by S. A. Tholin
Oh Finn. How surprised you'd be to see me in uniform. How proud you'd be.
But Finn was gone, and so too was Imaginary Finn, and she had no one.
"Nine o'clock," muttered a recruit from another squad. "I think your father's trying to get your attention, Somerset."
Her father was long dead, his ashes spread across Mars's dust, but Joy looked nonetheless, bewildered hope conjuring visions of a face she only remembered from photographs.
When she saw the man waving so insistently at her, she laughed, surprised and so delighted that when the tears that she'd been holding back for months finally came, they were tears of happiness.
As soon as she was off the stage, she ran for him, threw her arms around his neck and breathed in the smell of cologne and cigarette ash.
"Oh Rhys. I'm so glad you're here."
The left side of his face had the glossy sheen of freshly-grown tissue, and an eye-patch covered his missing eye. The brain damage had been severe, and his recovery had required many procedures. Cosmetic fixes and visual reconstruction hadn't been priorities. But at least he was walking again, albeit with a limp. At least he was still breathing.
"Wouldn't miss it for the world, princess."
* * *
"I see Achall's still the same old shithole."
Rain fell from the brown sky, turning Camp Achall's courtyard into a quagmire. Thankfully, the staff had planned for such weather, setting up vitro-plastic gazebos as shelter. Rhys had got himself and Joy the best seat in Gazebo C on the only bench that wasn't getting splashed by rain. It could've seated more than two, but Rhys demonstratively plopped down a big duffel bag on the remaining bench space.
"You trained here too?"
"You'd think two years at the academy would be enough, but yeah, they make us medics go through Basic too. Still, that was a long time ago. Long enough that I might've forgot about it, but they use Achall for more than Basic, did you know that?"
"Gogently says cataphracts train here. He keeps checking the sky for signs of their ships, but we've not seen any. Not that I'd know what one looks like."
"Oh, you'd recognise one if you saw one. A girl who's stared an Ereshkigal suit in the eye and lived knows better than most what cataphracts are. The southern hemisphere is their training grounds. Bastion builds cities in the deserts there, big and empty, for urban warfare training, allegedly."
"Allegedly?"
"Bastion has five thousand active cataphracts, each possessed of no ambition other than to be a perfect war machine. Thing is, we're not at war, and even when we are, conflicts don't last forever. That gives cataphracts a lot of downtime. A lot of time sitting around doing nothing, thinking of nothing but death and destruction. Can't let that kind of man get bored."
"So it's to keep them busy?"
"Yes, and Achall does a good job at that. You ought to see the fire shows – visible from orbit, some days. Though I suppose after Cato, nothing short of planet-wide destruction will impress you."
"Don't remind me. The things I did on Cato–"
"You did nothing wrong on Cato." He touched a finger to his glossy cheek, shaking his head. "Nothing at all, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise – least of all yourself. Nothing there burned that didn't deserve the fire. Speaking of which, mind if I light one up?"
He pulled out a cigarette packet from his chest pocket.
"I don't mind, but don't let the drill instructor catch you. If he's to be believed, smoking's just a hair less impure than demon worship."
"Been a long time since I was afraid of drill instructors." Rhys laughed, lighting his cigarette. "Besides, I don't mind coming here for you, Somerset, but Ach-all-wrong's a depressing place without indulging in a vice or two. I've spent enough time down here patching up cataphracts to know. This is actually where I first met the commander."
"When he was still a cataphract?"
"Yeah. Truth be told, I don't know if he's aware. Suppose to him I was just another nagging voice telling him to maybe not stand quite so close to exploding warheads. I knew who he was, of course. The hero of the Hecate. The champion of the Primaterre. Absolutely unmistakable on the battlefield – you may think you've seen him in action, but the banneret commander's a mere shadow of the cataphract. Very impressive, and just as damn stupid and hard-headed as I'd expected. I couldn't stand him at first. An arrogant idiot, I thought, single-minded and empty-souled. But then, early one morning during a temporary ceasefire, I went for a walk in the fake city."
"A walk?"
