Mr. Ruins: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 1)

by Grist, Michael John

  I turn back to the first page and begin to read the printed text.

  There's power in memory Ritry. I know that you know this too. There's power in love and loss, in desperation and forsakenness, in hatred and lies and sacrifice.

  Do you remember how we met? But then which time would you remember, when I was a Sino-Rusk sailor carving out blocks of ice for the ore drill gunwales to barge through? Or when I was a sergeant-at-arms fighting shoulder to your shoulder in the depths of an Arctic whitestorm? Or even when I was that lonely janitor, mopping up the floors in the neonatal room, gazing in at the little chunk of subdividing cells that was you, hanging in your artificial womb?

  I've been so many people, Ritry, in so many places, and I know you remember none of them. Such is life, a thing so fleeting we are but fireflies within it, glimpsing a single frame of an endless movie.

  Except of course for me. I alone of all souls alive remember the holocaust of the Caucasus, and the third and final rise of Napoleon. I alone stalked the battlefields of New South Texas, supping on the flagging thoughts of a hundred thousand dead to the gas, to the bombs, to the floods. I alone rode the Titanic 2 as she sank a second time, and walked the hospital barracks of the Arctic front line whispering words of condolence to dying men, feasting on their fading thoughts.

  All those lives lost, Ritry, and for what? For me? For you?

  There is power in memory, I tell you, in the shreds of it left behind, the tangles that curdle against the bowl long after the meal is gone, telling the shape that it had once been.

  There is power in these bonds that lie without our minds like an endlessly woven spider web strung between us all, and like the fission mushroom that bloomed over old Afric's southern cape, there is a vast power to be had in breaking them.

  I want to give that power to you. You, longest-lived of your batch, the first children grown out of a woman's living womb, and the only one not deformed or deranged beyond coherence, an absolutely unique delicacy, the first of a new breed.

  I want to help you Ritry, and I will. Come find me, and I'll give you more than everything you ever wanted. I'll give you something to want.

  Mr. Ruins.

  I put the papers down and rub my eyes.

  Bullshit.

  It makes me angry. Could this be Carrolla, I wonder? I don't want to fire him, but it's too far gone to be a joke.

  "Shit," I whisper, rubbing my temples. A few scrapings of dried blood rustle down to fall on the page, like haphazard punctuation. I must have missed them in the shower.

  If it's Carrolla, I'll deal with it. If it's someone else, I'll deal with it too. But Carrolla wouldn't kill a man for a joke, wouldn't dress him up like Napoleon.

  The image of the dead man rises again, more vividly now, accompanied by a strange presence in the darkness, teeth gleaming white like a shark. A shark arena.

  I sit up too abruptly, and the rush sends a wave of silvery nausea through me. Pushing through it, I pick up the pages, peel the first one away and look at the one beneath it.

  MCAVERY'S SHARK-FIGHTING ARENA

  SKULK 53, QUADRANT 7C, QUAYSIDE

  I knew there was something familiar when I flipped through the pages, like these were places I had been. I have been here, it's where I ended up last night.

  A shark-fighting arena on an abandoned skulk.

  Beneath the title and directions is the map, even the section of promontory descending into the water. The bar 'Shaley's' is even marked. I read the line below it.

  Abandoned 2055, when all the sharks were gone and the last tsunami warning came.

  I remember that warning. I was only three months out of the Arctic, still wandering the streets every night, unable to settle to any kind of work, burning through my bounties in women and beer, fighting to forget what I couldn't sell or afford to cede to the Lag.

  Half the people fled then, paying what they had to broach the tsunami wall, enter Calico on the other side. I heard it's a kind of paradise over there, but paradise is not for me, not for my kind. I belonged here. The eve of the wave, I sat at the edge of skulk 1 with a crowd of others with a death-wish, all of us waiting for the tide to come and wash us away, staring into the rain-gray distance.

  "Arctic?" a man to my right asked me. I could see he was a bounty-man from the deadness in his eyes.

  I nod.

  "Desert," he said. "Tar-sands."

