Mr. Ruins: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 1) (19 page)

"Found it," comes So's voice, and the corner image stops revolving. I pull the newly-formed map larger across my HUD. It looks much like any of the other ones she generated, except we are in a portion of it as a blinking red dot, and the five passageways leading away from us are marked out with structural red lines. "It's the only match for the exact angles and curvature of the section you're standing within," she adds. "It's the flat map image rotated at a 47 degree angle, then turned."

The number 47 is familiar, and it worries at my mind for a moment until I recollect why. "That was the locker number I found the mission pack in," I say, "back in the sublavic. Excellent work So, thank you." 

I wait five seconds, but no answer comes from So. I look at Doe. She's standing by with a spark-tool lit and held close to her cannon, already on guard duty.

"It's not a coincidence," she says, cool as ever. "None of this is."

I look at Ray. "Agreed. All of this is starting to feel pre-ordained."

I nod, click back to So on blood-mic. "Do you have a solution for this maze? Can you give us a direction?"

Still no answer comes. I kneel to check the comm line dropping out through the Solid Core inner shell, but it has not tangled or twisted free in the interim moments.

"So, report, that's an order," I say.

More static. I can see the fear in Far's eyes, and rest a hand on his head, even as I cut him off from the blood-mic with my tongue.

"I feel strange," comes So's voice at last. The sound of it is echoey, even fainter than before. That shouldn't happen, not through blood-conduction, and even if it somehow did the audibles in my HUD should have cleaned it up.

"Speak a little louder, So," I say. "You're drifting."

Another long lag. "I feel it," her voice comes, like a mist drifting across a far distance. "I feel like I'm drifting."

A chill grips at my middle. "What does that mean So, report. Be specific."

Silence. Ray is looking at me, so is Doe, even Far though he can't hear what we're saying. He begins to whine, a long low terrified C.

"So!" I bark.

"I think I may be dead," So's voice comes back, so crackly it is barely audible. "Would I know, if I was really gone?"

The chill leaps up into my chest. "What? Please repeat, So. It sounded like you said you were dead."

Her voice whispers in my ear like a feather, floating up through blood. "I don't know if I'm really seeing anything. I feel insubstantial. It started when you left, Me. When Far was gone, it got worse. I thought I was dizzy, but…"

"Come in, So!"

"I'm not really here, am I? Am I up there with you? I can't really see my hands. Where am I? La, are you here? La?"

I find myself blinking back tears, though I don't know why. I tongue on my HUD vacuums to suck them away, I haven't got time to wipe them.

"Talk to me So, tell me what you're seeing. Report, marine."

"I'm sorry," Me," she whispers. "I don't feel like anything. The soldiers are gone. Where are all the heads? I'm so alone now. I cut off the heads, but they're gone. La! Ti! One of you please answer me."

"I'm here," says Doe. "So, it's me. I'm here."

So begins to cry. Her soft sobbing filters through my HUD like a strange waterfall, music I've never heard before.

Then she is gone. Her link through the blood fades, and I cannot raise her again.

Ray flips up his HUD. Doe and I do the same, even Far does.

"We have to go back," Ray says. "We can't leave her like that."

I'm sure he knows that even as he says it, we can't do it. It's too late, and there's no guarantee that whatever came for So won't come for us too.

He makes no more protests, only flips down his HUD. "So which way?" he asks.

At that moment a flashing red route appears on So's map. Perhaps it was her last act, or perhaps it was simply delayed through the comm lines, only coming through now. It shows a path zagging toward the Solid Core, passing through numerous circular, square, and triangular cross-section 'rooms' on the way.

"Where's So?" Far asks.

"She's taking a nap," I say. "Now come on, let's move."

We go East, following So's map. Doe takes point, her cannon-spark poised and accelerator humming. Ray and Far walk the middle, and I bring up the rear with my musket and QC drawn. We talk little, though I overhear Ray chatting to Far about what an apple really is, how it tastes, and how you best get to the core.

It is a happy distraction, and I tune out.

I don't know what happened to So. Doe won't ask me about it, because I'm sure she knows better than I. Ray won't ask because I don't think he wants to know.

