Now my fingers are gone, and I'm trapped. Don Zachary knows where my family are, and if whoever dropped mind-bombs on me can find the Don, they can find them too. They can implode their minds to soup.
I need time. I need to think.
If only Carrolla can give me that. I can only hope the bonds of influence I put on him are in synchrony enough with any feelings he has left for me to outweigh his fear for his family.
Until then, there is no time to waste. I have to try everything I can.
I dive back, retreating to my own mind. In a fledgling new ghost-Bathyscaphe I sound out the seven harmonic notes of the artificial womb that brought me to life, healing and soothing my tortured Molten Core.
Doe, Ray, Me, Far, So, La, Ti.
There are gouges still where I tore through the Solid Core. I can feel the Lag within like a wounded dog, licking its wounds. I strained the architecture of my mind to breaking point, and it needs time.
I don't have time.
I set to work restructuring the battered floes of my subconscious, working fast, hoping some idea will shake loose. I redirect lavic surges, stimulate fresh production of CSF, and rebuild the sublavic ship I lost in my run at the aetheric bridge, manning the posts with my seven core marines. I scavenge from the twisted, half-melted wreckage of the old Bathyscaphe, prizing out trim tanks, the periscope, forging pods, and fix them into the new one.
It is not shiny and new. I don't have the memories for that. It is what Ven and all the others helped me to make it, what Loralena and my children burnished and made bright.
And still I cannot save them. While the tones ring through the lava, I turn every possibility over again. I can suture myself, but I cannot produce strength or stability from nothing. I could Lag my own mind for strength, but I know the frame of it would crack, and it still probably wuldn't be enough to break through the EMR's wall. I could drive for the aetheric bridge, but I don't think I can do that again. Without the tower and all those bonds from my family, I know I'd never make it.
So I work on what I can. Time passes, and Carrolla must be holding them off, for which I bless him. I recycle through all the thoughts I've already worked over before. I wonder who is hunting me, and for what they would use the aetheric bridge. There are thousands of them, Ruins said. They know me now. They have marines, and mind-bombs, and thick bands of bonded control stronger than I ever saw. They hunted me down within hours, somehow, and I can only imagine one reason why.
They felt me blast open the aetheric bridge. Through the aether, I wonder that my crossing must have felt like the birth of a new star across the bonds. In that one act of fission I unleashed more unfocused energy than had ever been felt before. I did things no one has ever done.
And for what? I Lagged a man from within. I could have done the exact same from without, if he hadn't guarded against me. That was all. I used all the strength of my past with my family embedded in the tower, to produce a vast reservoir of power, which I used only for that.
But what if…
The thought comes, and I leap upon it. A dream comes that I scarcely remember, and along with it, hope.
What if the bridge hasn't closed? What if there are enough fragments of my bonds left in the dust on Mr. Ruins' clothes to push me through that jagged door one more time?
I reach out and feel the fragments of memory dust on his jacket, each like the tiniest dab of salt or sugar on the tip of the tongue. They are an echo only, a taste left at the bottom of the barrel, but they still hum with power. I lap them up, and dive into myself, the only way I can.
The Bathyscaphe is frail, but I drive it on. Approaching the Solid Core there isn't the resistance there was before, and the weak bonds I have are enough to propel my whole phantom crew through. They breach the inner magmic sea alive, and fire their grapnels up in tandem. They swing to the Death Gate we blew, still ravaged open, and climb into the slowly closing hole. They race through the plastic battlefield, which is already morphing back into a lush model of inner Calico, and into the rotational maze.
The fractal maze is there, but familiar, and we run it in silence. The Lag slinks after us, but it is weaker than we. We leap over it and onward, along the path So laid out, up to the blast-door that we blasted open a day and a lifetime ago.
It has already begun to heal itself, the torn metal edges of the wall stretching inward like fingers reaching out to mesh, but it is not yet sealed. Within I see our bodies lying in a gossamer place of ice and white, bayonet wounds torn in our chests, as translucent now as these our new bodies.
