Soul Jacker Box Set

by Michael John Grist

  They have seen everything I have done, and they have learned. Now that the Suns no longer stand guard over the bridge I believe one of them will breach it soon, and come for, and everything will change again.

  We'll be ready.

  CODA

  There is no body, nothing physical to remember Doe by, because she never had a physical form in the real world.

  We remnant tones of Ritry Goligh stand grouped together around her empty coffin atop the helicopter deck of our suprarene. I stand at the head as befits the captain of the chord. I wear a woman's body reclaimed from the depths of King Ruin's Court, but I am still Me.

  Ray stands by my side. Ti and La were born into twins we prepared, both with dark curly hair. So is in the form closest to an Asiatic we could find, a lighter-skinned arene with straight black hair. Far stands at the base of the coffin wearing his young man's body.

  "We all loved her," says Ray. "We always will."

  I look at my chord. I am Me, but I am also Ritry Goligh. He is the bond that connects us, the tie that makes us one. I love him like I love Loralena and the children, like we all love the family we have left behind.

  Perhaps one day I'll go back and be her Ritry again. My body may be different but I dream she'll look past that. She'll see through to what I am, to what I have become and what we could someday be again.

  A family.

  We sing a song for Doe before we tip her empty box over the side. It is something simple, an old War chant we used to sing in the subglacic with Heclan by our side, Soul Jacking marines on the slab before us, that sometimes we'd hum while Ven was in the other room between tender bouts of making love.

  I will teach it to Ritry Goligh's children some day, and together we'll remember what it's like to be loved and carefree and open to the world. It is a song about fighting, and loving and living again. Being a chord, our voices rise in perfect harmony, except for a single note. There is no Doe.

  Into the deep bore hole we have dug for her in the sand of this foreign land, into the site of an old Court from which we have Lagged away all the memories of pain, we drop her empty coffin. Now we are six.

  I pray to Ritry Goligh it will be enough.

  SOUL KILLER

  ME

  --.

  EXTRAS

  About the Author

  The Last Excerpt

  Glossary

  ME

  1. HOLLOW DESERT

  The Hollow Desert lies vast and golden around me.

  I'm standing in a new body, one of the 'hands' cored by King Ruin to serve as his slaves, but still I'm Me, captain of the chord. I look out across the deep wilds of Darain sand from my perch seven stories high at the forward prow of King Ruin's old suprarene, a massive building of a tank rumbling on great caterpillar treads.

  It's early afternoon, and a glorious molten sun beats down on the endless waves of dunes from a plastic blue sky, making them shine like the promised land.

  It's just another raid.

  Tiny grains of sand skirl across the metal-grille gantry beneath my combat-booted feet, blown by a hot and rising wind. The railing under my fingers is warm and smooth, polished by the hands of countless arene commanders dating back to the earliest days of the War.

  I notice these kinds of details now, when I know I'm going to die. It's strange. I notice that the sun is hot on my cheek, but a dry wind sucks away my sweat in seconds, something I can't get used to about the desert. I can't even sweat here. This body was made for the sand, but not me. I'm a sublavic marine, not a desert arene, and I belong in a ship deep within a Molten Core.

  But here I am.

  I look out toward the target. Beyond the undulating golden dunescape, studded with brownish-green outcroppings of cacti, lie a few pale tan escarpments of ancient rock rising in a spine-like ridge a few clicks distant. They could be shark fins on a solid ocean of sand. Between here and there are three villages hidden behind the vales of yellow, and beneath them, a Court.

  It's a raid. It's a war. It's just another way to die.

  The air smells of corroded metal and old salt.

  "This is the life," I whisper to myself.

  Ray snorts from behind me. "Cleaning up death camps is not my idea of fun."

  I turn to him. He hasn't died since Becoming, hasn't had to, so he's still in the body of the first hand he took; a copper-skinned Darain dressed in full arene combat gear. He's leaning casually against the railing, picking at his teeth with a coil of gun spring, looking at me with his usual blend of cheerful insolence.

