Chapter Fourteen

Hopeless, Forsaken and Forlorn

Thawn lowered his head within the confessional.

‘Why did you always make us sit in here?’ he asked Jaho then.

‘What are we, Thawn, without our traditions? After all, did you not come here to confess, pilgrim? We are ancient creatures, and Winter’s last remnants, long disregarded by the Sign of the Tondrus.’ She sighed deeply. ‘They won the war against the machines because of us. Our soldiers. We fought their battles. They are living, festering inside humanity, because of us. Their once-forgotten aims and fancies are now within reach, because of us.’

‘Time moved on.’

‘Perhaps. We are both at the end of an exceptionally long life, millennia, Thawn. I would not have it conclude with Winter a mere memory.’

‘It’s Jask’s memory now. It has been a long time.’

‘The cult Jask created in our name is no Winter of mine. Winter lives so long as we live. So yes, we indulge in tradition. We confess in confession, and not over my desk. Begin, if you would.’

Thawn paused. The walls of the box closed in around him and he allowed his mind to flitter back through millennia.

*

Thousands of years ago, Thawn had been compelled to guard the tomb of the Patent Erebus in the desert for eight decades. Tomb though, in this case, may be an inaccurate assessment, as tombs tended only to house the dead.

The sun burst free of the horizon of the planet of Forlorn. It bloomed into the desert sky and Thawn rose with a start. He looked down at Malvo Jask, still sleeping. His handsome features were untouched by their decades of servitude.

Thawn pushed him awake and Jask groaned. ‘You’re a dick.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry, were you having a nice dream?’

‘You know, I was, it was the best… because you weren’t there,’ said Jask, pointing at Thawn like he were half-drunk.

Thawn pushed Jask a second time. ‘Oh, sure. Shut up.’

‘You don’t have to apologise by the way, for last night. I know you try your best.’ Jask rolled across his blanket and kissed Thawn where his neck met his shoulder.

‘Wha— Oh. Now who’s the dick.’ Thawn grabbed a fistful of sand and flung it at Jask.

Jask narrowed his eyes up at the sky. ‘No, no, I’m pretty sure it’s still you.’

Thawn huffed. He stood, scooping his tunic from the desert. With his other hand, he traced a finger across the lines in his chest, where his flesh had been fissured and fused together again, when he was an infant.

Thawn and Jask were ‘augmented’: unable to fail, unable to wound, unable to die. Engineered from conception and hard-wired through childhood to live without cost.

Jask reached a hand across Thawn’s shoulder and kissed him a second time. ‘We should get going,’ he said. ‘Drop at the Tower is still a day away.’

Thawn nodded, stooping to bag up his belongings and gather his armour, lazily piecing it together across his body.

Last to be packaged was the revolver. They shared it between them. It was all they had been given when the Sign of the Tondrus dumped them there. Winter’s pilgrims, the augmented, were notoriously hard to kill, so the Sign had the grace to impart to them a revolver with two shots in the chamber, laced in a very particular toxin, should the toll of their isolation exceed their wits. They dreaded carrying it, like the handle itself was poison.

‘Your turn today,’ Jask said. Thawn obliged, stuffing the revolver into his holster. He then tightened his boot straps and led Jask down the way. The passage to the Tower was a ravine, banked on either side by dunes that guarded against the dawn and twilight sun.

‘We haven’t properly talked about it yet.’ Jask said, several miles hence. ‘Erebus, the child: it never got past the moonwater before.’

Thawn shrugged, not meeting his eye. ‘There’s nothing to talk about,’ he said. ‘It happened. He did. He got out the cradle.’ He dragged his bag across his shoulder and marched ahead. ‘We got sloppy. Let’s just focus on getting to the drop.’

‘But the moonwater…’

‘Inhibits lower brain function,’ Thawn said irritably, as if Jask should already know. ‘Not the networker. The Patent, the machine, took control of the kid.’

‘But it’s still never happened before.’

‘We never left it alone in the moonwater this long before. Like I said… sloppy. We can only bury the machine so deep in the kid’s subconscious.’

‘Doesn’t help we augment them either. No wonder he smashed his way out that thing.’

‘Would you prefer we use one augmented kid to imprison Erebus or go through a dozen norms?’ Thawn rebuked. Jask and Thawn had agreed on the strategy together after all, and he had never offered a hint of contempt before. They had always made the children the Sign provided like them: stronger, better, immune to the disease of aging.

‘Does it really never bother you?’ Thawn could tell Jask had stopped walking. He turned. ‘When we lock the machine in those kids’ heads?’

