by S. A. Tholin
It disgusted him. Bastion had implied that Cato might one day be considered for annexation, but he knew now that he'd recommend against it. Better to let it die, to let it fade into history as a footnote, and let the bones of its people rest among its dunes.
Joy was of a different opinion. She still had people on the planet who she cared for, and she'd mentioned that if the red lichen was indeed toxic, perhaps its effects could be reversed. She was wrong - instinct told him that much - but she was wrong in a way that seemed right. Right for someone from a golden age; right for someone who had put her trust in strangers. Right for someone who shone with the light of stars.
But it was also the kind of wrong that could get her killed on a world like Cato. A dying enemy was often deceptively dangerous.
"Got a set of escalators going down two floors. No activity. Place is a maze, doors and corridors in all directions. Don't like the look of it," Florey said over the team channel. As they approached the entry point, he stepped from the shadows. They'd seen no one else, but had heard shouting from the market square. A crane had collapsed, Joy had explained, looking a bit sick as she added that the square was usually crowded at night.
People will have been hurt, she'd said. People will have been killed.
More of the right that was wrong. She'd looked at him like she'd wanted him to say that it wasn't her fault, but he wouldn't lie to her. The truth was that she had bared Nexus to the storm and all that followed was a direct consequence. The harder truth was that it didn't matter if people had died. She'd done what was necessary, not just for them, but for the greater good. She wasn't ready to hear that, though. Not yet.
The entrance to the undercity was a wide set of escalators underneath an arc of neon lettering. The lights were dead, but the dull glass still spelled the words DOVEDALE BUSINESS HOTEL.
"Any intel on this place, Somerset?"
"Sorry, Commander. All I know is the other entrance is for visitors. This one is for locals. I've never been down there. Duncan said..." Her voice cracked briefly. "Duncan said I shouldn't. Said it was too dangerous."
"Great," Hopewell said.
"It might be all right, though. You must've noticed how empty the town is, how many of the shacks are abandoned. Hal said..."
"Hal?" Cassimer inquired.
"The man who..." She tapped a finger to her face, where the faint bruising was enough to burn a trail of anger clean through the sedative in his system. "He said that the silver fortress calls people to it. That it takes and takes. If that's true, chances are the undercity will be mostly deserted as well. Only problem is, we're also heading to the silver fortress."
"All the little eggs in one neat basket?" Hopewell tugged at the strap of her missile launcher. "That's not what I call a problem."
◆◆◆
The escalators terminated inside a sprawling hotel lobby. Cassimer's night vision showed no heat signatures, but the area was evidently inhabited. Corridors opened up in all directions; some blocked off by barricades, others gaping wide and dark. A central fountain was mottled with lichen, thick swathes draped over the tiered edges.
Watch your step. Florey's message was accompanied by a blinking indicator on Cassimer's HUD, showing a collapsed section of floor. No, not collapsed; the edges were too clean. He approached and, for the first time, saw the undercity.
The spaceport had been built to be largely subterranean. The landing pads and arrival zones were above ground, but everything else - accommodations, security, baggage handling, shops and restaurants - nestled under the sands of Cato, safe from storms.
The locals had cut their way down through the floors, replacing failing structures with new beams to support their city. A two-hundred-metre drop, at least, and on every level of the shaft fires blazed. Heat rose from the deep, and wafts of smoke and the sounds of the undercity travelled on the warm air. Weeping, groaning, gunfire and laughter; the undercity was alive and eager.
He stood on the edge, rusting metal crumbling under his feet, and gazed into a pit so much like how he envisioned Xanthe.
Gunfire. Florey stood back to back with him, keeping an eye on their six, but even the gunner couldn't resist glancing into the abyss. East. Three levels down.
Rope bridges and precarious walkways of planks and sheet metal stretched across the shaft, connecting each side and level. On the third level, the braziers burned bright, and the dark shapes of armed men were silhouetted against the flames. Another shot rang out. The sound of shattering glass was followed by an outpouring of cheer.
