Lonely Castles

by S. A. Tholin

  The lake feeding into the marshland was deceptively deep. Cassimer's team had dived two hundred metres into gloomy water to reach their target. It had appeared as a long and bulky shadow, like something out of Joy's stories about the monster in New Inverness. According to Tower, it was a limnology station built for the benefit of freshwater biologists. Centuries-old, predating even the colonists who had been conquered by RebEarth, and its age had been evident in more than rusting locks and crumbling concrete. Murals had depicted people whose importance was long since lost to time, and the slogan repeated throughout the station – BLACK SONG – could've meant anything. A personal name, a war cry, a company or a nation? Cassimer didn't know, nor did he understand the purpose of the dusty relics crowding the rooms, but he wished he could've stayed longer.

  The RebEarthers who had holed up in the station certainly hadn't appreciated it. They'd turned it into a command centre, from which Justina Markham had controlled her father's troops on Hereward. Safe, they'd no doubt thought. They had been wrong.

  "Affirmative," Cassimer said. "Intact and ready to be repurposed, except for section C. A change in exit strategy left that flooded."

  A fine way of saying: we were cornered, so we blasted a hole in the wall and let the lake finish the job.

  "Any evidence of demonic activity?

  "None. The place appeared largely disused. RebEarth must've kept it as a fallback plan only."

  "Quite inventive. Our scanners wouldn't have found it. If Tower hadn't extracted the information from prisoners captured at the spaceport, Markham's daughter could've remained an issue for the foreseeable future. She might even have stood a fair chance at slipping away off-world. Good work handling that little problem, Commander. I assume you can confirm the kill?"

  Shrapnel lacerations from a grenade, burns to her legs and torso. A long trail of blood leading to the closet where she'd crawled to hide. One bullet to the head to end her misery.

  "Confirmed."

  * * *

  Instead of transporting them back to the urban forward base, the Epona wound its way down a familiar track. Pine trees cast a zigzag pattern of shadows on needle-strewn ground. Hopewell's Hill loomed in the distance, its crest pockmarked with artillery impacts.

  The vehicle came to a stop outside the bunker that Cassimer's team had taken three months previously.

  "Feels like forever since we were here," Hopewell said, and she wasn't wrong.

  The Bastion officer looked to his tablet. "All right, so: Lieutenants Rearcross, Wedlake and Quick – your ride is over there." He indicated another Epona. "You're temporarily reassigned to Polmak's banner. Sergeants Skye and Keszthely, you are to remain here awaiting Commander Ilminster's orders."

  "Hey, what're you talking about?" Hopewell folded her arms. "You can't just split the team like that. Rearcross is my partner. Where I go, he goes."

  "Unfortunately," Rearcross said.

  "See? He's even started to develop a sense of humour. We're staying together."

  "Direct your grievances to Bastion Command, not me." The officer shrugged dismissively. "Lieutenants Hopewell and Lucklaw, Captain Rhys, Commander Cassimer – report to LZ-9."

  "Why?" Hopewell looked at Cassimer as though she wanted him to find out, but he knew better than to ask – whatever this was, the Bastion officer wouldn't know, and whatever this was, they had no choice but to comply.

  * * *

  A shuttle waited for them, anonymous and mouse-like among troop transports and gunships. A man stood outside its open airlock, smoking a cigarette. Thick black hair fell to his shoulders in a style almost criminally in breach of regulation. When the team approached, he flicked the cigarette to the ground and stood on it.

  "Captain's expecting you," he said, wincing as though speaking hurt. "In the cockpit."

  Cassimer ducked into the shuttle. Its interior was equally anonymous. A bad sign. A definite sign of an impending unofficial, off-the-books mission – the kind undertaken on Primaterre territory. He'd run missions like that before, on Mars and Lysander, but didn't care for the work. Not quite assassinations, but always against some convention or another. Necessary, but distasteful.

  The captain sat in the navigator's seat, her feet propped up on the instrument board, a book in her hands, and the Tower whites looked as beautiful on her as they always did, so beautiful that he wasn't sure that she was real.

  "Captain Somerset?" he ventured.

