"Elba," I shout, remembering the keyword, and at once the burners release, shunting me out of the hollow pod to land on my knees on the beveled steel floor. Down-trim I see Ray stagger out of his pod too, Doe beyond him, and all the others down to Far.
"What the fuck," Ray gasps, spitting, rubbing at his big-boned black face. He's an Afri-Jarvanese I think, baked in the fires of hell, then I wonder how I thought that. There's no time though, because I smell smelting bauxite and clay in the air, and I feel the roll underfoot, and I know what it means.
The Bathyscaphe is peeling off its ablative brick hull, the screw must've shredded a thread, and we're listing at crazy diagonals. In short, we're going to die.
I get to my feet and look down the line of my crew, 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, and I know them, even though I don't remember anything about them. I know what we have to do to keep us alive, so I start barking out orders to do just that, because that is what the captain does.
"Ray get to the forward trim and start flushing the tanks. Ti eject the screw and sluice the replacement. So and La I want as much cooling to the double-hull as you can muster, and Doe you're with me for the conning tower."
The orders roll off my tongue easily, smoothly, as though I've commanded this sublavic every day of my life. But then have I? Wouldn't I remember, if I'd done anything else?
My crew lurch to their feet and get moving, because that is what the crew does when the captain gives an order. Ray runs away from me trimward, So and La scale up and down into ladders I had forgotten were there, Ti joining Doe and running toward me. In the moment before I turn to run myself I spot Far standing still, poor kid, alone and purposeless in the hall with his black uniform looking completely out of place. He doesn't have any yellow lines on his 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 the package, so what choice is there.
"Hunker down, Far," I shout over my shoulder, then I'm in motion too.
Running down rotten metal corridors stocked with rusted pipes, ducts, dials and wiring, I notice how all of them are polished shiny at their corners, where a thousand fingers have rubbed them smooth, discolored at the seams where long years of effluents have seeped away. I see it all so clearly, like this is at once the first and last memory of my life, and I need to hang onto it. What would it mean, to be born into all this? To die in all this?
My booted feet thump the hard steel floor, echoed by the timpanic drum concerto of Doe and Ti thumping along behind me. The stink of burning clay is thicker now, the lurching getting harder, as the rumble of molten stone scrapes off the outer hulls of our sublavic.
We're in the Molten Core, I remember from some far off memory load. We're diving, have been diving for days, weeks, maybe months. The Bathyscaphe has a triple-hull of mortared brick, cocooned in it like a blast-furnace, and it's supposed to see us through the Mohorovic discontinuity, but something is wrong.
Tides of convection quakes roll the ship underfoot, magma blooms that shouldn't be having this kind of effect. I touch the pipes like mariners past as I sprint onward, enough to keep my balance, with the smooth economy of a body that knows this corridor and its foibles. I adjust for the shocks and jerks in the super-heated flows without, until a final wave hits us like the hammer of a god, tossing me bodily into the wall.
Crunch, thunk, I drop to the floor, then Doe is there to pick me up. I catch a glimpse of her Peravian brows and bleach-white face, like a beaming whitelight in my eyes, then she's dragging me up and we're running again.
"The screw's stripped a thread," she shouts to me over the grind of our passage and the growing crack crack of the screw spinning wrong. "Core knows how."
"I know," I shout back at her, then we hit the conning tower ladder bank and begin to ascend. I slip a glance down as we rise and see Ti is already gone, off to the deep-belly. Bless Ti, for she'll be the first to go. I climb up into the sublavic's fin rung by rung by rung, trying to make the calculations I need before I'll need them. If the screw is off it'll take a moment to restart, it'll mean unpowered buffeting from the deepest phase of the Molten Core, and it'll mean the ablative bricking hulls will suffer, and we'll begin to feel the heat even more.
I corner the rim into the conning tower top, and rise to my feet again. At that moment there's a sudden burp from the sublavic's back-end which yaws the whole ship on its nose, steepening the dive. I barely grab onto the periscope bars as my legs kick out with the new direction of gravity, dangling me to the fore, which swiftly corrects.