He laughed, throwing his hands up, cigarette smoke painting circles in the air. "All right, you got me. I was looking for a quiet spot to get recreational in. Somewhere not even drill instructors would think to look. And I turned down this street, between concrete buildings as dull as the surroundings and heard weird noises coming from a house up ahead. Annoying, because I'd not expected to find anybody else out there, but curious, too. So I snuck up to a window and peeked inside. Now, a rocket had struck the house pretty hard at some point, caving in the roof. But the commander was in there, fixing it up."
"He was repairing the house?" With hands made for building; yes, she could picture that.
"More than that. Tidying it. Making it nice – well, as nice as a concrete shell on Achall can get. I kept checking in over the following week, and every day it looked a bit better. He even started making furniture for it – had just about finished the dining table when training moved into that section of the city. A firebomb hit the house almost immediately. The commander didn't say anything, didn't even seem to react, but over the next six months on Achall, I never saw him build anything again. And that... ah hell, I don't know, I guess I'm a sentimental fool. Poor bastard, I thought, stuck being a destroyer when what he really wants to do is build."
"So that's why you've been trying to help him," said Joy. "That's why you care."
"One of the reasons, at any rate." Rhys peered through the crowds towards the assembly hall. "Won't be long until the graduation ceremony's over. Suppose I'd best get on with things."
"Oh, please don't go yet."
"Go? I'm not going anywhere." He opened his duffel bag. "I haven't even given you your presents yet."
"I don't think we're allowed to receive gifts on base. It's a rule, or something. The drill instructor said–"
"Ah, but you're underestimating the powerful sorcery wielded by a wounded veteran. The base commander took one look at my face and the many, many medals attached to my name, and voila – special permission granted. Now then, this is from Hopewell."
A box, wrapped in shiny paper, contained a thin piece of plastic, shimmering with the coalescing greens and violets of an aurora. The ethereal design was stunning, mesmerising, and completely inexplicable.
"It's a cosmetic adornment, like the mermaid on Copenhagen's helmet. You can add it to any piece of equipment that allows ornamentation. I always did like that pink mermaid, but I didn't know Hopewell was so good at the abstracts, too. She's got a keen eye and a sure hand."
"She made this?" As beautiful as the design was, that made it a thousand times more beautiful. Joy carefully placed it back into the box.
"Yeah. She said it was meaningful, like the mermaid to Copenhagen." Rhys shrugged. "I don't know, but I suppose she expected you might."
Joy smiled. "Aurora. A Sleeping Beauty reference. I get it."
"I don't," Rhys said, "but it sounds about right. Next up, the commander's gift."
He needn't have specified. The grey metal box, heavy in her arms, couldn't possibly have been from anyone else.
"I told him flowers or jewellery, but you know what he's like. Touch your palm to the lid. It's coded to open to your primer alone."
A matte black handgun lay inside. Smaller than the one Constant carried, and lighter too, but very clearly a Morrigan. When she picked it up, a connection request appeared in the corner of her vision. She accepted, and her gun and primer connected, sharing information. The gun linked targeting data to her
visual augments, the trigger locked to accept only her touch, and her primer displayed a multitude of options and settings that she declined to go into.
"It comes with an instruction manual, but the commander spent the past three months customising the piece, so good luck trying to figure out what anything does. Never got the need to fiddle so much with equipment myself. Factory default's good enough for me – why complicate something as simple as a gun?" Rhys shrugged.
A pattern shimmered on the Morrigan's grip. Points of light, barely visible but for from the correct angle, coming together to form a sideways A.
"Libra," Joy said, running her fingertips across the engraved constellation.
"The scales of balance, wielded by the goddess of justice." Rhys dropped his cigarette on the floor, grinding the embers under his boot heel. "No pressure, then."
Balance did sound very Constant, but Libra also housed the suns that shone on Kalix and Gainsborough alike. Constant would've known that too, and he had made this for her, thought of this for her.
"A Morrigan?" Gogently appeared as if summoned, craning his neck to see the gun. Joy slid the box shut before his envious hands wandered too close. "What's a park ranger need one of those for?"
