"Soul Jacker's leading the run," she shouts. "All clear?"
"All clear," they shout back.
They know me. They trust Ferrily. We're going to fight together.
I love it.
This was always my true addiction. Not jacking in like Far, not alcohol like Ritry, not even dying, but this. I am addicted to leading a chord into battle, ever-ready to die for the people I love.
What I love is Ven, and that dizzy bastard Heclan, and the marines by my side and everyone in this ship. I'm ready to die for them all, and they are ready to die for me. We're in this together.
It's the best drug I've ever felt.
I get into my hatch in the lowboat as the door raises and latch myself in to the protective webbing across the narrow bench-seat. All across the subglacic's belly this will be happening, in twenty different lowboats set to jet up through the water and emerge behind the stealth boats waiting for us.
I cycle my HUD up. It'll be no protection against a mindbomb, we hadn't invented shields that small yet, and the readout is more simplistic than anything I had when I jacked the Molten Core, but I can hear the breathing and the voices of my fellow marines spread out in a supersized chord around me. I can see simple information about their positions relative to me displayed in the faceplate.
Fifteen is twice seven plus one, I think idly, as a computer voice counts down from T-minus ten minutes until launch. Two chords of seven like two almighty fists of god, falling to crush their enemies, with me fighting right in their midst.
I see that I loved these days and the War so well because I was never alone. I belonged so intensely, I had a family that I'd kill and die for, and when the mindbomb fell I lost it all. I've missed these days ever since, because emptiness was all that followed.
T-minus one, and the lowboat is driven sideways out of the subglacic with a propulsive thump that rocks us all in our seats, then the jet-screw fires and hammers us back into our webbing, rocketing up through the ice-fogged Arctic water like a missile hoving in for an explosion.
I relinquish Ven, the bonds of control stretched taut by distance. An instant later the EMR shield goes up around the subglacic, she's safe, and then we burst through the water and the battle begins.
O. COUNTER-RAID
The benches deploy like rail-guns into the gray spray of the Arctic, spitting us out on a flat and rocking platform while the lowboat's munition-racks peel open and shoot up, thrusting a fully-loaded howitzer chaingun through the llowboat's hull and into my hands.
I fire.
All around us are the vaulting canyons of glaciers, like dirty white cliffs in a labyrinth, thrashed by foaming gray waves. There is the stink of refined hydrates on the air and the buffeting of a freezing wind that reaches even through my subglacic suit to chill my blood, matched to the rattle and thump of the cannon in my hands.
I know this world. I fought in it countless times then lived through it countless times more in the minds of broken marines. I led the first mission of my chord into the heart of the Solid Core, and I can do this shit in my sleep.
Chaingun fire erupts around me and my own rounds strafe foam out of the ocean, homing in on the low hump of a stealthship surfacing through the water ahead. It is a low, poorly-armored oblong designed to evade sonar more than for combat. It turns rapidly, trying to deploy its meager guns and spit out its complement of marines.
We give it no such chance; our hail of depleted plutonium shells bites into it, striking sparks and chewing through its thin bulkheads into the crawlspaces within. It unleashes only one rocket before it explodes in a fireball of metal and surf, caught from beneath by a Bofors torpedo.
"Off-boat!" I shout through the HUD, then dive from the lowboat platform into the water. Five seconds later it explodes spectacularly as the stealth ship's missile finds it.
Dim cheering comes through the HUD from my fellow marines, followed quickly by Ferrily on a private channel.
"Fucking lead then, Rit."
The freezing water sucks at my suit but the air caps in its joints keep me easily afloat, and I circle propelled by the mini-screw in the small of my back. I can't see anything but chasms and caverns of dirty bluish ice, but in the HUD map I see the blips of our lowboats taking on other ships in the ambush arc. I look up to the mining rig, far above through hundreds of tons of solid ice.
That'll be where the mindbomb is, and where the munitions are thickest. The HUD displays the rig's wire-frame schematics atop the ice, pulsing red where the deep drill bit is coring the ice-bed, releasing the hydrates that have fuelled this War and will transform the shape of our world in years to come.
