King Ruin: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 2) (18 page)

The twin suns glow red overhead.

"They're getting nearer," Ti says, as they work on levering bricks out of the lower wall with bayonets.

Ray looks up. Sitting by the wall's base, he works one-handed with a bayonet, taking frequent breaks. On his own he would have scraped away the mortar for perhaps one stone. With Ti they have cleared five.

The suns are hotter.

"Not colliding," Ray says. "That's what I first thought."

"They might collide with us. They're already splitting a corona effect around the bubble of the Sunken World."

Ray looks wider. Beyond the heap of piled up dead soldiers on the mud, beyond the stack of stones they've emptied, beyond the garbled trenchlands of the courtyard, pitted now with sink-holes they've dug and covered over, past the line of trebuchet spikes, he sees the sky.

The gray clouds have a red tint. There is a clear pink haze rising from where the horizon would be, cut off now by the edge of the wall.

"What does it mean?" he asks.

"Fusion," says Ti. She throws an image over to Ray, which he can barely focus on through the sweat in his HUD. He thinks back to another raid, when Me's vacuums stopped working by the blast door. His suit has see some stress.

"Looks like, blotchy eggs," he hazards. "And bacon?"

Ti chuckles. "It's a new bond forming. Whatever that thing is, it's coming so close gravometric bonds are going it start pulling it in. That's what the bacon is."

Ray studies the image more. "Then where did we go?"

"Into the bond," says Ti. "Look at the mass of this place, then look at the size of those suns. We're emptying out, losing mass to entropy constantly, while that double system is massive. If it gets close enough, we'll get sucked up into it."

Ray considers this. Perhaps that would be a good thing, he wonders. "What will happen to us?"

"Spaghettification," says Ti. "Acceleration far beyond terminal velocity. We'd be strained to ribbons."

"Oh."

"It's not ideal."

He thinks about this for a time, while scratching at the wall. "Is that where the helicopters are coming from?"

"From the surface of a sun? I don't know. It's possible, I suppose. Then those are no suns like I've seen before."

"So maybe we won't be spaghettified?"

"Maybe it would be worse, if the helicopters come from there. We still don't know what they want."

"We don't know what we want."

This drops them both silent for a time, bar the scratching, and the outside baying of the worms.

"They're hungry," says Ray. "Would you mind?"

"No problem."

Ti gets up from her seat by the wall, and goes over to the pile of dead soldiers. She affixes one by the ankle to the trebuchet they rigged out of cross-beams buried in the mud, exposed by gamma scans as part of a stables. Three stones sit in the weight carriage. She unhooks the tether, and lets it go.

The stone blocks drop slowly. The long lanyard arm travels fast, yanking up the soldier with a crunch of joints coming out of place, then hurls him out over the wall.

The howls grow louder. The baying of the worms is more like a shouty bass whisper though, Ray wonders, all grind and no substance. Just feeding the Lag.

From without there is a sploosh, a long wait, then another sploosh.

Ray raises one eyebrow, impressed. "They're jumping higher." 

"That was the longest airtime yet," Ti says. "Maybe fifty feet."

"High enough for helicopters."

"High enough to get over the wall," she counters.

Ray smiles. "They won't. Not while there's anything out there to eat. This isn't like the dive we did. This mind has turned on its own Molten Core."

"This mind may only be held together by those suns," she says. "The corona suggests that. The bond is already happening, the bacon, and that's what's keeping the sky over our heads, instead of crushing our heads."

"Hmm," says Ray, thinking back to So's complex diagrams about a squashed orb, that wasn't really squashed. Too much, really.

He finishes scraping out the last bit of mortar round his stone, even as Ti finally winches the trebuchet weight back up.

"I think that's enough to fell it," he says, "when you finish yours."

"Roger that," says Ti. "Where will you run the fuse to?"

Ray points to the keep. "There. Last fallback."

"We should check the way. Be sure it's clear."

It has been hours since Doe last checked in, a garbled message to tell them she was with Ruins, and heading in to the keep. Ray only caught half of the words. Already the Solid Core was working its interference.

