Mr. Ruins: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 1) (7 page)

"Flies," says Ray confidently, then gestures at the ropes webbing us in position. "For this web. I bet I can get him to burp out the tones, if I find the right spot."

He starts poking at different bits of Far, the back of his neck, his chest, his arms. One of them causes a sneeze.

"Whoa!" says Ray. "Big time."

I smile, because there is no harm in this. Ray is a goofball, when he's not deadly earnestly serious. I like him, he reminds me of someone I used to know. Or perhaps he just reminds me of him.

I pull out the mission document. The hot wind flutters its pages, and I hook an elasteel line from my waist belt through the binding hole in the corner. It clanks satisfyingly. I look over the front page, where the title faded a lifetime ago in the sublavic.

"Mission goods?" Ray asks.

I nod, feeling the weight of the pack in my hands, wondering if I'm making a mistake to wait to read it, wondering there might be something we need to know right now.

"You should wait to share it with Doe," Ray says.

"I will," I say, and tongue on the blood-mic. "I'm going to read out loud the first page of our mission brief. I want you all to listen, but keep peeling."

They Roger it, and I lay my suited fingers at the hermetic-sealed edge of the document pack. I look at Ray, then peel back the first page like skin sucking off a fresh apple, and open my mouth to read.

DO NOT READ THIS ALOUD

ONE OF YOUR CHORD WILL KILL YOU ALL

I say nothing, instead close my mouth slowly as the words steadily fade from red to pink, from pink to nothing.

"Well?" says Doe through the comm.

Ray is looking up at me with a mixture of amusement and surprise, like this is a much better game than playing Far.

"We'll wait, on second thoughts," I say to the blood-mic. "Keep up the peel. Out."

Ray starts laughing. "That's embarrassing."

"It's unnerving," I say. "How did they know I would read it out loud?" I turn over the mission pack and look at the back as if there might be answers there.

"Maybe they didn't. Maybe it's standard. How many of those have you opened before?"

I strain to remember, because I know I've opened some, many, but where, and when? Was I inveigling then as well? Was it in the depths of the Molten Core, or some frozen one?

I tuck the pack back into my suit.

"So who do you think is the traitor?" Ray asks. "And what are they going to do?"

"It could be you," I say.

He shrugs. "Or it could be you."

There's not much more to say after that. Ray goes back to playing Far, and I look down into the molten blaze below, trying to think back on everything I know about the others.

But there's nothing. Names, a few traits, a sense about them, but that's all. We could be complete strangers for all I know, not even really tones in the same chord at all.

Four hours, and there's been no sign of an entrance. Doe finally reaches the far apex of the Solid Core.

"I feel I should plant a flag," she says through mic.

"But nothing hollow?" I ask.

"Nothing."

So and La chime in with the same result, by gamma or banging. The peel is not yet complete though, but will be soon enough when Doe spirals back to meet them.

Ray and I wait, flicking bits of rust off the black metal. It's odd that the rust is black, and that the metal under the black is black as well.

"Is this even rust?" Ray asked at one point.

"Maybe it's sweat," I say. "This black ball is actually alive and it's waiting to eat us, then it'll sweat us out like this."

Ray rubs a piece of black between his fingers. "As soon as we find its mouth. Not much of a predator, to have no mouth."

"Neither's a spider," I say. "It waits for its prey to come to it." That shuts him up for a while.

Two more hours, and the ladies have all convened at a point a third of the way round the Solid Core. "No hollows, no doors, no windows," Doe says, "and we're sweating while you've been taking it easy."

"Roger that, we'll rope for the Gaulic zone."

"See you there, out."

Ray is already untethering Far, strapping the boy in to his side-holster like an armament. Far wakes up in the middle of this, whimpers something.

"Shh," Ray tells him. "We'll be there soon."

I unclasp all three of the hooks holding me in place bar one, twist so both of my legs are dangling down the great girder's side, and get the grapnel shot in place, the rope all affixed.

"You first," I tell Ray.

He nods, his sharp blue eyes already looking into the distance, and fires. A percussive slap smacks the air, and his grapnel shoots off to loop around another girder far along the Solid Core's gentle curve.

