Lonely Castles

by S. A. Tholin

  Rhys patted her shoulder, and she nodded, managing half a smile.

  Joy, Cassimer texted. Static made her hair cling to his cuirass. Her open eye was amber in the light of the setting sun, and it struck him that Hammersmith had been right. Whatever mission he set his heart on was the mission he'd complete. 4.97 kilometres, strong winds, moving target. Nice shot.

  Her half-a-smile widened into a full smile.

  "Thank you," she whispered, touching his visor with her good hand.

  Her good hand.

  Cassimer took her other wrist, turning it gently. A bandage covered fresh tissue where her ring finger was supposed to be.

  "My Hyrrokkin didn't do that."

  "No," Rhys said, slamming his med-kit shut. "That was the houseplant."

  * * *

  A gunship hovering over the forest fired a barrage of missiles. The lighthouse exploded, showering the hillside with rubble, and the restaurant disappeared in a swell of fire. Carmody's mission had ended, but he had done well enough. The team had escaped their pursuers, and as the roar of the gunship grew louder and the shouts of RebEarthers echoed around the hill, they made their way down the narrow cliff path.

  Cassimer carried Joy, her arms around his neck and her breath misting his visor all that kept his anger from welling over when Rhys relayed the details of Skald's infiltration.

  The things it had done to Joy; the things it had done to them all by slithering unseen through their midst. Trusts broken, minds violated, wounds inflicted. It was evil, and had Cassimer not sensed that on Xanthe? He'd seen how the towerman had looked at him, the hate too strong to hide. He'd felt the prickle along his spine, the instinct that whispered that somebody had him in their sights, and he had heard the sly cruelty in Wideawake's words to Joy. If only he had done something then. If only he had broken the towerman's neck and left the empty body to rot on Xanthe.

  But Wideawake had been Primaterre. His armour had been emblazoned with the same symbol as Cassimer's, and that mattered. That made all the difference. Or at least it had, once.

  "It still does," Joy said when he texted her his thoughts, and she touched her wounded hand to the sun on her chest. "It means trust."

  "Trust did this," he said, brushing his thumb over her bandage.

  "And trust did this, too." She closed her remaining fingers over his hand.

  The sound of the approaching gunship faded as the blast doors rumbled shut behind them. In darkness illuminated by visor lights, the team took a moment to breathe, to think. Their HUDs reported seismic activity, and now they all knew what the fire raining from the sky was. The Primaterre fleet that patrolled Earth space had been baited across the Luna Belt. Thousands of crewmen dead in the blink of an eye, their ships locked on collision course with Earth.

  "More will come," Florey said. "Many more will die before they understand why."

  "If they ever understand." Hopewell's cheeks were flushed with anger. "They might not be able to, the same way there were things we couldn't see before. They'll see that crewmen die when they cross the Luna Belt, but will they really see it, or will they brush it off? I remember what it felt like when you told us the truth, Commander. You showed us undeniable facts, but this thing, this soft brightness was in my head, telling me that I didn't need to look, and when I did anyway, it told me that none of it mattered. The harder I tried, the less important it all seemed. I think they'll keep coming across the Luna Belt until Rampart runs out of ships and Earth is broken into as many pieces as Cato."

  "We won't let that happen. Primaterre protects us all."

  Rhys gave Cassimer a sceptical look. "You still think that's an appropriate phrase to use?"

  "More than ever," he replied, with enough conviction that the others – even Rhys – echoed the phrase as they had been conditioned to do. Except this time, they'd spoken the words because they wanted to. Because they believed, and because they trusted him.

  "Do you read?" Juneau's voice came over the comms, loud and clear.

  "Juneau," Cassimer said, relieved. "You got the comms back online."

  "Clearly, but Commander, you need to get back here ASAP. We have a problem."

  * * *

  The problem had a name, and it was Hammersmith.

  They found Juneau at the bottom of the stairs leading to the lab. Nervous, fidgeting, but unharmed.

