Soul Jacker Box Set

by Michael John Grist

  This is no normal mission.

  "Then whose Molten Core is it?"

  Solfeje taps the screen. Readings pop up; heat, patterns, flows, dimensions. The size of this opening into a living mind is small, definitely not big enough for either ship to fit through, maybe just wide enough for a single person wearing an EVA suit.

  I look at Solfeje. "What do you know?" I ask.

  "What do you know?" she answers.

  I rack my mind. Hollow Star, my chest says. Is that a message from Far? The mission pack from my hutch was just an archway, but that means nothing to me. Still, I can feel there's something important here now. Something that matters very much indeed.

  "We need to get out there," I say. "Figure out what that thing is. Where we are. If we're alone."

  Solfeje kills the periscope footage mid-revolve, just as I appear in the feed atop the Bathyscaphe. In the second before the image flickers away, I notice her ship's glassbomb forks are tuned and pointing right at the little figure of me.

  She was ready to kill us both. It's a good thing I dropped my weapons.

  "Let's go," she says.

  C. HOLLOW STAR

  It takes moments only to climb back up to her conning tower, and from there to the brick spine of the ship. I leap over to the Bathyscaphe and with deliberate slowness pick up my HUD.

  I watch Solfeje do the same. We'll need the visors just to go near that window into the Molten Core. She nods, and we both smoothly pull the helmets on. Now the QCs are largely useless again, so it doesn't mean much when I pick mine up and holster them. Hopefully that won't be a problem. Solfeje does the same.

  I gesture to the far end of her ship where the hot glow is coming from. "Ladies first," I say, our suits communing via blood-mic.

  "Captain's prerogative," she answers. "It's nearer my ship."

  Can't argue with that. I leap back to her ship then start back down the spine. The crunch of her footsteps on brick tells me she's following. My back itches to have her behind me, and I pretend not to feel it. There has to be trust.

  The light gets brighter as I near the tail fins, and the suit's visor dials darker, protecting my eyes from the glare. Above the screw I halt and Solfeje halts alongside me, both of us looking into the letterbox opening below.

  Lava churns within, held back by some unseen barrier.

  "There's no way our ships could have come through that," she says.

  I grunt agreement. We must have come in some other way. I take the opportunity to give myself another dose of shock-jacks to counteract the growing weakness in my legs. I try not to think of Solmiz, dead in his vomit, and instead point to the pitted rock ceiling.

  "You think there's Molten Core on the other side of that too?"

  "It would make sense."

  I contemplate the outline of such a structure. La or Ti would be better at this. Are we inside a rock inside a Molten Core? Are we in an empty Solid Core?

  "I can depth-sound it," I say. It's La and Ti's specialism, but I know the basics. "Gamma radiation should tell us."

  Solfeje waves a hand. I pull my grapnel pistol, mount a gamma head and tether it with elasteel, then fire. It thunks into the ceiling and begins transmitting data back to my HUD at once. I sling the feed to Solfeje and we read the streams together.

  "It's not a Core of any kind," she says.

  "It's nothing."

  We both read the feeds. There's a pulse out there, rapid-fire, but other than that it is empty. No echoes come back. There's no heat, no Core, no lava; nothing but empty space.

  "The wall's thin," Solfeje says. "It's a rock shell only. Maybe we can blow through and take a better look."

  "Maybe," I answer, and for a moment I remember doing something like this before. There was an explosion, a falling horse into lava, then the memory is gone. I point my QCs at the ceiling, Solfeje does the same and we fire in tandem.

  Anti-matter particles sloosh out, eat into rock, and through in seconds. At once glaring light sears in through the smooth-bored hole, purple and flashing. I cycle my HUD down against it and peer into the images as they resolve.

  I see emptiness, and energy, and drifting matter.

  What the…

  I grapnel up to the lip of the borehole. Solfeje grapnels in next to me and we both climb carefully through into…

  Space.

  Stars, blackness and emptiness.

