by S. A. Tholin
Lutzen might not be take bribes, but no doubt he counted his every last merit, stretching them as far as they would go, even if that meant smoking nasty cigarettes. That was one fact to work with; another that he cared enough about the welfare of women to accept being stabbed. Little pieces of the puzzle, and if Constant could see her now, he would be proud – and if Skald could see her now, he would be proud too.
She swallowed the taste of sea water and let thoughts of starlight fill her mind. For Constant, she would do what was necessary.
"A monthly payment to access the net; a good fifth of my paycheck. If I wanted to access off-world information – say, watch a news stream from Earth – it cost extra, based on the amount of data. Once, I was in such a rush to get to work that I accidentally left a download running. Instead of one episode of a show, I got the entire season's worth. The bill was in the region of six times my paycheck, and you should have seen my apartment; fridge empty, displays flickering, air conditioners on their way out. I really, really could not afford to pay that bill, but I'd only been living on my own for a few months, and I wanted to prove to my brother that I could manage. So I went to my landlord's office to see if something could be worked out, but they wouldn't budge. I tried contacting my data provider, but they wouldn't even respond. I suffered from lung disease back then, a real bad case, and I couldn't afford to top up my med-bracelet doses. I had to wear a mechanical respirator instead, but on the train home one day, my throat just closed up. I made it onto the platform – and then I guess somebody must've called an ambulance, because I woke up in the hospital. When I finally arrived home – with a nice, juicy hospital bill to my name – the landlord had nailed a notice of eviction on my door."
"Boo-hoo," Lutzen grumbled, but behind the unimpressed roll of the eye was something else. This man, who had certainly stared death in the eye more than once, did have fears, deep-seated and parasitic. Had he been poor once? Yes, she thought that might be it.
"So what happened?" A fifteen second pause had been enough to crack the man who'd resisted her every question with stony silence.
"My brother had picked me up at the hospital. I don't know what he said to my landlord, but judging by the way he stormed off, I can't imagine they had a good day in the office. He sorted out the bill, too, and made me swear never to keep secrets from him again. It's only money, Joy, he said, and money doesn't matter if you're not okay."
Once more her brother had been right: money didn't matter. She'd spend every last merit she had if it would bring him back – which, to be fair, wasn't a great sacrifice considering she only had 263 merits, and if Finn were there, he would've pointed that out with a laugh.
And four months and hundreds of light-years wasn't enough for wounds to have healed into scars. She pressed her hand to her mouth, closing her eyes to stop herself from crying.
"That's what brothers are for," Lutzen said, a touch apprehensive, as though he could sense her turning mood. As though he would rather she use the cattle prod than tears.
"Yes." She forced a smile. "Do you have any brothers or sisters?"
"Two sisters. One teaches maths on Kepler; the other was dumb enough to follow in my footsteps and enlist. She's not much older than you; only a few years out of Achall."
"It must be hard to live out here, so far away."
"Nowhere is far when you live inside a Cascade. Best line of communications in the galaxy."
Got something, Elsinore texted, and she could feel the surprise oozing from the glowing font on her HUD. Keep fishing.
She led Lutzen down a meandering conversation, learning about his ex in Kirkclair and how he looked her up online every now and then (not stalking, just, you know, like to keep informed), and she told him that she didn't judge. She unshackled one of his wrists, lighting a cigarette for him, and all the while Elsinore kept decoding data.
Towards the end, she didn't think the mind-worm was necessary. Towards the end, he was looking at her like he'd forgotten about Elsinore and Wideawake, or that this was an interrogation and not a chat. She could just ask him for the code, she thought, and he would give it willingly.
Before she had a chance to test that theory, Wideawake interrupted.
"Seven out of eighteen digits. Not bad, Somerset, just a shame they're not in the right order." He chuckled and shared the partial code to her HUD. "Feel free to play with it, if you like. If you can break a man, perhaps you can break a code, too."
And finally she understood. Just like Cassimer had once sent her on an assignment in hostile territory with only the barest of instructions, these men were putting her in situations that had no right or wrong solution. They wanted her to find her own way – so that they might find out how to best use her.
