Lonely Castles

by S. A. Tholin

  She tugged at her safety harness, but her hands were numb with shock or heat or stars, maybe she was dying, she couldn't even tell anymore. She breathed in saltwater and her smoke-damaged throat and lungs burned. Her knife was in her hip sheathe, and she tried to reach it, but something – part of the engine block? – pressed into her body.

  With a loud, sheering noise, the left side door was wrenched open and water flooded the interior. Through the darkness, lights approached. One set of hands grabbed hers; another worked her free, and then she was pulled out of the vehicle and towards the surface.

  * * *

  "Mercy." Florey shook his head as he surveyed the channel. The armoured vehicle was precariously suspended by its right-side tracks, caught on the walkway railing. "Don't they teach driving in Basic Training anymore?"

  "I..." Joy coughed, spitting water on the concrete walkway. "I haven't..."

  "He's kidding, Somerset." Hopewell's armour steamed as she burned off water. "He does that sometimes. I don't know why; could be he's under the delusion that he's funny."

  Florey didn't look like he was joking. Fire reflected in his visor as he stared down the channel, stony-faced and dour. The blast doors bowed inwards, a thin line of sunlight dappling the water as it flowed through. RebEarth had their breach now. They'd come, and Constant couldn't hold them all off.

  "There are crates in the back of the vehicle," Joy said. "Can you get them out?"

  The cataphract suit hadn't been airdropped alone. Hammersmith had provided two weapons crates from Room 36B's war room. Florey hauled them out, Hopewell cracking them open. The first contained Constant's Hyrrokkin and banneret suit, but underneath his equipment were weapons that made Florey arch an eyebrow and Hopewell smile.

  "They're for you. The commander said you'll know how to use them."

  "Oh yes," Hopewell said, picking up a substantial rifle, its barrel aglow with clustered power cells. She hefted it in her hands. "Never thought I'd get to try one of these out."

  "Expensive?"

  "Illegal."

  "The commander wants backup. He needs you outside to help hold the station."

  "The commander wants backup?" Florey asked sceptically.

  "And he wants you in charge, Lieutenant. He said you have experience working with cataphracts. Said you'd know what to do."

  "Yeah. I do." He held his hand out to Joy. She took it, and he pulled her to her feet. "Better get to the lab. Some of these weapons have a considerable area of effect. Don't want you getting caught in it."

  "Thanks," she said, and as he began to walk away, she couldn't help but add: "Good luck."

  "Earth provides, Captain Somerset," he said, and for the first time, he smiled at her.

  * * *

  Without its water, the Prime Mover had lost its ethereal glow. Now it was a veined and knotted mass of dripping tendrils, its core more a malignancy than a mind.

  "You got the chemical composition right?" Juneau, bent over a monitor, asked.

  Rhys rolled his eyes. "I can follow simple instructions, Major."

  He might have said Major, but it was clear that he was thinking something far worse. The tension was electric, and when Joy slipped into the room, only Elsinore noticed, weakly lifting his head to look at her.

  "Check these numbers, Captain."

  "We've run them half a dozen times. It's correct, and we are good to go."

  "On the biological side, yes, but this thing is part machine. Scratch that; it's part organically-integrated rift generator. Have you ever seen anything like that? I haven't. Nobody has, and the people who designed it insisted on putting everything in print and in these stupid folders." Juneau knocked a stack to the floor, papers rustling.

  "What you're saying is that you don't get it."

  "I'm a biologist, not a quantum physicist – excuse me if it might take me a little while. But you hear the noises out there? You see the Mars fleet approaching the Luna Belt? We don't have a little while. The team doesn't have a little while."

  Elsinore coughed violently, the fresh skin on his cheek tearing slightly. He wasn't allowed intake of liquids, but Joy grabbed a handful of tissues and soaked them in water from the emergency shower. She knelt by his side.

  "Here. It's kind of gross, I know, but sucking on these might help."

  "Thank you," he whispered, regarding her with a strange sort of terror.

  "Are you in pain? I could ask Rhys to give you more sedatives."

