"About time," I say, and give him a boot in the butt. He lurches against the wall with his pants around his knees, banging his head hard. We both laugh even as a trickle of blood runs down from a split in his temple.
"Am I cut?" he asks between gasps of laughter, holding out his fingers with red on them. "Is this blood?"
I was such a jerk. We both were, and the constant threat of impending death made it all seem like good fun. Getting wasted and smacking our bodies around was really just our way of taking what little we had control and using it to spit in death's face.
"You'll be fine, just walk it off."
We get dressed. We scrub our faces to get rid of the blear and the worst of the alcohol stink. I help Heclan put on a small plastic bandage, then we head out for the jack-bay.
L. MINDBOMB
There is an unspoken hierarchy on a subglacic.
I recall this as we walk along the narrow corridors together. Top of the heap were the combat marines, without question. I was one of them at the start of my military draft, before my aptitude in an EMR highlighted me for special training.
The combat marines fought together, died together and came back with booty together. We were the jocks in our training camps, the coolest kids who got all the best sex, cherry-picking whomever we wanted from the lower rungs on the ladder. We made our own tribe to which few others were admitted, because who could understand the sheer madness of what we faced when shunted out the conning tower assault tubes?
Next came command. Ven was in this group, at its head. Even she would demur to the combat marines at times, for morale. She ordered these men and women to their deaths; that could only work if she showed them the respect that risk demanded.
Beneath command lay all the numerous administration fields, the marines who didn't fight, from those who worked the radar room (low) to those who stocked the small-arms vault (medium) and manned the subglacic's weapons array (high). Beneath them was logistics, the subclass who didn't come close to the fighting and supported those who did, including cooking, cleaning and managing stock in the commissary.
At the edge of them all, isolated from any kind of standard hierarchy by the confessional nature of the job, were me and Heclan, the Soul Jackers. While essential to the success of any mission, integral to it in ways even the captain didn't always fully understand, it could be hard sometimes to argue we were necessary. Everything the ship had to do, it could do without us. You could not say that about anyone else on board. Even the guy who cleaned the nozzles in the chicken soup machine was more vital than me.
Yet a good Soul Jacker could change the entire crew. I'd seen it on other ships and learned it as a combat marine before they ever redeployed me. The best Soul Jackers provided a dozen essential support roles all rolled into one powerful package: absolver to marines who couldn't deal with the constant loss of comrades and needed select memories expunged forever; priest to people who believed in no god but still needed to feel a higher power watching over them; physical consort to the lost, the lonely, the frightened; psychologist to men and women who trusted no one and had felt their own minds blown inward by combat; most-trusted teacher of all kinds of EMR-injectable skills.
We had detailed files on every member of the crew, and I knew that kind of power and access could lead to mistrust and doubt as often as it did to higher morale. I'd heard of cases of abuse where Soul Jackers used their position to rape their way through a crew, Lagging the memories after they'd had their fill. I'd heard of spies posing as Soul Jackers, come from other factions in the War to drain all a crew's secrets and weaknesses without anyone even knowing it had happened, leading to an intrinsic mistrust. I'd also heard of incompetency, in cases where Jackers could not stomach the things they had to do, or were unable to do them in the face of intense battle pressure. Most of all, I heard of burnouts.
They happened all the time. War-Jackers had to weigh the mental wellbeing of everyone on board; we were known for our ability to 'feel' the emotional state of the ship. Now I know this 'feeling' as the bonds, but back then it was a vague idea even the best researchers were unable to pin down despite generations of jacking into the mind. We sensed it though there was no good name for it, and we were the ones best placed to apply a nudge here and a prod there to turn the mood around, for just as long as we could hold ourselves together.
We fixed problems. We hacked into living minds and made them right again, ready to serve again as fodder for the War, like the man with the lost eyes. If I hadn't 'fixed' him he would eventually have pulled his whole combat brigade down and gotten other marines killed.
