collected and crafted for my mission, my new life:

Modified survival systems to allow me to walk the surface without freezing or slowly suffocating. I built them secretly, from equipment originally designed for pre-implant apprentices when they were still allowed to work outside, before all vulnerable juveniles were restricted to the Crèches. They plug into and supplement the standard-issue sealsuit, adding minimal bulk to slow me down. If I could use our Tools on my journey, I would not need these. I could generate a shelter field as needed. But the new edicts have put locks on our Spheres and Rods: they will no longer operate beyond our Stations, not without specific Council approval, a measure to try to ensure that no more former Guardians try to go off and return to their higher callings.

Armor, to partially compensate for my lack of defensive fields. I modeled the pieces from my studies of medieval technology, but made them from modern laminates (I’m sure my instructors would agree this was a poor use of my studies in Materials Engineering). Then I artfully hard-polycoated them with a rust and ochre camouflage scheme to blend into the terrain. Chest, back, shoulders, neck, groin, and forearms. They should help me resist small arms and shrapnel, as well as edged weapons, but the coverage is far from complete because I will also need to move. I strap the articulated plates on over my sealsuit, just like I’ve done dozens of times while I crafted and fitted them, and dozens more times to try training—moving and fighting—in them. It all feels much lighter now, of course, but somehow much heavier.

A cowl and cloak, to conceal what I am, to help me fade into the landscape if needed, and to better weather the elements. It’s a multi-layered Nomad garment, a souvenir of my father’s Guardian service, a gift from grateful allies after the First Battle of Melas Two. Even though the Guardians were late to that fight, they did help finalize Chang’s defeat, and they were instrumental in helping the injured. My father would die only two months later, along with four of his fellows, their ship becoming target practice for Chang’s railgun.

A knife and a daggar. Colonel Ram himself—in the indispensible trainings he provided, along with the legendary Zauba’a Ghaddar, to our first Guardians—insisted on the necessity of having a good knife, for survival, utility, and combat. And while both he and the Ghaddar strongly recommended and carried plain sturdy single-edged tools, Ram historically favored a stout double-edged dagger for close-quarters combat. So I made myself one of each, painstakingly researching the ideal alloy for edge retention and resilience, even at significantly sub-zero temperatures. Then I spent months teaching myself how to use them, since we have so spoiled ourselves with our technology that even such basic skills as cutting with a physical knife are alien to us. I found the primal experience surprisingly exhilarating. These are the tools my ancestors—my species—have used since long before the beginning of recorded history.

And a sword. It took me a long time to decide upon the ideal design. I chose what appealed, based on the years I’ve spent secretly training, obsessively studying every historical and contemporary martial arts file we had in our libraries (including Colonel Ram’s and the Ghaddar’s sessions with our Guardians), practicing every free moment in the privacy of the tap-core tunnels. I take it from its hiding place under my bed: It’s a hybrid of Chinese and Viking, a medium-length broad double-edged blade with a thick crescent guard and a hand-and-a-half grip capped by a solid trefoil pommel, another product of my redirected metallurgical studies. I put it, along with my knives, in the scabbards I’ve made for them, and secure them to my belt where my Tools should be.

All I have to do now is shut down my interfaces and leave.

I take a moment to look at myself—my finished product, my transformation—in the mirror in my bedroom. It looks… alien—such a stark contrast to the pervasive order and safety of the world I’ve lived in all my life. For a moment, I almost can’t believe I designed and painstakingly crafted all of this. It’s all gaudy violence, ridiculous to my scientific sensibilities. I would call it a costume, the play-dress of immature fantasy, but every part of it is functional, and completely appropriate, even necessary, for the world I’m about to step into.

And it strikes me now like a weight much heavier than all the metal I’m wearing: This is it. This is final. I’m going. Outside. And I have no plans to return.

