King Ruin: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 2) (8 page)

A frame. It is a vast frame of a vast experience, with the sense of other minds like my own around it, surrounding it. I diffuse my focus to better sense them, as though hunting movement through peripheral vision, and they leap to the fore. A dozen feral scents bloom all around like the stink of shark-spoor in the water, predators all.

Hundreds even. I feel them move through the frame smacking their lips, and gain some sense of what happened here. I sense the boundaries of a massive loss radiating out, of a thousand deaths in a genocide so large it should burn like a sun, but instead there is only the frame, with the weight of it gone.

A feast.

They came together here years ago, and they dined. I can feel their sated paths branching out afterward, and among them a single band so thick I know it must be the one that came for me on the train.

It pulses. None of the others pulse, they are all shades only, but not this. It is alive. I approach, touch it, and in that moment see into it like a strike of lightning in my soul. Within I glimpse millennia of suffering, and millennia of rule. I glimpse order and chaos interweaving. I glimpse the fall of empires and the rise of empires, the never-ending turn of the world shot through with the rise and fall of man.

And it sees me.

It is impossible, unlike anything I've felt before, but somehow it grips me. It flails for me, and every second its grip grows stronger. I have reached too far. I feel it rearing back along its own line, its attention bearing down. Fear floods me, and my trail grows thick with it.

I yank and buck like a fish on the hook, tearing my own lips bloody to escape. I Lag my trail, Lag all of my search and my fear, and moments before the thick band opens its eyes upon me, I escape.

I race back to the skulk, back to my own mind, cutting my trail as I go. I open my eyes in the white room, to my own panting in the silence. I lie there terrified and adrift, trying to understand what I have seen and what I have done. How much of me could it see, and how much does it know? How could it be alive in its past, how could it be waiting for me, and does it know where I went?

I dare not reach out. I barely dare breathe. Have I been found out?

My answer comes within moments, by way of the thunderous applause of bombs going off overhead.

It takes a moment for me to understand what is happening. Disoriented and weakened by reaching so far, I look into Mr. Ruins' deathly face and could almost swear he is smiling.

The room rocks and tumbles, and I am thrown from the bench. Mr. Ruins topples too. In the corridor outside Don Zachary's marines race by, rifles in their hands. There is the ratatatat of heavy artillery from far above, vibrating down through the double-hulls of this tsunami-proof bunker. It is many levels up to the water's surface where marines will be fighting marines, but how long will that take them?

I feel the distant sting of a mind-bomb. Smoke jets out of a busted flue, and I pick myself up. The Don's bunker is under attack. I have brought them here, and here they come.

Down metal hallways suffused with the drumbeat of stamping feet and distant plosive bursts I run, pushing Mr. Ruins ahead of me in his chair. His pulse veers erratically, disconnected from his monitor, but there is no time. Ex-skirmishers storm past me on either side, and like Me at the head of his Bathyscaphe, I turn them all to my control.

They run along behind me, their priorities shifted. They race out down jetties and tubes, carrying through the orders I have already prepared.

More mind-bombs sting from above, but I shield my men as best I can with the weight of others put to the Lag. They falter and pause in a dozen different narrow chutes, and I cycle through setting them back to their tasks.

A gas-burst sprays before me, and I hold my sleeve to my face and run through it. Into the midst drops a black-clad marine, rappelling down from an exploded vent above. He wears one of the same tight-fitting HUDs, his EMR-helmet thumping tinnily through the fractious roar of rifle-fire echoing down from the vent above him.

He slaps the rappelling line out of the way, sights me through the fog, and I shoot him in the head with a Kaos rifle of my own. He sags to hang from his rappel line like a broken toy. I run on, but before I can clear the vent another of them drops out with his rifle already aimed. I dive forward, hammer the stock of my own weapon into his face three times until he goes down, then I fire point-blank into his chest.

He stills.  

There are more rushing down from above, and I am back in the battle of my life, Tigrates and Ferrily either side as we make a stand for our subglacic. I've done this before, and I've lived through it before.

I shoot up into the torn-open ceiling vent. I pull in some of the Don's men and have them hurl magnet-bombs into the gap. One more marine drops into our midst, shoots out the belly of a man to my left, then the bomb goes off and fragments him to pink mist. I feel the thick broad beam into his mind dim away.

Running again, I have to hold Mr. Ruins into his chair. The tunnels behind me are wracked with shouts and the bloom of fire, pained bursts of energy through the bonds as men die, then we're at the airlock and there are men to greet us. Strong hands lift Mr. Ruins from his chair and guide him down, and I follow.

A subglacic.

