Soul Jacker Box Set

by Michael John Grist

  Then it stops.

  Orange glow from a cracked oxygen flare flickers and dances nearby like firelight, casting eerie shadows over the rubble pile their QCs made of the pyramid walls; sealing them inside the hidden passage. Ray is breathing heavily, flat on the floor between them, and Doe is kneeling by his side, as tense as load-bearing elasteel. The numb reality that So has already died washes over her.

  It was Ti who went first the last time. She remembers being down in the screw room while the sublavic breached the Molten Core's surface, with the heat of the Core cutting through the protective brick cladding. Sweat had streamed down her unsuited skin, and she'd known then she would not escape the ship.

  It was Me's order though. Me had sent her down there, and there was no question she would do it. Her twin La had to live, the chord had to live, so she worked through until Me's thank you came ringing down on the Engine Order Telegraph bell, barely audible over the tormented screech of the screw as it stripped the last of its threads.

  That made it worth it, because it was for Me.

  But where was Me now?

  Now her sister wheezes softly in her embrace, a low rasp under the flood's cavalcade, which is no surprise since Ti's HUD tells her shrapnel from the entrance blast punctured La's left lung. She's lost blood and won't be able to endure any prolonged exertion. It makes Ti ache for her.

  She'd rather be the one to be hurt or killed. It would be easier than this, to watch and be unable to help. She's already inventoried all the gear they didn't strip off in their sprint for cover, and concluded there's nothing in it to plug a ruptured lung.

  The shrapnel has to stay embedded where it is; a narrow splinter of stone jammed through her intercostal muscles and ribs. The suit has to stay on. Without those things in place, La would die in moments, just like before. Ti has a ghostly memory of her sister's death scene, when La died in Me's arms on the outer Solid Core ring. She loves him for that, which only makes his absence now harder.

  She becomes aware of Doe looking at her, a strange, curious look on her albino face.

  "You can let go," she says. "It's over."

  Ti blinks, and realizes she has both her hands clamped around her sister's shrapnel wound. The roar of the flood is gone, and all that remains is the hiss of the oxygen flare and the stale sound of their breathing.

  She releases, and La smiles at her. "I feel all right," she says. "Really."

  Ti knows it's a lie, but she smiles back anyway. They hold hands while Doe turns her attention to Ray.

  "We need to set these limbs," she says.

  Ray nods vacantly, spaced out on shock-jacks; a mixture of sedative and adrenaline chemicals drawn from his own body, re-injected by his suit when needed. "I can take it."

  "It looks like all four limbs," Doe goes on. "It'll take time."

  Ray gives a weak grin. "Wouldn't have it any other way."

  Doe touches his chest. Ti is surprised, because Doe rarely shows affection of any kind. "Sleep well," Doe says, and turns a dial on his chest.

  Ray's grin slackens and his eyes close.

  Doe turns to Ti, all tenderness gone. "We have to work fast. There's barely enough shock-jacks in his suit to keep him under, and I don't care how tough he thinks he is, we'll never set these breaks with him awake."

  Doe sends endosuit gamma shots of Ray's four limbs to Ti's HUD. They show his bones are not just broken; they're pulverized.

  "Holy…" Ti breathes.

  "He balled them in front," La says, demonstrating by crossing her arms across her chest, carefully avoiding the jutting splinter. "Without that his chest and face would've been crushed by the blast."

  Ti studies the length of Ray's left arm in the gamma scan. There are four major breaks in the ulna, two to the radius, three in the humerus. His elbow has burst like a glass-bomb, driving powdered bone fragments outward through his muscles. Just this limb alone would take a day of full surgery in the Bathyscaphe, followed by a week of adaptive traction to heal completely.

  They're in a pyramid.

  "How is he even alive?" Ti whispers.

  "He's a lieutenant in the chord," says Doe coldly, "and he didn't have permission to die. Now help me get this suit off. La, can you walk?"

  La grits her teeth; her own injury has made her fractious. "Did So have permission to die?"

  Doe stares back, brooking no bullshit. "So had her orders. Now if you can walk, get out and scout the corridors. Do not take anything resembling a risk. Understood?"

