Soul Jacker

by Michael John Grist

  I gather my balance and any sense of pride, then point at this strange man in the darkness. He knows my name, which makes me feel cornered, and when I'm cornered I get aggressive.

  "Your hat looks ridiculous," I say. "Take it off."

  He smiles wider, and those bright white teeth blind me like boatlights. "It's not my hat," he says, his voice a warm baritone, then takes the hat off. "It's his." He points to something or someone at his feet, then drops the hat on it. There's a dark figure lying there, a long object obscured by the railing, like a body. "You should take a look at this gift. I think you'll like it."

  "No, I won't," I say at once, automatically contrary. The node is comforting in my hand and I take a wobbly step forward. "How do you know my name?"

  "I know a great deal about you, Ritry."

  Another step forward. "That's not an answer."

  My contrariness seems to delight him. "And Ritry Goligh's not a name. Who gave it to you, do you know? A clerk in the abortion hall, perhaps? The janitor, cleaning up dribbles of amniotic fluid dripping out of your machine womb? Perhaps he picked up a stub of crayon and wrote out a whim on your vat?"

  I can hardly make out what he's saying, my head's too fuzzy for it, but what I'm catching I don't like. "What the hell are you talking about?"

  "I think you know. I'm talking about the bath-tank that nurtured you, fed you, cycled sweet tones through the juice while you were just a scrub of organic matter waiting to be grown. Can you imagine yourself like that, Ritry, that poor, shitty cluster of cells, with no idea how unwanted it was, how pointless it was going to become as this lost, pathetic bastard I see before me?"

  I laugh, spit vomit taste into the scum arena, and take another step forward. He just made it easy. "You don't know anything about me."

  He spreads his arms. "Really? What do I not know, Ritry? Let me ask a question and we'll see. If you could have everything you ever wanted, everything and anything in the world, how would you feel?"

  "Fuck you."

  "Yes of course, but really think about it, Ritry. How would you feel?"

  "I'd feel brilliant," I snap back, "with your head on a fucking pig-pole."

  He smiles wide. "Liar." He says it calm and confident like he's reading facts off a node. It pisses me off, because normally I'm intimidating, at least people take me seriously, and he doesn't. I keep on forward around the curve of the shark arena but he doesn't budge.

  "You need to get out of my face," I slur.

  He laughs. "You're so like a fiddle when you're like this, Ritry, I swear. Easy to play. Would you like to know why you're a liar?"

  "I'll carve it in your face."

  He nods. "Remember you said that. Don't claim later that I didn't warn you. I am a liar to the core, Ritry, but then so are you, and I'll tell you why. Because you don't want anything at all. You may claim to, you may think you do, but what matters to you, Ritry? Nothing. You don't really feel a thing."

  "You're going to feel this," I say, holding up the node. It feels heavy and slow, but it'll do the job.

  He frowns. "You're not weeping yet, Ritry. Why aren't you weeping on the floor about how hard it all is, how you've lost everyone you ever cared for, to the Lag, to the ice, to the depths and shit and darkness? Why don't you weep for that poor baby you once were, because what else have you got, let's be honest? Come on, put on a show for me. Make your abandoning bitch of a mother proud."

  In that instant I know I'm going to kill him.

  "You're angry because you never had a mother," he goes on. "I understand that. You were aborted, flushed to a vat where they strung you along until you were old enough to fight in the ice. How do the tones go, Ritry, can you sing them for me, the ones you heard instead of a mother's pulse? Doe, Ray, Me, Far…"

  The singing is what makes me see red, and finally I'm charging, stumbling, bringing the node down hard in empty air.

  He's gone.

  My foot snags and I drop to my knees on something solid. I find my feet again, looking around, thinking I hear his laughter but it could just be echoes of my own footfalls.

  "Hey!" I shout.

  "It's because I want to help you," his voice comes, and I turn. He's standing at the top of the arena now, beyond the outer ring of seats and framed by an open doorway where pink morning light is pouring in like a slow magma flow. "You'll see that too, in time. All the Mei-Ans of this world, the Dons, they're only puppets to bring us together." He grins. "It's all I want, and why I've followed you for so long, because I see the real you, Ritry. Not this hopeless, broken Soul, but what you're truly capable of, and it is magnificent. Even now you shine through the shit like a tiny sun. I would be proud to have you stand at my side, soldiers in a war that never ends, comrades against the world."

