Lonely Castles

by S. A. Tholin

  "The turrets," Lucklaw explained. "They're protected by their own force fields. They'll keep RebEarth at bay for a couple of minutes."

  Cassimer reached out to pull Juneau up and in. His armour sparked slightly as she slipped inside, pressing close to the wall and to him. Rearcross was last up the ladder, and as soon as he was inside, Cassimer shut the door and ordered Lucklaw to reactivate the force field.

  A moment passed, and then another, and then the comms specialist's lips turned in grimace.

  "Lucklaw?"

  "Commander, I–"

  A churning clunk came from somewhere deep inside the laboratory, drowning out the sound of gunfire as it reverberated through pipes and walls. The metallic crescendo terminated in a sharp screech, and then another alarm joined the blaring fire siren.

  "You power-cycled too quickly," Juneau said.

  "I'm trying to fix it," Lucklaw said, but Juneau shook her head, shooting Cassimer an anxious glance.

  "Thermal stress blew the force field generator. It's dead, Commander."

  * * *

  The building was under Lucklaw's control, every door and lock responding to his command. He led the team towards the central laboratory situated on the third floor. The Kalevala survivors were gathered there, he said, watching them through a visual link to the lab surveillance cameras. He watched RebEarth, too, and had seized remote control over the turrets to give their aim strategy.

  The young comms specialist was doing the job of a dozen men, stretching his awareness to its limits. Perhaps Cato had been too good a crucible. Since that mission, Lucklaw had never stopped working, never stopped trying to attain perfection – and he'd done an outstanding job, excelling in every way.

  Until now.

  One mistake, and it had hit him like a gut shot.

  A second mistake, leading the team down a dead-end, and the lieutenant began to crumble.

  "Apologies, Commander. The building plans are complex, and..." Silver eyes turned blue, wide and worried. "Primaterre force field gennies can be power-cycled no problem. The Kalevala tech must be inferior. I... I didn't know. I–"

  "The turret force field generators. Can you transfer power from the building to boost them?" Give him a task to focus on. Give him the clarity of action, the purity of reason.

  "Do we need lights?"

  Cassimer shook his head, and when the lights died, he told Lucklaw: "Nice work."

  Give him compassion. Lucklaw wasn't the only one who'd come through the fires of Cato a changed man.

  Kiruna and Daneborg had made for the roof to observe the RebEarth forces. If the turrets failed, the two snipers would be the first line of defence. Hopewell and Rearcross had stayed behind to secure the fire escape. Task completed, they were now sweeping the building for other potential points of entry. RebEarth would breach sooner or later, but 'later' was a satisfactory goal to work towards.

  The doors to the central lab were securely locked behind DNA-scanners and pass codes. Lucklaw gave them a distracted glance, and they rolled open.

  A soft roil of smoke welled out, almost blindingly bright green to Cassimer's night vision. Thick tendrils seeped through the cracked seal of a door connected to the glass-encased skywalk stretching between the laboratory and the burning manufacturing plant. Flames licked the door, embers leaping against its circular window.

  The fire suppressant system spat only drizzles now, but ankle-high water had flooded the room. Clipboards floated like boats, test tubes making silvery sounds as the banneret men waded toward the central lab, accessible through a decontamination chamber. On the other side of the lab's glass walls, thirteen Kalevalans were huddled together, frightened and cowering.

  Cassimer switched on his suit lights. The Kalevalans panicked, shouting, stumbling, scattering to hide behind counters. A beaker fell to the floor, and the woman who'd knocked it over fell too, cutting her palms on broken glass.

  The Primaterre sun blazed on Cassimer's cuirass as he approached the chamber, its brightness turned up high to drive home the message.

  "Touch that door, Primo, and the dozen turrets aimed at you right now will blow you to hell."

  The voice came from a speaker beside the decontamination chamber's control panel. Judging by the man's accent, he was Kalevalan, but the standard RebEarth insult for the Primaterre had slipped right off his tongue.

  "We have come to assist," Cassimer said, looking up at the camera above the door. There were no turrets; no defences at all. "Your own government asked for our aid. Sharing clearance codes–"

  "As if we'd accept anything over a Primo connection. As if we don't know what you can do. As if we don't know that you've come to kill us."

