Soul Jacker Box Set

by Michael John Grist

  "Holy hell," he says as he picks himself up.

  "As a chord!" Doe barks, and as if on cue the walls either side of the conning tower groan inward under the pressure, shearing to let a thick bead of molten glass leak inward. "Now!"

  The chord hurtles toward her, bundling into a tight ball and locking their suits onto each other using exo-motors, then Doe triggers the resonant foils to override. There is a deep bass hum as they switch on and begin to liquefy the mud stacked below the Bathyscaphe's tail, then they too override and blow and the chord tumbles like a ball as the ship shoots upward like a rocket.

  Ray whoops. Doe tracks the trajectory as the mud peels back and light blares in. Up, up, and then she yells,"break!" and fires a grapnel through the open conning tower, which catches to something and yanks the clump of them out before the ship can drop and sink again.

  The tracers pull and they reel out through open air and the froth of falling mud, caught and flung and then tumbling and hitting mud and bouncing until…

  The ship crashes somewhere behind them and the ball of them stops rolling. The sudden absence of noise rings out like a blast in Doe's head; no engine, no screw, no nothing. She can't see anything; her HUD blinded with ud. She breaks the ball and rolls clear, standing knee-deep in mud and rubbing at her slathered HUD screen.

  "Chord roll call," she shouts over blood-mic. "Repeat, roll call."

  "I'm here," says Ray.

  "Here," from So.

  "Here," from La.

  A long moment passes filled with the sounds of scraping as they all dig into the mud blindly, seeking an arm or a leg with the tension building out of absence until-

  "Here!"

  It's Ti's voice.

  "Oh thank Goligh," says Ray.

  "Atmosphere's good," La calls from somewhere in the mud-coated darkness. Doe is still blind, but instead of wiping at her faceplate any more she simply clicks the valves to release and yanks the HUD off.

  The world resolves.

  "Holy shit," breathes Ray at her side, his helmet dropped to the ground and wonder written large across his features. "What kind of a Solid Core is this?"

  C. DOE

  They're standing on a low black rise looking out over a silt-slathered gray wasteland that stretches as far as Doe can see; the drained dregs of some seabed Sunken World, studded with an endless spray of ruin, beneath a tumultuous black sky splotched with inflamed tinges of red.

  Mud coats this world everywhere. There are peaks of ruptured buildings emerging through the dark-gray sediment, their walls ragged and canting and mounded either side with muck. In places the intestinal splay of trains hangs off them like bunting, dripping the stuff like bile. There are tangled black heaps of bloated bodies clustered in tight heaps, and huge jumbles of timber smashed to kindling like giant beaver dams, studded with the grasping fingers of half-buried planes and container ships, and everywhere; mud.

  "Tsunami," says So.

  They turn to her. Her helmet is off and a line of mud flecks her face like a dark scar. She points at a pattern of gouged striations stretching back across the ruined landscape.

  "A massive wave of water and mud," she goes on, "smashing everything in its path. It came from that direction." She points back along the pattern of the gouges.

  Ray just stares out over the wreckage. "You're saying a wave did all this?"

  So turns to him, and there's something dreamy about her gaze. "A big one."

  Ray takes a moment to swallow this. They all do. "Then what was here before? It's no Molten Core."

  "Maybe it was," Doe says, "but a different kind of Core. It looks like a city."

  No one argues. They stand in silence a little longer, lulled by a low pestilential wind ripe with the smell of peaty decay, still panting after their escape. There is no sign of the Bathyscaphe anymore, sealed in below the surface of the mud. They are stranded.

  "I think that's a kraken," Ray says casually, pointing. "Eating a whale."

  There are two lumps of flesh at the base of a timber-pile: red tendrils coiled about a black and white beast as big as the Bathyscaphe. They tremble only slightly as they slowly curdle tighter into each other's embrace, each consuming the other.

  So shudders visibly.

  Doe blinks, trying to get tactical. There are tiny buzzing creatures rising on the vapors of decay, nipping at her hair and zooming for her eyes. She bats them away, shifts her feet as they begin to sink and notices more of the tiny maggots underfoot.

