by S. A. Tholin
"...is by stopping potential human hosts from going there."
"Yes. Earth must be preserved, pure and untouched. It's quarantined, tended to by drones and machines controlled via Primaterre satellites in orbit. A planet-wide nature reserve, home only to wildlife."
"Sad." Her lips spoke one word, her eyes a thousand more. A future, a brother and now a home. So many sorrows; far too many to express in words.
"Necessary. Though there are those who would disagree."
"RebEarth?"
He nodded. "Religious fanatics who believe humanity's rightful place is on Earth. They want her as badly as the demons do, and their methods are no less horrific."
"Religious fanatics. That's what Rivka called you - and then Rivka turned out to be part of some weird lichen-worshipping cult. RebEarth, purity, the red - it's hard to know what to believe."
"With truth and clarity, belief becomes obsolete," he said, and momentarily, his mind cleared of shadows. The simplicity of purity was a sweetness in his blood.
Joy seemed less impressed, one eyebrow arching finely.
"Do you have any RebEarth files you could show me? I'd like to see for myself."
He shrugged and closed the open file to search through his primer. Most of the material pertaining to RebEarth would be mission-related and classified. They were hostile targets, otherwise unworthy of a single thought.
Then he caught Joy looking at him, and understood what her question really was.
She wasn't interested in RebEarth. She wanted to know what kind of a man he was. Though he knew that his actions at the train station had been justified, that the standing orders to kill or capture RebEarthers were as righteous as they were sensible, sudden anxiety prickled his skin. Perhaps whatever material he had on file wouldn't be sufficient to show RebEarth for the murderers they were.
"Wait a second." Joy squinted in surprise at the tablet. Nothing interesting there, as far as he knew - unlike most soldiers, he'd not even customized his setup. Copenhagen's had been a headache-inducing pink and Hopewell's was the stylized logo of the Kepler Blackbirds. Rhys's was locked to the default Primaterre logo against a grey backdrop after Cassimer had seen fit to override the medic's own, decidedly lewd, choice.
"Neave Crescent Creek? You know their music? You like their music?"
He'd been listening to their second album while clearing the bank of debris. The music player, pinned to the top-right corner of the screen, waited patiently for him to resume listening.
"Yes," he said, and prompted by her smile, added: "Though this isn't their best work. I prefer Gallow's Corner."
"So over a century later they're finally getting the recognition they deserve? Finn would die if he knew - he can't stand my taste in music. Used to be NCC were a band that only weird shut-ins liked," she said, mimicking someone else's voice - her brother's? - in a wryly derogative tone.
"No," Cassimer said, the fresh tissue in his left cheek stinging as he gave a half-smile. "I'm afraid it's still just music for shut-ins."
"Oh, come on - you?" She shook her head. "No way. You've even got a tan underneath all that armour. And looks aside, you're a commander. Us shut-ins aren't inclined towards leadership. Too shy, too nervous around crowds. Not great with attention either - one-on-one conversation like this is okay, but if this were a party, you'd find me in the kitchen, awkwardly standing around pretending like I'm not at all feeling out of place."
"We're not alone," he said, although he hadn't given Rhys or Lucklaw a single thought for quite some time.
"The rest of the world tends to fade when I'm talking to you."
He had absolutely no idea how to respond to that, and the silence between them lasted a beat too long, dragging into awkward.
"Do you want to listen to it?" Strangely, the question felt completely natural. Normal. Like this was life the way it was supposed to be.
She did, and as music filled the train car, it filled the space between her and Cassimer. A bridge of notes, as glittering as the bridges of Kirkclair.
The stims had all but worn off, and he let his body acclimatise to its unassisted self, leaning his head against the train window. He should shut his visor, maybe have his suit flush his system of chems, but didn't want to. Not yet. Not while he could imagine another life.
In the glow of the tablet, strands of Joy's hair sparkled golden. Sunlight, washing the decay from the surroundings. Mouldy seats turned sea-foam green; polished floors gleamed under the light of Emeralite lamps. The tracks straightened, the train's steady rumble overlaid by a susurrus of murmured conversations. An imagined snapshot of the past, with Joy as the final puzzle piece to complete the picture.
