Lonely Castles

by S. A. Tholin

  "Earth have mercy." For the first time, the phrase felt natural.

  At her touch, the Hyrrokkin initiated a connection with her primer.

  AUTHORISATION CHECK...

  PERMISSION GRANTED

  SOMERSET, JOY – ESTABLISH LINK?

  "Yes?"

  And suddenly she saw through something even stranger than another person's eyes. She saw through the rifle – and not just its scope. She saw minute movement in the woods kilometres away. She saw thermal signals and sound waves, projected trajectories and the predicted outcomes of shots. She saw the banneret men, tagged FRIENDLY and highlighted in blue.

  As she set the rifle up, it spoke to her. Instructive text showed her how to load the bipod, how to adjust the scope and how to position herself, and though the text was as neutral as the writing of any manual, she recognised Constant's voice in the words. He had written this for her, just in case, and he had granted her the authority to use his rifle. He had made sure that, no matter what, she would never be unprepared. Never alone.

  She sighted in on the gunship. The ship's specs were daunting, its force fields too powerful for the rifle to punch through. But in order for the gunship to fire, its autocannons had to drop their individual protective fields. She'd have a second to pull the trigger, a tiny moving target to hit.

  The pilot was a woman. Joy could see her as clear as day, every detail in the feather tattoos on her face. Red ribbons adorned her hair, light strips sewn into her jumpsuit in the shape of bright wings. Armoured figures moved behind her, red-and-black and ready to kill everyone Joy loved.

  Line up straight. Cheek firm against the rest. Relax your muscles.

  And then, breaking from the instruction-manual-voice: This will hurt.

  Yes, it would. But she was prepared, and with Constant in her head and Finn in her heart, she was not alone.

  A deep breath.

  "Primaterre protects us all."

  Then she squeezed the trigger.

  68.

  CASSIMER

  The shuttle came in for a hard landing on the beach, one wing breaking off against the rocks. Its ramp crashed open, and three dozen hostiles in red-and-black armour rushed out. Bright white wings glowed on their cuirasses, red veils covering their faces.

  "Move!" Cassimer heaved himself over the cliff's edge, turning to lay down covering fire. His HUD flooded with warnings as RebEarth weapons tried to paint him their target, his APF flaring as he took hits from the Hierochloe guards in the restaurant.

  The gunners made it up the cliff and onto the parking lot. Open ground, and Cassimer wasn't even halfway to the forest's edge when a heavy calibre round shattered a reactive plate in his back. He stumbled, and in his peripheral vision, he saw Hopewell fall. Florey went for her, but a barrage of gunfire forced him into cover behind an old truck.

  Cassimer made for the same truck, crouching next to Florey.

  Hopewell was cut off, crawling behind a derelict van that was being rapidly eaten to shreds by bullets. Every attempt at moving left her open to taking fire from the Hierochloe guards. Windows shattered as grenades flew from the building, exploding to spatter the parking lot with silver plasma.

  A heavy round punched through the truck's engine block. Armour-piercing, low-ex, laced with corrosives.

  "Primo killers," Florey said. "That's what RebEarth call them. Expensive ammunition. They came here prepared."

  "Came here." Cassimer moved towards the truck's hood. "Came to Earth."

  "Yeah." Florey ejected a spent ammo block. "It's an affront."

  "A violation."

  "We kill them," Florey said, inserting a fresh block, "but we don't leave their bones to rest."

  "We send them into the void," Cassimer agreed. He and the gunner might have their differences, but not when it came down to what was necessary – what was pure. When he fired across the truck towards red-veiled hostiles on the cliffs, Florey focused fire on the restaurant. He knew what was right, and so did Hopewell, darting across the parking lot. She skidded into cover behind Cassimer, breathing heavily as she held up her left hand. A Primo killer had shattered her vambrace. Jagged shrapnel lined the fractures, pieces of hot metal embedded in her wrist.

  "Not like you to cry about a scratch," Florey said.

  "It's not the scratch I'm worried about. It's that shit." She nodded towards the back of the truck. Runnels of silver plasma trickled down its side, pooling on the asphalt. The dandelions that had grown there were gone, consumed by the plasma. "Pardon, Commander, but getting dissolved is in my top five least favourite ways to go. You ought to worry to, Florey, with that nice big crack in your visor."

