Iron Truth

by S. A. Tholin

  "You said you warned them!" she whispered to Lucklaw, but the corporal was a black-armoured wall of silence.

  A local moved forward hesitantly.

  "Halt." Rhys trained his rifle on the man. "Drop your weapon."

  "But I need it," whined the man. "There's drifters about. We saw their work in the tunnel."

  "You may collect your weapon later. Now drop it and get out."

  The local obeyed and disappeared up the stairs.

  "Disembark the train," Cassimer repeated, his voice so calm that it edged into terrifying.

  "I don't think so, Primo." The conductor stepped backwards, the doors sealing shut. His voice turned tinny over the train's PA system. "This isn't Protectorate space, and you have no authority here. See, that's why I came here in the first place, to get away from your kind." He whipped off the cap he wore and pressed his face to the window. The inky smudge of a tattoo coiled around his ear. The distance was too great for Joy to discern any detail, but Lucklaw drew a sharp intake of breath.

  "He's RebEarth."

  "What's that?"

  "My mother calls them the roaches of the galaxy. Says it doesn't matter what rock you turn over, RebEarthers are going to come scurrying out from under it. Guess she's right."

  "And what exactly does that mean?"

  "It means the commander's going to blow his impure brains out in five, four..."

  Joy looked away to avoid adding more imagery to her ever-growing bank of nightmare material, but Lucklaw's countdown finished and the shot never came. Instead, Cassimer spoke again.

  "Citizens of Cato. The man at the door is RebEarth. All RebEarth must be purged. Anyone choosing to remain with him will be considered a RebEarth sympathiser. All sympathisers must be purged. You have twenty seconds to decide where your loyalties lie."

  "Ignore the ignorant jackboot." The conductor hit the button to signal the driver and a shudder went through the train. Sparks flew from the front, and metal screeched and groaned, but the train didn't move an inch. Lucklaw's clamps - whatever they were - had done their job.

  Joy tried to catch a glance of the locomotive. She glimpsed nothing behind the darkened windows, no movement at all, and somehow that was even more frightening.

  "Fifteen," said Cassimer and as one, the passengers lunged. The conductor disappeared in a flurry of arms and legs, screaming as he was pushed to the floor. No elevator shaft full of drifters for him, but the clawing and scratching and pulling of unwanted hands was bad enough.

  The train doors opened before Cassimer's countdown reached ten, and the conductor was hauled out. Weapons clattered to the floor as the passengers, one by one, unburdened themselves and slunk up the stairs.

  ◆◆◆

  Cassimer stood over the prone conductor, one boot firmly on the man's wrist.

  "Get on the train," he said to Joy, his voice no longer amplified but still distorted through the speaker system of his suit. She wished he'd open his visor like Rhys. "We leave as soon as Lucklaw has retrieved the clamps."

  "How did they stop the train? Some kind of EMP - or a force field?" The clamps were no bigger than her fists, and it seemed impossible for such small things to prove an obstacle for a massive machine.

  "Do not make me repeat myself."

  Ah. The tone of a man used to having orders followed without question or delay. Joy obliged, gingerly stepping over the conductor and onto the train.

  If you become a burden to these people, they will kill you, Joy. Do as they say, until you see an opportunity.

  Joy wanted to hush Imaginary Finn, tell him that he was wrong - but that would make her look quite mad.

  "Standard vehicle control equipment," Cassimer said, once she was inside the train doors. "They hijack and reprogram signals."

  "So when you said the train was under Primaterre control, you meant it quite literally."

  "Yes."

  "That's what the Primaterre do, little Red." The conductor peered up at her with bloodshot eyes. The tattoo around his ear was a badly-drawn phoenix with long, flame-red tail feathers. "Take what they want. Seize it. Use it. Took my planet. Took my home. Purged -"

  A gunshot punctuated the conductor's sentence with bold finality.

  "Why did you do that?" Joy looked in horror at Cassimer, stumbling backwards into the train. In the back of her mind, Finn yelled at her, told her not to question, not to make herself the target of the commander's next bullet.

