Soul Jacker Box Set

by Michael John Grist

  I start to laugh; airless bites connected to no lungs. Maybe that's madness. At least there's nothing more to vomit, I think, and that cracks me up worse. A single leap carries me onto the brick back of the Bathyscaphe, and from there I drop into the conning tower.

  T-minus three. I race down the corridor toward the captain's hutch, stopping halfway to pull one of the huge Extra Vehicular Activity concrete suits out on its rack.

  This.

  Where the combat suit is many-jointed and made of plates that can shift with full range of motion, the EVA suit has minimal jointing and minimal range of motion. It is closer to being a small sublavic itself, with its own rounded, bulky cement-clad hull.

  There's a fresh message written for me on its chest in yellow paint.

  CATCH SOLFEJE

  I laugh more to see it. Is it really there or am I just seeing what I want to see? It doesn't matter; it sounds like a plan to me.

  I unbolt the back and start stripping out all the internals I can, as the EVA rigs are not designed to fit a suit within a suit. T-minus two. I yank out the padding and bio-monitors, the haptic feedback and coolant arrays; all essential for a safe and comfortable ride, but I'm far beyond comfort now. T-minus one, and I feed my suit in. The exo-motors whine hard as leg-by-leg I force the sublavic suit in. Parts of it crumple under the pressure and tight confines, but I don't feel it. My nerve endings stop at the top of my spine now.

  The countdown hits T-minus zero and the combat suit powers down, stops cleaning and oxygenating my meager amount of blood, but I re-route the last few milliseconds into a jolting pull.

  In.

  The EVA seals up around me, clamping into the socket at my throat and using its own power supply to charge me up.

  The count resets.

  I take a simulated breath. Shock-jacks wash in. By Goligh, that feels good. I'm veritably bouncing. I'm ready. My visor tells me that the next wave of the Lag is only a few minutes away from hitting. Solfeje must have been crawling over the Bathyscaphe for hours, but whatever, it doesn't matter now.

  I take control of the EVA through the combat suit, a hand within a hand, and waddle it down the hutchway, scraping the metal walls to either side. I use the simple clamps it has in place of gloves to load its belly payload bay with concrete-clad candlebomb, then I tip its massive visor-less HUD-cap into position, encapsulating me inside and reducing my vision to only what the heat-shielded exterior camera sees.

  I grapnel up onto the Bathyscaphe's back, where I fire a new accelerator cannon to strip back the asteroid's ceiling in slooshing clouds of bondless gold. Through the ship-long gap I can see the next rank of the Lag flicking desperately in toward the orbital ring.

  One more adjustment.

  My calculations are haphazard but the best chance I have. Out on the asteroid's surface, clomping along while the Lag champs nearer, I set candlebomb explosives in the right places. I've no time to rig another pulley system. I set the blasts to blood-mic control then descend. Within a minute I'm standing before the furnace doorway into the Molten Core, facing what I have to do alone.

  I feel the heat already. The magma churns just feet away, held in by the gravity of its own mass; all fierce oranges, reds and yellows bubbling and twisting. I remember dropping La's body into magma much like this, a long long time ago.

  I've never been so alone. I should have the chord with me for this, but they aren't here. There's nobody to tell, nobody to look at, nobody to share this moment with, and so be it. We'll find out soon; I expect I'll have just a few minutes.

  I hook the umbilicus to the suit and push my stubby right arm into the lava flow; molten rock slides over the EVA concrete like liquid glass and draws me inward. I wonder if I will be able to get back out. I let it pull me in, folding into the blazing rock like an engram into a mind. Immediately the heat blows past intense; a few remnant coolants in the suit whine up to high-pitch to counteract it. Only liquid Freon cooling and a thick layer of plating lie between me and the burning heart of this asteroid.

  Soon I am engulfed. Through the HUD's outer camera, in the moments before it melts, I watch the familiar chiaroscuro of a Molten Core. Willowy yellow sulfurs and manganese reds spin around thick revolving banks of darker ferro-carbon, each warp and weft a piece of the larger revolution. It feels like home. I channel suit power to the tail fins and propel inward.