"We will," says Ray. "Now, incendiaries."

He slowly, slowly pushes himself to his feet. His right side feels stronger now, enough to take his weight, though the freshly broken left side less so.

"How does it feel?" Ti asks.

"Like a jigsaw," he grunts. "I have to stand up just right."

"It felt like it too, putting you back together. It was gross."

Ray laughs. "I owe you. Plus you did it in a pyramid."

He starts toward the stone steps, leading back up to the rampart. The incendiaries will go there, he thinks, hidden in the clothes of the bodies they've propped up against the wall, to make it look like the Tower is fully manned. Boom, any helicopter flying low overhead gets a bellyful of improvised napalm. For anyone who follows and lands, the wall crashes underfoot and their helicopters get eaten by worms.

"I've been thinking about the pyramid," Ti says, as Ray starts the slow process of lifting himself up the stairs.

Too heavy, he thinks to himself. Need to lose a little weight.

"What did you come up with?"

"The votive thing. The hieroglyphs. Is there anything to suggest Ruins was into that?"

"Not that I know of."

"So what is it? And the Suns. You've heard of Ajyptia?"

Ray screws up his eyes in concentration. "Some kind of disease?"

"Ha ha, no. It was a nation before the fall, in Ritry Goligh's world."

"Well, good."

"It had pyramids, and hieroglyphs, and votives. Also a sun god."

"Two sun gods?"

"Just one. Maybe this thing is the sequel."

Ray reaches the top. All along the rampart there are bodies and bits of wood scavenged from the mud. Hidden amongst them are a dozen IED incendiaries, triggered by motion springs.

Burn baby, burn.

Looking out over the wall, he sees the scored mud left by the ten or so worms gathered outside. Every now and then one of them shuffles to the surface, snouts at the air with its yellowy proboscis face, then sinks down again.

They're digging their own trenches, Ray thinks.

They're bigger than they were. It will take more than howitzer fire to burst them. The helicopters will need rockets.

The dying mind of Mr. Ruins is aggregating here.

"Sequel," he says, looking up at the sky. The heat from the Suns is palpable. "Maybe you're right."

"Maybe we have to kill them," Ti says.

"Maybe," Ray agrees. "But how? Before we get spaghettified?" 

"There's really only one way to kill a sun," Ti says. "Run it dry. All suns die that way, they core their own insides for energy, and eventually they implode into black holes."

"How would we accelerate that?" Ray asks.

"No idea," Ti says. "Normally it takes millions of years. It might be possible to overload it too, and force an early supernova, but the energy required would be enormous."

"I don't think we have millennia," Ray says. "And Doe took all our candlebomb."

He scans the horizon line. It is utterly flat now, leveled by the tsunamis.

"Any idea when the next wave comes?"

"I'd wager after the next troop of helicopters. We have until after that. Probably hours. I don't think the passage coming through is easy."

Ray pats the rampart top. Good solid stone, that will drop tumbling down soon enough.

He thinks back to a time a day or so ago, waking in the forging tube of the Bathyscaphe, and not wanting to get out. There was no Me to get them started. So was so cold, and the twins didn't want to wake.

"We barely made it when we passed through," he says. "But we came through the skin, through the mud. We lost our ship. How is this thing sending ship after ship?"

"At great cost," Ti says. "And they will come through the mud, whether its mud or not I don't know. Maybe a storm, if they arrive by air. Dense thunderclouds."

"I don't see any."

"You wouldn't have to see them. It's So's squashed, un-squashed sphere. Everything we are, and everything around us, is just a representation of the Molten and Solid Cores, trying to collapse."

Ray grunts. Once there was a time none of that meant anything to him. That changed though, after they blew open the aetheric blast-door. He still remembers Far putting the bayonet into his chest, and being reformed in the blast of power that followed.

Before he was just a sublavic marine, following orders. Missions followed missions, and that was enough. Now he knows he is part of a god-like creature called Ritry Goligh, one member of a seven-tone chord birthed from the pulse of an artificial womb.

