Iron Truth

by S. A. Tholin

  Then the woman shuddered and fell forward. Twitching fingers closed around the trigger and the gun went off, one bullet scoring Hopewell's helmet. Deep enough to breach - she could smell the smoke and the blood and the scent of lavender shampoo in silver hair.

  She pushed the woman aside and found that she could breathe again. Hemothorax, her HUD warned, whatever the hell that was (felt like she'd been run over by a truck), but she had to trust that the suit could handle it.

  The silver-haired woman was dead without so much as a squeak. Florey was on the ground, tussling with the tattooed man, and a dark shape moved in the foam-filled corridor .

  She grabbed her rifle and fired. First bullet was rewarded with a scream; the second cut it short.

  "Florey!" Stumbling towards him, she steadied her aim, fired again, and the tattooed man went limp. "Florey, I -"

  "Get down!"

  Her knees obeyed before her mind had even processed his words. Plush carpet deadened her fall as a shotgun blast tore through the air above her. A portion of the bulkhead exploded in a hail of plastic shards.

  Hot metal scraped the back of her head. She reacted instinctively, unsheathing her knife and stabbing backwards, downwards. The man behind her cried out, and Florey took the shot. After that, the only sound was the crackle of fire.

  ◆◆◆

  "Five dead," Florey said. "That's all the hostiles accounted for."

  "Are you sure? Somebody shot me with a much larger calibre weapon than anything these guys are carrying."

  "Nothing on the sensors. Nothing on Lucklaw's sensors either, apart from the construction workers on the hull." He shrugged. "Maybe your HUD is reporting incorrectly. Or maybe you just missed the gun in question, like you missed -"

  "Look, we've been over this," she said, feeling rather annoyed about the whole thing. "I didn't miss anything. I checked that guy very thoroughly. He had a small piece in his waistband and a knife in his boot, but that was it. Do you really think I would've missed a damn assault rifle?"

  "The way you've been shaking in your boots about this ship, yeah, maybe. Hard to keep your head in the game when all you do is complain."

  "Fuck you," she said, although not before muting her channel. He was still her superior, after all.

  They put out the fire in silence, tearing down drapes and tossing bedclothes. The smoke began to clear, revealing the destruction. The foam in the corridor frothed around a red-tinged centre. Numerous bullet holes perforated the walls and Hopewell couldn't thank the stars enough that they were deep in the interior of the ship. The RebEarthers, who'd been too stupid to appreciate the potential perks of captivity, lay flat on their backs, unseeing eyes staring into an afterlife that Hopewell expected was rather bleak.

  The last patch of flames died under her boots. When she turned, she found Florey staring at the dead RebEarthers.

  "Damn them. I didn't want this, Hopey. You have to believe I was trying to avoid it."

  "Not your fault, Floz. Can't help those who won't help themselves." Not like Florey to get sick over a few dead RebEarthers, but then, this wasn't really about them. It was about the man he'd dragged off to the shuttle bathroom. When Florey had returned, she'd known from the look on his face that he'd gone too far, done things he already regretted. No innocent, the RebEarther, but it wasn't for his own crimes that he had suffered a bad death.

  "You could've helped me," he said. "You could've stood by me."

  "I could've stood by you?" She shook her head, incredulous. "Our reality turned inside out, and the commander was doing all he could to hold the mission and the team together. You should've seen that. You should've stood by him. That's your job."

  "Oh, I saw just fine. I saw that the commander's lost his damn mind."

  "Of course he has. We all bloody have - or do you think that pointing your rifle at me is a sign of sanity?"

  He looked startled to find his own rifle trained on her. His hands shook as he lowered it.

  "The commander never once turned on the team. He could've justifiably kill switched you, but he didn't even issue a reprimand. He didn't abandon us, Florey; you did. When he needed assistance, you just sat there and said nothing. I had to climb a three-hundred foot tower in the pouring rain. I had no APF, no sensors, no backup - no nothing, except for the commander's voice to guide me. He kept me from dying while picking up your slack!"

