King Ruin: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 2)

by Grist, Michael John

  In the captain's hutch, I find there is no wetsuit tailored for me. Of course. All of the men have their own, because all of this was planned. I borrow one and shrug it on. It is over twenty years since I last shuffled into one of these, slipping firm rubber tubing over bare flesh. My arms and legs shiver at the memory.

  The zip comes up at the back, and I survey myself in a small corner-mirror. I don't need tanks for this, so on my back I fix a harpoon gun. At my waist is a utility belt crammed with tiny pockets, each stuffed with essential pieces of replacement equipment, alongside standard items like a whistle, extra ammunition for the Pstock pistol in my arm-pit holster. The suit hugs tight like a black second skin.

  Ray, I think, as I look into my own eyes in the mirror. There are pieces of me that have missed this, though I rarely ever cleared an enemy rig or float myself. That was the work of the combat marines like Ferrily and Tigrates, though I ran more routes than any of them afterward, when I soothed the memories in their frazzled minds.

  It is cold, and it makes me colder. With the black mask pulled down over my face, simple readouts popping up in the corners, I could be anyone. I look into the black visor, too transparent to see my eyes reflected, and wonder at the strange path my life has led me on, a kind of full circle back to this.

  I have no idea what lies ahead. I do not know that I will discover anything of use here. Will there be all King Ruin's secrets laid out for me to see? I can only know by doing.

  Standing beneath the con, with the team of four all looking to me, I cut my ties to their minds. One of them gives a small sigh, which comes through on the in-helmet comms, but the others show no sign. I won't risk being outside myself at all, once I'm above the waves. For a time I'll have to rely on Don Zachary's discipline.

  "Let's go," I say, and start up the ladder to the airlock. They follow.

  I emerge through the surface of the cold Allatanc water, and swim over to the fort's nearest red leg. My team emerge seconds later, and I point them two to one leg, two to the other. They assemble with smooth professionalism, and I feel a tingle of the joy to be had in such precision.

  It reminds me of the past.

  "Ready for combat," I tell them over the comms. My own voice echoes back to me rough and raspy.

  "Ready," they come back. I watch as they each pull their Kaos rifles ready for use.

  I draw my own Pstock, then flip up the visor, and look up the fort's leg. There are large barrel-rungs leading up along the leg's upper side, intended to moor refueling cables. They lead all the way up to a Bofors gun-emplacement, one perched above each leg. The barrels are pointing directly down at me, like four black insectile eyes.

  It almost makes me laugh. All of this could end right here and now, if one person pulled only one trigger once.

  "Climb," I say through the comms, and we begin.

  Out of the ocean, water wicks quickly away off the wetsuit, and gravity takes hold. Standing at the bottom of the leg, I bend over to grasp the first hoop, and start to walk myself up. Climbing like this involves an undignified hunch, grappling to the next barrel-hoop up while finding the balance-point with my feet. Every hoop I step over is a chance to fall, as I lunge for the next, but I don't fall, and neither do any of my team.

  The wind blows harder already, ripe with salt and the stink of chemicals used to strip hydrates, drifting from the rig. My back begins to strain with the effort of keeping my weight in balance, but it feels good. A sweat springs up and loosens me, smoothing the rub of the suit over my skin.

  I breach the gun emplacement with ease, and see with pleasure that I am the first.

  "On me," I whisper through the comms, and hike my legs over the gun emplacement's raised armored back. Holding to a roll of piping ducted to the fort's exterior, I work my way carefully to the single entrance. The men are edging their way closer as I reach it.

  There is a simple metal-grille platform to stand on, a rung-ladder leading to the top by its side, and a heavy metal door latched and locked into the wall with three strong bolts.

  I spray the bolts with acid-oil from my belt, hammer each with the haft of the Pstock, and they dislodge. I draw them out roughly, toss them down into the ocean, then jam the door open with a crunch and a squeal of old hinges.

  The stink of suffering hits me like a mind-bomb, and I almost stagger backward off the platform. My mind reels tighter closed against it, as the stench of corruption wafts around me in a cloud, thick with sweet putrefaction like a decomposing whale out to sea.

