Iron Truth (Primaterre Book 1)

by S. A. Tholin

  The needle went in, first through a designated port on the cryo chamber and then pushing into something that could only be (pith, not skin, just think of her as a plant) -

  "A touch to the left, if you would."

  It was a finicky procedure, but it was good to have something to focus on. Good to hear Rhys's voice as well. The air was so thick with mist that she could barely see her own hands. Easy to get lost in. Easy to be lost. Easy to feel as alone as FEMALE SUBJECT.

  Before disappearing into the mists, Cassimer had given the team orders and instructions. He'd stood under the beam of a spotlight, his armour shimmering as ice crystals melted and evaporated on reactive plates, and he'd seemed every bit the man in charge. Strong, cool, collected. So unafraid that, for a second, she'd lost sight of the man and seen him as the beacon of purity that he was trained to be. Pacing and tension had been traded for determination and purpose, as if no matter what came next, he would see them through safely. That worried her a great deal. A shield was a fine thing, so long as it didn't break - and if the observation rooms had bothered him, then she didn't even want to think about how the cold and bizarre Sublevel Two might be affecting him.

  "Yeah, that's it. Now pull that trigger."

  She crossed her fingers and obeyed.

  "Good job." Rhys straightened his back with a groan. His visor bloomed with frost. "Aim as true as ever, Somerset."

  "You sure about that? Might've been better if someone who could actually see had done the guiding."

  "My suit might be on the fritz, but there's nothing wrong with my visual augments. A little bit of ice is no bother." He gently retracted the syringe. The top unscrewed to reveal a vial filled with spinal fluid.

  "Revolting," Lucklaw said, his ghostly pale form separating from the mists.

  "You'd think someone with as many augments as you have would be used to this sort of thing."

  "I'm not awake for my own procedures, idiot."

  "Mind your language, Corporal." Rhys delivered the warning casually, with none of the iron weight of the commander's rebukes, but Lucklaw muttered an apology nonetheless. "Did you recover any useful data? I'm going to need a minute to analyse this sample, so feel free to bore us."

  "Yes and no." Lucklaw switched to the team channel. "As far as I can gather from the Hierochloe admin files, this was a regular medical cryogenics facility. It seems they were combining charity with research as most of their clients were poor or underprivileged, the kinds of cases that could never have afforded cryo storage or advanced treatments."

  "A front for their secret experiments," Joy said, mind racing. "Taking advantage of the desperate to perform dark science, using and abusing people who they could dispose of without anyone noticing."

  "Paranoid much?" Lucklaw shook his head. "There's nothing in the files even hinting at anything untoward. Plenty of their patients are listed as being cured, and there's a whole load of thank you notes on their mail server. The only mention of lichen is a memo to the janitorial staff, complaining about the air vents being clogged with the stuff."

  "Oh." How very disappointing.

  "That said, there were some irregularities. The employee travel itinerary goes blank about a year before the Ever Onward arrived. Work seems to have continued until shortly after the start of the Epoch War, but there's a lot of concerned mail from the Hierochloe head offices. Delays, cancellations, dropped projects, communication difficulties... could be nothing, could be war-related, but it's definitely odd."

  "Agreed," Rhys said. "The results of my preliminary analysis are available on the team share, but for those of you whose eyes gloss over at sciencey words - Hopewell - I'll summarise. The woman appears to be about thirty years of age, but has been in stasis for a good five decades. Her nervous system shows early signs of decay due to Crossmayne's syndrome, an hereditable disease that could be the reason she's in the cryo chamber to begin with. I can detect no other abnormalities."

  "You mean apart from the lichen growing from her head?" Hopewell interjected.

  "There are no signs of external contaminants in her system."

  "Lichen isn't a parasite, as such, and has no roots. It grows on top of them, not inside of them," Joy said. "It's possible that there is no interaction between these people and the lichen."

  "Uh, okay. So in that case, what's the point of it all?"

  "Remember Rivka?" Joy disliked saying the name, especially in a place like this, where the living were kept as the dead and mists danced like phantoms. "Her father said that the red would fix her. I think this is the same idea, only with Rivka, it would never have worked. Lichen takes years to grow, some species decades or longer. Rivka didn't have that long, but if she'd been placed in cryostasis..."

