Iron Truth

by S. A. Tholin

  For Finn, it would've been different.

  Their parents had died, and Finn had never had the time to mourn. He'd made Joy his first priority, and over time, unspent grief had festered to become a permanent scar. His anger had been well-hidden, channelled into ambition, but it had never left him.

  Finn had been clever and kind, always with a joke at the tip of his tongue and a smile in his hazel eyes. But he'd also been afraid and he'd also been angry. If he were alive and she were dead...

  No question about it. Finn would want revenge. Would have it, no matter what.

  But I never wanted you to be me, whispered Imaginary Finn.

  And nor was she. She didn't want revenge; she wanted answers.

  "There's something I need to know first, Lieutenant Florey," Joy said. "I need to know about Hypatia."

  ◆◆◆

  After she'd killed Duncan, time had slowed. Every second had lasted an eternity; every second forcing her to face a future where she had blood on her hands that couldn't ever be washed off.

  Only Lucklaw had kept her going. His kind arm to lean on and his murmuring voice. At first, his words had been little more than sounds, a calming drone in her ear but, eventually, she had come to listen.

  "What he told you about Hypatia," Lucklaw had said, "you need to know it came straight from the RebEarth propaganda scripts. Duncan wasn't there - but my mother was. The commander and Florey as well, all playing different parts in the purge. It was hard, it was long and it was bloody, so don't expect them to tell you a damn thing about it, but I'll tell you this: Hypatia is better off now than it was before, and so is most of its population. The Feehans? They died because they were stubborn, stupid and, above all, wrong."

  "What makes them wrong and you right?" she'd asked, too tired to be anything but direct.

  "You know the difference. It's why I'm here and Duncan's not. We kill to protect - RebEarth kills to destroy. It's as simple as that."

  Except it wasn't simple. Duncan was dead, but would always live on inside her. His razor-sharp jawline and squinting eyes, his scarred arms and insistence on being too hands-on. He was guilt, in the shape of a person.

  Nothing simple about that. Nothing simple about the Primaterre, either.

  Lucklaw had been right; Florey hadn't wanted to talk about Hypatia. Instead, he'd shown her, like Cassimer had shown her the demons taking Earth.

  If Hypatia had anything in common with Earth, it was the Earth of old. Before the great wars and the destruction of the south, when billions of people had lived on top of each other like ants in dark-alleyed high-rise duchies. Polluted air, toxic waters and crime-riddled streets - such was the Earth of old, and such was Hypatia of a decade ago.

  When Duncan had told her of the Feehans, she'd imagined their family's bakery as a quaint establishment overlooking the cactus-rimmed salt plateaus. Customers enjoying lunch in the shade of parasols; little Gaia and Gaius, playing in the sand and sun, cheeks rosy in the brisk air. That's how she'd pictured it, and that's how Duncan had seen it too, she thought, because that's what counted as a good life in Kirkclair.

  They should've known better. Cato should've opened their eyes to just how bad people could have it and still stubbornly cling on; how awful a place could be and people still called it home.

  If the Feehans had owned a bakery, what Florey had shown her guaranteed that it had been a hole-in-the-wall at best, nestled among thousands of concrete burrows. Hypatia's cities had been dull and grey and high; squalid rookeries wedged between volcanic mountain ranges. Sewage ran raw down the sides of housing, and trash piled in the streets for children to pick through, looking for trinkets to sell or bones to chew. Malnutrition. Starvation. Decay.

  And as for Gaius Feehan's salt flats, if he had been able to smell them on the wind, it would've been a wonder. The once-pristine white plains had been blackened with soot and scored by ceaseless, wending traffic.

  The Primaterre had changed that. A progression of footage had shown Hypatia burn, and then rise from the ashes. The cities had been razed, and in their place grew verdant jungle, home to soft-pawed, nocturnal fauna. The salt flats gleamed white in the sun, overlooked by clusters of settlements. Not concrete high-rises, these, but square-grid towns of volcanic rock and red-hued timber. In gardens and parks, cacti bloomed in the shade of cottonwood trees. It was order in harmony with nature, and though the architecture was plain and billboards played constant reminders of purity, it was beautiful.