"Ray's come through for us," Doe shouts up at me, as she pulls out of the ladder chute. "He's shunted the trim."
"First tank of many," I shout back, and pull down the periscope handles. "Hold on to something."
I splay the handle rests and slot my face into the display.
It is like looking into the belly of a sun. The grinding sound takes on shape as I gaze into the billowing magma without, every tremor through the sublavic's brick-hull corresponding to these convecting waves of red, yellow and orange as they churn within this body's Molten Core, driven by magnetic and gravometric forces too huge to imagine.
I wonder briefly how I know this about forces, when I know nothing else, but then I remember that knowing will not help us survive, and survival is all I can think of now.
I focus harder through the periscope, sweeping side to side. What I'm looking at is a magmic storm, dense enough to shred all the hulls we have if it catches us wrong, at a confluence. The cooling systems to the bricks will be nothing but a brief sizzle of ice in a volcano if I can't steer us through it fast.
Reports ring in from all decks, called out by Doe.
"Ti's jettisoned the screw. New one's toothing to the engine."
I feel the slowdown in the patterns of liquid metal ahead. Their buffeting gets stronger the slower we get,
"Tell her to make it bite now," I shout.
Another trim-tank vented by Ray sends us yawing deeper, almost wrenching the periscope out of my hands. I lean back in and watch as a great yellow wreath of molten rock bubbles up toward us, wondering if this will be the one to take us out. I only need to find the bearing to drive us through, and the propulsion to do it, and perhaps we'll make it.
"So and La say the engine's cooling at maximum," calls Doe, "we've got two layers of ablative bricking left, the outer one's completely shorn. Three trim tanks left."
"It's only getting hotter," I call back. "We need more…"
The new screw bites and I can't finish my sentence as the periscope punches me hard in the face. Stars, and Doe is tossed from her feet behind me.
"Backwash, clearing the gunk," Doe shouts, getting to her feet. "Me, we have to move now."
Blinking away the pain, I glimpse the outline of it, the black mass of the Solid Core like a fuzzy island through the magmic haze, corporeal to gamma rays in a way the flows are not.
Any port in a storm.
"Arc 23 degrees," I shout out to Doe, "flank speed, get us the hell through this."
I hear her ring out the order on the Engine Order Telegraph, two bells for direction and three sharp rings for full steam ahead. The thrum vibrates up through the floor, as Ti deep below decks drives the engine to new straining heights.
The thrust jerks me back from the periscope, as the sudden vector cavitates the magma ahead. Liquid rock bubbles and groans and then we're churning through it, moving too fast for the cooling magma drag to peel off, giving us a replacement layer for as long as the thought engine can take it.
"Arc 25, Hail 47, Veer 306," I call out to Doe, each navigation met by a ringing on the EOT, swerving us like a fish between the densest points of the lava storm. We thread it, and I rattle out a long stream of minute corrections that may just be enough to spare our insulation and to get us through. The room around me rings with the chi
me of the EOT bell as Doe relays everything to Ti far below, a high trilling melody over the deep bass thrum of the Molten Core.
"Arc 23, lock it in," I finish, then pull out of the periscope. We're almost to the surface, and there are other things I have to do now, to ensure we all survive. As I pull back another trim tank blows and jostles us slightly, lightening the load, speeding us.
I stride to the display bank and tap the dial for internal cabin pressure. It's coolest here, hottest down where Ti is, and not long to go. There are streams of sweat pouring off Doe already, along with a flow of blood down her cheek.
"Bit my tongue on the last yaw," she says. "You should see your eyes, you look like a panda."
My head aches, but there's no time. We have to get out of this one-shot bucket before we burn up.
"Call them all up," I say. "Have Ray get Far. We'll breach the surface in T-minus ten, and we need to be ready."
She aye-ayes and gets to the con, starts relaying my message throughout the ship.
I rub my eyes and take a deep breath.
What in hell are we doing here?
