Carrolla nods.
"What did you find?"
"His mind's frozen solid, like a wall. I couldn't get in. I don't know what happened, what could cause that, but he'd be dead if he wasn't on support."
The Don considers, then points at me. "Could he get in?"
"He might be able to. He's a better diver than me. He's the best I ever saw."
Don Zachary turns to his men.
"Alright. Bring the vegetable in."
Mr. Ruins comes in a wheelchair, eyes slack and staring, his skin a waxy fevered sheen. There are bits of silvery engram and blood still clinging to his eyebrows like strange tiny berries. They haven't changed his clothes, only dressed the open wound I hammered in his skull and stuck tubes and wires where they matter. He is still stained and dusted with the mortar of my memory tower.
Drool runs down his open mouth. His bright white teeth seem obscene like this.
The Don gives directions, and they manage to lift Ruins out of his chair without disrupting any of the wires or tubes attaching back to drips and regulating machines. They slip him into the EMR next to me. He smells of chemicals and death, like meat in formaldehyde, but he's still alive. I feel the lurid rasp of his breath against my neck, close as a lover.
The last time I did this was with a cute Asiatic named Mei-An, 11 years ago. She was a lover. She was a good girl.
"Ramp it up," says the Don. At once the EMR's thump changes, cycling faster to match the wavelength of my thoughts. I become drowsy.
"Come back with what I want," he says, the last thing I hear before I go under, "or don't come back at all."
DOE B
Doe can't move, she can barely breathe, but she can still speak.
"Is everybody trapped?" she asks on blood-mic.
"My junk is really trapped," says Ray, his voice high and pained. "Damn, this hurts."
Doe ignores him. "So, La, Ti?"
They chorus in with a series of checks.
"I'm wedged up against the periscope handles," Ray goes. "Right in the balls. How did that even happen? I was on the floor."
"Drawback," La says. "As the wave propagated in, it also sucked out."
Ray moans. "We have to get out of here. I don't wanna be discovered like this, fossilized, and have everyone think I died trying to hump the view-scope."
So laughs.
"It's not funny," Ray moans.
Doe agrees that it isn't funny, as very few things are. But she is fond of Ray's junk. With a series of winks and tongue movements she cycles through the screens in her HUD, readouts still available direct from the Bathyscaphe's sensory feed.
Already the mud is compacting and settling throughout the ship, warping the hull with its weight and fixing into place like rock. The screw is accessible remotely but to no avail, she already knows it doesn't work. There are weapons on board, glass-bombs on the flanks and Quantum Confusion foils on the belly, but the only thing they'd do is rebound and blow the ship apart.
Unless.
She clicks onto blood-mic. "La, Ti, can you work me an algorithm to overcharge the screw and rotate us belly-up, given some loosening of the pack around us?"
A moment of Ray's moaning, muttering that it might be getting better now, oh no it's not here it comes again, and Ti comes back.
"If you can drop the pack-density of the mud immediately around our bricking by a factor of three, perhaps, if the screw is not jammed beyond repair. But I don't know how you'd do that, and I don't see what impact it would have if we do."
"You will see, get started on it please," says Doe. "Ray, can you move the rudder from your position?"
He gives a pained laugh. "With my junk?"
"I don't need much, and there should be some loosening when we start to rotate."
"Then yes, I think so. Left or right?"
"Up. Now So, we need to talk about the trim tanks."
It takes an hour of meticulous planning, syncing their HUDs to the Bathyscaphe board-mind and reaching out through voice command, tongue and eye motion to take control of a range of new extra-bodily limbs.
La and Ti have the screw, working a complex shock-twist maneuver that would burn all the threads in a minute, but might have the chance to upend them, with a number of sub-systems requiring direct command over-rides, delivered in a precise sequence.
So has the trim tanks, following Doe's designation to vent to overload. All the liquid-state gases in the sublavic, stored for maintaining a breathable environment, would be routed through them. Ray has the periscope and steering, enough to twist the rudder by a few degrees, perhaps enough.