  My eyes blur and I rub them clear, then kick the door open wider, peering into the hot, pitch-black fort interior. The air is stale and full of death. I swallow back a gag, and shine the flashlight from my belt into the darkness ahead.

  Everywhere there are bodies. I run the white-light beam along the floor, up the walls, across the ceiling, and find them everywhere, stacked and layered like many layers of sediment, rising up at the walls like a sloshing tide.

  I gag again, and give thanks that I had already half-shuttered my mind to the bonds of this place. If I hadn't I'd be on my knees sobbing. As it is, I have to grip the frame of the door to remain upright.

  There are thousands, many so ancient they are skeletons, dry as tinder beneath an overtopping layer of fresh meat, and every one of them is marred by bite-marks, gouges, breaks, amputations, and the memory of hideous, overwhelming desperation.

  I feel hunger, suffering, and destruction. I feel rape, cannibalism, and murder.

  "Shit," says the nearest member of my team, as he looks over my shoulder into the dark. I hear another behind me vomit.

  I want to vomit too. I want nothing more than to dive from this fucking charnel house, get in the subglacic and hove the fuck out of here, but I can't do that. It's not why I've come.

  I'm here for King Ruin.

  Instead I open my mind, the tiniest amount, to the suffering of these people, to know their stories and learn what happened here.

  They overwhelm me. Beneath the tsunami weight of their cries for pity and succor, I am washed away.

  DOE F

  "The mud's rising fast," La comes through on blood-mic, her voice a pant in Doe's cochlear implant. "We have to get out."

  "We will," says Doe, and cycles through her chord's specs in her HUD, reading the status of La's right lung in glowing green letters. It is slowly filling with fluid, and the scrubbed oxygen can only do so much. They can't drain it. Ray meanwhile is prone, unconscious still, and she can only hope the microbials inside his suit are doing their work. "Hang on."

  She turns to survey the arranged molecule of victims. There are things they need, and this is all the materials they have to work with. She peers at the bond-junctures, and finds they are bound with some kind of leathery straps at the juncture-points. She tries her knife on one, and it cuts.

  "This one and that one," she says to Ti, pointing first to a tall broad woman dressed in some kind of toga, second to a pale-skinned man in a black three-piece suit and top hat.

  Ti nods, understanding. "Tallest and flattest, good. But we don't know what will happen when we sever the bonds. It's a molecule, after all. When you cut bonds they normally explode."

  Doe snorts. "It's not a molecule." She starts to saw at the man's feet-strap. "You said as much yourself. It's the showroom of a dying killer's mind. Now start cutting before the mud catches up to us."

  Ti draws her knife, and together they cut.

  A few moments later, with the mud already rising above the toes of their boots, Doe slices through the final bond. Ti winces, but it doesn't explode. Rather, she staggers back with the man's statue in her arms.

  "He's so light," she says.

  "He's a husk," Doe says. "The rest has been digested. Help me with the next."

  Moments later they have the woman free, and lay her on the ground in the mud next to the man. Doe disgorges twenty feet of elasteel from her grapnel, snips it off and begins to braid the two figures together. Ti does the same.

  "It
's rising up to his face," comes La's raspy voice on blood-mic. "Should I lift him up?"

  "Don't move him yet," Doe barks back. "Put his HUD on and let the mud overflow."

  Ti looks up. "Overflow?"

  "It'll help us lift him," says Doe. "Now."

  They stand and heft the two figures between them. Lashed together and side by side, they make a passable stretcher.

  Moments later Doe and Ti are sprinting down the passageway, back toward La and Ray. Only La is visible anymore, kneeling in the mud. Her face through the HUD is sickly pale and her breathing is so labored her chest moves up and down even at rest.

  "He's under," she says.

  "Then let's get him up," says Doe. "Slowly."

  They all drop to their knees, rummage gently beneath the mud, and carefully lift Ray up. Doe submerges the statue-stretcher and slides it under Ray's body, then looks up at Ti.

  "One step a time. Lash him to it firmly, and lash the frame round your sister's neck, because I don't think she can carry with her left hand. You have five minutes."

