it roars, a thick black jet of aerosolized mud blasting up from the whiplash-torn gouge. From La's position interwoven amongst Ti's limbs, it seems like a pillar to the sky, as thick around as the screw-room and growing wider, as more muck erupts from the crack in the earth. In seconds it is as long as the Bathyscaphe, then as long as the mud-hill they climbed out of, then it is a tsunami wall in its own right, made of screaming mud and rising
"La, Ti!" Ray shouts over blood-mic. La spins to see him already on his feet and running toward them from the black road. The canyon has split them off from him by an impassable gap, and already the up-surging tide has almost cut him out of sight. Doe is too far away, and La knows if they do not have Ray, they may as well be dead.
Another roar shakes the ground, and the line of the rising wave spits wider, cutting off all sign of Ray like a curtain drawn across the forging pods. There is no way he can reach them, as the violent blast of mud ripples out along the lash-whipped canyon. The geyser-wall's peak is already so high La can barely discern it, so much force and weight it would crumple Ray back upon himself.
"Get down," Doe shouts. La sees her running over to them, her shoulder-cannon pointing upward. Any moment, La thinks, all of that is going to fall and bury us. Any minute.
They need Ray. She turns to Ray, and does the first thing she can think of, the first thing Me did when he was trying to save her, when she was buried by Napoleonic hordes who were circling closer to So and Far.
She tongues her grapnel to heat-seek, then shoots it directly into the torrent of rising mud. There can be no way of knowing where or how it will make contact, but she can be certain that if it does not, they will all fall.
THUNK
It connects, she pings the lever to recoil, and only at the last moment does she realize that Ray is heavier than her, and she is anchored to absolutely nothing.
The recoil kicks in and hauls her off her feet and upward. Carried by the upsurge, the line draws her away from Ti, away from Doe, flying directly toward the tearing wall, so close she can feel its reverberation in the air. It will snap her in apart in seconds, and in the next second she must cut the grapnel or die. She has to cut the line and forsake Ray, or she'll be lost to the chord as well.
But they are a chord, together. They will always be a chord.
It is a split-second only, but there is no decision to make. There is no time to shout back and tell Ti what to do, but Ti must know, because La did. So is gone already, and she won't lose another note.
THUNK
Scant meters from impact with the churn of the geyser-wall, the blow crunches through her shoulder and rips her to a halt. For a moment she hangs like a kite caught on a branch, torn between two forces, then something gives.
"Hang on, La," Ti shouts through blood-mic. La cranes her neck to see backward, her twin standing on the mud-plain with the grapnel rifle in her arms and the wire shooting up, Doe wrapped around her legs as anchorage.
Looking down at her chest, she sees the black-metal claw of the grapnel jutting out and spreading across her breast and arm. The suit has sealed her internally, the pain is sharp and sudden but the HUD warnings are purple and not red, so perhaps she's going to make it.
"I'm here," she says, barely audible over the crush of the mud. "I'm here."
With a startling yank, Ti's grapnel begins to winch her back. The strain redoubles as her own grapnel continues winching in Ray, then the line gets painfully taut as her rifle's line suddenly yanks upward.
"Hold on Ray!" she shouts. He must be bodily in the upsurge now and shooting up fast. She can't hold onto the rifle with her hands, so lets the straps on her suit take the strain. For one terrifying moment she fears she'll be torn apart by the two lines, then the pressure relents, and far overhead a dark pin-wheeling figure pops out of the mud wall.
And falls. La falls too.
"You got me," comes Ray's voice on blood-mic. She can just make out her grapnel shot through his upper thigh. Then she hears the
SLOOSH
of Doe's bondless cannon below, and she hits the mud and sinks. It is soft and de-atomized, enough to cushion her fall. She kicks at it and tries to swim, aligning her body to the direction of the grapnel tug, and away from the point where Ray will fall.
She feels his splash down more than she hears it, a backwash through the mud. Then she is out, Ti QCs down her HUD, and she locks hold on to Ti and Doe to anchor the raising of Ray.
He comes up flapping and gasping, one arm locked at a bizarre angle behind his back.
