King Ruin: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 2) (11 page)

"I don't know," Doe says, running her gloved fingers through the old man's thick salty beard. "But this is what the soldiers looked like, inside the Solid Core. They were guards, then, trying to keep us out. I don't think these are. But they're not only decorative either."

She draws a knife from her thigh-sheath, takes a step to the side, then presses it to the cheek of a man dressed in some kind of stained beige jodhpur. The knife-tip enters, but Doe has to push hard to drive it any further in. She twists, and a splinter of matter jags out of the man's cheek.

"Wood," says Doe. She clicks off her HUD. "Smells like sandalwood."

Ti clicks off her HUD too. The air here smells of sandalwood and tar, scents she doesn't know why she recognizes, but does. She moves closer while Doe picks at the splinter, catching it in a little specimen box unclipped from her belt.

"What do you make of that?" Doe asks.

Ti seals the box and plugs it back into her belt, then runs a quick spectrographic analysis. Results chime through her cochlear implant via blood-mic, and she chews a molar-button to link in Doe.

The HUD voice reports zero trace of organic life, and one hundred percent chance of memetic life.

Doe draws a faint line down the jodhpur man's cheek, down to his chest and running through his white frilled tunic, piercing a hole.

"They're engrams," she says. "Memories."

"Memetic, that's right," Ti says. It is confusing, since she's so accustomed to seeing engrams embodied as flows in the Molten Core, but it doesn't have to be that way. Besides, even in the lava there are structures.

There are bunkers.

"This is a strong-room," Doe says, finishing the thought. "A vault."

"So these are friends?" Ti asks, pointing at the sphere.

Doe shakes her head, then sheathes the knife in its thigh-holster. "No. Not family either. Too many garbs, too many eras. And I've never seen memories stacked like this, for show. There's something ghoulish about it."

Ti turns. If possible, Doe's albino face has gone ever whiter. It sends a trill of fear down her back.

"Then what are they?"

Doe points. In the gap she has torn through the jodhpur man's tunic, a patch of his underlying skin is visible. Through it protrudes the gleam of a silver arrowhead, beaded around with dry blood.

"Victims," says Doe. "Enshrined here, in one of the few places still surviving the tsunami. We're not in Ritry's mind, Ti. We're somewhere altogether darker."

She doesn't need to say the name. Ti swallows hard.

"We need to get out."

"We need to do as we're ordered," says Doe, "and I just learnt our next directive."

"How?" asks Ti, and Doe points to her chest. Ti looks down, and sees something splattered there in yellow paint, above the mud, daubed just like on So's chest in tall, sloppy letters.

TAKE THE WHITE CASTLE

She laughs involuntarily.

"It's better than 'Run for your lives,'" Doe says.

"Is it? You and I, La with her lung impaled, and Ray without a single working limb. It won't be much of a siege."

"We've come this far," says Doe. "We'll go further still. Besides," she points out to the passageway. "La's awake, she has me on blood-mic. It looks like the mud found a way in.

They stride out, and by white suit-light see a thin carpet of dark mud creeping along the dry floor.

"Ray's not ready to move yet," Ti protests.

"That doesn't matter," says Doe. "What matters is the chord. We aren't victims, and we can't stay here."

Ti nods. Of course, she realizes, there has always been Doe. Without Me she felt rudderless for a time, but still they have Doe, who's been their rudder all along.

She nods. "Let's go take a castle."

The rock is a thousand miles from Calico, a thousand miles from anywhere. It is a flyspeck spot in the middle of the Allatanc that only skirmishers and rig-men will have ever had cause to go near.

Except for Mr. Ruins, and King Ruin.

King Ruin is the name I have given to the thing that is chasing me. It's ridiculous, but then so is everything now. I am captain of a subglacic full of ex-skirmishers, long after the Arctic skirmishes ended, men I control with my thoughts. Together we are hunting a being that has tried to mind-bomb me twice, after I crossed through a mythical aetheric bridge that connects all souls together.

It is ridiculous, but I've had two days to think, while my stolen subglacic has roamed the ocean depths. I've considered, and there are several things I know for certain.

King Ruin is my enemy. He or she or it is hunting me, using methods I've never before seen. It has deep, broad bands of thought stronger than any I've witnessed, that stretch out even so far as the rock, and allow control of operatives through EMR-buzzing HUDs. It has an infrastructure sufficient to hunt me down twice, drop mind-bombs on the Calico wall, and wage a full-scale tactical assault on Don Zachary's underwater war-bunker. It clearly has power beyond anything Mr. Ruins held, beyond what I hold, and military strength on par with the forces that once fought in the skirmishes.

So King Ruin.

But it does not know everything. It has not found my subglacic, and in these two days I've recovered my strength. My reattached fingers work well again. My hangover is gone, and I feel lean and sharp like I was in my skirmisher days. I control my chord of 43 men with greater ease than ever. At times it even feels like I could control more than one of them at once. On some shifts I almost succeed in looking out of the periscope at the same time as I scrub decks down in the gantry. I almost chop potatoes in the mess while charting our course in the captain's hutch.

