Lonely Castles

by S. A. Tholin

  "You've been busy."

  "Pardon the handwriting. Can't remember the last time I used an actual pen on actual paper. Wasteful, but the best way to keep secrets. Digital files are far too easily hacked. Perhaps even the ones stored in primers, if what Lucklaw says about Tower tech is true."

  "It may or may not be," Joy said, mouthing it definitely is.

  Rhys smiled wryly. "With secret-keeping skills like that, I don't see you lasting long in Tower, princess."

  "That's what my superior keeps telling me."

  "He the one with the...?" Rhys gestured towards his eyes, making a circular motion with his fingers. Joy nodded, and he scowled. "Can't say I care for the man. He came to me in the middle of the night. I woke up with a fist clamped over my mouth and a pair of shining eyes staring down at me. It was only when I realised that my comms were locked down that I knew I wasn't about to get murdered. That said, murder might've been more pleasant."

  "What did he do to you?"

  "Nothing that bears repeating. He got every secret he wanted, in the end. I considered using my kill switch, but if he'd come for me, he'd come for the rest of the Cato team, too. He'd come for you. I figured it was better if I took the hit. It didn't turn out that way, though. Did he tell you how he got onto us in the first place?"

  She shook her head, and Rhys grimaced.

  "Might have preferred it if he did. I'm not big on confessions, though at least I'm not the only fuck-up in this story. Lucklaw still had a copy of the trigger signal he recovered from the Ever Onward. Between his tech skills and my medical training, we thought we might be able to extrapolate how our primers work. We were careful – but obviously not careful enough. One slip up noticed by a Tower analyst is all it takes to wake up staring death in the eye."

  "It could've been worse. It could've been the people behind the priming who noticed. Maybe it's a good thing you were caught."

  "Maybe," Rhys conceded, "but it's you and Lucklaw who are paying for our mistake. Your superior has Lucklaw working all hours now. Kid's going to crash hard one of these days. That might be fine on base, but in the field... could get him killed."

  "It must be to do with Semele Solutions. The family who run it live in Kirkclair, just like the Lucklaws. The two families must have connections. High-level connections; hard to come by, irresistible for my superior to exploit."

  "Semele? They've got something to do with the priming? Stars..." Rhys pulled a cigarette from his jacket pocket and twirled it thoughtfully between his fingers. "Talk about enemies in high places."

  "Too high to see us coming, hopefully." Joy picked up a piece of paper from the floor. Schematics, complete with entrances and surveillance placements. "I'd really like to believe that this isn't what it looks like."

  "Depends. What does it look like?"

  "Like you and I are going to rob a bank."

  "In that case, brace for disappointment." Rhys smiled grimly, tapping the schematics with his index finger. "Scathach Station's med-wing. And that vault there is where the raw primer is stored."

  23.

  JOY

  A towerman always had at least three jobs: the one they were meant to do, the one they appeared to do, and the one they made people believe they were doing.

  "You can arrive at a station to collect reports, but no matter how upfront you are about that, nobody will believe it. They'll give you sideways glances and whisper to each other – but not too loudly, not even over private channels, because they'll think the Tower emblem on your uniform means you see and hear everything," Wideawake had explained. "And a standard cover job is no good if nobody buys it. So what you want to do is drop a casual line here and there, seemingly nothing to do with anything: This station gets its rations shipped in from Idun, yes? Or, if you really want to shut their whispering up: How's the weather on Kepler these days? Your brother works the docks there, doesn't he?"

  Wideawake had chuckled at that, Elsinore wiping spittle from his septicaemia-darkened lips.

  "The mention of family will always make them cooperative. For the rest of your stay, they'll be as quiet as little mice, scurrying to get away from under your feet."

  Joy didn't doubt it, but implied threats seemed far too nasty a tactic. She knew what it was to have a gun pressed to a loved one's head.

  So when she sat in Station Chief Amager's office, trying to pretend it didn't smell like Achall's latrines, she surprised herself by saying: "Do you still have family on Polhammar?"

