Iron Truth (Primaterre Book 1)

by S. A. Tholin

  That was the story told in recruitment posters and public announcements. That was what the Primaterre expected from him; what Bastion needed him to be, but it wasn't the truth in his heart. Just an illusion that he strived to make real; a perfection he could never hope to attain. The Primaterre had taken a victim and named him hero, had showered him with accolades before his wounds had begun to heal. Twenty years of pretending, twenty years of feeling like a fraud and knowing that he could never be enough.

  "It seems more likely that the trigger signal failed to reach your primer. You're alive because of a technical malfunction." Finn's smile turned wicked. "You are a technical malfunction. A creation meant to have self-destructed. A second-rate object fallen from the production line. Your makers intended to unmake you, Commander. Doesn't loyalty compel you to complete that task?"

  "No," Cassimer said, and he trained the Morrigan on the face whose copper-framed angles made his heart ache with recognition. Better to be a technical malfunction than a hero. Better to be unintended than purpose-built. If surviving the Hecate had nothing to do with who he was, then perhaps he could finally let the lights go dark on its sleeping quarters. "Now tell me where Joy is, or suffer another death."

  "You'd kill her brother?"

  "Finn did more than shield his sister from the world; he prepared her for it. The Finn Somerset who taught her Morse code and marksmanship put power in her hands so that she might use it to be free. You're not him, and you're not her brother. In your grasp, his body is just an instrument of torture."

  "Wait." The Finn-thing stared at the Morrigan, clutching his chest where the last demon to die had been shot. "I said I'd give you what you want."

  "And yet here you are, stalling."

  "Can you blame me?" Its voice changed again, from rough warmth to the serpentine lilt that Cassimer couldn't help but think was the demon's true voice. "I'll tell you what I told the little sister. I can endure the grey plains no longer, and to fail now, when the stars are within reach, would be my undoing. I too wish to be free, soldier, but though you fight for her freedom, you'd gladly see mine denied. Such interference I cannot afford, and so I propose a truce in this budding war. I'll give you Joy and you'll let me leave Cato. Acceptable?"

  "Acceptable," said Cassimer, and so demon and man agreed on terms that neither intended on honouring.

  ◆◆◆

  Steel gantries cut across a wide and bright space. Thousands of lichen-coated faces stared at him from behind the frosted glass of cryo pods.

  Tall bodies, rippling with composite-laced muscle. Faces that bore scars they didn't need to. Fingers with trigger-guard calluses. Pale patches of skin to temporarily cover up tattoos and severe haircuts. The Andromache's sleepers were undoubtedly military, and some so much like Cassimer. Seven foot tall or more, with enough augments to burn like bonfires on his HUD. Increased bone density, increased muscle mass and other expensive augments, unlikely to be used by anyone outside of the cataphracts.

  And nobody brought cataphracts unless they were expecting war, but arc ships were meant to travel to unexplored space. Unexplored, empty space, because there was no intelligent life in the universe besides humanity.

  Unless of course there was. Unless of course this was another lie. He had to stop then, gritting his teeth to force the nausea down. Had to tell himself that whatever war the Andromache sought, it wasn't his. He needed truth, but perhaps not all the truths. A few lies could remain, settling like sedatives in his veins.

  Except that wasn't who he was. He solved problems. He put puzzle pieces together until the picture became clear. The Andromache was a piece of a puzzle he could never even have imagined, and she would turn and turn inside his mind alongside the Hecate.

  And then he saw her, and the sun rose over the ashes.

  "Joy."

  The red swathed her like a blanket, soft tendrils caressing pale skin. She was a princess in a glass casket and he the knight come to save her - except in the fairy tales, the princess didn't look frightened. In the fairy tales, her chest didn't bloom with angry bruises. In the fairy tales, the knight would awaken her with a kiss.

  A body lay slumped on the floor. One of the Andromache's sleepers, evicted to make room for Joy, throat slit and discarded like trash. Cassimer requested an ID scan and the dead man's name came back as Lance Corporal Chance Muchmercy of Niobe 56th Artillery - and in Cassimer's files, he was already listed as KIA.

