Lonely Castles

by S. A. Tholin

  "Stars, Kyle. You're making me tear up here. But – no disrespect to your grandmother – let me offer an alternate perspective. Have you considered that maybe, just maybe, the demons tasted Rearcross blood once and thought well, that's quite enough of that?"

  He laughed, and she was glad, because mercy, she really was on the verge of tears. Daneborg leapt into the vehicle, bullets melting against his reactive plates. Rearcross leaned out the door, squeezed the trigger and–

  –a wave of heat and pressure swelled over the armoured vehicle. Shrapnel and gunfire pounded it, lacerating Hopewell's armour, and she pressed her foot down hard on the accelerator. The vehicle lurched forward, tearing free from a clamp that hadn't been fully cut through. Rearcross slammed the door shut.

  The ramp was still attached to the ship, flapping up and down, but she floored it, speeding through – felt her stomach flip as the ramp tossed the vehicle upwards – and then they were in the air, falling, plummeting, through a night sky streaked bright with the shooting stars of airdropped cataphracts.

  They landed hard, a loud crack reverberating through the vehicle. Something dragged behind them, scraping up sparks, one wheel pulled hard to the right and the suspension was stone cold dead, but the vehicle was still moving, groaning and complaining, but moving.

  She laughed, and when Daneborg slipped into the seat next to hers, she could swear a slight smile tugged at his lips.

  "Could somebody who knows how to do it please tag this vehicle as Primaterre? Don't want the cataphracts to light us up," she said. "And Daneborg, find me the quickest route out of this hellhole."

  * * *

  Not too far from the city limits, they passed a street where two cataphracts had made landfall. One was rampaging through a fortified building; the other had torn a great gouge in the street and was filling the subway below with fire from its mounted flamethrowers.

  Hopewell slammed on the brakes and, ignoring her teammates' objections, jumped out of the vehicle.

  "Hey!" She walked down the street, waving her arms at the cataphract with the flamethrowers. It was a fifteen-foot armoured behemoth, grey and inhuman, and it turned its featureless head in her direction. "Yeah, I'm talking to you, big guy."

  It ceased its fire and stood silent as black smoke licked its hulking body.

  "I'm with Scathach Banneret Company, under Commander Cassimer's banner. RebEarth troops captured him and our medic at a hospital in the centre of the city. We had to..." She bit her lip. "We had to fall back, but if you get the chance... he was one of you, once. Please, if you can – rescue my people."

  She hurried back to the vehicle, her heart beating hard against her ribcage. Florey might've been right about cataphracts being shields and not swords, but standing in one's shadow was terrifying. A monster had stared at her, its destructive power so great that it made her feel like nothing at all.

  But when she reconnected the ignition wiring and the vehicle's engine started up, something cool washed over her systems, wiping away whatever the towermen had done. In the back seat, Rearcross cheered weakly as his comms came back online, and in her ears, a calm voice spoke: "Last known location?"

  She passed the coordinates along and kept her face sternly turned from the team for fear she might cry. Maybe cataphracts were monsters, but they were monsters on the right side of things. Her side.

  "It's going to be okay," she assured the team. "They'll go get the commander and Tallinn. No such thing as a former cataphract, right, and they'd never leave one of their own behind. They'd never..." And now she really was crying, and she hated herself far too much to stop Daneborg when he placed a comforting hand on her shoulder.

  39.

  JOY

  A noise woke her from restless dreams. She reached for her Morrigan, but it wasn't on her bedside table or in the drawer, and the only thing underneath her pillow was A History of Earth.

  "It's in your locker." Hammersmith stood in the doorway. He switched the lights on, but when she winced, shielding her eyes, he dimmed them down to almost nothing.

