The scored black surface of the Solid Core drifts by above me like a distant lunar landscape, the silver carvings deformed by the bomb's eructation, the metal bucked into mountainous ridges and valleys, striated by my own gossamer shadows from hot spots in the Molten Core below.
Nearing the blast edge, I strain toward the blackness. The metal here has blown outward in jagged triangular chunks, curling back upon themselves like the petals of some wilting fractal flower. The traverse slides me through the gap between two of these spiky outcroppings, each twice as long as I am tall, gate guardians at the entrance to the center of the world. I pass slowly between them, then tongue the wireway to a halt as I hang directly beneath the black hole.
I look up. There is only darkness above, so thick it seems to rebuff the burnglow from below. There could be a whole world up there, but I can see none of it, only a few meters into a wall so thick I cannot see the inner edges.
I cycle my HUD through the infras and ultras, sonar, radiation and chemical-spec wavelengths, but none of it peels away the blackness.
"I'm going up," I say to the others.
My gamma-grapnel shoots upward into the darkness, and locks onto something. I work the ratchet to slide me up, powering on the whitelights in my suit, rising like a glowbug down the throat of some sleeping beast.
Beyond the immediate blast zone the candle-bomb ruptured, the walls around me turn sheer and smooth.
"It is an entrance," I say over mic. "Metalled over, but there's a tunnel."
I sweep my gaze from side to side to study the walls as I rise. They are heavy with more carvings, the silver lines of foot-high letters sparkling in my whitelight, many of them crisscrossing one another. "There's writing everywhere, over."
Doe's voice comes to me as a crackle, bitten at by static. "..areful now, there's …. Can you …. do they say?"
"I can't read them," I answer, "but they look like a hundred different tongues, not just Gaulic. I recognize some proto-Rusk, Afri-Jarvanese, Meso-Angli, Esperant. It's everywhere. I think I'm coming to the edge."
Her response is a hiss, but I am not listening. Slowly I emerge from the tunnel-mouth, up through a field of scraggy grass, to see trees, a vast hall stretching outward without any walls in sight. I tongue the haulier to a halt halfway to a sheer black ceiling where the grapnel clamped, and hang there like a chandelier in the middle of the space, my whitelights illuminating a battlefield below.
There are dead bodies everywhere, scattered amongst the trees, in places hanging from branches. I look from one to the next, some dressed in the white tights and blue tunic of the man on the horse, some in rough red greatcoats, all with ancient rifles nearby, all bloodied and filthy and still.
I cast my gaze wider, and glimpse cottages with yellow thatch aflame in places, half-obscured by the trees. There's a brook running behind me, and a watermill with its wheel knocked off-kilter, cannon-ball holes broken through the millhouse masonry wall. Turning, I spot dead gray horses lying in troughs of bloody mud, wooden carts overturned next to cannon dragged from their mounts, and everywhere men lying entangled. The flash of their polished brass buttons wink at me like a star-field.
And none of it is real.
I know this at once, instinctively, because there is something wrong. As I seek out the evidence for this I find it in the clinical stillness of everything. The smoke rising from the burning cottage doesn't drift and the flames don't flicker. The brook doesn't move or splash or shimmer.
I peel off my HUD and breathe in the air, but smell nothing, no stink of burning or blood, no green sap from the trees or peat from the dirt. The air is sterile, empty. This is a tableau of a battle that never happened.
"You have to come up here," I say into blood-mic.
A few minutes later Ray and Doe are beside me, each hanging from their own grapnel clamped to the ceiling, a heavenly host arisen from the burning depths below. Ray sucks in a sharp breath, as the combined light of our suits illuminates the hall further, and together we survey all this fake wreckage.
"It's like some giant's playset," Ray says, his HUD off and blue eyes wide.
"A toy battle," Doe answers.
"The man on the horse screamed charge," I say.
Nobody says anything more for a while.
"Are you OK up there?" La comes through clearly on the suit speakers. She or So must have figured the frequencies.
"Come up," I say.
