Don't turn off the EMR. Don't cross the bridge. Thank you for being our captain, Me, and giving us all a place to belong.
Far
P.S. I left what you need in the final crate. Think of me fondly, please.
I can't really see for the tears in my eyes, but I pull the final crate over. It clinks as it moves. I pull off the lid and look in.
Subglacic vodka. There must be ten bottles.
I start to sob, wildly and out of control. I can't see, am a teary mess, but there's no one here to see me and I don't care. There'll be no one to see me ever again.
I wrench the cap off the nearest bottle, bring it to my mouth and glug it down. The cold vodka stings in my mouth and burns down my throat, and I gulp it like milk from the mother I never had. I was alone then and I'm alone now, and this is what I need more than anything. This is the only salve for the wound of losing the last five parts of my broken Soul.
I am no captain anymore. I am no father, no husband, there is no hope for me to be Ritry Goligh again. I have become Napoleon, alone and abandoned at a monster's whim, and I have lost everything.
I'm sorry, I moan into the bottle. Far, I'm sorry.
I drink until I can't drink anymore.
12. MY CAPTAIN
I vomit throughout the night, because in this body I have never drunk before. I shiver and shake, because it's cold and the halogens give off no heat. By the morning I have drunk down two of the vodka bottles and five of the fifteen water bottles Far left me with, and thrown them all back up.
Now I lie curled on the stone floor, half-wrapped in a sleeping bag, vomiting only occasionally. It's too hard to get up and go to a corner. This is not my home so I don't care.
Alcohol is not good for me, but I can't die any more, which was always my addiction, so this is what I have. The day comes up and goes by, changing nothing in this dripping, dark laboratory grave. I moan my way through the hours. A million fears and regrets pass through my head. In the afternoon I stir enough to open a can and eat.
As the day turns to evening I begin to come out of the fog. It's amazing how quickly the mind can grow used to something. I still feel Yena's death and the death of the chord, but now they're dead and it's over, and there's work to be done.
By the light of the halogens I take up Far's MISSION PACK and read.
BLACK SEA MONASTERY
You need to know who he is to defeat him, Me. He broke us with such ease because he knew us so well. Just as Mr. Ruin's knowledge blew open King Ruin's golden shield, you need to learn who the brood-King is.
There is a school on the Black Sea, off Turkey. It is an old monastery on a cliff-edge, where King Ruin took his brood-children for training. Perhaps there will be something there to help.
Here are the coordinates. I wish you luck, my captain.
Far
36.759385, 28.235251
I sit back. I remember the monastery as a brief blip borrowed through shared-chord memory, when Doe was watching the film inside Mr. Ruin's White Tower. The teacher was a skinned corpse lecturing to bored-looking children.
King Ruin's brood.
Perhaps the brood-King was raised there. Perhaps it might be enough.
I look at his signature for a time, so simple and clean. He was always so intense. I don't think he ever thought of his addiction to the aether as an addiction. It was his duty and he did it; like So at her radar, like La in the sand, like Ray keeping the morale of all our people together.
I glance through the rest of the mission pack. There are some roughly sketched maps of the Black Sea coastline and monastery, of the layout of Iquliat and where the new King might be, of the Hollow Desert and the circle we had once cleared within it.
I put the papers down and crawl to the food cart to open a can of meatballs in gravy. I try not to think of what a god might say if he or she saw me now, sucking at my fingers with old vomit on my sleeves.
13. NEWLY FORGED
The next morning I feel clear. The confusion, fear and grief of the days before have gone, leaving only a solid core of certainty behind. There are things I must do, and that is why I'm now alive. It feels as though the liquor has burned the doubt out of me, boiling me down to crystal.
I am Me, and this is my mission.
A warm breeze blows into this stale rock, smelling of hot dust, salt, and hydrate froth. I get to my feet and strip off my filthy clothes, crusty with vomit and engine oil. My new body underneath is pale, like Ritry Goligh, an Arctic breed. The bruises and grazes I saw when I woke, from hauling all these crates out of the speedboat, are beginning to fade.
