I venture on into the fort. I ramble amongst these stories and bodies like a ghost in the fog, seeking the one delicate bloom that led me here, and might tie Mr. Ruins to his King in a way I can understand.
Don Zachary's son.
There are skirmishers and freighters mixed under my feet. There are fishermen and divers all around, all chewed up by the giant mouth of this black hole, broken to their constituent parts and ground down to the dust of pleading memory.
I find most of the Don's son in a tangled corner, his bones snapped and sucked dry of their marrow. His Napoleon uniform is long gone, and most sense of his weak mind is lost as well.
I catch the faint trail of his life before Mr. Ruins, back when he was using Mei-An for her body and connections in Calico Reach, back when the dictats of his father ruled his life. I remember those days through the fuzzy lens of his remnant bonds.
Mei-An was his pretty, petty rebellion, but she didn't cost him his life. Mr. Ruins even explained it, before he garrottted him to death.
"You're bait," Ruins told him. "For a much bigger prize."
Me.
He put on the Napoleon suit, afraid of something worse. Mr. Ruins was gentle, even, until he wrapped the cord around his neck.
Then he died.
I pull away. I reach out, and feel so many others brought here one by one, in the years since the skirmishes ended. Some came alive, some came dead, but all were deposited here like cheese in a larder.
Tributes.
"What is this place?" One of my men asks. His horror is thick like syrup, coating him all over. His voice rings off metal that has heard so many cries.
"It's a fly in a web," I tell him, as I begin to understand. "It's food."
He blanches.
I step out of the darkness and into the light. The stories are behind me, encircled by the thick band of King Ruin.
I think he has felt me now. I wasn't able to hide, as the memories of poor mad Harim filled me up. He felt me, and now he is coming.
I don't care.
The rock lies ahead. I need to know what there is inside.
"Follow me," I say to my men, and dive. The cold water hits and cleans the slime of decay off my suit, but not out of my mind.
I'm angry. I want to tear something limb from limb, because I am human, and all of this is not what I want human to mean. The skirmishes were terrible, we fought for something that proved useless I the end, but at least we believed it was right. Even if we were lied to and it was all a fucking sham, at least for a time, some of us believed.
This is nothing like that. This is a slow, endless genocide. It is cruelty beyond bounds, and I will not stand for it. When King Ruin comes I am going to fuck him up, or die trying.
I swim through the water with my new chord behind me, bound for the rock at the heart, rising up from the low waves like a basalt-black fin.
I feel it as I pass within the beam of King Ruin's thoughts. For an instant I sense his surprise, that I would dare to do this, then the beam cuts away. In that instant though I saw more than I would have thought possible.
This site is a Court. It has been operational since before the skirmishes, one of an uncounted number of such places round the world, scattered like seeds on the wind. They are all links in King Ruin's encircling web of thought, all troves of pain that feed him constantly.
As I climb the rock I throw my thoughts out to the other four forts arrayed around the rock named SPARTAN'S CRAG, and to the rig they surround, and find the frames of them empty as shriveled husks. Their metal walls echo with an immensity of death and suffering, though all the weight is gone.
Consumed.
How many thousands, I think, as I ascend the rock's foam-spattered side. How many millions. This place is an assault on all of humanity. King Ruin and his Court have treated us as less than animals, less than playthings, all so they could feast.
They are just like Mr. Ruins. They all seek suffering, they sow it, they reap it, then they sup it down.
I'm going to kill them all.
The rock opens before me like a long black wound in the sea, and I stride down. I do not care. The passageway is hand-carved and descends sharply below the waves, dripping with salt-water. Electric lights flicker on a long row of gray cabling. There is the pulsing sound of pumps somewhere below, working to keep this splinter of air dry.
I stride on. I feel minds working in the dark ahead of me, and I Lag them to stillness. Several fight back, and I know them as monsters like Mr. Ruins, but I am stronger. I have seen what deeds they have done, and righteous fury helps me transcend their protests.