It is odd. It is a strange kind of coming of age. He can accept he was never a child, as that was Far's role. He is something in between, an aspect or a facet. What that says about him loving Doe, even making love to her, he prefers not to think about.

"What are you chuckling about?" Ti asks.

"Nothing. Something, I suppose. What it means to be a marine in this chord, now. Do you remember when I woke you up in the Bathyscaphe?"

"Yes," says Ti. "I didn't want it."

"Neither did I. They say babies have to be smacked after they're born, to get them to breathe."

A pause, while the sound of Ti finishing up her scraping grinds through on blood-mic. "Who says that?"

"I don't know. It's something I know, though."

"Hived off Ritry Goligh, no doubt."

"I expect. Did it feel strange to you, to be woken by me? To wake out of sequence like that?"

"It's a becoming," Ti answers. "Becoming something new."

"New demands," says Ray.

A moment passes, then Ti speaks again. "It's all finished down here. All the stones are out, and there's powder lodged where it'll do the most damage. Fuses strung. Every trebuchet has a body looped in, and they're all wound. What now?"

Ray turns and looks back over the courtyard. The stubby arms of five trebuchets rise just above the ramparts, loaded with the grimy white stones.

"I think we can manage one more surprise," he says, as the idea comes.

"What is it?"

Ti pops out from below the rampart's shadow, walking on the mud-top, looking up at him.

Ray grins. It's a new idea, something he'd never have thought of before, something only this new Ray would even imagine.

"Have you heard the story of the Iovian horse?"

"Of course."

"Well, it's that. And I think we better hurry, because-"

His suit alarms him first, set to gamma-radar. He turns back to the rampart and looks out over the mudflat distance, tightening the resolution on his HUD. There is a line of black grit rising over the horizon.

"Because what?" Ti asks.

On the deepest zoom, Ray patches the image over to Ti, to Doe if she has any signal, and makes a quick count.

There are twenty helicopters. They have Bofors guns on their bellies. They all have double-pulse chords aboard, two leaning out manning missiles and howitzers, two in the cab.

They all drip blood from their rotors.

"Incoming," he says. "Ti, it's on."

For a time, I sleep. I dream of the chord lost in mud, slopping their way through a swamp without me.

"Where's Far?" I ask them. "Where is he, Ray? Doe?"

They don't hear me. They don't see me.

Around me the world changes. I'm yanked up as though on a grapnel line, out of the mud and up until I'm somewhere very high, looking down on a globe wrapped up with the shimmering bond-lines of King Ruin. They are everywhere, so thickly nested I can scarcely see through to the earth below, like dense Allatanc clouds pregnant with rain. From up here they look beautiful, like the world is turning to crystal.

Every one means suffering. Every one is a feeding tube linking out to a Court, like the sea-fort, like the Rock, like so many others. The entire planet is wrapped up like a fly in a web, with digestive juice slowly eating it away, and I wonder, if he has the bridge, why does he need these at all?

I try to pick out the center of the bonds, the hub they all link into that might give away King Ruin's location, but there is no central place. Instead I feel the heat on my back as his twin suns burn closer.

I try to spin to see them, try to move so I can escape, but it's a dream and I have no control of my body. I can only watch the glow of them reflect red off the silvery planet, making it glitter and glow like a Molten Core. The heat becomes intense, piercing, frying every axon and cell in my mind at once in endless, relentless pain.

Then I am consumed.

I wake with a violent start, to my battered body, and to King Ruin. He's sitting beside me, cross-legged on the floor. There is a skinning knife on the floor between us, threatening what will come.

I glare at him. The pain is everywhere now, the ache insistent. Echoes of a hideous death ring in my mind, along with memories of all the tortures he's inflicted already. How long has it been, a few days? Is that all? Do I have a lifetime of this to come?

I remember Ven, and what she said. I remember the planet covered in bonds, and I remember how I felt, in the moments after I exited the bridge. He wants to break me, he said, to dance in his parade, to serve as his warning. But it's not right, I see that now. It's different.

