Lonely Castles

  LONELY CASTLES

  S.A. THOLIN

  Also by S.A. Tholin

  The PRIMATERRE Series

  IRON TRUTH

  Copyright © 2019 S.A. Tholin

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-0763-6314-5

  FOR LOTTA, ROGER & MÅNS.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  10.

  11.

  12.

  13.

  14.

  15.

  16.

  17.

  18.

  19.

  20.

  21.

  22.

  23.

  24.

  25.

  26.

  27.

  28.

  29.

  30.

  31.

  32.

  33.

  34.

  35.

  36.

  37.

  38.

  39.

  40.

  41.

  42.

  43.

  44.

  45.

  46.

  47.

  48.

  49.

  50.

  51.

  52.

  53.

  54.

  55.

  56.

  57.

  58.

  59.

  60.

  61.

  62.

  63.

  64.

  65.

  66.

  67.

  68.

  69.

  70.

  71.

  72.

  73.

  74.

  75.

  76.

  EPILOGUE

  1.

  CASSIMER

  Cassimer had to keep moving, or he'd sink.

  The ice sang with tension as he leapt from floe to floe, glycol-blue water sloshing around his boots. The city groaned as water flowed, froze and expanded. Rockets speared the sky in the distance, streaking the skyline with crystal trails.

  Tuonela was a mining world deep inside Kalevala territory. The planet's sole settlement had been built with flood control in mind, but relentless bombardment had destroyed the perimeter barriers, and polar rivers now rushed between modular housing estates and abiogenic oil rigs. The embankments that had kept the colony safe for three centuries had become prison walls, trapping colonists inside the basin. The war had moved into the city and, without a ship, the only way out was up and over a hundred feet of curving concrete levees.

  Two factions fought for control of Tuonela and its oilfields. The Kalevala, protecting what was theirs, and the Gustavians, come to conquer. RebEarth had also arrived at the tail-end of the year-long war – there to recruit malcontents and to sow chaos.

  And now, moving quietly across fractured ice, a fourth faction had arrived on Tuonela.

  Cassimer took point, leading his small team through the chill-fogged battlefield. Lieutenant Lucklaw, their comms specialist, stuck closer to him than his own shadow. Then came Hopewell, followed by her new gunner partner, Rearcross, and Captain Tallinn, their medic. To the naked eye, they were wisps of mist, drifting across a patchwork of crisp whiteness.

  They were running through the colony's residential district, in the shadows of icicle-bearded buildings that sighed fog into the street as heat escaped through shattered windows. Pastel-painted facades flaked and cracked with subsidence.

  Their target was a building on the other side of the ice-choked river that had once been Tuonela's main traffic artery. It was a concrete high-rise, its soot-coated walls pitted with artillery fire.

  Cassimer leapt across a chasm, catching a refracted glimpse of submerged trucks, and climbed onto a window ledge that offered solid ground and a line of sight to their target.

  "Drone counts sixteen additional contacts. Linking targeting data." Lieutenant Lucklaw, his eyes glittering silver behind his rime-framed visor, joined Cassimer on the ledge. In the three months since Cato, the once-clumsy boy had become a banneretcy ghost to rival the best of them.

  "I see them." Twenty-five contacts in total. Fifteen roaming the corridors and stairwells, the remainder clustered inside a room on the 18th floor. Cassimer trained his Hyrrokkin rifle on a target moving down a hallway. No windows, but the sensors read the walls as reinforced concrete – easy enough for his Hyrrokkin to punch through. "Got a visual of the 18th floor?"

  "Negative; no surveillance cameras in that area and the windows are iced over."

  "You think that's where the houseplant is, Commander?" Rearcross asked.

  "They could all be houseplants for all we know," said Hopewell, nearly as cold as the water dripping from her armour.

  Cassimer's target passed a stairwell window. Red-and-black combat armour, reactive plates, ballistic fibre-weave, even a heat signature indicating a basic active protection field. None of it would save the man from the Hyrrokkin's bite.

