Soon Ray, So and I are back to back to back in a triangle, all shooting, adrenaline buoying us up as we pick soldiers off in straight lines, stepping in to drive our bayonets through any stragglers. Their numbers never seem to end though, and I'm tiring fast.
BOOM
The cannon-shot compacts the air like thunder, and abruptly half of the soldiers are blown to smithereens. A great gap appears in their ranks, and I see Doe on the other side with a fuse in her hand and the cannon at her side.
We stab at the remaining half, until Doe levels them too with another blast. We pick off the remnants with bayonets, a massacre with no screams or blood.
Afterward there is a curious absence of sound, beyond the ragged breathing of our chord and Far's quiet sobbing. I am sweat-slicked and exhausted, but the battle is over. We won.
I turn, taking in the scene. Far is still huddled by the tree, So, Ray, Doe have their HUDs off and are all steaming. So has a wild, fractured look in her eyes. Around us there is a mandala of dead plastic bodies and parts spreading outward like the layers of the Molten Core. Occasionally one of them champs at the air.
"Did we kill them all?" comes Ray's voice.
A long eerie moment passes as we each sweep the trees around us, waiting for more to emerge. None do.
The chord look to me. I am the captain, and my job is to lead, so I blink away the uncertainty and start giving orders.
"Ray help Far," I say. "Doe walk a patrol." My voice sounds strange after so much violence, like I should be more altered somehow, though I'm still the same. "Everybody take your shock jacks." I tongue the shock jack myself, releasing a stored flow of my own body's chemicals, designed to counteract the numbing, sickening after-effects of combat. At once I feel the impact, becoming more relaxed, more attuned to the world. My sense of smell returns, the fog in my hearing clears.
My orders are followed, and Ray goes to Far, Doe lifts a musket and starts for the tree-line perimeter. That leaves only So.
I turn to her. The wild look is still in her eyes. I walk over and take her by the hand, and I lead her to La.
THE DON E
Mid-afternoon, and the crulls are flocking through the blue-tarp park. The homeless marine is out, and so is an old mad women tossing seaweed crumbs. I watch them at their efforts as I circle the sagging lake of algae-scummed rain water.
He wants meat, and she wants companionship. That's what we boil down to, I suppose.
I nod to him, he nods to me, our ritual. I can see he's trapped a crull, is already wrapping it in old newsprint blown over from Calico. Roasted on an open flame of dried algae, the paper will come away with the feathers, leaving broiled and gamey meat.
I walk on, through the park and the outer slums, until I come to the skulk's main alley. It's quiet at this time, awaiting the night when more brave souls from massive freighters carrying Arctic hydrates will dare themselves to on-shore in the lawless skulks.
Of course the trade for these freighters is with Calico, though there's usually a cut for us. Some enterprising sailor will have siphoned a little of their load, and come to sell it to us directly, a barrel-full maybe, the dregs that nobody will miss.
Walking down the shifting alley, feeling the barrels bend and bob underfoot, I think about how much we're like the algae on the pond. One hole poked in the bottom of the pond-canvas, and we'll all flush away. We are saprophytic, living off the ruins of past skulks beneath us, off the scraps Calico doesn't even know it's lost, fallen away from its great estuary mouth.
Steny hails me from her window, two stories up in a wooden brothel called 'Mitzshallah's'. She's unpainted at this hour, probably just woken up like me, and is wringing soapy foam out of her long red hair hung out of the window like Rapunzel.
I wave.
The graysmithy is open, also the node shop underneath. They sell the latest models from Calico at vastly discounted prices there, because half of them are fake and the other half stolen. It's where I had my node adapted with the spike. The owner calls himself Tofu, has a cochlear implant which is always oozing pus. He says it lets him listen to the heavens.
"You hear that don't you?" I asked once, pointing at the stereo he had on blasting out old narwhal electronica. The bass was making the whole building tremble in the water.
"That's orca, Rit," he'd said. "Don't take it out on the whales."
"I'm taking it out on you." I picked up the stereo, carried it out of the shop, and dropped it into the water off the pier.
