Lonely Castles

by S. A. Tholin

  Minds like hers, and perhaps minds like his own. If he had been a Hierochloe man back in the day, would he have been a good soldier for them, as he was for the Primaterre? Would he have understood the necessity of their actions?

  He wanted to believe otherwise. Every time he saw Joy, he told himself that he was different, but in his heart, he wasn't sure, and in his imagination the same nightmare scenario played out over and over again. He saw himself, a century ago, wearing the white and red of Hierochloe instead of the Primaterre grey, giving the order to send trigger signals to Xanthe – Earth – Mars – and the sweetgrass plains of Gainsborough. He imagined white-and-red Cassimer killing Joy, and he couldn't decide whether it was worse when he was too blind to see – or when he did see and killed her anyway, because it was necessary.

  "You're full of all sorts of bad ideas, Major," Hopewell said, peering through the pod's porthole, "but then, it seems RebEarth are too. This one's got a phoenix on his neck and a facial recognition match in our database. River Haukland, originally of Hypatia. A real murdering scumbag, by all accounts, which probably means he's a bit of a feather-face rock star. I'm guessing he didn't end up on ice against his will, but rather to get a taste of that divinity you're talking about."

  "That's not how this demon works," Rearcross said. "Right?"

  "No," Hopewell agreed, "but these dumb bastards don't know that. If the houseplant is selling them immortality, I bet they're eating it right up."

  Haukland wasn't the only one. Dozens of pods glowed dimly blue, containing the frozen bodies of RebEarthers who had chosen their fate the second they threw their lot in with a thing that might as well be a demon.

  "Terminate them, Lucklaw."

  "One moment, Commander," Tallinn said, turning from a pod with wide eyes. "You're not going to believe this – but I think I just found Justin Markham."

  Facial recognition confirmed it. The aging RebEarth general who had pretended to be king now lay suspended in cold stasis. Red lichen crept over his face and between his slightly opened lips.

  "Stars," Hopewell said, grinning. "Can you believe our luck?"

  "We're privileged to receive such an opportunity to purify the galaxy," Rearcross agreed.

  "Well, yeah. But also, the merits. Check out the bounty on his head! Team split, Lucklaw?"

  The comms specialist rolled his eyes. "Sure, whatever. Permission to execute, Commander?"

  "Negative." A noise drew Cassimer's attention to the right, where a pair of security doors claimed to lead to PSYCH WARD D and ATRIUM. "We've got incoming."

  They withdrew into the shadows behind the lichen greenhouse moments before the atrium door swung open. A forklift whizzed through, accompanied by five armed guards.

  "Going to need you two to uncouple the pods. One at a time, all right? The doc says they'll keep for thirty minutes without power, but let's not push it, lads." The driver of the forklift began to manoeuvre into position in front of Markham's pod. "The big man first, of course."

  One of the assigned RebEarthers set to work at the pod, but the other one hesitated, looking up and down the ward. A thin sheen of sweat covered his face, and his pupils were wide and dark. His fingers tapped against the stock of his rifle, his teeth gnawing on his bottom lip. On some basic stim, or a similar drug.

  "Don't like this. You heard Karelia, someone's inside the hospital, and you know they ain't friendly. They could be anywhere. Why not here, where the water keeps drip-drip-dripping and the red grows so thick I can taste it. Bloody bitter."

  "You should try smoking it instead," said a RebEarther whose forehead had been marked for death by Hopewell. "It's fucking amazing. Gives you visions like you've never seen before. A little taste of eternity, the Bright-Winged One says."

  "No thanks." The stimmed-up RebEarther shuddered. "I'm not putting that shit in my system. I don't like it. And I don't like this place, and I don't think we should–"

  "Nobody gives a rat's ass what you think!" The forklift driver leaned out to shout at him. "Get over there and give Cedars a hand. The longer you stand around chatting, the more likely whoever's in here comes along and ruins our day."

  Speaking of which... Hopewell texted, looking to Cassimer for permission to go.

  Hold.

