Iron Truth

by S. A. Tholin

  So never mind handcuffs. She had to keep going, whatever it took. That was the promise she'd made.

  "Hello?" Her voice, intended to sound confident, quivered pathetically.

  A woman appeared in the cubicle's doorway. She wore a suit of armour, but no helmet, though her ruffled blonde hair showed signs of having worn one recently. "About time you woke up."

  "Hi. I'm Joy."

  "We've met."

  "Oh. You're the one who shoved me." That had hurt, and wasn't something Joy wanted to repeat, but now was not the time to act the frightened little lamb (even if that was very much what she was). Best to be assertive, maybe even conversational. It worked with the commander - Cassimer didn't say much, but she got the sense that he didn't mind if she did - so no reason it shouldn't work with his subordinates.

  Besides, Joy was a guest. Cassimer's guest, which surely made her fate his decision, and not this woman's.

  "Not much of an introduction. How about a name?" Joy held out her free hand, wondering briefly if they even shook hands in the future or if she just looked like an idiot.

  The blonde smirked and gave her hand a tight squeeze. "Hello Joy. I'm the sucker on baby-sitting duty, also known as Lieutenant Hopewell."

  "Sorry to inconvenience you."

  "Hey, it's better than welding duty." Hopewell touched a finger to Joy's manacle. A light blinked on the black surface, scanned the lieutenant's fingerprint, and then the manacle released its grip around Joy's wrist. "Want a shower before the boys dismantle that part of the habitat?"

  "A shower?" The manacle had left no mark on Joy's skin, but she rubbed her wrist nonetheless, as if to reassure herself she was free. "You better be serious, because if this is some sort of trick I think I might actually cry."

  "Get a move on, civilian." There was a hint of amusement in Hopewell's voice; just enough for Joy to relax a little. Hopewell might be all soldier, and no stranger to violence, but she had neither the venom nor the sharp fangs of Rivka.

  ◆◆◆

  Two seconds into her real shower and it had utterly usurped the real bed, crown and throne and sceptre.

  Bright light and hot water beat down on her. Dirty water pooled around her feet, but though there was no drain it never rose higher than about an inch. Whatever material this habitat was made of, it was certainly capable of much. The shower itself was primitive in comparison - a rusting old pipe had been led through the wall, into some sort of heater, and then on into a wide showerhead.

  The soldiers had made use of Stairhaven's old infrastructure, and that impressed her more than their sophisticated technology. The Primaterre didn't just dominate; they adapted, finding creative solutions.

  "Wrap it up, civilian." Hopewell sat in a folding chair on the opposite side of the small bathroom. Joy had been uncomfortable at first, getting undressed in front of a stranger, but Hopewell had barely glanced at her. There was a silver shimmer in her eyes that had to be some sort of implants, maybe even a descendant of the h-chip in Joy's arm. That had been the vision, after all, that the h-chips would one day evolve into the ultimate portable computer, working in perfect tandem with the human body and brain.

  Reluctantly, Joy turned the water off. Hopewell had provided neither shampoo nor soap, yet Joy could smell citrus-and-chemicals on her skin and in her hair. Some additive in the water made it an all-purpose cleanser - remarkable, so much so that it was almost shocking when Hopewell handed her a towel.

  "To dry myself with?" She felt the fabric in her hands. Soft white cotton.

  "Uh, yeah." Hopewell gave her a strange look.

  "I mean, it doesn't do anything else?"

  "What else would a towel do?"

  "Well, it could have heated fibres, or it could apply lotion secreted through nano-weave? Or..." Joy wracked her brain for more towel-related ideas.

  "You're a special kind of crazy, aren't you?" Hopewell shrugged. "Guess that's what it takes to survive on a planet like this."

  Joy quickly dried herself. While the towel wasn't a fancy future towel, it was very nice, nice enough to covet - but while stealing towels from hotels was an age-old cliché, stealing towels from military bases seemed a far more dangerous prospect.

  Hopewell handed her a pile of neatly folded clothes. "Get dressed."

  "Where are my clothes?"

  "If by clothes you mean the mouldering rags you left on the bathroom floor, they're in the decontamination chamber. You can collect them before you leave. Now get dressed - I'll be waiting outside."

