King Ruin: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 2) (29 page)

The Hollow Desert lies vast and golden around me. I'm standing in a new hand's body, ten stories high at the conning tower forward prow of King Ruin's old suprarene tank, looking out across the deep wilds of Darain sand. It is early afternoon, and a glorious molten sun beats down on the endless waves of dunes from a plastic blue sky, making them shine like the promised land.

It's just another raid.

Tiny grains of sand skirl across the metal-grille gantry beneath my combat-booted feet, blown by a hot and rising wind. The railing under my fingers is warm and smooth, polished by the hands of countless arene commanders dating back through the skirmishes.

I notice these kinds of details, when I know I'm going to die. It's strange. I notice that the sun is hot on my cheek, but a dry wind sucks away my sweat in seconds, something I can't get used to about the desert. I can't even sweat here. This body was made for the sand, but not me. I'm a marine, not an arene, and I belong in a Bathyscaphe deep within a Molten Core.

Not here. But here I am.

I look out toward the target. Beyond the undulating golden dunescape, studded with brownish-green outcroppings of cacti, lie a few pale tan escarpments of ancient rock rising in a spine-like ridge a few kilometers distant. They could be shark fins on a solid ocean of sand. Between here and there are three villages, hidden behind the vales of yellow dust, and beneath them, a Court.

It's a raid. It's a skirmish. It's just another way to die.

The air smells of corroded metal and old salt.

"This is the life," I whisper to myself.

Ray is standing behind me, and he laughs. "Cleaning up death camps is not my idea of fun."

I turn to him. He hasn't died since Becoming, hasn't had to, so he's still in the body of the first hand he took, a copper-skinned Darain dressed in full arene combat gear. He's leaning casually against a railing, picking at his teeth with a coil of gunspring, looking at me with his usual blend of cheerful insolence.

Of course, this is Ray. A year has passed, but still it's strange to see him like this, without his glinting tooth-loops, without his pure black skin. Instead he's added a strange kind of fractal pattern tattoo across his left temple, which I know is a memento of Doe. Without Doe none of us would be alive.

We buried her in the sand a year ago.

"I know what your idea of fun is," I say. "Is there anyone on this tank you haven't fucked?"

Ray laughs, rich and belly-deep. I laugh too. This is how it goes.

"Yena," comes So's voice from below, three decks down. She's in my head, like they all are now. There's no need for blood-mic when we're just facets of one mind split across the aetheric bridge. "He wouldn't dare."

Ray nods. "She's right, Me, I wouldn't. Yena's all yours."

"Very kind." 

Things have changed a lot since King Ruin. 

I know that Ray has been sleeping around so much because of Doe, because he misses her, and that's why I'll only gently tease him. I know how much it hurts him that she's gone, because it hurts me as well. What harm is there is him finding solace in lust? We're all addicted to something, now.

Far hardly ever leaves the aetheric soul, diving deeper and deeper for days at a time, searching for I don't even know what. La and Ti avoid each other compulsively, have put thousands of kilometers between each other, as some kind of reaction to finding the freakish husk of King Ruin's twin. It was just too much, I suppose. I think it's sad, but maybe they'll get over it.

So's addiction is the map. She never sleeps, only crashes, never taking her eyes off it voluntarily except to piss and shit. Even then she watches through the eyes of a borrowed hand.

And Me?

I die.

"We need to focus," I say. "So, give me what you've got."

We turn our thoughts to So. She is down in the suprarene's control cab, sixth floor, working on readouts, dials, and radar. Around her are three techs, she knows their names but I don't, which is what the schema of command is for.

The map can be displayed in a thousand possible ways, many of them only understood by So, but the main one is the master globe of the world. On the big screen at the head of the cab it slowly revolves, every pixel of it resizable to greater detail, containing everything we've gathered, scraped together, and been able to scan.

It is a mass of red lines still, like one of those balls Art used to make by wrapping elastic bands on top of each other. These are the bond lines of King Ruin's Courts, and they are everywhere still, smothering the world like a cocoon, except for two small patches that are empty.

This spot in the Hollow Desert, and Calico.

It's taken us a year to come this far.

Most of our advances came in the days after King Ruin's fall, when his Courts and his brood were in shock. We ran a flash raid on Calico via Dactyl helicopters, taking out old Courts and brood-members with mind-bombs and dry-ice blasts. There were another ten or so hydrate rigs repurposed as Courts spread around within range of Calico, several buildings even in the center of the city, and a whole suburb that was gradually being turned.

Saunderston.

They'd had it for years. I'd ridden trains through it many times, along the Wall, but each time they'd Lagged the memory of what I'd seen, Lagged it from everyone that rode by. They had people strung up on lamp-posts and skinned, people hanging out of skyscraper windows knotted together like one long bloody cord of intestine, people bolted to the street and left to stand while younger brood members raced cars amongst them, scoring points.

It was a sick place, full of sick fucks, but they were dizzy from King Ruin's partial death and they didn't expect us to hit them so hard. They weren't ready, and we razed their home to the ground. We saved what we could, killed or captured all King Ruin's children that were there, then healed the bonds like we did in Memphen.

It was where I died the first time.

At the same time we trawled the desert, plumbing for cities lost under the sand and exorcising the old pain. I died the second time in a munitions silo buried beneath a dune, where there was only the tiniest of private Courts. I hadn't sensed the brood member there, and he blew us both up with old-school TNT before I had a chance to run.