  La barks her answer. "Understood."

  She levers herself up and starts away down the narrow stone corridor, turning her suit's whitelights to full. Ti notices her left arm hanging limp at her side, and for a moment feels the phantom pain. Another injury; she hadn't even seen it, too focused on the punctured lung.

  Doe taps her on the HUD. "Ray first," she says, and Ti nods.

  Ray's suit is cracked and warped, but has already sealed itself with epoxy-resin built into its ventricles. With a series of HUD over-ride commands Doe floods his arm with anti-necrotizing mites and microbial platelets, has the suit tourniquet bloodflow at the shoulder joint, then unlocks the outer shell.

  Clasps down the length of the arm click open, though some are too buckled to release and only make a sad clunk. Carefully Ti and Doe work around these broken points, peeling off the suit. It comes away like fractured sections of eggshell, held together by the epoxy membrane. It reminds Ti of the moment Me and So opened up La's suit to watch innard soup roll out, another ghost memory from the chord.

  There's no viscera with Ray though, only a syrupy mix of sweat, blood and the mite/microbial solution. Underneath it his arm is a gory wreck, as though it's been through a wringer. Ti wonders if she will be sick, looking down at the wreckage of bone, tendon and muscle, so bright against the black of Ray's skin. It looks like the ravaged Sunken World above, gouged by tsunami.

  Doe is pale and cold in the face of it. "Here," she says, pointing, "and here. We tie with wire, fuse these parts, then leave the microbials to patch him up. Ti, look at me. I need your help. Take off your gloves."

  Ti looks down and sees the dark mud spattered over her gloves. She nods and clicks out of them. Doe sprays her own fingers down, such pale waxy things, with disinfectant that smells like lavender, then they begin.

  It is triage, but so they go, picking out bone fragments that can't be saved, settling ragged bone edges together like twigs in a fragile nest, clipping veins, nerves, tendons, and muscles back together with shots of microbial glue.

  Ti has been a medic's assistant before, but never like this. Open to the air, Ray's arm seems so plainly just a badly damaged machine, one they have no spare parts for. They can only tinker with it as best as they can, using the blunt instruments of scalpels and field-glues. Still, the suit should serve well enough as a traction tank. He may get full use back, some day.

  Last of all is the skin. It has been badly ripped by burst bone spars, so they stitch it together again like braiding a quilt, stretched snug over muscle. They spray it down with lavender disinfectant, take readings for blood-tightness, and Doe nods. Carefully they bandage him in his armor again, like a cocoon, and Doe unlocks the shoulder tourniquet.

  They watch the readings as blood flows back into the limb, barely breathing, but it seems to hold.

  "It looks good," says Doe.

  Ti becomes aware of La slumped against the wall nearby. She realizes she has been there for some time, returned from her scouting and wheezing hard, but she was too involved with Ray to notice. Now she notices the exhaustion on her twin's wan face.

  "I found something," La says. "It's bizarre."

  "Is there any danger?" Doe asks.

  "I don't think so," La answers, pausing to breathe. "None immediate."

  Doe nods. "Then tell us while we work. We can't stop now."

  Ti smiles for her twin, then turns back. They begin the triage process again with Ray's left arm, while La tells them what she found.

 
; G. TI

  Two hours pass as they repair Ray. The bones in his right leg are worst where the blast hit first, powdered like bondless golden spray in a jelly solution, but once the shrapnel is removed they recombine what they can with an amalgam of the suit's resin and bonding mites.

  "He'll hold," says Doe. "In a few hours he should be solid enough to be carried. Now." She turns to La, who is already half-asleep. "You need to rest. Increase the oxygen scrubbers in your HUD, that should give your one lung something more to work with. We'll be back soon."

  "I should guard him," La says woozily. Ti can see she is barely hanging on to consciousness.

  "You're no kind of guard like this," says Doe. "Put on the suit motion sensors, and if anything comes we'll know. I need you lucid, and you're far from that now."

  La nods dully, and allows herself to slide down the wall. The tip of the stone splinter poking through her back rasps against the wall, leaving a long bright scratch mark. She lays out flat on her side, arms by her sides like a good little soldier.

