Soul Jacker Box Set

by Michael John Grist

  A Lag worm leaps up to catch it, and is strafed by concerted Bofors fire. The second body falls from a higher arc, the range is perfect, and it gets caught up in one of the rotors, where it explodes.

  They stuffed the clothes of every soldier with all the gunpowder they could gather, and the rotor is briefly enveloped by a fireball, like a red boil swollen out of the hub. There is a terrible shearing sound as the blades warp and clash then the helicopter drops from the sky.

  The marines on board leap clear but the helicopter falls with them, and they all hit the clay together and burst in a massive red blast of fire. Worms leap up to champ down any survivors.

  Only two more of the bodies hit rotors and explode, but each takes down the helicopter.

  T-minus one and seventeen Dactyls left.

  Now their bombs rain down on the clay surface and expose Lag tunnels, bursting in sprays of wormy white meat. Now their missiles shoot on streamer jets towards the White Tower door while Bofors fire peppers the ramparts, chewing through stone and shredding any remaining propped-up bodies. Ti triggers her own howitzer and projectile QC amidst the cacophony, then drops down from the wall as the first of the huge helicopters hovers in low overhead.

  Sheltered beneath the rampart she pulls the third elasteel line, to blow the incendiary bodies atop the wall. They burst in one long chain, spewing sticky fire upwards and into the open missile-bays of the enemy as they pass overhead. They begin to blast and overload in seconds.

  Ti drops into a covered trench, longing to look back and see the carnage in the air as at least two of the machines send missiles blistering out at random angles, raking the mud-trenches with howitzer fire. To her right one of the helicopters hits the courtyard on its side with the rotor still blazing, spinning -

  CHOP CHOP CHOP

  - into the mud so hard that its cab tears apart and marines race out. Another almighty burst of fire blinds her for a second as the craft explodes, then she is down and sprinting along the dark trench.

  Her world rocks to the side as a helicopter crashes nearby and one of its landing skids scythes down through the trench wall and strikes her armored chest with a solid thump, pinning her against the mud.

  "Shit," she whispers and frantically works to dig her body out. Now there is the roar of fire and more missiles thumping overhead into the wall and the White Tower. She imagines all the helicopters setting down in the courtyard and on the wall, shooting out marines. She flicks up the remote detonator on her HUD and triggers it.

  BOOM

  The rampart wall blows where they mined it, and through the cacophony of raining stone and shouting marines she imagines the worms leaping in. There is no time. She wrenches herself free and continues sprinting down the trench, bouncing off the walls and staggering as each new explosion shakes the earth.

  The world is chaos around her as she reaches the shallow alcove dug into the top of the trench and pulls herself into it. There she lies still, one foot below the surface and hidden in the mud like a cocooned worm. She feels the solid thumps as more helicopters land around her in the courtyard. She feels the thrum of explosions as they bomb the trenches, and the thud of their booted feet thumping overhead.

  She thinks of La and the others, lost already. She thinks of Ray huddled somewhere in a similar alcove, hoping one of the explosions didn't already fragment him, hoping the worms haven't swept him up, hoping one of the helicopters didn't crush him as it landed.

  There are so many things that could go wrong.

  She thinks of Doe up ahead, hopefully deep into the heart of the White Tower by now, learning what they need and figuring out how it can be done. Doe is their leader, and though she has no special love for the analytical albino she accords her the utmost respect. If something can be done, Doe will do it.

  She feels worms leaping nearby. By now the marines will be fighting a flaming retreat to the White Tower door, where they will seek to barricade themselves against the Lag and hunt out whatever they've come for. It isn't Ti, and that is their mistake.

  She waits as their shouts and explosions track across the courtyard, and the rapid whine of their QC fire dissociates the Lag. She waits perhaps too long, hoping like she did in the firing tubes of the Bathyscaphe that Ray will come again to take the lead. He did it before, he is a lieutenant of the chord just as much as Doe, and she really needs it to be him, not her.

  But what if he's dead? What if his weakened bones dissolved beneath the blasts and now he's lying jellied in the ground, waiting for her to lead? She feels the block just like it was in the tube, and understands that this is what she must overcome. This is a becoming, and she must become whole. She readies herself to punch up through the mud and emerge.

