Soul Jacker Box Set by Michael John Grist

Author:Michael John Grist [Grist, Michael John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-10-08T06:00:00+00:00

17. COURT

Out of the water, the passageway bored into the rock of the Crag opens before me like a long black wound in the sea. I stride down steps hand-cut into the volcanic stone unafraid, no longer caring about myself. The passageway descends sharply below the waves, dripping with salt-water. Electric lights flicker along a row of gray cabling stapled to the rough walls. There is the pulsing sound of pumps somewhere below, working to keep this splinter of air dry.

I stride down, feeling minds preparing defenses in the darkness ahead, and I Lag them to stillness. Several fight back, these keepers of the King's Court and Mr. Ruin's peers, but I am strong in my outrage. I have seen what deeds they have done, and righteous fury helps me stamp them underfoot.

Then there are only screams. I feel wounded Souls crying for help, humans who are being consumed, and I balm them as best I can.

I emerge into a chamber, a circular guardroom carved into the rock, where three marines abandon their game of cards to fumble on buzzing black EMR helmets. I Lag then shoot them all. They drop and their blood swirls down to a gutter-drain in the floor, where a pump sucks it away. I do not need to reach inside their minds to know they have been turned to soup.

The steps continue and I wind deeper down until the density of old tortured bonds in the air becomes so thick I can't wade through them with my mind open. In this way I know the hall of the Court before I see it with my eyes, before I walk in and find the long rock cavern filled with experimental metal equipment, vats and tubs and saws, beds and frames and computers and EMRs. I know with sterling clarity that this is the worst place in the world, worse even than the sea-fort above.

Everything about it is familiar, but abhorrent. I recognize the shape of these bonds on the air, though these are worse than I experienced. It is a nightmare I woke from as a child but have never been able to shake, pushed to the extreme.

It is a laboratory for jacking, breaking, and remixing the inner realm of the Soul.

I enter, and all around me hang the fragmented minds of experimental subjects. Some are in torsion-rigs strapped into EMRs, half their skin peeled away with their throats excised so they cannot scream. Others lie on benches with tubes and spikes erupting in and out of their flesh, contorted in bizarre combinations with their various organs held aloft in clamps and on hooks. Some are strung up in liquid vats with all their body parts skinned and spread around them in a sickly cloud of pink and purple, their eyes blinking back at me from within.

It is too much. I close my eyes but still I feel their existential pain. To my right are four people whose brains have been quartered and intermixed and left to blend into madness.

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