Iron Truth

by S. A. Tholin

  "All right. Rhys, take Florey back to base in the other Epona. We'll take this one to check the plateau."

  His bones itched with foreboding when he looked to the mountains. Something was wrong - but Florey was alive, groaning across the team channel as Hopewell and Rhys carried him to safety. He was alive, and perhaps he wasn't the only one. Dark premonitions be damned, Cassimer had to know for certain.

  ◆◆◆

  They abandoned the Epona when the slope became too steep and the glass too smooth. Hopewell hummed a happy tune under her breath, and Lucklaw too seemed to have relaxed, turning his head this way and that as if sight-seeing.

  Cassimer didn't have that luxury. The silence of the mountains was oppressive; the fulgurite too dark. Wind made the dust ripple and shudder between outcrops and peaks. His suit's sensors recorded a tremor in the ground, and he thought of turning back.

  But then they found Abergavenny.

  All seven-foot of armour-clad man, prone and encased in a dark green cocoon. With his improved senses, Abergavenny would've noticed Florey's approach. He'd heard the Epona, and with the storm bearing down on him, he'd tried to run.

  Cassimer used his rifle to crack open the brittle fulgurite shell.

  Abergavenny turned his head. A ragged breath fluttered across the team channel.

  "He's alive," Lucklaw all but gasped.

  Cassimer shook his head and bent to remove Abergavenny's helmet. The man's eyes were dim and devoid of life; his blood-encrusted lips moving insensibly.

  "It's his augments. No brain activity, no heart rate - check your sensors." Cassimer placed his fingers against the dead man's skin. No warmth, no pulse. No life, but for erratically twitching augmented limbs. "Muscle and deep tissue augments, still working away though the body they serve is dead."

  From his primer, he called up the code to trigger Abergavenny's kill switch. Twice he had to confirm, and then the command was sent. An electric pulse propagated throughout the man's body via his primer, killing the synthetic just as surely as it would have the organic.

  Abergavenny twitched once more, and then never again.

  Cassimer collected his digital tag, and Hopewell set a small charge that would reduce both man and suit to slag. No trace could be left behind.

  ◆◆◆

  The flight crew engineers had also tried to run. Fulgurite had grown around their bodies, hoisting them high on gnarled branches. There was little point in scanning for vitals; rough glass protruded from their throats and torsos.

  "I hate this planet," Hopewell said.

  Not as much as it hates us, Cassimer thought, allowing himself a brief lapse from the pure and the rational.

  Copenhagen had not run. Lightning hadn't touched her, but at some point she had removed her helmet. A death mask of dust caked her face. Cassimer's HUD reported that her suit's supply of oxygen was depleted. The comms specialist had stayed with her beacon and continued her work until she had choked on dust and icy wind.

  The unfinished array was intact behind a shimmering force field. Copenhagen could've extended to force field to herself, but the power cell - blinking faintly - wouldn't have lasted as long as it had.

  A toolbox lay nearby, as did a crate of components. The crate, unlike the array, wasn't intact, and judging by Lucklaw's reaction, that wasn't good news.

  "Finishing construction isn't going to be easy. We'll need to bring -"

  "No," Cassimer said. "We're taking the array back to base. Gather what you can salvage, and let's go."

  The array, as it was, consisted of a three-foot pylon protruding from a square and incredibly heavy base. Carrying it would be -

  A low rumble caught his attention. He turned, looking up towards the looming peaks, and his HUD flashed red with warnings of tremors. A shiver went through the amassed dust. A small crease grew rapidly into a wave; then many waves. Dust began to break away in huge chunks, rumbling, tumbling, thundering down the mountain. It streamed through crevasses and burst through fulgurite in explosions of dark shards.

  Cassimer reached for the array. The force field recognised his primer, and flashes of energy sparked around his gauntlets as the field adjusted to allow him through. The array groaned as he yanked at it, cable tethers fraying and snapping. Then it was loose, all three-hundred kilos of metal and tech, and he tucked it under his arm, the force field fizzling as electric wiring tore.

  "Lucklaw, grab the power cell. Let's go."