  Waiting for what? Joy pulled a grey t-shirt over her head. What was the plan here, exactly?

  And - would she get to keep the clothes? The material was soft and warm, a uniform grey in colour, sporting a white emblem across the chest of the shirt. It was the same cross-in-a-circle she'd seen on the soldiers' armour, surmounted by two wings. Denoting a religious role? Or a pilot? Maybe even a doctor. The clothes were only about two sizes too large for her, so whoever they belonged to hadn't felt the need to transform themselves into a giant like the other soldiers.

  On freshly-socked feet, she padded back into the central area. Fourteen beds lined the walls, seven on each long side, all smartly made. In fact, everything was incredibly clean and tidy. Before the shower, Joy had been the only dirty thing in the habitat, a thought that embarrassed her enough that she found herself blushing.

  A desk, surrounded by folding chairs, took up the centre of the room. The bed where she'd spent the night was in a cubicle all by itself, shielded from view. Had the soldiers put it up just for her?

  Another, larger cubicle took up most of the opposite corner, dark and forbidding walls sending the message that whatever took place in there, was not for her eyes.

  "Sit." Hopewell pulled out one of the folding chairs and proffered it to her. Joy complied and had just about enough time to enjoy the seat (a real chair!) before Hopewell slapped the manacle back around her wrist, securing the other cuff around a desk leg.

  "Is that really necessary?"

  Hopewell didn't reply, instead taking a seat on one of the beds. Like all the other beds, it had a large crate at its foot, but it was the only crate that had a helmet resting on top of it. Hopewell's helmet, presumably, and likely her bed, too.

  From her cross-legged perch, the lieutenant regarded Joy with cool blue eyes. "Do you really eat spiders? What do they taste like?"

  "Like vomit scraped off the street, I imagine," Joy said. "Except the whole time you're eating, you're intensely aware that it is in fact spider guts, which really makes it a lot worse. At least vomit was once actual food, you know? Dogs eat vomit. Dogs would not eat these spiders."

  "In that case, you might actually enjoy one of these." Hopewell produced a slim, foil-wrapped bar from one of her many belt pouches. She turned it over, squinting at the label. "'Turkey with roast potatoes and cranberry sauce'. Yeah, right. Go easy on it, though; it's a bigger meal than you're used to."

  Hopewell threw the bar onto the desk. Joy picked it up, unwrapping silver foil (with a stated 15,000 calorie content) to find a brown rectangular bar. It didn't much taste like turkey, but it didn't taste anything like spider either, which made it absolutely delicious.

  "I think I can taste the cranberry sauce," she informed Hopewell, who smiled and shook her head.

  "A special kind of crazy, that's for sure. I..." Hopewell trailed off, tilting her head slightly. She pointed to her ear, then put a finger over her lips.

  Here it comes, Joy thought, her skin prickling with anticipation. The lieutenant was receiving instructions on what to do with her next.

  "Well, did you look in the toolbox? The blue one. By the tarps. No, not those tarps, the other ones." A moment of silence passed. Hopewell rolled her eyes. "Ah, Florey, you're driving me crazy. You know what, I'll just come up and do it myself. Yeah, that's right."

  The lieutenant got up and grabbed her helmet. "I need give the boys a hand up top. You just sit there and relax, all right? Someone will be along eventually."r />
  The airlock at the end of the room whooshed open to let Hopewell through. Joy must have passed through it when she arrived, though the last thing she remembered was sitting in the juddering vehicle, resting her face against cool window glass and watching the landscape roll by to the sound of a hypnotic rumble.

  Oh, great - she'd fallen asleep, and somebody had carried her into the base and chained her to a bed. The realisation made her nauseous. She couldn't go on like this, couldn't allow herself any more vulnerable moments. She'd been lucky so far, but sooner or later her luck would run out. Not counting the crash landing of the Ever Onward, she'd had at least two dozen near-death experiences on Cato. Thirteen more lives than the average cat - hoping for more would be greedy.

  From now on, she had to be careful. Had to be prepared. Though - she tried the manacle, pulling at the chain - there was little she could do in her current position.

