by S. A. Tholin
"And they appreciate it, no doubt – so long as he stays out there."
* * *
The next morning, Joy woke at dawn and examined the map of the city to plan a route that wouldn't get her in trouble. Rhys was still asleep, sprawled across his ridiculously huge hotel bed. She wrote a quick note, assuring him she'd be back before noon, and then she left. It was her last day in Kirkclair, and this last thing she had to do on her own.
Her apartment was gone. The traffic artery where trucks had lumbered down at all hours, making her kitchenware rattle in the cabinets, was also gone, and not a trace remained of the building complexes that had once serpentined along it.
The entire area had been turned to muddy slurry behind mesh-link hoarding. Bulldozers went to and fro, workers eating their breakfasts underneath giant billboards proclaiming it an URBAN REJUVENATION ZONE, soon to house FAMILY HOMES AND COMMUNITY CENTRES.
Relocating from Earth to Mars had cost Joy's parents nearly everything, so a two-bedroom apartment overlooking endless traffic had been the best they'd been able to afford. They'd intended it as their starter home, a stepping stone to something better. They'd never meant for their children to grow up there, but then they had died and nothing had turned out the way it had been meant to be.
There had been a playground, with a rusting old swing set that she'd been allowed to play on so long as she wore her respirator. The other children had teased her about it, calling her all sorts of names until Finn got wind of it and... well, she didn't know what he'd done, exactly, but nobody had ever teased her again.
But the playground was gone, the apartment was gone, and Finn was gone, and everyone she'd ever known was ash on Martian soil, or one of the countless names etched onto cenotaphs around the city. They commemorated the victims of the Epoch War, Rhys had explained; in particular those who'd died in Kirkclair detainment camps. He'd asked if she wanted to stop in a contemplation grove to search the cenotaphs for familiar names, but she'd declined.
Finn had been twice murdered, and she had to live with that every second of her life. She didn't want to add more names to the list of murdered friends. One day, she'd look, because Rhys was right, she didn't shy from truths – but not now. Not yet.
She knelt, touching the damp ground. It dyed her fingertips red, but she felt no connection, no sense of home, no Finn. It was dirt and Finn was dead and she was glad for the roaring bulldozers drowning out the sound of her grief.
When she climbed back up the embankment to the road, she found a taxi already waiting. Rhys leaned against it, playing with a cigarette.
"All done?"
"You following me?"
"The red demon took your brother's memories. He knows where you used to live, Joy. Can you be sure that he doesn't have a vessel here waiting for you?"
She hadn't considered that. On Cato, fear had felt natural but here, where a steady stream of bicyclists passed by on a bike bridge high overhead, their tires sparking electric patterns against the crystalline surface, her nightmares seemed so distant.
"I don't mean to alarm you," Rhys said, "but you've spent the past few months on Achall, safe and sound behind Bastion walls. It's different on Scathach. Though I haven't returned to duty yet, I see and hear things. I know what the entity has been doing. I know what we've been doing. I know what Cassimer's been doing. It's unpleasant business, princess, getting nastier by the minute."
"Skald deserves it," Joy said, surprised at the heat in her own words. "For what he did to my brother, he deserves everything Cassimer might have done to him." But Cassimer didn't deserve having to do it, and the thought of him marching deeper into darkness turned the fire in her heart to cold ash.
"Can't argue with that. You might've pulled the trigger, but Skald's the one who gave me this scar. I'll be returning the favour soon as I'm cleared for duty."
"Are you sure you want to go back? You don't have to–"
"Yeah, I do. So long as you and the commander are out there doing your part, I'll be around to patch you up. Speaking of which, we've got less than five hours before the shuttle to Achall leaves. Last chance to have fun."
"Well, mustn't waste that," she said, smiling as she reached for the taxi door.
"Hold on a second. I didn't come all the way out here just to keep an eye on you. See that billboard over there? Behind the cranes."
