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

by Grist, Michael John

  That is a galling question, because I have no good answer. A flip answer, that this seemed safer, more isolated, will not suffice. His gaze only pisses me off more, so I draw it away. His folder lies on the floor, by my feet, and I pick it up and hold it out. "I felt like taking a vacation. This is some kind of travel guide?"

  "An avoidance tactic? Very well. It is an education. Tell me Ritry, how did you dream last night?"

  An involuntary shudder rushes through me. Ruins notices and smiles. "I could feel your dreams from here. They were good, the best you've had in years, were they not? That was the balm of forgiveness, of a clean break. That is my gift to you. It remains to see how you will invest the funds."

  I try to ignore him, instead flick through the folder, to the first page now buried somewhere in the middle. It is stained with Carrolla's blood, crumpled and spattered by crusting salt. I scan the page to the bottom, to the final line, and read it aloud.

  "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." I look up at him. "So what am I supposed to want?"

  Ruins smiles wide, showing those crazy white shark-teeth. "More. Your due. Do you know the story of Napoleon, Ritry? It will shock you if I say I was there with him, through his days as Emperor, through his banishment on Elba, through his resurgence and back to exile again. You know this faintly, I believe, from an engram injected in your skirmish days. But then I am quite old. To the point though, you will not know of his second resurgence, the time he swept the Gaullic coast clean of pretenders and the blood of his rivals ran in the ornate halls of Versailles. You will not know it, because I took it all."

  He snatches at the air with one gray-gloved hand. "I took the whole of it, from all the minds that might know it, and it made me strong. Because Ritry, I am a predator."

  His teeth gleam menacingly. At that moment, a deep rain cloud passes over the sun and the room grows cold and chill. "I am a predator, and so are you. We exist to hunt, and shorn of the hunt, we are nothing. I suspected it in you from the start, and so I have watched you throughout. Why else are you so pathetically miserable? No, don't deny it, you are. It is because you have curtailed yourself. It sickens me, to be honest, because the potential to thrive is there. I hope to unleash it. Perhaps one day we will feast on the greatest minds alive, together."

  I have to will myself not to take a step back. What began as faintly amusing if bizarre is now repellently charismatic. The madness seems to burn up off him in waves, glowing through his cheeks.

  "Napoleon was hundreds of years ago," I say. "You're no more than 50."

  Ruins laughs again, and the density of the madness radiating off him abates. "Quite right. I am yet young, and in my prime! But answer me this, and be honest with yourself if not me. You felt something here, in this place, and it has fuelled you, has it not? You feel invigorated, flush with new strength. Why, your customary hangover has even failed to materialize. Wonders, praise the Lord! But heed this, Ritry. Dreams do not come from nothing. They are messages through the eternal aether, and the old power of this place," he stretches his arms out to encompass the godship, "has entered you, though you did not seek it directly. Seek it directly, and the flow will be so much stronger. There is power in bonds, Ritry, in the shapes we humans leave behind, every bit as much as there is in living thought. There is power in breaking bonds of life and memory, just as there is with breaking the bonds of the atom. Therefore, this is your trail of crumbs." He points at the folder. "Take it or do not; I offer you that choice. The paths lie before you. Can you truly turn away now?"

  I drop the folder on the bed. "You're talking about resonance," I say. "About harvesting that energy."

  Resonance is a theory in graysmithing aligned with the radio-tuning philosophy I described to Don Zachary, that there is an un-seeable aether of consciousness around us like molten amber, a kind of pluripotential amniotic record which captures every single bond between us and crystalizes our every thought and emotion for all time. Deep-divers have sought to prove its existence for decades, by trying to crack open the Solid Core and find the spider web of bonds linking us all through the aether, but all of those who got close enough to see were too deep to ever come back.

  Ruins clicks his fingers. "Precisely. It is a resource just as the hydrates under the Arctic pack were, worthy of fighting over. And out here, what is the cost? Every soul who left their pattern in this place is long gone or dead. To swallow the marrow of it is no different from gathering in corn grown with the sun, from the soil."

