King Ruin: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 2) (6 page)

All he'll remember of me is our last meeting, ten years ago. I haven't the spirit to erase that too. I don't want to make him a different man. I can't stand to be so completely forgotten.

The doctor is working on the second finger. I am so weary, but I have to stay awake. Everything is in motion around me, I'm sure I've seen to it all, but the fear that I will wake up again helpless, unable to think and trapped within an EMR shield, terrifies me.

I passed through the aetheric bridge again. I cannot fathom that for moments, seconds only, I was inside the middle of Mr. Ruins' flagging consciousness, wreathed in death and disarray, and through him I reached out.

It is an impossibility I've never considered before. It bends any laws of thought I once knew. It is a power I cannot begin to fathom.

I force myself awake through the work on my third finger, and the fourth. For some reason re-attaching the little finger of my left hand is the worst of all, and I can't stop myself from wailing out.

Around me I feel the Don's barracks continue as normal. To him I am an honored guest, and he loves me. All his men love me. I shoved that love roughly into every hole I cut in their memories, certain there would be no gaps this time for the Don to find.

It is an awful, rapacious theft, and it sickens me. What I have done is vile and violent, but then these are vile and violent men, They were going to kill me, they threatened to hurt my family. But I am the predator here. I have shown them that.

I am also prey.

My head is so foggy with bonds cut and bonds forged, with memories come and gone, with the bridge to Mr. Ruins still being open, and I know there is something I still need to do, but I cannot stay awake any longer. I need to know who the people are hunting me, I need to know what Mr. Ruins knows, but I can't walk the bridge again. I am beyond empty. I am alone.

I sleep.

Don Zachary is there when I wake up. This is what I wanted. The men around us are the men who were cutting off my fingers before. Now they love me, even if they don't know why. Perhaps it would even last, if I stayed, and was good. If I bedded in the new engrams. I could rule here.

So power corrupts.

"Breakfast," I say to one, because speaking is easier than working the bonds. My mind is a morass of scar tissue, healing. The man leaves, and I turn to the Don.

"You're building an army," I say to him.

He shrugs. "I've built one."

"To take Calico."

"To start with Calico. But I've got bigger plans than that. Who says the skirmishes really have to be over? What does their détente matter to me?"

I mull this. I am glad the skirmishes are over, and I don't want them to start again. I wonder if it would not be better to fully cut this man from the cloth of life completely. The détente is good.

"And the quakeseeds?"

He gives a sly smile. "Hard to get hold of. Ten years to source enough to make a global killer tsunami, bigger even than the one that tossed the godships."

His pleasure at this thought rankles like a bad smell. The godship tsunami killed billions. It saw the end of the old world order, destroying every coastal city in the world and smashing their infrastructure to dust. There was literally nothing but wreckage left.

Out of that chaos came the skirmishes, as every group that was left alive, bits of the old Aleut nation, proto-Rusk, Armorica, scrambled for the one near-untouched resource remaining. The desert oils were too hard to tap, the waves, wind and sun still not powerful enough to fuel a boom, nuclear too unreliable with the increasing number of earth-shaking events, so hydrates under the ice became the goal.

The whole world turned to it. I fought in the dying days of that war, when the worst atrocities were already committed.

I look into Don Zachary's eyes. His hunger to rule over that world is palpable. The thought of such chaos, in which the person best prepared and most ruthless would be able to rise supreme, excites him.

And with quakeseeds, long banned by mutual consent of every major power in the skirmishes for fear of mutually assured destruction, he can do it. Sown in the ocean floor, they tap the planet's core and result in volcanic events too powerful for any standard reckoning scale to fathom.

They would start a global-killer tsunami that goes round the world five times and keeps on going, rubbing and scrubbing until every mark of civilization above the waves is gone, leaving the world ripe for the Don to crawl out into and rule. 

I can't allow that, so I Lag it all. Not a soul in this bunker will even remember the quakeseeds exist. I have just saved the world.

I eat my breakfast.

Some time after that, after the doctor checks the bandages on my hands, after I've showered off all the puke and dust and blood, after I've put on new clothes and am feeling almost human again, I settle down in a chair looking into Mr. Ruins vacant eyes, and prepare to dive him again.

The Sunken World is moving. It shifts and plunges, turns and involutes, and the only way So can render it as a map is with the movements built in, a kind of scrolling, shifting image of great complexity, with ripple effects that trigger other ripples in a constant swirl of Brownian motion.

"Essentially, it's rotting," she says to Doe and Ray, when the model is built. They are standing at the peak of this mud hill, outlined in their stark mud-spattered black uniforms against the tortured dark skies. Only moments ago they were in a private conference on blood-mic, lieutenants conferring, and So thinks she knows what about.

Me, and Far. Thinking about them being missing scares her. She's still cold and wet, and that scares her too, but she's a marine and marines don't show that kind of fear. They don't run for their lives, despite what her new uniform says. They stand and fight.

"So it's deflating?" Ray asks, interrupting So's thoughts. "Like a rotten pumpkin?"

"Yes, but not only that," So goes on. She fires some graphics to all the chord, simplified, because the full simulation is too much for their HUDs to render. "First you see the rotting, which is yes, a kind of compacting downward, or inward, like the flat plane of a galaxy pulled by entropy and gravity."

