Free The God Mars Book Five: Onryo by Michael Rizzo Page B

of stacked stones, a meter tall. In the middle of the stack is
the largest stone, which looks hand-cut. On its flat front face are
carved three vertical lines of characters that I recognize as
Japanese, as some are Kana, not Kanji (and most of the Kana are the
more angular Katakana used to transcribe non-Japanese words). One
of the strings of characters has been painted red, though the paint
is well-faded. The marker is also overgrown by the local flora.
    “It looks like a grave,” I consider quietly.
    “It is,” Negev confirms. “’Peter Nagasawa.’ ‘Maria
Mendoza Nagasawa.’ ‘Alice Mendoza Nagasawa.’” He points to the
names as he translates. “The name in red traditionally means a
spouse who is still alive, the grave reserved.” He points back to
the painted character string. “’Peter Nagasawa’.”
    “Here’s another one,” the Ghaddar finds. It’s several
meters away, and smaller, simpler. But the name carved on this one
is in Standard English:
    “Declan Chance. 2103.”
    “Fifteen years ago, assuming that’s a date,” Straker
calculates.
    “Do these look fifteen years old?” Murphy
wonders.
    “The stones, maybe. But someone’s cleared away some
of the growth more recently than that. And there’s this…”
    Parting the growth, there’s a set of small handmade
bowls at the base of the stone tower. They are partially filled
with seeds, nuts, and dried fruits.
    “Offerings to the dead,” Negev confirms.
    “Someone’s tending the graves?” Murphy puts together.
“This ‘Peter’, assuming he’s alive?”
    “No recent tracks,” the Ghaddar studies the ground
all around.
    “The offerings are old,” Negev adds, picking up the
fruit and crumbling it in his fingers. Then he checks the nuts and
seeds, and decides “Years.”
    I help look for any sign of activity, but I find
myself distracted. Something about those names… Just on the edge of
my memory. Familiar, maybe. Or maybe something I read. Or
dreamed.
    “Signal?” my father asks Straker.
    She listens for a moment, then gestures further up
slope, up through the rocks.
     
    We have to catch up to Straker again. She climbs
better than the long-limbed Katar, even better than the Ghaddar. A
benefit of her Companion modifications, I’m sure.
    We find her leaning with her palms on what looks like
rock fall, her head turned like she’s listening.
    “This isn’t a natural slide,” Negev assesses,
gesturing over the slope of overgrown boulders we’re facing, a
talus pile nearly two dozen meters wide and half-a-dozen high.
“Someone moved these rocks.”
    He’s right: it looks wrong, just a bit too far from
the rim slope behind it, just a bit too “neat”.
    “It’s in here,” Straker declares. Then she starts
pulling away boulders. The Katar step back, visibly impressed by
her strength. She works at a single section, creating a kind of
cave mouth in the pile. We try to help her, but two of us can
barely budge a stone that she can lift by herself.
    Interestingly, the stones she’s pulling seem to come
away without disturbing the rest of the fall, even when she’s dug
in several meters.
    She digs like that for half an hour, while we can’t
manage much more than moving aside the stones she brings out. Then
from inside her mini-cave, she announces:
    “Hatch!”
    A few of us wedge in behind her. She’s revealed a
marred black surface, curved like a ship’s hull, with a
barely-visible seam that draws a circle just over two meters in
diameter. I’ve seen a circular hatch like this, and the black skin
over it, which I know is radar masking.
    “Colonel Ram had a ship like this,” the Ghaddar
remembers. “The Lancer. It came abandoned out of the desert.”
    “And he found another one near Tyr,” Straker adds.
“It was a fast recon vessel, paired with a lab ship. Sent by UNCORT
nearly two decades ago, to look for nanotech, to study. They even
experimented on whoever they could lure in.”
    “That means Earth knew there