King Ruin: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 2) (7 page)

"Nothing," he calls back through blood-mic. "No faces. No clothes. They're hardly even human anymore."

"Get a sample for La and Ti," Doe says. She has her bondless shoulder-cannon trained on Ray's environs.

Ray bends down, one knee in the dirt, extracting a sample kit from his hip pouch. A brief moment of clarity strikes So then, of what they are and what will be. She loves Ray as much as she loves Doe. She would die for either of them, if she had to. They are her, but greater than she is. She will always stand in their shadow, and be happy to do so.

Then Ray is falling. So is falling too, as the ground drops ten feet away from her.

SLURP

Screams ring out on blood-mic as every member of the chord crashes into the mud. So hits hard, feels the impact but little pain as her suit locks tight around her. One leg lodges into the muck but her weight rocks her backward, causing her foot to dig out a sucking tuft of fibrous black muck.

"Chord call in!" Doe's voice comes through blood-mic, urgent but flat, then the earth bucks again and So is hurled spinning upward. Maggots spread around her like a cloud of snowdrops, the sky revolves, then she hits the ground like a punch in the head, burying her whole face straight in the mud.

"I'm buried," she has just enough time to shout, then the earth jolts and flips her again like a pancake.

SLAP

The ground thumps her in the back, maggots fall like rain around her, and gazing stunned up at the sky she sees a flash of heat-blurred movement arcing down. The resonant bonds are breaking.

"Whiplash!" she shouts, as the humming line of force bears down. In that moment So knows it is coming for her.

She thinks of all those days watching Doe shrug on her battle-gear, glimpsed from far down the forging line as Doe hastened to the conning tower at Me's side, while So was left to watch, sent to flush the trim tanks, gather navigable information, and report in.

Every one of those moments was one she lived for. To speak with Doe about vortexes in the Molten Core and have her say, "Good work," when it was done, have her flat, authoritative voice ring through her mind, and envision Doe's taut white body wrapped in under-suit wear, musky with sweat and exertion, breathing words of praise just for her.

Was that love, So wonders, as the whiplash bears down on her. She has instants only, time for just a flash of thought, but enough to remember her proudest moment yet; slowly disappearing in the outer ring of the Solid Core, singing lullabies to herself just so she could hold on, enduring long enough to guide Doe through the aetheric bridge and save them all.

Doe, Ray, Me, Far, La and Ti. Ritry Goligh. She misses them all already. She loves them like they are part of her, which they are.

"G-" she manages, of the word goodbye, before the whiplash hits her full down the middle and bursts her apart, and the Sunken World fades to black a final time.

I dive and rebound again. The shell around the outside of Mr. Ruins' mind tastes like bitumen. I can't even form the Bathyscaphe and glass-bomb the exterior, because I'm too far out. There's nothing to work with.

I roam the outside hunting for a way in. The surface looks brittle and crystalline, but when I hammer against it there is no give, only the bonging of a weary pulse. I study the structure of the crystal wall, and conclude it is as Carrolla said; a kind of frosting of engrams fused with a last-ditch defensive measure.

It is sheer and unbroken, with no entry points in and none leading out. I wonder that it may have prevented some of the flood I injected into him, but it has also blocked him inside. He is a prisoner in his body.

I surface in the bright medical room. My newly attached fingers itch, and I lie there for a time in thought.

I've already been inside that crystal cage. The thought of that is still startling. When I pushed back through the bridge and for a terrifying few moments was inside the shut-off, isolated world of Ruins' inner mind, it was almost as though I was part of him. We became one and the same.

He was half-mad already. He was wasting away, without sense, sight or sound, just as I had when an EMR trapped me in my own mind. For Mr. Ruins now it has already been longer. I have no desire to make that voyage again, to conjoin with his flagging consciousness, but if it is the only way…

I dive again, and steer the Bathyscaphe into my own Molten Core, toward the moat-line around the Solid Core, but it is no longer so easy. It is in fact too hard. I drive the sublavic on, but can only just break the periscope through the bubbling inner surface of the Molten Core. Peering through the sight as it rises, I briefly glimpse the Solid Core hanging overhead like a dark and hollow moon, whole and unbroken, before we sink away.

The hole we bombed open has healed and reinforced itself with thick scar-girders, and there's not enough candle-bomb in the whole ship to blast through it again. Neither is there the will in the chord to fight through the outer ring, into the mazes within.

It is too hot already, as the ablative bricking peels away. Already Ti and La are burning in the screw-room, and So is screaming into the comms that the ship cannot take it. Me can see the Lag at my heels.

It sees that I am weak. I toss the memory of eating breakfast out to keep the Lag appeased, and flee.