It is a thrilling, eviscerating feeling. I am in my self and I am out there, almost at once. I am the chord refracted, a consciousness splitting in two.

The men do not chafe under my harness. I guide them gently, with suggestions they are already prepared to accept. They believe this is all for the Don, who first signed them up. They believe they are part of a new world order, with amazing rewards waiting for them at the end. I let them vent their steam in their dreams. When they're on my clock, I run a ship as tight as any Ven ever did.

So we roam. We circle the northern coast of proto-Rusk, to be certain we are not followed. We dip in and out of gulleys made of coral-laced harbor buildings. We scuttle along dust-muddied graveyards of sunken gray warships, tumbled at bay when the global killer tsunami rolled in. Now their numerous guns are slowly being gloved by seaweed.

This is the order that once ruled the world, now sunk beneath the ice-melt water.

We cruise above old airfields shot through with bright red algae blooms, like frozen explosions. Faint sparkles of sunlight strike off cockpits canted at rakish angles. This used to be my world every day of my skirmisher life, and back then there were enemies too, of a different stripe.

proto-Rusk.

Sino-Rusk.

neo-Armorica.

Aleut Nation.

Auropan Conglomerate.

Jovian Distinct.

Once they were all here, skulking these undertows, scratching away like chickens in a dry roost for worms, marking out the lines of their territory with sharp-beaked pecks to the face. We mind-bombed each other to fuck, blew up what we couldn't steal with neutron-squibs or dry-ice bombs, and got high to all hell on fermented Cerebro-Spinal Fluid.

Good times. I think of them as I sit by Mr. Ruins' side, drifting gently on the tides of his numb and faint unconscious. At times I rouse to hear one of the men in some far-flung part of the ship humming a tune I knew from those days. Each time I wonder if it came from him or from me.

So we circle the Allatanc. The subglacic swims without cease, and we gradually, slowly, work our way in toward the rock at the middle. It is blood in the water. I don't reach out far with my mind, scarcely more than the surface of the waves, in case King Ruin will somehow sense me. I reach just enough to know there is no immediate pursuit.

Unless they have technology that no longer exists, men peering down from the last drifting satellites in orbit, or new generations spying from the abandoned water-reservoirs on the moon, they cannot see us. They will not find us.

I talk to Mr. Ruins as we gather near. I ask him questions, and listen to him breathing.

"Why did you come here?" I ask.

"Who is King Ruin?"

"What does he want with me?"

But Mr. Ruins gives me no answers, because he can't hear me. His consciousness is trapped within his mind's rotting frame. I wonder that he has reached some strange kind of equilibrium in his mind, a teetering point with the Lag, but still I cannot reach in to be sure. The honeycomb shield remains in place, and when I place the ear of my thoughts up close to it, I can hear the tumbling thrum of tsunami, steadily washing him away.

We draw near to the rock.

I order the subglacic to surface at the slowest rate possible, a process that that takes over four hours. Everything I do, I do to minimize any chance of detection. The trim tanks fill and vent like puffer fish, slow and steady. In the conning tower I look at sonar, which describes an outcropping of five naval caisson-footed forts, stalked up on legs like three-legged robots, surrounding a hydrate rig beside the rock.

They're all bedded in the rock's raised volcanic slopes. We creep up the igneous incline like some amphibian creature evolving out of the water, yard by gradual yard, until I feel the change in the air.

It is different here. There is a pocket of emptiness around the rock, a hollowness at the heart of an almighty frame. I can sense the edges of it, feel the pop as we pass through, but I do not know what the weight of it was. There are the spoor of perhaps fifty minds, coming and going, but each is a shielded mask behind which I can sense nothing more than arrogance and satiation.

Mr. Ruins' own trail is amongst them, fresher than most, leading to the westernmost fort, the only one with a bridge still attached. Brighter than all the others though is the bright hot beam of King Ruin's thought. It haloes around the same fort, then beds down into the center of the rock.

I dare not go near it. To be even this close feels like standing in the shelter of proto-Calico's tsunami wall, knowing that one day the overtopping tsunami will come. It feels like the Lag, vast and unknowable and unstoppable.

I do not reach for it. I keep my mind confined to the shortest, sharpest bursts of direction to my men.

I have the subglacic surface beside Mr. Ruins' fort. Through the periscope I study a sky that is gray and heavy with rain. The stalk-legs of the fort rise up before me, jutting from water like grasping arms, coated in a rust-proof paint the color of old blood. Sitting atop their apex some thirty feet high is a single box-unit, as large as the Bathyscaphe, and brimming with old Bofors guns trained on the sky and the water.

We used to drop these forts around every hydrate-rig we helped install. On those installation missions I had little to do, except to tend and counsel the regular stream of war-shocked marines through massaging their worst combat memories. The rest of the time I spent watching the caissons sink to the ocean-floor, high on CSF-vodka with the men who would be left behind to guard the rig.