Grapnels tether us into some of the trees, and we slalom down. Huddled in a small clearing bounded by strangely clunky branches, we sketch out a rough base-camp with Far at the center, sitting with his back to the tree, surrounded by our packs and gear.
Ray has his parabolic out and goes to toe some of the bodies fallen nearby. I watch as one of them shifts, the whole of it jogging slightly to the side. There is no loll in the body, no flop of its limbs.
"Rigor mortis?" I ask.
Ray shakes his head, drops down on one knee, and digs the tip of his knife into the dead man's back. Only the tip of the blade enters, chewing out a tiny chip of some material. Ray picks the blue chip up and rubs it between his fingers.
"Some kind of plastic," he says.
"Analyze it please, La, So," I ask. La takes the chip from Ray, and both she and So start unclipping equipment from their suits.
I turn to the tree, strip off my suit's gloves, and run my fingers over the bark.
"There's no texture," I say. I lean closer and study the grain, scratch at it with a fingernail. Beneath the brown, it is gray. "It's painted on."
"The soil only goes a few inches deep," Doe's voice comes from behind. She's kneeling beside a little pile of grass strands, tapping at a metal base layer beneath the soil. "And it's not even soil, it's more like black sand glued together." She crumbles some of it in her hand, lets it trickle through her fingers.
"It's all fake," I say.
Ray picks up one of the rifles, sights down the barrel. "This looks real enough."
He points it away from us before I can tell him not to, and pulls the trigger. There is only a metallic click though. "Dud," he says. "Maybe they all are."
"They're models."
Ray tries another, picks it up, click, nothing. Doe and I watch as he attempts to peel the blue tunic off one of the soldiers, only to find it solid and unyielding. "It's all plastic," he says. He attempts to muss a dead man's hair, but it is rigid. "All of it."
"Is there something about this in the mission pack?" Doe asks.
I turn to her. "We'll talk about that." Then to So and La. "Any results?"
"Preliminary," says La, and looks up from the spectrograph she constructed from parts on the grass. "It's definitely a polymer of carbon, but it's carbon like the metal down there is metal, bonded in a way that shouldn't exist."
I nod at this. "Gravometric, not weak."
"It makes a compound that shouldn't be able to exist at all, given the normal laws of physics," So continues. "It's more solid in ways that are hard to describe. It means there must be some kind of field here that allows it."
"But we're here," Doe says. "If physics is different in this field, how come we're not being torn apart just standing here?"
Both So and La shrug, a gesture as cute as it is identical. "We don't know," says La. "If these really are gravometric bonds, them every one of them should be sucking us in, like a planet or a black hole. But each individual bond is so tiny, the opposite of how gravometric normally works, which is a single force across a whole planet. So maybe they're just different, or they're in a kind of equilibrium." She scratches the back of her head sheepishly. "Honestly, we just don't know."
I nod. It's weird, but everything so far has been weird. "Keep working on it. Scan everything, get a sample of it all. And look at those rifles, they have metal parts, when even the people are totally plastic. I want to know why."
"Yes sir."
"Call me Me," I say. "We're a chord."
La smiles, and it lights up her serious face. "OK Me
."
I turn to Far and smile at him. He is watching me with a sullen expression. "Can you watch over these two, buddy?" I ask, trying to keep my tone light.
He frowns. "I don't want to die," he says. I don't know what to say to that, so fall back on some friendliness script buried in my head.
"There's the spirit," I say, and offer a friendly wink. "We'll be back soon."
He grunts something.
I turn to Doe and Ray and gesture toward the woods. "Come on," I say, and start walking.
There are dead bodies everywhere, and I step over and around them, through the trees. The whitelight cluster we left hanging above the hole like a chandelier sheds easily enough light to walk by, plus I have my own suit lights on at a low buzz.
I have to push between the tree branches in places, their leaves flexing and bending with my passage. I pluck one of them as I go, and stroke its surface ungloved. It has a waxy sheen, and is completely symmetrical. I tear it, and it rips clean down the middle. The vein-lines printed on its surface do not continue through the middle.
