by S. A. Tholin
"When the Hesperia's crew died, I became head of operations. Sick of needless death and tragedy, I had our tech officer create the signal blocker that is currently protecting us from the priming. In theory, it worked, but we needed to test it. The war on Hypatia gave us an opportunity. Paget had contacts in a RebEarth cell who'd been working to repeat their sister cell's success at taking out the Cascade in Aurvandil. Their plan was to hit Hypatia's Cascade hard, so fast that nobody would have time to react before it went up. Paget and two of our other infiltrators went in with them. Once inside, her team was to neutralise the RebEarth cell, install the blocker and escape on the RebEarth ship. What we didn't know was that a banneret team had entered the Cascade just minutes earlier for a hostile takeover. That was mistake number one. Mistake number two was young Elsinore's. He'd never faced anything so complex as a Cascade system before, and he missed one of the alarms. The entire galaxy was notified the second our team stepped into that Cascade. While the RebEarthers fought the banneret team, Paget had the presence of mind to install the blocker, but when she retreated, the escape ship had already departed. Apparently, its captain's dedication to the cause was not so great as his dedication to his own freedom. And then–"
"You don't need to tell me. I know what happened next."
During a brief ceasefire, Cassimer's Helreginn squad had hunkered down in Hypatia's mountains. Black volcanic rock had been their walls and floor, a smoke-shrouded sky their ceiling. An outcrop had provided a panoramic view of the scorched valley they'd just stormed through and, beyond that, a burning band of ruined cities. It had been dismal enough that even the cataphract troopers had wanted to look at something else – anything else – and when a mandatory broadcast notification had flashed on their HUDs, they'd only been too happy to oblige.
It had been an execution. RebEarth had attacked the system's Cascade, and now an example had to be set. The captured RebEarthers had been marched out one by one. Beaten, their heads shaved, they had been stripped of clothes, dignity and identity. No last words, no speeches, not even a look into the cameras. One bullet to the forehead, and then it was time for the next RebEarther to die.
It hadn't sat right with Cassimer then – public executions were a favoured propaganda tool of RebEarth, not something the Primaterre would usually stoop to – but he had understood that the severity of their crime demanded equally severe punishment.
"You watched it." Hammersmith nodded. "Of course you did. Me too. A glimpse of Paget, nothing more, and then she was gone. Her choice. I wanted to intervene, but Paget decided that the mission was too important to risk. She decided that her life was a small price to pay for the Primaterre people to one day be free. And I..." He looked down at his hands. "I promised her that I would see the mission through. That her sacrifice would not be in vain. And here we are... almost finished. I can only see one potential obstacle."
"I take it you don't mean the hostiles."
"Your summary execution of the project manager may have been justified, but we now suffer the consequences of your rashness. I need to know that you'll follow my lead, Commander."
"You'll keep your promise, Hammersmith. This is important to me as well."
"Yes, but what matters most? Paget chose the mission over me. I have no doubt that Somerset would make the opposite choice. Her priorities are clear – but what of yours? I have two men up there who would kill her on the spot if I ordered them to. I also have evidence implicating you in a capital crime. All in all, I have excellent leverage over you – and yet I've not employed it."
"Threaten Somerset again and your mission ends here."
"Relax, Commander. She's a valued operative. I wouldn't let any harm come to her – especially since I don't think it would make any difference. I think that whatever mission you've got your heart set on, is the mission you will complete, no matter what."
"Hammersmith–"
"Hey, Commander." Hopewell waved at them from the back of the room. "Got something."
* * *
A weapons rack had hidden a hatch in the floor, so heavy it took Florey some effort to wrench it open.
Dark water lapped against the sides of a cylindrical hole. Cassimer's suit lights only succeeded in turning it a milky opaque. The rusted rungs of a ladder descended into the deep. This tunnel was off the map, and that, in his experience, was where unpleasant surprises lurked. His team could wait for the guards to resurface and make their move – whatever it was – or they could follow.
"Stars, I know which way I'm voting." Hopewell looked pale behind her visor.
