"There's some new uniforms in the webbing room," he says, and she disengages, taking a few hesitant steps down the corridor.
"It's fine, So," Ray says. "You'll be fine, I'm right here."
"I'll be fine," she repeats dully. "You're here."
Ray nods. "Good."
In the next two firing pods stand the twins La and Ti. Beyond them Far's pod is as empty as Me's. Seven tones down to five. It isn't right, but there's nothing he can say now to fix it.
The twins stand just like So, like dolls in boxes, like Ray before Doe came just waiting to be told to wake up.
"Come on, girls," Ray says, trying for a cheery tone, but it falls flat in the cold and dripping silence. He stands where they can both see him and grins, but they make no move to exit. Their eyes alone track him, like ghostly paintings.
Not acceptable.
He slaps the wall hard, sending reverberations through the hull. "Wakey wakey, ladies! Wake up La, wake up Ti, aren't you hungry, don't you need to go take a nice 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 get moving."
After he starts talking like this he knows he can't stop. To stop will mean silence and inaction again, a slow and fearful glide into nothingness, like So when they left her behind singing lullabies, like La's body as they tipped it over the edge and falling down to the Molten Core below.
That was the last time they were on a full mission together, he wonders, as he goes on talking about how pretty they are, how silly they are, as though they are little children and not Molten Core marines. Even as he banters on he wonders how he remembers that mission but not whatever happened to Me and Far.
No answers come. He takes them both by the hand and pushes his warmth into them through the conduction of his voice, of his touch, of his presence. He grins wide and pulls them out of their forging pods, putting their hands in each others and that seems to warm them up. He kisses them both on both cheeks, taps their noses, pats their butts and ushers them forward, talking all the while with forced jollity.
"It's going to be such wonderful weather up above, I don't doubt the Molten Core has just taken a brief break, or maybe it was the new brick cladding Me had fitted, and …"
At some point So emerges from the webbing room in a new uniform, though her hair seems to be dripping wet still.
Ray doesn't say 'what the hell is this?' 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 and pulls her in close, ruffles her hair and 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 there 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 keeps talking as he leads the three women down the dim, still corridor, following the trickle of dirty water.
At the first metal ladderway rising up through the deck the whole wall is wet with running water. The smell is stronger now; a tangy, marshy putrefaction. The liquid pools at his feet and starts spreading outward like a silty film over the floor.
He keeps on talking as he ushers So up the rungs. "Ha ha, Me's going to make us clean all this up, you know that don't you, Ti? What a bastard, and with old-style mops, no doubt! 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 engine screw, what do you think's going on with it now, hey? Screw, ha, is that an invitation? Why's it so quiet in here, La, any ideas?"
They climb in monotone procession with Ray herding them upward with his voice alone. At the ladder 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, like they've sweated it out.
"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 out loud, half to keep everyone's spirits up and half out of genuine relief. So gives him 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 and defending them against the coming tide?"
Ti ignores this, barely seeming to register what he said, but she does say something. "Where's Me?" Afterward she steps closer to her sister, pressing skin-to-skin 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? Ha, I can just see him and Far having a grand old time while the rest of us were in the forge pods, making muck castles. At least they could have got some decent mud, I mean look at this stuff. It stinks. It's indecent!"
They climb another ladder and Ray keeps talking and at every deck they find the water growing deeper, the mud thicker and riper until all the walls are running with it and droplets fall like rain from the ceilings. Doe's footprints appear in the brown sludge ahead, 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 all right?" he asks.
"Maybe," she says. She looks at her sister, squeezes her hand then lets it go and reaches to her hip where the Quantum Confusion parabolic pistol 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 speaking takes. "We don't know what's up there. We should be armed."
Ray grins, feeling the old sense of camaraderie coming back more naturally now, and reaches for the QC pistol 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's better now because there's a familiar sound rumbling up from the depths; the screw. The engines are turning over and trying to catch.
"That must be Doe," he says.
"It's not catching," Ti answers. "I should go down and check." She stops and starts to climb down but Ray grabs her arm, remembering what happened on their last mission.
"Not like that," he says sharply. "Not again. You don't want to drown in this stuff." The muddy water is up to their ankles now, sucking at every step.
Ti's face flickers with a hint of recognition for the last fate she met, then she smiles. "OK, I'll stay for now. We'll ask Doe."
Ray is only too glad for this diffusion of responsibility. "Exactly, let's ask Doe."
