Iron Truth

by S. A. Tholin

  "Fuck your brother. My wife sleeps above. Did you see her?"

  Joy shook her head.

  "She's like you. Wasn't born here. It's always hard for outsiders to adapt. Most drifters are those who came here to hide, to trade, to start a new life away from Primaterre, RebEarth and all the rest. They hear the whispers and they can't bear it. Go mad, snap - it's what would've become of your Duncan, I think. A few more weeks, and he would've been carving bone sculptures in a culvert." Hal laughed. "No more clever thoughts or fancy words then. He reckoned he could do a better job of maintaining the force field than me, but three more weeks and he would've been smearing his own shit on tunnel walls. And me? Still here. The force field, still here."

  "Your wife is a drifter?"

  He slapped her, hard, but it felt deserved, and she bit the pain and humiliation down. Call a man's wife a drifter and a slap was the least you had coming, she supposed.

  "Zora had to go to the fair at Natham's farm. She'd send others to do her trading, but there are so few left in Nexus. She had no choice. I'd have gone, but the mayor said no, said I had to stay. Fucking asshole. Like he didn't know what would happen. Out there on the plains, it's too quiet, too..."

  "...too easy to hear your own thoughts," Joy said. "And sometimes the thoughts are really bad."

  "Yes." He paused. "You've heard this before?"

  "It's part of the madness," she said, pulling fluffy white lies out of her magician's hat. "A trigger phrase to reinforce the delusion. When you speak it, it does something to you, doesn't it? Gives you a bad feeling? It's a subconscious reminder of the negative effects you believe you'll suffer if you don't obey the whispers. Pathological repetition is a common part of the framework of a collective obsessional behaviour. Even madness has parameters."

  Hal frowned. Outside, thunder rolled, and she wished he would hurry up. He wanted to do it, she could tell, but he was scared. Couldn't waste one dose on her; couldn't give one to Zora without endangering her life. His only option was to take the first dose himself - she knew it and he knew it, and he really ought to just get on with it.

  "I take this and the voices go away?"

  "The poison is neutralised. Yes."

  Still he doubted. Still he turned the injector over and over in his hands, and on Joy's HUD, the seconds ticked away.

  "But you can't have both of them. I'm sorry about your wife, but the vials are mine and I need one for my brother. When I find him -"

  "Fuck your brother," he repeated, and once more his eyes sparkled with that amused knowing that she hated so much. "Fuck him and fuck all the sleepers."

  40. Joy

  "We're in position, Somerset. Need that force field down ASAP."

  "On my way," she panted under her breath, her HUD typing out a mangled version of the words. Speaking aloud while mentally typing helped, putting less of a strain on her steel-banded mind. Only children do that, Lucklaw had said, but never mind him and his multi-boxing nerd brain.

  Hal had hit the floor like a stunned ox not twenty seconds after injecting himself. He'd felt it coming, had realised his mistake and tried to grab her, but he'd been too slow by then. She'd left the backpack and most of its contents behind - she wouldn't need it where she was going, and perhaps Hal could make use of it. When she'd bent to pick up the force field disruptor, he'd given her this look... a look of shame, she thought. A look of how could I be so stupid, and she'd wanted to tell him that he wasn't stupid at all. Just desperate. A man who thought his last chance had slipped through his fingers.

  Perhaps it had, but she still held on tightly to hers.

  The shuttle airlock was sealed and when she pulled the red lever, nothing happened. Of course not.

  lcklw

  The message was garbled, but not too garbled for the corporal's stupid, lovely nerd brain to understand:

  "What's the problem, Somerset?"

  in shuttle airlock won't open pls hlp

  Lucklaw's sigh rushed through her ears like a desert wind. "Specifics. What type of shuttle? What type of airlock? What do you see?"

  She saw nothing. Oh, there was metal and cables and wiring, a red lever to pull and buttons to press, but these pieces were part of a puzzle she couldn't begin to understand. The shuttle was old, and the interior painted a pleasant robin's egg blue. She told Lucklaw this and could practically feel his contempt slither across the aether.

  "Right. Great. Do you see a panel anywhere? Near the lever most likely."