  Always the bloody same. Cassimer shifted, irritated. "Open the door."

  "So you're why the force field's down. You're why RebEarth will be swarming the lab any second. Damn you all – but they'll kill you first. Give us a good show before it's our turn."

  "We're coming in one way or the other. It's your choice whether you want us to be in a cooperative mood when we do."

  A brief, animated argument broke out inside the clean lab. Cassimer gave them twenty seconds before he'd tell Lucklaw to open the door; twenty seconds before he was coming in one way or the other.

  On the count of ten, the decontamination chamber's doors hissed open.

  * * *

  The Kalevalan man's name was Ruotsi, and while insults and attitude had come easily to him from behind the safety of locked doors, he couldn't seem to peel his gaze from the floor once the Primaterre soldiers stood before him.

  Go on then, Cassimer wanted to say, call us Primos now. See what'll happen.

  But that was the stims talking, and while the chemical aggression spread like a nice warmth through his veins, it couldn't be allowed to affect his reason. Had to stay calm now, had to get everybody out.

  It would be easier than expected. The Kalevala had given them a list of 136 personnel, twenty-five marked as HIGH-VALUE and meant for extraction, but less than a dozen men and women remained inside the lab, of which only the scientists were of any value. Two survivors identified themselves as janitorial staff, and a third as a comms engineer. None of the facility's seventy-five military personnel were present.

  "Got bodies here." Lucklaw motioned towards a sealed backroom. His suit lights glared off the windows, barely penetrating the gloom beyond, where metal gurneys glinted.

  "Human experimentation," Juneau said, rather too enthusiastically. "For your primer research?"

  Ruotsi's dour facial expression was answer enough. Juneau lit up, but when she made to approach the backroom, Cassimer stopped her with a shake of his head.

  "Your primer research, Ruotsi – we need everything you've got."

  "The data's on the terminals. I assume you're already helping yourselves to that."

  "What about samples? We were told you've started production."

  "When RebEarth showed up, the manufacturing overseer decided to torch the plant rather than let them have it. The bloody idiot went up in flames along with all the viable product we had, except for a case of prototypes in the backroom."

  The bloody idiot had died a hero, but Ruotsi was too blind to see it.

  "Tallinn, go back there and secure the prototypes. Slag everything else. Lucklaw, scrape their databases, and Juneau, you need to scan these people."

  "Yes, Commander." Obedient, but she couldn't help but sigh as she began processing the Kalevalans, occasionally glancing over her shoulder towards the backroom where Lucklaw had restored the power and monitors glowed with scrolling data. Dissected corpses, splayed on gurneys, looked drained of colour in the blue light.

  Ruotsi shivered as Juneau ran her lightweave fingertips down his neck. He was a big man, his lab coat straining to contain broad shoulders and a rounded belly. Straw-coloured stubble bristled on his sagging cheeks, straw-coloured hair hanging limp and damp in his eyes. Small eyes, perpetually squinting; made smaller by his fear.

  "Cle
ar," Juneau said and moved on to the next Kalevalan.

  The pattern of wrinkles around Ruotsi's eyes shifted. A minute change, turning a suspiciously sloping line smooth.

  "Clear," he said, licking his dry lips with an equally dry tongue. "You wouldn't examine us if you were going to kill us."

  Cassimer said nothing. There was no point. None of these people would trust the word of a Primaterre, and it was better to let them reach their own conclusions.

  "I know what you're checking for. We've heard rumours. Some kind of infection, yes? An alien parasite."

  "A demon," Cassimer replied.

  "A bright-winged spirit." Ruotsi paled under Cassimer's glare, raising his hands apologetically. "It's what RebEarth call it. An angel to them, a demon to the Primaterre. As a scientist, I reserve judgment until it has been studied and classified."

  Studied. Pointless. It had to be destroyed, and that was the end of it. That was the truth of it.

  "Are any of its vessels here?"

  Ruotsi gave him a blank look.

  "The man with the hounds on his pauldrons, for instance. The RebEarth leader – is he possessed?"