Instead I erased his weaknesses. Now he'll alienate his old friends but he'll find new ones that match the man he's become. He was a broken cog and I hammered him true, but it wasn't all I did back then. The best Soul Jackers wielded their power in every social instance, and I was the best.
I had the crew's implicit trust. Having fought in combat myself, I'd been through all the worst things there were. Hardened killers came to me to weep and bitch and moan without any sense of shame, and often I could solve their problems without ever needing an invasive jack; just a word in the right ear, a quick roll in my regulation single bed, or a debauched evening slugging back strong CSF vodka.
That was the true role of a Soul Jacker; the beating heart of a ship. So Tigrates and Ferrily partied with us, drawn to our invisible mystique. So Ven fell in love with me despite herself, entranced by the compassionate depths of her own Soul that being near me exposed. So I drank to keep myself in balance as the world spun wildly on, and we all played our roles and we all stayed alive through the long grim haul of the War.
"Ritry," Heclan says abruptly, yanking me from the reverie. He's standing by the door to the jack-bay while I've walked clear past it. I toss a goofy grin and turn around.
There are already three marines waiting outside, ready to be fixed. I nod at them and enter the room. It is barely bigger than our quarters, half-filled with the gray metal donut of the EMR machine with Heclan's control screen beside it. The walls are lined with locked cupboards that stretch back into the hull, filled with all the supplies we need.
I pick up a tablet and scan through the manifest. Ten marines are on our docket for the morning, all of them needing engrams of the best schematics we have of an Aleutian hydrate mine and its defenses, spotted on a spy satellite pass.
It'll be a long but simple day, as the knowledge is light and the routes to embed it well-trodden. I groan at Heclan and he pulls a face back at me. I can't describe how good it feels to be here again, contributing as part of this team, even if I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing. I'm glad to play along.
"Send them in," I tell Heclan.
He clicks a button to open the door and shouts through it. "Next!"
A marine comes in. He's massive, square, but vulnerable in this place. There's something familiar about his eyes but I put that to one side as I wink cheerily, putting him at ease. Every crew-member knows their relationship with me is not a normal one. He says something insulting about me screwing the commander in my towel, which suggests Tigrates did see me in flight earlier. I reply with something bright about him maybe coming away from this jack with an inexplicable desire to screw his own asshole. He chuckles and winces. This is my rapport.
The familiarity grows stronger as Heclan straps him in for the jack, and I try to puzzle it out. Perhaps we drank together once? Fought together on an old hydrate raid? It's only when he is slid into the EMR like a half-rack of ribs, and I'm lying by his side scanning through the outer layers of his Molten Core that I remember how I know him.
I've lost most of it now, bait I used a long time ago to keep myself alive, but I'll never forget the basic texture of this man's Soul. I lived off it for hours, spooning chunks at a time to the Lag while I was trapped inside his mind. I cannibalized him to save myself.
Oh fuck. Realization hits me like a tsunami.
Today is the day we get mindbombed.
&nbs
p; I pull out of his outer thoughts sharply, snatch up the tablet and stare at the time display for long seconds as the weight of this sinks in.
The mindbomb is coming. In less than an hour everybody aboard this ship will be dead.
ME
17. ART
We descend like liquid into porous rock.
Two of my hands find passageways in the back of the monk's cloister cells, one finds a hole in the kitchen beneath a rusted metal oven, two rappel down to the anchorite hutches carved in the cliff and discover a rabbits warren of narrow tunnels.
At their head I run deep into a labyrinth of pitch-black caverns filled with memories of horror; past a hewn-rock crèche where the infant brood made finger paintings with blood, past a hall where children extracted the living organs of victims and strung them still pumping around the walls, past the cracked canvases of their latter artworks; exploded diagrams of the human nervous system made of slit-out nerve networks splayed like fractal tree branches, judged by the quality of screams they drew. Further in I pass hulking EMRs and medical equipment, everything the teenaged brood needed to section living Souls, and the precursor of the tortures King Ruin perpetrated on me in his experimental Court.
