by S. A. Tholin
Joy had been the light to see him through the dark tunnels, the light that made everything so clear. But then he'd caught her running through the rain, and he'd almost buckled at the knees. Had wanted to tear his helmet off and drop his gun and surrender on the spot. No more, he'd thought, no more duty or honour or responsibility. Only Joy.
And then he'd seen her face - what someone had done to her face - and the white flag of capitulation had promptly rolled itself up and disappeared. Stims rushed hot through his veins, demanding action, demanding retribution, sparking his nerves awake and flooding his muscles with energy.
A violent rage, but below its surface ran the current of a quiet and true anger. It wanted vengeance too, wanted badly to hurt the man who'd hurt her - but was cold and wise enough to know that ultimately, Cassimer was that man.
"I've seen cataphracts with radiation sickness last weeks longer than they would've liked to," he said flatly. Joy was looking at him, and if he said another word he was afraid that he'd say it all. All those things he'd never talked about; all those things he'd seen.
Galatea had been the worst. The Primaterre had faced fierce resistance, and by the time the cataphracts were deployed, the resistance had been reduced in number but increased in sheer viciousness. His detachment had been tasked with purging the capital city, as that was where Bastion had expected to need its most elite units.
Bastion had been wrong. The resistance had retreated into the countryside, to the thick-vined jungles and irradiated swamps where they could use the home ground to their advantage and wield nature as a weapon. Many cataphracts had been lost in the treacherous swamps. Ten hours of in-suit oxygen must've felt like an eternity to the men who'd sunk irretrievably into the murk. They could've used their kill switches, but rumour had it no one had. Hope had kept them alive until it hadn't.
They were still down there, he supposed. The radiation and depth of the swamps would've made recovering them as difficult as it was pointless. Scores of men and women, encased in their mobile fortresses, like flies in amber.
Cassimer's detachment, methodically moving through the blazing remains of the capital, hadn't had to deal with swamps or forests. The resistance had been clever, though, digging hundreds of miles of tunnels and trenches. Weeks would go by where he'd see nothing but damp earth, veined with sewage pipes and wormholes. Every now and then, his team would run into enemy fighters and there'd be a minute, maybe two, of blessedly simple gunfire. But most of the time, the resistance had kept their distance. Traps and ambushes had been their strategy, and if the Primaterre hadn't vastly outnumbered them, perhaps the Galateans might've stood a chance.
Their nastiest trick had been diverting rivers into the tunnels. It would start as a tremor in the ground, quickly becoming a quake as dirt and rocks fell from the tunnel ceiling. Then the walls would collapse in a gush of irradiated river-water. Soldiers were displaced, some swept several miles from the rest of their unit. Soldiers were buried, and not all could be recovered. Cassimer had dug himself out twice, pushing through sludge where pale-bodied worms wriggled and writhed. Like the living dead, his thoughts had screamed, but they'd been mistaken - the living dead were the cataphracts whose suits failed or cracked.
A captain in his company... Cassimer wished he'd forgotten the captain's name, because if he could forget the name, perhaps he could forget the face, but there it was, rising unwelcome from the ashes: de Bracy.
Captain de Bracy preferred gallons of coffee to stims and watched adult cartoons when he thought nobody was paying attention, but towards the end, he'd forgotten everything but how to point, shoot and scream. Cassimer had received a message from the captain once - a long string of random letters and numbers ending in a torrent of exclamation marks. Accidental nonsense, said the other soldiers when he showed them, but he thought it was how pain was spelled when you'd forgotten your letters.
The company commander had refused to activate de Bracy's kill switch because he can still tell friend from foe and I'm not losing another man because the rest of you are feeling precious. But when de Bracy ran out of ammunition, the commander was two hours away, and Cassimer would never forget how the men - him, Dogood, Carsten and three or four others - hadn't even had to look at one another to know what they needed to do.
Dogood had opened with a stun grenade. While de Bracy was reeling, they'd pinned him to the ground and even though there was half a dozen of them, all in cataphract armour, they hadn't been enough. Cassimer had emptied his rifle into de Bracy's chin, had heard his neck snap, and still de Bracy had fought.