  "Now," comes Ray's voice on blood-mic, back-washing relief through her body like a natural shock-jack. He survived the onslaught.

  "Aye aye," she shouts and bursts upwards.

  The courtyard above is a shrapnel-battered wreck, filled with the hot ticking bodies of massive Dactyls as their rotors whine down, fumed with gunpowder smoke and drifting gold bondless clouds. Ti's HUD phases through primary colors seeking pattern in the madness, picking out the bodies of enemy marines running for the Tower.

  A worm leaps up nearby and swipes the body of a marine, punching him into the mud. Candlebombs blow ahead as they work on the door, or perhaps they've already taken it out and now they're fighting Doe on the inside, Ti can't see.

  She spins, aligning her map and seeking out Ray. He's a distant blip on her visor and she makes the calculation at once. There's no way they can work together on this so she'll have to do it alone.

  "Concentrate fire on the doorway," Ray shouts through blood-mic. "We have to give Doe a chance."

  Ti runs to the front-cab entrance of the tank-like helicopter on her right and hauls herself up. The interior is black and organic and the pilot still in position at the controls.

  He lifts his weapon when he sees her but Ti is too fast, stabbing her knife through the gap beneath his visor and into his throat. He gurgles, jerks and dies.

  Ti slaps his safety belt off and hauls his convulsing corpse out of position, then drops into his seat. The controls laid out before her are complex, different from anything she handles in the engine room of the Bathyscaphe. There are two sets of steering grips, a joystick between her legs and one at her side, a console of buttons and three screens ahead.

  But it is a machine, and if Ti knows anything it is machines. She scans quickly with her HUD, deciphering as best she can, then hits three buttons, flips a switch and takes hold of the central joystick.

  The helicopter responds and the rotors fire back up to ascent speed. Ti feels the craft's incredible power as it lifts into the air.

  "Buttons in this order," she calls through blood-mic to Ray, slinging him video of her selections. "Flick the big switch and pull up on the stick."

  "Thanks, Ti," he calls.

  She rises. Sucking out of the mud and rising above the surrounding helicopters, she gets her first clear view of the White Tower since the attack. It is no longer white, rather blackened and gouged by missile fire. The doorway has been blown into a cragged O, even now thronged with marines rushing in.

  One of them notices her. He has long enough to fling up an arm and point, perhaps to give a message to his fellows, then Ti rains down holy hellfire upon them all. She unloads all the machine's remaining missiles at once, and they reach their targets in an instant, blossoming into a white-hot blaze that hurls her helicopter spinning backward.

  "Yeee haaa! Hell yeah!" Ray shouts over blood-mic. "Ritry goddamn Goligh, Ti, that was awesome!"

  She sees him now, another helicopter rising hesitantly across the rubbled courtyard.

  "Let's finish the rest," Ray goes on, and his machine spurts upward into the sky. Ti follows, hunting out the next set of controls as she goes. Her bombs drop first, chased swiftly by Ray's after she shows him how.

  The explosions rise up like corona bursts from the Molten C
ore, blowing the static helicopters and the whole courtyard to hell, followed by subsequent bursts as armored fuel tanks breach and blows.

  "Holeee shit," Ray breathes. "Are you seeing that?"

  "I see it," says Ti, "do you see this?"

  She doesn't explain what it is, because that would be too difficult. It is everything, collapsing at once. Looking back across the baked clay of the Sunken World the mother of all tsunamis is closing in, pulling not just the earth but also the stained red sky with it.

  "Dammit," Ray shouts over the roar of his rotor blades. "What kind of wave is that?"

  "It's the world collapsing," Ti shouts. "This mind is done."

  The sky is falling. The red from the Suns merges with the gray of the mud and together they rush in on all sides. The Sunken World is curling back upon itself as though sucked inward by the vast gravity of a nascent black hole focused on the White Tower.

  "It's what So predicted," Ti goes on. "The end of this world. The suns can't hold it back anymore. We're not going to get out, Ray. It has to be Doe."

  "Through the bridge," says Ray.