Target practice, Cassimer replied.
RebEarth?
Can't tell. Except instinct told him that it was. High probability.
We going down there? Florey tested the top rung of a ladder with his foot. It creaked anxiously.
Maybe. He hoped not. Lucklaw, any network activity?
A flutter, Commander. Feeding power to the system. Should be coming online in -
Incandescent light filled the lobby. Cassimer's visor adjusted a nano-second too late and, through the night vision, the light was blinding. He flinched, reflexively stepping backwards.
The worming fear feasted on the proximity of the pit. It grew fat inside his chest, pushing at his ribs until they ached, tightening his throat. A howl rose from the pit, and maybe that was good. Maybe the demons should come for him and end what they'd started so many years ago.
But the howl died down, and he blinked away the pain. The lobby lights had laid bare the devastation. Lichen, red as blood, grew from cracks in the walls. One barricade had the words KEEP OUT smeared across it in black paint. Another was topped with skulls on pikes - the same message more bluntly stated. Piles of trash and excrement grew from the floor like mole hills. Tattered paintings hung above stained and mouldering furniture. It was civilisation brought to its knees, driven by despair to surrender.
He could sympathise.
"Commander." Joy was by his side, tugging him away from the edge. A glimpse of honey-brown eyes was all he got before the lights died, but it was enough. The worming fear stilled, and the pit lost its allure.
"Bloody hell," Hopewell complained. "Do not do that again, Lucklaw."
"Apologies." Lucklaw sounded appropriately mortified. "All I did was power the hotel's systems. The lights must've been left on."
"No need to explain." Cassimer stepped further from the pit, one arm around Joy's waist. If anyone was looking, they'd see, they'd know, but for the moment, he didn't care. If they'd been spotted when the lights came on... if somebody was lining up a shot right now... He felt better knowing that Joy would be protected. The temperature of his suit increased a degree or two as it expanded its APF to cover her. "Did you get anything useful?"
"The hotel system is a mess. It'll take me a minute -"
Welcome to Dovedale Hotel. We are pleased to offer our services to you.
The pleasant and tell-tale hollow voice of a computer echoed in the lobby, accompanied by gentle piano.
"Switch that off." Cassimer scanned the room for movement. His armour plates fizzed with sparks as Joy moved closer.
Would you like to check in -
a brief pause, as if the computer stopped to think
- Finn Somerset?
Joy made a strange little sound, turning her face towards his chest.
"Your h-chip," Lucklaw said. "I didn't wipe your brother's profile. Could be useful. You should..."
"No thank you," Joy said. "I need to get to Castle Street. Can you give me directions?"
"Don't talk to it like it's a person. It's a computer, you need to keep it simple -"
Certainly, sir. Take the elevator to the subway station on the sixteenth floor. The train for Castle Street departs from Platform Two.
"Thank you very much," Joy replied. Lucklaw sighed, but Cassimer loved her all the more for it. Around her, the hotel's walls seemed to regain some of their colour, and the wind rising from the pit no longer carried the taunts of demons, but the whispers of ghosts. Cat
o's civilisation might have fallen, but for a time it had been good. For a time, it had been sweet.
"The elevators are online, but not responding," Lucklaw said. "Must be a mechanical issue."
The elevators were on the far side of the lobby. As Cassimer left Joy's side to investigate, his active protection field stretched and sparked, lingering around her, as unwilling to let go as he was.
He used his knife to jimmy one set of doors open and tossed a flare down the shaft. Magenta light illuminated corroded walls, bouncing until two hundred and sixteen metres below, it came to rest on the roof of an elevator. A long way to fall, but better than the hissing, laughing, RebEarth-infested alternative.
42. Joy
Given the choice of an elevator shaft or a perfectly good ladder, the cold, dark and fall-to-your-death option wasn't the one Joy would've picked. The flare looked distant enough to be a star and the drop long enough that she'd have time to think about her landing if she fell. She'd thought of it plenty already, a horror-reel of fracturing bone and rupturing skin playing in her mind.