  As the station chief's posture stiffened, the corner of his eye twitching ever so slightly, she tried to convince herself that she'd asked out of pure politeness. He'd mentioned his home planet earlier, but the conversation had since drifted deep into fish tank territory. She had simply grasped at any straw even remotely more interesting than the nutritional value of fish food flakes.

  "Yes," Amager said flatly and tapped his computer monitor. "There. Guest clearance granted. I understand you're here to collect reports. A brief stay, then?"

  "Depends on what the reports say." Cruelly vague, and she could see Amager's brain grinding away. Scouring himself, no doubt, for anything he'd done wrong. For anything that might make Tower take an interest. So mean, so unfair, and yet she couldn't deny that she was pleased he'd finally cut to the chase. Couldn't deny that maybe she had taken Wideawake's advice to push the station chief.

  "I feel sick," she said to Rhys, who'd waited outside the station chief's office.

  "Handy then that we're heading to the med-wing next," he joked, but as they walked towards the elevators together, he leaned in close to whisper: "You're trying to save these people, Joy. Don't forget that."

  * * *

  The med-wing was located within Scathach's central column, shot through with a shaft that housed multiple elevators and offered a spectacular view. The floors above housed glass-encased laboratories where white-clad scientists worked on improvements, and manufacturing facilities where med-techs synthesised recon strips and surgical nanites. Spotless wards and operating theatres were on the floors below, the bottom few dimly lit.

  "The med-wing has the capacity to treat thousands, but I can't remember seeing all floors in use at once. You ever see the bottom wards open up, you'll know the station's in trouble," Rhys said.

  Trouble on Scathach was hard to imagine. With its scale-plated hull, force field generators, railgun stations and protective fleet, it seemed like the space station version of a cataphract. Secure in every sense of the word, which was a pretty big problem for someone planning to break into its most secure vault.

  "You're early, Rhys." A tall doctor, running the final adjustments on a pair of new visual augments, looked up from his patient. "And you brought a friend to hold your hand, I see. Want a lollipop afterwards, too?"

  "Somerset's here to make sure you don't mess up my face. You remember how it used to look, yeah?"

  "I think so," she said, and Rhys laughed.

  "Well, if it starts looking that way again, tell this cack-handed butcher to try harder."

  They sat down to wait on a bench opposite a wall covered in reminders of purity. The soft green text cast a glow on Joy's white uniform.

  PERCEIVE WITH CLARITY – ACT WITH VIGILANCE

  AN IMPURE MIND MAY BE CLEANSED

  A POSSESSED MIND IS DESTROYED

  SUSPICIOUS BEHAVIOUR MUST BE REPORTED

  PRIMATERRE PROTECTS US ALL

  The ominous caps were accompanied by pleasant footage, in which a young woman acting strangely was reported to the authorities by her concerned relatives. Uniformed, but kind, officers came and took her away to a repurification facility. Before too long, she was back at home, making dinner for her family as thanks for helping her see with clarity.

  "I reported someone once," Rhys said.

  "Yeah?"

  "Yeah, and I probably wouldn't tell you this if I wasn't feeling bad about getting you in trouble. Shit, I probably shouldn't tell you, but..." He shrugged. "I've done plenty bad in my life, but plent
y good, too. Enough that I figured the scales were tipped in my favour. But now it turns out some of the good I've done might actually have been pretty fucking bad, and that's a tricky thing to face."

  "You don't have to face it alone."

  "Between yourself and the commander, you've got enough to carry."

  "When you love someone, there's no limit to how much you can carry."

  "Stars." He shook his head. "Now I really regret telling you. But I don't suppose you're going to let me get away with leaving the story unfinished, are you?"

  "It's up to you, Rhys. If you want to tell me, I'll listen. I won't judge."