  "He's in the lab," she said. "He returned about twenty minutes ago. I tried to explain what happened, but as soon as he saw Wideawake and Elsinore, he kicked me out. Talking to him has got me nowhere. He doesn't listen, and when he speaks, he rants about how the mission is a failure. I think this problem demands a banneret solution."

  Fine. Cassimer drew his Morrigan.

  "Wait." Joy placed a hand on his wrist. "Let me speak to him."

  "We don't have time, Somerset."

  "He's my superior, Hopewell. If that were your commander in there, wouldn't you want a chance to talk him down before letting another team kill him?"

  "I'd kill anyone who tried to kill my commander."

  "Exactly."

  "No exactly about it. Hammersmith did try to kill my commander."

  "So did the Hierochloe guards. You still managed to find a constructive use for them."

  "Enough." Cassimer nodded towards the stairs. "You've got five minutes, Somerset."

  69.

  JOY

  Five minutes didn't seem long enough.

  The combined active protection fields of four banneret men arced around her. Bright sparks popped in her vision, tiny crackles of electricity embellished by the stims in her system. Whatever Rhys had given her made everything so much more intense. The light touch of camail links against her cheeks felt like the silver flame of a Cascade, and Hammersmith's eyes were pools of liquid metal.

  He stood in the middle of the lab. His hands were covered in Elsinore's blood; his boots had trampled tacky footprints in narrowing circles on the floor. The way Juneau had described him, Joy had expected anger, but she saw only complete and utter defeat. There was a red mark at his temple that she felt sure was from his Kali sidearm, pressed hard to his skull. He still held the gun, his gauntleted fingers tight around its grip.

  "There you are," he spat. "To think I worried for your safety. Of course you're all right. You wear Tower blacks, but your heart's always been Bastion grey. Did you stand by as they slaughtered our team, Somerset? Or did you take part? Did you pull the trigger yourself?"

  "Hammersmith, listen to me. Things aren't what they seem, and Elsinore is still alive. You need to stand down so that he can get the medical attention he needs."

  "Still alive." Hammersmith glanced over his shoulder at the interpreter's bloodstained body. "If he could be said to ever have lived at all. His father took his childhood from him, and I took what was left. I told myself that it would be worth it, that one day, he'd be able to live in true freedom, but I was wrong about that. I was wrong about everything, and it's all too late now. None of it can be undone. All that's left is regret and failure."

  "That's not true at all. We can still do this, Hammersmith, but you need to put down your gun–"

  "Need? When everything's pointless, nothing needs to be done. What I should do is put a bullet in your pretty, lying face."

  The stairs creaked as Constant barged past her, fireflies stretching around him. Hammersmith raised his gun and hissed with pain as his arm was nearly ripped from its socket.

  "I warned you." Constant broke the man's wrist, collecting the Kali from limp fingers. His voice was cool, and it was with a slow, calm force that he shoved Hammersmith against the wall until bone crunched.

  "Don't kill him," Joy pleaded.

  "No offense, Somerset, but shut up." Hopewell advanced up the stairs, entering the lab with her rifle trained squarely on Hammersmith's forehead. "It's because of him that the commander ended up in RebEarth captivity. It's because of him that Valletta's in the med-wing, and it's because of him that Tallinn's dead. That makes this banneretcy busine
ss. That makes this personal."

  "It..." Hammersmith groaned as Constant clamped a fist around his neck. "It wasn't meant to go down like that. Lutzen's team were supposed to reach the primer samples first, there and gone long before you ever turned up. But the Shipwrecker and his fleet delayed the Hesperia. Once they made landfall on Hereward, Lutzen only had a small window of opportunity. He could have aborted, but he knew how important the samples were to the mission. To me. He was... he was a good soldier."

  "He was traitor scum," Hopewell persisted.

  "He fought to liberate the Primaterre people before you were even born, you ungrateful child. He protected you in ways you will never know, and in the end, gave his life for the greater good. No, he shouldn't have shot your recon man or crippled your commander. But he didn't kill anyone, and he didn't deserve the end you gave him. You executed a righteous man that day, Lieutenant."

