Lonely Castles

by S. A. Tholin

  "Not quick enough."

  "Nothing's wrong with me that you can't fix."

  "Fixing is one thing, but torture does more than physical harm. I can't undo that."

  "Undo. People keep saying that, like it's the word of the day, but that's not why we're here. We're here to let go of the past, whether it's a century ago or five minutes." She sent a command to her suit, and white turned black as the Hierochloe logo on her cuirass faded. The Primaterre sun replaced it, overlaid by Hopewell's shimmering aurora borealis. "Perceive the moment, but don't lose track of the horizon. Ever onward, Rhys."

  "You're not wrong, princess. And speaking of letting go..." He picked up her gauntlet from the floor and shook out her ring finger. How strange it looked in the palm of his hand; how dead and pale. "How attached are you to this?"

  "Not at all, Doctor," she said. "That's sort of the problem."

  "A soldier fit enough for smart-arse comments is fit enough to finish bandaging themselves up." He tossed her a roll of bandage perfectly matched to her skin tone. Her finger went into a clear bag filled with some sort of liquid, which he stuffed into one of his belt pouches. "I'll keep it on ice in case we have time to reattach it, though frankly, it'd be easier to get you a fresh lab-grown one later. I suppose I'd better do what I can for your colleague – not that he deserves it."

  "Elsinore? He's still alive?" It was hard to believe, but Rhys nodded.

  "The kid has invested in some pretty decent med-augments. Might be a good idea if you did the same."

  As Rhys walked over to Elsinore, Skald rolled over on his side.

  "Healer," he wheezed through broken teeth. "Unshackle me."

  "Doctor's advice: shut the hell up or I might not bother waiting for the commander to return to deal with you."

  "Hammersmith put together a nice file on you; a very interesting read about a very interesting man. But I won't bother telling you what you already know. Instead, I'll tell you this: one of the vessels in my first wave found work as a pilot. Not Primaterre, no; not good enough for you. I was a freelancer, transporting cargo between settlements in the Aurvandil system."

  Rhys stopped in his tracks.

  "Yes, healer." Skald smiled. "I have your attention now. My vessel was in the system when its Cascade was destroyed, and it's still there. I alone have eyes and ears in Aurvandil. I alone know what happened and what has come to pass since. A life cut off from the rest of the galaxy is not an easy one, and the colony was already struggling. Aurvandil isn't a pretty sight, healer, but there are survivors. Would you like to know if Captain Cecilia Grey is among them?"

  Rhys didn't respond, didn't even move.

  "Would you like to know if she remembers you? I can help you communicate. I can pass her a message. Something to keep her hoping. Something to keep her going. Or I could kill her." A gleeful bitterness crept into Skald's tone. "Set me free, healer. Aid me, or Cecilia Grey will die without ever knowing why."

  Rhys turned then. His visor was shut, black and fully opaque.

  "There are plenty of things to love about Cecilia, too many to list. But the thing I love most about her is this: she can take care of herself." He pulled his sidearm from its holster and fired once.

  The vessel died instantly, little of its head remaining.

  The medic holstered his gun again.

  "Rhys..." Joy held her injured hand to her chest to calm her racing heart. The offer he had just declined... if it had been put to her; if it were Constant who was lost twenty-five light-years away, she wasn't sure she could have declined. A month apart from him was agony, and Rhys had waited so long for word of Cecilia; so very long. "I'm so sorry."

  "I'm not." He opened his visor and gave her a wry smile. "That thing tries to go after Celie, he'll soon learn I wasn't kidding. The woman can handle herself. Besides, I owed him a bullet to the face. The commander might disapprove, but whatever. I can put up with a few frowns and angry glares."

  "I don't think he'll mind."

  "No." Rhys glanced at her hand. "Probably not."

  He went over and knelt by the unconscious Elsinore, shrugging off the equipment he was carrying. A couple of rifles, a missile launcher that had INNOCENT written in cursive on its side, and Cassimer's Hyrrokkin.

  "Where are the others?"