Thawn said nothing for a time. He hid in his armour. ‘Not our job. We’re just here to guard it and follow orders from Command.’

‘Lazy excuse, Abba, but it’s not like we could even do that well,’ Jask quipped. ‘What kind of fucked-up system imprisons a Patent this way?’

‘Children’s minds are more versatile, so I’ve heard. Easier to incapacitate the machine. I always thought you were a true patriot? A man of the Sign, committed without question. In some circles, that tone is treason.’

‘Lucky I’m with you then. I am committed to Winter… in its entirety,’ Jask said. ‘But in my mind, Winter and the Sign are two different things.’

Thawn rolled his eyes. They were questions they had asked of each other a thousand times before. Questions he had immunised himself against, even if Jask hadn’t. But all that mattered was the kid got out, and one of the Nine Patents was loose. Erebus was an AI, captured as a token of the Sign’s victory in the war against its brothers and sisters and enslaved in the mind of a child for eternity, cut off from her kin.

The Sign of the Tondrus were an ancient and pompous race. Bureaucrats. But an unending war with the Patent machines changed them into something darker. Their first religion, the Church of Winter, became a military church, emboldened by super-soldiers and monsters, the work of genetic experimentation. When the war drew to its twilight, these pilgrims became shameful reminders. They were hunted, executed, and banished from history, save for a handful. Thawn and Jask’s renown earned them a particularly unenviable task.

It was meant to be an easy job, guarding Erebus. But the kid had got out, and if it got back to the Sign they had failed, it would mean death. That was why they had to get to the Tower before their annual supply drop. Surely that was all that mattered. Getting there, getting the shuttle, and getting off-world. That was the plan. They could philosophise later.

‘There really no chance of finding her ourselves?’ Jask said, another mile later. Thawn was sure he knew it was a redundant point, but he asked it anyway.

He stuffed a hand into his pocket and tossed a clip of circuitry at Jask. ‘She tore off her transponder at the burial site. So, unless you’re telepathic, no. She’s somewhere under all this and had hours’ head start when we were sleeping. There’s tunnels for weeks. No chance.’

‘So, we go to the drop?’ Jask said, defeated. ‘Did it really have to be so far?’

‘We go to the drop. Patents won’t be far behind us, mind. She lit the whole station up like a firework. They’ll be coming for her, Sign too.’

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‘Good job Forlorn’s a world in the middle of nowhere then.’

Thawn scoffed. ‘It’s lucky for us, but where else would you hide a Patent when you catch one? The Sign razed a whole civilisation just to bury her here.’

Jask said nothing, apparently content with Thawn’s rebuttal.

Thawn and Jask plodded through the sand in silence, toward the growing blot of the Tower. Once, Thawn and Jask were the most feared legionnaires in the Sign’s ranks. There were days when they stormed the gates of the Patent camps, banners aloft, an army at their heel and topple their metallic cannon fodder in an afternoon. They liberated thousands (and no one ever escaped the Patents camps).

But the politics of a people who had wanted to forget the lengths they went to win the war against the machines meant Winter was now a shameful reminder. One the Sign needed to wash its hands of, along with the rest of its experiments.

‘What about after?’ Jask asked then, as the sun began its lonely march towards the horizon.

‘After?’

‘After we take the shuttle. And we leave Forlorn.’

‘I hadn’t really thought about it,’ Thawn lied. ‘Somewhere damn far away from the Sign.’

‘Fuck ‘em,’ Jask said. ‘We’ll find a little backwater somewhere. Build a farm, raise some weird-looking animals with tentacles or horns. Then, get fat, and… maybe get old.’

‘We’d be waiting a while,’ Thawn remarked. As the scars of his natal surgeries had not healed, so too his body had refused to age a day in centuries. He suspected it never would, no matter how long they waited.

‘You know what I mean,’ Jask protested.

Thawn laughed. He almost smiled. ‘Sounds good.’ He never allowed himself to dream. That tended to be Jask’s job; he was the ‘romantic’ one. ‘Can you imagine if Jaho heard us now?’ he added.

‘That witch would throw up,’ said Jask. He paused. ‘If we fail, shoot me.’ His voice was blunt. ‘I am not going Devil’s End. Not for a single day. I’ve spent enough time in hell already. The nightmares the minders told us about as children; I’m not waiting to see if they’re real.’

Thawn nodded, holding out a hand to Jask. It eased him.

‘We’re leaving,’ Thawn said. ‘We’re leaving.’

