Doe and Ti run on in silence for a few moments, until Doe speaks.
"Ti, unleash and make for the helicopter. Gather what you can."
Ti unleashes immediately. She latches the cord onto Doe's back, then jogs off toward the smoking ruin.
"We'll have to hope access is easy," she calls back over blood-mic. "Perhaps the defenders will let us in."
Ray laughs. "An easy siege, then."
"Let's hope so," says Doe.
The speed of the sled slows by half, with only Doe to pull. Ray tightens the focus of his blood-mic to only her.
"If time is too tight, you'll have to leave me behind," he says.
Doe laughs.
"I'm serious," Ray says. "The intel is more valuable than me, if it'll keep you alive"
"I'm serious too," Doe says. "We already tried to leave you behind once."
This is news to Ray. "What? When?"
"It was the worms. Never mind."
Ray considers. Worms sounds enigmatic, but fair enough. "So why didn't you leave me?"
Doe points roughly back at his chest. Ray peers down and sees yellow paint splurged across it. The letters are upside down, but so large it's hard not to read them.
WAIT
He grunts. "Hand of god."
"Hand of Ritry Goligh, more like," Doe says. "At least, we hope."
"We hope."
She pulls on, and the sled bucks and slides over the mud. Ray tries to think of a concrete memory of Ritry Goligh, but can't come up with much. They're all part of him, he knows that much, but anything more than that is murky. He is like a distant general, determining their fate, and for a marine that's what life is.
In the distance, Ti shrinks to a tiny dot approaching the helicopter.
"Double us your feed," Doe barks through comms.
"Already on it," says Ti, and a second later a video signal pops into the corner of Ray's screen. He chews it bigger and watches as Ti approaches the helicopter.
Up close it looks strangely insectile. The cab has melted into an interleaved ball of shiny black with silvery pleats, like a silk-spun pupal chrysalis waiting to bloom. Two long black antennae-like railings along the side are what Ray takes to be the runners. The rotor blades have drooped to encircle the pupa-cab like wilted limbs.
"It's hot," says Ti, circling warily. "There's no movement at all."
"Check the rotors," Ray says. "Especially the tips."
Ti moves closer. Her gloved hand appears in the shot, reaching out to touch one of the rotor's tips. Her fingers run down it, and the metal quivers like soft fat.
"Metal shouldn't do that," she says. "What am I looking for Ray?"
"I don't know," he says. "Look at the underside."
"Of the rotor?"
"Of the rotor."
Ti moves in, and the video view swerves across the melted cab.
"I'm leaning against the cab," she says, "damn hot here, but I think I can…"
Her hand reaches out and pushes at the rotor. It flops limply at her touch, lifting up and revealing a dark underside.
"Shine your flashlight on it," Ray says.
Ti does, and gasps. The underside of the rotor is gouged with some kind of writing, symbols so deep they almost penetrate through to the other side.
"What in all the Cores is this?"
"A language," says Doe. "But not any language I know, or that the HUD has easy access to. Scroll up, OK. Got it, processing. Ray, how did you know there'd be something there?"
"It was bleeding," Ray says. "From the rotor-blades."
"That's true," Ti says. "It's tacky with red liquid even now. Why do you think it's blood, Ray?"
"What else would it be?"
Neither woman has any answer to that.
"Can you go on to the next?" Ray asks. "There may be more."
"Roger," says Ti, and pushes off the cab with a grunt, circling round to the next rotor blade.
"Oh," she says.
Sticking out of the side of the cab is a body, one of the marines who'd been leaning out with a howitzer.
"He must be dead," Doe says.
Ti skips near and her foot flashes up, striking the figure in the head. His helmet flips off, revealing a melted pink boil of skin underneath.
"Ugh," says Ray involuntarily.
"He's dead. The purple fire melted him."
"Get his gun."
Ti reaches down and plucks it from his grip. She pulls the trigger, and the
CRACKACRACKCRACKA
report echoes sharply back to Ray and Doe at the stretcher, who get it in stereo.