  "All right," she barely manages, and closes her eyes.

  Doe rises to her feet and Ti joins her. "Let's go," she says, and starts away.

  "HUD off," Doe orders, and Ti complies. The corridor is dark and dusty, lit starkly by their whitelights. The air smells of must, wet gravel and acetone. Underfoot lies a granular orange sand, interspersed with thin brown shells that crackle under their boot heels.

  "Beetle husks," Ti says, recognizing the shape.

  Doe only grunts.

  The corridor stretches in a straight line for far longer than seems likely, given the size the pyramid had been on the outside. Ti says nothing, because La has already told them this. The corridor doesn't veer or turn, only continues straight with no inclination up or down.

  Ti runs her fingers along the walls as they go, dipping in and out of the endless stream of markings carved there. They are plainly a language, but nothing her HUD can decipher.

  "Do these mean anything to you?" she asks Doe.

  Doe shakes her head. "No. I ran them through decryption, and they're gibberish. Maybe they once meant something, but not any more. Everything is rotting here."

  Ti aims her suit lights at the wall. The 'words' are made of simple images in long rows, each intricate and clear, carved with a precision that cobwebs and dust can't obfuscate: an old wooden saucer-ship of some kind, a heart, two suns in the sky, a crackling star, an outstretched hand. None of them seem to repeat, like an alphabet with endless letters.

  "Stop looking at them," says Doe. "They're corrupted data, like the mud. They'll only confuse you."

  Ti turns her lights to focus on the darkness ahead.

  "Here," says Doe, and points. There is a break in the wall, the first they've come across, and it leads inward. "This is what La saw."

  Ti reaches for her QC then remembers she left it behind, the charge depleted in the mud rush. She doesn't have any weapon left but herself.

  "Eyes up," Doe says, and leads them in.

  Turning right, they walk another long distance before emerging into the hollow at the center of the pyramid. Ti gasps. What lies before them is as bizarre as La promised.

  It is people.

  The chamber is large, octahedral with a pyramidal roof set atop eight pillars of soft orange stone, and featureless but for the spherical lattice of people erected in its midst.

  "Thirty-five," Doe says clinically, already advancing. Ti finishes her own count, surveying the structure. There are indeed thirty-five people composing the edifice, all full-size, each with their own individual clothes and faces and hair, all of them stretched ramrod straight and linked to each other at head and feet by some means that defies gravity, in a rough globular matrix.

  Here there's a woman in a plaid gray business suit, tipped at 45 degrees like a tent pole, supporting a spray of three bodies angled off her head; one a dark-skinned man in a white poncho, one a yellow woman with a neck elongated by 23 copper torcs, one a dwarfish man with hooks for hands. There's something familiar about their distribution, something too regular in the chaos, and Ti swiftly recognizes it.

  "It's an atom," she says, and slips her HUD back on while circling the spheroid stack, capturing a three-dimensional render through the visor. Against the black of a sketchpad she maps chemical bonds along the bodies and potential atomic elements like electrons, neutrons and protons atop the joins.

  "It's an atom," she repeats as she comes full circle to stand beside Doe. "But it's not on the standard periodic table."

  Doe is leaning close to the face of a grizzled old man in a flowing dark robe, tipped upside down with his head perfectly balanced atop the back of a young woman wearing a metallic bikini.

  "What do you mean, not standard?" Doe asks absently.

  "It's a hypothetical structure." Ti spins the wire-frame shape in her HUD like one of So's maps. "The molecule counts are skewed, the bonds aren't right; this thing could never exist in real life."

  Doe considers. "Maybe. I think it's some kind of art."

  Ti lets the cloud of connections and bonding lines drop off her HUD. "Why would art be here? And why a non-existent molecule?"

  "I don't know," Doe says, running her gloved fingers through the old man's thick salty beard. "More nonsense, maybe. But touch them; they're carved like the Napoleonic soldiers inside Ritry Goligh's Solid Core." A pause hangs between them as she lets the weight of that settle in. "Our last mission. They were guards, then, trying to keep us out. I don't think these are. But they're not only decorative either."