  That explained everything. He fought the new coalition nations in the sand, and I fought them in the ice. Perhaps we were on the same side, or opposite sides, but what did that matter to either of us? I remembered from my strategic training engram-injects one surely misplaced story of brief armistices on the battlefields of the first great war, where the soldiers of rival powers crossed the barbed-wire-tangled No Man's Land and played football together.

  That's us now, masterless like ronin.

  "You're a graysmith," he said, again reading it in me, as I read in him he was likely a tank-crawling arene, who once roved the new deserts of neo-Armorica or Darain, boring down to scavenge cities lost beneath the sand for their treasure. I see it in his scoured hands and the blasted sand-grooves in his cheeks, circling the marks where his goggles would have been.

  "I was."

  He jerks a thumb back. "The last graysmith on 47 ran. His place'll be free, if you can use it."

  That was all. There were criminals and killers all around us, god knew I was one, but we sat together and waited for the wave, gambling our lives on the weather. It was a high point and a turning point, the air thick with lost dreams and resignation.

  When the wave never came, it seemed natural to move to the graysmith's joint, and start work. I've been there ever since.

  A second birth for you, wasn't it Ritry?

  This line, a footnote for the date 2055, written by hand at the bottom of the page, tells me it can't be Carrolla. He came years later, when I was long-acknowledged. There's no one I remember from before those days, and no way he could know how I came by the graysmithy.

  I look back to the paper. Following are three paragraphs describing the shark arena, a potted history like something I might be able to pull up on my node for any spot in Calico. Of course there are no records for places like this, out in the skulks.

  It was owned by a man named McAvery, who started it up with his bounty from the Alpine skirmishes, as part of a dream to breed a new trait into sharks that would make them hunt porpoise for food. His dream failed though, and he converted the podding bays into an arena, finding a modest level of success starving his sharks enough to make them kill each other off.

  In the midst of that McAvery lost his way, started to beat his wife and his daughters until they fled him. He was a drunk, so sickened by the deterioration of his dream that he grew cruel. He loved the sharks, and now he killed them every night, for crowds he despised. Soon the fights grew more ferocious, longer, drawn-out, as though he was plumbing for the lowest ebb he could reach. The crowds correspondingly grew larger. What else was there to do?

  On the night of the wave he killed himself with fire, burning half the skulk down with him, a conflagration which ironically left his most hated creation, the arena, completely untouched. It remained that way through the skulk repopulation after the wave didn't come, when a few drifted back and fresh grifters wandered in. Burned and sinking Skulk 53 appealed to none of them.

  The final line:

  There is power here, Ritry, if you're willing to look. Come find me.

  I set this paper down too. This is crazy.

  Still I bind the papers back in their folder, and slip it into my jacket, moving more confidently as the Helicomol takes effect, as a new certainty descends. Clothes on, jacket and boots, I look over my sad apartment.

  Will this be a ruin too, someday? I wonder how it will look crushed beneath the next great wave, driven to the bottom of the tsunami wall. Will divers who come to pillage stop and think as they kick through my living room, wonder who once lived here and how he felt? Will
they sense the bonds of memory I've left scattered about everywhere? Will someone write an entry on a piece of paper about me and my forgotten life?

  Out the door, I can feel something beginning to change. It is not a purpose, not yet, but something close, something more defined than I've felt since the bounty was the only thing that mattered to me, back when loyalty seemed to have some meaning.

  I'm going to dive my own head, Lag be damned, and remember the man who calls himself Mr. Ruins. Then I'm going to find him, and make him answer for what I've become.

  BONDLESS D

  Ray is first to start running back around the cottage, bolting on his HUD as he goes, bringing up his parabolic and QC rifle. Doe and I sprint after him, as Far in the distance screams again.

  "What is happening?" I call urgently through blood-mic, "So, La, report," but I get only fritzing static back, mingled with Ray's heavy breathing.

  Ray hits the tree line and dissolves amongst the thick plastic branches. I follow with Doe right behind. With the chandelier cut I can barely see anything beyond the nearest green-leafed boughs, reflecting my suit lights harshly back at me. Instead I flash through the ultras in my HUD until I fall upon infra and the world phases purple and green.

