Iron Truth

by S. A. Tholin

  Everything was. Nobody had walked these halls in years, perhaps decades. Odd. Even if the locals didn't have access, the doors were glass, no match for a determined man with a good supply of rocks. The locals should want to enter, for the salvage, or for a rest. So why didn't they?

  "Security system's mine," Lucklaw said, squaring his shoulders. "Not much in the way of automated defences. Seems they were relying on actual guards to respond to alerts. Plenty of security cameras, but I've got scripts set up to take care of them as we go."

  "Floor plan?" he asked, even though he could see the stairs marked SUBLEVEL and instinctively knew that down was where they'd have to go. Down from the sky; down from the mountains; down through Nexus; deep down to black glass and viscous shadow, and still that wasn't deep enough. At what depth had the miners of Xanthe struck the vein that had undone a galaxy? Without a doubt, that was how deep he'd be leading his team; all the way down into Cato's worm-eaten heart.

  ◆◆◆

  The door to the first sublevel was locked, but Lucklaw took one look at it and the red light on its keypad changed from red to green.

  "Commander?" Hopewell, one hand on the door handle, looked to Cassimer for the go-ahead. He nodded, and the team took up defensive positions as Hopewell pushed the door open.

  The corridor ahead was clear, but it was also clean. Not a speck of dust stirred as the team moved inside. A sign above the door they'd entered through marked it as a fire exit. At a junction up ahead, three more signs indicated three directions: PSYCHOPHARMACOLOGY, NEUROPHYSIOLOGY and the less intimidating CAFETERIA.

  "Pretty sophisticated stuff," Rhys said, staring up at the signs. It was good to see the medic's interest for once piqued by a topic befitting his station.

  "It might not seem like it to you, but the h-chip was incredibly advanced at the time, and that was only one of their many products. My brother used to say: Hierochloe isn't just our future, Joy - they're everyone's future! Guess he was wrong, since you've not heard of them."

  "Much was lost in the war," Cassimer said, thinking: innocence; hope; tranquillity - but not Joy, no, not you.

  "Does it matter?" Hopewell's fingers tapped an impatient beat on her rifle. "It's all ancient history. It's not like this Hiero-whatever is still up and running."

  "Someone's here doing something, though. The power usage is through the roof. And..." Lucklaw hesitated. "And I think I'm going to need to be careful. The systems aren't just being monitored, but actively used. One slip up and they'll know we're here."

  "Hopewell, Florey, secure the door to the stairwell and sweep the west wing. Lucklaw, Rhys, take the east. Somerset, you're with me." The weakest link joined with the strongest. Sensible, not selfish. "Nice and quiet. Avoid confrontation if possible."

  North was PSYCHOPHARMACOLOGY, and the way to loading bay's lower level. The locals were still in there, making plenty of noise, and as he and Joy drew closer to the source, he began to make out voices, words, sometimes even complete sentences.

  go home I want to go home

  is it done

  never never never

  yes soon and then we die

  watch your feet

  they taste better cooked

  As incoherent as they were insane. Without augments, Joy wouldn't be able to hear what they were saying, but he could tell that the sound of their voices disturbed her. Every yelled syllable made her twitch, every silence had her anticipating the next shout. Still, her hands were steady around her gun, and every door he opened, she braved without hesitation.

  Most of the rooms were brightly furnished, with pastel sofas, stacks of magazines, bold-patterned rugs and children's toys. An effort had been made to make the rooms pleasant and homely, but no amount of landscape paintings or cutesy animal posters could scrub the clinical feel from the stainless steel walls. These were not homes or safe spaces, they were illusions and mockeries; impure facades.

  "Hmm. I never knew a cat poster could look sinister, but there you go."

  "There's something wrong about all of this," he said, looking around the room. It was more furnished than the previous, with a large mirror stretched across one wall, and a chessboard set up mid-game.