"A very round-about way of doing an aptitude test, don't you think? Risky, too. What if I had used the cattle prod on Lutzen?"
"Oh, they'd have had a good laugh about that," Lutzen said.
"I was recording the whole thing hoping that you might," Elsinore said. "We don't get much in the way of entertainment round here."
Not much of anything, but she could see with clarity now, and she would solve whatever they threw at her. First their tests, then the Cascade, then the men. Elsinore, lonely and unhappy and desperately guilty about his ancestor's part in the Primaterre lie. Lutzen, merit-conscious and protective and easy-going, and Wideawake, who sat in his gleaming web of filaments and wires like a spider. Though his eyes never glowed silver, she knew that he was always part elsewhere.
No matter. She'd figure him out eventually. Him, and Hammersmith, and then Project Harmony. She'd unravel every secret, correct every wrong, and she'd do it for Constant and the future that might yet be.
15.
CASSIMER
Alarms blared through the corridors. Breaches to the east and the west. The lab's main entrance still held, but one turret hung limp and useless, black smoke rising from its fried power cell. The other turret, controlled by Lucklaw, fired relentlessly. Rounds smacked into the concrete residential block and powered through plate glass, but the RebEarthers had slipped out of range, returning fire from a safe distance. Sooner or later, the turret would join its twin in electronic death.
Kiruna and Daneborg haunted the upper stories of the building, observing six RebEarthers climb the fire escape. The first one died before the second made it to the last rung, but Daneborg made his death a silent one, dragging the man away by the combat knife shoved into his jaw. Kiruna stayed back, allowing the other RebEarthers to enter and discover the trail of blood. She let them start tracking it, and as the tension grew enough for the men to start snapping at each other, she made her move. Two more down, and the remaining three ran blindly down the dark corridors. Daneborg quietly waited for them to call in their predicament, and then he and Kiruna flanked and ended the chase. Elegant, and brutal enough that Cassimer estimated that it'd take RebEarth at least ten minutes before they tried that entry point again. Ghosts, the last one had gurgled over his comms, ghosts on the fifth floor.
Cassimer was running, and he was glad that his feet needed no instruction, because without the aid of a cataphract suit, stretching his awareness to control an entire building was exhausting to the point of being all-consuming.
He was only vaguely aware of Lucklaw running alongside him, boots splashing through water that was too dark and frothy to have rained down from sprinklers. The physical world had become shadow and automatic response, but the mental world lay wide-open, and the Lucklaw that guided Cassimer through the building's systems was anything but vague. Here, where augment-interpreted data met a primer-enhanced mind, Lucklaw was white light and a steady voice.
"The building's air conditioning can be reversed to fill the upper floors with smoke from next door. I can also overload the heating system to cause a carbon monoxide leak."
"Do it," Cassimer responded, a twinge of pain accompanying the sudden shift of visuals as he cycled through a series of surveillance cameras. Every twist and tur
n of the building had to be mapped. He had to know it before he could turn it into a gauntlet. "What about temperatures? Anything useful?"
Unlikely. He'd frozen enemies to death before, but on far more inhospitable worlds. Velloa's climate would keep the RebEarthers comfortable enough, and its air quality was satisfactory. A shame, because atmosphere venting could be quite the efficient strategy.
"Doubt it, Commander," Lucklaw confirmed. "I'm seeing RebEarth networks now though. Locked up tight, but I can take a crack at them."
"Later. Focus on securing the lab."
Hopewell and Rearcross were on the ground floor, and they were not alone. Through Hopewell's visual augments, Cassimer counted the heat signatures of nine hostiles. Distant, moving slowly and cautiously. Afraid of ghosts, no doubt.
It was dark up there, and silent but for the calm breathing of Hopewell, as she placed explosive charges along a wall whose destruction would cause obstructive debris, but – if the schematics were right – no critical structural damage. She and Rearcross were moving around the first two floors of the building, leaving a trail of traps behind, Lucklaw opening and locking doors as they went.
