Lonely Castles

by S. A. Tholin

  Room 36B was based in the ruins of one of humanity's greatest achievements. Xanthe's Cascade still functioned, connected to but somehow cloaked from the network. From the single porthole in Joy's cramped quarters, she could see its arcing pylons spit silver flame. A shuttle was there, then gone, folded through the fabric of the universe.

  Beautiful, but the Cascade's rift engines sang with tension, the hum reverberating throughout the structure. Bulkhead plates rattled and portholes creaked, debris rushing from a damaged section where a force field had just given out. When the silver flames died, there was no light but for the distant stars and a single light strip above Joy's bunk.

  Room 36B was a broken place, breaking a little more every day. A fantastic place to feel sorry for oneself, a perfectly morbid carcass to brood in, and for three days, Joy did exactly that.

  Her door was locked at all times, and she didn't have the pass code. Each morning, Elsinore came for her, as quiet as a ghost. Each day, he and Wideawake instructed her in primer usage, making her connect to various devices to perform tasks that had seemed irrelevant and pointless. But then her headaches had started getting better, her nose less prone to bleeding, and she'd understood that they were teaching her how to stretch her awareness.

  They still wouldn't give her comms access, and she spent her third night in Room 36B curled up on the thin and rickety slab that was her bunk, listening to Neave Crescent Creek and feeling, really feeling, the void between her and her loved ones.

  It wasn't fair and it wasn't right, but if it was ever going to be those things again, it was up to her.

  And so, on the fourth morning, she got up an hour before Elsinore would come to fetch her.

  "It's not so bad," she told herself unconvincingly. "And even if it is, so what? Just got to make the best of things."

  Her quarters were barely big enough to fit the bunk, but a small alcove accommodated a toilet and a sink, and a compartment near the door contained an electric kettle. It was built in, part of the Cascade's original design. She wasn't quite sure what kind of people would build a reality-rending space gate with amenities for making hot drinks, but she approved. Good people, she thought, practical but not without a sense of comfort. Better people than the hard-faced phantoms who now stalked the Cascade's halls.

  She washed, dressed, and made her bunk, tucking the blanket in just as Basic Training had taught her.

  Her quarters' walls were a depressing grey metal, incapable of displaying digital content, but making beds wasn't the only thing she'd learnt on Achall. She commanded her primer to paint an invisible marker on the wall by her bunk, to which she linked one of her stored personal pictures. Bastion used personalised geo-painted digital content as a method of team comms, but for the recruits, it was a way to make camp seem more like home. To anyone else, the wall would still appear bare, but to her, it would always show Constant.

  He didn't like having his picture taken. Went to great lengths to avoid it, in fact. Ironic for a man whose image was on countless walls and screens, but understandable. She hadn't pushed him on the issue, but on their last day together, as she'd been getting ready to leave for Achall, he had asked her if she wanted a photo. Maybe he'd realised that, otherwise, Bastion's version of him would be all that she'd see for the next few months.

  She'd told him yes, but only if I can take it when you're not looking. With some relief, he'd agreed.

  He half-smiled in the picture, the only time he'd smiled that day. He hadn't slept all night – she'd noticed as soon as she'd woken up that he'd taken some mild stim, preferring to lie awake than to let go to dreams. So tense, so deeply distressed behind his stoic mask. He'd made all the arrangements, had even packed for her, and she'd let him, because she could tell that he needed to keep busy.

  But when they'd stood in Scathach's departures lounge, his unhappiness had grown to overshadow all else, and she'd been desperate to do something; anything. She couldn't remember what she'd said – her memories of that day a blur of emotion rather than coherent thought – but it had been a joke, she thought. A silly little joke, some observation about their surroundings.

  Whatever it was, it had cut through the shadows, and he had smiled. She'd taken her picture then, and the man in the photo was just as handsome and strong as Bastion's commander, yet he was someone completely different. He was Constant, and he was hers.

  And he was very, very far away.

