Iron Truth (Primaterre Book 1)

by S. A. Tholin

  "Maybe. Maybe not. Regardless, it's a risk that cannot be ignored."

  "And regardless of risk, I don't want your kill switch." Her bottom lip wobbled, then set in a stubborn line. "Give it to one of the others, someone you can trust to use it right."

  "It's not a matter of trust." A half-truth. He might entrust them with his kill switch - it had passed through the hands of many superiors, after all, some far less competent than the men and women he now led - but never with his fear. "Not just a matter of trust," he corrected. "If I am taken, you will die last. Practically speaking, you'll have the best chance of using the kill switch."

  "You can't know that."

  "I do. I wish I didn't, but I do. They'll see you through my eyes, and they will take all that I feel and make it ugly. You will die, Joy, and it will be very slow, and it will be my hands that do the killing and the hurting. They'll let me back in for brief glimpses so that I can see and feel what I am doing to you. You'll say my name; you'll hope that it's all over, that I am back and the hurting will stop, but it won't, because that's the joke, that's what makes them laugh. Joy, you don't know... you don't know what they do, what it's like." The inside of his visor fogged, and around him, pastel walls shifted and changed into the matte grey of the Hecate.

  "Constant..." She slipped in close, rested her head on his chest, and in her he found an anchor; with her, reality steadied and solidified. "What did they do to you?"

  A rhetorical question, but the answers played in his mind, high-definition memories dredged up from deep beneath the ash. The look on the staff sergeant's face when the demons had loosened their grip - the gasp of horror at what he was doing to his cadets, and how that gasp had become laughter as the demons seized control once more.

  do it do it do it

  The mess cook's voice. The same voice that had only hours earlier asked three-hundred cadets if they wanted chicken or the vegetarian option, screeching a chant as the cook pushed through the roiling, tumbling crowd. After that, Cassimer's memories were only darkness and the taste of blood as countless hands scratched and clawed and did it. Did everything.

  Everything except for the punch line. Twenty years they'd bided their time, waiting for the perfect set up, and here it was, in his arms. Joy, who they would turn into sorrow.

  ◆◆◆

  "Huh. That's weird." Lucklaw's voice echoed in the stairwell.

  "What, Corporal?" And damn you for making me ask. No stims in his system to blame the irritation on this time. He was running on natural, didn't dare anything else. The Hecate lingered at the edges of his vision, blurring the lines between reality and memory. It would get better, he told himself, as soon as they got some real work to do. Searching empty halls and offices wasn't enough. Too much pent-up energy, too much silence allowing his thoughts to stagnate and fester.

  "I dug deeper into the building's network, and one of the routine keyword searches snagged on this old memo."

  The document share flashed on Cassimer's HUD. Not the kind of distraction he needed, but it would have to do. Light flickered behind him as Joy switched on her tablet. At least she'd appreciate it. If she and Lucklaw had their way, they'd have spent another few hours trawling through the building's network for data.

  WITH REGARDS TO THE PROPOSED REBRANDING

  With the upcoming expansion, we have an ideal opportunity to reinvigorate the company brand. After lengthy discussions with Creative and Marketing, a package was presented and passed on to Market Research. Their results are in, and after going over them, I thought you might like my opinion.

  HIEROCHLOE – keep the name but rebrand with a new look and logo. Cost-effective, but we'd essentially be paying hand over fist to, what, streamline the H and change the colour of our logo a shade or two? I know that some of the board are rather fond of the name and its origin, but out there in the real world, very few people know that hierochloe is the binomial name of sweetgrass, and even fewer are aware of the historical importance of the medicinal qualities of sweetgrass to this company. Not to mention the pronunciation issues! Even when people do pronounce it correctly, they don't necessarily like it (and I quote: "Hire-a-Chloe? Sounds like an escort agency." Doesn't exactly reflect our wholesome family values, does it?). Other negative feedback includes: sounds girly; don't get it; is that like, Latin or something? Yes, I know, but even stupid people require medical assistance – actually, stupid people especially require medical assistance. The day stupid is eradicated, we lose our jobs.