The Tower loomed, with the sun now caught behind it. They walked on in the strip of its shadow stretching infinitely past them, welcome for its relief. The dunes began to slacken to a plateau and the Tower became the only feature to distinguish this way from that.

The Tower was a nondescript stack of sand-coloured brick. It was older than them certainly. Its lonesome spire arrowed towards the heavens, marking their only interface with the wider universe. For Thawn, it was like being reunited with an old friend.

‘After you,’ Jask said, extending an arm to bear the Tower door for Thawn. Thawn entered into the cool embrace of the windowless spire. The desert wind strained and whistled through the cracks to punctuate their ascent.

‘We got about an hour,’ Jask called up. Thawn then studied the tainted pistol from his hip. ‘Reckon you can take out the shuttle in two shots?’

‘You know full well I can do it in one.’

‘I was just giving you a chance to be modest.’

Thawn smiled. They reached the summit and dispersed onto a wide balcony overlooking the dunes, now faded into moonlit waves. Thawn looked up. He watched the sky succumb to darker hues, reacquainting himself a final time with the stars whose configuration he had become so familiar with.

He then felt a nudge to his waist and saw Jask gesturing a finger towards the sky. One of those stars was pulsing, shifting across the darkness. Blinking lights lowered towards them, smearing a patch of night in wisps of white smoke, spiralling in helices as the shuttle blasted down towards the platform.

Thawn held a hand over his hip and the magnetised grip bound the revolver to his palm. Like howling wolves, the engines boomed over them. The night wind scattered. A reticule flashed upon the inside of Thawn’s helmet as he arced his weapon towards the sky.

Counting his breaths, Thawn lined the nozzle, against the whitish-blue glare of its engines, then squeezed the trigger.

Thawn’s arm kicked back into his shoulder and the turbine burst into flame. The shuttle twirled and danced towards the ground in broken spirals, tracing a trail of smoke. Sparks showered in concentric cascades. Wounded but not incapacitated.

He looked at Jask. A blast of alien laser fire ripped past them and the shuttle burst in its descent like a firework. The desert floor flashed alight. Diving to his knees, Thawn lunged for Jask, but felt his leg pinned to the ground by a dead thud. He screamed. A hunk of metal punctured his shin.

Thawn forced calmness upon himself. Just like he had been trained. He counted his heartbeat back to normality and reached an arm across his back. He bit his lip, screamed a second time, then tore it free with an almighty tug. Paralysed, Thawn extended a hand to Jask, who was flat against the platform.

The darkness trembled and a second ship tumbled down, many times the size of the shuttle it had just destroyed. It purred, and the sand around them whipped into towering vortices. All sense of direction was lost.

Thawn compelled calm again, muted the pain beyond awareness. The ship made no further movement: no gesture, no threat.

Then the platform shook. Thawn felt Jask’s grip loosen. The vortex diminished and Thawn could see once more. A jagged shard of debris sheared Jask’s breast into two. His tepid eyes begged. But Thawn could offer no reassurance.

Wordlessly, Jask tumbled into the flaming embrace of the desert. He couldn’t survive that. He couldn’t. Surely.

Thawn screamed. How foolish! How stupid they were to believe!

The dream was dead five hundred feet beneath him on the desert floor. He begged the world to end, but somehow it kept on existing. He looked upon their destroyer. A wide shroud of black, less than shadow.

A second blast lit the sky in crimson laser fire, and Thawn drew his hands together, waiting for death’s mercy. The sensation was calming. He need not force it this time. He listened to the shrill ringing of his eardrums and waited for the Tower to give way from beneath him, then fell towards Malvo Jask.

*

‘MAL!’ Thawn’s eyes burst open into a darkened chamber. His wrists were bound and bruised. The more he wrestled in his restraints, they tighter they choked his joints.

He scanned his surroundings for a hint of his whereabouts. A gurney rested under a narrow spot lamp beside him, next to a compliment of surgical tools.

A door across the suite fell open, and a figure glided towards Thawn, as if it were rolling on wheels. A machine stood before him, the mechanical conduits of the Patents’ will. It was almost human in shape, but its details were marked by rivets and patterns, the lines and bolts of its armour casing. The eyes shone an angry red, yet its expression was quite calm.

‘I regret your colleague is dead in the desert,’ it said blankly.

Thawn growled, reduced to some primal animal. His arms bulged against the weight of his binders. Thoughts deserted him. No tears welled in his eyes.

‘How did I survive?’ he said.

