Soul Jacker Box Set

by Michael John Grist

  "What are you chuckling about?" Ti asks.

  "Nothing. Something, I suppose. What it means to be a marine in this chord, now. Do you remember when I woke you up in the ship?"

  "Yes," says Ti. "I didn't want it."

  "Neither did I. They say babies have to be smacked after they're born, to get them to breathe."

  A pause, while the sound of Ti finishing up her scraping grinds through on blood-mic. "Who says that?"

  "I don't know. It's something I heard."

  "Hived off Ritry Goligh, no doubt."

  "I expect so. Did it feel strange to you, to be woken by me? To wake out of sequence like that?"

  "It's a becoming," Ti answers. "Becoming something new."

  "New demands," says Ray.

  A moment passes, then Ti speaks again. "It's all finished down here. All the stones are out and there's powder lodged where it'll do the most damage. Fuses strung. Every trebuchet has a body looped in and they're all primed to fire. What now?"

  Ray turns and looks down into the courtyard. The long arms of their five trebuchets lie flat to the mud, ready to start the party.

  "I think we can manage one more surprise," he says, as the idea comes.

  "What is it?"

  Ti pops out from below the rampart's shadow, looking up at him like a kid expecting presents.

  Ray grins. It's a new idea; something he'd never have thought of before, something only this new Ray would even imagine.

  "Have you heard the story of the Trojan horse?"

  "Of course."

  "Well, it's like that. And I think we better hurry, because-"

  His suit alarms him first, set to gamma-radar. He turns back and looks over the flat mud plains, tightening the resolution on his HUD. There is a line of black grit rising over the horizon.

  "Because what?" Ti asks.

  On the deepest zoom Ray slings the image over to Ti and to Doe if she has any signal. There are twenty Dactyl helicopters surging toward them, bigger and more powerful models than before, and they all drip blood from their rotors.

  "Incoming," he says. "Ti, it's on."

  O. DOE

  Doe and Mr. Ruin pick a path through the pile of blown-up bodies in the trench. She sees him picking up pieces of meat and shoving them into his pockets, but says nothing. These are all just pieces of himself.

  "You think I'm mad," he says by her side.

  "I don't think anything," Doe says, "can you walk a little faster?"

  "I might be mad, but what about you?" he asks. "You're hollow, I can see it so plainly. You're three sevenths of what you should be, like a hollow star. Do you know that a star consumes itself? Every day of burn it consumes itself from the inside until there's nothing left. It eats itself, you're eating yourself, I'm eating myself too. It's what we all do."

  Doe takes hold of his good hand and pulls him along. "You were talking about Suns, now it's stars. Which is it?"

  Mr. Ruin laughs as she drags him along. "Suns and stars are stars and suns," he says. "Meteors, now that is another thing. Asteroids. Did you ever ride a comet's trail across the sky?"

  Doe stops listening. She clicks into blood-mic.

  "I've got him," she says. "He's totally mad. We're going into the Tower. Over."

  Ray's voice when it comes back is scratchy and obscured by static. "…… careful …… battlements rigged …… signal…."

  "No read on that, Ray. It's OK. I'm going in. There may be no signal inside. Stay with the plan. Over."

  "………… Over."

  She clicks blood-mic off. They separated back at the wall, anyway. This is the Solid Core, now.

  "Here," says Mr. Ruin, "right here, albino."

  The door to the Tower stands before them, as large as the blast-door to the aetheric bridge. It is made of planks of dense-looking reddish wood, banded by black iron straps that lead to massive hinges lodged in the white stone.

  "This isn't Napoleonic," she says, turning to Mr. Ruin. "It's medieval."

  He shrugs. "I'm a man of many eras."

  "Can you open it?"

  "It's just a door," he says, grinning. "Not a bridge." He steps up and takes hold of a large black ring on the left side and turns it. A locking mechanism clicks, the door starts to swing open, and Doe notices the grin widening on his blood-plastered face.

  She dives to the side.

  A flurry of musket fire pops out from the interior as the door swings open. Mr. Ruin stands in the thick of it, grinning still, and offers her another shrug as she looks back. Doe shoots a grapnel that pinions him to the nearest trench wall by the neck, then dives through the open archway when the gunfire halts.