"Park ranger?" Rhys gave her a strange look. "Is that what you want to do?"
She nodded. "You disapprove?"
"No. Not at all. Stars, Somerset; I..." Rhys hesitated, as though he wanted to tell her something. Then he shook his head. "It sounds perfect for you."
She wanted to press the subject, wanted to know what had sat on the tip of his tongue and what he now swallowed. But Gogently was leaning over her, his interest shifted from the extravagant gift to the man who'd delivered it.
"You going to introduce us, Somerset?"
"I'm Captain Rhys of Scathach Banneret Company, and I'm fully capable of introducing myself if I want to, Private."
"Oh, yes, sir. Sorry, sir." Gogently, too excited to realise that his presence was unwanted, gave a clumsy salute. "Say, Captain, if someone wanted to join the banneretcy, do you suppose a personal recommendation would help?"
"Absolutely, and I personally recommend that you step the hell back and leave me and Somerset alone."
"Well," said Joy, watching Gogently slope off to rejoin his family, "that was a little meaner than it needed to be."
"Please. If the kid can't handle mean, he's hardly cut out for the banneretcy, is he? Besides..." Rhys stood, slinging the duffel bag over his shoulder. "You need to run back to barracks and drop off your gifts. Our flight leaves in ten minutes."
"Our flight?"
"You didn't think I'd let the others outdo me in the gifts department, did you? I'm taking you on a weekend trip to Mars, princess – unless you'd rather stay and clean the barracks?"
She most definitely did not.
6.
JOY
Stars glowed on the ceiling of Kirkclair Spaceport, opened in 1605, built on the ruins of the old port which was destroyed in the bombing of 1575 when Worker Union terrorists–
Joy blinked away the notification from the Cryo-CatchUp history program running in her primer and turned towards the spaceport atrium where an oak tree grew, generously donated by Semele Solutions to commemorate the evacuation of Earth in 1578 when millions of refugees–
The excess of data hurt. She shut the Cryo-CatchUp off, but the spaceport was still alive with vibrant imagery. Connection requests and purity reminders competed for attention with art and music, and black legal text that she couldn't make go away. The air crackled with colour and noise and energy.
"Rhys." She couldn't see him, the medic lost in a forest of intangible shapes.
"It's okay, Somerset. I've got you." He took her by the arm and led her through the crowds to a bench. She sat down, leaning back to listen to the tapping of millions of grains of sand against the windows. Outside, Mars's red dust danced in the downwash of shuttles.
"That's it; lean your head back." Rhys pressed a sweet-smelling medical wipe to her face. "Guess Basic Training didn't expose you to enough data for you acclimatise to full primer use yet. Kirkclair will sort that out right quick, as long as you don't bleed to death first."
"Nosebleed again?"
"Yeah, and plenty of it. Good thing you're on holiday with a medic. Let me sort out your primer settings, see if we can't make it a little better for you."
He requested a connection and she allowed it, following his lead through the different options and menus provided by the basic military package. The advertisements disappeared first, then the music, until only law and doctrine remained.
Next, he showed her how to set her identity options.
"Open means you're displaying your identity to the whole world, secure means complete privacy. I recommend Authorised-Open. That automatically identifies you to customs officers, law enforcements, government. It makes travelling easier, and you might as well get used to it as, in Bastion, higher-ranking officers will always be able to see your identification details anyway, snooping bastards that they are."
"You're a higher-ranking officer," she said, smiling.
"My point exactly. Think I didn't get the details of all your squad-mates on Achall? Think again."
"Cassimer did too, from who knows where. He sent me a full assessment of each of them."
"Of course he did. A nosy, meddling bunch, the lot of us."
When her nosebleed abated, they made for the spaceport exit. With the air clear but for the occasional floating reminder of what was and wasn't allowed in carry-on luggage, she could finally see Kirkclair Spaceport. Though it had been built in the same location as the spaceport she and Finn had departed from so long ago, it couldn't have been any more different. She remembered the surrounding area as industrial, so polluted that the dust had been tinged a dingy black, but now the blue sky cut a clean horizon across terracotta plains. Rowan trees, rich with crimson berries, shed their autumn leaves on the pavements.
