They both drop to their knees, rummage gently beneath the mud, and carefully lift Ray. He is unconscious still.
"Lash him to your suit" Doe says. "La, you too. Bring him down the corridor; I'll be waiting."
Ti begins unspooling elasteel, and Doe turns to run back down the passage. Already the mud flow reaches her thighs, making every stride a sucking effort. In the central room she lays her hands on the structure and starts to climb. The weight of mud around the base holds it steady, and with shoulders and faces for footholds she reaches the peak in seconds.
The peaked pyramidal roof is just above her, scribbled with more nonsense symbols. She extracts her batch of 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 moves her foot to 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
The suit and the mud layer mute it, but still she feels the pressure wave thump against her back, baking the mud into hard ceramic.
She punches her elbows through it and emerges. There is a breeze blowing in from the splintery hole in the ceiling now, and she can see two furious red suns in the lowering black sky, growing close to conjunction. A steady waterfall of mud flows in through the hole, falling upon a chiaroscuro of thrashing plastic bodies. They are all alive now, but torn by the blast and weighed down by chunks of fallen masonry.
"They're waking up," she says on blood-mic. "Be careful when you come through, over."
"Copy," says Ti, panting and sloshing. "We're almost there."
Doe un-holsters her grapnel, shoots a spread-hook through the gap in the pyramid's peak and lets the tracer reel her up.
She emerges out of darkness and into the watery under-light of the Sunken World. The landscape has been completely reshaped by the passage of the tsunami. 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 heaps of the dead, only a lone and level wash of endless gray sand that subsumes 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 to seek it out. Beneath the bloody glow of the twin suns she picks out the half-buried stub of white 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 mud around them wriggles with plastic bodies, but there isn't much they can do against the sublavic suits.
Doe tosses down her grapnel line.
"Hook in and grapnel up," says Doe. "We'll raise him together."
The twins latch three lines carefully onto Ray's suit then fire their grapnels and rise out of the mud using all three tracers at once. Doe orients them gently through the hole and they lift Ray between them. In his wake the mud bubbles swiftly up and froths through the blasted opening, sealing it over as if their presence were the only thing holding it back.
"Just in time," says Ti. La is on her knees panting wetly. Doe drops to Ray's side and plugs in to his HUD. It's been two 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, though it'll still be hours before he can move.
Decisions. Doe turns to La and considers. La will be dead soon; an unavoidable fact. There is nothing they can do about it, unless the White Tower holds specialist equipment. She can probably handle the trek there, if they go slowly. If they lay her out beside Ray and pull her she will certainly make it alive, but that will slow them further. In either case they are unlikely to make it before the next tsunami rolls through.
So's last simulation rolls through her HUD: the map, the waves circling, the route getting erased. She looks at La and La looks back. She knows what Doe 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 recover at all unless they find the supplies they need.
She loves them both. It comes down to odds, not love or favoritism.
"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 grapnel leashes, spread out like dogs in the traces and start to run across the mud, pulling their fallen lieutenant behind.
I. DOE
The mud underfoot packs firm and they make good time, the way 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 in.
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 sucked in his own parents. They talk about the joy of coming back together again after the last mission, even though they were both dead by then.
These are ghost memories, shared by the chord.
"We'll find Far," Ti insists, as her sister wheezes on. "He'll refresh the seed of you through the Molten Core again."
La laughs, a mucusy cough. "That boy played us all for suckers."
Ti laughs along. 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 jog over flat gray mud that's so still 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 in the absence of Me she is changing, becoming something more as the others die.
It scares her to think this. It's not something she can explain. It makes her long for Ray, and miss So, and weep as La slowly dies by her side.
Hours pass and gradually La's pull on Ray's suit falters. They slow to match her, until at last she stops. She hasn't been speaking for some time now, only breathing that raspy wet gurgle.
"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 to see her one good lung almost filled with fluid too. They might be able to drain it if they set up a camp and worked to sterilize an improvised intubation kit, but it would be a short-term fix only. The lung would only fill again faster, and they don't have the time.
"Please," Ti is saying now, supporting La in place, "just a little further."
