Soul Jacker Box Set

by Michael John Grist

  "Precautions," the Don says.

  The guy above reaches the top and his footsteps thump over the wood. There's tense silence for a few minutes, then he's back leaning over the edge.

  "He's here. In the suit, everything."

  The Don gestures for me to climb, and I do, and with every rung up a new plan presents itself. I could simply ride it out and hope the Don will let me go, but that seems unlikely. I could try to overpower the one bodyguard at the top, but he'll probably be standing a ways back with his gun on me, ruling that out.

  I wonder if I should risk the bullets. Another plan would be to wait until we're all up close and studying his son, then dive into the froth of the arena. If they don't shoot me mid-dive, escape might be possible, though I'd probably just drown before I swam out from under the Skulk. I reflect sourly on that. Even if I did manage to swim my way out, I'd only pop up a few feet away by the sunken jetty, where they could pick me off like a fish in a barrel.

  There's no good plan.

  I reach the top of the ladder and get to my feet. As expected, the bodyguard is standing a good distance off in the shadow of the arena, a stray fleck of sunlight glinting off the barrel of his gun.

  "Come on in," he says.

  I do, and he shuffles backward carefully, keeping his distance. Inside everything is just as I remember it; Napoleon down by the arena, his two-cornered hat slack across his face, his tunic open where I popped out the folder.

  I wonder if I am about to go to my death just as he did. Will I perform the pantomime and get into my coffin-suit, on the infinitesimal chance that the Don might let me live? That's getting harder to believe by the second. There's never a cost to killing in the Skulks, but in this abandoned arena so far from everything else, that lack of cost is a palpable thickness in the air, pressing in on me like the drink and madness must have pressed in on the arena's suicidal owner.

  I walk down the rotten stands and circle the Don's dead son. Oddly he doesn't look as fat as he was in my memory.

  "Scene of the crime," says the Don, emerging at the top of the stands, in the door's oblong of daylight. "How do you feel, Ritry Goligh?"

  I don't think it's good that he's using my full name. Like an obituary. "Hungover," I say.

  He cackles and starts down the steps.

  "So this is my boy," he says, pointing at the corpse in Napoleonic clothing. "I suppose I should be glad it's not in public."

  This cements my suspicion: I am certainly going to die here. The Don can't afford to let any sign of weakness get out, even if he believes me about Mr. Ruin, and the murder of one of his own sons can have no living witness. In five seconds I am going to dive for the arena.

  Four.

  Until then every outward sign I give will be normal with no emotional wind-up at all, a Jacker's particular skill.

  Three, two.

  One.

  Then Napoleon sits up. His hat falls away off, and in the second before the air gets thick with confusion and impossible electromagentism, I see that it is not actually the Don's ugly son, but Mr. Ruin.

  The thugs to either side of me drop instantly, as if all their bones have just gone to jelly, like they've been Lagged standing up. I feel the EMR soup rushing beneath the air as it happens, a powerful and throbbing sensation like I'm about to make a jack and the magnets are thumping up around me, only there are no magnets and this is like no jack I ever made before. This is destructive, filling my mind with unseen possibilities.

  CRACK

  CRACK CRACK

  I can't focus. Gun smoke clouds the arena. The Don is hunkered behind a row of seats with his one remaining thug and they're shooting at us.

  Ruin's white teeth glint at me in a wide grin, then he nods toward the third thug, who drops on cue. I feel the shift in my Soul or some part of it, like a memory swallowed by the Lag. I'm staring, almost frozen, but now Ruin is moving. He walks up the stands with preternatural grace to stand over Don Zachary, who's now on his knees. I have never seen the Don kneel to another man. Ruin points a finger at the ugly old man's face, and I think in any minute I'm going to feel that strange sense of Lagging dislocation again, but it doesn't come.

  Instead Mr. Ruin plucks the folder from the Don's hand. "I believe this belongs to me," he says.