  "You wouldn't ask if you weren't new to this time," Cassimer replied, holstering his black gun. "But I hope you never have cause to learn what this man and his kind are."

  The one argument for which she had no counter. Perhaps all RebEarth should be purged. Perhaps demons did lurk in the shadows. Perhaps the Primaterre soldiers were the ones who - what had Rivka said? - were rotted inside. Death was certainly within their skill set. A man lay dead at his feet, and Cassimer's hands were as steady as ever.

  "But didn't Lucklaw warn you? The driver doesn't allow violence on the platform."

  "It's an automated train," Cassimer said.

  "Of course it is. Are you sure you weren't frozen 250 years ago?" Lucklaw's jeer scraped her eardrums. "Because that's about the last time trains had actual drivers."

  He had known all along that there was no driver, that she had fallen for some pathetic urban legend. What had he said over the soldiers' private channel? She blushed at the possibilities. Had they laughed at her?

  "Lay off the poor girl." The defence came from an unexpected source - Rhys, who had gone to examine the conductor's body. "This could be a problem. Don't often see a RebEarther on his own. They like to travel in packs."

  "I've not seen anybody else with a tattoo like that." She hadn't - though during her brief stay in Nexus, she'd tried her very best not to look too closely at anybody.

  "They're not all branded," Rhys said, smirking. "Only the really fucking stupid ones."

  "Language, Captain. Any hits in the database, Lucklaw?"

  "DNA matches an Anfield, Johan. Suspect in several bombings on Matisse, but there've been no sightings since the planet was purged. Records have him down as presumed dead."

  "Make that confirmed, Rhys." Cassimer looked around the darkened platform. This new development clearly bothered him. "News that we've seized the train will travel. If there's a RebEarth cell on Cato, we've all but given them our location. If they're in contact with their people off-world..." He trailed off, leaving Joy's mind to fill in the blanks - which it was all too eager to do.

  "Think we can scratch the ifs, Commander," Lucklaw said, peering in through the locomotive's windows. "Got several crates of industrial explosives here. Modern, probably jacked from a building site. Definitely not local."

  "You want to change the plan? Return to base?" Rhys asked.

  Yes, thought Joy, let's go back to base where you can safely explain to me what is going on and why the three of you suddenly seem so wary.

  "No," said Cassimer.

  20. Cassimer

  The train shook and weaved through Cato's underground. The high velocity might have made sense when the tunnels were regularly maintained and the train kept in perfect working order, but now it was a white-knuckle ride. Lucklaw monitored the train's systems, boosting its scanners with his in-suit tech, but at the speed they were travelling (453 km/h according to Cassimer's HUD), it was unlikely to make much difference. The sense of not being in control ate at him, little ant bites under his skin, and he could neither sit nor relax, instead pacing the aisle.

  "So, girl out of time, what world do you call home?" Rhys sat sprawled across three seats, back resting against the window. The only sign of his anxiety was the cigarette he rolled between his fingers.

  Mars, Cassimer thought, she's from Mars.

  Home port of the Ever Onward, and the arc ship's main recruitment pool. Selected experts would've been headhunted from other colonies, but hardly a junior botanist. A local girl, for certain, from the dense forests of Torthorwald, or the many-
spired university town of Applegarth. Or from Kirkclair, the capital city, from where the Ever Onward's transport shuttles had departed.

  She knew nothing of the Primaterre, but he knew something of her world. He knew the curves of Kirkclair Spaceport's domed ceiling and the gilded arches that had been its gateways. Long gone now, but forever captured in footage of the Ever Onward's departure. He could see in his mind's eye the fireworks making a kaleidoscope of the night sky as transport shuttles shot upwards towards the arc ship itself, hull gleaming with reflected sunlight. The spaceport had been crowded with prospective colonists eager to dare the stars.

  Joy would've been in that crowd. Had he seen her before, flashing past on-screen? Copper and cream; gentle curves and sincere smile. Perhaps these things appealed because of their familiarity, his subconscious inexorably attracted to a glimmering mote of the past.

  He wanted to pull up the footage from his ARC SHIPS folder and scour it for signs of her but distractions were the last thing he needed.

