Soul Jacker Box Set

by Michael John Grist

  I jack and rebound. The icepack shell around his mind tastes like bitumen. I'm so far outside his Molten Core that I can't even form the Bathyscaphe and glass-bomb the exterior. It's slippery and dense and there's nothing to work with.

  Instead I roam the exterior, floating through the flow of the bonds hunting for a way in. The surface looks brittle and crystalline, but when I hammer against it there is no give, only the thumping of his sickly pulse. I study the structure of the crystal wall and conclude it is as Carrolla said; a kind of frosting of memory fused with the silvery engram patch in a last-ditch defensive measure.

  It is sheer and unbroken, with no entry points in and none leading out. I wonder that it may have prevented some of the flood I injected into him, but it has also blocked him inside. He is a prisoner in his body like I was a prisoner in the EMR.

  I surface in the bright medical room. My newly attached fingers itch, and I lie there for a time in thought.

  I've already been inside that crystal cage, entered from within via the aetheric bridge. The thought of it is still startling. When I pushed through the bridge for a second time, and for a terrifying few moments was inside the shut-off, isolated world of Ruin's Solid Core, it was almost as though I was part of him. We became one and the same.

  He was half-mad already. He was wasting away, without sense, sight or sound, just as I did when a mindbomb killed Ven and the others, leaving me locked in an EMR. For Mr. Ruin now it has already been longer. I have no desire to make the passage through the aether again, to conjoin with his flagging consciousness by the inner door, but if it is the only way…

  I jack in and steer the Bathyscaphe into my own Molten Core, toward the moat-line of lava around the central void, but it is no longer so easy. It is in fact too hard. As Me in the conning tower I drive the sublavic on, but can only just break the periscope through the bubbling inner sea. Peering through the sight as it rises, I briefly glimpse the Solid Core hanging overhead like a dark moon, whole and unbroken. I glimpse the Gaullic zone we bombed open through the deathgate; now it is healed and reinforced with thick scar-girders. There's not enough candlebomb left in the whole ship to blast through it again. Neither is there the will in the chord to fight through the outer ring into the maze within.

  It is too hot already, as the protective bricking peels away. Already Ti and La are burning in the screw-room, and So is screaming into the comms that the ship cannot take it, with the Lag snapping at our tailfins.

  It sees that I am weak still, while the Lag has recovered. I toss the memory of eating breakfast out to keep it appeased and flee.

  I rouse panting. My mind's defenses have recovered, while I remain weak. Without some kind of bond to harvest, something more than the random thoughts of ex-marine Hawks around me, I won't infiltrate the Solid Core again. Even the depth of faith in the godships would barely get me above the surface.

  I need Loralena, Art, and Mem. Mementos from the life and love we built together were enough to get me through the first and second times, but that's all used up now, and the last thing I can do is go back to get more.

  I lie back and wait for my heart to stop racing. I need to do something, but I don't know what it is.

  8. ZACHARY

  Don Zachary comes to sit by my side, because I call him.

  "Why do you want to rule the world?" I ask him. It seems like something I ought to understand. He no longer knows he has the capacity to do it, since I took the memory of his quakeseeds away, but I don't think I could ever Lag that core drive wholly away.

  He shrugs. "Someone has to. Why not me?"

  It hardly seems an answer. I turn my reattached right hand before me. The fingers are just beginning to feel again. The healing process was sped along by DNA-tinted microbials injected along the wound-lines, a level of tech I only ever saw used in the War for suturing minds. These germs are similar, bearing genetic knowledge that teaches the localized cells how to heal faster.

  The scars are there, but retreating. In fact my fingers are better than they were before, after a year of beating beaten on Skulk 12, straightened out and with the cracks smoothed away. My ribs feel stronger too, old breaks repaired by the doctor, as does my nose, which was horribly disjointed, and my teeth, many of which had been knocked out.

  Under the ocean in an observation room off Zachary's main battle halls, we sit and look out at the gloomy under-Skulk waters. Spores float like ash amongst tendrils of seaweed, lit by floodlights picking out some of the Don's fleet of subglacics. He has scoured the world to gather all these old boats in; repurchased, rebuilt, recovered after foundering.