  "Go? Go where?" Lucklaw's voice rose to a high pitch. "We're screwed!"

  Two point three kilometres to the vehicle. A minute to get in and get it started. The increasingly loud rumble told him they wouldn't make it, but fear couldn't be allowed to override reason, and reason told him that their only chance was to keep moving.

  His sensors flooded his HUD with chaos. Raw data, complex and distorted analyses. This planet was lightning and dust; turmoil and interference, but there had to be a way to make sense of it. There had to be a way to survive.

  Then he heard a voice, bright and quick, like a silver flash in the whirling ash.

  "Over here! Hurry!"

  He turned and saw a hooded figure at the foot of a boulder. The stranger waved at him, beckoning him over. Unexpected, unaccountable; the kind of surprise that could prove more deadly than a landslide.

  But mysterious strangers had one thing landslides didn't - a vulnerability to bullets.

  ◆◆◆

  Dust and rock gave way to steel and concrete. Behind the clutch of boulders lay a tunnel, bored deep into the mountainside. Rust powdered the floor as aged girders shook. The landslide was on top of them, it and the mountain itself held at bay by century-old construction.

  Lichen-mottled walls. Widening cracks in the concrete. An askew sign reminding staff that hard-hats were required beyond this point.

  Then a door, beyond which darkness gave way to the glow of a campfire. He was through first, Morrigan at the ready, sweeping its cone of light across the room. Empty. No immediate threats.

  A screeching sound came from behind. Lucklaw and Hopewell were in the room with him, and the stranger - overtaken by them in the tunnel - was at the door, struggling to shut it as dust plumed down the tunnel.

  Cassimer dropped the array and grabbed the door handle, his gauntlets closing above the stranger's hands, and he pulled the door firmly shut. The booming rumble of the landslide diminished to a hum as a foot of steel closed between it and them.

  "Gun," Hopewell warned.

  Not just any gun. Cassimer had seen it as he passed the stranger in the tunnel. An Eclipse Compact, unmistakable even at a glance. A relic, long out of production, but the piece was in excellent condition. Obsolete compared to modern weaponry - no chance of its bullets penetrating his armour - but it would fetch a tidy sum on the collectors' market.

  The stranger had made no move towards the gun, keeping arms raised and well away. Petite, and even the many layers of ragged sweaters couldn't hide the obviously female shape. A filter mask covered most of her face, a deep hood the rest.

  He levelled his own gun at the woman and stepped back a few paces.

  "Weapon on the ground."

  With trembling fingers, she undid the straps on her thigh holster.

  "Kick it to the side."

  The gun clattered across the concrete floor, each scrape and cut devaluing it as a collectors' item. When it came to a stop, Lucklaw collected it.

  Hopewell, secure the area.

  Hopewell quietly acknowledged the texted command before slipping into the shadows.

  "On your knees. Hands behind your head."

  The woman obeyed, though kneeling seemed to cause her pain.

  "Sensors reporting no hidden weapons or explosives. No primer either." Lucklaw scoffed. "Just another dirty local. There is something, though. Not sure what. Reads like a crude augment"

  The augment black market was a good source of income for the unscrupulous, and fairly risk-free. The Primaterre cracked down hard on the unauthor
ised sale of their intellectual property, but if back-alley wireheads whipped up their own augments, nobody much cared - with the exception that Primaterre hospitals didn't treat injuries caused by unofficial augments. While the back-alley techs took little risk, their customers gambled with their lives.

  He hadn't expected Cato to have much of a black market, however. An augment and a gun as expensive as it was old-fashioned? This woman was no local.

  "Remove your mask."

  She took great care in removing it. The mask, though little more than junk, mattered more to her than the gun.

  She pushed her hood back. Cassimer's lights reflected off hair so deeply copper it glowed. At her collarbone, the waves ended, curling gently inwards. On a planet where everything was cold ash and jagged glass, she was warm light and soft curves.

  "Identify yourself," he said and realised he'd lowered his gun. She looked harmless enough. Pale and dust-streaked; tired and malnourished, maybe even sickly. No different from the settlers at the farm, but for the way she looked at him. Fear, yes, she trembled with it, but he saw no suspicion in her eyes, none of the hostility or scepticism that he was used to.

