Then I make two calls. The conversations are short and sharp. I am barely strong enough to reach through the distance and influence them. I'm barely strong enough to stop my fingers shaking as I tap in the numbers.
Then I Lag that too, and wait for the train, wondering like a drunk going over the same thoughts again and again, did I really make the calls? Did I cut every bond I possibly could? Did I drink Arcloberry with Carrolla, and how did it taste?
The next train comes, and I barely remember to get on.
In Candyland, I'm standing atop the rollercoaster amidst the rubble of my Tower, panting with the exertion of the climb back up the rails. The sun is high behind the clouds, and its gray. The air is humid, thick with the scent of boiled sweets, and Mr. Ruins is still alive.
Barely. He is entrenched as I'd expected, hiding within the high innermost walls of his mind, fending off the encircling tsunami of nonsense I've injected into him. Perhaps he's already Lagged his memory of Napoleon, to keep himself alive. Perhaps he's sacrificed all memory of torturing my family. Soon enough it'll all be gone, and with it the spark that keeps him alive.
I can only hope it isn't too late. I need him to help me understand what I'm facing.
With a chock of wood as a hammer, and a spike of twisted coaster-track nail as a pick, I crack open his skull like an egg. Three blows and the bone within shears. He whimpers.
Ven did it once for me. A bead of metallic liquid spiraling with blood leaks out of the bloody furrow I've dug into his forehead. More follows. The engrams run down his face like yolk.
I sag beside him, with everything I can do, done. I am exhausted, and the drugs are finally doing their work. But it's alright, it must be alright, I can nap for a little time.
I rouse with a face before me. Above me, I must be lying down.
"You," the blurry face says. It is Don Zachary. He is every bit as ugly as he always was. I did this, I remember. I called him. He hauls me up by my jacket, other men move in to lift me, and in their strong arms I black out again for a long, long time.
RAY A
The Bathyscaphe is quiet when Ray comes to.
There is no smoke, no fire, no twist of the screw as it fights against the torquing force of a Molten Core. No steam, no oil, and no Me.
This thought comes to him as easily and smoothly as the forging fires.
Elba.
There is nobody that says Elba. He is fully forged, and the air is cool. His breath clouds frostily in the air, and for a long moment he feels lost. The sublavic wall is ahead of him, a flat gray panel studded with rivets and bolts, roofed by vents carrying all the ship's essential wiring, and none of it is humming. There is no vibration burr of molten stone without, tearing at the ablative panels, shuddering through the screw and the bulkheads, and there is no Me.
Instead there is a drip. It's not a familiar sound to Ray, and he stands in his firing pod a long moment, listening.
plink plink
There is a thin line of something running down the wall, and a faint scent in the air. Salt, and rot.
"Where's Me?"
It's Doe, standing in the corridor outside his pod, but she looks different. She looks lost, and Ray feels it too, some kind of longing emptiness at his middle. He's not supposed to move until Me says something, anything, but there is no Me. He's terrified to step out of his pod and look into the captain's space and find him gone.
"Ray," urges Doe. "Ray, where's Me?"
He shakes his head.
"I don't," he manages, his throat dry and strange. It's so cold, and Doe looks paler than ever. She's insubstantial, as though the weight is gone from her and all that remains is this albino frame. His own weight is gone too. Shouldn't he be swearing now, cursing out the others, teasing Me about something, but if there's no Me to tease then what is he then?
He reaches up to touch his face. It's there, he's here. He touches his teeth, feels the loop braces pierced through the ivories. It's him, tattoos and all, so where the fuck is Me?
"Ray!" Doe shouts, and the strange sound of panic in her normally emotionless tone cuts through the fog. It's enough.
He steps out of the pod, as though a spell has been lifted. He can move and breathe. He puts his hands on Doe's shoulders and looks into her eyes.
"You haven't seen him?" he asks. "He's not in his pod?"
"There is no pod," says Doe. "There's not even any place for him to forge into."