He looked sad when I came back. I used to be an asshole. I felt so bad one night I went out to his place once with a portable dive-kit and Lagged the whole thing out of his head. I replaced the stereo, and he started playing narwhal electronica again.
That time I paid to soundproof his ceiling.
Up the elevator, Carrolla is standing at reception poring over the reservation book. He looks up when I come in and gives me a big grin.
"Conquering hero!" he calls. "I heard about your exploits."
I smile, wish I could install a little sound-proofing on Carrolla. "I saw yours firsthand," I counter, thinking back to the little group he'd been shouting at in the bar. "Did you take both of those girls home?"
His grin stretches even wider, like a keyboard of teeth. "I took them to the bar, yup. And there were three."
I can't help but laugh. In all likelihood he spent hours explaining every detail of his 'bar' to them, which is currently a lean-to scaffold of sea-bamboo, largely floorless, without a hint of alcohol in sight. I doubt any of the girls stayed long enough for any 'romance' to happen, though in the past some girls have found his passion for the project intoxicating. Perhaps they're imagining all the cash he'll one day make while slinging whiskey to freightermen.
"Did you get your curtains?" I ask. I remember the night up to about that point. "The diver."
"Got'em, thanks to you. I owe you Rit."
"You do. You can pay me back in the EMR, I'm going to self-dive."
His grin turns quizzical. Such a big dumb face, a big dumb guy with goofy 'explosion' hair, but it's hard not to like him, whatever goofy stuff he does. "You lost something again?"
"It's not like that," I say, remembering then dismissing the memory of the time I lost two teeth on a bender. It wouldn't have been a problem, but one of them had a full back-up of all my last engrams from the last ten years in it. We eventually found it, after dredging up the black-out memory, half-buried in a balsawood table in a low-skulk bar, where someone had beaten it out of me.
"I met someone," I say, "and I need to find them."
He frowns. "Another girl, after the cute one yesterday?"
"It's not a girl. Some weird guy I met. I'll tell you about it later, anyway."
Carrolla holds up his hands. "Fine, but first you should know, Don Zachary is looking for you."
I stop in mid-pace across the foyer. I pay the Don like everyone else. "What does he want?"
Carrolla shrugs. "He just called, didn't say why."
I curse under my breath. The Don doesn't call himself unless it's something important. "Fine. We'll dive first, then I'll deal with it."
"You're the boss."
I lie down on the compact gray-metal EMR scanner tray, in the dive room. It's an ancient piece of kit the graysmith before me must have lifted off one of the commodium barges that got tossed up in the wave of '49.
It begins to thump as I slide myself within its arch. Inside electromagnets are whirring, phasing with the transponders implanted deep in my cerebellum. I can feel the tide rising, and I nod to Carrolla at the controls.
"No inject then?" he asks, holding up a syringe filled with silvery metallic liquid. This is a programmable engram, the exact kind of thing we injected Mei-An with, right through the eye and into the brain through the optic nerve hole. It deposits engrams directly into Broca's area, from where they propagate to wherever they should go.
"No need. It's all in here already. I may give one of your bar tours up to the Lag, though," I
say.
He laughs. "Fine, just means I can run you through it again."
I close my eyes as the wave crests, and then I'm diving.
The brain is like an astronomical body, I've come to understand. Cut it in cross-section and you'll see a concatenation of concentric rings, from the tough outer layers of the cortex down through both hemispheres in layers of glial cells and axons, toward the cerebellum at the middle, and at the center of that lies the core of consciousness, nestled next to which my transponders gently buzz.
This is the Solid Core. Everything else in the surrounding Molten Core is shaped by it, moved by it, controlled by the deep and shifting waves of power that well out from this electromagnetic furnace of consciousness. To dive it, you must know every fold intimately, must understand the enfoldments and every false turn in the maze, because if you don't the Lag will eat you up.
I know my own mind better than any. I've dived as deep as I can, beyond the transponders themselves and right up to the edge of the aetheric bridge, the one that may connect everyone to everything else through an extra-dimensional space.