  We stand upon a slowly spinning chunk of cratered gray rock, one of thousands of asteroids in a vast conglomerated ring that stretches ahead and behind in some kind of orbital ring, curving hundreds of thousands of clicks around a flickering purple star at the center.

  The scale is immense. My jaw drops.

  I look in to the purple star, so massive and bright that I can't resolve any details. Every second it pulses three or four times, like a lighthouse transmitting Morse code. I can taste something on those wavelengths, some embedded message like the bonds of memory, but I can't decipher what the meaning is.

  In every other direction hangs the empty black void of space, studded with countless distant stars.

  "Ritry Goligh," I whisper.

  "Indeed," says Solfeje, "and look."

  She points. It takes a few seconds to resolve them; out there in the darkness, faintly white when they catch the star's purple pulse, so miniscule they're like hairline cracks on my HUD. But they're moving. They're undulating closer like worms, and the sight of them brings the cold sickness back to my belly with a biting hunger.

  I know exactly what they are. I know what they want, and in this place with so few memories of my own and a woman I barely trust, I have no idea how to stop them.

  The Lag.

  D. THE LAG

  I watch them wriggling closer at maximum HUD resolution. Flare from the blazing purple star pulses across my visor like a heartbeat, but even through that coruscating distraction I can see that something is different. This Lag is not the same Lag I have fought a thousand times before.

  It's space Lag.

  "They're bigger," I say at last.

  "Of course they look bigger," says Solfeje dismissively. "They're getting closer."

  "That's not it. Do a rebound, calculate the distance and you'll see what I mean."

  A moment passes.

  "Ah," she murmurs quietly through blood-mic. "They're immense."

  "They're damned tyrannosaurs. They could swallow this asteroid whole."

  "You're right," she says, and turns to look at our asteroid. It's large, obviously bigger than the two ships inside it, but just one of those Lag worms could swallow it whole.

  "We're dead," I say, reading the HUD display. "They're due in T-minus forty-seven minutes."

  "Confirmed," says Solfeje. "The first wave at least, there's five of them in it."

  I spin back and count them. Spread out like this they look like the wiggling aliens in a simplistic video game, with five in the first wave, eight in the next, then thirteen, and they're too small to see after that.

  "Fibonacci numbers," I say. "Part of the golden spiral."

  "Is that supposed to mean something?"

  It's the kind of thing So would say and Ray would then question. I don't know why I said it. "I have no idea. It just means every wave is going to be exponentially bigger. They'll be unstoppable soon."

  "Can we even stop this wave? How much amp has that shoulder cannon got?" She points back to the Bathyscaphe where I left it.

  "A lot, but compared to them?" I think it through. "It might take one of them, maybe two. The QCs all focused together might take out another. That's three. After that, unless we can rig our sublavics to shoot plasma straight up at them, I think we need to be long gone by the time they arrive."

  We both look toward the pulsing purple star.

  "So all this is the Molten Core, and that's the Solid Core," Solfeje says. "It doesn't look too solid."

  "It looks like it'll fry us to bacon."

  She hums agreement, then points to my chest. "Hollow Star. Is tha
t where you always write your mission objectives?"

  INFILTRATE THE HOLLOW STAR

  She's mocking me, and I grunt. I miss the others. "I didn't write that. Either way, we need to get off this rock. Can you think of any way to clear this distance and get us there?"

  We both look across the massive orbital gulf to the sparking surface of the purple star.

  "Not one," she says. "I've never been in space before."

  "Neither have I. The screw on my ship wouldn't make any traction on a vacuum. My grapnels wouldn't get us one hundredth of the way to it. There's got to be some other way."

  "Could we ride the Lag?"

  I shake my head, even as I try to picture it. "I don't see how. We can't even kill them, how could we subdue one or hope to control it? They're too massive."

  We both look around, thinking, but there is nothing here. We are just one floating rock in an orbital moat of floating rocks. There is no explosive powerful enough to launch us across the divide, no rope or umbilicus long enough to bridge it.

  But that's the secondary problem. First we have to survive the first wave.

  "We have to rig the ships," I say. "See if we can't align the plasma cannons to shoot the Lag down. That'll win us some time."