  No, stupid, whispered Imaginary Finn in his most annoying know-it-all tone. Pay attention. Look around. Learn as much as you can about these people.

  The ration bar's foil wrap, complete with the Primaterre logo, offered a list of ingredients. Apart from the surprising amount of nutrients, the only thing that stood out was 'free-range turkey'. Free-range? That was the sort of moral luxury that only fortunates like Miana could've afforded back on Mars - and hardly expected of a galactic war machine.

  At the bottom of the list, in fine print, were the words MADE ON ATHENAIS.

  The arc ship set to colonise Athenais had departed six months before the Ever Onward began its journey towards Gainsborough. Those colonists had made it to their destination, and a hundred years later their efforts were still paying off - even if it was only in the form of strange-tasting military rations.

  If Athenais lived, maybe Gainsborough wasn't a dead dream. She and Finn could still make it to fields of blue sweetgrass and deeper blue oceans. They could still -

  The airlock whooshed open again, allowing a Primaterre titan entry. Not Hopewell, because the lieutenant hadn't needed to duck through the door. This had to be one of 'the boys'.

  The soldier's visor turned towards her, and he stopped in his tracks. A few moments of silence passed - Joy making the most of them by trying to shrink into the chair and disappear - and then the soldier removed his helmet. Slowly, hesitantly, almost as though he was afraid of taking it off.

  She was reminded of what Finn had said to her about spiders (long before spiders became synonymous with dinner): It's much more afraid of you than you are of it - it's tiny compared to you!

  But she was no spider, and the soldier, he was...

  ...a man, dark of hair and dark of eyes. Mid-thirties, at a guess, scarred and ruggedly handsome. Tanned, athletic - the sort of man who might spend his leave hiking the great forests of Mars. The sort of man who'd scale sheer cliffs to prove that he could. In short, the sort of man who Joy had never encountered outside of adverts for mineral water and running shoes. The only difference was the lack of a smile and the blank look in his eyes - even as he fixed his gaze on her, she couldn't help but feel that part of him was elsewhere.

  He looked like a man ready to carry the burdens of worlds on his shoulders (they were certainly wide enough), and she recognised in him what she'd heard in the commander's voice.

  "Cassimer."

  He frowned. "You know me?"

  Strange question. "Well, yes. We've met."

  "No, I meant..." He gestured towards his face. "You recognise me."

  "You look like you sound," she said.

  He said nothing else, disappearing into the cubicle where Joy had slept. She could hear the sound of crates being opened, followed by metallic clatter. Each second ticking past raised her pulse. She tugged at the manacle, but it only sucked tighter around her wrist. The desk might be the weak link. If she could kick the leg loose and run before she had to find out what Cassimer was doing back there -

  - a chair scraped against the floor. Cassimer took a seat on the opposite side of the desk. His armour was gone, replaced with grey fatigues, but the man himself was no less intimidating.

  "The truth, Joy."

  A trustworthy voice and a trustworthy face, but he had lied to her once, had admitted as much. Rivka had a liar's face, rat-sharp and hungry, but Rivka had never lied.

  Joy had long since left the world of fairy tales behind. In the real world, not all witches had warty noses and not all princesses were beautiful. Still, that didn't stop reality from disappointing her from time to time, and Cassimer - he had disappointed her deeply.

  "I told you the truth. I think I'd remember you - especially if this is how you usually treat your guests." The chain of the manacle clanked against the desk as she demonstratively showed him her wrist. "Is this really necessary?"

  "Yes. Guests are potential security risks." He didn't even seem apologetic. "I look like I sound. What does that mean?"

  "If you're fishing for compliments, you've caught me in the wrong mood."

  "I..." He blinked, and briefly, the blankness in his eyes was disturbed. "No compliments. Only truth."

  "All right." If it was truth he wanted, he'd get it. "Reliability. Honesty. That's what I heard in your voice, and that's what I see in your face." She stopped there, leaving the accusation silent.

  He leaned back in his seat, as though trying to put distance between them. Imaginary Finn warned caution, but Joy ignored him - the way forward with the commander was to be bold, to be sincere, to be raw. She could see her words take effect, discomfort turning his face, and did he not deserve that?

