The man before me smiles uneasily. "No sir, of course not. Well, let's open it up."
I wink. "Just a crack will be enough. I can slip through."
"Of course sir."
A portcullis-style section of the wall lifts up to my left. I nod briskly and make for it.
"Carry on," I say, and they do, all interaction between us forgotten.
Inside the wall is a weakly lit passage that smells of urine and seaweed-tobacco ash. The Don's line through here is hot and recent. A few industrial drying-lamps wrapped with metal bars spit hot orange light out in staccato bursts. A camera array above records my face and entrance, reports it to men ahead who I feel begin to panic, move to raise the alarm, but this is no concern to me.
I reach out and quiet them from a distance.
Through the passageway, I emerge into a wide open space, gravel underfoot like a courtyard, where a dozen ancient road-vehicles are parked. I walk amongst them, these collectibles scoured from a forgotten era, useless on the skulks, trailing my fingers over their sleek, gloss-metal lines.
BMW
ROLLS ROYCE
PORSCHE
LAMBOURGHINI
They are all silver. From this I infer that Don Zachary prefers silver.
The gravel crunches underfoot, and I notice the absence of any give in the flotation devices underfoot. Perhaps there are none, and this part of the skulk is actually rooted deep down in the sea-bed. I have heard rumors to that effect.
Overhead the night sky is blocked by a high white plastic-looking ceiling held up by an array of metal rafters, this to keep any prying eyes atop the Calico wall from peering down.
I stalk through it, following the Don. I still every thread that leaps out from my body, before it can dart back through the eyes of the soul that sees me, to a mind that would shoot me on sight. At a gateway I talk through an intercom while soothing the man who mans it, persuading him to open for me, and he does.
The skulk is vast, a maze, and I walk down long halls filled with the bright light and syrupy smell of narcotic hydroponics, others filled with chemical apparatus and clinical white light, attendants within busily working at their titration like Heclan on his CSF still.
I pass down a long corridor of dormitories, sensing more ex-Hawks in the rooms either side, off their shift, some of them sleeping. They are all thugs, drawn from the skulk morasses, though some of them have families too. I feel the hot tang of Don Zachary's children mixed in amongst them, adult and infant both. The Don's thread is everywhere now, his influence touching everyone, like a thick purple web.
I follow it back.
Another entrance, another intercom, and then I am riding down in an elevator, deep down, to emerge within the Don's private mansion. A grand hall extends away from me, and everywhere I look there is sheer salvaged silk or vat-grown mahogany, the fur of extinct creatures used for curtaining and rugs, ancient bones used to hold up his coffee table and worked into the details of chairs.
Through four vast living spaces I proceed, each more opulent than the last. The solid cement ceiling overhead has been disguised with Romanesque flourishes and elaborate skirting, but I can feel the weight of it bearing down. All of this is tsunami-proof. Nothing less for the Don.
In one room everything is made of glinting brass, as though I am gazing into the innards of a polished trumpet. Chairs, walls, floors, tables, all sinuous and perfectly golden.
A ladder leads down further stairs, and I can feel the chefs down there at labor, the mechanics watching the gas levels and the security guards watching their monitors. If I Lagged them all then sealed them tight from above, they wouldn't remember enough to even turn their oxygen on, and all of them would die.
The sense of the Don is everywhere, the air is thick with his thoughts and his deeds, like salt and rot in the skulk air. I find him in a four-poster bed in a grand circular room, alone. It is pitch dark but I find my way to him easily, following the hot trails in the air. There are women sleeping in alcoves all around the room, each a colorful buzz of thoughts raised on a small dais with spotlights above and ensconced with mirrors. A private boudoir, a strip club, a brothel for the Don should he wish it.
I turn on all the lights, go to his side, and nudge him awake.
"You wanted to kill me," I say.
He wakes up fast, and with consciousness and recognition comes rage, hot and red. He goes for my throat, but I Lag the depth from his intention to move and he sags back.