  Ti nods, and begins unspooling elasteel.

  Doe turns and runs back down the passage. Already the mud reaches up to her knees, slowing her down, making every stride a sucking effort. In the molecule room she lays hands on the structure and starts to climb. The weight of mud round the base holds it steady, and shoulders and faces for foot-holds she reaches the apex in seconds.

  The peaked pyramidal roof is just above, scribbled with more nonsense symbols. She extracts the last of her candlebomb from its pouch at her waist, rigs it with a length of fuse, then stretches up to attach it.

  The structure underfoot begins to move. She looks down and sees the jaw she is standing on yaw open. She stands on its forehead instead. The teeth snap closed where she'd been standing, but it doesn't matter.

  She sparks the fuse, then jumps off the structure as it snarls to life. Her arms spread wide and she hits the mud in a flat belly-flop, sending up a thick billow and cushioning her fall. She lets the mud overflow her, waiting for the blast.

  boom

  It is muted by the suit and the mud, but still she feels the pressure wave against her back, baking the mud into hard ceramic.

  She punches her elbows up through it and emerges. There is a breeze blowing in from the splintery hole in the ceiling, through which she can see two pale red suns in the watery gray sky, growing close to conjunction. A steady waterfall of mud flows in through the hole, falling upon a chiaroscuro of thrashing wooden bodies. They are all alive now, but tangled by the bonds of their molecule, torn by the blast, and weighed down by chunks of fallen masonry.

  "They're waking up," she says on blood-mic. "Make sure the ones in the stretcher have their mouths leashed. Be careful when you come through, over."

  "Copy," says Ti, panting and sloshing. "The bitch just tried to bite me, but I cut off her jaw. We're almost there."

  Doe un-holsters her grapnel, shoots another spread-hook through the gap in the pyramid's peak, and lets it reel her up.

  She emerges out of the darkness and into the bright gray under-light of the Sunken World. The landscape has been reshaped again. Any emergent sign of the pyramid is gone, now it is only a hole in the ground by her feet. There are no ruined buildings anymore, no hills or vales, no road of the dead, only a lone and level wash of endless gray sand, subsuming everything.

  Everything will fall, Doe thinks, a scrap of odd thought from somewhere. It's the kind of thing Far might say, but there is no Far. There is no Me. The sense of abandonment here is keen, whistling in the low wind, but she shrugs it off. Me has a plan, she has to believe that. They are here for a reason, and that reason lies in the White Tower.

  She turns, seeking it out. Beneath the bloody glow of the twin suns in the sky, she picks out the half-buried stub of White Tower in the distance, sticking up like a cauterized finger.

  "Here," comes Ti's voice. Doe looks down and sees La and Ti either side of Ray, carried on their shoulders now just above the rising mud-level. The stretcher is wriggling and moving, but is too well bound with elasteel to pose any damage.

  Doe tosses down her grapnel line.

  "Hook us in and grapnel up," says Doe. "We'll raise him together."

  The twins latch three lines carefully onto the stretcher, then fire their grapnels and suck out of the mud. Doe orients them around the hole, and they all heave, lifting Ray out of the mud. In his wake, the mud bubbles up and froths through the opening, sealing it over.

  "Just in time," says Ti. La is on her knees panting. Doe drops to Ray's side and plugs in to his HUD. It's been hours since they first set his patchwork of bones, and the suits inner gamma reads that the microbials have begun in earnest, knitting bone ends together.

  It'll still be hours before he can move.

  Decisions. Doe turns to La and considers. La will be dead soon, she knows. There is nothing she can do, unless the White Tower holds equipment they can use. She could handle the trek there, if they went slowly. If they laid her beside Ray and carried her she would certainly make it, but that would slow them as well. In either case, they might not make it before the next tsunami rolled through.

  She looks at La, and La looks back. La knows what she is thinking, surely. Ti must as well.

  Ray or La? Ray who is currently useless, or La who soon will be. Ray who will recover slowly, or La who will not, unless they find the supplies they need.

  She loves them both. It comes down to odds.

