Lonely Castles

by S. A. Tholin

  "No," he admitted.

  "But you did, because I gave you no other choice than to keep fighting, keep thinking, keep searching for another path. It's not over yet, Constant, and if we're to save each other, we have to save ourselves. You're not a lonely castle anymore, and I recommend you get used to it."

  If she had been with him on the Hecate, it would've been this Joy, the defiant girl whose hair was molten gold in the sun. He had been angry moments ago, and now he barely remembered what anger was.

  "You've been spending too much time with Rhys," he said, half-smiling.

  "And not enough with you. So keep thinking, Commander, and don't ever surrender."

  "Never," he agreed.

  * * *

  Joy repaired the comms console, Hammersmith provided the contact details, and Cassimer composed the message. He kept it brief, because even though he'd agreed to never surrender, some compromises were almost too distasteful to bear.

  One word would have to do: Revenge, followed by Earth's coordinates.

  "Will he understand?" Joy asked.

  "He will. For better or for worse, the Shipwrecker will come."

  "I hope Kivik decides to join us against Skald."

  A comment as reasonable as it was innocent, and yet it chafed. He didn't like to hear Kivik's name spoken in Joy's voice, and he especially didn't like the idea of joining forces with the RebEarth captain.

  "He's not a man to be relied on, Joy. His hate for Skald is simple – he wants it eradicated – but his hate for me is different. More complicated. If he had the choice between killing me or harming you, I think he'd find the latter more satisfying."

  "Well, he can try," she said, faux-confidently, giving Cassimer a small smile. "Though I'd prefer it if he waited until whatever Rhys gave me wears off. It's made everything go a little bit fuzzy at the edges, and sometimes..." She tapped the floor with her boot. "Sometimes I can't quite tell whether I'm on solid ground or floating."

  "I'd prefer it if he never tried. Here, let me carry you." He holstered his Morrigan. "Hammersmith's already at the rendezvous. If we're to reach it before RebEarth reinforcements arrive–"

  "We can't afford to be delayed by a drugged-up AC-1. Got it, loud and clear, Commander. But before we go... could you send a message to Captain Versailles, for him to pass on to Lucklaw? I'd rather Hammersmith didn't know."

  "Lucklaw's on Scathach, out of reach."

  "He's in Kirkclair."

  "Why?"

  She motioned for him to come closer, to bend until they were face to face, and he couldn't resist opening his visor. Rhys's cocktail of stims and chems had elevated her body temperature. The heat of her against his skin was how he imagined the sunset might have felt. She began to whisper something. He cut her off with a kiss. Only one, he'd told himself, only a momentary lapse of control, but she made a soft little sound that made him need so much more.

  But the part of his awareness that remained inside the station, watching through Hopewell's and Rhys's eyes, reminded him of his priorities, and he let Joy whisper in his ear. Like his message to Kivik, hers was a single word.

  No. Not a word.

  A name, and as soon as he heard it, he knew that Joy was right – he was no longer a lonely castle.

  * * *

  The first wave of battle-damaged RebEarth ships arrived as twilight settled into night. Gunships screamed across the sky, shuttles throwing up plumes of sand and smoke as they landed. The seaside town, empty for a century, had come alive with floodlights and the long, flickering shadows of RebEarth hunters.

  Hammersmith kept watch from the top floor of a crumbling hotel. It was the tallest building in the town, situated on a hillock overlooking the harbour, but even with him as their guide, the journey through the wreck-choked streets proved difficult.

  Gunships swept past on a regular basis, scanning the area. Cassimer kicked down the door to a shopping mall just in time for him and Joy to escape detection, but when they tried to pass through the building, they found that a good dozen RebEarthers were already crawling through it.

  What are they doing? Joy's arms tightened around his neck as a couple of men passed by, pulling a squealing trolley.

  Looting. Like scavengers, they can't resist, Cassimer responded, even though he understood their reasons perfectly. This was Earth; the decaying objects artefacts. Under different circumstances, he'd love to explore these ruins, every corner and every bone a story waiting to be read.

