Lonely Castles

by S. A. Tholin

  "None of your business," Cassimer said. Perhaps thirty-eight bullets would be enough after all.

  "For a while it was. It told us things. Grand plans for the future, which I'm sure were mostly bullshit, but it also told us about a Primo woman who it claims as its own. It showed us pictures and told us her name is–"

  "Quiet." One syllable of her name in Kivik's mouth and thirty-eight would definitely be enough.

  "As I suspected: personal reasons. Then maybe you can understand that my own reasons for hating it are no less significant. It's destroying RebEarth. The cause, the movement, the message – all of it, dismantled by a talking plant. I don't know what battles you've fought against this thing, Primo, but know that I have fought too. Fought and lost, yes, but the war's not over yet. I can regain my fleet. I can reassert power. I can be for RebEarth what you are for the Primaterre, and this time, we fight the same enemy. Once it's dead, we can resume killing each other. Perhaps I'll even give you the hero-versus-villain showdown you crave."

  Cassimer craved no such thing, nor did the Primaterre need RebEarth assistance. But he had lost Kiruna and he had lost Tallinn, and the entire company had suffered losses on Vadgelmir. Kivik might chalk that up to shit happens, but Cassimer knew better. They had died to the unexpected, and such deaths were preventable only through preparation and intel. In that regard – and that regard alone – Kivik the Shipwrecker was temporarily invaluable.

  * * *

  "The primer jammers are through there." Kivik raised his shackled hands, pointing towards a door. "Memory will have posted a guard."

  "Six men." Cassimer checked his guns. Thirty-five rounds left. Plenty. The bigger problem was the darkness blurring his vision, and how his injured leg occasionally refused to obey. There was something wrong with his hearing, too, and in truth, he wasn't sure if there were six or eight RebEarthers on the other side of the door. He'd not missed a shot yet, but the last RebEarther they'd run into had managed to put one in him, too. Just a through-and-through to his left bicep, but the squelching of blood between his fingers was an unpleasant reminder of mortality. "Room layout?"

  "Used to be the quartermaster's office. An office at the front, one desk to the right. A larger equipment cage in the back, separated from the office space by a steel mesh. The door to the cage is directly opposite the entrance. That said..." Kivik grimaced. "I haven't had cause to board the Host Fetter in quite some time, and Memory likes to redecorate."

  Cassimer had noticed. Hardly an inch of the ship's original Andromedan austerity remained. The mural on the corridor's walls was a swirling chaos of red birds pecking the flesh of dark-armoured foes, and black birds silhouetted against a backdrop of flames. Memory's own bird, with crimson and ebon feathers, appeared once, Earth cradled in its talons.

  "Maybe the direct approach is unwise." Kivik watched a droplet of blood fall from Cassimer's knuckle to the floor. "I have an idea, but it requires a modicum of trust. You need to remove these shackles, for starters."

  "No."

  "Come on. Don't be stupid – the plan is to disable the jammers so you can connect with your people, yeah? Won't do you much good if you bleed out before they get here. I'm not going to pretend that you can trust me, but these fuckers kept me locked up and starved for weeks. You better believe I want to voice a violent complaint or two." He held up his hands. "Take off the shackles and put them on yourself. Keep the guns if you like, but hidden. We'll pretend you're my hostage. You've seen Feed the Eagle, yeah? You know the scene where Lucette pretends to be Eyvind's hostage so they can talk their way into the villain's headquarters and kill them all? Let's do that."

  "Got any ideas you didn't see in a movie?"

  "Does it matter where I got it from? It's a good idea."

  Good or not, he'd never let a RebEarther shackle him. He shook his head, and Kivik sighed.

  "You got a better idea?"

  No. But he did have a more honest one.

  * * *

  The door slid open and six pairs of eyes (six after all, and Cassimer was glad that he had been right, glad that he was still able to do his job) stared at them; six guns turned on them.

  Cassimer stepped into the room, one arm around Kivik's neck, the other pressing a gun to the RebEarther's temple. Hostage or human shield, depending on how things went.