  Not long, although every breath felt like forever. Just long enough for them to get the cryo pod uncoupled and the forklift turned around. The RebEarther who'd voiced his disapproval of the lichen was the only guard not to turn his back on the ward, and when Cassimer took the shot, he almost felt sorry for the man. He was the only RebEarther to have shown any sort of sense, and now he was gone, the first to die.

  Hopewell ended her two preselected targets and clipped the leg of another. Rearcross finished that one off, making his kill count three.

  "All dead," Tallinn confirmed.

  Not quite. Cassimer took one last look at Markham. A fool in life and a fool in death, but at least he'd be spared the misery of being a fool for eternity.

  "Lucklaw. Execute."

  Three dozen cryo pods spat their prematurely awakened sleepers onto the floor as Cassimer led his team deeper into the hospital. Behind them, the sounds of nails scratching concrete and last breaths choked with vitrified blood. Ahead, a silence that seemed somehow worse.

  * * *

  On approach to the atrium, Cassimer turned a corner and found himself staring at a man who his sensors claimed didn't exist.

  A dark mesh camail obscured a lined face, steel-grey eyes visible between the chain links. His lightweight plate armour was covered in scales that shifted colour to adapt to the surroundings far more convincingly than the basic camo ability of banneret suits. A thermal knife was sheathed on one thigh, a Kali sidearm holstered on the other. The assault rifle in his hands was not trained at Cassimer, but the man was clearly unhappy about the situation.

  "Identify yourself," Cassimer demanded.

  "Captain Lutzen. This is my strike team." He gestured towards five shadowy figures behind him. One of them knelt at a door panel, his lightweave-gauntleted hands working to open it. "And this is my mission that you are interrupting."

  "This hospital is the target of a Bastion op. My op."

  "We know, Commander Cassimer. Our intention was to slip in and out unnoticed, our path never crossing yours. We hadn't expected your team to hunt us down."

  "What is your purpose here?"

  "Classified, Commander. Don't pretend you don't know the drill."

  "Don't pretend you don't know who's in charge." Annoyance prickled the back of his neck, amplified by the stims in his system. Tiny jabs of electricity, fuelling the territorial dispute. He didn't care for Tower, and he certainly didn't care for Tower appearing unexpectedly in the middle of enemy territory.

  That said, in the middle of enemy territory was an important point and one he couldn't afford to ignore. While Captain Lutzen had all the serpentine qualities of a towerman, there was also a touch of field-forged honesty about him. Half-shadow, half-soldier, and fifty percent was better than zero. "We just eliminated Justin Markham. He your target?"

  Lutzen shook his head, an expression of genuine surprise on his face – not that 'genuine' meant anything when dealing with Tower. "Intel suggested he was holed up in a compound near the spaceport."

  "Tower intel. We know? So much for that. Your hubris has sent too many Bastion men to their deaths."

  "Take it up with the analysts and the whisper-collectors. I'm just the guy who gets kicked out of my bunk at four AM and airdropped into hostile terrain without so much as a bowl of cereal for breakfast first." Lutzen's wry smile tugged at the scars around his mouth. "I expect you know what it's like."

  "And I expect you know there's a good chance this hospital is the red demon's headquarters on Hereward. We intend to kill it. Would that goal align with yours?"

  "It wouldn't not align. You suggest a joint op?"

  "The more guns the better."

  "All right, Commander Cassimer." Lutzen extended his r
ight hand; Cassimer shook it, although he didn't care for the touch, no matter how mitigated it was by gauntlets. "Let's do this."

  * * *

  Rain pattered against the atrium's vitro-plastic ceiling, smearing it with streaks of lichen. Floodlights pointed towards a hole excavated in the floor and highlighted the red pauldrons of at least two dozen RebEarthers. There were civilians too, one driving a forklift loaded with crates down a precarious ramp.

  "Another tunnel." Hopewell lay prone next to Cassimer on an upper level walkway that surrounded the atrium, their suit camo adapted to the dirty concrete floor. A guard patrolled the perimeter, one of Lutzen's men following him so closely that it was a wonder the guard couldn't feel the towerman's breath on his neck. "These RebEarthers are worse than rats."