  But while a glance was enough to confirm that his target was RebEarth, it wasn't sufficient to say whether or not the man served as a vessel to the red demon that called itself Skald. The Ever Onward had carried a frozen cargo of roughly ten thousand. The majority had perished on Cato, leaving nine hundred and twenty-three vessels in Primaterre captivity and whatever number had gone forth in the demon's first wave. Tower investigations, matching victims to the arc ship manifest and examining cryo pod data, suggested that the first wave had consisted of no more than a hundred. All Cassimer could be sure of was that there were fewer of them since he'd started his hunt.

  Intel had come down from Tower that a RebEarther on Tuonela had matched a facial recognition scan when they'd run the Ever Onward files against their databases. They had offered no further information, but the fact that they'd passed it on to Bastion at all meant that it was serious.

  Tuonela was outside Protectorate space, and the Primaterre had no interest in the planet or its fate. The ongoing war had, however, turned what should've been a simple mission into something far more perilous. The original plan had been to seek and destroy – Hopewell and Rearcross weren't carrying Verdandi missile launchers for nothing. They had confirmed the RebEarth presence earlier in the morning, prepping to flatten the building when a red-and-black shuttle had come in for an askew landing on the roof. Through the haze of smoke rising from its chevron wings, Cassimer and his team had watched RebEarthers drag a shackled man, his face slick with blood, from the shuttle and into the building.

  That had changed things. It was odd for RebEarth to be on Tuonela in the first place, even stranger that they had set up base in the middle of an active war-zone. There had to be a reason, but Tower had offered none and Cassimer had been unable to understand RebEarth's logic until the arrival of their captive. Whether it was the demon or RebEarth who wanted the man, Cassimer needed to know why. And so, the seek-and-destroy had become a rescue mission.

  Tallinn hoisted herself onto another window ledge. She sniffled behind her visor as her active protection field crackled, melting the ice away. "Twenty-eight degrees centigrade inside my suit, a perfectly sterilised environment, and still I've somehow come down with a cold in the five hours we've been here. Nasty little planet."

  "We've seen worse," Lucklaw said.

  "I can imagine." But judging by her curious tone, would rather not have to. The men and women of Scathach Banneret Company were aware that Cassimer had taken seven banneret men to Cato and had returned home with four and a new enemy whose very existence
had turned the Primaterre Protectorate upside down. Beyond that, the details were classified, and even Hopewell had resisted the wheedling for more information with stonewall silence.

  Cassimer nodded for Hopewell and Rearcross to initiate the breach. As the two gunners made their way towards the target building, he checked in with his recon units deployed around the city. Three pairs responded with an all-clear, but the fourth reported activity to the west. Kalevala forces, retreating from a Gustavia-held industrial estate, had run into a pack of RebEarthers.

  "Kalevala taking heavy fire, Commander, and have requested air support. Expect the whole area to be a battlefield soon, with potential splash damage on objective zone."

  "Pull back to Landing Zone 2 and keep the route clear." Ideally, they were to execute their mission without alerting any of the three warring factions to the Primaterre presence. Realistically, Cassimer could hear the approaching gunfire.

  Across the flooded street, Hopewell used her thermal knife to slice a hole in a window pane. She carefully set the glass down and slipped inside the building, followed by Rearcross. Their visual feeds showed a corridor thick with sloping ice where water pipes had burst. Silver insulation film had been torn from walls freshly-spray painted with red-and-black phoenixes. RebEarth had wasted no time making their pointless mark.

  The gunners' objective was an apartment on the 5th floor, chosen for its view of the street below. Two patrolling guards stood in their way. No problem normally, but if either of the guards were Skald, attacking or killing them would notify every vessel of Skald's across the galaxy. Not instantly – extensive research and field testing had shown that much. The theory was that the red demon connected to its vessels through the Cascades, possibly even hijacking signals to transmit its own information. Nobody could say for sure how it worked, but in Cassimer's experience, there was a slight distance-based delay in communication between vessels.

