I groan. It comes out of me low and grows, because we are low and slow now, and they haven't found us, but perhaps they should. Perhaps I need to be stopped, because how far will I go? What am I now, if I can't go back to my wife, and now that I am what I am, how can I ever go back to my wife again?
I am a quakeseed in the wind. I am fucking poison to this world. I was born a freak, seven-toned in my abortive womb, and a freak I should die, bombed down to the sea-floor with every mercenary bastard aboard my stolen ship, down to live on the scum-black rime of this ocean's Sunken World.
This is not the world I thought it would be. I am not the man I thought I was.
I pick up the glass of vodka and knock it back. I pour another and do it again, and again.
Let them wake up and mutiny. Let them tie me to the fucking periscope and dive so deep my eyes pop. I don't care. I didn't ask for this, and I don't want it anymore.
Goodbye Loralena, goodbye Art, goodbye Mem. I loved you so much, and now I have to go. I can bring you nothing but pain, and I cannot stand to do that again.
Goodbye.
Rocking, rocking. I am in the darkness, surrounded by the chord. They are each distinct, their forms gathered around my body as I lie splayed across the floor of the captain's hutch.
They are watching me, and I know I have let them down. I have let Far down. Me looks down at me with pity. In Doe, so influenced by Ven, there is contempt.
"He's given up," she says.
"I understand," says Ray. He's kneeling by my side, his ghostly touch on my brow. "I feel for him. He's lost everything, even who he thinks he is."
"He has us," Doe says.
"He is us," say La and Ti at the same time.
I want to reach up and hug them. I want to beg for their help.
"Help me," I want to say, but I can't make any sound. "Please. I don't know what to do."
"He's weak," says Doe. "It means we're weak."
"We've always been weak," says So. "Can you only see that now?"
Ray looks up. "He's a man, only. That's all."
So shakes her head. "He was supposed to be more. He was supposed to make himself more."
"But he can't," says Doe.
They stand as though at a funeral, and the anguish of their sadness hurts me worse than anything.
"It means we're weak too," says Doe again. There are now tears in her eyes, as she looks to Ray. "So's right. It means I'm weak at the core."
"You're not weak," says Ray. He stands up and reaches out to her, but she pushes him away.
"I am," she insists. "If all I'm built on is this, then what am I? Push me enough and I'll crack too. What is that? How can I go on, knowing this is what's at the Core?"
"I died for him," says La. "I threw myself on their bayonets, for this."
"I died in the screw room," says Ti, "for him."
"I died in the outer ring," says So, "and this is his repayment."
"I'm sorry," I want to sob. "It's not what I wanted. I've let you all down."
"He's nothing," says So, and turns away. She disappears. Ray shakes his head, full of pity and sadness, then he too leaves. Ti and La follow, sobbing now, hand in hand. Last of all is Doe, disbelief in her eyes.
"Will you really do this to us?" she asks. "We fought for you from the beginning. We kept you alive. Would you do this to us now?"
Then she too is gone, and I am alone with Far.
His eyes burn with anger. I look into them and feel afraid.
"I am no part of this," he says. He points at the vodka bottle smashed on the floor by my side, the smear of blood where I have ground my hand against a fragment of glass. There is congealing spit leaking from my slack mouth. "This is not what we are, Ritry."
I start to sob, though my figure on the floor doesn't make a sound.
"This is not our Core," he says. "Don't you think I know our Core better than any? I built it. We built it together before we could even think. The others don't know because they weren't there, but we were, Ritry! We were there. We Lagged them all, when we were nothing but a gleam beneath all the scars they heaped us with. We killed all our mothers and our fathers, because we deserved a chance at life. And more are coming now, so what? We'll be ready. What are you crying for? Why are you sniveling? This is not the time to ask for forgiveness. Now is the time to roll out with all the fury in the world. Now is the time to make those fuckers pay. Do you understand me?"
I can barely breathe for my tears.
"Far," I say. "Far."