  I start staggering up toward him.

  "I'm offering absolution," he goes on, unphased by my slow charge, "if you can bear to reach out and take it. More than even that, though, I'm offering you a way out of this miserable malaise. I can clear out the guilt and give you something to want." A pause. "You've got a long way to go, but I'm here to help. Consider this day my gift to you. Sincerely."

  My eyes blear up again and I smear them back like I'm grinding his face under my foot. "I'll kill you," I say.

  He laughs. "You'll certainly try. I hope you will. I do so hope we'll become friends, equals even, in time. For now spend some time with my colleague. He'll show you I'm serious, and set you on the path."

  He backs out of the entrance and the door closes behind him, plunging me back into blackness. I keep after him, but it's dark away from the hole in the roof and I bang my shins and stub my toes on the uneven steps, cursing as I go. My hand cracks off a seat back and the node clatters away over the floor but I continue up to the door.

  I yank it open to find I am standing at the shoreline of this rotten Skulk, looking out over the gray-green waves of the Arctic Ocean. The sun is coming up salmon pink, like old blood swishing down the drain. It spears my spinning head and I blink against it, one hand raised to shade my eyes while I scan the Skulk-edge.

  There's no sign of him.

  At my feet there's a rung ladder leading down to a narrow, sun-bleached wooden walkway. It leads off along a thin jetty, half-sunk beneath the water. A few shack-like buildings rise up from it at veering angles, the water cutting them off in a diagonal line across the doorways and windows.

  "Hey!" I shout, but no answer comes. I could try to chase him down, but I already dropped my node and I'm too drunk to run.

  I wedge the door open with a shard of broken glass then start back down the tiered seating. With light flooding in I see the place for what it really is; a wreck. Even in life it was a place for only the dregs of humanity to come. There are broken bottles littering every surface, dark stains that must be blood splattered on floors and walls, cobwebs, the stink of bat guano. The railings and seats are all brittle faded plastic, cracked and shattered.

  I find my node near the door. The glass face has maybe one more crack, but it chirps to life when I palm it. There's a call from Carrolla showing, and another from an unknown number which I guess to be Mei-An. I scrape blood out of the spike fold and depress it. It's only when I turn back to the arena that I see the body.

  It's lying where Mr. Ruin was sitting; a man on his back dressed in a bizarre military uniform straight out of ancient history: white tight pantaloons with yellow trim, a deep blue vest over a white tunic with gold buttons, epaullets at his shoulders, a two-pointed hat resting over his face, and one hand tucked into his tunic over his chest.

  For a long moment I stare. Not just because there's a body, but because of how he's dressed. I know who he's meant to be. As Soul Jackers we had all kinds of knowledge injected into us when we went up to face the ice, and this man was in one of them, something about strategy.

  Napoleon.

  A startling memory flashes up, in the way jacked-in engrams sometimes do, of two images side by side. One is of a gallant figure on a rearing h
orse, with a bright red cape swirling about his shoulders like a classic hero, his right hand held aloft and leading forward. The other is a mean-faced man in the rain, wearing a miserable green trenchcoat and riding a stocky brown pony, his right hand tucked into his coat. They're both the same man, but rendered by different artists.

  NAPOLEON CROSSES THE ALPS

  The title flashes into my mind. I lurch down toward him.

  He is pot-bellied. My pulse thumps a sickly cadence in my ears as I edge up to his stockinged legs. His polished black shoes gleam in the morning light.

  "Hey," I say, "wake up," but he doesn't say anything or move. I reach out tentatively to touch his left hand.

  Yeah, he's dead.

  I stand there and look down. The hat covers his face. I look at the seat where Ruin was sitting and surmise he must have had his feet on this man's chest. That image is hard to shake. I reach down, wary of what I'm going to find, and pluck the hat off his face.

