King Ruin: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 2) (21 page)

When he met Yena, all that changed. They were like keys for each other's locks. Something had done this to them, and together they swore they would stop it.

I rise up from her mind, stunned.

I saw the sea forts. I knew there were more like them, but I never imagined there was anything like this. I gasp for breath, like a swimmer barely keeping his head above water.

"He did it all," I say.

Yena nods. "We think he made the tsunamis too, with quakeseeds. It was a grand, lasting cull. Places like Memphen were his larder, hidden away."

I want to gag. Just to know this sickens me. I want nothing more than to kill him. I want it so bad, I do not even hear the tiny voice in the back of my mind, saying

not this

because all I hear are the screams from Naji's memory, the faces pressed to the glass in Yena's.

"I'll try again," I tell them. I don't care that it hurts to speak. "I'll dive the bridge until it kills me. I'll find him."

Yena smiles. Naji sheds a tear.

"Thank you," he says. "That's more than we could hope."

The sound grows louder, like the churn of the Bathyscaphe's screw fighting through boggy lava, and Ti hunkers in position on the wall, manning the flamethrower and howitzer.

The rampart line is well-stocked with propped-up bodies, facing outward, their musket triggers all lashed into an elasteel trigger line. The White Tower surely looks fully manned from without.

Ray is gone, in waiting. Now it comes to Ti.

She watches the blackening sky as the helicopters come closer. These are different models from the others, not single rotor reconnaissance machines, instead twin-rotor airborne tanks, with multiple howitzer ports, grim batteries of missiles under their bellies like some strange crustacean carrying its own eggs, and thick black ablative plating.

The flamethrower won't do anything except make them warm. The howitzer will play a tinkling tune off their hulls. Even the Lag worms might not have much impact, certainly not in a single leaping bite.

And there are twenty of them. Each one looks to harbor eight marines, so four double-pulse chords aboard each. She counts the numbers in her head, it means one hundred and sixty votive-ready marines coming for them. It means eighty minds in the real world bent against them.

And only two of them. Ray and Ti, and Ray not anywhere in sight.

The heat of the twin suns is nearly scalding now. The whole sky, encircling the black, has taken on a red tinge. There can be no doubt, the Suns are holding the world together. Without it, all of this would have crushed itself to nothing long ago.

"T-minus five," Ti whispers to herself. They resolved not to communicate on blood-mic, for the chance that the incoming marines might catch the transmission. Her presence here should still be a surprise. It is the only advantage they have.

Four.

The sound of their rotor blades becomes impenetrable, a hammering wall of noise she can't beat back, can only endure as it makes the rampart shudder around her. In her heart, Ti is fairly certain she is going to die. She doesn't want to die, but she misses La so much already. It isn't right for twins to be apart.

Three.

She peers between the gap of the howitzer and the flamethrower. The helicopter-tanks are so close it stops her breath. She ducks back down and reaches for the first elasteel line, which she gives a tug on.

It reaches out to braced trigger-pulls on every musket-clump spotted down the wall, eleven in total. In ragged unison, they fire.

CRACK CRACK CRACK CRACK CRACK CRACK CRACK CRACK CRACK CRACK CRACK

A hail of tiny lead balls flows out toward the incoming force, to be met by implacable black faces. The thunder of blades sucks at Ti's breath, and she clamps down her HUD.

She can't be seen. To be seen would ruin everything.

Two.

Peering through the smallest gap, she sees the front rank of helicopter-tanks drop bombs from their bellies. They whine as they catch the air, then

BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM

as they burst into the mud leading up to the walls, tearing craters out of the ground and showering the air with clods and spray. Ti catches a few glimpses of white worm meat torn up with the explosion, then reaches to the second elasteel line and tugs it.

The trebuchets all loose their traps at once, and swing ponderously upwards, jolting their payloads up and flinging them out towards the enemy. These are all bodies. Ti watches barely daring to breathe as the first body arcs up, apexes, then falls. It comes close to the slowing helicopter line but they're still out of range.

A Lag worm leaps up to catch it, and is shredded by concerted howitzer fire. Then the second body is falling, the range is perfect, and it gets caught up in one of the rotors. There it explodes.