  "Through the bridge," Ti answers, "and we have to help her." She spins her helicopter back to look at the White Tower. It really is tall, taller than she'd ever noticed before, with the apex higher even than her hover point. "There. If it's anywhere, it's got to be at the top."

  "We'll go together," Ray calls back.

  "Roger," she shouts, then there's another blast and the seat jumps out from underneath her, the windshield smacks up into her face, and she hurtles out of the open cab-door. Her foot catches on one of the controls and arrests the fall, dangling upside down from the open cab. There is heat and a screaming sound in her ears, while below the burning black courtyard spins.

  "Ti!" Ray shouts.

  She knows that something hit the helicopter. She looks up along her body to where her leg is wedged into the handle, and sees a great chunk of the rear cab missing where a missile struck, like a bite-mark. The whole back end is on fire.

  "Bail, Ti!" Ray shouts. "The suit will soften the landing. You'll be all right."

  She looks back down to earth and sees tiny figures standing amidst the wreckage of their fragmented machines, holding a smoking QC cannon and taking aim for a second shot.

  More than anything she wants to bail, but she can't. La wouldn't do it, or So. None of the others would do it, not when survival of just one meant survival of them all. Not when Ritry Goligh's life was on the line.

  She pulls herself back into the seat even as blood runs down her cheek inside the HUD. It takes only seconds to pitch the craft pitch into a steep dive. It won't even matter if the self-destruct blows before the ground, as long as it hits.

  "What are you doing?" Ray shouts from somewhere above. "That's a direct order, dive out of the cab and lock your suit!"

  Ti smiles to herself as the wind rushes up past her. She'd always thought Ray was a bit of a jester, just comic relief alongside the clinical severity of Doe and the anguished responsibility of Me, but she can also see what he's good for in moments like this. The morale of the chord, and keeping them all together. If it wasn't for Ray they wouldn't have made it this far.

  "You can't order for this, Ray," she tells him as the wind roars and a second QC volley launches from below. "This is for the chord."

  The volley tears away her chassis but still she hangs on to the controls and steers herself down, down, falling out of the sky like a meteorite to hit the marine who took her out, who would have taken Ray out too, until -

  BOOM

  Q. DOE

  Doe ties Mr. Ruin up with an elasteel loop that pins his elbows to his sides, then runs the leash back to her grapnel.

  "Like a pet," Ruin says, with an odd smile.

  "Like a criminal psychopath."

  He shrugs. "This way."

  He scampers ahead, venturing amongst the tightly-packed stacks of hoarded bric-a-brac. Doe follows, sidling around a headless Grecian statue, past the orrery and stepping over a low wall of what look like jarred tomatoes.

  "Actually they're hearts," Mr. Ruin calls back to her. "Pickled in brine. They keep forever."

  Together they weave through the maze of old record-players stacked atop VHS decks, bathtubs filled to the brim with old papyrus scrolls, closets stocked with many-badged uniforms and fluttering with moths, until they reach a spiral staircase with its bottom few steps lost in a heap of molding fur coats.

  "Russian cavalrymen," Ruin says by way of explanation as he scuttles over them. "Very bitter, an acquired taste."

  Doe climbs the mound after him. The spiral stairs beyond are pearly white marble and rise in a graceful arc. In single file, with Ruin hurrying ahead like an over-eager dog and their feet clapping rhythmically off the stone, they begin the ascent.

  "So tell me about you," Mr. Ruin says as they climb, looking back regularly to check she is still there. "What is it like to be a piece of Ritry Goligh?"

  Doe has no interest in making conversation. "Teach me how to kill the Suns and I'll answer any question you want."

  A few silent moments pass before Ruin replies. "I don't really know how to kill him. Nobody does. Every past assassin tried to go through the bridge, but they all failed. He's too strong."

  Doe pops open her HUD visor to rub a trickle of sweat from her brow. It's getting hotter. "Because of the Courts."

  "Yes," Ruin says sadly. "He owns this world."

  "So how do I kill him?" Doe persists.

  Ruin takes a deep, shuddery breath. "It's treason to even talk about this. The things he would do to us…"

  "We're beyond worrying about that now. You're basically dead already."

