Soul Jacker Box Set

by Michael John Grist

  With a metallic clunk and a hiss of outgas we are sealed off from the crumpling bunker. I watch it on monitors: the whole facility is ablaze from the top down; the corridors are filled with EMR-marines and smoke; everywhere is gunfire and violence.

  "Get him to support," I shout to a waiting medic, pointing at Mr. Ruin. "Keep him alive."

  The medic disappears. The screw far below grinds to life and we pull away. I put my head to the periscope and turn it ninety degrees; a dozen other subglacics are already disengaging and sliding backward from their berths all around us.

  "All stations brace," I shout, "fire!"

  From the bellies of a dozen War-era subglacics Hammerhead torpedoes launch in perfect synchrony. They strike their bunker berths in seconds, creating a tsunami wave of shock water that flings us all back and out to sea with hull-crumping force. We reel and I barely manage to keep my hands on the periscope.

  "Full screw," I shout, and the Hawk at my side taps the order in. The engine's roar carries up through the decks, fighting the wash of blast-water and turning us to surge outward and down.

  At the same time twelve other subglacics do the exact same thing, in twelve different directions. I have told them no more than to flee. I won't be able to influence them any further, as I cut all the bonds of control between us. For this to work I have to be invisible amongst the fleeing armada, each looking exactly like our ship from above.

  Last I cut all my ties backward but one, to Don Zachary, who is standing in the inmost depths of his bunker now, holding the controls to an almighty weapon in his hands.

  Maybe he deserves better than this. Maybe we all do.

  "I'm sorry," I whisper to him through the bonds, then have him trigger a quakeseed.

  The resultant blast dwarfs the torpedoes. If we were closer we would be atomized, but the first backwash flung us clear enough to provide a buffering tranche of water. The quakeseed taps into the ocean floor and sets off a tsunami like nothing I've felt before, plucking me off the periscope with ease and barreling me backward into my crew. The whole ship groans as we tumble in the tremendous backwash of a wave that will carry halfway around the world, shot out like constituent matter from a nuclear blast.

  THE CHORD

  D. SO

  The chord runs.

  The mud is slippery and alive with maggots beneath So's feet, rising up like froth on the boil as if the incoming wave has driven them wild. Probably it has; nonsense drawing to nonsense and reshaping the map of this smothered Core in ways hard to predict.

  So's mind and screen race with data as Doe leads them at a sprint away from the Bathyscaphe's mud-entombed hull and onto the long flat expanse, skirting the heaps of the dead. Everywhere is black and gray and slathered with mud, already pounded countless times by tsunami.

  "How long before it hits?" Doe shouts on blood-mic, "can we reach the Tower?"

  So is already deep into her calculations, inputting all observable phenomenon along with informed estimations at every thumping stride; she doesn't know the full circumference of this Sunken World, but from the curvature of the horizon and the tectonic flows of mud she can infer a solid guess, which combined with readings of the tsunami's rate of growth from a slim gray line to a thickening bar allows her to estimate distance, speed and time to impact.

  "Not long enough," she answers on a blood-mic channel direct to Doe. "Minutes only."

  "Minutes?" Doe answers.

  There is no time for So to think. She's been in this moment before; foggy memories of their last mission rise up, when the others left her behind and she'd floated on drifts of panic with all sense of her body falling away. She hadn't wanted the role then, she'd tried to run from it but there can be no running from this. It is her purpose, after all, to guide the chord home. No one else can do it but her.

  The yellow paint on her chest has proven to be prophetic. So be it.

  "So!" Doe shouts.

  The sound jogs her from the reverie; every second has to count now. She beams tight to Doe on blood-mic. "You won't reach the White Tower before the wave hits, not even close. You need to find shelter right now, and I can't produce a route for you on the run." She sucks in a breath, making the decision. For how many years has she harbored feelings for Ray? As long as she can remember. This will be cruel on him, but there is no other way to keep him alive. "Tell Ray not to follow me. Make it an order."

  "What?"

