She reads the heat-map and sonar, delicate instrumentation mounted to the belly of my Dactyl, while I swoop in low toward the second village, my downdrafts blowing sand into the guttering crater where the first artillery piece had stood. It is molten slag already, incinerated by one thousand-degree-plus temperatures.
"Clear," she says, "Court entrance is ahead of you in the last village."
I tear above the second village in a flurry of chopped rotor beats, like a cavalry stampede with howitzers spinning like fans, but no resistance emerges.
"Deserted," I call, and nose-down toward the third. It's no different from the others, except here we know there's a rough spiral staircase dug into the walls of a natural sinkhole cave, down which all the villagers have been surely transported. "We didn't see the evacuation on recon?"
"Only the meat-cart going around," So says grudgingly, "but maybe they were picking them up."
"They were picking them up," I grunt, and jerk the Dactyl to a landing so hard in the midst of the third village that one of the landing skids cracks.
I don't care; even before it hits my hands are piling out, finding cover and drawing beads on every dark opening into these abandoned huts. We rush in to dark, dingy rooms of mud and straw one after another, and in each of them I see the same thing I have seen at all the orgy-Courts; everything left as it was, frozen at the moment the people were taken.
There are clay-plate meals at dirty plastic crate-tables, dishes in the bucket-sink, bright clothes hung out on long lines from the ceiling to dry away from the bleaching sun. There are neatly folded bedrolls and a few battered hand-me-down toys on the dirt floor and ceramic pots half-filled with winter rice. Usually there is a message for me on a wall in every hut, written in some poor bastard's blood.
RITRY GOLIGH IS NOT A GOD
Many of them do this now, like a welcome mat or a message of defiance. I don't know why, because I never claimed I was.
I hate the orgies the most, not because there are so many dead or because the suffering is so intense, but because this is what his brood do when they've given up. They roll belly-up underground and wait for Ritry Goligh to descend like the hammer of a god they don't believe in, all the while debasing themselves in squalid pleasures, amping up the suffering even as their terror grows.
It's pathetic that this is all they know, and all they want. This is the limit of their ambition.
I've tried to communicate with them so many times, to offer terms in advance, but they won't listen. They clam up, hunker down with a hall full of Souls to scrape away at and wait for me to come, until at the last moment they Lag themselves to soup, too cowardly to be taken my prisoner.
Fuck them all. I hate every last one for the arrogant, sick, pathetic parasites they are. This time I'll charge in to the hilt and extract at least one of them alive, and if not alive, then I'll keep some shred of their thoughts intact, so I can finally fix a location and drop the bomb where I ought, on the resurgent remnant of King Ruin and call this whole attritive war a day.
My ten hands sprint out of their huts while in the distance the slow rumble of Ray's suprarenes draws closer. We hit the rough-cut spiral well staircase at a run with me in the lead, racing down to what must be an adapted tsunami bunker. The steps are large and unevenly cut, the work of generations' past, smacking loudly as my many-booted feet go down them.
I flick up my front-lights as we drop into darkness, all white glare and echoing footfalls. I am a millipede edging in to the core of a rotten apple, and now I begin to feel the villagers trapped in this Court; perhaps fifty in all, all dying and in pain, with perhaps two or three brood-members sitting in judgment. The fact that they are going to die soon helps a little, as the suffering will end. Still I'll have to clean up the ruined bonds of fifty tortured Souls.
At the bottom of the staircase we run along a natural tunnel through chunky basalt, strip-lit in places with flickering yellow halogens. It reminds me of Spartan's Crag out in the Arctic, where so much of this began.
The first body we come to has been partially skinned and submerged in a barrel of salt, enough to keep it screaming. It was a woman but now she's just pink meat and muscle; I shoot her in the head to end the pain. She falls silent, but as I run by an ideation mine buried somewhere in her barrel blows, and several of my platoon are wiped out. The blast sends me crashing into the wall and rocking onto my knees, but it's not enough to take me down.