RebEarth would breach, but Scathach Banneret Company weren't about to make it easy for them.
"Here." Ruotsi's voice snapped Cassimer back to the physical world. Silt-clouded water lapped against his knees. Three percent salinity, zero degrees centigrade, with no detectable microbial content other than that of human waste material. It was the water of a dead sea, and when Cassimer dipped his gauntleted fingers into it, he felt nothing. No past, no present, no future. A nothing sea on a nothing world.
"This is the room you wanted," Ruotsi said, nodding towards the largest room on the laboratory's basement level. Reinforced concrete walls, no windows, no large air ducts, the only door the one they now stood before. It was steel, biometrically locked, with a plaque that read MORGUE.
"Charming," Juneau said, and behind her, Tallinn laughed nervously.
"Can't wait to see Rearcross's reaction. He won't like this one bit."
"Rearcross has sent enough people to enough morgues that he ought to know corpses are only cold meat," Lucklaw said.
"Maybe that's the problem. In their dead eyes, he sees the stares of all those he killed. It weighs on a soul, no matter how pure. You'll understand, one day."
"Get the door open, Lucklaw," Cassimer ordered before his comms specialist said something he might regret. There was a sharpness to the glare he was giving Tallinn, a sense of impending impertinence about his demeanour, and Cassimer knew why. Tallinn was wrong; Lucklaw already understood. On the Rossetti Cascade, he had single-handedly destroyed thirty-three of Skald's vessels and rerouted five Primaterre ships into Cato's surface.
Joy's idea. Cassimer's order. Lucklaw's execution.
Together, the three of them had caused the deaths of tens of thousands. Their actions had been as righteous as they'd been necessary, yet knowing that wasn't the same as accepting it. But while grief and remorse were reasonable reactions, the notion of culpability was not. Joy had outright asked him if her actions made her as bad as Skald or RebEarth, wondering if perhaps she shouldn't be punished, if maybe the universe was going to send some karmic retribution her way – "I'm afraid something bad will happen, and that I'll have deserved it."
Lucklaw would never express his feelings in so many words, but Cassimer could see them on his face sometimes, in those distant looks of his. Unacceptable, and before entering the morgue, he took the lieutenant aside and gave him the same truth he'd told Joy:
"None of us ever left a ghost behind that didn't deserve it."
* * *
Fluorescent lights beat down on brown water. An autopsy had been abandoned in progress, and a medical tray carrying a selection of organs bobbed on the ripples around the team's boots. Monitors on a far wall showed scans, radiographies and reams of medical data.
"We're going to set up base in here?" Juneau sounded half-disgusted, half-enthused.
"Affirmative." As unpleasant as it was, it was also safe. As long as RebEarth didn't gas the vents, the Kalevala civilians could survive in here for a week by Cassimer's calculations. His own team could survive far longer, their suits keeping them alive for a month or more. Not ideal, but nor was it an outcome wholly intolerable. "Hopewell, report."
"RebEarth have retreated for now. I think Kiruna and Daneborg have them quaking in their boots. They'll be back, but the first two floors are ready for them now."
"I want you and Rearcross in the basement. Kiruna and Daneborg, sweep the building. Don't engage unless the odds are overwhelmingly in your favour."
He turned towards Ruotsi. The big man seemed to have shrunk as they descended into the depths of the lab. Water tinged his lab coat's hem ruddy. The blood of his colleagues, or the blood of the failed experiment on the gurney. Failure, either way – and that too, weighed on a man's soul.
"The force field generator – it's on this floor?"
"Down the corridor, second door on the right."
"Lucklaw, check it out. Take Juneau with you."
Neither of the pair seemed happy about that, but they left without so much as a snippy comment to each other. Good.
"What about sewer access?"
"There are access hatches at the back of the morgue and inside the laundry we passed. They flood at high tide. Normally, the pumps take care of that, but they must've blown along with the force field generator."
"How long does high tide last?"
"It's a twelve hour cycle, more or less."
"Tallinn, do what you can to make the civilians comfortable. When the others come down here, we'll start fortifying the place. Might want to look for ways of making the stay more comfortable for us, too."
