The God Mars Book Four: Live Blades Read Online Free

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