"I'm sorry your son died," I say. "It wasn't me though, or Carrolla, or any of them. I'll deal with the man who did it. You can remember that."
I let some of his anger spike through the fog I've put him in, to afford him his say.
"I want to hire you," he says.
I have to laugh at that, the schemings of his mind. This is how he has become the Don of so many skulks, not only through barbarism but through intellect.
"You can't afford me," I say, "and you won't even remember I was here."
He looks at me with some kind of understanding. Perhaps he knows something about the gray, and about the Lag. He saw Mr. Ruins' notes after all, and he sees me here now, unharmed in the heart of his bunker-mansion.
"Please don't hurt my children," he says.
It hits me like a blow between my eyes. Upon hearing it, I want to leave. I want to assure him I am not that man, I would not kill them all for some petty vengeance, but I can't afford to say those things now. He is still a killer and a torturer, but then this is the skulks and we are all killers and torturers of some kind.
So what kind am I?
Outwardly, I nod. I feel sick, but there is still a job to do, and only I can do it. I seize hold of his mind and all the bonds linking him to me, and I Lag away his every recollection of me. Weight and frame both, I strip it back to the barest outlines, that there was once a graysmith on skulk 47.
The unwelcome power of those broken bonds shoots me through the roof, beyond my control. His hatred was immense, and these are settled memories in a living mind, not unformed sensations or relics from the past.
Now my consciousness is hovering a mile overhead, hanging in the air above the skulks and gazing down on them all, even over the Calico wall. Spread throughout, I can see to the heart of every person I have ever touched or known. They are spotted everywhere like visited dots on a map, the women I've fucked and the drinking buddies I've fought. The neo-Armoricans I stabbed with my node are still in their cups, drunk or sleeping scattered around the end-skulks. The red-headed whore is at work even now in my old alley.
I look wider still. In Calico, the city shining and high-towered behind its protective wall, I see Carrolla. He is alive and healthy, recovering from his nail-branded hands, and cursing my name every day for getting him involved. There is Mei-An in the Reach, distraught at the depths she has fallen to in her parents' eyes. There are others too, scattered throughout this little isthmus of unbranded land off the Allatanc ocean, marines I'd met, people who helped or hurt me as a child.
I feel them all, until the glow of Don Zachary's loss ebbs, and I sink back down. He is lying there gazing up at me with rheumy eyes. His women are wakeful in their perches, and I still them.
I walk out of the skulk like a wave of darkness and sleep, leaving emptiness and quiet behind. I drop into my speedboat and roar away, both sickened and gladdened by what I have done.
Access to the tsunami wall between Calico and Tenbridge Wulls is easy. Mr. Ruins' notes detail an ancient stop on an unbuilt in-Wall train line, when once they hoped to link the skulks without to the city within by more permanent means. Now the station is a vacuum inside the core of the wall, locked off by great metal plugs.
Access hatches remain though, too small and reinforced to present any threat to the wall's integrity. I pull up to a stretch of open wall between the cities of Calico, where the night sky is brilliant with stars and the waves reflect that back, and there is no walkway and there are no skulks.
I am alone. I teth
er the boat to a docking ring embedded in the wall, and climb up shadowy dimples spotting its flank. Up, up, until the subglacic-like hatch is beside me, locked by triple combination locks, and I dial in the number written down in the folder of ruins.
The chute beyond is narrow and still and smells of mold. Already I feel the massed ranks of engineers who built this place welling up from the poured concrete. These were grand dreams, faded glory.
I lock the hatch behind me and proceed by flashlight, through a series of flood-proof valve-doors, until I emerge into the half-oval of the solitary station on an unbuilt line.
The rails have been laid and bedded with gravel, but they end in solid concrete at either end. A platform rises up at the side, where there are old-new metal seats still covered in their factory-plastic. A few unpowered vending machines line the wall, interspersed between tile plates announcing this lost station's name.