Doe loosenn her leash to Ray and embraces them both, while La fights for breath. "It's all right," she says through blood-mic, trying to adopt the kind of soothing tone Ray might use. "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. The three of them take off their helmets and look into each other's eyes while La's breathing steadies and stills under the soothing chemic
als. 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 breath stops. She goes limp in their arms. Tears slip down both Ti and Doe's cheeks. A few seconds longer they remain, silently paying their respects and saying goodbye, then Doe pulls herself away. Ti looks up at her.
"I don't want to bury her here," she says.
Doe has already thought of this. "We make her dust."
Ti nods.
Reverently they put La's helmet back on, then strap back into the traces and start away. At a safe distance Ti sends the command for La's suit to self-immolate.
It is a flash, a brief and blazing green fire as all the oxygen components in the armor electrolyze at once, then she is just a gust of black smoke in the air. Like that, La is gone.
"Thank you," says Ti.
Doe nods.
They run on.
Rumbles come from behind them. The haul is a drudgery, they've been running for days it feels. Endless, endless. Doe's feet hurt, her shoulders hurt where the sublavic armor presses tight from the sled, her knees hurt and she is exhausted.
Then she sees something. Cycling back through her HUDs rear-view angle, she glimpses a flash of leaping white.
"Maggots," says Ti dully. "They're following us."
Doe highlights the rear camera and runs on. Soon she sees one clearly, a fat white bole flung up from the mud, arcing through the air then plunging back into it.
"They've grown," she murmurs.
"They're as big as whales," Ti answers, echoing something her sister said a long time ago. "I've been watching them for hours. They're getting closer."
Doe does not know what to do with this information. They cannot run any faster, not with the marathon still ahead of them. Ray slows them down too much.
She turns to Ti. She looks at Ray.
"No," says Ti fervently. "Not again. Not after all that."
"How many are there?" Doe asks.
Ti runs a quick count, her eyes dancing inside her visor. "Three near us and dozens more following behind, but I can't be certain. They don't all leap, or they don't all leap at once. Some of the rumbles we're hearing don't coincide with a leap."
"Then what do the rumbles mean?"
"It's them eating something," Ti says. "Burrowing through buildings and pyramids underneath the mud surface."
Eating. Doe peers ahead using the HUDs highest resolution, comparing what she sees with So's maps. The White Tower is closer, but far still. Hours yet. She can pick out the white bricks it is made of, the scaly green lines of mold working up the sides like an infection. Everything here is sick.
"They're the Lag," says Doe, trying to think in a clear line. "There's plenty of easier prey for them; all this dead matter. Why are they following us?"
"La said it before," Ti says, "they've gone mad with nonsense and we're magnets of something real. Nothing will stop them."
"Not even the White Tower."
"Maybe for a short time. Until the next tsunami comes and tosses them all over the wall."
Doe wants to say we'll fight them. She wants to say we'll stand our path and frag these worms to bits, but they don't have any weapons that can do it, with the QC pistols all depleted and discarded. What use is a knife against a horde of whale-sized Lag-maggots? The grapnels would only make them angry.
There is only one thing they can do now; the sad reality of survival. For the two of them to reach the Tower, one more member of the chord must die. Doe unhooks her tether and goes over to the sleeping figure of Ray.
And stops. There is a new message daubed across his chest in thick yellow paint, just like So's, just like Ti's.
WAIT
Ti looks at it. Doe sees the tamped-down terror in her eyes. "Wait for what?"
Doe doesn't know. She doesn't know where the message comes from, if it's somehow Me or Far leaving them clues or something else entirely, but she doesn't care. It's enough.
"We wait," she says.
"How long?"
"Until it's almost too late. You tell me how long that is."
Ti goes quiet for a time, running calculations built off So's figures. "I estimate we can make it to the White Tower in one hundred thirty-six minutes, unencumbered. If we can gain access quickly, call it two and a half hours until we're safe. Judging from the lead worm's speed we need to start moving in forty minutes to stay ahead. Any later than that, they'll catch up to us, and then the tsunami will roll around too, and…" she trails off.
Doe slumps down on the hard mud. She sets an internal timer for T-minus thirty-nine minutes and closes her eyes, dropping into an instant, dreamless sleep.
She wakes to gunfire and explosions two minutes before the alarm is set to go off.
Perimeter alerts flash and wail in her HUD. She bolts upright and scans the mudfield; there are bursts of incendiary fire erupting behind them. What? She blinks and stands. The landscape has become a patchy inferno studded with burning candle-white lumps. From the nearest welter of fire leaps a great white maggot only to be strafed by rapid-fire shells from above.
