T-minus zero. Its great jaw closes over the asteroid even as it begins to dissolve from the inside out; its throat turns translucent as its innards backwash out and its jaw fragments into three parts. One chunk smashes into the asteroid near my feet, chewing out my clamp and sending me reeling into space, while the bulk of its body flows on to splatter across the asteroid in a flood of gray dissociated sludge.
"Solfeje!" I call through blood-mic as I hurtle away into space, trying to fire off a targeted grapnel but I'm spinning far too fast to get a lock. In seconds the centrifugal force overpowers my circulation and drives me into the dark.
ME
6. ASSAULT
The subthonic bursts through the desert crust like a Lag worm leaping from the mud of the Sunken World, and the jaw platform drops before it even comes to a stop, jolting us all as it hammers down onto the sand. Fresh salty air sucks in through the gap teeth, then the upper jaw winches back with a crunch of old gears to reveal a purple-black pre-dawn sky. I give the signal and our strike force revs out, hitting the sand hard and accelerating.
Wind rushes by as we tear down the wind-smoothed side of a dune, sand spitting up in our tracks and spraying off my suit like surf. I focus ahead; through the infra layer of my subthonic suit's Heads-Up-Display I search the rolling blank dark of coastal dunes, like an alien planet.
"Ahead of you, twenty-three degrees," So chimes.
I look out over the dark shoulders of sand to the flat Ohkotsk Sea, and see a structure jutting up through the horizon line that is eerily familiar, but completely out of place.
"It's a subglacic," comes Ray's voice through the bridge. He's supposed to be watching the skies around the suprarenes, but I'll allow him this. It is bizarre.
Through the infras I track the shape of the grounded boat, twisted on its port side at a dizzying angle on the Ohkotsk seashore as though it's been dropped there by the hand of a god.
"Almost," So says in my head. "Godship tsunami. It must've been carried all the way from the Arctic."
"By Goligh," Ray whispers, "and they're using it as a base?"
"Eyes on the skies," I tell him, while picking out some kind of radar array attached to the subglacic's periscope, bristling like kelp reeds rising from the shallows. "La, take out that radar array, but don't destroy the entrance."
"I'll clip it with a mortar," she says, and for a moment I'm looking through her eyes, down crosshairs in the Jeriko tank as she sights on the periscope, locks and fires.
The Jeriko jerks with the mortar-blast and I flip back to Me in the packed groundhog, surrounded by four men in my chord and five others controlled by Ti as the shell whines by overhead.
BADOOM
The ship's conning tower blows in a halogen-white flare through the infras. I flick to the eyes of one of my arenes with a better angle and watch the top of the subglacic burn; individual tongues of flame lick along the spikes of the radar array until it topples forward to the sand.
Hopefully now they're blind.
"Strafe pattern gamma," I call back to La as my groundhog tears on, the hot point of a spear with two wings following behind. I taste the air and drive the Warthog's engine harder. "Make them think it's a Dactyl attacking them; submerge the subthonic and keep moving."
"Already on it," she says.
"Movement!" Far calls through the bridge. "Something's happening on the bonds, I think it's a Lag."
I can sense it now too, through the grit in my face and the whine of another shell zipping overhead; the sense of an intense culling of memory happening ahead, just like at every Court so far. Hopefully we can make it before everything is erased.
La's second mortar explodes on the left of the subglacic, followed by a third in a strike pattern that should appear like overhead deployment. Geysers of shadowy dust plume into the sky chased by electric white crackles.
"Brace for ideation," I call across my arene-chord as our groundhog roars into the leaning shadow of the subglacic. Seven figures and I dismount, leaving two behind to drive the groundhogs to a safe and circling distance.
"Entrap," I shout, "La take the engines and I'll seize the con."
We break and circle around the still-burning radar array at a run, and I fire eight grapnel lines up the side of this tumbled behemoth with my eight bodies, then activate tracers to haul my selves up. I'm first over the rise onto the upper deck, feet on crumpled plate-metal, and train my HUD on the bombed conning tower.
