Lonely Castles

by S. A. Tholin

  A chunk of cockpit had struck Cassimer with enough force to throw him into a souvenir shop, pinning him under its weight. The remnants of its pilot were smeared across its viewport, one dangling eye staring at him. The shop's roof shivered as a back wall collapsed, sending a spray of twinkling water across the room as shelves of snow globes shattered. A flutter of bleached postcards settled on the cockpit, their edges immediately curling with heat.

  Two RebEarth ships fired missiles. Cassimer's HUD calculated the trajectory and effect; his suit's defences prepared. He braced as he had been trained – head down, arms folded across his chest – and did the most important thing a cataphract could do: breathe.

  Causing destruction was easy. Enduring it was much harder.

  Training couldn't prepare a cataphract for the realities of combat. Their job was to shrug off rockets, stride through fire and go toe to toe with enemy war machines, but while their suits protected them from physical harm, hate slipped right through. Every bullet, every deflected missile came screaming their name. Every cataphract experienced a moment of realisation – when they understood that they were the target of dozens, hundreds, thousands of people who all wanted them dead; each cataphract the eye of a storm of hatred.

  Although the psych teams tried to prepare them for that moment, a cataphract was always alone when it came. Cassimer had seen recruits unseal their armour and run from it, with predictable results, or use their kill switches on the spot. Many others had seemed to come through fine, only to be psyched out of the cataphracts shortly afterwards.

  He had survived his moment. He would survive this too.

  All he had to do was breathe.

  The hostile scripts diverted one missile into the harbour. The shockwave sent the building crumbling down around him. He closed his eyes, let wood and mortar rain down on him, and then the second missile impacted.

  He opened his eyes to a smouldering crater. The cockpit was gone, the dead man's eye obliterated. Curtains of smoke surrounded him, rising towards a sky where ships readied to fire. He'd lost two of his autocannons, the remaining six damaged. But it didn't matter, because he had done what a cataphract was meant to, keeping RebEarth's attention firmly focused on himself.

  Meanwhile, Hopewell and Florey had set up a cluster of anti-aircraft artillery on the hillside and linked its controls to him.

  Fire.

  Three dozen high-ex bursting shells speared the sky. He braced, breathed, and waited. His suit's defences burned so much power that when the clamour died down, he had no sensors, the smoke and wreckage too much for a visual.

  "Eleven down, Commander," Hopewell reported over a static-filled connection. "The survivors are... actually, I think some of them – the smart ones – have decided enough's enough, but I count three heading straight for the artillery site, just like Florey predicted."

  "And the station entrance?"

  "Secured. Collapsed the cliff. We can dig it out – or Rhys can clear the elevator shaft – but it'd take a while. RebEarth's not getting in there now, not a chance. We've–"

  A screech of static ended the transmission.

  "Hopewell?" His sensors had kicked in again. Contacts were moving in on him from all directions. Ground troops, mostly, but a unit of armoured vehicles approached from the south. Best to head for them, where he could make the most noise. "Florey, do you read?"

  "...hear you, Commander. Got some of Kivik's men making an attempt. Guess they're not satisfied fighting just their own."

  "Paint targets and keep moving. Don't engage unless necessary. We only need to keep RebEarth occupied until reinforcements arrive."

  "If that asshole Hammersmith comes through."

  "Language, Hopewell," Cassimer said and looked to the sky, cursing the towerman in far worse terms.

  * * *

  The sun reached its zenith, and Cassimer no longer saw the enemy. They were there, all around, trying to kill him, but they were static, meaningless and empty.

  Instead, he reached far and deep into the ruins of civilisation. If the Primaterre Protectorate could no longer be his home, perhaps Earth could be. He and Joy could live here, as she had suggested others might already do, but not underground – he wouldn't want that for her, not again. They could hide in the forest, he thought, and imagined building a house from rough-hewn oak and clay tile. They could hide in the mountains, which according to an old travel agency's terminal were gorgeous in the summer and enchanting in the winter. He pictured himself brushing snow from Joy's hair and warming her hands in his.