They stuffed the clothes of every soldier with all the gunpowder they could gather, from all the spent muskets.

The rotor is briefly enveloped by a fireball, like a red mushroom grown out of the helicopter's top, and there is a gross shearing sound as the blades warp and clash like brittle bones against the twin rotor, and the helicopter drops from the sky.

The men on board scream and jump out, but the helicopter falls with them, and they all burst in a massive red blast of fire when they hit the mud. Worms strike out to champ down on any survivors. 

Only two other bodies hit rotors and explode, but each takes down the helicopter.

T-minus one.

Bombs rain down on the mud, missiles drop and shoot off on streamer jets towards the White Tower door, and howitzer fire peppers the rampart, demolishing stone and erupting their propped-up bodies. Ti triggers her own howitzer amidst the cacophony, then drops down from the rampart as the first of the helicopter-tanks hovers in low overhead.

Sheltered underneath the rampart Ti pulls the third elasteel line, to blow the incendiary bodies atop the wall. They burst in one long chain, spewing sticky fire upwards and into the missile-bays of the enemy, which begin to blast and overload in seconds.

Ti drops into her covered trench, longing to look back and see the carnage in the air as at least two of the machines send their missiles shooting out at random angles, raking the mud-courtyard with howitzer fire. To her right one of the helicopters hits the ground on its side with the rotor still blazing, chewing

CHOP CHOP CHOP

out of the mud and spinning itself so hard its cab tears apart, sending marines out screaming and another almighty fireburst that blinds her for a second, even as she sprints down the dark and covered trench.

BOOM

The world rocks her to the side and the mud walls of her trench cave in as a helicopter runner scythes down through the wall and strikes hard against her armored chest with a solid clack. The mud flows with it and buries her legs.

"Fuck," she whispers, and frantically works to dig her feet out of the clinging mud. Now there is the roar of fire, more missiles thumping overhead into the wall and the White Tower, and she imagines the helicopters setting down in the courtyard, on the wall, spewing out men.

She flicks up the remote detonator on her HUD and triggers it.

CRUNCH

The rampart wall blows, and through the cacophony of raining stone and shouting marines, she imagines the worms leaping in. There is no time. She wrenches her feet free and continues sprinting down the trench, bouncing off the walls and staggering as each new explosion rings out, quaking the earth.

To her landing spot. The world is chaos around her, as she reaches the culvert dug into the trench side, and pulls herself into it, crawling deeper through the wall. It is easy to kick in dirt after her, collapsing the tunnel. She is one foot below the surface, curled into a ball in the mud like a cocooned worm, but even here she hears the solid thumps as the helicopters begin to land, the thrum of explosions as they bomb the trenches, the patter of feet thumping by overhead.

She thinks of La and the others, briefly, lost already. She thinks of Ray huddled somewhere to the side, hoping one of the explosions didn't already crush him, hoping the worms haven't swept him up already, hoping one of the helicopters didn't already land on his body and crush him to death.

There are so many things that could go wrong.

She thinks of Doe up ahead, hopefully deep into the heart of the White Tower by now, learning what they need, figuring out how it can be done. Doe is their leader now, and though she has no love for the analytical albino, she has the utmost respect in the world. If something can be done, Doe will do it.

The worms will be in by now, leaping over the wreckage of the walls. All the marines will be fighting a flaming retreat to the White Tower door, where they will seek to barricade themselves inside, and hunt out whatever they've come for. It isn't Ti though, and that is their mistake.

She waits, through their screams, as the explosions move off to focus on the door, as the rapid whine of QC fire disassociates worms up above. She waits perhaps too long, hoping like she did in the firing tubes of the Bathyscaphe, that Ray will come again to take the lead. He did it before, he is commander of the chord just as much as Doe, and she needs it to be him. She really needs it to be him, not her.

But what if he's dead? What if his weakened bones ruptured beneath the blasts, and he's lying jellied in the ground, waiting for Ti to take action. She feels the block, just like it was in the tube, and understands that this is what she must overcome.

