Soul Jacker Box Set

by Michael John Grist

  "He didn't Lag it," I say.

  My own voice startles me. I haven't spoken aloud for a week.

  "He didn't Lag it," I say again, enjoying the way my new mouth vibrates and the way the sound echoes in that chamber. My hands pay no attention.

  I wonder at this odd choice by King Ruin. To have left the ancient memories of this place intact means he let his brood grow up around them. Perhaps he saw it as a perverse reminder of everything they would stand against. Perhaps it amused him. Perhaps it was another form of torture.

  I no longer know what I'm looking for, with no hint of the brood-King here, but I continue regardless. We exit the cathedral and pass through a complex of other huddled stone buildings: a small rock church hanging on a trellis, a kitchen with stone ovens, a library thick with the dust of old books, a dormitory for the lowest-ranked monks stretching back into the rock, a small iron forge, a stone font with water trickling down from a channeled slit in the cliff, a brew house, and finally the rounded tower at the peak.

  Stone stairs turn in a circle from the tower's base, and I climb them with my chord of hands trailing behind. We pass by small open windows in the stone wall through which I catch glimpses of the ocean, graced by small puffs of sea air. After five revolutions I emerge into an open landing off which two rooms diverge.

  Classrooms. I step into the first and it is like stepping into the past. The view through the stone window is the same as in Mr. Ruin's memory. The front wall and chalkboard are here still; there are even several skeletons of past lecturers laid out by the front desk.

  "Attention, class," I find myself saying.

  Of course the room is empty, though I can feel the potential of what it once held. I can see the bond-lines of a hundred generations of brood-members stretching out into the world. Some of them are vaguely familiar, perhaps ones that I have already killed.

  Is there a hint of him here?

  I walk to the desk that was once Mr. Ruin's. It is still here, stained dark with blood like all the desks. My ten hands stand in the doorway watching me blindly, and I send them back. This is not for them.

  I sit.

  Mr. Ruin once sat here as a child. I jack into the bonds held within this space, of an infant gathered from between his dead mother's legs and raised in the madness of this place. Fellow brood-members became his mother and father, King Ruin was his god and this was his world. There were no friends here, there was no love, no affection, only a single mission.

  Make the King proud.

  All his childhood he was tormented in inventive ways that only seasoned torturers could know. He continued the cycle of abuse as soon as he was large enough to; he had to or he would die. Those who were cruelest, who could make themselves most feared, survived. The others did not.

  It is of course sad, but I am done with sympathy for Mr. Ruin and the brood. The infants they once were died when King Ruin took them, and they became my enemy. If I could reach out and kill them all at a stroke, I would, with no remorse.

  I open the little desk but there is nothing inside bar dust. I feel Mr. Ruin's recent tracks through this space, only several years past. He must have come here in the years I was living with my family in Calico, waiting for his crop to come to fruition. He came to suck what little sustenance he could from the memory of past glories.

  I stand. This place is empty. It has been a wasted trip, and the brood-King has left no trail I can follow, which means there is no trail I can conceivably find.

  So I go to Iquliat, to muster as much of an assault as I can.

  I push back through my chord. My footsteps slap loudly down the spiral stairs and back through the warren of buildings into the cathedral. I am halfway down the nave when I finally sense it, reaching tentatively out toward me within my EMR Wall.

  A Soul.

  It is gone in a second, like a dead satellite twinkling in the sunlight as it revolves, but the pattern it leaves behind is clear and I cling to it.

  The brood-King.

  It is not him, not by a long distance, but there is a deep, abiding, all-consuming terror of him here. There is one who knows him. I snatch out, reaching to the outer edge of my EMR Wall and find the Soul to which this fear belongs, immured within solid rock at the end of a bricked-in passageway, long-mad and haunted by terror.

  It knows him.

  My chord floods into every dark hole in the rock to root this lost Soul out.

  --.