  An armoured vehicle fired a barrage of rockets. His suit's left knee joint was too mangled for him to evade, so he braced and took the fire. When it was over, he limped towards the vehicle. Its tracks spun, but it was too slow. He dug metal fingers into its engine block and began to drag it along. The screaming RebEarthers inside would do as a temporary shield from missiles.

  Hopewell and Florey were pinned down on the outskirts of the town. Instinct begged him to assist them, but logic stated that he would only bring the rest of the RebEarth troops down on their heads. He had to do what he could remotely, hacking weapons, overheating armour – and there, a security door leading to an old bank. He found its systems, overrode them and the door slid open. It was solid and heavy, offering escape and refuge.

  "...go, Hopey, I'll cover you."

  "No way. I'm not leaving anyone ever again."

  Was she talking about Hereward? It struck Cassimer that he should have talked to the lieutenant about that. After he'd been taken captive, command had fallen to her. She had done well, but doing the right thing didn't necessarily feel right. But now was not the time for him to intervene. They were here to give the Primaterre people the freedom to choose, and he wouldn't take that freedom from Hopewell.

  "Don't be an idiot. Your leg's wrecked, no way you make it unless I stay behind to provide covering fire. Go, Hopey; that's an order."

  "Oh yeah? Well, too bad I don't take orders from civilians."

  In the end, they ran together, stumbling through alleys in a rain of sparks as Cassimer overloaded generators and billboards, covering their retreat with fire and smoke. They lost their pursuers in the town.

  Perhaps Cassimer and Joy could do the same thing. The city across the bay burned, and the seaside town was beyond saving, but there were so many others; so many more settlements than on any other planet. They could scale the fortress walls of Stockholm or sail to floating Copenhagen. All the places he'd dreamed of could be theirs; all the treasures of Earth for them and them alone.

  "Commander Cassimer." A voice, terse and clipped, came over the open Primaterre channel. "This is Captain Versailles of the Alex Helios. The Cascade is operational and reinforcements are en route. Not a moment too soon, it'd seem – the Luna Belt has been destroyed, and the images we're capturing from your position..."

  Versailles droned on, but Cassimer looked to the sky in silent gratitude. Hammersmith and Lucklaw had both come through, though he'd never doubted that the latter would.

  RebEarth ships still did battle, inside Earth's atmosphere and in space alike, as Kivik's men and turncoats and zealots fought each other for pointless, hollow reasons. When the Primaterre reinforcements arrived, their internal disputes would be moot.

  Which presented Cassimer with a dilemma. His heart said one thing, the betony in his hand another. Reason dictated indifference, but the path of mercy had its rewards.

  "Kivik," he said, switching to the RebEarth channel Hammersmith had provided earlier.

  "Cassimer?" The RebEarther sounded half-amused, half-disappointed. "You still alive, then?"

  "Obviously."

  "A Primaterre ship just rammed my Stortebecker, crippling her badly in the process. I thought it might've been you. Too bad it wasn't."

  "Was it a barque?"

  "Yeah. You knew the pilot? Maybe you can tell me why the hell his last words were 'for pageant'. I hate to leave a mystery unsolved."

  Paget; not pageant, but Kivik d
idn't need to know that. How strange that Hammersmith was gone without so much as a word. The colonel had sent no final transmission to the team, left nothing to remember him by. He had raced headlong into death, alone and silent.

  It was the death of a man who had nothing.

  Cassimer had stood at the brink of such a death many times. Its approach had always seemed like a mercy, but now he knew that life, too, had its mercies. And perhaps poor Tallinn had been right. Perhaps the Primaterre could lead the galaxy down a better path.

  "The Cascade's operational again, Kivik. A Primaterre fleet is en route to Earth. I suggest an immediate retreat if you want to survive."

  "Well." Kivik sounded genuinely surprised. "My men down planetside will appreciate that, but you needn't have worried about little old me. I left hours ago. See, we found all these Primaterre frigates adrift in space, stuffed full with augment-rich corpses, and we figured it was a real shame to let such a mother lode go to waste."