I look around one last time at the world I’m leaving behind. It’s not a large world, by any means, despite the artificial sunlight and extensive gardens and projected landscapes (a rotating selection of past Mars, current Mars, and the Earth my forefathers knew). The Crèche, even the Station as a whole, is a facility, a contained habitat. It’s big enough for two hundred and forty of us to comfortably live and work and while our extended lives away in, but it’s certainly not a planet. The planet is Outside. And it’s the planet that needs us, needs all of us, very badly. Especially now. I’ll just have to do.

This, I realize, is the impetus I need: I need to feel the smothering isolation of this place, I need to rage at all the restrictions that our generational leaders have placed on our lives in the name of keeping us safe in a world that’s becoming less so by the day. I need to feel disgust at the certainly lethal stupidity of our choices to simply withdraw and hide from the twin threats of the reckless military might of Earth’s new world government and the devastating weapons forged by the supposedly indestructible Syan Chang. I need righteous anger to purge my doubts and my attachments to the only home—the only world—I’ve ever known and shove me Outside.

But first, a moment of nostalgia, here in my rooms for the last time…

One thing I know I’ll miss: My grandfather’s books, antique crumbing paperbacks, a selection of classic literature and science fiction and fantasy, expensively brought from Earth, handed down after his death in the years after the Apocalypse, passed to my father, and through him to me. I wonder again if my father, and his father, realized the seeds they were planting: tales of adventure, of heroes, of larger worlds. I pull one of my favorites, from a series by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and drink in the cover art: Muscled warriors and beautiful women bravely facing fierce monsters and detestable villains, set on a Mars that never existed. The protagonist even shares my surname.

One thing I tell myself I’ll miss: My brother. My only blood family. And I tell myself that Elias will miss me. But there’s no connection, no affection between us, and never has been. All we share is a name, and a father; a father who’s now dead, and the nominal motivator for my mission.

I look one last time at the obligatory family images on my desktop. The schism between us is clear in every one where both of us appear together, pretending to be family, pretending to be brothers. Hate in the eyes of a child that never fully faded as he grew into an adult. I started my life with him quietly—and sometimes not so quietly—blaming me for the death of our mother, as if a fetus can be responsible for the complications of a difficult pregnancy. I expect he also blamed my father for impregnating her before her age of implantation, but that was back when we still did such things the natural way, because we had to, because our nanites prevent in-utero pregnancy and we hadn’t perfected our synthesized womb-incubators yet, so young fragile Natural mothers did face risks. So Elias should really blame the state of our science. And if not, then himself, as he’d put our mother through just as much risk as I did, as he’s three years my senior, and his complication-free birth probably helped encourage the young couple to repeat the ritual, to increase their family.

Maybe he was showing his resentment by not volunteering for Guardian service, not even after our father was killed in that service (a calling I was denied when the Council disbanded the force before I was of age). But I expect the stronger reason is that he’s always been so much more invested in science—in his precious particle physics—than family. Or people, as I’ve seen him with neither a lover nor friends his entire life, and seemingly not bothered by that isolation. Maybe not having a mother—or losing a mother so young—did that to him. Or maybe he’s just wired that way. I never knew a mother, and I find that I can’t not care about others, especially those far more vulnerable than we are.

A clear sign of the chasm between us is that Elias suspects nothing, that he’s never noticed all my preparations: two-and-a-half years’ worth of secret training and crafting, begun when Colonel Ram came to us and made us face the world outside and gave us our mandate to protect the vulnerable. Or if he does suspect, he doesn’t even care to try to stop me from doing something so outrageous. Perhaps he wants me to incur the wrath of the Council, and the subsequent humiliation and ostracism.

But what he doesn’t realize: I welcome that. I would consider myself in good company, along with Doctor Paul Stilson, his brave brother Simon—brothers that truly loved each other, and the people of this planet, above themselves—and all the other Guardians who tried to continue the fight against Council orders to withdraw, until the Council forced compliance by remotely deactivating all of their Tools. And especially Paul Stilson, who refused to quit even when he was disarmed, and who follows Colonel Ram to this day (assuming he still lives).