"It works," says Ti. "Hell of a kick."
"Can you get anything else? Like a mission manifest?"
Ti leans in and rustles at the dead man's waist, pulling chunks of black metal from his belt and stacking them on her own.
"Looks like some primitive kind of candle-bomb, munitions, compass. There's a rifle scope, and a relay for the comms in his helmet."
At the stretcher, Doe turns back to give Ray a pointed look.
"Strip it," she says.
Ti does, scraping the guts out of the helmet and stacking them with the relay. "That's it."
"Any more guns?"
Ti runs a quick circle of the helicopter, then leans in and attempts to pry the cab-pupa open. "None. I could try to blow it open, but is that the best use of this candlewax?"
"Save it. Check the other rotors. I'm getting something on the markings."
"What is it?"
"They're hieroglyphics," Doe says. "That's about as good as it can distinguish. Ancient, indecipherable without a key."
"On the rotors," Ti says drily, as she leans in to peel back a second blade from the cab. "There's more here too."
"Get a good look at them all, I'm collating. There was something like this on the pyramid walls, but they were corrupted."
"Something like this?" Ray asks. "How much like this?"
"The suit couldn't make sense of it, but these figures were everywhere. Why?"
"I think it's a votive," Ray says.
"A what?"
"A votive. It's a kind of sacrificial marking. Something you write on an offering to a god."
"Why would you think that?"
"Because it was bleeding even before it got blown up. It was already cut with the words of its sacrifice. If I'm right, it means that helicopter, with its bonded pulses and two minds conjoined, expected to die from the outset."
Ti sucks in a breath.
"How do you know that, Ray?"
Ray shrugs, and instantly regrets it, because it hurts. "Morale is part of my job. Remember we used to write messages before we went into a dive, in case one of us was lost to the Lag?"
"Faintly," says Doe.
"I think it dates back to Far, for us at least. Warriors have always done it though, kind of a cross between prayers and messages to loved ones left behind. But we didn't do it as a message, because we didn't have anyone else for the messages to go to, did we? There was only ever us."
"So why did we do it?" Ti asks.
"We did it to strengthen the chord, after we were gone. To add mass to the whole."
"This chord is dead," says Ti. "Melted."
"So what is the votive for?" Doe asks. "Or who?"
"For something bigger than us," says Ray, "bigger than any single chord alone, and important enough to die for."
Doe trudges on in silence for a few moments.
"They came in expecting to die," she says. "They only meant to kill the Lag and damage the Tower. That's why the other helicopter fled."
"Its rotors weren't bleeding," Ray agrees. "It wasn't marked."
A few more steps.
"So this assault was just a beach-head," says Doe. "Preparing a staging ground. Shit. What the hell are we up against?"
"An army, from the looks of it," says Ray. "With a god at its head."
"Fuck."
"Fuck indeed. We need to get inside that Tower fast."
An hour passes.
Ti returns to the sled and picks up the slack, redoubling the rate at which Ray gets shaken and stirred. He tries to lie back and plan for what is going to come, but planning was never his strongest suit. Most of the time he spends gazing off at the twin red suns, glimpsed through gaps in the gray cloud cover. He'd thought earlier they were going to collide, that they were just another symptom of this place's slow death, but now he thinks otherwise.
They are not on a collision course. Neither are they following one after the other. If anything, they seem to be revolving around a common fixed point, like lavic flows in a Molten Core.
"What does it mean?" Ti asks when he tells her.
"No idea," he answers.
They run on. They go past the wrecked helicopter, its smoke flagging now, sending up intermittent puffs like secret messages.
When the hard-pack mud beneath lurches, and the next tsunami tips up the far edge of the world at a concave angle, they are within QC range of the White Tower.
"How long?" Doe asks, and Ray can hear her teeth gritted through the pain of dragging him. It must be hell.
"Perhaps ten minutes," Ti answers. "There's nothing to slow it down, no incline or features. It'll be on us soon."
"And to the Tower?"