  "Well, hoorah for the big bloody hero."

  "How about you cut the sarcasm and apologise instead?"

  "Apologise? Thanks to your lack of support, I'm a failed mutineer. What do you think is going to happen to me back on Scathach?"

  "Nothing," she said, as calmly as she could manage. "The commander didn't pull you out of Kalau'a Valley only to see you court-martialled over a moment of idiocy."

  "He doesn't even know that I was there."

  "Seems to me like exactly the sort of thing the commander would know."

  "He never said anything."

  "Well, he wouldn't, would he?"

  Florey didn't respond, instead curtly suggesting that they search the corridor for the missing weapon. She agreed, but kept one eye on him. He was still shaky, still all wrapped up in worry. She had a pretty good sense of what had tied him into such knots, but it wouldn't do for her to start picking at them. Only Florey could untangle Florey; she'd learnt that a long time ago.

  She was on her knees in fizzing foam, patting the floor down, when he decided to speak again.

  "The commander is a man of principle. Kalau'a Valley might not mean much compared to rules and regulations. And mutiny is a capital crime."

  "Pretty sure regulations have a thing or two to say about hooking up with subordinates, too, so maybe he's not the man you think he is."

  Florey turned to look at her, one eyebrow arched. "What, him and Somerset?"

  "Oh yeah."

  "She can't have been alone with the commander for much more than ten minutes."

  "Plenty of time in my experience."

  "You've been seeing the wrong men."

  "Of course," she said. "Wrong is me all over. Must be why I like you so much."

  He hugged her then, pulling her close, and through his fogged visor, she could see deep lines of pain and fear on his face.

  "If I'd let you challenge him," she whispered, "he'd have caved your face in. And if he hadn't, if you'd won - that would've hurt you worse. I was only protecting you, Floz. It's all I ever do."

  "I know. I know, Hopey." He shook his head, looking down at her. "How can you be so calm? All I can think of is my family. I'm out here to keep them safe, but now I find out that the enemy was inside my house all along; a whispering voice violating their minds. Even if I make it back, I can't keep them safe from that. I'm going to have to go home and look at their smiling faces and know that they are not completely themselves, that some small part of them is someone... something else. That's..."

  "Impure," she said.

  "Yes." He sobbed then, mouth twisting with emotion. "And the commander; all he was thinking of was her. Wanted to risk all our lives for a woman we barely know. Wanted us to die for her when I have people who need me to come home. I shouldn't be here, I see that now - I need the earth and air of home. The things in life that are true. Not this." He tapped the Primaterre symbol on his chest.

  "I understand." Except, not really. What he was saying was how she had always felt. The Primaterre, purity, Earth - none of those things had ever mattered as much as home and family - but now she was beginning to see it differently. Florey called purity a lie, but she saw the design behind the lie. There was no better place in the galaxy than the Protectorate, and the Primaterre had made it so. They had concocted this one great lie because they'd felt it was their duty to unleash humanity's potential.

  She could understand that. She could maybe even accept that.

  "Shit." Florey opened his visor and rubbed his face. His cheeks were wet, with what he'd claim to be sweat if she mentioned it. "There's not a lot of regre
t in my life, Hopey, but the past eighteen hours - if I could take them all back..."

  "You can't, but lucky for you, you have a good team. We're here to help you carry that regret, and the sooner you stop acting like an idiot, the sooner we can get on with it. Okay?"

  "Okay." He gave a wan smile. "Let me take a look at your back. See if we can't figure out the mystery of the missing weapon."

  "Stars," she complained, "you still don't believe me, do you?"

  But by his silence, she understood that he did. Through his visual link, she saw cracks spider-webbing around two craters in her back plate.

  "Armour-piercing high-explosive." He scraped a finger along one of the craters and rubbed the ash between his fingers. ".600 Gungnir, at a guess."

  More than a guess; Florey knew his stuff well enough that he could probably be blindfolded and identify ammunition by taste.

