He shrugs. "Someone has to. Why not me?"
It hardly seems an answer. I turn my reattached right hand before me. The fingers are just beginning to feel again. The healing process was sped along by DNA-tinted microbials injected along the wound-lines, a level of tech I only ever saw used in the graysmithy for suturing minds. These germs are related, bearing simplified engrams that teach the localized cells how to do everything faster.
The scars are there, but sealing. In fact my fingers are better than they were before, after a year of beating beaten on skulk 12, straightened out and with the cracks smoothed out. My ribs feel stronger too, old breaks repaired by the doctor, as does my nose, which was horribly disjointed, and my teeth, many of which had been battered out.
Under the ocean, in an observation room off the main battle halls, we sit and look out at the gloomy under-skulk waters. It is mostly spores afloat like ash, drifting amongst tendrils of seaweed, lit by floodlights picking out some of the Don's fleet of subglacics. He has scoured the world to gather all these old boats in; repurchased, rebuilt, or found after foundering.
This bunker is his ark, and with these ships he would cow anyone left after the flood.
"Is that enough of a reason?" I ask him. "Would you kill the world to do it?"
"The world's been killed a dozen times before," he says. "What's one more, if it's the last? I'll set things up correctly, so it needn't happen again."
"In your image."
"Can you think of a better one? It could be better looking, of course."
I chuckle. I think I would like Don Zachary, if he were not so evil. My ten years on skulk 47 were fair and peaceable. There was no crime to speak of, despite the freedom under the law, because the Don's will was law, and he was fair.
"I need to find someone," I tell him, "but I don't know how. Someone's hunting me, and I don't have any way to hunt them back."
He grunts. "Like Ouroboros."
I consider this. The worm that eats its tail.
"He hunts you, and you hunt him," the Don adds. "Like a circle. I've been there many times, when I was first banned from Calico."
I turn to look at him. I never knew this about him. "You were banned?"
He laughs. "Of course, Ritry. Why do you think I started the skulks? They tried to scrape me off a thousand times, but the wall's a long place, and they were dealing with rebuilding too. They were always hunting me, and I was always trying to stay one step ahead, so I had to know where they were, and what they were looking for."
I try to picture the Don racing from point to point around the wall, setting up skulks like lean-to villages, fixed to temporary mooring points drilled into the concrete. I suppose he was young then, perhaps idealistic, probably rapacious. Maybe he thought he was saving the world, or building a new one. I don't doubt he clung on like a limpet.
"I always just imagined you fully formed," I say. "Master of the skulks."
He laughs. "I was young once, like you. The trick when you're hunting in a circle like that, is to play the bluff."
"What bluff?"
He leans back in his chair, settling in to his role as benevolent father figure. "Underestimation. It's the only way to win, but to win big you have to lose big. It's simple really- you lead them in to ground you've prepared, then you lose. You lose so everyone can see, and you make it look real, by making it real. It has to hurt, so they'll believe it's the final hurt. They have to think they've really put you down and exhausted your limits."
"But they haven't," I say.
He clicks his fingers. "Exactly. You only lose what you can afford to, so they underestimate you. You make a huge sacrifice, but you keep enough aside to build again in their blind spot, then you smash them to pieces."
He smiles, and I match his smile. I do like him. "Like all this," I say. "You built an army, and who knows?"
He taps his nose. "Only you and me, Ritry, old friend. Only you and me."
I feel badly that I have lied. To have his affection through this kind of pretense is false. But then, a day ago he was hammering nails into my hand, so perhaps it comes even.
"So how do you know where to prepare the ground?" I ask.
"Work," he says. "Hard graft. You get men inside, and if you can't get men inside, you kill men inside and have your own men replace them. If you can't kill men inside, you wait until they come outside- they always do- where you pump all you can out of them, then you kill them." He holds up his right hand. "It's where I first learned about how badly a rusting nail hurts under the skin."
