"He'll hold," says Doe. "In a few hours he should be solid enough to be carried. Now." She turns to La, who is already half-asleep. "You need to sleep. Increase the oxygen scrubbers in your HUD, that should give your one lung something more to work with. We'll be back soon."
"I should guard him," La says woozily. Ti can see she is barely hanging on to consciousness.
"You're no kind of guard like this," says Doe. "Put on the suit infras, and if anything comes we'll know. I need you lucid, and you're far from that now."
La nods dully, and allows herself to slide down the wall. The grapnel in her back rasps against the stone, leaving a long bright scratch mark down the dust-patinaed wall. She lays out flat on her back, arms by her sides, like a good little soldier.
"Alright," she barely manages, and closes her eyes.
Doe rises to her feet, and Ti joins her.
"We go see," says Doe.
They start away.
"HUD off," Doe says, and Ti complies. The corridor is dark and dusty, lapped gently by the oxyfer in Doe's hand. It smells of wet gravel and acetone. Underfoot is a granular orange sand, interspersed with thin brown shells that crackle under their boot heels.
"Beetle husks," Ti says.
Doe only grunts.
The corridor stretches on in a straight line for far longer than seems possible, given the size the pyramid had been on the outside. Ti says nothing, because La has already told them this. It doesn't veer or turn, only continues straight with no inclination up or down.
Ti lets her fingers run along the walls, dipping in and out of the endless stream of markings. This is plainly a language, but it is nothing her HUD can decipher.
"Do these mean anything to you?" she asks Doe.
Doe shakes her head. "No. I ran them through the HUD, and they're gibberish. Maybe they once meant something, but not any more. Everything is rotting here."
Ti aims her suit lights at the wall. The images are intricate and clear, carved with a precision that cobwebs and dust can't obfuscate. An old wooden ship of some kind, a heart, an outstretched hand, a crown. None of them seem to repeat, like an alphabet with endless letters.
"Stop looking at them," says Doe. "They're corrupted data. They'll only confuse you."
Ti turns off her light, and focuses on the darkness ahead.
"Here," says Doe, and points. There is a break in the wall, the first, leading inward. "This is what La saw."
La reaches for her QC, then remembers it is gone, lost to the mud with its charge depleted. She doesn't have any weapon but herself.
"Eyes back," Doe says, and leads them in.
Ti sees the hollow at the center of the pyramid in reverse, unveiled from the door outward, as she steps backward through the entrance. There is a doorway carved into the orange stone, pillars devoid of markings, rising up to a steeply inclined roof made of eight rising triangular stones.
Doe gasps, and Ti turns. What lies before them is truly bizarre.
It is people.
The chamber is large, octahedral, and featureless but for the spherical lattice of people erected in its midst.
"Thirty five," Doe says, already advancing. Ti finishes her own count, surveying the shape. There are thirty-five, all full-size figures, each with their own clothes and faces and hair, all of them stacked and arranged across each other by some means defying gravity.
Here there's a woman in a plaid-gray business suit, tipped at 45 degrees like a tent-pole, supporting a spray of three bodies angled off her head, one a dark-skinned man in a white poncho, one a yellow woman with a neck elongated by 23 copper torcs, one a dwarfish man with hooks for hands.
There's something familiar about their distribution, something too regular in the chaos, and Ti understands.
"It's some kind of atom," she says. She starts circling the vaguely spheroid stack, capturing the image for a three-dimensional render in her HUD. Against the black of sketchpad, she draws valency bonds across the bodies, and at the vertices she draws atomic hub-points like electrons, neutrons and protons.
"It's off the periodic table," she reports, as she comes full circle to stand beside Doe.
Doe is leaning close to the face of a grizzled old man in a flowing dark robe, tipped upside down with his head perfectly balanced atop the back of a young woman wearing a metallic bikini.
"High end or low end?" Doe asks absently.
"Sideways," says Ti, spinning the structure in her HUD like one of So's maps. "The molecule counts are skewed, this thing could never exist in real life."
Doe considers. "I think it's some kind of art."