  "The houseplant has the best damn comms system in the galaxy, and there's nothing I can do to jam it." Lucklaw shook his head. "If the Cascades weren't so off-limits, maybe we'd be able to find a way to shut it out. The government's been in talks with the Cascade Engineers Union for months, but I heard they're making no headway whatsoever. Bloody fools. Can't they see that the demon is a threat to us all? You'd think they'd at least be interested in investigating whether or not it's using their precious Cascades."

  "Cascade engineers sleep, eat and work next to open rifts all day long. Maybe the demon's affecting them. Maybe it's already possessed them. You know–" Tallinn tapped her helmet. "–telepathically."

  "No such thing as telepathy," Cassimer said. The red demon did possess and control its victims, but its abilities were neither magic nor supernatural. As far as he understood, it was akin to an organic computer network. In order to affect or steal a person's mind, it required physical contact via the lichen that was its manifestation in this dimension.

  Well. He shifted, uncomfortable. The more he thought about it, the more like magic it sounded. Better not to think about it at all. That was someone else's job – his was far simpler.

  Hopewell and Rearcross slipped unnoticed past the guards, courtesy of Lucklaw causing a distraction by overloading a streetlight, and took up position in the apartment. Hopewell was at the window, her suit ghostly pale behind frost-coated glass, signalling an all-clear.

  Cassimer took one last look at the city. Flames licked concentric data towers to the west, and judging by the black smoke, the RebEarthers must have hit the oil refinery the Kalevala forces had tried and failed to retake.

  "Incoming Kalevala gunships," said a silver-eyed Lucklaw. "ETA four minutes. With the refinery gone, they intend to bring the hammer down on both RebEarth and the Gustavians."

  "Too little, too late." The Kalevala's pussyfooting had lost them the city, and countless of their own citizens lay drowned or burned. Caution could win wars, but only if it was incisive – never apprehensive.

  * * *

  The team haunted the apartment building, creeping through snapshots of lives that had ended abruptly. Photos flickered on wall displays that the cold had cracked and discoloured. Families smiled at Cassimer, waved and blew out birthday cake candles, built snowmen and rode sleds down hills to which they'd never return.

  Even if the Kalevala retook their territory with enough strength to hold it, Tuonela was unlikely to ever be rebuilt. The original colony was old, from the days when architect ships had blazed across the void and humanity had been united enough to afford terraforming and civilisation-building. Apart from the Primaterre, Cassimer could only think of one, maybe two, factions capable of such wonders anymore, and the Kalevala wasn't one of them. Tuonela would be left to rot, refineries and industries rebuilt, but instead of a city, her population would have to make do with barracks and habitats.

  "Commander!" Hopewell, turning from a window. "We've got incom–"

  Her voice was drowned out by thunder, her shape lost in a flurry of glass and snow.

  Cassimer dropped to the floor, his APF flaring hot enough to melt the frosty film on the tiles. A Kalevala gunship sprayed the building with a hail of projectiles that bored through the wall in fist-sized chunks. Snow and smoke filled the room. A pipe erupted through a bowing wall and burst in a shower of icy shards.

  The Kalevala gunship fired rockets towards the west, in reply to the Gustavians' booming artillery, and its mounted guns spun white-hot, raking the RebEarth stronghold. Explosions rocked the building as the gunship hit the engines of the shuttle on the roof and, with a violent shrug, the ceiling collapsed.

  Cassimer rolled to the side, away from a snarl of beams and brick. He shrugged his Hyrrokkin from his shoulder, steadied his aim, dredging from his memory the weak spots of Vasara Class ships–

  –and then the ship was gone, tearing down the submerged highway, its downwash blowing a dazzling blizzard through gaping doors and windows.

  * * *

  "Still ten on the thermal." Lucklaw crouched next to Cassimer, his light-weave gauntlets running across a red-painted wall.

