Free Mr. Ruins: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 1) by Michael John Grist Page B

bell in my mind, though I don't know which bell.
    I'm first to the gamma-clamp we set near the candle-bomb, so I'm first to rig a traverse wire from it to the next rivet-hole over and coil it tight.
    "Be careful," comes Ray's voice in my head. I tongue their voices up, but they're all quiet now. I look back and see them all clustered together like black crulls perched on the last girder back, waiting. I give them a thumbs up, draw my Quantum Confusion parabolic, and slide along the traverse.
    The scored black surface of the Solid Core drifts by above me like a distant lunar landscape, the silver carvings deformed by the bomb's eructation, the metal bucked into mountainous ridges and valleys, striated by my own gossamer shadows from hot spots in the Molten Core below.
    Nearing the blast edge, I strain toward the blackness. The metal here has blown outward in jagged triangular chunks, curling back upon themselves like the petals of some wilting fractal flower. The traverse slides me through the gap between two of these spiky outcroppings, each twice as long as I am tall, gate guardians at the entrance to the center of the world. I pass slowly between them, then tongue the wireway to a halt as I hang directly beneath the black hole.
    I look up. There is only darkness above, so thick it seems to rebuff the burnglow from below. There could be a whole world up there, but I can see none of it, only a few meters into a wall so thick I cannot see the inner edges.
    I cycle my HUD through the infras and ultras, sonar, radiation and chemical-spec wavelengths, but none of it peels away the blackness.
    "I'm going up," I say to the others.
    My gamma-grapnel shoots upward into the darkness, and locks onto something. I work the ratchet to slide me up, powering on the whitelights in my suit, rising like a glowbug down the throat of some sleeping beast.
    Beyond the immediate blast zone the candle-bomb ruptured, the walls around me turn sheer and smooth.
    "It is an entrance," I say over mic. "Metalled over, but there's a tunnel."
    I sweep my gaze from side to side to study the walls as I rise. They are heavy with more carvings, the silver lines of foot-high letters sparkling in my whitelight, many of them crisscrossing one another. "There's writing everywhere, over."
    Doe's voice comes to me as a crackle, bitten at by static. "..areful now, there's …. Can you …. do they say?"
    "I can't read them," I answer, "but they look like a hundred different tongues, not just Gaulic. I recognize some proto-Rusk, Afri-Jarvanese, Meso-Angli, Esperant. It's everywhere. I think I'm coming to the edge."
    Her response is a hiss, but I am not listening. Slowly I emerge from the tunnel-mouth, up through a field of scraggy grass, to see trees, a vast hall stretching outward without any walls in sight. I tongue the haulier to a halt halfway to a sheer black ceiling where the grapnel clamped, and hang there like a chandelier in the middle of the space, my whitelights illuminating a battlefield below.
    There are dead bodies everywhere, scattered amongst the trees, in places hanging from branches. I look from one to the next, some dressed in the white tights and blue tunic of the man on the horse, some in rough red greatcoats, all with ancient rifles nearby, all bloodied and filthy and still.
    I cast my gaze wider, and glimpse cottages with yellow thatch aflame in places, half-obscured by the trees. There's a brook running behind me, and a watermill with its wheel knocked off-kilter, cannon-ball holes broken through the millhouse masonry wall. Turning, I spot dead gray horses lying in troughs of bloody mud, wooden carts overturned next to cannon dragged from their mounts, and everywhere men lying entangled. The flash of their polished brass buttons wink at me like a star-field.
    And none of it is real.
    I know this at once, instinctively, because there is something wrong. As I seek out the evidence for this I find it in the clinical stillness of everything. The smoke