Iron Truth

by S. A. Tholin

  Scarsdale slid backwards, boots screeching across the floor. He lifted one gun to fire a volley at the cab, but the movement was too much. He lost control, stumbling. The bullets went wide, missing their mark, piercing glass and chassis.

  Chips of smouldering metal showered Joy, stinging her skin, sizzling in her hair, but it was okay, it was worth it, because the tractor was still moving. Not dragging Scarsdale, but pushing him towards the wall. For a few horrible seconds, he was pinned, staring straight at her. Then the wall buckled, and the tractor ploughed through.

  The corridor was a whirling chaos of smoke, blood and crackling electric heat. Bullets burst through the cab's windows, whining as they ricocheted. The tractor sped forward, not stopping until it and Scarsdale crashed into the next wall along.

  The crunch was loud enough to rise above the cacophonous din.

  Bone. Her thoughts were as hot and wild as the gunfire. That was bone and I am crushing him.

  Like Cassimer had. The commander had promised her that they would slip through the ship as shadows, and he had kept that promise.

  But she was no shadow, not yet, and she released the lever, eased the pressure. She had done what was necessary, but would go no further; would not be cruel.

  The tractor shuddered as Scarsdale pushed back, and inch by inch, the great machine moved. Far enough for him to free his arms, and once more she was staring down white-hot barrels.

  She reached for the door, but the cab had warped in the impact, and it wouldn't budge. Even if it had, the steering wheel was jammed against her chest, too tight to move, almost too tight to breathe.

  She was trapped, and now she could hear the whine of spinning barrels.

  Reverse. I have to reverse. She pulled the lever backwards but the tractor didn't move.

  No, Joy - forwards. Until you hear bone crunch, Imaginary Finn urged, and she tensed her grip around the lever. Maybe she could do it after all; maybe she could step into that darkness.

  But instead of darkness came light; a flash as bright as phosphorus. She cried out, clutching her hands to her eyes. To her left, metal screamed as it tore, and shattered glass fell over her like rain.

  Her seat jerked backwards sharply, and strong hands pulled her from the tractor. The world was a haze of blinding pain, but warm static nipped at her skin.

  "Cassimer?"

  No response, and that if anything made her certain it was him.

  Another exchange of gunfire erupted. Cassimer dropped to the ground and she dropped with him, into ankle-deep and icy water.

  He's hit, she thought, despairing, but then his arms closed around her and the static hummed louder, hot against her skin as it extended to envelop her. With one hand placed protectively on the back of her head, he dipped her backwards into the water, shielding her with his body.

  Enough bullets hit their target that she could feel their impacts as heavy thuds reverberating through Cassimer's armour. He made no sound, but no matter how sophisticated his suit was, sooner or later, there would be one bullet too many.

  Then a volley of gunfire responded from the other end of the corridor, and suddenly Cassimer was on his feet again, pulling her up and away. Not far, just a few meters before he stopped again.

  She opened her eyes, blinking. Bright spots danced in her field of vision, but she could see enough to tell that they'd hunkered down on the right side of the tractor. Air seeped from a wheel where bullets had torn through thick rubber.

  "We move in five."

  Move where? Five what? The questions bubbled to the churning surface of her mind, but now Scarsdale was firing his weapons again - not towards her and Cassimer, but towards the supporting gunfire.

  Apparently Cassimer had expected this and apparently five was five seconds, because he leapt onto the tractor, dashing across its roof and ruined engine block, closing the distance with predator speed. The black gun was in his hand and then pressed to Scarsdale's jaw, and a burst of fire and lightning tinted the room orange.

  She wondered if he would continue, if he would pull that super-heated combat knife of his and disable Scarsdale's pain receptors.

  Instead, he came back to her, pulling her up into his arms before dashing down the corridor, into light pouring down from the hole in the ceiling. Lucklaw was on his knees in cover behind scorched and pitted debris, bullets spitting from his assault rifle.