  Rhys's eyebrows curled with scepticism. "Human/lichen symbiosis? Even if that were possible - which I highly doubt - to what end? Lichen can't grow a leg back and it can't cure neurological disorders. If this is some kind of experiment, all it'll achieve is a nasty rash and giving the pharmaceutical industry a new kind of fungal cream to push."

  "Well," Hopewell said, voice tight with held-back mirth, "don't know if you've been paying attention, doc, but it might be we're not dealing with the sound of mind here. Sticking a person in cryostasis to create a human/houseplant hybrid probably makes perfect sense to the loony locals."

  Experimentation. Cryostasis. The pods stolen from the Ever Onward. The missing Andromache with her cargo of thirty thousand sleepers. Hopewell was right; it did all make a kind of sense. All one had to do was realise that a puzzle didn't necessarily resolve into a picture of a castle or kittens in a basket. Sometimes the picture was an abstract - paint, sloshed on a canvas.

  "That's why the Ever Onward was wrecked, and that's why the Andromache was taken. They needed more chambers, more people. More subjects."

  "Hijacking the Andromache is well beyond the scope of the locals. To even know about her existence would require top level clearance, and to bring her down without warning, without a trace? Impossible. For a bunch of half-mad settlers, beyond impossible."

  Florey was right, she supposed, but who had done it was irrelevant - even the why didn't interest her much. All that mattered was that if she was at all close to the truth, Finn might still be alive.

  "And none of that explains what happened to the captain of the Ever Onward." Rhys glanced at the woman whose spinal fluid he held. "I could wake one up to see if they have any answers for us."

  "No. We've no way of knowing what it is we'd be waking up," Cassimer said, returning from the mists. His hand touched the small of Joy's back, a gesture as brief as it was welcome. And surprising - but not nearly as surprising as the tone of his voice. Almost happy, she thought.

  "Besides, it's no longer relevant," he said, and then, to her private channel: "Everything's going to be all right, Joy."

  ◆◆◆

  Ragged silver edges framed a gaping hole in the laboratory's far wall. Five metres of metal and concrete foundation had been cut away, the materials repurposed as supports for a tunnel bored into dark glass. Thick cables serpentined along the tunnel's walls, deep grooves marring the floor. In the vitreous ceiling, recessed lights burned like stars, their glow captured and carried into the glass.

  Joy ran her hand along the wall. It was smooth and ringed, like ocean-tumbled glass. The excavation must've been difficult, but the results were extraordinary. Cato's past hung suspended within the tunnel walls like motes of time. A spider's legs, reaching from the dark. The gnarled silhouette of a tree trunk, split and scorched by lightning. A smattering of pale-winged insects. And there, so deep that the light barely touched it, a stretching human shape.

  She turned her flashlight on the figure. Hands reaching for the sky. An up-turned face, a gracefully bent leg - or just another tree, and her imagination was getting the better of her.

  Cassimer showed little interest in what lay inside the glass, but perhaps he had his reasons for not wanting to look. On the slick surface, their refle
ctions were distorted, made multi-faceted and twisted. Demonic.

  The tunnel turned one last time, and she blinked against the glare of hundreds of lights. Cassimer stopped, his visor shut but transparent, and he smiled at her, at all of them.

  Behind him, the tunnel opened up into a silo hewn from glass and craggy bedrock, a subterranean pit so vast that it was dizzying. Light-strip gantries spiralled up the walls towards a distant opening overhead, where windswept dust danced across the flat shimmer of a force field. Inside the silo, vertically suspended by countless humming force field generators and mag-locks, hovered a ship that could only be the Andromache.

  She was no hump-backed whale like the Ever Onward, but a serpent, long and sleek, with rippling scales of gold and azure. Less a ship than a new kind of creature, meant to skim the surface of suns and sleep coiled in the void. The Andromache was a century's worth of repressed dreams and forgotten desires expressed in a glorious, sky-forged architect ship. Humanity had dared to hope again, opening its hand to let its latest child fly - and here she was, trapped and bound in a tomb of unyielding earth.

