Lonely Castles

by S. A. Tholin

  It was. Now it's up to you to decide what's necessary. Hammersmith descended into the hold; Bytheway visibly shaking at the sound of boots on metal. The towerman found a dark corner behind their prisoner, where he leaned back against the wall. Not casual, but predatory. This is your show, Somerset.

  Great.

  She established a connection to Room 36B and the waiting Elsinore. Hundreds of light-years away, he sat ready to interpret data captured by the mind-worm that already gnawed through Bytheway's firewalls and defences. Wideawake had taught her what to do, and she'd practiced on Lutzen, but this was real. Bytheway was alone and afraid, and she had been in his position more than once. She knew the feeling of wrists rubbed raw by shackles.

  "Hey, it's okay." She approached, slowly, but not so slow that the sheer anticipation would seem like torture. She kept her voice low and reassuring, and when she reached him, she placed a hand on his shoulder. He jerked backwards, but she kept her hand in place. Gentle, but firm. "It's okay, Bytheway."

  "Y-you know my name?" he stammered, lips chapped and dry with cold.

  "I do, and you know mine too, I think. I'm going to remove the hood, okay, and then you can tell me if you recognise me." Hood. Nice word for bag, and she glared at Hammersmith once more. Getting Bytheway into the Imago all by himself must have been difficult and, as far as she was concerned, completely unnecessary.

  The hood came off, revealing tousled black curls far longer than Bastion regulations would allow. Clearly, Oriel had different standards. Lower standards, whispered a little voice in the back of her mind that sounded so much like Constant that she almost smiled.

  Bytheway blinked, spring-green eyes looking up at her through thick eyelashes.

  "The woman from the posters. The Earthborn. Somerset?"

  "Joy Somerset. That's right, and I'm sorry for how my colleague has treated you. You don't need to be afraid. I'm just here to talk. To see how you're doing, really. Some people are a bit worried about you. Maybe we could lose the shackles?" She looked past Bytheway to Hammersmith, but the colonel shook his head. "Okay, so you're going to have to put up with the shackles a little longer. It's just a precaution. In case of possession, you understand."

  Bytheway nodded. No reaction to the mention of demons. No hint that he no longer believed. She glanced at Hammersmith, unsure how to proceed. Unsure if they even needed to proceed. If Bytheway hadn't discovered the Primaterre secret, what was the plan here?

  And what was it if he had?

  "You're here to talk about Cato," Bytheway said. "Because you've been there too. Almost no one else on the Cleo Selene has. They sit in orbit, keeping the sector secure. Sometimes they fly people like me down to the surface and ferry equipment backwards and forwards, but they don't come out of their ships. They haven't walked the dust. They haven't heard how the winds howl through the forests of glass. They skim the rims of craters in their shuttles, going would you look at that and a demon planet if I ever saw one, but they don't really know."

  "Not like I do," Joy agreed. "Nor you, I suspect. You were down there as part of an Oriel expedition?"

  "My assignment was to examine the local flora. Nothing but tubers, it turns out. Edible, but no replacement for potatoes. I took a few samples to cultivate back at Miranda Station, but I quickly ran out of things to do. The dust was getting to me, so I suggested that I go back to the Cleo Selene, but my unit told me no. Said we should stick together. Said that I should study the lichen. I tried telling them it's not really a plant, but..."

  Joy smiled. "Yeah, same thing happened to me. I'm a botanist, too."

  "Really? That's... none of the promotional material mentioned that. Suppose I shouldn't be surprised; Bastion does tend to favour brawn over brains. It's kind of nice to know botanists can be heroes too, though." He returned her smile, even if it was just a tug at the corner of his lip. Elsinore shot her an annoyed message about being flooded with tuber-related data, but she dismissed it. As Hammersmith had said, this was her show.

  "But though it's not really a plant, botanists know enough about lichen to know that what happened to Cato can't have been good for it."

  "It's dying," Bytheway said. "Faster than the planet, which is saying something. We found a cavern underneath the old spaceport where it grew thick on the floor and walls. Acres of brittle lichen, bone-pale and withered. It crumbled as we passed through. The air whirled with the stuff, dead and fragmented, a blizzard in the light of our torches. How strange it was to walk through the corpse of a demon."

