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

has been welded shut,” she declares after
a quick examination. Then she uses the tip of her Blade to slice
through the welds like she’s carving soft plastic. Unfortunately,
then she turns to me. “That should do it. Want to see if you still
have the touch?”
    Not really, but I don’t say so. I step up past her,
put my palm on the lock’s scanning plate. Nothing happens for a
moment, and I’m about to breathe a sigh of relief, but then I get a
green light and hear the locks open with a grinding clunk.
    My stomach does a flop on me, and I feel flushed.
    “Okay, we are officially inside weird,” Straker tries
to lighten the shock I’m feeling.
    “And you’ve never been here before?” Murphy wants me
to confirm. All I can manage to do is shake my head.
    Straker takes point again, and eases the hatch open
with her Blade ready. Both Murphy and I have our weapons leveled
over each of her shoulders. The lights flicker unhelpfully as the
hatch groans on its hinges.
    “ Ack …” Straker complains. We get hit by a
cloud of fine ash. Straker probably isn’t at risk, but Murphy, the
Ghaddar and I quickly make sure our masks and goggles are properly
sealed.
    Flickering lights barely illuminate the section in
front of us. Straker makes her sword glow, bathing everything is a
ghostly light. I can’t see past her, but I feel her start,
freezing.
    “ Hellloooo …” she sings, covering whatever
scare she just got. “Okay… that is just… not okay…”
    We manage to get a look past her. The room is indeed
a control room, probably a cockpit, with heavy swivel chairs for a
number of operators. A lot of the operating surfaces look smashed
and melted. Every surface looks like it’s been charred. But that’s
not what made her jump:
    The central chair is swiveled toward us, facing the
door. Sprawled in it is a body, or I assume it’s a body, as all I
see is a suit of heavy armor, similar to what the Katar wear:
overlapping sections of plate laced together, helmet with a wide
sectional flange over the neck. Even burned, I can tell the plate
is supposed to be black. The lacing (remarkably, it’s mostly
intact) is blood red. But the most striking part is the facemask: A
bright white human skull grins at us.
    It takes me a moment to realize it is a
facemask, as it’s out of proportion and position for a real skull
wearing the helmet. Straker confirms this by nudging at it with her
Blade. As her light comes close, I can see that the dark pits of
the eye sockets are actually lenses.
    She prods the body with her Blade, and I hear a dry
rustling, not quite hollow. She carefully pries the mask aside,
revealing a real skull, this one burned, with only bits of
carbonized flesh still sticking to it. The rest of the armor
appears loose, like it’s also just covering a skeleton.
    “Who were you?” Straker wonders out loud.
“ What were you?”
    I get a closer look: There are a lot of bullet holes
in the armor, large caliber. I also see bullet holes throughout the
cockpit, though they all look like they came from this direction,
from the hatchway. The chair that the suit is in has been shot
through so much it’s almost falling apart.
    “Someone cornered this guy in here, hammered him with
AP rounds, then set him on fire somehow,” Murphy sums what I’m
thinking.
    “Looks like a chemical incendiary, high heat,”
Straker assesses, looking at the burn patterns over everything. The
deck around the chair and the frame of it show signs of melting,
the padding totally charred. “They didn’t just want him burned.
They wanted him incinerated.”
    Straker moves forward past the body to check out the
rest of the cockpit. Murphy joins her, moving around the other side
of the burned armor. There aren’t any more bodies, just him.
(Her?)
    I’m still getting crushed by the sense that I know
this place. I can see in my mind a vague picture of what it must
have looked like when it was intact. But in my mind it was bigger
than this, so