Seagulls flock in the air above and I feel their tiny Souls like hot dots on a sonar screen, each a tiny molten lake swathed around a pellet-like Solid Core. I reach out further to the oceans; there are orca hunting a school of fish, and I feel their Souls too. Hotter than the birds, concealing deep and heavy Cores, they respond to my touch.
I tell the orca to swim to the surface. I command the birds to fly to meet them. In instant after glorious instant they come beak to beak, these inhabitants of such different worlds, and I luxuriate in the power. Now I see that I never needed an EMR to do this. I just needed the will.
I stride along the Ylep's keel top feeling like I could spread my own wings and fly. From the high tip of the ship's broken middle a pair of wires shoots away to anchor in another wreck, and I walk out atop them without a second thought, because I know instinctively that this power is not limited other Souls.
This power can transform my own. With it I feel the wind and the sway of the cables like an extension of my body. My Soul expands to encompass these things, and I learn to walk the tightrope as if it is level ground. Everything I need is here; I breathe the world and it buoys me up, as if this is the most natural thing there is.
The Ylep fades behind me and I sway above a lethal fall to the frothy rocks below, more alive than ever. Every sway in the wire is known to me already, as though we are one, bringing the simple and certain knowledge that I will never fall. My feet will not slip because I am their master. I am master of all of this through the bonds left behind.
Halfway along I begin to run, because I can. The wire jolts and bounces and I jolt and bounce along with it, in perfect harmony.
At the bottom I leap off onto a landing gantry amongst the rocks. The wreck here offers a section of forecastle split off from its hull like a boulder sheared along a fault line. I climb into it with ease, avoiding broken glass and toothy snarls of metal, onto a level corridor which many thousands of people walked before me. I can feel all their bonds branching out like a web.
I enter the cathedral ship's inner temple through a large archway, twisted to the side like a dislocated shoulder. Before me stretches a vast and towering space filled with hundreds of long wooden pews, lined up before an altar marked with icons from all the world's major religions.
The weight of belief here drops me to my knees and forces tears from my eyes. Light streams in through high broken windows, painting the central aisle a vivid red and turning the pews a welcoming mahogany. It is beautiful, holy, and the mass of intersecting bonds is beyond overwhelming. It is rapture.
When I come back to myself the bars of light have shifted, and I feel full up to the brim. Everything I'd hunted for in the days after Ven and the war; scrounging around the Skulks hunting for a reason to be alive, all the while fighting for scraps in brothels and bar-fights, fighting against others just to get a taste; all of that is here in abundance. I can feel every Soul that passed this way and left their trace as an individual note in this grand symphony of memory. They are imprinted in me now too.
And I don't hurt a single living Soul to do it, unlike Mr. Ruin, no more than a gliding gull hurts the wind. They didn't know what they left behind in life and none of them will miss it in death. I could live here for a thousand years and never need anything else.
But I can't stay. Being here has changed me, and Mr. Ruin was right about what he promised, because now I've found something to want.
More.
12. SKULK 47
Back at the Ylep as the sun sets, I siphon gas from the jet-skis into Don Zachary's speedboat. The sky grows dark but I have never felt less tired.
Easing the boat through the sharp reefs is so easy that I could do it with my eyes closed, sensing the outline of rocks beneath the water. Full dark falls as I pull onto open ocean and accelerate over the low breakers. Wind streams through my hair and a sky full of stars sparks to life above. The bonds of the godship fleet snap away from me one by one, but the charge they injected remains.
I stand up before the wheel and shout into the sky. Everything is open and everything is to play for now. Mr. Ruin's folder of locations is warm at my chest, and I wonder if I really am the predator he named me to be. Could I ever break living bonds and serve as a kind of living, vampiric Lag growing strong off their loss?
How would that feel, if I did?
I cannot imagine it. In all my years as a Soul Jacker I have built connections. Even when I jacked marines' minds to steal information in the War, I never destroyed what I found, merely brought it to the surface. I fought the Lag and staved it off where I could, always trying to build.