  "Oh, thank the Earth and all the stars – we bloody found it." Hopewell laughed, giving Florey's shoulder a celebratory punch.

  "And more. Somerset, come." Cassimer motioned for her to join him. "Look."

  She tore her gaze from the majesty of the Andromache and saw, on the spiralling gantries above and below, the illuminated glass panels of thousands of cryo pods.

  "Are they - ?" She couldn't bring herself to finish the question.

  Cassimer linked his visual to her tablet and through his eyes, she saw one of the pods. A blurred face behind frosted glass, three white spikelets of sweetgrass set inside a triangle, and above the pod's control panel, stencilled in blocky red: PROPERTY OF HIEROCHLOE/EVER ONWARD.

  The face was not Finn's, but he was in this silo somewhere; he had to be.

  Oh Finn, my Finn; I'm coming for you. I'm coming to save you.

  I knew you would, little sister, responded Imaginary Finn, his voice no more than a whisper.

  "Hey, Commander. Mind if I ready Plan B?" Hopewell had set down the green box.

  "Wait, what?" Joy gave the lieutenant a startled look. "You're going to destroy the Andromache?"

  "If she can't be recovered," Cassimer said.

  "What about her crew? Thirty thousand people in cryostasis - now that we know where they are, wouldn't it be better to leave and call for help?"

  An uncomfortable silence settled over the team. Looks were exchanged and words too, she was sure of it, over private channels. Finally, Cassimer said: "It's a sensitive matter. There are political complications -"

  "You'd kill thirty thousand of your own because of politics?" She couldn't hide her horror; not even when she saw the wounded look on Cassimer's face.

  "What the commander is being too polite to say is shut your face, Private." Rhys smacked the back of her helmet. "Maybe once you've caught up to the seventeenth century we'll be interested in your opinion, but for the time being, how about you follow orders, same as everyone else?"

  "The captain's right," said Florey.

  "No he isn't." Hopewell stuck her tongue out at Joy, pink tip pressed against the inside of her visor. "We'll never be interested in your opinion."

  "Sorry." Joy adjusted her helmet, then changed her mind and pulled it down to shade her eyes. The familiar glow of embarrassment had heated into the burn of shame. "Sorry, Commander."

  "Apology accepted. Hopewell; permission granted." Cool; neutral. In his private message, the tone was quite different: I don't need you to be sorry. I need you to trust me.

  She'd trusted him with her life when he was still a stranger; had trusted him with her secrets when she knew him to be a liar; had trusted him with her heart less than an hour ago. If trust was all the commander needed, then he was a lucky man.

  "I am happy we've found her," Hopewell said, staring into the deep, "but I have to say, Commander, she looks like the piece of cheese in a mousetrap, if you get my meaning."

  "I hear you, Lieutenant. Lucklaw, status?"

  "Building systems are mine. Elevators and doors locked down. Sharing keys, in case we need to make a quick exit."

  A brief discussion about exit strategies ensued, during which no effort was spent to make Joy feel relevant. The soldiers referenced floor plans she couldn't see and devices that they'd apparently planted during the descent. It wasn't like she'd be able to offer any help, but she couldn't help feeling left out. Like maybe she was just a puppy after all.

  "Don't worry." Rhys nudged her, his whisper as warm as a smile. "Your mission is to follow my lead. I'll try not to get us too lost."

  To reach the Andromache, they'd have to go down a ramp of glass onto a gantry. From there, a long and narrow bridge connected to one of the arc ship's airlocks. There were many bridges like it, both above and below. Any approach meant complete exposure and no easy retreat, and Cassimer wasn't willing to lead his entire team into such a trap. I'll scout it, he'd said, and like at the train station, she was sure he'd intended to go alone - but then he'd glanced at her, and perhaps remembering his promise to her, he'd added: Florey, with me.

  The two of them now crossed the bridge, their armour flickering white as mist licked their calves. Lucklaw and Hopewell had climbed onto the next level gantry, where the lights of cryo pods blinked. Joy watched with envy, her gaze searching for the one thing she still needed.

