Iron Truth

by S. A. Tholin

  He gave Lucklaw the go-ahead and, one by one, the lights of cryo pods were extinguished. Ten thousand potential enemies became ten-thousand hostages and, judging by the look on Elkhart's face, the gambit had paid off.

  "Turn them back on," Elkhart said, speaking not to Cassimer but to some unknown accomplice aboard the Andromache. But Lucklaw was in their systems now, deploying his full battery of hacks and countermands, abstract warfare that Cassimer didn't comprehend, but pictured like a planet-wide barrage from a Primaterre assault fleet.

  "Turn them back on." This time Elkhart did speak to Cassimer.

  He shook his head. That part of his counter-offer was non-negotiable. He'd expected Joy to object, but perhaps she believed her brother to be lost, or perhaps she had done what Cassimer had asked and trusted him. The guilt stung, because he had no hidden agenda, no trick up his sleeve to save Finn Somerset. If her brother slept among the ten thousand, he would die with them.

  "Ten thousand cryo chambers. How long before irreparable damage sets in? I'd say thirty minutes, but these chambers, they're antiques. Your army could be drawing its last breath as we speak."

  "Turn them back on!"

  "As soon as you surrender the Andromache or allow us to retreat. If you start manually opening pods now, your losses may not be catastrophic."

  Elkhart's face twisted as he swallowed his fury. No demon like any Cassimer had seen, but a demon nonetheless, and putting the screws to it felt good. Not as good as destroying it, but he'd get his chance, he'd make sure of that. Retreat, regroup and return with a more informed plan of attack.

  "Two men unwilling to compromise. Such is the seed of war, and make no mistake, soldier, it is you who sowed it. Cato will come for you."

  "I look forward to it," Cassimer said, speaking heartfelt truth. Fire and death to make his blood sing, purpose and order to make his veins run bright with purity. Purge this corruption, and perhaps the light would burn hot enough to sear the Hecate from his mind.

  The demon smiled. "Then allow me to draw first blood."

  A gun went off - once, twice. On his HUD, Cassimer saw the mouth of the tunnel flash yellow. Rhys and Joy stood face to face, so close to one another, her hand on his neck, his hand clutching her shoulder. Then Rhys fell, toppling backwards, blood gushing through the remains of his visor.

  Joy turned. Her hair glowed like copper, and in this cave of white mist and black glass, she was golden harvest and dark sardonyx, honey and red-apple orchards. Starlight, bright and pure.

  But her fingers opened to release the grip of a hot-muzzled gun, and her face was blood and shadow. Darkness streamed from her nose and eyes, poured from her mouth as her scream became a laugh.

  Once upon a time, there was a ship called the Hecate. That was how the story had begun, and this was how it ended.

  47. Cassimer

  "Hold your fire!" Cassimer heard himself shout the order, but couldn't feel his lips move. Couldn't feel anything at all.

  He called again for his team to hold their fire, to go against every instinct. The Morrigan was in his hand, his finger pressed against its trigger. All he had to do was squeeze. All he had to do was turn the gun on himself and -

  A quick burst of gunfire rolled like thunder. Locals had crept from the tunnel to crowd Joy, but Florey's bullets tore through their torsos. Lightning arced from Joy's chest as her reactive armour plates mitigated the impacts, and she fell in a cascade of zipping fireflies and crackling blue. Copper hair fanned across black glass. Her helmet tumbled down the ramp, rattling onto the bridge. Florey's footsteps were heavy as he moved to finish what he had started. It was a world without shape, without inked lines of sense and reason; a world of only colour and sounds, and Cassimer was watching it through a blizzard of static.

  Impurity had to be cleansed. Demons had to be purged. The white snow became the meltwater of doctrine, coolly reassuring him that Florey was doing the right thing. The only thing.

  Something clattered against his boots. He looked down and, through the static, a pink mermaid glittered and winked. She smiled, a toothy cartoon grin, and in that smile he saw Copenhagen and he saw Joy.