  "Or slaughtering a pig."

  "Ha! Indeed. Perhaps you will come to see that the two are not so very different. Did you grieve for your lost lover, Ven, when the mind-bomb dropped upon your subglacic, or were you too busy scrabbling to survive? Life is a war, Ritry, and right now you are its biggest loser. But is that all you are, casualty of a specific kind of surrender? Are you the lion who will not bloody his claws or fangs for the pain it will cause his prey? So the lion pines and dies, and what does he honor any living thing that he will not do as his nature dictates, to the best of his ability? What do you honor Ritry, to deny yourself? Napoleon fought until the last, and I honor him for it. He has become a part of everything I do, and in this I preserve him. Can any man hope for better?"

  I point at the folder. "So this is training. To sharpen my claws."

  Mr. Ruins shrugs. "You will decide that. I will be watching. And remember, I too am a lion, one far more powerful than you, and I have slaughtered other lions before. Farewell Ritry Goligh. May your training be everything you wish for."

  He turns and strides from the room. I stand there stunned for a few moments, as though I have been visited by a ghost. His footsteps clang down the floor-ceiling without, until abruptly they stop.

  I follow, peer up and down the habitation corridor, but of course there is no sign of him. Was he ever here? I wonder if I could dive the Solid Core, I might be able to track his movements through the eternal amber record, his pathways and meanderings.

  A shudder passes through me. I wonder if Mr. Ruins just gave me permission to murder people and eat their souls. He is undoubtedly mad, or mad from the viewpoint of the world I have always known. But perhaps that too is a kind of sane, one that I have never seen before.

  Hmm. These thoughts should be important, but strangely they do not concern me overly. They are squashed beneath the euphoria I feel rising within. The effect of the dream is still with me. The dawn has buoyed me up.

  I feel hungry. I know there are more pineapple and meatball cans with my name on them. I start back through the dead cathedral ship, the bonds of a thousand lost souls rubbing up against the skin of my mind, heading for a sugary breakfast in the canteen.

  LAG A

  Ray comes up through the hole sweating, and claims he saw a room full of statues that were expanding, crushing him into a corner so tightly that he was pressed into a ball, then down to the size of a pea. There wasn't any pain, but he continually became smaller and smaller.

  This appears to utterly terrify him.

  Doe is cool as ever, and explains that in her dream she killed first me, then Ray and Far, then ran back down to kill So. It disturbs me how little this seems to concern her.

  Far comes last, tugged through on the end of a rope as he was too frightened to pass through on his own. When he appears amongst us he is white and shaking so hard a hot sweat drips off him.

  "What did you see, Far?" Doe asks, but Ray shakes his head. Instead he starts pinging Far on the nose, the eyebrow, the ear, until the tones bring the boy back to some kind of normalcy.

  The tones actually sound somewhat different in this space, flatter somehow, or sharper. Doe and I watch, talking quietly on blood-mic.

  "What does it mean?" she asks. "What person makes tones when they're struck?"

  "Someone very special," I say.

  Soon the boy is calm again, though the haunted, hunted look remains in his eye
s, and the welts in his neck are lividly bright.

  "What are those?" I ask Ray.

  He shrugs, then lifts up the boy's shirt. Far barely seems to notice. Beneath his miniature tree-bark armor and black uniform, his chest is a map of welts, scars, and burns.

  "Gods," whispers Doe.

  Ray puts his shirt back down, pats the boy on his head. "He's had a rough time."

  Doe unspools the first length of comms cable, fastens it to the RG-stubbled corridor floor with a gamma-clamp, and feeds the end carefully back down the gap.

  I access it through my HUD and blood-mic to So at base-camp.

  "So, can you hear me? Come in, So."

  After a five second delay of hazy white noise on the line, So responds. "Roger, Me. I have you orbitally located. You're in the outer ring, over?"

  "It's good to hear your voice, So. Yes we are. It was strange getting in, but we're here. Are you getting telemetries?"