  "Mars. Kirkclair to be exact," Joy said.

  Yes, he could see that. Empress trees and broad boulevards, lantern-lit squares and towers of glass that weren't dark and gnarled, but crystalline. She would look at home there.

  "Please tell me that Kirkclair still exists?"

  "Bigger and better than ever," Lucklaw said.

  The corporal was right. Kirkclair had changed much since Joy last saw it; Cassimer had no doubt she'd find the city unrecognisable. Mars' capital had grown to span the surrounding catenae of glass-lined craters, arching bridges linking each city block. The empress trees and lantern-lit squares were still there, but no longer tinged puce with exhaust and dust. The pollution of Joy's era was no more. Forests grew between the crystal towers, and the craters had become lakes fed by waterfalls. It was an extravagance of purity, for much of which the Lucklaw family was owed thanks.

  "Lucklaw." Joy tapped her bottom lip thoughtfully. "One of my professors was a Lucklaw, and I think there might've been a politician by the name too. Any relation?"

  "More than likely," Lucklaw said, begrudgingly adding: "So I guess we have a hometown in common. Never heard of a Somerset of note, though."

  "My family moved to Mars when I was just a baby, when my parents got tenure at Atwood. If it's notable Somersets you want, you'll have to look to Earth. That's where I was born."

  Earth-born.

  Cassimer no longer paced. Religion was impure, but in that moment, he understood what it was to be in the presence of something sacred. He was not alone in his reaction, either; he could sense it in the sudden heavy silence, in Lucklaw's rigid spine, in the way Rhys no longer twirled his cigarette.

  "What?" Joy looked at them nervously. "Don't tell me Earth isn't there anymore?"

  "It is," said Cassimer, when no one else seemed willing to respond. "But no one has walked its surface in over a century."

  ◆◆◆

  Tunnel wall flashed past the window. Broken tiles in blue and green, every now and then a sign proclaiming the name of a station. The seat creaked uncomfortably underneath his weight.

  Joy sat next to him - too close, but she didn't seem to mind the lack of distance. Didn't seem to mind how, with every quiver of the train, her arm brushed against his. She was closer than he'd ever let anyone who wasn't a medic. Far too close.

  Or maybe not close enough.

  Instinct told him to smother that thought in cold ash, but purity demanded recognition and analysis. The first step towards balance had to be acknowledging that he was the source of his own discomfort. Joy hadn't breached his defences - he had opened the gates, and it was his responsibility to seal them shut again.

  Stims would help. A rush of artificial electricity; jolts of energy to clear his mind and sharpen his senses. It'd been over twelve hours since his last dose; six since it had begun to leave his system. He was in the final throes of it now, in the twilight borderland between chemistry and reality. Fatigue had set in, leaving his limbs heavy and sore, and in the corner of his eye, the tunnel walls flowed around the train like seawater. A fresh dose would take care of those problems, but Rhys was monitoring his usage. Best not to push it.

  Besides, the side-effects weren't all bad. The visual glitches made the mildewed and grimy surroundings more bearable, and when he looked at Joy...

  ...she glowed deep gold, and from her hair flowed rivers of warm light. She was August on Earth, golden harvest and dark sardonyx, honey and red-apple orchards underneath glittering Perseids. She was bonfires and song, and around her, the train car rippled and warped.

  Yes. Pleasant. Certainly better than what Joy was watching. She had neither primer nor augments, so he'd connected his own primer to a tablet to show her what had happened to Earth. He didn't watch - didn't need to. The footage was as ingrained in his memory as it was in his DNA.

  First a wide shot of Earth from space, gradually closing in on the mist-veiled orb until the northern hemisphere came into view, enthroned upon a band of barren nuclear waste. The scars of an ancient war, fought long before the construction of the very first architect ship. The oceans had begun to reclaim the devastated south, dappling the black earth blue and bringing life back to the scorched continents.

  The Earth was the mother of all humanity, and she had withstood her children's recklessness with unfailing grace, patiently tidying up their mistakes. The footage revelled in the maternal verdancy, zooming to skim sun-splashed water; to soar above rolling hills and circle snow-capped peaks.