ERRAL FALL
I climb to the platform, leaving trails in the thick dust as though through snowfall. The feeling of the bonds tracked through here are similar to the godships, and to the skulks, but unique. These minds are scientific, filled with purpose, linked back to families spread throughout the world. This place was built by some of the brightest minds in existence.
And abandoned. I sit on one of the wrapped metal seats and crack open a can of beer, one of 24 I have brought with me, along with godship vodka. I set down a halogen lamp and flick the switch to light it, turning off my flashlight. It surrounds me with a globe of warm light.
I could go back to my home on skulk 47, even reclaim my graysmithy, but what kind of life is that now? I have started down this path into ruin, into a world of bonds and unfathomable power, and I can't stop myself now.
I start to drink. I scan the far wall, covered in rough, unfinished blastcrete, the return platform not yet constructed. I am not tired, but I have been awake too long to not want sleep. I am tired of myself, and of this power that connects me to everyone and everything, but to no one and nothing at once. I am tired of seeing again the look in Zachary's eye, as all pretense fled away and he truly understood who I was, and what I had come to do.
Don't hurt my children.
He was begging, and it makes me ill. I am not the man to enjoy that. It makes all the power of the bonds from the godships tainted, if this is what they are for.
Mr. Ruins said I was a predator, but I do not think I am. I don't want to feel this way anymore. The Don's rheumy eyes won't go away.
For some reason they make me think of Ven, and thinking of Ven makes me drink harder. What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world, but loses his soul? And where is my soul now, after I have stolen so much from so many? I looted the memories of the dead and the living alike. I feel sick at what I have done, and yet here I am back in the thick of those dreams, tonic for the massive hangover coming due.
I drink. I take another beer, and I drink. Carrolla is well but he hates me. I open the vodka, and I drink. Ven is still dead, and the half-life I built on skulk 47 is over, and again I don't know what to do.
I drink, and I drink, until the power fades and the questions fade, and the blackness of unconsciousness beckons. I drink because it is the only way out, and the only way I know.
YOUNG RITRY C
The corridor without is much as the corridor before, metal-walled, lined with its tiny RG reminders that we are a pulse of Ritry Goligh, or a figment of Ritry Goligh, some envoy dispelled into the system.
"Doe take point, Ray and Far middle," I order, and they adopt the positions as though out of old habit. There is so much to say, but so little, because we all know as much as the others.
"So, come in," I call through blood-mic, as we start down the corridor at a hot run. Already I can hear the distant thumping of the lip-intestine, hunting us down. Already the sharp relief of these RG embossments are beginning to glisten and melt. "So, we need a map."
There is only white static through my HUD. We race along the single corridor at an incline, at least headed Inward, our feet clacking out a hasty drumbeat. I try to raise So again and again, but there is only the faint drifting. We reach another five-way crossroads, and down the Eastward tunnel I think I catch a glimpse of the sphincter's nictating mouth, worming closer.
Doe sparks her light and holds it to the cannon-fuse, but I clap her on the shoulder.
"Just run," I say. "Upward."
She leads at a gallop, up through the metal which sags like it is some thin plastic-sheeting over water. We begin to slip, as we pass through an increasing number of intersections, every one of them five-way or more.
"Inward," I call at every one, and we climb. The thump-thump of the lips gets stronger with every mossy step we take, and I catch faint snatches of it down the increasingly shifting, undulous tunnels to either side. This place is a honeycomb, and it is getting closer.
"So!" I shout through blood-mic, "So, in the name of La, help us!"
Still nothing comes but a hiss and static. Perhaps we are too deep, too far gone. I pull up the three-dimensional map So last provided and spin it, searching earnestly for the path we're on now, but I can't find it. There is no section as cross-branched and asymmetric as the interlinked network of nodes we're sprinting through now.
Up ahead Doe stops to let fire with the cannon. BOOM rings the retort, and the walls around us pulsate and contract. Clear liquid swims down a rivulet underfoot, as the metal cleaves to heaving gray flesh. In flashes to either side I see two sets of lips racing us, smacking, closer with every junction.
50 yards.
30 yards.
10 yards, and we are just running, running, running.