Ideation mines work where mindbombs cannot, operating not on an electromagnetic level but through hormonic overload; the blast fractures armor while releasing a cloud of weaponized chemical hormones which pour through the fracture gaps. These chemicals work the opposite effect of shock-jacks on the human nervous system, accentuating whatever emotion they've been keyed to. Taken full-bore, they can turn a Soul insane and start them firing upon their own people within seconds, and Electro-Magnetic Resonance helmets do nothing to stop them.
I have the bridge, though, and my link to the others through the aether keeps me focused and running. I am more than one set of senses and one single mind and that's enough to ground me, but still I feel adrift for a few dizzy moments as the dying woman's pain is amplified and blown across my body, rushing in through my nose, eyes, ears, lungs and skin. I feel her terrible pain and it almost overwhelms me. We take suppressant pills against this, we've made the suits and EMRs as airtight as we can, but the brood have been adapting their mines too, and something always gets through.
The connection to several of my hands cuts off as the blast backwashes off the walls; they're lost now and unreliable. A chunk of sand fused to glass emerges from my chest plating, tickling my ribs within, but I've had worse.
Six of us stand, put bullets in the heads of our flailing fellows then storm forward two by two. Rifle fire barks from the dim tunnel's end, a woman and a child who must be hands of the Court, but they fall under our return salvo. We leap over their corpses and corner into a broad, wide, hellish cavern.
All the villagers are here, some fifty bodies laid out in a dark and rough-hewn cave like penitents in some vision of hell; all in barrels of salt, all screaming, no doubt all rigged to blow, and I see this for what is it.
A grand ideation trap.
It'll be the fifth in as many weeks, and it'll be just as much a waste as all of them, unless…
I feel Far, hunkered down in his 50th floor bunker in Calico's rain-soaked Reach, send a galvanic hook out into the universal aether. It isn't anything more than a kind of trace, bondless thoughts he surrenders like I once gave up Arcloberry to the Lag, but it should gravitate toward me. I am just the placeholder in this, now, needed to tag the brood members so Far can track their Souls.
I can feel them ahead of me now, EMR-helmeted against any incursion on the bonds, waiting for me to take the step forward into ideation that will fry this six-tone chord to bits. They're wondering why I haven't.
"Got something," Far calls, and yanks on the galvanic thread, setting his hook. It leads to a tiny gold-shielded constellation in the aether. All this is experimental, a new kind of Soul-grapnel we've never tried before, but it might just work.
Now it falls to me to put these bastards out of their misery.
Silently I send the order and my chord of six hands charges as one. The first rank of barrel-bodies explode with hormonic overload, blasting me with their pain, but pain holds no fear for me after what I've been through, only disorientation, and I charge through it like the Bathyscaphe plunging into a Molten Core. I run on and the next rank blows and the next, and with each ideation blasted over me I slow a little more.
Through the chaos I pick out the brood-members at the head of this awful congregation, a woman and a man standing in strange robes atop a low pallet-stage. They are holding hands, proud and blood-soaked and righteous in what they have done, and I hate them. I hate them so much I love it, can't get enough of it or of what I'm about to do.
At the seventh line of barrels I am perhaps within range, but barely st
aggering. Who am I, I'm not quite sure. I hate them, but who is it that I hate? These two before me have concern on their faces, they look so wholesome but for the blood that covers their arms and chests.
kill them
-comes the little voice in my head, and I remember what I have to do just long enough to do it, before they can Lag their brains to gray soup in gray skull bowls. I raise my Kaos rifle and send two bullets through each of their heads, pop pop, ten thousand miles an hour and fast enough to outrun the mulching they're hoping for, fast enough that when they die and their gold shields implode so their Souls can release, Far may just be able to hook something of what they are before they dissipate into the aether.
I drop to the floor as they drop ahead of me and the last of the hall erupts in the hormones of skin-searing pain, engulfed by such a familiar sensation I almost welcome it, and-
got them
-comes the little voice, and-
got you
-it comes, before I die for the fourth time.
