Outside, it grows dark.
Six cans sit before me, a few meatballs, one green beans, three pineapple. I am stuffed, now seated on a righted chair at one of the tables.
I could live here forever, I think. I could stay, and stay, and make a new life.
I laugh out loud at the thought, at what Ven might say at that. Then I try to snatch back that name before it spreads any wider.
Ven. I haven't thought of her for more than ten years, not since I Lagged the weight out of her, then went crying back to the EMR to try and snatch some of that weight back. Ven who I lost in the Arctic, who died just like most of us died, in meaningless skirmishes against people who looked just like us, who wanted just what we wanted, like soldiers trapped in filthy black trenches just holding the line, killing our time by killing each other.
Ven. Fuck. I punch the table, go back to the cupboard store, and come back with a bottle of ancient vodka.
It's easiest this way.
SUBLAVIC G
-the sublavic.
I am wreathed all in forging yellow flames again, looking out on the same pale gunmetal corridor. I can hear Ray nearby calling out the same curses. Black oily smoke fills my mouth again, and I spit it up, smirch down my yellow-lined uniform.
"Elba," I gag, and the fire forge spits me out, freshly kilned. I catch myself on my feet this time, look down the empty corroded corridor.
Ti is already out. She is standing there with a smile on her face, her dark hair swaying as though in some unseen wind. She mouths words.
"Come with me."
I never knew Ti. She died before I could speak to her, before I could do any more than order her to her death, and I feel it. It aches within me like a loss, though I am newly born. I start toward her, padding down the red metal floor. To my side there is Ray, crying out in his forge, and Doe, and the others, but they can wait.
I owe this to Ti.
She smiles and turns. I smell burning brick in the air, and call for her to wait, but she disappears down a hatch, as she had before. Down to the screw.
I follow, dropping into a narrow chute filled with barking red light and the steady hiss of oxygen escapement. The air down here is super-charged, rubbing like ghostly fingers over my cheeks and the backs of my hands.
"Ti!" I call, trying to look down past my own knees, only catching glimpses of her upturned meta-Asiat face, her swinging bangs, her nymph-like smile. "Wait for me," I call.
The sublavic jolts, but I continue down, until I emerge in a furious inferno. Either side of me are giant clashing pistons, rods of metal each taller and thicker than me, each pumping up and down with a grinding friction that shakes the steel-grille flooring.
Thick red smoke is all around, and I just glimpse Ti running into it, toward the rear of the sublavic and the screw. I run after her blindly, holding my arms in at my sides to keep them away from the chopping, grinding pistons. The sound of them thickens and batters against my skull. The fog of scalding clay tastes like a liquid in the back of my throat, forcing its way in.
Then we are standing by the giant sublavic screw, itself as large and wide as the corridor we've just run down. It is jerking and attempting to grind, but there is something blocking it and instead all that pounding force from the pistons is forcing the screw deeper into the ship itself, boring a hole back up the engine corridor like the metal bulkheads were tissue paper.
"Look!" calls Ti, and points down to something dark and trembling wedged between the screw and the deck. This is the spanner in the works that is forcing the screw to back up. It is dark and flailing with the screw's gargantuan pulsations, marked by shreds of yellow.
"What is it?" I call across.
When I look up Ti's smile has become hideously wide, as big as the champing black mouths of the soldiers in the Solid Core, biting at the air out of sync with her words.
"It's you, Me. It's all of your chord, come to nothing."
A shudder tears through me, as I feel the first bite of the screw in my own skin. I look down and see the uniform on my left leg tear away, watch the gouge cut into my shin and blood drool out.
"You're the traitor," I call to Ti, as the pain begins.
She strides closer, stepping in air above the screw, her champing mouth snapping close to my face. I can't move, as my other leg begins to sever at the knee, churned away by the maddened screw.
"You're doing it to yourself, Ritry," she says. "You've brought all of this upon yourself. How could you hope to reach the core of me? How could you ever hope to beat me? You are the traitor. You should have done what I said, when I said it. You should never have sent your fucked-up pulse to fight me."