We rush through the narrowing gap into the bridge, into….
Madness, and dark. Everything is dying here, everything is rotting, and it hurts just to be here. I am not what I thought I was. I can't stay, have to escape, because this place is diseased and taking me with it, but I have to be here now. I can feel nothing, smell nothing, see nothing, because all senses are lost, but I have to stay. I only feel the flow of the EMR washing over me, attuned to the mind of another.
Not to mine. Not shielding mine.
The realization caves me in and rebuilds me from the ground up.
I am inside Mr. Ruins, inside the honeycomb coma of his sludge-filled mind.
I cannot move and I can barely think. Everything is lost and I am going to die, but I can feel the flows outside like a distant memory, flavors I once knew, so many souls I would once have so easily crushed.
Lost.
So little need be done. I am madness, but so little is required. What will it profit me, but then what will it not? Why would I not? Please, I speak to myself, the strong part to the weak part, the weak part to the strong part, you owe this to me. You did this to me.
You did this to me!
I am strong enough, for now, the part of me that is less dying than the rest. I reach out, untrammelled by the shielding field in the air, using the dying mind of Mr. Ruins. The EMR wall doesn't block him, Carrolla is not watching for him, because they don't know about the bridge.
EMRs can't stop the bridge. Nothing I've ever seen can stop the bridge.
Through Mr. Ruins I reach into the air, and with what strength I have tamper with a few tiny flows in the mind of the man called Carrolla, who is already primed to act and just needing a tiny, final push.
The EMR dies, and I tip back into myself like a soul dropped off the tsunami wall. For an instant only I am terrified at the vast profusion of inflow coming from my ears, my eyes, my nose, my body. After the stifling swaddling of Mr. Ruins' madness this is like being reborn, welcomed back to my own body with sickening pain in my hands.
The scents of sweat and vomit and blood rush in, the ebbing thump thump of this great aortal machine fills me up to the brim. It was only moments I was stuck inside Mr. Ruins, but I've almost forgotten what having a mind and a body is like. I've forgotten senses, input and output.
This is what having a body is, I remember. This is what being alive really means.
Then I reach out, through the broken EMR shield, and I Lag the room. Four men drop to the floor. I guide Carrolla over, and he uses the shears to cut my plastic bonds. I slide myself carefully out of the machine, out of the wheezing embrace of that rotting predator Mr. Ruins, and look up into my old friend's blank face. I release him.
Carrolla sags. I sag.
"Rit?" he says, blinking, looking around. He is older than when we last met, supping Arcloberry over Calico-way, but he is still Carrolla. I feel the old vivacity in him, still shining beneath the hardening effect constant fear of the Don has had on him. He has a family now, a girl he settled with, a bar they converted to a restaurant, a graysmithy to run. He is still the same Carrolla, but a grown man.
"How the fuck did you do that?" he asks.
"Lock the door," I say, "we've got work to do."
We do it. Carrolla pinions the four of them while I work, settles the unseeing, unfeeling body of Mr. Ruins back into his wheelchair, dabs potent CSF like alcohol on my butchered hands.
"It's all your equipment," he says, pointing around at the EMR and the walls stocked with graysmith cupboards. "They took it all, had me set it up. I've been coming here ever since. I hate it, but he pays well. Rit, goddamn, it's good to see you."
He embraces me, and I'm present enough to smile and hug him back. This feels good. It makes me want to cry. I really want to hug my wife. I want to hold my children.
"Pull them out," I tell him, holding up my scarecrow hand of nails. "Did they keep my fingers?"
"I don't know," he says.
"I'll find out."
I do, diving the man nearest me. They did. They're in a medical fridge on the second under-floor of Don Zachary's bunker, alongside a hundred other fingers. Preserved for the day the Don wants to use them, to make an offer some soul can't refuse.
I reach wider through the bonds, and feel there are thousands of minds around us. It is a simple winnowing to pluck out and Lag every one that was close to the Don, that was ever warned of me or knew about my family, that would ever have authority to subvert the Don on suspicion of influence.