  Though the lid said TEA, the box next to the kettle contained only capsules of coffee. Fresh, and so were the oat biscuits stacked next to the ration bars. It was the only sign that any of the towermen had made an effort to welcome her, and it was so nice that she hadn't touched any of it yet, reluctant to spoil the feeling of being thought of as a human being.

  She filled the kettle with water and as it bubbled away, she wondered which of the towermen it might have been. Elsinore, probably. Though mono-syllabic, there was something sensitive about the fine-limbed man, whose skin was so pale it seemed translucent. He wore his flaxen hair buzzed short, but a longer style would suit him better. Would make him look like an elf, Joy thought, smiling at the idea.

  She poured the brewed coffee into three mugs, all sporting the Primaterre sun logo, and just about managed to avoid spilling the last one when a sudden knock on the door startled her.

  "You may enter," she said – as if he wouldn't anyway – and greeted Elsinore with a smile. "Good morning. I made you coffee."

  A look of confusion crossed his delicate features. It was almost funny how his gaze darted between her and the mug, as though they were both utterly alien and exotic creatures.

  "Black, I'm afraid. Hope that's okay?" She set the mug in his hand, letting go once his spindly fingers tightened around it.

  "Yes. Thank you."

  He turned, and she followed him through Room 36B's winding corridors just like every morning. The architecture was bewilderingly mazelike, but she had started to learn. Here was the broken air conditioner. There was the floor tile that made a kuh-thunk noise when stepped on. Turn another two corners, and there'd be a porthole with a disturbing crack.

  Each little detail was a piece of the puzzle; each little detail another step on the road to making things right. She'd get to know the place first, and then the people, and then she could decide on where to go from there.

  Elsinore had drunk his coffee so quickly it must've hurt going down. Still too hot for her, but he had emptied the mug in seconds, and now cradled it in his hands. A faint blush crept across his face – the drink, she supposed, but every now and then he glanced at her. And as they entered the core chamber, crossing a gantry high above the plasma moat, he did something he'd never done before.

  He initiated conversation.

  "One hundred and eight Cascades are a single fold away. In the blink of an eye, we could go anywhere in the explored galaxy. The Primaterre Protectorate, the Europa Heptarchy, hell, even the Black Nine. Did you know that the word FREEDOM is embossed on the rift generators? Not just in this Cascade, but all of them. Freedom of movement, exchange and of trade. Our ancestors constructed them with liberation in mind." He glanced at her. "Yet you must feel like a prisoner. Apologies."

  "Not keeping me locked up would go further than apologies."

  "Hah." He smiled nervously. "We don't lock you in to imprison you. Only to keep you safe. If you were to wander around on your own – and Wideawake seems to think that you're the type who definitely would – you'd soon find yourself lost."

  "Wideawake is very perceptive," she said, returning his smile.

  "Reading people is his job. Mine too, in a manner of speaking." With every word, Elsinore lost some of his ghostliness. A hot drink and a good morning had done more than cheer him up; it had straightened his spine and relaxed his shoulders. "Until you know Room 36B better, it's safer if you remain contained. It's seven centuries old and without regular maintenance, it's starting to show its age. There are too many things wrong with it now for us to stop the decay. We can o
nly patch it up, do our best to keep life support and the rift generators going, but our best is hardly ever enough. Just three months ago, we lost the residential wing. An electrical fire caused a huge explosion, ripping through the outer hull. If it had happened an hour earlier, we'd all have been killed. Wideawake was lucky to escape with his life."

  "That's how he was injured?"

  "He was in his quarters, along with his interpreter, Baines, and Tamworth, our other interrogator. When Lutzen took his men in for a rescue op, we lost three of them, too. Bad, but not so bad as knowing that sooner or later, something like that will happen again. Hammersmith's solution to the problem was making us all sleep in separate compartments. To minimise potential casualties, he says. An excuse to make me bunk by the rift generators, I think."

  "Wouldn't it be better to repair the Cascade?"