  Thank god there's no mutilation, though his neck is chafed red from the garotte that killed him. It's not Napoleon. It's just a man, blunt-nosed and ugly.

  I know who it is.

  Don Zachary's son.

  Shit. I stare. I can't figure this out; what it means. Then Don Zachary's son begins to beep. I flinch, suddenly aware that this is how I will die, blasted apart by a bomb buried in a dead-man's fat belly, just like we bombed the crap out of the proto-Rusks with dry ice bombs stuffed in the icepack.

  Boom.

  But nothing happens, except the beeping continues. I set the hat to one side, stiff dark felt incongruous against the ratty plastic seating, and pat this faux-Napoleon's chest down. I have to unbutton his tunic to get to it, a tiny alarm clock clutched in his tucked-in right hand.

  Underneath that there's a folder slid inside his tunic. I peel it from the cold and clammy skin of his liverworted chest with a nasty sucking sound then hold it up to the light.

  RITRY GOLIGH

  The words are embossed in gold on the red vinyl cover. I open it and ruffle through mismatched pages full of the same old typewriter font, interspersed with hand-scrawled maps, diagrams that look like family trees, a sketch of what looks like the earth in cross-section or perhaps a topography of the brain.

  A shivery flop-sweat coats my skin. What is all this? I drank too much, fought too much. What did Ruin say? Already the sense of him is fading.

  I look at the Don's dead son, Mei-An's oppressor, and wonder if he dressed up as Napoleon before he was killed or after? What must that have been like, if he'd known it was coming, like being forced to dig your own grave? Get into your coffin suit, Napoleon, you're going to make a point for me.

  "Hey," I say, nudging his corpse with my foot. "I'll send someone for you."

  I know as I say it that this is probably not true. I won't remember where he is, won't remember any of this in a few hours probably, with only a gleam of white teeth in the darkness and a folder of crazy conspiracy scrawlings left. I tuck it into my shirt just like Napoleon had it: touching his skin, touching mine, but so what? We all rise together, fall together. We're all the same really.

  Stumbling up the stairs, I think about Mei-An, and what this means for her. I bring up my node and finally see the message she sent.

  Thank you for what you did. You're a good man, Ritry Goligh. I'm sorry if you'll have to pay for my mistake.

  I laugh and lurch out into the new day like some diseased wolf cub from the belly of its dead mother. What started out a pink dawn has already settled to a gray and rain-fat sky. This is all that we have now, after we blew the ice out of the Arctic.

  I start down the ladder to the slap-slapping sound of the waves nudging the promontory. One good tsunami and we're all gone, I catch myself thinking. Hoping. Wash it all clean.

  Over the unfamiliar terrain of that broken Skulk, I start for what home I have.

  ME

  A. ME

  Me woke with a mouthful of smoke and hot grit in his eyes, hardly able to move, breathe, or see. He looked down at his tactical black sublavic suit, geared for war, though his chestplate was painted with spiraling yellow lines, like routes through a maze.

  What?

  Thoughts bubbled up from nothing, giving meaning to shape. This was his ship, he remembered, the Bathyscaphe, a sublavic vessel built to travel through the magma of a Molten Core, and he was the captain. Now something had gone very wrong. He tugged at his arms and legs but they were trapped in thick orange licks of fire, holding him in place and burning him into existence like a pot in a kiln.

  "Shit!" someone shouted nearby, and he recognized the voice, Ray, though he didn't know how.

  He shook his head to clear it, blinking the grit from his eyes. A corroded steel wall lay before him, a corridor. He was in a one-man pod wreathed around with flames that didn't hurt. A firing pod in the belly of the ship, he knew that much. This was where they roused when there was a mission, where they'd roused a thousand times before, but what was the mission this time?

  He didn't know.

  "Ray!" He shouted.

  "Me, I'm burning here man!" the voice shouted back, and with the call of his name something flipped inside.

  Me.

  Of course that's who I am. Captain of the Bathyscaphe sublavic, even now jacking for the Solid Core with my seven-tone crew. With that remembrance comes the code to stop the forging.