It tires me and it fuels me. While Carrolla uses the shears like pliers to suck the nails out of my hands, I dive the Don and twist him completely to my side. I twist all his men. I make myself the god of their little world, and through their minds I see what their little world has become.
Bigger.
The skulks were not enough for Don Zachary, so he's been arming himself. For a decade he's been smuggling in skirmish-class weaponry and sucking up ex-skirmishers to wield it. I see the role I have played in it, by taking refuge in Calico. In part, I am his motivation.
Now his under-skulk bunker has expanded into a vast underwater training camp and barracks, where an army of honed marines train daily with all manner of ordinance, with mind-bombs and a fleet of subglacics, with dry-ice bombs and gasbursts, and most of all with quakeseeds.
Only the top rank of his generals know about that. The discovery of it embedded deep within a tissue of secrecy and locks, like sick pollen at the heart of a flower, stuns me.
Quakeseeds could end the world.
That thought should terrify me, but I am beyond terror. I am racing to Lag every shred of my existence and any single link from me to my family, and that is the priority now. All of it must go. I brush back along Mr. Ruins' trail, along the Don's, erasing it all.
When it is done I open my eyes in another room, lying back on a bench under bright white lights while a doctor begins the long work of re-attaching my fingers. Carrolla is by my side, his concerned face still ripe with disbelief.
"Why is all this happening?" he asks. "Why are they helping you, Rit?"
He's the only one not under my direct influence. I love him for it.
"Get out of here, Carrolla," I whisper. "You can walk out with your family, and they'll never come for you again, I promise. You need to get out. Please."
"What happened?" he asks again. "I don't know how you did any of this."
So I tell him. I tell him all of it, while the doctor begins to knit the bone of my thumb back to my hand. I tell him every horrible torment Mr. Ruins put me through, and every wonderful revelation I earned in spite of that. I tell him about Loralena and my children, and he listens. He cries, because he is a father too, because he knows the pain of bringing any danger to them, and he holds my hand while tears run down his face.
"God, I'm sorry Rit."
"I'm sorry," I tell him. "Now go get your wife. You take care of them. Go back to Calico and make a new restaurant there. Have a drink for me."
He nods. He knows he has to go. I am so sorry to see the back of him. I love the big lunk. I want him to stay, but I have no right.
The minute he walks out the door I start to Lag him. I do it so there is no pain or confusion, only one step at a time, so he forgets first me, then once he has his family, a rambunctious red-headed woman and two fiery boys, he forgets why he is even there. He leads them out of the bunker, and when they are off the Don's skulk, he forgets that he was there at all.
All he'll remember of me is our last meeting, ten years ago. I haven't the spirit to erase that too. I don't want to make him a different man. I can't stand to be so completely forgotten.
The doctor is working on the second finger. I am so weary, but I have to stay awake. Everything is in motion around me, I'm sure I've seen to it all, but the fear that I will wake up again helpless, unable to think and trapped within an EMR shield, terrifies me.
I passed through the aetheric bridge again. I cannot fathom that for moments, seconds only, I was inside the middle of Mr. Ruins' flagging consciousness, wreathed in death and disarray, and through him I reached out.
It is an impossibility I've never considered before. It bends any laws of thought I once knew. It is a power I cannot begin to fathom.
I force myself awake through the work on my third finger, and the fourth. For some reason re-attaching the little finger of my left hand is the worst of all, and I can't stop myself from wailing out.
Around me I feel the Don's barracks continue as normal. To him I am an honored guest, and he loves me. All his men love me. I shoved that love roughly into every hole I cut in their memories, certain there would be no gaps this time for the Don to find.
It is an awful, rapacious theft, and it sickens me. What I have done is vile and violent, but then these are vile and violent men, They were going to kill me, they threatened to hurt my family. But I am the predator here. I have shown them that.
I am also prey.