There's a furrowed gouge canting inward to the interior con, all glowing hot on infras from the blast. Rifle fire peppers from within, striking sparks off the fragmented metal and one shot takes me in the thigh, penetrating the armadillo armor deeply enough to incapacitate me.
On one knee I snatch a mindbomb grenade from my shoulder bandolier with a smooth and practiced motion, yank the pin and hurl it into the gouge. I follow it immediately with my seven remaining hands, transferring my central consciousness to a new leader. We leap and climb into the mortar crater with our lines looped to the stub of the radar array; the lines catch and halt us at the edge of a heavily adapted conning tower, which I spray with Kaos shells even as-
BOOM
-the mindbomb grenade erupts ahead without any light or noise. Disruptive emptiness washes out and cores any Souls nearby, but I'm protected by the thump thump in my EMR helmets. Through infras I study the interior; some kind of mapping room, lined with banks of radar and sonar readouts. Three warm bodies lie on the deck by a green-glowing display screen; unhelmeted, unprepared, not brood members but hands.
I cut my lines, charge on and fire down the narrow corridor to the captain's hutch, eliciting another thud of flesh hitting metal. I hear muted BOOMS as more of La's mortars blow up the dunes around us, then the rest of my chord is with me. I loop our cables around the periscope glass then dive headfirst into the ladder leading down, two at a time in series.
An instant before the first pair of us hit the next deck head first the line slows us, and we unleash a hail of rifle fire down the dank corridor in both directions. One of me takes a bullet through the brain and dies, but another falls into place and keeps shooting, creating a beachhead for the rest to fall into.
We find out feet and our armor-piercing bullets ricochet crazily through this tin can. A rival hands fall in the darkness. A bullet thumps off my armadillo suit. I advance the chord and more bodies hit the deck in the darkness. With wordless commands I send my hands flooding in three different directions at once.
"Hurry, Me," Far calls, "whatever they're doing on the bonds is nearly finished."
I sprint down a narrow corridor chasing the sense of this ship-wide Lag. Into personal quarters I dive two more ladders, race down three corridors then blast my way through a wheel-locked bulkhead door with a TNT clamp into-
Not a dimly lit corridor nor a grease-marked deck of personal quarters but a tall and wide space completely decked out in white, with white lights, walls, machines, EMR and the sterile stink of CSF in the air, holding only two figures in the middle.
One of them is the skeletal remnant half of King Ruin, hanging limply on cords dug through her biceps and thighs with a thicket of cables rising from nodules in his spine. Where the front of his head was once attached to his long-dead twin I see the bulbous protuberance of a pulsing red brain, encased wrapped in transparent plastic. Old blood trails run down his sunken chest like water stains on the sublavic, ridged across his protruding ribs and sagging chest, meeting the trails running down from his thighs to pool in a broad black circle on the white floor.
It takes a second for my to recognize the pattern on the bonds; the Lag is happening to him. I pluck off my EMR helmet and throw it. It hits the ground by his feet and instantly expands in scope, cutting the King off from the Lag in a bubble as thick as the Wall.
The other figure turns to me. It's a man dressed in a white lab coat spattered with King Ruin's gray CSF and dark blood. His face bears the scars of deep gouges that look like they've been raked by fingernails
, and the teeth in his smile have been filed down to sharp points, more like a shark than Mr. Ruin ever was.
My first thought is to reach out and Lag him, but he's protected by the bubble of my helmet now too, so instead I bead my Kaos rifle and shoot him in both knees.
"Don't move," I shout, advancing rapidly and three hands strong.
He doesn't even make a sound, just drops to the ground.
"It's you," he says, calm and smooth with a neo-Armorican accent, as though we're meeting in some genteel Calico coffee shop. "Ritry Goligh, the man who would be god. I wondered when we'd meet."
"Wonder on," I say, running closer with my rifle trained on his forehead. "Who the fuck are you?"
"Nobody," he says, then moves with an astonishing speed I hadn't thought possible with shot-out knees; lunging toward the King's frail body while palming a scalpel. I take off his hand with Kaos-fire before the blow falls, but it's close. Still he doesn't even shout as blood pumps from his ruptured wrist. I'm almost on him and can't read him at all; is he a brood member or a hand, or something else? I've never seen such pain tolerance before.