I feel newly forged.
I walk naked up the winding cavern stairs, past the dead guards and glowing halogens, out into a world full of light. The sky is a furious blue, the sun is gloriously warm, almost as if I was back in the desert. The Arctic gets such days maybe once a year, usually in the wake of a typhoon.
I look to the speedboat, and luckily it is still there. Without that I'd truly be stranded.
I dive from the Crag, into the ocean. It is cold and bracing and wonderful. I wonder, when did I last swim like this? There is no water in the Darain, bar a few pitiful oases, most of which were infected with Courts. Every place we went had been corrupted.
Not here. This place is clean again, after Ritry Goligh Lagged it a year or so past. I see fish squirling away from me, into their cubbyholes in the underwater slopes of the Crag. I swim forward with powerful strokes, luxuriating in the feel of the water on my skin. The salt tingles as it touches my grazes, but it is a good pain, a healing pain.
I reach the first sea fort without really aiming for it. I climb up into it, my new toes clinging to the metal rungs like barnacles, following a path I once took with armed men at my back. I sidle past the Bofors gun, rusted-stiff, and edge around the side to the entrance.
Inside the fort there are bodies, but not a hint of suffering. I almost cry to see this. Here are the dead, but they are clean. Their pain is long gone, and I did this. I have done good things.
It doesn't matter that I am naked. I am only another person, like them. I stalk inside and gather the first of them up. He is a boy, mummified, his skin crisp like fried pigskin. He saw such terrors in here, but the horror now is gone. Now this place is just another coffin.
I carry him to the edge, then drop him carefully into the water below, where he sinks. His constituent matter will rejoin the world, and the fish will feed. This is a good thing.
There are hundreds more in the first fort alone. It takes all day to clear them, and I do it until my back aches and my legs throb. I could push them out in great batches, as many of them have shrunk down to sticks and leather like the carved dolls in Mr. Ruin's Sunken World pyramid, but I do not. I gather them one by one, and let them drop one by one.
No one will ever know I have done this. These Souls are at rest already. But a god does not do things just so other people can see.
It takes two days more to empty all the forts. I eat the food Far brought with me. I drink the water. I look at the vodka and smile. Last of all, I enter the hydrate mine, suspended above the Arctic like the sea forts. It is no different from the others, only in how the bodies have been stored. There are dozens stuffed in the fuel tank, where they must have drowned. There are dozens dropped in the screw shafts, where they were chopped into fragments when the screws were turned on. There are hundreds lying in every possible position, stacked and folded, heaped and hung.
I drop them all into the water. I cleanse this Court for a final time.
Standing on top of the mine's uppermost cab, holding to an antennae array, I feel an upswell of pride as I look out over these lost, forgotten buildings. It is the first Court I have truly cleansed, in both body and bonds. It is a new domain from which I will build. Standing here like this, it does not seem so impossible that I might become a god.
Back in the Crag I put on the arene suit and the EMR-thumping HUD. The noise fades away quickly, canceled by buffers in the
helmet. The suit itself fits well, just as well as any of the combat suits I wore on assaults into Darain Courts.
I flick the switch on the EMR in the crate, and its low thump powers down. Inside the Crag there is only silence. I reach out carefully through the bonds, feeling the limits of the micro-Wall thrown out by my helmet EMR. It expands about as wide as the walls of the room, and no further. It is a pillar of invisibility, and it will follow me everywhere. Perhaps with this, I can do enough.
I Lag the bonds made by my passage over the past several days. Nobody will know I was ever here, except me. I gather up the crates, mostly empty now, and carry them to the crag top, where I place a few in the speedboat and drop the rest into the ocean. They bob away, carried by the waves. It is gray today, and a cold and dusty wind blows from the north. The ocean rolls heavily, and the clouds foretell rain.
I'm ready. I look around a final time, at the forts and mine and Crag, then I drop into the boat, untether it from the makeshift harbor, gun the engine to life, and tear away over the water.