  Rhys was on the floor above, and Cassimer wasted no time lifting her towards the medic's reaching arms. As soon as she was over the edge, Rhys dropped her in favour of his rifle, yelling over his shoulder for her to go.

  She scrambled to her feet, and hurried down the corridor, as fast as she could and still keep breathing.

  The rumble of an explosion rolled through the ship. She slipped, falling into biting water. Panels fell from the ceiling, bouncing and splashing. A clutch of spiders tumbled into the water ahead in a confused mess of flailing legs.

  Then the lights went out, and from behind came the heavy footfall of boots. She imagined Scarsdale, furious and victorious, steaming down the corridor. In the dark, he'd trample her without even noticing.

  Waving cones of light rounded the corner and in the blue-white haze, she saw the Primaterre soldiers. Cassimer first, armour scorched and scratched, and behind him one - two - and she could breathe again.

  She tried to stand, but her limbs were too cold and shaking to obey, and once more Cassimer pulled her up, carrying her across the threshold of CRYOGENICS.

  He set her down, helped her steady herself, and turned to face the corridor, black gun raised and ready.

  "Get that door shut."

  Her heart raced as she stumbled towards the tiny green light indicating the door access panel. They were still going this way, into this darkness where thousands slept, and even though the power was failing, it was okay because it wasn't too late. It wasn't too late to wake Finn.

  As Lucklaw and a limping Rhys jostled inside, Joy held her wrist to the chip reader. It chirruped in response, flashing a cheerful green, and then the doors hissed shut, cutting through the water.

  "Lights, Lucklaw. Clear the entryway."

  Rhys tapped her shoulder and motioned for her to follow. Water sloshed around her ankles, but she could feel the chain-link mesh of a gantry underneath her feet. The ground wobbled unsteadily, and when she reached for a railing, she found only air.

  "Relax." Rhys took her by the shoulders, and she stood still as the medic patted her down, checking for injuries.

  Over by the door, Cassimer knelt to place what looked like mines. That explained having to clear the entryway, and she shuddered at the thought of the person who would set them off.

  Sparks popped in the air as fluorescent light strips switched on. Stark light washed over a multi-storey chamber. A section of the ceiling had collapsed, and the chamber was flooded with clear water. Gantries ran high above and deep underwater, a network of steel that allowed access to the cryo pods.

  But there were no cryo pods.

  ◆◆◆

  Bouquets of curling wire sprang from white walls. Tubing, hoses, connectors for liquid nitrogen - all of these were present, but none of the pods they were meant to serve.

  "I don't understand." She didn't know what else to say, how else to express the sucking void in the pit of her stomach. Seven long months and she had never stopped thinking about Finn's quiet face behind frosted glass. She'd believed he would be rescued, had feared he would be dead - but never had she ever pictured him not being there at all.

  "She all right, Rhys?" Cassimer's voice, so close and so lovely, but his question so ridiculously stupid that her cheeks flushed with anger. All right? In the short time he'd known her, she'd never been all right and now she never would be.

  "A few cuts and bruises. Nothing that'll matter in the long run."

  "We need to move. You ready to go?"

  "My leg caught a bullet from Scarsdale. Fractured my tibia. It's a bloody awful feeling to have all those bits of bone slipping
around inside me. Suit's compensating, but it'll slow me down."

  "All the more reason to get moving. Joy?"

  Cassimer held his hand out, and she realised he intended to carry her again. Even with a broken leg, Rhys would be able to outpace her by a mile. A burden, more than ever.

  Not that it mattered. Not that any of it mattered anymore.

  "Aren't you seeing this?" She gestured towards the empty recesses in the walls. "They're all gone!"

  "We see it. Discuss it on the move."

  Rhys took point, setting the pace for the group, and over Cassimer's shoulder, she could see Lucklaw, always with one eye on the door. With good reason - tremors sent ripples through the water, heralding the approach of Scarsdale.

  "Must've been thousands of cryo pods in here. A hell of a job to move them all," Rhys said, apparently deciding to start the promised discussion.