  He pulled up a chair and took her arm. Her skin crawled at his touch, and her hand went to her stomach. It had been... she wasn't sure how long it had been since the Sol Cascade, actually. With Lucklaw's help, she'd installed the signal blocker, and then she'd half-shoved, half-dragged a groggy Elsinore back to the shuttle. Lucklaw had still been with her, helping her use the shuttle's auto-pilot to return to their previous location. He hadn't left her until the fold completed. She remembered seeing the Tower monitor ship come into view, and then... Then she couldn't remember much more. At some point, somebody had brought her back to her quarters in Room 36B, and she'd spent days in there, cut off from the outside world.

  "Show me." Hammersmith nodded towards her stomach as he pressed a jet injector to her arm.

  She obeyed, reluctantly lifting her shirt. There was no scar, not even a mark. The internal injuries had taken longer to heal – not that anybody had told her, but she'd felt the twinges of pain, the creeping feeling of being knitted back together from the inside out.

  Hammersmith placed his hand on her stomach and held it there for the few seconds his lightweave gauntlet needed to perform a scan.

  "Good." He shone a light in her eyes. It stung – her eyes still photosensitive – but not nearly as bad anymore. "Better. The med-techs recommend you start using your primer again, slowly. Don't overdo it."

  She nodded and wondered if she should say something. The silence was starting to feel awkward, but what was there to say to this strange man that he did not already know? She picked up her borrowed book instead, clutching A History of Earth to her chest like a shield. It was still pristine, its only two readers both careful people, but it no longer felt unread.

  Hammersmith made to leave, but stopped at the doorway, his back to her.

  "Thank you for not killing him," he said. "Any other mission, any other operative, I would have executed him myself. It would have been justified."

  "But not necessary."

  "I'm glad you see the distinction."

  "Glad? He thinks you hate him. That's partly why he did what he did."

  "Hate him?" Hammersmith turned, his eyes gleaming gold and silver. "I've known him since he was an infant. A child to all of 36B, our son and future. But the road to the future has been long and it has been hard. Mistakes have been made – some of them mine, some of them his. When I look at him, all I see are those mistakes. My own, especially. But I don't hate him."

  No. He hated himself. "You should be telling Elsinore this, not me," Joy said. "You should've told him a long time ago."

  "Another mistake. I'd apologise to you, if I believed an apology would suffice."

  "And I'd accept the apology if there were one."

  He grimaced at that. "You understand that you must continue to work with him? The mission requires it."

  "I'm here to solve problems, not cause them." And the quicker the problems were solved, the quicker she could be out of here and away from these people. She could bear Elsinore in her head – she'd had far worse poking around in there, after all – but the thought of being near him physically made her ill. She hadn't forgotten the crush of his fist, nor the way he had enjoyed the violence. "But I don't want to be alone with him again."

  "I'll rouse one of the analysts."

  "Analysts? What about Lutzen?"

  "Lutzen." Hammersmith's face hardened. "The Hesperia returned the way she always does. A failure."

  He left the room, and she was left wondering what that meant, exactly. Nothing good, for sure, and her stomach churned with worry for the man who smoked the same brand as Rhys, and who had promised to pass advice to Constant.

  But the important thing was that she could use her primer again. She put down her book, slipped out of bed and tiptoed across the room to collect her Morrigan from the locker. Its weight in her hands made her feel safer, the glimmering Libra a touch of the balance she so desperately needed.

  A single
throb of pain in her temple heralded the activation of her primer. Once her dreary quarters were painted with colour and sound and motion, she looked toward the half-smiling Constant to find courage.

  Thoughts of him were far more comforting than the Morrigan, the memory of his touch a dancing crackle of electricity on her skin. He wanted her to be safe – but for him, she had to risk everything.

  "I will right the wrong, Constant," she promised. "I will set you free."

  To that end she connected to Room 36B's systems and activated the scripts Lucklaw had written for her. He'd built them from scratch, reverse-engineered from the code in the signal blocker, combined with some extra things that he had somehow snatched from Elsinore via her connection to the towerman. She wasn't quite sure what he had done, but he had assured her that there was no way it'd be detected.