--.
G. THE WAR
The pillar of magma rockets me across the aether. The Bathyscaphe's hull shudders beneath the incredible heat and pressure, and curled amongst the smoking EVA suits I watch the metal ceiling strip away to reveal the frenzied purple surface of the Hollow Star beyond, zooming closer like an accelerator blast. Fire plumes around the ship's ruptured brick cladding like a thorny crown, and just as the count on my HUD's power supply clicks over to zero a blinding purple light envelops me and I open my eyes to-
Gray.
There are gray walls and gray floors around me, studded with pipes and rivets that thrum with the familiar burr of a screw turning far below. There's the smell of Cerebro-Spinal Fluid vodka and sweat in the air, and ice and blood, and…
I blink, suffused with a dizzying mix of memory and sensation. I'm in a Soul-jack station. There's a large thumping EMR machine in front of me with a marine lying on the input tray, and somehow I remember this. The marine's some kid who lost both his eyes in a raid back in the thick of the War, and I taught him to see again. Ritry Goligh taught him to see, that is. I look down, too confused by the dislocation to really question it; he's already had his implants, rudimentary eyes that will do the work of vision and talk to his brain, but as I remember, he doesn't want them.
Souls are fragile, I think, as I look into his unseeing new eyes. Old thoughts supersede new ones; how I felt the first time I performed this jack. He's too angry and lost to accept the implants, still running the maze of the hydrate mine where he was injured, and he doesn't want my help; he doesn't want to be fixed. Of course, this is not his choice, not in the War, not when his nation needs him to fight.
It's just one of a thousand jacks that I made, that Ritry Goligh made, and I lean into it now like a dream version of myself, moving through the motions my gestalt self made a long time ago. I jack into the marine's Soul and I flow through his Molten Core as a chord in the Bathyscaphe, split unconsciously into a sub-split of Doe, Ray, Me, Far, So, La and Ti, changing his brain so that he'll work. I pluck at the threads that build his resistance, the emotions and scar tissue the Soul thinks it needs to keep him safe, and I pull them away. This is not even healing, but rewriting. I erase the memories that hold him back and remake him as the marine we need him to be. I fix him, and now he'll never be the same, because of Me.
The War always came first, and Ritry served the War, and I served Ritry. Whatever mission he needed, I led the chord to complete. For this and so many other crimes I'll be paying reparations for the rest of my life.
When the jack is done the marines looks up at me through his new eyes for the first time, a different man. I remember how this felt; always a heady cocktail of emotions at the cutting edge of the Soul, with our mutual survival mattering most of all. I remember that there is no room for softness and only the smallest room for compassion, because anything else will kill us all. I know this so well, because it was Ritry's softness that killed Ven and all his crew.
My crew.
The marine stands and nods his thanks. His hand uncurls from within mine, though I hadn’t realized I was holding it. My hand, not Ritry Goligh's, but what is the difference in this place? Dark recognition pours through me; what have I just done here, but an early kind of coring? I Lagged swathes of what this young man is. He is now a 'hand' for the War, a slave to the mission, just another body slain on the ice.
Time slips around me like a night in the Skulks. I come back to myself sitting in the jack-bay in the aftermath with Heclan, drinking the strongest CSF he brewed and trying to rub the memory of what we have done away.
"We helped him," Heclan says, slurring his words and sloshing his liquor. The door is barred and it is just the two of us now, turning ourselves into fuzzy copies of ourselves to get us through the worst. "He'll live better. He'll survive harder."
"We changed him," I slur back with no real resistance in my words, only misery at having to accept them. "We broke him."
Heclan burps and swigs his CSF. "Fuck this War," he says, and I clink jars with him.
"Fuck this War," I agree, a constant refrain.
This was one day, I think, as I feel the liquor roll down my throat; a precious memory of a time so long ago, of friends and lovers that I lost. I want to be here so much I can't express it in words; trapped like a passenger in this old version of Ritry Goligh. I was never really clean, but I was cleanest here. I was better, still innocent of my greatest crimes. Every day I was with people I loved, and everything seemed so real while we were in it together, suffering together, fighting together, before I was alone.