  Now Ray is a hot orange silhouette driving forward through cold blue brush, toward something terrible happening ahead. I can see to the clearing where we left them behind, the hot shapes of So, La and Far clear, and surrounded by a range of advancing blue and purple figures.

  My blood runs cold, as I watch either So or La fall to the ground beneath the encircling horde. The other figure is standing and dispelling QC particles in recurrent waves, each a tiny red blip on the screen.

  "They're waking up!" Doe shouts on mic, even as I see something purple loom at me out of the trees. I tongue back to holistic vision and see one of the soldiers striding toward me, his rifle held out with the bayonet sparkling in my suit lights. His face is motionless but for the mouth, which is a black and champing nightmare that stretches down and through his neck. There's blood stained from a bandaged wound in his head, and he's almost upon me.

  I disassociate him with one blast of the QC, but he doesn't flay apart like he should, only staggers backward. I reach him and drive the haft of the parabolic into his solid plastic forehead with a thunk, followed by a suit-enforced thrust-kick that sends him wheeling back into the screen of trees.

  "The QCs are ineffective," I call on blood-mic as I run on. "Use the suit exos."

  "Roger that," I hear Ray huff. Far's scream rings out louder now, then I emerge into the clearing beside the hole where we started.

  There must be 50 of the soldiers gathered in a rough circle around the tree where I left Far. Their backs to us, red coats and blue tunics pressed close in together like they've called a truce and are huddling for warmth, against a pale red dome rising up in their midst. I breathe a brief sigh of relief, that the twins had the sense to erect the lava shield we brought from the sublavic.

  It ripples like a film of oil on water, and I wonder how long the power supply can hold back the plastic soldiers. I can't see if it's So or La at the center, but unlatch my QC and start firing as fast as the parabolic will charge, into the mass.

  "Carve a path and we evac," I call out on mic. "Report!"

  Ray is already ahead of me and pulling at the soldiers with his hands, tossing them backward with the suit exos. "Carving," he calls back. "Do something about the ones I've cleared."

  "Roger that," I answer and stride up to one of the ones he's hurled and unload a stream of QCs into its mouth. Even at this range though there is no dissociating effect. If anything the black jaw starts to champ faster.

  Far screams again, and I hear the breathy voice of So on blood-mic. "Help, the QCs do nothing, and they have La. Help us!" I'm thinking fast on how to clear them, as Ray hurls more aside only to have them rise again and lurch back toward him. Then Doe is by my side and unshouldering the bondless cannon, a heavy chunk of black metal that contains a compressed atomic accelerator.

  "Cut a path for Ray," I tell her. "I'll keep them out. Ray keep doing what you're doing."

  Doe nods as she assembles the weapon and sets the tripod braces into the ground. Ray calls a grunting, "Roger" as he hurls more soldiers aside.

  I pull out my grapnel and fire one hook around the nearest tree. It catches and I pull the line taut, then start to run, weaving between all the soldiers rising back to their feet and making for Ray. They champ their teeth at me but do little else as I circle them each, wrapping them in the cord like a spider wrapping flies in its web.

  I enfold ten, perhaps fifteen, before their collective drag begins to pull me with them. I cut and re-head the elasteel rope end, then fire it back to the same tree with an automatic haulier. The hook locks in and begins to wind, and the soldiers caught in my web are jerked off their feet and dragged toward it, bundling tight.

  I turn to Doe, see she's sighted behind the cannon, aimed squarely at Ray's back buried three soldiers deep into their ranks. "We're coming," I rasp into mic for So and Far, then to Doe, "Now."

  The percussive shock is nothing next to the recoil, as a golden spray of bondless atoms jet out of the accelerator cannon's funnel end. Doe is knocked flat on her back, as the atoms slip off their sheaths of non-reactive gold and affix to the plastic backs of the soldiers and rip chunks out of them in instant bond-creation.