  I look up at Ray, who is holding out two complex reticulated metal structures, wired into his suit-mount. These are the telemetry scouts, which should be bouncing the tunnels all around us with recursive sonar, building a map. They look like old-style television aerials.

  "It's coming in Me, I've got it," says So in her far-off voice. "It looks like you're in one of the spin models, if I just run a simulation," the image slings over to my HUD, as SO manipulates the rotational axis of the flat map to three dimensions multiple times.

  "It's like turning a key in a lock," she goes on, "but it's like a safe too, because there are so many angles it can turn at."

  I turn around to study the corridor walls and floor while So attempts to match the map in the corner of the HUD. Passageways stretch off in five directions, which we already decided to address by the direction of subtle rotation in the Solid Core: North, South, East and West, plus Inward. They each recede away, spotted by striplights that seem to follow no regular pattern. Perhaps their organization is a clue, or just chaos.

  Each of the passages has a slight and visible curve, following the arc of the Solid Core. Even the Inward shaft leading up seems to curve, making determination of what lies beyond it impossible.

  "Found it," comes So's voice, and the corner image stops revolving. I pull the newly-formed map larger across my HUD. It looks much like any of the other ones she generated, except we are in a portion of it as a blinking red dot, and the five passageways leading away from us are marked out with structural red lines. "It's the only match for the exact angles and curvature of the section you're standing within," she adds. "It's the flat map image rotated at a 47 degree angle, then turned."

  The number 47 is familiar, and it worries at my mind for a moment until I recollect why. "That was the locker number I found the mission pack in," I say, "back in the sublavic. Excellent work So, thank you."

  I wait five seconds, but no answer comes from So. I look at Doe. She's standing by with a spark-tool lit and held close to her cannon, already on guard duty.

  "It's not a coincidence," she says, cool as ever. "None of this is."

  I look at Ray. "Agreed. All of this is starting to feel pre-ordained."

  I nod, click back to So on blood-mic. "Do you have a solution for this maze? Can you give us a direction?"

  Still no answer comes. I kneel to check the comm line dropping out through the Solid Core inner shell, but it has not tangled or twisted free in the interim moments.

  "So, report, that's an order," I say.

  More static. I can see the fear in Far's eyes, and rest a hand on his head, even as I cut him off from the blood-mic with my tongue.

  "I feel strange," comes So's voice at last. The sound of it is echoey, even fainter than before. That shouldn't happen, not through blood-conduction, and even if it somehow did the audibles in my HUD should have cleaned it up.

  "Speak a little louder, So," I say. "You're drifting."

  Another long lag. "I feel it," her voice comes, like a mist drifting across a far distance. "I feel like I'm drifting."

  A chill grips at my middle. "What does that mean So, report. Be specific."

  Silence. Ray is looking at me, so is Doe, even Far though he can't hear what we're saying. He begins to whine, a long low terrified C.

  "So!" I bark.

  "I think I may be dead," So's voice comes back, so crackly it is barely audible. "Would I know, if I was really gone?"

  The chill leaps up into my chest. "What? Please repeat, So. It sounded like you said you were dead."

  Her voice whispers in my ear like a feather, floating up through blood. "I don't know if I'm really seeing anything. I feel insubstantial. It started when you left, Me. When Far was gone, it got worse. I thought I was dizzy, but…"

  "Come in, So!"

  "I'm not really here, am I? Am I up there with you? I can't really see my hands. Where am I? La, are you here? La?"

  I find myself blinking back tears, though I don't know why. I tongue on my HUD vacuums to suck them away, I haven't got time to wipe them.

  "Talk to me So, tell me what you're seeing. Report, marine."

  "I'm sorry," Me," she whispers. "I don't feel like anything. The soldiers are gone. Where are all the heads? I'm so alone now. I cut off the heads, but they're gone. La! Ti! One of you please answer me."

  "I'm here," says Doe. "So, it's me. I'm here."

  So begins to cry. Her soft sobbing filters through my HUD like a strange waterfall, music I've never heard before.

  Then she is gone. Her link through the blood fades, and I cannot raise her again.

