Soul Jacker Box Set

by Michael John Grist

I'm going to kill them all.

  17. COURT

  Out of the water, the passageway bored into the rock of the Crag opens before me like a long black wound in the sea. I stride down steps hand-cut into the volcanic stone unafraid, no longer caring about myself. The passageway descends sharply below the waves, dripping with salt-water. Electric lights flicker along a row of gray cabling stapled to the rough walls. There is the pulsing sound of pumps somewhere below, working to keep this splinter of air dry.

  I stride down, feeling minds preparing defenses in the darkness ahead, and I Lag them to stillness. Several fight back, these keepers of the King's Court and Mr. Ruin's peers, but I am strong in my outrage. I have seen what deeds they have done, and righteous fury helps me stamp them underfoot.

  Then there are only screams. I feel wounded Souls crying for help, humans who are being consumed, and I balm them as best I can.

  I emerge into a chamber, a circular guardroom carved into the rock, where three marines abandon their game of cards to fumble on buzzing black EMR helmets. I Lag then shoot them all. They drop and their blood swirls down to a gutter-drain in the floor, where a pump sucks it away. I do not need to reach inside their minds to know they have been turned to soup.

  The steps continue and I wind deeper down until the density of old tortured bonds in the air becomes so thick I can't wade through them with my mind open. In this way I know the hall of the Court before I see it with my eyes, 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.

  Everything about it is familiar, but abhorrent. I recognize the shape of these bonds on the air, though these are worse than I experienced. It is a nightmare I woke from as a child but have never been able to shake, pushed to the extreme.

  It is a laboratory for jacking, breaking, and remixing the inner realm of the Soul.

  I enter, and all around me hang the fragmented minds of experimental subjects. Some are in torsion-rigs strapped into EMRs, half their skin peeled away with 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 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 their existential pain. To my right are four people whose brains have been quartered and intermixed and left to blend into madness. To my left a man is slowly having the gray matter shaved off his cerebellum like soft cream by a swinging pendulum; another has had various boreholes scooped out of the language cores of his brain, while a third has had numerous magnets pierced through his visual center.

  Yet all this is not the worst part. The worst part is what is happening on the bonds. It makes what Mr. Ruin or my parents did look like child's play.

  Their minds are being incessantly, repetitively and consecutively jacked, without respite. They are violated in their thoughts and their memories again and again, their defensive 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 and along the bond-lines of the keepers of this Court. There are four of them here, each twisted like Mr. Ruin, 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 keeper in their field could speculate. They have published research papers and made scholarly doctrine of their horrors for their peers to read, they have 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.

  Passage 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 that are just like I was as a child. I too was jacked and scarred for this same purpose, until Far entrapped my parents and saved me.

  I would have had no chance here. Far would have been quartered and broken on the inhuman science of their persistent experimentation, and it is too much.

  Rage fuels me, and I breach my own Solid Core in moments, with no longer any 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 now I see that it is my door and I have every right to pass through it. Standing within that point of power I Lag away all this horror, in the sea-forts and inside this fell Crag, and draw it into me. I end the pain of every broken Soul within range and suck out the raw anger. I snuff out the keepers 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 shoot up 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 for a day or a second longer. I see his Courts lodged everywhere, circled about in frames of death like this, festering with his judgment and funneling him a constant source of strength. With that strength he forces all others to pay him tribute, cementing his position while he seeks out the ultimate power I already have.

  There is no reason to wait.

  I look out over the aetheric splendor that lies beyond the bridge, shimmering with billions of Soul stars and bond lines, and I rush out to strike him down. He is easy to find, embodied as twin burning red stars circling each other at the heart of the aether. I jack him from within as I once did with Mr. Ruin, but am somehow repelled.

  I strike again, pouring greater weight into the blow but again I am blocked, and where my blows 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 this golden shield cannot be penetrated.

  I realize then something that seems impossible but must be true: I am not the first. King Ruin has crossed the aetheric bridge before me and assembled this shield.

  I reach wider, tracking the scorched trails his thick band of thought has left in the aether, but the complexity of the web stymies me. It is too thick, too intertwined and I can make no sense of it. It is a fractal maze and I am a blind man lost within it, a forest of connected pathways I can never unravel in time.

  I see that he is too strong. He is too deeply nested and protected. I could chase down his Courts for years and never break through to the Solid Core at the heart. I could expend all my strength in defusing each one but it will be like fighting over empty expanses of ice in the Arctic War, always falling back to the same boundary lines.