Limb by limb, they'd cracked him open. Cut and pushed and wrenched until pieces of the captain came seeping out, colour as dark as the coffee he'd loved so much. Radiation wasn't the only contaminant to have slipped into his suit, and the bacteria and river parasites had made a feast of his body. When they tried to lift him out, his belly - soft and distended - had split open to reveal a chittering colony of pink-shelled things.
Carsten had turned heel and run then. De Bracy... de Bracy had still lived, eyes rolling and rolling in their sockets, tongueless mouth spilling mush over his lips. His fingers had moved to squeeze triggers that weren't there. They'd tried to pull his head loose, but the suit had protested and tightened its grip, and in the end, they'd cut off the front of his skull -
(Who did that? Did I do it? The memory was a blur, and it could've been anyone of them. Might as well have been him. But please let it have been someone else.)
- and yanked the augments right out of his brain.
When the company commander had returned hours later, de Bracy and his suit had been a pile of burning slag. They'd expected reprimands, or worse, but the commander hadn't said a word.
Cassimer hadn't thought of de Bracy in years. He'd buried those memories so deep in the ash that even the journey to Nexus, trekking through flooding tunnels, hadn't caused a single stir.
Not until he saw Joy again. He watched her speak, listened to her explain where the RebEarthers were encamped and how many there were, and while the part of his brain that was always in mission mode, calculating risks and needs, took note of it all, the rest of him was distracted by thoughts of her.
Some of what he felt was obvious. A strand of copper hair brushed her neck and made him hot with the memory of how soft her skin was; a simple emotion, requiring no further analysis. Then there was embarrassment, consternation, frustration; all simple, even though they crawled in the ash like a mess of worms.
But wanting to tell her about de Bracy was something he couldn't wrap his head around. Countless doctors and psychiatrists had tried to pry these thoughts and memories from him, and he'd given them only the bare minimum necessary to clear him for duty.
Joy was the last person he should want to tell, but maybe it was because she understood what it was to go to sleep in one world and wake up in another. Maybe it was because her light seemed bright enough for the both of them. Maybe it was just because she wasn't a doctor or a psychiatrist.
Or maybe he wanted her to have the truth of him. If it made her turn from him, then so be it, but if it didn't - if he could let out the scratching thoughts and be still in her light - that if was as fragile as a moth's wing, and he dared not dwell on it.
"...so if one of the components of the red lichen is a psychoactive fungus like ergot, that'd go a long way to explaining the locals' behaviour."
"Interesting theory," Rhys said.
"I first had the idea when I found an abandoned shack, table set with plates half-full of food as though the people living there had got up and left mid-meal. It reminded me of an ancient ship called the Mary Celeste -"
"The Mary Celeste's crew is unlikely to have suffered ergot poisoning. The crew of the Gratia Dei recovered the food supplies and ate them without ill effects. For the ergot theory to hold water, you'd have to accept that only one sack of grain was contaminated, and that the crew finished it before disappearing." Cassimer had spoken without thinking, and he stopped abruptly wh
en he noticed the team's stares and Joy's smile. At once, he regretted saying too much and too little.
"That aside, ergot poisoning is very much a real thing," Rhys said. "Between the suits and the habitat, we ought to be in the clear, but I'll run a few tests regardless. Lucklaw, since your visor's been open the past fifteen minutes, how about you let me take a sample of your blood?"
Lucklaw paled and snapped his visor shut. "Wouldn't it affect her first?"
"I've already got plenty of blood samples from Somerset."
"It's a legitimate question." Cassimer could see the concern on Joy's face and wanted to help put it to rest. "Somerset's levels of exposure far exceed ours."
Rhys understood and gave Joy a reassuring pat on the shoulder. "Don't worry, princess. Between the lung reconstruction and the basic Primaterre induction package, you've got enough antimicrobials in your bloodstream to kill anything that doesn't belong. Likewise, the commander and Florey have borderline superhuman immune systems, and Hopewell is just smart enough to keep her lid nice and tight."
