Iron Truth

by S. A. Tholin

  FLOREY: If he is Tower, we're in over our heads.

  CASSIMER: Tower is irrelevant. We take our orders from Bastion.

  "What is Tower?" she whispered to Rhys.

  "Intelligence branch. Hopewell's got the right of it; shadowy and mysterious. Not the sort of people you want to get mixed up with." Rhys shook his head. "Earth have mercy. If we're pawns in some game between Bastion and Tower, you might end up wishing you'd stayed in the tunnels."

  If it was a game, Cassimer seemed more than willing to escalate it to war. He repeated his demand for Elkhart's surrender, and Elkhart once more refused to comply, insisting that Tower orders countermanded Bastion orders.

  "We have the situation well in hand, and our operation is proceeding according to plan. Your assistance is not required, nor is the Andromache in need of recovery. Go home, Commander Cassimer, and tell Bastion to keep out of Tower business." Elkhart's hair had fallen into his eyes and as he pushed it aside, the motion triggered another memory. Joy knew that soft and slim-fingered hand. The bones of her wrist remembered the curve of his thumb, held there just a touch too long; her cheeks remembered the warm glow of a blush.

  HOPEWELL: So what, Copenhagen and Abergavenny died because Bastion and Tower can't communicate? This is - apologies Commander - BULLSHIT

  CASSIMER: Agreed.

  "We have orders to secure or destroy the Andromache. You have one final chance to surrender." Cassimer needed say no more. Florey shrugged Plan B from his shoulder and set it down on the bridge.

  Operations Officer Elkhart viewed the box with faint amusement.

  "Heads as hard as your shells, I take it. Perhaps we can compromise."

  "I'm listening," said Cassimer, a stern for now implied.

  "You may board the Andromache and investigate. Once satisfied that everything is in order, you will leave and allow our operation to proceed."

  "Acceptable." Cassimer lowered his rifle. "If you surrender yourself into my team's care."

  Elkhart smiled - friendly, warm, trustworthy - and the dimples in his cheeks unlocked further sensory detail. The sound of a thousand shuffling feet, a chill in the air, thin cotton clinging to her skin. The memory refused to take solid shape, but it was enough for Joy to know that something was wrong. Enough to know that she couldn't allow Cassimer to enter the Andromache.

  "I know you, don't I?" The thin echo of her voice bounced between vitreous walls. She made to approach the bridge, but Rhys held her back, whispering in her ear to be quiet, to let the commander handle this.

  Elkhart looked at her and in his eyes she saw recognition. "I wouldn't have thought so," he said, and what was in his eyes was not in his voice. He sounded truthful and confused.

  "Somerset -" Cassimer began, but Elkhart smiled again and oh, she knew that smile, knew that man. Didn't know his name, but knew his nature - he was a thief. A thief in the doorway of a stolen ship, in the light of stolen cryo pods; a thief, intending to steal again. Unlike the others, she wasn't afraid of his uniform or his rank. If Tower had something to do with Finn's disappearance, then she'd tear it down, brick by brick.

  "He's a liar, Commander. You can't trust him."

  "Of course we can't," Rhys muttered. "He's Tower. Lying is what they do."

  "Cassimer, please." She had to make him understand that she was speaking to the man and not the commander. Had to make him see that she feared for him, not for the mission. "I'm sure I've met this man before."

  "Most peculiar." Elkhart frowned, regarding her with curiosity. "Random chance or subconscious choice? You are right; I see it now. A passing encounter; two strangers brushing past each other. A mere moment of connection and here we are, a century later, remembering it. I had forgotten the poetry of the ephemeral."

  HOPEWELL: What the f**k is he on about

  "The ship is almost full." Elkhart's voice changed as he spoke. Became lighter, younger, more casual. The cut-glass pronunciation began to lose its edges, fattening vowels sliding between dropped consonants.

  "How many more? I've been up since 4.30. There are no windows and I'm missing the last sunrise. Sad. God, some of these people smell. At least there are no more children to process. Can't believe they let so many onboard in the first place; I think all that screeching might actually have damaged my hearing. Christ, who'd have a kid? Not me, that's for sure - although, hello, who's this? Pretty face, pretty smile and quiet too, which right about now makes her my dream woman. Should I say something? Lay some groundwork? No, the boss is watching. So I just say the same damn phrase I've said a thousand times: Hold out your arm."