  This bunker is his ark, and with these ships he could cow anyone left after a new flood.

  "Is that enough of a reason?" I ask him. "Would you kill the world to be that man?"

  "The world's been killed a dozen times before," he says. "What's one more, if it's the last? I'll set things up correctly, so it needn't happen again."

  "In your image."

  He laughs. "Can you think of a better one? It could be better looking, of course."

  I chuckle. I think I would like Don Zachary, if he were not so evil. My ten years on Skulk 47 were peaceable enough. There was no random crime to speak of, despite the freedom from Calico's laws; only the crimes the Don and his people committed themselves. There was a kind of certainty in his rule, and a kind of safety, if you played within the unwritten rules he set.

  "I need to find someone," I tell him, "but I don't know how. Someone's hunting me, and I don't have any way to hunt them back."

  He grunts. "Like Ouroboros."

  I consider this: the worm that eats its tail.

  "They hunt you and you hunt them," the Don adds. "Like a circle. I've been there many times, when I was first banned from Calico."

  I turn to look at him. I never knew this about him. "You were banned?"

  He laughs. "Of course. Why do you think I started the Skulks? They tried to scrape me off their side thousand times, but the Wall's a long place, and they were dealing with rebuilding their own infrastructure too. They were always hunting me and I was always staying one step ahead. I had to know where they were and what they were looking for just to stay alive."

  I try to picture the Don as a younger man, racing from point to point around the Wall and setting up Skulks like lean-to villages, fixed to temporary mooring points drilled into the concrete. I suppose he was different then, an idealistic kind of revolutionary probably dreaming of saving the world, not conquering it. I don't doubt he clung on like a limpet.

  "I always just imagined you fully formed," I say. "Master of the Skulks."

  He chuckles, and it's a warm sound. "I was young once, like you. The trick when you're hunting in a circle like that is to play the bluff."

  "What bluff?"

  He leans back in his chair, settling in to this new role as my benevolent father figure. "Underestimation. It's the only way to win, but to win big you have to lose big. It's simple really: you lead your enemy in to ground you've prepared, then you lose. You lose so everyone can see, and you make it look real, by making it real. It has to hurt, so they'll believe it's the final hurt. They have to think they've really put you down and exhausted your limits."

  "But they haven't."

  He clicks his fingers. "Exactly. You only lose what you can afford to, so they underestimate you. You make a huge sacrifice, but you keep enough aside to build again in their blind spot, then you come back stronger and smash them to pieces."

  He smiles, and I match his smile. I do like him. "Like all this. You let the last tsunami smash the Skulks, while you built an army. And who knows?"

  He taps his large nose. "Only you and me, Ritry old friend. Only you and me."

  I feel badly that I have Lagged him so much, and lied so much. To have his affection through this kind of pretense is false. But then a day ago he was hammering nails into my hand, so perhaps it comes even.

  "How do you know where to prepare the ground?" I ask.


  "Work," he grunts. "Hard graft. You get your people on the inside to spy, and if you can't get people inside fairly you kill others inside and have your own replace them. If you can't kill people inside you wait until they come outside, which they always do, to screw or get high or whatever, then you pump all you can out of them, then you kill them." He holds up his right hand. "It's where I first learned about how badly a rusting nail hurts under the skin."

  I see jagged scar lines along the base of each of his fingers. "The mayor of Calico back then was a hard man," he goes on, "and he taught me this. Scars didn't heal so neatly then as they do now. Naturally, I nailed him by the fists to his own goddamn Wall."

  This is all new to me; part of the legend he's had scrubbed away. I nod like it's nothing. "Naturally."

  "Now I have an agreement with the new mayor. I take his dregs and he looks the other way while I expand. Everybody benefits."

  "Until you take over the world."

  He shrugs. "We're years off that, yet. Lots to build."

  He's forgotten how ready he was. The quakeseeds are gone from his mind. Otherwise I think he was almost there.