"I'm right here," he says. "I'm not leaving you Ritry. I never will"
I want to pull him close, but I can't move. This sullen boy, this broken boy, this boy that killed and saved us all, I want to hug him but I can't move.
Instead he lies down at my back. He wraps his arms around me, and presses his cheek against my shoulder.
"I'm here, Ritry," he says. "I'm always here."
The sobs well up and out of me like a geyser. I can't stop them. I am not alone.
In the flicker of the hutch's strip-lights I wake hard, and now my head is really throbbing. Thank the Lag I don't need to puke. I push myself up, feeling the sting in my left hand where the broken glass grazed it.
This pain is alright, because I have earned it. I'm lucky to have my fingers. I'm lucky to be alive. It's time to be done with whining. I am not helpless and I never was. I killed people not because I wanted to, or because I was selfish, but because I was forced to.
They are hunting me. They killed those people, by forcing my hand.
I know it is a justification, but still it is true. I am no Don Zachary, I would never have done this if I had not been forced. I am a good man who only hoped to see his family again.
They've taken that away from me. They should not have done that.
I call the crew.
There's no need for them to gather, or for me to give a rousing speech. They do what I tell them, when I tell it, and now I'm feeling more resolved they do it fast.
These marines are like my hands and my feet. By reaching out through them I can handle the whole subglacic. It is similar to the partitioning I do every time I dive the Molten Core, splitting myself between the tones of the chord, though that is unconscious.
Doe, Ray, Me, Far, So, La, Ti. When I'm them, I am them. I become seven streams of thought, seven views of the world, complete with their own minds. It is not quite the same with the Black Hawks, and I struggle to consciously divide my attention into more than one at a time, but I manage. I leave an order like a silvery engram needled into their gray matter, then move onto the next. I cycle through them fast, setting all the paths in motion.
We're going to the rock.
I dare not reach out to it, for fear the thick beam of thought will feel me. I only hope it wasn't able to pin down my search to that one point already. If it did, then this effort is over. But something in the sense of it tells me it did not. Rather it was somehow attuned to all the lines of its past at once, like a spider at the center of its web, waiting for a shiver. It doesn't know me wholly, not yet.
It found me at the Don's bunker, but then the beam of my search was going out from there for long moments. I only glimpsed the rock for seconds.
We will see.
I have only the loosest sense of where the rock is, out in the Allatanc midst. I think we fought an under-ice skirmish near there, somewhere. We fought skirmishes everywhere. But all the hydrate mines, certainly the clusters, were known.
The subglacic has maps, and I search them, running my fingers over old paper, printed before the godship tsunami and the world changed forever. There are dates on some of them that make me laugh. So many years. Several show the Arctic before the ice was all blasted away, outlining the glacier-line like an empty white continent.
It used to be like this, I mull, before the skirmishes. There were no battleships hunkered behind every calved-off iceberg, no subglacics shadowed beneath every drifting floe. The lines of control were theoretical, not bound
aries marked out in blood.
This subglacic is old, like me. I am only 47, but I feel my age. The skirmishes ended over twenty years ago, but still I remember them like they were yesterday.
On one of the middle-era maps, before they built-in the sub-stations and vast undersea pipes to connect the hydrate drills to refineries off the Aleut nation, I find a hub of rigs circling a tiny speck of rock.
SPARTAN'S CRAG
someone has written in on the map next to it, in scrawly red ink. Perhaps a great battle was fought here, remembered and commemorated to this day. Perhaps it was only an imaginative bosun's idle fancy, killing the long dull hours while he was waiting for his CSF to ferment.
This is the place Mr. Ruins went. This is the place where his lonesome path crossed with those others. This is where I'll learn who they are.
Sonar tells us we are alone, out in the ocean depths. The other subglacics have hoved far out of range. Instead on the screen I see a whale sounding sonar far to the North, guiding its calf. A tribe of hammerhead make hay of a tuna school to the East, participants in the endless hunt. This is nature, red in tooth and claw.