  J. STRANGE

  "You look strange," Ven says, studying me from inches away on her shitty bed in her tiny, shitty hutch of a room. "What's wrong with your eyes?"

  I blink, barely keeping the tears from flowing, and slide up onto on elbow. I rush my hand up to my eyes and rub them. I can't believe this.

  "I'm fine," I say, "something got in my eye."

  She's looking at me still, doubtful. "While you were sleeping?"

  Her face is a blur and I rub at my eyes more. I want to give her a massive hug and cover her cold white face in kisses, but I don't think she'd like that.

  "Probably a spider," I manage. "Your ship is full of them."

  She snorts. "I killed all the spiders on this ship myself. There are none."

  For a moment I have the image of Ven; expression intent, cheeks daubed with blue warpaint, holding a burning torch in one hand and a spear in the other, hunting spiders through the subglacic's narrow halls. I laugh.

  She frowns, perhaps guessing the image she's given me. By that I can judge this is many months into our time together, after she'd started to soften and adapt to being around another person so intimately.

  "I gassed them," she says. "Before we embarked. The whole ship was decontaminated for rats, cockroaches, fleas, everything. It couldn't possibly be a spider."

  Now I do lean in and kiss her. Her confusion delights me. I kiss her on the other cheek, pushing the moment as far as I can.

  "Stop it," she commands. "I don't have time to do this again."

  "There's always time," I say, pulling back the covers to reveal her pale naked chest, breasts squashed up between her arms. It shocks me how easily I slip back into the horny young man Ritry Goligh once was.

  "Perhaps for an alcoholic Soul Jacker," she says, batting my hand off the cover and rolling sideways from the bed. "Not for the ship's commander."

  I lie like a louche on her sad little bed, watching while she gets up and pulls a fresh and crisp uniform off one of a dozen hangers slung from a gray pipe. She starts to put it on, an unreal sight that I drink in. Ven who I was never right for, never good for, who changed me forever.

  I bite my thumb to see if this is real, and it hurts.

  "What are you doing now?" she ask.

  "I'm hungry," I say, right back into teasing again. There's the frown again and I love it. She doesn't know if I'm serious or not. Probably she's about to suggest I go to the communal mess. I catch some faint sense of that in the air but she withholds, still uncertain if I'm teasing or not and opting to get on with dressing herself.

  I lay back and watch. She is slimmer than I remember, her cheeks more angular, her breasts tauter and smaller, and I can even see the outline of her ribs beneath her skin, but she is Ven still. I never had any photographs from this time; only the rough, bruised memories I sheltered of her through the long EMR Lag, after the mindbomb fell.

  What matters is not her body though but the Soul lodged inside, like a pearl in a gnarly shell. That is more beautiful, more innocent, more hesitantly loving than any I had ever known until then. With her, for the first time, I no longer felt like a freak.

  Thinking these thoughts while she gets dressed makes tears spring to my eyes again. She's looking at me again.

  "It is not a spider," she accuses, and this just delights me further. I would leap to my feet and gather her up in my arms, but I've done enough of that already. Ven was always like a cat, willful and independent, and she never welcomed unforeseen affection. It's enough that I kissed her twice outside the ritual movements of sex.<
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  "It's your beauty," I say goofily, as goofy as anything I said in my early twenties, when I was packed full of shallow self-confidence papered over chasms of insecurity. "It's blinding me."

  "You are strange this morning. You should rise too. We have the circuit of Iquliat to run, and there are many marines that need the appropriate skillsets."

  I nod dumbly, surprised by the name of the place. Iquliat. It sounds familiar, and that jolts me somehow. Where am I really, I wonder? On a purple Hollow Star after crossing from an orbital ring of asteroids after Solfeje betrayed me, or in a neo-Armorican subglacic working my way through the War, or am I dead and this is what happens when you die, or maybe some combination of all three? Am I Me, or Ritry Goligh, or some combination of those two?

  "Ritry," she says, answering the question for appearances' sake at least. "Get up and go jack my marines."