  Of course, this is Ray. A year has passed since we Became true individuals in Ritry Goligh's world, but still it's strange to see him like this, without his glinting tooth-loops, without his pure black skin. Instead he's added a strange kind of fractal pattern tattoo across his left temple, which I know is a memento of Doe. Without Doe none of us would be alive.

  The year since we buried her in the sand feels like a lifetime.

  "I know what your idea of fun is," I say. "Is there anyone on this tank you haven't screwed?"

  Ray laughs, rich and belly-deep. I laugh too. This is how it goes.

  "Yena," comes So's voice from below, three decks down. She's in my head, like they all are now. There's no need for blood-mic when we're just facets of one Soul split across the aetheric bridge. "He wouldn't dare."

  Ray nods. "She's right, Me, I wouldn't do that. Yena's all yours."

  "Very kind."

  Things have changed a lot since our Bathyscaphe days.

  I know that Ray has been sleeping around so much because of Doe, because he misses her, and that's why I'll only gently tease him. I know how much it hurts him that she's gone, because it hurts me as well, and what harm is there in finding solace in lust? We're all addicted to something, now.

  Far hardly ever leaves the aether, jacking deeper and further for days at a time, searching for something none of us understand. The twins, La and Ti, avoid each other compulsively. They've put thousands of kilometers between each other, as some kind of reaction to finding the freakish husk of King Ruin's twin. It was just too much, I suppose, to see twins like that. I think it's sad, but maybe they'll get over it.

  So's addiction is building the map. She never really sleeps, only crashes out from exhaustion, refusing to take her eyes off it voluntarily except to use the bathroom, and even then she watches through the eyes of a borrowed hand.

  And Me?

  I die.

  "We need to focus," I say. "So, give me what you've got."

  We turn our thoughts to So, down in the suprarene's control cab on the sixth floor, working on readouts, dials and radar. I close my eyes on the blistering Hollow Desert and look out through her eyes to the holographic map hanging above the projection desk. Circling it are three techs; she knows their names but I don't, which is what the hierarchy of command is for.

  Her map can be displayed in a thousand possible ways, most of them only understood by So, but the main one is the master globe of the world. At her touch it slowly revolves, every pixel of it resizable to greater detail, containing everything we've scraped together about King Ruin's infrastructure.

  It is a mass of red lines, like one of those balls Art used to make by wrapping elastic bands on top of each other. These are the bond lines of King Ruin's Courts, and they are everywhere still, smothering the world like a cocoon, except for two small patches that are empty.

  This spot in the Hollow Desert, and Calico.

  It's taken us a year to come this far.

  Our greatest advances came in the days after King Ruin's fall, when his Courts and his loyal 'brood' were in shock. We ran a flash raid on Calico via Dactyl helicopters, taking out old Courts and brood-members with mindbombs and dry-ice blasts. There were another ten or so hydrate rigs repurposed as Courts spread around within range of Calico, several buildings even in the center of the city, and a whole suburb that was gradually being turned.

  Saunderston.

  They'd had it for years, it
seemed. I'd ridden trains past it many times along the Wall, but each time they'd Lagged the memory of what I'd seen; Lagged it from everyone that rode by. They'd had their victims skinned and strung up on lamp-posts; hanging out of skyscraper windows knotted limb to limb like links in a chain; bolted to the street while younger brood members raced cars amongst them, scoring points.

  When we hit them they were dizzy from the King's partial death, and we razed their home to the ground. We saved what we could, killed all his children and healed the bonds.

  It was in Saunderston that I died for the first time, a lucky shot from a panicking Hawk. I got over it. We've shut down hundreds of Courts like it since then, freeing thousands of victims, but the battle lines scarcely bend. It's a slow, grinding attrition, just like the War, clearing one Court at a time while trying to hold onto the territory we've carved out for ourselves.