"Just smart enough," Hopewell agreed. "That's me all right."
"What about you?" Joy asked, before timidly adding: "If you don't mind my asking, sir. I've seen you with your visor open plenty."
"I've been a Primaterre combat medic for nearly thirty years now. That's three decades of traumatic injuries and exotic diseases, interspersed with long periods of crushing boredom, and near enough unlimited access to the best drugs in the universe. Let's just say that there are times when you're sitting on your ass on some forsaken rock of an outpost, and you start scrolling through your medicine cabinet and get to wondering what'll happen if you mix a pinch of somamine with a dash of kinetizam..."
"Captain."
"Apologies, Commander," Rhys said in a far too merry tone. "I'll try not to corrupt our young recruit's mind any further. Doubt she's an innocent, though - are you, Somerset? I know what the lab assistants in MedRes get up to after hours and I can't imagine botany labs are any different. Who needs pharmaceuticals when you can grow your own -"
"Captain." This time he followed up the warning with a written reprimand; a quick line of red text attaching itself indelibly to the medic's record.
Rhys countered swiftly. A request to administer a low dose of sedative flashed on Cassimer's HUD, only to be immediately authorised via a team safety order.
A soft veil descended to swaddle restless muscles and grinding thoughts. He stopped pacing, relaxed his fists and let the white wave wash over him. It took his fears, took his anger, swept away even his sense of violation. Then Joy said something about botany labs being nothing like that -
"...but we were working on pineapples mainly, and I suppose there's only so much fun to be had with pineapples..."
- and he found that her voice rang less clear than usual, that her smile had lost some of its brightness. Anger punched through the fog, the seething ember in his heart flaring. Rhys had the authority to do this to him, to dull his emotions and smooth out his thoughts, but he shouldn't have that right. No one should. He'd told Joy that he wanted to be a person, but it was more than that. He wanted to be free.
From the moment he'd woken up to the sounds of screaming on the Hecate, neither his body nor his mind had ever truly been his own again. Demons, doctors, psychiatrists, public relations; the hacks that had taken his hell and turned it into entertainment; even the people who'd gone to see the movie. When they didn't force themselves on him, they helped themselves to him.
Reduce the dose.
Rhys ignored the request and the seething thing leapt and hopped, wanting him to escalate - but that would be the wrong move. He forced himself to take a deep breath, reminding himself of who he was (in command, of yourself especially) and of who Rhys was. An interfering, hardnosed old bastard who stretched the odd rule and smoked far too much, but always had the team's well-being in mind.
If he wanted to control his own body again, he'd have to prove to Rhys that he was capable.
"Lucklaw, any success with the suits?"
As Florey had predicted, the sewers under the old mining complex had flooded quickly, forcing the team to swim through water so cloudy that their suit lights had barely been able to penetrate it. It'd been like swimming through smog, albeit smog swirling with excrement and bone. Lucklaw's suit, which was the basic model (apparently Admiral Lucklaw had bought her son his position, but had declined to buy him equipment), had been the first one to start acting up. Visor display glitches, problems with air flow and temperature, as well as malfunctioning reactive plates and APF. Only two of their armour's many layers of defence, but the afflicted soldiers were bound to feel naked without them. Cassimer knew he would.
The merits he'd earned back when trading in his heavily modded Helreginn suit a few years back had been more than enough to buy him the absolute best available to the banneretcy. He replaced pieces every couple of months, partly because he liked to keep up to date and partly because what else did he have to spend merits on? No beach house in his future.
"Must be doing something right," Rhys said. "Mine's stopped sparking."
"Yeah, because the reactive plates have shut down completely." Lucklaw's face was pale and drawn, but his eyes sparked with a newfound determination that netted him Cassimer's approval.
"Well, shit." Rhys patted the pouches on his belt. "And to top it all off, I'm out of smokes."
"Not much I can do. Haven't got the tools or materials."
"Don't worry about it, kid. We're just going to have to try extra hard not to get shot."
"I've got the cure for that, doc. It's called 'shoot first'." Hopewell patted her assault rifle and grinned, the light inside her visor casting ghoulish shadows on her face.