  The heat grows dizzying. My own sweat bathes me, collecting around my neckline and evaporating to fog within the visor. I swim on and soon the exterior camera burns away, leaving me to navigate by the suit's telemetry alone. It only gets hotter. The HUD counts down the estimated time I have left on the concrete cladding on the belly-bay, within which the candlebomb rests.

  T-minus ten. T-minus nine.

  The HUD tells me I've reached the asteroid's edge before I feel it through the suit's lagging haptics. Solid metal and molten rock feel much alike now. The magma flows push me against it, solid matter at the core. I have to hope.

  I unclasp the candlebomb from its belly-bay and press it to the outer rock. The concrete cladding around it melts and bonds at once, holding it in position. It is the largest charge I could carry.

  The umbilicus winds me in, and the flow back out is almost peaceful, though the heat is torturous. It becomes easy to ignore the blaring of my suit's warning light. I get so hot my vision grays, but this is what it takes so I do it.

  How much time? T-minus three on the suit. T-minus five on the cladding.

  I pour out of the Core like hot molasses and stagger away from the furnace as the cool vacuum air freezes the heat right off me, cracking the concrete suit's hull with loud pops. Single-use only.

  I wrestle out of the EVA like an insect climbing from of a man-shaped chrysalis, exo-motors whining loud. T-minus three on the bombs? Residual charge from the EVA will keep my sublavic suit going for a few minutes after that. The Lag's here in four. I want to throw my head back and laugh out loud. If this, if that…

  I lope back to the Bathyscaphe and leap down the chute into the conning tower, the HUD sloshing with sweat and vapor. I look up through the wide gash in the asteroid to the black mouths of Lag. T-minus one. They're so close now, eight ugly slugs kicking their inexorable way toward me.

  I wave them goodbye. The countdown is down to seconds.

  I fire the first rank of explosives placed on the asteroid's exterior, and the great rock responds with a terrifying jolt, throwing it into a spin. I wait and I watch, praying the vector is correct. The belt rotates by overhead and I fire the second rank.

  The asteroid shifts track, pin-wheeling inward until the furrow I've cut in the roof is gliding toward an angle directly facing the Hollow Star. I set a fresh count and drop back into the Bathyscaphe. Seconds on the Lag. Minutes on the suit. Down the corridor to the captain's hutch I bury myself among EVA suits and send the pulse to detonate the candlebomb deep in the Molten Core.

  At first there is nothing, then there is a great and fiery heaving of the whole ship as the initial blast gases escape, then the rippling red glow from outside grows until the conning tower is bathed in it, until the corridor blazes red hot, until the light is so bright my HUD shuts off all visuals.

  Then it erupts. The asteroid's Molten Core explodes with pent-up energy like a god's roar, lofting my ship like a child's ball atop a tsunami and punching it out through the opening in the asteroid's roof and into the gulf toward the Hollow Star on a volcanic geyser. I soar across the empty expanses toward the nimbus of pulsing purple light, and cry out with joy and ferocity despite my graying consciousness, because I'm on my way.

  Solfeje tried to kill me, she left me behind, but I am Me of the chord and you should not fuck with me. Superheated lava pours into the Bathyscaphe through the open porthole, swaddling me like a baby, and wrapped up in solidifying rock I arc from this Chthonic Rock toward the Hollow Star on a pillar of molten fire.

  I'm coming for you, Solfeje.

  ME

  11. ME ALONE

  T
here's a hole, a deep black hole and I'm deep and black within it.

  I think of King Ruin. Always I think first of King Ruin. He humiliated me, tortured and terrified me, stripped me down to nothing and in doing so helped make me what I am today.

  In King Ruin's white chamber of horrors I learned truths that passed through the bridge to the rest of the chord, fundamentally changing who we are and who we Became. He taught us we are not our arms or legs, not our organs or skin, we are not our thoughts or ideas, we are not even only seven tones of a single Soul, but seven constituent Souls combined within a greater gestalt being.

  Ritry Goligh.