My resolve bolstered by these non-fictional heroes, I confidently go now to join them. I can only hope they will accept me into their esteemed number, and allow me to be part of their good service.

I gather the last few practical things I may need: A few canteens to carry precious water, and a small pack of assorted nutritive bars to supplement my nanites’ recycling abilities.

Finally, I use the manual disconnect code to shut down all of my interfaces, all of my connections with my fellows and what they’ve wrought. And just like that, with a trigger thought, my head goes silent, back the way it was before I was implanted. I am alone within myself.

I set my desk to simulate my presence here, hopefully convincing until someone (Elias?) comes to physically look for me. I’ve already stripped the tag-ware from my suit and gear. I am invisible.

Then I sneak away, in the dark of night, like a thief, like a Shinkyo Shinobi.

I’ve planned my exit route to avoid both living and machine eyes, using the conduit access tunnels from the housing section to get underneath Life Support, then around the Reactor Cluster shielding, and climb down in what should be blind darkness (my enhancements make everything glow ghostly green) into the constantly thrumming and hissing abyss that is the Station’s Tap Well.

I make too much noise despite my practice climbs, because now I’m wearing the extra armor, and the awkward protrusion of my sword scabbard refuses to cooperate. With my enhanced hearing, every scrape and bump echoes loud as a gunshot even over the music of the always-working Tap Cores, but no one (or thing) seems to notice. I’ve picked the hour well, before the leaner nocturnal shift begins making their maintenance checks.

I find the lateral branch tunnel I need, created decades ago by the Core Drillers. This one is long unused since their automated tentacles bored and sucked this section of cliff rock practically dry before moving on to richer strata. These tireless machines have been cutting and mining permafrost veins and useful mineral deposits for more than half a century now, leaving a labyrinth of tunnels like the root-patterns left by some giant tree, reaching dozens of kilometers outward from the Station’s foundations. Even with a map, getting lost here, deep in the Rim, is almost guaranteed. But I have spent decades exploring at every opportunity, if for no other reason than to escape my brother’s company. Then I made these abandoned spaces my training monastery, perfecting my skills far away from critical eyes.

I make my way deep downslope—beyond the security perimeter of our surface sensors—before I find my ultimate exit. I found this way out over a year ago, digging through a few meters of collapse where this Tapline got too close to the surface. Then I placed a makeshift airlock across it to hide the breach from pressure sensors. The passage is barely a meter wide and high—I have to crawl. I carefully open the inner shelter fabric hatch I glued across the gap, and seal myself beyond it.

The tunnels—even this far out—are warm from the Cores, so I’m hit by a shocking blast of sub-zero air the instant I rip away the fabric outer hatch, the pressure equalizing in a rush. I can feel the cold through my suit, through my mask and helmet, even as my onboard heater struggles to compensate.

I crawl gracelessly out into the night, out under the open sky, and promptly almost lose my balance when I try to stand up on the loose rock of the Southwest Rim slopes. There’s a thin glaze of ice on the rocks, and already forming on my armor. My systems tell me it’s negative twenty degrees Celsius. The atmospheric pressure up here is only 0.17, three points lower than it should be, despite our best efforts to undo the damage that the Earth commanders did in their desperation to destroy beings like us. Their overkill bomb created a pulse strong enough to crash most of the Melas Atmosphere Net, bleeding years of our efforts into space before we could repair the damage. Add to that the fallout, bolstered by the fissile material in Chang’s reactors, which cooked a toxic swath across the middle of the valley. Compounding the tragedy is that they probably didn’t even succeed in finishing Chang, despite the price paid by everyone who calls the valley home.

But I am Outside. I take a moment to appreciate the crossing of that threshold, to look up at the starry sky and feel the winds blast me with fine sand. Then I move before any long-range eyes see me.