It's horrific, but I don't give a shit about any of it. I've seen and lived this for years now, and none of it is not what the immured Soul fears most. He was an earnest part of all these exercises in pain; he wound out the guts, he splayed the nerves, he flattened the minds with just as much gusto as the rest of the brood. Rather he is afraid of something far more terrible.
Then I'm there.
The tunnel ends at a rough octagonal chamber in the rock, with seven tall redbrick walls facing me at faceted angles, weirdly bright in the suit lights. The air smells stale and ancient but for an acrid tang of human effluent, reminding me of the mud-filled central sepulcher in the middle of Mr. Ruin's ancient pyramid of memory.
A shrine to past sicknesses.
In the center of the octagon lies a large stack of red clay bricks set upon a wooden pallet. Beside them sits a squat gray portable generator, its cables lost in dust, and a blue barrel with a TOXIC label on its side.
I stride closer and detect the smell of burnt hydrates on the air. I circle the brick stack and see a motorized cement mixer lying on its side, the same kind Skulk-crews in proto-Calico use to mortar their jetsam buildings together.
I kneel beside it, resting my fingers lightly on the equipment's rough lip. There are so many bonds here at this deepest point; a thousand sedimentary layers of suffering. Here victims were sacrificed, here brood members were punished, here King Ruin held frequent cannibalistic survival games amongst those coming of age to cull out the weak. The strongest bond by far though is the terror. There is one Soul here, now, and it has long gone mad with fear.
I walk to the reddest, most freshly bricked wall from which the terror emanates like a cold Arctic wind. A brick wall fits crudely within a carved rock archway, perhaps leading to deeper tunnels. I touch the rough fired clay and the terror beyond hits me like an electrostatic shock, focused and desperate. I slide my hand into the slim gap at the edge, and feel the madness of his Sunken World.
One of my hands passes me a pickaxe, and the terror beyond redoubles.
"I'm coming," I say, and swing the pick hard into the brick.
18. SUNKEN WORLD
The wall is fifteen layers thick of brick and takes hours to smash through, swapping in and out for my hands. The terror beyond heightens until at last, as I break through the final brick screen into darkness, the heart of this desperate creature overloads in a flurry of staccato beats.
I punch through the gap into the foul stench of bodily waste, and drop to my knees by a translucent-white cave thing, lank and slack and naked in its own filth, lying on the shit-strewn floor and palsying in death.
Down one side of the wide tunnel are more brick-stacks, with another cement mixer, fuel supply, generator, cables and buckets. Down the other side are numerous pallets stacked tall with cans of food. Down the middle is an open sewer of waste. In the cave thing's hand there's a mortaring trowel, with a bucket of shiny wet cement and a small heap of bright red bricks nearby.
It has been immuring itself.
A hand passes me a syringe concocted from the tanker's Soul Jacker lab. I stab it into this creature's heart and depress the plunger. Epinephrine jolts him back to life, and he opens his wide eyes on me and starts to scream.
I punch him silent in the bonds then jack through his mind's weak crystalline shell and deep into the tsunami-blasted mire of his rotten Sunken World.
The mountains of shit inside are epic.
I stand atop my Bathyscaphe alone after passing through slurry, looking out over a rotting landscape. The stench is overpowering; I can smell it even through my sublavic suit's HUD, seeping into everything. All around lie the remnants of a Molten Core torn to shreds. There are scraps of buildings and pyramids, features that were once whole memories but have since been gnawed at and partially consumed.
The black mud of mulched memory is everywhere. I look up to a lowering dark sky. I look to the horizon to see a low tsunami rolling in, the hint of Lag worms leaping like froth on its crest. In the other direction I see a shoddy White Tower.
Fuck this.
I don't have time for it. I've been this way before and I know what caused it: an overpowering engram inject of nonsense knowledge, too much for the brain to handle. I did it to Mr. Ruin, and from everything I'm sensing this mind did it to itself.