"I'm just saying," she complained to Hopewell, "Cato's one silver lining was the lack of heights. Oh sure, it's got tunnels and spiders and more lunatics than you could swing a cat at, but at least I rarely had to worry about plummeting to my death."
"Cheer up," Hopewell said, tightening the straps of a harness around her waist. "One way or another, it'll all be over soon. Florey, you okay climbing with all that gear?"
Florey was preparing to follow the commander down the elevator shaft. Apart from his usual arsenal, he also carried a large duffel bag and a strange green box attached to a strap slung over his shoulder. He gave Hopewell a dismissive wave.
"What's in the box?" Joy asked.
"Plan B, in case you couldn't disable the force field. You didn't think we'd place our lives completely in the hands of a recruit as fresh as they come, did you?" Hopewell laughed, her eyes bright behind her visor. "In fact, you took so long to respond that I already had my finger on the detonator, metaphorically speaking. Another minute and we would've blown the force field."
"You could do that?" Cassimer's I'll come for you suddenly made more sense.
"Sure, but it would've been permanent and it would've been loud. We'd be exchanging bullets with eighty-plus RebEarthers in the middle of a raging storm right about now." A wistful look crossed Hopewell's face, and she sighed. "If only, right?"
"I'm not going to be able to keep up with the rest of you at all, am I?" Joy tugged at the harness, which bit into her ribs but still didn't feel snug enough.
"Of course not, and nobody ever expected you to." Hopewell patted her helmet. "That's why you're getting the sweetheart treatment. See, recruits are supposed to start out bright-eyed and fresh-faced and slowly get that hammered out of them. They're not supposed to have gone through hell and back before they make private, and they're certainly not supposed to tag along with the banneretcy on their first mission. You're in way over your head, and being anything but nice to you would be like kicking a puppy."
"From recruit to science experiment to puppy all in one week. Quite the transformation."
"Hey, keep advancing through the ranks at that pace, and you'll make general by next month. Look - just keep your head down and remember that the commander only expects from you what he expects from all of us - your very best."
"I'll try," Joy said. "Sorry for whinging."
"We all need a good moan every now and then." Hopewell stepped up to the edge of the elevator shaft. "See you down below."
Lucklaw went next and with most of the team gone, the lobby felt very large and very scary. She inched closer to Rhys.
"Can we see what's happening down there?"
Rhys shook his head. "The commander cut my access to the visual feed."
"Why would he do that?"
"In a hissy fit, I imagine. He's none too pleased with me at the moment."
"Why's that?"
"Hostile territory is no place to be playing Twenty Questions, Somerset."
And that was all Rhys would say. When the word came through that it was time for him to lower her down, he did so in silence. When she landed on the roof of the elevator, Hopewell was there to unclip her, in silence. When she dropped through the open hatch in the elevator's roof, Cassimer was there to help her down, in silence.
The time for friendly banter was over; now all that mattered was the mission. Keep your head down, Joy thought, her spine rigid with tension, keep your head down and do your best and everything will be fine. This is serious business, and you need to show them that you can handle serious business.
"Subway station up ahead. Multiple contacts."
Very serious business. Joy's fingers danced nervously against the grip of her gun - a Primaterre gun, so heavy and strange on her hip - but Cassimer had other ideas. She and Rhys were to remain in position while the rest of the team cleared the station. She barely had time to process the orders before the others were gone. Being kept on the sidelines should be a good thing, but it didn't feel like it. Her muscles knotted so tight that she feared that if she didn't move soon, she might not be able to move at all - and that was the moment that Rhys chose to break the silence.
"I'm engaged to be married," he said.
Her instinct was a beaming congratulations, but something in his voice warned her that this wasn't going anywhere pleasant.
"The wedding date's set to the seventh of August."
August. It'd been July when she enlisted, and Joy realised with dismay that Rhys was going to miss his own wedding.
"Twenty-two years ago." Rhys patted his pockets, searching in vain for a cigarette.
"Twenty-two years ago?" she echoed, confused.