"Up the cliff," I call through the HUD, over the rushing sound of ice cracking and breakers striking the hissing ruin of the stealthship. I mark the ice-face purple on their screens. "Two squads of seven left and right, low-slalom to encircle and infiltrate, I'll run central pivot, go."
"Don't need to tell me twice," Ferrily calls back, and already I see she is firing her ice-hook upward, catching in the pack and reeling herself up. She bobs twice off the water, skating like a pro along the surface as the slack on the line gets taken in then she's ascending and the rest follow; fourteen of them flowing like white fire up the ice.
I take center point.
Thirty seconds later we breast the glacier top, and the wind howls hard enough to blow us off our feet. The storm is blinding here, snow whipping harshly across my HUD.
"Down!" I shout and we lay flat with practiced movements on the ice, getting into a linked-up slalom-chain with feet locked to shoulders.
"Fire."
The marine at the tail fires the jet-propellant pack and we shoot off over the ice. Ferrily steers this human train from the front, sliding us over the wind-scoured upper surface in a human train, circling chasms and ice spikes, while the rest of us lie still with our Kaos rifles out. She's aiming for the great iron bulk of the mine, squatting over the ice like a beast feeding on a carcass.
I crane my head back and howl into the HUD, riding the thrill of imminent engagement. I'm turning everything around now and I'm doing it myself, not hidden away in the relative safety of the Soul jack-bay. I was always meant to be a combat marine out here with my chord. Answering howls rise up from in front and in back; the high of the pack.
We rush in and glimpse flashes of the mine through thick flurries of snow caught in cross-glacier gales. It looks like the one at Spartan's Crag but bigger, set atop five metal boles sunk deep into the ice and heaped up with a confusion of rusted gantries, walkways, lookouts, rigging and weaponry nests, painted with a thick veneer of crusted snow. At the top a hot plume of steam pulses out in hacking coughs, spewing invisible pollutants from the refining process along with frequent methane burps of fire.
Figures are moving up there now, running into position and taking up weapons. They must be stunned at our sudden assault. This was to be their great coup, taking a neo-Armorican flagship without a single shot fired, an historical rout. Now it's suddenly a hot war they weren't prepared for.
Ferrily swerves us and we snake jerkily to the left; seconds later a crater erupts in the wind-polished ice-top to the right, showering us with frozen shrapnel. We swerve again, closing now, and another crater bursts open to our right. Chaingun fire peppers us and I feel two of us are hit, one in the thigh, one in the chest.
"Bastards," Ferrily grunts.
"Hold fast," I call. "We're on them in seconds. Ferrily take your team left up the southern stairwell, Tigrates take yours up through the underbelly, I'll cut a diversionary swathe."
"Aye aye," Tigrates says, "bring it on."
The propellant fades out as we skid into the mine's shadow, unhooking in seconds to form into two teams that race across the sleeting ice. We are the first of all the lowboat teams to arrive. I charge a path direct to the middle, reaching out through the bonds to divert the aim of snipers training in on my chord. Their bullets zip through the air as near misses, burying their hot metal bodies with hissin
g sighs in the crunchy surface snow.
I hit an ice-draped ladder and climb, monitoring the progress of my two teams. They're in on the bottom floors and clearing corridors already, shooting the life out of backstabbing proto-Rusk and Aleuts, clearly all gathered here in a combination plot to bring us down.
I don't care about their machinations. I only care about my chord and ending this. Up the ladder I fold myself into the building's superstructure, Kaos rifle deployed. I run along a narrow rig corridor, shoot a marine emerging out of cover and roll carefully around the body. I hear the ruckus caused by my teams below and bless them for drawing fire.
I take a shot in the shoulder when I emerge onto command level, but shoot my attacker, an officer, in the heart by way of reply.
He drops with a groan.