  Ruin laughs. "You think being dead is any defense against the Suns? I've seen him bring the dead back. If he wanted he could snatch me from this Sunken Core and put me in a new mind just to punish me further." He pauses. "He's very inventive."

  Doe yanks on the elasteel. "Be afraid of me for now. Who did this to your Molten Core? Me. Remember that."

  "Yes," Ruin says whimsically, "well, since you put your request so charmingly. In theory there are two ways to kill the Suns: attrition and overload. Attrition would require starving him of any food. Perhaps if you could cut off all his Courts he would weaken and die. That would take years though, a concerted effort on a thousand fronts at once, one we can never do from here."

  "So how do we overload him?"

  "We increase his intake exponentially, beyond his capacity to contain. Suns go supernova when they reach a critical energy level. If we could tip him over that limit, it might be enough."

  "And how would we do that?"

  Ruin harrumphs. "I don't know. Past traitors never shared their plans with me."

  Doe thinks about this until the stairs ahead stop. Abruptly there is a wall where the next step should be, reaching up toward a vanishing point.

  "What's this?" she asks.

  "It's a step," Ruin says. "Just a very big one."

  Doe touches the wall. It's solid. "Why would a step be this big?"

  "To slow us down." Ruin is panting now in the heat. "It's a kind of automatic defense, I suppose? Use your grapnel."

  "It's attached to you."

  "Well un-attach it."

  Doe eyes him.

  "I know what you're thinking," he says. "Maybe this is a trap? Mr. Ruin was always so devious before, how can I trust him now?"

  Doe grunts.

  "It's in my interest now. The Suns will never forgive me for helping you, and I don't want to ride in his Court forever. Far better to die here, Ritry dear, and watch you tear the bastard down."

  "That's logical," Doe answers, "but you're not logical are you? You're cruel and capricious."

  Ruin looks hurt. "Yes I am, but I've changed, I promise. Besides, what choice do you have?"

  Doe stares. It is ignominious to cede her control so simply, but he's right. They're in his mind and must follow his rules. She unhooks the grapnel leash, wraps an arm aro
und him and fires it upward. The elasteel wire shoots up for long seconds before biting into something far above, then she hits the tracer and it yanks them up together. The giant white step races past, while by her side arrow-slit openings appear in the wall looking out on the Sunken World.

  Through them she catches glimpses of the courtyard and world below like frames in a zoetrope: Ti and Ray digging out blocks at the base of the ramparts; Ray on the wall pointing into the distance; Ti at the howitzer while twenty huge black helicopters swarm across the reddening sky like chunks of grit in a bloodshot eye; the Suns burning closer than ever.

  Then she reaches the top and takes the step.

  A strange vertigo hits, and instantly the staircase ahead of her splits like a kaleidoscope twisting. Where there should be one route there are now ten, then twenty or a hundred, spinning off at strange angles in tight spirals and lazy arcing ones, overlapping each other in impossible permutations.

  Doe reels. "What the hell is this?"

  "What?" Ruin asks.

  She grasps him by the throat and blinks. It feels like she might fall backward. "Don't toy with me. You did something. Which staircase is the correct one?"

  He tries to gulp but fails, starts to turn purple, and his eyes dart back and forth. "What?" He barely manages to speak through his constricted throat. "What are you talking about?"

  The staircases just thicken further, drawing themselves atop each other until Doe can no longer focus on anything. The air solidifies with thousands of insubstantial routes passing through the same space and she weaves on the spot.

  "There's no path," she says, teetering dizzily. "What happened?"

  A furtive look comes into Mr. Ruin's eyes, and he gently unclamps her grip from his neck. "More defenses, I expect, my dear Doe. I see only one path. I will show it to you, if you do just one thing for me."

  She sets spinning eyes on him. "What thing?"

  He gives a winning smile. "Kiss me."

  Doe doesn't need to think. It's nothing compared to some of the things she's done in the past. She whips off her HUD and kisses him on the lips. When he holds her in place, pressing his blood-grimed chin against hers, she allows it. In this place she needs him, and it is only a momentary discomfort.