  "More like a decaying limb," Joy said, thinking of the vast network in the brane between Cascades. "I wonder how that rot is affecting the entity as a whole. It feels the pain of human vessels – does it also feel the death of the lichen?"

  "We wondered the same. Wonder still. You should visit Miranda Station – some very interesting research is being conducted there right now. Carefully, of course. We can't risk the lichen spreading or affecting anyone. It was difficult to get permission to bring samples back home – there are plenty who would rather it would never have been allowed within the Protectorate's borders."

  "Count me among them."

  "You must know that it doesn't really matter. None of it does. I wanted to leave before it's too late, but..." He paused, biting his lip. "That's why you're here, isn't it? I triggered some keyword on some Tower analyst's radar. You have to understand, I was afraid. I'm not actually going to leave the Protectorate. Stars, where would I even go? And if I did find a place, what difference would it make? None. We both know what's coming. We've both seen it."

  Somerset? Hammersmith leaned from the shadows, one eyebrow arched.

  No idea what he's talking about.

  I decoded a few files called up from his primer, Elsinore reported. Related, maybe. Photos, I think – the data is incomplete, the pictures distorted. All I see is glossy darkness. Fulgurite?

  "Tell me about it." Joy touched Bytheway's hand, her fingers warming cold skin. "Tell me about the glass."

  He hesitated, trembling. Afraid, so very afraid – but not of her. Not even of Hammersmith. He was afraid that if he spoke of his fears, the corruption would claw its way in. She recognised the way his eyes darted towards the hold's shadowy corners, had seen the same disquiet on Constant's face so many times.

  "Perceive the moment," she said. "Look at me, Bytheway. Be aware, and let me be your anchor to the real. Take my hand and tell me what you saw on Cato."

  "Earthborn," he mumbled, his sweaty fingers locking around her hand. "You won't let go?"

  "Never," she promised.

  He told them his tale then. His unit had decided to follow the trail of lichen deep into Cato, through tunnels of opaque glass. Carefully, at first, examining their surroundings with scientific interest. But soon the lichen and the spider webs had grown too thick, and their Bastion escorts had cleared the path with flamethrowers.

  "That was the first time we saw it, as the fire lit the glass, turning it the colour of dark molasses. We saw it that day, but we didn't realise. We thought the shapes silhouetted in the glow were coincidences, like how clouds can look like animals or faces if you look hard enough."

  Four kilometres below Cato's surface, the tunnel had widened into a cavern several miles wide and as black as pitch. They'd heard water in the distance, the rush of a waterfall. The lichen grew patchy down there, but the spiders thrived, as big as rats. The unit's exo-zoologist had been thrilled, collecting egg sacs and live samples as they went. Their Bastion escorts had been less pleased, muttering about returning to the surface, but they didn't complain for long.

  "Locals found us that night. Not drifters – people from Nexus, driven down below by the destruction of their home. They had to have been there for weeks. Weeks in the bowels of corruption; can you even imagine it? No wonder they went at us like they did. Like savages."

  All but one of the Bastion escorts had died that night. The locals had died too, but Bytheway's unit had been scattered in the chaos, lost in the d
ark.

  "I huddled amongst egg sacs the size of my fists. Swollen things, with spindly legs pressing against the membranes. I'd fallen, cutting my forehead, and I sat there thinking when they hatch they'll smell my blood. How many spiders would it take to eat a man alive? I don't know, but I felt sure I was about to find out. Thank the stars Captain Mersey kept his cool."

  Captain Mersey, the Bastion escorts' medic and sole survivor, had killed the last local and set to treating his own wounds. When he'd realised that a shotgun blast had ruined his tibia beyond repair, he'd drawn his combat knife and coolly amputated his leg at the knee. Once he'd stopped the bleeding and adjusted his anaesthesia/stim flow, he'd pulled out his flare gun and fired into the cavern's ceiling.

