Lonely Castles

by S. A. Tholin

  "Looks to me like the barbarians are on their knees in sewage water," Hopewell said.

  Ruotsi spat in the water. "We'll see if you are so glib when the galaxy comes for you. The Primaterre is grand, but it stands alone. You have no allies. You are–"

  "A lonely castle," Cassimer said.

  Ruotsi nodded, because he didn't understand. But the banneret team did, and Juneau did, and they all relaxed. The Primaterre Protectorate relied on its citizens leading meritorious lives, each contributing to the best of their ability. It relied on them being as strong as they could be, as courageous and as prepared as they were able. Because when the demons came, a citizen's own purity would be all that stood between them and the corruption. When the demons came, they would stand alone, their own walls all that could protect them.

  The Primaterre Protectorate was an empire of lonely castles ready to face the void.

  "Commander, do you read?"

  "I hear you, Kiruna." Cassimer stepped away from the Kalevalans, motioning for Lucklaw to gag Ruotsi. The man should save his speeches for the tribunal awaiting him on Scathach Station.

  "Got good news and a dangerous proposition."

  "Go on."

  "Kivik wasn't lying about the shuttle. It's on the landing pad next to their gunship. Lightly guarded."

  So far, so good.

  "And we've got eyes on the hostages. They're held in the sixth storey conference room in the residential complex. Heavy guard. Close quarters. Lots of windows."

  "Status on flight crew?"

  "All seven alive and accounted for."

  Together with the Kalevalan hostages, that made thirty men and women in total. A big number to rescue covertly. Judging by Kiruna's eager tone, she seemed to think it could be done, but she was a wolf, and like pilots, predators were prone to overestimate their own abilities.

  "We've been unable to contact them. RebEarth must be using localised jammers."

  "That'd explain why the RebEarthers on guard keep walking up to the windows to shout at the ones in the courtyard. The jammers are disrupting their own comms, too."

  "Amateurs," Lucklaw scoffed.

  "Indeed. Shall we show them how professionals work?"

  "What are you thinking, Kiruna?"

  "Daneborg and I free the hostages quietly. You seize the shuttle. Rendezvous on the landing pad."

  A puzzle with many moving pieces. Dangerous, but no more so than waiting for reinforcements that might never show – and if they did, might turn out to be enemies rather than allies, if Ruotsi was to be believed.

  "Let's do it," he said, once more thinking of Joy.

  18.

  JOY

  Palace Green was a small moon on the edge of the Primaterre Protectorate, orbiting a planet whose rings glittered with precious metal. The days were short and almost painfully bright as the sunlight refracted in the moon's corundum plains. During the long nights, spotlights and artificial sun domes provided the colonists with a sense of circadian rhythm.

  Two thousand had made their home on Palace Green, their colony a perfect square of lawns and prefabricated housing. The moon's only highway cut a straight line across a rocky landscape where wind and sand had polished the corundum into sapphire formations.

  Miles Ashbrook had lived on Palace Green for two years, earning good merit as a geologist. He stood on his prefab's lawn, slippers damp with sprinkler dew, watching a flutter of moths that had congregated underneath a dawn-simulating street lamp. His wife was in the garage, getting their bikes ready. The geology station wasn't far, only a few miles down the sapphire highway, but Alicia Ashbrook would never get there. She reached for the tire pump, but grabbed a wrench instead, heavy in her hand.

  Miles's eyes had already started to bleed. His fingers contorted, his mouth opened, and he licked nosebleed off his top lip. When the wrench crunched into the back of his head, he turned and punched Alicia in the face. He took his time with her on the lawn, so long that when he finally staggered towards the neighbouring house – already alive with screams – he died of hypertensive organ failure before he was off his own property.

  Joy stood next to him as it happened. She looked into his eyes and saw the moment that the trigger signal hit his primer. It was a subtle thing, a minute widening of the pupil as the real Miles was shoved to the back of his consciousness, unbridled aggression taking the place of his soul.