As we walk I pull out the mission pack again, flick through its pages, but nothing has changed. They are all still empty after the point where

SAVE FAR

faded away.

I would ask Far, but I know he'll have nothing to say. He's just a lost, terrified kid. Of all of us, he belongs here the least.

The passage curves to the left and inclines slightly Inward. I watch the blip that is us moving along the red line. Ray has his TV aerials mounted on his back pack now, and they are confirming the spin that So discovered. The map matches the reality.

Bland walls and ceiling, all stamped with the letters RG. Initials, I assume, for Ritry Goligh. Ti called me by that name in the dream, and there must be a reason why. Perhaps it is who I am. I think about the undulating tunnel I'd glimpsed, before these metal walls stamped themselves across it. That was the real place, I feel. This is what we have made of it, by our very presence. Another phase-shift, like the one that killed Ven.

That thought stops me cold.

Who is Ven?

At that moment, the floor trembles.

"What was that?" cries Far.

I spin around, but nothing has changed. Then another tremor comes, like a punch from below, dashing me off my feet. I hit the corridor wall hard and rock backward to the floor.

Thump-thump, comes the sound of some distant massive pulse. Thump-thump. The floor shakes me like stones on the bottom of a drilling hydrate-bed, and I see something shifting at the far end of the corridor we've come from.

The metal is warping, turning to black, and starting to undulate. Orders get choked off in my throat, as the distant end of the tunnel turns outside in, like a worm's body burrowing through dirt, and starts back up the inside of itself.

The vision makes me nauseous. The passageway has become a sucking mouth, bending back through itself. Thump thump, its lips smack. Thump thump, the staccato rhythm of some other soul's heartbeat. The solid metal underfoot begins to soften, the crisp RG melting away, and finally I get the word out.

"Run!"

We run. Ray scoops up Far and Doe leads us in a mad sprint through a tunnel pulsing with its own life, beginning to sway. Far is screaming again, and I tongue his voice down. I scan So's map in my HUD desperately, seeking out something that might offer us shelter, settling upon one of the triangular cross-section rooms.

But there isn't time.

The thump-thump is growing louder all the time, and the sucking mouth is slicking closer on a tide of viscous CSF, its toothless lipless wet rims champing like the valves in a heart. The fluid washes around my feet and I slip, try to catch myself on the wall but there is no purchase to be gained.

"Duck," comes Doe's shout, then

BOOM

I feel the cannon ball rush by my head like a swooping crull, track it down the long and dark intestine the passage has become, to impact solidly against its lips. It tears a gout of fibrous flesh out of the sucking mouth, a welter of blood spumes outward, and the thump thump goes haywire.

Ray snatches me up and we're sprinting together, another

BOOM

as Doe lays down covering fire and then we're past her and I'm in the lead now, looking down the tunnel toward another sucking black mouth champing its valve-lips closer.

The map says we go through it, beyond to an Inward corridor leading to the triangle, but there isn't time. I shoulder my musket and fire a continuous stream of lead balls forward at the lips, peppering them with purple weals that spit dark blood, even as I run along the spongy organic flooring, spinning So's sphere in my HUD as I go and searching for another way out.

I find it fifty yards ahead, and already hidden by the fleshy walls. Thump thump, smack the lips, one thump at each end like an echo, sucking closer to us. I sprint toward it with the others at my back, the occasional BOOM from Doe winning us quavers of time, until the red dot that is us is standing beside the space an Inward path should be, leading up toward a circular cross-section.

It is not the solution to the maze, it is merely a place that is not here. I stab my musket into the heaving purple wall and unleash a shower of gore.

"Here," I shout to Ray, and he dives in beside me. The lipless orifices are smacking closer, so near I can feel the wind of their exhalations. He drops Far into the hip-holster and thrusts his bayonet into the wall, spilling more clotted purplish matter to the bucking floor.

The lips scream as we both tear at the same time, two parallel lines like we're disemboweling an enemy top and bottom. Vileness oozes out, the thump thump ratchets to a constant hammering, and we make the final slice each, horizontal top and bottom.