Such as disposing of the dead body and the bobbing organs. A fine start to redecorating any space, really.
"The stay? We're hunkering down?"
"Awaiting reinforcements, yes."
"But..." Tallinn hesitated. Her green eyes were catlike behind her visor, large and wary. She hadn't served under his banner long. Still unsure, he thought, of what was acceptable behaviour, of what he would tolerate and what he would reprimand.
There were many ways for a soldier to transgress, and many more to earn Cassimer's personal disapproval, but never by asking mission-related questions. Clarity could only be achieved through illumination.
"Yes, Captain?" he said patiently.
"With all due respect, Commander, I was under the impression that our forces would be unable to enter this system."
"Correct. I'm not calling the Primaterre Protectorate."
She blinked. "Then who?"
The Europa Heptarchy, whose deep space observation crew had been forced to cannibalise itself to survive. The Gustavians, whose shipping lanes had been harassed to the point of dissolution. The Andromeda Resurgence, whose men had been left to freeze in space and whose women had suffered worse.
Factions and federations, planet-wide nations and system conglomerates. Powers who could muster fleets and powers who could pay mercenaries; those who would come for revenge and those who would come to profit. All of them united by one single emotion: hate, and all of it for Kivik the Shipwrecker.
"They'll come for him," Cassimer told Tallinn. "And then, if there's anything left, we'll come for him."
* * *
Their off-world comms had gone down with the shuttle, but RebEarth would provide the key to their own destruction. As augments were a luxury outside the Protectorate, RebEarth used comms equipment, ranging from small ear pieces to large handheld devices. When Kiruna descended the basement stairs in a whirl of smoke, her arms were full of such gear. Unfamiliar things, clunky and crude, but Lucklaw would make sense of them.
"Wet down here," Kiruna said, frowning as she surveyed the corridor. "The whole place flooded?"
"Yes. Stay down here long enough, your APF will malfunction. You should have invested in better water-proofing for your armour."
/> "Should have," Kiruna agreed. "Excessive streamlining is a professional hazard. Always looking to be lighter, faster, sleeker. Always thinking about not getting caught – but you can't run from the sea. Halfway up a mountain and it's come for us. Reminds me of you, Commander."
"Sergeant?" Odd comment from an odd woman. She smiled, but that only made her teeth look sharp.
"Ask RebEarth to clarify later. They think they're the wave that'll break this place – they don't know a thing. Not yet, anyway."
The conversation teetered on the edge between uncomfortably flattering and plain uncomfortable, and Cassimer rather wished that RebEarth would storm the place. Better that than this. Earth have mercy, his best case scenario here involved being trapped inside a six-by-six room full of corpses and, worse, the living.
"Commander Cassimer, do you read?" The voice was shaky, the connection fuzzy with interference, but it hit him like a shot of stims.
"I read you, Baltimore. Good to hear your voice – we thought the shuttle had gone down."
"It did," Baltimore responded, and even across the bad channel, his indignation was clear. "Camo fields were running 100%, digital footprint at zero. We should've been invisible, but out of nowhere we're hit by a barrage of missiles. Nothing on the sensors until the damn cockpit was on fire. Lost control, spun into the side of the rock. Crew evaced, but shuttle's sunk."
"Guess there's a reason Kivik's called the Shipwrecker," Kiruna said.
"What's your location?"
Baltimore's silence lasted long enough for Cassimer to know that there'd be no good news.
"The courtyard outside the lab. Kivik says he wants a conversation. Says he's in charge." A brief pause, then the captain added: "We both know that's not true. Orders, Commander?"
The pilot and his flight crew were not banneret men, but they'd obey a banneret commander's orders nonetheless. Out of honour, loyalty or programming – no way to be sure which was which anymore, no way of knowing which decisions were made out of conviction and which were reactions to scripted prompts. Cassimer could order the crew to activate their kill switches and remove themselves as leverage; he could tell them to take out as many RebEarthers as they could before dying. He could tell them anything, and once followed up with a Primaterre protects us all, their doubts and fears would be washed away.