I've never wanted to cross it. It is a door that's never been opened. Nobody ever has, though many have Lagged themselves trying. Perhaps it's the brain's final mystery, and within it may lie the key to all divinity, the seed of sentience. Or perhaps within there's nothing at all, merely a fixed locus about which all else revolves.
When I dive I imagine myself as a crew on a mission into the Molten Core. There are seven of us for the seven tones in my prenatal memory. Of course I am the captain, who steers the sublavic ship and commands the crew, but I am also the crew. I am all of them at once, as my self fragments the deeper I go.
That's how it is for me, but every graysmith I've met envisages diving a different way. For some it's a journey through an unfamiliar country, while for others they're soaring back to the heart of the universe. We're doing the same thing, but we each have our own approach.
This dive is not deep, nor should it be it dangerous. I can feel the Lag lurking nearby, like the sense a sea-diver has of their breath slowly running out, but there is no need for an offering.
I find last night as a network of electric pulses stored across my visual cortex, long fibers trailing out to short and long-term memory, left and right hemispheres. It is grimy, and I isolate it for cleaning with a blast from the sublavic's sonic cannons, shifting the accreted drying stone already accumulating like rust.
I give the order, and my sublavic team starts work together to pick out the night's contours, like archaeologists salvaging an ancient piece of pottery from the earth, handling every moment with delicacy. I see Mr. Ruins, and I see a man dressed in Napoleon's clothes, but I have no time to stop and process any of it deeply. The cleaning takes time and I need to focus, because the Lag is always there, waiting for weakness.
Soon the memory is exhumed, sparkling clean, and I give the signal for the sublavic to surface.
The trim tanks release their ballast, and we rise up through molten stone. But we encounter a block, at the edge. This is not uncommon, random shiftings of the mind can turn walls around, cutting off the entry path. I reverse course in my sublavic and try for another exit, one through the haptic-center for my left hand, but find a block there too.
Strange. I try another, out through a memory of Mei-An, but I find it blocked too. Another and another still are blocked, and I begin to worry. I've felt this before. I can almost hear the EMR around me thumping undiminished.
Carrolla, I shout inside my sublavic, all the crew calling at once. Carrolla!
Once when diving the mind of an enemy bountyman in the Arctic, searching for secrets on resources and their force outlay, I got trapped when our subglacic took attack and my operator was killed. I survived for half a day inside the man's dying mind before someone came to shut the dive-tank down.
The man was dead, and by that point I'd given up half of everything I ever remembered to the Lag. I was a zombie for months afterward, relearning how to do the simplest of motor actions, elementary engrams I'd sacrificed to save the core frame of my mind.
The Lag remembers this. It has a taste for my blood. Already I feel it rooting at my sublavic's back, teeth snapping at its fins, driving me forward. I bat around the internal cortex of my own mind like a ricocheting bullet, looking for the way out, while members of the crew begin preparing a walk through Carrolla's bar as the first offering.
Carrolla! I shout through the link. Carrolla!
Finally the surface yields, and I burst through. I rise up with a gasp, inside the EMR machine as its thumping cycles down. There's a restraining hand on my chest, but it's not Carrolla. I blink, as it pulls me down the slider out of the machine, to look up at Don Zachary.
He's an ugly old man, ancient really, with cataract-rheumy eyes and a craggy red alcoholic's nose. As ever, he wears an outfit that looks like pajamas, bright red and purple, like he's just gotten out of bed. He's the boss of all the skulks, and is as vicious as anyone I ever met in the Arctic.
"Where is he?" he asks.
I blink, and push against the stubby hand holding me down. It relents, letting me up, and I look around. There are three of them in the room, big guys I've seen escorting the Don around before. At the operator's panel is Carrolla, pale faced, with a bloody clump of tissues held to his hand. He lifts the tissue away to reveal his index finger is missing, replaced by a long nail driven into the wound and jutting out like a scarecrow's.
"Sorry Rit," he says. "They wouldn't let me bring you up."