Ray tears the thick flap of veiny organics away, revealing a dank metal-walled corridor on the other side.

"Get through," I shout, "for the circle," and Ray dives into the gap, squirming and kicking through to clang down on the other side.

"Go, Doe," I shout, and she follows, her shoulder-cannon almost catching on the mucal membrane wall. The oozing wound paints her with gelatinous slime. Then the lips are upon me, and for a moment I know what they are, emissaries of the Lag sent to hunt me down, and I know what I have to do. I toss the memory of Ti into them like a grenade.

For a moment they halt, and it is the moment I need, enough to dive through the slippery gap and into the corridor beyond. Doe yanks me upright and we speed clattering up the steeply inclined Inward path after Ray, until we reach a dead-end door, which Ray rams open.

I stagger through last, into a field of light, just as one of the duodenal lips slips itself through the wound in its own cell-wall, and slaps wetly up the RG-imprinted metal toward me.

Ray slams the door closed, and I am overwhelmed briefly in the white light.

"Who is Ti?" Far asks, while my HUD makes sense of the ganglial node we have burst into.

I have no answer for him, as the circular space renders out to a large room filled with an enormous leather-bound book, so massive that its face fills the floor, and its width rises up to my waist. The title across the front written in gold-leaf print reads

VEN

But who is Ven? And who is Ti? I do not know, I can't remember.

The lips smack at the door, but there is no sign they can come through. We are safe for now. 

SKULK 47 B

I have lost everything, but I feel better than I have in years. Standing at the highest point of the godship complex, at the top of an impromptu crow's nest tower cobbled together out of metal strips and old decking riveted to the sharp keel of the Ylep, I feel alive.

The Allatanc sea swirls in the Arctic basin, spinning in the plug-hole we dug with all our mines and depth-charge explosions, and I feel good. The sky is gray, the sea is gray, and I can never go back to the skulks again. I have lost Carrolla who was the closest thing I had to a friend, I have lost the routine that saved me when the tsunami never came, and I feel like a weight has been lifted off.

It feels like forgiveness, for all my many crimes. 

Tears roll down my cheeks, as I breathe in the fresh rain and salt air. There used to be ice in all these places, I think. We are not only saprophytes come to consume the decay we have left behind, we are predators too, come to take that which is ours. I am a predator, and always have been.

The cathedral ship lifts me. I can feel it, the waves of memory Mr. Ruins spoke of.  I can ride them, if I try.

I leaf through the folder he left behind, pressed to the dead flesh of a faux-Napoleon, and read the story of the godships written in Mr. Ruins' hand. I know most of it already, though it all happened before I was born. These were history engrams injected into my brain the old-fashioned way, back when I was leap-frogging from school to school.

The cathedral ships were arks bought up by the richest religions in the world, old cruise-liners repurposed to carry some 5,000 people each along with thousands of animals. I've seen footage of them in their prime, vast city-states drifting serenely over the rising tides like mini-Calicos, each geared with the best flood-defenses and buoyancy aids possible.

They roamed the empty middle oceans, far from any land, on the theory that they were unsinkable by any tsunami in water, and too heavy to carry far enough to dash upon the rocks.

Back when the wall around Calico was half its current height, and few cities had walls that were higher, they seemed like paradise. The cathedral ships were safer than anywhere, and added to that they were godly. Of course there were the rich and poor on ship, there were servants, but even the lowest oilsman to work the bilge rooms had proven his or her faith through a three-year interview, before being allowed to sail in god's ark armada.

Their sermons became legendary, broadcast around the narrowing, shrinking coastal cities of the world. They were a light that people looked to, the hope to restart creation if the flood they forecast for so long truly came about. We had torn up the sky and torn up the sea, and their god's wrath was coming to strike us all down.

It struck the cathedral ships first. They were at their yearly plenum in the mid-ocean when the great Allatanc fault broke. The global tsunami hit, and kept hitting, as the fault continued to vent massive internal pressures, like a hemmorhage. Wave after wave lofted them and shifted them, inexorably, toward coastal barriers.