  Considering that no alarms had gone off, and Hammersmith hadn't rushed back in, she supposed he must've been right – and now Room 36B weren't the only ones to have a backdoor into systems designed to be impenetrable.

  * * *

  "Where is Lutzen?"

  Hammersmith, lunar blue in the light of the plasma moat, shrugged. "Dead. The entire team, all gone."

  "Dead?" Before she had the time to so much as react to the news, Hammersmith pressed a tissue into her hand. Vaguely offensive, but not entirely unwarranted as it turned out. She hadn't known Lutzen well, but compared to the other towermen, he had always seemed reliant. A pillar to lean on, or in whose shade she'd at least felt safe, and now that pillar was turned to rubble. "What happened?"

  "We had a lead on a primer sample. It did not go well."

  "So... what do we do now?"

  "The mission continues. Wideawake is making progress on his side of things. We will find new ways to achieve our goals."

  "But there's hardly any of us left. We can't go to Earth on our own. We don't know what's down there and without the strike team... apart from you and me, do any of our team even have combat experience?" The dour look on his face gave her the answer. "And to be honest, any team that counts me as muscle is doomed to fail."

  "We've suffered setbacks before. We will recover."

  "We will commit suicide, more like it. Go ahead if you want it so badly, but I'm not dying with you."

  "You don't have a choice. You obey orders, and that's the end of it."

  "You say that, but you don't really mean it."

  "Excuse me?"

  "Your last expedition to Earth ended in disaster, and you never recovered. Yeah, you've kept the mission going, but this place – this cause – it died that day. Room 36B is a ghoul, shambling on out of sheer stubbornness, but that won't stop the decay. I know you don't want Elsinore to die in vain like his father did, and I know you don't want me to die for no good reason. Above all, I know that you don't want to die to an enemy that never even knew you existed. You want this war, and you want to make them feel the hurt they've caused. You want to take your pain and make it theirs."

  "My pain." He scowled. "You know nothing."

  "Please. One broken heart recognises the beat of another. You don't have to tell me anything – you don't need to. Finn tells me all I need to know. The life I shared with him, the life I must live without him. We're both living in the aftermath of loss, Hammersmith; I see that clearly."

  "Doesn't matter. Can't change the past, or the path we've chosen."

  "But it does matter. You called Elsinore the future, but how can he be when he sees no future for himself? He has no hope, no faith, and because of that, he will follow your destructive path. In trying to make him what you wanted him to be, you ensured he never could be." She paused for a deep breath, trying to still her nerves. She hadn't expected an opportunity to arise so soon, but she had to seize it. At least this way, poor Lutzen wouldn't have died in vain. "But I do have hope for my future, and I don't want a war – I want to win the war. And I want to do it for the same reason you are still here – because I care."

  Hammersmith was quiet for a long while. When he finally spoke again, he sounded so tired that her heart ached for him.

  "So what do you suggest?"

  "We recruit. I recruit," she corrected herself. "We need a strike team to replace Lutzen's. People with combat experience. People who don't even blink at limited-intel drops into hot zones. And, most importantly, people who have reason to want to go on this mission."

  "No." Hammersmith shook his head. "Absolutely not."

  "Can't beat having a banneret team on your side."

  "Can't trust them, either."

  "You can't trust them, maybe, but I can. I do."

  "With your life?"

  "With the lives of every Primaterre citizen."

  "Even if I allowed this," he said, and she could tell that he was going to, and her stomach fluttered with butterfly wings, "it won't be a full team. We'll still be short."

  "They're banneret men. On Cato, the five of them fought an entire planet and won."

  Five was perhaps a tad optimistic. Rhys and Lucklaw would come, and Constant, of course – he'd show Hammersmith and Wideawake how wrong they were about him. Florey's attendance would be dependent on Hopewell. He certainly wouldn't want to hear from Joy, or his old commander. But Hopewell was persuasive, and Florey... something told her that he would want to see justice done.