Ray frowns. "So not like a pumpkin?"

"It's enough like a pumpkin," So answers. "You can think of it that way. Everything we see now around us is the Molten Core, crushed. We're standing on the outer shell of it now."

"So does that mean we're on the outside now?" Doe asks. "If we're on top of the disc, which was a sphere, were we actually inside before when we were buried in the mud?"

"No," says So, "because it's a spatially resonant flattened sphere, not a straight flattened sphere. Which is to say, it maintains some knowledge of its own sphereness. Watch." She fires another, even simpler simulation over to them, of a globe compressing, and narrates as it unfolds.

"Everything we see around us is the outer skin and the inner skin of the Molten Core, usually a sphere, mulched together." The simulation shows the sphere flattening. "But it's not so simple as that, not just three dimensions rendered down to two, because some structures of the host mind have proven more durable than others. They jut out of the mud-sandwich, which is what the rest of the Core has become. Mud, I mean."

Doe and Ray both gaze at her. "So we're standing on top of the mud," Ray says, pointing down. He is inexplicably physical. "It looks like we're on the outside. But because some existing structures are jutting through, it means we're not actually on the outside? We're on the inside, now?"

The mild panic on his face is gently hilarious.

"Essentially, yes," says So. This is obvious, she thinks, elementary collapse dynamics, but plainly not. Even Doe just looks at her blankly. She goes on.

"We are on the inside, though it may seem otherwise, because the resonant edges of the Core's sphere are not defined by the mud, though the mud does define their hard edges." No further clarity seems to arise from this statement. "Imagine this. There's a tree on the ground, and you build a house around it. Then one day someone smashes the house flat transversely, and the tree with it. So where is the tree?"

Ray frowns. "Inside the house sandwich."

"Yes and no. All the top of the tree is, the trunk and branches, but you're not thinking about the roots. They bed down in the ground still, because they didn't get crushed with the hut."

Ray sucks air through his pierced teeth. "You didn't say anything about roots. I guess they weren't in the house. Maybe a basement?"

"There's no basement," So says, disapprovingly. "That's not possible. For a Molten Core, those roots are the shape it takes in the aether. They still remain, hanging in a collapsed space above or around the mud sandwich, even after the bulk of the Core is gone. That's where we are now."

"So we are inside the sandwich," Ray says. "That's all I need to know, isn't it?"

So considers explaining why that statement is not purely accurate, since they are not in in, but resonantly in, yet a look from Doe stills her.

"It's not important that he understands," says Doe. "Tell us what it means for us."

So nods, pulls up the original simulation. "Two things. One, everything is rotting. That means a continual suck, as the roots linking the sandwiched sphere to the underlying aether snap clear. Those snaps will be vastly destructive in this interim-space we're occupying now. They'll lash back like elasteel lines under high tension, and the landscape will buck and buckle."

"That's one," says Doe.

"Second, the mud we're on is shifting, like tectonic plates. There's residual heat within, from the breakdown process, and it's got to get distributed. That will cause bubbles, which will blow apart huge sections of what we see now and hoover them in."

"And that's it?"

"That's it for now. But remember, all this is happening on top of an already rickety, dense, resonantly disharmonious flattened superstructure, every part of which is fluid, chaotic, and constantly reducing down. It's like we're in a stew on a slow boil, with great spoons whacking down on us, and the bottom of the pan shifting position constantly."

Ray rubs his chin thoughtfully. "Stew," he says.

Doe points off toward the White Tower. "But that is the Solid Core, isn't it?"

"Certainly. Or at least, it's highly likely. But what everything else we're seeing is, I don't know. I also have no idea what caused the tsunami, or the collapse, only that it is ongoing."

La stands up beside them and adds her voice to the discussion. "I think we might have an answer to that."

Ti stands as well, holding out a silver spectroscope platter, upon which she's laid out the dissected husk of one of the off-white maggots. It turns So's stomach, the color of cream gone sour.

Ti flashes a close-up into their HUDs. The interior of the whitish thing seems to be made of rings, like a tree, all the way to the center, with no visible organs or sensory apparatus.

"It's made of data," La says. "Accreted data, seeking logic, and it's growing."

"What do you mean, made of data?" Ray asks.

"I mean made of data, as in facts and numbers and figures. Every ring of growth is an extra layer of digested information packed on like a skin. And it's dense. We looked into its genetic make-up with some sample cells shaved off- they're still alive and growing too, by the way- and it seems to be some kind of language information. I don't recognize it, but the patterns are linguistic."

Doe considers. "This thing is made of language."

"Its raw code is, yes. It may even be some kind of offshoot of the Lag. It's rooting around to find data to dig into, but since there's no good Core here and everything is already pretty much mulched, it's getting frantic. That's why it bit Ti, looking for a place to bite in. And it's not only language code. We scraped a dozen other samples, and found patterns analogous to mathematics equations, historical records of some kind, experiential encodings, and what was the other one, Ti?"

"Recipes," says Ti.

Ray barks a laugh.

