The Emperor of Everything

The Gench’s eyespots ceased their endless circulation, as though it had focused all its energies on the solution Ruiz had proposed.

Finally, when Ruiz had almost decided that the Gench had fallen prey to some self-circuited fugue, it spoke. “It seems at least possible,” it said.

Ruiz considered. He no longer wore the collar, so he might now turn around and flee to some dark corner of SeaStack, there to hope to hide from Publius’s anger. But he would be in no better position to get off Sook. No, his best hope still lay in gaining leverage over Publius.

Ruiz bounced to his feet. “Let’s try,” he said, and went forward to fetch the puppet.

Chapter 15

The submarine was approaching its design limit, creaking under the pressure of the black water, when they reached the ancient ingress. Ruiz watched the sonar image in the holotank intently, nudging the craft centimeter by centimeter closer to the stack’s vertical wall. The ingress showed as a circular depression, two meters in diameter, crudely blocked with fused metal girders, now shapeless with corrosion.

They touched the wall as gently as Ruiz could manage, but the submarine rang like a bell at the impact. The others watched with anxious faces as he extended the repair chamber, adjusted its mating surfaces to the wall’s irregularities, and activated its molecular hooks.

A pump came to life, sounding unnaturally loud. “It’ll be a few minutes before we can get into the chamber and start cutting,” Ruiz said.

Everyone looked down, a synchronized gesture that made Ruiz wonder if they had all heard the same tales he had — tales about huge voracious monsters that coiled through the uncharted deep grottoes of SeaStack, never rising to the surface. He laughed, prompting the others to glare at him suspiciously.

When the repair chamber was clear, he beckoned to Albany. “You’re good with a torch, Albany, so you’re elected; I’ll use the other one.” The two of them squeezed into the chamber, wearing respirators and protective masks, and started cutting away the dripping metal, along the circumference of the ingress. Thick white fumes filled the chamber, and Ruiz’s world narrowed down to the glare of the torch and the bright trickle of molten metal that ran from the cut, to be sucked up by the torch’s aspirator. He tried not to think of the coming action, the odds against his success. He succeeded in forcing away those thoughts — but he couldn’t entirely forget about Nisa, waiting for him in the pen, who would probably never learn the circumstances of his death, should he fail.

After ten minutes, the hiss of Albany’s torch changed, acquiring the fluttering note that indicated breakthrough into an airspace. “Stop,” said Ruiz, but Albany was already shutting down the torch.

Ruiz fed a finewire aural probe through the thin seam where Albany had broken through, turned up the gain on the amplifier. “Hold your breath,” he told Albany.

Nothing. Ruiz listened intently for thirty seconds. He heard only the most obdurate of silences; devoid even of the most basic sounds — the sigh of ventilators, the vibration of generators, the subtly distorted noises of life that usually filtered into even the most remote burrows of the stacks. “Maybe our employer was right,” he said, and put the probe away. “Maybe no one knows about this passage.”

Albany seemed briefly cheered. “You mean we might live through this?”

“I didn’t say that,” answered Ruiz — but he smiled and slapped Albany’s shoulder. “Let’s cut some more.”

An hour later they had freed the meter-thick plug that closed the ingress. They forced a thixotropic lubricant into the seam, then welded half a dozen automatic shear jacks to the outer edges and set them into motion.

Slowly, the plug slid inward, groaning. Ruiz donned his weapons.

“Make sure the others are ready — get them in their armor and check to see they’ve got all their gear,” he told Albany, who nodded and went back into the sub.

Ruiz tried to think what else he might do to increase his chances of survival, but nothing came to him. All now seemed to depend on how good Publius’s intelligence had been — and on how much good luck remained to Ruiz. He remembered Dolmaero’s dour pronouncements on the subject of luck, and smiled. He found that he missed the Guild-master.

The plug cleared the opening, and the jacks pushed it inward half a meter, just far enough to permit a person to slip past. Air puffed into the repair chamber. Albany sampled it, bent over his meters, then spoke. “Clean enough.” He took off his breather, made a sour face. Ruiz took off his mask. The faint stink of Gencha stained the air. He wrinkled his nose, then put on his helmet and lowered the visor.

The rest of his team stood waiting, and Ruiz nodded at Durban the beaster.

“Go,” he said.