I see jagged scar lines along the base of each of his fingers. "The mayor of Calico back then was a hard man," he goes on, "and he taught me this. Scars didn't heal so neatly then as they do now. Naturally, I nailed him by the fingers to his own fucking wall."
I nod. "Naturally."
"Now I have an agreement with the new mayor. Everybody benefits."
I consider. The Don is a criminal genius, after all. "Work," I murmur.
"Work," he repeats.
I sit again with Mr. Ruins, looking into his dead eyes. I hate this bastard. Still I hold his hands. I get into the rhythm of his pulse, monitored by the machines. I get into synchrony with the deep thrum of his cocooned mind.
This is high-risk. I Lagged every link between Mr. Ruins and myself that I could think of, cutting them off at the root. He cut all my ties himself, and I cut any more that I made afterward.
But many remain, out there in the world. To find them is hard and dangerous work. I'll have to reach out through the aether, making traces of my own while I search. They'll be slight, barely visible, lines of thought only and not experience, but they might be found.
I prepare for that eventuality too.
Then I dive, outward.
His trail back through space and time is ragged where I have cut it. Almost all of the last year is gone, chopped with the axe-head precision of my anger. There are glimpses of him only, in the weeks he was not with my family in the Reach, when he was at large in Calico, sometimes on the skulks, but nothing concrete.
He met with no one of apparent significance. I feel nothing unusual, no men on the inside whom I can follow and track. So I reach wider, stretching out of the Don's bunker to track his fading pattern back through time.
Ten years elapsed since I told him never to come see me again, in CANDYLAND. The beginning and end of that time are cut off, wherever I was involved, but most everything in between remains, growing fainter with age.
I follow him back. When he wasn't watching me, he voyaged beyond the confines of the Calico isthmus, to the shores of proto-Rusk and across those Siberic wheat-fields, down through the old Aleut nation, over the broad expanse of the Auropan tundra, stopping in various great ruined cities to reminisce on times gone by.
On the isle of Elba, now a desert atoll barely poking its rocky tuft above the salty tides of the Mediterrane, he languished and lolled in the memory of Napoleon's anguish. It is a powerful memory still, stretched out over the thousands of miles, but in it he is alone.
His trail leads further back, and I follow, tracking him from the bitter mountain coasts of New Armorica down to the island chains of Abindian. Atop the Himalay archipelago he bedded down with Pidgin tribes come aboard to hunt stork, and regaled them with tales of how he led a hundred mountain climbers astray with dreams of their lovers voices in the snow and dark. He told them of the items he stole from each, a snow-axe here, a necklace, a crampon.
In the ruined towers of Jodhpur, he sat with monkeys amidst the arboreal jungle canopy and ticked off the number of pilgrims who had come to sacrifice their girl-children for him in days gone by, believing he would bring them boys. He knew the names of dozens, kept a snippet of their birth-clothes in a chest, over which he knelt and warmed himself as though from hot coals.
I begin to glimpse what this trip is, and come to understand better what I was to be.
Trophies, all. I would have been just another trophy in his case, like the misery of Na
poleon, to keep him warm in the long dark furloughs in his hunt.
I sink further back still, immersing myself in years of travels from sites of war and pestilence to natural disasters, at all of which he worked some manner of enslavement, plying strength from the suffering of others, storing mementoes all about. Here a scrap of leathered scalp, a broken spear-point, the unfinished novel of a genius stymied by his touch.
It is a victory lap of past glory, sad in its faded sting. I feel him feeding off the relics of things he'd done, like a ghoul. All these once belonged to him, and I was to belong to him too.
But I see nothing to help me. In all of these memories, he is alone. There are no trails that cross his that mean a thing to me, no sign of others like us.
Further still I reach, until the paths are so misty with hoar and time I can barely discern them. I dive the full ten years back, stretching myself gossamer thin, until I am with him standing outside the shark arena on skulk 53, contemplating the web he would spin, to entrap me.