I too am a hunter, a predator. I showed it to Mr. Ruins, and I will show it to these others. I am Ritry Goligh, ex-skirmisher and graysmith to the skulks and Calico, I mastered Mr. Ruins and Don Zachary both, I dove the Solid Core and passed through the aetheric bridge for the first time in history, and you do not want to fuck with me.
Under silent fusion power, our subglacic glides smoothly through the ocean depths, sleek and wakeful as a shark.
TI E
Ti holds to her sister tightly while the flood roars over the stone above them, shaking the walls and drifting ancient dust down from the ceiling. She holds tight and can't let go, because they're twins and she won't be separated again.
Orange glow from a ruptured oxyfer stick flickers and dances nearby, like firelight, casting eerie shadows. Ray is breathing heavily between them. Doe is kneeling by his side, as tense as drawn elasteel. The numb reality that So has already died washes over her.
It was Ti who went first, the last time. She was down in the screw room while the sublavic breached the Molten Core's surface, with the heat of the Core cutting through the ablative panels. Sweat streamed down her unsuited skin, and she had known even then she would never escape the Bathyscaphe.
It was Me's order though. Me had sent her down there, and so there was no question she would do it. Her twin had to live, the chord had to live, so she worked through it, as the heat grew intolerable and she felt herself begin to cook. Still she drove the screw on and on, to keep the sublavic afloat on the inner surface of the Molten Core just a few moments more.
At last Me's voice came to her on the ship's blood-mic speakers, barely audible over the barreling screech of the screw as it stripped the last of its threads.
"Thank you."
It made it worth it, because it was for Me.
But where was Me now?
Now her sister is wheezing softly, a low rasp under the flood's cavalcade, which is no surprise since Ti's HUD tells her the grapnel punctured La's left lung. She's lost blood and won't be able to endure any prolonged exertion. It makes Ti ache for her.
She'd rather be the one to be hurt, or to die. It would be easier than this, to watch and be unable to help. She's already inventoried all the gear they were able to bring with them three times, during the flood, and concluded there's nothing there to plug a ruptured lung.
The grapnel has to stay in. The suit has to stay on. Without those things in place, La would die in moments, just like she did before. Ti has a ghostly, chord memory of that moment, when La died in Me's arms on the outer Solid Core ring. She loves him for that, which only makes his absence now harder.
Doe is looking at her now. There's a strange, curious look on her albino face.
"You can let go," Doe says. "It's over."
Ti blinks, and realizes she has both her hands clamped to her sister's grapnel wound. The roar of the flood is gone, and all that remains is the hiss of the oxyfer, and the stale sound of their breathing.
She releases, and La smiles at her. "I feel alright," she says. "Really."
Ti knows it's a lie, but she smiles back anyway. They hold hands, while Doe turns her attention to Ray.
"We need to set these limbs," she says.
Ray nods vacantly. "I can take it."
"It looks like all four limbs," Doe goes on. "It'll take hours."
Ray gives a weak grin. "Wouldn't have it any other way."
Doe touches his chest. Ti is surprised, because Doe rarely shows affection of any kind. "Sleep well," Doe says, and turns a dial on her chest.
Ray's grin slackens and his eyes close.
Doe turns to Ti, all tenderness gone. "We have to work fast. There's barely enough shock-jacks in both our suits to keep him under, and I don't care how tough he thinks he is, we'll never set these breaks with him awake."
Doe sends endosuit gamma shots of Ray's four limbs to Ti's HUD. They show his bones are not just broken, they are pulverized.
"Holy…" Ti breathes.
"He balled them in front," La says, demonstrating by crossing her arms across her chest. "I thought of it too, when I almost hit the surge. Without it his chest and face would've been crushed."
Ti studies the length of Ray's left arm. There are four major breaks in the ulna, two to the radius, three in the humerus. His elbow has burst like a glass-bomb, driving powdered bone fragments outward through his muscles. Just this limb alone would take a day of full surgery in the Bathyscaphe, followed by a week of adaptive traction to heal.