  Already his brood are closing in on the Crag. I feel their hunger to be the one to capture me and lay me down on their operating table and find out what makes me tick.

  I cannot allow that.

  I open my eyes again in the real world, to the dark hum of the Crag's interior. The air is ripe with the smell of fresh blood. My Hawks are wandering through the freak-show of wired-up brains and bodies, staring in horror. At least the screams have ended.

  I reach out for Courts beyond the Crag, and I find one, two, a handful of others spread throughout the Arctic, and I end them all. I Lag every keeper and Soul and peer and draw the power in, but they are just single threads in the tapestry of what the King is, while I am only a single thread alon
e, connected to nothing. I am not strong enough to win, and now he is coming for me.

  Except perhaps.

  Ideas flash in my mind, of Don Zachary and Mr. Ruin, of EMRs and the boy I once was and a never-ending 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 is terrible, never done before, but I see no other choice. With all the power stolen from the King's Lagged Courts I break my Soul apart. I rip out the tones of my chord one by one; Doe, Ray, So, La, Ti, and I force them into the only place they can hide: through the icepack shell of Mr. Ruin's drowning mind. Maybe they will find a remnant of Mr. Ruin inside, and he will be able to…

  I drop to my knees, because I don't know anything now. Far has gone too, I don't know where, and I am in this world for the first time and alone for the first time, and no longer Ritry Goligh at all.

  I am only Me.

  Captain of the Bathyscaphe. Tone in the chord. Marine of the Molten Core.

  On my knees, I open my eyes to a horrific place. I don't remember coming here. I am surrounded by unknown marines in strange sublavic suits who look to me for guidance with fear in their eyes.

  "Captain?" they ask, but they are not my chord. I look into their eyes and see nothing I recognize. Where are the firing pods? Where is the Bathyscaphe? Where is the stink of burning brick? I can't remember. Things spin and fizz like La burning up in the magma of thought. What? When? I don't remember or understand. What has happened here?

  I can't think. Shots ring out but it is as if I cannot see. My body goes limp and I kneel while around me these strange marines die. Bullets tear through their bodies and others marines replace them; they wear strange HUD helmets that buzz from within. They look at me as if they know me, but who am I now? I don't remember this body. Where is my suit with the yellow maze written on the chest? Where are my chord, Ray and Doe, Far and So, La and Ti? What am I now, without them?

  I don't know.

  One of the figures stands before me, looking down. His helmet buzzes and he speaks in a deep and resonant voice. "Hello again, Mr. Goligh."

  THE CHORD

  J. RAY

  The Dactyl helicopter burns in the distance, and Ray lies in the mud watching the purple fire bend its metal frame inward, trying to think. In the second after he'd woken lying flat in the mud there'd been explosions and helicopters then Doe had said…

  "Another Soul?" he asks, remembering.

  It's hard to form thoughts through the pain racking every part of his body, but something about the idea of meeting another Soul seems terribly wrong. There's always been just the chord. Throughout all their missions in the Molten Core it's never happened.

  "Multiple Souls," chimes in Ti, compounding things. "I counted four with two marines each arranged in pulse formation. They're not split into chords of seven tones like us."

  Ray struggles to keep up. The last thing he remembers is the tsunami and blasting open the pyramid, and now… "You're saying there's someone else in here with us?"

  Ti nods grimly. "At least four of them. Two now, after the explosion." She gestures toward the flaming Dactyl. "And they're well-armed; their missiles took out the White Tower's defenses and the worms."

  Ray's frown deepens. "Worms?"

  Doe holds up a hand to silence him. "They're well-armed but didn't attack us. Why?"

  "Maybe they didn't see us," Ti says. "They were too focused on the Tower?"

  Doe chews her lip. "They could have bombed the Tower to dust with all those belly-mounted munitions, but they didn't. Their missiles were precise, aimed at the QC accelerator only. When that was done the second helicopter fled." More chewing. "I think they were a scout party. It was more important to report back."

  Ray listens and watches, struggling to focus. The feeling in his arms and legs is strange, like cold jelly is giving him a painful, kneading massage inside the suit. He looks from Doe to Ti and back again, realizing something.

  "Where's So?" he asks, "where's La?"

  "Both Lagged," Doe says without missing a pause. "It's just the three of us now."

  Ray blinks. Both gone? They'd trusted him, he thinks, and now they're gone? They'd woken up for him and he just let her go...

