Don Zachary stares. "You know what happens if you're lying to me."
Carrolla nods numbly.
"All right." Zacharys turns to his men. "Bring the vegetable in."
Within five minutes they wheel in Mr. Ruin. He's on a gurney, eyes slack and staring, his skin a waxy fevered sheen. There are bits of silvery inject and blood still clinging to his eyebrows like tiny, strange berries. They haven't changed his clothes, only dressed the open wound I hammered in his skull, and stuck tubes and wires where they're needed to keep him alive. He is still stained and dusted with the mortar of my memory tower.
Drool runs down his chin. His bright white teeth seem obscene like this. He's already mostly dead; they've just managed to slow the process down.
The Don gives directions and they lift Ruin from his gurney and slip him into the EMR next to me. He smells of chemicals and death, like meat in formaldehyde, but he's still clinging to life. I feel the weak rasp of his breath against my neck, close as a lover. The last time I rode an EMR input tray like this was with Mei-An, eleven years ago. That was such a different time.
"Ramp it up," says the Don, and at once the EMR's thump changes, cycling faster to match the wavelength of my thoughts and facilitate the jack. I start to sink down through the layers of consciousness, ready to break through.
"Come back with what I want," Zachary says, the last thing I hear before the electromagnetic flood overwhelms me, "or it's your family on the chopping block."
5. BATHYSCAPHE
I jack in and rebound off the cold, solid wall of Mr. Ruin's mind.
Carrolla was right; it's frozen solid. I try again and again but there's some kind of ice-pack shell locking me out, encircling his entire mind like a sphere. I've never seen anything like it, but can only imagine it's a combination of his memories and the meaningless information of the engram I injected, fused as a last-minute attempt at protection.
It's too strong and I am too weak. I beat at the wall but it's a glacier and I can't even form my sublavic ship. I have only my exhausted thoughts, flitting in the exterior electromagnetic soup.
Carrolla will see this. Carrolla will know I am failing at this first hurdle. But will he tell the Don so soon?
I need to do something. If I could just get in then I could salvage some memories for strength, feed the Lag and burn the Bathyscaphe back to life, maybe get strong enough to punch through the shell and-
I bounce off again. It's hopeless. I need time to think, but I don't how thinking can help. Any second they can pull me back out and start the torture again. If he brings my family in I'll give it all. Don Zachary will have the bonds and the bridge, and I can't face that. I can't think of anything worse.
I bounce off. I blunt myself on the edges of Mr. Ruin.
I pull back into my own mind. Carrolla will see this but please, give me time. From a distance I see the twisted, half-melted wreckage of my old Bathsycaphe sublavic ship floating at the exterior edge of the Molten Core, bobbed up like a cork after the chord left it behind.
It is crushed like a can, the brick cladding burned down to metal. The chord are not there and I don't have the strength to bring them to life in their forging pods. I try to sound out the seven tones of my artificial womb and summon my marines, but it's not enough.
I race around the outside of my own mind, scanning the dark patches everywhere; from Don Zachary's attempts to jack me and the wounds left by the mindbombs. I can feel the Lag out there like a wounded dog, licking at these cold wounds. I strained the architecture of my mind to breaking point, and now it needs time to heal. I can't even sacrifice my own memories for strength; it would break my mind.
I can't do anything.
I go back to battering myself against Mr. Ruin. Maybe this will bring numbness, and numbness will make what follows acceptable. I'd come so close to being free. I bang my head again and again until something chips free, and…
I see it.
I reach out wider within the EMR's electromagnetic soup, not to the outline of Mr. Ruin's mind but to his body. His clothes and hair are dusted with fragments of my tower still, every piece a shred of my family's memories. I suck them up like the addict I am, each like the tiniest dab of salt on the tip of my tongue. These are echoes of power only, a taste left at the bottom of the barrel, but there's strength here still and with that strength I jack back into myself.
The Bathyscaphe stirs as I bloom within it, calling my marines to life in their forging pods: Doe, Ray, Me, Far, So, La and Ti. I send them to their stations and drive the screw into a hard dive, cavitating the lava ahead and pulling us in. The Lag is too slow. Racing in to the Solid Core there isn't the resistance there was before, following the trail I blazed just hours earlier. With a screech the ship breaches the Molten Core's inner sea and my chord fire their grapnels up through the blast hole in the Death Gate, still not fully knitted together. One by one they die but I whip them on, up into the rotational maze of the Solid Core where they run the old trail with the Lag limping behind us, storming up to the blast-door that we blew open a lifetime ago.
Like the Deathgate it has begun to heal too, its torn metal edges stretching inward like fingers reaching toward each other, but it is not yet sealed. On the other side I see a flashing purple universe of stars, and the same trail across the aether I blazed the last time I came, leading to Mr. Ruin.
I rush through the narrowing gap into the bridge into his mind, into-
-madness and dark.