It falls to the ground and burns and writhes like all its fellows, but Doe is not looking at that, she is looking into the sky at the last thing she would have ever expected.
A Dactyl helicopter. It is black all over with twin rotor hubs blurring six rotor blades like a wasp's wings. As she watches another bomb drops from its underbelly, exploding when it touches the dirt. Gouts of baked clay spray out, in the midst of which Doe picks out a splash of torn white maggot.
"What the hell is that?" comes a deep voice at her side. She turns and sees it is Ray. He is leaning on one of his broken elbows and pointing with his broken arm. "A helicopter?"
Doe laughs, unable to stop herself. It is too ridiculous to comprehend.
"Woman, what is happening here?" Ray goes on, sounding faintly aggrieved. His voice is gravelly and rough, but the color is coming back to his face. "Shit's really gone to pot."
"It has," says Doe. She doesn't know what more to say than that. "I'm glad you're back."
"I feel like I'm only half here," says Ray, "like I'm held together with sticky-tape and elasteel." He blinks. "How many helicopters even are there?"
Doe spins back to see a second helicopter, this one bearing down directly on them. Its front rack guns are spinning and leaning out from the doors are two black-clad marines manning howitzers trained on the ground. The backwash tumult of the machine's rotors is already thunderous, while a thick red liquid streams down from the blades like dark rain.
"Fuck me," whispers Ray. "What a thing to wake up to."
Doe takes his hand and looks into his big dark eyes; there's nothing else to do now.
"It's bleeding," Ray murmurs. "Raining blood."
Then the helicopter is upon them. Its downdraft batters the drying mud and sends rough ripples spreading outward. This is the end, Doe imagines, and any moment the howitzers or rack guns will fire, the bombs will drop and that will be it.
It overpasses them without firing.
In a second the downdraft is gone and the deep chop of its rotors Dopplers away, leaving a spattered trail of red liquid on the clay behind.
"I swear that's blood," says Ray. He tries to push himself up off the stretcher, but something in his arm clicks and he says, "Ow," then drops back flat. "Shit, that hurts."
Doe is torn between tending to Ray and tracking the helicopter. It buzzes away from them in a straight line, headed directly for the Tower and covering the distance in a few minutes
"Just lie back," she says absently, patting at Ray. "You'll be fine."
Through maximum magnification Doe watches as a pillbox atop the White Tower's outer wall opens fire in a burst of bright purple flame, shooting something too small to see. At the same moment the helicopter drops two missiles which ignite and zoom toward the source of the flame. Moments pass as they draw tracer marks in the air,
but before they hit a sudden wash of purple flame engulfs the helicopter in some kind of primitive QC effect.
Projectile Quantum Confusion molecules, Doe figures, like the ones fired from her bondess accelerator.
Almost instantly the machine stops being a machine and starts being a lump of fused metal and flesh dropping from the sky. An instant later the missiles connect with the White Tower wall and detonate, chewing a ragged bite-mark out of the rampart and spraying white stone across the surrounding clay.
The fused helicopter crashes down. The other helicopter flying away. Ray is up on his other elbow, pointing again.
"What the hell is going on?"
Doe knows what it is. Looking over the field of crumpled metal and burning white Lag whales she remembers seeing this before, back when she did it herself.
"It's an assault on the Solid Core."
"What?" asks Ray.
"White Tower," Ti corrects.
Ray looks back and forth between the two of them. "Assault by who? By Me? Do we have helicopters now?"
Doe shakes her head. There is only one other possibility. "It wasn't us. That was another Soul, and it wants the White Tower too."
RITRY GOLIGH
14. FORT
I emerge through the surface of the freezing Arctic water and swim over to the fort's nearest 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.
"Ready for combat," I tell them over the comms. My own voice echoes back to me rough and raspy.
"Ready," they come back, pulling their Kaos rifles ready for use.
I draw my Pstock pistol then flip open the visor and look up the fort's leg. There are widely-interspersed barrel-rungs running up the leg's upper side, intended to moor refueling cables. At the top of each leg stands a Bofors gun-emplacement, the barrels pointing directly down like four insectile eyes.
Soul Jacker Box Set Page 29