The engine sputters and stalls and Ray leads them up the last ladder to the conning tower, where Doe stands beside the periscope, surrounded by display equipment and desks filled with buttons and levers, all encased in verdigree-stained green copper units. There is mud slathered over her arms, chest, and face like a second skin; 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, pointing down the corridor to the captain's hutch. The hundreds of tiny locker doors are missing; Ray guesses dissociated by QC fire. "I looked in all the lockers."
"You didn't beat around the bush, did you?" Ray asks. So chuckles.
"The screw won't kick, I think it's clogged," Doe goes on. "All I can see out the periscope is black mud. We're not in any Molten Core I've ever seen before."
"So where are we?" So asks.
"Somewhere else," Ti says, "readouts minimal." 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 below decks. 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.
When was that, he wonders? How long ago?
"Gear up," says Doe.
They take QC pistols, elasteel wire and grapnels, candlebomb wax and assorted gear from the stores in the conning tower walls. Doe winks as Ray takes an extra reel of fuse.
"I need all my fingers this time," he says, a reference to that last mission he still remembers. That in itself feels unusual to him, as if remembering is not normal.
They harness up and clamp on their HUDs. Doe mounts her bondless shoulder cannon, holsters two outsized QC pistols and slots a sawn-off musket and bayonet blade into a sheath down her thigh. Musket? Ray grabs a pop-tent, oxygen, gas canisters, provision packs and flashlights, while So hoists on the comms gear and La and Ti hastily slick muck off the ruck bags holding all their scientific equipment.
"Hear me, one two, one two," Ray says over blood-mic. "Everybody ready?"
A chorus of four checks rings back, each at a different pitch.
"Beautiful harmony," Ray replies, "I should start up a choir."
"Pickaxe," Doe says, and So smashes the emergency glass and hands the tool to her. Ray stands with the others at the base of the ladder while Doe climbs, unlatches the exit hatch, and exposes the brick cladding layer without.
"It's intact," she calls back down. "But it's black."
Ray can see: the layer of mortared bricks overhead is jet-black with seeping mud. A blot drops to splash off his HUD. "It's come through the brick?"
"Not possible," Ti answers. "The bricks are three layers thick, non-porous. Nothing can get through unless it's 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 pickaxe back then drives it up into the bricks. Chips of soggy brick and mortar splat down into the mud by their feet, along with a thin rain of wriggling, maggot-like creatures.
"Oh, Goligh," swears Ray.
"That's disgusting," says So, blanching through the tint in her HUD.
"There's a lot more of them up here," says Doe, brushing detritus off her shoulders coolly. More of the tiny creatures fall like seeds into the spreading black mound below, where they dig in.
"I'm gonna puke," says Ray.
Ti picks up one of the creatures and studies it. "These are saprophytes," she says in a voice filled with wonder. "Entropic genetic devices, wired to mulch dead and dying matter."
"By Goligh, 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 shock-jacks to kill the pain.
Ray looks into her eyes. "Are you all right?"
Ti nods.
"Don't pick anything up."
"Look at that," says So. They do. The severed finger is already moving in the mud, writhing like a larger version of the other maggots.
"Get us the hell out of here, Doe," Ray says.
"Roger that. Brace hard." She hits the bricks again, and this time the cladding layer implodes inward in a torrent of rotten brick that's alive with maggots, chased by a vomiting flood of clotted water and sludge.
Doe is ripped off the ladder by the weight of it. The chord is flattened by the flow like trampled blades of grass. Someone screams out through blood-mic as the tide of putrid filth showers upon them, burying them in mire and locking them tight like Souls lost within a cooling lava flow.
Ray cannot think as the weight and roar of the onslaught fills up the conning tower until everything is muffled, stilled and silent, and he can't budge his heavily suited body an inch.
"Shit," he whispers through blood-mic.
B. DOE
Doe can't move, she can barely breathe, but she can still speak.
"Is everybody trapped?" she asks on blood-mic.
"My crotch is really trapped," says Ray, his voice high and pained. "Damn, this hurts."
Doe ignores him. "So, La, Ti?"
They chorus in with a series of checks.
"I'm wedged up against the periscope handles," Ray goes on. "Right in the balls. How did that even happen? I was on the floor."
"Drawback," La says. "As the flood poured in the air pressurized and blew out."
Ray moans. "Thanks, professor. We have to get out of here. I don't wanna be discovered like this, fossilized, and have future archeologists think I died trying to hump the periscope."
So laughs.
"It's not funny," Ray moans.