  "If you want to interrogate me, then do that. Get out your needles and your knives, or whatever ways you Primaterre have," she said, thinking please don't what am I even saying, "and cut your truth from me - or you can accept the truth I've offered you."

  "Don't speak of such things." The angles of his jaw hardened. "Don't put yourself in more danger than you already are."

  "Danger? I thought I was the dangerous one. Why else have you got me chained up?"

  The airlock wheezed, and another soldier stepped inside the habitat.

  Cassimer shook his head. "Not now, Lucklaw."

  The soldier nodded, backing into the airlock again - stopping only to glance at Joy. Even through the dark visor she could sense the curiosity she invited. Then the soldier was gone, back to the grey plains whose perils were so much more familiar than what she now faced. Who she now faced.

  "Out there, you were just another local. In here, you are a threat. Everything you see and hear is a weapon to be used against us. Every moment spent in our company is an invitation for corruption to seize your mind. The shackles make you less of a weapon. Less of a target."

  "Then why did you invite me?" She didn't need to wait for his answer - it was clear on his face. A glimmer of pity in his eye, a sympathetic twitch of the lip - it all spelled the same thing.

  "Out of kindness," she said.

  "It doesn't matter," Cassimer replied, but he was wrong. It mattered very much.

  "Thank you."

  "Don't. They may be watching. If they see you with me, they may try to take you."

  "They? The other soldiers? Or the locals?" Oh, how she hoped he would say yes.

  "No," he said. "While you are my guest, you have nothing to fear from either."

  Unexpected. Might even have been endearing if it'd come from a man who didn't feel the need to keep her in chains.

  "It's the demons that concern me."

  Of course. Great - and now his eyes were searching the shadows for things that weren't there, and Joy didn't know which notion was worse: that she'd been chained by a madman, or that there really were demons lurking in the dark.

  "Cassimer, please - I don't understand what you're talking about. What demons?"

  15. Cassimer

  A simple question with a complex answer, and an answer he'd never expected to have to give. In Protectorate space, the threat of possession was as much a part of life as air or water - a given, re
quiring no further explanation.

  He'd heard of distant colonies, all but forgotten, where the population remained ignorant. Many other worlds knew only bits and pieces, sometimes puzzling enough together to create their own strange, cargo-cult doctrine of purity. Exeter had often spoken of such worlds, yearning to enlighten them, but the Primaterre Protectorate didn't concern itself with exo-space.

  How to explain corruption to one untouched by it? He understood now how she could be so light of spirit. To her, the stars were bright with promise and a mind a thing that could be allowed to wander freely; unguarded.

  "Start at the beginning," she sensibly prompted.

  "They first appeared about a century ago. A spark of conflict on Earth had become blazing fire, spreading quickly across worlds and systems." Common knowledge, and yet he saw not a glimmer of recognition in her eyes. How distant humans had become from one another, that she could be ignorant of the war that had threatened to end civilisation. The arc ships, intended to spread a glittering web of kinship across the galaxy, had instead created tiny pockets of insulated humanity, adrift in the void.

  Yet the void of space seemed easier to overcome than the void between him and Joy. He wanted to close it, to connect, to draw from her light a bridge across the span. Instead, he had to give her darkness.

  "To feed the war, any world not yet a battlefield was stripped of its resources. Xanthe was a mining world much like Cato, uncolonised save for one city. Their gold mines had been nearing depletion even before the war, but in profit-fuelled hunger, they dug, deeper and farther than ever before, until the earth shook and groaned above the miners' heads."

  He knew this part of the story as well as he knew his own name, rank and kill-switch code. It was learned history, distant enough from remembered experiences that it didn't hurt to tell.

  It also helped that Joy seemed interested, her attention rapt and entirely on him. No longer so afraid, and in the light of her honey brown eyes, he walked deeper into the darkness. Deep into the yellow soil of Xanthe, where the miners had struck a vein that should never have been excavated. Gold, they'd thought, but when they dug into it, a great maw had opened in the earth. In a hiss of sulphur, the corruption had poured forth to wrap its tendrils around impure minds.