"Pain is so subjective," he says s if responding to my thoughts, then lunges the last few inches to sink his teeth into King Ruin's skeletal throat. I've already shot him fifteen times by the time his teeth touch flesh, but it's not enough. He jerks backward under the force of the bullets like a sail whipping in the wind, but the damage is done. King Ruin's neck, already thin as a chicken's with the spikes of his vertebrae jutting out, is pumping dark blood.
I send a hand to the King at once, injecting him with a brain-freezing engram that should crystalize his existing Molten Core before it fades any further, while simultaneously I advance on the man who did it. He twitches in a heap of his own innards and bone fragments, somehow still impossibly alive. He looks up at me with eyes full of blood driven there by the cavitation effect of Kaos ammunition at short range, and manages to speak.
"First time for everything," he says, then closes his eyes and sags.
"Goligh!"
I hear Far's shout just as the man dies, and on the heels of it comes a blast through the bridge like I've never felt before.
BOOM
I am dragged into its wake; a tsunami wave of power that blasts through the aether like a quakeseed just dropped, irrevocably altering everything in its path. I have to focus all my efforts just to maintain control of this hand.
Finally it's happened. I feel it just as every brood member in the world felt it when I was the first, standing atop my rollercoaster in CANDYLAND and throwing my life to the wind to take my final shot at Mr. Ruin.
This man just crashed through the aetheric bridge.
A second after he dies the whole hall erupts in ideation mines, and I am driven out of my hand as it crumples to the floor with the maddening pain, unable to do a thing as the pitiful figure of King Ruin shudders, shakes and dies.
7. KING RUIN
I jump into the last two bodies of my ten-member chord, the only ones outside the blast radius and propel them in to the subglacic and down to the white hall, past my twitching bodies while the aftermath of ideation backwashes off the walls like a frothy tide. I run one of them to the King and one to the man who just smashed through the bridge.
"Find him," I shout to Far as I lay one pair of hands on the King's pale, malformed head and the other on the blood-soaked assassin's forehead, hoping the skinship contact will help me get what I need. "Hunt him down!"
Then I jack in. The King is already fading under my touch, his unique Molten Core deeply corroded by first the Lag and now the ideation mines, but I pull out everything I can. There are thoughts in there still despite his death, partially preserved by the crystalizing engram I injected, but mostly he is garbled. I scalpel out what pieces I can and shunt them through the bridge to the others.
"So," I call, "Ti."
They descend on everything I find at once, and still I keep on pulling data until the King is empty and the only next step is to run his brain through augmented EMR for final pattern extraction.
At the same time I jack into the assassin, and recoil. Within I find a regimentation like I've never seen before. His mind is sectioned in rings of empty partitions as neat and perfect as the age-lines in a tree, layer over layer, with each one of them empty. His Solid Core is simple steel corridors and his Molten Core is barely lukewarm. He's like one of the King's hands but on a whole other order.
There is no sign of his Soul.
Not repressed or split in half, not curtailed or partially erased, just gone. I've never seen anything like it. It is alien and terrifying at once, and my thoughts reel around what this might mean. He died but he crashed through the bridge at the same time, leaving nothing at all behind.
I dig in through his Solid Core regardless, throwing open door after door to find everything scraped clean except one garbled load of data in what a kind of mental input space. It symbolizes as a towering pile of crumpled papers in a heaps in the middle of an otherwise empty room.
I approach and start uncrumpling, reading through pages written in other languages, pages of sketches, pages of random jottings that don't seem to make any sense, though a few words are repeated multiple times: my names. Ritry Goligh comes up, along with Doe, Ray, Far, So, La and Ti. It's about me. I search more papers and find Egyptian hieroglyphs, I find tallies of sacrifices, I find votive inscriptions.
It's knowledge taken from the King, about me, awaiting decryption.