  "Explains why we didn't find any cartridges. Caseless and useless, people used to say. Doesn't see much use anymore - too heat-sensitive - but about fifteen years back, it was available as standard Primaterre military issue. Not my kind of thing, but Tower liked it well enough that when it was discontinued, they developed their own version -"

  "Tower?" Best to interrupt before he got carried away and lost sight of the important part. "The commander said the RebEarthers stole the Eshi suits from a supply ship en route to Hypatia. Could be that ship was carrying more than cataphract equipment. Could be we might be in a spot of trouble here."

  "Yeah. Better let the kid know something might be up. Hey, Lucklaw?"

  But the kid didn't respond, and with dread, Hopewell thought of the cat-soft thing that had brushed her leg.

  55. Lucklaw

  A moment of silence before the vastness of space was enough to know that he was not the commander, and quiet contemplation not his friend. Instead, Lucklaw touched the Cephalopod's instruments, brushing light-weave fingertips across gauges. The ship's soul fluttered at his touch. It was a mosaic of salvaged code, rife with obfuscation and cob-webbed legacy, so inexpertly put together that it made the duct tape around the viewport look like an elegant solution.

  The Cephalopod seemed conscious of how clumsy it was, because it twisted uneasily as his primer made contact. He smiled and adjusted his approach, reaching in and picking a gentle way through. When the final security measures withered, he was no longer alone - the universe had come, travelling on beams of light.

  The Cascade was approximately ninety minutes away, and the universe he now touched was the universe of two hours ago. The Championship match that streamed past in a burst of green grass and spirited cheering would've long since concluded. The delay made him feel crippled, but it was better than being empty.

  A great way to pass time, Somerset had said, but Somerset had never known anything but emptiness. She had come to Cato's grey wastes from a time so antiquated it might as well have been a millennium ago. No primers back then, no wireless power radiating freely across worlds, no information received but for a body's own sensory input - no wonder she'd had such a hard time adapting.

  She had improved towards the end, though. Those last few messages...

  Well. He was just glad he'd intercepted them before they hit the team channel. Bad enough that he'd had to see them. It hadn't really been her, of course. Just a switch in her brain, flipped to cause maximum pain. No, it hadn't been her talking. Except for maybe in the very last text.

  He had toyed with the idea of letting it pass through the filter. Constant, she'd said, maybe the word or maybe the name. In the end, the maybes had been too many (maybe it will help him/maybe it will break him) and Lucklaw had relegated the word to the upper left of his HUD. It burnt there, bright as a star in the light-flow of information. A reminder of the word and of the name, and of his own duty to remain steadfast.

  The commander had given him a message to send to Bastion, and it was for the Cascade that he searched, sifting through chaff and echoes of long-dead signals. In Protectorate space, every Cascade, supported by satellite relays, was open for traffic, folding and unfolding at blinding rates. The Rossetti Cascade, however, was as unhealthy as the planets it served, its signal weak and erratic.

  Twice he locked onto it and twice he lost it, its dancing light elusive. Garbled bursts of transmissions provided an undergrowth for it to hide in, and he picked through those shadows with some trepidation. A Primaterre signal slipped past, its signature that of a report compiled several weeks ago. A few hours from now, Company Chief Vysoke-Myto would receive notification of the deaths of Abergavenny and Copenhagen. How many more deaths would there be between now and then?

  All Lucklaw knew was that sitting in Cato's orbit was no less chilling than standing on its surface. No lichen here, but Cato whispered all the same, a susurrus of data activity emitted from the world. Day-old RebEarth chatter mixed with meteorological reports from beacons not yet succumbed to age, and scripted loops requesting updates from long-dead servers on other worlds. He worked his way through the chaff and tried not to look too hard, because some of what he saw was very old and very strange. Too old. Too strange, and singing with the ringing tone of glass. Jade light filled his mindspace and he remembered Elkhart's words:

  You walk the ruins of a conquered world and breathe the ashes of the long dead.

  It wasn't true. It couldn't be. Earth was the mother of humanity and the universe held no other intelligent life. That was doctrine, and that was reality as Lucklaw had always known it. Yet these dark-glass signals were as real as they were impossibly old, and he turned his eyes from them, because he wasn't ready to have another truth revealed.