  The Tower is dark and fumey with gunpowder smoke and absolutely crammed with junk. She rolls, and there is too much to take it in at once, stacked to the high ceiling in piles of mahogany cabinets, baize card-tables, bookshelves overstuffed with vellum scrolls, reams of film canisters, a grand bronze scale, many grandfather clocks, a ticking planet orrery, miters, three life-sized wooden Indians and three hanging chandeliers, with every nook and cranny crammed full of ornamental crystal horses.

  Doe rises smoothly to her feet and picks out five soldiers hiding amongst the junk, holding muskets. Two of them are reloading by pouring in powder. The first doesn't see her and takes her leaping knee in the face, crunching into his plastic cheek and dropping him to the floor.

  "Grenades!" comes Mr. Ruin voice from behind, and as she turns to the next Doe gives the grapnel line a sharp tug to silence him. He gives a strangled bark and she rolls toward the four remaining soldiers.

  She impales one through the back with his own musket, elbows the next in the throat, then takes a bayonet drive on the chest plate. It scratches into the crack Ruin's musket ball made and tickles her shoulder, but she twists away with a spinning reverse kick that catches him in the head and somersaults him facefirst into the floor.

  There is then a raspy click, the thunk of old metal, and Doe throws herself for cover behind an ancient cedar armoire.

  BOOM

  The grenade sends a blast wave of sparkling glass horses outward. They ricochet off the room's hoarded treasures and tinkle down like shattered ice. The armoire tips and Doe dashes out from behind it. The man who threw the grenade is gone, as are all his fellows, except for one of their legs. One has been blown out the door and lies prone in the mud at Mr. Ruin's feet.

  Doe's ears ring. She spins around, running a quick gamma scan of the interior and finding no more soldiers waiting.

  "It was a joke only, just a joke," Ruin calls from his position at the trench wall, his hands up defensively.

  Doe stalks toward him, the blast still ringing in her ears. He flinches as she draws near.

  "Please," he says. "Please understand. It's my Solid Core, I had to try and defend it."

  Doe doesn't hit him. Instead she unloops the elasteel from around his neck. "I know that," she says. "I'm not here to hurt you any more."

  He breathes a cautious sigh of relief. "Good, good." He looks up brightly. "Well, would you like a cup of tea?"

  Doe restrains laughter. The switch was instant. "Tea sounds perfect. Lead the way."

  He does. The little old man faltering step is gone now, and he strides confidently into the vestibule of his inner Solid Core. In the middle he spreads his arms to proudly display his collection.

  "Here you'll find all the greatest treasures of my life."

  "I don't care about your life," says Doe. "I want to know about the Suns. But what's with all the horses?"

  Ruin looks back at her. "I like horses. And if you want to know the Suns, you need to know about me too."

  "Why?"

  "Because they made me."

  Doe frowns at this. "What does that mean?"

  "It means I was made. Here, can we just watch the film?"

  He points to a dusty old projector, stacked amongst other assorted display and recording devices. Doe counts three squat CRT television screens with cracked screens, one LCD,
a recording deck from a studio and a large console in olive-green metal, studded with a dizzying array of metal switches, plastic buttons and multi-colored lights.

  "What is that?" Doe asks, pointing at the console.

  "That? It's broken. It's part of the controls for my left hand." Ruin laughs. "I don't really need it in here, not without any wires going out, but I couldn't bear to leave it outside."

  Doe turns around, taking in the junk. "Is all of this your wiring? Nervous system, things like that?"

  "Most of it," he says. "Treasured memories too. Various people. You see I am dressed as my greatest possession, Napoleon."

  He gives a bow.

  "You're a killer and a torturer, and all of these were your victims."

  He shrugs. "To put a fine point on it. But it's what I was taught. You really should watch the film, it's only short. Besides, you may remember I tried to make you part of this, too. If only you'd said yes, dear Ritry. Dear, sweet albino Ritry. Now the Suns are at my door, and they won't stop until they harvest me too."