  "Cosmetic," he said. "Doesn't go all the way through."

  "Well, aren't you the lucky one."

  "Luck is useless," Cassimer said. "We forge our own path. Hopewell, provide cover. Florey and I breach."

  * * *

  They advanced through a fog of smoke grenades. The restaurant was a dark shadow, but the thermal contacts of hostiles glowed bright. Florey took out another Hierochloe guard with cold precision, while the remaining guards could only fire haphazardly into the fog.

  As they reached the stone steps leading up to the building, Cassimer spotted the flash of a laser sight between the trees to the east. No thermal contacts, because these enemies had come prepared, their weapons loaded with Primo killers, their armour designed for camouflage.

  "Florey!" He shoved the gunner off the steps, following him into cover behind the concrete railing.

  And then gunfire lit up the forest. RebEarthers screamed, retreated, died – the confusion was total as Rhys burst from the woods, lobbing a grenade over his shoulder. He clattered into Cassimer and Florey as he slid into cover.

  "Hopewell," he shouted, "get your arse over here before they light you up!"

  It took her less than three seconds to get there, and less than that to frown at their new position. "We won't last long here."

  "Won't last long anywhere." Rhys paused to catch his breath. "Forest's crawling with RebEarth."

  "How did you get past them?"

  "Real bloody fast. Now shut up for a second and listen. We need to fall back to the station. RebEarth don't know about the submarine pen doors yet, so that's our best bet."

  "There are still Hierochloe guards in the building behind us," Florey protested.

  "RebEarth will sort that problem out for us. Commander, we need to go."

  RebEarth. It made no sense that they were here. It made even less sense that Rhys was here, with a better handle on the situation than Cassimer. But this wasn't the time for questions. What he needed was a moment to perceive; to see the battlefield and all its moving pieces with clarity. He needed purity, and it came to him in the form of a roar as loud and overpowering as a wave.

  Treetops swayed wildly in the downwash of a gunship. Spotlights lit the parking lot, focusing on him and the team. Florey grabbed Hopewell, shielding her with his body. Rhys ducked down, his APF on full, but none of that mattered. None of it would make any difference, because the ship's autocannons spun up and–

  A bolt of blue lightning shot across the sky. It punched through the starboard autocannon's barrel, continuing through steel and titanium. The ship veered violently to the side, treetops snapping under the impact. The remains of a RebEarther came spilling out through the broken hull, landing heavily on the parking lot.

  The ship went into a spin, and though Cassimer could see a shadow desperately reaching for its controls, they couldn't recover. In a plume of smoke, the gunship went down into the woods.

  A RebEarth gunship, taken down by a single shot of a rifle.

  He had left his Hyrrokkin with Rhys, but the medic wasn't carrying it. His HUD projected the trajectory of the shot, tracing it to the base of the lighthouse, and in his heart, he knew who had pulled the trigger.

  "Commander! We need to go, now." No doubt Rhys knew the shooter's identity too, and no doubt he knew that if there were more gunships en route, the
y would turn the lighthouse into ash.

  "Negative," he forced himself to say. "We breach."

  * * *

  The gunners laid down fire, driving the Hierochloe guards deep into the restaurant. Cassimer took the stairs in a leap and kicked the door off its hinges. A white-armoured man lunged and Cassimer grabbed him, locking his arm around his throat. Another came from the shadows, but Rhys knocked that one out with the butt of his rifle. The gunners followed, Florey shoving the door back in place, propping a table against it, Hopewell taking up position in a window to hold the RebEarthers back.

  Good. Fast, efficient, and though it might not make much sense to them, they had obeyed his order to use non-lethal force only.

  Cassimer tightened his hold on the struggling guard and pressed his Morrigan to the man's temple. The white Hierochloe helmet bubbled under the gun's hot muzzle.

  "Lay down your weapons."

  Eight contacts in the kitchen, two of them civilian. The civilians looked shell-shocked, panicked, huddling in a back corner, but one of the guards sighed and stepped forward. The name tag underneath his insignia read CARMODY. He dropped his rifle on the floor, kicked it towards Cassimer, and placed his sidearm on a counter.