  "The fact that they are unyielding Bastion is half the problem. But I see your point; half a team is better than no team. We have leverage over the medic and the admiral's son, so they shouldn't pose a threat."

  "We don't need leverage," she objected, ill at the thought.

  "You don't need leverage, maybe, but we do." He echoed her own words with an unpleasant smile. "The two gunners both have families. A blunt threat is not my favoured tool, but it will do."

  "And I suppose you mean to use me to control Cassimer." She clenched her fists and thought of the scripts working their way through Room 36B's systems. Hammersmith could smile as much as he liked. Worms were gnawing at the shambling ghoul, and those worms belonged to her.

  "The commander was reported missing in action over a week ago. You'll take Lutzen's place, with the mandate to recruit the banneret men, but Cassimer is no longer an option." He turned towards the viewports and crossed his arms. "I told you it would have been better to cut all contact. Too late now. Far too late, but now you'll see. Now you'll understand."

  40.

  CASSIMER

  First, the familiar:

  The satisfaction of a successful mission. The smell of ozone and the sounds of casual chatter as he strapped into a flight harness alongside his men. The sounds of Valletta wincing as Tallinn patched his face up, and Hopewell laughing at her own joke. Rearcross, pretending to understand it, laughed too.

  Silver fire, shifting constellations, and the turning rings of Scathach Station. The med-wing, where techs did preliminary work on restoring his augments. The banneretcy common room. His quarters, and waiting inside the place that was his and his alone, Joy.

  Then, the new and unexplored:

  His quarters were enough at first, but his and Joy's universe soon grew too large to be contained by grey walls. It expanded into Scathach's park and beyond, until the ground underneath their feet was soil, true and deep and rich, and the sun in her hair the light of a real star. Outside of Bastion's walls, he built new ones to keep them safe. He could feel wood and brick in his hands, could see how to turn the materials into a home, and then he felt her warmth against his skin and knew that he was already home.

  He could see her so clearly, waking up next to him, smiling at him, and the sun poured in through the windows or rain pattered against the panes or snow piled on the window sill. The alarm clock played the music that they both loved, and music that she didn't know yet, that he would introduce to her, and he'd have breakfast with her – just the two of them, and how strange that felt, to eat in a kitchen and not a mess. Steel-cut oats, plain, his preferred morning meal – although, she made them; she had to, because he
had never cooked a meal in his life. But she'd teach him, she promised, smiling; she'd teach him, and he would learn how to do all the things he couldn't yet do.

  He stayed with the fragmented dreams long after he knew them to be illusion. The surface under his hands was cold metal, not pliant wood, and the smells were far from the pleasant fragrances of his imagined home. But the pain, though his body screamed with it, couldn't scream louder than the music.

  So he stayed with Joy and could have stayed with her until the pain stopped and the cold took him, but a single, quivering voice did what nothing else could have:

  "Commander? Are you all right?" A brief, bitter laugh followed. Then Tallinn spoke again. "Can you hear me?"

  "I hear you," he said, his own voice so hoarse he barely recognised it. His armour was gone, his jumpsuit stripped away. He lay naked on a floor covered in inch-deep water and waste. Moisture dripped down from the ceiling, needling his skin.

  He coughed, spitting foul water, and tried to sit.

  "Easy, Commander. You've been out of it a good long while."

  A good long while in this filth was far too long. He gritted his teeth and pushed through the pain, forcing stiff, frozen limbs into action. A wall made for decent support, and he leaned back against it, groaning at the cold and the intense jabbing ache in his thigh. The light was dim, but he could see that his wound wasn't fully healed, his skin flushed a deep red where Lutzen had stabbed him.

  Tallinn was inside a narrow cell directly opposite his own. Two sets of prison bars separated them, and two sets of shimmering force fields. She knelt, one hand gripping a titanium bar, the other held protectively across her bare chest. Bruises mottled her face, her nose slightly off-kilter. When he looked at her, she smiled, revealing a missing front tooth.