  "Elba," I say, and at once the licks of flame release, shunting me out of the pod to land on my knees on the corridor's steel floor. One pod along I see Ray stagger out of his forging bay too, then the others beyond him. Seven of us in total; my crew.

  "What the hell," Ray gasps, rubbing at his big-boned black face. "What happened?" He's an Afri-Jarvanese I think, baked in the fires of hell, black skin and black hair above black sublavic suit with more yellow maze lines on the chest, in a black-tinged corridor already filling with acrid black smoke. I smell burning clay and I feel the roll underfoot and I know what it means.

  The ship is burning off its heatproof brick cladding. Probably the magma has already bored in through the outer layers, which is a big problem. We're also listing at a crazy angle, so the screw must've faltered. In short, unless I can get us to the inner surface of the Molten Core in time we're all going to roast alive.

  I get to my feet and look down the line of my crew straggled down this worn metal corridor, from big black Ray to albino Doe, Far just a boy, Asiatic So with her short black hair, and thin blonde twins La and Ti holding on to each other at the end.

  This is my crew; I know their names and rank even though I don't remember anything else about them. I know how to keep them alive though, so I start barking out orders, because that is what the captain does.

  "Ray, get to the forward trim and start flushing the tanks. Ti, eject the screw and fire up the replacement. So and La, I want as much cooling to the inner hull as you can muster, and Doe you're with me for the conning tower."

  The orders roll off my tongue smoothly, as though I've commanded the Bathyscaphe every day of my life. But then I have, haven't I? Wouldn't I remember, if I'd done anything else?

  My crew lurch to their feet and get moving; Ray running down the corridor, So and La climbing up and down into ladders I had forgotten were there, while Ti and Doe run toward me. In the moment before I turn to run myself, I spot Far standing still, poor kid, alone and purposeless in the harsh metal corridor, looking completely out of place. He doesn't have any yellow maze lines on his black suit at all. I want to give him a teddy bear or something, but there's no time. He shouldn't be here, but he's part of the crew too so what choice is there?

  "Hunker down, Far," I shout over my shoulder. "Ray will come back for you." Then I jerk into motion.

  I sprint along the metal corridor with the map of the ship unspooling in my head. To either side rusted pipes, ducts, dials and wiring scrawl their own map across the wall. They are polished shiny at the corners where a thousand hands have rubbed them smooth, and discolored at the seams w
here long years of effluents have seeped away. Even running I see all this so clearly, like it's at once the first and last memory of my life.

  My booted feet thump the steel floor, echoed by Doe and Ti racing behind. The stink of burning clay is thicker now and the lurching sharpens as molten lava bites at the ship's outer layers. I adjust for the lurches well until one hits us like the Lag, tossing me bodily into the wall.

  Crunch, thunk, I drop to the floor but Doe is there to pick me up. I catch a glimpse of her white brows and bleach-white face, like a lighthouse beam in my eyes, then I'm on my feet and we're running together.

  "The screw must have stripped a thread," she shouts over the grinding of the engines. "Goligh knows how."

  "We're in too deep," I shout back, "we'll have to punch through," then we reach the conning tower ladder and climb. I slip a glance down and see Ti is already gone, off to the deep belly to rig us a new screw. Bless Ti, I think, for she'll be the first to go.

  Rung by rung I ascend, trying to make the calculations I need before I'll need them. If the replacement screw is off kilter it'll take Ti long minutes to restart, which will mean unstabilized buffeting from the deepest regions of the Molten Core. That in turn means what remains of the hull will suffer worse, and we'll begin to feel the heat even harder.

  I speed up the last few rungs into the conning tower. It's the command center at the top of the ship, with a central periscope sight hanging down with handles and two glass eyes. On close-set walls assorted panels crammed with buttons flash and red lights blink and a siren blares out, showing the pattern of the emergency. Sharp-cornered desks and chairs hug the edges in discolored greenish metal; everything built-in and bolted to the floor, all cramped, angular, and utterly functional, just like me and my crew. The smell of ozone from buzzing circuitry fights with the burning clay stink. This is where I belong, where I'll get some answers. I've run a thousand missions from this spot and I'll surely run a thousand more.