Amongst them, there are screams ahead. I feel wounded minds crying for help, members of my race, and I balm them.
I emerge into a chamber, a circular pod in the rock with three marines wearing buzzing black EMRs. I Lag and shoot them all. They drop, one on a table where various snacks are laid out, two on the floor. Their blood swirls down to a gutter-drain in the center of the floor, where a pump sucks it in.
I do not need to reach inside their minds to know they have been turned to soup.
Further down I stride, until the density of old tortured bonds in the air becomes so dense I can't wade through it with my mind open, and I have to shut my thoughts down. In this way I know the Court-hall before I see it, before I walk in and find the long rock cavern filled with experimental metal equipment, vats and tubs and saws, beds and frames and computers and EMRs. I know with sterling clarity that this is the worst place in the world, worse even than the sea-fort above.
Because everything about it is familiar, but stronger. Every bond on the air I know, but it is worse than anything I ever imagined. It is a nightmare I woke from as a child but have never been able to shake.
It is a laboratory. I enter, and all around me are the fragmented souls of its experimental subjects.
Some are in torsion-rigs strapped into EMRs, half their skin peeled away, their throats excised so they cannot scream. Others lie on benches with tubes and spikes erupting in and out of their flesh, contorted in bizarre combinations with their various organs held aloft in clamps and on hooks. Some are strung up in liquid vats with all their body parts skinned and spread out around them in a sickly cloud of pink and purple, their eyes blinking back at me from within.
It is too much. I close my eyes but still I feel them. To my right are four men whose brains have been quartered and intermixed, then sealed again and left to blend into madness. To my left a man is slowly having the gray matter shaved off his cerebellum like soft cream, another has had various bore-holes scooped out of his Broca's area, while a third has had numerous transponders pierced through his basal ganglia.
And all this is not even the worst part. The worst part is what is happening in the bonds. It makes what Mr. Ruins did to me look like child's play.
Their minds are being incessantly, repetitively, and consecutively dived, without respite. They are violated in their thoughts and their memories again and again, their Lags blown to pieces and cast aside, their Molten Cores drained, their Solid Cores battered like subglacics shelling a bunker, with every effort aimed at just one thing.
To breach the aetheric bridge.
I feel this mission stretching back past the inception of this place, back out along the bond-lines of the ones conducting the research. There are four of them here, and they think of themselves as 'Judges' in King Ruin's 'Court.' They are all twisted like Mr. Ruins, but sagging now where I have Lagged them. Still I can feel the paths they have taken throughout their long and varied lives.
They have tried everything they can think of, every torture and invasive measure they and every other 'Judge' in their field could speculate. They have published research papers and made scholarly doctrine of their horrors, conducted repetitions of past experiments and held live-dissections to teach each other. They have treated living minds like meat to be manipulated, again and again, all to reach one goal that none of their efforts have yet managed, that I am the
only person to have ever achieved.
Pass through the aetheric bridge.
There is too much suffering in this place. There are too many eyes on me, begging for relief, too many souls long lost under the knife that were just like me as a child. I too was dived and scarred for this goal, until I split myself into the chord of my artificial womb's pulse, and smothered my parents in the quagmire of my Molten Core.
I would have had no chance here. I would have been quartered and broken on this rack, and it is too much.
I breach my own Solid Core in moments, with no need for the Bathyscaphe. I am too hot and too filled with the fury of all these dead, with their souls piling up inside and demanding one thing and one thing only.
Revenge.
I burn through the fractal maze of my own mind and open the door to the aetheric bridge with ease, because it is my door and I have every right to pass through it. Standing within that point of power I Lag away all the horror I have seen so far, in the sea-forts and inside this fell rock, and draw it into me. I end the pain of every broken soul in this place, and suck out the raw anger from within. I snuff out the Judges as though they never were, and I hold their victims close to my own heart, because I too have been a victim, and will never forget.
