Iron Truth

by S. A. Tholin

  Okay, that was more creative than usual. She squinted at the viewport, wondering about the tiny black spots marring the ship's surface.

  "Captain's something special, you see."

  "Oh yeah? Let me guess: he's an eight-foot monster that breathes fire and eats children for breakfast?"

  "No," said the RebEarther smugly, "that's your commander."

  "Touché," she said and wondered why Lucklaw and Florey looked so glum. This was fun, she was trying to have fun, and they all bloody should before it was too late. The Cephalopod was huge, much larger than anticipated, and her thigh hurt like a son of a bitch. Her defence systems were still down, and in the back of the room, Rhys was still dying. Dire, and if the corporal and lieutenant didn't perk up, it was all going to go downhill. "Though nobody who's lived off rations for as long as we have would turn down a nice bit of children for breakfast, so that's not really saying much."

  Children for breakfast. Little saplings for breakfast, and now it wasn't so funny anymore. Now the thought made her sick, and she wished she hadn't said anything at all. Damn it, Florey. This was all his stupid fault.

  Then the Rising Flame's comms channel crackled to life, and Hopewell knew at once what was so special about the captain. No mistaking the drawl in his voice; he was from Kepler, same as her, and based on the way he spoke, almost certainly military. Almost certainly Primaterre.

  She glanced at Florey and he nodded - yes, he could hear it too - and her heart pounded an extra beat.

  Florey cut the RebEarther free. "Just like we rehearsed, and you'll live to see another day."

  Hopewell hadn't been there for the rehearsal, but she supposed that's when the man had earned his bruises. Acting the fool, no doubt; Florey wasn't one for unnecessary roughness, although Florey wasn't one for insubordination or mutiny either. As she watched him take the RebEarther by the neck, shoving him close to the comms unit, she couldn't help but wonder who it was she was really looking at.

  "Hey, Captain," the RebEarther said, with admirable cheer. Then he glanced over his shoulder at Hopewell, and his eyes narrowed with such hatred that she almost swallowed her piece of gum. What? she wanted to ask, what did I ever do to you?

  A question that would remain unanswered, because he turned back around and shouted: "Primos incoming, Cap! Kill them all!"

  Florey slammed the RebEarther's head into the instrument panel and whispered in his ear: "Earth have mercy on your soul" - which Hopewell knew to be Florey speak for you dumb bastard. As Lucklaw unmuted the comms channel and began speaking in the RebEarther's voice, Florey clamped his hand over the man's mouth and dragged him from the cockpit. Scuffling, scraping, struggling, all the way down to the corridor, and Hopewell knew that pretty soon, the bathroom wouldn't be spotless anymore.

  By the time Florey returned, his thermal knife sizzling as it burnt off blood, the Cephalopod's captain had accepted Lucklaw's story ("quick supply run before the lads go to catch the train, yeah? Don't want to go after the Primos half-cocked.").

  As the docking bay opened to darkness, Lucklaw shuddered.

  "What now?" he asked, so boyish and so green.

  "Easy, Corporal. Visors down, weapons hot, soundtrack of your choice." Hopewell smiled and tried not to think about her aching leg or malfunctioning suit. "Now we go to work."

  53. Cassimer

  He met the drifters a mile out from Platform 2. Like a pack of rats, they came coursing through the sea-green tunnel. Twitching, chittering, sniffing at the air as if they had caught the scent of prey.

  Whatever they hunted, it wasn't Cassimer. A tremble went through the pack when he approached.

  "Move along," he said, motioning for them to pass.

  "We can do what we want," said a drifter, several others echoing his words. Cassimer prepared to drop the autocannons, long since out of ammunition, and draw his knife, but a young woman at the front of the pack smiled at him. Her rough-shorn hair was matted, and she was naked but for garlands of lichen. Her thighs were streaked red and pink. Bite marks ran down the length of her arms and they could've been anybody's, but he felt sure they were her own.

  "We can do what we want," she said. Her smile, turning dust-smeared cheeks apple-round, was bright and full of life. "The red said so. The red said Cato is ours. The red said to go and do and take and eat whatever we want. And now..." She tapped her forehead. "Now the red says nothing."

  "Nothing," echoed the crowd.