  I surface from the darkness filled with dread and memory. My eyes open in a terrible, familiar space; not the gray of Far's Reach hideout or the orange sand of the Hollow Desert, but a place I never thought I'd return to, buried in rock.

  A hissing halogen lamp illuminates bare rock walls and a ceiling spray-coated with cracked cement. Saltwater drips through the gaps, leaving crystalized stalactites of salt hanging down. Bolted to the gloomy walls are racks of cages, empty now but for the straggling bones and leathery skin of King Ruin's dead experiments. Beneath them are rows of cracked vats, some still filled with glutinous dark liquid. In one a chunk of unrecognizable pale flesh floats on the surface, lit from below by a low and glowering halogen-flicker.

  The bonds hum with the hangover tang of familiar cored pain. It's an experimental Court.

  Spartan's Crag.

  The sense of dread redoubles, and I remember that my chord are dead. I gasp as this understanding deepens like a third-degree burn. It wasn't a dream. They're really all dead and I am somehow alive, somehow here.

  How? Why?

  I rise to my feet in a rough triangle of light cast by three halogen lamps set around me. Dripping water plinks off old metal. The lull and shush of the Arctic Ocean breathes far above.

  "Far," I whisper, my voice a croak. It hurts to speak. "Ray."

  No answer comes.

  I reach out to the bonds but of course this place is empty, scrubbed clean after Ritry Goligh once Lagged it for strength. I can't feel the chord because they're all dead, and that absence sears like I've had my whole body amputated. Still I strain for some connection in vain, but I can't feel anything, not the chord or the brood-King or poor dead Yena or…

  I reach wider and feel some kind of EMR Wall hemming me in.

  "Far," I call again louder, hoping against reality that he'll be there, because I need him to be.

  I rise to my feet and peer into the shadows, past corroded metal tables and workbenches where once innocent victims were sawn into pieces in the name of crossing the bridge, but none of the chord are there, hiding. I feel like I've been forged into the Bathyscaphe alone. My head throbs like it never has after Disjunct. Five times, now, I have died.

  "Somebody," I call but no answer comes, only a flat wet echo. "Far!"

  I look down at the arms and legs of this new body, and see my clothes are filthy and marred with some astringent-smelling black substance, like tar or motor oil. I pull up the sleeves of my black cloth jacket to see grazes and dark bruises spreading over the skin of my pale forearms. I never woke from death so weary and battered.

  What has this hand been doing?

  I reach for the bridge seeking answers trailing back, but it is closed to me. I reach around its edges, in the inner space of my Solid Core where the blast door handle should be, but there is no handle at all. I cannot budge it reach through to the aether. I can't feel anything beyond this body or this rock at all.

  I start running, as if I can outrun the truth. Through the jumbled pathways of stirrupped metal benches I go, past strewn electric cables, catheter-like ducting and assorted rusted saw blades and meathooks where once a hundred grotesque experiments hung. I run toward the exit and charge up the winding tunnel by the light of a few staggered lanterns. My legs throb with every step, as though I've already been running for hours, but I continue on, tumbling off the walls like a pinball. I pass up through a guard's room where half-decomposed bodies lie in their uniforms still, with Kaos rifles and key-fobs sinking into their leatherized skin, and up, until fresh cold Arctic air hits me and I burst out into gray.

  I slip at the rock's wet edge and almost fall, barely catching my balance on a rusted railing. All around me lies the Arctic Ocean, rough and choppy under a strong wind. Overhead fierce gray clouds tumble like the Lag, threatening a deluge. I spin in wild circles, my eyes alighting on the ring of sea-forts, their brown leg pillars marked out by white wave-froth, just as they were when I last came this way.

  There is no one here. The only sign of life is a speedboat moored below, lapping harshly against rubber tires hung from the Crag's shabby dock. It too is empty, bar a few lengths of frayed blue rope and a single can of pineapples rocking on its side with the waves.

  "Far!" I shout. "Ray, So, Ti, where are you?"

  Still no answer comes. A moment later the deluge begins, falling on me like an endless spray of freezing surf, but I have nowhere else to go.