It was another REJUVENATION ZONE advert, displaying artist's impressions of glass-and-bamboo apartments where models lounged on balconies spilling over with orange cress, enjoying the sunshine as they looked out over a terracotta plaza. At the bottom of the billboard, bright text announced the new estate's completion date and its name:
SOMERSET PLAZA
"Lucklaw's real present to you. Quite proud of himself, he was, for no good reason. His family own half the damn city, so it's not like he had to go to great lengths. What do you think? You like it?"
Finn's body had burned with the Cascade. Nothing left for her to bury, no headstone to visit. This was far better, far more fitting. Her brother had been life and laughter; motion, action and energy. No solemn granite words could ever have done him justice. A city block would be his cenotaph; a hopeful future his legacy.
She loved it, and she loved the next five hours, and when they stood in the spaceport again, she wanted to tell Rhys that she loved him, too. But if a kiss on the cheek had made him uncomfortable, then she supposed a declaration of love, however platonic, would more than cross bounds. So when they parted at the gate – Rhys waiting for a later shuttle to Scathach – she simply thanked him for the brilliant weekend.
"We should do it again sometime. Maybe I'll take you to see my home. I think you'd like it, the..." And then he surprised her, leaning in to kiss her cheek. He squeezed her arm, murmuring in her ear: "You take care now. Make sure we do get a chance to do it again."
* * *
She fell asleep on the shuttle, and her dreams tasted of metal and ice water. She was inside the groaning carcass of the Ever Onward, drowning in pain and darkness, but Constant held her, refusing to let her go. And then–
–and then she woke up, but the world didn't change. Still darkness, still the groaning carcass, and still she was in the arms of a man. But he was not Constant, and the airlock they were passing through was not the white-plated lock of the Ever Onward.
The man spoke, and his low rasping voice had neither the rolling r's of Constant's, nor his earnestness. This man had edges, carefully sharpened and deliberately laced with poison.
"Girl's waking up."
"Shouldn't be," came another voice from nearby. Younger, less acerbic, but no less a stranger's voice. "The sedative should keep her out cold another hour at least."
Strange men carrying her through a corridor of steel. She bit her tongue to control her panic. They were not drifters and she wasn't just Joy; she was Corporal Somerset, and the first lesson of Basic Training blazed in her mind: Perceive with clarity; act with certainty.
She was disoriented and outnumbered. Her only advantage was that they didn't know that she was conscious, so she relaxed, feigning sleep. Through her eyelashes, she glimpsed metal floor and the lightweight armour of the man carrying her. Her primer offered no identification, nor any information on her surroundings. The virtual world had gone as dark as the real.
But the man wore a combat knife in a thigh sheathe, and she didn't need a primer to tell her how to work one of those. A brief moment of hesitation – what if this is part of Basic Training? – but screw it, if people didn't want her to stab them, then they should bloody well not drug and abduct her.
She closed her hand around the knife's grip, pulled it from its sheathe and plunged the blade through the gap between his breastplate and greave, deep into the man's hip.
7.
JOY
She ran into darkness and into the unknown.
Perceive with clarity.
The words came to her in Constant's voice, and she tightened her blood-slicked grip around the knife.
He was far away and fighting to keep her safe, and she wouldn't let him down. She would come back to him. She would–
–a floor tile tilted, and she lost her footing. Her knees bruised on the cold floor, her new dress, the colour of Kalix's lavender fields, tearing as she pushed herself up. The rhythm of her pursuer's footsteps was uneven but, despite his injury, the man was fast.
Had the shuttle been hijacked? She'd heard stories of RebEarth and Black Nine raiders. Bad stories, the kind of stories she shouldn't be thinking about if she wanted to keep her cool. And where were the other passengers? Had they already been... no, shouldn't think about that, but a tiny panicked voice in the back of her mind whispered: violated/killed/enslaved.
Damn it. She stopped, forcing herself to breathe and perceive. There was a door ahead, its side panel glowing forbiddingly red. Locked, but she had a knife, and as long as she had a knife, she had no excuse for failure. She pried the panel open, cutting her fingers on sharp edges as she pulled the cover loose, and cut through every single damn wire.