  "Oh, Kivik's a demon, all right," Ruotsi said, his squinting eyes almost disappearing into his face. "But only metaphorically speaking. Only. Hah! As if that wasn't bad enough."

  Leo Kivik, also known as the Shipwrecker. To Bastion men, he was just a name on a Most Wanted list, but to Rampart's pilots and crews, he was a bogeyman. A confirmed kill was worth five million merits, a capture a few hundred thousand more. Unnecessary. No Primaterre soldier worthy of their uniform would need motivation beyond what their primers told them about Kivik.

  He was a harasser of shipping lanes and trading routes, a raider of space stations and installations, his blunt and bloody career captured in Bastion's RebEarth files. A quick skim showed Cassimer:

  A research station in orbit around Ainina's moon, dark and deserted, surrounded by a debris belt of frozen victims. The male crew had been spaced; the women taken to be traded or worse.

  A deep space observation platform, six months from the nearest Cascade, robbed of its supplies and ships. The three hundred strong crew had waited nearly a year for rescue. When it finally came, twenty still lived. Footage showed them emerging from the platform like nocturnal animals, wide-eyed and wary. When the rescuers explored the observation platform, their joy at finding survivors had turned to horror when they discovered gnawed bones and meat cured in de-icing salt. En route to the Cascade, a mutiny had broken out on the rescue ship, and by the time it folded back to civilisation, the Shipwrecker had another dozen lives on his conscience.

  "The armour he wears looks Baltic."

  "Old Baltic," Ruotsi said, and he was right. New tech, old flavour, designed to mimic the armour worn by Polaris troopers in the first Baltic uprising six centuries previously. The universe had been smaller back then, connected by less than twenty Cascades, as opposed to the one hundred and eight that now serviced humanity – but the conflicts had been no less bloody. The Polaris troopers had lost their war, their people once more forced to submit to foreign masters, but their courage had lived on in legend. Their rallying cry – Aos! – had been used in the second, and successful, Baltic uprising, even though at that time, nobody remembered who or what Aos had been. Three centuries had stripped the word of its meaning, but not its spirit. It was defiance, pure and simple.

  Did Kivik think of himself as a Polaris trooper, his cause as just as theirs? Laughable. On him, the armour was a mockery.

  "Southern Baltic," Ruotsi added. "Nothing to do with the forerunners of the Kalevala. Funny, really, how we still cling onto our history. My grandmother used to tell me: never trust a Stockholmer. As if she'd ever met one. As if any of our family has breathed Earth air. Space should have been a fresh start, but instead, distance has made our roots grow stronger."

  "So strong that you would shelter a RebEarth fleet based on shared heritage?"

  Ruotsi blanched. His thin lips moved insensibly, but he seemed to have run out of words.

  "Commander." Juneau had finished her scan of a Kalevala scientist. He was short, young, wearing a neon-print t-shirt under his lab coat and rings on all fingers, his ash-blond hair pulled into a bun on top of his head. Coffee stained his shoes and clothes, and where he'd rolled up his trouser legs, his skin was badly burnt. He'd had a bad few days, and judging by Juneau's tone, things weren't about to get any better. "This one scans positive."

  Cassimer's Morrigan was in his hand before she finished her sentence. Lucklaw drew his sidearm too, and a hush passed through the room.

  "Positive?" the burnt man asked. "Positive for what?"

  He looked to his colleagues for support, but they wouldn't meet his gaze. Good. This thing was no man. It was vile and corrupt, an evil from the void. It should be shot on the spot.

  And yet Cassimer's finger would not squeeze the trigger.

  Hate hissed at him to do it. Logic reasoned that death would solve the problem. Habit informed him that one Kalevalan less made no difference.

  Unless the Kalevalan had a Joy waiting for him. Unless he had someone to whom it would make all the difference.

  Cassimer's definition of necessary had more variables now, threads of cascading consequences attached to every decision. They glowed like strands of copper hair, connecting fates and outcomes.

  "No false negatives," he said, turning to Juneau. "What about false positives?"

  "Well." Juneau hesitated. "A few, but better safe than sorry, don't you think?"

