The God Mars Book Six: Valhalla I Am Coming by Michael Rizzo

containment
tube, his recently-exploded head grown back to the point that his
skull was intact again, though not his hair (except for a few
random blonde wisps). There was so little flesh on it that he
resembled a desiccated mummy, only with pale, baby-like skin tight
over the bone. Stripped of his golden armor, his body was similarly
wasted, having to consume itself to repair his injuries, to
re-create his brain and most of his head from about the nose up.
Murphy’s last act of service.
    “Is he back to consciousness?” I asked Bel urgently,
the first words I spoke to him.
    “Partially. I still haven’t been able to sift
anything useful from his visual memory, just more images of cut
caves that could be the Pax Keep. But now we know it is. We know
that’s where he went.”
    I dropped the fields, opened the container. Bel
sealed the hatch behind us, turned up the scrubbers to make sure no
part of Fohat could try to make a run for it. Then he sat to
monitor while I interrogated the old fashioned way.
    “Where did he go?” I asked the paper-skinned skull.
“Asmodeus. After Pax, what was the fall-back?”
    I got nothing for several seconds. I grabbed him by
what hair I could get my fist around and shook him until I could
hear his neck grind. His jaw flopped open, like he was insensate.
But then the thin lips twisted up into a grin, exposing the budding
teeth of an infant poking out of his upper gums, while his lower
jaw still had most of its adult set. The contrast was deeply
disturbing to look at.
    “Sometimes… I remember Janeway… You remember
Janeway…?” It took him a lot of effort to speak with his
underdeveloped unbalanced mouth, and his words slurred, rasped.
    I looked to Bel. He shrugged.
    “It’s the rebuilding brain, digging up fragments,
apparently finding leftovers of the body his Seed took over.”
    “I remember Janeway,” I decided to confirm. “You ate
him alive. Took his body for your own. That’s him, haunting you for
it.”
    He chuckled dryly, weirdly with his mismatched mouth,
and opened his sunken eyes. The left one was too small for the
socket. The right one was just a cluster of metal contacts, like a
multi-pin plug, where his hardware implant used to be, the
cluster-eye linked to his creations, letting him see through all
their eyes, letting him watch them murder. I want to rip the rest
of that linkage out of his head, slowly. But instead, I focus on
what’s pressing, lever:
    “Asmodeus. He left you. He’s done with Pax,” I lied
more than assumed. “Where did he go then? Where was he going to go
after he was done there?”
    The baby/mummy head shook, the eyes closed.
    “He left you,” I kept selling. “He milked you
for your all your precious knowledge, downloaded everything of
value without you even knowing it, then he left you to us… He took
all your skills, and all your toys. Now they’re his. All his. No more toys. No more toy making. Just this. You in a cage
with us. Until we get bored torturing you. And there’s long line
waiting to get a turn.”
    If the desiccated skull could manage tears, I expect
he would have cried. But he just kept weakly shaking his head.
    I drew my knife, grabbed his right wrist, started
cutting. He screamed himself hoarse in his restraints, lopsided
mouth gaping and twisting so far open it looked dislocated. I saw
Bel give me a look, then look away, keeping his eyes on his
screens.
    I cut the hand free at the elbow, and put it in a
small containment cylinder, where it would begin to disintegrate
having almost instantly gotten the master signal that the rest of
his body is intact elsewhere (a handy safety so that every bit that
we lose doesn’t grow a new one of us). Then I wiped my knife on his
dirty robes, and let him watch as my blade and glove absorbed what
blood was left, my Mods neutralizing his, breaking them down and
consuming them as raw material.
    I let him stew on how much more he would starve
replacing that hand. But all he did