Ti lets the cloud of vertices and bonding lines drop off her HUD. "Why would art be here?"
"I don't know," Doe says, running her gloved fingers through the old man's thick salty beard. "But this is what the soldiers looked like, inside the Solid Core. They were guards, then, trying to keep us out. I don't think these are. But they're not only decorative either."
She draws a knife from her thigh-sheath, takes a step to the side, then presses it to the cheek of a man dressed in some kind of stained beige jodhpur. The knife-tip enters, but Doe has to push hard to drive it any further in. She twists, and a splinter of matter jags out of the man's cheek.
"Wood," says Doe. She clicks off her HUD. "Smells like sandalwood."
Ti clicks off her HUD too. The air here smells of sandalwood and tar, scents she doesn't know why she recognizes, but does. She moves closer while Doe picks at the splinter, catching it in a little specimen box unclipped from her belt.
"What do you make of that?" Doe asks.
Ti seals the box and plugs it back into her belt, then runs a quick spectrographic analysis. Results chime through her cochlear implant via blood-mic, and she chews a molar-button to link in Doe.
The HUD voice reports zero trace of organic life, and one hundred percent chance of memetic life.
Doe draws a faint line down the jodhpur man's cheek, down to his chest and running through his white frilled tunic, piercing a hole.
"They're engrams," she says. "Memories."
"Memetic, that's right," Ti says. It is confusing, since she's so accustomed to seeing engrams embodied as flows in the Molten Core, but it doesn't have to be that way. Besides, even in the lava there are structures.
There are bunkers.
"This is a strong-room," Doe says, finishing the thought. "A vault."
"So these are friends?" Ti asks, pointing at the sphere.
Doe shakes her head, then sheathes the knife in its thigh-holster. "No. Not family either. Too many garbs, too many eras. And I've never seen memories stacked like this, for show. There's something ghoulish about it."
Ti turns. If possible, Doe's albino face has gone ever whiter. It sends a trill of fear down her back.
"Then what are they?"
Doe points. In the gap she has torn through the jodhpur man's tunic, a patch of his underlying skin is visible. Through it protrudes the gleam of a silver arrowhead, beaded around with dry blood.
"Victims," says Doe. "Enshrined here, in one of the few places still surviving the tsunami. We're not in Ritry's mind, Ti. We're somewhere altogether darker."
She doesn't need to say the name. Ti swallows hard.
"We need to get out."
"We need to do as we're ordered," says Doe, "and I just learnt our next directive."
"How?" asks Ti, and Doe points to her chest. Ti looks down, and sees something splattered there in yellow paint, above the mud, daubed just like on So's chest in tall, sloppy letters.
TAKE THE WHITE CASTLE
She laughs involuntarily.
"It's better than 'Run for your lives,'" Doe says.
"Is it? You and I, La with her lung impaled, and Ray without a single working limb. It won't be much of a siege."
"We've come this far," says Doe. "We'll go further still. Besides," she points out to the passageway. "La's awake, she has me on blood-mic. It looks like the mud found a way in.
They str
ide out, and by white suit-light see a thin carpet of dark mud creeping along the dry floor.
"Ray's not ready to move yet," Ti protests.
"That doesn't matter," says Doe. "What matters is the chord. We aren't victims, and we can't stay here."
Ti nods. Of course, she realizes, there has always been Doe. Without Me she felt rudderless for a time, but still they have Doe, who's been their rudder all along.
She nods. "Let's go take a castle."
KING RUIN F
The rock is a thousand miles from Calico, a thousand miles from anywhere. It is a flyspeck spot in the middle of the Allatanc that only skirmishers and rig-men will have ever had cause to go near.
Except for Mr. Ruins, and King Ruin.
King Ruin is the name I have given to the thing that is chasing me. It's ridiculous, but then so is everything now. I am captain of a subglacic full of ex-skirmishers, long after the Arctic skirmishes ended, men I control with my thoughts. Together we are hunting a being that has tried to mind-bomb me twice, after I crossed through a mythical aetheric bridge that connects all souls together.