  "Hard work," he says, "building in the blindspot."

  I consider. The Don is a criminal genius, after all. "In the blindspot," I repeat.

  It's not exactly an answer to my current problem, but maybe it will help. Maybe there are other ways than attacking the fortress of Mr. Ruin's mind head-on.

  9. BAND

  Again I look into Ruin's dead eyes. I hate this bastard, but still I hold his hands. I get into the rhythm of his pulse and reach into the bonds around him.

  At first there is nothing. I probe the ice-pack shell of his Molten Core, feeling only cold and madness. Nothing goes in or out; the nonsense engrams I injected have cut him off from the world completely. Even the trail of his Soul leading away has become frail and insubstantial, no more than a ghostly wisp.

  But it's there. I touch it with the greatest care, like a butterfly's wing. Old connections drift off it like weeds in an unseen current, hinting at mysteries out there in the world.

  I reach back along them.

  His Soul's trail stretches away from the Don's bunker and into the glimmering mindscape of Calico, to the last place he was truly himself; atop the rollercoaster in Candyland, before I dropped my tower on his head. There his Soul was brutalized when I injected him, and the trail leading back grows as faint as spun sugar.

  I lean in and track it like a bloodhound, back through Calico to the Reach, where it lingers around the hot nexus of my family for some time, before shooting away in a series of spiky voyages. I follow his trail first to the shores of proto-Rusk, then to the Siberian grasses of the old Aleut nation, then to the broad expanse of the Europan tundra, each time culminating in a hot tangle of local bonds.

  On the isle of Elba, now a desert atoll barely poking its rocky tuft above the salty tides of the Mediterranean, I see how he basked in the proud memory of Napoleon's anguish. Atop the Himalayan archipelago I read how he regaled Pidgin tribes with the tale of how he once led a hundred mountain climbers to their deaths. In the ruined towers of Jodhpur the bonds show me where he sat with monkeys amidst the jungle canopy and ticked off the number of pilgrims who had once come to sacrifice their girl-children to him, in days gone by.

  I start to understand what these pilgrimages are to him; a victory lap of past glories, feeding ghoulishly off his old exploits. Their pain remains a warm coal he can warm his bitter, cold Soul upon. Like the misery of Napoleon, like the Himalayan dead and the sacrificed girls, I see that I would have become just another trophy in this sad parade; my suffering serving to fuel him through the long dark barrens of his lonely life.

  Because he is alone. There are no friends for him, no lovers, no family anywhere in the world, nor any sign of the powerful mind that led the assault on the train. I have never seen someone so disconnected from the world.

  Then, just on the verge of giving up, I see something different.

  Wedged in the far past down Soul-trails so misty I can barely discern them, he goes to a knot of the bonds that still burns hot today. In the empty expanse of the Arctic Ocean lies an isolated jut of rock, surrounded by the ancient hulks of rusted hydrate-rigs. There I lose him in the stronger sense of something huge on the bonds; sharp and bittersweet and redolent of pain.

  Something terrible happened here. I can sense the frame of it only; the outline of vast suffering with the emotion and weight Lagged away. Here at last there are hints of other Souls like Mr. Ruin, glowing bright. I diffuse my focus to better sense them, as though hunting movement through peripheral vision, and they leap to the fore. A dozen feral scents bloom like the stink of shark-spoor in the water, predators all.

  Hundreds even. I feel their movements through the frame, smacking their lips and lapping at something I cannot see, and gain some sense of what happened here. The frame shows the boundaries of a massive loss radiating out, of a thousand deaths in an atrocity so large it should burn like a sun, except the weight of it is gone.

  I feel sick. Compared to Ruin's other exploits this was a feast. For this his people came together like lions at a watering hole. I can feel their sated paths branching out afterward, and among them flows the thick band of thought from the train, as wide as a river.