Ti bursts into flames then, and the black mouth vanishes. I leap over the screw on my bloody legs and catch her, try to stamp out the flames, but I cannot. She is melting and I can't stop it. She begs and cries, but there is nothing I do can help.
She dies again, in my arms, melting to a burning puddle that slips through the grating in the floor.
The frustrated gyrations of the screw whump through the air. churning the sublavic apart, and I realize I have to stop it. But looking at the pistons and the stripping threads, I have no idea how. I may be the captain, but I never came down here before.
I sprint back down the walkway on bloody legs, even as another split opens on my left arm and a wound begins to cut itself in. Up the ladder, my right arm shreds and more blood flows.
Running back along the forge corridor, peering into pods, I see every member of my crew is champing back at me with hollow black mouths. I reach Ray and Doe and drop to my knees and scream, even as a slit opens in my own face and memories begin to pour out, as my jaw begins to champ up and down into darkness and nothing.
And through.
I'm kneeling in the dark, panting hard, with faint voices buzzing in my head like insects. One flick of my tongue and my suit lights fire up, illuminating an umbilical tunnel, roughly circular in cross-section and smooth, flowing away from me front and back. As I watch, the whole thing flexes and shifts, lifting and rising and flapping side to side like breakers on a wave, like a slow fin gradually pulsing back and forth.
Thump thump,
I hear,
Thump thump.
"Me, come in Me, answer me now, Me!"
The voice in my HUD slaps me awake, and I tongue on my blood-mic.
"I'm here. Doe, I'm here."
The relief in her voice is palpable. "Oh thank the chord. Me, what happened? Where did you go?"
"I'm inside," I answer, looking again at the billowing tunnel. "There was something strange, I was inside the sublavic, Ti was there, everybody was, and then…"
"Then what?" comes Ray's voice. "They all burned, because you killed them, is that it? Over."
I blink, thinking I must have misheard. "What?"
"You heard me, Rit, you slippery shit. You'll not get away so easily."
It's a different voice now, no longer on blood-mic. I spin to see Ray standing behind me, only there are black holes where his eyes should be, and blood running down his neck. "It'll only get worse," he chides. "Ritry, don't you see? This is my land, now, and you're just not prepared."
He closes on me, his bayonets lick out, then plunge into my face.
Gasp, and I'm awake again, this time lying on a hard iron floor, the corrugated surface paneled with a repeating pattern.
RG RG RG RG RG RG RG RG
I stroke it softly, as though it can offer comfort. It stretches out in four directions, down four featureless iron corridors, interspersed by harsh white ceiling bar lights.
A crossroads. I rub my eyes and wonder if this is real. The metal is cool to the touch, the filigree like braille beneath my fingertips. I wonder that once I could read this, perhaps another part of me remembers. Was that Ti, or La? I'm not sure.
It isn't real. It is real. I don't know the difference, perhaps.
"Me, come in, come in Me?"
I feel sick and weary, but I roll over to the
hole I climbed up through and peer down. The ladder is there, stretching down, and at the bottom stand Ray, Doe, and Far, but they seem altered somehow, like I'm looking at them through tinted glass. As I move my head, the image warps slightly.
"I'm here," I say to the HUD. I wave. "Can you see me?"
"Roger that," says Ray. "I'm coming up right now."
"Wait," I say, catching my breath.
"What is it?" Doe says. "Is it not safe?"
I consider how best to explain this, a second time. "I saw two visions," I say. "Passing through the black bubble. I was back in the sublavic, and you were all burning, then I was in some sinuous, living Solid Core, and Ray you killed me. It was horrible."
Silence on blood-mic. I look down and see Ray has not moved at the bottom of the ladder.
"You mean bad dreams?" he asks.
"Yeah. But… yeah."
A moment.
"Well fuck that," says Ray, and continues on up.
I want to laugh. God, I love Ray. "Just, be prepared. He'll throw all he can at you."
