Mr. Ruins: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 1) (15 page)

"What about cannonballs?"

"Don't need them. I never loaded it last time, like you never loaded your muskets. It just fired."

I nod, considering. "But the muskets didn't fire until the soldiers woke up. They still fire now though. Some kind of phase change?" she shrugs. "Alright, rig it. But keep the accelerator. We have to account for the possibility that the phase may change back"

"Roger that."

I head back over to So. She is sitting on a small pallet-box unclipped from La's backpack, studying one of the soldiers' heads. She looks up as I draw near.

"They're not heads in any more than outer form," she says. She pokes a tip of a duct-tape wound bayonet carefully into the white of the soldier's eye, and a chip of plastic exudes. "It's not an eye at all. The noses have no holes, and the mouth is filled-in."

"What about bonds?" I ask.

She looks up at me, sighs, and gives an exhausted smile. "Nonsensical, as we know."

I nod. "Good, good. Well, keep working."

It doesn't get dark, though there is the sense of the Solid Core revolving. I wonder how much time we can remain out here. I don't really feel hungry, but I chew on a grain-bar from my rations. There's enough in our packs for weeks, especially if we supplement with the up-cycled waste products harvested by our suits.  

It takes hours to weave the chips of bark into enough armor for all of us. The bigger chips are the best, and we get better at prying them off the trees, drilling holes in them. One by one we peel off the hardest outer layer of our suits, like the sublavic losing its ablative paneling, and replace it with a chain-mail vest and leggings of wood-chips bound with split elasteel wire.

Ray kicks up his legs and dances like a Can-Can girl, flashing his loose armor up and down like a dress, much to everyone's amusement.

"I am so appalled," he says, mimes blushing, then kicks some more, showing his under-armor. "What a disgrace."

Far gets on his feet and imitates him.

"Do it like this," says the boy, and adds flapping arms to the mix. Ray acquiesces, then steps it up to kicking, flapping and spinning, until even Doe is laughing.

I pull So aside. "How are you doing?"

"I'm fine."

"Good. Listen- I want you to stay here. This is base camp, and I need someone to guard it."

I can feel her begin to simmer, get ready to mouth off like she did before, but I can't afford any breach of decorum now.

"Don't say it, So. This is not from pity or concern about your mission-fitness, it's plain sense. We can't carry everything, so we need a base. We can't keep track of ourselves once we get inside without a fixed point, and the only point we can know will be fixed is a person who says they haven't moved."

"I'll rig an automated signal," she protests. "We can just leave the gear, there's nobody here anyway."

I point at the soldiers. "And if one of them wakes up again, decides to pick it up and run around? In what sense are they even dead, anyway? There's holes in them, but no blood. If just one of them did that, it would throw everything off. We need a north star, So, and it's you. You've got to guide us."

She stares a moment longer, then lets it go.

"I still want to fucking kill something, sir," she says.

"As do I. You may get your chance down here. Keep the lights on for when we come back."

She nods.

In all of this, neither of us mentions what will happen when we get back. There is no sublavic anymore. Unless the path through the Solid Core leads to a bridge or a new ship, I don't see any of us getting out of this.

But she doesn't mention that, and I'm grateful.

I try on my new wood-chip armor. It is light and clatters musically as I walk.

"So how are we getting in?" Ray asks, pointing up at the ceiling.

"Like we got in here," I say, patting the candlewax pack on his back. "We blow a bloody great hole."

All of us, even Far, strap on a musket and at least one broken bayonet blade. Doe has three, two down her calf boots and one on her wrist. With the cannon mounted on one shoulder and the accelerator on the other, she looks like some kind of robot sentinel out of a nightmare.

Ray points. "Fire that thing and the recoil will make you do a somersault."

Doe raises one eyebrow at him. "So don't stand behind me."

He laughs, claps her on the shoulder.

We start. I look back at So, as we pass into the nearest rank of plastic trees. She looks forlorn, surrounded by dead bodies, gear, in the middle of the clearing. I nod, and she nods back.

Then we're trekking.