  Hold out your arm.

  "She's got a medical bracelet, which is a bit of a turn-off, but hey, where we're going beggars can't be choosers, and so, unable to help myself, I say: Guess you must be pretty exceptional to have been chosen. Or they just needed to -"

  "Fill their quota of redheads." Joy completed the sentence, and she was so thankful Rhys was there, so thankful he still held her by the arm. She clutched his shoulder and whispered to him where she had met Elkhart. Never mind pieces - she felt as though half a dozen puzzle boxes had just been dumped on her, the pieces tumbling across the floor, slipping through her fingers.

  Text flew by on her HUD.

  can't be Tower if he was on the Ever Onward/but the code/doesn't make sense/where did he get the code/Rhys she's bleeding/can't access systems/stars that's a lot of blood/get a reading/safe?/should be/if it's a Tower op/irrelevant, we're taking the Andromache

  Rhys turned her face towards him, and her blood ran down his fingers. It was bad, she knew it was, could feel something inside her head stretching and straining, but she wanted to see what was happening below. Wanted to -

  "Bloody hell, Somerset. Sit down." Fingers clamped around her nose, pinched it hard and tilted her head backwards. "I said sit down!"

  She stumbled to her knees on glassy ground. Rhys steadied her, wiping blood from her face as he rooted through his pouches. Medical alcohol stung her nostrils, the smell so strong it made her dizzy. Her head throbbed and she wanted to scream, to shout at Elkhart all her questions until he stopped smiling and started giving her answers, but something like a fist had hold of her brain and it squeezed so hard. She thought of Finn and whispered his name, then Constant's.

  "Focus on me, Somerset." Rhys slapped her face gently. His eyes were pale blurs behind his visor. A drop of sweat ran down the length of his nose. She focused on that – so human, so real – and watched it gather volume and momentum. The fist eased its grip and she could once more access her words. All she had to do was find the right ones –

  Lightning flashed in the pit. A blinding white burst forked outwards and upwards, licking the length of the Andromache. The soldiers staggered backwards; Cassimer's armour ablaze with arcing light. He fell to his knees and she tried to get off hers. Had to get to him, had to save him, but Rhys – swearing like a sailor – held her down.

  "Should the Andromache's shields have failed, I would not have lost much in this one. His days were spent checking gauges and running diagnostics, watching numbers on screens while wondering how long until the next coffee break." Elkhart's voice cut clear across the crackling din. "I believed I had chosen this vessel for its redundancy, but I see now that I was mistaken. I must have felt it, that pearl of a memory nestled deep within. A glow I could neither resist nor understand. Not so strange perhaps, considering how often my thoughts stray to you, Joy."

  Her name. How could he know her name? Logic twisted and turned into reasonable explanations: he might've remembered it from the Ever Onward; it would have been on his screen as he checked her in. Lucklaw might have missed some surveillance equipment and Elkhart had watched their approach, had heard Cassimer say her name. Maybe. So many maybes, but though Elkhart was clearly as mad as any local, he looked at her like he knew her. Not just her name or her face, but her.

  "Enough." Cassimer stood, casting a long shadow over Elkhart. The Andromache's shields crackled between them. "You will i
dentify yourself and you will address no one but me."

  "You ask questions you already know the answers to and demand what I cannot give."

  "Speak plainly or not at all."

  "How much more plainly do you want it, soldier? You have seen my work. You walk the ruins of my conquered world and breathe the ashes of the long dead. These lands once bloomed with flowers of black glass, shining, gleaming, stretching from horizon to horizon, bright with jade light. The people whose bone dust is under your boots and in your lungs, they wanted freedom and they wanted truth. I gave them both, soldier. I rode their shells until they decayed and the storms eroded their cities to sand. A hard-won truth, but truth nonetheless: only gods are free, soldier."

  HOPEWELL: madder than a mooncat

  FLOREY: We should retreat, regroup. This isn't right.

  LUCKLAW: Andromache's resisting, commander. Need more time.

  CASSIMER: Arm the explosive.