  Finn, oh, Finn - perhaps not a pile of bones at all. If he dreamed, it would be of blue grass and white-crested oceans, of raven-haired and razor-sharp Miana, and of a sister who had changed so much while he'd slept.

  "Lucklaw will let you know if he finds your brother." Rhys, crouching at the mouth of the cave, motioned for her to join him. His armour's active protection field no longer functioned, but a pleasant heat emanated from his reactive plates.

  "I doubt he's looking."

  "Oh, he is. You think he'd waste an opportunity to boast?" Rhys pointed at the abyss over his shoulder. "You watch the commander's back. I've got the tunnel."

  Yeah, yeah. Rhys couldn't fool her - he had the tunnel and the commander's back, focus split but not diminished - but she appreciated his compassion.

  Cassimer and Florey had reached the centre of the bridge, where cold mist lapped in waves against glass walls that glowed blue in the light of the Andromache. They stopped - perhaps in awe of the arc ship. The Ever Onward had carried the seeds of civilisation, but the Andromache was a world unto herself, a bringer of life into the void. Sleek metal sinew coiled around her cylindrical core, giving her shape the appearance of a caduceus. She inspired a primitive instinct to worship, like the first sunrise or the first time man had seen Earth from space.

  Then the two soldiers dropped to their knees, rifles raised. Not worshipping - reacting - as a gust of wind tossed and parted the mists. To the sound of whirring mechanisms, the airlock at the end of the bridge began to open.

  Heat crackled on Joy's skin, her hair bristling with static as active protection fields intensified, expanding their reach. A sudden shower of sparks flared on the gantry above.

  "Damn it!" Hopewell's transmission seemed more reflexive than intentional, as though Joy wasn't the only one who sometimes broadcast more than she wanted.

  "Relax, Hopey. We've got you covered."

  The airlock rolled open, golden light spilling out. A man stepped from the light. Five rifles turned on him; five fingers readied to pull triggers.

  45. Joy

  "On your knees! On your knees! Get down on the ground now!"

  Cassimer and Florey advanced, weapons trained on the man, sparks surrounding the soldiers like a shield of winking fireflies.

  On her tablet, still linked to Cassimer, Joy saw the man smile. He was young and good-looking, with neatly-combed blonde hair and a smile that... that seemed somehow familiar. He wore a white dress uniform, tailored to fit tight and well, its stiff collar scraping his clean-shaven jaw.


  "One more step and we will open fire. On your knees and show me your hands!"

  The man did stop and he did show the soldiers his hands, but he did not kneel.

  "You are in possession of Primaterre property. I recommend your immediate surrender."

  "Stand down, Commander." Pleasant but sharp, like a blade dripping with honey. The blond man's voice nudged a distant memory. The tone was new, but Joy had heard that voice before, remembered it saying - what? Addressing her, she was almost certain. Joking? Yes. Or no? The memory shifted like a puff of smoke.

  But he did not joke now, this blond man in a bright-buttoned jacket. She saw no weapon, but he moved like a man familiar with the heft of one. He was a good foot shorter than Cassimer, and his flesh was soft and pale, skinny-fat edging towards chubby, but he carried himself with the same natural dominance.

  "Identify yourself."

  "You have no authority here, Commander, but since we are all friends, I suppose I'll oblige. I'm Operations Officer Elkhart, and you are interfering with an operation sanctioned by Tower; authorization code AM77CH-89RVNCRFT."

  Rhys lowered his rifle ever so slightly, and Hopewell swore over the team channel.

  "Commander Cassimer of Scathach Banneret Company. We have orders from Bastion to seize this ship." Cassimer's reaction wasn't so pronounced, but there was a touch of hesitation in his voice.

  Joy tasted blood on her lips as her HUD blazed with message activity.

  CASSIMER: ID, Lucklaw?

  LUCKLAW: Auth code checks out. No primer ID detected, but if he's Tower, maybe that's to be expected.

  HOPEWELL: I thought Tower were supposed to be shadowy and mysterious. This guy looks like my real estate agent's assistant.