  Ray flips up his HUD. Doe and I do the same, even Far does.

  "We have to go back," Ray says. "We can't leave her like that."

  I'm sure he knows that even as he says it, we can't do it. It's too late, and there's no guarantee that whatever came for So won't come for us too.

  He makes no more protests, only flips down his HUD. "So which way?" he asks.

  At that moment a flashing red route appears on So's map. Perhaps it was her last act, or perhaps it was simply delayed through the comm lines, only coming through now. It shows a path zagging toward the Solid Core, passing through numerous circular, square, and triangular cross-section 'rooms' on the way.

  "Where's So?" Far asks.

  "She's taking a nap," I say. "Now come on, let's move."

  We go East, following So's map. Doe takes point, her cannon-spark poised and accelerator humming. Ray and Far walk the middle, and I bring up the rear with my musket and QC drawn. We talk little, though I overhear Ray chatting to Far about what an apple really is, how it tastes, and how you best get to the core.

  It is a happy distraction, and I tune out.

  I don't know what happened to So. Doe won't ask me about it, because I'm sure she knows better than I. Ray won't ask because I don't think he wants to know.

  As we walk I pull out the mission pack again, flick through its pages, but nothing has changed. They are all still empty after the point where

  SAVE FAR

  faded away.

  I would ask Far, but I know he'll have nothing to say. He's just a lost, terrified kid. Of all of us, he belongs here the least.

  The passage curves to the left and inclines slightly Inward. I watch the blip that is us moving along the red line. Ray has his TV aerials mounted on his back pack now, and they are confirming the spin that So discovered. The map matches the reality.

  Bland walls and ceiling, all stamped with the letters RG. Initials, I assume, for Ritry Goligh. Ti called me by that name in the dream, and there must be a reason why. Perhaps it is who I am. I think about the undulating tunnel I'd glimpsed, before these metal walls stamped themselves across it. That was the real place, I feel. This is what we have made of it, by our very presence. Another phase-shift, like the one that killed Ven.

  That thought stops me cold.

  Who is Ven?

  At that moment, the floor trembles.

  "What was that?" cries Far.

  I spin around, but nothing has changed. T
hen another tremor comes, like a punch from below, dashing me off my feet. I hit the corridor wall hard and rock backward to the floor.

  Thump-thump, comes the sound of some distant massive pulse. Thump-thump. The floor shakes me like stones on the bottom of a drilling hydrate-bed, and I see something shifting at the far end of the corridor we've come from.

  The metal is warping, turning to black, and starting to undulate. Orders get choked off in my throat, as the distant end of the tunnel turns outside in, like a worm's body burrowing through dirt, and starts back up the inside of itself.

  The vision makes me nauseous. The passageway has become a sucking mouth, bending back through itself. Thump thump, its lips smack. Thump thump, the staccato rhythm of some other soul's heartbeat. The solid metal underfoot begins to soften, the crisp RG melting away, and finally I get the word out.

  "Run!"

  We run. Ray scoops up Far and Doe leads us in a mad sprint through a tunnel pulsing with its own life, beginning to sway. Far is screaming again, and I tongue his voice down. I scan So's map in my HUD desperately, seeking out something that might offer us shelter, settling upon one of the triangular cross-section rooms.

  But there isn't time.

  The thump-thump is growing louder all the time, and the sucking mouth is slicking closer on a tide of viscous CSF, its toothless lipless wet rims champing like the valves in a heart. The fluid washes around my feet and I slip, try to catch myself on the wall but there is no purchase to be gained.

  "Duck," comes Doe's shout, then

  BOOM

  I feel the cannon ball rush by my head like a swooping crull, track it down the long and dark intestine the passage has become, to impact solidly against its lips. It tears a gout of fibrous flesh out of the sucking mouth, a welter of blood spumes outward, and the thump thump goes haywire.

  Ray snatches me up and we're sprinting together, another

  BOOM

  as Doe lays down covering fire and then we're past her and I'm in the lead now, looking down the tunnel toward another sucking black mouth champing its valve-lips closer.