"He's given up," she says.
"I understand," says Ray. He kneels 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 ask for their help.
"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. 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. "It means I'm weak."
"You're not weak," says Ray. He reaches out to her but she pushes him away.
"I am. If all I'm built on is this, then what am I? Push me enough and I'll crack. What is that? How can I go on, knowing this weakness is what lies beyond the Bridge?"
"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 Solid Core," says So, "and this is his repayment."
"I'm sorry," I want to say. "I've let you all down."
"He's nothing," says So, and turns away. She disappears. Ray shakes his head, full of sadness, then he too leaves. Ti and La follow, sobbing now, hand in hand. Last to go is Doe, disbelief in her eyes.
"Will you really do this to us?" she asks. "We fought for you from the beginning. We sacrificed ourselves to keep 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 cry, though my figure on the floor doesn't make a sound.
"This is not us," he repeats. "I know our Soul 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! We were there. We Lagged all our enemies 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. More enemies are coming now, but 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 the fury. Now is the time to make the bastards 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 med-bay's strip-lights I wake.
My head throbs like an engine-screw is drilling into my skull. Now I really am hungover, and 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 all right, 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 by choice. 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 they do it fast; Hawks responding like my hands and my feet. By reaching out through them I can handle the whole subglacic. It is similar to what I do every time I jack the Molten Core, splitting myself between the tones of the chord.
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 Hawks, and I struggle to consciously divide my attention into more than a handful at a time, but I manage. I inject my orders like silvery engrams needled into their gray matter, setting all their paths in motion.
We're going to the rock I saw in Mr. Ruin's Soul-trail.
I dare not reach out to it on the bonds, for fear the terrible Soul 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 doomed, but something in the sense of it tells me it did not. Rather it was somehow attuned to many more live feeding lines than just this one, like a spider at the center of its web, waiting for a shiver. It doesn't know me wholly, not yet.
It will.
I have only the loosest sense of where the rock is, out in the Arctic midst. I think we fought an under-ice skirmish near there, somewhere. We fought the War everywhere, but all the hydrate mines are known and marked.
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 have passed. 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 War. There were no battleships hunkered behind every calved-off iceberg, no subglacics shadowed beneath every drifting floe. The lines of control were theoretical, not boundaries marked out in blood.
This subglacic is old, like me. I am only forty-seven now, but I feel my age. The War ended over twenty years ago, but still I remember it like it was 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
The name is circled in red ink. Perhaps a great battle was fought here, remembered and commemorated to this day. Perhaps it was only an imaginative crewmember's idle doodling, killing the long dull hours while she waited for her CSF to ferment.
I close my eyes and remember what I saw. The orientation of rigs on the map match. This is the place Mr. Ruin went seeking succor. This is the place where his lonesome path crossed with those others, and this is where I'll learn who they are.
Sonar tells us we are alone, out in the ocean depths. The other subglacics have moved far out of range. On the screen I see a whale sounding 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 predator. I showed that to Mr. Ruin and I will show it to these others. I am Ritry Goligh, ex-marine and Soul Jacker to the Skulks and Calico. I mastered Mr. Ruin and Don Zachary both, I jacked 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 as sleek and wakeful as a shark.
13. SPARTAN'S CRAG
The Crag is a thousand miles from Calico, a thousand miles from anywhere, a flyspeck dot in the middle of the Arctic that only marines and riggers have ever had cause to go nea
r.
It takes seven days to reach. In those days I recover my strength. My reattached fingers work well again. My hangover is gone, and I feel lean and sharp like I was in my marine days. I control my expanded chord of forty-three marines with greater ease than ever; looking through the periscope with one at the same time as I scrub decks down in the gantry with another. I 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 in them at once. I am the chord refracted, a consciousness splitting into multiple pieces, and the marines 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 and they are valued lieutenants in his new world order. I let them vent frustrations in their dreams. When they're on my clock I run a ship as tight as any Ven ever led.
We sluice through the oceans. We circle back around the northern coast of proto-Rusk, to be certain we were 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 over. Now their numerous guns are gloved by seaweed and anenomes.
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, and back then there were enemies too, of a different stripe.
proto-Rusk
Sino-Rusk
neo-Armorica
Aleut Nation
Eurasian Conglomerate
Jovian Distinct
Once they were all fighting out here, skulking these undertows and 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 mindbombed each other to shit, blew up what we couldn't steal with neutron squibs or dry ice bombs and got high to all hell on fermented CerebroSpinal Fluid.
Good times. I think of them as I sit by Mr. Ruin's side, drifting gently on the tides of his dying unconscious. At times I rouse to hear one of the Hawks in some far-flung part of the ship humming a tune I knew from those days, and each time I wonder if it came from him or from me.
So we circle closer to the Crag. The subglacic swims without cease, and we gradually 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 the Soul out there will somehow sense me. I reach just enough to know there is no immediate pursuit.
I talk to Mr. Ruin as we draw near. I ask him questions and listen to him breathe.
"Why did you come here?" I ask.