  But he didn't have the time to see it for anything but what it was. He hurried down hallways that would have to remain dead and out onto a street where an old hand-painted sign proclaimed that Anna's had, in contradiction to Carmody's testimony, 'the best crab salad in town'.

  Shards of glass twinkled in the thick moss on the hotel's driveway, crunching under Cassimer's boots as he dashed towards the front entrance. Every window in the building had shattered, staring darkly from the white facade. The destruction was old, far too methodical to have occurred by accident, and the sight of it gave him a few seconds to steel himself for what he now knew to be waiting inside.

  The lobby was too dark for Joy to see the scattered remains and filth-smeared walls, but the stairs were congested with mummified corpses and he had no choice but to step on them, grinding bone and leathery skin to dust. Perhaps his grip on her tightened, or maybe his breathing changed, because she looked at him instead of their surroundings. Good. That was good. He focused on her eyes, her face, and pushed the shadows away.

  Hammersmith had taken up position on the balcony of a suite. The bed was a nest of bones, the mattress rotted through with old blood. The wallpaper had been stripped away in inch-wide ribbons. Filthy footprints painted chaotic circles on the yellowed carpet. A single set led towards the balcony and up onto its railing. It could've been one of the possessed, resorting to self-harm when all other potential victims had died, but Cassimer didn't think so.

  This room he could read clearly. The walls came alive without permission, colour and life forcing themselves on his imagination. Something like the Hecate had happened here, and someone like him had been left alive to wander in circles until circles were no longer enough to keep the scratching thoughts out of their head.

  He set Joy down, walked over to the bed and bundled up the bones in the tattered duvet. A nearby door led to a bathroom; he dumped the duvet there and shut the door firmly.

  "You might have warned us about the state of the place," he said to Hammersmith.

  "What were you expecting? Five stars and a mini bar?"

  Fair enough. He shrugged the Hyrrokkin from his back.

  "I'll take first watch."

  * * *

  The Hesperia's landing zone lay ten kilometres to the south. Gunships made regular passes over the woodland, but no RebEarth vehicles had gone up the road past the Talien Castle tanks.

  "Strange," Cassimer said. "Skald knows where the Hesperia is. Why leave her unguarded?"

  "It may not want RebEarth to know about her. Whatever this entity is, Somerset describes it as greedy and selfish. The Hesperia is a one of a kind, and perhaps Skald believes it too good to waste on terrorist scum." Hammersmith sat on the opposite side of the room, watching the north. Silver foil winked in the dark as he unwrapped a ration bar. "You'd have to ask Somerset. She knows how it thinks better than anyone."

  Yes, but Somerset was asleep, curled up on a sofa that Cassimer had dragged in from an undamaged suite. Rhys had administered sedatives remotely, the sleep meant to aid and accelerate her healing, but it had hardly been necessary. She'd been running on stims and adrenaline for far longer than she was accustomed to.

  "But I know RebEarth," Hammersmith said. "I've spent my life surrounded by their impurities. The entity's followers are a particularly contemptible breed – the spiritual."

  "I thought they all worship this Mother Spirit."

  "To different degrees. People like Kivik may believe in spirits, but when push comes to shove, they have other prioritie
s. Money. Fame. Revenge. But there are those to whom the faith is everything; the most corrupt of all, who shun reason for myth. Poor tools and even worse assets, so Tower rarely bothers with them. You've probably encountered more of their kind than I have – but then, in your line of work, you don't take too much of an interest in why or how the hostile in your sights came to be where he is."

  "Zero interest."

  "Which is why you are now left without understanding." Hammersmith smirked. "I'd say there's a lesson to be learned, here, but it's all too late for that now."

  "We'll see."

  "We will. In any case, these faithful won't be the cream of the crop. The true zealots follow only the word of their sages, and they have yet to accept Skald's 'Bright-Winged One' identity as doctrine. Many of my colleagues are working hard to ensure it remains that way, though now that Skald has led troops to Earth... it may be impossible to prevent its ascension to demi-godhood. But for now, the ones who follow it are the easily-led and the easily-impressed. I can understand that the entity may not want the Hesperia to fall in their childish hands. Wideawake wouldn't have."