  Muchmercy, and everyone else who'd been on Niobe Station when a RebEarth attack had destroyed it six years ago.

  Well. No point in asking questions that he'd never have the answers to. He collected Muchmercy's digital tag and approached Joy's pod. The glass displayed a graphical overlay of vitals and functions. The reanimation process had been initiated remotely by the demon, and the overlay asked for confirmation. He hesitated, remembering how Duncan had caused deaths on the Ever Onward. It was possible that the demon was setting him up for similar tragedy, pretending to relinquish Joy to steer his hand to take her life.

  He placed his palm on the glass panel. Such a thin barrier, so easy to break - but that would do no good. So he confirmed, and he waited, as machines and pharmaceuticals did what he couldn't.

  When the panel slid open and Joy took a first, stuttering breath, he slipped an arm around her waist. When the pod's straps released and fell away from cold limbs, he held her close. And when dark lashes parted to reveal honey-brown eyes that made a man want to smile, he did just that.

  And if he were the knight in the fairy tale, he would've kissed her. Instead, he pressed a stun gun to her arm, and when her lips parted and she whispered something that might have been his name, he pulled the trigger.

  57. Joy

  She'd asked too many questions already, but for the sake of the man she loved, she had one more.

  "Are you a demon?"

  The amber-eyed entity sighed. "No, little sister, and I don't care to repeat myself."

  "Then what are you?"

  Needle-thin teeth gleamed in a white and wicked smile. "Complicated."

  "Do you have a name?"

  "I did once, but I offered it up as a sacrifice. To my people, I was known as..." He paused to consider his response. "The tongue favoured by your kind pleases me. I sense waves in its vowels, craggy cliffs in its consonants. It's a king's tongue, a conqueror's cadence, an empire of vocabulary. But for my title, it is not sufficient. For my title, I must reach for old roots and wilder waves, and speak words hewn from snow and stone. Skald, little sister. Skald I am, and Skald you may call me."

  With his answer came a great tug at her mind, and she dared ask no more. She reached for more classifications but found the memories submerged and reduced to shapeless blurs. She tried the periodic table next but lost her way in the Scandiums.

  "Not my doing, little sister." The man smiled as he wrapped slick-bladed kelp around her wrists. "You lost that knowledge yourself, shoved it aside to fill your head with dreaming. You were never meant for the sciences. You belong here, where the universe is poetry, not physics."

  "Physics is poetry," she replied through chattering lips and thought of starlight and love and unfamiliar constellations reflected in a dark visor. The man pulled the seaweed bonds tight and tried to pry that thought from her, tried to steal the windswept crest and the starry night.

  She resisted but swallowed mouthfuls of him instead. She begged him not to, and he shook his head.

  "No more games, little sister." His voice, drawing on a now-shared memory, dropped to a gravelly murmur. Sour breath coated her cheek damp as he leaned in close."Now I take you."

  He spat in her face.

  Thick saliva ran down her cheek, dripping onto her collarbone, and she was once more in the abyss of the elevator shaft, and this time the hands grabbed her, this time she fell tumbling into eager darkness. As she fell, memories floated like spectres beside her. Rivka, kicking her ribs. Hal's weight on her aching lungs. Duncan's fist. And there - where the darkness was the dens
est, where the guilt hurt the most - there she found what had really saved Constant on the Hecate.

  Anger; deep and righteous and pure, and she gripped it like a gun.

  Now kick him in the nuts.

  Imaginary Finn's voice was louder here in the place that wasn't a place. It echoed between the sea cave's tawny walls, rippled across turquoise water - and the man flinched. One brief slip, and she kicked her way out of the darkness, kicked him straight in his not-really-real groin. The seaweed slithered from his hands, and she splashed towards the rocky shore.

  Fish bit at her legs, no longer harmless, and her soles tore open on jagged coral. When she reached the shore, the man was right behind her and his nails raked her legs, but she didn't care, didn't scream, because none of it was real and now she had solid ground under her feet. Sun-warm sand and iron-rich rock; half-buried sea lilies and scattered mollusc shells. These things were her, and she drew from them the strength to run towards the tunnel.