At the back of the conning tower is the captain's hutch, and I drive my way into it, between concrete heaps of bulky roaming suits, tumbled from their racks by the trim-jettisons. Beyond them, the hutch is a small space with a bolted-down desk and chair, surrounded by walls of lockers, each with its own keyplate and number. I stand in the middle holding to the edge of the desk while I look around at them. There must be two hundred, some even embedded into the ceiling.
Mission orders. I rack my mind for some hint of which one is for me, is for this mission, but they all feel familiar. I have the sense that behind every one is a memory of something I've done or have to do, something some person like me once did and will yet do, but I don't know which one is the right one for now.
"Ray's here," Doe shouts down the straggle channel over the Core's deep stone grind. The grinding has gotten into me like an endless scream, like a threnody for seven lost marines making up a chord. Something about this is familiar, unique, but I can't be certain.
"Ablative layer two is peeling," she shouts. "It's gonna be close."
The ride gets rockier as we start to hit dregs of cooling rock, and I sit down in the chair and look around at the walls, racking my mind. A mission to the core, but for what?
I look down at the yellow maze on my chest. The black smoke oil has mostly smeared off, and I can make out the lines of it clearly. It looks like a schematic for a world, now that I think about it, with lines of magnetic and gravometric flow. Either that or the topology of a brain.
There's something hidden underneath, a lump hanging around my neck on a leather cord. I fish it out and find a key dangling before me like a hook, the number inscribed plainly on its side.
47.
I scan the room for the locker it matches, find it wedged down in the corner. On my knees before it, the key goes in, the door opens, and out slides a long slim metal box, heavy. I set it on the table and unlatch the top clasp, open the lid.
There's a thick mission dossier inside, pierced by an open metal loop in the top left corner binding the pages together, with the usual faint red ink on every page that will dissipate when exposed. As I watch, the title on the front slowly fades.
RITRY GOLIGH – PROTO-CALICO
I shove the dossier down into my uniform then evacuate the captain's hutch.
The crew are gathered by the conning tower donning lava suits. Ray and Doe are kitting on their QC parabolics, Doe with her huge shoulder-mounted bondless accelerator, Ray strapping in the side-hammock for Far to ride in. They shove a knife in each boot, fasten elasteel coil spools to their belts, grab their packs full of candle-bomb, fuse, gamma-clamps, hauliers.
La and So are holding hands, like La and Ti usually do, but Ti is down with the screw. La and Ti are twins, each as pretty as the other. Her blonde hair is in a tight bun, while So looks out of place, like a shadow. Both of their suits are covered in pockets and patches containing every possible tool we could need in the Solid Core, ready to work.
These are all professionals. These are my crew, tones hand-picked for a chord, and already I've sent one of them to her death. These remaining are sweating, shaken, grime-stained down to their boots, and they're looking to me for guidance. I am the captain, after all. Ray gives me a tired wink. He doesn't even have a cigar stub between his silver loop-pierced teeth, that's how bad it is.
The sub lurches again, and La bleats out the report. "That'll be the second layer gone. We've minutes only."
"Where's Far?" I ask, looking around. "Where's Ti?"
Ray produces Far from behind him. The boy is terrified, and the welts in his neck are rising up again. "Give him some candy, Ray," I say, then turn to Doe.
"Where's Ti?"
She says nothing, looks away.
The sub jolts, and we all fall down. Steam pours into the conning tower top, the overwhelming smell of sea salt and sweets baking in kilns. What? Doe is at my side, whispering in my ear.
"She'll have to stay down there," she says. "Egg the screw on, or we'll sink. All of us will sink."
I understand. I knew it the moment I sent her down there. Ti is going to die for the rest of us.
I barrel for the EOT and ring it backward and forward five times, enough to make it clear when no words will do.
Thank you.
Then Doe is pressing my combat suit on around me, Ray is helping, strapping in my QC parabolic, HUD over my head, and I can think clearly enough now to help them.
Then we surface.