  "Shipwrecker." A woman leaned against a desk, arms crossed. Younger than the other guards, but undoubtedly in charge. Her armour, as sleek as Memory's, was embellished with a silver shimmer. Bleached hair fell to her shoulders, a wreath of red-and-black feathers tattooed along her hairline. "Why am I not surprised to see you out of your cell? Slippery like a god-damned eel. I told Memory to cut your feet off if she wanted to keep you, but she obviously didn't listen."

  "She doesn't anymore, does she? Not to me, not to her corpse-pickers. Not even to you, Mist," Kivik said. "Only to the Bright-Winged One."

  "Oh, I recognise that voice you're doing. Sweet Kivik; cajoling Kivik. You think you're going to make me feel sad, Leo? That I'm going to say, why yes, Captain Black has been quite the bitch recently, so let me betray her for the biggest bastard in the galaxy?" Mist's smile was knife-sharp and wry. "No, no. I think I'll settle for cutting you down at the ankles. You, and the Primo cunt. Got a first aid kit in here somewhere, so don't worry, we'll bandage him up nicely."

  "There's nobody I'd rather have chop off my feet than you, Mist, you know that. Sure hands, pretty smile, dirty mouth – when the Mother Spirit birthed you, the stars must've wept at the perfection. But do you even hear yourself? You're going to kill me, but keep the Primo alive? Heretical, Mist, and worse – disappointing."

  This had better be going somewhere quickly. Cassimer ran through alternate scenarios. He'd shoot the woman called Mist first. She was about the same age as Joy, but the path she had gone down so different. Joy had asked him once: "What if I had met RebEarth before you?", as if she were one bad choice away from becoming a slaver and torturer. He had told her then that she was nothing like them, and looking into Mist's eyes, he knew that it was true. A person always had a choice, and Joy, she might not always make the right ones – stars knew nobody did – but she always tried to make the kindest one.

  In a sense, so would he.

  "Those are my orders." Mist shrugged, and where her bone-white hair touched her armour, the shimmer dyed it the colour of moonlight. "Okay, fair enough – Captain Black would rather you live long enough to be paraded in front of the Victual Brothers, but she's not going to be too upset if I have the fun I'm owed."

  "Owed? There was a girl once, a little runaway who couldn't decide whether she wanted to kill herself or everyone else. When the waystation she was squatting in got raided, she was meant to be sold into slavery along with the other survivors, but I saw something in her, a wild spark that it would be a sin to chain. I took pity on her, didn't I? Took her onto my ship and into my crew, and yes, I suppose you might make the case I took advantage."

  "Do us a favour and pull the trigger, Primo?" Mist leaned to the side, arching her eyebrow at Cassimer. "Can't stand this fucker acting all civilised. Took advantage? Fuck you, Leo. You didn't take anything from me I'm not better off without. What you owe me for is promoting me to Station Overseer and pretending it was a big honour, something I'd really earned, when really you just wanted me off the Stortebecker so you could fuck the fresh meat undisturbed."

  "That wasn't you, though. That was Vanessa. Remember her? A quiet girl, always thinking, always doing her job right. But the work we do on the Stortebecker wasn't good for her. Last time I saw her, she had a fresh cut across her ribcage. Couldn't cut her arms anymore; too much scar tissue. So yeah, what I did to Vanessa was despicable, I'll give you that. I owe her – but that was before she bleached her hair and changed her name and remade herself to suit Memory's fancies. Mist? I don't owe her a god-damned thing."

  A light calm settled on Mist's face, and Cassimer readied himself. She was no violent fire like Memory, but a cold and deep curre
nt. She wouldn't order her men to kill them. She would do it herself, and he could see her fingers tensing around her gun. Calculating the risks, deciding on who to shoot first. Him, if she was smart, and he thought she was.

  "And yet," Kivik said, "I'm here to offer you everything you ever wanted."

  "Don't look like you're in a position to offer much of anything."

  "You'd be wrong. I can offer you your life, for starters. Memory put you on jammer watch? You know the Primos are going to come here sooner or later. You tell me, how do you rate your chances?"