I turn back to the Don. This is the reason there is little crime in the skulks, because the Don doesn't like it, and what he doesn't like gets shut down. A finger swapped for a nail and some Lag-time are really just his way of saying hello.
"Don Zachary," I say. "What a pleasure. Have a cup of tea, why don't you?"
He doesn't smile. In the past he's seemed amused by my cheeky irreverence, but plainly not now. I dump it.
"Where is he?" the Don repeats, holding up what can only be Carrolla's finger. He wags it at me. "Tell me what you know, or your boy'll not get this back. I might even take a few more."
"Where's who?" I ask. "I don't know who you're talking about."
The Don looks at me a long moment, then sets the bloody finger down by my side. "My son," he says. "He's been round here for collections before, as ugly as me but fat too. You know him."
I realize that I do, and I know where he is. Dread builds in my belly. The memories are all there now, freshly cleaned, and he is clear as ever in my mind amongst them, lying in the darkness of the abandoned shark arena, wearing the pantomime costume of Napoleon Bonaparte.
"Fuck," I whisper.
"That's right, boy," says the Don. "You dove his girlfriend, you fucked her, and now he's gone. Where is he?"
Another piece clicks into place, Mei-An and why a Calico Reach girl would come here of all places for a graysmithing. There were parts of her she kept hidden, and I did not pry. This was the reason.
I've been set up. I stare up at the Don, unable to get the disbelief out of my eyes.
The Don nods sagely. "Take another finger."
After the screaming, Carrolla stares dumbfounded at the nails in his hand. They shift faintly as he works his missing fingers. That's when he pukes, but they don't let him leave. The smell makes me sick too, with the effects of the Halicomol sweating off, leaving just a viscous slurry of old liquor and seaweed bread in my gut.
I'm sitting in a chair in reception now, and Carrolla's two fingers are resting on the desk before me.
"Once more with feeling," says the Don calmly, belying the violence we've all just witnessed. "You've got to understand I'll do anything to get him back. He's a fat fuck who sticks his dick where it isn't wanted, I'll admit it, but he's my son. What did you do?"
"I didn't do anything," I say, "I swear it."
Don Zachary considers. "Would it help if we took your fingers instead of his? Something else perhaps?" He wagg
les his pinkie.
"Shit no," I whisper. "I didn't do anything. The girl came to my place, it's part of the contract, and that's it. I didn't know. I went out drinking afterward."
"And got yourself beaten up."
I look down at the bruises on my arms. I know my face is probably puffy and dark around the eyes. "It was freighters, new Armoricans in some end-skulk bar."
"Not a man fighting for his life?"
"Why would I want to kill your son?"
The Don shrugs. "You fell in love with his little bitch, maybe? What's her name?" He turns to one of his hulking men, who whispers in his ear. "Mei-An, that's it. I heard about her climbing over the tsunami wall. You were helping her to escape, but you couldn't leave without getting recompense. Will we ever find his body? Did you burn him up, or sink him down deep?"
"I wouldn't be such an idiot. I didn't even touch him."
The Don surveys me with a new interest. "Really? Now, you had me until that. But that was a lie, wasn't it? Now I'm interested."
One of his men hands him a bat, and without any warning he lifts it up and slams it into my stomach. I barely have time to tense before it lands, but still it drives all the air out of my lungs. I gag on my own spit, cough, and try to curl up but they won't let me. It hurts so bad I can't think.
"I'm not playing around here, son," says the Don, toying with the bat. "Tell me everything you know, or both you and your boyfriend here are going to be stroking each others' dicks with nails for the rest of your lives. Now."
I start to tell him everything that I know, about his son dressed as Napoleon, the shark-fighting arena, and Mr. Ruins.
LA E
La dies.
I jack in to give her whatever blood, adrenaline, plasma her body might draw from my own, but it takes nothing. She is barely breathing, looking up at So, unable to move. The suit knows there is no benefit to any transfer, she is too far gone.
Mr. Ruins: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 1) Page 9