  His gaze catches on words plastered across Ti's suit, like the ones before on So's.

  TAKE THE WHITE TOWER

  He doesn't even know what the White Tower is, but that doesn't matter. The mission is the mission, and losses along the way have always been part of the deal.

  "Then let's take the Tower," he says.

  Doe gives a sharp nod. "Before the Dactyls do. Ray, no," she puts a restraining hand on his chest, "don't try to get up, that's an order." He stops trying to get his legs under him and lies back in the mud. "Your femurs will break. We've pulled you this far; we'll pull the rest of the way. I'm locking your suit to protect you. Ti."

  She turns away and starts running without any pause, and Ray feels the jerk on his shoulder as the elasteel line catches. Ti flashes him a pained smile then follows a second later, balancing out the tug.

  It hurts to be dragged, but Ray is just grateful to be alive, watching the red-veined black sky pass by overhead. At a command HUD records overlay across his visor, telling him what his body has been through; every bone broken is a new record. His shock-jack reserves are empty, so he distracts himself from the pain with supposition.

  "We should check the helicopter," he says on blood-mic.

  "No time," says Doe between pants. "Ti?"

  "Agreed. According to So's estimates the next tsunami should roll through in a little under an hour. It'll wipe out everything and bring the mud to the top of the Tower's ramparts. Everything out here will be destroyed, and it'll take us almost an hour to get there."

  "Too tight," says Doe, panting, "sorry."

  "Not sorry," says Ray, thinking fast. "The waves are a problem, but with other Souls in the same Core as us, riding in Dactyl gunships? What use is it if we make it to the Tower then die at their hands?"

  Doe and Ti run on in silence for a few moments, until Doe speaks. "Ti, unleash and make for the helicopter. Gather what intel you can."

  Ti unleashes immediately, latches her elasteel line onto Doe's back then sprints off toward the smoking ruin.

  Their speed slows by half with only Doe to pull. Ray narrows the beam of his blood-mic to only her.

  "If time is too tight, you'll have to leave me behind."

  Doe laughs.

  "I'm serious. The intel is more valuable than me, if it'll keep you alive"

  "I'm serious too," Doe says. "We already tried that once."

  This is news to Ray. "What? When?"

  "The worms were gaining on us. Look at your chest."

  Ray peers down and sees yellow paint written there. The letters are upside down but so large they're easy to read.

  WAIT

  He grunts. "Hand of god."

  "Hand of Ritry Goligh, more like," Doe says. "At least, we hope."

  "We hope."

  She pulls on. In the distance Ti shrinks to a tiny dot approaching the helicopter.

  "Double us your feed," Doe barks through blood-mic.

  "Already on it," says Ti, and a second later a video signal pops into the corner of Ray's HUD visor. He enlarges it and watches as Ti approaches the Dactyl.

  Up close it is strangely insectile. The cab has melted into an interleaved ball of shiny black with silvery pleats, like a silk-spun chrysalis waiting to bloom. Two long black antennae-like railings along the side appear to be the landing skids. The rotor blades have drooped to encircle the pupa-cab like wilted limbs.

  "There's no movement at all," says Ti, circling warily.

  "Check the rotors," Ray says.

  Ti moves closer. Her gloved hand appears in shot, reaching out to touch one of the rotor blades. 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."

  Ti moves in and the video view pans across the melted cab.

  "I'm leaning against the cab," she says, "damn hot here, but I think I can…"

  Her hand pushes the rotor, which flops limply at her touch and lifts up to reveal a dark underside.

  "Shine your whitelights 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 is this?"

  "A language," says Doe, "but not any 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 from the rotor-blades."

  "It's tacky with some red liquid even now," Ti says, her fingers receding across the frame. "I'll run a spectrum test. 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 hub?" Ray asks. "There may be more."

  "Roger," says Ti and pushes off the cab with a grunt, circling around 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 manning the howitzers.

  "He must be dead," Doe says.

  Ti skips near and her foot flashes up, striking the figure in the head. His helmet flips off to reveal a melted pink boil of skin underneath.

  "The QC melted him."

  "Get his gun."

  Ti plucks the long multi-barreled weapon from his grip. She pulls the trigger, and the-

  CRACKACRACKCRACKA

  -report echoes sharply back to Ray and Doe.

  "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 candlebomb, munitions, compass. There's a rifle scope and a relay for the comms in his helmet."