  "Any chance to kill a Primo is good enough for me. Besides, we've got backup coming. Two Victual Brother cruisers will be here in the next twenty minutes."

  "Memory's got backup coming, you mean. She's gone to the station, right?"

  "There are weapons–"

  Kivik shook his head. "No weapons. Nothing but cans of Vits. Oh, and a panic room."

  "A what?"

  "The station might look like floating garbage, but I had the core reinforced and rebuilt strong enough to withstand railgun fire. There's life support, supplies, hell, even hot water. Memory could be having a nice steaming shower right now, soaping herself up safe in the knowledge that by the time her hair's dried, the Primos will either be gone or dead. Of course, she'd prefer them dead and Cassimer in her possession still, which is why she's told you to stand guard here." He laughed. "And you think I made you look like an idiot."

  "Bullshit."

  "Is it? If Memory ever cared about anyone but herself, that all ended the moment she met the Bright-Winged One. Another humiliation for you corpse-pickers, am I right? You spend your lives playing on the emotions of others, and now your illustrious leader has gone and been seduced herself. Embarrassing."

  "It's a spirit, not a man."

  "Does it matter?"

  Mist didn't need long to think about it. "So what exactly is the offer on the table, Kivik?"

  "Mist," one of the other RebEarthers protested, but she shut him down with an icy glare.

  "Tell her, Primo."

  "There is a banneret team onboard your ship, working their way through fast and efficiently. They will show no mercy. They are here for me and my medical officer. Once they have what they came for, they will leave, but to locate us, they will want to disable the primer jammers. They will come here, and they will kill you all."

  "Or we'll kill them," Mist said.

  He could have told her that her armour might as well be a nightgown for all the good it'd do against the standard banneretcy arsenal, or how the team wouldn't need to fire a single round, that they had explosives and chems and knives that would do the trick just as well. He could have told her how, when faced with a locked compartment, his team had once climbed the outside of a ship and painted the hull white with cutting gel. It had eaten through to the enemy's position, and he had watched as hostile after hostile had come floating out and away.

  He could have told her so many stories, but he simply repeated: "They will kill you all."

  "Unless of course," Kivik interjected, "they have no reason to come here."

  "You mean disable the jammers?"

  "Destroy the jammers," Cassimer said.

  "Okay. So we survive, and then what? Hope Memory's in a forgiving mood?"

  "No. You take the ship," Kivik said.

  "Mutiny?"

  "Never. It's my fleet, as is the right to name a new captain. How about it, Captain Vanessa Northrup? You take the ship and rejoin the main armada, and I'll give you your choice of crew. Hell, you can even choose a new ship, if you like. Nothing like a gun to the head to make me feel generous. I'll give you the authorisation codes so no one will question your new rank. All you have to do is destroy the jammers, hole up in here, and then kill Memory. Now, don't think I'm trying to butt in or tell you how to run your own ship or anything, but if I were you, I'd probably put a bullet in Sully. The man's a big time Memory loyalist."

  "Hey, fuck you, Kivik." The RebEarther who'd objected earlier stepped forward, his cheeks burning red underneath his bushy beard. "I'm–"

  Mist gave a discrete nod, and a female RebEarther slit Sully's throat. He fell to the floor, gurgling as blood pooled around the new captain's feet. Runnels slithered across the room, touching Kivik's boots and Cassimer's bare feet. A deal had been struck, signed in blood.

  "And, nothing personal, but maybe Gary too," Kivik said, and a squat man at the back of the room didn't even have time to protest before he too lay dead. "Not that he was a fan of Memory, but–"

  "But he's wearing a jacket that costs more than he makes in six months. Yeah, Leo, I'm not blind. I only kept him around because I assumed he was leaking intel to you."

  "He was on my payroll, that's true, but I don't pay my informants that well."

  "Nor your captains, if Memory's to be believed."

  "I'll consider giving her successor a raise."

  46.

  JOY

  Light strips guided her through the air ducts like the breadcrumb trail of the old fairy tales. She wasn't a child, nor lost in the woods, but there were worse things than witches where she was going.