"We go in," Florey said.
"We go in," Cassimer agreed.
"Right. Yeah. Exactly what I was going to suggest." Hopewell took a deep breath. "Do, don't think. Thanks for the advice, Colonel."
"Rhys, stay behind to disable the cryo pods. Hammersmith, keep watch. If the guards return, fall back to the lab and hold that position." Cassimer holstered his Morrigan and passed his Hyrrokkin rifle to Rhys. The tunnel was going to be a tight squeeze as it was. "Florey, take point."
The gunner slipped into the water with such confidence that it seemed to rub off on Hopewell, who followed without hesitation.
Then it was Cassimer's turn. Velloa's sea had been dead, but this sea was alive, even in this old tunnel, every ounce of it teeming with life. Colonies of barnacle encrusted the algae-furred walls. Tiny creatures swam, bouncing against his armour and shaking dozens – hundreds – of little legs and feelers.
The water sucked at his boots. Hopewell's suit lights were fading into the distance.
He looked up and was met with Hammersmith's metallic stare. There was a question in those cold eyes – the same question that the colonel kept asking, that Cassimer kept answering.
"You have my word, Hammersmith. What else can I give you?"
"A banneret commander's word is the same as the word of the Primaterre; the same as the thing in the tank. I'm speaking to you, but sometimes I think I may as well be speaking to it. That what sits behind your visor is not a man at all, but a mass of writhing tentacles."
A moment of silence passed between them, and it was as though that silence answered Hammersmith's question better than anything Cassimer could have said or done. A flash of decisiveness lit the towerman's eyes, and he slammed the hatch shut.
Cassimer raised his arm to stop it, but the ladder rung he stood on snapped under the sudden force. He slipped – slid downwards into the darkness – grabbed another rung and heaved himself up, pushing against the hatch. It wouldn't budge, and he could hear the dull sound of the weapon rack being pushed back into place.
No exit, no escape. Only the deep and the narrow walls, and the darkness into which Hopewell's suit lights had disappeared.
Only the void, and the scratching of thousands of little legs and feelers.
62.
JOY
The Prime Mover cast long branching shadows. The blue light and moving water reflections made the laboratory seem like an underwater forest.
Wideawake wasn't wrong; the Prime Mover was beautiful. Its thin tendrils were ethereal, laced with silver, and its cortex had the intricate grace of a human brain with finely sculpted folds and crests. The organically-integrated open fold rift that connected it to the Primaterre was invisible to the naked eye, but it made the Prime Mover appear otherworldly; half-here, half-elsewhere. It floated like a phantom jellyfish inside an artificial sea, supported by fine metallic wires. Though the hum that permeated the room was just the noise of tank machinery, Joy thought of it as the Prime Mover's song.
But she hadn't been born Primaterre or raised to obey doctrine and to fear the corruption that sought out impure minds. Demons were myth and fantasy, the notion that they might actually exist so foreign that the terror had never taken root in her mind.
When her teammates looked at the Prime Mover, they saw a demon. It didn't matter that they knew it wasn't – the conditioning was too deeply ingrained, the fear burrowed in their bone marrow. Eve
n the pragmatic Juneau could barely stand to be in its presence.
"Pick up the pace, Somerset, because between the colonel and the commander, I see a lot of potential for hasty decisions in regards to the fate of this thing." Juneau gestured towards the tank, her gaze firmly fixed on a monitor where files swished by. What she was doing was more like processing than reading, at speeds that quite frankly were amazing.
Joy's task was more pedestrian. Dozens of folders were laid out on the floor around her, each holding at least five hundred printed pages. It was her job to scan them. Not read them, Juneau had said, as Elsinore set up a link between her and Joy: "Skim each page. Your visual augments will scan the words and pass them onto me. I'm running scripts that'll flag anything that seems pertinent to the situation."
It was a little condescending to be treated like a tool rather than an intelligent person in her own right, but fair enough. It wasn't like she knew anything about psychopharmacology or neuroscience – but she did know one thing better than Juneau.