  "Far!" I yell into the rain until I am hoarse, until my clothes are drenched through and my shivering is so strong I worry I may tremble off the Crag and into the water. In this beaten, bedraggled condition, I'm not sure I could even climb back up.

  The chord are gone.

  I retreat. I walk shuddering back down the rocky stairs along with a stream of rainwater, and for the first time notice the low thrum of pumps. The Crag is at least operational, and I will not drown.

  I stop at one of the halogens set along the descending corridor and touch it, as if this contact will give me some answers. It is a cold light that offers no comfort. I move on, feeling numb. I stop in the guard's room and remember the day I first came through here and shot them all, back when I was still Ritry Goligh.

  I see now that they were playing a game of cards. Their poker hands still lie on the table where they fell. I notice one of them has a full house, aces and nines.

  I feel disembodied, standing here in my own decaying trail. Time has hollowed me out. I am not Ritry Goligh anymore, full of seven nascent Souls, I am only Me and this is a dead, Lagged Court from a different man's past.

  I feel like laughing. This is a ruin of my own life, and I am its King. I'm delirious and dangerously exhausted. What I really need now, I think, is some vodka. The laughter breaks out of my throat in a weird shuddery bark. Ritry Goligh would drink, and curse, and get into fights. But I'm Me, I've always had the chord and responsibilities, except now I don't.

  I remember dying in the aether. How am I even alive?

  I head back down to the hall where I woke up; it is empty still. The EMR shield still buzzes, but I can sense something through it now: the Soul-trail left by this hand, in the hours before I was birthed into it. I track it back and forth, unloading the speedboat to carry the contents down here, and I begin to understand.

  This was Far.

  At one edge of the dripping hall I find a pile of plastic crates tucked underneath a surgery table. I squat and pick through the contents: one crate loaded with bottled water, another with tinned goods, one with clothes and another with weapons and combat gear. In one crate there is a sleeping bag, a tent, and several canisters of gas for the halogen lamps. In the penultimate I find a sheaf of scribbled notes in a red binder, and beneath that lies an EMR helmet; it is switched on and throwing up a Wall that blocks my access to the bonds. My first reaction is to turn it off, but words are painted across its top in thick yellow paint.

  LEAVE IT ON, ME

  I leave it on. I slump to sit on the cold rock floor with the helmet at my side and the binder in my hands, feeling the chill reaching up from the core of the earth. The binder is a mission pack. It says those words on the front page.

  MISSION PACK

  I can't think clearly now; I need to be told what to do. I turn the first page, noticing there are blotches of ink on my own fingers that seem to match the ridges and whorls of fingerprints on the pap
er. I wrote this, it seems. I can feel this hand's trail upon it. Far wrote it through this body, before he made way for me.

  A block of text faces me and I start to read.

  Do not turn the EMR off, Me. When you leave this place take the helmet with you. The brood-King will find you the instant you turn it off. For now he thinks you're dead, but if he catches even the faintest glimmer of you, he will come and it will be over.

  HE HAS THE BRIDGE, ME. HE HAS THE BONDS. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO JACK BEYOND THIS EMR SHELL.

  While he was raiding the suprarenes and the subglacics and the subthonic, I was in the aether. I went deeper than I've ever been before, and saw things I've never seen, but I did not find the inner bridge to godhood. I still don't even know if it exists.

  I only know you have to find it.

  I heard you calling, Me. I came back, but I was too late and you were all dead. The King came for me too, but with the last of my strength I brought you here. It was the only way, with the bridge so completely colonized.

  DO NOT TRY TO CROSS THE BRIDGE.

  If you do this, you will only do it once. He is everywhere there and the aether belongs to him now. I barely slipped through. By the time you read this I will be gone.

  You are alone now like you never were before. I know this will be hard, but you must remember that Loralena is still alive. Our children are still alive.

  You have to kill him, Me. I don't know how or if that's even possible anymore. He is more powerful than King Ruin ever was, and already far along the path toward godhood. There is no telling what he will do with that power.

  You have to become a god first, Me, whatever it takes. You have to make sacrifices.

  I'm sorry I couldn't save more of us. I'm sorry I can't be there with you now.