  The haemorrhaging eyes and nose were just a symptom of the hypertensive emergency that the trigger signal invariably caused. The internal damage was much worse, the end-organ dysfunction so severe that without immediate medical attention, death was inevitable.

  Joy, whose h-chip had once been triggered, froze the re-enactment in the moment before, when Miles was still watching the moths. She could touch him, the Tower mindspace simulating tactile feedback well enough that she could feel the terrycloth of his robe, and she took his hand and told him how sorry she was, how she wished she could freeze this moment for real and never let happen what came next.

  But she couldn't, and the massacre of Palace Green had taken place twenty-six years ago. Miles had died, along with two thousand other colonists, and Joy knew that one of the medics who would arrive on Palace Green to handle the aftermath was a young Jamie Rhys, just out of the academy. Had he stood here, on the Ashbrooks' lawn? Or had he been to the worse places, the buildings Joy refused to enter?

  She took a step back, leaving Palace Green to stand in the dark space between horrors. A hospital, a bio-medical station orbiting Neptune, Xanthe – even Earth. They were all around her, simulated re-enactments pulled together from footage and data, waiting to be explored and examined. And there, wedged between the bio-med station and Palace Green, floated the Bastion transport ship called the Hecate.

  Her grey hull was unassuming, her viewports welcomingly lit, but Joy knew that she contained only darkness. She pressed her hands to the ship's airlock, felt the metal underneath her hands, and cried for the people whose deaths she'd witnessed and for the horrors she would not watch.

  "Constant," she whispered, as though the boy inside the ship might hear her. "You will survive this. You will be brave and you will be strong, and one day, you'll come for me. I'm already waiting for you. I always was."

  When her tears ran dry, she returned to the hospital. The demonic outbreak there was one of the earliest and, unlike Palace Green, there had been survivors. Approximately fifteen percent of the people on the scene had been left unaffected, and Joy thought she knew why. Both victims and survivors were a blend of Primaterre and non-citizens – those with primers and those without. Whoever was in charge of Project Harmony had meant to obfuscate the fact that only those with primers could be triggered.

  And perhaps, she thought, watching a mother's heroic rescue of her children, the survivors had also been chosen for maximum dramatic effect. That turned her stomach, especially when she thought of Constant inside the Hecate. Had someone used him as propaganda?

  Yes; she was almost certain of it. But who?

  Every person in the re-enactments had a file available, as did every known employee of Hierochloe at the time of the Epoch War. So much information, and so much of it useless. The company's board members were a dead end. Those who had survived the Epoch War had gone on to lead unremarkable lives, as had the senior research staff. The very first Primaterre government had consisted of Hierochloe employees, but democratic elections had seen them gradually replaced. A decade after the founding of the Primaterre Protectorate, no Hierochloe staff held any positions of importance.

  Strange, for people who'd sought control.

  A single exception existed, in the form of a man named Carter Keiss. His file had been tagged red by Hammersmith, which Joy could only assume meant that he was important.

  Like her, Keiss had lived in Kirkclair. He'd been Head of Bio-Mechanics at around the same time as Finn had been Chief of Security. This long-faced man, with the awkward smile of someone who hated having his picture taken, had no doubt
known her brother, if only in passing.

  "Hi Carter," she said. "I'm Joy, Finn Somerset's sister."

  More like Joy, a silly girl who still talked to ghosts.

  After Hierochloe had become Primaterre, and the company had become a nation, Keiss had started his own company. Semele Solutions manufactured everything from pharmaceuticals to augments – Joy had seen their ads all over Kirkclair – but their main focus was Luna One, the moon-based station that guarded Earth and whose Luna Belt satellites dispatched drones to collect flora and fauna from the forbidden world.

  The connection between Keiss and Project Harmony seemed obvious. He had to have been involved somehow, possibly even in charge. He was long dead now, but his great-grandson, Cooper Keiss, was one of the wealthiest men in the Protectorate and a major player in Martian politics. He had his ancestor's long face, but the awkward smile had been replaced by a far too bright one. It was the smile of a man perpetually ready for photo ops; the smile of a man who'd smile if he was telling the truth and smile even wider if he was lying. He–

  A hand landed on her shoulder. So real it almost hurt, and she closed her eyes, willing the mindspace to shut down.