  "Tell me about the Suns."

  He sighs. "It really will be much easier if we watch the film."

  "Give me the précis."

  He stares, clearly annoyed. It seems an odd thing to be put out by, but he is an odd man. "Fine. The Suns are a god. They eat pain, and they've been doing it for thousands of years. What else do you want to know?"

  "Thousands of years?"

  "Yes, thousands."

  "And they feed on pain?"

  "And death," says Napoleon. "All the shades of psychological suffering, like a gourmet buffet."

  Doe frowns. "Why are they attacking your Tower? You're already dead."

  Mr. Ruin waves a hand dismissively. "My dear, I would have thought that was obvious. They're looking for you. You, Ritry, took my body. The Suns took you both. Now they're trying to jack into Ritry, and he's sent them here. It all makes perfect sense."

  "The Suns has Ritry?"

  Ruin is clearly growing frustrated. "Of course! At least, maybe Me? Probably the boy, Far. You're here, after all. It's all very complicated. You'll be glad to know I've decided to help you."

  "Help me how?"

  "You'll see. Now I really must insist that you watch my film. I have been curating it for days in case a moment like this should arise."

  He moves over to the projector and starts rustling about, trying to extract it from the pile.

  "It's difficult with only one hand," he says, looking back. "Perhaps you might help."

  There is no time for this, Doe thinks. And yet, there may be time for anything. The last command she got through paint on the suit was to TAKE THE WHITE TOWER. She has taken it. She is here, inside it. What else ought she do but listen to its master?

  She goes over to help. Together they dig the projector out and set it on a rickety dark wood coffee table, which Mr. Ruin steadies with a stubby piece of wood.

  "Looks like a chair leg, but actually it was a peg leg," he says brightly. "Of a pirate."

  He bustles with the cord and plugs in the projector somewhere amongst the junk. It flickers to life, and a faint image appears on the closed inner doors of the tower. Ruin hurries over and tugs down a white screen, then hurries back to pull up a chair.

  "I'll stand," Doe says.

  "Of course you will," chuckles Mr. Ruin. "This is my Tower."

  He sits down in his chair, presses a button on the projector and the image starts to move.

  It shows a burnt-orange room, some kind of primitive hut, and there is a figure moaning in the dark. The walls look like reed-grass and mud-wattle, with chinks of light shining through. The figure is a woman and she's panting hard.

  "My mother, moments before I take the stage," whispers Mr. Ruin. "She dies soon."

  Moments later she does, but not before giving birth to a screaming son.

  "That's me," he whispers. "Not so dissimilar to you, shallow copy of Ritry. No one to love me, no one to care, etc..."

  The baby cries, until it stops. The bars of light arc across the room then sink in sped-up motion, and the space grows dark.

  "A baby born alone in a cowshed," says Ruin. "I suppose I had my first taste of death right then, as I tried to sup from her dying umbilicus. Her pulse was gone and I was alone."

  Doe turns to face him. "You can't possibly remember this."

  He shrugs. "I salvaged it, once. I think it was one of the Suns' training exercises. Everything gets stored somewhere. This was stretched tight as a balloon across the skin of my Molten Core. I gathered it up and brought it here."

  "How did you survive?"

  "It wasn't anything I did. It was the Suns."

  The screen changes as the darkness thickens. There is a rickety sound of wind rattling the old hut.

  "There was a Court going on," Mr. Ruin says. "Outside, beyond the frame of this memory. The Suns was judging my whole town, somewhere in Gaul, perhaps four hundred years ago."

  Doe stares. Four hundred years? "What's a Court?"

  "Oh, yes, you wouldn't know. The Suns takes people, and through pain he turns them into food. It's simple, and he usually does it the same way because it breaks the most bonds, which squeezes out the most food. That way is to force humans to dehumanize themselves. To strip away any hint of civilization and reduce them to savagery. It's quite effective."

  Doe leans in, watching the baby on the screen. "How?"