  I wipe my eyes with my forearm and rise. I am naked too, and the chill off the ship's bare metal walls strikes me like an Arctic breeze. I remember briefly a year spent in a blue-tarp park on the Skulks, eyeing a fellow marine across the way, living with blood and bruises and always subject to the weather.

  Ven is watching me

  I shake it off and cast about for my clothes. There'll be time to figure things out later. "Where are-" I mumble, but Ven cuts me off.

  "I threw them in the incinerator, as they stank of alcohol. I don't know where you get it, I destroyed all the alcohol on board this ship too."

  I remember this; a faint recollection of this exact moment, along with another image of her stalking the corridors in her cavewoman paint, digging out cowering bottles of booze. I must have hidden this memory so deeply I even forgot it, sheltered like a tiny spark in my mind. I even remember what I said the last time.

  "Then give me a bra," I say, following the script laid out some twenty-five years ago. "And some panties, a thong will be fine. I'll go collect new clothes at the commissary."

  Her mouth opens wide, scandalized. "I don't have a thong. And you may not take my bra!"

  I get up nonchalantly and go over to the brown wooden chest of drawers against the wall, the only hint of anything natural in this room, and start riffling through her underwear. "This one maybe," I say, tossing a scarlet bra I bought for her on one of our offshore breaks onto the bed behind me. I toss the matching scarlet panties. "Maybe these?"

  "No!" she hisses, as though afraid someone will hear us. She is at my side now, closing the drawer and grabbing at my hands. "You wear your uniform; there's one spare in the cupboard."

  "These look a lot more attractive, I think I can pull them off

  She covers my mouth with her hand. "I am the captain," she says, wagging a finger in my face. "You will not wear my bra!"

  I love this. She is the captain, she is a genius, but I can get under her skin this way. I suppose it's her insecurity; being a woman doesn't come naturally to her, any more than being a well-adjusted person comes to me, and I can play with that. I would never abuse it.

  I kiss her forehead. She shoves me back onto the bed, and as I tumble in the rumpled sheets I catch a fleeting reflection of myself in the sliver of mirror she keeps above the dresser.

  I am so young; without any gray hairs, not a speck of fat on me. Young, slim, and laughing still. She storms out in a huff, clutching a handful of fabric I imagine must be all her lingerie, leaving me amused with myself.

  It takes a few minutes before I realize she has actually taken my uniform. It does make me laugh more, but I don't put on her bra. Instead I wrap myself in a sheet and dash into the corridor with my head ducked down.

  K. NA

  It's a joy to remember what the War was like.

  There are simple things, like the alternating cold metal of outer bulkheads/hot metal of inner bulkheads that I feel as I walk back to my room, trailing one hand on the worn walls. It's just like the Bathyscaphe; details Ritry Goligh's mind replicated every time we forged to life.

  I look down on a pattern hammered into the ground underfoot, several letters repeated like initials:

  NA NA NA NA

  Neo-Armorica, Ritry's faction in the War; a nation that barely exists anymore. Or does it exist again, because I'm here? I don't know.

  There are other details I've experienced again since, like the constant musk of bodies in the air, the bland smell of tinned food after a year in storage, the alkali tang of shower water from the sub's recycling cisterns; all these things are discrete and familiar to me. They are features I could experience in any other place at any other time.

  What is impossible to replicate is this overall feel of the War, hanging like a constant thickness in the air, like fluid in an artificial womb swaddling me in. It envelops me now even as I walk down the hull, perhaps some early precursor of my ability to read the bonds; a mass human redeployment that will change the face of my world forever.

  I was on the frontlines in that change, and every day death was a companion. Our people were dying constantly. Our ships and mines were being lost to enemy fire even as the global tsunamis unleashed by quakeseed blasts continued to pummel our homeland; wrecking cities and destroying our bases of power.

  It was apocalyptic, the real end-times, but there was a kind of transcendent joy in living on that knife-edge; in walking it with others and feeling that what we did every day could make a difference. I feel that joy again now, making every second that I'm here, wherever and whatever here is, so poignant it aches.