Down the ladder-way I climb, all polished metal and lines of pipes and angular jutments, into the conning tower where I stand and send the commands as Ven once would have done. I crank the EOT to full reverse, then call through the ship-wide communications.

"Disengage clamps, lock the bows, flush the trims, and set us to dive."

Nobody speaks, because there is no need. They have trained on this at Don Zachary's behest for years, and all I need to do is send the simple instruction to activate the skills they have in place.

With a metallic clunk and a hiss of outgas, we are sealed off from the crumpling bunker. I can see it from feeds above and throughout, displayed on the monitors all around the periscope. The whole bunker is ablaze from the top down, the corridors are filled with black-clad marines and smoke, everywhere is gunfire and violence.

"Get him to support," I shout to the waiting medic, pointing at Mr. Ruins, hanging now in a burly man's arms. "Hook him up."

They disappear. The screw grinds up and we begin to pull away. I put my head to the periscope and spin, to see a dozen other subglacics already disengaging and sliding backward.

"All stations brace," I shout, "fire!"

From the bellies of a dozen skirmish-era subglacics, hammerhead torpedoes are launched. They strike the bunker berths in seconds, creating a tsunami wave of shock water that flings us all back and out to sea with hull-crumping force. We reel and I barely manage to keep my hands on the periscope.

"Full screw," I shout, and the man at my side cranks the EOT to full. The subglacic roars with its own inner force, fighting the wash of blast-water, and turning us to blast forward and down.

At the same time twelve other ships do the exact same thing, in twelve different directions. I have told them no more than to flee, I won't be able to influence them beyond that after we grow further distant, but for now they will look exactly as our ship does from above.

I cut all my ties but one, to Don Zachary, who is standing in the most secret depths of his bunker, holding the fuse to an almighty weapon. .

Only one is left, vastly diminished.

"I'm sorry," I whisper to him through the bonds. Then I have him trigger a quakeseed.

The resultant blast dwarfs the torpedoes. If we were closer we would be atomized, but the torpedo tsunami flung us enough clear to provide a buffer of water. This next tsunami pulse is the greatest kick in the rear I have ever felt, plucking me off the periscope with ease, barreling me backward into my crew. The whole ship groans as we accelerate faster and harder, shot out like constituent matter from a nuclear blast.

So bursts like a bag of gas, her constituent parts sprayed out in a black fog. La sees it as she rolls on to her hands and knees, then feels it as the invisible whiplash bond gouges deep into the ground, splitting the muck down to the underlying plate.

CRACK

The sound deafens her even through the HUD, punches the ground into her face, and tosses her backward into her twin Ti. She struggles to right herself, only to see the wave rising.

UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUR

it roars, a thick black jet of aerosolized mud blasting up from the whiplash-torn gouge. From La's position interwoven amongst Ti's limbs, it seems like a pillar to the sky, as thick around as the screw-room and growing wider, as more muck erupts from the crack in the earth. In seconds it is as long as the Bathyscaphe, then as long as the mud-hill they climbed out of, then it is a tsunami wall in its own right, made of screaming mud and rising

"La, Ti!" Ray shouts over blood-mic. La spins to see him already on his feet and running toward them from the black road. The canyon has split them off from him by an impassable gap, and already the up-surging tide has almost cut him out of sight. Doe is too far away, and La knows if they do not have Ray, they may as well be dead.

Another roar shakes the ground, and the line of the rising wave spits wider, cutting off all sign of Ray like a curtain drawn across the forging pods. There is no way he can reach them, as the violent blast of mud ripples out along the lash-whipped canyon. The geyser-wall's peak is already so high La can barely discern it, so much force and weight it would crumple Ray back upon himself. 

"Get down," Doe shouts. La sees her running over to them, her shoulder-cannon pointing upward. Any moment, La thinks, all of that is going to fall and bury us. Any minute.

They need Ray. She turns to Ray, and does the first thing she can think of, the first thing Me did when he was trying to save her, when she was buried by Napoleonic hordes who were circling closer to So and Far.

She tongues her grapnel to heat-seek, then shoots it directly into the torrent of rising mud. There can be no way of knowing where or how it will make contact, but she can be certain that if it does not, they will all fall.

THUNK

It connects, she pings the lever to recoil, and only at the last moment does she realize that Ray is heavier than her, and she is anchored to absolutely nothing.

The recoil kicks in and hauls her off her feet and upward. Carried by the upsurge, the line draws her away from Ti, away from Doe, flying directly toward the tearing wall, so close she can feel its reverberation in the air. It will snap her in apart in seconds, and in the next second she must cut the grapnel or die. She has to cut the line and forsake Ray, or she'll be lost to the chord as well.

