Free The God Mars Book Four: Live Blades by Michael Rizzo

proportions. Both wear Nomad-style cloaks.
And both walk openly across the desert from the west. But they
travel separately, one seemingly following the other at distance,
perhaps far enough back to remain out of the other’s sight line,
but she says the follower does not appear to be trying to hide from
the leader.
    I immediately wonder if someone has come from our
people in Melas, to seek after our condition, but it’s unlikely
they would travel solo, and less likely they’d have managed to
catch up if they’d followed our course. The Ghaddar also insists
that the closer one—the one she could see clearer through her
sniper scope—did not look Nomad. Perhaps Knight. But the Knights
wouldn’t expose themselves so blatantly, not even when moving in
force.
    That leaves immortal, and the foolhardiness of
walking alone and in plain sight would agree. But Colonel Ram and
his disturbing company had been traveling by personal aircraft when
last we saw them. My father hopes that one of them may have met
with the misfortune of having lost their flyer and therefore forced
to walk back to their new base (assuming they’ve established one),
just to have word of our old friend after all these months. In our
last conversation, Colonel Ram was headed into the Deep Green,
toward what the Jinn call the “Vajra”, a region our maps say lies
yet another hundred and fifty kilometers further east. And that was
the last we saw of them. That was months ago now.
    The Ghaddar says that the one she got a decent look
at bore no resemblance to any of the immortals that we know (though
others may have arisen). The other possibility is a Jinn, a
Terraformer. They’ve been known to travel the valleys on foot,
relying on their wondrous Tools to protect them. But Paul Stilson
told us that his leaders were placing extreme restrictions on his
kind to keep them confined to their remote Stations. (And then he
defied them again, in favor of his friendship with Colonel Ram, of
his higher calling to put his talents to the service of
others.)
    The Ghaddar insists that they are still too far out,
more than two klicks back, around the eastern tail slopes of the
last mountain of the Lesser Divide, and therefore not able to have
seen us yet. My father chooses to ignore them for the time being,
to see if they follow us to Concordia, and keeping an eye behind us
to see if they draw enemy attention in our wake.
    We pack quickly and move out, south-southwest, for
Concordia, five klicks away.
     
    Unwilling to risk any more of our numbers to idle
curiosity, we get within half a kilometer of the colony site and
find high ground to observe. The colony sat just east and south
around the point where the valley widens out, though we can see now
that the slide-slopes reach most of that into the valley floor,
forming a cluster of low rocky mountains that rise up out of the
decline just east of the point, probably left by erosion. The
nearest of these mountains forms a narrow perpendicular side canyon
to the main valley between its western slopes and the southeasterly
curving of the much higher Divide Rim to its west. The resulting
depression—only a few hundred meters wide at the bottom—slopes
gently upwards toward the Rim, probably cut by either rimfall or
ancient permafrost melt or both. It eventually snakes up and around
behind the mountain maybe eight klicks in, but the colony is just
inside the mouth of this lopsided canyon. Many colony sites were
placed at the bases of such “drainage” cuts, likely in hopes of
accessing water and exposed mineral deposits. The UASP—the founders
of Baraka and Uqba—were among the few that chose the open valley
floor rather than build up against rim slope. (And while that
spared our ancestral homes from slides, it left them exposed to
nuclear blast waves.)
    I assume the location must also provide some relief
from the evening winds that blow from the west, the rim point and
the mountains we have just come around acting as a