  They stagger, several drop, but not nearly as many as should have. Ray leaps into the shallow breach, protected by the ion-charge in his suit which repels the bondless atoms. He kicks off their bodies as they fall in the dirt and resurge, and I follow after him with another grapnel trap hooked behind me and the rope drawing out from my waist-spool. I loop in every fallen soldier and all the ones Ray tosses away, until we've clear a path through the dumb press of bodies, and can just see the black-suited form of La lying underneath their feet ahead.

  I fire the grapnel again, my last, and it drags the cannon-pitted soldiers away to join their fellows struggling at the trees, but still Ray can't quite reach La. She's too entwined amongst the soldiers' feet, and most of our efforts now are spent keeping the tunnel walls he's carved through the soldiers' ranks from collapsing in on us.

  "Help me, Me," he calls, and the fear in his voice terrifies me.

  "Again," I shout to Doe, and feel the second atomic shotgun blast peel out. The gold sprays like party dust around me and a few more bodies fall ahead, dropping across La's prone body.

  Ray darts in and snatches her up. "I've got her!" he shouts, then lofts her lolling body to his shoulder. A blue-tunicked solider grabs at his knee but I drive it off with three targeted QC particles. Together we drive back down the carved path as the walls close in.

  Doe lets loose another blast with a curse, just enough to ease us free of their grasping arms. "It's not doing anything," she grunts, as the wall of bodies reseals. Far's screams have gotten weaker, and I only hear the intermittent whuff of So's QC parabolic cutting through the lava-storm shield.

  We lurch to a stop beside Doe, and Ray drops La at our side. I can see at once that she's in hideous shape. There are bayonet gouges in her midriff through which blood has leaked, though there's no way any normal blade could have gotten through the armor. There's a deeply cracked pockmark in her shoulder where a musket ball must have torn it away, like an impact crater, again impossible for any normal projectile to effect.

  "It's the bonds," Doe says, leaning over La's prone body and running her fingers across the resealed wound. She looks up at me. "They're just more solid than us."

  "Do something!" comes So's cry through blood-mic, and I turn to see the top arc of the storm-shield sputtering. Again it is impossible, something bayonets and rifle fire should not be able to achieve in a million years, but it's happening before my eyes.

  Bonds.

  I toss my QC to the floor and scour the fake grass until I spot a fallen musket. Three steps and I pick it up, then I'm at the soldier wall and driving the bayo
net into the back of the nearest soldier.

  It sticks in like I'm carving wet clay, deep in past the blade's edge and halfway up the rifle barrel, to shear out the soldier's front and stab into the back of the one in front of him.

  They both give a sigh, their champing jaws stop, and they drop. I let go of the buried musket as they drag it down with them, staring for a moment. So solid. Then I snatch both the muskets from their hands, toss one back to Ray who's already at my side, then dig in with the other.

  "Doe keep it coming," I shout.

  Gold dust erupts around us like a cloak, and side by side we stab a path through the soldiers, dropping them with sighs to the ground and stepping on their bodies when they fall. For long desperate moments that is all I do, stabbing soldiers through the backs and heads, chests and faces. I stab them two and three at a time like skewer kebabs, slice them like meatloaf portions, even as I watch the flickering red shield ahead sputter, fade, and die.

  We burst through the final rank of soldiers and into the inner circle seconds after the shield cracks. So is there with a musket in her hand, fierce determination writ over the desperation. Far is curled up with his hands over his eyes at the tree's base, and all around us are the pressing ranks of the soldiers, advancing. Still there are too many and I know that they'll soon overwhelm us, like ants swarming a scorpion.

  Then So cranks one of the muskets and points it at the nearest soldier, depresses the trigger, and

  CRACK

  The musket ball shears through the model soldiers like the QC should have, felling a handful in a straight line. She cranks it again, takes aim, and nods at me.

  "Get a cannon Doe," I call over blood-mic. "A real cannon."

  So's next shot cracks out and a half dozen more bodies fall and don't get up. I crank my own musket just like So had, aim it at the nearest bulge in the mass of pressing plastic, and fire. Soldiers tumble all in a line.