Soul Jacker Box Set

by Michael John Grist

  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 off the wetsuit as gravity takes hold. Standing at the bottom rung of the leg, I grasp the first hoop and begin the ascent in an undignified hunch. Every hoop I climb is a chance to fall as I lunge for the next, but I don't fall and neither do any of my team.

  Halfway up the wind blows harder, ripe with salt and the stink of chemicals used to strip hydrates, drifting off the old rig. My back strains with the effort of staying balanced, 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 first.

  "On me," I whisper through the comms, and hike my legs over the emplacement's front armor plate. Holding to a roll of piping ducted to the fort's exterior, I work my way carefully to the single entrance. My team 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 roof and a heavy metal door latched 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 then pry the door open with a crunch and a squeal of old hinges.

  The full force of the frame within hits me like a mindbomb. I almost stagger backward off the platform. My mind reels and the stench of corruption buffets me in a cloud, thick with sweet putrefaction like a decomposing whale out at sea.

  My eyes blur and I rub them clear then kick the door open wider, peering into the hot, dark fort interior. The air is rich with the stink of old death. I swallow back a gag and shine a flashlight 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 literally everywhere, stacked like layers of sediment and rising up the walls like a sloshing tide.

  I swallow another gag 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 right about now. As it is, I have to grip the door to remain upright.

  There are thousands of dead in here, many so ancient they have withered to leathery skeletons, dry as tinder beneath an overtopping layer of fresher corpses, and every one of them is marred by bite-marks, gouges, breaks, amputations, and the memory of hideous, overwhelming despair.

  I feel hunger, suffering and destruction echoing through the remaining frame. I feel rape, cannibalism and murder.

  "Shit," says the nearest member of my team, as he looks over my shoulder into the dark. Another one of them vomits.

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

  I'm here for knowledge, and the information here is denser than any bonds I've seen before.

  I open my mind the tiniest amount to the suffering of these people through the frame, to know their stories and learn what happened here, and one voice surges above the rest. In a second it overwhelms me, and beneath the tsunami weight of its cry for mercy I am washed away.

  15. HARIM ONGSHOY

  My name was Harim Ongshoy and I should never have died this way.

  I was a lieutenant marine on the Orinoci subglacic, New Aleut nation. We were patrolling a routine beat around the last Arctic shelf, sonar-hunting other boats in our vicinity when the first bomb went off and everything went dark.

  I woke up in this dark and fevered metal box, crammed so tightly with the peoples of other nations that there was scarcely room to breathe. Everyone was screaming and there were dead bodies underfoot and the rank smell of rot in the air. My captain rallied us and we carved out a section in the dark for ourselves, pushing the others aside as they wailed, throwing corpses and damp bones at them.

  We tried to communicate, but half of these people only raved as though mad and half spoke the languages of other nations. One man spoke to our Soul Jacker in a tongue he could partly translate, perhaps proto-Rusk, and described a horrific three months spent in this fetid cell.

  "How do you know it's three months?" our captain asked.

  "They came to take one of us ninety times," the man said. "Every time I saw that it was dawn outside. Every time I tried to flee."

  He had us touch the nub where he lost his arm, trapped in the door when they closed it on him.

  "It didn't cut clean," he said, "I only got free when they opened the door the next day. I had to bite it off myself."

  When the Soul Jacker translated this, one of our crew vomited. The stench went nowhere, only hung in the air along with the scent of death, defeat and rancor. Wails rang out incessantly in the blackness. Some of our men started to sob, others cried for their mothers.

  "Let me stay with you," the man said. "I'll help you. Together we can rush the keepers. I know when they come. We can charge the door. These others are disorganized, they don't know what to do."

  "Who are the keepers?" our captain asked through the Soul Jacker. "What do they want?"

  The man shuddered. "I don't know. All I know is, they throw the ones they take back in here a day or two later, sometimes a week, and if they're not dead they're different."

  "What do you mean, different?"

  "They can't speak," said the man. "They've been amputated. They have no eyes or ears, no face or throat. Some come back as limbless worms, to root around and groan in the bones and muck. Some have no skin and no tongues. Some have their skull tops sitting on their brains like the lid on a porcelain sugar jar. Many of them are already dead, and most of the rest die within hours."

  It took a long time to translate this. The captain pulled our Soul Jacker, the amputated man and myself aside to hear it. It was too much for the crew.

  As I listened I became aware of the wheezy silence around us. Bar the occasional squall of bodies stepping on other bodies, there was only the slow pulse of their breath. This dank, foul prison became one giant lung, breathing in and out the same foul humors. Already I felt the tang of despair upon my tongue like a thick black fur.