  "I used to eat here," he said. "Best crab salad I ever had. Even after the pollution killed the fishing industry, and despite the economic sanctions and the embargos, they somehow managed to make it taste like it was seafood, not just flavoured vit-paste. Yeah. It was a great little place, and look at what we did to it."

  Dark smears on the walls. Bones and rags piled in pans, countertops chipped and scored by cleavers. Many horrors had played out in the restaurant.

  "We told ourselves it was worth it, that we were cleaning the slate for a new world. We were going to usher in an age of harmony and human accomplishment. Well." Carmody frowned, looking towards the windows where Florey had joined Hopewell. They fired relentlessly, silhouetted against the flame-reddened sky. "I guess we failed."

  There was an earnestness in Carmody's voice and a resignation on all their faces. One by one, the guards laid down their weapons. They had committed atrocities because they had believed in something. Still believed, which meant that the failure was not in the cause, but in their own efforts.

  "No," Cassimer said, "you didn't fail."

  * * *

  He passed the guards his tablet and showed them what they had helped create. All he had were the pictures from Joy's visit to Kirkclair, but the tourmaline towers and regenerated craters got the guards' attention just fine. They saw clean streets, unpolluted skies, and contemplation groves that in their time would have housed labour camps. They saw people who, if not carefree, were at least healthy and strong and led meritorious lives. They saw Joy, smiling in awe at the cascading waterfalls, and when Cassimer had no more to show, Florey quietly transferred a batch of his own photos.

  The Hierochloe guards watched in silence as the screen changed from Martian cityscape to an Earth Provides compound on a much smaller colony. Florey's wife tended to the garden and his eldest children rode horses and milked cows. The family gathered under a starry sky to talk and sing. They built and sowed, and they were happy.

  Then came the white beaches of Kepler and the turquoise sea that drew millions of tourists every year. The tablet showed sunshine, magenta flowers and a beach house exceedingly familiar to anyone who'd been in the vicinity of Hopewell in the past year, and it showed the Primaterre Protectorate at its most shining and relaxed self; a side that even Cassimer had never had the privilege to experience.

  "Hey, I recognise that bay," said one of the guards. "That's... is that Kepler? God, it's beautiful. The houses, they didn't use to be pastel, and the sea, it was brown and on some days, the stink would hang over the colony like a cloud. To see it like this, I... I could never have imagined it. I don't suppose the Blackbirds are still around?"

  "Won this year's system cup," Hopewell shouted over her shoulder. "Go Blackbirds!"

  "So Project Harmony was successful," Carmody said, nodding slowly, "but you figured it out. You realised that you're being conditioned, and now you're here to end it. Which of course means we all have to die."

  "Pragmatically put," Cassimer said.

  "I'm Chief of Security. It's my job to consider every possible scenario, even the ones that... no, especially the ones that management says are impossible. They said the subjects would never be able to break the priming. They said that Earth was impregnable. They said an awful lot of things that I knew to be bullshit, because real life can't be projected. The first casualty of war is always the goddamn plan, and the only thing you can really, truly, rely on, is that people find a way to screw things up. So." He put the tablet down on the counter next to his sidearm. "I appreciate you showing us that. It's a kindness, letting a man know he didn't die in vain. That said, it'd be good if you'd just get on with it already."

  "Got one more thing to show you first."

  * * *

  RebEarth had made it over the cliffs. They'd fanned out across the parking lot, taking cover behind vehicles. Footsteps came from the forest as more hostiles moved to surround the restaurant. Florey and Hopewell held them at bay, but Cassimer thought the RebEarthers weren't advancing because they didn't need to. Throwing themselves at banneret men was foolish when another gunship could do the work for them – and if they were expecting reinforcements, then that went a long way to explain the familiar lines of the ship that had obliterated the city across the bay. It had looked like a Primaterre frigate. Cassimer had only discounted the notion because it had seemed absurd. It couldn't be. It shouldn't be.

  But as the RebEarthers closed in around the restaurant, they began to sing, and he knew beyond all doubt that the smouldering flakes of titanium carried on the wind had once been the grey hull of a Primaterre frigate.

