Mr. Ruins: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 1) (21 page)

I remembered it because later on when I told it to Ven in bed she said, "I'll have him demoted two classes," which was funny in itself, then, "Freon is a gas, the idiot, it'd have to be frozen CO2 or something," which was funnier still.

Ven had some kind of social disability, perhaps one of the mild Autisms gene-coded to make her more palatable for service in the skirmishes.

Accordingly, she was a genius of administration and management, able to quantify the output of a threat-matrix faster than any unmodified conscript. Because of her, our subglacic evaded any number of dry-ice bombs left to percolate in the water-pack, several mind-bombs dropped via depth-charge from the Schooner-class warships overhead, until the last one took us all, which was all my fault.

We were unlikely to ever cross paths, as anything more than resident expert liaising with command, and then only after a successful raid on an enemy outpost or drilling rig, when the prisoners would be shuffled down the gantry to my gray-walled office, shuffled into the thumping pulse of my massive EMR, and I would dive them for secrets.

Heclan made us cocktails out of artificial Cerebro-Spinal Fluid, in a complex filtration system he wangled together by borrowing parts from Tigrates and Ferrily, shooting marines who stole them from the outposts we raided, like pirates.   

Before every raid Heclan would ruffle back his thick hair-mop and draw up a shopping list filled with retorts, round-bottomed flasks, tiptration condensers, hose-tubing and reflux drums, then deliver it to the twins, who would try to hunt those items out and claim them as spoils of war.

It tasted like piss with vinegar, but we toasted our own health with it, toasted the numbers tallying up in our accounts onshore, toasted the amounts of pack we'd blown apart and the other idiots we'd blasted to make a few yards, and drank ourselves shit-faced.

I met Ven because somehow we screwed up, and labeled a fermented bag of CSF in place of an unfermented one in the gray-room cupboards, then inadvertently loaded it in to the coolant channels for my next dive.

Both the target and I were three thousand sheets to the wind and piss-drunk beyond all conception within a matter of seconds. Our brains were bathed in raw alcohol to a level pretty much unheard of in history, and even within the triple-hulled ablative brick shell of my sublavic bathyscaphe, it fucked me up beyond all recognition.

It was inescapable, having breached the blood-brain barrier, and even unconsciousness could not get it out. After a few moments of utter chaos as my mind ballooned and shrank, blurring like ingredients in a food-mixer with color, shape, names and events, I died, as did the target.

Naturally Ven was called. One glance at the readings told her what had happened, and she tossed both me and the target into artificial wombs to keep our hearts going and replace our corrupt CSF, then with a hammer and surgical chisel cracked open our heads one after the other like eggshells, to let the poison out.

Then she dived me. I can't quite imagine what that phantasmagoric freakscape must have been like, or quite why she determined to do it, but probably it had something to do with the threat matrix, with needing whatever glimpses I'd taken of the target in the seconds I'd seen into his head, and gambling she'd get it best by recovering me first rather than him.

I was dead, so it can't have been nice, but still she managed to tap my Solid Core for the seven tones of my artificial womb, and she chimed them throughout my brain. They kept the architecture alive as the liquor slowly drained out, replaced by fresh CSF, long enough for the womb to bring me back round.

"Gaargh!" I shouted.

I was drunk for days afterward. There was no one left to dive the target, and he died despite the articicial womb. Heclan explained the accident away on a batch of faulty CSF, which was just believable enough as it had happened other times too, and in private offered to quit the marines and pay me all his onshore account as restitution.

I told him I'd kill him if he ever did it again. He nodded his blonde bob solemnly, and we toasted it with the foul liquor that had briefly killed me. They were different times, in the thick of the skirmishes. Death was always a bad ice-floe away.

The day they released me from the womb, Ven came. I thought it must be for the information I'd gleaned, but it turned out to be the opposite. She was there about information she'd gleaned in me, and how it had disturbed her. She was not a diver in any more than certification, as all commanders were then required to be, and she wasn't used to the influx of another person's mind.

She suggested we have sex, and I consented, still drunk.