What strange power there must be in destruction. I tear into the night following the trails hanging in the air around me and hungry for more.
Docking at Skulk 47, everything feels different. The tawdry neon alley I walked every day for ten years now reads as a tangled knot of intersecting traces; hot and cold with passion, anger, the stinging efflorescence of sex and the bile of violence and addiction with countless sub notes of ownership, pain, love, loss, loneliness and hunger.
The godships have opened my eyes. All these threads now seem distinct and familiar and I pick through them in my mind. Here are my old traces; a solitary line woven back and forth ten thousand times along the same route. Here is a red-haired girl from the brothel, here is Carrolla my assistant, here is Don Zachary's blazing line, and his son's and Mei-An's all overlapping like a massed tangle of bright wool.
The alley burns like a furnace. I could thrive off these, if only they'd stay as clear as they are right now, though I know they won't. Already I can see the bonds begin to fade, and without the immense, clarion faith of the godships to boost me along I soon won't be able to pick them apart at all.
I can't let that happen now. I can't choose to be blind after seeing such light.
I dock the speedboat and drag a molding, half-disintegrated green canvas sheet out of the seafoam to cover it as best I can, then I start up the alley.
My jack-site has been repossessed already. The door is fenced off and the trail of Don Zachary goes in and out like a fresh trail of slug slime. There'll be nothing left for me inside, so instead I follow the Don's thread.
It leads me down the alley, through the pimps and whores and masseuse boys and girls and touts, still out parading their wares at this early hour of the morning. They stare at me like I'm a dead man waking, when in truth I am Napoleon come for his second resurgence, ready to bring the world to its knees.
I smile at them. I'm sure they have heard what happened to Carrolla. They know Don Zachary is looking for me, and here I come by with a smile. I am radioactive and they shrink away.
The Don's line follows mine and Mei-An's back through the Skulk slums and past the sagging pond in the blue tarp park. In the darkness I spy the homeless marine, and he looks back at me with eyes that burn with a hundred dead in the Arctic depths. I can feel his trace arcing north to the bloody ice of the War, where his mind dwells even now.
He nods at me and I nod at him, brothers in this.
The Don's thread leads me up the stairs to my apartment. It is a ransacked wreck. The mattress has been torn into foamy pieces, my breakfast chair and tables have been smashed and the walls have been ripped back to wooden scaffold. The alarm clock no longer sheds red light, its white shell fractured with its innards crunching underfoot. My clothes lie tossed around like sun-dried kelp, my seaweed bread has had chunks bitten out of it and my toaster is dented.
It looks like one of the rooms in the godships, with all the belongings left behind as though the owner expected one day to come back. I see my own trace knotted brightly on the air in hot zones of thought and activity; my track backward through the last ten hopeless years.
Now it's a ruin.
Don Zachary has done this to me. I reach out along his thread on the bonds like I'm jacking a Molten Core, hunting him down until I sense him ten Skulks over; hidden in the depths of his bunker, surrounded by his marines and his harem
and his children both adult and infant, asleep.
He dreams of revenge.
So do I. I stride out of my old apartment like a butterfly pupating from its cocoon, hard upon the trail of the Don.
13. DON ZACHARY
Don Zachary owns an entire Skulk. In truth he owns them all, and I can see that ownership glowing in the air like colorful tracer rounds; his path linking him to every floating barge in proto-Calico.
I slow the speedboat engine as I draw near to the Skulk's central dock. There are marines there with Kaos rifles held at the ready, dressed in the black regalia of Hawks; mercenaries who fought in all theaters of the War, for all coalitions.
Don Zachary's path shoots through their chests too. It shoots through mine, and leads to a tightly-woven nest at the heart of the Skulk where the Don is rumored to have built himself a tsunami-proof bunker.