  "You should. No one else can." He sighed. "But sure, might as well get it off my chest. His name was Westphalia, and he was my roommate at the academy. West was a good kid. He'd dreamed of becoming a doctor since primary school and wanted only to serve. Real clever, with perfect recall and a creative mind. Me, I was a different sort of kid; the kind of kid who ends up enlisting because he's run out of options and is on the run from half a dozen other things. I was never big on studying, and even less interested in actually showing up to class, but I scraped together decent grades nonetheless. Not good enough for civilian med-school, but in Bastion, things work a bit differently. I'd intended to go straight to Basic Training, but I suppose the recruiters saw something in me. Guess maybe they were right, too, because I've been doing this so long now that I honestly can't think of anything else I'd rather do. For better or for worse..." He patted his scarred cheek. "This is who I am."

  "And I'm thankful for it every day." Joy placed her palm on her chest, feeling the beat of her heart, the rise of her healthy lungs.

  He smiled before continuing: "West and I got on well enough. I didn't care for his snoring, he didn't approve of my blatant flouting of the no fraternisation rules, but on the whole, we were mates. And then he started talking about his dreams. At first I didn't think anything of it, just thought it was an okay, if boring, topic to discuss over breakfast. He dreamed about eyes, he told me. Eyes, always watching. He got a notebook to keep next to his bed as a dream journal. Couldn't keep a journal in his primer like normal people, he said, because the eyes would see. They could read him, could read all of us. Can read you, Rhys. Aren't you afraid of what they'll see in your thoughts? Afraid for them, I told him, laughing it off even though it was getting strange. I'd come home after curfew, and he'd be sitting bolt upright in his bed, scribbling away.

  "Still, I chalked it up to the pressure of the upcoming exams. We'd all been cramming hard, pushing our stim allowance to the limit to stay awake weeks at a time, studying and practicing. No wonder his dreams were weird, right? But then, he started seeing eyes everywhere. He nailed a blanket to the wall by my bunk to block out a particularly large eye. He'd stop and point eyes out to me – there, by the ceiling light? Do you see it? – and one day in class, I caught him staring at the floor, shaking like a leaf. Later that night, I came home to find him sitting in his bed, knife pressed to his wrist, blood everywhere. It's okay, he said, I'm almost a doctor, I know what I'm doing. I'm not trying to kill myself. The blood confuses the eyes. They don't know where to look.

  "I should have taken him to the dorm nurse, but he'd painted big bloody circles on the floor, and all I could think when I saw them was demons. I thought my roommate was on the verge of possession, and I can't remember ever being that afraid. It was like a fist twisting my insides. All the evil they warn you about, all the corruption that purity is meant to keep at bay, those horrible things were inside my room. And I just knew that if the demons took him, I'd be next. So I backed right out and reported him. They came and took him away within the hour – people just like in the ad. Friendly, pleasant, professional. They took him and told me I'd done well. Told me to be proud. Proud? For calling the fucking thought police on a friend?" Rhys shook his head, his fingers tearing apart the filter of a cigarette, tobacco drizzling to the clinical floor.

  "He obviously needed help," Joy said. "He'd have been at about the right age for the first symptoms of schizophrenia, right? The people who took him would have realised that, I'm sure. They'd have given him the treatment he needed."

  "Maybe. All I know is that I never saw him again. All I know is that I got spooked by a bloody ghost story and betrayed a friend. Maybe they did help him, or maybe they did whatever it is they do to those who can't be purified. Repurification facilities are supposed to be nice, but who knows anymore. Maybe they're pastel charnel houses and I'm a fucking murderer."

  "If something did happen to him, it was no more your fault than this was mine," Joy said, briefly touching his scarred cheek.

  * * *

  The doctor finished with his patient and directed her and Rhys to a treatment room. She could sit in, he said, and introduced himself too, but she wasn't really paying attention at that point. Elsinore was in her ear, whispering as he used her as a conduit to travel through the med-wing's systems and alarms, guided by Rhys's notes. There was a security panel on the treatment room's medicine cabinet, and all Elsinore had needed to hack it was for Joy to stay within two metres of it.

  As he slipped through the med-wing, a ghost travelling on electronic signals, she watched. The primer vault was on this level, separated from the general med-wing by armed guards, several sets of alarms, and enough key card readers and pass code panels that Joy lost count. Elsinore didn't seem too concerned – but then, he was half a galaxy away, far enough that it probably just felt like a game – but the primer vault gave him pause.