  HIERARCHY – Another cost-effective alternative as it would allow us to keep the current H-branding on buildings, letterheads etc. According to Market Research, it tests as more masculine than Hierochloe, which is a positive as we do wish to strike a balance, but it suffers from similar pronunciation issues. Also, no less than two people surveyed said that it sounds like "an alien race bent on conquering human space. Bow down to the Hierarchy!" Remarkably, I find myself in agreement. It does have certain connotations of classism that are counter-intuitive to our stated message and intent.

  PRIMATERRE – A fresh new name for a fresh new start. It tests satisfactorily both with our environmentalist market (Earth First is a message they can get behind) and with our investors, who understand that our priority – like theirs – is to secure Earth's unique resources. We've previously had success with our alliterative branding (Hierochloe/Humanity/Harmony), and Primaterre/Primer/Purity is equally memorable. That said, I'm partial to our fourth option -

  Cassimer closed the file. The letters had crawled like insects on his HUD, unwilling to be still. It was nothing important, just an internal memo between people long since gone, but he felt like he shouldn't have read it. Like he had seen a piece of history meant to stay buried.

  "So the Primaterre and Hierochloe are one and the same?" asked Hopewell, even though it was an issue clearly meant to be ignored. He felt that in his very bones, and judging by her hesitant tone, she did too. Still couldn't stop herself from opening her mouth, though.

  "The name, at any rate. Not so strange; it's common knowledge that the Primaterre started out as a conglomerate of companies and factions pooling together to purge the demons." Rhys's words made a soothing, settling sense.

  "I guess that makes me the senior employee," Joy said.

  "Explains your crap typing skills," Lucklaw said. "Senior citizen Somerset."

  She ignored Lucklaw's jab. "But the memo mentioned purity, long before anyone knew about the demons."

  "It's possible they did know. You saw the footage from the Ever Onward – maybe Xanthe wasn't the first outbreak after all. It's hardly a stretch to imagine a similar event on Cato. It's a mining world just like Xanthe, and we know that communications dropped sharply even before the war. Hierochloe could've been fighting the corruption long before anyone else ever knew they existed." Rhys was making a lot of sense.

  "But if there was a demonic outbreak, wouldn't they have reported it?"

  "Maybe they did and nobody believed them. Maybe it happened in other places too, and maybe they were all reported – only, nobody took it seriously until the major, undeniable outbreak on Xanthe."

  "Maybe." Joy sounded unconvinced. She thought she'd found another piece of the puzzle, a gleaming shard of mystery that she wanted to turn over and over until she found a way to make it fit. He liked that in her, but this time she was wrong. There was no mystery here. "What do you think, Commander?"

  A thousand things or more, black and scratching against the bone of his skull. As she asked the question, some thoughts became tangible shapes, spelling a fear he had no name for.

  "Primaterre protects us all." He hadn't thought that, but those were the words he spoke. They felt good, settling sweetly on his tongue.

  "Primaterre protects us all," echoed Rhys; Lucklaw; Hopewell; Florey. Cassimer smiled at the relief in their voices. The Primaterre protects us, and we protect the Primaterre. Everything is fine.

  44. Joy

  A9445ezQ12 -

  No, no, no, b
ut the code haunted her mind relentlessly.

  A9445ezQ1277c -

  Her HUD responded, obediently turning thoughts to text.

  Delete!!!

  The text disappeared, but letters and numbers danced round the edges of her mind, refusing to vanish. Necrosis no longer sat enthroned as the Worst Word in the Universe. It had been usurped, its crown snatched by eighty-six characters that didn't spell a word, but held more meaning than a dictionary.

  Rhys had managed to stop her nosebleed with some unholy concoction of drugs and a mild stimulant to keep her going. She hadn't slept in twenty hours, and most of her waking time had been spent on the move, trying to keep up with the soldiers. She should be tired - she should be sleep-walking - but her body rushed with energy, and an eager voice in the back of her mind nagged her to push harder, to really go for it.

  It was strength and clarity, and entirely false. If this was purity, she had a better word for it: detachment, making reality at once lucid and malleable. If this was Cassimer's normal, no wonder he saw demons in the shadows. No wonder he'd given her The Worst Word in the Universe.