  Not yet. For the time being, he needed his rage pure and focused. For the time being, he needed -

  An arm slipped around his neck, and a gun pressed hard against his temple. Except his sensors told him there was no gun and no arm. Nothing at all on the bridge but himself. He clutched at the empty space around his neck and felt something, but his fingers found no traction, sliding from the invisible limb. In the viewport, he saw nothing but his own reflection and the unholy dark.

  We were wrong, oh stars, we were wrong. They are real and this is what the commander felt on the Hecate; this is the choking arm of the corruption and I am lost.

  "Weapons on the floor." The bark came out of nowhere, bouncing off the crimson walls.

  Instinctively, he tightened the grip on his rifle. Opened the team channel and -

  - he couldn't reach it. Couldn't reach any of it. The network of light glimmered all around, beams shooting through the void like stars, but he had been shut out. He had been... oh, damn it. He'd been put on lockdown.

  ◆◆◆

  "I said drop your damn weapon."

  Lucklaw obeyed.

  The viewport reflected rippling light as the man dropped his stealth field. Ribbons of prismatic white veiled his face, revealing only glimpses of sallow skin and a single, black-inked feather on his cheek. He was tall and thin and had one white-knuckled hand wrapped around the gun pressed to Lucklaw's temple. Neither man nor gun existed according to his sensors, but he didn't need sensors to recognise a Morrigan. Expensive, versatile, practical - and at this range, deadly regardless of his armour.

  The man reached over Lucklaw's shoulder to tap the ship's instrument panel. The sleeve of his suit shimmered soap-bubble iridescent, colours shifting and changing. Chaff camouflage, designed to cloak its wearer from detection.

  The man turned the chair around so that Lucklaw faced him.

  "Did you think I wouldn't notice you scuttling about my ship? My Cephalopod let me know the moment you boarded. All I had to do was watch and wait. Find an opportunity and seize it."

  Damn Florey and damn Hopewell; damn them both to the void. He grit his teeth and tried to summon up the courage to look death in the eye, but if the man pulled the trigger, the Morrigan would leave very little of his head intact. Would he feel bone fracture and brain matter evaporate? All he knew was that he felt it now, a shadow of what wa
s to come.

  "The strong and silent type, I see. Have I caught the commander himself, perhaps? Let's find out."

  A command was sent to Lucklaw's suit. His automatic defences allowed it through as though it had come from an authorised source, and when he tried to stop it manually, he got nothing for it but a bloody nose. The suit hissed as the collar seal released, and the man used his free hand to remove Lucklaw's helmet.

  "No. Too young." The man pursed his lips. "A shame. Still, I'd like to know who I'm talking to."

  Something probed his defences, reaching deep - too deep, beyond suit and into primer. It burned as it scraped against scripts and firewalls, and when Lucklaw looked into its glow, he wanted to scream. It was fangs and gnashing teeth in code form, a writing segmented payload that left a trail of corrupted data in its wake, and it was impossible. Mind-worms capable of riding primers upstream into the user's mind were only rumour, told in spooky stories about towermen - but the thing sniffing his primer bore all the signs of the impossible. Perhaps the rumours were true. Perhaps Tower was everything people said it was.

  But the man wielding this mind-worm was no towerman, and in his inept hands, it was a crude battering ram. The automatic defences fought it off, and Lucklaw took the opportunity to look beyond the worm, slipping past it to touch the RebEarther's system.

  The invisible battle was over. The RebEarther's nose crinkled as blood dribbled down his chin, and Lucklaw smiled, because he had felt something before the mind-worm faded and the connection was lost. He'd felt the warm and organic glow of a primer. This man had been Primaterre once, and Lucklaw had a pretty good idea as to his identity.

  "Captain Osten of the supply ship Amalthea. We thought you were dead."

  "Not dead," Osten said. "A ghost all the same."

  "I've seen your records. You had a fine career once."