  "I need you to pull, La," she says on blood-mic. "We all pull."

  It is most likely a death sentence. La accepts it with a nod.

  "For the chord," she says. "Tell Me I miss him."

  "I will."

  They shorten the leashes, spread out like dogs in the traces, and start to march across the mud, pulling their fallen lieutenant behind on a slobbering, snarling stretcher.

  The mud is packing firm and is easy to walk, and they make good time. So's projected map is meaningless now, so Doe discards it and focuses on taking the next step. The way is smooth and plain like a beach when the tide has drawn back. As they go La and Ti talk about childhood memories they have manufactured, things they don't really remember but lay claim to all the same, and Doe listens.

  They talk about Ritry Goligh, and how they'd do anything for him. They talk about his childhood as a function of their own, all the misery of partition as Far broke apart and suckered in his own parents. They talk about the joy of coming back together again.

  "We'll find Far," Ti insists, as her sister wheezes. "He'll refresh the seed of you through the Molten Core again."

  La laughs, a mucusy cough. "That boy played tones when Ray tapped his face. Crazy."

  Ti laughs along. They reminisce about things that neither of them really remember, events from the Solid Core they only felt through the chord's fuzzy memory. Doe startles herself by finding she has begun to weep. It is soft and slow and won't stop, and she cuts herself from blood-mic so they won't hear her.

  Steadily, as they stride over the flat gray mud so still now that not even maggots wrinkle the surface, she wonders what is changing in her. Once she never would have cried, but now she does. Before she was a facet only, cold and logical, but she is warming, becoming something more.

  It scares her to think this. It's not something she can explain. It makes her long for Ray, and miss Me, and weep as La slowly dies by her side.

  Hours pass, and gradually La's pull on the statue-sled falters. They slow to match her, until she stops. She hasn't been speaking for some time now, only breathing that raspy wet gurgle. She wavers in place.

  "I'm done," she manages, before dropping to her knees.

  Ti catches her, crying as well now.

  "A little further," Ti says. "La, you can make it."

  La laughs through the fluid filling her lung, which becomes a long and racking cough.

  "No," she manages, "this is it. I'm sorry Ti. I go first this time."

  Doe logs into La's HUD t
o see her one good lung almost filled with fluid. They might even be able to drain it, if they set up a camp there and worked to sterilize everything, but it would be a short-term fix only, and impermanent. The lung would only fill again faster, and they don't have time.

  "Please," Ti is saying now, supporting La in place. "Just a little further."

  Doe looses her leash to the body-sled and spreads her arms around them both, while La fights for breath. "It's alright," she says through blood-mic, trying to adopt the kind of soothing tone Ray used to use with Far. "You'll be with Me soon, La. You'll be with Ritry Goligh, I promise. Shh."

  She plugs what's left of her suit's shock jacks into La's breastplate, and surges the flow to full, beyond the safety levels. She nods to Ti to do the same thing, and she does.

  They take off their helmets and look into each other's eyes, while La's breathing steadies and stills. Her blonde hair is everywhere, tangling on Doe's cloud-white skin like a lover's kiss.

  "I'll tell him," La begins, between faint sucking breaths, but doesn't finish.

  Her breaths stop. She goes limp in their arms. Tears slip down Doe's cheeks.

  A minute longer they remain. Then Doe pulls herself away, and stands. Ti looks up at her.

  "I don't want to bury her here," she says.

  Doe nods. "We make her dust."

  Ti nods.

  Reverently, they put La's helmet back on. They strap back into the sled, and start away. At a safe distance, Ti sends the command to La's suit to self-immolate.

  It is a flash, a brief and blazing green fire, as all the oxyfer components in the armor electrolyze at once, then it is a gust of black smoke in the air. Like that, La is gone.

  "Thank you," says Ti.

  Doe nods.

  They pull on.

  Rumbles come from behind. The walk is a drudgery, they've been marching for days it feels. Endless, endless. Doe's feet hurt, her shoulders hurt where the armor presses tight from the sled, her knees hurt, and she is exhausted.

  Cycling dully through her HUDs rear-view angle, she glimpses a flash of white.