The door hissed open and air rushed from behind, whipping her hair about her face. The vanilla scent of hotel shampoo mixed with charcoal and the crackling heat of electricity. Dust motes whirled forwards to dance against the shimmer of a force field that jutted from charred walls, bulging into the star-speckled void.
Space. She was in space, at once endless and a dead end. The man stormed round the corner, clutching one blood-soaked hand to his thigh. She had been chased like this before, and she had been caught and hurt, and she couldn't let it happen again.
She took a tentative step backwards, wondering if the force field would support her weight where the floor came to an abrupt end.
The man stopped. "Don't."
"Then back off."
The man frowned and tilted his head, squinting, as though listening to something in the distance. As though receiving orders. Joy braced herself for the inevitable.
But the man raised his hands and stepped back, nodding towards another door as its lock turned from red to green. Highly suspicious. Highly dangerous. But any path was better than no path, and Joy hurried to open it, slipping through while the man glared at her.
The ship was a maze of broken floor tiles and fizzling light strips. Portholes showed only space, but for the ones where the glass had shattered and force fields glowed blue. There was nothing between her and cold death but for a membrane of energy, and that didn't seem near enough.
She heard voices occasionally, metallic echoes bouncing between the walls of abandoned office spaces where desks gathered dust. Pipes lined the ceiling, cold and dripping and hot and hissing.
And then the lights went out at once, leaving a single glowing line of light strips to follow. It was her breadcrumb trail in the dark woods, her lighthouse on a rocky coast, and it was absolutely a trap.
She stopped inside a store room, hiding in a shadowy space between empty crates. This was real, no matter how much like a nightmare it seemed, and she had to be calm. Had to perceive with clarity, had to act with certainty.
First, she typed out a message, a long and tearful plea. When she thought of Constant receiving such a message, she cut the second draft down to: Need urgent advice. Please respond.
When she tried to send it, it just sat there, blinking in the top corner of her vision. She commanded her primer to search for available networks, but it found none.
She deleted the message and took a deep breath. It was better this way. Even if Constant was on Scathach, she didn't know where she was. Only that she was far away, too far for him to help her.
Except that wasn't true. He had helped her through a situation like this once before, and she remembered his advice: approach the situation like a puzzle, see the pieces with clarity and use them to make a pattern that makes sense to you. To use what was available to make a plan that suited her skills and abilities.
So, okay. She was in space, inside a crumbling ship or station. It was too old to be Primaterre, and she'd seen no RebEarth murals. The man chasing her hadn't sported any phoenix tattoos, nor any insignia on his black armour.
Still, who didn't matter half so much as where. A ship might have escape pods, but there'd be nothing stopping the men from recapturing her. There'd be comms, somewhere, but without her primer's pre-programmed channels, she wasn't sure how to make contact with the Primaterre.
Killing her captors was one option. The Constant option, for sure, but she was two days out of Basic Training and had nothing but a knife, and even if she did by some miracle kill them, she didn't know how to fly. Chances were she'd end up stranding herself in space, lost and drifting towards an unpleasant and lonely end.
Shit. Okay, so she didn't have the skills or abilities to get out of her predicament, but the men would. Maybe she could make them let her go. Taking a hostage might work. Basic had taught her close-quarters-combat and takedowns, and while she knew she'd never be able to slit a man's throat, they didn't know that.
A solid plan. Except that no amount of training changed the fact that she was barely even an AC-1, short, slight, and wearing a dress that had looked beautiful in Martian sunlight but would be no good at all in a fight.
She stood, leaning against the wall for support, her legs still wobbly, her mind still dream-fogged. The vibrations of machinery travelled through her palms, reverberating through her bones. An engine was running hot somewhere.
An engine, with flight-critical parts and power cells. Maybe she couldn't take the men hostage, but she might be able to take their ship hostage. A crazy idea, but also her only idea.
* * *
The hum of engines led her to a vault-like security door that no amount of wire-cutting could hope to breach, but when she approached, it whirred open.