Joy, unhurt and unafraid; Joy, in a dress as blue as the artificial sky over Stairhaven. Joy, surrounded by passengers who could smile and talk and live without fear of the shadows.
No place for dark-armoured men.
◆◆◆
The mists of dreamless sleep parted at the foghorn blare of an alert.
Twenty kilometres to destination.
Red text burned against Cassimer's retina. He blinked it away, along with the last remnants of sleep.
Sleep. No wonder Rhys wore a big smirk on his face. Irritating, but perhaps the medic had been right about the benefits of natural sleep.
Regardless, he'd been careless to allow such loss of control, even if it had only been for a few minutes (three hours and twenty-six minutes, his HUD informed him and he closed his visor to stop information from displaying straight to his visual augments). If the demons had tracked him across the void, or if a vein of corruption lay beneath the windblown dunes of Cato, his mind would've lain wide-open.
And like Peter Winstanley of 1146 Westcott Rd., Joy would have been the first to die. An image of his own hands around her neck crystallised in his mind's eye, and he could feel her throat underneath his fingers, could hear the...
He turned, needing visual confirmation that she was all right.
All right and asleep. Knees drawn up, tablet clutched in her hands, head resting against his arm. He couldn't feel her through his armour, but she was far too close, and so were the walls and the shadows.
"Lucklaw. Stop the train."
It came to a screeching halt four-point-five kilometres from their destination. Closer than he'd planned, and there was a lesson to be learned in that. Even the most trivial diversion affected the mission.
The stretch of tunnel was in dismal condition. The ceiling sagged, dust drizzling from wide cracks in the concrete. Collapse was as imminent as it was inevitable.
He shone his lights up and down the line. Cobwebs cast a tangled network of shadows on the walls. His sensors reported movement in the ceiling; the weavers of the webs, no doubt.
"Tunnel's crawling with spiders. Seal the doors behind me."
Camouflage on. Sound-dampeners on. His suit buzzed with activity, warm static nipping at his skin. The tunnel lay dark and silent ahead, but the shadows held no terrors.
He had purpose now, and his heart beat pure and loud.
21. Joy
"I can't believe you're letting him go out there by himself." Joy wiped dirt from the window, but the tunnel curved sharply up ahead, cutting off visual contact. The commander was gone.
"We don't 'let' the commander do anything. We follow orders," Rhys said.
"Obviously, but surely one of you should've gone with him? These tunnels are dangerous."
Lucklaw swore and blinked silver from his eyes to give her a nasty look. "Rhys, could you shut the civilian up? I'm trying to concentrate."
"He's not alone, Joy. Here, let me link to your tablet."
The screen changed from the grey background of Cassimer's primer database to show a video feed of the tunnel, overlaid with diagnostic information on everything from the structural integrity of the tunnel (panic-inducing), the temperature (freezing) to (ugh) hundreds of faint heat signals crawling in the ceiling.
Bones were stacked in neat piles along the tra
cks, just far enough away that the train would not disturb them. The walls were white with the Cato shorthand for danger - long jagged zigzags, drawn in chalk. A warning - though, given the bones, it seemed unnecessary.
Where the chalk marks abruptly ended, sloppy dark letters spelled one word: LIES. A few metres on, the same dark paint - which she knew damn well wasn't paint - had been used to draw a heart.
"I hate this planet," she said and the soldiers did not tell her to be quiet.
Multiple contacts.
The text appeared on the screen moments before the overlay updated its information. How did the soldiers function with so much information streaming through their brains? Sifting through the glut to find the pertinent seemed impossible.
Approaching for visual.
Dim light-strips illuminated the small station where Joy had spent her third night on Cato. The first night, also known as The Worst Night Ever, had been followed by The Same, But With Spiders. In comparison, the third night hadn't been so bad.