My first course is down, as there are still thousands of meters to the beginning of the valley floor. My eyes boost the faint starlight into a hazy glow, enough to find my footing. I have six hours until sunrise to get myself out of physical sight of my home. I look back up-slope once, but can barely see the Station’s towers rising above me against the Rim cliffs. All I can see is their output, the eternal columns of steam and oxygen and Greenhouse gasses billowing up to flatten and spread against the Net ceiling as they have done since the reactors went online more than sixty years ago, diminished not at all by my absence.

As I trudge my boots downhill, keeping hold of my sword hilt so that the scabbard doesn’t catch on the rocks behind me, I begin to feel the extent of the path that stretches before me: hundreds upon hundreds of kilometers (and so far I am only able to count my progress in the hundreds of meters), east all the way across Melas Chasma and then deep into Coprates. I will pass by the territory of the Shinkyo, pass the Earth base Melas Two, go outwards to Tranquility—my heroes’ former home—and beyond. I’m following them, though I know not where they’ve gone. East. Just east. To protect those fleeing the disaster Earth has wrought here in Melas. To seek the peoples of legend that live in the deep green.

Mike Ram. Paul Stilson. Belial. Lux. Azazel. Astarte. Thompson Bly.

None of them have been seen or heard from in six months.

I will find them. I will offer my life and my sword in their great service. And if Syan Chang did indeed survive that nuclear fireball, I will make myself part of finding a way to destroy him with finality, for the sake of everyone on this planet.

8 April, 2118:

It’s taken me a week to travel only one hundred and fifty kilometers.

Being eager but not foolish, I’ve gone somewhat out of my way to the north in order to give Shinkyo territory a wide berth. Their Shinobi have well-deserved reputations as devastating opponents, even to large forces of fully-equipped Guardians, and they’re certainly still hungry for any opportunity to take our bodily technology. Even keeping ninety kilometers between myself and their likely base of operations in the Dragon’s Tail (their original colony is still sitting abandoned since their ill-advised surrender to Earth forces nine months ago), I take the extra precaution of wearing my father’s cowl to cover my distinctive helmet, hoping to pass for a Nomad or a Knight, or perhaps something much more frightening.

The route makes me do some climbing, up over the elevated slide plains and rolling hills of western Melas, finally dropping down into the central lowlands as I come up on the ruins of Baraka. From the crest of the uplands I can see the near-miss crater that proved too near, destroying much of the colony and rendering the rest uninhabitable. What remained was squatted in for a time, until the first-generation Nomads—joining with their UASP brethren to the north at Uqba—packed up every piece of emergency survival equipment they could salvage and headed out into the open desert, living off ingenious taps they spliced into our Feed Lines, moving regularly to avoid competitors for precious resources. And thriving.

I stop several times to check the radiation counts. I still appear to be keeping north and west of the fallout drift-pattern that roughly bisected the valley after the Earth commanders recklessly detonated a four hundred and fifty kiloton yield nuclear weapon inside a flying fortress powered by several re-tasked and modified colony fusion reactors. The destruction of Chang’s flagship—the Stormcloud—was certainly an urgent priority, but their method proved disastrous, and was probably planned and ordered without a thought for consequences. That one bomb is what’s responsible for the toxicity of almost twenty percent of the valley—a swath two hundred and fifty kilometers from east to west and almost fifty kilometers wide—as well as the critical failure of the Atmosphere Net, bleeding off nearly a decade’s worth of enriched atmosphere and dropping the pressure below what’s livable for too many of the local peoples, and sending generational cultures on an exodus into unknown and likely dangerous lands to the east just to survive.

I’ve considered risking a journey to ground zero, to see what’s hopefully the end of Syan Chang for myself, to poke through the shards of molten wreckage to assure myself that my father’s murderer—and the murderer of so many thousands of others—is indeed incinerated and disintegrated beyond recovery. But I know I couldn’t manage the distance on foot. Even the shortest route, twenty-five kilometers in that hot zone (and back), could do me irreparable damage. I doubt I would survive the first leg of the trip. So I’ll have to delay my closure until I have the luxury of some kind of aircraft.