"So!" I shout.
The lips to my left dive, and close around my leg. The pain is white-hot and visceral, and only worsens as the lips circle and begin to suck, slurping me in like a wet noodle. I am tossed to my back and my other leg is sucked in, and worse than the pain is the sheer horror of this eyeless, dark, lipless thing, about to consume me, swallow me into darkness and gone.
BOOM
says the cannon, and a splattering gout flies off the thing's side, but that doesn't stop it. Ray and Far fall upon it with their musket bayonets, driving the blades deep then firing once inside. I feel the tremor as the creature shudders, but still it sucks me in, up past my waist, up to my chest.
"So!" I cry into blood-mic, "please."
The second slithering sphincter closes on Far, and sucks him down to the neck in a second.
I spin the memory of La like a projectile in my mind, and hurl it at the beast's shining intestinal side. It sags flat and its grip on Far weakens, as though dosed with some narcotic. Ray tears him out, but the champing mouth holding me isn't slackened at all, and the image of Ray staring back at me with disgust and disbelief are the last thing I can see, before the pain of digestion begins all around me, and thought is driven from my mind.
"Ven," I manage to gasp through blood-mic, before the pain short-circuits me completely. "Use Ven."
A burst of light, and Ray and Doe are hauling me up and out of something. I am dizzy and weak, disoriented in this mucal chamber. Behind me is a long snaking trail of shriveled organic mass like a snake, a lipless head cut off to its side. Another one is to my right, also beheaded.
Silver tooth-loops gleam in Ray's wide grin.
"Not yet, buddy," he says. Blood is all over him, and there is the flash of silver beneath the dark ichor on his musket bayonet. Doe is holding Far. Are we alive?
I remember, and remember that I have forgotten. There are two holes now, or three. Still, I am the captain. Already another thump-thump is building, from far-off but racing closer incredibly fast, and we have to run.
"Me," comes the faintest hiss through my blood-mic.
"So," I answer, as I gesture for us to run. We run. "So, we need a map. Nothing matches anymore."
"I know," she says, fainter than ever, so quiet I have to boost the gain on her crackly voice over the thump of our footfalls. "I'
m having trouble focusing. Are you really there, Me? I can't remember things well. How did I get here?"
"So, I'm sorry, I want to help you but the mission comes first. Please, can you get us a new map."
"I have one," she says, forlorn. "I understand, Me. I understand. But I feel like there's something important I've forgotten. Some part of me."
I know how she feels, but there is no time. "The map, So."
She slings it, another three-dimensional sphere but this one completely different from the previous one. Where that was a rotation with some degree of symmetry, this is a labyrinthine mess of thousands of intersections, lumpish nodes, and scraggly lines. There is a flashing red dot in the thick of a cortex halfway to the heart of the Solid Core, and a faint red line leading up to one of the ovoid nodes.
"What the hell happened?" I ask. "Where's the old map?"
"You went the wrong way," says So. "I had to recalculate."
Ahead Doe takes the first turning on our new path. It leads us West instead of Inward, toward the thump-thumping of the Solid Core-snake.
"But this is nothing like the rotational models from before. How did it get so complex?"
"Oh," says So, a little sigh like I've disappointed her. "You're right. It's not a rotational maze anymore, Me. It's more involved than that. I converted the old flat map to a mathematical set, then extrapolated it through a series of organic Mandelbrot iterations, to map onto what you're seeing now. And it's still growing. Every moment you're there longer, it gets denser, replicating itself inward in slightly different variations. There are islands around you where the whole Solid Core is repeated, and within those Solid Cores there are more islands where the whole Solid Core is repeated again, and on and on. If you stray off the path into one of those fractal offshoots, you'll be trapped and you'll never escape. Even if you reach the middle of that island, it'll be the wrong middle. Can you understand that? And even if you follow the path I've given you and avoid all the fractal islands, I still don't know if you'll be able to reach the true middle before even that path balloons too."
Mr. Ruins: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 1) Page 17