  "Went for a swim. They'll be back as soon as the guards have been dealt with."

  "We've got a much bigger problem than guards to worry about."

  She told him about RebEarth, and he cursed worse than ever before.

  67.

  JOY

  Major Juneau reluctantly returned to the lab and biopsied the Prime Mover. She reported no ill feelings when collecting the tissue specimen, no mental block at all. Joy's connection to the thing in the tank had been successful, her point made. The Prime Mover now understood what it was, and it was willing to accept the logical consequences.

  "A step in the right direction," Juneau said, "but our first priority needs to be removing the block on our comms. Elsinore couldn't figure out what was jamming them, but that's because he was looking at the station's systems. It wasn't Hierochloe's doing; it was the red demon's. I'll scan the body – Captain Rhys, check his equipment. If we can get the comms back online, we can call back the others and warn the Primaterre fleet before it's too late."

  Joy washed blood from her hands and face. Her armour proved too difficult to put back on with one finger less than she was used to, but her Morrigan was back in its holster, her combat knife in its sheathe. That made her feel a lot better.

  "Apologies." Juneau's mutter was barely audible. "I left and you got hurt. It was wrong of me."

  "You left because you didn't trust me. Understandable – we don't know each other at all. But Major, I'm going to choose to trust you now."

  She told the major what she had seen through the neural link. How Skald wasn't a perfect, healthy network at all; that some of his roots were black with blight.

  "Spurious memories," Juneau said, tapping her chin. "Are you familiar with the concept?"

  She'd clearly asked the question only so that Joy would have to say no. Annoying at the best of times, and with the stims in her system, it was difficult to not snap at the major. Truth and clarity, Joy reminded herself, before acknowledging her inferiority.

  "When you construct an artificial neural network, it's easy to provide it with data, but for it to be more than just storage, it has to function as a brain. It has to be capable of learning, pattern-recognition and of drawing logical conclusions, using the data it's fed as a basis. Show it a picture of a cat, tell it that this is a cat, and it will recognise other cats. But let's say that you provide it with pictures of dogs, labelled as pictures of cats. You've given it false data, but worse, that data will create new, false learned data as it applies everything it knows about cats to dogs. From now on, every conclusion, association and assumption the network makes will be affected by the false data you fed it. The entire network has become tainted by spurious memories, that are not only false, but almost parasitic. They grow unchecked and exponentially, until the network's true data is buried by an avalanche of fiction and fantasy – a cognitive blackout catastrophe. Some studies suggest that certain mental disorders are caused by a similar process. Schizophrenia, for instance, may be a case of the brain failing to find true memories in a flood of the spurious."

  "And Skald is essentially a huge neural network."

  "Correct. It must have some tolerance for spurious memories – I doubt there is a single human mind untouched by delusion, no matter how trivial – but it's possible that the damage is accumulative. The human mind purges spurious memory build-up through sleep. That's what dreams are; data dumps, processed and deleted."

  "But while Skald's vessels sleep, its root mind never does."

  "And when it absorbs a mind that is wracked with spurious memories so traumatic that they colour the mind's every thought, the damage is significant."

  "That's why it won't take people on whose mind
s it has already exerted influence. They're damaged goods. They're practically toxic," Joy said.

  "I believe you're right. We saw a hospital on Hereward, its psych ward emptied of patients. They could have been put in cryo, but instead they were fed lichen. The entity used them as puppets – to it, that's all they were good for."

  "So," Joy said, "if we were to create an artificial neural network and deliberately load it with spurious memories, and we somehow got Skald to absorb it..."

  "It could destabilise Skald's entire network. But creating such a thing is easier said than done."

  "Not really." Joy gestured at the tank where the Prime Mover floated peacefully. "Here's the blueprint. Take the Hierochloe research, Juneau. Use it. Make it into a weapon."

  "I doubt Commander Cassimer would approve."

  "He understands weapons." Joy looked down at her hand. Underneath the bandage, fresh tissue had already begun to grow where her missing finger had been. It was a strange creeping feeling, one that Constant was all too familiar with, and one that he wouldn't have wanted for her to experience. "He understands necessity."