"At this pace, perhaps eleven."
Doe swears under her breath and charges ahead harder.
Ray leans up on his elbow, the click has gone now, to study the White Tower wall. It was a stub before, and now it is as big as a whale. Its white blocks seem yellowish, like decaying teeth, and the mortared gaps between them are yellow and green with some kind of pus-like slime.
The bitten-out hole the helicopter's missiles chewed out of the irregular rampart looks to be equally infected, rimmed with green and yellow like marsh moss. A thick dark-brown discharge runs out of it, staining a widening sheen down the wall. At the base where it meets the mud, there are bubbles and steam.
"You think grapnels can reach it?" Doe asks on blood-mic, panting.
"Yes, but we don't know what other defenses it has."
"There's someone up there," says Ray.
"What?"
"On the left side, he's looking at us through an arrow-slit, but he's there."
"Ti, hand me the howitzer."
Ti does.
In the far distance, the thump thump sound of rotors cuts in on the steady grumble of the nearing tsunami.
"Three," barks Ray, spinning to home in on them, looking back. "They're just above the tsunami. No blood this time."
"Then this could be the invasion wave," Doe says. "Ti get the cradle ready for Ray, and give me your grapnel."
Ti unlatches her gun and elasteel reel and hands both to Doe.
"I'll clear the way," Doe says, then unleashes and sprints ahead. She covers half the distance to the Tower wall in moments, then drops to one knee and aims the howitzer.
CRACKACRACKCRACKA
A stream of supersonic bullets tears out of the spinning weapon's barrel, ripping through the cross-hatched THUMP THUMP THUMP of three fused pulses drawing nearer, and raking into the arrow-slit in the Tower.
A scream rings down. Doe shoulders the weapon and runs on, launching her grapnel and taking to the air as it bites into the top of the rampart. Purple fire blazes out from the Tower top but catches only her heels as she fires the second grapnel, which yanks her sharply on a different angle, soaring up toward the wall.
The fire tries to follow but sputters, and Doe is already over the edge and sprinting back along the wall with the howitzer shouting
CRACKACRACKCRACKA
with every step.
Ray turns back to see the helicopters gaining on them, and with them the tsunami wall. The earth is thrumming now with the drumbeat of so many rotor-blade pulses, he can feel it through his re-bonding bones and in his blood.
"Hurry Ti," he calls.
"Lose some weight," she gasps back at him.
At that he unties the clasps holding him to the stretcher-sled, and immediately feels it slide out from underneath.
"What happened?" Ti shouts.
The pain is immediate and intense, crunching through all Ray's budding nerves and bones as his suit drags along the surface of the mud, but there is no other way. "Sled's gone," he grunts back. "It's just you and me, Ti."
"It wasn't even," Ti manages, sucks in a deep breath, "that heavy."
There's another burst of howitzer fire from the wall, then Doe's voice on blood-mic. "You're not going to believe who I'm looking at," she says.
"Cover us," Ti calls, and grunts into a final push, even as the shadow of the tsunami wall eclipses them. A helicopter screams by overhead, launching its rockets, even as both Doe's howitzer fires back, and a jet of purple flame erupts from the rampart.
Rattling along behind Ti, Ray has an unobstructed view as the howitzer bullets shred the missiles and burst them in air, followed by the helicopter frothing into a purple frenzy and fusing.
It drops. At the same moment, Ti hooks Ray into her suit and they rise, soaring up toward the yellow-slimed wall.
The tsunami is a bank of brown he can almost reach out and touch. One of the helicopters swerves to avoid Doe's rain of fire, and is caught by the tide and crumpled at once. The one remaining machine yaws up and away, its front guns hammering off the wall and into the gray sky, and for a moment seems to have escaped.
Then a vast white shape, as big as the Bathyscaphe and ringed with creamy-brown lines, bursts out of the frothing tsunami crest and clamps down on the helicopter's cab. A missile releases and explodes from its belly, and the two burst together in a spray of white meat and black metal, falling to be swallowed by the surging tide.