  "No child starves on Hypatia anymore," Florey had said. "Perhaps her people would eventually have found the righteous path. Perhaps they could've been enlightened and educated, but that is a slow process. Decades, centuries, even, of human suffering. In ten years, we solved a problem that would have taken generations if left to the people of Hypatia."

  "But you took Hypatia for your own citizens. What of the people who were displaced?"

  "They were given homes and purpose on annexed worlds. Anyone who accepted the new order had every chance of a meritorious life. Regardless, their children no longer starve, either. That is all that matters. That is all that ever mattered."

  As heartfelt as Florey's words had been, Joy couldn't bring herself to believe that fire and steel was the only way to save a world, but it gave her an understanding of how the Primaterre thought. What they protected, and what they believed worth killing for.

  Securing the future of humanity was too grand a picture for her, but watching the jungles of Hypatia glow moonlight-blue with blossoming ghost orchids and kadupul flowers was something she could understand. Seeds had taken root on Hypatia, once-extinct flora supplanting urban decay, and there was value in that.

  In this hostile universe of violence and fear, that was what she had to hold onto. The seeds that were too rare not to cultivate. The flowers she wanted to bloom.

  "Cassimer."

  The commander stood behind Lucklaw, watching the monitors over the comms officer's shoulder, but as soon as she spoke his name, she had all of his attention.

  "Have you come to a decision?" he asked, showing her into his quarters.

  "There's one more thing I need to know."

  His lips twitched impatiently. There were less than ten minutes left until his deadline, and the commander didn't care for time-wasting, that much was clear. Question was, once all was said and done, would he still feel she was wasting his time?

  He pulled the door shut, and the outside world became a blur behind opaque walls. The temperature seemed to tick up.

  "It's a question about Bastion regulations. What do they say about fraternization?"

  A beat of silence. About a thousand beats of her heart.

  "Familiar relationships are allowed between service members, as their purity may otherwise be compromised. However, relationships within a direct chain of command are considered improper and are strictly prohibited."

  "Very sensible," she said, and now there was hardly any space between them at all. She couldn't remember moving; it felt more as though the room had shrunk, or maybe the whole universe, compressed to contain only what mattered.

  Constant. He'd been Cassimer for so long, but as she touched his arm, it was Constant she thought of, Constant she wanted.

  And now her fingers were running up his arm and his muscles tensed; now she was moving into unknown territory. The universe shrank a little more. Something not unlike panic flickered across Cassimer's face, and she thought she'd lost him, expecting him to withdraw.

  But whatever was between them, whatever the pounding rhythm in her blood was, he had to feel it too, because he didn't turn away. He relaxed, and her universe was only Constant, his heart its burning core.

  Her lips brushed across neatly trimmed beard to find his, and her hand closed around his as she set their universe on fire with a kiss.

  Her breath against his neck, she whispered: "I accept -"

  "Wait." His voice in her ear, so close and so hoarse and strained. "Wait."

  And then he kissed her.
She wrapped her arms around his neck, spoke his name against his lips. He lifted her off the ground, and this was another thing his hands were meant for, she knew that now; she felt that now. He was tense, his eyes so dark and deep and wild that she might've been afraid if she wasn't feeling the exact same thing.

  Let it happen, she thought, her heart beating rapidly - or maybe it was his heart. Maybe there was no difference. Maybe they were one and the same, and that was the new rhythm she'd felt; two hearts adjusting to the same song.

  And then he stopped. She could hear muffled voices outside, the sound of chairs scraping across the floor, and she understood that their ten minutes were up.

  Understood, but didn't like it. And though Cassimer had set her down and stepped away, blank and neutral, his fingers were still intertwined with hers and unwilling to let go. The commander didn't like it either, this deadline he had set, but he couldn't ignore it.