"It's not funny," says Ti. "If it had bit me any deeper, it would have filled me up with recipes like a poison. It's saprophytic, but it doesn't care if the flesh it digs into is living or dead. It would turn me into a nice repository of cooking knowledge, but I'd be dead."

Ray coughs. "Sorry."

"It's fine," says La. So notices that she's batting her eyes a little. Does she like Ray too?

"And you said they're growing," Doe says.

"They are," La says. "Even this one, it isn't dead, just because we cut it open. It's under a field right now, but if I-" she clicks a button on the edge of the platter, and the little discolored speck starts to wriggle again.

"Ugh, gross," says Ray.

"Quite," says Ti, clicking the field back in place. "Now imagine one of these ten times bigger, a hundred, a thousand, fat with all the data it's eaten through. It would be as big as us, then it'll be bigger. There may already be some that size, like whales moving in the muck underneath, hunting us out. They're like magnets for fresh information, so I'm sure they'll be drawn to us. We won't be able to outrun them, if the speed of these little ones is anything to go by, and our suits won't be any deterrent to us being swallowed whole."

A long beat passes. Underfoot So feels the squirm of the maggots and it revolts her.

"What about the White Tower?" Doe asks. "Can they eat that too?"

"It'll surely hold the longest. But it'll fall too."

Doe looks at Ray, and Ray looks pale.

So speaks up. "If it isn't the maggots that bring it down, it'll break with the collapse. Any tremors and lashbacks we feel are only going to get stronger, and become more focused around the tower."

"Understood," says Doe. She nods briskly. "Thank you. Everything you're telling me suggests the tower is soon going to be at the center of a storm. But everywhere else will be dead before then. So we make for the tower, and hope we find some answers there."

So wants to say something about Me, that perhaps he'll be waiting for them in the tower, but she doesn't. It doesn't seem right, almost childish, to worry about Me like that. But he is part of them.

"Enough talk then. We need to move. So, give me a route. Ray, take the rear on the lookout. I'm not going to lose anyone to one of these things," she points to the maggot. "And everyone, HUDs on and turn your suit to anti-collision lock, in case the ground quakes hard enough to break bones. We're going to stay solid, and we're going to stay whole. Understood?"

We're going to run for our lives, So almost adds, but she doesn't. It wouldn't help. They all see it there on her chest, paint that won't peel off. Instead she prepares and sends a preliminary route to the White Tower, skirting the black road of the dead and one of the heaped pyramids.

Doe nods, pulls her QC, then starts down the mud-hill. So drops into formation behind her, La and Ti go next, and Ray brings up the rear.

The mud is slippery-black, and alive with churning maggots beneath So's feet. They seem to come out of the muck like froth on the boil, gathering in frenzies in each of her footfalls, biting at the skin of her suit.

SQUISH

They say underfoot.

SQUISH SQUISH

Doe leads them down off the mud-hill and into a shallow furrowed valley, which spreads out into a long flat expanse, skirting the road of the dead. Everywhere is black, gray, and deserted. Underfoot there are the frail skeletal frames of buildings, So reads via gamma-scan, but with every moment passing they thin a little more. There was a city here, lined with roads and buildings where some kind of metaphoric people lived and worked, and now it is all turning to mud.

Information as DNA.

There are tunnels far below, once bored for underground trains to move within, now filling in with maggots and filth. So notices the mire creeping up her legs with every footstep forward, wants to blast the QC at her legs to clean them off, but that would be a waste.

Instead she focuses on her surroundings. La and Ti are chattering behind her on a private blood-mic. She can just make out their voices through the HUD skin, like the warbling of doves. That is alright, nothing new. She is mostly alone in the chord most of the time, and that suits her. She likes to figure out puzzles, she isn't a leader, and she isn't attracted to any of the others.

Except perhaps Doe. But she doesn't say anything about it, because it isn't that important. Doe is with Ray. That is fine.

She trudges on over the Sunken World, following Doe following the course she'd laid. Maggots squish underfoot like white beans. She tries to think of the last time she ate anything, but it is far off. They didn't ever eat, on the Bathyscaphe. Even all that time she'd spent in the Napoleonic ring, guiding the others through the fractal maze toward the blast-door at the middle, she doesn't think she ate anything.

All that time is blurry anyway, the memory insubstantial, like she'd only been half there, or a quarter there. There had been the map, and lullabies, and glimpses of the world around her. Then she was reborn. It seems an awfully long time to go without any food.

Squish squish, say the maggots underfoot. Squish and squish.

The sky glowers darkly overhead. The wastes around her are rutted and heaped, here a churn of boulder-like lumps, scattered about with torn and burnt pages of books, bustling with maggots. Ahead lies the first pyramidal hump, seemingly made of mud and great oblongs of dissolving stones, like some vast burial mound.

To the right lies the black road of dead bodies. Her course swerves them around it, but that doesn't stop Ray from peeling off from the chord to go investigate.

So tenses, afraid for what he will find. As he trudges over to the broad swath of decaying bodies, she fears any of a dozen things will happen to him. A giant maggot will bite off his head. The earth will rock and swallow him up.

He reaches the road, and looks a lone figure standing amongst all those prone bodies.