In the distance more rockets blast, jolting the gantry floor. Gunfire echoes scatter up exposed outer corridors like scree pebbles tossed down a well. I sprint and shoot my way to the mine's apex, dropping marines in the uniforms of two different nations until I blast through a final door into the mine's conning tower.
Two briskly uniformed men stand in a room over a holographic map, the pips on their collars identifying them as generals.
"How?" one of them asks, looking at me in disbelief.
"Time travel, fucker," I say, and shoot them both in the head.
They had planned far worse for me. Of what little mind I had left after riding out their mindbomb in the EMR, they must have taken half. They jacked me nearly as hard as my adoptive parents did, searching for the secret of how I survived. All they left behind was broken memories and regret.
Now there's no regret.
At their control panels I set the mine to overload capacity. It isn't easy but I have the expertise of hackers, engineers and marines all rolled into my Soul Jacker's head still, and I work the command path through the computer's systems like I'm running a Solid Core maze, disabling safeties and churning the drill deeper into the red.
There are hundreds of enemy marines hidden here still. I can feel them spread out through the decks, perhaps enough to turn the tide of the battle now we've used up the element of surprise. Even in the best case victory we'd still lose dozens more digging them out of their bunkers like the brood from their Courts, and I won't stand for a single death more.
I shoot the display to disable it then call through the HUD. "All teams out on the ice, explosion in T-minus five, the whole thing's going to blow."
"Affirmed," Tigrates and Ferrily come back.
I leap on an ice-line from the top-floor gantry, rappel down at a sprint then run out across the glacier top. After four minutes forty I spin around, encircled by the red blips of my chord on the HUD, to watch the mine erupt. It shoots a year's worth of partially refined hydrates into the sky like a volcano. Boom. The ice melts faster. Everything is as it always should have been.
ME
19. TOWER
This is where I'll make my stand.
The engram mixture takes two days and a night to refine, working with the insufficient equipment in the tanker's Soul-jack lab. It's nothing compared to the gear Ritry Goligh had access to in Calico, not even as well-stocked as his jack-site on the Skulk in proto-Calico.
Lucky then the process is mostly one of subtraction.
I begin with a silver ammonite solution, still the most neutral carrier for engrams, using the whole stock this shabby jack facility has, siphoned out of a battered metal canister long past its use-by-date. I run the fluid through a purification distillation, using flasks, beakers and titration condensers gathered from crew quarters, where they were stowed between batches of mixing up their own version of CSF-vodka.
Heclan and I weren't the last to run a Soul Jacker's still, it seems.
The laboratory gear reminds me of the brood's experimentation with tortured Souls. I sit with the burners running and watch the purified fluid drip through the equipment, thinking about blood and matter and thought.
I seal the refined silvery mixture in an outsized ampoule, with an atmosphere-proof rubber nipple through which I can syringe out the fluid, and a contactless magnetic plate through which the engram data can be copied in. Then begins the harder process of reduction.
The EMR is slipshod and rusted, it barely-
thump thumps
-on command, but I crack open the circuitry and massage the flow of magnetism and electrons with a few simple hacks, cutting out the safety boards and cannibalizing them for parts, soldering in workarounds where I can.
I lie in the machine and set it to a full Soul download. It scans me and sucks out a facsimile of my Soul, filling up half a solid-state data bank with all the data of my personality; my memories of the chord and the foggy recollections I carry over from Ritry Goligh.
I roll out of the EMR and sit at the seat that would have been Heclan's or Carrolla's, and the longest slog begins. This was Ritry Goligh's specialism, and I only dimly remember it through the communal chord memory. I am more familiar with the bonds and the aether, but they are closed to me now. Physically resonating equipment and magnetically imbued silver are the only way I can reach out into the world. It feels like a hundred-fold deceleration, but at the same time there is a workmanlike pleasure in doing it.
As I isolate and prune memory streams in the copy of my Soul, I feel a powerful affinity for this older, slower way of doing things; molding the shape of the engram like wet clay, slice-by-slice erasing my own mind and leaving only a few load-bearing pillars of memory to sustain a core motivation. It offers up a kind of fulfillment and meaning of its own.