They're in a pyramid.
"How is he even alive?" Ti whispers.
"He's a lieutenant in the chord," says Doe coldly, "and he didn't have orders to die. Now help me get this suit off. La, can you walk?"
La grits her teeth and nods.
"Good," says Doe. "Scout the corridors around us. Do not take anything resembling a risk. Understood?"
"Understood."
La levers herself up and starts away down the dark stone hall, sparking an oxyfer flare off her thigh. Ti notices her left arm hanging limp at her side, and for a moment feels the phantom pain.
Then Doe taps her on the HUD, and she bends to the work at hand.
Ray's suit is cracked and warped, but has already sealed itself with epoxy-resin built into its ventricles. With a series of HUD override commands Doe floods his arm with anti-necrotizing mites and microbial platelets, has the suit tourniquet at the shoulder joint, then unlock.
Clasps down the length of the arm click open, though some are too buckled to release and only make a faint sad clack. Carefully Ti and Doe work around these broken points, peeling off the suit. It comes away like fractured sections of eggshell, held together by the epoxy membrane. It reminds Ti of the moment they opened up La's suit to watch innard soup roll out, another ghost memory from the chord.
There's no viscera with Ray though, only a syrupy mix of sweat, blood and the mite/microbial solution. Underneath, his arm is a gory wreck, as though it's been through a wringer. Ti wonders if she will be sick, looking down at the wreckage of splayed bone, tendon, and muscle, so bright white, pink and red against the shredded raw black of Ray's skin. It looks like the ravaged Sunken World above, gouged by tsunami.
Doe is pale and cold in the face of it. "Here," she says, pointing, "and here. We tie with wire, fuse these parts, then leave the microbials to patch him up. Ti, look at me. I need your help. Take off your gloves."
Ti looks down and sees the dark mud spattered all over her gloves. She nods and clicks out of them. Doe sprays her fingers down, such pale waxy things, with disinfectant that smells like lavender. Then they begin.
It is triage, but so they go, picking out bone fragments that can't be saved, settling ragged bone edges together like twigs in a fragile nest, clipping veins, nerves, tendons, and muscles back together with shots of microbial glue.
Ti has been a medic's assist
before, but never like this. Open to the air like this, Ray's arm seems so plainly just a badly damaged machine, one they have no spare parts for. They can only tinker with it as best as they can, using the blunt instruments of scalpels and field-glues. Still, if the suit does what it should, it may even serve well enough as a traction tank. He may get full use back, some day.
Last is the skin. It has been badly ripped by burst bone spars, so they stitch it together again, like braiding a quilt. They wrap it snug and lovingly around the pieces from inside Ray's arm, like stuffing a toy bear. Then they spray it down with lavender disinfectant, take readings for blood-tightness, and Doe nods. Carefully they bandage him up in his armor again, like a cocoon, and Doe unlocks the shoulder tourniquet.
They watch the readings as blood flows back into the limb, barely breathing, but it seems to hold.
"It looks good," says Doe.
Ti becomes aware of La slumped against the wall nearby. She realizes she has been there for some time, wheezing, but she was too involved with Ray to notice. Now she turns, and sees the exhaustion on her twin's face.
"I found something," La says. "It's bizarre."
"Is there any danger?" Doe asks.
"I don't think so," La answers, pausing to breathe. "None immediate."
Doe nods. "Then tell us while we work. We can't stop now."
Ti smiles for her twin, then turns back. They begin the triage process again with Ray's left arm, while La tells them what she found.
Two hours pass, and they repair Ray's arm and his legs. The bones in his right leg are worst where the grapnel shot through, powdered like bondless golden spray in a jelly solution, but once the grapnel is removed, they recombine what they can with an amalgam of the suit's resin and bonding mites.
King Ruin: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 2) Page 9