  It was a white, clinical space, so cold that mist crept along the floor. A dispenser sat inside a frosted glass cage, its vat filled with a milky liquid. Clear vials waited on a small conveyor belt underneath a complicated-looking machine. A red glow indicated that the cage door was locked.

  "A primer lock. Two sets required. The med-wing manager and the station chief must both be present to access the raw primer. The vault's external lock is the same."

  Can you hack it? she texted back.

  "Impossible. Direct entry will not work. Checking for alternate routes."

  "You all right, Lieutenant?" The doctor had paused his work on Rhys. "Your nose is bleeding."

  "I've only had my primer a few months. I'm still not used to the strain," she said, although the work she'd done with Elsinore and Wideawake had led her to believe that her body had finally acclimatised. Not a drop of blood in weeks, but now she could feel it trickling down her lips.

  "Hypersensitivity is rare, but there are long-term treatments available. You should make an appointment for an examination. Here; before you ruin your uniform." He reached over Rhys, waving a packet of sterilised wipes at her.

  Just a nosebleed, and the doctor hadn't made it seem like too big of a deal. But afterwards, when the glass doors of an elevator closed shut around them and Elsinore confirmed that nobody was listening, Rhys gave her a worried look.

  "You want to tell the man inside your head to go easy? Strain a computer and it'll crash, and the main difference between a computer and a brain is that the latter is much harder to repair."

  "I'll tell him, but I'm not sure we'll have much of a choice. Did you see the surveillance footage of the vault?"

  "No, but I've been outside it before, picking up primers. I know what it looks like."

  "You also notice that both the station chief and the hospital manager were there to unlock it?"

  "A primer lock? Well, princess, if that's the case – a bloody paranoid security measure in the heart of Scathach – I don't see how this is going to be possible."

  "Unfortunately, I do." She shared a blueprint with him, pulled by Elsinore from Scathach's databases. It showed the station's utility conduits and the med-wing's many fail-safes. In case of a viral spill or outbreak, the first measure was to seal the polluted room and vent its atmosphere. Every unit in the med-wing had a duct for just such an event; even the primer vault. And unfortunately, as the ducts required regular maintenance, they were just about large enough t
o fit a station engineer – or a former botanist. "I'm going to have to crawl in through the vents."

  24.

  CASSIMER

  Five hours of silence, and then–

  –projectiles battered the ship's force field, a searing laser sweeping across exposed hull. The ship made a sharp evasive manoeuvre, throwing banneret men forward in their harnesses. Lucklaw's helmet slipped from his hands, tumbling to rest against Cassimer's boots. He picked it up, threw it across the aisle to the wide-eyed comms specialist – who had been through many things, but never this; never the complete vulnerability of being a ground trooper in a space battle – and shouted across the booming of railguns for him to make sure your suit's sealed up tight.

  Because if one of those lasers pierced hull and bulkhead, the suit would feed him warmth and oxygen.

  Because if the ship was torn to shreds by cascading force field failure, the suit would cradle him in the void.

  Lucklaw would have been taught these things in Basic Training not so long ago. Joy had told Cassimer about the videos they were made to watch on Achall, of soldiers too slow to put their helmets on; how their skin froze and peeled. Is it really like that? she'd asked, and he'd been forced to tell her that no, it wasn't like the training videos at all. It was much worse.

  Because in truth, their suits would not save them. Shrapnel, shockwaves, collisions, enemy fire – once a ship was compromised, a soldier's life depended on luck, nothing more. Hopewell, Lucklaw and Juneau – even Rearcross – they'd never done this before. They'd never flown through a section of space so wild with gunfire that it danced and glowed like a solar storm.

  And he, whose luck had carried him more than once before, flailing in his Helreginn suit against an enemy that could not be fought, slick with sweat as the fear of corruption crept inside his mind – he could say nothing, do nothing, to see his men safely through.

  All he could do was breathe.

  Inhale as the ship's lights died.