The Patent half-laughed. ‘We… revived you. Abbadiah Thawn, is it?’ The Patent unfurled its spindly fingers to dangle Thawn’s dog tags. ‘I recollect we suffered greatly at your hand. Ironic that we are your salvation.’

‘I’m not exactly grateful.’ Thawn swallowed his grief, occupied by his restraints. The machine sighed, raising a lazy wrist and the binders clutching Thawn unclicked. The pilgrim fell to his knees.

‘Your augmentation made the feat easier, I admit. We owe you a great debt, pilgrim,’ it continued.

‘Oh?’

‘Your failure has made Erebus scarce. And now we have a chance to recover her.’

‘You heard that?’

‘She made it hard to miss,’ the Patent said.

Thawn rubbed his reddened wrists. ‘And what’s that got to do with me?’

‘We need to find Erebus and your particular skillset is well-attuned.’

‘Use a sentry,’ Thawn said. ‘It’s what they’re for.’ Whatever Thawn, and Jask’s festered resentments towards the Sign, he could not stoop to becoming the Patents’ grunt. Surely.

‘Regrettably, even encased in the mind of a child, Erebus would be able to exert a certain influence over our kind. They recognise her. They would… respond to her. She could elude capture again. In any case, we must regress and rebuild. War is a crippling business.’

Thawn looked down at himself, in this deathly place. ‘You and me both,’ he quipped. ‘Why wouldn’t he come willingly?’

The Patent paused. ‘He is ill, damaged, but one of us all the same. And shock you though it might, the Patents have a remarkable sense of kinship. He deserves to be with us.’

Thawn wished so desperately to hear what Malvo Jask might have said now. What he would give for a few more minutes beside him. Truthfully, Thawn wanted to give up and surrender all agency. To show his weakness for once. Jask would have said grab a scalpel and cut the bastards down till they were dead, or he was. But there was no way out of this one.

‘Whilst reluctant to put our faith in flesh, sometimes it must be done,’ the Patent continued. ‘No doubt the Patent will fall back into the Sign’s hands. You understand the Sign as a part of them. There is no finer candidate.’

‘Why would I do that? What if I refuse?’

The Patent was unmoved. ‘Then we will put you back where we found you, in the state we found you. But you don’t want that.’

How dare a machine pretend to tell me how I think. Thawn wanted to scream. How dare a mere machine pretend to know him.

‘Consider this an escape.’ The machine prowled to where Thawn rested on his knees. ‘From the Sign. From the war. From everything. You know if you return to them the Sign will execute you, don’t you? But imagine you could retire somewhere quiet.’

Thawn spat but didn’t say anything. He kicked back on his heels and leant against the board that had restrained him.

What do I have to do?’ He avoided the Patent’s infinite stare.

It knelt beside him. ‘Find her.’

‘How? She could be anyone. The Sign could hide her anywhere. In the darkest, slimiest crack of some insignificant little moon.’

The Patent laughed if it could be called that. ‘However you want. How isn’t our concern,’ it added to silence Thawn as he opened his mouth. ‘I trust your ingenuity and resourcefulness.’

‘Aren’t you sending me back to Forlorn?’

‘I think not. We are of no doubt the Sign are already on their way. Better to wait it out, I think. I am sure an opportunity will present itself to a man of your talents.’

‘I could restart the war, end the war, if I tell them where you are.’

‘Hm.’ It smirked. ‘You could. That you could. But you won’t. They’ve taken too much from you for you to give anything back. You’re as bitter and spiteful as any man. The lonest of wolves.’

The Patent glided across the chamber and gestured a tubular holding cell, which slid open, and he directed for Thawn to enter. Forsaken and forlorn, Thawn obliged in silence. He returned to his armour and let the narrow walls press against him.

He thought then he might accomplish his mission and find his backwater. Farm a piece of land, just as Jask had wanted. Raise a herd of something or other. He would do it for Mal. Not for the Patents. Certainly not for the Sign. Nothing else mattered anymore. What purpose had he but this?

‘How long will I be out?’

‘A long time,’ Inartus said blankly. ‘We’ll set you drifting, until such time as we have a fix on Erebus’ location. You do us a great service, soldier. Your part in our enterprise might just end this forsaken war.’

The pod hissed in fits of smoke, then an icy glaze came over Thawn, as a terrible weight pulled him towards sleep. His final thought was of Mal, how desperately he loved him, how desperately he missed him, how desperately he hoped he was dead.

If he was alive down there, all alone, it was enough to drive any man to insanity. What if he awoke and saw Thawn wasn’t there? What if he blamed Thawn?

That was his final thought as all sense of place and time left him.