  He had never left the Hecate, that much was clear. It was still with him, embedded in his self like dark shrapnel. If he didn't feel like a person, then that was why - first, the Hecate had to be removed and reassembled, made into a single, comprehensible whole. Not so that he could set it aside and forget, but so that he could acknowledge it and move on - still carrying the burden, but refusing to let it cut and chafe.

  A difficult task, made impossible by the life he led and the chemicals coursing through his body. How could a cohesive image form when one drug brought barbed sharpness and another soothing confusion?

  Oh, Constant. What have they done to you?

  And not just him. Rhys, walking beside her, whose hands reflexively patted his pockets for a cigarette every time they took a break, looked just like the Rhys she'd come to know. But she had asked Cassimer a straight-forward question, and he'd responded with a slogan - one that Rhys had repeated. They all had, one by one turning into strangers. They were all patriots, yes, and adherent to doctrine, but they had never struck her as scripture-spouting drones; not even Cassimer, who was supposed to be their devoted reminder of purity and Primaterre.

  "Rhys, can I ask you a question about purity?"

  The man who looked like Rhys nodded.

  "Sure, but you should really wait until the commander's got the time."

  "Can't ask him. Not this; not now. Tell me, how did the doctrine of purity come about?"

  "They'll teach you all of this in training, you know, but all right. Long story short - you'll get the cinematic version on Scathach - nobody had a damn clue how to stop the demons when they first appeared. Their vessels are only human, but killing them doesn't kill the demon. It'll simply jump to the next vessel, usually the person who pulled the trigger on the previous one. The Primaterre research division put forward the concept of purity as a possible shield, but nobody wanted to listen while there were still weapons that had yet to be tested. Violence always seems to present the most effective and convenient answer, doesn't it?"

  "But not when used against beings that relish it."

  "Exactly. So, when a Primaterre medical research station fell to the corruption, and the company announced that they would take it back by the light of purity, anyone who still had a sense of humour just laughed. A crazy idea, right? Well, the Primaterre sent a unit consisting of their lead scientist and twelve security guards to that station. Not only did they retake the station, but they destroyed every demonic vessel onboard without their unit losing a single soul. After that, sense of humour or not, nobody was laughing anymore."

  "And that's a true story?"

  "Of course." Offense crept into his tone as he looked at her askance. "What do you take me for, some child believing in fairies at the bottom of the garden? This is history, Somerset. Modern history with plenty of hard evidence to back it up."

  "Sorry," said Joy, who had once believed in fairies and wished she still could. "It's just that it doesn't make sense to me. To be pure is to live in the moment, right? To be aware and to perceive, to see the rational world clear and true? And somehow that wards off demons?"

  "The corruption burns in the light of the clear mind."

  "Right. But the Hecate was a Primaterre military vessel. Surely its crew should all have been walking in the light of purity."

  "One corruptible mind is enough. Once the demons gain a foothold, fear is the fertile soil in which they sow their seed."

  "And you're telling me that the one person onboard the Hecate who wasn't afraid, was a fifteen-year-old boy?"

  "I suppose that must have been the case."

  She shook her head. "He was scared, Rhys, so scared."

  "You don't need to be actively pure to be shielded. It's learned behaviour, a mindset that creates layers of passive protection."

  "Then why are we constantly told to think about it? Be aware, stay anchored in the moment, et cetera. And if it is a passive shield, it should have protected the crew of the Hecate. And if it didn't, if just one impure thought was enough to let the demons in, then really, why bother with any of it?"

  "I, uh..." Rhys frowned. "I've never thought of it like that before."

  "You're a scientist, Rhys. How can you not ask yourself these questions? Purity isn't faith; it's a defence, and it can't be an effective defence if its faults aren't examined. You should know that."

  "That's the chaplains' job, not mine."

  "And here I thought keeping the team alive was part of your job description."

  "Bloody hell. You plan on taking that tone with all your superiors?"

  "Only the ones I care about, sir."

  "Stars." He cleared his throat. "Suppose I can't blame the commander. You do have a way of getting under a man's skin. Just burrowing on in like a relentless ginger badger."