  "No!" Joy pushed herself to her feet. Rhys grabbed her wrist, and over the team channel, Cassimer warned her to be quiet, but the silo glowed with the light of ten thousand cryo pods. Plan B was not an option, and she didn't care what Cassimer or the constricting fist inside her head had to say about it. "No more lies. Tell me where my brother is! He was on the Ever Onward - is he here?"

  "Yes, Joy." Elkhart's smile curved to the left. His slouching back straightened; his shoulders squared. The vulture crick of his neck vanished, head held alert, eyes bright and jaw set. A soldier's stance, softened by a casual lean. "But you knew that already, didn't you? That's why you came here. That's why you sought out the slave-minds and why you let their corruption into your veins – oh yes, I can hear its feeble whispers. Out here, the signal is too weak to scream your mind into submission. Out here, the corruption relies on its most loyal slave-minds to do the warping. Tell me, do you love the Primaterre yet?"

  She didn't know what to say. Elkhart smiled, a wide and easy smile, the kind of smile that said that everything was going to be all right, and now his voice changed again, his words clipped and tight with the spring of a Kirkclair accent. "I thought not. How about you, Banneret Commander Cassimer? Do you love the Primaterre? And the rest of you – don't be shy now, tell us how you really feel."

  "Primaterre protects us all."

  The soldiers spoke in unison, Lucklaw and Hopewell's voices drifting down from above. Rhys was smiling, in his eyes the distant look of a man lost in pleasant memories. But it was wrong, all wrong, because Rhys was not a man to get sentimental over abstract concepts like patriotism or ideology. People, not doctrine, moved him. Whether they were his struggling commander, the lost Cecilia, a freckled soldier dying on Vainamoinen, or a junior botanist, it was their faces he saw in his dreams, their names he remembered, their lives he served.

  She slapped him hard across his visor, her fingers sliding across the cool surface, desperate to remove his helmet. She needed his face, his undistorted voice, the faint smell of nicotine on his breath.

  "Rhys!" She slapped his visor again, but he was a stranger and down on the bridge, among the dancing mists, more strangers stood. The same distant look would be in Constant's eyes, the same pleased little smile on his lips, and she couldn't stand the thought of it. Didn't want to see him like that, not until she had stolen Rhys back and proven that it could be done.

  "Somerset." Rhys grabbed her wrist before she could strike him a third time. The distant look peeled away and left behind confusion. "What -"

  "Do you love the Primaterre?"

  "Primaterre protects us all," he responded, but too much of him was still pouring in, and he heard himself that time, caught himself saying words that she was certain he hadn't intended. His confusion flared into alarm. "I... what the hell? Somerset, I..." One hand went to his temple, and with the other, he shoved her backwards. "Get away from me. Something's wrong and I - oh, stars." He tossed his rifle to the side, ignoring it as it slid down the ramp, spinning on black glass. "I can feel it, something inside my head that isn't me; a whispering shadow. Oh, Earth have mercy; is this how it starts?"

  "Rhys!" Get away, he'd said, but for once, the doctor's advice was wrong. Joy pulled him close, held his head between her hands, whispered every soothing thing she could think of. Blood made tacky rivers between them and filled her nose with hot iron steam as reactive plates burned the blood away. Stars, that's a lot of blood. She wasn't sure who'd made that observation, but they'd been right; so much and it didn't seem to want to stop. Her legs wobbled and her fingers trembled against the warm surface of Rhys's armour, but she had to stand, had to keep the medic focused.

  "It's not what you think, Rhys." There was something in his head, all right, but it was no demon. Elkhart had spoken a trigger phrase, one to which the soldiers were primed to respond, and now she understood the purpose of a banneret commander. His was the voice they listened to, and his was the voice used to deliver the trigger phrases. Reminders, he'd said; purity, he thought, but it was only applied psychology, only mental conditioning.

  In Rhys's visor, her reflection stared back at her, slick with blood. It streamed from her nose and when she blinked, a tear rolled down her cheek. Round and glossy and darkly red, and the thing to finally make sense of the Primaterre. Pieces she'd thought parts of different puzzles were in fact parts of the same awful whole.

  "It's all right, Rhys. You'll be fine." A lie; perhaps the worst of lies, but not half so bad as the truth. She understood now, saw what the others couldn't see, what they weren't permitted to see. "You're not being possessed. It's the primer - it's the corruption in your blood; it's what's whispering to you."

  He looked at her blankly.