Far skips about like it's a game, darting to the furthest edge of our whitelights before coming running back, like he's playing with an incoming tide. I almost caution him, but hold back. The weight of this place has sloughed off for a time, and I don't want to begrudge him this. Still, I blood-mic Doe to keep an eye on him through ultras, in case any stray soldier escaped the slaughter.

We walk through a forest splintered with clearings that never seems to end. There are more cottages, and clouds of wispy smoke above stalagmites of flame blooming from their hay roofs, static. More brooks, more tumbled cannon, a few more waterwheels all tumbled at the exact same angle as before.

After an hour, So chimes in on blood-mic, and I tune her up.

"I want to talk about the map," she says.

I answer with a tongued confirmation from us all.

"Good," she says. "Well, there are three options for how to read it, I believe. First and most simply, it could be that this actual map is only a single slice, or plane, cut through the inner sphere. In this version the map essentially remains two-dimensional. It would mean everything inside the sphere to either side of the slice is solid, or just a distraction. That kind of map should be easy to run. Is that clear?"

"As lava," says Ray.

"It is," says Doe. "So the second choice is fully three-dimensional."

"That's right," So agrees. "It could be that the actual two-dimensional map somehow stretches to fill the three-dimensions of the inner sphere."

"How would that even work?" asks Ray.

"Have you ever seen a tetragrammaton," So asks.

I tongue no.

"It's a hypercube," she explains, and slings the image of one at us, a kind of cross made out of cubes. "It's what a square with four dimensions might look like, exploded in three dimensions."

I study it for a time. A faint memory of some great man, dead upon a structure just like this, echoes through my mind, then is gone.

"But we're dealing with a circle here, So," I say. "And not four dimensions."

"I know, I just wanted to get you thinking dimensionally. If it's the second way, then we need to think of this map as though it's on his axis. Put it on its edge, then spin it like a globe in those shutter-stop old films, and the concentric walls we see here will make shells, or orbits, in space."

We all think about that for a moment, until So slings over a translucent three-dimensional model of the map doing just that. The flat map stands on its edge in the HUD, then begins to slowly spin, with each of the walls leaving glowing bars in the air behind it. When one turn is completed, so is the sphere.

"Like an onion," says Ray.

"Exactly. But here's where it gets tricky. It matters where the axis of spin is. If it was only perfectly concentric circles it wouldn't matter, because the end result would be the same. But it's not, it's overlapping, and we've got all these other shapes mixed up."

The sphere in the HUD un-rotates back to two dimensions, then turns like a wheel, only to rotate back into three on the same up-down axis. One of the triangles within the sphere highlights itself, making a thick triangle-shaped torc around the upper half of the sphere.

"Now look," So says, and adds the original sphere next to it, with the same triangle highlighted. This time it is positioned on the axis of rotation, so when spun it only makes a solid tight triangle hanging in the upper middle. 

"They're totally different," I say.

"Bloody hell," says Ray.

"Bloody hell is correct," says So. "It all depends on the axis. Every angle will make a different map, so which map is the right one? Add to that the circle is not symmetrical on any axis, so how will the conflicting bits react with each other when spun?"

My head reels.

"What's the third option?" Doe asks.

"The third option is something more like the tetragrammaton I showed you. It's nothing so simple as a spin, it's an explosion. I can't render it any meaningful way, just like the tetragrammaton is not a meaningful rendering, just a conception. Suffice it to say, it gets very complex, and stops looking like a sphere at all."

I frown within my HUD. "But it is a sphere," I say, looking up through tree branches at the glossy black ceiling far overhead. "We can see that."

"I know. But that doesn't mean it has to be like any sphere we've ever seen before. Remember the bonds? It could be we're just lines walking along a two-dimensional surface, while there's actually a three-dimensional world going on around us."

"Except in three and four dimensions," interrupts Doe.

A long silence.

"Fuck," says Ray, with a sigh. "So what you're telling us is, we haven't got a bloody clue what the map means."

I stifle a snort.

"Not yet," says So. "Not until we see some of its internal architecture. But when you do, you're going to let me know, and I'll get to work on cracking a route. I've already got three ways of solving the two-dimensional version. They may even hold up for the three-dimensional one."