  "Or maybe it assumes that we will remain inside the station until our mission is completed."

  "Maybe. Who can say? This entity's motives are difficult to discern."

  To a towerman, perhaps, who instinctively mistrusted everything he heard, but Skald told truth as frequently as lies. What had it said on Cato about Earth and its seas? That it longed for them. And in the place of truth, it had said it would rule on Earth.

  Cassimer's stomach twisted as he remembered seeing Wideawake kneeling by the waterline. The towerman's lightweave gauntlets had brushed the sun-dappled surface. A moment of awe, he had assumed, but now he knew differently.

  It had been a moment of triumph.

  * * *

  A second wave of ships arrived shortly after midnight. Back at the station, Hopewell and Florey were forced to retreat from their defensive position in the narrow rock tunnel that led to the Hierochloe station's main entrance. They detonated charges in the elevator shaft, effectively blocking access. But sooner or later, RebEarth would find the submarine pen blast doors, and when they broke through, the station team would be trapped with no escape – and with no reinforcements while the Luna Belt was active. The Hesperia was their best chance at destroying the belt, but reaching the ship would require Cassimer's gamble to pay off.

  "Kivik's ships?" He panned his rifle across the starry sky, catching sight of glowing underbellies and crackling force fields.

  "No," Hammersmith said, dashing the faint hope.

  As more RebEarthers arrived, more signals travelled towards the Cascade. Cassimer intercepted a few, watching phoenix-tattooed fighters give speeches to their brothers and sisters across the galaxy. Some messages were more personal. He could see tears in their eyes as they relayed to friends and family that they were on Earth. There were pragmatic broadcasts too, far beyond anything he'd expected of RebEarth, as scientists took samples of flora and fauna and documented the data.

  "Found a patch of wild wheat among ruins in the woods. It must've been farmland once, because when Romilly went digging around, she discovered these." A man held up a clutch of dirty tubers to the camera. "Potatoes! We've got six crates of edible samples and true potato seeds so far. We're grabbing the genetic data, too, uploading it to you as we speak. Even if we don't make it back, you should get enough to fuck with the Primo crop monopoly."

  A noble goal for the short-sighted. Yes, if the Kalevala could grow their own crops, they might never have ended up on the brink of starvation, but without the might of Primaterre to pull them back from that brink, they would have perished. And the Primaterre might was, like it or not, partially made possible by their hold on Earth's resources.

  "Linking some data signals. See if you can shut them down, and this ship..." He passed the science vessel's identification tag to Hammersmith. "Mark it as a Rampart priority target."

  "All right," Hammersmith said, but Hammersmith wasn't looking at him, nor at the town below. He was looking at Joy. Too long. Too intensely.

  "Hammersmith."

  "Yes?"

  "Eyes on the mission."

  "Funny," the towerman said, "that's just what I was thinking. I told her, you know, right from the start, to put all attachments aside. Eyes on the mission, Somerset. But she didn't listen, and now she's paid for it with her life. A waste, Commander. She had promise. She could've been good."

  An armoured vehicle rolled along the street outside, crushing debris underneath its tracks. The gun on its roof was manned, but the gunner was more interested in sweeping his flashlight across storefront windows than searching for hostiles.

  The shops outside the hotel had been boutiques, selling luxury items to the wealthy. The dead who littered the streets had believed that money mattered. That's what Cassimer had been taught, and that's what he saw in the decaying exclusivity of the hotel room, but he couldn't judge the dead for their mistake. The universe was vast, and pinpointing what mattered in a literal infinity was difficult. Perhaps the dead had understood that in their last moments. He doubted it, because he hadn't. It had taken him so much longer.

  "You're not wrong to have committed to the mission," he said to Hammersmith. "Nor was Paget wrong to sacrifice herself, but the mission blinded the both of you to what truly mattered. It happens. Even the best of us are not immune to tunnel vision. I've served under commanders who were so wrapped up in their objective that they couldn't see the battlefield. I've walked through fire on the orders of men who were so focused on what lay on the other side that they couldn't look for another way. I'm guilty of it myself."