And Doe has the weapons. Glass bombs and QC foils.
"You've turned us into a bomb," Ray says. "A bomb we're inside."
"Is that enough fuse for you?" So asks. Ray groans.
"T-minus ten," Doe says, "final rehearsal."
"It's easy enough, I just give my hips a twist," Ray says.
"T-minus 9."
She counts down, and there is only the gummy sound of lips and teeth sucking and clicking. In the darkness their eyes roll.
3
2
"T-minus 1," says Doe, "brace, and zero."
They all hear So sub-vocalizing orders through the HUD, causing the support systems of the ship to shunt all available gas to the trim tanks. There is some faint groaning sound, as the tanks on all sides bulge and creak outward with internal pressures they were not designed for.
"Pumps at maximum," So says after a long few moments. "The burst comes in any second."
They brace. Nobody speaks, for fear of speaking over one of the others. Rather they wait, as metal doors in the far-off trim tanks of the ship over-reach their containing capacity.
BOOM
The first one rocks the whole ship like a munitions impact, as the Bathyscaphe expels the trapped gas into the mudpack. Hull-girders groan and protest, then the next BOOM goes, and the next, twisting and warping the frame, compressing the mud around it and forcing clear micrometers of empty space round the sublavic's outline.
In the resounding echo of the blasts, the screw churns back to life, vibrating madly up through the mud. On her screens Doe reads fires in the engine, but she expected that. The pack around them has loosened for an instant, and it has to be enough. She tamps down the glass-bombs, arrayed on the flanks, and fires them all at once.
The sound is deafening, as liquid glass spits out into the slimmest of gaps between the Bathyscaphe and the mud. In a Molten Core they'd crystalize out into enormous ramming spikes, useful for excising unwanted engrams and deterring the Lag, but within the micrometers of give the trim tanks have earned they will be a hyper-compressed frictionless superfluid.
The screw rages, and they begin to turn.
"It's working," Ray calls. At the same moment he twists the periscope enough to change their vector as they turn.
"Burn it out, La," Doe says as her world slowly inverts. Cocooned in blackness, she feels the grip of the mud slacken as it finds its new gravity, enough for her to reach the QC parabolic on her waist band, just enough to slip one hand into the trigger guard and pull.
Antimatter spits out into the darkness, consuming everything it touches, turning the hard-pack mud into a watery mush one tenth of the density. She fires again and again into the blackness, aiming the gun back at her face to bounce off the resistant coating of her suit.
Now she's lying on her side and the whole ship is shuddering as the screw inverts toward 180 degrees. She hears the others firing their weapons into the mud, and finally slips loose herself. Kneeling in slush on hardpack, she turns the cannon on her shoulder to the ladder heading back down to the belly of the ship, which is now off to the side.
SLOOSH
Bondless atoms in a cloud of glittering gold eat into the mud and consume it. Her crew fall out of their wedged-in positions like baby birds learning to fly, all haphazard and maladjusted to the turning gravity. Stray gold fragments glitter and spark as they burrow in.
Ray
hangs from the periscope for a moment, awkwardly, before he lets go and slaps into the wash of disintegrated muck on the wall, now the floor.
"Fucking yes," he says as he picks himself up.
"Will it make it?" Doe asks. "Will it complete the turn?"
As if on cue the wall before them begins to twist, shearing to let a thick bead of molten glass leak inward.
"Parts of it will," La answers.
"Then let's get into those parts," Ray shouts, and starts firing his parabolic at the gaping hole where the ladder had been. Doe triggers the cannon and lets out another
SLOOSHING
flow.
The mud is cleared, the walls are cleared, the ladder is cleared into constituent molecules. Already the grinding yaw of the ship has that passageway, once a ladder heading down, turning to an incline upward, and they run into it, goring a path through the belly of the Bathyscaphe.
Mud starts to unpack and evacuate ahead of them, slurrying down through the tunnel as the decks tilts backward. La slips and Ti drags her up. Ray instinctively picks up the rear, Doe the lead, until soon the wall is at forty-five degrees and the mud is a rain falling hard around them, clearing the ladders ahead.