  "Oh, I don't think it's as bad as all that. These rooms will have been used for psychological evaluations and observations. As part of the Ever Onward application process, I had to go in for psych eval in a room much like this. They even had the same sofa - looks cosy, right, but it's actually really uncomfortable. To throw the interviewee off, I think - easier to get to the truth of a person if they're feeling off-balance. Certainly worked on me; I'm pretty sure I came this close to being disqualified."

  "I doubt that."

  "It was mostly because of the questions about my job. The company I worked for at the time didn't operate under the same code of ethics as Hierochloe. Corruption, pollution, animal abuse... I don't know where they got their information, but the Hierochloe interviewers had all sorts of tales to tell. The corruption I'd heard rumours about, and I knew the factory workers were disgruntled, but the rest was news to me. They showed pictures - horrible pictures of rabbits, cats and monkeys - and it all looked authentic enough, but I had friends in Zoology. I just couldn't believe that, according to these people, three floors above my laboratory my best friend Elodie was torturing rabbits to death. Elodie loved animals!"

  "They were trying to confuse you, to gauge your reaction. The truth was irrelevant."

  "Not to me. When I went to work the next day, it was all I could think about, and when I was accepted and had to say goodbye to Elodie, I didn't know whether I was saying goodbye to my friend or to a woman who would wake up in the morning and feed her cats, only to go to work to inject another cat with polonium-210. I thought I knew her. Having a truth like that - a truth you never questioned - ripped away... It's sickening."

  "You're clear of mind, Joy. I'm certain that what you saw was the truth."

  She smiled. "I appreciate the vote of confidence, Commander, but you didn't know me then; the Joy I was on Mars. Not so long ago for me - less than a year - but it might as well have been a century. I've learned so much since; specifically, how very little I know. The old Joy, who lived in the safety of her parents' old apartment, who experienced the outside world mostly through screens, she thought she knew it all. She could tell right from wrong, good from evil, justice from injustice. The privilege of security allowed her the luxury of moral superiority. You could've put any issue to her, any question, and she could've given you a snap judgment. He's evil and she's good, easy as that, and people who perform experiments on animals? Evil, black-hearted, rotten to the core. And maybe that's true - maybe Elodie was that, and not who I thought - but maybe she was both. Maybe she was a good person who did what she believed was necessary. If killing one animal will save the lives of tens of thousands, is that evil?"

  "It depends," he said, uncomfortable with the direction of the conversation.

  "On what? I've struggled with that, and the answer I've come up with is less than satisfying. It depends on why the person in question is doing it - which means that most of the time, you'll never truly know. I killed Duncan and I feel awful about that, or am I just saying that? Am I just playing a part? How could you ever know, Commander?"

  "I do know. I..." A strand of hair, glowing gold on cream skin, had slipped from her braids, and he brushed it from her cheek. Inappropriate, but he couldn't help it. Didn't want to help it. Wanted just a moment of himself before he was gone. "I can feel you. Your light, your soul, your -"

  "Rhythm?" she suggested and he nodded, letting his fingers run down her cheek; the length of her neck. Yes, rhythm; that was a good word for what he felt. The song of her in his blood.

  "I know you too, Commander." Her pupils were large and dark and around them, golden flecks joined to form a solid circle. "That's what didn't make sense to me. That's what made me ask these questions. I've seen you hurt people, kill people, do terrible things, and as far as old Joy is conc
erned, that makes you evil. A bad person. But that's not who I see when I look at you; that's not what I feel. Perhaps, I thought then, that doesn't mean you're not bad, it just means I'm not good."

  "And what do you think now?" He could hardly believe he'd asked. He knew who he was, and there could be no pleasant answer to such a question.

  "I think it doesn't matter. I think I love you, Constant."

  No pleasant answer. How wrong he'd been, how very wrong; so wrong that he felt what she had described - as though a truth had been ripped from him. A truth about himself and the trajectory of his life, undone by words, and he did feel sick. Unable to breathe, unable to hear over the deafening roar of rushing blood, and on his skin, a fever burned. His hand nestled in her hair, pulling her close to his chest, but he wanted her closer, so much closer, and he made to remove his helmet.

  "No."