  Below, the vehicle turned down a side street. The darkness of dead Earth's night was complete again. Sea winds jostled the bones of the dead, and to Cassimer the brittle sounds were like whispers. They whispered to him that he was right, that they understood now. But it was too late for them, and when the wind died down, so did they.

  "But if there's one characteristic true of every mission, it's unpredictability. Parameters shift, circumstances dictate new approaches. I took my team to Velloa to retrieve primer samples. We failed that objective, but missions never really fail; you know that as well as I do. They're simply renamed, reborn, reassigned. Missions don't die – but people do."

  "If Paget and I had chosen each other over the mission, we might not be here now, on the verge of success."

  "Maybe not you. Not Room 36B. But somebody else would have come. Rhys and Lucklaw made this their mission after Cato. Perhaps they would have made it here in the end, or maybe Somerset would have. It might have taken a year or a hundred, but I can guarantee you that one day, somebody would've walked into the Hierochloe station with or without you."

  "Hope of future success isn't good enough."

  "It is, when weighed against a loss that can never be restored. I don't dream about primer samples. It's Kiruna I see when I close my eyes. It's Tallinn, Copenhagen, de Bracy..." So many names. Too many to list, too many to ever forget. "Somerset once told me that we are all made of stars. Now I know that we are more than that, each of us a universe."

  "And what will you do when Somerset finds herself in Paget's position? Put on a cataphract suit and storm the Primaterre tribunal?"

  "If that's what it takes," Cassimer said.

  Hammersmith smirked. "You'll die just the same as her."

  "A quicker death than the one you chose."

  * * *

  Kivik's ships arrived in the mist of dawn. A formation of gunships circled the town, aglow with red lights, one passing close enough to the hotel that Cassimer could see the golden dogs painted on its hull. A red phoenix hovered above, but the dogs' teeth were tearing into the white wings of a ghostly bird.

  "A good sign," Hammersmith said, breaking a silence that had lasted hours.

  Cassimer's HUD detected a flurry of signals between Kivik's ships and the other RebEarthers. The conversation went on for nearly five minutes
– more than long enough for a man who loved compromise to change his mind and allegiance. The Bright-Winged One had given them Earth, however temporarily. Even Kivik had to be impressed by that. Even Kivik had to see the potential in this new ally. Kivik, especially, would smell the profit in this bold assault.

  But then the signals ended abruptly as the gunships opened fire. Hot rounds cut searing trails through the mist. Vehicles roared down the streets, ceasing exploration to fend off the unexpected enemy. An armoured truck clipped the hotel's wrought-iron fence as its gunner fired a missile.

  Kivik had come, and he had brought the chaos they needed.

  73.

  LUCKLAW

  The man-of-war Mars Caturix, capital ship of the Martian fleet, left debris in its wake as it smashed through the line of attacking ships. Railgun rounds shattered against its hull, lasers were absorbed by its force fields. It was a leviathan in the void, invincible and intrepid.

  That was its strength, but also its weakness. When RebEarth realised that they stood no chance – which didn't take long – they stopped trying. They evaded, focusing fire on smaller targets, slipping through gaps in the net to make runs at Mars's colonies. No such attempt had been successful yet, but Lucklaw could hear how badly they wanted it.

  "Got to get a shot in, got to drop a nuke in Kirkclair central, really make those towers glow–"

  "Burn the forests of Torthorwald, torch them like a purge, see how they like it–"

  "Going to carve my name in red soil–"

  The Mars Caturix trembled as its great cannon fired, and Lucklaw braced against the bulkhead for support. Only a few hours ago, he'd been in his old bedroom wondering at how weird it was that what had been his for eighteen years suddenly seemed like a stranger's, and now he was onboard a man-of-war while RebEarth tried to obliterate his home. A bulkhead wasn't near enough support.

  Another tremor, and then a red light above an airlock turned green. A banneret commander, whose name Lucklaw had managed to forget in the fifteen minutes since their introduction, slapped his shoulder.