They hadn't known about drifters then, so a train station, with electric lights and radiators that occasionally spat out a bit of heat, had been a wonderful sign of civilisation. As she'd drifted off to sleep that third night, she'd done so believing that everything would be okay.
How long ago that seemed, and how far away Cassimer seemed. No matter what Rhys said, the commander was alone.
The figure of a man appeared on the screen. He stood on the platform, a smouldering cigarette between his lips.
Five contacts on the platform. Sophisticated gear. Not locals.
"RebEarth," Lucklaw said, with a hint of a tremble in his voice.
"There's never just one cockroach," Rhys agreed.
Linking audio feed.
Voices came through a whoosh of static, loud and impatient.
"...could've sworn I heard it."
"Well, where is the bloody thing then? I hate standing around down here, place gives me the creeps."
"Maybe it got waylaid by drifters?"
"You know they don't attack the train. It's out of bounds."
"Don't know shit about drifters. Wouldn't put it past those crazy fuckers. Did you see the bones on the tracks? And the mess in the bathrooms? This planet's not right, I'm telling you."
If these men really were RebEarth, Joy was surprised at how normal they sounded. Hardly the monsters Cassimer would have her believe, or the vermin that Rhys and Lucklaw saw them as.
"Might've broken down. I mean, did you see the state of it? Feared for my life, I did, on the ride here."
"Should we go check?" A third male voice joined the conversation. Young, with an almost unintelligibly heavy accent.
"Oh sure, I'll just pick up my tool box and head down the dark bone-filled tunnel to check on a train that may come barrelling down those tracks any second now. Sounds like a good plan. In fact, it's so good, why don't you do it, Feehan?"
Nervous laughter drowned out Feehan's muttered response. On the screen, embers floated past the camera lens as the man on the edge of the platform flicked his cigarette onto the tracks.
"Got voice recognition matches on two of them," Lucklaw said. "Feehan, Gaius. Born on Hypatia. Since it was purged, he and his sister Gaia have murdered and robbed their way across the galaxy. The other is Lockwood, Valerian, wanted on suspicion of involvement in multiple chemical attacks on civilian targets. Both confirmed RebEarthers."
"And a long way from home. What brought them to Cato, I wonder?" Rhys peered at the screen where photographs of the men had appeared.
If the Conductor's neck tattoo had made him really fucking stupid, then Gaius Feehan had to be something very special, because he wore the phoenix inked on his face. A black-and-red bird splayed its proud wings from cheekbone to cheekbone, underneath eyes so dark and intense that Joy couldn't help but wonder what they had seen. Something had inspired rage in Feehan, bright enough to burn clearly even in a photograph.
Lockwood was much different. In his mug shot, he looked every bit the dashing professor. Wavy hair smartly parted to the left, aquiline nose sneering over finely drawn lips. His anger was well-concealed, invisible but for a sheen of frost in his eyes.
She looked at the faces of the RebEarthers, remembering Rhys's cold refusal to treat her injuries and how Lucklaw had so casually spoken of genocide. And while Cassimer heard the same things she did in Neave Crescent Creek, he had shot the conductor without so much as asking a question.
Murderers, Voirrey had called them. Murderers and religious fanatics. The doctor was wrong about the second part, because Joy believed the footage Cassimer had shown her. Special effects, no matter how convincing, were glossy and spectacular - only in real life did brutal murder look banal.
Joy loved horror movies, even though she always ended up having to pause them to call Finn for moral support - no I don't think the weird sound in your ceiling is a vengeful ghost for god's sake Joy why do you watch these movies anyway all right I'll be over in ten there'd better be coffee waiting for me - but even the ones that strived for authenticity lacked something. Indefinable then, but she'd seen enough now to know that it wasn't spurting blood or stomach-turning gore that made death terrible - it was how trivial it seemed.
Naomi Winstanley had picked up her daughter and ended the life she'd borne into the world, and it had looked like nothing at all. A life extinguished without flourish, a living body transformed to empty carcass in an instant.
Sickening, in a way that no gratuitous spatter ever could be.