I shudder and break contact, surfacing back into the white room with the King's dark blood running against my knee. This impossible assassin lies before me, shredded by bullets and missing his hand. He's not even human, but maybe he's something more at the same time.
Every time I passed through the bridge it was in pieces only. I never crashed my whole Soul through at once, and I don't know what the ramifications of that might be. I can't imagine what he's capable of now.
And he's hunting me.
I call the others to a conference at once, summoning the Dactyls and suprarenes to join me at this beached subglacic. We thought killing King Ruin would bring the war to a crashing end, but I see now that we were very wrong.
The war has just begun.
8. APOTHEOSIS
"We go after him," Far says. "We go now, we go hard and we rub him out completely."
We're standing on the Wall deck thirty minutes after the ideation mines blew, all the constituent parts of Ritry Goligh plus Yena. It's been a flurry of activity since the King died, with each of us making preparations, planning, jacking and throwing together theories.
"Where did he go, So?" I ask.
Her two-tiered map hovers as a holograph before us, again showing the purplish aether laid out over the Hollow Desert. Everywhere there are crisscrossing intersections as the two clash in new and unexpected ways.
"The blast wave he made by breaking open the bridge was massive," says So, starting a simulation that sends a flood of blue light out in every direction. Her voice is flatter than normal; in shock just like the rest of us. "It touched everything, but I've been able to follow the dregs of its wake to here." She points to one heavily massed locus in the aether, burning bright blue. "It corresponds to an Inuit city, Iqaluit, capital of their resurgent nation on the other side of the world, and a brood stronghold."
I rub my eyes. I've been looking at this map since I dragged the corpses of the King and his assassin out of the subglacic, and I still can't fully grasp what it means. Far knows, though, and he's staring hard waiting for me to see it too. But I have to be sure. I have to exhaust every possible avenue first.
I turn to Ray. "Can we raid Iqaluit by any conventional means?"
"No," he says swiftly. He doesn't wink or make some joke; none of us has energy to spare now. "The Dactyls couldn't get a quarter of the way there on their fuel tanks, let alone we'd be visible for a full day in the air if we could, overflying brood lands. Ti's subglacics could go secretly, but I'm not convinced
we'll get anywhere near this bastard again in any kind of numbers; he's in the middle of a brood city."
I spin the floating map, studying the blazing blue locus and the many shifting correlations between it an Iqaluit. I run it backward in time to the point where the assassin died, then I run it forward again and watch the blast wave wash out across the aether. The force unleashed is phenomenal.
"Where did all this power come from?"
"From the Disjunct," says Far flatly, meeting my eyes and ushering me toward the inevitable conclusion. "It's the burst of power released when a Soul dies. It looks like that every time you die, just before I gather you back."
I frown. I've seen the Disjunct played out in simulations before; my Soul bursting out like a ripe seedpod to launch its patterns on the unseen aetheric wind. Far's been studying the Disjunct since we Became, jacking deeper every time to try and track where dying Souls go, but he hasn't found the destination yet.
"It's not like this when I die," I say. "I can't harness this kind of power. I'm just dead."
Far shakes his head. "We have harnessed it before; just not this efficiently. It's how Doe blew up half of King Ruin; she died. It's how I first leaped across the bridge to reach Mr. Ruin; I killed you, Doe and Ray. We used it explosively those times, destructively, really just surfing the wave unleashed from a fragment of a Soul passing on. But if we could harness it in this way, and from the death of a complete Soul…" He trails off.
I stare at him. I hadn't thought about that; it's true I am only one seventh of Ritry Goligh. So was Doe, and that was enough to half kill the King. "Harness it how?"
"I don't know, but we need to learn fast. With the Disunct as fuel, there's no telling what kind of power this man will have."
"He'll be unkillable," Ray chimes in. We all look at him. "Imagine it; right now Me can go in with a chord of ten and hop from mind to mind until they're all done, but when the last one dies he's sent back to wait for a few hours to overcome Disjunct and synchronize again. But if he could use that spike as fuel? He could hop into anyone, anywhere, without end. There'd be no way to stop him."
Soul Jacker Box Set Page 45