  "We'd never have found our way back to each other if he hadn't. Two of my colleagues didn't. Search teams found Carrack's backpack near a stream, and her shoes, neatly placed on a rock in the water. I guess we'll never know what happened to her. I hope not, because when Mersey fired those flares..." Bytheway squeezed Joy's hand too hard, but she didn't complain. "When he fired those flares, we saw what was inside the glass. All around us, inside the cavern walls. We saw the spires and the towers and the dancing hordes."

  Dancing. The word sparked a memory. In the tunnel leading to the Andromache, Joy had also seen things caught inside the glass. Trees, spiders... and a human shape. Graceful, twisting, as though dancing – but she had chalked it up to her imagination. Just another tree, she'd told herself.

  But what if it wasn't?

  She let Bytheway's fingers tighten around hers while he spoke of dome-capped cathedrals and spiralling towers, questioning nothing, simply taking it all in. He spoke of demons, too; tall, humanoid shadows captured in glass, and none of it made sense, because demons weren't real. That was fact. Though Constant said that Skald might as well be a demon, Joy knew that he wasn't, no more than spiders or drifters were. He was an entity, an organism of unknown origin and purpose, but not supernatural. Evil, yes, but not a force of evil.

  "But what you saw was trapped inside the glass," she said. "It can't hurt you."

  "Trapped for now. But Cato is breaking apart. Our astro teams think it's only a matter of time before the whole world is nothing but debris. And when Cato breaks open, what will come pouring out? From black glass instead of yellow soil this time, but it'll be Xanthe all over again, I have no doubt. And is the galaxy pure enough to withstand the corruption this time? The Primaterre, maybe, but who else? Will we stand alone against the horde?"

  "That's what has you looking to escape?"

  "When your people... Tower... when they heard about it, they came swooping in. Blocked off the cavern, made us all sign NDAs..." He gave Joy a worried look. "I'm not in breach by talking to you, am I? You are Tower."

  "It's okay," she assured him.

  "Nothing's okay." He sniffled. "In any case, it was clear to me that they weren't just curious. They knew what they were going to see. They were prepared for it. Expecting it, I think, like they know something's coming. Something bad."

  Waste of time, Hammersmith texted. He knows nothing of relevance. Finish up, Somerset.

  Finish up? How? She looked up at Hammersmith, about to ask, when she saw him pull out a pair of gloves and casually snap them on.

  No. She looked into Bytheway's frightened eyes. No, that wasn't okay at all.

  "The Primaterre protects us all," she said gently. Bytheway echoed the phrase, and when she smiled, he did too. He couldn't not smile while his priming mimicked a rush of euphoriants. "You know that. And you know who I am."

  The woman in the posters. The soldier fighting side by side with Cassimer, and as the commander represented the Primaterre in all things, perhaps she, too, was now a trusted voice. A voice he was primed to believe in.

  "You resisted the red demon. You were born on Earth, before the corruption broke free of Xanthe. You are pure of purpose and clear of mind; an example to us all," Bytheway said, his words not rehearsed so much as imprinted. It disgusted her to have been made a tool for the very slavery she was trying to end, but if it would save this man's life, then she could swallow her revulsion.

  "Yes, and now I'm with Tower, working to destroy what you saw in the glass. We're working to bring light to the galaxy, Bytheway, but we can't do that if you are afraid. We can't do that if you keep writing and talking about what you saw, even if you keep it vague. We need you to believe in the Primaterre." As she spoke, she cut the mind-worm's connection. "Solidarity is strength, Bytheway."

  "Solidarity is strength," he echoed, and as the mind-worm released its grip on him, his eyes widened.

  Good, but not enough. She spent another hour with him, repeating trigger phrases and talking about the glass, leading his subconscious to associate what he had seen with the sense of security induced by the phrase Primaterre protects us all. It was basic psychology, repetition and connection, facilitated by the priming done to him since birth. She was simply piggy-backing on the pre-existing programming.

  When she finished, Bytheway no longer shivered. When Hammersmith unlocked his shackles, he thanked them both for making him see with clarity, and when Hammersmith produced yet another NDA for him to sign, he did so readily. When he said goodbye to Joy at the Imago's airlock, it was with a smile.

  "It was an honour not meeting you," he said, winking, before disappearing into the Cleo Selene, spine straight and stride full of purpose. The broken man had been fixed.

