Soul Jacker Box Set

by Michael John Grist

  I taste salt, urine, vomit. All the things I've done, for him.

  "You'll be so beautiful," he says softly to me, all the time. "When you ride the pike."

  not this

  I shudder and shiver. I don't want to hear this voice. I have learned terrible things about myself and the voice only makes it worse. It is this, I argue back. It is this! I cannot hide from the truth. Now I have learned the color of the inside of my bones. I have learned what suffocating on my own screams feels like. I have tasted shame I could not imagine.

  "We can be like this forever," the King said fondly. "You and I. You'll parade for me at every Court with the pike jostling up your ass, and I will be so proud."

  not this

  At the end he fed me like a baby.

  "One more," he insisted, pushing another of my fingers to my lips. "Just one."

  "No," I murmured.

  "It's all right," he said. "You're hungry. I know you are."

  He made me eat. Spoonful by spoonful, I ate.

  "Can you imagine the ones in the fort?" he asked. "Can you imagine how that must have felt for poor Harim Ongshoy?"

  I am too hungry to be sick. I have eaten nothing but pieces of myself for days.

  not this

  It is this!

  I scream the answer in my mind. Hope only hurts, now. I rage against this small voice that won't be silent, that always brings on worse punishments and earns a disappointed look from the King and a crueler scoop from my Soul.

  not this

  Stop it! I tumble through dried patches of blood on the floor, beating at my own head. I tug at the stitches in my forehead.

  think

  - says the small voice.

  think, me, think

  I can't think, though. Think with what? I have nothing left. I sob in the near dark. This is what he wants, to turn me against myself and dig this voice out and present it to him on a platter, and I would if I could. It's all that I want.

  think

  I beat my forehead against the floor. I beg it to stop but it just keeps on, as insistent as the King.

  not this

  think

  Tears dry on my cheeks and I lie there helpless and hopeless, unable to do a thing but wait for the mercies of sleep, but sleep holds no mercies for me.

  I dream I am lost in a Sunken World of mud, trekking alone, always alone. Everything I see is gray and dying, the land like a toxic seabed pregnant with festering gases that wheeze through in oily bubbles.

  Somehow this place is familiar. I feel ghosts moving across my trail and calling to each other, maybe calling to me. We are seeking each other but we cannot see. I feel them dying nearby, sacrificing themselves for something that matters and I long to be there at their sides.

  Then a tug comes on my shoulder. In moments I am yanked upward as though on a grapnel line, racing out of the mud and up past two cancerous suns raging red in the sky until I'm somewhere very high, looking down on a planet wrapped up with the creeping red-brown bond-lines of King Ruin.

  I weep to see them.

  They are everywhere, so thickly interwoven I can scarcely see the ground below, like a disease consuming the world. Every one is a feeding tube linking a Court to the King. I see whole cities buried in the radioactive sands of Armorica, their buildings crammed floor to ceiling with tens of thousands of the dead, Lagged and left to mummify in the enclosed air. I see great container ships laden with bodies as cargo, every box filled with the dead and left to drift aimlessly on the tides of this new world. I see the entire planet wrapped up like a fly in the King's web, suffering on his whims.

  A voice comes from behind me.

  "Ask yourself why, Me."

  I turn and see a boy hanging in the darkness behind me. Bright weals glow on his cheeks and down his neck. Over his shoulder a purple star pulses in the aether.

  "It's you," I say. "The voice."

  He doesn't smile.

  "Ask yourself why," he repeats. "If he has the bridge, why does he need so many Courts?"

  "Who are you?" I ask.

  He doesn't answer. "Think, Me. It's all you have left. Think for yourself."

  He fades then and I am left alone, wondering at his words. They seem to float around me like stars. Courts and bridges. What do I know of such things?

  I wake with a violent start in my broken body to see King Ruin's hand sitting cross-legged beside me. The pain is everywhere again, the ache insistent. Echoes of his tortures ring in my mind. How long has it been, a few days? Is that all?

  There is a skinning knife in his hand now, threatening new wonders to come.