  "No sign they see us coming," So says in my head. "All three villages are quiet. I'm reading heat signatures underground spreading for hundreds of feet. They have dozens of people down there, and from the flyover it looks like they've got some War-era artillery."

  I read the map through So's eyes: three villages of baked adobe clay that have been sitting there for thousands of years. Probably human civilization first sprang up near here. Each of the villages is spaced only a short distance apart, part of an old trading hub circled around an oasis, and each has a well leading down into natural underground caverns, which is where the Court will be.

  "Movements in the last few days?" I ask aloud.

  "Nothing more than usual," So answers, "some covered wagons went hut to hut selling spiced meat earlier. The people above have no idea what's lurking underneath."

  I nod, though only Ray can see it. They'll feel it. We've seen this a dozen times already: a settlement with a Court right underneath, with the brood preying on them person by person. Sometimes it's very slow, farming the villagers like livestock and giving them time to repopulate. These are the brood-members who don't even believe I'm real, like a bogeyman in the night. I know who they are from the sudden terror in their minds when they see me crashing in; they never thought it would happen to them.

  Others do believe, and when they realize I'm coming they either flee or they plunge into suicidal, end-of-days decadence. All we find of these latter Courts are the charnel ruins of a bloody orgy that lasted until all the living playthings were dead and the brood-members pulled their own plugs, going off like brilliant fireworks on the bonds. Only rarely do they put up a fight, but their outdated weaponry's no match for us, and it never lasts long.

  As for the rest of the King's brood, all the many thousands spread across the world, they're still fighting a cold civil war to fill the power vacuum his half-death left behind. We can glimpse it in the shuffling of bonds, as new generals vie for control of the Suns' global empire.

  We're lucky it's taken them so long. If they had united and readied an army at once they could have erased us like they'd erased every insurgency before. Thank Ritry Goligh they did not. It's given us the time to clear their fringe, consolidate our base of power and grow stronger.

  I cycle out of So and reach further down, to the open fourth floor bay in the middle of the suprarene, where Yena and her fellow survivor Naji lead the Wall; a group of fifty warriors spread out in EMR bays. I open the eyes of a hand near to her, and she notices at once.

  Yena is a survivor of the King's 'glass menagerie', a unique kind of 'zoo' in this very tank where he kept people trapped for years in tiny glass coffins, forced to stare lidlessly into each others' eyes. He was always fascinated by the devastating effects of proximity. She is still broken in many ways, but she is also one of the strongest people I've met, and her knowledge of the King's pyschology is unparalleled.

  She's also beautiful, with dark skin and long flowing hair, but beauty is not the thing that draws me to her most. There is something about her pulse on the bonds that inspires me. Before the menagerie she tried to lead a resistance movement against King Ruin, after detecting his presence through warping effects on her EMR research. Nobody believed her, though, and she had nothing to fight with when the King scooped her up.

  Now she has me.

  "How's the Wall holding?" I ask.

  The Wall spreads like a bright bond bubble to encompass our suprarenes, an EMR-shield maintained by our army. This is a trick we learned from the brood; the same way they hid Saunderston from us along with countless other Courts. Multiple minds work in concert to hide us on the bonds, meaning no enemy can know where we are or what we're doing at any time.

  The Wall. Yena often runs it. I don't need to ask how it's going, but I like to.

  "Holding strong," she says. "Me, try not to die this time."

  I smile. "I don't even notice it now." I close the hand's eyes and shift again.

  Back at the prow I feel Ray slot back into himself moments after me. He's in charge of the suprarene tanks, four of which we salvaged from the brood, and second wave assault, so he'll have been handing out last-minute orders. He doesn't like it that I take point on these raids, it's not the captain's job, but who cares what he thinks, really? I don't want any of the others to have to die.

  Beyond Ray I feel the others: Far tucked into his 50th floor apartment back in the Calico Reach, searching through the aether for some unknowable truth; La churning through the sand beneath us in her subthonic, a deep drill that delves beneath the sand like my old subglacic went beneath the ice; Ti out in the Arctic patrolling the waters we have claimed for ourselves with her two subglacics and an ancient commandeered battleship,

  "It's just another mission," Ray says. "Another, and another."