  "Con–" She paused, put her book down and stood, smoothing her skirt, but couldn't quite kill her smile. "Commander Cassimer. Welcome aboard. Welcome to the team."

  * * *

  The shuttle ascended through a sky streaked with artillery. Cassimer caught a glimpse of scorched woodland lining a crater that had once been a settlement, and then the shuttle was swallowed by thick clouds that flashed orange and white. A series of distant booms reverberated through the hull. Gunships flew past – the first red-and-black, with a tail of smoke; the following trio grey, their guns hot and churning.

  Layers of atmosphere parted like veils to reveal a silent fireworks display. A Primaterre frigate's hull concertinaed under the onslaught of a RebEarth dreadnought, but sleek cutter ships harassed the dreadnought, eating away at its defences.

  Blinding light filled the shuttle's cockpit. The bulkhead rattled, seats shaking. Electricity arced across the navigation console. Joy cried out, and behind Cassimer, Rhys swore as a ceiling panel clattered down on him.

  "What the bloody hell was that?" Hopewell looked wide-eyed at Cassimer.

  "Man-of-war railgun fire," he replied, and the black-haired pilot nodded.

  "Don't worry. They're not targeting us."

  In Cassimer's experience, that mattered very little. But Joy had turned towards him, and she looked so afraid that he couldn't help but downplay the danger: "We'll be out of range soon."

  A Europa Heptarchy fleet was stationed on the outskirts of the battlefield, watching, waiting – ensuring that the Primaterre noticed their numbers and firepower. Joy's pilot had to field a barrage of borderline hostile messages. Yes, their shuttle would be heading straight for the Cascade. No, they wouldn't be making any detours to Heptarchy territory. No, they weren't attempting to scan the fleet. No, a boarding inspection wouldn't be allowed unless the Heptarchy wanted to go through Tower channels first.

  And then they were clear, alone in relatively empty space. The shuttle's scanners detected the system's two dazzling Heptarchy colonies and the less affluent Gustavian world. Cassimer's primer registered signals from all three; music and news and shows that made no more sense than the relics in the limnology station.

  The scanners also showed the Cascade. Their pilot hadn't been bluffing the Heptarchy – they were heading straight for it. It, and whatever this was about. Joy had passed him documentation that showed that Tower had requested him and his men for a joint-op. It also listed her as their liaison officer, but offered no further information. Boilerplate wording, boilerplate authorisation.

  "Can you provide further detail on our mission, Captain Somerset?"

  She turned her seat around and gave him an apologetic smile. "Sorry. My superior will brief you when we reach our base."

  He didn't press the issue. No point making her feel guilty for following orders.

  Hopewell, on the other hand, wasn't so tactful. "You've got to give us something, Somerset. Like, why isn't Rearcross here? There had better be a damn good reason you took me away from my partner."

  "How about a chance to get your old one back?"

  "Florey? Are you serious?"

  "It's up to you, but yeah. We would like for him to be part of this mission."

  "Earth have mercy." Lucklaw, in the seat next to Cassimer, wrenched off his helmet. He held it in shaking hands and took a deep breath. "Mission. This is it, isn't it? The mission."

  "Easy, kid." Rhys fumbled through his belt pouch for a cigarette. "We knew it was coming sooner or later. Though you might've given us a heads-up, Joy."

/>   "I don't think I'm ready for this."

  "Ready for what?" Hopewell asked. "I'm getting the feeling I'm the only one who has no clue, and I don't much like it."

  "You're not the only one," Cassimer said, quietly.

  "You'll be given a choice." Joy gave him an unhappy look, clearly feeling the guilt he'd tried to spare her. "That's all I'm allowed to say. I am sorry."

  "Can you at least give us an ETA?" Hopewell tapped her armrest impatiently. "How long until we get to this base of yours?"

  "We're already there." Joy gestured towards the silver flame-licked viewport. Their shuttle had folded and outside, the receiving Cascade's open petals glimmered darkly. As their pilot set a course for the structure, Cassimer could see broken glass, cracked hull plates and a scattering of ghostly lights. "Welcome to Room 36B."

  55.