  Eventually, natural beauty was abandoned to show the old cities of Earth. Glorious submerged London, where royal pennants flew from the silver spires of Greenwich Palace. The walled fortress of Stockholm, always with her guns trained on floating Copenhagen. America Urbana, with her alabaster ziggurats and looping hover-tracks, and the forbidding palisades of the northern principalities.

  All wondrous destinations, forever locked away as untouchable history.

  But to Joy, Earth was more than that. It was a home, a place of familiar smells, tastes and sounds. An enviable privilege - but it would also make what came next so much worse.

  London had been first to fall.

  The footage returned to the city for one last tour of its wave-lapped architecture, and then it cut without warning to imagery recovered from a nanny camera belonging to Peter and Naomi Winstanley of 1146 Westcott Rd.

  Why the Winstanleys? That question remained a matter of heated debate. The couple's life had been investigated and analysed, no detail too small to ponder.

  Though there was no hard evidence, it was true that Naomi Winstanley, an exo-mining consultant, might have done business with miners from Xanthe. On the date in question, Naomi had just returned from a crisis conference on Luna Station, where she might have come into contact with potential demon-carriers.

  It seemed the most likely theory. Poor Naomi had just been unlucky. Wrong place, wrong time, and a stray impure thought had left her mind open to the reaching darkness.

  Still, most likely wasn't enough to stop speculation, because if bad luck was all it took, then how could anyone be safe? How could any world be secure? No amount of adherence to purity, nor awareness and mental self-flagellation, could ever protect from bad luck.

  Cassimer couldn't accept that, refused to, and so, like millions of others, he searched for other answers. Had living under the waters of the Thames unbalanced the couple? Had there been pollutants in the air filtration system? Had Peter's gambling habit or Naomi's brazen unfaithfulness made them easy targets?

  No matter the cause, the outcome was always the same.

  Grey and grainy. A moment of galaxy-changing history, captured by the lens of a budget nanny cam.

  It is 5.53 in the afternoon and outside the foot-thick windows, the waters of the Thames run thick and sodium orange. Naomi Winstanley has just arrived home from a week-long conference and Peter plants a welcoming kiss on her cheek. Their two children, Linus and Ingrid, are by the window watching fish swim past. In the di
stance, a curfew klaxon blares. Naomi sets down her bags and shudders. She turns, limbs twitching and jerking. Peter asks what's wrong and the nanny cam catches a glimpse of the blood oozing from her eyes and mouth and nose. Naomi screams, then laughs, and picks up a vase and -

  And then 1146 Westcott Rd became indistinguishable from the Hecate. The Winstanleys' stainless steel kitchen wasn't the sleeping quarters of a Primaterre troop ship, but thinking of one event was impossible without the other creeping in, and suddenly he was glad Joy was too close, because without her light, nothing would keep the crawling shadows away.

  He no longer needed the reminder, no longer needed to watch Naomi tear family and home to shreds before moving onto the streets of London. He knew what he fought to protect, and now, so did Joy.

  The footage was only about ten minutes long and had run its course twice that. Still Joy had said nothing.

  "Earth was overrun," he said, and when she looked at him, there were tears in her honey-brown eyes. "Lost to the demons. The major factions in the galaxy tried to take it back through traditional warfare, but any troops sent in simply became more vessels for the corruption. Evacuations of both civilians and soldiers proved unsafe, as there was no way of telling who might be a carrier. Hundreds of ships were lost to outbreaks, and hundreds more landed on other worlds, only to find that the corruption had travelled with them. In the end, it was decided that in order to preserve Earth, it had to be purified. The Primaterre had learned how to shield their minds against the corruption, and so a team was chosen. With truth and clarity, they travelled to Earth and deployed a bio-weapon in the form of a deadly contagion. A week later, every human on Earth was dead."

  "Is that why people can't go back?"

  "The virus is long since neutralised. But the demons cannot be allowed to have Earth, mother of humanity, and the only way to ensure that they won't..."