  The Don does nothing, just stares as Ruin walks elegantly back down the stands and puts the folder in my hand. He looks at me with eyes so dark I feel like I'm looking into the empty void of space.

  "I promised you something to want, Ritry," he says, and taps the folder once with his finger. He then points at the prone Don Zachary. "And here's a reason to run. There's really nothing keeping you in your sad little life."

  I open my mouth to say something, but abruptly he's gone, like the record on a turntable skipped. One instant he was there, the next he wasn't, and the EMR-like feeling is stronger than ever.

  Lagged again.

  Now Don Zachary is shouting and shooting.

  CRACK

  CRACK

  CRACK

  I don't think; I run, around the front of the foamy arena and toward the exit. A bullet grazes my shoulder and the pain slices like a syringe in the eye.

  CRACK

  CRACK

  CRACK

  I jump over one of the fallen thugs; his eyes are open and full of tears, and I can't help but think of Mei-An on the EMR tray, just chum to the Lag. I snatch my node from his pocket and sprint up the tiered seating chased by gunfire, through the door and into the light where I jump to the jetty below…

  My ankle crunches with the landing, but the jetty has some give and the damage can't be too bad. I catch my balance and run on at a hopping limp along the pier toward the speedboat.

  CRACK

  The Don fires at me from the ladder top and chips spit from a wooden pole nearby, then I leap into the boat. I pull the mooring line loose and while the Don shouts something about nails and my manhood, I rev the engine and tear out of there.

  With the wheel in one hand and the stolen node in the other I dial Carrolla, but there is no answer. I can only hope he's in surgery, not already twelve foot deep and drifting amongst the velour of a world long gone. Perhaps I'll never know either way.

  The ring clicks to message and I shout into the mouthpiece.

  "Get the hell out of the Skulks, Carrolla. Don Zachary's going to kill you, me, whoever he can. Don't stop to raid the jack-site, forget your bar, just pay for passage over the wall and start again in Calico. Just get out." I pause a second, then add a final message. "I'm sorry."

  After that I toss the node in the water and race on over the open ocean, bearing for the only place I can think of, and the last place anyone could hope to find me: the lost wreck of the godships.

  ME

  E. DEATHGATE

  We all stare into the candlebomb smoke seeking answers from the freshly-blown hole in the Solid Core, but at this angle there's nothing to see.

  "Was that a man?" Ray's voice comes through on blood-mic.

  "On a horse," I add.

  Nobody speaks further, as we all contemplate what that might mean.

  I fire my grapnel before Doe can protest; it's not really the captain's role to dive into the breach, but I can't risk any of the others.

  Superheated air buffets me as I swing toward the hole, blurring my HUD. The others protest on blood-mic but I fade them down. I need to focus, because there was something familiar about that man on a horse. It rings a bell in my mind that I didn't know was there. I think the word 'Napoleon', but it doesn't mean anything yet.

  I swing up to the gamma-clamp near the gate. The metal around the blast zone has blown outward in jagged triangular chunks, curled back like the petals of some blooming fractal flower.

  I fire a traverse wire across the breach and slide between two of the spiky metal outcroppings, coming to a halt directly beneath the blast hole. Only darkness hangs above me; a shaft rising up so black it seems to repel the magma light. There could be a whole world up there,
but I can see none of it. I cycle my HUD through the infras and ultras, sonar, radiation and chemical-spec wavelengths but none of it peels away the dark.

  "I'm going up."

  I don't wait for a reply. My grapnel shoots into the darkness and locks onto something two hundred yards in. I work the tracer to slide me up, powering on the whitelights in my suit, and rise like a glowbug up the throat of some giant sleeping beast. Beyond the immediate blast zone the walls either side turn smooth.

  "It is an entrance," I say over blood-mic. "The door must have been sealed over but there's a vertical shaft behind it."

  As I rise, more carvings of silvery foot-high letters appear in the walls, sparkling in my whitelights, many of them crisscrossing one another. "There's writing everywhere."