The new spaceport had none of the gilded arches of the old, nor the domed ceiling or burnished brass cornices. It was plain and functional, painted in shades of Primaterre grey. Little touches of nature were the only decorations – the oak tree in the atrium, a water feature central to the baggage carousel, a formation of volcanic rock as abstract art.
The reminders of purity were ubiquitous, but less militaristic than on Scathach or Achall. The Primaterre sun sat surmounted on messages to CONSERVE, CONTEMPLATE, COOPERATE that might have come across as nice if it weren't for the heavily-armed guards patrolling the spaceport, and the suspicious glares people kept shooting Joy.
"What, never seen a nosebleed before?" Rhys snapped at a security guard who'd made to approach but changed his mind when he saw the medic's scowl. "No wonder I'm in exo-work. As bad as Cato was, at least I could have a smoke every now and then."
Underneath the WELCOME TO KIRKCLAIR sign at the exit, a map of the city declared it a NO-SMOKING ZONE. When Joy approached, the spaceport recognised her as a first-time visitor (how mistaken it was), and sent a list of laws and local restrictions to her primer. The doors wouldn't open for her until she'd acknowledged and accepted the list, and when the doors did open, she suddenly felt very nervous.
"There are so many rules. Rhys, I don't know about this..."
"If you steer clear of murder, theft and terrorism, you'll be all right. It's not so bad as it looks. I've got enough citations for unlawful smoking to wallpaper my quarters, but they're just fines, princess. No inquisitor's going to come swooping down on you for being new and unsure."
"So breaking the law is possible."
"Yes." He said nothing else, but a minute later, messaged her over a private channel.
And thank the stars. If it weren't for those citations, and all the things I never got caught doing, I'd have no way of knowing if I have free will. All that keeps me sane is the satisfaction that I've spent a lifetime bucking that control, every smoke and speeding ticket a victory in a rebellion against a master I never knew I ha
d. If I could do that, so can the Primaterre people. We can still choose our paths, Somerset.
To a degree, anyway, but Kirkclair Spaceport was neither the time nor the place for such discussion.
"By the way, Rhys, it's okay if you call me Joy."
"Hah." He gave her a slightly strained smile. "All right then, Joy. I suppose I ought to tell you that my name's Jamie."
"Jamie. That's–"
"–something nobody's called me since primary school, so let's just stick with Rhys, yeah?"
* * *
A car waited outside the spaceport, black and stately and entirely out of place among the round-curved, off-white taxi cabs. The chauffeur, dressed in a tidy grey uniform, broadcast a sign that read JOY SOMERSET.
"There's got to be some sort of mistake," Joy protested as Rhys ushered her towards the far too fancy car, but he just smiled. The chauffeur smiled too, polite and professional and just as fancy as the car, and opened the passenger door to an interior of plush cream leather and guayacan wood trim.
"Courtesy of the Lucklaw family, Corporal Somerset."
"You saved the kid's life," Rhys said. "A ride and a hotel room was the least he could do, don't you think?"
"He didn't need to do anything. He owes me nothing. None of you do; least of all you, Rhys."
"Oh, not this again. Don't tell me you're still feeling bad about shooting me?"
How could she not? Her finger had pulled the trigger, her hands had been spattered with his blood, and Duncan's too, and while the car was nice and the trip was wonderful, she'd paid for these gifts in blood. That was awful, and she tried to explain this to him as the car pulled away from the spaceport, speeding soundlessly down a road lined with rowan trees. Rhys just shook his head.
"Take a look outside the window and tell me what you see."
The car travelled down a steep corniche circling a water-filled crater. Pockmarks in the impact glass walls overflowed with saxifrage and hawkweed. Crags housed bunting nests, and long-legged dunlins waded along the turquoise waterline. Coracles floated on the lake, passengers leaning out from under white canopies to touch the water. It was late autumn, but the weather was mild enough that Joy's uniform jacket felt hot. A group of children had stopped underneath a chestnut tree to scoop up handfuls of conkers, their accompanying teacher speaking animatedly.