I unstick my teeth from the blood holding them together, putting aside the ache in my jaw, and I glare up into his eyes.

"You lied," I say. The words spit clumsily through the clotted blood in my gums, but they're clear enough. "About this place. There are no thousand others who dived the bridge. You may string up crucifixions, but they never dived the bridge. You can't do it, and you want it from me."

For a moment his expression wrinkles, betraying anger beneath. He must read the understanding in me. I don't need the bonds to know I am right. This thing with a thousand hands cannot dive the bridge. It can crush men's bodies and minds, but it cannot touch their souls.

It seems so plain now. It was lost in the pain before, in his eyes and mind always on me, always witnessing my shame, but now I see.

If he could dive the bridge, he wouldn't need the Courts. Crucifixes would be unnecessary. He could suffer the whole of the soul at once, shave its strength for his own, and crush any revolutions before they began. He would have found me in moments in proto-Calico, as I found his twin suns through the soul. He would not need buzzing EMR helmets to control men over distances, nor mind-bombs, nor hands.

He can hear me think all of these things. His face smoothes out, and he stares off into the distance.

Receiving instructions.

I have tried to take advantage of this before. Now I go for him with what teeth I have left bared, hungry for his throat. Only at the last moment does he stop me. I would have made it, would have ripped out his jugular, if only I had any hands.

He took my hands.

He stops me, and looks down calmly.

"I'm the only one who ever dived the bridge," I say, "and I will never, ever teach you."

He points the skinning knife idly at my head. "I am curious, where does this resistance come from? I hear you talk to your memories, but that isn't enough. I can peel those away, one by one. I've already taken enough to break most men. But then I hear that voice tell you, 'Not this,' and I can't Lag it. I've tried, but I can't see where it comes from. Somewhere in the Solid Core, perhaps even the bridge? Do you even know?"

"It's the voice of god," I mumble. "Coming for your ass."  

He frowns.

"So crass, still. Shall I crack you open, then, Mr. Goligh, to root it out? I've refrained so far. In your mind is the capacity for something amazing, and I don't want to risk it. But you're giving me no choice."

"It won't make any difference. I'll never help you."

"Are you sure? You're right, by the way, about how I would use this world. Its people are an endlessly renewable resource, and I am endlessly hungry. We're a perfect match. I've worked up such an appetite, Mr. Goligh, over the millennia. I was there before your people climbed out of their woad-painted infancy, and I'll be here long after they're all buried alive in the sand. It's what you were born for, and what I was born for. When you give me the bridge, my touch will flow through the aetheric soul like a cleansing tsunami, washing away any hope. There will be no god for this world to reach to, only me. I'll put them all to suffer. Your world will be a hell, and I will be its King."

"So crack me open," I say. "See what help you can find in here."

He chuckles. "Too easy. A thousand hands for this, a thousand for that, and you think I'd end your suffering on a whim? Didn't I tell you, this is a very special Court? There are ways to get what I want. If you won't do it for me, you'll do it for you. Vanity, Mr. Goligh. Pride. And after you've betrayed everything you believe in, I'll be sure they all know it was you, in the moments before they die. You'll be the star attraction in my martyr's parade, forever."

I pick myself up. Slowly, I stand. Without hands it is difficult. I stand before this evil fuck, and notice again that he isn't even that tall. I don't feel weak this time. I feel like I'm soaring.

"Stop talking and do it, bitch," I say.

At that, he Lags me to blackness.

I wake laid back in a chair, pinioned knee and elbow, while men and women in white coats drill into my skull.

Vibrations fill my mind. What teeth I have left chatter and burr against each other. There is no anaesthetic, only restraints, and the pain comes in waves with the sound, as the plate-bones of my skull are ground through.

It is a different room, with shelving and various pieces of medical equipment stacked there. I see a large cooled-tank in the corner, which I recognize as a CSF container. It has the same logo in the corner as the ones I used to order in Calico. How odd that King Ruin uses the same company, a reminder of a different world.