"See you at the Deathgate, Me," he says, locks the grapnel rifle in to his suit, and shuffles off the girder.

Together he and Far fall, begin to arc like a pendulum. I hear the boy's long wail call out like a siren fading, growing deeper. They are a dot against searing lava, the rope slimmed to nothing by the bending of light.

The blood-mic cranks on. "Yee-haa!" It is Ray, raucous. "You never said it was this much fun Doe," he calls. In the distance he's on the backswing now, already half of the cable raveled in, nearing the latch-point speedily.

"Say it's fun after another hundred swings," Doe comes back. "Over."

I wait for Ray and Far to reach their latch point, hook and unhook, fire, and launch off again, before I ready my grapnel. In the last moment before I fire, I look back down at the lava, hunting the indistinguishable point where the sublavic was lost, where Ti is probably still buried, cooked within the can as it melts.

I can't help but feel I am leaving a part of myself behind. But the rest of me is ahead, and that is the only way now. I fire the rifle, the cable shoots out and snags on the same latch-point Ray used. I shuffle off, and am flying.

The Solid Core loops away, the orange-red screams up at me, then the rope catches and pulls me into a pendulum swing. Hot air rushes over my HUD, exhilaration swarms through my body driving out the cramp of squatting to wait, and I let out my own wild whoop, of course off-mic.

Even as the first swing reaches apex, the haulier in my suit kicks in and starts to reel me in, a tasty tid-bit on the end of a long slim tongue. The swings get sharper and faster as the length shortens, then in moments only I'm clamping round the latch-point to sit on the edge, refastening my cables to fire.

In the distance standing at the next projection, Ray is holding out a hand with one thumb up.

"The only way to travel," he says through blood-mic, then dramatically falls backward. I watch him arc down again, and follow.

It is less than a hundred to the Deathgate. We pull up to find Doe, So and La hanging from a brace of three wires strung tautly across an open expanse between stanchion girders. Ray is latching in when I reel in. I feel the slight flex in the latching wires as they take my weight.

"Welcome," says Doe, "to the Deathgate."

I look at the sheer black metal here, and see the carving truly is remarkable. The Gaulic words are arrayed in a spiral, each letter as big as my shin, scored so deeply into the black that they shimmer silver.

I reach into one of the depressions. "What alloy is this?" I ask, flicking up my HUD and looking at So.

"Something poly," she says, brushing black hair out of eyes. She looks to La for confirmation.

"Anhedronic," La goes on. "Bound not with the weak force, but something else."

I frown. My molecular chemistry is weak, but not that weak. "But it's made up of elements, correct? How can it be anything but the weak force?"

La reaches through the tangle of our bodies, hanging ungainly there like bats in hammocks, to pass me a readout. I look at it, see numbers. "This just says its gravometric."

She nods. "They're gravometric bonds, working at an elemental level."

"It's not possible, we know," Doe says. "But here's the really interesting thing. The silver metal is different from the black stuff diametrically. Which is to say, they're opposites."

Now I look to her. "Like I and O."

"That's right. Or matter and anti-matter. They can't exist in a molecular form, when held by weak bonds. But here, like this? They can."

I am still getting used to the idea. "But gravometric is for heavenly bodies. Planets, not at this scale."

Doe shrugs, the motion barely captured in her suit, and enough of a motion to start us all bobbing from the cables above like ducks floating on a ripple. "So we're at that scale, or we're not. What it comes down to, is there might be a black hole on the other side of this metal."

I nod. "Can we blow it?"

"I thought you'd never ask. Yes we can, but it'll take most of our candlewax, and almost all our fusing. I don't want to be anywhere near this hole when the blast goes up. The whole sphere could lose integrity. Hell, if it's a black hole we'll just get spaghettified in an instant. But if it's something else…" she trails off.

I look around at the chord. Ray has flicked up his HUD and is running his swarthy fingers through the metal.

"Who would carve something like this," he says quietly.

I look back to Doe. We're marines after all, and the Solid Core is our mission. "Set it up."