3. CALICO REACH
I jerk awake in the gray of Far's bunker, at the top of a Calico Reach tower panting hard, and kick out of the augmented EMR machine as its-
thump thump
-winds down. I'm disoriented and spin to take in my surroundings. The room is simple and plain, just like my old jack-site on the Skulks of proto-Calico. Adapted jacking gear lines the gray walls. There's the acrid stink of Cerebro-Spinal Fluid in the air and the precision feel of Far on the bonds.
"Did you find him?" I croak, not fully certain of what the words mean.
Far's sitting by my side in the space Carrolla once occupied for Ritry Goligh, just coming out of the jack that caught me in the aether. He wears the body of a handsome young man now, dark-haired with a grizzled stubble beard and deep blue eyes that have looked too long into the aether.
"Far, did you find something?"
Far blinks back at me. He has grown into this new face and body in ways I could never have expected. He's clinical and fixated in a way I can barely fathom.
"The mines were stronger," he says, focusing on me. "It's too soon to tell. But maybe."
"Maybe?" I repeat, as I swing my legs, new legs I've never seen before but now my legs, off the birthing table and down to touch the ground for the first time. I always do this, hoping to outrun the Disjunct, though I know it will catch up to me in moments. "Do we have a location?"
Those are the words I mean to say, anyway. What comes out is more of a stream of nonsense, as the patterns of my diffused consciousness flow awkwardly through the corridors of a new hollow hand's Molten Core. This is the Disjunct; the burst of power that releases upon death and spreads the Soul to the aether.
Being gathered in from that spread is like rousing from a deep jack in a foreign Core, only to find the gray matter of my brain out of sync with my Soul. Here is the area for producing speech, here is the motor area, here are all the neurons and wiring that make up the hardware of a brain, just as they should be; I recognize them, know them, but my Soul needs to recombine and remember how to run them before I can think smoothly.
King Ruin's hands have all been cored clean to help him control them, but none are a perfect fit for my whole consciousness, especially after it's been fragmented by death. For an instant only I was shooting outward in an amorphous cloud of dissipating thought in the aether, heading to wherever Souls ultimately go…
Then Far gathered me in, like the three times he has before. Now I'm like a newborn, like Ritry Goligh as he woke in his subglacic from the EMR coma that killed his crew. The world is a chaos of jumbled, unordered meaning, and I only grow more baffled as I try to stamp meaning onto it. I sway in position as the incoming signals from my eyes and ears overwhelm my thoughts and the world washes to gray.
"It may be a link to the King," Far says, patting my shoulder in time with the words, aiding in the synchronization, but still it all comes to me in a too-fast jumble. "We don't know."
My pulse surges. "Where is he?" I try to say, though I barely remember who I'm asking about, and the words come out as drool down my chin.
"We'll know soon," says Far, patting my shoulder still, reminiscent of someone else who used to do this for some other incarnation of me so long ago. "We'll have more soon. Take your time."
He helps me up, my legs like jelly, and guides me to the reclined sonic bath chair at the edge of the room, looking out of the window. To me all these sensations now come as a strange lump, but a familiar one. I've run this particular route three times already, from EMR to chair to look at this rain-gray city beyond the glass, and there is some familiarity.
Far settles me into the seat and guides my head into the sonic bath. Slowly he chimes up the simple sound that will help synchronize my drifting mind with my physical body, massaging in the single tone of what I am.
Me.
I let myself succumb, while thoughts of King Ruin and a cavern full of screaming skinless Souls are gently soothed from the burning cells of my Molten Core.
I wake hours later, silent and watching.
The Arctic skies are sediment-gray beyond the glass, turning steadily toward a bitter purple dusk. One of the floor-to-ceiling windows is slightly ajar, and through it I smell Calico, like melting ice and ancient dust, even up here in the Reach. The city lies gray before me, all concrete and steel blotted with portions of green; parks I once took my children to play in. Even death can't steal the weight of Ritry Goligh's memories.