  "Give the order!" So shouts. There is no time. "You need him. You don't need me after this."

  They sprint in silence for seconds as Doe absorbs this. Mud splashes. Maggots burst underfoot. For a second she turns and looks back, pink irises latching onto So's, and that will have to be enough.

  "Thank you," Doe says, then flicks over to a wide channel. "Ray, So's going to make a recon to that wreckage heap. We'll pick her up on the other side; we have time. Understood?"

  He's too busy running to see through the deception. "Roger that."

  "You're clear," Doe says again on tight-band to So, but So is already breaking left.

  Ten seconds she runs off-track, long enough for Ray to run on and the twins to pass by, long enough so that none of them will look back and see her, too far for them to think about coming back and grabbing her.

  There she stops running.

  The tsunami is already a subjective foot tall on the horizon, and So whips assorted equipment from her belt and off the magnetic webbing on her back with uncanny precision: a gamma-scan which she stabs into the mud to better read the tectonic churn; a pair of tuning fork antenna which she stands up like flags on their exttendable poles, to capture the topography of the immediate vicinity and interpolate it into a reliable 3D map; a singularity-sight with which to tag the incoming tsunami and measure it for weight and destructive power.

  The chord run on and So works the numbers in her HUD faster than she ever has before; not just the route to get them to shelter now but a way to get them to the White Tower when the wave overpasses. It's the only way to survive.

  Raw data crashes through her equipment and the roar of the tsunami builds in the air as a physical pressure, like the engine screw burning brick in the Bathyscaphe's belly. She looks up and sees the chord sprint over a low rise and out of sight. The tsunami already yawns wide like a shutter on the sky, maybe T-minus two. She uploads an algorithm for the forks, rolling with inferred data from the singularity-sight that will seek out a structure strong enough to withstand the incoming crush of mud.

  Possibilities whip up on her HUD as the algorithm works and she dismisses them rapidly: not the cracked shell of the Bathyscaphe, not the bodies scattered in black heaps, not the heaps of fragmented wreckage craggy with ruptured ships and train; all of these will be broken and reassembled by the passage of the wave. She looks further, weighing every ruined building that pokes through the mud, along with the position and speed of the chord, and finds the only thing that could possibly withstand the stress, that is within sprinting distance and might save them all.

  There is no entrance but the chord have blown doors before; a great pyramid jutting up through the mud, built of stepped oblongs of stone too massive for this tide to lift, and containing, what? Horrors? Monsters? Better than certain death in the mud.

  "Here," she blood-mics to Doe and slings the updated map. "It's been an honor."

  "The honor was ours," Doe answers swiftly. "Ritry Goligh himself will hear about what you did here."

  It's more than So expected, and enough to make her cry. She almost blurts the truth, about how she's loved Ray for as long as she knows, but what good would that do now? Ray loves Doe. Some secrets go better to the grave, and she loves them all anyway.

  "Goodbye, So-"

  So kills the line and turns to face the wave.

  It is immense. She isn't scared, though. The chord will know what she did, and that matters. Ritry Goligh will know, and that is something to be proud of.

  The tsunami rears back like the end of the world, eclipsing the sky,
and she thinks of all those missions spent watching Ray, glimpsed from far down the forging line as he helped rouse the chord. She thinks of this mission, when he brought her back from the terror-filled darkness of her forging pod, offering kind words and his warm touch on her back.

  Was that love, So wonders, as the rending gray wall bears down? In her last moments she flashes back to her proudest memory of all; slowly disappearing in the outer ring of the Solid Core, singing lullabies to herself just to hold on long enough to guide the chord through the aetheric bridge and save them all.

  Doe, Ray, Me, Far, La and Ti. Ritry Goligh. She misses them all already. She loves them all like they are part of her, which they are, until the tsunami hits full-force and-

  E. RAY

  Ray feels something as he sprints up another rise, some change in the dynamic of the chord, but before he can figure out what it is Doe comes in shouting over blood-mic

  "Drop everything now! Weaponry, gear, drop it all. There's a pyramid two clicks further on that will shelter us if we can make it."