I am cut out of it, as is the Don, but still I watch his ghost murder the Don's son, holding him close while the garroting wire works its slow magic. I watch him afterward, once the corpse has been dressed and used to ensnare me,, carrying the body out to sea in a boat of his own.
Along the tide-drifted wafts of his trail, I follow, to an abandoned jut of rock in the mid-Allatanc, surrounded by ancient rusted hydrate-rigs. There he pulls into a natural culvert in the rock, and carries the Don's dead son into a tunnel bored into the rock. There I lose him, but there's something else in the air around him, something sharp and bittersweet and faintly redolent of pain.
A frame. It is a vast frame of a vast experience, with the sense of other minds like my own around it, surrounding it. I diffuse my focus to better sense them, as though hunting movement through peripheral vision, and they leap to the fore. A dozen feral scents bloom all around like the stink of shark-spoor in the water, predators all.
Hundreds even. I feel them move through the frame smacking their lips, and gain some sense of what happened here. I sense the boundaries of a massive loss radiating out, of a thousand deaths in a genocide so large it should burn like a sun, but instead there is only the frame, with the weight of it gone.
A feast.
They came together here years ago, and they dined. I can feel their sated paths branching out afterward, and among them a single band so thick I know it must be the one that came for me on the train.
It pulses. None of the others pulse, they are all shades only, but not this. It is alive. I approach, touch it, and in that moment see into it like a strike of lightning in my soul. Within I glimpse millennia of suffering, and millennia of rule. I glimpse order and chaos interweaving. I glimpse the fall of empires and the rise of empires, the never-ending turn of the world shot through with the rise and fall of man.
And it sees me.
It is impossible, unlike anything I've felt before, but somehow it grips me. It flails for me, and every second its grip grows stronger. I have reached too far. I feel it rearing back along its own line, its attention bearing down. Fear floods me, and my trail grows thick with it.
I yank and buck like a fish on the hook, tearing my own lips bloody to escape. I Lag my trail, Lag all of my search and my fear, and moments before the thick band opens its eyes upon me, I escape.
I race back to the skulk, back to my own mind, cutting my trail as I go. I open my eyes in the white room, to my own panting in the silence. I lie there terrified and adrift, trying to understand what I have seen and what I have done. How much of me could it see, and how much does it know? How could it be alive in its past, how could it be waiting for me, and does it know where I went?
I dare not reach out. I barely dare breathe. Have I been found out?
My answer comes within moments, by way of the thunderous applause of bombs going off overhead.
It takes a moment for me to understand what is happening. Disoriented and weakened by reaching so far, I look into Mr. Ruins' deathly face and could almost swear he is smiling.
The room rocks and tumbles, and I am thrown from the bench. Mr. Ruins topples too. In the corridor outside Don Zachary's marines race by, rifles in their hands. There is the ratatatat of heavy artillery from far above, vibrating down through the double-hulls of this tsunami-proof bunker. It is many levels up to the water's surface where marines will be fighting marines, but how long will that take them?
I feel the distant sting of a mind-bomb. Smoke jets out of a busted flue, and I pick myself up. The Don's bunker is under attack. I have brought them here, and here they come.
Down metal hallways suffused with the drumbeat of stamping feet and distant plosive bursts I run, pushing Mr. Ruins ahead of me in his chair. His pulse veers erratically, disconnected from his monitor, but there is no time. Ex-skirmishers storm past me on either side, and like Me at the head of his Bathyscaphe, I turn them all to my control.
They run along behind me, their priorities shifted. They race out down jetties and tubes, carrying through the orders I have already prepared.
More mind-bombs sting from above, but I shield my men as best I can with the weight of others put to the Lag. They falter and pause in a dozen different narrow chutes, and I cycle through setting them back to their tasks.
A gas-burst sprays before me, and I hold my sleeve to my face and run through it. Into the midst drops a black-clad marine, rappelling down from an exploded vent above. He wears one of the same tight-fitting HUDs, his EMR-helmet thumping tinnily through the fractious roar of rifle-fire echoing down from the vent above him.