I lead us through a clearing ringed with red and blue soldiers and cannon, to one of the cottages I'd spotted earlier, where a puff of black smoke hangs in the air above willowy whips of static flame, like a thinly dispersed ball of black wool.
There is no inside to the house, only a wood-effect doorway frame with a shallow alcove where the hallway should be, the wall there just unpainted gray plastic. I circle us round to the back of the house, round low thatch gables to a small vegetable plot, where two dead plastic men lie with their rifle bayonets plunged through each other's bellies. There I stop.
Ray and Doe file up behind me, and I ready the speech I've been composing in my mind.
"We're in this together," I say.
"Of course," says Ray.
"Yes," says Doe.
"But we don't know who we are, not really. We have a feeling only. We're a chord, but we don't remember each other more than a vague sensation. I believe I'm the captain, and you seem to believe it too, but how do you know?"
Ray points at my suit. "You've got the insignia."
I look down at the complex yellow design on my chest, like a maze. I'd forgotten about it. "And how do you know what this means?"
"Like you say, it's just a feeling," says Doe.
I nod, considering, looking between the two of them. "I feel I can trust you both. I don't know why, but you're closer to me somehow. But So and La, I don't have that same feeling. Before I say anything more though, I want to know what you think."
"They're on the other side of Far," says Ray.
I frown. "What does that mean?"
He shrugs, toys with the grapnel wire hanging from its spool at his waist. "In the forge-pods they were on the other side of Far, and Far's a weird kid. You've seen the welts on his neck, right?"
I think back to those first moments in the sublavic corridor, as I stumbled out of the forge fire, looking sideways at Doe, then Ray, Far, and the others beyond. I was at the head, which didn't seem quite right at the time, but there I was.
"Alright. Doe?"
She shrugs. "They seem OK to me. Maybe they're distant, but so was Ti, and she died to save us. Why does it matter?"
I nod at Ray.
"It was the first page of the mission book. It said 'Don't read this out loud. One of your chord will kill you all.'"
"So that's why you didn't read it out. I thought that was strange. And you think one of us is the traitor."
I shrug. "I don't know. I want to be careful." Now I pull out the mission pack again, hold it by the metal ring through the top corner. The front cover is blank, and so is the next page.
"T-minus 1," says Ray.
"Pay attention," I say, and slip a finger under the flap of the next page. "Ready?" They nod. I turn it.
It's a mission brief page with title and five bullet points in a large font, all of which begin to fade at once.
INVEIGLE THE SOLID CORE
- SURVIVE
- INFILTRATE THE LABYRINTH
- REMEMBER
- FIGHT THE MINOTAURS
- REVIVE
That is all. I scour the page as the ink lightens away, but there is nothing else. I look to Ray and Doe.
"Does that mean anything to you?"
"It's more like a motto than a mission directive," says Ray.
"And is it sequential?" Doe asks. "If so, where are we up to? Have we survived already, or is that yet to come? The sublavic could've killed us all, but most of us survived. We've broken into this hall, so does that mean we've infiltrated the maze?"
I shrug. "It's meaningless without context."
"It could be these are concurrent things," Ray adds, "like we should be doing them all constantly. It works for all of them. As long as we here, we might be always surviving, always infiltrating deeper, remembering more, fighting more minotaurs- that's a kind of maze guardian right, and reviving."
"From Gracian myth," I say, one of those odd things I remember.
"Reviving what though?" Doe asks. "Remembering what?"
None of us has an answer.
I edge my finger under the next page. "Ready?" They nod.
As I flip the paper, three things happen at once.
One, strident and impossible to ignore, is the scream from the forest. I know at once it is Far, and he is terrified.
Two, the sharp crack of gunfire rings out, and the bright nimbus of light from the whitelight cluster over the hole is extinguished, plunging us into a grayscale world lit only by the low embers of our suit lights.
Three, I see the fading writing in the mission pack, echoing the scream back at me.