She is a whole thing now. This is a becoming, and she must become. She readies herself to punch up through the mud and emerge.

"Now," comes Ray's voice on blood-mic, back-washing relief through her body as chemical endorphins. He survived the onslaught. He was waiting too, and now it is time

"Aye aye," she shouts, and bursts upwards.

The courtyard is a shrapnel-battered wreck, filled with the fat hot ticking bodies of helicopter-tanks as their rotors whine down, fumed with gunpowder smoke and drifting gold bondless clouds. Ti's HUD phases through primary colors seeking pattern in the madness, picking out the running bodies of enemy marines, making for the Tower.

A worm leaps up, just outside the end of a black corridor between cab-bodies she's standing in. It bites down across the body of a marine, and smothers him down into the mud with a crash. Bombs blow out from behind, as they continue to work on the door, or perhaps they've already taken it out and they're already fighting Doe on the inside.

She spins, aligning her map, seeking out Ray. He's a distant blip on the in-suit radar, and she makes the calculation at once. There's no way they can work together on this. She'll have to do it alone.

"Concentrate fire on the doorway," Ray shouts through blood-mic. "We have to give Doe a chance."

Ti runs to the front-cab entrance of the helicopter-tank on her right, and hauls herself up. The interior is black and organic, with the pilot still in position at the controls.

"What the-" he shouts, but Ti is upon him, stabbing her knife down through the gap in his suit, into his throat. He gurgles, struggles, then ceases.

No musket left, no QC. Ti slaps his safety belt and hauls his jerking corpse out of position, then drops into his seat. The controls laid out before her are intensely complex, different from anything she handles on the Bathyscaphe. There are two sets of steering grips, a joystick between her legs and one at her side, a console of buttons and screen ahead, one to right and left, one above.

But it is a machine, and if Ti knows anything, it is machines. She scans quickly with her HUD, deciphering as best she can, then hits three buttons, flips a switch, and takes hold of the central joystick.

The helicopter responds, as the rotors fire back up to ascent speed. Ti feels the power beneath and around her rising, as the helicopter lifts into the air.

"Buttons Indigo, Tango, Alpha," she calls through blood-mic to Ray. "Flick the big switch, and pull up on the stick."

"Thanks Ti," he calls.

She rises. Sucking out of the mud, rising above the surrounding helicopters, she gets her first clear view of the White Tower. It is no longer white, rather blackened and gouted by missile fire. The doorway has been blown into a cragged O, even now thronged still with marines rushing in.

Only one of them notices her, in a random backward glance. He has long enough to fling up an arm and point, perhaps to give a message to his fellows.

Then Ti rains down holy hellfire upon them all. She unloads all the machine's remaining missiles at once, and they reach their targets in a second, making a blazing white-hot implosion that throws her helicopter backwards spinning in the air.

"Yeee haaa! Fuck yeah!" shouts Ray through blood-mic. "Ritry fucking Goligh, Ti, that was awesome!"

She sees him now, another helicopter rising hesitantly across the open space that used to be a courtyard, but is now a blasted ring of mud lined by rubble and filled with helicopters 

"Now let's do the rest," he shouts, and his machine spurts upward into the sky. Ti follows, hunting out the next set of controls as she goes. Her bombs drop first, chased swiftly by Ray's after she tells him how.

The explosions rise up like the reach of the Molten Core below, blowing the whole courtyard to hell, followed by subsequent bursts as each helicopter's fuel tank breaches and blows.

"Holeee fuck," Ray breathes. "Did you see that?"

"I saw it," says Ti, "do you see this?"

She doesn't explain what it is, because that would be too difficult. It is everything, collapsing at once. Looking back across swamps of the Sunken World, up to the black skies rimmed with red, she sees the mother of all tsunamis closing in.

"Shit," shouts Ray, over the roar of his rotor blades. "What the hell is that?"

"It's the collapse," Ti shouts.

The sky is falling. The red from the Suns is merging with the black and rushing in on them faster than any tsunami yet. The Sunken World is curling back upon itself, as though sucked inward by some vast gravity. Everything becomes the tsunami, homing in on the one most central point at the heart of it all, the White Tower.