  "No, I..." He sighed. "I thought the banneret men were for sure going to kill Hammersmith. And, you know, for so many years, I've thought about killing him myself. Kick him out an airlock. Smother him in his sleep. Just fucking shoot him. But I never did, and I thought it was because I was afraid to, but that wasn't it at all. He's all I've got, Somerset, and I... I..." He sobbed, pressing a hand to his face.

  "You care," she said, finishing the sentence for him.

  He nodded, leaning back and closing his eyes.

  Elsinore had hurt her, but Elsinore had also been a friend. If she thought of the shy young man who liked comedy shows and had shelves full of tiny toy ships – "collectibles, Somerset, some of these are really rare" – maybe she could put the attempted murder out of her mind. When she thought about how somebody must have brought him all those toy ships, and that it had to have been Hammersmith, it wasn't so hard at all.

  "Having people who care for you is lovely," she said, "but it's not nearly as important as having people to care for. My brother was wonderful, but not perfect – nobody is. His downfall was cleanliness. His apartment would've been disgusting, except I'd come round and clean it out for him once a month. I'd complain about it, but you know what, when I was alone on Cato, I missed cleaning his apartment so badly. I missed packing his lunches and buying him socks. I missed all the little things I used to do for him far more than I missed what he used to do for me. And Elsinore, I know that you've not had much, but that doesn't mean you don't have much to give. Instead of being angry at Hammersmith for failing you, try to think of how you can help him."

  "How can I help? I'm nothing, didn't you hear?"

  "You're not nothing." She glanced at Juneau, who was so stressed she was practically in tears. "Major?"

  "Whatever it is, I don't have time for it, Somerset."

  "You said that the Prime Mover is part rift generator. Probably based on the same principles as the generators onboard comms relay ships, right? That means it's essentially a mini-Cascade, and, well – Elsinore here knows a few things about Cascades."

  "Does he?" Juneau said. "We saw the state of Room 36B."

  Her dismissive tone made Elsinore's face turn from deathly pale to a determined flush.

  "You folded there and back again, through a seven-hundred-year-old Cascade that hasn't had any maintenance in ages – save by me. I kept her alive all these years, but I also dreamed of killing her. Let me look at the Prime Mover. I'll figure it out."

  Rhys looked at Joy. "You onboard with this?"

  "Yes," she said, looking into Elsinore's eyes. "I trust in our team."

  * * *

  The wall monitors showed footage intercepted from exterior surveillance cameras and hacked RebEarth systems. Comms crackled over the station's announcement systems; little snippets of conversations and orders given. It was a fragmented view of the battlefield, and Joy tried not to look at the monitors that were linked to the banneret men's visual augments, but it was impossible not to, and even harder to stay put in the lab.

  "Stop wriggling." Rhys flipped her camail back from her face, strips of skin peeling away with the mesh. She glanced over his shoulder at the screen that showed his visual feed. Underneath a coating of charcoal, she looked like she'd been badly sunburnt. The camail had left a honeycomb pattern of bleeding lacerations. "And quit admiring yourself. I assume you're not going to insist on keeping a scar or two?"

  "No. People do that?" Constant had scars. He had never talked about them, and she had never asked, but her fingers knew the
ir shape and texture. The long, narrow cut across his nose. The thick patch of tissue on his neck. An obvious gunshot wound to his back, a light spattering of starburst scars on his thigh. In contrast, the idealised version of him on Bastion's posters was unmarred. Bastion liked their stories epic, their heroes perfect.

  "Sure, out of vanity or a desire to remember. It's bloody annoying from a medic's perspective." He pressed his palm against her freshly-cleaned cheek, fixing recon strips into place. "Any headaches? Sensation of dizziness?"

  "No, but I might have inhaled some smoke."

  "No shit. You think you'd even be alive if I hadn't been administering aid remotely? Good thing your armour has excellent pharmaceutical and diagnostic tools. Too bad it's bloody useless for anything else." He tapped the right side of her ribcage. A gouge had been taken out of it, a sticky glaze of blood coating the edges. "You took a bullet on the way over here."

  "I didn't even notice. I... oh." She swallowed hard.