"Who is your master?"
"What does he want with me?"
Mr. Ruin gives me no answers. Mr. Ruin can't hear me at all, with his consciousness 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 icepack shield remains firm, and when I place the ear of my thoughts up close to it, I just hear the tumbling thrum of tsunami steadily washing him away.
We reach Spartan's Crag.
I order the subglacic to surface gradually, a process that takes over four hours, to minimize the chance of detection. The trim tanks fill and vent like puffer fish, smooth and steady. In the conning tower I look at sonar displays, which describe an outcropping of five seaforts suspended above the water, stalked on concrete caisson anchor plugs with trident legs, surrounding a hydrate rig atop the Crag itself.
The Crag is an extinct volcano, and we creep up its submerged slopes like some amphibian creature evolving out of the water, yard by gradual yard, until I feel the change in the bonds.
It is different here. There is that same pocket of emptiness around the Crag, a hollowness at the heart of an almighty frame written in pain. I can sense the edges of it, feel the pop as we pass through, but I do not know what the true weight of it was. There are the spoor of perhaps two hundred minds like Mr. Ruin's coming and going, though each is a shielded mask behind which I can sense nothing more than arrogance and satiation.
Mr. Ruin's own trail is amongst them, fresher than most, leading to the westernmost fort. Brighter than all the others though is the bright hot band of his master's thought. It encircles the whole complex and beds down in the Crag.
I dare not go near it this time. To be even this close feels like standing within the shadow of Calico's tsunami wall, daring the overtopping wave to come. It feels like the Lag, vast and unknowable and unstoppable. I keep my mind confined to the shortest, sharpest bursts of direction to guide my Hawks.
The subglacic surfaces beside the westernmost fort. Through the periscope I study a sky that is gray and heavy with rain. The great metal legs of the fort rise up before me, jutting from the water like some alien sculpture, coated in rustproof paint the color of old blood. Sitting atop their apex some thirty feet high is the fort, half as large as my ship and brimming with old Bofors machine artillery guns, trained on the sky and the water both.
We used to drop these forts around every hydrate-rig we installed. On those missions I had little to do, except to tend and counsel the regular stream of War-shocked marines by massaging away their worst combat memories. The rest of the time I spent watching the concrete anchor plugs sink to the ocean-floor, high on CSF-vodka with the marines who would be left behind on guard duty.
They were as certain to die as we were. We all knew that. Any concerted assault on the rig would cause them to buckle. They existed 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 great leg now, I wonder if at some point I built this very installation. Perhaps I watched while they assembled sea-cranes and jacked this precise fort-box up into the sky. Perhaps I dropped memories into the minds of marines who would go on to control its massive guns.
There's no way to know. I gave almost all my missions to the Lag a long time ago.
"Captain?"
One of my Hawks 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 rig atop the Crag, guarded by the forts.
It is empty. If Ruin's master expected me here, he has not shown his hand. I see only the wan five forts circling the rig and Crag, linked to the seafloor by umbilical hydrate pipes. It is plainly derelict, the mine underneath likely gone dry. Only a few tattered flags hang desultorily from its railings. Just one suspension bridge remains, leading from the rig to the eastern fort, though chunks of its metal plating look to have been bitten out. The other four bridges hang down the rig's side, sunk into the water. Someone must have cut them.
Beneath the hydrate rig lies the Crag, a thick spear of dark basalt. From this angle I can't see the entrance, though sonar showed it is wide and unobstructed; a channel blasted down into the old volcanic chambers. The sphere of the terrible Soul dips under the water here too, so I reason there must be a complex beneath.
Soon.
I pull away from the periscope and 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, and I can see he wants to ask why we're here, how this helps us subjugate the world, but he has too much fear of Don Zachary to put a foot out of place.
"Weapons," I tell him, to set him at ease. "We're looking for War-era weapons."
He grins, because that at least he can understand. "Yes, sir," he repeats with more energy.
> In the captain's hutch I find there is no wetsuit tailored for me. Of course. All of the Hawks 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 oxygen 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 equipment and extra ammunition for the Pstock pistol in my armpit holster. The suit hugs tight like a black second skin.
Me, I think, as I look into my own eyes in the mirror. There are pieces of me that have missed preparing like this, though I only ever cleared enemy rigs in my early days in the War. In my latter years they made me a Soul Jacker, though I ran more routes than any of them then, soothing the memories through their frazzled minds.
The suit 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 dark within 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.
Standing beneath the periscope with the team of four all looking to me, I inject engram packets of instruction into their minds, then cut all ties between us. 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 reaching out to the bonds at all, once I'm above the waves. For a time I'll have to rely only on Don Zachary's discipline.
"Let's go," I say, and start up the ladder to the airlock.
THE CHORD
F. TI
The rumbling rolls on for long minutes after the tsunami first hit, and Ti holds to her sister tightly while the walls shake and ancient dust drifts down from the ceiling. She can't let go, because they're twins and she won't be separated again.
Soul Jacker Box Set Page 27