"A worm," Ray murmurs under his breath.
Then they hit the wall's peak hard, his vision darkens with dislocating pain in his shoulder and hip, and scant meters below the tsunami strikes, trembling everything.
"I've got you," Ti shouts, and he's in strong arms being guided down to a stone parapet covered in dark brown stains and fresh blood. She sets him against the wall and runs off clattering shouting for Doe.
Beneath him the flood hammers away, and through the gray buzz of pain he looks to either side, to see dead figures lying all around. They are wearing torn blue tunics with tarnished brass buttons, filthy once-white pantaloons, and scattered in their flaccid hands are ancient muskets.
He remembers this, from another place and another time.
"Mr. Ruins," he whispers through blood-mic, before the pain swallows him under.
MOVEMENT 2. WHITE TOWER
FARA A
I am me.
I move in darkness, in light. I dream of a hurricane come to sweep me away, within which are things I remember the shapes of, the foggy feelings of, but nothing else.
There are no names, no sharp details. I don't know these people, or these places, but they are all mine. They make me up, but what does that mean, when I don't know what they are?
I don't know what I am. I know my name, perhaps, but who am I? What do these feelings mean without anchors to root them in?
I am anger. I am love, somewhere, deep beneath the rage, and defiance. I am ready to die.
I am me, and I am Ritry Goligh, and I am some kind of hollow.
I roll into light, and open my eyes. It is a white space, and the walls are so thick I cannot reach through them. My own thoughts bounce back to me. Thee walls are white all round, as is the floor, as is the ceiling. There are no doors or windows, only a slow effulgent bath of white light.
Curled up in a ball, I begin to sob. I don't know why. I feel empty inside. I feel hollowed out, and it hurts so badly. I want to cry for my mother, but I never had one. Didn't I used to drink? There is nothing to drink here.
Instead I bite into my fist and moan. I do it until I taste blood, sharp and tangy on my tongue, and the hollow flood fades.
I am Ritry Goligh, I say to myself. I am from Calico. I am from proto-Calico. I fought in the skirmishes. I loved someone. I am worth somethin
g. Someone loved me.
They are platitudes without root, but I believe them. They are blobs in my Molten Core, soon to dissipate without roots, so I invent roots for them. I massage myself, as I have massage a thousand minds before. I use the trick of skinship upon myself.
My wife is called Fara, and we have three daughters. We go to the park every weekend, in Tenbridge Wulls. We watch television shows and laugh. I have a best friend called Yale, and we sometimes drink and hit golf balls off the wall, over the skulks down below, where we both once lived.
It helps, and I repeat it until the memories start to bed in. Every second that passes I'm losing something, and I backfill as much as I can. I create my job and our life together, all the things we used to do. I fill out the world with inventions to keep from going mad, and I repeat them like a mantra.
There's drool running down my cheek when I emerge. It wasn't a dive, not any kind of dive I've done before, because this white room forbids it. The walls bounce me back at myself, reflecting only me. Without something concrete to hold onto I'd go mad.
I feel the ache for Fara deep inside me, though Fara is not her name. I long for my three daughters harder than anything. I revel in it.
For a time I just lie there, staring up at the ceiling. There are some details I remember. The worst things. I remember a man called Mr. Ruins, who tried to steal everything. I remember the sea-fort filled with bodies, and the rock filled with tortured souls. I remember helping them, and striving to fight this thing that hurt them, and finding there was no way.
Now the thing that hurt them has me. King Ruin. He's going to carve out the pieces of my mind to get at what he wants, and there's nothing I can do.
I am not up to it. I can't face it. But that doesn't matter, because it is going to happen anyway. I will face it, and there will be no way to win. There will be no dignity for me. There will be no way to control what I become.
King Ruin will turn me inside out. All I can do, all I will ever be able to do, is resist. I will fail. I already know I will fail. And knowing that, that madness will inevitably come, is a balm. I only need hold out for as long as I can.
King Ruin: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 2) Page 14