  "Rampart ships are primer locked–"

  "Yeah well, I've got people on my crew who've never seen a lock they couldn't pick. A hardware jack did the trick. But don't fret, Cassimer – I only took two. One for each arm you broke seemed a fair trade. The Sinister and the Dexter will make fine additions to the Victual Brothers' fleet, once we space the dead and slap phoenixes on their hulls."

  Each frigate carried a crew of hundreds; hundreds of unjustly slain Primaterre men and women, their bodies now defiled and picked clean by scavengers. Their remains would be left to drift in the void while impure filth piloted their ships, their augments repurposed to serve slavers and raiders.

  Cassimer let the vehicle he'd been dragging along fall to the ground and fired a round of grenades through its windscreen. Mercy was great, but unless limited by righteousness, it was weakness. RebEarth did not deserve it. Kivik did not deserve it.

  "Better fly fast, Kivik."

  "Why?" The RebEarth captain laughed. "You coming to get me?"

  "If Kiruna doesn't get you first."

  Doctrine stated that there was no afterlife, no such thing as spirits, but Kivik wasn't pure, and though he made a typically smart comeback, Cassimer could hear the fear in his voice. The RebEarther was a true believer, and if he believed in mother spirits, then why not vengeful ones?

  Cassimer did not believe, but he didn't need to. Cataphracts were more than shields; they were swords, and he'd had enough of playing defence. It was time to purge Earth.

  * * *

  It was his second sunset on Earth, far more than he could ever have hoped for, and this time he felt the light on his skin, filtering in through cracks in his Helreginn armour. The town lay in ruins about him. The wind had swept the forest fire away and to the east. Over the sea, the air was clear of smoke, and he could see Sol's golden glow and the arrival of the first Primaterre gunships.

  The pilots had to feel some of what he and the team had when first arriving on Earth, this sacred and forbidden place, but they did not hesitate. They engaged RebEarth ships and pursued those who tried to flee. They darted across the sky like hawks, painting it bright with fire.

  And then Joy's voice was in his ear, fearful and hopeful at once.

  "We're disengaging the Prime Mover. Please prepare yourselves. In three, two, one..."

  It felt like a sigh of the soul, a shudder through his core so great that he couldn't move, and then, with a faint slither, something like a tendril receded.

  The world hadn't changed. The sunset was the same, the sea as vast as ever. But a softness had vanished from the edges of his mind, making everything a little bit sharper. He had experienced similar effects with stims, but it had always been temporary. This... this openness without protective, fuzzy borders, it was going to be permanent.

  It was terrifying. It was electrifying.

  The RebEarthers who had still been taking shots at Cassimer were smart enough to know when to retreat. Some made for their ships, others for the wilderness. Perhaps they meant to hide and make their home on Earth.

  Cassimer's daydreams of such a future had disappeared the moment he saw the Primaterre sun blazing on gunship hulls. He wasn't a drifter or a Black Niner on the run. He was a Primaterre soldier. The Protectorate was his home, his heart, and he was Commander Cassimer of Scathach Banneret Company.

  Together with Hopewell and Florey, he dug the team out of the station. When he looked at them, he saw universes connected to universes. He saw Florey's wife and children, Hopewell's sister, whoever Cecilia was to Rhys. He saw a gleaming multiverse that was his to protect, and he would do it the only way he knew how. Only when he helped Joy out did his conviction falter, but he couldn't change who he was. For the first time, he was in full control of himself, and he had made his decision. He would face the Primaterre Protectorate's justice.

  As they stood on the cliffs, a Primaterre ship came in for a landing on the beach.

  "Well," Hopewell said, leaning hard on Florey to compensate for a broken leg. Her visor was shattered, her face streaked with blood. "Now we're in trouble."

  Cassimer opened the faceplate of his armour and knelt next to Joy.

  "I can't run from this," he said.

  She smiled and touched his face, running her fingertips across the scar on his nose.

  "You don't have to. We just need to think like Bastion."

  * * *

  Florey and Rhys hauled the Prime Mover from its tank to the cliffs. Cassimer wondered what the dead thing might have made of the sea. A tank wouldn't seem like much of a home to someone who'd glimpsed the ocean.