"Optimal outcome is no shooting whatsoever," Cassimer reminded the team. "Florey, you all set?"
"Yes, Commander." The gunner stood, holstering the gun he'd been cleaning. His suit was the only one to rival Cassimer's own, carefully pieced together over a twenty-five-year military career. Cassimer knew little about Florey's private life, save for the fact that he had a wife and many children - but the man had a mind for sound investment.
"Scout our route and take up position at the entry point. We move when it's clear."
Florey nodded and lifted the bar from the door. A honey-comb pattern of light flickered on the surface of his armour as it adjusted to match the dark outside.
"Commander. May I have a word?" Joy's injuries were almost healed. The swelling had gone, only a faint redness remaining on her cheek. Underneath the brim of the too-large helmet, her eyes were wide and dark, and she suddenly looked very young. "In private?"
No. That's what he should say, but outside, there were eighty RebEarth men seeking blood, and she didn't have even a malfunctioning suit; she had nothing and she was everything.
"Keep it brief." He stepped behind the shack's partition wall. Not exactly private, but he trusted his team not to eavesdrop.
"Scarsdale mentioned your name."
"I'm not surprised. What did he say?" In truth, Cassimer couldn't care less what Scarsdale had to say, but the sound of Joy's voice cut through the white veil. Keep talking, he wanted to say, keep talking until the world becomes sharp-edged and true.
"Before I tell you, I'd like to know what happened on the Ever Onward."
"You know what happened."
"The bullet-point version, sure. But there's more, isn't there? I heard what Scarsdale did to you, and I saw the radiographs."
"It's all in my official report." He might've left it at that, if it weren't for the sudden realisation that perhaps she wanted to hear his voice, too. That maybe this wasn't about the Ever Onward or Scarsdale at all. "We were trapped on the bridge. Rhys and Lucklaw escaped through the floor with you, but to buy time, I stayed behind. When the RebEarthers breached, I had no choice but to surrender."
"Surrender? But you must've known they'd hurt you. Kill you."
"I had enough of a sense of Scarsdale to k
now that he'd want to talk. Figured I could give the team a head start at least. After that..." He shrugged. "The surrender was never genuine. Wishful thinking on their end to believe it for even a second. I would've done what I could to survive. I did."
"So noble sacrifice wasn't the plan?"
"No." Yes. Maybe. He frowned, uncertain. "Look, Somerset, we haven't got long - what's this about? What did Scarsdale say?"
"He called you insane. Said you had a..." She hesitated, biting her lip. "A bad attitude. And he called you a hero."
Hero. No. Heroics were for the version of him who lived on Bastion's glossy recruitment posters, for the hollow mockery that blasted its way through demon hordes in The Hero of the Hecate. "He's wrong."
"Good," she said.
"Good?"
"Yeah, because Scarsdale has plans for you. He intends to capture you, torture you and cut your head off on a live stream broadcast through every Cascade in the galaxy. And Scarsdale, he may be dying, he may be little more than a talking corpse, but I just know that if you try to be a hero, he's going to get what he wants. And that can't happen, all right? Please, Commander. Please be careful."
Watch your six. Be on guard. Stay alert. Observe all necessary precautions. All familiar variants on the theme. Please be careful? That was new. That was nice.
"I will," he said, wanting to believe that he'd keep that promise.
◆◆◆
Whether by ergot poisoning or isolation madness, Nexus was dying. There was a hollowness to the spaceport, through which a seam of corruption crept. Freshets of water spewed from overflowing pipes and walls gave way, sliding into the mud at odd angles. Red lichen stretched like tissue across alleys.
Nexus was dying and it was not a graceful death. It was dying like Andrew Scarsdale would, like Captain de Bracy had. Rotting and screaming inside a metal husk, aware but uncomprehending.
It disgusted him. Bastion had implied that Cato might one day be considered for annexation, but he knew now that he'd recommend against it. Better to let it die, to let it fade into history as a footnote, and let the bones of its people rest among its dunes.