He slaps the rappelling line out of the way, sights me through the fog, and I shoot him in the head with a Kaos rifle of my own. He sags to hang from his rappel line like a broken toy. I run on, but before I can clear the vent another of them drops out with his rifle already aimed. I dive forward, hammer the stock of my own weapon into his face three times until he goes down, then I fire point-blank into his chest.
He stills.
There are more rushing down from above, and I am back in the battle of my life, Tigrates and Ferrily either side as we make a stand for our subglacic. I've done this before, and I've lived through it before.
I shoot up into the torn-open ceiling vent. I pull in some of the Don's men and have them hurl magnet-bombs into the gap. One more marine drops into our midst, shoots out the belly of a man to my left, then the bomb goes off and fragments him to pink mist. I feel the thick broad beam into his mind dim away.
Running again, I have to hold Mr. Ruins into his chair. The tunnels behind me are wracked with shouts and the bloom of fire, pained bursts of energy through the bonds as men die, then we're at the airlock and there are men to greet us. Strong hands lift Mr. Ruins from his chair and guide him down, and I follow.
A subglacic.
Down the ladder-way I climb, all polished metal and lines of pipes and angular jutments, into the conning tower where I stand and send the commands as Ven once would have done. I crank the EOT to full reverse, then call through the ship-wide communications.
"Disengage clamps, lock the bows, flush the trims, and set us to dive."
Nobody speaks, because there is no need. They have trained on this at Don Zachary's behest for years, and all I need to do is send the simple instruction to activate the skills they have in place.
With a metallic clunk and a hiss of outgas, we are sealed off from the crumpling bunker. I can see it from feeds above and throughout, displayed on the monitors all around the periscope. The whole bunker is ablaze from the top down, the corridors are filled with black-clad marines and smoke, everywhere is gunfire and violence.
"Get him to support," I shout to the waiting medic, pointing at Mr. Ruins, hanging now in a burly man's arms. "Hook him up."
They disappear. The screw grinds up and we begin to pull away. I put my head to the periscope and spin, to see a dozen other subglacics already disengaging and sliding backward.
"All stations brace," I sh
out, "fire!"
From the bellies of a dozen skirmish-era subglacics, hammerhead torpedoes are launched. They strike the bunker berths in seconds, creating a tsunami wave of shock water that flings us all back and out to sea with hull-crumping force. We reel and I barely manage to keep my hands on the periscope.
"Full screw," I shout, and the man at my side cranks the EOT to full. The subglacic roars with its own inner force, fighting the wash of blast-water, and turning us to blast forward and down.
At the same time twelve other ships do the exact same thing, in twelve different directions. I have told them no more than to flee, I won't be able to influence them beyond that after we grow further distant, but for now they will look exactly as our ship does from above.
I cut all my ties but one, to Don Zachary, who is standing in the most secret depths of his bunker, holding the fuse to an almighty weapon. .
Only one is left, vastly diminished.
"I'm sorry," I whisper to him through the bonds. Then I have him trigger a quakeseed.
The resultant blast dwarfs the torpedoes. If we were closer we would be atomized, but the torpedo tsunami flung us enough clear to provide a buffer of water. This next tsunami pulse is the greatest kick in the rear I have ever felt, plucking me off the periscope with ease, barreling me backward into my crew. The whole ship groans as we accelerate faster and harder, shot out like constituent matter from a nuclear blast.
LA D
So bursts like a bag of gas, her constituent parts sprayed out in a black fog. La sees it as she rolls on to her hands and knees, then feels it as the invisible whiplash bond gouges deep into the ground, splitting the muck down to the underlying plate.
CRACK
The sound deafens her even through the HUD, punches the ground into her face, and tosses her backward into her twin Ti. She struggles to right herself, only to see the wave rising.
UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUR
King Ruin: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 2) Page 7