We tidied that up. We've tidied up hundreds. Along the way we've freed thousands of souls, some of whom have stayed with us. Yena is with us, and so is Naji, and they work closely with So in trying to pattern where the brood-line will ebb next. They are still broken, still weary, but being here helps them, I think.

We salvaged other suprarenes, four in total, which Ray and I split command of. We found a subthonic too, and even now it's drilling its way deep underfoot, digging out the deepest Courts with La at the helm. In the Allatanc we have two subglacics and an ancient battleship, commanded by Ti.

It's slow, grinding work, just like the skirmishes, clearing one Court at a time.

"No sign they see us coming, all three villages are quiet," says So. "I'm reading heat signatures underground spreading for hundreds of feet. They have dozens of people down there, and from the flyover it looks like they've got some artillery pieces, skirmish era."

I see it through So's eyes, on the detailed map she has laid out. Three villages of baked adobe clay, they've been sitting there for thousands of years. Probably civilization first sprang up near here. Each of the villages is spaced only a short distance apart, part of an old trading hub circled around an oasis. Each has a well, leading down into natural underground caverns, which is where the Court will be.

"Movements in the last few days?" I ask aloud.

"Nothing more than usual, two covered wagons went hut to hut selling meat. The people above have no idea what's living underneath."

I nod, though only Ray can see it. They'll feel it. We've seen this a dozen times already, a settlement with a Court right underneath it, preying on them person by person. Sometimes it's very slow, farming the people like livestock, giving them time to repopulate. These are the brood-members who don't even believe I'm real, like a bogeyman in the night. I know it from the sudden terror in their minds when they see me crashing in.

Others do believe, and if they haven't already fled, their reaction is to plunge into suicidal, end-of-days decadence when they know I'm coming. All we find of these Courts are the charnel ruins of a bloody orgy that lasted until all the living playthings were dead, and the brood-members pulled their own plugs. A few put up a fight, but their outdated weaponry's no match for us.

As for the rest of King Ruin's brood, all the thousands spread across the world, they're still fighting a civil war to fill the power vacuum their King left behind. We can glimpse it in the shuffling of bonds, hear it through explosive echoes as they burn out their supplies of military hardware on each other.

We're lucky, for that. If they had united and readied an army at once, they could have erased us like they erased every insurgency before. Thank Ritry Goligh they did not. It's given us the time to clear their fringe, consolidate, and grow stronger as we go.

I cycle out of So and head further down, to the fourth floor open bay at the middle of the suprarene where Yena and Naji are leading a group of fifty, spread out in EMR bays across the metallic floor. I open the eyes of a hand near to her, and she notices at once.

She's not as young as she was in my mind. She's not as pretty as the figure King Ruin sent to impersonate her. But there is something about her. She tried to lead a resistance, when all she had was nothing.

Now she has me.

"How's the Wall holding?" I ask. I do not need to ask, because I can feel it, spreading out like a bright bond bubble to encompass our suprarenes. I don't need to ask, but I like to.

"Holding strong," she says. "Me, try not to die this time."

I smile. "I don't even notice it." I close the hand's eyes and shift again.

Back at the prow-con I feel Ray slot back into himself moments after me. He's in charge of the tanks and second wave, so he'll have been handing out last-minute orders. He doesn't like it that I take point, it's not the captain's job, but who cares what he thinks, really? I don't want any of the others to have to die.

Beyond Ray I feel the others, Far tucked into his 50
th
floor apartment in the Calico Reach, La churning along beneath us, and Ti out at sea in her subglacic, patrolling the waters we have claimed for ourselves.

"It's just another skirmish," Ray says. "Another, and another."

"Hoorah," I reply.

"We're getting closer. We'll find his trail soon."

I grunt something non-committal. The bonds that encircle the world still stink of King Ruin, but it's not only him anymore. There's another brood member out there, someone working together with the weakened King to keep drawing on the Courts. We don't know where they are, but they've learned quickly. They keep Walls up everywhere. We've tried to hunt them through the bridge, but more golden shields pop into existence every day, including a new one encircling the remnant sun of King Ruin.

I can't even see him anymore. We'd hoped his children might help us, but every time we find them they've been Lagged to mindless soup. We've cleared one patch of desert, and one patch of water, but that means nothing because now they're uniting. We need to find the new heart and blow it to fuck.

"Agreed," says Ray. "With bells on." 

"Come through slow," I tell him. "Wait 'til we've blown the artillery. Then sweep in with holy hellfire."

He grins wide. It's not as impressive as it used to be, but now there's that tattoo by his eye, which accentuates when he winks.

"I know the routine."

"You should wink more," I tell him, as I start back toward the flight deck. "It suits you."

"Yes sir."

The suprarene grinds up a pitch around me, yaws backward as its great caterpillar treads climb a final dune. I roll with it smooth as an arene, drop swiftly down the cage-metal steps to the helicopter deck, and run underneath the blades of my dual-rotor Dactyl as they fire up.

In the main bay are ten hands dressed in black-marine garb, all with King Ruin's buzzing EMR helmets, keyed to transpond only to my thoughts. I jump in amongst them and pick up my Kaos rifle, affix the bayonet, and check my bandolier for ideation grenades.

I might have given a speech back in my subglacic days, but these people are all me now, and I'm really going in alone.

"Right behind you," says Ray.

"Beneath you," says La.

Hell yes, I think. This is a fucking war, after all.

The helicopter lifts off. I send two hands to man the howitzers, two to man the Bofors rockets, the rest lining up at the rappel drop lines, then I take over the pilot's mind and send us roaring out over the sand, nose down, toward the enemy.

Coming late 2014!!

Sign up here to hear exactly when.