  "You think somebody stole them? Like scavengers?" Stupidly, she'd never considered that possibility. The Ever Onward had lain dead on Cato's surface for over a century - what were the odds of it having gone untouched? Maybe she'd denied herself that reality check, needing to believe the ship intact and quietly slumbering.

  "Not necessarily. You never saw this section of the ship. Perhaps there were no cryo pods to begin with."

  Cassimer's theory was completely implausible, and she was sure that he knew it too. She loved him a little bit for that, for allowing himself to say something silly to make her feel better.

  "There's a console up ahead. I can access it, find out what I can," Lucklaw said.

  After one quick look at the door - they were three storeys above it, and a good distance away - Cassimer gave the go-ahead. Lucklaw tapped the console awake, and its system booted to an animated version of the Hierochloe logo, the three blades of grass swaying gently.

  The walkway shuddered as something large thudded against the door. A battering ram, Joy thought, although that seemed far too medieval a word for what was really happening.

  "Hurry it up, Lucklaw." Cassimer sounded impatient, though not bristling as much when he'd requested the schematics earlier. His fever had run hot then, all that roiling intensity threatening to boil over.

  "Got it."

  A face smiled at them from the screen. Joy recognised the blue backdrop against which she'd had her own photo taken during final registration. Neither name nor face was familiar, but this was clearly another colonist; another hopeful who'd gone dreaming into space.

  ANDERSON, AIMEE

  and underneath that followed information about Aimee, but the one fact that mattered, the one fact Joy cared about, was writ large and bold:

  STATUS: DISCONNECTED

  Aimee had gone to sleep expecting to wake up to fields of blue grass. What had she seen instead? Had she ever woken up at all? Or did she lie at the bottom of the chamber? Deep underneath the water, on an ocean floor of silt produced by thousands of rotting bodies, bones and skulls piling like coral reefs. All of the sleepers, dead and staring up at Joy. Jealously, she imagined, or angrily, because she had caused the death of one of their own.

  No, not caused the death. She couldn't let herself get away with euphemism. She'd killed Duncan, that was the truth of it. Aimed the gun, pulled the trigger, sent the bullet on the trajectory that had ended the man who had woken her from dreamless sleep into waking nightmare.

  If this was punishment, perhaps she deserved it. But Finn didn't. Not Finn, not Miana, nor any of those whose names scrolled by on the screen, each tagged DISCONNECTED.

  "Somebody moved those units out of here." Rhys shook his head. "Makes no sense. Cryo tech isn't cheap, but there are easier ways to come by it than this."

  "RebEarth?"

  "Negative, Commander. The pods were disconnected over a century ago. Shortly after the ship crashed, by the look of it."

  "A century?" She echoed Lucklaw's words, unable to grasp the horror. A century? Had Finn been gone so long? Had he been dead a hundred years and all her love for him, all her prayers and held-back tears had been for nothing?

  "Grab whatever data you can. We need to go."

  "Wait - please. Could you look up Finn Somerset? I need to know."

  Cassimer nodded his approval, and a few quick taps of the screen later, there he was. Her wonderful brother, all broad smile and auburn waves and it hurt that she would never see that smile again, because whatever it meant, he had been:

  DISCONNECTED

  "Finn," she murmured, but in her head the name was a cry.

  Where are you, Finn? What happened to you?

  Did his body rest at the bottom of the chamber? Had he died in his pod, or had he woken before he died? Had he lived a long and full life on Cato?

  No. Much as she wanted to believe it, much as it might've helped to picture him having some semblance of life, she knew that he would never have left her to sleep. Neither war nor storms would have stopped him. He would have come for her, like she had come for him.

  Lucklaw pressed another button and the screen changed to

  SOMERSET, JOY

  and there she was, the girl she'd once been. Awkward smile, lipstick a shade too red. A world like Cato should've swallowed her whole, and yet she was the one who lived. Stupid. Absurd. So ridiculous that she wanted to scream.

  And then she remembered the crack in her medical bracelet and the emptiness of its display, and understood that Cato had only been saving her for last.