  The team had dug their way out of the destroyed apartment, with no injuries worse than a few scratches on their armour, and had taken advantage of the momentary chaos to reach the 18th floor. Cassimer, Lucklaw and Tallinn had entered the apartment adjacent to the unit where the RebEarthers congregated. The gunners had moved up a floor, preparing to breach from the apartment directly above.

  "Audio's patchy thanks to the gunship, but I think they might be interrogating someone. It doesn't sound pleasant," Lucklaw said.

  None of it was. RebEarth had spent some time inside the high-rise, covering its walls with murals. The ubiquitous phoenixes, of course, and flames devouring Primaterre soldiers, but there was a new, repeated figure that Cassimer had never seen before: darkness in the shape of a man, white wings spreading from his shoulders.

  It disturbed him. Maybe because it was unfamiliar, or maybe because it wasn't. Something about it scratched at him, as though a memory was trying to surface.

  The Kalevala gunship made another pass. It no longer focused fire on the high-rise, but its hull brushed the facade, its engines spewing black smoke.

  "What are they playing at? There are still civilians on the ground – Rearcross and I saw a whole bunch, their belongings packed into sleds, trying to escape to the south. The Kalevala should be trying to draw the fighting away from the city, not into it," Hopewell said over the team channel.

  The gunship's cannons coughed between clips. Its pale blue hull was battered and dented. It was a Vasara; the same class of gunship that the Kalevala had used in the battle that had lost them the territory of Vainamoinen, but that was near enough forty years ago. If they had been brought out of retirement, the Kalevala forces had to be struggling even worse than intel had suggested. They had to be on the brink of defeat.

  "They'd rather see Tuonela razed than lost," Cassimer said.

  "Crazy. Don't they care about their own people?"

  "It
's more than a matter of territory. Between the Kalevala and the Gustavians, it's personal, and they'll fight to mutual destruction if they must. It's an ancient conflict, rooted in old Earth history." Cassimer had read about it en route to Tuonela, attempting to get context for the war his team were being dropped into. The initial rift had occurred after the Aland rebellion, caused by an argument over which of two languages should be the new nation's official tongue. Neither language was in use anymore – the point moot, but the animosity alive and well.

  "Good riddance if they do destroy each other. The one good thing to come out of the Epoch War was a clean slate for humanity, and squandering that is a waste. I can't stand these weird, nostalgic factions clinging onto history that doesn't matter," Tallinn said.

  "History isn't something to be shrugged off, Captain. It's a path to understanding."

  "Do you suppose that's how the Primaterre would've ended up without purity? Splitting into factions over nonsense, fighting each other to the death?"

  "Perhaps," Cassimer said coolly. Hopewell was edging too close to the forbidden topic, and not for the first time. She understood his implied warning, apologising in a private text. Lucklaw sighed deeply.

  "Fibre-cam in place. Visual available, Commander," Rearcross reported.

  The camera, slipped through a minute hole in the target apartment's ceiling, revealed a one-room unit. Large, open plan with an industrial feel, complete with concrete pillars and exposed piping. Smoke glittering with ice crystals billowed against floor-to-ceiling windows. Two men in red-and-black combat armour stood guard at the door, and a thin woman was nervously sucking on a cigarette underneath a fire escape sign.

  In the centre of the room, a man sat slumped forward in a chair. The skin on his back had been expertly peeled away and draped in strips over his shoulders.

  He was alive, and he spoke, pleading for mercy.

  "RebEarth," Tallinn said. "Every time I think I've seen it all, they find a new way to disgust me."

  "Not RebEarth," Cassimer said.

  The torturer was a woman, her hair cropped short, her earrings weighing heavily on fur-collared shoulders. He couldn't see her face, but he'd heard her voice. Rich, melodic, with the rising cadence of a Kirkclair accent, yet brimming with acrimony. The bitterness of juniper, Joy called it, and he had to bite his tongue to chase away the thoughts of what this thing had done to her; what it was doing to her still, during sleepless nights and quiet moments.