  "Then all we'd need is a delivery method; some way of connecting our network to Skald's."

  "We'll figure something out."

  "Yes," Juneau said. "We will."

  Though it was clear she had forced herself to say we instead of I, Joy smiled. If she could get the major to include her in a we, well, then maybe anything was possible.

  * * *

  As Rhys helped Joy put her armour back on, a tremor shook the laboratory.

  "Hopewell?" Joy ventured, but Rhys shook his head, his lips a thin line.

  "Much bigger. Think nuclear."

  "Nuclear?" She thought of the warheads Constant had helped bring up from Xanthe. They had looked so old, so dangerous. He hadn't been comfortable storing them near the Cascade, but Wideawake had said–

  No. Wideawake had died a long time ago. It had been Skald who'd walked the yellow soil with them, Skald who had guided them through ruin and decay. She had been alone with him while he had sent Constant down a deep, dark hole full of unstable weapons, and stars, what had the entity been thinking? Constant had been in a bad mood afterwards, hinting that he thought her superiors might want him dead. At the time, she'd chalked it up to a general unease caused by visiting Xanthe, but now... maybe he had been right.

  No, he'd definitely been right, and her heart twisted with guilt for ever having harboured doubt. He deserved her trust, had earned it a thousand times over, and she swore to herself and the universe that she would never doubt him again, just please let him still be alive, please let the nuke have had nothing to with him, please.

  Maybe Rhys could tell what she was thinking, or maybe he was thinking something similar himself, because he gave Elsinore one last injection. The interpreter's bleeding had stopped, his worst wounds already healing, but his breathing was shallow and infrequent. Rhys stood, shutting his visor. "Getting the comms back online is taking too long. Let's go find the team."

  "Good idea," Joy said.

  "Bad idea," Juneau said. "What if they return once you've gone? Then they'll want to go find you, and then we're all going to be running around like headless chickens. Patience is purity for a reason. My scans have pinpointed the source of the jamming to an augment in the chest cavity of the deceased. As soon as it's been disabled, we can..."

  Rhys drew his sidearm.

  "No." Juneau leaned protectively over the dead vessel. "Didn't you hear what I said about patience? Destroying the augment may not end the jamming. I'll need to examine it."

  Rhys sighed and kicked his med-kit over to her. "I assume you know how to use a bone saw?"

  "You assume correctly."

  "Then get the augment out and get it disabled. Somerset and I are going to find the team."

  * * *

  They went to the cryo lab, where over a hundred people were quietly dying in their sleep. Joy didn't want to look, but that was wrong. She had to see, had to take responsibility. Had to acknowledge what she was party to, because turning a blind eye was the opposite of moving forward.

  Past the cryo lab was a small armoury, where Rhys explained they had found a tunnel under a weapons rack. The rack had been put back in place over the hatch, which made Rhys frown, but he only made an off-hand comment that it was just as well; he hadn't fancied going into the water anyway.

  They searched corridors and rooms that had been left untouched for centuries, but there were no tracks in the dust, no sign of the team.

  They went down through winding tunnels where the smell of seaweed was so strong Joy held her breath, until they saw the bodies of guards bobbing in the channel's dark water, sunshine glinting off their white armour. Massive blast doors opened onto a long tunnel carved into the metamorphic rock, leading out to sea. A wide concrete walkway continued along the water to the rocky coastline.

  Joy and Rhys followed the walkway onto the flat rocks. Across the bay, the city burned. The boom of another explosion sounded over the swell of the waves. Distant, but so powerful that she could feel heat against her skin. Gunfire followed, unrelenting and sharp.

  Rhys took point, and they ran along the steep path up to the lighthouse. Dark smoke had settled over the sea to the west. It roiled and churned as hot winds whirled from its centre. Mist rose from the water and spread in tendrils across the waves.