  Time to command. With no Me here, the captaincy falls to her.

  "Get me samples of these things, La," she orders, pointing down. "Don't handle them directly. I want to know exactly what's going on here. So, you need to build us a map and find a place to shelter. All this devastation was not caused by just a single wave."

  She doesn't need to spell out what that means; that another giant, eradicating tsunami could be coming at any moment. The women nod and set to work; the twins taking samples and So working on the radar in her comms block. Doe and Ray remain standing, surveying the mud and ruin. Doe shoots him a loaded glance then flips her blood-mic to a private channel.

  "Thoughts?" she asks.

  "I'm beyond confused," Ray answers. "It's no normal Molten Core, nothing like anything we've ever run a mission in before. We weren't ready for this and we're not equipped. The only mission information we've got is a weird scrawl on So's uniform."

  Doe nods. "I saw that. Run for your lives." She gestures at the tableaux of death and destruction. "But run where? There's nowhere left."

  "There must be something. Why else would we be here?"

  "And where's Me? Where's Far?"

  "I've got no answer. But Me wouldn't abandon us for nothing, I know that. There must be some reason."

  Doe runs diagnostics on the the Bathyscaphe's system memory, scraped before the ball blew out of the hull, but there is no sign of Me and Far leaving the ship at all. There is no sign they even forged to life.

  "Look at the sky," Ray says.

  There are lowering black clouds overhead, rutted as though a reflection of the gouged landscape beneath, with a glimpse of two suns bleeding through tattered gaps. They are a sick red, and seemingly on the same orbital track.

  "Even the suns are dying," Ray says. "We've seen Molten Cores that color and they never survived. This whole place is dying, Doe. It's rotting from the inside out."

  Doe considers. Me is gone and so is Far. The ship is gone, the world is fading around them and there is no mission brief.

  "How's your penis?" she asks flatly.

  Ray snorts, and she feels him coloring red through the HUD. "What?"

  "Your penis and your testicles. You said they were trapped against the periscope."

  "I didn't say 'penis' or 'testicles,'" he answers quickly. "I said crotch. And balls."

  Doe inclines her head, then puts a hand on his shoulder. Ray is attractive, after all, and they have been lovers now. She remembers that much. So sweet, so bashful, so noisy. "Ray, please tell me, are they all right?"

  "They're fine! My boys are fine."

  Doe laughs.

  "You're not supposed to joke," Ray protests lamely. "That's not your thing."

  "I'd rather joke than be dealing with this."

  Ray sighs. "I know."

  So's voice interrupts on blood-mic. "I've found something."

  Doe gives Ray a raised eyebrow and opns the channel. "Report."

  So points. "There's a structure still standing in the distance, twenty clicks maybe. You can barely see it, it just looks like a white speck."

  Doe looks, raising the resolution on her HUD until a fuzzy white splodge appears on the horizon. Some kind of tower, maybe.

  "It's white still," she says. "The mud tsunami didn't breach it."

  "Exactly," says So. "I'm working out the best route to get there. From what I can tell, some of this mud is solid and lots of it isn't. I took gamma-scans of the underlying city and there's quicksand, bridging mud, cavity t
unnels; and that's not all."

  She seems happy to have news.

  "Go on," says Doe.

  "This whole world is moving, for one," So says, "like the flows of a Molten Core, but slower and in destructive, reductive ways. The only way I can render it as a map is with predictions of those movements built in, like a weather forecast. It makes a kind of scrolling, shifting maze. There are ripple effects that trigger other ripples in a constant swirl of Brownian motion."

  Doe and Ray just stare at her.

  "Essentially, it's rotting," she translates, slinging a model to their HUDs. "If you'll put your helmets back on." They do.

  "It looks like a sphere," Doe says, studying the map as it slings onto her visor. "But I'm not seeing a sphere out here."