If the Primaterre were fanatics, at least they had good cause - unlike Rivka and her kind, who ascribed higher meaning to lichen. But killing came easily to the soldiers, and words like "purge" and "purification" - made her suspect that the Primaterre weren't the only ones with good cause.
"Maybe," Rhys said, in the tail-end of a conversation that must've taken place over the soldiers' private channel. Oh, she was getting quite sick of that.
Cassimer was on the platform, crouched in the shadows of a doorway. It was hard to picture all seven foot of him sneaking past anyone, but if the RebEarthers had noticed him, they were very good at pretending otherwise.
Three on the platform, another one pacing near the exit stairway. The fifth was nowhere to be seen, and she hoped that Cassimer knew the missing man's position and wasn't about to be attacked from behind.
Silly. Of course he knew. He probably did this sort of thing all the time, and if he wasn't good at it, he'd be dead, but watching through a screen made her anxious. Even though she'd be of no help, she felt an urge to assist. A new feeling. A weird feeling. Almost as though living in the tunnels had made her a little braver.
Wasn't the tunnels. You always had it in you.
It wasn't really Finn. Still, he sounded so real in her head, so close, and in a way, he was - closer than in quite some time.
"I'm coming, Finn. Hold on," she whispered, blinking away the gathering tears.
The three men on the platform were armed and armoured, to a significantly greater degree than any local. Gaius Feehan sat on a bench, busy cleaning a rifle that looked advanced enough to rival even the soldiers'.
And then a sound like thunder came from the far side of the station, and broken tiles fell from shaking walls. Bright lights followed, and in a burst of brick-dust, a giant stepped from a side corridor.
"Oh my god." Joy clasped a hand to her mouth. "What is that?"
The man - if it was even human at all - was a towering nine foot of black-and-red metal, so wide he had to tear his way through the door. A phoenix blazed crimson on his cuirass, and painted feathers glowed on massive pauldrons. His visor was a narrow strip of red.
He was a walking fortress, under whose boots floor tiles cracked, his shoulders heavy with mounted cannons. The screen overlay updated to display the brand and technical specs of the guns, but all Joy took from it was that they were huge and deadly.
"Primaterre cataphract armour," Rhys said. "An Ereshkigal Class suit if I'm not mistake
n."
"You're not," Lucklaw said. "Makes me sick to see it painted RebEarth colours. And look at what they've done with the visor - gaudy bastards."
"Sure would like to find out how they got their hands on that."
Clear train. Transfer control.
Lucklaw and Rhys got to their feet immediately. The train doors hissed open and Lucklaw began chucking their bags into the tunnel.
"What's happening?" Joy asked, too afraid to be worried about asking stupid questions.
"The commander's going to secure the station. If you're asking what the train is for, use your imagination. That's what he'll be doing." Rhys grabbed the large rifle left behind by the commander and jumped off the train. "Unless you want to join in the fun, I suggest you get down here."
"But there's five of them, and one's a monster."
"The commander spent half his life in a suit just like it. If anyone knows how to crack that shell, it's him."
Dry old bones cracked under her feet as she stepped off the train. The sticky smell of decay washed over her, and she turned to board again, but Lucklaw had already closed the doors. Behind his semi-transparent visor, she could make out a crooked smile.
"Just watch the screen, civilian. You're about to see who our commander really is." He leaned forward, static electricity sparking between his armour and her skin. "Not the sort of man you want to fall asleep next to."
◆◆◆
The train stopped halfway into the station.
"...told you the fucking thing is on the fritz, need to get some mechanics to this planet."
"Need to get off this planet, don't give a shit about what happens once we're gone. Think you can get the train going if it's busted?"
"Once we get the supplies I'm not spending another minute in this tunnel. The train's the conductor's responsibility."
"Speaking of - where the hell is he? Hey, Anfield!"
Two RebEarthers approached the train. Its doors opened, and over the comms channel, Joy heard Cassimer take one long, controlled breath. Then gunfire boomed so loud that the audio cracked and popped. A burst of bullets slammed into the back of each man approaching the train.