  The captain gathered our troops and we planned. There would be an escape attempt; we would work together and charge the door come the dawn. We'd get out, he insisted. He made us repeat this. I already knew he was wrong, deep inside. These other men and women were marines too. They were no weaker than us, no more foolish than us and they had clearly been here for months.

  The floor was slick with slime I could not see. We arranged a patrol in the darkness, communicating by touch and feel. Gibraltes had long hair, so I knew it was him. Locklan had impressive muscles so I knew it was her. With every touch across their hot pulsing bodies I said my farewells.

  "It's hours yet until they open the door," the captain told us, relayed through the Soul Jacker from the amputated man. "Squad one sleep. We'll clear a space."

  I was squad one, so I laid down in the dreck. Already the foul smell was becoming normal. I felt it griming into my hair, into my pores and filling me up. Slowly a dark and stinking sleep took me, and I dreamed of drowning in blood.

  I woke to the slaughter. There were screams and the hard flat smack of bodies impacting, as the older prisoners bludgeoned their way through our ranks. I heard the amputated man's voice rising above the cries at times, directing them on and describing us by our features and our positions.

  Gibraltes by my side fought and went down to a gang who bit and used their long fingernails like claws, tearing him apart. Locklan was strong but it didn't help her, as the sheer weight of bodies held her down. She screamed that they were blinding her as it happened, that they were biting through her thick neck.

  I shuffled backward and buried myself in old corpses so deeply I could barely breathe and rode the slaughter out like a coward.

  Afterward I heard them patrolling, and shuffled
deeper into the wasted corpses, though there was no way to escape the sounds that followed, as they fell to eating.

  Raw flesh tore like wet cloth. The chewing was obscene and went on and on. A few they kept alive and ate pieces of raw, for entertainment. I heard their cries for help and they changed me. I began to understand.

  Those people did this because it was all they could do. Their suffering was so dire that the only relief was to visit a greater pain upon others. I learned much about what it means to be human, as they reveled in the screams which meant they were strong. For a time they could be victors.

  After many hours the screams became intermittent and the entertainment was at an end. My crew were all dead and I was alone. I listened to the others suck at the air, their breath rising like a mist pregnant with the meat of my fellows.

  I was sure the same fate awaited me. I had only delayed it. I lay in the hot embrace of the dead and waited for my turn to come, but it did not. Rather, a long time later the door of the prison opened.

  The light blinded me, even shielded by the dead as I was. Some kind of stupor descended upon me and I was unable to move. In the burning white light I saw figures dressed all in white come in to collect the men and women who had slaughtered my crew. These victors now bowed their heads like penitents, their straggled hair and naked bodies matted with blood, and went.

  It was almost a greater terror than the feast. Soon all of them were gone and I was left alone. They closed the door and I laid for hours more in my tomb, trembling as the numbness wore away and I began to grasp what would happen next.

  Many hours passed. I was starving already and every hour only sharpened the need. At last I emerged to eat.

  In time, as my supplies dwindled and rotted in the dark, as chewing through cheek meat and belly fat became commonplace, others arrived.

  They were dumped in a trance. I killed half of them with strong bites across their throats while they lay there stunned. The rest I spared, to keep me supplied with fresh meat.

  More followed. The prison filled, and for a time I was the ghost amongst them, slipping in and out of their ranks. I knew the confines of this cell well by then, having learned to travel it blind. Now my hands and feet were my eyes; my nose and my skin gave me all the information I needed.

  My ears I learned to ignore. My victims spoke, and many of them I understood. They talked of the War and who their captors might be. They followed the protocols of command still, and set up a space to sleep within, set a patrol.

  I saw myself within them. I donned the mask of the man I once was, and spoke.

  "I can help you," I told them. I moved into their ranks sinuously. I was petted and touched and beheld with wonder. "They open the door once a day," I told them. "We will charge them together."

  They let me in and they assigned shifts. They had no idea I had slunk out. They were unaware as I rallied the others to attack.

  We all ate well, and it was good. This time I checked every pile of corpses for men in hiding, like I had hid. I did not want to be reminded of what I once was. What I had become now was strong and beautiful, an embryo in its womb waiting to be born.

  Time went by. The prison filled so full I could scarcely breathe, swimming between legs like a shark in the thick of a school of fish. I took my snacks wherever I wished to; a hank of calf-meat here, a knob of big toe there. In my wake I left screams and murder. They killed each other for my crimes. Their cries and confusion became sweet music. They told me I was stronger and better than them. I adapted and survived.

  The figures in white came for some of them, sometimes. They returned them as unthinking dummies for the others to cut their teeth on. People with only half a brain did not fight back. People with no jaws could not cry out their protest. People with no limbs became a larder for us all.

