King Ruin: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 2) (10 page)

It found me at the Don's bunker, but then the beam of my search was going out from there for long moments. I only glimpsed the rock for seconds.

We will see.

I have only the loosest sense of where the rock is, out in the Allatanc midst. I think we fought an under-ice skirmish near there, somewhere. We fought skirmishes everywhere. But all the hydrate mines, certainly the clusters, were known.

The subglacic has maps, and I search them, running my fingers over old paper, printed before the godship tsunami and the world changed forever. There are dates on some of them that make me laugh. So many years. Several show the Arctic before the ice was all blasted away, outlining the glacier-line like an empty white continent.

It used to be like this, I mull, before the skirmishes. There were no battleships hunkered behind every calved-off iceberg, no subglacics shadowed beneath every drifting floe. The lines of control were theoretical, not boundaries marked out in blood.

This subglacic is old, like me. I am only 47, but I feel my age. The skirmishes ended over twenty years ago, but still I remember them like they were yesterday.

On one of the middle-era maps, before they built-in the sub-stations and vast undersea pipes to connect the hydrate drills to refineries off the Aleut nation, I find a hub of rigs circling a tiny speck of rock.

SPARTAN'S CRAG

someone has written in on the map next to it, in scrawly red ink. Perhaps a great battle was fought here, remembered and commemorated to this day. Perhaps it was only an imaginative bosun's idle fancy, killing the long dull hours while he was waiting for his CSF to ferment.

This is the place Mr. Ruins went. This is the place where his lonesome path crossed with those others. This is where I'll learn who they are.

Sonar tells us we are alone, out in the ocean depths. The other subglacics have hoved far out of range. Instead on the screen I see a whale sounding sonar far to the North, guiding its calf. A tribe of hammerhead make hay of a tuna school to the East, participants in the endless hunt. This is nature, red in tooth and claw.

I too am a hunter, a predator. I showed it to Mr. Ruins, and I will show it to these others. I am Ritry Goligh, ex-skirmisher and graysmith to the skulks and Calico, I mastered Mr. Ruins and Don Zachary both, I dove the Solid Core and passed through the aetheric bridge for the first time in history, and you do not want to fuck with me.

Under silent fusion power, our subglacic glides smoothly through the ocean depths, sleek and wakeful as a shark.

Ti holds to her sister tightly while the flood roars over the stone above them, shaking the walls and drifting ancient dust down from the ceiling. She holds tight and can't let go, because they're twins and she won't be separated again.

Orange glow from a ruptured oxyfer stick flickers and dances nearby, like firelight, casting eerie shadows. Ray is breathing heavily between them. Doe is kneeling by his side, as tense as drawn elasteel. The numb reality that So has already died washes over her.

It was Ti who went first, the last time. She was down in the screw room while the sublavic breached the Molten Core's surface, with the heat of the Core cutting through the ablative panels. Sweat streamed down her unsuited skin, and she had known even then she would never escape the Bathyscaphe.

It was Me's order though. Me had sent her down there, and so there was no question she would do it. Her twin had to live, the chord had to live, so she worked through it, as the heat grew intolerable and she felt herself begin to cook. Still she drove the screw on and on, to keep the sublavic afloat on the inner surface of the Molten Core just a few moments more.

At last Me's voice came to her on the ship's blood-mic speakers, barely audible over the barreling screech of the screw as it stripped the last of its threads.

"Thank you."

It made it worth it, because it was for Me.

But where was Me now?

Now her sister is wheezing softly, a low rasp under the flood's cavalcade, which is no surprise since Ti's HUD tells her the grapnel punctured La's left lung. She's lost blood and won't be able to endure any prolonged exertion. It makes Ti ache for her.

She'd rather be the one to be hurt, or to die. It would be easier than this, to watch and be unable to help. She's already inventoried all the gear they were able to bring with them three times, during the flood, and concluded there's nothing there to plug a ruptured lung.

The grapnel has to stay in. The suit has to stay on. Without those things in place, La would die in moments, just like she did before. Ti has a ghostly, chord memory of that moment, when La died in Me's arms on the outer Solid Core ring. She loves him for that, which only makes his absence now harder.

Doe is looking at her now. There's a strange, curious look on her albino face.

"You can let go," Doe says. "It's over."

Ti blinks, and realizes she has both her hands clamped to her sister's grapnel wound. The roar of the flood is gone, and all that remains is the hiss of the oxyfer, and the stale sound of their breathing.

She releases, and La smiles at her. "I feel alright," she says. "Really."