  "What was that dream?" he asks casually, as if it doesn't matter and he is merely curious. I know this about him by now. He is a bad actor.

  I unstick my lips from the blood crusting them together, put aside the ache in my jaw and raise my head to look into his eyes. "What dream?"

  He looks back at me, seeing something new. I don't know what it is, only that I am a fool for feeling this way.

  yes

  The voice in my head comes again, helping me remember the planet covered in bonds, and the aether, and how strong I used to be. Some small glimpse of that earlier man shines through and gives me strength.

  I start to think.

  This hand wants to break me, I think. This King. He wants me to ride in his Court like all the others, and that's where the secret lies.

  yes

  In a flash of inspiration I see it, and once I've seen it I can't unsee it. The hand's eyes widen on me, reading the revelation as it comes.

  "You lied," I say. The words fall clumsily between the clotted blood in my gums, but just saying them helps me understand. "About the bridge. There are no thousand others who passed before me. No others have ever done it, bar you and I." I pause. "And you can't do it any more, can you?"

  For a moment his expression wrinkles, betraying a hint of anger beneath. I don't need the bonds to know I am right. Even this King with all his slaves cannot cross the bridge. It all seems so plain now. It was lost in the pain before, in his eyes and mind always enforcing my suffering, but the truth was always there.

  If he could cross the bridge he wouldn't need any of this: not the Courts, not me, not a parade of failures to warn his people. He could just feed off every Soul in the aether at once. He could crush any revolutions from within long before they began. He wouldn't have sent EMR-buzzing hands and mindbombs to snatch me in proto-Calico; he would have found and disabled me in instants through the aether. He would not have done any of the things he has done so far.

  Knowing that flushes me with fresh strength. It gives me leverage, and I know he can hear all these thoughts, and I don't care.

  His face smooths out and he stares off into the distance. Receiving instructions from the King.

  I go for him with what teeth I have left. Only at the last moment does he halt me. I would have made it, would have ripped out his jugular if only I still had my hands.

  He looks at me calmly.

  "I'm the only one who can cross the bridge," I say, hardly needing to force the anger now, "and I will never, ever teach you."

  He just stares, reading into me.

  "You're afraid," I say. "You don't know what I am."

  He gives a small nod. The decision is made; to go further than he ever went before. "Let's find out."

  THE CHORD

  N. RAY

  The twin suns blaze a furious red overhead.

  "They're getting nearer," Ti says, as they work on levering bricks out of the lower wall with bayonets.

  Ray looks up. Sitting by the wall's base he works one-handed with a bayonet, taking frequent breaks. On his own he would have scraped away the mortar for perhaps one stone. With Ti they have cleared five.

  The suns grow hotter.

  "Not colliding with each other," Ray says. "That's what I first thought."

  "They might still collide with us. They're already forcing a corona effect around the Molten Core."
<
br />   Ray snorts. "Sunken World," he corrects.

  Ti shoots him a look.

  "You've been correcting everyone this whole time," he says to that look. "Don't dish it out if you can't take it.

  Ti sighs, as if she is so perpetually put-upon. Ray chuckles to himself as she goes on. "It's a collision course, one way or another. Take a look for yourself."

  Ray looks. Beyond the heap of piled up dead soldiers they've stacked on one side of the trench, beyond the stack of wall-stones they've stacked on the other, even beyond the garbled trenchlands of the courtyard, pitted now with sink-holes they've spent hours digging and covering over, past the line of trebuchet spikes they've built, he sees the sky.

  The black clouds are bloody with red. There is a clear red haze rising from where the horizon would be, cut off now by the edge of the rampart wall.

  "What does it mean?" he asks.

  "Fusion," says Ti. She slings an image to his HUD, which he can barely focus on through the blear of exhaustion. He thinks back to another raid, when his vacuums stopped working by the blast door. His suit has seen some real stress in its day.

  "Looks like blotchy eggs," he hazards. "And bacon?"