She slings another image, one with a flashing red slowly creeping around the outer ring, which I recognize as us. So handsome, I wonder idly. Such a fetching shade of red.

"What was that, Me?" Doe asks.

I catch myself mumbling, and snap out of it. This place is making me giddy. "Nothing," I say. "Go on."

Three colored routes appear across the flat circular map. "It depends on what the shapes are- if they're solid or hollow, if they're doorways or what. There's a way through in any case."

"My head is spinning," says Ray. "Does it matter what axis of rotation?"

I laugh this time.

"That's more like it Me," he says. "Stop your crazy muttering."

That only makes me laugh more. "We're going to be OK," I say, and in that moment I really mean it.

After that we mostly fall silent. Even Far stops larking around, and falls into a steady march at Ray's side. Every now and then I see Ray tapping Far on his head and face, enjoying some private blood-mic conversation and musical composition.

We walk, and I watch the handsome red blip of us circle around, toward the far end of the Solid Core.

There is a ladder.

We all stop and stare, dumbfounded. It rises up out of the grass of a spartan clearing, and continues all the way directly up to the glossy black ceiling overhead. It looks to be made of pine-colored wood, and is impossibly long.

"That's very convenient," says Ray.

"It's a trap," says Doe.

I look around, but see no sign of any soldiers, nothing of any sort. "It may be a trap," I say, "but it's where we want to go anyway."

I shine my whitelights at the ladder terminus, but the pool of inky blackness around it is impenetrable. There is a hint that the ladder continues inward, though.

"I'll go first," says Ray, and looks to me.

I shake my head. "No. I want you at my back, then Far, and Doe brings up the rear to rig the radio and cable. Is everybody clear?"

Ray nods. I look at Far, who has gone a little pale.

"Put on your HUD," I tell him.

I don't have the soft touch that Ray does, but this is not about being soft. The boy's had his time for fun, we all have, and now we're down to business. I pull out my broken-off bayonet, carefully wrapped with duct-tape for a handle, and wedge it in an easily accessible space in my thigh armor, then start across the clearing to the ladder.

The rungs up close look much like the trees and the leaves, printed with a pattern that repeats. They climb up towering above me, and at my feet sink into the grass. I kick at the dirt there, see the ladder-bars descending.

"Here goes nothing," I say, lay my hands to the rungs, and start the ascent.

Steadily I climb. Looking up I can still see nothing inside the inner sphere. Looking down Ray, Doe, and Far start to look more like little models, stranded in a clump on that fake grass. The height makes me giddy in a way the corroded outer metal didn't, and I wonder that it's the perspective, so stop looking back.

I look at the rungs, and my hands.

"Good luck," comes Ray's voice from below.

The blind-dark black is just above me, roaring with a silence I can't understand. It feels to be drawing me up, as though my ascent is unstoppable, inexorable. I cannot fight it, and steadily one hand pushes through the darkness, then the other, and I climb up into-

GODSHIP G

It takes two hours before the first of the godships comes into sight. They are a dirty brown smudge on the clay-gray horizon, rusted hulls split like long-rotten bananas, barely emergent over the waves.

I try to count them, but the bucking of the speedboat against the rough water prevents me. A fleet, or a school. I see a half hull here, a tilted glimpse of white-above decks there, a bulbous under-nose jutting proudly up like an erection out of a corpse midden.

I shake my head to clear the image, and am greeted by the drilling pain of my Arcloberry hangover. A thousand brain-cells dead with every sip. My shoulder stings in the salt wind where Zachery's bullet grazed it, though the cut has long dried over. My stomach throbs where it met his bat. 

I stopped once after leaving the abandoned skulk, well out of range to be seen. I wrapped a sock round the graze in my upper-arm, a ragged tear in the outer skin only, then dug through the speedboat's boarding and guts to find its GPS transponder, a chunk of black plastic with a red and yellow lead trailing from it. Like the node, I dropped it into the water. Then I opened up the folder from Mr. Ruins and shook it out to the godship page.