  "It's no longer whispering to you?" Cassimer shifted, uneasy being near creatures so bloated with corruption. There are no demons, Rhys had said, but he could see feathery red tendrils in the shadows, tumbling from a ventilation shaft. What were these drifters if not possessed? What was the thing which wore many faces if not a devourer?

  He had been lied to, but the lie was a truth.

  "Quiet." The woman drummed her palms against her ears. "Hush hush, bye bye. The red is leaving and has set us free. We can do what we want."

  "And what is it you want?"

  "To go and take and eat."

  "That way then," he said and indicated the tunnel behind him. "Plenty to take and eat in Nexus." And plenty of furious RebEarthers to run straight into. A good tactic, pitting one enemy against another. Scarsdale had been wrong - this wasn't going to be a good day for anybody.

  "Nexus." Another hush went through the quivering pack. Lips turned in snarls, and one drifter began to strike the tunnel wall with his blade.

  Nexus. The last outpost of civilisation on Cato. The red had worked hard to keep the drifters from pouring in and overrunning the city, but now the leash was off and they hungered for what had been forbidden.

  The woman peered at him, a glimmer of intelligence in her sunken eyes.

  "Red said to find Primaterre. Red said to eat their flesh first. Are you Primaterre?" She approached, close enough that he could smell her through the cracks in his suit. "Are you the one who tastes of citrus and starlight?"

  Her fingers painted ashen zigzags across his cuirass. More drifters advanced to surround him. Sneaking, creeping, so quiet and light-footed that they seemed little more than ghosts. Phantoms, drifting on Cato's winds, as directionless and inconsequential as reedmace seeds.

  More hands touched him. Searching, feeling, groping, and on the walls, their shadows grew long and dark. He knew what it would be like, this end. Knew the touch of a hundred hands, knew the raking and the scratching and the pulling and the pushing. At the back of the throng, a drifter laughed, and Cassimer knew that laughter too. There are no demons, Rhys said, but oh, there were. Oh stars, there were, and his kill switch glowed bright on his HUD, awaiting confirmation.

  But she had said starlight, this woman who writhed against his suit. He saw no such light in her. Her soul was ruin and cold ash, and if he surrendered, Joy would suffer the same fate.

  "It doesn't matter who I am. The red is leaving and you can do what you want."

  "That's right." The woman beamed.

  "You're free," he told her, thinking free from sanity, free from logic, free from kindness and from mercy. Freedom was the open void, and what good was the void without the light and warmth of suns? What good was freedom without limit; without the shackles of rule and regulation, and the bonds of love and loyalty?

  "Free," said the woman and the pack echoed the word, their voices a rising sound that rushed down the tunnel like white-water. He closed his eyes and saw the quilted underside of a mattress, saw a deck of playing cards scattered on the floor, and some part of him accepted that this was how he'd always been meant to die.

  Except there was more to the universe than the black-between. There was starlight, and while he had fought and cried on the Hecate, while he had sat among the dead and listened to the hollow clicking of an empty gun, Joy had slept on Cato. For as long as he'd lived, she'd been there, long before the darkness.

  So he closed his eyes and saw the mattress, saw the cards, but pictured her. Felt her hand in his when the screaming reached its pitch, and s
he didn't let go, not even when the mess cook laughed. And when he opened his eyes and her hand faded from his, the drifters had gone and the tunnel lay empty.

  ◆◆◆

  At Castle Street Station, white-helmeted guards paced behind makeshift barricades. Two grenades later, the station lay quiet but for the heavy footfall of the Ereshkigal suit. Cassimer stopped only to examine the bodies of the guards. Ash-pale and malnourished, with bones so frail he thought they might crumble when he touched them. Locals, then. He had suspected as much. Elkhart claimed to be one of ten thousand, but he had never strayed from behind the shields of the Andromache, and when the cryo pods had released reinforcements, they'd all been locals. When Lucklaw had shut down the pods, Elkhart had all but panicked - strange for a man who so clearly cared for nobody but himself.

  And when Elkhart had spoken of death - and in the dark with you will be your dead - his words had come from a place of experience. Whatever this devourer was, Cassimer couldn't claim to understand, but he did know that it was afraid.