"Who?" Doe asks. "Who will, Me?"
I consider well, before I answer. The voice called me Ritry, and perhaps that is who we are, the chord. Ritry Goligh, of proto-Calico. I pull out the mission pack and leaf through the empty pages. All of it memories, all of it forgotten. If there is a traitor, perhaps it's me, for bringing us here at all.
But here we are.
"I don't know," I say. "But whoever he is, he's pretty pissed. This is his Solid Core, and he knows we're trying to get in."
"Roger that," says Doe, always the professional, leaving the details until the action's done. "We're coming up."
I lie back, looking up at the ceiling, where the RG RG RG pattern continues. It is everywhere, stamped upon the umbilicus by me, by what I have brought with me. What is the true shape of this place, the true map of the Solid Core? Perhaps I am making it, with every step I take.
Because I am the chord. The chord is me. Together we're going to find the bastard at the heart of this maze, who killed Ti and La and wants to kill us, and we're going to really fuck him up.
I start to laugh.
"We're coming," I shout, though I don't know to who, or for why. My voice echoes crazily in four directions down the corridors. I don't know what we've come for, or what we'll do once we arrive, but I know it will be righteous, violent, and earned. "We're coming!"
MOVEMENT 2. SOLID CORE
ABANDONED A
I can't go back.
I rouse with this thought in my mind, lying with one arm splayed off the bed in this bright room. It is a thought whole and complete, without fear or regret. It is a fact, a new foundation to build upon.
I open my eyes to sunlight. The glare blinds me and I struggle to my feet, pawing for the wall and window blind, but this is not my apartment on skulk 47, and I come up against glass.
The surface is hot, and I crack open my eyes. Inch by inch, the glorious view before me is unveiled.
The godship fleet lies before and below me in ruin, burnished to a startling copper glow by the dawn sun. Every contour of broken ship and jagged jut of metal seems utterly correct and alive, sparkling in this holy moment of orange light shot through the Earth's polluted troposphere.
I pick out hints of green in the shining orange boneyard, where windblown grass and small trees have nestled into culverts in the battered metal and begun to thrive. Pink Arctic cherry blossoms spray across the red and white godship flanks like snowfall, carried on a tidal wind.
I am transfixed, beholden to this like nothing else. The view over blue tarps and homeless people from the sallow dank of my slum skulk rooms seems so far away, as though the realm of an entirely different person.
Bathed in this glow, I remember the night before, staggering through the rooms of this twice-abandoned cathedral ship to one of the holy halls, and cursing every god I could think of between swigs of the second vodka bottle, for Ven and Heclan, for Tigrates and Ferrily, and most of all for Ven, and myself.
The habitation room I chose was dark then, the bed soft and inviting and neatly made, as though it had been prepared just for me. I sank into it, and into dreams where they were all with me. We ran through the old godships like children, exploring every nook and cranny, skating over the waves on jetskis, laughing and loving, all my old friends and lovers together again.
And I wake to this. It feels like bliss.
"You begin to see," comes the voice from behind.
I know then that this will be Mr. Ruins. I even know what he will say, as though I can feel it building in the air like an electrical charge, like the rising smell of dust before a storm.
I turn to face him. He stands at the entrance dressed in dapper gray: a smart gray waistcoat with black toggle buttons, a crisp white shirt open at the throat, gray sharply-pressed suit trousers above black dress shoes. On his chin is the grizzled peppery stubble of a Calico underwear model. His nose is aquiline and lean, his tan cheeks bright, his dark hair buzzed close to the scalp.
The lines on his face mark him to be somewhere about 40, though clearly he must be far older, if everything he said about watching me in my artificial womb was true. His gray eyes burn with the reflected dawn, and his teeth shine a polished ceramic white.
Mr. Ruins. Everything about him exudes a genteel Calico class. I wonder if I should cut his throat, or thank him.
"You," I say.
He smiles, dashes off the slightest of bows. In that brief moment I might have had him, if I'd wanted. A distraction, but something holds me back. "Me."