  "Hey." Elsinore removed his hand from her shoulder as soon as she opened her eyes. "Apologies. Just thought I should check on you. It's easy to get lost in there."

  Very. Tower's database had many storeys, its bricks information and every chamber a repository of secrets. Joy had wandered its halls, testing every door she came across. Some hid truths that meant nothing to her, others hid truths so old they meant nothing to anyone. The graphical interface had been so real that she had felt the dust on her fingertips and smelled yellowing paper on the air.

  Most doors had been soundly locked. Tower wasn't shy about letting her know how insignificant she was. NO CLEARANCE, angry red signs had barked at her, not even a contributor. Until she'd provided Tower with a brick or two, it wouldn't trust her with its secrets beyond what Hammersmith had allowed her to access.

  Though none of the rooms had been real, Room 36B was even less real than the rest. That's what the 'B' meant, Elsinore had explained – Tower language for an unsanctioned, off-the-books operation.

  "Wait," she'd asked. "You have an official designation for unofficial operations?"

  "It's a Tower thing," he'd said, shrugging. "It's in the budget, too. Hammersmith runs Room 36, complete with an A-budget and a B-budget, and it all goes into the accounting reports. Wideawake says that Upstairs are just glad we're not running a C-budget too."

  "C? There are operations even more secret than B?"

  "No, which no doubt means yes. Trust me, Tower's doors are locked for good reasons."

  No doubt, but that only made them all the more irresistible. Joy could've stayed in there a lot longer, she thought – and then she tried to stand from her chair and realised how tired her body was.

  "Oh." She yawned, stretching. "Thanks, Elsinore. How long was I in there?"

  "Ten hours, roughly."

  "Ten? It felt like half an hour."

  "Time feels different inside your mindspace. It's easy to forget that you still have a body that needs to eat and sleep and drink. No nosebleed this time, I see, but you need to be careful, Somerset. You're not built for long-term stays; not like our analysts are."

  The four analysts sat in the core chamber below Joy's office, as still as statues, as quiet as the night, and as dark as space in their black uniforms. She'd never seen them so much as twitch a muscle, seemingly as dead as the rest of 36B. Hammersmith was rarely available, busy with his official work in Room 36, although Joy couldn't say she missed his presence. Besides the team she'd been introduced to, Lutzen commanded a squad of five. She'd not met his men – which Elsinore, shivering, had said was for the best – but she'd seen them in the core chamber, and occasionally heard voices from the strike team's quarters.

  "How long do the analysts stay in the mindspace?"

  "A three-month rotation is the standard," Elsinore said. "Augments keep them nourished and waste-free, as well as activating their muscles and tissue to prevent dystrophy. They could stay in longer – and ours do – but the longer you're in, the harder it is to readjust to reality. It can cause real mental issues, so the rules are strict. The only reason our analysts are pushing it is because Hammersmith says it's crunch time. Four months they've been in now, and two of them had just come off the previous shift. It's only a matter of time before something breaks – it'll be interesting to see if the Cascade or the analysts go first."

  "You're not big on positive thinking, are you?"

  He smiled. "The entire concept of 'positive' is unfamiliar to me."

  "Well, stick with me and maybe you'll learn a thing or two. If I could stay positive in tunnels full of spiders, this Cascade shouldn't be a challenge."

  "Spiders." Elsinore sighed. "It'd be interesting to see an animal one day."

  "I think spiders would be a terrible first introduction. They're not really a beginner's kind of animal, you know? You need to start with something cute, like a kitten or a meerkat."

  "I've seen videos of kittens. They seem a little... bitey." He cleared his throat, shooting a nervous glance over his shoulder. "In any case, we shouldn't waste time on idle chatter. I'm putting in the order for next month's supplies. I accounted for you in regards to food and water, but, uh..." He handed her a tablet. "Here's the catalogue. I'm in charge of placing the orders, everything from toiletries to ammunition, but I didn't know if there were any special things you might need. Women things."