Lying in my arms afterward, after the rhythmic pulsations were done and all her hollering was finished, she wept, which perhaps she hadn't done ever in her life. It was my gift to her, my mind holding up a mirror to all the awful things she'd endured as a child, reflected in all the awful things I'd endured.

The sex became regular. We began to talk, too. I came to see the beauty in her, despite the fierce and analytical front. She was never soft in front of me, never self-piteous, but always raw. She lit up my emotions like a blow-torch, kept me guessing at every step. I never knew if she would kick like a wild horse or wrap me up in hot passion like a choking squid. She was as irrepressible as a force of nature.

It was wild, heady, and it changed us both.  While she never grew soft, she softened. Humor crept into her dealings, while a little of her fierce intellect infected me. The passion remained while a solid core of loyalty, faith and love crept up between us.

"You're the Ice King now," Heclan said. "Do you shit Freon too?"

"It should be frozen CO2," I corrected him.

Tigrates and Ferrily thought it was great, and constantly teased me about what she'd do once we broke up. Perhaps I'd be left as a target after the next raid, or abandoned floating on a tiny raft of pack-ice, drifting away into the ocean tundra.

We didn't break up. After six months passed, we began to talk about a future away from the ice, making a home and having dozens of children and to hell with the population controls, behind a tsunami-wall on one of the inland high-latitude mountains of proto-Rusk.

"You bear one, then I'll bear one, then one for the artificial womb," she said, pointing between us. Even then it was a possibility for a man to bear a child.

"We'll name them after our missions," she said.

"What are our mission names?" I asked, because I never knew, I was always too deep down in the ship and drunk to care.

She reeled off the lists from memory, each named after a population center closest to the infraction zone:

Yakut Even

Kutchin Hare

Yukagahir

Naskapi

Iquliat

Chukchi Koryak

Athabascan

Places where ancient Eskime peoples once lived, Inutuc and Yupik, dark-skinned snow-dwellers that we turfed out like we turfed out everyone, as the middle belt of our world fattened and the oceans rose.

We talked about the morality of our way of life, about how many other skirmishers we killed on our missions, how much sea we could grab, and whether it was worth it. It always seemed to me that all our efforts merely flexed at the lines, pushing them out, pulling them in.

Ven knew all the details of deaths and square acreage, had figures at the ready. I think they helped convince her that it was a good thing we did, though she said she would do it anyway, because it needed doing. If we didn't fight, then one of the other coalitions would win, and that would lead to an unacceptable monopoly of power and wealth. We weren't fighting for victory, then, but for a stabilized détente amongst competitors.

I came to understand that from her, as she came to understand from me that détente was a hard proposition to ask people to die for. We both changed, molding to fit in each others' worlds, to both of our benefits. The softness I nurtured in her made her a better, more empathetic commander. The cool outlook she brought to me made me a better, more analytical diver.

In the end, I think it was my softness that led her to get us all killed, and her hardness that kept me alive while everyone else died.

The choice was to raid a civilian ship skirting the old Laskan perimeter. Every sign it gave out bespoke its age and the presence of children aboard. It was not even over the boundary line, merely on the edge.

The old Ven would have sunk it without a second thought, and scavenged amongst its survivors for some targets to dive for intel. The new Ven hesitated, gave the ship time to turn around, perhaps thinking of the children we had promised each other, and that was enough.     

They dropped a mind-bomb on us, an EMP for the nervous system. They were banned weapons, similar in scope to the biological weapons of the past that killed everything organic then dissipated in a given period, leaving the enemy's entire infrastructure in place and unharmed, ripe for annexation. 

The mind-bomb disrupted electrical and magnetic fields at a level so minute it would not cause a subglacic's engines or systems to falter. Perhaps a few digital clocks in the crew bedrooms would overload and fuse. Along with them, every bit of human matter enervated by electrical impulse was overloaded at once.

Grand mal seizures killed every member of the crew. Their brains stopped functioning, their hearts stopped pumping, their limbs stopped holding them up, their breath halted, they were simply switched off like sharks with their fins cut away, dropped to the bottom of the ocean to die within their imprisoning skin.