  "Rhys, please, you have to try. Elkhart knows and he will use it against us. Will use it against Cassimer, you understand?" An idea formed. "Do you have any euphoriants on hand?"

  He nodded.

  "Good. I need you take some, as big a dose as you can manage, and then I need you to look at those Hierochloe files Lucklaw found. Read them, read them all, and Rhys..." She touched his visor, kissed his armoured cheek. "There are no demons. There never were. And once you see, once you really see, you have to protect Cassimer."

  And then Elkhart spoke again, in a voice that brimmed with mirth; the voice of a man who always had a joke on the tip of his tongue, a man who was ready to do what was necessary but intended to have fun while doing it. Not quite the voice that had read her bedtime stories; not quite the voice that had sung Happy Birthday to her twenty-two times, but close enough.

  "Such a minute part of me. Should have been irrelevant; was irrelevant for over a century. Then you woke, and your footsteps stirred the ashes of this world. You touched me, do you remember that? Fresh from your sleep, not yet sure if you were awake or dreaming, you touched me. So bright, so warm, and inside of me, love surged to the surface, coursing like corposant fire. For you, and for the others too - Susan Voirrey and poor Theo Duncan - but they heard my voice and my love for them faded. Only you stayed out of reach, flittering like a butterfly, and with every passing day, my love has grown stronger roots."

  He smiled a smile she'd seen so many times before, but his was not the right face for that smile, and she wanted to scream.

  "I've had a thousand brides or more, but never a sister." The thing which was not quite Elkhart held out its hand towards her. "Never a Joy." Once more, a distant look fell on his face. "Our last summer on Earth. So much hotter than Mars, and the air so much finer. The vanilla ice cream Dad got me is melting down my wrist. I lick it off and it tastes sweet and salt. The flavour of summer. The flavour of happiness. Then Dad opens a door and Mom is there. The curtains are open and reflections of sunlight dance on the walls, so bright they dazzle me. Mom says to come over, to meet my little sister, and there you are. Wide eyes and tiny fingers. Feet so small they fit in the palm of my hand. Joy, I say, her name is Joy, and Mom and Dad cry. They tell you that story many times, and when they are gone, I'm the one to tell you. Joy for a sister. Joy for a new life
on Mars. Joy for the last summer on Earth. In truth, I named you Joy because that was the name of the pink robot in my favourite cartoon, but I never told you that. I never told anyone that, because no matter where the name came from, you were always our joy. My Joycie."

  His voice had deepened as he spoke, but hadn't quite hit the mark until the nickname. The silly, silly nickname she'd made Finn give up right around the time she started high school and that nobody could know about. Nobody but Finn, and now Elkhart brushed his hair out his face and he moved so much like Finn, smiled so much like Finn.

  So much that maybe she'd been wrong. Maybe there were demons.

  She couldn't stop herself from screaming this time, and the fist inside her head squeezed hard, drowning her in pain until she forgot why she was screaming.

  46. Cassimer

  In Cassimer's experience, Tower were always unexpected and always unwelcome. He'd not encountered many towermen, but he had forgotten none.

  A rocky hill, providing the only natural cover on a flat steppe. Sorry, it's being used for a Tower op, so why don't you grunts get back out there and soak up the booming artillery like you're supposed to?

  An irradiated swamp where local resistance was nearly as thick on the ground as the fungus, and in its the centre, they'd found three towermen collecting water samples. Nobody in Cassimer's unit had been stupid enough to ask questions, but three weeks later, as they filed into their evac, a towerman had been there, his arm around a stack of NDAs.

  A cataphract ship engine room. Another trio, who'd spent a week in there without so much as saying a word. Just watching, waiting, unsettling the crew. They're expecting a demonic outbreak, one cataphract had whispered to another. No, the ship's cook had said as he passed out meal after meal, they're looking for RebEarth infiltrators. On the seventh day, the towermen had left without incident, and nothing - so far as Cassimer knew - had ever come of it.

  But outside of Protectorate space, there was no higher authority than Cassimer's own, and he had his orders. The Andromache was his to claim, and he'd find a way through her shimmering shields and scaled hull. Would cut his way in if need be. The increasingly heated exchange with Elkhart made his blood rush hot, and it was all he could do to hold himself back from digging his fingers into the Andromache's shields.