  The forest to the southeast was dappled with fire. The clearing where the Hesperia had set down lay somewhere beyond a smouldering band of flame. Low groaning sounds echoed as trees snapped and fell where grey-hulled wreckage had carved a deep gouge in the side of the hill.

  "Oh my God – it's the Primaterre fleet."

  Skald's prediction had been right. When RebEarth ships had made for Earth, Rampart had pursued. The instant their ships had crossed the Luna Belt, every single crewman would have died as their kill switches were triggered, the ships continuing onwards in an uncontrolled descent.

  "There's nothing we can do for them," Rhys said. "Come on, Somerset."

  The sky was streaked with smoke and blooms of fire. Debris splashed into the sea, tearing holes through buildings in the seaside town. Down near the shore, about halfway between the town and the lighthouse, gunfire blazed between the trees.

  Rhys put his rifle to his shoulder, scoping in on the shoreline. "Got eyes on the commander and Florey. Can't see Hopewell, but I can hear her rifle. She's down there."

  "What's going on? Who are they fighting?"

  "They're... hang on." Rhys placed a hand on her shoulder. Her HUD lit up with a request for a direct connection. She accepted, and her vision split in two. The view from the cliff was still there and, if she looked down, she saw her wounded hand clutched to her chest, her other hand firmly around the Morrigan. But she also saw through Rhys's eyes and, stars, it was incredible and disorienting, and she couldn't understand how Constant managed to see so much and more.

  The team were pinned down in a parking lot, taking fire from two directions: a building to the north and the shoreline to the southwest. They were holding their ground, but their comms were down and their awareness limited, and over the din of battle, Joy doubted they had heard the squad of RebEarthers approaching through the woods to the east.

  "They'll be overrun, Rhys. We've got to help them."

  "Yeah." He shrugged off his extraneous equipment. "I'm going down there. You stay put."

  "I don't need protecting," she protested.

  "Protecting? You're our last bloody line of defence." He hesitated, then gave her his pack of grenades. "Hold the line, Somerset, no matter what. And, princess, you should know that..."

  "What?"

  "That I forgive you for shooting me in the face." He winked at her, and then he was gone, dashing down the hill towards the kind of chaos and fire that no sane person would ever dash towards, and Joy wanted so badly to follow. But she had her orders, and she took up position as Basic Training had taught her.

  Her connection to
Rhys's visual cut out before he reached the team. She had seen glimpses of red-and-black armour and bullets splintering tree trunks, each shot far too close, far too likely to be the last shot the RebEarthers would need.

  Watching and waiting was so much worse than acting. Down there, she'd be too busy to be afraid for Constant and the others. Up here, where the sea breeze dusted her camail with soot, fear was all she had. It consumed her with visions of the worst, made her stomach turn with nausea and her hands tremble. Stims couldn't fight it, nor could thoughts of purity. When a RebEarth gunship tore past the hill, tree canopies shaking in its wake, singed leaves twirling in the air, she couldn't help but feel it was her fault; that her fearful imagination had summoned it.

  Her HUD identified the class of gunship, detailing its arsenal – more than enough to flatten the parking lot where Constant and the team fought for their lives.

  Her first instinct was to run down the hill to warn them – but she'd never make it in time. Her second instinct was to call his name, to shout for them from the hilltop, and she did, even though it was pointless.

  An echo was her only reply. Overhead, seagulls cried, and she wanted to cry too. This was how she had lost Finn – powerless to save him, helpless before the forces that had taken him from her. Time, chance, Skald. They had been her enemies then, and they were her enemies now.

  Don't be stupid, Joy. You know exactly what to do. Basic Training might have refined you, but I'm the one who taught you how to handle an emergency.

  She had said goodbye to Imaginary Finn on Cato, but here his voice was again, so close and so real that she turned her head to look for her brother. He wasn't there, of course, but Constant's Hyrrokkin lay on the ground, carelessly dropped in a manner its owner would frown on no matter the circumstance. Even so, the rifle still managed to look intimidating. It was undeniably a big gun.

  No.

  It was a really, really big gun.

  For really, really big emergencies.