  As she speaks Ray watches her strip her bondless shoulder cannon followed by her thick exo-suit plating, and he follows her example, shedding weapons and armor into the maggot-writhing mud in his trail.

  They run faster. Ray tries to figure out what the changed dynamic is, then the apex of So's pyramid appears ahead and for the moment he can't think about anything else. It is different from everything else in this blasted landscape; older somehow, built from great stone blocks with lichen frosting the exterior green and purple, only lightly spattered with a clinging crust of wind-blown mud.

  A swift glance over his shoulder shows the wave is almost upon them.

  "Where's the route in?" he asks.

  "No entrance," Doe shouts breathily, "So says there's an inner passage." She slings a highlighted section of the pyramid to his HUD. "I'll blow it like the Deathgate."

  Ray's hands go to the candlebombs at his belt. Demolition work should not fall to the captain of the chord.

  "You did the honors last time," he says, "this one's on me."

  Before Doe can protest he reroutes suit power to overcharge his exos, putting on a dangerous burst of speed that peels him away from the chord, bounding in massive leaps. The mud is like molasses underfoot, slipping and unctuous, but he was built for this kind of thing.

  "Get back," Doe shouts, "we'll blow it together, that's an order!"

  "Understood," says Ray and does nothing different. The wave is already here, as vast as a Solid Core hanging above with the upper lip curling down; as big as a continent.

  He hits the pyramid's base some twenty seconds before the chord. The candlebomb is pliable and he wedges a shaped charge into the corner where the oblong steps meet the hidden passage beyond. T-mins ten seconds now, with the chord only seconds ahead of the tsunami and he has no time for more fuse than an arms' length. He sparks it against the express warnings of Doe then hurls himself for cover-

  BOOM

  It's not nearly far enough.

  The blast smacks him mid-air with an eruption of stone, breaking both his legs and folding one arm back at the elbow. He hurtles and bounces and breaks the other arm before Doe scoops him out of the air.

  "Chord on me!" she commands and La and Ti lean in at once to grab Ray's broken limbs and carry him with the wave aon their heels. Shock-jacks flood Ray's system but they barely take the edge off the incredible pain.

  The suns blot out and darkness falls, T-minus seven seconds and Ray just has long enough to realize So is not here, because So is already dead, then the chord plummets through the cloud of blast-smoke and into a rushing stone corridor until-

  BOOM

  The wave hits the pyramid like a giant's stamping foot; percussive shock throws them off the walls. The stone itself rumbles a riotous bass note as a torrent of mud piledrives in through the blasted entrance.

  Doe and the twins are waiting for it, kneeling over Ray with QC pistols firing antimatter particles into the incoming surge like bullets into a hurricane.

  RITRY GOLIGH

  11. SUBGLACIC

  After the quakeseed blast is done and the wave passes on, I slump in the med-bay beside Mr. Ruin and watch his rickety pulse on the display. Time passes us by in silence, disturbed only by the steady movements of my crew. Many of them are sleeping now, where I sent them. It is easier to keep a leash upon them that way.

  Hours go by, and no sign of pursuit manifests itself. All comms to the Skulks and other ships were cut from the moment we left the bunker-bay. I haven't thought my way beyond the walls of this hull since ordering Don Zachary's suicide.

  My head aches like an Arcloberry hangover. I can still feel the shredding, as Don Zachary's bunker was torn apart and everyone inside died. I was still tied to him when it happened; I remember that instant of absolute destruction as if every death happened to me…

  Hundreds? Maybe thousands.

  The Skulks will have been destroyed. The quakeseed was ratcheted as low as I could make it, but it was still a quakeseed. Could it even have broken down the tsunami wall? Could I have just destroyed Calico, and along with it murdered my wife and children?

  I don't know. The hangover throbs and hammers; from splitting my mind into so many Hawks, from reaching so far back along Mr. Ruin's Soul trail, from the horror of their deaths. It is too much, more than I can handle at once, added to which I have just conducted an atrocity of my own.