  She draws a knife from her thigh-sheath and presses it into the cheek of a man dressed in some kind of stained beige jodhpur. The knife-tip enters, but Doe has to push hard to drive it any further in. She twists and a splinter of matter jags out of the man's cheek.

  "Plastic," says Doe. "Like the soldiers."

  Ti picks up the splinter and presses it into a small specimen box unclipped from her belt.

  "What do you make of it?" Doe asks.

  Ti seals the box and plugs it into her belt to runs a quick spectrographic analysis. Results chime through her cochlear implant via blood-mic, and she slings the result to Doe: zero trace of organic life.

  "Never alive," Doe muses, drawing a faint line down the jodhpur man's cheek with her knife tip, down to his chest and slitting through his white frilled tunic. "Fake wood. Fake fabric."

  "They're memories," Ti says, making the leap. "Embodied."

  "Memories, that's right," Doe muses, "and this is some kind of strong-room to store them. A vault."

  Ti considers. "So these represent friends? Family?"

  Doe shakes her head, then sheathes the knife in its thigh-holster. "I don't think so. Too many garbs, too many eras, and I've never seen memories stacked like this, for show. There's something ghoulish about it."

  Doe's albino face has gone ever whiter. It sends a trill of fear down Ti's spine. "Then what are they?"

  Doe points. In the gap she has torn through the jodhpur man's tunic, a patch of his underlying skin is visible. Through it protrudes the gleam of a silver arrowhead, beaded around with dry blood.

  "Victims," says Doe. "Enshrined here, in one of the few places still surviving the tsunami. We're not in Ritry Goligh's mind this time, Ti. We're somewhere altogether darker."

  She doesn't need to say the name. Given the plastic figures, where else can it be? Ti swallows hard.

  "We need to get out."

  "We need to do as we're ordered," says Doe sharply, "and I just learned our next directive."

  "How?" asks Ti.

  Doe points to her chest. Ti looks down and sees something splattered there in yellow paint, daubed just like on So's chest in tall, sloppy letters.

  TAKE THE WHITE TOWER

  She laughs involuntarily; not in amusement but barely strangled panic.

  "It's better than 'Run for your lives,'" Doe says.

  "Is it? You and I, La with her lung impaled and Ray without a single working limb. It w
on't be much of a siege."

  "We've come this far," says Doe. "We'll go further still. Besides," she points back to the passageway. "La's awake, she has me on blood-mic. It looks like the mud found a way through the rubble. We should get back."

  They turn, and by their suit whitelights see the thin carpet of mud creeping along the dry floor toward them.

  "It gets everywhere," Doe says, "there's no defense against it."

  "Ray's not ready to move yet," Ti protests.

  "That doesn't matter." Doe looks at her intently. "What matters is the mission. We aren't victims, we're marines, and we've got a job to do."

  Ti nods. Of course, she realizes, there has always been Doe. Without Me she felt rudderless for a time, but still they have Doe, who's been their rudder all along.

  She nods. "Then let's go take the tower."

  H. DOE

  "The mud's rising fast," La comes through on joint blood-mic as they run back toward her. Her voice is a labored pant. "We have to leave."

  "We will," says Doe, and cycles through the chord's specs in her HUD, reading the status of La's right lung in glowing green letters. It is slowly filling with fluid, and the enhanced oxygen levels can only do so much. They can't drain it, which means she will soon enough drown on her own fluids. Ray meanwhile is prone, unconscious still, and Doe can only hope the microbials inside his suit are doing their work.

  "It's overflowing him!" La calls, and now Doe can hear the panicked echo of her voice ringing off the walls as well as through blood-mic. "I can't lift him."

  "Hold for the moment," Doe answers, and then they are there in the corridor with the mud around their knees and the orange oxyfer swallowed along with Ray. Only La is visible anymore, slumped in the mud and straining to lift something under he surface of the mud. Her face through the HUD is sickly pale and her breathing is so labored her chest moves up and down even at rest.

  "He's here," she shouts, pointing at the flowing river of mud. "Underneath, help me!"

  Doe isn't panicked; Ray had his HUD on and the air inside the suit is probably better than the pyramid, but there is still no time to waste. "Let's get him up," she says to Ti, "his suit's locked, but slowly."