  "I killed a man who had his gun on Major Juneau. Don't give a shit how righteous he was, I'd pull the trigger all over again any day of the week. Speaking of which..." She trailed off, giving her commander a hopeful look.

  "Go ahead. You have it your way. It doesn't matter anyway." Hammersmith's metallic eyes stared over Constant's shoulder, seeking Joy. "Did you know that, Somerset? Did you figure it out yet? We can't complete the mission. We never could, because how do you kill a thing that is inside your head? The major thought she could disconnect it. Fine, but I wanted a contingency plan, too – one that the banneret men wouldn't know about, or be able to prevent. So I planted explosives all around the station, high and low, deep and wide, and I'm not talking breaching charges here, Somerset. I mean the sort of explosives that would turn this mountain inside out. There'd be nothing left at all. No data, no tissue, not so much as a scrap of paper – Project Harmony gone forever. I set a refreshable timer, and then I tried to arm the explosives."

  "But you couldn't," Joy said.

  "No, I couldn't. It wouldn't let me. This abomination..." He turned his head towards the tank. "It's in our heads. It sits there, in the margins. For decades, it has let me believe that I could put an end to its control. It would have been kinder if it had just erased those thoughts. Slavery only hurts if you know the meaning of freedom. This thing, it let us taste it. It let us come here, let us hope... stars..." He sobbed, though there were no tears in his eyes. "It's more evil than we thought."

  If he tries to arm those explosives again... Juneau texted.

  Constant's grip on Hammersmith tightened. Florey. Handle it.

  Yes, Commander. The gunner slipped out of the room and down the stairs.

  "Juneau and I are working on it," Joy said gently. "Right now, you have more pressing matters to worry about. See this?" She removed the bandage from her hand. "Wideawake did this to me."

  "Bullshit."

  "He did, and that's why he's dead. Except Wideawake never really existed at all. He was a vessel, Hammersmith. Thanks to us, Skald made it to Earth and worse yet – he invited his RebEarth followers. They're here now, and they are coming. For us, for the Prime Mover; for all of the Primaterre Protectorate."

  "You're lying. I've known Wideawake for years–"

  "Have you?" She shook her head. "You, Lutzen, Elsinore... none of you truly knew each other. You never trusted each other, never let the others in. Skald took advantage of Tower's darkness and distrust. That's where he's strong, just like the demons Hierochloe invented. But for people who trust each other with more than their lives, he is no threat. He can't break us." She placed her hand on Constant's and held it there until he, begrudgingly, let Hammersmith go. "He won't break us."

  * * *

  For a towerman of three decades, even a system as protected as Sol was an open book. Hammersmith switched on the lab monitors and linked in the Hierochloe security cameras. When he saw the red-and-black troops moving down the cliff path, a tiny twitch at the corner of his mouth was enough for Joy to know that he had taken a first step towards believing her.

  A view from a Talien Castle surveillance camera showed smoke rising from the beach. The parking lot and restaurant were ember-spitting ruins; the surrounding forest aglow with plasma. A single gunship circled the hill like a vulture, searching for the banneret men that had slipped through its grasp.

  Approaching the station's tunnel entrance, a RebEarther stopped and stared straight into a camera. His red veil was a dirty old bandana, and the wing tattoos that framed his face were the work of clumsy, inartistic hands, but that made his devotion no less frightening.

  The RebEarther flipped off the camera, then shot it.

  "Yeah, same to you, buddy," Hopewell muttered.

  "Found a functioning satellite. Establishing link." Around Hammersmith's metallic irises, his eyes were cold silver. "One moment."

  The images on the monitors changed. No footage, but reams of scrolling data that made Hammersmith swear. Joy's primer translated it into a chart detailing the locations of ships, some stationary in Earth's orbit, others on a course for deep space.

  The systems of a Primaterre cutter in orbit were too secure for Hammersmith, but her crew were no longer running scripts or firewalls. Visual augments lay wide open to the towerman's touch, and through the eyes of dead men, they saw a cockpit unharmed and pristine. No gunfire had touched the ship, its force field strong and humming. The pilot stared ahead at the stars. His navigator had slumped over the instrument board, one frantically blinking red light shining into his right retina.