They affix three quarters of the candlewax bomb to the heart of the Gaullic spiral using gamma-clamps, lead it with fuse, then we all swing back to the last gantry-girder. There we cluster together like crows roosting on a single aerial.

Doe is at my side, her white hair pasted to her cheeks in sweaty clumps. Ray reaches over and pats the hair away. She eyes him curiously, as though she can't quite comprehend what he's doing.

"Excuse me," he says.

Doe frowns, then holds out the fuse, while I unjack a periscope lens that hangs down five feet beneath us. It gives me an unobstructed view around the curve of the Solid Core to the glistening pack of candlewax at the detonation point.

"T-minus 10," Doe says, "10 minutes lead time." She holds the gasjet barrel of her rifle to the fuse, it sparks, and she lets it go.

It drops away from us, and Doe begins a quiet, barely voiced countdown.

Far wriggles by my side, and Ray pats his head quiet. I see So and La are holding hands. Ray rests his free hand on Doe's thigh, and she does not push him away.

I watch the spark race along the fuse through the dangling periscope, like a shooting star against the black Core. I wonder what we'll find inside, and I wonder how many more of the chord I'll lose before the job is done.

Doe's countdown reaches one minute. I feel the others either side of me clamp their grip tighter to the metal. We're supported by cables spun three girders back, but that's no replacement for holding to the solid metal underfoot.

"Five, four, three, two, one."

The spark strikes the candlewax, and the explosion bursts out like a vast aquatic body surging upward from the icy depths, like the sublavic emerging from molten metal. Black gouts of shrapnel blow outward and down in a broad trajectory, a fireball inflates in a split second, like some miniature version of the lavic sea around us, then with a staccato snap sucks back into itself.

B-

The sound crashes over us, my HUD quickly renders it silent, then the pressure wave hits and we all sway, but the clamps hold us in place. Throughout, I watch the freshly wrought hole into the Core, beaded so tightly I dare not breathe, so I clearly see the shape that falls out from inside, an instant after the blast rang out. I watch it fall and struggle through the smoke, down and down until the lava claims it with a hiss and a pop. I have long enough to focus, to be certain that what I think I'm seeing is in fact what it is.

A man on a white horse, dressed in a dark blue tunic with brightly burnished epaulets and buttons that caught the magma like lens flare. He held a shining silver rapier in his hand, and there was dark blood on his bright white pantaloons embroidered with yellow thread, spurs glinting on his long black boots as he spun down to the magma. 

"Charger!" he shouted, the sound reaching me seconds after the lava claimed him.

I let the periscope go slack in my hands and turn to Doe.

"Gaulic," she says, her voice a cracked whisper. "It means charge, as in attack."

I look back to the smoking space in the air, far off round the core's curvature, and wonder what madness lay within. I can feel the others around me doing the same.

SHARK ARENA C

A long moment passes as he looks at me and I look at him. It's dark, and his teeth are bright. Somewhere far off there is the lapping of the Allatanc against this abandoned skulk's shore.

Is this real?

The stink of my own puke is rising up, right in front of my face, a dark Arcloberry purple. I push myself to my feet, where I waver for balance. Still woozy. It doesn't help that he's sitting there staring at me, his teeth mesmeric.

There's blood on the back of my hand, I notice as I rest it on the shark arena railing. At once the railing gives way, and I stagger a step forward, watch as the metal rail slaps into the thick layer of mossy crud grown over the arena water. Slowly it sinks, cutting lines through the compacted sea-foam and dust that reseal themselves like hot wax after it.

I re-gather my balance, any sense of pride, and point at the halogen-toothed man in the darkness. He knows my name, which makes me feel cornered, and when I'm cornered I get aggressive.

"Your hat looks ridiculous," I say. "Take it off." 

He smiles wider and those bright white teeth blind me, like boatlights in the darkness, giving me a headache. "It's not my hat," he says, his voice a warm baritone, while taking it off. "It's his." He points to something at his feet, then drops the hat on it.

There's something dark lying there, like a long package, a glint of white, obscured by the railing and the darkness. "You should take a look at this," he says. "I think you'll like it."