The God Mars Book Four: Live Blades Read Online Free Page A

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