Ray turns to the left, counting the pod bays. Doe here, then Ray, then Me should be right here by his side, but there is no forging pod at all, just blank, unmarked sublavic steel, and beyond it there is none for Far either.
Ray strides along. In the next pod is So, and her eyes are wide and terrified. Her lips are trembling and her eyes are full of tears.
She feels it, Ray knows at once. They all can feel it.
His voice sounds far warmer and stronger than he feels. "It's alright," he says, soothing, leaning in to the pod to rest a hand on So's shoulder. He strokes her face, nudging a lock of preternaturally straight black hair off her cheek, where it's basted with tears. "So, I'm here. Doe is here. We're all right."
He pulls her gently out of the pod. She steps out like a newborn lamb, gingerly, as though the patterned metal floor might bite her.
There's water there, Ray notices absently. A thin rivulet of it, dirty brown with little clumps. He looks back to the wall, and recognizes the thin line there as another stream of the same dirty water, dripping.
plink plink
He looks to Doe, and knows she's seen it too. He'd ask her, but there's already too much they don't know, and it'll do nothing but panic the others.
She nods, and it's enough to tell him she'll find out. He's to tend to the crew, to warm them up and get them ready, while she'll take command.
"I'll go to the con," she says, her voice clipped as ever. "Come up as soon as you can."
He nods in return, and she starts away, her footsteps clanking down the hall. Good luck, he wants to call after her, but luck is not the message he wants to send. It shouldn't need luck.
He turns back to So. "What are you thinking, So?" he asks, rubbing her shoulders, peering into her eyes. "Are you in there?"
"It's cold," she says, monosyllabic, her eyes slack and staring.
He pulls her into an embrace, and finds she is freezing. She's wet, in fact, there's something icy running down her back. Ray pulls his hands away from her half-expecting to see blood on his palms, already terrified that it's what he will see, but there's no blood.
Dirty water.
"It's going to get warmer," he says into her ear. "Who needs Me? We'll get the engines back on, it'll be toasty warm. For now let's get you into a new uniform."
Her teeth chatter and she doesn't hug him back, simply stands in his arms like a piece of ice.
"There's some new uniforms in the webbing room," he says, and she disengages, takes a few steps toward it. She's crying again, as she turns to the narrow culvert leading off to the webbing room.
"It's fine, So," he goes on. "You'll be fine, I'm right here."
"I'll be fine," she repeats dully, biting her lip. "Get the others."
Ray nods. "Good."
There are only two firing pods left, for the twins La and Ti. Seven down to five. They are standing there just as So had, like dolls, just as Ray must have before Doe came, waiting to be told to wake up.
"Come on girls," Ray says, trying for a jocular tone, but it falls completely flat. In the cold and silence it feels like a failure. He stands where they can both see him, but they make no move to exit. Their eyes alone track him, like ghostly paintings.
Fuck that.
He slaps the wall hard, sending reverberations of his own through the hull. "Wakey wakey girls! Wake up La, wake up Ti, aren't you hungry, don't you need to go take a long morning piss? Come on come on, the show's on and off to the market we go, don't tell me you're feeling shy, you know me, now let's get moving."
After he starts
talking like this he knows he can't stop. To stop will mean silence and inaction, a slow and fearful glide into silence and nothingness, like So when they left her behind going mad singing lullabies, like La's body as they tipped it over the edge and falling down to the Molten Core below, like another silent failure.
So he goes on, talking about how pretty they are, how silly they are, as though they are little children and not Molten Core marines. He takes them by the hand and pushes his warmth into them through the conduction of his voice, of his touch, of his presence. He grins big and pulls them out of their pods, puts their hands in each others, and that seems to warm them up. He kisses them both on both cheeks, taps their noses, smacks their butts, and ushers them forward, talking all the while.
So emerges from the culvert in a new uniform, though her hair seems to be dripping wet still.
Ray doesn't say what the fuck, when he touches her back and finds it's wet still, as though she's just peeled off one sopping layer and put on another. He doesn't say that because that would mean despair, and it's far too soon for that.
"I'm still cold," So says.