On their strength I zoom a thousand feet into the sky, and look out at the web that King Ruin has made of this world, of my world, and know that I will not accept it. Not a day more, not a second longer. His Courts are lodged everywhere, circled about in laboratories like this, festering with his Judges. They spread around the globe and bring him a constant source of strength, with which he forces all others to pay him tribute, which only makes him stronger, while he seeks out the ultimate power I already have.
I storm through the aetheric emptiness to meet him and strike him down. He is easy to find, embodied as two burning red stars circling each other at the heart of a web. I strike at him, dive into him as I once did with Mr. Ruins, but am somehow repelled.
I strike again, pouring greater weight into the blow, but again I am blocked. Where my blows have landed, a golden ring of force shimmers and warps. I hit again and again like a man trapped by the EMR trying to escape his own mind, but the golden sphere cannot be penetrated.
I know then something that seems impossible, but can only be true. King Ruin has dived the aetheric bridge before. He has assembled this shield and I cannot break through it, because I don't know what it is.
I sink back into myself. It is too soon to give up. Instead I reach out through the bonds in air, streaming back along the scorched lines his broad thick bands of thought have left, but the web stymies me. It is too thick, too intertwined, and I can make no sense of it. It is a maze and I am a blind man within it, a forest of connected flies I can never unravel in time.
He is too strong. He is too deeply nested, and hidden. I could chase down his Courts for a year and never find the Solid Core at the heart. I could expend all my strength in defusing them like old skirmish mind-bombs, but already his marines are closing in on the rock. I feel them drawing near, itching to be the ones to capture me, to bring me in, to lay me down on their tables and find out what makes me tick.
I cannot pry out King Ruin from here, not with all the force in the bonds. I cannot burn him down when he has rooted himself so deep. I cannot kill him when he is shielded within and without, when he will see me coming every step of the way, when he belongs so much more than me.
There is nothing I can do.
I open my eyes to the real world, the dark hum of the rock's interior. The air is ripe with the smell of fresh blood. My men are wandering through the freak-show of wired-up brains and bodies, staring in horror. At least the cries have ended, now. I realize perhaps that is the only thing I can do.
I reach out and still them. I find one, two, a handful of other such Courts spread throughout the Allatanc, and end them all. I Lag every soul and draw them in, but they are single threads in the tapestry of what he is, while I am only a single thread alone, connected to nothing. I am not enough to win, and now he is coming for me.
Except perhaps.
Thoughts flash in my mind, of Don Zachary and Mr. Ruins, of EMRs and the boy I once was, of a neverending quest to breach the aetheric bridge and a million tangled Courts with a monster at the Solid Core, and…
I do the only thing I can think of, the only hope I have. It breaks me in pieces, but I see no other choice. He is coming and I cannot hope to fight, not in any way he might understand or expect. I am but one man with one subglacic, and I cannot overthrow a King alone.
When it is done I drop to my knees, feeling airy and sick. I reach inward, and begin the systematic Lagging of my own Molten Core. I erase the details and frames of everything that could be used against me, faces, names, places and dates, from my family to my work, from the bonds I used to the way I broke open the bridge, freezing the lavic floes and flushing them into nothing.
Loralena goes, Art and Mem go, Carrolla, Mei-An, Mr. Ruins goes. I strip it all, rooting out the memory of how I blasted through the blast-door in the Solid Core, how I fought off the Lag, how I brought Mr. Ruins down.
I take it all, and when it is done I open my eyes to the horror-show of a place I don't remember coming, surrounded by unknown men who are looking to me for some reason.
"Captain?" they ask.
They die in moments. Men in black with strange helmets replace them and gather me up. But who am I? I don't remember. What am I now?
I don't know.
One of the men stands before me, looking down. His helmet buzzes faintly. "Hello again Mr. Goligh," he says.
He touches my head, and everything turns black.
RAY G
"Another chord?" spits Ray.