  It twisted and turned, but distant sunlight illuminated her path. Wet footsteps slapped against the ground behind her, closing in fast. Not fast enough, because there was the end of the tunnel, there was the golden light, and she stepped into it and saw -

  Oh no.

  She stood on a cliff, high above thousands of sea caves, each with the same sandstone walls, the same waters and rainbow-bright schools of fish. And in each was he, gold and ebon, man and serpent, and in each was a prisoner like her. Some bobbed lifeless in the water. Some were in the man's arms, weeping into his chest as they told him all their secrets. One woman, her dark hair defiantly windblown, stood on the shore and pelted the man with rocks. Others tried to swim out to sea, or run for the tunnel, or bury themselves in sand.

  The honeycomb of sea caves stretched in every direction, farther than she could see. The man called Skald wrapped his cold arms around her and held her tight.

  "How fortunate they are," he said. "Listen to their song."

  A song to his ears, but to her, the cacophony of screaming and pleading was hell. A sea-foam spattered, roiling hell; prison to tens of thousands of confused minds. The tunnel, the hope of escape, a trick meant to break barriers and crush any remaining resistance.

  "A heart can be broken. A soul can be corrupted. The pure truth of a person, the essence of their being, is the unique set of information collected and stored in their mind. Every death is a loss of data that can never be recovered. From the highest to the lowest, they are all special, little sister." He rested his chin on her head, his arms tightening in a lover's embrace. "And with me, they will be forever. No song forgotten, no poem lost."

  "I don't want this," she whispered.

  "Yes, you do." He turned her gently and kissed her forehead. "You are just too attached to the corporeal to see. I'll show you, little sister, what eternity is. All you have to do is look up."

  She did and saw a ghostly pale web of thin filaments. Moon-white and infinite in span, a delicate structure spun from alien silk. Impossible, beautiful, and utterly familiar.

  It was like a mass of mycelium threads; a fungal network capable of connecting unrelated organisms. A botany excursion had once taken her to a meadow where the professor had dug up a patch of soil to show the fragile strands coursing through the earth. One fungus, he'd explained, connected to every plant in sight. The bushes, the trees, the clutches of long-spurred violets - they were all linked by the mycelia, through which they shared information and strength. Trees shared nutrition with their saplings, elms gained resistance against disease, and kudzu withered and died as the fungal network united to attack the unwelcome invader with poison. And like the red, orchids used the network to steal sustenance from other organisms.

  "Is that you?" she breathed.

  "It is," he said, pleased at the question.

  "But how?"

  "You said it yourself when you told the slave-minds that..." his voice changed to mimic hers "...lichen can even grow on nothing at all, drifting aimlessly on the wind. Oh, little sister, there's no such thing as nothing."

  As he spoke, moonbeam strands descended to encircle them in a canopy of brightness. They reached for her, gentle and tinkling, and when they grazed her skin she saw -

  - a prismatic expanse where the lichen's roots grew thick and wild among snapshots of ships and shuttles. She saw people too, and towering spires, and flying things, but instinct told her to turn her eyes from them.

  Skald's hands were on her shoulders, and she asked: "Where are we?"

  "In what you would call nothing. In the unseen in-between. In the folds of creation." He reached out towards one of the snapshots. "Let me show you."

  It was the Ever Onward's white hull, frozen in time. The snapshot flickered, and there was Finn; alive, untouched, asleep. She placed her hand on his pod and found that she could touch it, pressed harder and then she was touching him, running her hands over cold skin and icy curls.

  "Eternal," said Skald. "Unchanging."

  "Can we wake him?"

  "Unchanging," Skald repeated, with a touch of irritation. He waved his hand and Finn was gone, and they stood inside a cockpit where a blonde pilot sneered at a Primaterre soldier. His visor parted in layers at Joy's touch, and his skin was as hot as she remembered it.

  "As I said, too attached to the corporeal." Skald said, wearing the pilot's sneer. "What you love is no more the flesh than the armour he wears. What you love is far more wondrous, and only my roots can preserve such things. With me, he would be forever. With me..." His damp lips grazed her forehead. "...you'd be forever, oh sister."

