Free The God Mars Book Three: The Devil You Are by Michael Rizzo Page B

like
pretty much everybody else did. And I wanted a second chance, but
there was nothing I could do.
    Maybe there’s something I can do now, in this
time.
    I need to rethink. The me from the other time, the
one sent to stop Chang, has failed, lost the war before he even got
on the field. But the me from this time has his gifts, his tools.
His weapons.
    What can I do with them?
    It’s enough to get me up, get me walking.
     
    I make it to the end of the mountains by nightfall,
only because much of it was downhill. I realize I’ve been running a
day-and-a-half on the surface, no water except what I can absorb
out of the thin frost, no food, no heat.
    (“Figured out all the upgrades, yet?”)
    My helmet apparently will serve as a
moderate-efficiency rebreather and compressor, splitting the CO2 I
exhale and condensing additional O2 out of the existing atmosphere.
It’s taking the strain off whatever tech lives in my lungs, lets me
breathe almost normally. The residual carbon is a building block
for my nano-buggers.
    I haven’t peed since Melas Two. I seem to be in some
kind of strict recycle mode. And my skin has “hardened” again.
    Bonus: I can apparently draw solar power.
    Still, none of these nano-miracles are a substitute
for a good meal and a tall glass of water. But I am starting to not
miss being human.
     
    I dream of Lisa.
    Not the one I saw die. This one—the one from the
other time stream—never did. Maybe never will. (Unless this whole
muck-with-time thing has erased her, obliterated her.) But
she hates me as much as the other one, though for different
reasons.
    Matthew was a big part of that.
    I was so angry at him, because he wouldn’t take the
tech. I saw him getting sicker, weaker. Older. And then when the
diagnosis came out… (Funny. Both versions got the same fucking kind
of cancer.) The bastard would rather die—sick and in pain—than
accept what would save him.
    I couldn’t watch. That was what Lisa couldn’t deal
with. I abandoned him. In a righteous fucking snit because he was
being so stupid , so selfish… It was easier because he’d gone
to Mars, last assignment, security consultant for a big
corporation. (Stupid fucker was working for a company that made what could save him, and he wouldn’t put it in
himself.)
    And I think it pissed me off worse that he was
happy.
    I have an unexpected chuckle now—a crazy idiot
wearing a ram’s skull on his head wandering the desert giggling to
himself—because it took me this long to remember: That Matthew
married Tru Greenlove.
    I didn’t even try to go to the funeral, not even
virtually. Or make peace with my fucking best friend on his
deathbed. Because I couldn’t face it. Because he didn’t have to die
at all.
    Lisa really wouldn’t speak to me after that.
Disappeared from my life entirely, maybe permanently. (But who
knows, when it comes to immortals. Small universe.)
    But at least I knew she was alive.
    Maybe that’s why I’m not wrapping my head around her
death. It’s like I know she’s not dead, can’t die. If that
other time still exists.
    And if it doesn’t, it’s more I owe Chang for, an
incalculable amount… It’s not just all the people he killed—tens of
thousands—cutting us off from Earth to keep that future from
happening, but if he’s actually erased—obliterated—everyone in that
time… And the math for all of the descendants the people he killed
here might have had…
    No. I can’t empathize with Chang. And I can
never make him repay those debts.
    It’s just a matter of stopping him from doing more
damage, saving what’s left.
    (The irony doesn’t escape: I’ll probably need to do
the same against Earth.)
     
    I’ve actually slept lying down, curled up in my cloak
in a patch of relatively soft sand.
    No breakfast. I shake off the dust and walk.
    It’s still almost a hundred klicks to
Tranquility.
    Now that I’m out of the mountains, I have to cross
the open valley, get to the Datum-high Divide that