"I'm barely conscious," comes Ray's voice faintly. "Arm and leg broken by the surge. The suit couldn't take it."
Ti docks in to his chest-plate with her own shock-jack and begins a flow of blood, adrenaline, plasma, whatever he might need. At the same time Doe is standing and turning her cannon again to the sky.
"La get here and brace me," she says. "The wave's about to crest."
La looks up and sees she is right. Already the flow of the great wall has slowed, and the top is beginning to mushroom outward. To fall.
La's mouth goes dry. "We'll be buried."
"We won't," says Doe, and drops to one knee, setting the haft of the bondless cannon into the mud, shadowing the prone forms of Ti and Ray. Protecting them. "Now get over here."
La jerks to her feet, the pain in her breast forgotten, and kneels next to Doe, straddling Ray's broken leg. She wraps one arm around Doe's waist, and with the other draws her own QC parabolic. On the other side Doe does the same, and they point their weapons up at the mud.
"Thank you," Ray manages, from between them. "La. You almost shot me in the junk. So close."
"Just don't move," Doe cautions. "Nobody move. We'll ride this out."
"Couldn't move if I wanted to," Ray gasps. "I think both my legs are broken, actually."
Then the first falling clots of mud strike, the bondless cannon fires gold-dusted particles fritzing out, the QCs pulse, and the onslaught begins.
La fires into it. Doe fires into it. The chord holds together, braced as one, while the wave descends around them.
It goes on a long time, a vast earthfall barely shredded by their weapons. De-atomized mud rains around and amongst them, while at every side the matter thunders down and stacks up like a roofless igloo on every side. La hugs to Doe, and they ride it out together.
Then it ends.
La wakes from the furor into a sudden silence, punctuated by the fervent click of her QC trigger, shooting nothing into the sky. The rain has ended, just as her weapon's store of particles has run dry.
She lets the useless parabolic drop from her hand.
"Doe," she says, but there is no pick-up on blood-mic. She loosens her grip on Doe's waist, and clicks back and forth to receive, but no sound comes. There is no sound in her HUD, the internal speakers ruptured by the endless torrent. She blinks and looks around. Steep black walls rise all around them like a well. They are at the bottom of a vertical crater.
Beneath her, half-buried in a low sludge of mud fizzing with maggots, are Ray and Ti, looking up at her with pale faces.
"Are you alright?" she mouths at them. It seems too soon to take off her helmet.
Ti nods. Ray mouths something similar to, "Fucking hell."
Then Doe is rising, sucking out of La's mud-slathered grip. She unslings the accelerator and drops it to the side, draws her grapnel-rifle in its place, sets it to spread anchor, and fires up the slope. A net of grapnel points spreads out, circles the top of the narrow crater-mouth, and begins to draw.
Doe lifts up. Looped in her arm is one of the other grapnel wires. Already the steeply sloping walls of the crater-cone are beginning to slide inward.
La tongues her suit for painkillers, then turns to Ray.
"Brace yourself."
The grapnel catches on La's chest and she is pulled upward against the loosening crater wall, dragging out a thick snarl of muck. The pain in her chest is sharp and thin, makes her breath come in short little pants. P
erhaps she punctured a lung.
At the top Doe pulls her over the edge, and she helps to reel in Ray, then Ti in close succession.
Doe has her helmet off, and La follows suit. There is a rush in her ears still, like the slow churn of the Molten Core in the screw room, but she can just make out what Doe is saying as she points off to the side.
La looks. The landscape has altered completely, the road of the dead gone, the hill they had climbed out of gone, with different rotten buildings poking their heads up through the mire. The only constant is the stone pyramid covered in mud, perhaps a fathom away.
And in the distance, swelling and rolling like magnetic currents in the Molten Core, is another tsunami wave of mud. It could almost be the horizon line, but for the shifting swells and troughs in the breaking line.
"The frozen ones have come unstuck," Doe shouts over the auditory rush. "We have to run."
"Ritry fucking Goligh," Ray swears. He is lying on his back still, with his HUD off, and La can see at a glance that he can't walk. He can't even move. His dark face is pale with shock and pain. "You'll have to carry me."