  It pulses. None of the other Soul trails pulse; they are all records of past action only, but not this. It is somehow alive, as though feeding still. I approach gingerly through the whispery bonds, touch it gently, and like a strike of lightning in my Soul I see within: millennia of suffering and millennia of brutal rule; order and chaos interwoven with insatiable hunger; the rise and fall of empires and the never-ending turn of the world, stamped everywhere with the authority of one all-powerful Soul.

  And it sees me too.

  With thought alone it seizes me, and I am trapped. I flail to escape but every passing second its hold grows stronger. Panic flushes through me. I have reached too far and woken a sleeping titan. I feel it rearing up along its own trail now, its full attention turning to me.

  I yank and buck like a fish on the hook, tearing my own lips bloody to escape, until at last its grip comes loose. Terrified and desperate I flee back to my body, Lagging my trail on the bonds as best I can, only moments before this unstoppable Soul could train its whole gaze upon me.

  My eyes flash open in the white room in Don Zachary's bunker and I gasp, horror-struck and adrift at once, trying to understand what I have seen and what I have done. How much of me did this behemoth see, and does it know where I am now?

  I dare not reach out at all. I barely dare breathe. Have I given myself away?

  My answer comes within moments, by way of the thunderous applause of bombs exploding overhead. I look into Mr. Ruin's deathly face and could almost swear he is smiling.

  The room rocks with a blast and I am thrown from the bench. Mr. Ruin topples too. In the corridor outside Don Zachary's Hawks race by, Kaos rifles in their hands. There is the ratatatat of heavy artillery vibrating down through the bunker's double-hull. Many levels stand between us and the surface, but how long will it take them to break through?

  I feel the distant sting of a mindbomb. Smoke jets into the corridor outside from a ruptured flue and I pick myself up. The Don's bunker is under attack. I have brought them here, and here they come.

  10. SEED

  Down metal hallways suffused with the drumbeat of stamping feet and distant explosive bursts I run, pushing Mr. Ruin ahead of me in his chair. His pulse veers erratically, disconnected from the monitor, but there is no time. Zachary's Hawks storm past me on either side, and like Me at the head of his ship I reach out, Lag their simple minds and turn them all to my control.

  Now they run ahead of me, their priorities shifted. They race out down underwater jetty tubes to carry out my orders.

  More mindbombs sting from above, but I shield my troops as best I can. A vent overhead bursts and sprays gas before me, and I hold my sleeve to my face and run t
hrough it. They've already drilled down into the bunker. Another vent bursts and now a black-clad marine on a rappel line drops into the spray. He wears one of the same tight-fitting HUDs from the train, his EMR-helmet thumping tinnily through the fractious roar of rifle-fire.

  He sights on me through the fog and I shoot him in the helmet with an armor-piercing round from a Kaos rifle of my own. He sags on his rappel line like a broken mannequin. I run on, but before I can clear the vent another marine drops through with tranquilizer darts already firing. I dive forward, hammer the stock of my rifle into his face until he goes down, then fire point-blank into his chest.

  He stills, but I feel more of them dropping down like hail, each an EMR buzz tethered to that immense Soul, splashed across the radar of the bonds like a net. For a moment I am thrown back into the battles of my earlier life, outnumbered and fighting side by side with Tigrates and Ferrily in the narrow corridors of our subglacic; for the nation, for yards of icy water, for our lives.

  I know how to fight like this.

  I snatch magnet-bombs from one of the Don's Hawks and hurl them up into the broken vent. One more marine drops into the corridor and shoots out the belly of a Hawk to my left, then the bomb clamped to his chest goes off and fragments him to pink mist. I feel the thick Soul-leash cinched around his mind dim away.

  Running again, I have to hold Mr. Ruin into his chair as nearing explosions rock the floor. The corridor behind me shakes with shouts and the bloom of fire, the bonds become greasy and slick with pain, then we're at the airlock and here are the Hawks I sent ahead, waiting to greet us. Strong hands lift Mr. Ruin from his chair and guide him down, and I follow.

  A subglacic.

  The ladder into the conning tower is all polished metal and lines of pipes and angular protrusions. By the periscope I send commands without speaking, to disengage the mooring clamps, lock the bows, flush the trims and set the engine-screw.