  "Exactly," So answers. "Everything we see now around us is, or was, a Molten Core, but it's been spatially flattened on a higher dimension." Ray gives her a blank look. She tries again. "That is to say, it maintains some properties of its previous sphere-ness, while displaying as this flat wasteland." More blank looks, and So sighs. "The math checks out, and I'd love to share it with you, but for our purposes it's probably enough to recognize that this is a Molten Core gone bad. Watch." She fires a simple simulation over to them of a familiar orange Molten Core compressing into mud.

  Ray shudders. "I've been on the Bathyscaphe for a long time and I've never seen this before. How did it happen?"

  "A gargantuan influx of matter," So says. "Something flooded this Core with tsunamis, giant ones, that are now circling the sphere and leveling it."

  "An influx caused by what?" Doe asks.

  So shrugs. That's not her job.

  "What about these ruins?" Ray asks, pointing at the structures emerging through the mud. "What are they?"

  "I'd guess that some structures of the original Core have proven more durable than others, but it's just a matter of time; they'll be ground down soon."

  "When the next tsunami comes around," Doe says. "When is that, So?"

  "I don't know. I can't map the other side of the sphere from here, so I can't gauge the wave's location or velocity. It could be an hour or it could be ten."

  Doe thinks about what Me would do, then abandons that train of thought because Me isn't here. She has to do what she thinks is best.

  "Our first priority remains shelter." She points toward the smudge of the White Tower. "Do we have a route yet?"

  "Working on it," So says.

  "Can you confirm it's the Solid Core?"

  So nods. "It's highly likely. Everything's a supposition."

  La speaks up then. "I think we can help with that."

  Doe turns. Ti is holding up a silver spectroscope platter upon which lies the dissected husk of one of the off-white maggots. It is the color of cream gone sour, enough to turn her stomach. Ti flashes a close-up into their HUDs; the interior of the whitish thing seems to be made of rings like a tree, with no visible organs or sensory apparatus.

  "What is it?" Doe asks.

  "It's made of nonsense," La says. "On a genetic level its DNA is heaps of information with no meaning."

  Ray frowns. "What do you mean, made of nonsense?"

  "I mean just that, as in facts and numbers and figures that don't make sense. Every ring of growth is an extra layer of digested information packed on like a skin. And it's dense. We looked into its genetic make-up of some sample cells and it seems to be some kind of language information garbled with etiquette rules. I can't make any sense of it."

  Doe considers. "So this thing is made of etiquette?"

  "Its DNA is, yes." A pause. "I think we're looking at some kind of diseased, evolved child of the Lag."

  That silences them all. The Lag has been their enemy for the longest time.

  "It's trying to live off nonsense," La goes on, "but in turn it's getting infected. Tainted."

  Ray lifts the visor on his helmet. "You're saying the Lag has gone mad?"

  La nods. "That's a good analogy. Now it's frantic, looking for something real to eat. That may be why it bit Ti immediately. And it's not only language and etiquette we're seeing. We scraped several other samples and found patterns analogous to mathematics equations, historical records of some kind, memory engrams, and what was the other one, Ti?"

  "Recipes," says Ti.

  Ray barks a laugh.

  "It's not funny," says Ti. "If it had bit me any deeper it would have filled me up with recipes like venom. I'd become a nice repository of random cooking knowledge, but I'd also be dead."

  Ray coughs. "Sorry."

  "It's fine," says La.

  "And they're evolving," Doe says.

  "They are," La says. "Imagine one of these but ten times bigger, or ten thousand times. They could be as big as whales under the mud, hunting us right now. We'd be like blood in the water to them, because we're not made of nonsense."

  Doe looks off to the white smudge again, thinking about tsunami. "Can they eat the White Tower? The Solid Core."

  "It'll surely hold the longest, but it will fall too, like everything else here. It's not a matter of if, but when."

  Doe looks at Ray, and Ray nods.

  "We start for the Tower," she says. The route's not finished, but there may be no time for that now. "So, pick me a path that'll get us started. Ray, take the rear. I'm not going to lose anyone to one of these things," she points at the maggot. "And everyone, HUDs on and turn your…"

  She trails off, looking at So, whose face has suddenly gone pale.