  "You wanted to create a new world," he said to Carmody, gesturing towards the windows. Red veils fluttered in the breeze. Feather-tattooed faces stared at them from behind clear visors. The wings on their cuirasses glowed stark bright even through the gathering smoke. "We are the result. They are the reaction."

  Carmody observed in silence. The man had no context for the situation, no understanding of the history and years of conflict that had led to this point. But he did have an imagination and experience, and his armour was emblazoned with same symbol as Cassimer's. That mattered. That made all the difference.

  "You want us to fight these red bastards," Carmody concluded. "Alongside you? No. No, you want us to hold them while you fall back."

  "That's insane." One of the civilians spoke up. She stood hunched, one hand clutching her side. Damp blonde hair fell over her face, dripping water onto lips that turned in pain, but there was no mistaking the animosity in her eyes as she glared at Cassimer. "After what you did to us? They killed everyone, Carmody! God only knows what they've done to the Prime Mover. We're not doing shit for them. Especially not something that'll get us all killed just the same as refusing!"

  Carmody drew a deep breath. He walked to the counter where he'd left his gun, picked it up, and shot the blonde woman twice in the chest, once in the head.

  "It was never about us. Our lives ceased to matter the second we signed on to Project Harmony," he said to Cassimer. "We didn't do what we did so that we could live happily ever after. We did it so that you might."

  * * *

  Branches and undergrowth scratched Cassimer's armour, his boots slipping on leaf-covered ground. Earth was so full of life, so disorderly compared to the colonies. The word terraforming suddenly seemed all wrong, because Earth had no form – here plants grew as they pleased, wild and uncurated. It was overwhelming, and he was glad for the odd reminder of human civilisation. Ruins, wreckage, even the bullets that occasionally whined past.

  The Hierochloe guards had opened fire on RebEarth. Only nine against so many, but Cassimer had told them the one thing they needed to know: while the red-and-black armour was capable of taking a few hits from their century-o
ld weaponry, the suits weren't sealed. They had to have taken his advice, because he heard screams echoing through the woods; screams of a kind he'd only ever heard from cataphracts decaying in their suits. Hopewell hadn't been wrong. Being dissolved was not a good way to go.

  "This way." Rhys stopped at a small cairn marking a trail. Deep boot prints showed where the medic had previously descended the hill. "The path goes all the way to the top."

  "Go," Cassimer said, because he could hear RebEarth approaching, could see muzzle flashes between the trees. "Hopewell, mines, now."

  The gunner laced the trail with explosives as Cassimer and Florey covered her, until there were too many hostiles approaching too fast, and then the three of them ran, following Rhys's tracks up the hill. Heat waves washed over them as RebEarthers triggered the mines. The ground rumbled, first with explosions, then with the slow tearing of roots as trees toppled. Up ahead, rocks shook loose, tumbling down the hill. Bones jangled in the undergrowth, and Cassimer couldn't help but think that if he stopped to catch his breath, roots would burst from the ground to snare him. Earth was beautiful, Earth was sacred, and it was also too much.

  It became easier to breathe once they were above the tree line, easier to focus even though he could hear the distant roar of oncoming gunships. Sky above, earth below, and on the hill's summit, the lighthouse stood as a reminder that humanity had once ruled this world.

  Then he saw Joy and forgot all about Earth.

  "Joy." He knelt by her side at the base of the lighthouse, brushing blood-matted hair from her face. She could only open one eye – the other one too swollen – but gave him a look of pure relief. "Joy, I–"

  "Her hearing's gone." Rhys sat on her other side, one hand cradling the back of her head, the other rooting through his med-kit. "Blown ear drums, dislocated shoulder, a minor fracture to her orbital socket, and a detached retina. The girl makes me work nearly as hard as you, Commander."

  "Is she going to be all right?"

  "Sight and hearing will recover shortly. Her shoulder is–" Rhys snapped her arm back into place. Joy cried out, huddling against Cassimer. He held her, although he shouldn't, and wanted nothing more than to never see her hurt again. "–fine. Apologies, Somerset, but any more anaesthetics and you wouldn't wake up until morning. I'm guessing you'd rather be awake, and I can guarantee you we'd rather have you up and about. So, grin and bear it, yeah?"