Doe agrees that it isn't funny, as very few things are, but doesn't say it, as she very often doesn't. With a series of voice commands she cycles through the screens in her Heads-Up-Display, showing readouts are still available direct from the ship's sensory feeds.
The Bathyscaphe tells her that already the mud is compacting and settling throughout the ship, warping the hull with its weight and hardening in place like rock. The screw is accessible remotely but to no avail, as she already knows it won't catch. There are weapons on board, glass-bombs on the flanks and the harmonic resonating foils on the belly, but the only thing they'd do is rebound off the mud and blow the ship apart.
Unless.
She clicks onto blood-mic. "La, Ti, can you work me an algorithm to overcharge the screw and rotate us belly-up, given some loosening of the mud pack around us?"
A moment passes of Ray softly moaning, muttering that it might be getting better now, oh no it's not, then Ti comes back.
"If you can drop the pack-density of the mud immediately around our brick layers by a factor of three, perhaps; if the screw is not jammed beyond repair. But I don't know how you'd do that, and I don't see what impact it would have if we do."
"You will see, get started on calculations please," says Doe. "Ray, can you move the rudder from your position?"
He gives a pained laugh. "With my crotch?"
"I don't need much, and there should be some loosening when we start to rotate."
He mutters something about the humiliation, then speaks up. "Yes, I think so. Left or right?"
"Up. Now So, we need to talk about the trim tanks."
It takes heated minutes of meticulous planning to sync their HUDs to the ships' computer, thereby taking direct control of a range of functions. La and Ti program the screw to run a complex shock-twist maneuver that will strip all the screw's threads in a minute, but might have the chance to upend them, with a number of sub-systems requiring direct command overrides delivered in a precise sequence.
So has the trim tanks, following Doe's designation to vent until overload. Ray has the periscope and steering, enough to twist the rudder by a few degrees. Doe has the weapons; glass bombs and QC foils.
"You've turned us into a bomb," Ray says. "A bomb we're inside."
"Is that enough fuse for you?" So asks. Ray groans.
"T-minus twenty," Doe says, "final rehearsal."
"It's easy enough, I just give my hips a twist," Ray says.
"T-minus ten."
She counts down, and there is only the gummy sound of lips and teeth sucking and clicking as the chord works the controls insi
de their HUDs. In the darkness their eyes roll.
Three.
Two
"One," says Doe, "brace."
They all hear So sub-vocalizing orders through the HUD, causing the support systems of the ship to shunt all available gas to the trim tanks. There's a groan as the tanks bulge outward with internal pressures they were not designed for, then-
BOOM
The first tank bursts and rocks the ship like a Lag-strike. Hull-girders groan and protest, then the next BOOM follows, and the next, each warping the frame while compressing the surrounding mud, forcing micrometers of empty space around the sublavic's outline.
In the resounding echo of the blasts the screw churns to life; the pack around them has loosened for an instant, and it has to be enough. Doe overrides safeties on the glass-bombs arrayed on the flanks, firing them all at once.
The sound is deafening, as weaponized liquid glass fires out into the slimmest of gaps between the ship and the mud. In a Molten Core these glass bursts would crystalize into enormous ramming spikes, useful for scalpeling out unwanted memories and deterring the Lag, but within the micrometers of give the trim tanks have earned they manifest as a hyper-compressed frictionless superfluid; maybe enough to ease their passage out.
The screw rages and the ship begins to rotate.
"It's working," Ray calls, "we're turning!"
"Burn it up, La," Doe says, and the world rotates backward. Cocooned in blackness, the grip of the mud slackens as the direction of gravity shifts, enough for her to reach the QC parabolic pistol on her waistband, enough to slip one hand into the trigger guard and pull.
Antimatter particles spit out into the darkness, consuming everything they touch, turning the hard-pack mud into a watery mush one tenth of the density. Doe fires again and again into the black, even aiming the pistol back at her QC-proof HUD to drive off the blinding muck.
The ship shudders as the screw rolls toward one hundred and eighty, and they all fire QC pistols into the mud, releasing their bodies from the solid pack. Kneeling in slush on the conning tower wall, Doe turns the cannon on her shoulder to the ladderway leading sideways and out.
SLOOSH
Bondless atoms in a cloud of glittering gold eat into the mud and ladder, burrowing a bulbous path through metal and brick. Light penetrates briefly in; Ray hangs from the periscope for a moment longer, awkwardly, before he lets go and slaps into the wash of disintegrated muck pooling on the wall, now the floor.
Soul Jacker Box Set Page 23