  "Our budget wouldn't even allow for a new lick of paint. Besides, who do we get in to fix a Cascade that shouldn't even exist? We tried it once, years ago. Got a crew of non-Primaterre workmen in to do what they could. Paid them ridiculous sums of money, made them sign NDAs. Not to buy their silence, mind, but to buy their trust. It worked really well. None of them so much as raised an eyebrow when Hammersmith asked them to get in the airlock. I saw one of them floating past my quarters later. Face frozen, but not in terror. He didn't even look worried. Maybe just a little surprised."

  "Hammersmith killed them?"

  "On my father's orders. It was a bad day, and not one anybody's willing to repeat. A very bad tenth birthday for me."

  "Tenth birthday?" His pallor told a story, she realised, each trailing blue vein under his skin part of a pattern. "How long have you been here?"

  "Xanthe is twenty-six light-years from the nearest Cascade. When my father founded Room 36B, he had a ship built capable of making that journey, but as beautiful as the Teneral was, she was still bound by the laws of physics. The journey here was long – long enough for the crew to get bored and have children, apparently." He gave her a sad smile. "I was born here. A towerman born and bred, working to liberate a society I've never even visited."

  "But you have a primer," she said. "You're a citizen."

  "My parents wanted me grow up without a primer, but the work demands I have one. I have to be able to interface to interpret. I got mine when I turned eighteen – Hammersmith arranged for it somehow – and so, just like you," he said, touching a finger to his nose, "I sometimes bleed. We became Primaterre too late for the primer to truly be a part of us. It'll always be a foreign element, just like we will always be to the Primaterre."

  "That's not been my experience. For the most part, I've been treated no differently than any other citizen," Joy said. "You should go see the Protectorate for yourself."

  "Hammersmith won't allow it."

  "Hammersmith is your superior, not your owner."

  "We've been here a long time, Somerset, and the Cascade's not the only thing getting old. You're the first new recruit in twenty years. Wideawake is pushing sixty and all of Lutzen's crew – our strike team – are in their fifties. I'm the only operative under thirty, and the idea was for me to lead the next generation. But I'm not my father, and Hammersmith..." Elsinore smirked. "Well, his only attempt at recruiting new blood gave Lutzen a stab wound and the new blood in question a very dubious first impression."

  "My impression has improved slightly since then."

  "Really?"

  "The coffee's decent."

  For the first time, Elsinore laughed. "I suppose there was no coffee on Cato."

  "None that I'd recommend drinking. None on Achall either."

  "Achall." He spoke the word slowly, tasting the syllables. "So new to our time, and yet you've seen so much more of it than I. I envy you."

  "If you'd seen Achall, you wouldn't."

  "It can't be worse than this place. Hammersmith won't risk me leaving, though. He wants to keep me safe and sound here – at least until he decides that you're a better candidate for the future of the mission. Earth have mercy, I shouldn't say this – but I hope you'll impress him enough that he'll make me the expendable field operative and you the princess in the ivory tower."

  "Impressed or not, he's not keeping me captive."

  "It won't be up to you. Room 36B changes a person over time. Maybe it's the mission or maybe it's the rift generators. Who knows? In any case, there may come a time when you find yourself agreeing with Hammersmith. His way of thinking will get under your skin, inside your mind, until the mission is all you care about. I heard him tell you his little story about Xanthe, about how he goes down there to contemplate."

  "That wasn't true?"

  "Oh, he goes there, but not for contemplation. A couple of years back, I found him teetering on the edge of the plasma moat one night, drunk enough that I could smell him from across the chamber. I got him away from there, walked him back to his quarters, but when we got there, he asked me to come in. You've got to realise, I've known Hammersmith since I was a kid, and I'd never seen the inside of his quarters before." Elsinore shivered. "Anyway, he's got all these photos on the walls, like some sort of crime investigation. Pictures of people, pinned next to pictures of their skeletons. He told me they were the people of Xanthe, that he's been down there working to identify them and to piece together their last moments. He told me all these stories – one about a family, dead inside their van. Suicide, he said, when they knew it was all over. But thing is, I've lived here all my life. I've seen Xanthe. I've seen that van, and it didn't use to have a fucking family of skeletons in it. He collected them, he posed them, he gave them names and histories and made up this weird story about how they were trying to get to the spaceport, but the youngest kid had asthma and..." Elsinore shrugged. "Who knows where he got the photos from. Probably just pulled them off some stock database."