  Solfeje nods smartly. "Agreed. But moving the ships will be impossible. Neither is designed for operation out of lava. What we should do is move the asteroid."

  "What?"

  "We can rotate it, I think. See that?" She points to one of the chunks of rock floating above us, just another part of the orbital belt. "I think I can grapnel over to it. From there, I go to," she weaves her finger through the air, settling on another larger rock a little further off, "that one. I drop a mass anchor using a QC and reset, and between us we should have enough elasteel to rig a pulley system."

  I frown at her. "Are you suggesting we rotate the asteroid with pulleys?"

  She nods firmly. "It shouldn't be so difficult. All the rocks are trapped in this gravity band, but their orientation isn't fixed. They'll rotate as easily as well-oiled artillery, with zero friction. One of us works the pulley while the other fine-tunes the aim."

  I stare. "It's crazy."

  "But it'll work, if you keep up your end."

  "What's my end?"

  "You stay with the ship and shoot them down. I'll set up the rig. I've got it all figured out already," she taps her HUD. "Better at math than targeting. How's your aim?"

  "Solid."

  "Good. If for some reason we can't align the ship in time, you've still got the shoulder cannon. You can take a few out before they hit, and maybe we'll get them all."

  I run it through my mind. It seems technically possible. "OK."

  "OK. So give me all your elasteel, I'll need it for the jump."

  I don't hesitate to reel it out. "There's more in the other suits."

  "Same for me," she says.

  Without another word we drop down our grapnel lines and make for our respective ships to start harvesting elasteel. Between us we should be able to muster about ten clicks-worth. Given a distance of one click to the next rock over, that should allow a torque multiplier of five through the pulleys.

  But is that enough?

  Preparation takes fifteen minutes; I gather the scavenged elasteel and carry it to the sublavic top.

  "Help me with these," Solfeje says, her helmeted head popping up from her conning tower ladderway. I jump over and she points down into the dim recesses of her ship, where a set of ten heavy-duty steel gearwheels lie. Pulleys.

  "Where did you get them?" I ask.

  "Salvaged the screw," she says. "QC on precision mode."

  I admire the work. "We're almost ready, then. You need to start jumping."

  "Agreed," she says. "There isn't much time."

  T-minus twenty-six. On the outside of the asteroid I fire QC particles at the rock just enough to destabilize it to the texture of pudding, then work in two quadruple twined loops of elasteel for an anchor. When the rock re-sets they poke out like the wirework of a swept-away home.

  "Done." I drop into the asteroid to find Solfeje looping her elasteel coils and pulleys. T-minus twenty. At T-minus fifteen Solfeje shoots a grapnel off to the other rock.

  "Wish me luck," she says, then triggers her in-coil and zips off into the black, dragging her pulleys and ten clicks of looped elasteel after her.

  Back in the Bathyscaphe I bring the front pulse cannons on line. Designed to cavitate lava and speed us through a Molten Core, they should make short work of the asteroid wall. I wire their sights through the periscope and fire, blowing a hole first through the brick hull then through the asteroid, revealing the empty black of space. Off the left side I can see one of the great Lag worms wriggling closer.

  It makes me feel ill. I gag and channel shock-jacks just as a wave of something; nostalgia or sadness washes over me. I feel the absence of the others as a Soul-deep ache. I need them. I need Ray and Doe and La and…

  I remember that Doe's dead. I always forget. But the others, they can't be dead, where are they?

  "In position," comes Solfeje's voice, dragging me from this reverie. "Status report."

  I blink and look at the controls before me, the gap. All of it feels so foreign. So should be doing this, not me. Still, I can read that the asteroid needs to turn by a yaw of some twenty degrees to bring the Lag into range. Then something occurs to me.

  "Clear here," I call through blood-mic, "but how are we going to make the asteroid's rotation stop? If it over-rotates and I can't shoot all the Lag in one go…"

  There's a long silence before she replies. It looks like neither of us thought of that. "We can't stop it. The pulleys can't brake. You'll just have to be sure to shoot them as you rotate past."