  To his surprise, she stopped him.

  "It's not safe. They showed me after the interview; maybe as part of the evaluation, to see how I'd react." She turned and rapped her knuckles against silvery glass. "A one-way mirror."

  "Back away."

  His reflection grew larger and less like himself. It wore his armour and it carried his Morrigan, but the thing in the mirror looked like it would relish in terrible deeds, and if he opened his visor, the mirror would show not eyes, but writhing worms. It was the thing he would’ve become if the demons had taken him on the Hecate.

  Unless they'd purposefully let him go. Unless the thing in the mirror was one of them, laughing behind its visor. Did they watch from debris fields and black holes, from the long-dark shadows of setting suns? Watching and laughing, waiting for the punch line to a joke twenty years in the making. Waiting for the painful twist.

  Control drowned in a flood of wild panic. He smashed his fist through the glass, but that only turned the big joke into a thousand glittering, laughing pieces. They were everywhere, they were -

  No. Deep breath. Illusion and corruption could only be fought with purity. Awareness, perception, a focus on the real and the true.

  "Clear." Joy shone her flashlight into the small room on the other side. A desk, covered in silver shards, and two chairs. "If anybody had been in there, I'm pretty sure you would've scared them to death. Made me jump, anyway – hope nobody else heard the noise."

  No questions from the team. No change in the conversations between the locals. Nothing new on his sensors. The thick walls and padded doors had served their purpose.

  "We're good," he said, and then he saw the blood on her face and the glass fragments dusting her shoulders. "Apologies, I didn't mean... I didn't think."

  "Sorry?" She touched her hand to her face. "Oh – that wasn't you. Just that stupid nosebleed I can't seem to shake. Rhys says it's nothing to worry about."

  Yes, and Rhys had also said he had it under control.

  ◆◆◆

  One of the observation rooms was not like the others. Yellow tape crisscrossed the door, stretching across its bowed and bent frame. Inside, dark spatters formed constellations on the ceiling and ran down the walls in dried rivulets. The one-way mirror was broken, a pair of bloody footprints on the ledge where someone had climbed through. The furniture was in disarray, the posters torn, the magazines swelled with blood and decayed into clumps. Flakes of dried blood whirled like rust motes in the light of his suit.

  "Huh." Joy turned her own light on the room. "I guess my psych evaluation could've gone worse after all."

  Her casual tone surprised him, but he supposed old blood and old death held few terrors for her anymore. The locals frightened her, but this was history and just another piece of the puzzle.

  "What do you think happened?"

  "Couldn't say." As much a truth as it was a lie. The sofa cushions had been ripped open, the stuffing pulled out and strewn across the room, the fabric torn into long and fraying strips. Not one object remained intact, every decoration and piece of furniture rent or smashed or crushed. Not the work of a patient suffering a psychotic episode, but what happened when a possessed vessel ran out of flesh to defile.

  He shut the door firmly and shoved his thoughts deep into the ash. They left the room of horrors an unsolved mystery and continued their sweep of the northern wing. Observation rooms gave way to laboratories which in turn gave way to supply closets, and then the walls were no longer painted pastel but left a glossy stainless steel.

  Less than thirty metres to the loading bay. The locals' voices were clear even to an unaugmented ear now, and Joy needed no reminder to stay behind him.

  Ten metres. He ordered Joy to stand guard and linked his visual feed to her tablet. Better to feed her curiosity than her imagination.

  The corridor opened up onto a brightly-lit mezzanine. As his armour adjusted to the environment, bleaching to plastic-white, he moved towards the edge, quiet and low.

  Fifty-three locals according to sensors, fifty-three human-shaped fires burning on his HUD. Easy enough to reduce to none with one or two of the grenades he carried, but that wasn't the mission. Tread softly, Bastion had requested. I think it doesn't matter, Joy had said, but he knew in his heart that it did. She had come to understand necessity, but she also believed compassion and mercy to be necessities.

  A beautiful thought, but in this case, death would be a mercy.