  Throughout, they did not come for me. The prison filled and emptied like the pulse of a heart and still they did not come for me. At every cull I was left alone. It must have been years, it must have been a hundred times that I betrayed my own troops, and it grew easier and more natural every time. I acquired a taste for tongues and the soft cartilage of the ear. Others bit these away and gave them to me as tribute. I became a king.

  One day the figures in white cleared the prison again. The door remained open, but I knew better than to leave. Those who left never came back whole.

  Yet the door stayed open. In time the sense of numb compulsion upon me faded, and a figure drew near. My eyes were useless by now, only sensing the dimmest of difference between dark and light. The figure was a bright upright band before me, viewed from within the boughs and brambles of my corpse nest.

  It spoke with a voice that filled my mind.

  "I am proud of you, Harim," it said. "You have done so well."

  It fondled my head. No one had spoken my name for years.

  "There are so many years ahead for you at this great work," it went on. "I look forward to them all."

  Afterward, alone in that dark and sweaty place I finally saw the scope of my fate. None of my victories belonged to me. They were all the possession of this figure, and they were all I would ever know: betraying others, killing others, eating others, and I did not want that. I had lived as an animal and murderer for long enough.

  My strong sharp teeth bit through the thin skin of my wrists and tore out the veins. I sucked on those blood spigots as I had a thousand times before, letting the heat run down my chin and chest. I sucked until I grew sick and light-headed, and wondered that for the first time in years, the prison was truly dark.

  I should not have died this way.

  16. KING

  I lurch forward into the bare box of the fort, stumbling amidst bones and memories like a drunkard, unable to cope with the great weight of suffering. Harim is just the strongest of a thousand minds now, reaching up to me from the record of bonds. His imprint is etched the deepest but there are so many others following behind, all fraught with suffering and consumed for the power of their broken bonds. The scale of horror dizzies me.

  It is the reverse of the goships, a wave of dizzying corruption that could turn a man into something like a god…

  "You shouldn't-" my Hawks call from behind, but tail off as I weave deeper into the darkness. They are hard marines who have done hard things, but the scale of this death flattens them.

  I venture further, drunk on power and pain. I ramble amongst these stories and bodies like a ghost in the fog, seeking some sense of the why and the how and only finding satiation, and smacking lips, and the gorged minds of so many like Mr. Ruin, overseen by a single great master.

  The Soul that bombed me.

  There are marines and freighters mixed under my feet. There are fishermen and divers all around, all chewed up by the giant mouth of this foul black prison, decayed to their constituent parts and ground down to the dust of pleading memory, for the master.

  Tributes. Trophies. Sacrifices.

  "What is this place?" one of my Hawks 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 spider's 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 now, encircled by the Soul of a master more powerful than any of the rest; much stronger than Mr. Ruin, much stronger than me, and I feel the hint of a title rising with it.

  King Ruin.

  In this place he rules. It is his larder and I am certain he has felt my presence here now. I see that I cannot really hide from his gaze, not now that the poisoned memories of poor mad Harim Ongshoy have filled me up. My signature on the bonds stinks of this place.

  He's coming for me.

  I wonder how I will die; like Harim Ongshoy, brutalized for years by my own desire to survive? Like Don Zachary, evaporated by my own vaulting ambition? Like Mr. Ruin, drowned within my own mind?

  The Crag lies ahead. Maybe there is somethin
g yet I can do.

  "Follow me," I say to my Hawks, and dive off the gun platform. The water rushes up and hits me cold, cleaning the slime of decay off my suit but not from my mind. If anything, I'm angry. I want to tear this King limb from limb, because I am human and all this is a twisting of what humans should be. The Arctic War was terrible; we fought for something that proved useless in the end, but at least we believed it was right. Even if we were lied to and the reasons were all a 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, for its own entertainment, and I will not stand for it. The King must be made to pay for what he has done.

  I swim through the water with my Hawk chord behind me, bound for the Crag rising up from the low waves like a basalt-black fin. I feel it as I pass within the thick and pulsing band of King Ruin's Soul, and for an instant I sense his surprise that I would dare to do this, before the band cuts away. In that instant I see more of him than I would have thought possible.

  This place is a Court.

  It has been operational since before the War, one of an uncounted number of such places circling the world like seeds on the wind. They are all links in King Ruin's encircling web, all troves of pain that feed him constantly.

  As I climb up the Crag I throw my thoughts out to the four forts arrayed nearby and find their frames equally freighted with the memory of horror. 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 Crag's foam-spattered side. How many millions? This place is an assault on all of humanity. King Ruin and his Courts have treated us as less than animals, tapping our pain so they could feast.

  I feel them all now, Mr. Ruin's peers on the bonds, and see they are just like him. They all seek suffering. They sow it, they reap it, then they sup it down.