  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 Gaullic. I recognize some proto-Rusk, Afri-Jarvanese, Meso-Angli, Esperant. It's everywhere. I think I'm coming to the inner edge."

  Her response is a hiss, but I'm hardly listening as I emerge up from darkness through a field of scraggly grass to see trees, a forest, and a vast open area stretching away. I bring the tracer to a halt halfway toward the sheer black ceiling where the grapnel clamped, and hang there like a chandelier in the middle of the space, my whitelights illuminating some kind of battlefield.

  There are dead and dying bodies everywhere; scattered amongst the trees, hanging from branches, heaped in piles around dugout furrows in the dirt. I look from one to the next in the search beam of my lights; some dressed in the white tights and blue tunic of the man on the horse, some in rough red greatcoats; all with ancient muskets nearby, all bloodied and filthy and completely motionless.

  None of them move. The whole landscape is deathly still. A man with his leg blown off screams at the edge of a bomb crater, silent and unmoving. A man stares down at his steaming entrails, tangled and frozen around the bayonet blade of his enemy. It's unreal.

  Further afield there are cottages with their yellow thatch on fire, though the flames don't move at all. There's a brook that doesn't run and a watermill that doesn't turn. There are kicking gray horses lying in troughs of bloody mud, caught in the instant, and a wooden cart in mid-explosion with a cannon ball hovering uncannily in its fragmented midst. Everywhere bodies lie in the heated embrace of static battle. The flash of their polished brass buttons wink at me like a star-field.

  My mind warps to take it in. I feel dizzy and ill, like I'm looking at the world through a distorting periscope prism.

  "What do you see, Me?"

  It takes me a moment to recognize Doe's voice. I'm sweating. I don't like this; it's worse than being outside the Core, but it must be the way forward. I click back my visor because I need some air, but it's hardly air at all in here; there is no stink of burning or blood, no green sap from the trees or peat from the dirt. Each breath I suck in is sterile and empty.

  "You'll have to come up," I say into blood-mic.

  Soon they are beside me. We stand in a narrow clearing by the lip of the Deathgate shaft, surrounded by the frozen dead. A cluster of our lights hang from the ceiling overhead like a bright moon, casting this strange world in a monochrome wash of grays.

  Ray sucks in a sharp, angry breath. "What kind of bullshit is this?" he asks.

  Far trembles in the holster at his side.

  "It looks like a giant's playset," Doe says. "A toy battle. What do you make of it, Me?"

  I don't make anything. These soldiers look dead, but the one who fell through the hole was moving. He shouted. We shouldn't feel safe.

  "Base camp is around that tree," I say, taking command. "QCs at the ready, perimeter here." I point in a circle and sling the overmap to their HUD visors. "Far in the middle with So and La working on mapping and materials analysis; see if you can figure out what's going on here. Doe and Ray, we clear the bodies out of our perimeter."

  So and La jolt into action, unsnapping bits of equipment from their suits. I escort Far to the tree then join Ray and Doe with their QCs drawn, approaching the dead. Ray lifts the first by the arm; a man clutching a chest wound. His whole body moves as Ray lifts, with no give in the limbs.

  "Rigor mortis?" I ask.

  Ray grunts. "Not that. He's hard all over. Let's try…" He pops a knife from its waist sheath and digs it into the dead man's exposed throat. Only the tip of the blade enters, chewing out a tiny chip of some hard material. Ray picks the pink chip up and rubs it between his fingers.

  "Some kind of plastic," he says.

  There's nothing I can say to that. "Analyze it please, La," I say. She takes the chip and unclips more equipment from her suit.

  "It's all fake," Doe says as we clear more bodies; tossing them beyond the basecamp edge. They aren't too heavy, certainly not with the suit exo-motors engaged. We're on a command blood-mic channel now for just the three of us. "There's no texture on their skin. The pattern of veins is painted on."

  She slings a closeup image to my visor. It redoubles the sick feeling.