"If Cassimer was going to destroy the Prime Mover, he would've done it already. He won't risk going against your advice, Major."
"Wagering an awful lot on the patience of a soldier," Wideawake said. "Men conditioned to pull the trigger on a problem rarely see cause to change their ways. Just ask Archer."
"Archer knew about as much about soldiers as you seem to. Basic Training teaches clarity and patience long before recruits even get to hold a weapon."
"With a bit more patience and clarity, Archer would still be alive to tell us about the Prime Mover. The alarms wouldn't be going off and half our team wouldn't be downstairs chasing enemies."
"What's done is done."
"Did you learn that in Basic too?"
She shook her head. That lesson had been hard-won, deep underneath the dust dunes of Cato. In the tunnels and among the unkind, she had learnt that lingering on mistakes was the biggest mistake of all. "Hindsight is a killer, Wideawake, and nothing kills a team quite so fast as dredging up what can't be undone. Accept the situation and handle it."
As if to underscore her point, a barrage of gunfire sounded below. Blue and orange light flashed through the lab's narrow windows.
When it was all over, Joy dared a quick peek. Only a sliver of the channel was visible. A white-armoured body bobbed in the dark water, another sinking, visible only as a pale blur. Hopewell stood on the edge of the channel. When she saw Joy, she signed an 'okay' before disappearing out of sight.
"Our team's all right," she reported.
"For now."
"Wideawake, you're–"
"Right," Juneau interrupted. "The longer we remain here, the greater the chances of something going wrong. We need to speed things up. A more hands-on approach, perhaps. Somerset, get me a specimen of the Prime Mover's tissue. Wideawake, you take over her scanning duties instead of, well, whatever it is you're doing. It looks suspiciously like nothing."
"That is my specialty." Wideawake smiled as he turned from the tank. Where his palms had left foggy prints on the glass, tendrils amassed, as though drawn to his body heat. "But certainly, Major. I'm quite the expert at multitasking, too."
Gloves, mask, biopsy needle, vials, specimen tray. Joy collected the required tools and opened a small access hatch. It had to have been built for this very purpose, or perhaps so that something – nutrients? – could be added to the tank.
The water lock inside the hatch was full. She scooped out a sample, filling a vial, and slid the biopsy needle into the water. A few tendrils moved at the bottom of the lock. Snipping or scraping off a sample should be easy, but–
"I can't do it."
"A child could do it, Somerset. I'm sure a botanist can manage. Think of it as giving a big plant a trim, if that helps."
"No," Joy said, doing her very best to keep her irritation at bay, "I know how to do it. I just can't. It's like it won't let me."
"Hand me that needle."
Juneau approached the task with the heated enthusiasm of someone about to prove themselves superior, momentarily forgetting her distaste for the Prime Mover, but then she took a step back, the biopsy needle empty and dripping with water.
"You're right. It's like there's a mental barrier in place. A protective mechanism, presumably, to keep people from tampering with the thing."
"To keep people from hurting it." That was the impression Joy had got. It was hard to describe – just a sense when she had been about to touch it that she was doing something wrong, that she was about to step on a kitten or drop a baby or some other unthinkable act.
When Juneau had Wideawake and Elsinore try, they both reported similar feelings.
"Well, that's not good. The signal blocker you installed in the Sol Cascade should be protecting us from the Prime Mover's influence. Either it's not working – or the priming is so deeply embedded in our psyche that it no longer matters whether the signal can reach us. It's possible we won't be able to shut this thing down even if we figure out how to." Juneau shook her head, her lips a thin, pale line. "It may be that no Primaterre citizen is capable of harming it, consciously or otherwise. It may be that we came all this way for nothing."
* * *
Joy checked the station crew files to see if any of the staff had yet to receive a primer, but no luck there. Of course not. Every wall of the subterranean station was painted grey, the Primaterre sun adorning doors and equipment. Corporate identity had been everything to Hierochloe, and when they had become Primaterre, they'd simply replaced corporate with national. A civilisation-ending war had been tearing the galaxy apart, and yet these people had taken the time to rebrand, slapping their new logo on everything from stationary to personnel – except the foyer where Archer had greeted Joy.