  Ahead, surveillance cameras whirred and turned. In the Hierochloe facility, monitors flickered to life, their built-in cameras connecting to his field of awareness. There were unexpected points of light to jump to as well - sensors on Hierochloe weapons, comms equipment, and angry alerts sent by the security alarm of an office block.

  A thousand fragments for logic and experience to glue together. Snipers on the sixth floor of the office block. Several men inside the lobby of the Hierochloe facility, hiding behind the receptionist desk. Minute vibrations in the ground from the roar of distant engines.

  His awareness stretched wide, across a glimmering network of nodes. Behind him was the dull glow of Nexus, and a reaching trail of lights that were the augments and weapons of RebEarthers. Ahead, the world burned even brighter - lit up like fireworks - a shining path that he could follow through abandoned labs and frozen chambers until it abruptly ended. A great void gaped darkly, too dense and forbidding to be the absence of connection. The Andromache was shielding herself from prying eyes.

  Something shifted, and he paused at the bottom of the station stairs. The constellations had changed and a star blinked out. He dropped the field of awareness and fell back into himself. Some things were better grasped as a man than a god, and as soon as he heard the silence and saw the darkness, he knew what was wrong.

  No more low hum. No more moonlight spilling down the stairs. The force field that held the chamber was gone, switched off.

  Oh.

  Cassimer redirected all available suit power to the APF and made it up the stairs just in time to see a rocket blaze through the branches of the fulgurite tree. The rocket climbed higher and higher until it impacted with the cave ceiling. A cloud of smoke followed, raining dark glass shrapnel.

  The cave groaned. Dust poured from widening cracks as a fractured patchwork of glass moved like tectonic plates.

  Two faint lights tugged at the edges of his awareness. Triggers pulled, electronic commands sent, and now two more rockets speared across the span.

  A fully operational Ereshkigal suit. A comms specialist. A team. Any of these things, and he might've stood a chance at diverting the rockets' paths, but he was alone and all he could do was -

  run

  - screamed every instinct as the ceiling began to fold inwards. When he did run - and shrapnel sizzled against his armour and he waded through mounting piles of dust - they screamed even louder that he had run in the wrong direction.

  As he rounded the fulgurite tree, the men in the lobby opened fire in a burst of light and glass. His suit's APF flared, and the fulgurite tree creaked and bowed as its trunk was eaten through by diverted projectiles.

  He opened the release on his bracers. Hands free of the armour, he pulled his Morrigan from its holster and returned fire. Not stopping, not even aiming. Sometimes surviving meant killing, but sometimes it simply meant keeping the enemy occupied. A few rounds from the Morrigan tearing through the Hierochloe front desk had his opposition diving for deeper cover. A few locals seemed to come to their senses and looked in horror at their surroundings before dropping their weapons and fleeing into the interior.

  Elkhart had expected the Primaterre to return, and he'd expected them to use the main entrance once more. Not so stupid - the familiar was often the more tactical choice than the unknown - but the Ereshkigal suit had made that path impossible. Too many narrow stairways and corridors left Cassimer with no choice but to enter through the loading dock.

  The ground quaked as chunks of glass the size of trucks fell from above. Pulverised glass and dust whirled around the cavern, abrading the silver fortress's once-perfect surface. The security alarm's connection was suddenly cut as the office block toppled, taking most of the west side of the street with it.

  Above the Hierochloe facility, the ceiling was a quivering network of expanding fractures. Any second, it would collapse, and Cassimer would get the death Elkhart had promised.

  But this wasn't the tunnel. This wasn't the Hecate. This was Elkhart's idea of a nightmare, not Cassimer's, and so he ran, fast and loud and unhindered by fear. And there, behind a stalactite of glass that had skewered the asphalt, was the loading bay.

  As he dashed across the lichen-smeared floor, he saw recent footprints and discarded weapons near the lift controls. The shaft was empty, but the high-pitched whine of engines told him that the guards had broken from Elkhart's control to seek refuge in the deep.

  Refuge wasn't what Cassimer sought, but the deep and the dark was where he needed to go.

  54. Hopewell

  In Kepler's coral cities, nestled between golden dunes and sun-dappled water, RebEarth was far from most people's minds. They were distant bogey-men, providers of a constant churn of gore for the news, but unlike demons or tsunamis, they were the sort of threat too incongruous to consider.