It is ridiculous, but I've had two days to think, while my stolen subglacic has roamed the ocean depths. I've considered, and there are several things I know for certain.
King Ruin is my enemy. He or she or it is hunting me, using methods I've never before seen. It has deep, broad bands of thought stronger than any I've witnessed, that stretch out even so far as the rock, and allow control of operatives through EMR-buzzing HUDs. It has an infrastructure sufficient to hunt me down twice, drop mind-bombs on the Calico wall, and wage a full-scale tactical assault on Don Zachary's underwater war-bunker. It clearly has power beyond anything Mr. Ruins held, beyond what I hold, and military strength on par with the forces that once fought in the skirmishes.
So King Ruin.
But it does not know everything. It has not found my subglacic, and in these two days I've recovered my strength. My reattached fingers work well again. My hangover is gone, and I feel lean and sharp like I was in my skirmisher days. I control my chord of 43 men with greater ease than ever. At times it even feels like I could control more than one of them at once. On some shifts I almost succeed in looking out of the periscope at the same time as I scrub decks down in the gantry. I almost chop potatoes in the mess while charting our course in the captain's hutch.
It is a thrilling, eviscerating feeling. I am in my self and I am out there, almost at once. I am the chord refracted, a consciousness splitting in two.
The men do not chafe under my harness. I guide them gently, with suggestions they are already prepared to accept. They believe this is all for the Don, who first signed them up. They believe they are part of a new world order, with amazing rewards waiting for them at the end. I let them vent their steam in their dreams. When they're on my clock, I run a ship as tight as any Ven ever did.
So we roam. We circle the northern coast of proto-Rusk, to be certain we are not followed. We dip in and out of gulleys made of coral-laced harbor buildings. We scuttle along dust-muddied graveyards of sunken gray warships, tumbled at bay when the global killer tsunami rolled in. Now their numerous guns are slowly being gloved by seaweed.
This is the order that once ruled the world, now sunk beneath the ice-melt water.
We cruise above old airfields shot through with bright red algae blooms, like frozen explosions. Faint sparkles of sunlight strike off cockpits canted at rakish angles. This used to be my world every day of my skirmisher life, and back then there were enemies too, of a different stripe.
proto-Rusk.
Sino-Rusk.
neo-Armorica.
Aleut Nation.
Auropan Conglomerate.
Jovian Distinct.
Once they were all here, skulking these undertows, scratching away like chickens in a dry roost for worms, marking out the lines of their territory with sharp-beaked pecks to the face. We mind-bombed each other to fuck, blew up what we couldn't steal with neutron-squibs or dry-ice bombs, and got high to all hell on fermented Cerebro-Spinal Fluid.
Good times. I think of them as I sit by Mr. Ruins' side, drifting gently on the tides of his numb and faint unconscious. At times I rouse to hear one of the men in some far-flung part of the ship humming a tune I knew from those days. Each time I wonder if it came from him or from me.
So we circle the Allatanc. The subglacic swims without cease, and we gradually, slowly, work our way in toward the rock at the middle. It is blood in the water. I don't reach out far with my mind, scarcely more than the surface of the waves, in case King Ruin will somehow sense me. I reach just enough to know there is no immediate pursuit.
Unless they have technology that no longer exists, men peering down from the last drifting satellites in orbit, or new generations spying from the abandoned water-reservoirs on the moon, they cannot see us. They will not find us.
I talk to Mr. Ruins as we gather near. I ask him questions, and listen to him breathing.
"Why did you come here?" I ask.
"Who is King Ruin?"
"What does he want with me?"
But Mr. Ruins gives me no answers, because he can't hear me. His consciousness is trapped within his mind's rotting frame. I wonder that he has reached some strange kind of equilibrium in his mind, a teetering point with the Lag, but still I cannot reach in to be sure. The honeycomb shield remains in place, and when I place the ear of my thoughts up close to it, I can hear the tumbling thrum of tsunami, steadily washing him away.
We draw near to the rock.