He winks, pulls her in close and ruffles her hair, says something about how he'd love to eat pineapples and does she know pineapples can grow in the winter out of pine nuts and apple seeds fused together, and about how pineapples make a really terrible sex aid, and all the while ushering them along.
He doesn't mention the message now blazoned across her chest, words in scrawled yellow paint like she's just daubed them on herself. He stops himself from reaching down to see if the paint is still wet, because he's afraid that it is.
RUN FOR YOUR LIVES
That is all it says. Ray ignores it, so he can keep talking as he leads the three women down the dim, still corridor, following the trickle of dirty water.
At the first ladder rising up through the deck, metal rungs barred across inset hollows in the wall, the whole wall is wet with running water. The smell is stronger now, a tangy, marshy putrefaction. The bitty liquid pools at his feet, starts to spread outward like a smearing dark film over the floor.
He keeps on talking, as he starts So climbing up the rungs. "Me's going to make us clean all this up, you know that don't you Ti? What a bastard. La what do you say, give me a smile? You're stunning, such beautiful girls, both of you. Which one's the naughty one, I always forget? Ti you're always talking about the screw, what do you think's going on with it now, hey? Screw, ha ha. Why's it so quiet, La any ideas?"
They climb in monotone procession, with Ray guiding them all ahead with his voice, like sheep. At the top the water is worse, thicker and coagulated with a layer of mud and sediment. Even the walls here are basted with a thin skin of muck and dirt.
"So what the fuck is all this?" Ray murmurs, forgetting for a moment that he's supposed to be keeping their spirits up. So turns to him though, with some of the teasing light back in her eyes. She's waking up.
"Day at the beach," she says quizzically.
Ray laughs it up loud, half to keep everyone's spirits up and half out of genuine relief. So gives a shy smile.
"Some shitty beach," he says. "Besides, I forgot my bucket and spade. La, Ti, what about you, you feel like digging this shit into muck-castles, defend them against the incoming tide?"
Ti ignores this, barely seems to register what he said, but she does say something. "Where's Me?" Afterward she steps skin-to-skin with her sister, pressing close as though she can somehow push herself into her twin.
Ray shrugs broadly. "Perhaps he made all this mess. What kind of a captain is that? Damn, I can just see him and Far both, fucking around while the rest of us were in vitro, making mud-castles. At least they could have got some decent mud, I mean look at this stuff. It stinks. It's indecent."
They climb and Ray keeps talking. As they rise the water grows deeper, the mud thicker and riper, until all the walls are running with dirty water and droplets fall like waterfall rain down the ladderways. Doe's footprints begin to appear in the brown sludge before them, a straight path of perfect strides leading upward, and La speaks from the back.
"Thank you Ray."
He turns back, stopping his diatribe for a moment. La is looking at him like she's a real person.
"Are you alright?" he asks.
"Maybe," she says. She looks at her sister, squeezes her hand then lets it go, and reaches to her hip where the QC parabolic rests. "But we haven't heard anything from Doe since she left." she takes a long shuddery breath, and it's clear how much effort this is taking her. We don't know what's up there. We should be armed."
Ray grins, feels the old sense coming back more naturally now, and reaches for the parabolic at his own hip. This is how it should be, a proper chord working together. "So let's arm ourselves."
He stops talking, but it seems OK because now there's a new sound rumbling up from the depths, far below where the screw runs the keel of the sublavic. The engines are turning over, trying to catch.
"That must be Doe," he says back to them.
"It's not catching," Ti answers. "I should go down and check." She stops and starts to turn, but Ray grabs her arm.
"Not like that," he says. "Not again. You don't want to drown in this shit." He points at the muddy water underfoot, halfway up their ankles now and sucking at every step.
Ti's face flickers, perhaps a flicker of recognition for the last fate she met, then she smiles. "OK, I'll stick around. We'll ask Doe."
Ray is only too glad for this diffusion of responsibility. "Exactly, let's ask Doe."