  "They've dug into a subway tunnel," Lucklaw said. The comms specialist was standing well back in a corridor, but his awareness stretched far and wide. "A maintenance track, I think, connecting to the wider city network. A lot of unsecured connections down there. Surveillance cameras, mainly. I'm connecting–"

  Lucklaw paused, tilting his head. A slight flutter crossed his face.

  "Lieutenant?"

  No reply. Unusual. Uncharacteristic, and Cassimer was about to crawl back to check on him when one of Lutzen's men spoke up.

  "Inside the surveillance systems. Sharing footage."

  Blinking fluorescent lights. Crumbling tile and worn tracks. A convoy of open-top terrain vehicles waited in the tunnel, engines running up a smog of exhausts. Trailers were hitched at their rear, likely how RebEarth had intended to carry Markham and the other sleepers to safety. A small crew of workmen loaded crates from the forklift into the first trailer while a woman oversaw. Mid-forties, unremarkable in every way, but that was an illusion quickly dispelled by Cassimer's facial recognition database.

  Her name was unimportant. One hundred and twenty-one years ago, she had boarded the Ever Onward and the second the cryo pod had sealed around her, her life had ended. Another thing wore her skin now, and whatever personality it affected inside this vessel was a patchwork of stolen memories and traits.

  "The demon," he said, although of course, the demon was all around them. It ran in runnels on the roof, it grew in patches on the walls, and fragments of it swirled in the smoke from a RebEarth guard's roll-up cigarette. It was inside his inbox and inside his head.

  "Cut power, concussives? My team enters the tunnel, yours takes overwatch."

  At least Captain Lutzen wasted no time in getting down to brass tacks. Good, but not good enough for Cassimer to trust him with the mission objective.

  "My team rushes the tunnel. Yours provides support. Limit environmental damage. We're here to retrieve fragile cargo."

  "I hear you. My man can handle the hospital systems. Your comms specialist up for crowd control duty?"

  Crowd control – finding and seizing ways into enemy armour and weaponry, and figuring out how to best exploit their weaknesses – was a difficult job, even though it was largely done through scripted processes. Cassimer's primer was loaded with hostile scripts, remnants from his cataphract days, and unusable without a cataphract suit working to boost his cognitive capabilities. It took a mind used to stretching to run crowd control without the aid of a suit or advanced augments, and it took a quick and creative mind to run effective crowd control.

  Lucklaw was good at it. Better than Copenhagen had ever been; better, perhaps, than any comms specialist in Scathach Banneret Company. But now he stood silent, silver eyes staring into the distance.

  "Lucklaw." Cassimer pulled him into the corridor, shaking his shoulder. "Snap to it, Lieutenant."

  "I..." He blinked, his eyelashes long and dark against their silvery backdrop. "Yes, Commander. Crowd control. Got it."

  Got it. As if Cassimer couldn't tell when someone replayed the last minute of audio to cover for not having paid attention. A tiny bubble of blood had formed in Lucklaw's left nostril, threatening to well over.

  "Tallinn, Lucklaw needs a check up."

  "Something the matter?" Tallinn switched smoothly from battle-ready to silken bedside manner, placing a hand on Lucklaw's arm. "Elevated blood pressure. A data transfer spike?"

  He nodded. "It's nothing. I'll be fine. I can handle it."

  "Tallinn?"

  "His vitals are looking okay. I'll keep an eye on him, but I shouldn't worry, Commander."

  "I can do the job," Lucklaw insisted, and Cassimer had no choice but to believe him. Engines revved in the tunnel, fumes puffing over the edges of the hole. A RebEarth guard walked over to stand just underneath their position on the walkway, his voice barely audible over the noise.

  "...third god-damned warning, Cedars. If you guys are still in the women's ward instead of doing your fucking jobs, I'll kick you over to the Primos so fucking fast..." His voice, hot with anger and worry, trailed off. When he spoke again, the anger was all but gone. "Karelia, Fors – we've got a situation in Cryo. No reply from Cedars or the others."

  "We're en route to you, Essex. We should bail while we can," a voice replied over the comms.

  "Without Markham? Are you crazy?"

  "Then you go get him. We'll keep a seat warm for you in the car."

  "You set one foot in this courtyard without Markham, and I will shoot you myself."

  "All right. Fine. We'll go get him, but if the Primos are in there, I swear I'll haunt your ass until the end of time."