I order the subglacic to surface at the slowest rate possible, a process that that takes over four hours. Everything I do, I do to minimize any chance of detection. The trim tanks fill and vent like puffer fish, slow and steady. In the conning tower I look at sonar, which describes an outcropping of five naval caisson-footed forts, stalked up on legs like three-legged robots, surrounding a hydrate rig beside the rock.
They're all bedded in the rock's raised volcanic slopes. We creep up the igneous incline like some amphibian creature evolving out of the water, yard by gradual yard, until I feel the change in the air.
It is different here. There is a pocket of emptiness around the rock, a hollowness at the heart of an almighty frame. I can sense the edges of it, feel the pop as we pass through, but I do not know what the weight of it was. There are the spoor of perhaps fifty minds, coming and going, but each is a shielded mask behind which I can sense nothing more than arrogance and satiation.
Mr. Ruins' own trail is amongst them, fresher than most, leading to the westernmost fort, the only one with a bridge still attached. Brighter than all the others though is the bright hot beam of King Ruin's thought. It haloes around the same fort, then beds down into the center of the rock.
I dare not go near it. To be even this close feels like standing in the shelter of proto-Calico's tsunami wall, knowing that one day the overtopping tsunami will come. It feels like the Lag, vast and unknowable and unstoppable.
I do not reach for it. I keep my mind confined to the shortest, sharpest bursts of direction to my men.
I have the subglacic surface beside Mr. Ruins' fort. Through the periscope I study a sky that is gray and heavy with rain. The stalk-legs of the fort rise up before me, jutting from water like grasping arms, coated in a rust-proof paint the color of old blood. Sitting atop their apex some thirty feet high is a single box-unit, as large as the Bathyscaphe, and brimming with old Bofors guns trained on the sky and the water.
We used to drop these forts around every hydrate-rig we helped install. On those installation missions I had little to do, except to tend and counsel the regular stream of war-shocked marines through massaging their worst combat memories. The rest of the time I spent watching the caissons sink to the ocean-floor, high on CSF-vodka with the men who would be left behind to guard the rig.
They were as certain to die as we were. We all knew that. Any concerted assault would cause them to buckle, just as it proved for us. They existe
d only to force concerted assaults, which meant concentration of enemy forces, and gave our generals something to aim for.
Sitting ducks. We toasted them and they toasted us. Looking up this fort's leg now, I wonder if at some point I passed through this exact space. Perhaps I watched while they assembled sea-cranes and jacked this precise fort-box up into the sky. Perhaps I dropped engrams into the minds of men who would go on to control its guns.
"Captain?"
One of my men is by my side. I have been standing at the periscope for a long time. I silence him with a thought, and turn my gaze to the inner circle guarded by the fort.
It is empty, and we are alone. If King Ruin expected me here, he is not here in force. I see only the wan five forts circled around the central rig, itself atop a floating compliance tower tube, linked to the seafloor by umbilical pipes. It is plainly derelict, the mine underneath likely gone dry. Only a few tatters of ragged flags hang desultory from its lanyards. One suspension bridge from it to Mr. Ruins' fort remains, though chunks of its metal cross-plating look to have been bitten out.
The other four bridges hang down the rig's side, sinking into the water. Someone must have cut them. Beside the rig is the rock, a thick spear of dark basalt. From this angle I can't see the entrance, though sonar showed it is wide and unobstructed. King Ruins' thought-band heads under water, so I reason there must be a chamber inside.
Soon.
I pull away from the periscope. I turn to the lieutenant at my side, a man who once forced his own children to beg him not to kill their mother on a drunken whim, and give the orders vocally. It is better to conduct as little communication through thoughts as possible.
"You and three more," I tell him. "Full combat wet-gear, ropes, Kaos rifles. We exit underwater and climb."
"Yes sir," he salutes. I can see he wants to ask why we're here, how does this help us subjugate the world, but he has too much fear for Don Zachary to put a foot wrong.
"Weapons," I tell him, to set him at ease. "We're looking for skirmish-era weapons."
He grins. "Yes sir," he repeats, with more energy this time.
King Ruin: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 2) Page 10