  "Hoorah," I reply.

  "We're getting closer. We'll find his trail soon."

  I grunt something non-committal. The bonds that encircle the world still stink of King Ruin, the half of him that escaped Doe's blast, and he's learned quickly. He keeps his own Walls up everywhere. We've tried to hunt him through the bridge, but more golden shields pop into existence every day. We'd hoped intelligence from his brood-children might help us, but every time we find them they've been Lagged to mindless soup. To date we've cleared one patch of desert and one patch of water, but that means nothing because every day they're uniting more around the remnant of the King. We need to find this new heart and blow it to bits.

  "Agreed," says Ray, listening in on my thoughts. "With bells on."

  "Come through slow," I tell him. "Wait 'til we've blown the artillery. Then sweep in with holy hellfire."

  He grins wide. It's not as impressive as it used to be when he had tooth-piercings, but now there's that tattoo by his eye, which accentuates when he winks.

  "I know the routine."

  "You should wink more," I tell him as I start back toward the flight deck. "It suits you."

  "Yes, sir," he says, and flashes me a big one.

  The suprarene engines grind up a pitch underfoot, and the whole structure yaws backward as the great caterpillar treads climb a final dune. I roll with it as smooth as an arene and clatter swiftly down the cage-metal steps to the helicopter deck. My dual-rotor Dactyl, a huge black War-era beast, waits for me on the landing pad, firing up its blades.

  In the payload bay stand ten hands dressed in black marine garb, all with King Ruin's buzzing EMR helmets keyed to transpond to my thoughts. I climb in amongst them and pick up my Kaos rifle, affix the bayonet and check my bandolier for ideation grenades.

  I might have given a speech to a marine team like this back in my Arctic War days, but these people are all me now, all controlled by my thoughts, and I'm really going in alone.

  "Right behind you," says Ray.

  "Beneath you," says La.

  Hell yes, I think. This is a war, after all.

  The helicopter lifts off. I send two hands to man the howitzers, two to man the Bofors miniguns while the rest line up at the rappel drop lines, then I take over the pilot's mind and send us roaring out over the sand, nose down towar
d the enemy.

  2. DACTYL

  My Dactyl eats up the distance in taut seconds and I feel the rush begin to build within me, anticipating the carnage to come. Sand tears by, dunes rise up and down like waves. I've died three times by now, though in truth it's more like thirty. I always go with a squad of ten hands and I feel it as each one of them dies. I've died so many times that the line between death and life has become meaningless.

  "Steady now," comes Ray's voice in my mind.

  "Steady," I repeat, holding the Kaos rifle close.

  I surge us low over a dune crest to look down on the spread of three villages. Each is a cluster of tan adobe huts hand-shaped from ancestral mud, centuries old and etched out along some ancient line of best fit, like stars in Orion's belt.

  "Frag incoming," So calls, and a second later the sand just to my right cloud-bursts with a ringing-

  BOOM

  -throwing a backdraft of golden dust skittering off the Dactyl's hull and blowing us off to the side.

  I ramp up the throttle, bank sharply left and use the eyes of my hand squatting over the Bofors controls to sight the exact location of the Court's two War-era artillery pieces. They could be fighting in a pre-tsunami world for all their tech level has kept up out here.

  Our missiles drop, and while I swerve a sharp zigzag course down the sandy valley toward the first village, the explosions ring out.

  BOOM

  BOOM

  "Qualified," So calls, reading from her aerial heat-graph. "You took them both."

  "Diving," I call back, though there's no need as they can all see with my eyes.

  The howitzers whirr up and I strafe low over the first village with my fingers on the triggers, sweat beading down my many chests. I'd drop a mindbomb if I thought it was needed, but there's nobody here. Even the artillery pieces were automated.

  "Looks like an orgy site," I call back to So. "Seeking confirmation."