Crafting new Souls. If this isn't godhood I don't know what is.
Soon I bring the first of them in, a woman. I remember her as one of the prostitutes on the Skulk; she has red hair, brown eyes, and I find tears trickle down my cheeks as I look into her vacant pupils. I have destroyed her.
I push the syringe in past her bright white eyeball and inject the engram into her brain. Her Molten Core reacts, and I jack in to massage the Lag away like a kelp-tilling shark, helping the engram to bed in and take root.
Then I bring in the next.
It gets easier with each one that follows, until all forty of my stolen hands lie on the floor around me, ammunition ready to be fired off.
I stand in the monastery cloister with the cave-creature lying slack by my feet, watching as my tanker trawls away, black smoke belching up from its three central funnels. I keep watching until it dissipates across the horizon; forty seeds sent onto the wind in search of the remant survivors of the brood-King's brood. If I can know him as they know him, then perhaps I can defeat him.
In the tower classroom I switch on my communications array. Scavenged from the ship, the electronics are ancient but they can still sync into the last few satellites in the sky and suck down any messages that come from my expanded chord.
Their messages will be my bonds. I have three screens powered by the cave-creature's generators, burning on hydrates; the bones of long-dead dinosaurs. So are we all layers upon layers, feeding on the past. I luxuriate in the buzzing electric smell from my Arctic past, reminding me of raids I fought on and raids I dreamed of in other marines' minds. A glass of Arcloberry gin would be good now.
I chuckle. Carrolla would laugh if he saw me sitting in this place with this drooling man at my feet.
"What the hell is that, some kind of pet?" he'd ask. It would be a joke, but it would horrify him if he really knew.
I climb to the tower's roof, a far higher point than the rollercoaster atop Candyland. From here I can see in every direction; back along this rocky promontory wormed with holes like Lag warrens, forward across the Black Sea, up into the sky. I know what I have to do. It is what Far had us do a long time ago, when there was no other hope.
It will be the deepest jack I've ever done. For that I need the tallest tower I ever built.
Several pallets full of bricks are here, brought up my hands. The mortar is here, the cement mixer is here an
d a space has been swept clear of old moss.
So I begin.
The cave-creature helps me. This fallen man of the brood works by my side, silent and slobbering. Together we lay down a wide base of bricks around the crown of the tower, building atop its walls as foundation. I peek into his Sunken World and see he's driven by the same old desire to hide himself away.
"It'll be a doorway," I tell him. "A bridge. Not a hiding place."
He doesn't hear me. He puts his bricks atop my bricks and together we raise this thing. There are no memories to sow into the walls, no plaster dust, no hidden ropes to collapse the structure behind us, but I don't need that now. I just need a pillar tall enough to reach up and touch the face of god.
20. THE BLOODY BOY
Five days in, god reaches down and touches me.
It is a jolt more total than the shockwave of someone crossing the bridge. I am scarcely attuned to those any more, they've become so commonplace in the last few days. Rather this feels like the deep raw strings of the universe being plucked, like the aether itself has been restructured. I feel it in my mind the same way a mother's pulse vibrates through a forming embryo, beginning to reshape physical matter.
It must be the brood-King forcing his way closer to the inner bridge. The thinning in the air is stronger now, siphoning weight from everything. Perhaps he too is building a tower, using all the world's strength to raise it. So the world feels less dense even here inside my EMR Wall, cast by this helmet I have to wear everywhere I go. I can feel the world turning translucent, as if I could reach out a hand and rub it away like papery old skin, leaving…
I don't know what will be left behind. A blank canvas, perhaps.
The first two floors of my tower are complete. Inside I survey the wooden steps circling upward in a tight spiral; I climb them and look out from the top. The view is much the same, but of course it's not about the view. It's about the effort and the focus, about layering and relayering my own bonds in this space until I've forged a missile strong enough to punch through his shield.
Soul Jacker Box Set Page 54