  His body was moving before any coherent thought had finished forming. Doctrine screamed, but he was deaf to it; reason tugged at him, but reason had no place in this world of colour and sound. His feet caught him up to Florey, his hands grabbed the gunner's assault rifle and tore it away, and when Florey swore and reached for his sidearm, it was the small seething thing inside Cassimer's chest that smashed the butt of the rifle into Florey's visor. Hard enough to knock him to the floor, hard enough to do damage. Hard enough to make the gunner forget about rank and duty and launch himself to his feet with violence in mind.

  Electricity surged as armoured suits clashed. The smell of ozone grew strong and acrid, and the temperature flared as though Cassimer's suit had a temper of its own. Florey threw a punch and Cassimer let it come, welcoming it. Wanted the pain, wanted unconsciousness, but Florey's blow, hard enough to fracture a man's skull, didn't even crack his visor.

  Voices yelled in his ear and text filled his HUD with bright urgency, but it was the sound of laughter that made Cassimer remember the true enemy. He grabbed Florey's arm, wrenching it backwards, and slammed his own fist into the gunner's side, shattering reactive plates. Florey groaned, dropping to his knees.

  Rhys's visual feed had died, but Lucklaw's showed a top-down view of the fallen pair. Locals had crept from the tunnel to surround them. Rhys lay bleeding and unattended, but a ragged woman knelt by Joy. Long white fingers pressed against the neck Cassimer had kissed, and he groaned too, sick with dread and grief.

  Elkhart laughed and laughed in the long-dark shadow of the Andromache. Laughed and laughed at the punch line to a joke twenty years in the making.

  "Shut up." Cassimer wrapped one arm around Florey's neck, securing the gunner in a chokehold. The fear churned in his stomach, its tail wrapped tight around his spine and lungs, but it didn't really matter anymore. Copper hair on black glass floor, honey brown eyes clouded with blood. The quilted underside of a mattress, the flutter of a falling deck of cards. The smell of ozone, and the smell of sea breeze detergent. His forearm pressed against the throat of a man who was Florey or the Hecate's staff sergeant or a thing of shadow.

  "You think it's funny? You think I didn't see this coming? You think I didn't feel you watching all these years?"

  Florey fought, tried to wrench himself loose. Other voices spoke too, anxious and uncertain, but Cassimer tightened his hold on Florey. If there was to be any hope of containing the situation, the gunner had to submit and stand down. Had to swallow the unforgivable until they were secure.

  "I'm quite sure I've no idea what you're talking about, soldier."

  "Couldn't kill me on the Hecate. Couldn't kill me in the trenches. I saw you there, in the shadows. Heard you in the cries of the dying. Couldn't find your way in, though, could you? Not until you found her." Too personal, too raw, but it all came spilling out through the cracks now. "I knew from the moment I saw her. Not a woman at all, but a bullet meant for me. But you didn't beat me; I chose the bullet. I welcomed it. I wanted it."

  Hairline fractures widened into crevasses, but still he held himself together. Even sent orders to the team so that they'd know their commander might've lost his mind, but not his sense of duty. Ruby red bloomed on the chests and foreheads of selected targets as guidance systems painted them with impending doom. Signals from planted charges chirped to confirm that they were armed. Their exit would be swift and it would be bloody, and Florey no longer struggled, channelling his anger into purpose.

  Then Joy began to stand, helped by locals. Soft curves twisted into awkward angles, limbs contorting painfully. Her fingers pulled back to make claws of her hands. The memory of such claws raking his skin merged with the memory of her hand on his cheek, and he only just managed to mute his channel before a strange, strangled sound escaped him.

  "Joy!" He opened his visor to the
cold and the dark. Tasted frost and fresh blood on his lips, and called her name again, her name and so much more. Pleaded with her to come back, to fight the thing inside of her, to remember how she was starlight, untouched by darkness -

  - until she met me. The thought hit harder than the cold, hit harder than Florey, and the Morrigan's mercy whispered his name. Joy had let him into her heart and the demons had followed that dark trail.

  Joy didn't listen, instead throwing herself at the woman who had checked her pulse. Scratching, flailing, laughing. The woman tried to hold Joy back, but teeth found flesh and the woman screamed. Cassimer couldn't take it anymore. He had to choose a darkness.

  Lights.

  Lucklaw reacted to the order faster than Cassimer could raise his weapon. The silo's lights went out in a great sigh of electricity, and Cassimer released Florey. The gunner knew what to do. They all did.