  "Hitting you now, is it? A minor adjustment to your stims will take care of the shock. Get that cuirass off; let me patch up the wound properly."

  "You shouldn't waste time on me."

  "You'd rather I waste it on the hard-headed fool gone to war in a Helreginn suit?" He wrenched her cuirass loose and unceremoniously unzipped her jumpsuit. "Or maybe that's not it. Maybe you're thinking about what that piece of shit Hammersmith said."

  "He isn't wrong, Rhys. No point patching up my scratches when the odds are stacked against me. Help Elsinore instead, or the gunners."

  "Princess; sit back, shut the fuck up, and let me tell you a little story while I work." He began to clean out her wound, and as a tingling chill spread across her skin, he spoke. "About ten years back, Scathach Banneret Company was airdropped onto Erinys. An enemy warship sliced our shuttle up real good a couple of seconds after I jumped. The explosion scattered the company across a good five hundred miles of hostile jungle. I landed hard, my chute on fire, in a grove of..."

  He hesitated. "I don't even know how to describe it. Erinys has no xenoflora, so it had all come from Earth at some point, but I'll be damned if it didn't look alien. Flowers as tall as men, trees covered in black nodules. And the stench... my visor cracked in the landing, and that grove smelled like a mass grave. I had about two seconds to think – well, great – and then a chunk of shuttle came crashing down through the tree canopies. Lieutenant Fivekings – one of our comms specialists – was still strapped in his seat, still screaming as he fell. I swear he hit every damn branch on the way down. Ended up with a good few of them inside of him, too."

  He pulled a deformed bullet from Joy's side and examined it briefly, before throwing it over his shoulder.

  "Fivekings' augments couldn't keep up with his injuries, so I grabbed my med-kit and cracked his armour open. His left leg was gone. His ribcage was such a mess I couldn't tell what was bone and what was splintered wood. Shrapnel had perforated his bowels. As I was staunching the bleeding, he looked me right in the eye and asked me if he should use his kill switch. I told him no. I told him I'd get him to base and fix him up good as new, and I kept telling him that every day for a week as I dragged him through the undergrowth. We encountered hostiles once and only barely managed to survive. He asked me again then, if he should just kill switch. The anaesthetics had run out at that point, and he had to have been suffering something unimaginable. But I told him no, and I kept dragging him. See, I knew I could fix him. I'd already mapped out the procedures, laid out every bit of nano-surgery and reconstruction required. He was suffering – so what? He'd thank me in the end."

  Rhys sighed, ripping open a fresh pack of recon strips.

  "We got pinned down by hostiles about a klick from base. By the time I'd dispatched them, Fivekings had bled out in a stream. Caught a bullet at some point, but the thing is, he died trying to bandage himself up. He hadn't quit, and neither will I. Death can be a mercy, but ask anyone who knows me, they'll tell you I'm a merciless bastard. I don't care if you're dying. I don't care if you're in pain. If you are one of my people, I'm going to drag you screaming through a swamp whether you like it or not."

  "I've been upgraded to one of your people? I'll take it," she said, smiling. "On Cato, you left me to die once."

  "Twice," he said. "If the commander hadn't put his merits towards your treatment, I wouldn't have fixed you up."

  "Cassimer paid for my lungs?"

  "And never told you, apparently. He's the noble one, and the only one you owe thanks to. Me, I'm just a callous old bastard who is forever fucking grateful that my commander has more sense than I give him credit for."

  "Rhys..."

  "Jamie," he said. "You're not one of my people, Joy. You're family, and I don't care how deep a swamp you're drowning in. I'm not going anywhere."

  * * *

  "...where the hell are you going, we need backup!"

  "Forget it, we didn't come here to go up against a cataphract, have you seen what he's doing–"

  "I'm seeing it right now, and I'm seeing that we're holding him back. If you guys get over here, we can finish the fucker."

  "We've got three ships full of tech and flora. That's worth a lot more than some dead kitty-cat."

  "The Bright-Winged One wants what's inside that station–"

  "Who cares?" a third RebEarther interrupted, and the comms channel came alive with protests and arguments. When the din finally settled, the sceptic continued undeterred: "Kivik says the Victual Brothers will accept anyone who joins him instead of throwing their lives away for some alien plant. Sounds like a good deal. Sounds like a hell of a good deal compared to fighting a cataphract."