  But that was no excuse. He should keep his gun on her; his every ounce of training and experience told him as much. He should keep his gun on her; he wanted to. But she had honey brown eyes that made a man want to smile, and his gun remained at his side.

  She smiled - out of nervousness, he was sure, but some fool part of him wanted to believe otherwise.

  "I'm Joy," she said. "Joy Somerset."

  Joy. He wanted to laugh at the absurdity. It seemed the kind of dream a man might have as he lay dying underneath a landslide. A final vision of things he'd never known he'd wanted and now would never have, as his brain activity sputters and flat-lines.

  But Cassimer was not dying, and she was very much real - which made her highly questionable. Perhaps the corruption had come for him, secreted inside a vessel specifically chosen to appeal to him. The demons had seen into his soul once before. It wasn't inconceivable that they knew things even he didn't, such as how honey brown eyes and copper hair was a combination that made him -

  That made him weak. He tightened his grip around the Morrigan and took a deep breath. No, not a demon; the corruption was not so devious. More likely she was RebEarth, or a thief, tasked to keep him and his team in the bunker with sweet glances and innocence, while the rest of her crew dismantled the Epona.

  "Though I suppose that doesn't mean much to you. I'm nobody special. I'm -"

  "A scavenger." Hopewell stepped from the shadows and threw a backpack into the circle of campfire light. It was a ratty old canvas bag, bulging with scrap. Spools of wire, basic tools, clipped metal; things that only held value to people eking out an existence at the very fringes of galactic civilisation. "Come to loot our dead, did you? Bloody vulture. No sense of honour."

  "What? No, I didn't know..." Her gaze darted between the three soldiers. "I'm sorry for your loss. I didn't know."

  Cassimer ignored her for the moment. "Anything to report?"

  "Area's clear, Commander. Not much more to it. Part of a larger mining complex, I think, but the tunnels are all collapsed."

  "Any other exits?"

  "There's a hatch in the floor at the back, underneath a crate," Joy said. "It's how I got in."

  "Where does it lead?"

  "The sewers. Disgusting, I know, but underground is the only way to travel on this planet. The plains are riddled with old culverts and train tunnels. The locals use them for shelter and safe travel." She paused, pursing her lips. "I shouldn't oversell it - when I say safe, I mean slightly less likely to kill you than the surface."

  The locals. That confirmed his suspicions. Nothing about this woman said native to Cato. There was a lightness about her, an air of optimism that couldn't possibly have been born out on the grey plains. Her entire demeanour was trusting, as though she didn't for a moment believe that Cassimer and his team would harm her.

  Naive. Unusual. Pleasant.

  "So that's how they do it. Commander, next time we see that impure bastard of a farmer, requesting permission to put a bullet in his ugly face."

  "Stand down, Hopewell." The lieutenant's pacing irritated, her outburst even more so. It was true that if the farmer had told them about the tunnels, Copenhagen and the others would still be alive. It was also true that Cassimer could've made the farmer talk. Breaking him - or killing him and breaking whoever was next in line - would've been simple.

  It was Cassimer's mistake, and not one he'd make again.

  "Natham? He's the one who told me about you," Joy said. Her willingness to talk was a relief. "I stopped by his farm for supplies, and the whole place was abuzz with talk about soldiers."

  "What were they saying?"

  She bit her lip. "No offense, but nothing nice. Said you were a bunch of jackbooted, uh, well - I probably shouldn't repeat it. Said you raided their supplies, which is obviously ridiculous because if they had anything worth taking, actual raiding crews would've helped themselves a long time ago. Besides..." She arched an eyebrow as she looked Cassimer up and down. He got the strange sense that she saw right through his armour and, stranger yet, he didn't mind. "With that sort of equipment, you're about a century ahead of Cato."

  "Anything else?" Bellyaching and gossip were irrelevant. What mattered was to whom the farmers might be talking.

  "Two of their people went missing. Natham said you killed them, but come on, it's storm season. More like they were drunk on that awful greet-shine and got caught by the dust. I should say, though, the villagers were pretty upset. Talked about going after you to see justice done, only, they don't know where you're based. One of them said he'd seen a ship hovering over this plateau."