  "What?"

  So just points. They all turn and look across the mud-plains of the Sunken World, over the leering ruins and spiky clumps of wreckage, to a low gray line lying like a worm on the horizon. It's hard to distinguish in that grayscale world, but it's unavoidably there.

  It wasn't there before.

  "Tsunami," So says, her voice a ghost, "inbound."

  RITRY GOLIGH

  7. WAR

  Don Zachary is there when I wake up, looking down on me with care and concern. This is what I wanted. The Hawks around us are the Hawks who were cutting off my fingers before. Now they love me, even if they don't know why. Perhaps it would even last, if I stayed, and was good. If I bedded in the new knowledge I could rule here.

  So power corrupts.

  "Breakfast," I say to one, because speaking is easier than working the bonds for the moment. My mind is a morass of scar tissue, healing. The Hawk leaves and I turn to the Don.

  "You're building an army."

  He shrugs. I'm his closest confidante, now. "I've built one."

  "To take Calico."

  "To start with Calico. But I've got bigger plans than that, son. Who says the Arctic War really has to be over? What does their détente matter to me?"

  I mull this. I am glad the War is over, and I don't want it to start again. I wonder if it would not be better to cut this man from the cloth of life completely. The détente of the last twenty years is good, and has given places like Calico a chance to breathe. Civilization may be coming back to the world.

  "And the quakeseeds?"

  Zachary gives a sly smile. "Hard to get hold of. It took ten years to source enough of them to start a global killer tsunami, bigger even than the ones that tossed the godships."

  His pleasure at this thought rankles like a bad smell. The godship tsunamis killed billions and saw the end of the old world order, destroying every coastal city in the world and smashing every country's infrastructure to dust. There was literally nothing but wreckage left.

  Out of that chaos came the Arctic War, as every cluster of surviving humans banded into new alliances along fault lines of race, religion and altered geography. Bits of the old Aleut nation conjoined with Russia to create the proto-Rusk alliance; the engulfed middle of the United States mixed with European refugees to create Armorica; African nation-states blurred into the Afri-Jarvanese conglomerate; the Koreas, China and Thailand combined into the Asiatic Empire and took on their ancestral enemy, Japan.

  Ancient history
now, a hundred years gone.

  The tsunamis kicked off a mad scramble for the one near-untouched resource remaining. The desert oils were too hard to tap by then, the waves, wind and sun were still not powerful enough to fuel a boom, gas and coal were long-exhausted, nuclear was too unreliable with the increasing number of earth-shaking events, so hydrates trapped deep under the Arctic ice became the goal of every new nation.

  The whole world turned to it, and to War. I fought in the dying days of that War, when the worst atrocities had already been committed, when we were really just fighting over pride, with the ice blasted and the old lands irradiated and the zones of control clearly laid out.

  I look into Don Zachary's eyes and see the perceived glory of those days burning still. His hunger to rule over the world is palpable. The thought of such chaos, in which the most ruthless person would rise supreme, excites him like nothing else.

  And with quakeseeds in his armory, long banned by mutual consent of every major power for fear of mutually assured destruction, he could do it. Sown in the ocean floor, they tap the planet's core and result in volcanic events more powerful than any standard reckoning scale can fathom. They would start a global-killer tsunami that went around the world five times before slowing down, rubbing and scrubbing until every mark of civilization above the waves was gone, leaving the world ripe for the Don to rule.

  I can't allow that, so I take this decision upon myself and Lag it all from his mind and all his people; the seeds, the plot, the vision. Not a Soul in this bunker will even remember such terrible weapons exist. I have just saved the world.

  I eat my breakfast.

  Some time after that, after the doctor checks the bandages on my hands, after I've showered off all the dust and blood of the past few days and I've put on new clothes and am feeling almost human again, I settle down in a chair looking into Mr. Ruin's vacant eyes, and jack in again.