The foyer was a high-ceilinged, cylindrical space, undecorated but for a floor mosaic of red and white glass tesserae, carefully laid out in the shape of a sweetgrass-emblazoned triangle – Hierochloe's logo. Joy had walked across it with a strange sense of déjà vu.
"It's just a formality, Joy, no need to be so nervous," Finn had said to her once, in a foyer much like it, his anxious adjusting of her jacket belying his words. "They just want to talk to you, to make sure you're not a complete sociopath."
"Okay," she'd replied, a moment later adding: "I'm not, am I? Can you be a sociopath without knowing it? Oh, God. Finn, what if they reject my application?"
"Then I'll smuggle you onboard the Ever Onward in my hand luggage. Don't worry, Joycie, I'm getting you on that ship one way or another."
Her name had been called and he had kissed her forehead, and if she closed her eyes, it was like she was there, surrounded by the past. The quiet whispers of other, equally nervous, prospective colonists. The sound of high-heeled shoes on stone floors; the rustle of papers; the hissing of doors opening, and drifting in from outside, the drone of Kirkclair's relentless traffic. Echoes of time, captured in the amber of her memory.
But when she opened her eyes, she saw Archer's body.
His death had brought Constant a measure of closure. Unexpectedly, it had done the same for her. The transformation seemed complete now. Joy Somerset, the junior botanist from Kirkclair, was as much a part of the past as the world she'd known. Her armour no longer chafed, the gun on her hip no longer weighing quite so heavily. She had woken up in her cryo pod on Cato and stepped straight into a situation that seemed to have no end, but for the first time, she was handling it.
"A waste." Wideawake stood in the control room doorway, frowning as he regarded the dead body.
"He murdered worlds with the push of a button. I'd say his fate seems fair."
"All death is waste. When you look at him, you must see some of the world you left behind. Your friends, your family, the entire social context. Individuals are unique, as are the patterns they form. Society is a sea of minds, swelling like waves against one another. But when a mind is gone, it's gone. What Archer was can never be again."
"That's supposed to be a bad thing?" She regre
tted the words almost instantly. Archer had received his punishment and it seemed wrong to add insult to the memory of a man who had acted with what he had believed to be good intentions.
"Ah, you don't really mean that. No one person is all good or all bad, I know you believe that. How else could you possibly love the soldier? You hear that? More gunfire. More death, more killing. Your soldier is either dead or he has taken yet more lives."
"Wideawake." She took a deep breath. The control room seemed so small with his shadow in the doorway and his words crawled on her skin.
He smiled as she shimmied past him into the laboratory. Pleasantly, humorously, the way he had always smiled at her, even when he'd been in so much pain. When she turned, he had sat down on the sofa to scan a folder, just like he'd been told. No trouble, no problem, no harm done, and she was clearly stressing out worse than she'd thought she was.
Though, not so much as Juneau.
"I'm beginning to understand it," the major said, pacing the laboratory. "Stars, I understand so much for the first time in my life. The primers, the conditioning, this thing... it's like blanks have been filled in. It's... it's so insulting. People don't like me much, Somerset, never have. When I was younger, I tried to figure out why, tried to change to please them, but eventually I thought, never mind – I'll just focus on what I'm actually good at. Except I wasn't allowed to be good at it, not really, because I wasn't allowed to see. And even though I do see now, I'm not allowed to act on my understanding. Do you understand how infuriating that is? I can see how to fix everything – but I can't do it."
"Have you considered using the neural interface to connect with the Prime Mover? Perhaps it can be reasoned with."
Juneau blanched, touching her right palm to the stained glass sun on her chest. "Absolutely not. The personal risk aside, Archer's files state that this thing thinks and feels what he brings into it. Do you think any of us are feeling particularly harmonious right now? Imagine the effect it could have on the Primaterre people if we unsettle the Prime Mover."