Ti knows it's a lie, but she smiles back anyway. They hold hands, while Doe turns her attention to Ray.

"We need to set these limbs," she says.

Ray nods vacantly. "I can take it."

"It looks like all four limbs," Doe goes on. "It'll take hours."

Ray gives a weak grin. "Wouldn't have it any other way."

Doe touches his chest. Ti is surprised, because Doe rarely shows affection of any kind. "Sleep well," Doe says, and turns a dial on her chest.

Ray's grin slackens and his eyes close.

Doe turns to Ti, all tenderness gone. "We have to work fast. There's barely enough shock-jacks in both our suits to keep him under, and I don't care how tough he thinks he is, we'll never set these breaks with him awake."

Doe sends endosuit gamma shots of Ray's four limbs to Ti's HUD. They show his bones are not just broken, they are pulverized. 

"Holy…" Ti breathes.

"He balled them in front," La says, demonstrating by crossing her arms across her chest. "I thought of it too, when I almost hit the surge. Without it his chest and face would've been crushed."

Ti studies the length of Ray's left arm. There are four major breaks in the ulna, two to the radius, three in the humerus. His elbow has burst like a glass-bomb, driving powdered bone fragments outward through his muscles. Just this limb alone would take a day of full surgery in the Bathyscaphe, followed by a week of adaptive traction to heal.

They're in a pyramid.

"How is he even alive?" Ti whispers.

"He's a lieutenant in the chord," says Doe coldly, "and he didn't have orders to die. Now help me get this suit off. La, can you walk?"

La grits her teeth and nods.

"Good," says Doe. "Scout the corridors around us. Do not take anything resembling a risk. Understood?"

"Understood."

La levers herself up and starts away down the dark stone hall, sparking an oxyfer flare off her thigh. Ti notices her left arm hanging limp at her side, and for a moment feels the phantom pain.

Then Doe taps her on the HUD, and she bends to the work at hand. 

Ray's suit is cracked and warped, but has already sealed itself with epoxy-resin built into its ventricles. With a series of HUD override commands Doe floods his arm with anti-necrotizing mites and microbial platelets, has the suit tourniquet at the shoulder joint, then unlock.

Clasps down the length of the arm click open, though some are too buckled to release and only make a faint sad clack. Carefully Ti and Doe work around these broken points, peeling off the suit. It comes away like fractured sections of eggshell, held together by the epoxy membrane. It reminds Ti of the moment they opened up La's suit to watch innard soup roll out, another ghost memory from the chord.

There's no viscera with Ray though, only a syrupy mix of sweat, blood and the mite/microbial solution. Underneath, his arm is a gory wreck, as though it's been through a wringer. Ti wonders if she will be sick, looking down at the wreckage of splayed bone, tendon, and muscle, so bright white, pink and red against the shredded raw black of Ray's skin. It looks like the ravaged Sunken World above, gouged by tsunami.

Doe is pale and cold in the face of it. "Here," she says, pointing, "and here. We tie with wire, fuse these parts, then leave the microbials to patch him up. Ti, look at me. I need your help. Take off your gloves."

Ti looks down and sees the dark mud spattered all over her gloves. She nods and clicks out of them. Doe sprays her fingers down, such pale waxy things, with disinfectant that smells like lavender. Then they begin.

It is triage, but so they go, picking out bone fragments that can't be saved, settling ragged bone edges together like twigs in a fragile nest, clipping veins, nerves, tendons, and muscles back together with shots of microbial glue.

Ti has been a medic's assist before, but never like this. Open to the air like this, Ray's arm seems so plainly just a badly damaged machine, one they have no spare parts for. They can only tinker with it as best as they can, using the blunt instruments of scalpels and field-glues. Still, if the suit does what it should, it may even serve well enough as a traction tank. He may get full use back, some day.

Last is the skin. It has been badly ripped by burst bone spars, so they stitch it together again, like braiding a quilt. They wrap it snug and lovingly around the pieces from inside Ray's arm, like stuffing a toy bear. Then they spray it down with lavender disinfectant, take readings for blood-tightness, and Doe nods. Carefully they bandage him up in his armor again, like a cocoon, and Doe unlocks the shoulder tourniquet.

They watch the readings as blood flows back into the limb, barely breathing, but it seems to hold.

"It looks good," says Doe.

Ti becomes aware of La slumped against the wall nearby. She realizes she has been there for some time, wheezing, but she was too involved with Ray to notice. Now she turns, and sees the exhaustion on her twin's face.

"I found something," La says. "It's bizarre."

"Is there any danger?" Doe asks.

"I don't think so," La answers, pausing to breathe. "None immediate."