  I try to imagine it. It seems near impossible. "So we have one shot at this."

  "Multiple shots in a row," she confirms. "Excuse me while I bury this anchor."

  The fizzling sound of her QC ripples through the comms. I shut down blood-mic and focus on the sights, playing with the degrees of range the pulse cannons have. It's not much. They're designed primarily for blunt forward thrust. This is going to be hard.

  "T-minus ten," I call as the light in my HUD blinks

  "The pulleys are set," Solfeje answers. "Everything looks good. Start the in-wind, slowly."

  I fire up the conning tower's umblicus, designed for pulling an EVA suit through a Molten Core, and watch the elasteel pulley lines slowly tauten. Any moment the asteroid will start to turn. Through the hole I watch the Lag soaring closer, five asteroid-eating worms swimming through the blackness. Their mouths are black holes circled with dirty yellow fronds, trailing long whipping tails like spermatozoa, driving them on with all the grace of a convulsive fit.

  I hate them. Far understands them maybe, but not me. I hate them because they take pieces of the chord and never give them back. Every loss bites into me and I want…

  I don't know what I want.

  T-minus six.

  "The revolve's coming," Solfeje shouts on blood-mic. She's just barely visible from here on her rock; tiny and waving her arms. The lines are fully taut now, ten black elasteel ropes taking up the strain. "Get ready."

  The kick hits; the asteroid jerks and I am knocked off my feet as the spin begins. After that it only gets faster, as the universe spins and the pulleys winch us around, bringing the sublavic's pulse cannons fast into alignment. T-minus five. The Lag's yellow mouths are almost on us, vast leeches as big as moons, and-

  "On it." I lock into the periscope, scan out for the Lag and wait for the first of them to pass through the sweeping crosshairs of my trigger-sight.

  VRRRRRP

  I give it both barrels, bondless plasma jetting out in a hot blue stream that hits the first Lag full in its lipless dank mouth. Energy jitters across it spasmodically for a few seconds then it dissolves in a frothy burst of dust.

  "One down," comes Solfeje's steady voice, "your window's creeping fast."

 
T-minus three until arrival, and she's right. I take aim at the next as my ship strafes swiftly across the black and hit it with both barrels again.

  VRRRRRP

  It dissociates just like the first. The asteroid tracks me across the sky and I take out the next before we even hit T-minus two, the fourth by T-minus one and I'm on course to finish the fifth with thirty seconds to spare, staring right into its champing jaws when-

  SNAP

  The asteroid kicks violently and I'm tossed backward as a massive soundless twang vibrates through the hull. I roll hard into the far wall and up to the ceiling as the asteroid enters a desperate spin. Something's gone wrong and now someone I don't know is shouting in my blood. Solfeje.

  "The line snapped! The Lag's almost on you, Me. Get the shoulder cannon and blow it away."

  "On it," I shout and try to get my feet under me, but it's hard to take a single step as the Bathyscaphe rolls like a spinning screw. I solve the problem by grapneling out through the conning tower and crab-clamping my way clear of the asteroid. T-minus twenty seconds and on the surface of the asteroid everything is spinning; the Star, the orbital belt, the Lag. I feel sick and dizzy and flush shock-jacks to steel me, settling my stomach and whirring mind.

  The Lag is seconds away. Its huge yellow jaws spread wide, showing darkness and nothingness within; like the loss of my chord forever, a terror greater than any I can imagine. Somewhere far away I glimpse Solfeje firing her QCs across the distance but they're too weak and too distant, buffing only tiny gouges off the Lag's leviathan flank. I glimpse our pulley lines drifting loose in the interstellar void, surely sheared under the pressure, then I fire a QC clamp into the rock to hold me steady as the asteroid pirouettes, fire up Doe's accelerator cannon and wait for the rock to spin me into full alignment, T-minus two seconds, and fire.

  SLOOOOSH

  The weapon unleashes a rush of gold-sheathed atoms that glitter across the sliver of void between us, impacting the Lag in its open yellow mouth, then it is upon me.