  He spoke to her, the bitterness in his voice unmistakable even over the speaker system. His voice filled the duct, wrapping itself around her, and she remembered what it was to be utterly alone.

  "You shouldn't have come here. This isn't your place, not the part you're meant to play."

  Constant had hunted Skald for months, but she hadn't seen or heard from the entity since Cato. Only in her nightmares, and now they all came back to her. The taste of him, the weight of him, his cruel indifference as he'd peeled back the layers of her mind.

  "Stay where you are, locked away for safekeeping. Wait for this to end. My people won't kill you. You are safe, little sister, so long as you don't–"

  His voice cut out when the power died. The air duct echoed with sharp bangs as vents automatically sealed. Don't move? She'd be dead already if she hadn't. Skald was as vast as the sea, but he wasn't all-knowing. That was encouraging, and when she worked open a vent and dropped from darkness into more darkness, she left her nightmares behind.

  She landed on her feet, her fingertips brushing the floor. Her comms were still jammed. Gunfire echoed close by, but she couldn't tell from which direction. She'd heard Skald, though, heading astarboard.

  She gripped her Morrigan, told herself she was a hunter, and hurried after her prey.

  * * *

  She caught up with Skald in time to see him enter an airlock. The black-haired woman was with him, and that was good. Joy didn't care for her at all.

  It was funny how first impressions worked. With Constant, she'd known immediately that whatever else he was, he was someone she could rely on. When she'd got her job at the botany lab, she'd known that Elodie was going to be her friend even though they had little in common. And the black-haired woman... Joy could tell that she was the worst kind of cruel – sort of what her lab supervisor might've been like if unbound by law and polite society. He'd had to settle for taking out his sadistic urges on junior staff, suddenly rescheduling shifts or criticising their work until they broke down in tears. If he'd been RebEarth instead of a Senior Botanist, Joy suspected he might have had all manner of unpleasant ideas.

  But he had never made her cry, and neither would this woman.

  She waited for the airlock to reset, then another minute to make sure she wouldn't alert them to her presence, and then she went through, tentatively stepping into a metallic tube that formed a bridge between ship and station. The material was pliant, moving like a quaking bog. She tried the walls for support, but they were cold enough to bite through her gloves.

  She stumbled through the tube, sending ripples ahead, and tried not to think about how it was all that separated her from space. Halfway across, the ship's gravity field ended. For a few metres, she floated – and then the station's gravity field took over, dropping her onto a floor that buckled and swayed, stretching so thin it looked
sheer.

  The station's external lock was old, and instead of buttons or panels, it had a wheel to turn. Freezing cold, so cold that it did more than bite. Pain shot through her palms and fingers, until there was no pain at all because her nerve endings had died. But the wheel turned and the airlock opened, and she could still move her fingers – just not feel anything, and she really didn't want to take off her gloves and look at the damage.

  The station's interior was nearly as cold. It had gravity, but the only other nod to life support was a low supply of oxygen. Her breathing turned rapid, her heart pounding against her ribs as she navigated the crumbling structure, following the sounds of voices and footsteps towards its centre. When the voices were abruptly cut short, she crept around the next corner and found a door that looked as out of place as a gingerbread house in the woods. It was solid, shiny and modern. Its lock glowed a welcoming green.

  She shouldn't enter without Polmak or Hopewell – but she had to.

  * * *

  The RebEarth colours couldn't hide the fact that the station's core was a very familiar place. The entrance was a decontamination chamber, the doors gas-tight and secure. Every surface was smooth metal, the floor curved to ensure a sealed shell.

  The inner door clanked against an office chair used as a door stop. The decontamination procedure had either been disabled or was malfunctioning. Jackets hung from hooks on the walls, a crate of shoes shoved to one side. What had once been the high security, clinical interior of a modular bio-lab had been turned into an untidy panic room.

  The next area was the shower room, and while it still served that function, it was like no laboratory shower Joy had ever seen. Her old botany lab had hardly been a hotbed of infectious agents, but even there the safety protocols had been stringent. Certainly, they'd never have been allowed to keep hair care products in there, and the mouldering pile of towels in a corner would definitely have been classed a biohazard.