  Only the ship's gunner provided a useful view. He had died with his eyes firmly fixed on his target, and his HUD still showed the targeting data. A dozen hostile ships had made for Earth. Five had made it past the fleet; one had been obliterated halfway through the Luna Belt.

  "One crashed on the beach and Somerset took out another," Hopewell said. "So that leaves two, yeah? Assuming they all carried about the same amount of troops, we could be looking at fifty, maybe seventy-five hostiles, minus however many the Hierochloe guards managed to take out. I don't want to sound too optimistic, but those odds aren't insurmountable."

  Hammersmith skipped into another satellite, then another, continuing along network nodes and the unprotected systems of ships until he reached the deep space telescope of a research station.

  "That's an Oriel station in the ruins of New Miranda," Juneau said. "How did you access its systems? You're not even supposed to know it exists."

  "Tower knows," Hammersmith said, then laughed; a bitter, empty sound.

  The telescope provided a view of the Cascade. Heavily trafficked, as per usual, but its fleet was nowhere to be seen. A token guard of cutters was all that remained. Enough to keep the commercial traffic in line, but not enough to protect the Cascade from a hostile force.

  "...requesting backup. Do you read?"

  "That's a secure Rampart channel." Juneau gave Hammersmith a sharp look, which he ignored, and pursed her lips. "Bloody Tower."

  "...require a blockade fleet immediately. Do you read?" A moment of silence, and then the cutter pilot, exasperated, reached out to another Primaterre ship. "We're experiencing some sort of interference – you in contact with anyone?"

  "Negative, and I don't think it's interference. Check out the queue – the open channel's choked with complaints."

  Hammersmith shut down the connection, switching to the open channel. The noise was incredible; a cacophony of irritated voices in a range of accents so great some of them might as well have been alien languages. But for all the diversity, the gist was the same: fold requests weren't being processed, and some of us have been waiting for an hour, damn it, don't they know we're carrying perishables.

  "I can't get a connection either. For all intents and purposes, the Sol Cascade is dead."

  "How?" Juneau asked, but Joy already knew the answer. It was in the look Hammersmith gave her, and in the sinking feeling in her heart.

  "It's the signal blocker," she said. "The one I installed. It's meant to block the priming signal from individual primers, but it
's doing more than that, isn't it, Hammersmith? It's blocking all Cascade traffic. No comms, no folds."

  "It wasn't meant to."

  "Didn't mean to shoot Valletta, didn't mean to get Tallinn killed, didn't mean to bring the houseplant to Earth. Does anything ever go how it's meant to for you, Hammersmith?" Hopewell scowled. "The major's right – bloody Tower."

  "Cool it, Hopewell," Constant said. "Hammersmith, can you disable the blocker?"

  "I don't have access. I should have, but Wideawake... the entity... it must've locked me out. The Cascade crew will have realised that their systems are compromised by now, but Baines – the interpreter who designed the blocker – he was a genius, and at least twice as belligerent as he was clever. It won't be an easy task to restore Cascade functions, and it won't be quick. Baines..." Hammersmith suddenly looked ill. "He was Wideawake's interpreter. They worked together for years. If Wideawake was close to anyone, it would've been Baines. Persuading him to add some additional code to the blocker wouldn't have been hard."

  "The interpreter who died in the accident that injured Wideawake?" Joy asked.

  "I doubt it was an accident. Earth have mercy; five of my men died that day, in my base of operations. Murdered, right under my nose."

  "Ought to be ashamed of yourself," Hopewell muttered.

  "Hopewell." Constant pointed to the door, and the gunner sloped outside without so much as another word. "Forget the past. We need solutions now. What about him?" He nodded towards Elsinore.

  "Wouldn't make it," Rhys said. "Can't say I'd care one way or the other, but in his state, connecting to the Cascade would kill him long before he makes himself useful."

  "What about Sapporo and the other analysts?" Joy looked at Hammersmith, who gave her a scornful look in return.