  Fifty-three locals carried supplies and materials from carts to a large freight elevator. Their overalls were tidy and their faces clean, but their shoulders twitched and their heads jerked. The conversations weren't conversations at all, but long and rambling monologues.

  A handful of heavily armed locals stood watch while the others worked. One of the guards suddenly laughed, triumphant and deliriously happy. He drew his gun and pressed it to his own temple.

  "I can do it!" he shouted.

  The other locals surged forward as one, grabbing at the guard's arm, clawing at his clothes and limbs. A shot rang out, sparking as it ricocheted off the ceiling, but when the crowd parted, the guard was still alive.

  He screamed as his gun was wrenched from him, cried as he stumbled from his post to join the labourers. By the time another had taken his place among the guards, he was lifting a crate onto the elevator. Tears streamed down his face, but his vacant eyes had forgotten why.

  It was not a question of what was good and what was evil; a disease thrived here, and it should be purged. Whatever poison had touched these people had made ruins of their souls, and Cassimer could think of no worse fate.

  He shared his visual feed with the rest of the team.

  "Demonic possession?"

  "No. This is different. Something else."

  "I still like the poison theory," Rhys said. "You'd be surprised at how psychotropics can affect the human mind."

  "But what are they doing? Look at those crates - there's clothing, food, weapons - better than anything we've seen the locals use."

  "They kind of remind me of Supply. You know, always running around stacking crates filled with equipment they could only dream of. Sure, supply officers don't get shot at quite so often as we do, but it seems a miserable existence to me, lugging around other people's luxuries all day long."

  "I think you've got a skewed view of Supply; not to mention an unhealthy obsession with material possessions," Florey said.

  "Oh blah blah blah," Hopewell responded.

  Cassimer muted the channel. His HUD continued to transcribe the team's conversation, but at least he didn't have to listen to it. He needed silence to think about Hopewell's words, needed a moment to understand why his stomach churned with acid.

  A supply train. Yes, it had to be. RebEarth were the obvious suspects - who else would be raising an army on the outskirts of galactic civilisation? But none of the RebEarth men they'd encountered had shown any interest in Cato beyond using it as a temporary hideout. Andrew Scarsdale might've known better than to mention an underground army, but he would've given it away somehow - a knowing smile, a sardonic comment, a gloating glint in his eye.<
br />
  But if not RebEarth, then who? The locals numbered less than three-thousand according to Primaterre intel, and from what he had seen, he believed it to be accurate. Even taking the underground population into account, the planet wasn't capable of supporting a larger population.

  Three thousand men and women.

  And the ten thousand from the Ever Onward.

  And the thirty thousand gone missing with the Andromache.

  An army of forty thousand, but under what banner would such a company fight, and for what cause?

  Ten thousand cryo tubes opening to spew forth a horde of the possessed.

  No. That was something his imagination had cooked up onboard the Ever Onward, untrue and irrational. The demons did not raise armies; they seized armies. They needed no weapons and no supplies, because their soldiers were not meant to live. They killed until they died, and then the corruption leapt to the next, and the next, and the next, until nothing was left but the laughing darkness.

  Joy waited where he'd left her. Hands too-tight around her gun, eyes wide and bright. She was the sunrise after a long winter's night, but her warmth, his comfort, was now a cause for concern.

  Two turns from the rendezvous, he took her by the arm. Too clumsy, too rough, but words burned inside his head, and he could no longer keep them to himself.

  "I need to ask you a favour."

  "Anything, Commander."

  He didn't need to request the code from his primer. An eighty-six-character-long string of letters and numbers flowed from his memory to her. She winced as the message was delivered, fresh blood welling from her nose. He wiped it away, sorry to cause harm, but not sorry for trying to prevent worse.

  "Save it to your primer, but keep it available without delay."

  "What is it?"

  "My kill switch."

  "Cassimer, no." She frowned.

  "If I'm possessed, it may be your only chance to stop me."

  "You won't be. You're stronger than any demon, Cassimer; I know you are."

  "Maybe. Maybe not. Regardless, it's a risk that cannot be ignored."