But they are a chord, together. They will always be a chord.

It is a split-second only, but there is no decision to make. There is no time to shout back and tell Ti what to do, but Ti must know, because La did. So is gone already, and she won't lose another note.  

THUNK

Scant meters from impact with the churn of the geyser-wall, the blow crunches through her shoulder and rips her to a halt. For a moment she hangs like a kite caught on a branch, torn between two forces, then something gives.

"Hang on, La," Ti shouts through blood-mic. La cranes her neck to see backward, her twin standing on the mud-plain with the grapnel rifle in her arms and the wire shooting up, Doe wrapped around her legs as anchorage.

Looking down at her chest, she sees the black-metal claw of the grapnel jutting out and spreading across her breast and arm. The suit has sealed her internally, the pain is sharp and sudden but the HUD warnings are purple and not red, so perhaps she's going to make it.

"I'm here," she says, barely audible over the crush of the mud. "I'm here."

With a startling yank, Ti's grapnel begins to winch her back. The strain redoubles as her own grapnel continues winching in Ray, then the line gets painfully taut as her rifle's line suddenly yanks upward.

"Hold on Ray!" she shouts. He must be bodily in the upsurge now and shooting up fast. She can't hold onto the rifle with her hands, so lets the straps on her suit take the strain. For one terrifying moment she fears she'll be torn apart by the two lines, then the pressure relents, and far overhead a dark pin-wheeling figure pops out of the mud wall.

And falls. La falls too.

"You got me," comes Ray's voice on blood-mic. She can just make out her grapnel shot through his upper thigh. Then she hears the

SLOOSH

of Doe's bondless cannon below, and she hits the mud and sinks. It is soft and de-atomized, enough to cushion her fall. She kicks at it and tries to swim, aligning her body to the direction of the grapnel tug, and away from the point where Ray will fall.

She feels his splash down more than she hears it, a backwash through the mud. Then she is out, Ti QCs down her HUD, and she locks hold on to Ti and Doe to anchor the raising of Ray.

He comes up flapping and gasping, one arm locked at a bizarre angle behind his back.

"I'm barely conscious," comes Ray's voice faintly. "Arm and leg broken by the surge. The suit couldn't take it."

Ti docks in to his chest-plate with her own shock-jack and begins a flow of blood, adrenaline, plasma, whatever he might need. At the same time Doe is standing and turning her cannon again to the sky.

"La get here and brace me," she says. "The wave's about to crest."

La looks up and sees she is right. Already the flow of the great wall has slowed, and the top is beginning to mushroom outward. To fall.

La's mouth goes dry. "We'll be buried."

"We won't," says Doe, and drops to one knee, setting the haft of the bondless cannon into the mud, shadowing the prone forms of Ti and Ray. Protecting them. "Now get over here."

La jerks to her feet, the pain in her breast forgotten, and kneels next to Doe, straddling Ray's broken leg. She wraps one arm around Doe's waist, and with the other draws her own QC parabolic. On the other side Doe does the same, and they point their weapons up at the mud.

"Thank you," Ray manages, from between them. "La. You almost shot me in the junk. So close."

"Just don't move," Doe cautions. "Nobody move. We'll ride this out."

"Couldn't move if I wanted to," Ray gasps. "I think both my legs are broken, actually."

Then the first falling clots of mud strike, the bondless cannon fires gold-dusted particles fritzing out, the QCs pulse, and the onslaught begins.

La fires into it. Doe fires into it. The chord holds together, braced as one, while the wave descends around them.

It goes on a long time, a vast earthfall barely shredded by their weapons. De-atomized mud rains around and amongst them, while at every side the matter thunders down and stacks up like a roofless igloo on every side. La hugs to Doe, and they ride it out together.

Then it ends.

La wakes from the furor into a sudden silence, punctuated by the fervent click of her QC trigger, shooting nothing into the sky. The rain has ended, just as her weapon's store of particles has run dry.

She lets the useless parabolic drop from her hand.

"Doe," she says, but there is no pick-up on blood-mic. She loosens her grip on Doe's waist, and clicks back and forth to receive, but no sound comes. There is no sound in her HUD, the internal speakers ruptured by the endless torrent. She blinks and looks around. Steep black walls rise all around them like a well. They are at the bottom of a vertical crater.

Beneath her, half-buried in a low sludge of mud fizzing with maggots, are Ray and Ti, looking up at her with pale faces.

"Are you alright?" she mouths at them. It seems too soon to take off her helmet.

Ti nods. Ray mouths something similar to, "Fucking hell."