"Yeah, but let's not skip to the end. The details are important. To get the point, you have to understand. You have to know about Cecilia."
And she had to know about war, because it was on the battlefield that Rhys had first met Cecilia. Vainamoinen, a distant Primaterre colony, had come under attack by the Andromeda Conglomerate, a rivalling faction looking to expand its territory ("but don't bother committing the name to memory. Their fate was sealed on the shores of Vainamoinen"). Rhys had spent six months there, giving first aid and pulling casualties from the field. Six months of tasting nothing but blood and sea salt, emptying his boots of sand and cleaning seaweed from open wounds. Six months of screeching gulls, heavy bombardment and the roar of shuttles and transports hovering overhead.
"One day I was sitting in the sand trying to piece some poor kid back together again. About your age, fair hair, freckles. Don't remember his name, his rank, or his blood type, but the face... I suppose I never forget the faces of the ones who don't make it." He shrugged, giving Joy a tense smile. "I had both his arms and one of the other medics was trying to find his left leg, and I told him, it's going to be all right, just hang in there, but he was losing blood faster than I could replenish it, and the whole time these damned transport ships were buzzing over our heads like vultures. I knew I couldn't save the kid and I knew there were other wounded in need of attention, but I still worked on him, still kept telling him these awful lies. He died just as the other medic came running up with the missing leg. And... I don't know if it was the triumphant look on the medic's face or the sight of the leg, but I snapped. A transport ship had just landed to off-load supplies, and I got up and ran over there, grabbed the officer in charge and shouted - well, I don't know exactly what, but I'm fairly sure I threatened violence if they didn't get the damned ships out of my fucking face."
A muffled cry in the distance interrupted Rhys. A metallic clanging echoed through the corridor, and Joy's heart fluttered nervously.
"Nothing to worry about; just Hopewell introducing herself to the locals. Reckon we'll be moving soon, so let me finish my story."
The officer in charge had been Transportation Officer Cecilia Grey, and she had responded to Rhys's threat with three gifts. The first was a stiff drink from a flask h
idden in the floor of her shuttle. The second was a written reprimand that earned him three days in jail. The third was her contact information.
"I put that to good use as soon as they let me out of jail, after which Cecilia put me to good use."
"Inching close to too much information there," Joy said, though she couldn't help but smile at Rhys's wistful tone.
"A lady might not kiss and tell, but a doctor isn't afraid to get downright anatomical." He grinned. "I'll spare you the details. Suffice to say, Cecilia did not mess around. At first, I thought it was because of the war, that it made her want to grab life by the horns while she still could, but then the war ended and it turned out it's the way Cecilia's wired. A ball-busting, rule-bending, fire-breathing dragon of a woman, which, when I say it out loud sounds like a damn nightmare, but she wasn't. She was everything I'd ever wanted."
The battlefield fling turned into a sex-fuelled romp across three different worlds (during the description of which Rhys went back on his promise to spare her the details), and eventually more than that. More than love, even.
"I took a liking to her brand of cigarettes, she got tattoos from my go-to artist. Her slippers found their way under my bed and my toothbrush was in her bathroom. I wasn't Rhys anymore, and she wasn't Cecilia; we'd become a whole new creature, a thing called Rhys-and-Cecilia - and neither of us could remember being anything else. So by the time I asked her to marry me, it almost seemed pointless. Still, she said yes."
They set the date and made the preparations and had six months of happiness before Cecilia's transportation unit was called in for an exo-mission.
"It wasn't supposed to be a big deal. A minor system had been offered annexation, which they were only too happy to agree to. The Primaterre military was only there to oversee the process and make sure everything went smoothly. Which it did - until RebEarth decided they didn't want to miss out on an opportunity to cause trouble."
Most of the RebEarthers weren't even from the system, Rhys explained. They didn't care about the planet or its people; all they wanted was a chance to stick it to the Primaterre. Things were relatively quiet for a while. A few hit-and-run acts of terrorism, minor casualties, mostly affecting the locals.