Everything is dying here, everything is rotting and it hurts just to breathe. I am not what I thought I was; not a chord anymore but just Ritry Goligh alone in a place where I cannot survive. I can't stay, have to escape, because this Soul is diseased and taking me with it. I can feel nothing, smell nothing, see nothing, because all Ruin's senses are lost except for the flow of the EMR washing over us both.
But it's weaker here. It doesn't shield his Soul as thoroughly as it shields mine.
The realization caves me in and rebuilds me from the ground up. I am inside Mr. Ruin, inside the ice-pack coma of his sludge-filled mind, and this EMR shield is not keyed to the frequency of his mind.
With a thought I punch through. The shell cracks and for a second I am free, outside the EMR and swirling from mind to mind in the room beyond. With what little strength I have I alter a few tiny flows in Carrolla's mind, giving him the final push to do what he already wants before the EMR forces me back in.
He kills the machine.
6. MR. RUIN
I tip back into myself like a body dropped off the tsunami wall, and as the EMR shell dies and the thumps fade I reach out and instantly Lag the room.
Four men drop to the floor and their strength floods in. Carrolla stares and I guide him over to cut me free, then have him slide me out of the machine and away from the wheezing embrace of that rotting predator, Mr. Ruin. Sitting on the edge of the input tray I look up into my old friend's blank face and let go of my hold over him.
He sags for a moment, overcome, then he blinks in wonder. "Rit," he says, "how the hell did you do that?"
"Magic," I say, and feel like I'm going to pass out. I pushed beyond all my limits, eking out another jack through the Solid Core with not-enough strength. "It's good to see you, Carrolla. Now can you lock that door?"
His eyes well with tears. He doesn't know what's happening. I can feel him beginning to think he might actually be free. He staggers to the door and locks it, then turns back and looks at me, and comes lurching back.
"Goddamn, it's good to see you." He hugs me. I'm present enough to hug him back. It feels good. It makes me want to cry. I really want to hug my wife. I want to hold my children.
First things first. I raise my scarecrow hand of nails. "Did they keep my fingers?"
"I-," he starts, but trails off as he pulls away. Guilt, I suppose, though it's not on his head at all. "I don't know."
I nod grimly. "I'll find out. Tie them up."
He does it, still dizzy with what's happened.
All this is like a dream. While he pinions their wrists and settles the unseeing, unfeeling body of Mr. Ruin back into his wheelchair, I jack the man nearest to me.
Strength comes in as I toss out surface memories. I jack deeper, the Bathyscaphe gleaming again, then gritty with its triple-layer brick cladding, then steaming through his Molten Core. I find that they kept my fingers; in a medical fridge on the second under-floor of Don Zachary's bunker, alongside a hundred other specimens; preserved for the day the Don wants to use them, to make an offer some Soul can't refuse.
I reach wider through the bonds and feel thousands of Souls spread throughout the bunker. With each step forward more strength comes flooding in, and it becomes a simple winnowing to pluck out and Lag every one that was close to the Don, that was ever warned of me or knew about my family, that would ever have authority to subvert the Don on suspicion of influence.
It tires me and it fuels me. While Carrolla uses pliers to pry the nails from my hands I jack into the Don and twist him completely and brutally to my side. I twist all his Hawks. I make myself the god of their little world, and through their Souls I see what their little world has become.
Bigger.
The Skulks were not enough for Don Zachary, so he's been arming himself. For a decade he's been smuggling in war-class weaponry and sucking up ex-marine Hawks to wield it. I see the role I have played in this, by taking refuge in Calico out of his reach. In part, I am his motivation.
Now his under-Skulk bunker has expanded into a training camp and barracks where an army of ex-marines train daily with glass bombs and a fleet of subglacics, with dry-ice bombs and gas bursts, and most of all with quakeseeds.
It freezes me in my tracks for a moment. Only the top rank of his generals know about the seeds, embedded deep within this bunker like diseased pollen at the heart of a flower.
Quakeseeds could end the world.
That thought should terrify me, but I am beyond terror now. I close my eyes and race to Lag and backfill every shred of my existence. All of it must go, with no telltale holes to give me away again. I stretch back along the Don's trail and erase all the safeguards he put in place.
When it is done I open my eyes in another room, lying on a bench under bright white lights while a surgeon begins the long work of re-attaching my fingers. Carrolla is by my side, his concerned face still ripe with disbelief.
"How is all this happening?" he asks, with confused tears in his eyes. "Why are they helping you, Rit?"
He's the only one not under my direct influence. I love him for it.
"Get out of here, Carrolla," I whisper. "You can walk out with your family and they'll never come for you again, I promise. You need to get out. Please. I'm sorry."
I remember saying the same thing to him a long time ago. But he can't let go yet. "But how? I don't know how you did any of this."
So I tell him. I tell him all of it, while the surgeon knits the bone of my thumb back to my hand. I tell him every horrible torment Mr. Ruin put me through, and every wonderful revelation I earned in spite of that. I tell him about Loralena and my children, and he listens. He cries, because he is a father too, because he knows the pain of bringing danger to his children, and he holds my good hand while tears run down his face.