  I have missed this.

  I hurry through the subglacic, down corridors where marines I know jeer at me in a comradely way. I think I even spy Tigrates but I duck quickly out of sight. If there was anyone who would rip my towel off and laugh for months to come as I ran naked back to my quarters, it would be her.

  Happily I reach my quarters without such incident and stride in, slamming the door behind me. The space is small, and Heclan is on the floor off his bed balled up in sweaty covers and groaning.

  "Rit?" he mumbles, still drunk from the CSF bender we went on last night. "Turn off the light."

  "It is off, you idiot," I slur back at him. I'm still drunk too, I suppose. Most of the crew is, most of the time.

  I turn the light on and the room flickers to yellow life.

  "Stop it, I'm dying," Heclan moans.

  He's short, quite ugly and a crazy little bastard. Already half-bald, with scrags of wispy brown hair standing up on the side of his head like static from where he's been curled up like an unwanted dog, I wouldn't want anyone else for my jack assistant. Being ugly has never stopped him making off with a wide range of women, some even combat marines, using his inestimable persistence. The man never stops, has some unknowable well of confidence and competence I've never scraped the surface of, and that gives him a charm many can't resist. It's what kept me from killing him when he injected alcohol directly into my brain instead of CSF coolant.

  He flaps a hand vaguely upward. "Light, dying."

  "Hurry up and die then," I tell him, acting out the script just as I remember it without even needing to think, "or get up, we have to go inject some engrams for this latest raid."

  "I'll take you with me when I die," he mumbles, shielding his eyes. "At least shade the light."

  I look up at the light, recessed into the ceiling to avoid potential injury, like everything on the sub. There's a folded bit of burnt yellow fabric held over it with magnetic clamps, a shade jury-rigged to reduces the glare. I remember this detail now; how we went through a few of these towels a month as the light burnt them out. This latest one is almost burnt through.

  I pull the shade down and Heclan sighs contentedly. By the yellowish light I look around the room, my room, where I spent so many years of my life. It is a tight galley spread liberally with empty CSF jars smuggled out of the lab, with two narrow cots piled with rumpled clothing, a slim ravine between them filled with Heclan and sheets, and shelves which have mostly been stacked with mismatched Soul Jacker journals scavenged from various rai
ds, all in different languages. Every inch of the panel floor is covered in clothes, dirty plates, and other garbage: assorted note-papers covered in my scrawly ink, several of Heclan's collection of pottery owls, shoes, ski-poles which Heclan and I used to use for 'deck-hiking' around the sub on our shifts off; all of it scattered from various cubbyhole shelves and inbuilt cupboards.

  The room looks like a dry-ice bomb hit it.

  "What happened here?" I ask Heclan.

  He rolls to look up at me, squinting against the light. "Mouse," he mumbles weakly.

  Ah, yes, I remember. We had gotten extremely drunk after fixing that blinded marine, then we'd started searching for a mouse sometime in the middle of the night, because of a sound one of us thought we'd heard. At some point I went to find Ven to ask her help in hunting it.

  "Did she wear warpaint?" Heclan asks.

  I laugh, remembering that part of our conversation too. So that's where the image came from.

  "No paint. Now get up." I prod him firmly with my toe. He groans more loudly the more I toe him, which is exactly as it should be. I play a tune off his skin, and he groans differently when I poke his belly and when I poke his face, until finally he starts to rouse.

  I sit on the cot, dizzy myself, while he stumbles to his feet. I'm still drunk, of course. My head feels too heavy, and once more I try to make sense of where and what I am. I still feel like Me, one seventh of Ritry Goligh, but I remember being Ritry Goligh too. I remember Solfeje, and my heart beats a little harder at that.

  Is she here? Is she waiting? Is this the race we've both stumbled into?

  "I'm up!" Heclan declares abruptly and proudly, as if I've been badgering him all this time.