Doe nods, and begins to slough off weaponry. "Too heavy," she says. "Leave it all."
La snaps the grapnel wire off the latch in her chest and the one through Ray's leg, then starts shedding all her scientific equipment. The Durance packs she keeps, the medical pack and blocks of candlewax, but everything else non-essential she drops.
Ti and Doe do the same. Already the wave has covered a quarter of the distance between them.
"She shot me in the leg," Ray sings feebly, his voice loose and warbly, high on the shock-jacks, "and she didn't even know my name."
Doe drops to one knee, then grips Ray underneath his shoulders. La and Ti take him by one hip each, and then they hoist.
Ray laughs. "That tickles," he says.
The women lift him to their shoulders, and begin to run for the pyramid.
At the side, the sweeping wave draws near.
They fall into a pattern, like a galloping horse, while Ray talks to them about the shapes he can see in the sky.
"That's Me looking happy," he says, "not too frequent. That's Me looking serious. He always looks so serious, don't you think?"
La doesn't have the heart to tell him to be quiet. He's injured, high, and he's part of the chord.
The pyramid is near, its great oblong blocks half-submerged in mud, and wriggling with white maggots. They must be drawn by the activity, La thinks. Old mold and lichen frost the pyramid's exterior green and purple, all daubed with a clinging crust of wind-blown mud.
The wave is nearer.
"Drop me," says Ray.
"Never," says Doe.
They run on. The mud is like molasses underfoot, slipping and unctuous.
"La, get us in," Doe orders. "Break off, that's an order."
"Understood," says La, and lets go of Ray. Her sister grunts to take his weight, but continues on.
La runs ahead. In moments she outstrips them by far, and moments later she reaches the pyramid's base. It feels good to have solid stone underfoot, but the relief lasts only seconds, as she scans the pyramid surface.
There is no way in.
She turns to the tsunami wave, runs a quick calculation, and knows there will be no time to find one. It has to be here or nowhere, but there is no entrance here.
So she'll make one.
The candlewax is pliable and slick with mud, easy to wedge into the vertice where the steps meet. She has no time for more fuse than an arms' length, which she sets, sparks, and then hurls herself for cover.
BOOM
The pyramid vibrates, then she's on her feet again and picking through the debris of broken stone and dust, scattered around the blasted dark mouth in the structure's side like a scraggly beard. Doe and Ti are nearly there, juggling Ray between them. Fast on their heels comes the deep bass rumble of the tsunami wall.
La ducks in. It is dark, but there is an inside, a musty and dark corridor leading left to right. She twists off a slim thread of candlewax, affixes it to the ceiling several feet within the entrance, then leads back to it with fuse.
She starts it burning before the others even breach the entrance. The spark flares away, and then they are in and running. Ray cries out as his broken limbs scrape off the walls and ceiling. The roar of the tsunami is upon them, and La picks up at her sister's side, hefting Ray and running into darkness.
BOOM
The candlewax blows behind them, and the sound is amplified a hundredfold within the contained space. The percussive shock knocks La into a wall, giving her a brief HUD-light glimpse of nonsensical patterns carved into the stone. Then the tsunami strikes above and all around, and the pyramid thrums a low bass note, which Ray matches.
But the rubbled entrance holds.
Along with Doe and Ti, La drops to kneel on the dusty floor, plugs her shock-jacks into Ray's suit, and holds to the others tight in the darkness, while the flood storms on overhead.
SKIRMISHER E
Time passes in silence, disturbed only by the steady movements of my crew. Many of them are sleeping, where I sent them. It is easier to keep a leash upon them that way.
Hours have passed, and no sign of pursuit has come. All comms to the skulks and other ships were cut from the moment we left the bunker-bay. I haven't thought my way beyond the walls of this hull since ordering Don Zachary's suicide.
I sit in the captain's hutch, my head in my hands. It aches, some kind of migraine. I already took Helicomol to tamp it down, but still it hammers like an Arcloberry hangover. I can still feel the shredding, as Don Zachary's bunker was torn apart and everyone inside died.