"God, I'm so sorry, Rit."
"I'm sorry. Now go get your wife. You take care of her. Go back to Calico and make a new restaurant there. Don't come back to the Skulks, Carrolla. Have a drink for me."
He nods. He knows he has to go. I am so sorry to see the back of him. I love the big lunk. I want him to stay, but I have no right.
The minute he walks out the door I start to Lag him. I do it gently so there is no pain or confusion, only one step at a time, so he forgets first me, then the Don, then why he is even here in the Skulks. I guide him as he leads his family; a rambunctious red-headed woman and two fiery boys, out of the bunker. When they are off the Don's Skulk I Lag all memory of this place from them completely.
All Carrolla willl remember of me is our last meeting, ten years ago in a bar in Calico. I haven't the spirit to erase that too. I don't want to make him a different man. Maybe I just can't stand to be so completely forgotten.
The surgeon works on me for hours. I am so weary, but I have to stay awake. Many Souls are in motion around me, turning the Don's war machine to my defense. I'm sure I've seen to it all, but the fear that I will wake up again trapped within an EMR shield overrides the exhaustion.
I barely understand what I've done. Somehow I passed through the aetheric bridge again. What was once impossible I have now done twice. For a time I was actually inside Mr. Ruin's mad mind, wreathed in death and disarray and completely invisible to the EMR. It is a possibility I have never considered before, to hide within another living mind. It bends any laws of thought I once knew; a power as terrible as the quakeseeds and strong enough to restart the Arctic War.
But I am safe here. To the Don I am now an honored guest, and family. All his men adore me. I shoved that love roughly into every hole I cut in their memories. It is a vile and violent act, but then these are vile and violent men. We are predators all.
My head is fogged with all the things I still need to do, but I cannot stay awake any longer. I need to know who the people are hunting me, I need to know what Mr. Ruin knows, but I can't walk the bridge again now. I am beyond empty, and alone, and can't fight the darkness any more.
THE CHORD
A. RAY
The ship is quiet when Ray wakes.
There is no smoke in the air, no fire forging him to life and no thrumming twist of the screw as the Bathyscaphe fights against the terrible churn of a Molten Core. There is no steam spewing up, no screams ringing out and most of all there is no Me.
This thought comes to him as easily and smoothly as breathing.
It is like having a missing head. Ray can't think without Me there, but where could Me be? Me is always there. Me isn't here now.
Instead there is a drip.
It's not a familiar sound to Ray, and he remains in his cold firing pod listening, waiting for Me to come.
plink plink
There is a thin line of dark liquid running down the corridor wall opposite, and a faint scent of rot in the air. These things do not belong in the Molten Core.
"Where's Me?"
The words come from Doe, though they are not the right words. Ray blinks; she is standing in the corridor outside his pod, but she too is different. He feels it too, some kind of longing emptiness at his middle. He's not supposed to move until Me says the word, but there is no Me, and what does that mean? He wants to move but he's terrified to step out of his pod and look into the captain's space and find him missing.
"Ray," urges Doe, "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…?
He reaches up to touch his own face. He touches his teeth and feels the loop braces pierced through bone. It's him, so where the hell 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 forging pod as though a spell has been lifted. Now 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, still too afraid to look for himself. "He's not in his pod?"
"It's empty," says Doe.
Ray turns to the left, counting the pod bays. Doe here, then Ray, then Me should be right by his side, but it's true, he isn't; the pod is cold.
Ray strides along. In the next pod stands So, her lips trembling and her eyes wide and full of tears. She feels the same, Ray realizes at once. They all feel it, and while he doesn't understand, he knows tha
t this is something he can handle.
His voice comes out warmer than he feels. "It's all right," he says soothingly, leaning in to stroke So's face, nudging a lock of black hair off her cheek. "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 underfoot, Ray notices absently; a thin rivulet puddling through the stippled RG indents, dirty brown with little clumps of mud. He looks back to the wall and realizes the thin dripping line is another stream of the same dirty water.
plink plink
He looks to Doe; 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 should tend to the crew, to warm them up and get them ready while she'll take command.
Me's 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 at once, her hurried footsteps clanking down the hall. Good luck, he wants to call after her, but luck is not the message he wants to send. She shouldn't need luck.
He turns back to So. "What are you thinking, So?" he asks, rubbing her chilly shoulders and peering into her eyes. "Are you in there?"
"It's cold," she says, her eyes slack and staring.
He pulls her into an embrace and finds she is freezing. She's wet, in fact; there's icy liquid running down her back. Ray pulls his hands away half-expecting to see blood on his palms, but there's no blood, just the same dirty water.
"It's going to get hotter," he says into her ear. "Who needs Me? Ti will get the engines back on and 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 sliver of ice.
Soul Jacker Box Set Page 22