  "Fuck Kivik."

  "Fuck you–"

  The comms cut out in a burst of static as a tremor shook the station. Glass shards from the broken tank tinkled on the floor. Whatever had caused the tremor had been powerful enough that Joy could feel her bones vibrate.

  "Bloody hell." Rhys glanced at the monitors. The grainy feed of a security camera showed a distant view of a cliff from where a unit of RebEarthers had been firing rockets at Constant. Red-and-black dust lay in piles. As a breeze came in from the sea, it swept away part of the cliff, now turned into sand. "You gave Hopewell a Tisiphone pulveriser rifle? A bad idea on the best of days, but it'll give the RebEarthers some extra motivation to piss off."

  "It might frighten them, but not Skald."

  "No, but what's he going to do?"

  Joy didn't answer. She didn't know. But Skald was in the room with them, tinting the Prime Mover red, and Skald was inside the brane and an unknown number of vessels. If they succeeded in destroying the Prime Mover, how angry he would be. She understood the depth of him now, the bitterness of his soul. He was vast, and his hate was greater still. If any of the team survived, he would come for them, she was sure of it, and he would want to do worse than kill.

  "Somerset."

  One word, barely audible, over her private channel.

  "Hammersmith?" She stood, walking away from the others, into the control room where design plans for the Primaterre Protectorate decorated the walls. A nation, a people, treated like products, moulded and nudged. Despicable.

  "Sending you an activation code. Enter it and confirm."

  "What is it?" she asked, thinking of the explosives he'd planted in the station. Florey had neutralised them, allegedly, but who knew what else Hammersmith might have done.

  "Enter it and confirm. That's an order."

  She hesitated, and he sighed loudly across the channel.

  "Aren't you the one who said we have to trust each other? Just do it."

  She obeyed, and as far as she could tell, nothing happened. But Hammersmith sighed again, this time with relief.

  "Thank you. I set the Hesperia's weapons systems to fire on the Luna Belt satellites, but I couldn't bring myself to activate them."

  "You needed someone who didn't know what they were doing."

  "Yes. Our fleet is coming, Somerset. I couldn't let t
hem die. Too many have died for my mission already."

  "What about you? Are you coming back? The team could use an evac."

  "Every RebEarth ship in orbit detected the Hesperia the second you activated the weapons systems. I will ensure the Luna Belt is destroyed, but..." A long pause, followed by a long sigh. "I would have liked to know how freedom feels. I would have liked to have just a single thought that was all my own. But I must place my hope in your hands, Joy."

  "Elsinore and Juneau have almost got it. Use the Hesperia's escape pod, or climb inside a cataphract suit. Please, Hammersmith. Reinforcements will be here soon. They'll find you, and the mission will be over. You can move on. You can be free."

  "Somerset."

  "Yes?"

  "I'm glad the commander proved himself worthy of your faith."

  "He's not the only one, Hammersmith."

  He didn't respond, but she knew he'd heard her. No matter what else the man had done, he had made it possible for them to get this far. It was his conviction and devotion that would undo the corporate evil on the control room's walls. Flow charts and projections and scientific achievement, all undone by the will of a single man.

  That was how it should be. Free will could not be preserved in amber or in a moonbeam network of roots. It was invisible, it was ephemeral and it was always moving towards some distant, glittering horizon.

  76.

  CASSIMER

  Thousands of electronic eyes surveyed the battlefield, and they all belonged to him. His body was titanium composite and self-repairing nanites, his limbs the barrels of autocannons. Around him, an aura of active protection fields surged and fell and surged again as reserve power cells kicked in. The din of war was so loud it became white noise. Only the faint scent of betony reminded him that he was no longer a cataphract, but something far greater.

  The targeting systems of eighteen gunships locked onto him. There had been twenty-three, but his suit's hostile scripts had chewed through their systems defences and switched their targets to other RebEarth ships. The sea boiled in the town harbour where the resulting wreckage spewed heat and radiation.