  She did, although she hadn't before and might never have without being told where to look. Thin grooves cut a square in otherwise smooth metal. She pushed to open it, revealing circuit boards and a whole mess of wiring.

  "Cut the wires."

  which 1, she asked, thinking red, remembering all those stupid movies Finn loved so much. There was almost always a bomb that the ammo-draped hero had to defuse, and wasn't it almost always the red wire?

  "All of them. And hurry up, we're getting fried out here."

  All of them didn't seem right, didn't seem delicate enough, but at least she didn't have to worry about accidentally setting off an explosion. Probably. Airlocks didn't explode, did they? Nagging anxiety urged her to ask Lucklaw, but she knew that it'd only net her another sigh.

  The knife sliced through the wires, and the airlock rolled open without so much as a groan. She squeezed through the gap before the mechanism changed its mind and pushed aside the shower curtain.

  Long tongues of blue lightning fizzed and sparked as they licked the force field. The rain was coming down hard, surrounding Nexus with frothing dark turmoil.

  90 seconds, she messaged the team. She'd scouted the quickest route between Hal's home and the generator hut a good two dozen times. Cut between the two passenger ships, run straight through the hole-riddled mining vessel, take the first alley on the left and climb over the fence - her best attempt had taken less than fifty seconds.

  45 seconds! her HUD declared triumphantly as she landed on the other side of the chain-link fence, falling to her knees in mud. Another aggravating thirty seconds passed trying to fit the key into the lock.

  ten seconds

  She placed the disruptor on top of the generator like Lucklaw had instructed her and pressed the buttons that needed pressing. A small green light flickered on and -

  - lightning struck first, with staggering force. Rain followed, hard and fast, spraying through holes in the hut's roof. Cassimer spoke over the comms, but though she recognised the warm tones of his voice, his words were lost in the reverberating cacophony.

  Didn't matter. She knew what to do. First, grab the disruptor. That was one of the few specific orders she'd received - do not leave Primaterre tech behind. She tucked it inside the collar of her suit, took a deep breath, and ran.

  Strong winds thrashed the floodwaters into choppy foam. Lichen slid from leaning shelters in a wet and veiny tangle. Debris pummelled the spaceport. She stumbled through alleys that crackled hot with electricity. White-blue sparks leaped between walls, quick like silverfish, winding through mesh and along corrugated steel.

  Above, a wind-tossed crane snapped. Wires as thick as thighs whipped through the air, tearing through shelters and shuttles. Screams went up from the square, though they were soon drowned out by thunder and the falling crane.

  She turned a corner and ran straight into a stream of spiders. Legs clutched at her hair, scratching her face, tugging at her jumpsuit. She cried out, swatting at the arachnids, twisting and turning through the dark and squishy torrent.

  She had reached the edge of Nexus. Cato had not wasted any time in encroaching. Mud poured in, forking between bubbling fulgurite. The buildings on the outskirts had gone, buried or blown away, and the blue shuttle she'd used as a landmark was nowhere to be seen. The Nexus she knew, the Nexus she had so carefully mapped, had, in an instant, been transformed into chaos.

  The ground rumbled as another crane toppled, blinking red lights cutting a lingering line across the sky. Every direction
seemed a death trap, but from the west came the heavy footfall of boots, approaching hard and fast, and she hurried towards the sound, hoping that there was only one person on Cato mad enough to run into the storm.

  When strong arms pulled her close, and a familiar tingle danced on her skin, she knew she'd been right to hope.

  ◆◆◆

  A door slammed shut. The darkness was so complete it felt solid, as if she could reach out and scoop up fistfuls of ink from the air. But titans moved in that darkness, and she wasn't alone anymore.

  "Somerset." Faint white light outlined Cassimer's transparent visor. His eyes were as dark as the void. Gauntleted fingers closed around her chin and gently turned her face. "Rhys."

  More lights switched on as the team followed their commander's lead. White-lit faces, ghostly in the dark. With relief, Joy counted five. At least whatever had delayed them hadn't caused deaths. Not even hers, remarkably.

  "My lungs," she said to the medic who was now fussing over her. A childish plaintiveness had crept into her voice. She hated it, but couldn't help it. The feeling of being taken care of made her want to regress, to no longer be a soldier but an innocent, trusting the doctor make everything better. "He kicked me pretty badly. I think something might be wrong with them."