  "Or how about you just do what you're supposed to and kill them?" The RebEarther named Essex switched off his comms, giving an exasperated sigh as he turned to his nearest man. "Mother Spirit preserve us. I knew Markham's men had grown fat and lazy on Hereward, but I hadn't expected them to be cowards. With men like that, how are we meant to win this war?"

  Good question, and one to which the man should hurry to find an answer, because one by one, the floodlights died. Darkness fell over the courtyard, save for the milky glow of headlights down in the hole.

  Cassimer vaulted over the railing, dropping fifteen feet onto concrete and landing on his feet in front of Essex. A red diode on the RebEarther's radio cast a weak light. Perhaps instinctively, the man raised it, angling the light towards Cassimer. The last second of his life, and instead of reaching for clarity to find an answer to his question, the man wasted it on horror. His eyes widened as he stared up at a dark visor washed crimson, his boot scraped against the floor as he took a step back. His arterial blood sprayed in a rightwards arc, showering the other guard.

  Hopewell and Rearcross advanced on the hole, controlled bursts of fire finding pre-selected targets. Thin lines of light waved across the courtyard as RebEarthers switched on visor lights and flashlights. Some of them immediately went dark again, as Lucklaw slipped inside their systems. Targeting systems were scrambled, clips spat from guns too reliant on electronics, comms jammed and turned into screeching static. But when Lucklaw jumped from the walkway, he landed on his knees, and when he pushed himself upright, he clattered into Cassimer.

  No time to stop. No time to check if he was all right. The gunners had disappeared into the hole and through the security camera feed linked to his HUD, Cassimer saw wall tiles shatter under an onslaught of bullets.

  "Come on." He grabbed Lucklaw by the shoulder, half-dragging him along. They dashed across the courtyard as RebEarthers died around them, falling quietly and falling screaming to Lutzen and his shadows.

  Inside the maintenance tunnel, lit bright by Hopewell and Rearcross's suit lights, crates lay scattered across the tracks. Lab equipment and lichen spilled onto the ground around the woman who was no longer woman, but vessel. Hopewell's rifle had marked her face and torso, but the gunner hadn't taken the shot.

  "All yours, Commander."

  "Commander," the vessel said, its voice hoarse and thick with cold. "Soldier. Hold your fire. Let us talk."

  He ignored it for the time being, sending instead for Juneau. One of Lutzen's men escorted her to the hole, and Tallinn helped her down. She was shak
ing, her face pale and sweaty, but her lips were set in a thin, determined line, and when she saw the lab equipment on the tracks, her eyes lit up.

  "Check the trailer." He grabbed the woman vessel by the neck, shoving it against the wall to make way for Juneau. It tried to speak, its cracked voice coming out as weak whistles, but he wouldn't listen to it, not anymore. It had moments and he had forever, and nothing it said could change that.

  "The primer prototypes are here. It's been... if I'm interpreting the data correctly, it's been trying to strip integrated Primaterre primers down to their basic building blocks. Theoretically speaking, it could use that data along with the Velloa samples to reverse-engineer our primers down to their rawest form. Unfortunately..." The major hopped down from the trailer, a tablet in one hand and a box of samples in the other. "It hasn't finished decoding the primer, but it has made a great deal of progress. Even if the data is confined to the computers in the back of this trailer – which I highly doubt – deleting it won't change what the demon knows."

  "Losing the Velloa prototypes will put a halt on its plans, though," Tallinn said. "They're as close to our primers as I've ever seen. Where else is it going to get something like that? Manufacturing its own would be nigh-on impossible, even with the data it's collected. The Kalevala spent years and unbelievable amounts of resources to produce theirs."

  "Indeed. Regrettably, time is not an obstacle for this enemy."

  Oh, but it was, if Cassimer had anything to say about it. As Lutzen's shadows began to drop down into the hole, he loosened his grip on the vessel's throat and leaned in close, whispering his hate into its stolen ear.

  "I told Joy about your letters."

  It almost purred at that, a shiver of pleasure rippling through its body. He grit his teeth, swallowed down the revulsion, and continued:

  "She wanted me to give you a message."