I turn to the Bathyscaphe, flick a switch in my mind and it becomes a Dactyl helicopter. I swing into the cab and fire up the dual-rotors, pull back on the stick and this machine that is me jerks upward with a roar. I give it the commands and it soars toward the White Tower.
Bofors rockets take out the soldiers on the wall, dressed in a medley of ancient armor, all leather and chained mail. My howitzers rake the Tower's doorway, blowing it inward enough for me to see the piles of heaped garbage inside, some bastard's mementoes I don't care about.
I thrust the stick back and take us lurching up into the sky, toward the peak where the Tower is still whitest and gleaming, where a door to the aetheric bridge should stand. In seconds I reach the peak and blow it to dust in a hailstorm of rockets and shells.
I grapnel into the gap and tie off the elasteel line to my Dactyl, left hovering in place behind me like a moored boat. The aetheric bridge stands behind a colonnaded door to my right, and right in front of me, cowering against a clamshell-wall now striated with ash and burn-marks, huddles the same figure I found in the immured cave.
He's gibbering, but I don't expect him to talk. Rather I stride in, crack his head open and look at what's left inside. Snatches of memory come bubbling up through the mud of his mind and I see myself:
- loading a Soul Jacker's syringe with silver liquid, my hands trembling. I am surrounded in the bonds by dozens of others now, my brood class all gathered together in a grand suicidal pact. As one we lift the glinting steel to our eyes, push the needles in and depress the plungers.
The rush that follows is awful, destructive, terrifying, but it can't wipe it all. Nothing can wipe away the fear.
Another memory bubbles up, of sitting in the classroom in the circular turret when I was just a brood child. With the others I am flicking pins into the open stomach cavity of a screaming woman, when one of our cadaver lecturers enters with a new boy in tow.
He is flaxen-haired, gaunt and covered in blood. His mouth is mired with it, his eyes are wild with it, his teeth are stained with it.
The pin-flicking stops. All eyes turn to look at him; a new brood member older than most when they're brought in. All of us can feel the hate burning up off him, with none of the fear new inductees usually show when they arrive.
His hate is overwhelming. He hates the hand at his back, hates the Suns themselves, hates himself and the things he has done. It sends a chill in my blood. He looks at us like we are nothing, the same way we look
at the victims the Suns brings for us to play with.
I know at once that he is now the predator and we are the prey.
One of the girls doesn't realize this quickly enough, and flicks a pin at him. It bounces off his cheek, and he reaches out through the bonds in a way I've never seen before. At once the girl begins to choke. She grabs for her throat, rises to her feet, then a fountain of blood and entrails spews up from her mouth.
She dies while we watch. None of us has ever seen this before. The Suns hasn't taught it to us.
The cadaver teacher grins. "This is a new boy in the school," it says. "One day he'll be your general. Play nice."
I look at the boy and he looks at me, one amongst many. In his eyes I see not only death, but emptiness forever, and it turns my bowels to water.
The boy walks in and takes a seat. The memory fades.
Another rises up.
I have made my own successes, brought my own minor atrocities down upon the small circle of the world to which I have been assigned, these islands off Ankara, and the Suns has begun to notice me. I am not yet invited to the deeper research Courts, I have never joined an experimental jack into the Solid Core, but perhaps one day I will. I am a sergeant on the frontlines in the Suns' ceaseless war against the world, and that is fair, that is right, I am no general of the brood yet.
Then one man changes everything. Ritry Goligh. I feel it as he breaks open the aetheric bridge for the first time since the Suns first did it millennia ago; the shockwave reverberates across the world. The ground I have been raised to stand upon all my life shifts, and I no longer know the things I thought I knew.
Moments later the call comes out from the Suns to soothe us: the event is localized, the matter contained, it is nothing to be concerned about. Moments after comes its warning echo from the boy covered in blood, a general now in the experimental Courts, jacking deeper than any have before. In his warning I feel his old hate swelling up again, and the sense of promise this new development offers him.
Soul Jacker Box Set Page 52