  "It's not that they don't want to attack us. It's just that once they get here and see the beaches, they forget all about it. Nobody can stay mad on Kepler!" So said Chastity, Hopewell's sister, who loved to talk politics in the brief window between blood alcohol levels when she'd stopped giggling and wasn't yet picking fights. Hell, before enlisting, Hopewell had probably been dumb enough to say it herself.

  But that was before she saw the training videos. Before she spent two years working security in the transit camps on Phobos. What little she'd told Joy hadn't even begun to cover the horrors - even accounting for her time on Cato, it was hard to picture the little redhead surviving Phobos. The sentinels kept order and Welfare kept the population fed, but the mental toll was something else. Every couple of days, sentinel ships went out to scoop up the asphyxiated bodies of camp residents who'd chosen death over deportation. That wasn't supposed to happen - the camp was supposed to be sealed up tight, and any holes would eventually be found and plugged, but never in a hurry. The general feeling, from janitorial to the top brass, had been that if they want to die, let them.

  Citizenship rejections were the most common cause of suicide, but sometimes it was just the wait. The months - or years - of uncertainty, spent living amongst constant reminders of why they'd come to Mars's desolate moon. The youths were usually criminals looking for new hunting grounds, or escaped slaves, who'd spent their teens trafficked and traded, but neither category was deemed stable or pure enough to become meritorious citizens. A few more months on Phobos, telling girls the same age as Chastity that they had to leave Protectorate space, and Hopewell was sure her heart would've turned to ice. Still, most of the young ones had enough fire and energy that they left Phobos spitting and cursing, but alive.

  Death, it seemed, was the mature choice, the exit favoured by those whose experience told them that life could always get worse. They'd shared their stories - sometimes looking for sympathy, sometimes out of anger, and other times, she wasn't sure they'd known she was even there. They'd just walk round and round, words spilling from their mouths as though the suffering was too great to contain.

  Hope
well had no war stories like Florey's. She had no Kalau'a Valleys or Hypatian trenches in her past, but she carried in her heart the stories of others. The hunted, the downtrodden, the desperate and the dead-inside. She'd listened, taking on their pain to give them a moment of peace. For her, it was easy, after all. She could hit the nearest bar after work, and a couple of drinks later, she'd be right as rain (although towards the end, the number of drinks had increased and been supplemented with stims. If her application to the banneretcy hadn't come through when it did, she'd have become just another pharma-dulled body-scooper).

  It'd been half a decade since she last saw the half-digested floater Mars called a moon, but every now and then, the stories came back to her, told in the bass thump in her veins and in the tickle of anticipation in her chest. And now, peering into the haze of the Cephalopod's docking bay, she remembered every damn word.

  Lucklaw's readings indicated a crew of twelve, excluding the construction workers on the hull. Two of the dozen stood at the bottom of a ramp in the docking bay. Men in identical orange overalls, waving a friendly welcome to the shuttle. Their hands were dirty with grease (broke my fingers when I said no) and low-slung holsters hung around their waists (shot her, in front of our children). One said something to the other, and they both laughed (he laughed when I threw up, but he didn't stop).

  The ramp led to a series of gantries, connecting to a glass-walled office. A man sat inside, feet on a desk and a steaming mug in his hands. His face was bright red, marked for death by Florey, and she was glad for it, because the real reason RebEarth didn't attack Kepler was nothing to do with beaches.

  "It's idiots like us," she told Lucklaw as they moved towards the shuttle's airlock. "Brave enough to step up, dumb enough to keep coming back for more, mad-dog crazy enough to enjoy it."

  "What about honour and duty?"

  "Fancy words, and maybe there's some of that too, but look at us. We're a thousand light-years from home, in the belly of a patchwork junker. Our medic has no face and our commander has gone berserk. We're being hunted by RebEarth and a human houseplant, and you know what it feels like to me?" She waited for him to shake his head before continuing: "Wednesday. It feels like Wednesday. And that's not right, is it? Given everything that's going on, we should be at breaking point, don't you think? Somebody should be crying or panicking or going ahh I can't take it anymore, but look at us. We're in gear, in formation and ready to go."