  Before the locals had time to adjust to the sudden twilight, the chamber bloomed with gunfire. Measured and focused, the clinical execution of pre-selected targets. Hopewell was clear, moving down the gantry in a mist of enemy blood.

  The bridge creaked and swayed as Cassimer sprinted across it. The locals were returning fire, bullets streaking through the air, minor explosions erupting on dark glass walls. Elkhart shouted for them to stand down, but the fever of battle and survival had the locals in its grip. Untrained as they were, they would heed no other master now. Didn't matter if Elkhart told them over and over again.

  A line of defence had formed at the end of the bridge. Cassimer crashed into the first man as his active protection field fizzled and died under the strain. Bullets turned to sizzling plasma on his armour plates, searing the locals with thick, smouldering splashes.

  The first local was down and would never get back up again. Two more tried to hold him back with their bodies when their weapons failed to stop him. One bullet, one kill. A shove, and the other local crashed through the bridge railing. There were more coming, but Florey was behind him, laying down support fire.

  "Joy!" A moment of carelessness, reaching blindly for the one thing that mattered more than the mission, more than his life - and a moment later he was on the ground, paying for it. Smoke joined the swirls of mist. A network of lightning bolt fractures burst from a crater three metres from his position. A missile, his HUD informed him. It had seen what he hadn't and resuscitated its protection field for a final sputtering flare of target scrambling. The prospect of taking a hit from a missile with a flat-lined APF was incentive enough to get back on his feet.

  Missile launcher on fourth level.

  On it. Hopewell, at the mouth of the tunnel, shrugged her own launcher from her back. Before Cassimer had regained his breath, the fourth level burst into flame. The gantry collapsed inwards, pulling a string of cryo chambers along. Arcing sparks made rainbows in a spray of liquid nitrogen and ice crystals.

  Another one, fifth level. Cassimer passed the target to Hopewell; he had another in his sights - the sniper on the third level, with the Hyrrokkin pressed too close to his orbital socket. The sniper's default-red targeting laser painted retina-burning loops around Lucklaw. Shaky hands. Shaky nerves.

  And then the sniper was gone, his Hyrrokkin clattering into the inferno below. Cassimer lowered his rifle, ignored the sizzle of the odd bullet striking his armour, and searched for Joy. There, a flash of red in white, almost out of sight behind the Andromache, half-carried, half-dragged by locals.

  He was faster than them. So was a bullet from his Hyrrokkin. Friendly target, his HUD advised. As if he needed the reminder. As if his finger would move to the trigger even if he wanted it to. His mind knew that death would be a mercy, but his body rebelled, refusing to destroy what it desired.

  Run after her. The thought pounded against his temples, but the haze of smoke was clearing. Rhys lay near the crater, armour scarred by bullets and shrapnel. His visor was gone, along with most of his face, but five hearts still beat on Cassimer's HUD.

  "Commander." Florey stood back to back with him, the gunner's APF stretching to cover them both.

  "Evaccing Rhys. Provide cover." The medic's limp body was heavy, made more so by the sight of Joy disappearing behind the Andromache.

  When they were halfway through the tunnel, where the reflections stretched the longest, the proximity charges at its mouth went off. The ceiling fractured into boulder-sized chunks, and a plume of fine green dust shot forward, covering everything in a film of pulverised glass. No way for anyone to follow them now. No way to run to Joy.

  They stopped briefly in the cryo laboratory to give first aid to Rhys. One eye was irreparably lost, lacerated by needle-thin slivers of his visor. They all knew the basics of field medicine; they'd all seen worse injuries before, but none of them had ever treated one. In the end, Florey was the one to apply the strips of nano-weave and regen-spray. Not nearly enough, but all they could do.

  Then Rhys was slung over Cassimer's shoulder again, his weight an anchor to reality, a thing to focus on through the overwhelming static. Couldn't stop running, couldn't stop fighting, couldn't lose himself to grief and chaos while lives depended on him.

  Had to keep going.

  ◆◆◆

  They ran far from the gleam of the silver fortress. They could've sheltered in the ruined offices. They could've stopped on the train tracks, hidden inside the vents. They could've stopped on the platform or in the labyrinthine undercity, but they'd had enough of darkness and of constricting walls; enough of echoes and the weight of the earth.