  "Percentage, Major."

  "Thirty-six percent."

  Thirty-six innocents in a hundred, all of them so easily condemned by Oriel; so easily condemned by a woman who hadn't even drawn her own weapon. Juneau saw fit to leave the killing to the banneret men, but they were not her pet killers, and a ring on the burned man's left hand bore the inscription PRIMROSE.

  His wife, his mother, a fashion brand or his favourite fucking flower; it didn't really matter. For Primrose, meaning lost but spirit intact, Cassimer lowered his gun.

  "Cuff him, Lucklaw."

  "Are you sure that's wise?" Ruotsi unexpectedly objected. "Southgate is new to the team. None of us really know him all that well."

  Nods of agreement came from around the room. Only the woman who'd cut her hands on broken glass had the decency to look appalled. Southgate looked confused as Lucklaw secured black shackles around his wrists, as though he understood what was happening but couldn't quite believe it.

  "RebEarth breached our defences a little too quickly. They had to have had inside help. Why not Southgate? Look at his wrist – a tattoo of white wings. Bright wings."

  "The swan wings of Kalevala," Southgate cried. "Our national symbol, Ruotsi, you bastard. And you know how RebEarth breached the compound. They got Domanska, and then they tortured her until her husband cracked and let them in. You know that's what happened!"

  "It's what Kivik says happened. It's what you say happened. None of us saw it. None of us have seen Domanska since... since she went outside the walls. Could be it's true. Could also be it was you who let them in."

  "I heard her." The thin voice belonged to the woman with cut hands. She clenched her quivering fists, blood dripping onto the floor. "I was in the cafeteria when they arrived, same as Southgate, and I didn't see anything because, oh God.. because we just ran, but I heard her. I heard her screaming. Oh, God, I heard her screaming and I ran."

  "If the demon had a vessel inside the facility, it wouldn't have needed to send RebEarth here. It wouldn't have needed to torture a man for the location," Cassimer said, but though his words were logical and sensible, they had little effect on the Kalevalans. Three days cooped up and living in fear had taken a toll. Every workplace disagreement, every personal affront, however minuscule, had become amplified. The Kalevalans were trapped between RebEarth and the Primaterre, and for lack of an enemy they could fight, they turned on each other.

  A lack of purity, Cassimer th
ought. The Kalevala had none of the clarity nor presence of mind of his own people – but was that down to Primaterre supremacy, or was it just their primers talking? Without the subtle mind-control, how would Primaterre citizens behave? Would they remain as they were, or regress to impurity? Perhaps order and liberty couldn't coexist. Perhaps human minds could not see reason unless forced to.

  "Commander, we've got activity," Hopewell reported over the team channel. "RebEarth are preparing to breach, east and west side entrances."

  "The fire escape?"

  "Clear, but I don't expect it will be for much longer."

  Right. Now or never.

  "Tallinn, you about done?"

  "Yes, Commander." The medic exited the backroom carrying a white case. She closed the door and armed the slagging charges she'd set. Seconds later, the backroom was a self-contained inferno. The fires would leave no trace of research behind.

  "Databases scraped, copied and purged," Lucklaw reported.

  "All right. Time to move out. Ruotsi, you get your people in check and follow our lead. Stay low, stay quiet. Captain Baltimore?"

  No response.

  "Captain Baltimore, do you read?"

  Maybe the comms were down. Maybe RebEarth were jamming them, or maybe Baltimore was slacking off, but Cassimer knew silence well enough to tell the good from the bad; the calm from the dead.

  "Lucklaw, check the shuttle comms channel."

  "It's down, Commander."

  "Interference?" Juneau suggested, but Lucklaw shook his head.

  "Not the comms. The shuttle. I think it's been shot down."

  Panes of glass exploded outwards, flames billowing from the skywalk. It collapsed in on itself, metal screaming, embers smattering against the laboratory's windows. Smoke turned the day as dark as night, and over the roaring blaze, Cassimer could hear rapid gunfire as RebEarth laid into the turrets.

  The world had shrunk to a single building, and death pressed against its walls.

  13.

  JOY