  "Usually it's simple compression. You've heard of the Black Hole of Calcutta? Of deathships across the Pacific? I think you know the concentration gulags of the last Great War, before the Arctic. You put people together in a tight space, then more people, then more, and you deprive them of light and food and air and space. They begin to rot even while they're still alive. They fight each other. They eat each other." He pauses, contemplating. "It's like fermenting a wine, a skill the Suns has perfected to a fine art."

  Doe shudders. Some faint memory from Ritry Goligh creeps in, of a death fort upon the water filled with just these kinds of memories.

  "Then he eats them?"

  "Their bonds. It's hard work, running the world. Many he stores. He is the world spider, after all, and he's got this kind of food everywhere, left to mature over time; buried in bunkers, hidden in abandoned mines, trapped in manned torpedoes sunk to the bottom of the ocean. He is the greatest connoisseur of human suffering this world has ever known, and his hunger is endless."

  The image flickers, and it is daylight again. A man enters and stands beside a rusted ploughshare, looking down at the baby in its congealed blood and hay.

  "It happens sometimes that Souls slip through the Court," Ruin narrates. "The Suns is superstitious about these survivors. Perhaps it was the great pain of the birth that shielded my mother, or perhaps she was simply special, like you. The Suns favors these infants. In a way, we become his children."

  "So that's him?" Doe asks. "The Suns. Why do you call him that?"

  "That is one of his hands, a Soul he has taken as a vessel for his thoughts. I have never seen the real man, or woman, behind the Suns. No one has. I only know the pattern he, or she, leaves behind in the minds of all those they take, like a brand. Two burning red stars, endlessly revolving."

  The figure on the screen draws a curved sword and strikes downward. The umbilicus is cut, and he picks the child up tenderly in one hand.

  "So he raised you?" Doe asks.

  The image changes. Years have passed and this is a new room arrayed like a classroom, though at the head of the class where a board should be there is the hanging carcass of a skinned man, opened at the gut and spread-eagled. There are children at their desks before it, while the dead man speaks to them of the bonds.

  "His favorite form of tuition," says Ruin. "He taught us with corpses."

  Out of a roughly plastered stone window Doe can see a stark cliff-face, dropping away to a sparkling blue ocean crashing against distant orange rocks.

  "A promontory off old Africa," Ruin says. "Once a monastery. Here he
raised a whole brood of us. Some of these have gone on to become great craftsmen, serving their father well. They have architected slaughters the like of which you could not imagine."

  Doe looks into the eyes of the children as they listen to their gory teacher. None of them seem upset in the slightest. Several appear bored.

  "But not you," says Doe.

  He sighs. "I was great, once. But not any more."

  The image changes to something strangely familiar. There is a younger version of Mr. Ruin walking across a spent battlefield, littered with corpses of both sides. Doe recognizes the scene from the outer ring of Ritry's Solid Core; a diorama of civil war. Two armies of the Napoleonic era have fought and slaughtered each other, leaving their bodies, their weapons and their blood lying everywhere.

  Doe blinks. Even the placement of the cottages, the tipped-over carts and cannon-stands is familiar.

  "What you saw in Ritry was a living memory of this day," he says, his voice cracking with nostalgia. He points at the one moving figure. "And there am I. I have just orchestrated my first Court, with the Suns' guidance. I did well, better than many of my peers. I herded whole nations to their own pointless, debauched destitution, and under my guidance they slaughtered in their tens of thousands."

  The lanky, younger Ruin figure looks maudlin. He does not look down at his victims, but out to some unseen distance.

  "You don't look happy."

  Beside her he shrugs. "Ah, pale Ritry, you see through me so easily. Indeed, I was not happy. I should have been. There was so much to feast on. I had made my father proud. But I was not happy until he gifted me Napoleon."

  "And that made you happy?"

  "It is the only thing that ever did."

  The projector clicks, and now there is a closeup of the dysenteric, green-cheeked figure of Napoleon, kneeling in the dirt. Vomit stains his white tunic and there is filth mired around his mouth.

  "Coprophagia," Ruin says with a happy sigh. "Shit-eating. A favorite, but very challenging. In front of his wife and children, too. This, the man who crowned himself Emperor of Gaul. Such colossal arrogance. I loved him dearly."