I come to panting. My mind's architecture is stronger than ever before, and I am weaker within it. Without some kind of bond to harvest that matters, something more than the random thoughts of ex-skirmishers around me, I can't infiltrate the Solid Core again. Even the depth of faith in the godships would barely get me above the surface.

I need Loralena, Art, and Mem. Even distant memories from the life we built together allowed me to fight my way through the marines on the Helter line. But the last thing I can do is go back to them. I am hunted now, and I cannot risk it.

I lie back, waiting for my heart to stop racing. I need to do something, but I don't know what it is.

Don Zachary comes to sit by my side, because I called.

"Why do you want to rule the world?" I ask him. It seems like something I ought to understand. He no longer knows he has the capacity to do it, since I took the memory of his quakeseeds away, but I don't think I could ever Lag that core drive wholly away.

He shrugs. "Someone has to. Why not me?"

It hardly seems an answer. I turn my reattached right hand before me. The fingers are just beginning to feel again. The healing process was sped along by DNA-tinted microbials injected along the wound-lines, a level of tech I only ever saw used in the graysmithy for suturing minds. These germs are related, bearing simplified engrams that teach the localized cells how to do everything faster.

The scars are there, but sealing. In fact my fingers are better than they were before, after a year of beating beaten on skulk 12, straightened out and with the cracks smoothed out. My ribs feel stronger too, old breaks repaired by the doctor, as does my nose, which was horribly disjointed, and my teeth, many of which had been battered out.

Under the ocean, in an observation room off the main battle halls, we sit and look out at the gloomy under-skulk waters. It is mostly spores afloat like ash, drifting amongst tendrils of seaweed, lit by floodlights picking out some of the Don's fleet of subglacics. He has scoured the world to gather all these old boats in; repurchased, rebuilt, or found after foundering.

This bunker is his ark, and with these ships he would cow anyone left after the flood.  

"Is that enough of a reason?" I ask him. "Would you kill the world to do it?"

"The world's been killed a dozen times before," he says. "What's one more, if it's the last? I'll set things up correctly, so it needn't happen again."

"In your image."

"Can you think of a better one? It could be better looking, of course."

I chuckle. I think I would like Don Zachary, if he were not so evil. My ten years on skulk 47 were fair and peaceable. There was no crime to speak of, despite the freedom under the law, because the Don's will was law, and he was fair.

"I need to find someone," I tell him, "but I don't know how. Someone's hunting me, and I don't have any way to hunt them back."

He grunts. "Like Ouroboros."

I consider this. The worm that eats its tail.

"He hunts you, and you hunt him," the Don adds. "Like a circle. I've been there many times, when I was first banned from Calico."

I turn to look at him. I never knew this about him. "You were banned?"

He laughs. "Of course, Ritry. Why do you think I started the skulks? They tried to scrape me off a thousand times, but the wall's a long place, and they were dealing with rebuilding too. They were always hunting me, and I was always trying to stay one step ahead, so I had to know where they were, and what they were looking for."

I try to picture the Don racing from point to point around the wall, setting up skulks like lean-to villages, fixed to temporary mooring points drilled into the concrete. I suppose he was young then, perhaps idealistic, probably rapacious. Maybe he thought he was saving the world, or building a new one. I don't doubt he clung on like a limpet.

"I always just imagined you fully formed," I say. "Master of the skulks."

He laughs. "I was young once, like you. The trick when you're hunting in a circle like that, is to play the bluff."

"What bluff?"

He leans back in his chair, settling in to his role as benevolent father figure. "Underestimation. It's the only way to win, but to win big you have to lose big. It's simple really- you lead them in to ground you've prepared, then you lose. You lose so everyone can see, and you make it look real, by making it real. It has to hurt, so they'll believe it's the final hurt. They have to think they've really put you down and exhausted your limits."

"But they haven't," I say.

He clicks his fingers. "Exactly. You only lose what you can afford to, so they underestimate you. You make a huge sacrifice, but you keep enough aside to build again in their blind spot, then you smash them to pieces."

He smiles, and I match his smile. I do like him. "Like all this," I say. "You built an army, and who knows?"

He taps his nose. "Only you and me, Ritry, old friend. Only you and me."

I feel badly that I have lied. To have his affection through this kind of pretense is false. But then, a day ago he was hammering nails into my hand, so perhaps it comes even.

"So how do you know where to prepare the ground?" I ask.

"Work," he says. "Hard graft. You get men inside, and if you can't get men inside, you kill men inside and have your own men replace them. If you can't kill men inside, you wait until they come outside- they always do- where you pump all you can out of them, then you kill them." He holds up his right hand. "It's where I first learned about how badly a rusting nail hurts under the skin."