  Ti tuts. "It's a new bond forming. Whatever that thing is, it's coming so close that gravometric bonds are going to start pulling it in. That's what the bacon is."

  Ray studies the image more. "The bacon," he repeats.

  "Not bacon," Ti says, infinitely patient. "A killer link bringing atomic bond fusion. Like a QC particle. Like antimatter to everything here."

  "Hmm," says Ray. "Yeah. Not much difference though, is there, between dying because of that or dying to the worms, or the pulses or the mud?"

  Ti just stares. Wrong answer.

  "OK," he says. "I'll bite. What happens to us if that bond hits?"

  She continues her lecture, looking pleased with herself. "Just look at the mass of this place, then look at the mass of those suns. We're already emptying out and losing mass to them constantly, while those binary stars grow larger. If they get close enough we'll just get hoovered up."

  Ray considers this. Perhaps that would be a good way to die? "What will happen to us?"

  "Spaghettification," says Ti. "Acceleration far beyond terminal velocity. We'd be strained to ribbons."

  Maybe not. "Oh."

  "It's not ideal."

  He thinks about this for a time, while still scratching at the mortar lines in the wall. "Is that where the helicopters are coming from?"

  "From the surface of a sun? I don't know. It's possible, I suppose. Then those are no suns like I've seen before."

  "So maybe we won't be spaghettified?"

  "It's anyone's bet right now," says Ti, and Ray laughs.

  "What?"

  "That was funny. You're not normally funny, either."

  She snorts. "Have we ever even spoken? Normally I'm long dead by now, right?"

  He laughs more. "Right! Nobody knows you at all."

  "Well," she says, but can obviously think of nothing more to say.

  "Of course your sacrifice is appreciated. Every time."

  "Good."

  Ray feels giddy, ready to laugh at any little thing, but he holds it back. "Well, I think they're definitely connected. The suns and the helicopters. We just need to know what they want."

  "We need to know what we want."

  Ray laughs. "There you go again!"

  For a while longer they work in silence, scratching blocks out of the wall. From outside the baying of the worms grows louder.

  "They're hungry," says Ray. "Would you mind?"

  "No problem."

  Ti gets up from her seat by the wall and goes over to the pile of dead soldiers. She affixes one of them by the ankle to the trebuchet they rigged out of cross-beams. Three wall stones sit in the weight carriage. She unhooks the tether and lets the mechanism go.

  The stone blocks drop slowly. The long arm travels fast, yanking up the soldier and hurling him out over the wall.

  The baying of the worms grow louder. It's more of a shouty bass whisper though, Ray wonders, all grind and no substance. Just feeding the Lag.

  From without there is a sploosh, a long wait, then another sploosh.

  Ray raises one eyebrow, impressed. "They're jumping higher."

  "That was the longest airtime yet," Ti says, checking the simulation in her HUD. "Maybe fifty feet."

  "High enough for helicopters."

  "High enough to get over the wall," she counters.

  Ray smiles. "They won't. Not while there's anything out there to eat. This isn't like the mission into Ritry Goligh's Solid Core we did. This mind has turned on itself."

  "This mind may only be held together by those suns," she says, pointing. "The corona suggests that. The bond is already happening, the bacon, and that's what's keeping the sky up over our heads instead of squashing us flat."

  "Hmm," says Ray, thinking back to the notion of spaghettification into the suns. Which is worse, really, that or getting squashed by the sky?

  He finishes scraping out the last bit of mortar around his stone as Ti winches the trebuchet weight back up.

  "I think that's enough to bring the rampart down," he says.

  "Roger that," says Ti. "Where will you run the fuse to?"

  Ray points to the Tower. "There. Last fallback."

  "We should check the way. Be sure it's clear."

  It has been hours since Doe last checked in, a garbled message to tell them she was with Ruin and heading in to the Tower. Ray only caught half of the words. Already the Solid Core is working its interference.

  "We will," says Ray. "Now, incendiaries."

  He slowly, slowly pushes himself to his feet. His right side feels stronger now, enough to take his weight, though the freshly dislocated left side is less so.