As we study each other, the orange gloam of dawn fades outside the window, back to the Arctic rain-gray. The room goes dull.
"You set me up," I say, and once I start it all pours out. "You killed the Don's son, and dressed him up like some pantomimist. You sent Mei-An to hook me in, then you waited for us at the shark-arena. You laid a trail for me to follow, and I followed it, and now I'm here."
He regards me coolly, as though waiting politely for me to go on. I accede.
"You've made it so I can't go back. No doubt Zachary's already repossessed the graysmithy, my apartment, beaten the crap out of Habeas if he's even alive, the same for Carrolla, and he'll have all the skulks looking out for me. You've snipped off my old life like some errant hair." He seems particularly pleased with this metaphor. "What I want to know," I go on, "is why. What could it possibly be for?"
Even as I'm speaking I slowly work my peripheral vision round the room, scanning for anything to serve as a weapon, without shifting the focus of my gaze from Ruins' face. It's a graysmith's trick, one learnt from diving a hundred minds: how to split the mind's attention into separate functions and leave them running on near autopilot. There's nothing though. The room is plain and functional, surely exactly as it had once been in its godship days, though inverted 180 degrees.
Ruins clears his throat politely. "You'd like an answer, so an answer you shall have. I believe in potential, Ritry. May I call you Ritry?"
I make a noncommittal gesture, and he continues smoothly. "Excellent. I hope you won't mind that I use your first name, whereas I have only given you my last, and a false name at that. Perhaps, in time, though my true name is as meaningless now as the truth behind the first Jamestown colony. Yet to the topic of potential. As I told you in the shark-arena, after an evening spent squandering your considerable and unique brain through alcohol, salacity, and the adrenal opiate, I have watched you for all of your life. Will it be showing my hand too much, to venture that you are unique? That you are, in some ways, much as I am and was? Would such a comparison offend you?"
I frown. "What the fuck are you talking about?"
His smile broadens, and he waves a hand vaguely at me. "Coarseness is certainly a part of your charm, though it too is merely a shield, keeping you from the reality you so cravenly seek. Ritry, do not be a child. You well understand what I am saying, and we are both fucking adults here, are we not?"
I grunt. It mig
ht be galling to have this psychopath call me a child, if he weren't such a child himself in all his parlor tricks and games. "Stop blathering then. Stop feeding me a line of bullshit. If you care about potential, what about that poor sad case in the Napoleon suit? What kind of fetish is that, by the way? And what about his potential?" I click my fingers. "Cut off at the balls, staff and scrotum both."
Mr. Ruins allows a rich laugh. "Colorful. But what potential did he have, Ritry? The unconsidered life is not worth living, have you heard that expression? His life was deeply unconsidered. He was an animal following a base line of programming written from his birth, and to extinguish him from the bond-lines was no more consequential than the slaughter of a pig for its meat. Another pig will simply rise to take his place."
"That is just weird," I say. "I hope you didn't take a bite out of him, while he was resting."
He laughs again. "So vituperative. Ritry, dead flesh is of no consequence to me. The true vitality comes from those living, and the trails they leave behind. But to take your deeper, unintended point, in that sense did I take a bite from him? Only in the most ephemeral way, in no way something that would impact upon him beyond the veil. It wasn't very nourishing or tasty either, but then I take my meals when the opportunity presents."
A long moment passes in which I say nothing, just look at him. He seems content to merely look back at me. Is he talking about eating people, or not? He doesn't have a weapon. Perhaps I could rush him, take him down and have an end to it, but I just don't know enough.
"You're mad," I say, instead.
"That has been said, yes. But then why are you here? Are you mad too? Everything you have said so far, you knew before you came. You could have taken the old man's speedboat in any direction, to any city. You would have had a fair chance to hit the wall at some point, and indebt yourself to cross it. A new life might await you on the other side, but instead you came here. What does that say about you, Ritry?"
Mr. Ruins: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 1) Page 13