"Two chords," says Ti, "each comprised of four marines, which means two pulses per chord, with two marines to a pulse. I've never seen anything like it. They were fused."
"The helicopter was fused?" asks Ray. "How can that be?"
"The pulses were fused," says Ti. "Two minds functioning together as one, banded together. I didn't know it was possible."
Ray frowns. "So we're not diving alone. There's someone else in here with us?"
Ti nods. "Exactly. I don't know how or who they are, but they're strong. Those missiles were real. Without them the worms would have had us."
Ray's frown deepens. "Worms?"
Doe holds up a hand to silence him. "They had bombs too, but they didn't try them on the Tower. The other helicopter peeled off. Why?"
"And they both ignored us," says Ti. "That or they just didn't see us. Either they can't, or they were too distracted. Maybe they want the Tower too much."
Doe snaps her fingers, a loud click through blood-mic that makes Ray wince. "They want it, that's it. They could have bombed it from a safe distance, but they didn't. The missiles were precise, aimed at the ramparts only, not intended to blow the whole thing up. And the other one fled, to report back."
Ray listens and watch. The feeling in his arms and legs is strange, like cold jelly is giving him a painful, kneading massage inside the suit. He vaguely remembers looking into the faceless face of a dead body in the black road, then the earth split open and mud shot up into the sky.
The next thing he knew La and Ti had been eclipsed, he was running, and a grapnel bolt materialized through his thigh, yanking him up into the mud. The upsurge caught him front on, the noise of his bones crumpling was deafened by the volcanic roar, and a dozen alarms went off in his HUD.
Then he was through. The pain was dimming as sense from his limbs fell away, to this.
"Where's So?" he asks, interrupting Doe and Ti as they talk. "Where's La?"
"Both Lagged," Doe says. A moment. "It's just the three of us now."
Ray looks around. He sees the words plastered on Ti's suit, like the ones before on So's. She had trusted him, he thinks. She woke up for him.
TAKE THE WHITE TOWER
He doesn't even know what the White Tower is.
"Let's take it then," he says.
Doe gives a sharp nod. "We have to move. There's something in the Tower they want, and we need to get there first. We need shelter too, before another tsunami comes, or they come back and bomb us to mud. Let's go."
She stands up, straps on the leash without waiting for Ti, and starts to pull at a run.
It hurts, but Ray can hardly complain. The mud is flat, but the stretcher he's lying on seems to inexplicably be made of bodies, which is odd. He doesn't ask about it though, as there are more important things to think about, like holding himself together through the pain.
HUD records tell him what he lost, and what his body has been through. Every bone broken is a new record. The shock-jacks are fully emptied now, so every jolt as the stretcher's toes or nose catch on a slaggy bit of mud hurts like the devil.
He grits down and sucks it up. He thinks about Me and Far, and where they might be. He thinks about the dead bodies in the black road, how they were completely excised of any sense of individuality. No noses, no eyes, nothing.
He peers ahead to the dark plume of smoke bisecting the flat horizon, rising from the wreckage of the helicopter. The thought of another chord in the same mind as them makes him shudder.
The wreck is far ahead still, but leaning up on his left elbow, which doesn't seem to click like his right, he can make out the heaped outline of black twisted metal through his HUDs zoom. A heat-haze rises above it, rippling across the twin pale red suns in the gray sky.
"We should check the helicopter," he says.
"No time," says Doe. "Ti?"
"According to best estimates, the next tsunami should roll through in a little under two hours," Ti says. "It'll wipe out everything, and bring the mud level to the brink of the Tower's ramparts. It won't be a Tower any more. And it'll take us almost two hours to get there."
"Too tight," says Doe, panting. "Sorry."
"Not sorry," says Ray, thinking fast. "You're not seeing the Core for the floes. The waves are a problem, but other chords in the same Core as us? What use is it if we make it to the Tower then die there at the hands of some freak-bonded chord?"
King Ruin: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 2) Page 13