I breathe in the moment and the loss. I suck it up and time slips again.
Now I am here.
Lying on my back, I gaze up at the metal ceiling. I feel indescribably happy. I roll over and see a woman who looks like Doe looking back at me, lying in our shitty little bed in her shitty captain's room, before any of it went wrong. Her face is so pale, her eyes so clear of conscience, and it is everything I can do not to weep. She is here. She is beside me, and I haven't yet caused her and them all to die.
Ven.
I am really back in the War, where I belong.
ME
14. RACHRANIKA
In a day I reach Calico. The boat is running on fumes by then, choking out as I pull close to the proto-Calico verge of floating barges. The Skulks. I've never seen them with my own eyes before, Me, this fragment of Ritry Goligh. For him it was reality, a pit in which he grew out of the chrysalis of his survivor's guilt.
To me it is a distant memory, a black and white history that lived long before I was born.
The tsunami Wall rises off-white above the Skulks like a vast and sheltering hand. One day this too will be crushed by the ravages of time. Looking at all this I remember Ritry's life, lived on both sides of that wall. On one there was despair, on the other, hope. I know what lies beyond; Loralena and the children, and also what lies beneath; Don Zachary's broken bunker.
I let my eyes fall across the ramshackle line of the Skulks, all-new since Ritry destroyed them with a quakeseed a year ago, but already stretching as far as I can see to either side. Neon lights pick out their conjoined contours; the bars, brothels and barrios that make these lawless, forsaken neighborhoods tick, that keep the flow of money flowing through. They seem in places to hover magically over the dark water, buoyed atop a low blue line.
These are the barrels that keep the proto-city afloat. Atop them lies a foundation-structure of twisted rebar and driftwood salvaged from the last Skulks, with reclaimed blue-tarp matting and plate-metal hewn from the gutted innards of old subglacics. The Skulks are a forager's world, last bastion of traumatized marines and all those who can't face the structure, law and forward-looking hope of Calico.
The engine sputters and I coax it a little farther, to the place where a great black ash-stain rears up the side of the wall like a towering Rorschach blot. I flip the EMR HUD's visor down and zoo
m in, picking out the pit-marks and freshly-poured cement reinforcements stippling the wall's black face.
This is what my quakeseed wrought. Ritry Goligh's quakeseed. It did not destroy Calico, and I'm grateful. It did not tear down the wall, beyond which the family of my other life lies, but everything else…
Below the scorch-marks lies just another Skulk, agglomerated buildings made of flotsam, freshly built atop the bunker that once stood here. I spot a bar at the water's edge, its neon light flashing a tawdry Morse welcome into the evening dark, regular as a lighthouse.
ZACHARY'S
Someone has a sense of humor, perhaps.
I throttle the boat up to the mooring clamps of this replacement Skulk, already looking for my next mode of transport. I can't get to the Black Sea in a speedboat. I need something faster and larger.
I climb from the boat onto a bobbing jetty strewn with drying gray seaweed and octopus skins, their smell of salty desiccation rising up in a fog. I take only Far's mission pack with me, pressed close to my chest in a plastic wallet. Before me a narrow alley lies open, lined with scraggy metal facades that were once boat-hulls and welded metal container doors. I walk into it like I was born here. Here in the midst of the neon Skulks I taste the old familiar stink of desperation and lust.
The barrels of this floating world loll and bob underfoot as I pad inward. I can feel the trails of other Souls moving around me, within the aegis of the EMR helmet. They crawl in and out of lean-to buildings and shabby flotsam huts like silkworms boring holes in leaves. Everybody's seeking something. I stand in the midst of them and feel the change on the air already.
The brood-King is draining the bonds. It is faint here, distant, but I can detect the sapping on every living thing, pulling life out of them on thin tendrils; fish-hooked into their Souls and stealing a portion of their strength like an invisible tithe.
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