The dock is circled by a tall plate metal wall, and there are Hawks up there manning howitzers. I sense them rouse as my speedboat comes into range of their floodlights.
"Stop there," a voice calls out, and they point their weapons my way. Bullets rake the dark water before me as a warning, but I do not stop. Instead I reach out and pluck at the threads between me and these marines even as they form. I follow them back through the air like I would in the EMR, jacking straight into their Molten Cores where the threads between us plug in neatly: their eyes, their ears, all the means they use to sense the world.
I unplug them.
It is so easy, like smoothing a surface-level engram in the jack-room, with Carrolla watching over from above and the EMR machine shaping the electromagnetic soup around me, except I don't need an EMR machine anymore. I am a fission reactor burning hot, able to Lag bonds with my mind alone, and each one serves to drive on the chain reaction. Even as I pull their switches and work the Lag, I remember Mr. Ruin doing the same thing in the shark arena; dropping Zachary's thugs with a thought.
I have that same power now. It is intoxicating; a better high than the godships. The jolt of power from each one spooling free is substantial. They heighten my senses and increase my reach, recharging the slow dwindle of the godships' vigor. I have never Lagged a waking soul before, and never felt anything like this.
It feels indescribably good.
I pluck at their Souls like a virtuoso banjo-ist, keeping my presence in their minds as nothing more disturbing or important than the ache in their legs from standing duty all night. Though they see me, I prevent them from really seeing me. I'm like a ghost walking before them in plain sight.
They do not fire as I pull up and rope in. I could flex my muscles and Lag them all into puddles on the dock, if I wanted. I control what they see and how they feel about what they see.
"Sir, you can't park that here," one of them says, his eyes lukewarm and calm as a gentled shark. He can barely see me.
"It's the Don's boat," I say, and let this slip through for them all. It means they will guard this boat as though it is the Don's until I return.
"But who are you?" the man asks. His dull face is vaguely quizzical. Just following a rote script, barely realizing what he's saying. "Does the Don expect you?"
"Yes," I say, and pull the weight out of the lie before it sees me shredded by howitzer from above. It is so easy now, with every struck bond of fresh-forming memory providing more energy than it takes to break it. Their minds want to recoil against me, are waiting for the weight of a clear observation to tell them to, but I don't give them that chance. "Can you let me through please?"
"We're not supposed to," a man says from above.
I chuckle. "Would you prefer I climb?"
I let the chuckle and the warmth through. They are professionals, cold killers as ruthless as I ever was, as cold as Ven before I softened her a little, but like Ven they will respond to warmth in the complete absence of threat. For them, there is nothing here to fight.
The man before me smiles uneasily. "No, sir, of course not. Well, let's open it up."
I wink. "Just a crack will be enough. I can slip through."
"Of course, sir."
A section of the wall lifts up to my left. I nod briskly and make for it.
"Carry on," I say, and they do, all interaction between us Lagged and forgotten.
Inside the wall lies a weakly lit passage that smells of urine and seaweed-tobacco ash. The Don's line here is hot and recent. A few industrial drying lamps pour out hot orange light. A camera array above records my face, reporting it to Hawks ahead who I feel begin to react, but this is no concern. I reach out and quiet them from a distance.
Through the passageway I emerge into a wide courtyard spread with white marble chips, where a dozen ancient cars are parked. I walk amongst them, these collectibles scoured from a forgotten era and useless on the Skulks, trailing my fingers over their sleek, gloss-metal lines.
BMW
ROLLS ROYCE
PORSCHE
LAMBOURGHINI
The gravel crunches underfoot, and I notice the absence of any give in the flotation devices. Perhaps there are none, and this part of the Skulk is actually rooted deep down in the seabed. Maybe this whole facility is Zachary's unsinkable bunker.
I stalk on, following his trail and stilling every thread of memory that leaps out from my body before it can dart back through the eyes of the person that sees me, preventing them from shooting me on sight. At a gateway I talk through an intercom while soothing the Hawk who monitors it, persuading her to open for me, and she does.