  "Which is why you're here. Even though all you've heard is that we are murdering thieves." Hopewell's voice dripped with scepticism.

  "Yes." She laughed, a quivering teary laughter. "Sounds mad, doesn't it? Maybe it is. Maybe I am. Can I move my hands? I want to show you something."

  He nodded and she rolled back the many sleeves on one arm. The innermost layer of clothing was a white polymer weave quite unlike the other ragged fabrics. A curious metal bracelet cinched around her wrist. Like her gun, perhaps it was a relic of Cato's former civilisation. On her pale and delicate wrist, groups of Roman numerals were scrawled in smudged ink.

  "Six months, two weeks, three days." Her hand trembled. "That's how long I've been stranded on this world. Dust in my mouth, my eyes, my clothes and my hair. Dust in my lungs and even in my dreams, if you can call them that." She shuddered. "And that's not even mentioning the spiders."

  "Stranded - how?"

  "Our ship crashed."

  "Our?"

  "There are two other survivors, but they're back at Nexus. Have to stay there, in case a ship shows up. A trader, a visitor - anyone willing to take us off-world. But it's been so long, and when I heard about you, I... I had to find you. Please, I could really use your help."

  "Do we look like charity workers to you?" Hopewell scoffed.

  "Of course not. But that looks like a long-range communications array." She nodded towards the machine. "Could I please use it to send for rescue?"

  ◆◆◆

  No, he'd told her in no uncertain terms. Disregarding the fact that the array was non-operational (a fact that outsiders should be kept in the dark about), it was Primaterre property, its use strictly limited to authorised Bastion personnel.

  You could send the message for me, she'd pleaded and he'd wanted to give in, if only to see her smile again. But sending a message on the behalf of a civilian while on a clandestine operation? Protocol forbade it as much as common sense did. If he used a secure military channel to arrange for transportation for a couple of non-citizens, Bastion would think he'd lost his mind - and they'd be right.

  He'd said no again, and Hopewell had driven home the message with a sharp shove. Now Joy sat quietly by the fire, picking through the conte
nts of her rucksack, and Cassimer stood at the array, finding it hard to listen to Lucklaw's assessment of its condition while she glowed at the edge of his vision.

  "Any luck contacting base, Lucklaw?"

  "Negative, Commander, but I do have good news. I linked my suit to Epona's systems previously, and I just managed to re-establish a connection. Patching into its cameras now."

  Three cameras showed static, another four nothing but dust. On the eighth, there was a thin slice of dreary sky.

  "She is operational and available for remote control," said Lucklaw, more than a little triumphantly.

  "Good thinking, Corporal. Final word on the array? Keep it brief."

  "The YAG crystal's completely shot, but that shouldn't be a problem, there's plenty of equipment back at base that can be repurposed to fit. Anything with a guidance system - even your rifle should have the required components. But, uh, I'll check the other equipment first. Obviously."

  "So you can fix it?"

  "Yes and no."

  Cassimer had known Copenhagen's presence would be missed, but not quite how keenly nor how soon. She might've had a pink mermaid on her helmet, but at least she knew how to keep it brief.

  "Some of the tools are salvageable, most of the components - spare and otherwise - aren't. Lightning and sensitive electronic equipment don't play well together. We need a replacement beam expander at the very least. But repairing it isn't really the problem. Finishing it is. The basic problem is this: to ensure secure comms, the array is fitted with an interferometer. Attempt to hijack the signal, and the interferometer shuts the whole thing down. Now, that's usually a good thing, but unfortunately, the interferometer interprets Cato's electrically charged atmosphere as hostile interception."

  "So it shuts down, rendering comms impossible. What about removing the interferometer?"

  "Thing is, we're not supposed to. For security reasons, its presence is hard-coded into the array's on-board computer system."

  "So hack the system."

  "I can't." Defensively, Lucklaw added: "Neither could Copenhagen. Her idea was to build a dummy interferometer and trick the computer. But to do that, I need a lot of things we no longer have."