  "Women things?" She smiled, taking the tablet.

  "As you may have noticed, you are our only female operative. The only one in quite some time. You might as well be a unicorn, truth be told."

  She hadn't thought much of it, really. She'd been raised by her older brother, their parent-free apartment a natural hangout for Finn and his friends. Teenage boys and later men, and some had been tough and some had been borderline bad, but all of them had left their boots outside the apartment door and dusted off their clothes before coming inside. Some had helped her with her homework and some had shown her card tricks, and none of them had ever been anything but good to her, and not just because of Finn's watchful eye.

  "You have a thousand merits available to spend as you see fit. Don't overspend, and don't spend exactly a thousand either. Hammersmith hates that." He hesitated, then added: "I have a girlfriend, you know."

  "Yeah?"

  "So you don't need to feel uncomfortable. I'm not looking to chat you up or anything."

  "Didn't think you were," she said, but couldn't resist adding: "Until just now."

  For a split second, he looked mortified – and then he smiled. Smiles were nice on his face, and becoming more frequent. "You're joking. Another thing we're not so used to in Room 36B."

  "Well, I wouldn't want to ruin the glum atmosphere, but if you want to keep me company while I do my shopping, I promise I'll keep the jokes to a minimum." She gestured towards the chair on the other side of her desk. "Take a seat, and tell me all about this girlfriend of yours, if you like."

  He did, and it seemed like something he'd wanted to talk about for a long time, but hadn't had anyone to listen. Joy was happy to, especially since the Tower catalogue was the only mail order catalogue she'd ever seen that offered everything from deodorant to 'interrogation multi-tools'. Five thousand merits brand-new – 25% off if you didn't mind the second-hand option. Blades slightly chipped, one needle dulled. Pliers and subdermal worms in mint condition.

  What's wrong with these people, she thought, seconds later realising that she was one of these people. Her official rank was now lieutenant, her job description Field Operative. She was a towerman, and if she ever forgot it, the emblem on her new uniform reminded her. Unlike Bastion's grey, and Hammersmith's black, she was to wear white. A shirt, a jacket and a skirt – though it included a holster, it was hardly an outfit meant for combat. Good news. She'd had more than enough of death and killing o
n Cato.

  "Grace and I talk every day," Elsinore said. "For nearly three years now. She wants to meet for real, and so do I, but Hammersmith would never allow it, not until the mission's completed. I suppose he's right. I suppose I'm doing all of this for Grace too. It's just getting really awkward to have to come up with excuses. I've told her I'm in IT support – pretty much true – on an asteroid mining platform – also close to the truth. That gives me the excuse of distance and work, but not merits. I should be making more than enough to go see her. She's even suggested meeting halfway for a weekend on Kepler. I wish I could – I really, really do."

  "Hammersmith seems to think it'll all be over soon. This time next year, you could be sitting on a Kepler beach marvelling at the turquoise waters."

  "Maybe." Another smile, though this one was wan. "The lies are getting burdensome. To seem normal, you know, I've had to make up stories. There's this show we both like to watch, and I tell her that I watch it with my colleagues on the platform, and I make up comments they've made, entire conversations, to relay to her. A pretend social life so that my pretend girlfriend doesn't think I'm weird – could I be anymore pathetic?"

  "I get it," Joy said. "I just spent three months living in barracks surrounded by people a century ahead of me, all talking about shows and movies and music and I just... I tried catching up, but there's a lot of ground to cover and the regimental sergeant only allowed so much entertainment time a week. In the end, I pretended too, nodding and smiling when people made references I didn't get, laughing at jokes that I didn't find funny. Trying to understand, in hopes that eventually I'd understand for real. It was a small problem in the grand scheme of things, but, Elsinore," she said, smiling at him, "we can solve each other's problems now. I need to catch up on current culture – you need someone to watch your shows with – let's watch them together. Then you can tell Grace real stories, about your real new colleague."