  Or could he? She commanded this moment, and if she wanted him to lose himself to her, to throw regulations to the wind, he would. He wanted her to make that decision for him, she thought, but it wasn't hers to make.

  Instead, she told him, gently: "I accept your offer."

  32. Cassimer

  "I say we abort. Send an extraction request and hunker down until an evac comes through." Hopewell's arms were crossed defensively, and she shot glares around the room. "And don't none of you look at me like I suddenly turned yellow. We're banneret men, not exorcists. Bastion needs to know, so that they can send in the experts."

  "They did send in the experts," Florey said. "The experts at doing what needs to be done."

  "But look at that thing!" Hopewell gestured towards the central monitor, where the recovered footage from the Ever Onward was frozen on the captain's blood-coated and snarling face. "How do we fight that?"

  "With purity and resolve," Cassimer said, and the room fell silent, all eyes on him. On the expert. Purity and resolve was the doctrine, and after the Hecate, the traits for which he had been praised. Purity and resolve had made him famous, had made a striking slogan on recruitment posters bearing his image, and a fine tagline for the movie.

  But onboard the Hecate, purity had been the last thing on his mind. When claws scratched and tendrils probed, no armour could protect a man - not even armour of the soul.

  "The vessels die the same as anyone else," he continued, and that much was true. "Bleed like anyone else. The corruption may have taken the Ever Onward, but it will not have the Andromache. Thirty-thousand Primaterre lives depend on us."

  His mind was made up - demons be damned - but he could see doubt on Hopewell's face and fear on Lucklaw's, and that wouldn't do. If they were to walk into the void, there could be no cracks. "Primaterre protects us all," he added, and as the team echoed his words, their eyes lit with truth and clarity.

  Cassimer took a seat, nodding for Lucklaw to continue the briefing. Behind him, Hopewell whispered to Joy: "Going to be an interesting first mission for you, Somerset."

  Too interesting, he thought, but he could no more change the nature of the mission than he could change the nature of Cato. Private Somerset would be tested and forged in the purest of crucibles.

  Private Somerset. How false that name rang. Joy was the one who had come to his quarters, inside his walls and inside his shields, and Joy was the one who had kissed him. Unexpected. Strange. Surreal; the experience lingering in his mind, fuzzy-edged like a stim-withdrawal dream. Highly inappropriate, too - but he did not regret it.

  "The Ever Onward's scanners did pick up the Andromache," Lucklaw said, and Cassimer forced himself to listen, although none of this was news to him. "Little over nine weeks ago, she folded into the system and, ten minutes later, set a course for Cato. She entered its atmosphere a few hours later, after which there's too much interference to track her movements precisely, but she's down here, all right."

  "But we still don't know where?" Hopewell sighed dramatically.

  "Well, I wouldn't say that," said the corporal, whose trials and tribulations had done nothing to make him more concise. "In the bridge surveillance footage, the Ever Onward's comms officer mentions intercepting signals from Cato."

  "Weird signals," Joy said.

  "Yeah, very weird - that much he was right about. He was wrong about having intercepted them, however. Two signals were in fact transmitted directly to the Ever Onward in a targeted attack, piercing straight through her shields and firewalls. Sophisticated, and impossible without advance knowledge of the ship's systems. The first signal is a data stream of a kind I've never seen before. No idea how to even begin decrypting it - no idea if decryption is something that can even be applied to it. And if it's too advanced for me to understand, it must've seemed like magic to their comms officer. The second signal is less complicated. Landing instructions, complete with a set of coordinates to a location on Cato."

  "Sounds promising," Hopewell said.

  Florey shrugged. "Could just be a mistake by the port authority. A mix up with another ship awaiting permission to land."

  "Sure. Except, after the captain killed the crew, those were the coordinates he entered into the navigation systems. Overshot them by a couple of hundred miles, but that's where he was trying to go."

  "I never heard of a demon doing anything like that before." Hopewell left her question unspoken, but Cassimer understood. He shook his head - once possessed, the Hecate's crew had been beasts, bereft of intelligence.