"QCs down," Doe shouts, and they proceed onward up the ladders to the bottom of the ship. The screw is thrashing like a vast and wounded beast, catching on only every third turn and jogging the ship further to vertical at jolting uneven degrees.
"Almost there," La calls.
They clatter down the ceiling of a holding tank, toward the primal roar of the screw-room and the foils that lie beyond. Inside the mud is hard-baked to every surface, the air is boiling with the screw's energy, and the room is visibly warped from the torque.
Doe's HUD tamps the sound but still it comes through like an inferno. The drive-train for the screw is hammering like the fist of a god overhead, ready to blow at any moment.
"We can't be here when it goes!" Doe shouts over blood-mic, but probably none of them can hear her, because she can hear none of them. She leads them rushing onward down mud-wattled walls baked as hard as clay, to the fore-holds where the screw's detritus vents out, and the QC foils jut out through the Bathyscaphe's skin above.
Through the controls in her HUD, she turns on the foils, and feels the deep bass hum as they begin to liquefy the ablatives and mud stacked above them.
Then she takes a deep breath, raises the bondless cannon to point at the ceiling, and discharges.
After that everything is chaos. Blowing a hole directly through the bank of foils sucks them out of their ship and into the direct path of the massive power of the QC foils. It propels them upward on a stream of particles that would shred them if not for their suits.
Doe screams, perhaps somewhere Ray is whooping, and all of her body is being dragged upward through a grater, the mud parting before them like the cleaving of an ocean, but all Doe can see is the blackness as she froths up like a bubble, up and up, rushing and out of control and higher and…
BREAK
The sudden absence of furious up-rushing noise is like a blast in her head, as the noise-canceling in her HUD struggles to compensate. The foil flow is still there but weak, and she's standing on a surface smearing at the mud on her visor.
"Chord call in," she shouts over blood-mic. "Repeat, call in."
"I'm here," says Ray.
"Here," from So.
"Here," from La.
A long moment passes, filled with the sounds of scraping and sucking as they all pull their legs out of the settling mudpack and scrub the blear from their screens, as tension builds out of absence, then,
"Here!"
It is Ti's voice.
"Oh thank Me," says Ray.
"Atmosphere good," La calls from somewhere in the darkness. Doe is blind, and instead of slathering at her faceplate any more she simply clicks the valves to release, and yanks it off.
Standing on a thick high island of mud, she looks out over a mud-splattered wasteland stretching as far away in ruin and gray as she can see, the drained dregs of some seabed Sunken World.
"What happened?" breathes Ray at her side, his helmet dropped to the mud. "What kind of Core is this?"
Doe turns, taking it in. Spreading in every direction is an endless spray of ruin, all of it dark-gray with a wasteland of rolling mud plains. There are peaks of ruptured buildings in the distance, emerging through the gray, their walls ragged and canting. In places the intestinal splay of trains hang off them like bunting. There is a thick black road of bloated bodies floating on intermittent residual lakes. There are vast thick rafts of timber smashed to kindling, like sandbars in a delta, studded with the grasping fingers of planes and container ships half-buried and spiking upward.
"Tsunami," says So.
They turn to her. Her helmet is off, and mud is flecked across her face like a scar. She points, sketching out a pattern of frozen waves spread across the ruined landscape.
"Like ripples in a lake," she goes on, "or a weather front. They came from that direction," she points again, back along the course of the waves, "and they washed everything away."
"What was this?" Ray asks.
"It was a city," Doe says.
They stand in silence for a long time, lulled by a low pestilential wind, ripe with peat and snappish rot, still panting after the escape from the Bathyscaphe, now locked so far below.
"I think that's a kraken," Ray says, pointing. "Eating a whale."
They are two lumps of flesh at the base of a pyramidal mud-pile, red tendrils coiled about a black and white beast as big as their ship. They are still, and slowly curdling into each other's embrace.