  Nice, Joy thought.

  * * *

  "Ruthless," Hammersmith said, as he piloted the Imago towards the Cascade.

  "Excuse me?"

  "I see the worldbreaker now. Beneath the sweetness, you're a woman who'll stop at nothing."

  "What are you talking about? You were putting gloves on. You were going to kill him."

  "Only if that's what you wanted. I told you, it was your show. Since he knew nothing, I would personally have settled for an NDA, but it was your call."

  "I didn't even know what the options were."

  "Yes, you did. And you chose the worst of them all."

  "Worse than death?"

  "There are few things in life that a man can call his own. His mind should be one of those things; sacred and inviolable."

  "I agree, but we're working to put an end to the priming. If we're successful, Bytheway will have his mind back. Until then, isn't it better for him to not be scared?"

  "His fear was his own, not yours to take." Hammersmith glanced at her, his eyes cold silver. "What if it was justified? What if the darkness he fears does come to pass? He won't flee from it now. He will face it, believing himself safe even if he's not. You took his survival instinct, the most primal and true of all instincts."

  "But there is no darkness," Joy protested. "Even if he did see something in the glass, it'd be long dead."

  Hammersmith said nothing, but something about the way he said nothing made her nervous.

  "Do you know something, Hammersmith?"

  "The official story has it that the Andromache was an experimental vessel, intended to be deployed in case an existing Cascade breaks down or is destroyed. She was in this system on a test run, constructing a new Cascade for Rossetti to replace the piece of junk we're about to fold out through. A solid enough story, but I know she was more than that – and you do, too. You were onboard her before she was destroyed. You saw what she really was."

  "A warship. No," she corrected herself, "a fleet of warships."

  "Yes. She was built to fight, but who? I didn't know. I heard only strange rumours, too strange to take seriously. Perhaps not so strange anymore." He shrugged. "It doesn't matter. We have our own war to fight, Somerset, and you mustn't forget who our enemy is. Use their methods if you like, but take care you don't become them. You took away a part of Bytheway because you thought you knew what's best for him. That's exactly what the Primaterre did to its citizens, what it is doing still."

  "I'm sorry," Joy said. "I won't do it again."

&nb
sp; "I'm the one who's sorry. Sorry that I had to bring you into this. Sorry for all the things we'll make you do, and for all the things that'll be done to you. You should–" He paused, breathing a deep sigh. "Tower is no place for women."

  "Bastion doesn't seem to view genders differently."

  "Of course not," Hammersmith sneered. "They've all had equality hammered home since birth, haven't they? It's part of the Primaterre system of values; women and men being of equal worth and ability."

  "There was a female banneret man on Cato. She performed just as well as the men on the team."

  "I'm sure she did. But what of the men? Did their commander not set his mission aside to rescue you? Did his second-in-command not attempt mutiny to get back home to his wife and children? They almost failed in their duties because of women. Because you are worth more than honour and duty, worth more than..." He grimaced angrily. "Do you think I'd have left biscuits in the quarters of a male recruit? No, I fucking wouldn't. Nor would I have come all the way out here just to hold his hand on a simple assignment. But you're on your own from here on, Somerset, you hear me?"

  She heard him, but he was wrong. Her HUD was a star chart of messages and notifications. Vienna, now stationed in a sentinel mess hall on Phobos, wondering where Joy had ended up (never saw you again after graduation! Also, turns out there are worse places than Achall. Bastion's slogan should be Enlist and Learn New Awful Facts Every Day). Rhys, imploring her to get in touch ASAP. The captain of the Cleo Selene sending her his contact details (in case you ever need a ride). And, from an adventurous Oriel officer she'd met in the ship's common room, a list of rock climbing sites, most of which looked terrifying to Joy, but Constant might like them – and if he were with her, she wouldn't be afraid.

  And with a HUD where messages burned like stars, she wasn't alone. Not on her own, not ever again.

  20.

  CASSIMER

  The tide was rising, dark water filling the sewers beneath the laboratory. These tunnels were older than the one the team had entered through, the crumbling brickwork coated with ingrained filth.