  "How does it feel?" Ti asks.

  "Like I'm a jigsaw," he grunts. "I have to stand up just right."

  "It felt like it too, putting you back together. It was grotesque. Bone fragments got everywhere. In my hair."

  Ray laughs. "I owe you. Bonus points for doing it in a pyramid."

  He starts toward the stone steps that lead to the wall's rampart. The incendiaries will go there, he thinks, hidden in the clothes of the Napoleonic soldiers they've propped against the wall to make the Tower look fully manned. Boom, any helicopter flying low overhead gets a bellyful of improvised napalm. For anyone who follows and lands, the wall crashes underfoot and the worms pour in.

  "I've been thinking about the pyramid," Ti says as Ray starts up the stairs.

  "Oh yes?"

  "The votive thing. The hieroglyphs. Is there anything to suggest Ruin was into that?"

  "Not that I know of."

  "So what is it? And the suns. You've heard of Egypt?"

  Ray screws up his eyes in concentration. "Some kind of eggplant?"

  Ti looks unimpressed. "No. It was a nation before the fall, in Ritry Goligh's world."

  "Well, good."

  "It had pyramids, and hieroglyphs, and votives. Also a sun god."

  "Two sun gods?"

  "Just one. Maybe this thing is the sequel."

  Ray reaches the rampart, strung with his incendiary dummies. Burn baby, burn. Looking out over the wall he sees the tunnel mouths left in the mud by the ten or so worms gathered outside. Brown cheese, he thinks. Every now and then one of them shuffles to the surface, snouts at the air with its yellowy proboscis, then sinks down again.

  Only ten, he thinks. There used to be more, but they've been eating each other and growing. It will take more than howitzer fire to burst them now.

  The dying mind of Mr. Ruin is aggregating here.

  "Sequel," he says, looking up at the sky. The heat from the suns is palpable. "Maybe you're right."

  "I think we have to kill them," Ti says.

  "I expect so," Ray agrees. "But how do you kill a sun, without getting spaghettified or squashed?"

  "There's really only one way to kill a sun," T
i says. "Run it dry. All suns die that way, they core their own insides for energy and eventually they implode into black holes."

  "How would we accelerate that?" Ray asks.

  "No idea," Ti says. "Normally it takes millions of years. It might be possible to overload it too, to force an early supernova, but the energy required would be enormous."

  "I don't think we have millennia," Ray says. "And Doe took the rest of our candlebomb."

  He scans the horizon line. It is utterly flat now, leveled by the tsunamis.

  "Any idea when the next wave comes?"

  "I'd wager after the next batch of helicopters. We have until after that. Probably an hour. It can't be easy, breaking through the shell around this place."

  Ray pats the rampart top. Good solid stone, painful to have land on your head. Fatal, really. You could rely on stone.

  He thinks back to a time a day or so ago, waking in the forging tube of the ship and not wanting to get out. There was no Me to get them started, and So was so cold, and the twins didn't want to wake.

  "We barely made it when we passed into this place," he says. "We lost the Bathyscaphe. How are these suns sending ship after ship?"

  "At great cost, I expect," Ti says. "Expect a storm, when they come. Dense thunderclouds. Their arrival will tear any last mooring bonds away. The fuse should run for minutes only."

  Ray grunts. The last short fuse almost killed him. He owes it to Doe and Ti and La for saving him. How strange it is, to be one part of another man's mind and know it.

  Once there was a time he had no idea about any of it; he was just another sublavic marine following orders. Missions followed missions and that was enough for him, but all that changed after they blew open the aetheric blast-door. He still remembers Far plunging the bayonet into his chest, and being reformed in the blast of power that followed. Now he knows he is part of the god-like creature called Ritry Goligh, one member of a seven-tone chord birthed from the pulse of an artificial womb.

  It's odd. It's a strange kind of coming of age. He can accept he was never a child, as that was Far's role. He is something in between, an aspect or a facet. What that says about him loving Doe, even making love to her, he prefers not to think about.