I see jagged scar lines along the base of each of his fingers. "The mayor of Calico back then was a hard man," he goes on, "and he taught me this. Scars didn't heal so neatly then as they do now. Naturally, I nailed him by the fingers to his own fucking wall."

I nod. "Naturally."

"Now I have an agreement with the new mayor. Everybody benefits."

I consider. The Don is a criminal genius, after all. "Work," I murmur.

"Work," he repeats.

I sit again with Mr. Ruins, looking into his dead eyes. I hate this bastard. Still I hold his hands. I get into the rhythm of his pulse, monitored by the machines. I get into synchrony with the deep thrum of his cocooned mind.

This is high-risk. I Lagged every link between Mr. Ruins and myself that I could think of, cutting them off at the root. He cut all my ties himself, and I cut any more that I made afterward.

But many remain, out there in the world. To find them is hard and dangerous work. I'll have to reach out through the aether, making traces of my own while I search. They'll be slight, barely visible, lines of thought only and not experience, but they might be found.

I prepare for that eventuality too.

Then I dive, outward.

His trail back through space and time is ragged where I have cut it. Almost all of the last year is gone, chopped with the axe-head precision of my anger. There are glimpses of him only, in the weeks he was not with my family in the Reach, when he was at large in Calico, sometimes on the skulks, but nothing concrete.

He met with no one of apparent significance. I feel nothing unusual, no men on the inside whom I can follow and track. So I reach wider, stretching out of the Don's bunker to track his fading pattern back through time.

Ten years elapsed since I told him never to come see me again, in CANDYLAND. The beginning and end of that time are cut off, wherever I was involved, but most everything in between remains, growing fainter with age.

I follow him back. When he wasn't watching me, he voyaged beyond the confines of the Calico isthmus, to the shores of proto-Rusk and across those Siberic wheat-fields, down through the old Aleut nation, over the broad expanse of the Auropan tundra, stopping in various great ruined cities to reminisce on times gone by.

On the isle of Elba, now a desert atoll barely poking its rocky tuft above the salty tides of the Mediterrane, he languished and lolled in the memory of Napoleon's anguish. It is a powerful memory still, stretched out over the thousands of miles, but in it he is alone.

His trail leads further back, and I follow, tracking him from the bitter mountain coasts of New Armorica down to the island chains of Abindian. Atop the Himalay archipelago he bedded down with Pidgin tribes come aboard to hunt stork, and regaled them with tales of how he led a hundred mountain climbers astray with dreams of their lovers voices in the snow and dark. He told them of the items he stole from each, a snow-axe here, a necklace, a crampon.

In the ruined towers of Jodhpur, he sat with monkeys amidst the arboreal jungle canopy and ticked off the number of pilgrims who had come to sacrifice their girl-children for him in days gone by, believing he would bring them boys. He knew the names of dozens, kept a snippet of their birth-clothes in a chest, over which he knelt and warmed himself as though from hot coals.

I begin to glimpse what this trip is, and come to understand better what I was to be.

Trophies, all. I would have been just another trophy in his case, like the misery of Napoleon, to keep him warm in the long dark furloughs in his hunt.

I sink further back still, immersing myself in years of travels from sites of war and pestilence to natural disasters, at all of which he worked some manner of enslavement, plying strength from the suffering of others, storing mementoes all about. Here a scrap of leathered scalp, a broken spear-point, the unfinished novel of a genius stymied by his touch.

It is a victory lap of past glory, sad in its faded sting. I feel him feeding off the relics of things he'd done, like a ghoul. All these once belonged to him, and I was to belong to him too.

But I see nothing to help me. In all of these memories, he is alone. There are no trails that cross his that mean a thing to me, no sign of others like us.

Further still I reach, until the paths are so misty with hoar and time I can barely discern them. I dive the full ten years back, stretching myself gossamer thin, until I am with him standing outside the shark arena on skulk 53, contemplating the web he would spin, to entrap me.

I am cut out of it, as is the Don, but still I watch his ghost murder the Don's son, holding him close while the garroting wire works its slow magic. I watch him afterward, once the corpse has been dressed and used to ensnare me,, carrying the body out to sea in a boat of his own.

Along the tide-drifted wafts of his trail, I follow, to an abandoned jut of rock in the mid-Allatanc, surrounded by ancient rusted hydrate-rigs. There he pulls into a natural culvert in the rock, and carries the Don's dead son into a tunnel bored into the rock. There I lose him, but there's something else in the air around him, something sharp and bittersweet and faintly redolent of pain.