Tiny buzzing creatures rise on the fumes of decay, nipping at Doe's hair and zooming for her eyes. She bats them away, shifts her feet as hey sink, and looks down to see more of the tiny maggots underfoot.
"Get me samples of these, La," she says. "Don't handle them directly. I want to know exactly what we're doing here. So, you need to start mapping all this. Find us some place to shelter."
The women nod and set to work, the twins taking samples and So starting on the radar in her comm block.
Doe and Ray remain standing, looking out. Doe gives him a look, then flips her blood-mic to a private channel.
"Thoughts?" she asks.
"I'm confused," Ray answers. "It's not a Molten Core, or nothing like one we've ever dived before. We weren't ready for this, we're not equipped. The only mission intimation we've got is a weird scrawl on So's uniform."
Doe nods. "I saw it. Run for your lives." She spreads her arms to take in the tableaux of death and destruction. "But run where? There's nowhere left to go."
"There must be something. Why else would we be here?"
"And where is Me? Where is Far?"
"I've got no answer. Bur Me wouldn't abandon us for nothing, I know that. There must be some reason."
They stand, lost in thought, for moments.
"Look at the sky," Ray says.
There are lowering black clouds overhead, rutted and gouged as though a reflection of the broken landscape beneath. In a tattered gap there is a glimpse of two suns in the sky, pale orange in color, seemingly on the same orbital track.
"They're dying," Ray says. "We've seen Molten Cores that color, and they never made it. Un-saveable. Plus it looks like they're going to collide. This whole place is dying, Doe. It's rotting from the inside out."
Doe considers. Me is gone, and so is Far. The ship is gone, the world is fading around them, and there is no mission brief.
"How's your penis?" she asks flatly.
Ray snorts, and she feels him coloring red through the HUD. "What?"
"Your penis and your testicles. You said they were trapped against the periscope."
"I didn't say 'penis' or 'testicles,'" he answers quickly. "I said junk."
Doe inclines her head, puts a hand on his shoulder. Ray is hot, after all. So sweet, so bashful, so noisy. "Ray, please tell me, are they alright?"
"They're fine! My junk is fine."
Doe laughs.
"You're not supposed to joke," Ray protests lamely. "That's not your thing."
"I'd rather joke than think about this."
Ray sighs. "I know."
"I've found something."
It's So on the mic. Doe gives Ray a raised eyebrow, then turns. "Tell me."
So points. "Out there, there's a structure still standing. You can barely see it, it just looks like a white speck."
Doe looks, raising the resolution on her HUD until a fuzzy white splodge appears on the horizon.
"It's white," she says. "The mud tsunami didn't breach it."
"Exactly," says So. "I'm working out the best route to get there. Some of this mud is solid, but lots of it isn't. I took gamma-scans of the underlying city, and there's quicksand, bridging mud, cavity tunnels, all kinds of hazards."
She seems happy.
"Good," says Doe, oddly. "Keep on."
So goes back to her work. Doe turns back to Ray.
"Good?" he asks.
"It is good. They're all focused and awake. Now what do you think the White Tower is?"
"Easy," says Ray. "It's got to be the Solid Core. And if Me's anywhere, he'll be there."
QUAKESEEDS C
I dive, and rebound off the cold, solid wall of Mr. Ruins' mind.
Carrolla was right, it's frozen solid. I try again and again, but there is some kind of honeycomb ice-pack locking me out, encircling his entire mind like a sphere. I have never seen anything like it, but can only imagine it is a combination of memory and engram, fused as a last-minute attempt at protection, holding steady now like pre-emptive rigor mortis.
It's too strong and I am too weak. I beat at the wall, but it is a glacier and I can't even form my Bathyscaphe. I have only my exhausted thoughts, flitting in an electromagnetic soup.
Carrolla will see this. Carrolla will know I am failing. But will he tell?
I asked him to help me, I remember. I planted the influence deep into his bonds, from the Tenbridge Wulls station through the call on my node. I don't remember the exact sense of it, but it must have been to keep Mr. Ruins alive, to keep us safe, and to work with Don Zachary to do it.
King Ruin: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 2) Page 4