The bunker is a vast maze, but Don Zachary guides me. I walk down long halls filled with the bright lights and syrupy smell of narcotic hydroponics, where attendants work busily at their product like my old friend Heclan on his CSF still.
I pass down a long corridor of dormitories, sensing more ex-Hawks in the rooms either side, off their shift, some sleeping. They are all thugs drawn from the Skulks, though some of them have families too. I feel the hot tang of Don Zachary's children mixed in amongst them, adult and infant both. The Don's thread is everywhere now, like a suffocating purple web.
I ride an elevator down and emerge in the Don's private mansion. A grand hall extends away from me, and everywhere I look there's a wealth of sheer salvaged silk and vat-grown mahogany, the fur of extinct creatures used for curtaining and rugs, ancient bones used to hold up a coffee table. Through four grand halls I proceed, each more opulent than the last. The solid cement ceiling overhead has been disguised with Romanesque flourishes and elaborate skirting, but I can feel the weight of it bearing down. All of this is tsunami-proof; nothing less for the Don.
I find him in a four-poster bed in a large circular room. It is dark but I find my way by following his hot trail. There are women sleeping in alcoves all around the room, each a colorful buzz of thoughts raised on a small dais, with spotlights fitted above. This is his private boudoir, strip club and brothel.
I turn on all the lights, go to his side and nudge him awake.
"You wanted to kill me," I say.
He wakes up fast, and with consciousness and recognition comes rage, hot and red. He goes for my throat, goes for an alarm button by his bed, thinks of the gun beneath his pillow, but I Lag the weight of all those intentions away as soon as they arise and he sags back.
We look at each other.
"I am sorry your son died," I say. "It wasn't me though, or Carrolla or Mei-An. I'll deal with the man who did it. You can remember that."
I let some of his anger spike through the fog I've put him in, to afford him his say. What he does say surprises me.
"I want to hire you."
I have to laugh at that; the schemings of his mind. This is how he has become the Don of so many Skulks, not only through barbarism but through intellect.
"You can't afford me," I say, "and you won't even remember I was here."
He looks at me with some kind of understanding. Perhaps he knows something about the Lag too. He saw Mr. Ruin's notes after all, and he sees me here now, unharmed in the heart
of his bunker.
"Please don't hurt my children," he says.
That plea hits me like a punch in the face. Upon hearing it, I want to leave. I want to assure him I am not that man, I would not kill them all for some petty vengeance, but I can't afford to say those things now. He is still a killer and a torturer, on a Skulk where we are all killers and torturers of some kind.
So what kind am I?
Outwardly, I nod. I feel sick, but there is still a job to do and only I can do it. I seize hold of his mind and the bonds linking him to me, and I Lag them all. Weight and frame both, I strip his sense of me back to the barest outlines, that there was once a Soul Jacker on Skulk 47.
The unwelcome power of all those broken bonds shoots me through the roof, beyond my control. His hatred is focused and immense, so much more portent than the unformed sensations and relics from the godships.
My mind hovers a mile overhead, hanging in the air above the Skulks and gazing down on the hearts and Souls of every person I have ever touched or known, spotted like hot dots on a map: all the women I've loved and the drinking buddies I've made; the neo-Americans I fought the other night sleeping drunk and scattered around the end-Skulks; my redhead at work even now in my old alley; the marine in the sinking park by my old apartment.
I look wider still, to Calico behind its towering tsunami wall, and see Carrolla. He is alive and healthy, recovering from his nail-branded hands and cursing my name. I see Mei-An in the Reach, distraught at the depths she has fallen to in her parents' eyes, the prodigal daughter starting a new life. There are others here too, scattered throughout this narrow jag of mountain rock off the Arctic Circle; marines I've met and jackers I've worked with, people who helped or hurt me as a child.
Soul Jacker Page 12