  "Mild pleural effusion," Rhys said, daubing her face with something that both burned and chilled. "You'll be fine. Best cure would be a few days' bed rest, but there's a piece of advice that no one ever cares to hear. So a big old dose of wallet-draining drugs it is."

  "The man who did this." Cassimer's gaze was fixed on her, the look on his face suggesting that the damage was worse than she'd thought. Self-consciously, she touched a hand to her nose. Swollen, slightly crooked - broken? Her fingertips came away dark and slick with blood. "Is he alive?"

  She nodded and could practically see the commander make a note on his mental to-do list. "But incapacitated. I gave him a 25 mg dose of somamine."

  "He'll either wake from that in a few hours or not at all," Rhys said.

  "So no one's following you?"

  She shook her head, and Florey, standing by the door with his weapon drawn, relaxed.

  "All right. Force field should be back up in...?" Cassimer glanced over his shoulder at Lucklaw.

  "Ninety seconds, Commander."

  Or not at all, thought Joy.

  "Thirty-minute break to catch our breath and let things settle down outside. Lucklaw, take ten, then see what you can do to repair the damaged suits. Somerset, gear up."

  No armoured suit for her, but the mud-stained duffel bag the commander kicked towards her bulged with the second best. Hopewell took her behind the one dividing wall in the shed to help her dress. The battledress uniform fit well enough that somebody had to have taken the time to make adjustments. Pale stripes weaved pixellated patterns across the grey fabric.

  "Desert night camo," Hopewell said. "Don't be lulled into a false sense of security, though. Camo or no camo, to any half-decent scope or visual augment you'll glow bright as a firefly. There are pockets inside the elbows and knees - slide these pads into them for a little extra protection. They won't do a damn thing against the kind of resistance we're expecting, but I guess if you trip, they'll save Rhys from having to kiss your scratched knees better."

  "Speaking of scratches," Joy said, indicating the state of Hopewell's armour, "looks like you had a tough time getting here."

  The rest of the team had breathed a collective sigh of relief when Cassimer ordered thirty minutes rest. Rhys sat in a corner in a haze of smoke; Lucklaw had drawn his knees up to his face, and Joy was pretty sure he was snoring. Her eyes had acclimatised to the dim light enough that she could see what she hadn't before: the team had been through hell. It wasn't just the mud caking their equipment, or their scuffed and scored suits. It was the slump of their shoulders, the slightly distant look in Hopewell's eyes, and it was the way Cassimer paced the room.

  "Tough? Bloody dire. Only upside is I'm fairly sure I'm cured of my arachnophobia."

  "Do I want to know?" Joy asked, certain that she didn't. Cato had already provided her with enough nightmare material to last years.

  "Nope," Hopewell said. "You might be interested in hearing about that mining complex you warned us to stay away from, though. Turns out it's empty, boring and full of skeletons. There were signs of a quarantine - sealed doors, closed off levels. Lots of bodies, all inside the quarantine. Some kind of incident, maybe, but it had to have happened decades ago. We saw plenty of labs, so it could've been a chemical spill or something biological. Whatever it was, Rhys assured us it's long gone. So the moral of the story is, just because a place looks spooky, it doesn't mean it is. Now, put this on."

  This looked to Joy to be a bulletproof vest, which Hopewell confirmed.

  "Top of the line, at that, but in its standard state, it weighs over fifty kilos. It'd make a little twiglet like you as bullet-proof as a fortress, but also about as mobile. So we removed the pouches, took out most of the inner plating, jiggled the rest around for as much coverage as possible. And then Lucklaw - although the idea was mine - scavenged a few reactive plates from one of our spare suits and rigged them to the vest."

  The lieutenant turned the vest around to show neat rows of glossy, paper-thin rectangles, stitched together like lamellar armour. Joy touched one of the plates and felt the familiar electric tingle.

  "All highly experimental, so I recommend trying to avoid getting shot. Also, maybe don't touch the plates. They shouldn't turn your fingers into plasma, and I see that the theory holds up so far..." Hopewell laughed as Joy curled her fingers into her palm. "But like I said, it's experimental. And you can't make an experimental omelette without frying a few chickens."