I look across the gap to the neighboring building; a tower just as tall as this, partitioned by floors and apartments, and run my gaze slowly across. Three floors from the top, five from the edge is the window where they still live. This is the perfect sight to wake to after death, to remind me what I'm fighting for.
Ritry Goligh's family.
I see them sometimes through Far's eyes; opening the curtains in the morning, drawing them closed in the evening. They follow a normal day-night cycle like cogs in a machine. Sometimes my daughter Mem stands at the window and looks out into the neon lights and darkness beyond, through what must be her reflection on the bright inner glass. She's seven years old and taller now; in her hand she sometimes holds a doll dressed like a ballet dancer. It breaks my heart to see her like that, waiting for her father to come home.
Waiting for me, or the man I was once a part of. Ritry Goligh. I feel it on the bonds sometimes; thinking if she watches long enough she might just see him coming home. Sometimes Art will stand with her, and Loralena too, a glass of wine in her hand, pressing herself against her children in an act of loving consolation, as if they can ever heal when they don't even know what the wound is.
I don't know if this wound will ever heal. I don't know if the chord can ever go back to being the man they knew. With Doe forever gone and the brood still out there, I can't imagine what the future holds.
Far rests a hand on my shoulder and speaks across the bonds to us all.
"Looks like rain."
Ray snorts in my head. They have jokes between them that are not even jokes. It can be enough sometimes to say words, I suppose.
"Let me know when you get some sun," Ray answers.
Things are different for us now. The world is so much bigger; wider than the War, wider than Mr. Ruin. I see it through six sets of eyes, hear it through six sets of ears, feel it through six layers of skin. Ray has his own life. I have my own life which will continue despite the four times I've died. We all coast on the surface of each other's minds, but we are not one mind anymore, we are not Ritry Goligh.
The Becoming, we call it. We weren't reduced when Ritry Goligh pulled us out of himself; we Became something new.
"What did you find?" I ask.
"Tracks," Far answers, "maybe a correlation."
My heart rate quickens. "And So?"
So answers. I see her on a rare break from her map room, going down to the open deck of the Wall where Yena stands over the corpses of the dead brood members, reclaimed from their Court. They li
e in augmented EMR machines, thumping endlessly as we try to capture some trace patterns from their partially-Lagged brains.
"They cored themselves almost completely," she says, "even before you shot them, but along with the scraps Far hooked I think we've got something. You need to be here, Me. We're closing in on a potential location for the King."
My heart thumps like an EMR. "Where?"
"Get here," says So and kills the link.
I push myself up from the sonic bath, forcing this body's unfamiliar, unsteady muscles to work. My mind feels like it's sloshing in a low-brimmed cup and might spill out at any time, but that's a sensation only, not a real concern. I haven't had the top of my head cut off since King Ruin.
A correlation could change everything.
I turn to Far. He's my height now, not the boy he once was. I know he doesn't approve of this, my dying and flitting back and forth between bodies, as with every jack through the aether we give more hints to the brood on how it might be done. I don't approve of what he's doing though either, the way he delves deeper into the aether all day and all night, dancing with the Lag like it's his best friend.
These thoughts pass between us smoothly and naturally. These are our addictions and our choices.
"Send me back," I say.
He turns and gestures to the EMR. With his help I lurch to the machine and slide inside. I close my eyes and wait for Far to pull me out through the bridge, toss me across the world to the orange deserts of Darain and slot me into the waiting body of a new hand in the belly of Ray's suprarene.
It will make the headache worse. I'll have another new body to adjust to, but it's nothing compared to the Disjunct, because I haven't died this time and a little discomfort won't bother me. More than anything, I feel surging hope. For a year now we've been hunting the remnains of King Ruin across the bonds and the bridge, through Courts, mindbombs and ideation mines and this is the first hint of his location we have found. Perhaps it will lead us to his beating Solid Core deep in the ruins of his broken empire, and show us the brood member that's helping him resurge so we can blow them both to fucking dust.
Soul Jacker Box Set Page 41