  "That's so sad," Joy said. Hammersmith had seemed so cold to her, but this was the behaviour of a man who was anything but. This was a man who needed personal connection to such a degree that he would conjure it from thin air. Not healthy, maybe, but not wrong.

  "I thought so too, but then I saw a couple of faces I did recognise. Previous assignments... targets, truth be told. Their bodies were much fresher. Hammersmith's been taking people to Xanthe, and yeah, sure, they were meant to be terminated. But we kill people quietly and quickly. We don't drop them on deserted worlds and sit back to watch them die through the eyes of drones. That's sick, and... And Hammersmith wasn't always like that, and I wasn't always like this. So when I say I'm sorry for making you feel like a prisoner, I mean it. You are the best thing to have happened in years. Because of what you started on Cato, we must act swiftly. Soon, it'll all be over. So thank you for that, Somerset. Thank you for shining a light on our secrets. Win or lose, either way is fine with me."

  * * *

  Wideawake sat cradled in the gold wire of his exo-skeleton, staring at the star-dappled void outside. Quiet, lost in thought, or in his own pain. The treatments he was receiving for his injuries weren't enough to keep him comfortable. Perhaps not enough to keep him alive, either – the veins around his temple were touched with darkness.

  Poor, poor man – but Joy, who had once lived with pain, knew that he wouldn't want to be pitied. His condition defined him no more than her illness had defined her, and so she greeted Wideawake with a smile, offering him the coffee she'd made. Instead of the injuries, she focused on the man – on how he returned her smile though it had to hurt, and on how he was wearing a sports sweatshirt in spite of Hammersmith's adamant insistence that they all wear uniforms.

  "Not bad," Wideawake said, tasting his drink. "Never tastes quite right in space. Earthy flavours need earthy environments. But a nice idea. Should have a coffee machine installed here, so we can have it every morning. Elsinore, have Hammersmith see to it when he gets back."

  Elsinore muttered something unintelligible, but Joy got the gist well enough. There was no chance in hell he'd bring such a thing up to Hammersmith.

&nbs
p; "No spine," Wideawake tutted. "Perhaps earthy flavours aren't the only things that grow weak in space."

  Elsinore sullenly began to set up his computer equipment, his lips a thin, pale line.

  "No." Wideawake waved a weak hand, golden wires tinkling. "Somerset made coffee. No more warm-up exercises. She's ready for the real work."

  14.

  JOY

  Room 36B had been founded on the dying words of a madwoman.

  Annabeth Elsinore had been born on Earth before the Epoch War, raised within the walls of floating Copenhagen, that quaint capital fortress where castles shaded leafy alleys that the law wouldn't enter. A silent agreement between government and pirates had made Annabeth's childhood home a haven for smugglers and those who preferred to live between the lines.

  Perhaps the sea and the lawless zones had given Annabeth a taste for travel and a sense of adventure, because as soon as she graduated from Black Diamond University, she had found passage on a cruise ship heading into deep space.

  A decade of planet-hopping had followed, doing whatever to make ends meet, until her work at a lab on a distant colony had earned her a reputation.

  "Good or bad?" Joy asked.

  "As someone unafraid of radical measures. Whether that's good or bad depends on the measures, I suppose," Wideawake said.

  Maybe a decade of travelling had been enough, because when a Hierochloe head-hunter made Annabeth an offer, she accepted it. For the next fifteen years, she stayed at the biomedical company, working on what Hierochloe had named Project Harmony: a way to unlock humanity's potential via mind control.

  "Not control," Elsinore said, defensively. "Nudging, setting us onto the right path. They meant to be our shepherds, not our masters."

  "Shepherds don't murder to keep their flock compliant," Joy said.

  "Annabeth wasn't part of that."

  "Allegedly," said Wideawake. "Perhaps there were only so many sins she was willing to confess on her deathbed. Perhaps, when she claimed not to know who was running Project Harmony, she was protecting someone – or something. It was, after all, her work; her legacy."