But that’s assuming Chang is actually dead. I’ve obsessively studied the video records of the rebel Guardians that joined the attack on his ship that day, then raced to protect the more-vulnerable humans from the blast as Chang, for no clear reason, chose to pilot his doomed fortress away from them before it was consumed in the nuclear fireball. Chang appeared to be injured, weakened by the combined assaults of Colonel Ram, Paul Stilson and the unknown hybrids Belial and Kali. Perhaps he finally saw that he was beaten, that he could no longer fight an enemy willing to throw nuclear warheads at their own people and allies, that he hoped those he was saving could do better in that endeavor. Or perhaps he simply used the time and distance to get himself off the ship, along with his own hybrid allies Fohat and Asmodeus, before the explosion. If so, I have no reason to visit Ground Zero—we will all be facing Chang again soon enough. (Is it a sign of some pathology of my own that part of me does hope for the opportunity?)

I stop now on a rise overlooking the Baraka ruin, still five or six kilometers away. I’ve already decided not to set foot there, thinking the discretion would be a show of respect to the Nomads, and to the holy ground that once held the first Mosque on Mars. I have no idea if any of them are even watching to appreciate my act, though I have detected movement and heat from time-to-time on the far periphery of my scanning range.

Behind me, the sun is setting over the long parallel valleys of Ius and Tithonium. The evening wind tide is battering my back, as if pushing me forward to the ruin. But this is as far as I go until tomorrow. Traveling at night, in the deep cold, has been putting too much demand on my limited resources (and the ground gets slick with the glaze of frost that forms). And from here, I can see approach from all directions.

I find some rocks to partially shield me from the cyclic winds, risk lifting my mask to sip precious water and nibble from my rations, feeling the bite of the cold on my skin as I do so. I dig a shallow hole with my hands, clear a relatively smooth place to sit—regretting that one thing I failed to pack was a simple entrenching tool—and settle in to sleep sitting up with my back propped against stone.

The layered cloaks of the Nomads are an ingenious thing: Alternating insulation and radiation protection, with a hand-dyed camouflage pattern unique to each artist. Some of the layers contain air bladders that can be inflated with the exhale-bleed from a standard survival mask, proving additional insulating effect as well as a backup supply of breathable air if needed (as Normal lungs aren’t very efficient—what they expel is still fairly oxygen rich). Huddled under them, half-buried in the sand, a Normal might survive a Martian night if caught without a heated shelter. Given my sealsuit and its heating system, the effect becomes downright cozy, assuming I sleep either sitting up with my legs pulled up close or fetal. I’ve found the former more practical for several reasons, though it took some getting used to.

As I watch the evening gusts begin to bury my legs in sand again, I look up at the sky, across the expanse of the valley, back across the distance between here and home, and I’m struck again by how far—how much farther—I’ve come from the relative safety of my Station. I’m truly out in the wilderness, sleeping in sand, the stars for my ceiling. Alone. Vulnerable.

There’s another interpretation for my condition, however. It strikes me that I may have made myself more instead of less safe; because my former home, our Stations, are under threat. Even if Chang is gone, Earth has made their agenda clear, as well as their implacability. They will take our Stations by force even if it makes the planet unlivable for everyone; strip all of us of our technology even if it kills us. In their stupid fear, they will accept no compromise. My Council choosing to withdraw, to hide away in our facilities, will not forestall what’s coming for very long. (And they must certainly realize that.)

Again, I have trouble sleeping, and it has nothing to do with being wedged up against a rock in sub-zero and too-thin air over a hundred and fifty kilometers from home.

I sleep sitting up, hiding under my cloak and cowl, with my hand on the hilt of my sword.

9 April, 2118:

It’s hard to tell if he’s awake or still asleep, under that mask.

These are the words that I wake to, a melodic voice, though filtered through a breather mask.

Ahhh… It stirs.

I see a shape I don’t immediately recognize, a blob-like mass on the edge of the hill-slope just meters in front of me. Everything is still shadows under the dawn sky.

I reach for my sword.

Ah! the voice scolds me, raising a hand to gesture