They were as certain to die as we were. We all knew that. Any concerted assault would cause them to buckle, just as it proved for us. They existed only to force concerted assaults, which meant concentration of enemy forces, and gave our generals something to aim for.

Sitting ducks. We toasted them and they toasted us. Looking up this fort's leg now, I wonder if at some point I passed through this exact space. Perhaps I watched while they assembled sea-cranes and jacked this precise fort-box up into the sky. Perhaps I dropped engrams into the minds of men who would go on to control its guns.

"Captain?"

One of my men is by my side. I have been standing at the periscope for a long time. I silence him with a thought, and turn my gaze to the inner circle guarded by the fort.

It is empty, and we are alone. If King Ruin expected me here, he is not here in force. I see only the wan five forts circled around the central rig, itself atop a floating compliance tower tube, linked to the seafloor by umbilical pipes. It is plainly derelict, the mine underneath likely gone dry. Only a few tatters of ragged flags hang desultory from its lanyards. One suspension bridge from it to Mr. Ruins' fort remains, though chunks of its metal cross-plating look to have been bitten out.

The other four bridges hang down the rig's side, sinking into the water. Someone must have cut them. Beside the rig is the rock, a thick spear of dark basalt. From this angle I can't see the entrance, though sonar showed it is wide and unobstructed. King Ruins' thought-band heads under water, so I reason there must be a chamber inside.

Soon.

I pull away from the periscope. I turn to the lieutenant at my side, a man who once forced his own children to beg him not to kill their mother on a drunken whim, and give the orders vocally. It is better to conduct as little communication through thoughts as possible.

"You and three more," I tell him. "Full combat wet-gear, ropes, Kaos rifles. We exit underwater and climb."

"Yes sir," he salutes. I can see he wants to ask why we're here, how does this help us subjugate the world, but he has too much fear for Don Zachary to put a foot wrong.

"Weapons," I tell him, to set him at ease. "We're looking for skirmish-era weapons."

He grins. "Yes sir," he repeats, with more energy this time.

In the captain's hutch, I find there is no wetsuit tailored for me. Of course. All of the men have their own, because all of this was planned. I borrow one and shrug it on. It is over twenty years since I last shuffled into one of these, slipping firm rubber tubing over bare flesh. My arms and legs shiver at the memory.

The zip comes up at the back, and I survey myself in a small corner-mirror. I don't need tanks for this, so on my back I fix a harpoon gun. At my waist is a utility belt crammed with tiny pockets, each stuffed with essential pieces of replacement equipment, alongside standard items like a whistle, extra ammunition for the Pstock pistol in my arm-pit holster. The suit hugs tight like a black second skin.

Ray, I think, as I look into my own eyes in the mirror. There are pieces of me that have missed this, though I rarely ever cleared an enemy rig or float myself. That was the work of the combat marines like Ferrily and Tigrates, though I ran more routes than any of them afterward, when I soothed the memories in their frazzled minds.

It is cold, and it makes me colder. With the black mask pulled down over my face, simple readouts popping up in the corners, I could be anyone. I look into the black visor, too transparent to see my eyes reflected, and wonder at the strange path my life has led me on, a kind of full circle back to this.

I have no idea what lies ahead. I do not know that I will discover anything of use here. Will there be all King Ruin's secrets laid out for me to see? I can only know by doing.

Standing beneath the con, with the team of four all looking to me, I cut my ties to their minds. One of them gives a small sigh, which comes through on the in-helmet comms, but the others show no sign. I won't risk being outside myself at all, once I'm above the waves. For a time I'll have to rely on Don Zachary's discipline.

"Let's go," I say, and start up the ladder to the airlock. They follow.

I emerge through the surface of the cold Allatanc water, and swim over to the fort's nearest red leg. My team emerge seconds later, and I point them two to one leg, two to the other. They assemble with smooth professionalism, and I feel a tingle of the joy to be had in such precision.

It reminds me of the past.

"Ready for combat," I tell them over the comms. My own voice echoes back to me rough and raspy.

"Ready," they come back. I watch as they each pull their Kaos rifles ready for use.

I draw my own Pstock, then flip up the visor, and look up the fort's leg. There are large barrel-rungs leading up along the leg's upper side, intended to moor refueling cables. They lead all the way up to a Bofors gun-emplacement, one perched above each leg. The barrels are pointing directly down at me, like four black insectile eyes.

It almost makes me laugh. All of this could end right here and now, if one person pulled only one trigger once.

"Climb," I say through the comms, and we begin.

Out of the ocean, water wicks quickly away off the wetsuit, and gravity takes hold. Standing at the bottom of the leg, I bend over to grasp the first hoop, and start to walk myself up. Climbing like this involves an undignified hunch, grappling to the next barrel-hoop up while finding the balance-point with my feet. Every hoop I step over is a chance to fall, as I lunge for the next, but I don't fall, and neither do any of my team.

The wind blows harder already, ripe with salt and the stink of chemicals used to strip hydrates, drifting from the rig. My back begins to strain with the effort of keeping my weight in balance, but it feels good. A sweat springs up and loosens me, smoothing the rub of the suit over my skin.