It means this is some kind of graysmithing lab. I survey it, and the people within it, through a juddery lens as my eyes tremble in their sockets. The pain is less than this discomfort. There are few nerves in the skull, beyond those in the skin. The shaking though, and the bone conduction deep churn of the drill, are mind-numbing.

Then they stop, and there is relief. The sound ends, followed by some prising and grinding at my skull as they lever off the cap they have drilled out. I imagine how it looks, as my brain opens to the air for the first time.

Inadvertently, I think of King Ruin skimming off the white strands of cortex from inside the sheep's skull. Am I to be eaten?

But there is no sign of King Ruin here. I can't touch the bonds, but I can see the way these people move, jerky and hesitant, as though controlled by a bad connection. The others compensate for them smoothly. All of them though are terrified.

"What are you doing?" I ask, but no explanation comes.

"Where is he?" I try. Now my voice tastes coppery. I know that means they're into my white matter already. Probably spreading the hemispheres of my brain apart with clamps, to get at the core stem and cerebellum.

The Solid Core.

"Be careful," I tell them. "He's watching."

Nobody answers, but I briefly catch a terrified glance from a young woman with curly black hair. She gasps and spins away. A moment later she jerks under King Ruin's invisible touch and walks out of the room.

"Did he do this to you too?" I call after her. "Did he cut off your hands and make you eat them?"

She leaves, and the others continue as if I haven't spoken. I feel strange, like there is nothing to fear. What can they do to me? A lot, of course, but they can't touch my soul. King Ruin doesn't know how. On that battlefield I win.

"Hands," I say aloud. "You're all just hands."

The operation takes what feels like hours. There are no clocks for me to look at. Men and women in white coats come and go. At times I feel sensations in my legs and arms, though I haven't moved them. I feel odd fleeting memories resurge, images from my childhood, from some particular raid on a subglacic compound, taking a hydrate rig.

I lie there and let them wash over me. I imagine they are scanning me while this happens, to see if what they're doing is going well. I can't tell if they're putting something in or taking something out. I feel like me throughout.

At the end, they close me up. Nobody speaks. I imagine the reins of King Ruin's thoughts lying upon them loosely, steering them gently. As they finish, I wonder about Mr. Ruins. Is he dead yet? I wonder if King Ruin is still diving him too, searching for some way into the bridge.

I left no trace of my passage. I think I left none. But then King Ruin had a shield about his twin suns' mind, and I'd never seen that before. I don't understand that.

Could I have left some hint to how the bridge might be opened?

It is my last cogent thought, before everything changes.

BOOM

The door bursts inward, my chair rocks, and then there's smoke and shouting everywhere. Through the thick black drifts I watch a chord of black-clad arenes sweep into the room, clinical as surgeons, shooting the King's hands dead with Kaos rifles and leaning in to cut me free and scoop me from the chair.

"They've taken his frontal lobe," one of them calls over the ringing in my ears. I barely hear it as they cut me free. Tubes leading into the nubs of my wrists pop out, spilling fluid.

It is almost comical when another one shouts, "Find it!"

They are hunting for my brain.

More explosions rock the room. I don't know what's happening. It feels like I'm back in a place I was before, trying to escape. There was smoke, shaking, and now there is King Ruin, standing in the midst of the smoke. His copper-skin looks pale in the harsh white suit light of the arenes.

He hurls a blade at the nearest black-suited figure, which pierces the helmet-faceplate and drops the man flat to the ground.

"Mr. Goligh," he says, and reaches out toward me through the bonds, then a stream of Kaos bullets cut pebble-sized gouges through his chest. The light fades from his eyes and he sags to the floor.

It makes me happy.

"It's alright," someone says to me, someone carrying me. We're running down a long white hallway and I'm watching the ceiling lights flash by. My head rocks to the side, and I worry that something will fall out of my brain. I wonder numbly what it would be like to lose my frontal lobe.

My head lolls again, this time so I can see the trail of blood leaking behind us, from me, through the smoke. The next arene tramps all over it. Then I pass out.