Everybody falls as the sublavic jerks forward with the lack of resistance, bobbing up in the magmic floe within the proximal zone like a cork in the water. The grind of molten stone fades a little, even as the screw deep below begins to whine hard, to keep the extra weight of us buoyant.
I pick myself up and quickly take stock. Smoke is everywhere, so thick I can barely see the others, but I can find my way to the fin ladder and start climbing. Ten more rungs and I hit the exit hatch, rotate it a full revolution in both directions, and open it inward.
Super-baked air pours in, scalding my lungs, and I slam my visor into place. "Charge your faces," I shout down at them. My HUD grays instantly, blocking the worst of the magmic glare glowing through the brick.
"Pick," I shout down, and Ray hands me up the pick-axe. Hard to wield in this short space, but it has to be this way. The final ablative hull of brick is mortared in place like the wall of a house, and it's the last thing between the outside and the cooking interior of this metal can.
I drive the pick into the brick, and red shraplets spit out, a chunk of mortar falls and clatters off my visor. Sweat is everywhere, and I'm losing my grip. I swing again, take a sizable divot out of the outer hull, and catch a glimpse of the extreme heat without.
Two more blows, and the ablative bricking tumbles out and down. I climb up through the hole, onto a blackened crag of sinewy black magmic crust, cooling now atop the surface-nose of the Bathyscaphe.
Around me is the all-encircling glory of the Molten Core, and we are but a dark outcropping on its churning concave ocean. In every direction the molten floes spread outward, then rise, arcing round to form a vast and perfect hollow sphere, a three-dimensional moat about the Solid Core of this world.
I look directly up, and see the grimy black heart of this body, hanging impossibly overhead. It is a vast moon of rusted metal, and we have breached the Mohorovic discontinuity between it and the Molten Core.
Far climbs up beside me, and I hold onto him in his little suit, like a toy to be played with. So and La follow soon after, Ray, then Doe. No Ti.
"Work the grapnels," I tell Ray and Doe. "Get us off this thing."
The sublavic grumbles underfoot, and I know the screw is dying under the sudden load I've asked it to bear. There is no way Ti can make it.
Who is Ti anyway? I have no memories of her, and perhaps this is why. I saw her once down the corridor, and then she
died so that the rest of us could live. She will die, but what is the difference now, her death is as certain and complete as any death in history.
History. What is any other note in the chord for, but to pass the message through whole, and let history continue the way it should, the way it does.
I pat the mission document sealed against my chest, hold onto Far tight, and watch as Doe launches the grapnel traverse-line to the Solid Core. I know that inside that rusted metal heart there will be answers. There must be answers, because if there are not then all this has been for nothing.
The grapnel snags into the black Core, and Doe begins latching us all into the taut line, even as the sublavic sinks underfoot. I can hear its metal walls buckle beneath the heat and mass, its brick-hull melting away. It begins to cant then slide downward, and we slide with it, inching back to the molten floes which birthed us.
Goodbye Ti, I think, as Doe starts the haulier line and my feet lift off the crusted black sublavic nose. It should be the captain who goes down with the ship, I think, not the engineer. Goodbye Ti, goodbye the Bathyscaphe.
As we rise into the air in a pressed-together black-suited clump, I watch my sublavic sink. Perhaps I am crying, as I watch it enfold slowly into the burning waves. Magma flows into the hole I broke through the ablative brick and mortar wall, and I can only hope the end for Ti will be quick. Probably she will choke on exhaust though, as the magma burns up all the air. Then she will bake, then she will crumple as the walls bend like chewing gum, and then she will burn.
The Bathyscaphe is swallowed, and gone.
I look up, my body nudging against Far and So as we rise. The ragged black bulk of the Solid Core begins to grow larger. This is why we have come.
CARROLLA B
Afterward, she sleeps. I lie awake, watching the red glow of the alarm clock cycle through the numbers available to it, shadows through the room lilting slightly with every digit. Through the glass I see the moon, can just make out the half-circle encampment around the man in the moon's left eye.
Mr. Ruins: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 1) Page 3