Doe nods. "Then tell us while we work. We can't stop now."

Ti smiles for her twin, then turns back. They begin the triage process again with Ray's left arm, while La tells them what she found.

Two hours pass, and they repair Ray's arm and his legs. The bones in his right leg are worst where the grapnel shot through, powdered like bondless golden spray in a jelly solution, but once the grapnel is removed, they recombine what they can with an amalgam of the suit's resin and bonding mites.

"He'll hold," says Doe. "In a few hours he should be solid enough to be carried. Now." She turns to La, who is already half-asleep. "You need to sleep. Increase the oxygen scrubbers in your HUD, that should give your one lung something more to work with. We'll be back soon."

"I should guard him," La says woozily. Ti can see she is barely hanging on to consciousness.

"You're no kind of guard like this," says Doe. "Put on the suit infras, and if anything comes we'll know. I need you lucid, and you're far from that now."

La nods dully, and allows herself to slide down the wall. The grapnel in her back rasps against the stone, leaving a long bright scratch mark down the dust-patinaed wall. She lays out flat on her back, arms by her sides, like a good little soldier.

"Alright," she barely manages, and closes her eyes.

Doe rises to her feet, and Ti joins her.

"We go see," says Doe.

They start away.

"HUD off," Doe says, and Ti complies. The corridor is dark and dusty, lapped gently by the oxyfer in Doe's hand. It smells of wet gravel and acetone. Underfoot is a granular orange sand, interspersed with thin brown shells that crackle under their boot heels.

"Beetle husks," Ti says.

Doe only grunts.

The corridor stretches on in a straight line for far longer than seems possible, given the size the pyramid had been on the outside. Ti says nothing, because La has already told them this. It doesn't veer or turn, only continues straight with no inclination up or down.

Ti lets her fingers run along the walls, dipping in and out of the endless stream of markings. This is plainly a language, but it is nothing her HUD can decipher.

"Do these mean anything to you?" she asks Doe.

Doe shakes her head. "No. I ran them through the HUD, and they're gibberish. Maybe they once meant something, but not any more. Everything is rotting here."

Ti aims her suit lights at the wall. The images are intricate and clear, carved with a precision that cobwebs and dust can't obfuscate. An old wooden ship of some kind, a heart, an outstretched hand, a crown. None of them seem to repeat, like an alphabet with endless letters.

"Stop looking at them," says Doe. "They're corrupted data. They'll only confuse you."

Ti turns off her light, and focuses on the darkness ahead.

"Here," says Doe, and points. There is a break in the wall, the first, leading inward. "This is what La saw."

La reaches for her QC, then remembers it is gone, lost to the mud with its charge depleted. She doesn't have any weapon but herself.

"Eyes back," Doe says, and leads them in.

Ti sees the hollow at the center of the pyramid in reverse, unveiled from the door outward, as she steps backward through the entrance. There is a doorway carved into the orange stone, pillars devoid of markings, rising up to a steeply inclined roof made of eight rising triangular stones.

Doe gasps, and Ti turns. What lies before them is truly bizarre.

It is people.

The chamber is large, octahedral, and featureless but for the spherical lattice of people erected in its midst.

"Thirty five," Doe says, already advancing. Ti finishes her own count, surveying the shape. There are thirty-five, all full-size figures, each with their own clothes and faces and hair, all of them stacked and arranged across each other by some means defying gravity.

Here there's a woman in a plaid-gray business suit, tipped at 45 degrees like a tent-pole, supporting a spray of three bodies angled off her head, one a dark-skinned man in a white poncho, one a yellow woman with a neck elongated by 23 copper torcs, one a dwarfish man with hooks for hands.

There's something familiar about their distribution, something too regular in the chaos, and Ti understands.

"It's some kind of atom," she says. She starts circling the vaguely spheroid stack, capturing the image for a three-dimensional render in her HUD. Against the black of sketchpad, she draws valency bonds across the bodies, and at the vertices she draws atomic hub-points like electrons, neutrons and protons.

"It's off the periodic table," she reports, as she comes full circle to stand beside Doe.

Doe is leaning close to the face of a grizzled old man in a flowing dark robe, tipped upside down with his head perfectly balanced atop the back of a young woman wearing a metallic bikini.

"High end or low end?" Doe asks absently.

"Sideways," says Ti, spinning the structure in her HUD like one of So's maps. "The molecule counts are skewed, this thing could never exist in real life."

Doe considers. "I think it's some kind of art."

Ti lets the cloud of vertices and bonding lines drop off her HUD. "Why would art be here?"