The skulks may have gone too, I don't know. The quakeseed was ratcheted as low as I could make it, but it was still a quakeseed. Could it have broken down the tsunami wall? Could I have just destroyed Calico, and along with it extinguished my wife and children?
I don't know. The pain throbs and hammers. I am not worth this much, I think. I should not have fought. I should have gone quietly, and so many men, women, and children would still be alive. At times though I swing the other direction, and try to mount a defense. Perhaps this is wholly a good thing, killing a bunker full of ex-skirmishers and Black-Hawks who were planning to murder the world.
At each swing, the noose constricts a little tighter around my neck, and I feel myself sink, hating my pathetic efforts to rationalize. It was Don Zachary's plan, and most of the skirmishers I touched knew nothing of it. They were not good men, but few of them had dreamed of genocide, yet I killed them so I might escape.
So I might see my family again. And who am I to weigh their lives in the balance?
It doesn't feel good. There's a bottle of subglacic vodka on the captain's table before me, a glass fully poured, but I haven't touched it. For ten years I never touched a drop, but for the year that followed it was all I lived for. Battered in the skulks, it was my refuge, the last hole of a lost and broken man.
It calls to me now.
We are cruising slow and low, far beneath the subglacic's operating depth. The metal around me groans and squeals to reflect that. Heclan always told me these ships could take far more pressure than they were gauged for, but what does that mean now? Why am I even trying to hide?
I laugh.
"Who the fuck are you?" I ask out loud. "Who the fuck?"
One of the Don's men comes in. His face shows mild confusion.
"Sir?" he asks.
"Who the fuck are you?" I ask him.
"Uh, Algehriel, sir," he says.
"What is that, old-Alab?"
"Mohammen," he says. "Of the Durai plains."
It doesn't mean anything to me. "You fought in the desert skirmishes, a sand-man," I say, and he nods. "Were you looking forward to blowing up the whole world?"
He looks at me blankly. "Sir?"
"Don Zachary's quakeseeds, were you looking forward to surfing the global killer wave around the world?"
A gentle frown creases his forehead. He must be around my age. I sense he left three children behind in the bunker, all by different women, each long gone. This man cared for them, reluctantly, but he did. He took a job with the Don to pay for them. He is not a bad man, perhaps he is what I might have been. The quakeseeds were never part of his plan.
Did I really kill his family?
I rest my head in my hands. I can't get any consolation this way. I can't help this man, and I can't get his forgiveness. What then should I say?
"I'm sorry," I tell him.
"Sorry for what, sir?" he asks.
I haven't the heart to say. I am too much the coward to say. I should lift the bond of compulsion off him and let him kick me to pieces, but I'd probably not be able to. I am too weak to lay back, too soft to surrender. I would fight back, and I'd win, and I'd only hurt him more.
What the fuck kind of person am I?
"Just go," I say.
He does, and I hear his footsteps clack back to the con. Probably he'll stand there for a few minutes now, wondering what he ought to do next. I'm having a hard time keeping hold of all these minds.
"Go to bed," I call out down the hall.
A moment passes. "Me, sir?"
"Go to sleep," I repeat. "You're tired."
Another moment, then he clacks away. Perhaps he was the last. I'm too tired to reach out and see. I'm too tired to get up and go look. I think of the subglacic captain who foundered his own vessel, all because his lieutenant didn't love him back.
How many thousands have I just killed?
I can't escape from it, can't hide from it. I did it, and it was real. I was callous and cold, and I sent every order. I planned it before I even reached out through the bonds. On some level, I knew I was going to do it, if I had to, as though that compulsion is some kind of excuse.
A year alone on the skulks has changed me. Mr. Ruins has made me a different man. I was such a fool to hope I could see my family again, so childish to think happiness could ever come to such as me.
I have fucked it all up.
If Mr. Ruins was with me now, sucking air through his tube, his pulse metered by his artificial womb, I would punch in every fucking bone in his face, because I have hurt too many of the wrong people. I would hurt him even more to make it right, and I wouldn't care that that made no difference. I'd only care afterward, when the massive futility of it settled on me like polluted gray snow.
King Ruin: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 2) Page 8