  CASSIMER

  Xanthe's two suns were a fractal glow behind ochre clouds. Cumulonimbus clouds amassed at the desert plain horizon, their bases orange where winds kicked up dust, their tops illuminated with storm light.

  Cassimer opened his visor and let Xanthe touch him. Its air, its earth, its light and its shadow. The breeze carried a slight acrid smell. The ground was sun-cracked, rough and uneven, but there were no abyssal cracks, no escaping sulphur, and no wicked laughter.

  Because you haven't gone far enough yet, the fear whispered. Because they're waiting for you to walk deeper into their home.

  "No," he mumbled, shutting his visor. "The demons aren't real. They never were."

  But Xanthe was, and so were the half-buried bones that crunched underneath his boots. It wasn't hell, but it was close enough.

  "You really don't need your suit, Commander." The towerman called Wideawake came walking down their shuttle's ramp, pushing a cart. "There's nothing down here."

  "There's you."

  Wideawake laughed. "And I thought towermen were the ones prone to paranoia."

  "Diligence." Experience. And, if truth be told, a great deal of distaste for the men of Room 36B. If he had known where Joy had been stationed all these months, he would have... well, he wasn't sure what he would have done, or what he could have done. Something. Anything. He'd confronted Rhys about it, but the medic swore that while he had known about Joy's mission, he'd known nothing about the Cascade or Xanthe. Cassimer was inclined to believe him. Perhaps even forgive him. Eventually.

  "It's so quiet." Joy stopped at the bottom of the shuttle's ramp, rubbing her arms as if cold, though the temperature was close to 40 degrees centigrade. "It's stupid, I know, but I'm almost afraid of going out there. Wherever I set my foot, it'll be on someone's grave. What if we stir up more than dust?"

  "Not stupid," he said, holding out a hand to her. "But if the dead are watching, they'll see that we're here to make things right."

  She took his hand and stepped onto Xanthe's yellow soil. A gust of wind whistled through a silo's rust-eaten holes, sweeping a fine mist of sand across the landing zone. Joy turned her face towards Cassimer's chest, hiding herself in his arms, and it was the closest he had been to her in months.

  When the sand settled, Wideawake was staring at them. Frowning, giving Cassimer a look of deep disapproval. Not for the first time since their arrival to 36B, either. Wideawake and Hammersmith had both made their dislike of Cassimer very clear, and seemingly spent half their time keeping him and Joy separated. Understandable, from a mission perspective – but in this moment, on this world, the towerman's glare made Cassimer want to spite them.

  And that was the only reason he stepped away from Joy. Spite had no place between them, and he refused to invite it in.

  "Wait," she said. "Before we enter the settlement, I want you to know that it gets worse. It's going to... it's going to look like your nightmares, Constant. Promise me you'll let me know if it's too difficult. There's no shame in it – the others didn't want to come down here at all; not even Hopewell. If you want to return to the shuttle, it's fine."

  He shook his head. "If it is too difficult, I need you to promise me that you won't let me turn back. No matter what, Joy. I need to see this. I need to feel it."

  * * *

  He loved the Primaterre, his home, his people.

  He loved the Primaterre, and this was its birthplace. The dead whose bones hung like chimes from window frames and the dead whose skeletal hands still gripped steering wheels; they had, unwittingly, been the first of his people. They were the bloody sacrifice from which a great community had been born, their genocide intended to reshape the future of humanity.

  They were more Primaterre than their murderers could ever be, because to be Primaterre was to be pure, and to be pure was to serve, to strive; to preserve and protect. Even Hereward wouldn't meet a fate like Xanthe's. Its people would be offered second chances, its forests regenerated. There would be blood and fire and ash – but it wouldn't be left like that. Not like Xanthe.

  What had happened here was an act of war, the first strike in a century-long campaign against the Primaterre people, and Cassimer, who loved the Primaterre and had never been anything but a soldier, knew only one way to respond to such an assault: with uncompromising force.

  "In here." Wideawake turned his cart, its wheels squealing in protest, through the open gates of a mall. "One set of escalators down, then two lefts to the toy shop. Let it never be said that Hammersmith doesn't have a sense of humour."