  "I think I was happier as a recruit than a science experiment," Joy said and picked the next item of clothing from the duffel bag. A pair of socks. "And these? Stab-proof? Equipped with an EMP pulse in case I step on a mine?"

  "Don't even stop your feet from smelling, I'm afraid." Hopewell's breath misted the inside of her visor as she chuckled. "As you'd be all too aware of if you were the one sleeping in the bunk next to Florey's."

  Florey, sat with his back against the door, flipped her two fingers.

  "And last but not least..." Hopewell pulled a helmet from the duffel bag. It had no visor but otherwise looked identical to the lieutenant's own helmet. On its side, a pink and rifle-brandishing mermaid grinned wide. "It belonged to our comms specialist, Copenhagen. She had a thing for mermaids. She was a..." Hopewell's voice cracked, and she looked away for a few seconds. "She was as good as they come."

  Suddenly the helmet felt heavy in Joy's hands. She'd worn a dead woman's clothes before - was wearing a dead woman's clothes - and now she would wear the helmet of a beloved dead woman, the pink mermaid an indelible reminder of loss.

  "Don't worry about it," Hopewell said, as if she'd read Joy's mind. "Copenhagen wouldn't mind. Nothing she liked better than a good work in progress - and besides, it only seems right that our little mermaid's gear should be passed on to our sleeping beauty. Here..." Hopewell produced a few hairpins seemingly out of thin air and used them to pin Joy's hair back. "Good as new. Put that helmet on, and you'll be ready to face whatever this dump of a planet throws at us."

  "Thank you, Lieutenant Hopewell," Joy said.

  "Ah, don't bother with all that now." The pleased smile belied Hopewell's humility. "It's not got any of its bells and whistles. We had to refit it to work without a suit and had to do a bit of restorative work because, well - there's no real delicate way of putting this - Copenhagen died wearing it. There was a fair bit of damage, but not much of a mess if that helps. So it hasn't got a visor and no electronics, but it's still a big lump of metal and ballistic composite."

  The second she put the helmet on, Cassimer called for her and Hopewell to rejoin the others, and once more she found herself the centre of attention, as the commander demanded an explanation for the change of location.

  "Ab
out a day after I arrived, a RebEarth ship landed." She described the ship, its crew, and the man who captained it. A brief bit of speculation ensued, as guesses were made as to his identity, names she'd never heard bandied about as possibilities. The discussion was killed by Cassimer - doesn't matter, he said, they're all the fucking same - and Joy glanced at Rhys, in whose eyes she saw her own concern reflected.

  "There's one more thing," she said. "Andrew Scarsdale is alive."

  41. Cassimer

  "Impossible." Lucklaw yawned, rubbing his face. "Even if he survived the Ever Onward, the radiation would've killed him. We had to take anti-rad shots and we were underground by the time it blew."

  "The radiation did get him, but -"

  "But the Ereshkigal suit is keeping him alive," Cassimer said. "I've seen it before. I've seen men rotting from the inside out, still on their feet, still doing their duty even as they smell their own flesh decomposing." Brave men. Proud men. Oh, some of them had cried before the end and all of them had screamed, but none of them had ever opened their visors in the field to rub their eyes like a child.

  He clenched his fists to quench the unreasonable anger. Lucklaw was tired, they all were, and for the time being, they were secure. It wasn't really the corporal's lax attitude that made Cassimer's skin crawl with heat, and it wasn't really the sight of him yawning that made all air and light go out of the room.

  Cato was to blame, not Lucklaw. A corruption lurked underneath its dust, he could feel it, but just a hint - as if they'd only scratched the surface. Dig deeper, the planet had seemed to say when he and the team had trudged through flooded sewers, go deeper. Come find me. He could swear he'd practically heard the walls whisper the challenge. It was just his imagination seizing on the sound of rushing water and turning it into something sinister, but it had given his thoughts claws and they had not stopped scratching since.

  Because they were going to go deeper. The hint of corruption would become a stench and the shadows would come alive around them. That prediction he drew not from his imagination, but from instinct and experience, and he could tell that Florey, at least, anticipated the same.