Not a good sign.
She gripped her knife tight and stepped through the door, onto a mezzanine that overlooked a vast chamber encircled by a chrome-encased particle collider. Silver pylons arced high in the air, connected by a network of filaments radiant in the light of a plasma moat. Eyes gleamed in the gloom below, where black-clad figures sat in silence in front of a glass wall. A single planet, veil-swept and yellow, dominated the outside view.
Her fingers felt numb around the knife handle. When footsteps approached from behind, she didn't run. She was onboard a Cascade, and had nowhere to run.
"Drop the knife."
She let it slip from her fingers as she turned. It landed point-down, its tip piercing the mezzanine floor.
A man towered over her. Not the one she'd stabbed, or the one who'd stood by as she ran. This one wouldn't have let her run. This one wouldn't have let her hurt him. This one was neither poison nor sharp edges, but cold hard iron in the shape of a man.
His greying hair shone lunar blue in the Cascade light. A fine mesh of metallic augments ran just below the surface of his skin, competing with whisper-thin scars to turn his handsome face inhuman. His irises were rings of gold and silver, their natural blue remaining only as speckles. His lightweave armour was as black as the void, and though he appeared unarmed, she knew he wasn't.
"Who are you?" Her voice sounded so weak inside the core chamber. She shied backwards, the mezzanine railing pressing into her back.
The man's critical gaze turned judgmental, his mouth twisting with disapproval.
"Hammersmith. But I'm not interested in your questions. I'm interested in your answers."
"I don't know anything. I don't even know where we are."
"Don't you?" He motioned towards the viewport, as though the answer would be writ on the glass, but out there was only black space and yellow soil.
Yellow. Yellow like earth rich with gold, like the mines where sulphur hissed from cracks in the walls. Yellow like the word EARTH, finger-painted on skin.
But it couldn't be.
Xanthe, the first world to suffer a 'demonic' outbreak, had been purged, the system's Cascade destroyed. A permanent quarantine, a radical excision, forever cutting off the home o
f corruption from human civilisation.
It couldn't be Xanthe, but she knew in her heart that it was.
And if she had been brought here to see the world where Hierochloe had begun their great Primaterre experiment, it could mean only one thing. Whoever this Hammersmith was, he knew. Worse, he knew that she knew.
He collected the knife and placed his hands on the railing on either side of her. The blood on the blade glittered violet in the plasma light, and in his eyes, rings of gold and silver turned. There was a stiffness to his shoulders, and the metal railing groaned in his grip. Hammersmith was cold hard iron and he was cold hard anger – but he smelled of citrus and, in an instant, she understood what he was. Neither RebEarth nor Skald, but something far more dangerous.
"Welcome to Room 36B," Hammersmith said. "Welcome to Tower."
8.
CASSIMER
Two weeks in space. Two weeks ferrying Skald from system to system, crossing into exo-space more than once, all to keep Vadgelmir's location secret. Two weeks, and they had taken their toll.
"We should've brought a chaplain," Rearcross had said, pearled with sweat behind his visor.
"I am your truth and your clarity," Cassimer had replied, but the gunner's response – a blithe smile and a blither Primaterre protects us all – had made him wish he had brought a chaplain. Demons weren't real and chaplains were either liars or propagators of a lie, but they were strong and steadfast, and it wasn't right for him to deny his team the moral support. Tallinn, Rearcross and Juneau still believed, still feared.
And why shouldn't they? The truth was that any second, the invisible enemy controlling their thoughts could flip the switch in their heads that turned them into violent savages. They were all at the mercy of some distant shadow, and Cassimer, who had hated demons for so long, could think of little else. Learning the truth hadn't quelled his hate, only turned it into a wildfire, unfocused and distracting. He wanted a name. He wanted a target.
Joy had once tried to reassure him by telling him that he was perfectly safe. "You survived the Hecate. Sending the trigger signal to you now would ruin the story, destroy the hero. It would be bad for morale, bad for the entire Primaterre Protectorate."