  Ray picks up one of the soldiers' old wooden muskets and sights down the barrel. "This looks real enough." He points it away from us and pulls the trigger, but there's only a metallic click. "Dud," he says.

  "Is there something about this in the mission pack?" Doe asks.

  I turn to her. She's right; with the immediate threat handled we need to dig into the mission itself, but I don't want to do it in front of So, La and Far. Likewise I can't do it over blood-mic through the HUDs; I need to really see both their faces for this conversation, where one of us might be a traitor. I need to do this without the HUDs on.

  "We're reconnoitering," I say on the open line, then gesture to Ray and Doe to follow me into the woods.

  There are dead bodies everywhere inside, lying in darkness until our whitelights come near. I have to push between the tree branches in places, their leaves flexing and bending stiffly. I pluck a leaf as I go and study its surface. It has a waxy sheen and is completely symmetrical. I tear it cleanly down the middle. The vein-lines on its surface do not continue through the middle, as if they were printed on.

  Nothing seems real. I lead us to a clearing ringed with the bodies of red and blue soldiers and several cannon, fringed with the watermill I spotted from the grapnel. A puff of black smoke hangs in the air above the chimney like a thin ball of black wool.

  There is no way inside the building, only a doorway frame set into a shallow alcove; just one more disconcerting detail. There I stop and take off my HUD and wait for the others to do the same.

  They do. I ready the speech I've been composing in my mind.

  "We're in this together," I say, "we're a chord."

  "Of course," says Ray.

  "Yes," says Doe.

  "But we don't know who we are, not really." I pause and look at them, seeking something in their eyes. "We have a feeling only. 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. "You're my lieutenants, and I feel I can trust you both, but I don't know if I can trust that feeling. It seems like you're closer to me somehow. As for 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 look at his sharp, green eyes. He looks honest. "What does that mean?"

  He shrugs. "In the forge-pods they were on the other side of Far, and Far's a weird kid. Like a kind of bridge."

  I think back to those first moments in the sublavic corridor as I stumbled out of the forge fi
re, looking sideways at Doe, then Ray and Far with the others beyond.

  "Understood. Doe?"

  She shrugs. "They seem loyal to me. Maybe they're distant, but so was Ti, and she died to save us. Why does it matter?"

  I look at Ray and he looks at me. "It was the first page of the mission book," I say. "It said, 'Don't read this out loud. One of your chord will kill you all.'"

  She takes a second. "So that's why you didn't read it. I thought that was strange. And you believe it?"

  "I don't know. I have to be careful." I pull out the mission pack.

  "What's Ritry Goligh?" Doe asks, looking at the title.

  "We don't know," Ray chimes in. "Do you?"

  Doe shakes her head.

  "OK," I say, and flip to the blank first page.

  "T-minus one," says Ray.

  "Pay attention." I slip a finger under the flap of the next page. "The ink fades in seconds. Ready?" They nod and I turn it.

  It's a mission brief page with three words in a large font, each of which begin to fade at once.

  SAVE RITRY GOLIGH

  That's all. I scour the page as the ink lightens away but there is nothing else. I look to Ray and Doe.

  "There he is again," Ray says.

  "How is that a mission objective?" Doe asks. "We don't even know who he is."

  I grunt, and edge my finger under the next page. "Ready?" I ask. They nod and I flip it, and three things happen at once.

  First, strident and impossible to ignore, is the scream from the forest. I know at once it is Far, and he is terrified.

  Second, the sharp crack of musket fire rings out, and the bright nimbus of light from the whitelight cluster we hung over the hole is extinguished, plunging us into a swaddling darkness lit only by our suit lights.

  Third, I see the fading writing in the mission pack, echoing the scream back at me.

  SAVE FAR

  F. MUSKETS

  Ray is first to start running back around the cottage, bolting on his HUD as he goes and bringing up his QC pistol. Doe and I sprint after him as Far in the distance screams again.