The engines churns and sputters a few more times, then stall and are quiet. Ray leads them up the last ladder to the con, where Doe is standing with mud slathering her arms, chest, and face like a mask. Bits of it cling to her bleach-white hair like grimy dew.
She spreads her arms in resignation. Up here the sound of pouring water is louder than ever. "There's no mission folder," she says. "I looked in all the lockers I could reach."
She points down the hall to the captain's box, where all the locker doors are hanging open, blasted full of holes by QC fire.
"You didn't mess around, did you?" Ray asks. So laughs.
"The engine won't kick, I think it's clogged. All I can see out the periscope is black, swirling and turning. We're not in any Molten Core I've ever seen before."
"We're not in any Molten Core at all," says Ti. "The screw would work, if we were. There's nothing to clog in liquid rock, it's what it's designed for."
"So where are we?" So asks.
"Somewhere else," Ti says. She points up at the exit hatch. "Open that and find out."
They all look up. Ray remembers what happened when last they came this way. Ti was already lost. La was soon to go. Me smashed through the bricks, and the chord made for the Solid Core on grapnels of elasteel, leaving one dead tone behind.
All the gear is there. Ray doesn't know what they'll need, so he points to it all.
"Gear up."
They take QC parabolics, elasteel and grapnels, candlebomb wax and more fuse than before from the webbing affixed around the conning tower walls. Doe winks as Ray takes an extra reel of fuse.
"I need all my fingers," he says.
They harness up, HUDs on, and Doe mounts her shoulder cannon, two outsized parabolics at her waist, and slots a sawn-off musket and bayonet blade into a sheath down her thigh. Ray bundles a pop-tent, oxygen and other gas canisters, provision packs, Durance kits and flashlights, while So lumbers on the comm. gear, and La and Ti hastily slick muck off the ruckbags holding all their scientific equipment.
"Hear me, one two, one two," Ray says over blood-mic, into the HUD. "Everybody geared up, over?"
A chorus of four checks rings back, each at a different pitch.
"Beautiful harmony," Ray replies. "I should start up a choir, over."
"Pick," Doe says, and So hands it to her. Ray stands with the others at the base of the ladder while she climbs, unspools the exit hatch, and opens the sublavic to the brick wall layer
without.
"It's intact," she calls back down. "But it's black."
Ray can see, the wall of mortared bricks overhead is jet-black with seeping mud. A blot drops to splash off his HUD. "It's come through the brick?" he asks into HUD, smearing the mud off his screen.
"Not possible," Ti answers. "The ablatives are three decks thick, non-porous. Nothing can get through unless its cracked."
"Well is it cracked?" Ray asks.
"No sign," Doe answers.
"What the hell is out there?"
"Let's find out," Doe says, "brace yourselves."
She pulls the pick-axe back, then drives it up into the bricks. Chips of soggen brick and mortar splat down into the mud by their feet, along with a rain of tiny, maggot-like creatures, wriggling in the mud.,
"Oh fuck," says Ray.
"That's disgusting," says So, blanching through the tint in her HUD.
"There's a lot more," says Doe, brushing detritus off her shoulders coolly. More of the tiny wriggling creatures fall like seeds into the black, where they dig in.
"I'm gonna puke," says Ray.
Ti drops closer, picks up one of the creatures, and studies it. "Saprophytes," she says. "Entropic genetic devices, wired to mulch dead and dying matter."
"God, put it down girl," Ray says.
"Ah!"
"What?"
La grabs Ti's hand and pulls it close to her face. "It bit her finger. It's burrowed inside."
"I'm fine," says Ti, but Ray is already moving. The shears are in his hand and encircling the bitten finger before anyone else can move.
The snip is clean and sure, and Ti only cries out for a second before her suit seals the wound and feeds her psychotropics to kill the pain.
Ray looks into her eyes. "Are you alright?"
Ti nods.
"Don't pick anything up."
"Look at that," says So. They do. The finger is already moving, the whole thing like some larger version of the other maggots, worming into the muck.
"Get us the fuck out of here, Doe," Ray says.
King Ruin: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 2) Page 2