  Nobody spoke, but Cassimer knew that they all wanted the same thing. The light of the sun and open skies, space to breathe. Cato had no such place, and when they emerged from the undercity, even the sky disappointed. Neither sun nor moon could be glimpsed through a thick layer of rain-heavy clouds.

  The shed where they'd sheltered previously was as empty and quiet as they'd left it. When Cassimer lay Rhys on the floor, the medic coughed and said something unintelligible. His right eye opened, and Hopewell smiled as she removed her helmet and knelt by his side.

  Good. It was all good. The team was secure, with time to regroup and rethink. The demon had tried to corrupt them and had failed. It had tried to kill them, and it had failed. They'd remember that for the next confrontation. That was good.

  "See what you can do for Rhys. Lucklaw, watch the perimeter."

  Before anyone could object, he opened the door and stepped out into Nexus. Wanted to walk and walk and never stop, but for the sake of the team, he couldn't risk detection. So he stayed close by, pacing alleyways, passing leaning shanties whose owners were slaves to a demon or lay dead inside the silver fortress. He ran his hands along corrugated steel, wondering whose home this had been, or what about that one? Had the sniper lived here, under one of these rusting lean-tos, surviving all this time on Cato only for a Primaterre bullet to end his life?

  Pointless, all of it.

  He took off his helmet. Nexus smelled sweeter than he'd expected, but it was the sweetness of fermentation and rot. Rainwater drizzled from quivering rooftops. He looked towards the sky, let the water run down his face - and then he couldn't stand anymore.

  His knees sank into inch-deep mud. He wrenched his gauntlets off and threw them aside. Muted all channels and made himself unreachable; dug his fists deep into grey mud.

  I lost her.

  No, not lost. He'd abandoned her. He had stood by and watched as the demon had made a traitor of the kindest heart. If some part of her had been left untouched by corruption, she would've been begging for mercy.

  He had refused her that mercy, refused it still. Her kill switch glowed in the corner of his vision. Target in range according to his HUD, which knew neither context nor compassion.

  He typed the characters one by one. Duty demanded of him to kill and return focus to the mission. Grief was for later, for the eucalyptus-scented psych office on Scathach. "So, tell me how you feel", the psychiatrist would ask, and he'd say nothing; a session like every other
session, only this time he couldn't understand how he was supposed to return to his quarters. This time, he couldn't understand how he was supposed to get up in the morning or take another breath.

  The last character was a J. He forced himself to type it and regretted letting a mirror stop him from kissing her one last time. If only he'd had at least that. If only he'd stayed with her in that room a little longer. She was quick and bright and saw more of him than anyone else, but she couldn't have known what she meant to him. He should have told her then, should've found some way of capturing a sunrise in words.

  If he had, perhaps the demon would have found no foothold.

  "Commander."

  Rhys's visor lights cast ghoulish shadows over a face that no longer seemed human. The medic stood at the end of the alley, leaning hard against a wall.

  "Rhys. You shouldn't be out here." The gauntlets slipped on easily, but where had the helmet got to? He looked around, ashamed to have been discovered on his knees. Though, strangely, not as ashamed as he might've expected. When he found his helmet, it was with a jolt of happiness that made grief and shame fade.

  When he looked at Rhys, he understood, and the sweetness washed away in a flash flood of rage.

  "Damn you, Rhys, don't you dare take this from me. I won't allow it, understand? No drugs, no white veil." But even as he spoke, his rage cooled, fanned by pale-feathered wings. Wire-tense muscles relaxed, and he fell to his knees once more. Grief had gone and left him spent.

  "You need to shut up and listen, Commander, because I haven't got much time." Rhys knelt too, and once they were face to face, it was hard to see how he had any time at all. "Joy asked me to protect you. Compassionate, our girl, but misguided. Men like you and I don't need protection, nor coddling. We reject the illusion of security. With 500mgs of selenetamine flowing through your veins, you should be feeling fucking ecstatic, but you're fighting it. That poor, sweet drug; all it's trying to do is help, and you're spitting and cursing in its face."