  27. Cassimer

  They made it another two levels before the mine reported activity in its radius of effect.

  Kill the lights, he ordered Lucklaw and the corporal must've got a decent handle on the system, because the darkness was instant. He switched off his own suit's lights and night vision kicked in. The gantry ahead was delineated in faint green, shuddering under their feet.

  Structure unstable, his suit warned, and he ignored it because what wasn't unstable? The ship, the mission, Rhys's leg, Lucklaw's nerves, the sobbing woman in his arms. His own balance. Everything was on the verge of crumbling.

  In a sense, that made focus easier. It was the clarity of standing on a cliff and knowing that there was no choice but to surrender and die, or to embrace the danger and run along that cliff's edge.

  It was not a state of mind he strived to achieve, but once there, it was better than any stim. It was raw energy, it was barely-contained electricity. It was truth, and it was purity.

  The mine at the door sent a warning chirrup to his suit, and then an explosion ripped through the chamber. Light bloomed from behind, illuminating their path in roiling whirls of orange.

  Not enough to disable an Ereshkigal suit, but enough to slow the man inside down. Rattle his brains a tad. Certainly enough to kill any unarmoured RebEarthers stupid enough to have stepped through the door. He'd have liked to set more explosives, but the risk to the ship's structural integrity was too great - and at the time, he had believed that there were colonists who might yet be saved. One in particular, for whose death he hadn't wished to be responsible.

  But Finn Somerset was gone and couldn't be saved. His sister on the other hand... She stood on the crumbling cliff's edge too, and he could see in her eyes, could feel in the tired arms around his neck, that she wanted to surrender and fall into the abyss.

  "I won't let you," he said, though his suit was muted and all she would hear was silence. He repeated it, over and over, promising that he would carry her until she found the strength to stand.

  The gantry ended at a door and his throat tightened because this was it. This was the moment when they'd find out whether he knew what he was doing. If the door opened up into another corridor or a cryo chamber or cargo hold -

  - Joy reached out, her arm luminescent green, and the door whizzed open. Brilliant light shone from a high ceiling, illuminating sleek wings and fuselages.

  The hangar, just as he'd thought. The hangar, just as it had looked in the pictures. Multiple storeys of vessels, stacked from floor to ceiling, ready to take off through
ramps that would open in the hull.

  There were barrel-bodied M-76s, meant to shuttle colonists from orbit to their new home. ME-44s, the many-armed ships with their folded hulls; the ultimate multi-purpose tool. Along with the bulky NGNEER-ships, whose shadows loomed large in the back of the hangar, the ME-44s would've picked apart the Ever Onward and reshaped her into a Cascade.

  This was human ingenuity untouched by fear, and to him this was a church, as holy as any sacred grove of old.

  He knelt, not in worship, but to plant charges at the door. It felt as wrong as it was necessary.

  "Bridge is directly above," he told the team. "Should be accessible through an elevator on the other side of the hangar."

  They hurried through the maze of ships. There was no time to spare, no time even to look - but passing close to one of the ME-44s, he couldn't help but reach out and touch its paper-thin yet super-strong hull.

  The elevator groaned under their collective weight, flashing angry messages about exceeding load capacity, but Lucklaw overrode the warnings.

  Cassimer set Joy down, bracing against the wall to make room for her in the cramped space. She shivered, so cold that her lips had turned a faint blue, and her downcast eyes were dark with sorrow.

  She grieved for things he had never had, but had begun to understand. When the waters had wrenched her from his grasp, a sickness had seized his bones. When he'd pulled her from the tractor, unsure if she was alive or dead or bleeding out in his arms, the ground had quaked underneath his feet. He'd felt something he'd thought lost in ash, a feeling too new and strange to name, and she had found it for him.

  For that, he owed her everything. For that, he owed her a name.

  "Constant," he said to her, only her, caring not that the others could hear. He had to give her this piece of himself for her to guard and hold, to keep as a reminder that not all was lost. Her world was gone, but there was a new one. Her brother was gone, but she was not alone. "My name is Constant."