SURVIVE
- SAVE FAR
"Fuck," says Ray.
POWER D
I sleep, and I wake. It's afternoon. A pale gray light rinses through the windows of my apartment. The smell of Mei-An is on the sheets still, one of her hairs shimmers on the pillow, but she is of course long-gone.
The scent fades quickly, beaten back by the thump of my pulse booming in my head, pain in my back, my head, my chest. I feel out the sore places without moving, letting the movement of my breath be my sonar.
Bruises and cracked ribs tell a story of violence, and with it come intermittent images of last night. Carrolla was there, and a fight, then I was wandering through some ruined skulk, after swimming the sludge-divide because I didn't feel like walking the wall. And there was a dead body.
My breath stiffens involuntarily. Last night I saw a dead man, and I don't remember why.
Of course I know how to get the memories back. Its my job, after all, what I've done all the days of my adult life; graysmith. They're not gone, only obscured. Being blackout drunk is not like making an engram sale, or even like the chum I tossed to the Lag in Mei-An's mind. The frame and the weight of the memory both remain, I just need to get the right kind of relaxed to feel it out.
But right now I truly don't give a fuck.
A trip to the toilet nearly ruins me. I lean on the ceramic bathtub's rim and run the hot shower over my throbbing head. I ease myself over the rim, and sit under the hot water stream in the bath well, steam frothing the air and the water a drumbeat on my scalp and back. I spit and heave into the water, gross clots of purple and red out of my nose and hawked bitterly from the back of my throat.
I piss without getting up, and drink hot water straight out of the shower flow. This is horrible. In the distance far off my node rings, probably Carrolla calling me in to gray, but they don't need me right now. It's book-keeping today, some check-ups, and he can handle that.
Thirty minutes dozing in the heat, and I get up. I feel a little clearer now, ready to stomach more than water. In my miserly kitchenette, I locate the seaweed bread in the cupboard.
It's half stale, springy in places, hard in others. I drop two slim slices into the toaster, click it on. It pops while I'm swirling two fizzing tablets of Helicomol into a glass tumbler already frosted white with past
tablet accretions. This is a pattern for me.
Sprawling on a checked red chair by my small breakfast table, I make the calculation carefully, weighing the benefits. If I wanted to I could erase this whole morning, gift it to the Lag for nothing and rouse to a sonic bath with the weight erased, only the outline frame remaining. As a graysmith it's only too easy to remove unpleasant memories. But that wouldn't make it any less horrible for me right now.
I knock the foamy water back in one gulp, chase it quickly with two mouthfuls of bread. The sound of my own mastication rivals that of my pulse for a time. A hard swallow, and I feel the pain in my jaw.
Out of the window lies a corner of the blue-tarp park below. The crulls are cawing away, and the old homeless man is just visible, setting up his complicated trigger-spring crull-traps. The day is gray like brain matter around him, rain clouds forever rolling by.
The blurry image of the dead man slips back into my mind, along with something else. A cursory glance brings it to my attention, a folder of white pages scrawled with red ink, lying spread out like a magician's fanned cards across the floor.
A dead man's script. I gather the pages up, then sit back down to give the room time to stop lurching. I try to straighten the pages neatly with a few sharp raps along their edge off the table-top, but the sides don't align. I run my fingers over them, flicking between them looking for where they're stuck, but they're not. Every page is a different size.
It's disconcerting. The front page reads
FOR RITRY GOLIGH
But the 'TRY' has run and faded where a drop of water has smeared it. Interesting. I try to remember exactly how I got this, was it really a dead man, or a trick from Carrolla? Perhaps I imagined it, some other person's memories surfacing from the Lags I'd consigned them to.
I flip through the pages, unevenly. There are titles in bold at the top of every page, followed by some kind of directions, a crudely hand-drawn map, then paragraphs of detail. There's something vaguely familiar about them, but I don't know what it is. Some kind of travel guide, maybe places I'd been before?
Mr. Ruins: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 1) Page 7