  A gauntlet of ruined shop fronts flanked them. The vaulted glass ceiling above the main walk had shattered. Yellow sand piled high, welling from half-buried stores. The corruption–

  No. The trigger signal. Cassimer forced himself to accept the truth. He had to perceive Xanthe with clarity.

  The trigger signal had wreaked havoc in the mall. The signs of violence were everywhere, and this was what the Hecate would have looked like if she'd been abandoned adrift for a hundred years. This was how her passengers and crew would have decayed; that skeleton over there, the one who had scribbled his last thoughts on the wall before he died (none of them good thoughts) – that one could have been him.

  "Hey. Look at this." Joy brushed the dust from a book and handed it to him, making no comment on how badly his hands were shaking.

  "Architect Ships – A History of New Worlds." It was by the same writer as the book he'd checked out from the banneretcy library; the book he'd let Joy borrow. A nice edition, hard-cover and large, with (its cover promised) over fifty thrilling illustrations.

  "Yes, and look here." She opened the book to the title page. A dark ink signature was scrawled across it in a nearly illegible rendition of the writer's name. Underneath, a small dedication: to the reader who wonders, who yearns, who dreams and who learns. "You should keep it."

  "It wasn't meant for me."

  "It might as well have been."

  It might as well have been. The bookstore was a tangle of fallen shelves and paper swollen with damp. A water pipe had sprung a leak a long time ago, mould discolouring the back wall. Bunting hung across the shop's central aisle, the banner bleached and its message lost, but for a few letters:

  SI NING ODA !

  But Cassimer could see what it had once been. Walls painted in bright turn-of-the-century fashion, the shelves bare metal not because it was cheap, but because the stripped-back look had been the style at the time. Physical books had been as much a luxury item back then as they were now, and he wondered how well the bookstore could possibly have fared on a remote mining world like Xanthe. Had it been on the verge of closing down? Or had the miners spent their hard-earned wages on books?

  Yes, he decided, and at once the store was full of people. Their fingers were stained by yellow soil, their hands rough from manual labour, but when they weren't down in the deep dark underworld of Xanthe, they came to the bookstore to buy leather-bound pocket universes.

  "I could have lived here with you," he said to Joy. If he had, it wouldn't have mattered whose uniform he wore. He wouldn't have helped Hierochloe end worlds. He would never have looke
d into honey-brown eyes and pulled the trigger.

  "In a little under a thousand days, you can live with me someplace much better. Somewhere not covered in dust would be nice for a change."

  And suddenly his imagined horizon took shape, found colour and sound and warmth, and though the mall's old escalators creaked underneath his weight and the darkness below was compact, he knew he walked a path that would lead him to the light.

  "Over here." Wideawake waited in the doorway of a shop. The crooked sign read: LOTTIE'S TOY CHEST. Perhaps the towerman saw the hesitation on Joy's face, because he added: "We cleared it out years ago."

  The implication that there had been things to clear out was bad enough, but Wideawake was right. Cassimer's suit lights revealed only toy-laden shelves.

  "The walls were painted recently." Joy touched her fingertips to the stark white surface.

  "Yes. Try not to think about it." Wideawake wheeled the cart towards the back of the shop. "Let's not spend any more time here than strictly necessary. Come on, help me load this up."

  The backroom shelves were stocked with toys of a more familiar kind. Nerve gas canisters. Vials containing biological agents far more unpleasant than Caldean fever. Fission grenades and high-burn phosphorous grenades that burned for hours instead of seconds.

  "Quite the arsenal."

  Wideawake nodded. "For quite the mission."

  "We've not been made privy to any details yet. What exactly should I tell my men to expect?"

  "Anything," Wideawake said curtly.

  We don't know. Joy glanced nervously at Wideawake as she texted Cassimer, as though afraid the man was listening in. An army, or nothing at all, or anything in between.

  All right, he replied.

  All right?

  My team and I will assess the situation as it unfolds.

  You're not worried?

  About work? No. Cassimer leaned in and whispered in her ear: "An army or nothing at all – we know what we're doing."