That is how Ven died.

I alone survived, along with my dive-target, protected by the electro-magnetic field of the EMR machine. It thumped on as Heclan died at the controls, as Tigrates and Ferrily died, as everyone died.

I was trapped, with no one to switch off the machine and let me out, but thanks to Ven's cold core, I did not panic. I hid from the Lag within my target's mind, tossing what memories of his I could to buy time, until there were none left. Then I fled to my own, and fed it all the non-essential things I could afford to lose, the weight and frames both in the end, until I had to make real choices about what I most needed to keep.

Ven and my three friends stayed, but perhaps I had other friends that I gave up. I will never know, because I gave them up. I gave up all the fringe parts of my childhood, keeping only in place the worst of it and the best of it, to keep me the same person as much as possible. I gave up my knowledge of everything except the dive, I gave up walking and breathing and running and talking. I peeled off bits of myself to the Lag piece by piece like a cannibal dressing his own limbs for dinner, all the while calling through the EMR links for Heclan to let me out.

They let me out hours later. It was the enemy, but that did not matter. Marines switched off the EMR and finally I surfaced, to their utter disbelief. They kept me alive in a womb as a scientific miracle, perhaps sustained due to the odd architecture of my Solid Core, perhaps due to some intrinsic genetic ability.

They studied me and dived me, hunting for the reason I could survive for so long. Even after the skirmishes came to an official end, scientists continued to come to my recovery pod, begging me to make a run on the Solid Core and open the aether-door within. If anyone could do it, it would be me.

I had no interest in that at all. I had nothing, having cored myself of who I was, leaving only a skeleton for ragged clumps of meat to hang upon. I had a heart, that was Ven, and some organs that were Heclan, Ferrily, Tigrates, and the horrors of my childhood, but that was all.

I was a freak, worse than the divers who'd Lagged themselves to death, because I had come back, and was less. Once I learned how to speak and to move again I fled them all and the empty spaces inside, kept running until I hit the neon-skulks of proto-Calico, where I drank and whored my onshore account away in stupor and flesh until the tsunami wave was forecast to come, promising to bring a final, lasting erasure.

Far stops reading, and a long silence fills the aftermath. There are tears in Ray's eyes. He reaches out to Far and takes the boy in his arms, and they embrace. I look to Doe, blurry through the tears in my own eyes.

Because I remember. I go to her and wrap my arms about her, working them underneath the shoulder-cannon and accelerator. Perhaps she even cries too.

I know who Ven is. I remember being Ritry Goligh. I remember it, and feel again the surging righteousness of revenge coming due, of earned redemption, of the pure rightness of this mission we are on to take back all these things that have been stolen.

I pull back and see the same revelation in Doe's eyes.

"Let's go," she says.

I nod.

We cross the book to the doorway on the other side, and Doe blows it open with her cannon.

BOOM

ORICIPULIS C

Don Zachary owns an entire skulk. In truth he owns them all, and I can see that in the air like colorful tracer rounds, his path linking him out to every skulk in all of proto-Calico.

I slow the speedboat engine as I draw near to the central dock. There are men there with Kaos rifles held at the ready, dressed in the black skirmisher regalia of Black Hawks- mercenaries who fought in all theaters, for all coalitions.

Don Zachary's path shoots through their chests too. It shoots through mine. It leads to a woven nest at the middle of the skulk, at the heart of the skulk where the Don is rumored to have built himself a tsunami-proof lock-box.

The dock is circled by a tall plate-metal wall, one I know continues around the entire skulk because I've seen it from the tsunami-wall walkway. There are Hawks up there too, manning howitzers. I sense them perk up as my speedboat comes into range of their floodlights.

"Stop there," a voice calls out, and the men down on the dock and the men up top all point their weapons my way. Bullets rake the dark water before me, but I do not stop. Instead I reach out and pluck at the threads between me and these men even as they form. I follow them back through the air, like I'm diving in my sublavic while conscious.