  "How sweet." She smiled at this Rhys - far better than the Rhys who used phrases like 'fear is the fertile soil' - and looked up at him through her eyelashes. "You do like me."

  "Sure I like you, princess. Enough that I'd take you out to dinner to make up for the whole abandoning you to die thing. I know a little place on Tamar that has the dessert for just such an occasion. Could have a good time, the two of us, I reckon, if I didn't think the commander would kill me for so much as entertaining the notion."

  "Nonsense."

  "You don't think he's the jealous type? Because I'll bet you every merit to my name that you're wrong."

  "No bets," she said. "I just think that for a mere notion, he'd settle for a stern glare."

  "Haven't you seen the commander's stern glares?" Rhys clutched his heart. "Kill shots, every single one."

  She laughed, pleased to have the real Rhys back, but she had one more question for him. Lucklaw had said that his keyword search had hit on only one memo, but she could clearly see several more hits listed. She'd asked him, and he'd feigned ignorance - and now Rhys did the same thing. Evasive, distant, difficult to engage.

  "It won't be anything important, Somerset. Just junk."

  "Could you open the files for me? I don't have the clearance."

  He hesitated, frowning deeply, and she added: "If it's only junk, what harm could there be?"

  "Just don't let the commander catch you looking at something you shouldn't." He tapped her tablet and the files unlocked. More memos, a couple of videos, and a whole slew of reports from the psychopharmacology department, and she saved them all to her primer.

  ◆◆◆

  Lichen grew in deserts and arctic wastelands. It grew on trees and plants; on rocks and in rocks, or on nothing at all, drifting aimlessly on the wind. It could even survive the vacuum of space. A remarkable organism, but though Joy was no expert, she'd never heard of lichen growing on people.

  Mist rolled across the rime-covered floor of Sublevel Two, swirling languidly around columns of cryo chambers. Glaring spotlights provided no warmth, but made floati
ng motes of ice sparkle in the air. Shadows framed the room, cast by second storey gantries. Every now and then, Joy glimpsed movement up there, as though a phantom had glided past. It was only Hopewell securing the perimeter, Rhys had assured her, but knowing was different from feeling, and her heart thumped so hard she could swear its echo bounced between the polished metal walls.

  The cryo chambers were online and in use. A hundred sleepers by her estimate, locked in dreamless stasis. The hardware was original, as old as the building, each chamber enamel-white and marked with the red Hierochloe triangle. Inside each, lichen swaddled the sleepers.

  It grew in their hair, on their skin, in feathery tendrils creeping into half-open mouths, and its spores dusted shoulders ruby-red. The sleepers were echoes of Rivka rotting on her scaffold; only here, there was no decay and no death - which somehow seemed so much worse. So much more wrong.

  "Steady hands now, Somerset, or this woman's going to wake up wondering where the hell that extra orifice came from."

  While the rest of the team scouted the area, it had been decided that she and Rhys investigate the cryo chambers. She'd tried to tell them that lichen, though it resembled moss, was not a plant and therefore not her area of expertise, but the general consensus seemed to be that simply knowing that lichen wasn't moss made her a Genius Expert on All Things Planty.

  Not that she complained. It was good to be able to contribute in a unique, if marginally useful, way. To start their investigation, they were going to have to take a sample from a sleeper, and in order to do that, she was going to have to insert a needle into the sleeper's spine. Old tech demanded old methods.

  "Insert the syringe." Rhys hunched over the cryo chamber's control panel. His armour had adjusted from ash-grey to whisper-white.

  She tightened her grip around the metal nozzle and tried her very best to ignore the intense cold. The sleeper was a woman, whose frozen blue eyes stared through the porthole. It was possible that she was original too, one of Hierochloe's clients, forgotten in her tomb while centuries turned. The cryo chamber's control panel had provided no clues as to her identity, all information entries left blank but for the one stating her gender. She'd been someone once, this woman whose short blonde hair was interwoven with tufts of lichen. She'd had a name, a home - dreams and hopes - but she'd traded those things for an eternity on ice. An eternity as FEMALE SUBJECT.