  I acted without thought. It was foolish and selfish. I am not worth so many lives, I think, and there is no one to argue, only Ruin's glassy glare to judge. I should not have fought, I see that now. I should have gone quietly, and so many men, women, and children would still be alive.

  Yet this is not all. The Soul hunting me is evil like I've never known. I witnessed the mass murder it led at the hydrate-rig; a thousand Souls swallowed whole. What horrors would be unleashed if it was to prise the power of the aetheric bridge out of my mind?

  So I make and scorn my own excuses. There can be no defense, surely, but there must be one. At each swing back and forth the noose constricts a little tighter around my neck, and I feel myself sinking further. I should have done more. I should have been ready.

  There's a bottle of subglacic vodka on the captain's table before me, a glass fully poured, but I haven't touched it yet. For ten years I barely touched a drop, except for the final year when Ruin took my children, and it became all I lived for. Battered in the Skulks, it was my refuge, the last hole of a lost and broken man.

  It calls to me now.

  We are cruising slow and low, far beneath the subglacic's usual operating depth. The metal around me groans to reflect that. Heclan always told me these ships could take far more pressure than they were gauged for, but what does that mean now? Why am I even trying to hide?

  I laugh.

  "Who the hell are you?" I ask out loud. "Who the hell?"

  One of the Don's Hawk's comes in. Her face shows mild confusion.

  "Sir?" she asks.

  "Who the hell are you?" I ask her.

  "Uh, Algehriel, sir."

  "What is that, old-Alab?"

  "Mohammen, of the Darain plains."

  It doesn't mean anything to me. "You fought in the desert War, an arene," I say, and she nods. "Were you looking forward to blowing up the whole world?"

  She looks at me blankly. "Sir?"

  "Don Zachary's quakeseeds, were you looking forward to surfing the global killer wave around the world?"

  A gentle frown creases her forehead. She must be around my age. I sense he left three children behind in the bunker, all by different men, each long gone now. This woman cared for them. She took a job with the Don to pay for them. She is not a bad woman, perhaps she is what I might have been, if I'd taken a different path. The quakeseeds were never part of her plan.

  Did I really kill her family?

  I rest my head in my hands. I can't get any consolation this way. I can't help this woman and I don't deserve her forgivenes
s. What then should I say?

  "I'm sorry," I tell her.

  "Sorry for what, sir?" she asks.

  I haven't the heart to say. I am too much the coward to say. I should lift the bond of compulsion off her and let her beat me to death, but I'd probably not be able to resist. I am too weak to lay back, too soft to surrender. I would fight back, and I'd win, and I'd only hurt her more.

  What the hell kind of person am I?

  "Just go," I say.

  She does, and I hear her footsteps clack back to her post. Probably she'll stand there for a few minutes now, wondering what she ought to do next. I'm having a hard time keeping hold of all these minds.

  "Go to bed," I call out down the hall.

  A moment passes. "Me, sir?"

  "Go to sleep," I repeat. "You're tired."

  Another moment, then she clacks away. Perhaps she was the last still awake. I'm too tired to reach out and see. I'm too tired to get up and go look. I think of the jealous subglacic captain who foundered his own vessel, all because his lieutenant didn't love him back.

  How much worse have I just become?

  The vodka glass looms large in my eyes. It becomes an answer, as it has many times before. I pick it up and knock it back, then pour another and do it again, and again.

  Let them wake up and mutiny. Let them tie me to the periscope and dive so deep my eyes pop. I don't care. I didn't ask for this and I don't want it anymore.

  Goodbye Loralena, goodbye Art, goodbye Mem. I loved you so much, and now I have to go. I can bring you nothing but pain, and I cannot stand to do that again.

  12. THE CHORD

  Rocking, rocking. I lie in darkness, surrounded by my chord. They are each distinct, their forms gathered around my body as I lie splayed on the floor of the med-bay.

  They are watching me, and I know I have let them down. I have let Far down. Me looks down at me with pity. In Doe, so influenced by Ven, there is cold contempt.