Then Doe is rising, sucking out of La's mud-slathered grip. She unslings the accelerator and drops it to the side, draws her grapnel-rifle in its place, sets it to spread anchor, and fires up the slope. A net of grapnel points spreads out, circles the top of the narrow crater-mouth, and begins to draw.

Doe lifts up. Looped in her arm is one of the other grapnel wires. Already the steeply sloping walls of the crater-cone are beginning to slide inward.

La tongues her suit for painkillers, then turns to Ray.

"Brace yourself."

The grapnel catches on La's chest and she is pulled upward against the loosening crater wall, dragging out a thick snarl of muck. The pain in her chest is sharp and thin, makes her breath come in short little pants. Perhaps she punctured a lung.

At the top Doe pulls her over the edge, and she helps to reel in Ray, then Ti in close succession.

Doe has her helmet off, and La follows suit. There is a rush in her ears still, like the slow churn of the Molten Core in the screw room, but she can just make out what Doe is saying as she points off to the side.

La looks. The landscape has altered completely, the road of the dead gone, the hill they had climbed out of gone, with different rotten buildings poking their heads up through the mire. The only constant is the stone pyramid covered in mud, perhaps a fathom away.

And in the distance, swelling and rolling like magnetic currents in the Molten Core, is another tsunami wave of mud. It could almost be the horizon line, but for the shifting swells and troughs in the breaking line.

"The frozen ones have come unstuck," Doe shouts over the auditory rush. "We have to run."

"Ritry fucking Goligh," Ray swears. He is lying on his back still, with his HUD off, and La can see at a glance that he can't walk. He can't even move. His dark face is pale with shock and pain. "You'll have to carry me."

Doe nods, and begins to slough off weaponry. "Too heavy," she says. "Leave it all."

La snaps the grapnel wire off the latch in her chest and the one through Ray's leg, then starts shedding all her scientific equipment. The Durance packs she keeps, the medical pack and blocks of candlewax, but everything else non-essential she drops.

Ti and Doe do the same. Already the wave has covered a quarter of the distance between them.

"She shot me in the leg," Ray sings feebly, his voice loose and warbly, high on the shock-jacks, "and she didn't even know my name."

Doe drops to one knee, then grips Ray underneath his shoulders. La and Ti take him by one hip each, and then they hoist.

Ray laughs. "That tickles," he says. 

The women lift him to their shoulders, and begin to run for the pyramid.

At the side, the sweeping wave draws near.

They fall into a pattern, like a galloping horse, while Ray talks to them about the shapes he can see in the sky.

"That's Me looking happy," he says, "not too frequent. That's Me looking serious. He always looks so serious, don't you think?"

La doesn't have the heart to tell him to be quiet. He's injured, high, and he's part of the chord.

The pyramid is near, its great oblong blocks half-submerged in mud, and wriggling with white maggots. They must be drawn by the activity, La thinks. Old mold and lichen frost the pyramid's exterior green and purple, all daubed with a clinging crust of wind-blown mud.

The wave is nearer.

"Drop me," says Ray.

"Never," says Doe.

They run on. The mud is like molasses underfoot, slipping and unctuous.

"La, get us in," Doe orders. "Break off, that's an order."

"Understood," says La, and lets go of Ray. Her sister grunts to take his weight, but continues on.

La runs ahead. In moments she outstrips them by far, and moments later she reaches the pyramid's base. It feels good to have solid stone underfoot, but the relief lasts only seconds, as she scans the pyramid surface.

There is no way in.

She turns to the tsunami wave, runs a quick calculation, and knows there will be no time to find one. It has to be here or nowhere, but there is no entrance here.

So she'll make one.

The candlewax is pliable and slick with mud, easy to wedge into the vertice where the steps meet. She has no time for more fuse than an arms' length, which she sets, sparks, and then hurls herself for cover.

BOOM

The pyramid vibrates, then she's on her feet again and picking through the debris of broken stone and dust, scattered around the blasted dark mouth in the structure's side like a scraggly beard. Doe and Ti are nearly there, juggling Ray between them. Fast on their heels comes the deep bass rumble of the tsunami wall.

La ducks in. It is dark, but there is an inside, a musty and dark corridor leading left to right. She twists off a slim thread of candlewax, affixes it to the ceiling several feet within the entrance, then leads back to it with fuse.

She starts it burning before the others even breach the entrance. The spark flares away, and then they are in and running. Ray cries out as his broken limbs scrape off the walls and ceiling. The roar of the tsunami is upon them, and La picks up at her sister's side, hefting Ray and running into darkness.