  "Here," Joy directed him. "Keep your faceplate open. Put your boot on its cortex – gently; we don't want to squish it."

  He complied, but there was something theatrical about the pose; something far too heroic. "Is this necessary?"

  "Absolutely."

  The team gathered round. On the beach below, the Primaterre ship's ramp hissed open and the flight crew took their first, hesitant steps onto Earth soil.

  "All right. Florey–"

  "Hang on." Hopewell removed her helmet and untied her hair. It was dark gold in the light of the setting sun, rippling as she shook it out over her shoulders. "Better, right?"

  "Very heroic," Joy assured her, the very word enough to make Cassimer chafe.

  "I'd better get a poster deal out of this."

  "Poster? You've got to think bigger, Lieutenant. This is movie material," Rhys said. "I'm thinking Prosper Torrence would make an excellent me."

  "Sure, maybe fifteen years and twenty-five kilos ago."

  "Florey," Joy said. "It's time."

  As the Primaterre crew on the beach approached, the gunner detonated the explosives inside the station. The hill crumbled, a plume of fire shooting out through the submarine pen doors.

  The Primaterre crew looked up, squinting against the blaze, and on the cliffs, they saw Cassimer in his Helreginn suit, one boot firmly placed on a demon, surrounded by his team. They would not see criminals and traitors, but strength and solidarity. They would see purity.

  "Aren't we just ending one lie with another?" Elsinore whispered.

  "The difference is," Joy said, "this time they can choose whether to believe it."

  "This time they are free," Cassimer said, and as the Primaterre crew began to climb the cliffs, he opened the releases on his gauntlet. Joy's hand found his, and he held her tightly, the betony between their palms. He was free, and if the Primaterre crew decided not to believe, this was how he chose to die.

  Not as a man who had nothing, but one who had everything.

  EPILOGUE

  The fish tanks in Station-Chief Amager's office had been bricked up and sealed. Reminders of purity glowed on the walls – not to comfort the station chief, Joy thought, but so that he would never forget the part he'd played in the assault on Scathach.

  The station chief looked uncomfortable in his chair, and she doubted it would be his chair for very much longer. General Hawthorne from Bastion Command stood on his right. Th
e man on his left was a stranger, but undoubtedly Tower. He smiled at her when she entered and motioned towards the empty chair next to Major Juneau.

  "Captain Somerset," Hawthorne said, although they knew each other well enough by now that he called her Joy outside of the office. "We won't keep you long. Colonel Vantage here has a gift and a proposal."

  The gift was a small case containing a medal engraved with the Primaterre sun. It was plain, as all the highest honours were.

  "As Colonel Hammersmith had no next of kin, we thought it should go to his second-in-command. Perhaps you will know how he would like to be commemorated," said the towerman Hawthorne had called Vantage.

  "Thank you." She thought she did know. She'd send the box to the Earth Provides compound where Florey's family made their home, and where Elsinore now spent his days repairing agricultural machines. It would be up to him whether he wanted to throw it away or keep it. She wished for the latter, hoping he would discover that he was a forgiving man.

  "It isn't much, considering what he did. To realise that one of his subordinates was in fact a demon, and to then keep the demon on in order to uncover its plans... Few men would have dared. Without towermen willing to bend the rules and think outside of the box, the demon on Earth could've continued to grow undisturbed."

  "Let's not forget that it was unyielding Bastion who destroyed the demon," Hawthorne said.

  "Indeed, General. It takes all kinds – which brings me to my proposal. Bastion, Tower, Rampart, Oriel, Sanctum and even Moat... though we are family, we don't necessarily play well together. Yet the team who successfully defended Earth against a demon and its worshippers consisted of members from three branches, standing pure and united against corruption. As you were Hammersmith's Liaison Officer, I assume this was down to your influence."

  "She held the team together in the most dire of circumstances. She excelled in her duty," Juneau said, and Joy had to rewind her audio to make absolutely sure she'd heard that right.

  "Good, because I'm putting together a joint-op task force. Major Juneau will be Oriel's representative, Scathach Station will provide the muscle, and I'd like you to make sure they all get along, Captain Somerset."