  "We are more than information," she said, "more than gathered knowledge."

  "Perhaps, but the sum is lesser than its parts. But now, little sister, I must sacrifice you to save the many. Go to your flesh and aching bones. Go to your base desires and mortal limits. When I come for you again, you'll beg for me to take you."

  "Sacrifice?" The word hung silver and eternal in the expanse, but the time for questions was over. The moonlight tendrils receded and she was -

  alone

  - but her palm held warm seashell-speckled sand, and she closed her fingers around the real and the true.

  ◆◆◆

  Pain traced the outline of her body in synaesthetic red: a broken rib here, a bruised hip there. The crimson glow of a pounding headache. Pain, so much of it, and all of it her own. Her flesh, her skin, her bones.

  Slowly, other senses returned. The chill of ceramic tiles. The low hum of machinery. And in her hand - not seashells and sand, but all the warmth of the real and the true, delivered through strong fingers wrapped around hers. A hand made for building; a hand made to hold another's.

  A hand made to hold hers.

  She blinked against golden light. A vaulted ceiling above, terracotta tiles on the floor. Row upon row of cryo pods, with more on lower levels visible through a glass railing. It had the strange familiarity of a location from a dream.

  Cassimer's hand held hers. A thin line of blood ran along his index finger and down the back of her hand. She traced it upwards to its source - his shoulder, where fresh blood glistened on frayed jumpsuit material. A gunshot wound, but he paid attention to neither it nor her, his full focus on his bipod-mounted rifle. He stared down its scope, tracking the movements of something below.

  "Constant," she whispered.

  He tensed, his grip around her hand tightening so much it almost hurt - and then he let go. Turned towards her and raised a finger to his lips.

  Hush. Okay. She nodded, and he gave another signal - two fingers this time. Two hostiles?

  He steadied his aim and pulled the trigger smoothly. The Hyrrokkin juddered as it spat solid lightning, making the same muffled sound Joy had heard when Gaia Feehan died. Not loud, but heavy.

  The recoil opened up his wound, and more blood trickled down his arm. He fed a round into his rifle and gave another hand signal. One finger.

  This shot took longer; long enough that the situation had time to sink in. She was
on the floor, naked but for underwear. A camouflage jacket lay draped over her, a blanket of swirling shades of grey.

  Cassimer wore no armour. Only a matte-grey jumpsuit, snug across broad shoulders and tense muscle. The honeycomb material was warped and scorched in places, and a smell of fire-smoke permeated the air. The right side of his face was slightly swollen, and the darkness under his eye more than shadow cast by the Hyrrokkin's scope.

  He had come for her, and it had cost him.

  The Hyrrokkin blazed with lightning once more.

  "Clear." He reloaded and turned his focus to her. "It takes them a few minutes to recover between attacks. We need to take the opportunity to make a move. Are you good to go?"

  She sat and tried to put the jacket on. It smelled of citrus and chemicals, and she breathed in that now-familiar scent, as if it might give her the bearings she so sorely lacked. The sea cave was gone, the warm waters receding. She was regaining herself, every stolen memory returning, and losing the strange flashes of another's life, but being yanked from one place to another was jarring. This was reality, but without the context of how and why and where, it hardly felt more real than a dream.

  And Cassimer was acting as though nothing had happened. As though they were on a regular mission and everything made perfect sense. Only the hard angles of his face told her that was not the case.

  "Here." The hard angles softened a touch as he helped her put the jacket on. She looked down and saw the reason her left arm didn't seem to want to obey - skin-tone bandage wound tightly around the length of her arm, from bicep to wrist. His skin-tone, she realised; a perfect match to his outdoorsman's tan.

  "Apologies." Gently, he threaded her injured arm through the jacket sleeve. "It was necessary to remove your h-chip, but I'm no surgeon."

  "You came for me," she said.

  He took his time in answering. So long that she thought perhaps he wouldn't, but then he buttoned up her jacket and looked her in the eye.