My head is so foggy with bonds cut and bonds forged, with memories come and gone, with the bridge to Mr. Ruins still being open, and I know there is something I still need to do, but I cannot stay awake any longer. I need to know who the people are hunting me, I need to know what Mr. Ruins knows, but I can't walk the bridge again. I am beyond empty. I am alone.
I sleep.
Don Zachary is there when I wake up. This is what I wanted. The men around us are the men who were cutting off my fingers before. Now they love me, even if they don't know why. Perhaps it would even last, if I stayed, and was good. If I bedded in the new engrams. I could rule here.
So power corrupts.
"Breakfast," I say to one, because speaking is easier than working the bonds. My mind is a morass of scar tissue, healing. The man leaves, and I turn to the Don.
"You're building an army," I say to him.
He shrugs. "I've built one."
"To take Calico."
"To start with Calico. But I've got bigger plans than that. Who says the skirmishes really have to be over? What does their détente matter to me?"
I mull this. I am glad the skirmishes are over, and I don't want them to start again. I wonder if it would not be better to fully cut this man from the cloth of life completely. The détente is good.
"And the quakeseeds?"
He gives a sly smile. "Hard to get hold of. Ten years to source enough to make a global killer tsunami, bigger even than the one that tossed the godships."
His pleasure at this thought rankles like a bad smell. The godship tsunami killed billions. It saw the end of the old world order, destroying every coastal city in the world and smashing their infrastructure to dust. There was literally nothing but wreckage left.
Out of that chaos came the skirmishes, as every group that was left alive, bits of the old Aleut nation, proto-Rusk, Armorica, scrambled for the one near-untouched resource remaining. The desert oils were too hard to tap, the waves, wind and sun still not powerful enough to fuel a boom, nuclear too unreliable with the increasing number of earth-shaking events, so hydrates under the ice became the goal.
The whole world turned to it. I fought in the dying days of that war, when the worst atrocities were already committed.
I look into Don Zachary's eyes. His hunger to rule over that world is palpable. The thought of such chaos, in which the person best prepared and most ruthless would be able to rise supreme, excites him.
And with quakeseeds, lo
ng banned by mutual consent of every major power in the skirmishes for fear of mutually assured destruction, he can do it. Sown in the ocean floor, they tap the planet's core and result in volcanic events too powerful for any standard reckoning scale to fathom.
They would start a global-killer tsunami that goes round the world five times and keeps on going, rubbing and scrubbing until every mark of civilization above the waves is gone, leaving the world ripe for the Don to crawl out into and rule.
I can't allow that, so I Lag it all. Not a soul in this bunker will even remember the quakeseeds exist. I have just saved the world.
I eat my breakfast.
Some time after that, after the doctor checks the bandages on my hands, after I've showered off all the puke and dust and blood, after I've put on new clothes and am feeling almost human again, I settle down in a chair looking into Mr. Ruins vacant eyes, and prepare to dive him again.
SO C
The Sunken World is moving. It shifts and plunges, turns and involutes, and the only way So can render it as a map is with the movements built in, a kind of scrolling, shifting image of great complexity, with ripple effects that trigger other ripples in a constant swirl of Brownian motion.
"Essentially, it's rotting," she says to Doe and Ray, when the model is built. They are standing at the peak of this mud hill, outlined in their stark mud-spattered black uniforms against the tortured dark skies. Only moments ago they were in a private conference on blood-mic, lieutenants conferring, and So thinks she knows what about.
Me, and Far. Thinking about them being missing scares her. She's still cold and wet, and that scares her too, but she's a marine and marines don't show that kind of fear. They don't run for their lives, despite what her new uniform says. They stand and fight.
"So it's deflating?" Ray asks, interrupting So's thoughts. "Like a rotten pumpkin?"
"Yes, but not only that," So goes on. She fires some graphics to all the chord, simplified, because the full simulation is too much for their HUDs to render. "First you see the rotting, which is yes, a kind of compacting downward, or inward, like the flat plane of a galaxy pulled by entropy and gravity."
King Ruin: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 2) Page 5