  "What about the men who turned up after the crash?" Hopewell looked to Lucklaw, who shrugged.

  "Got no IDs and no ideas. But I can tell you this - moments after the Andromache entered the system, the Ever Onward recorded a signal originating from those same exact coordinates."

  "Great." The lieutenant clapped her knees, ready to get up and go. "So, where to?"

  Lucklaw pointed to the monitor, and a drone-captured image appeared. Billowing dust dunes, dark in the shadow of craggy mountains. A red dot indicated the location.

  "Nothing but dust." Hopewell sighed once more.

  "There's more than dust." Joy leaned forward, one hand gripping the backrest of Cassimer's chair. Frightened, intrigued - and so close that he was glad he had already decided on a course of action. His mind couldn't be swayed, one way or the other. "There's the city under the dust."

  "Right." Lucklaw frowned, annoyed at having his reveal stolen. The image on the screen changed again as the dunes were overlaid with a map of urban sprawl. "The signal appears to be coming from a building in the Aigburth district. There are no further details available on the building, but I managed to find this photograph."

  Cassimer had seen it before, flicking through the files on Cato. Instead of fountains and copper domes, the outer industrial districts consisted of corporate offices towering over clusters of boxy grey employee housing. The photo in question had been taken on the somewhat more pleasant high street, where gaudy shop windows tried in vain to outshine hydrangea flowerbeds and high-def billboards.

  "There." Lucklaw pointed to a building largely obscured by passing traffic and other offices. Several storeys high and sharply angular, with a brightly polished silver facade.

  "The silver fortress." The excitement had gone from Joy's voice. "The drifters said that Cato was more than meets the eye. That it's the plains and the mountains and the silver fortress. Could they have meant this building, or is that too crazy? It is, isn't it?"

  To Cassimer, it sounded like the ramblings of lunatics, and he was about to tell her that, to set her imagination and fears at rest - but Lucklaw beat him to the punch.

  "Well, probably," the corporal said, though his brow was furrowed with concern. "They're as mad as moon-cats, for sure, but... I mean, it's likely just coincidence, but the street the building's on? It was called Castle Street."

  Yeah. Probably just coincidence. But an unease settled in the room, and a silence that lasted a near-minute. The silver fortress sounded like a base of operations, and whoever - whatever - waited there,
had a century of preparation on their side.

  "I suggest we request reinforcements from Bastion," Hopewell said. "I know they won't like it, but tough."

  "The array's connection to the Cascade is intermittent at best. It could take days for the message to get through. And..." Lucklaw glanced at Cassimer, who nodded his permission. "And we shut the array down a few days ago. Had to, because I was seeing strong indications that someone else was scanning for it. For us."

  "Locals?"

  "No. Whoever they are, they're in orbit. Chances are that they'd detect and trace any signal of ours long before it reaches the Cascade."

  "In orbit." Florey frowned. "The RebEarth ship."

  "Yes." Cassimer stood, once more taking command of the room. "We have to assume that they know about us and what befell their team. We must also assume that RebEarth reinforcements may be on their way. We must move now, or find ourselves trapped. The locals are likely to be unappreciative after we hijacked their train, and if this buried building has some significance to the drifters, there's a good chance we'll be up against them as well."

  "One heck of a mess, Commander." Hopewell shook her head, though a small grin played on her lips. Demons might frighten the lieutenant, but challenge did not. "And this silver fortress, how are we supposed to get to it if it's buried?"

  "The undercity," Joy said, and Lucklaw nodded.

  "The Castle Street subway stop connects to a station underneath Nexus Spaceport."

  "But we can't just walk into Nexus," Hopewell said.

  "Not without facing resistance," added Florey.

  "It'd be a massacre." Rhys, speaking up for the first time. The medic still looked tired.

  "And too great a risk to the team," Cassimer said. "Nexus is protected by a force field and the only point of entry is via the train. Fighting our way out of the station and through the town would be inadvisable, but if the force field were to be disabled, we'd be able to enter undetected, at a point of our choosing."