The Dust Filter

The crackling notes of the Divisional anthem faded away, and silence fell in the mess hall.

‘Citizen-Soldiers,’ barked the loudspeaker. ‘These are the morning announcements: Presently, three friendly shells are fired for every two enemy strikes detected. Production has risen by three-point-five percent since last year, for which The General Staff of the Central Commissariat has ordered a commendation be awarded to Section Eight. We salute their achievement. No further announcements.’

The final words were almost drowned in the discordant mass of conversation, laughter, and scraping cutlery that feeding a hundred people entailed.

‘What a joke,’ grunted Marten, stabbing at his tray. ‘Those knuckle-draggers would never have gotten the conveyor online if we weren’t there.’

‘Ordnance barely thinks about the Commissariat as long as the guns are fed, so the General Staff only really care about putting lead in brass,’ said Ramona, picking her teeth with a fingernail.

‘Yeah. Still rubs me the wrong way.’

‘That’s being a Three, Marty. Told you as much when you got transferred here,’ She hauled herself upright and brushed crumbs from her greatcoat. ‘We keep the dust out, nobody’s brain rots, nobody bothers us. We fuck up, people get sick, everything goes to hell. Ditch my tray will you? Gotta fetch today’s board.’

Marten watched her weave between the benches, envying the ease with which she slapped shoulders and called greetings to other crews. Would he be laughing and cracking jokes with the crowd if he’d been in a posting for six years? Not likely, he thought. He’d always had trouble with large groups, which had been dangerous until he was placed in Section Three. In two and a half years of seeing the same hundred faces, he could count on one hand the people he was on first-name terms with. Thankfully, that wasn’t an issue here.

Giving up on the rest of his potatoes, which were metallic-tasting again, he fed their scratched-up, off-white trays into the rack, and picked his way through the hall and into the street.

Section Three’s barracks complex was a wide five-story building sandwiched between an ammunition hoist and a support column, both stretching up past the orange lamplight toward the firmament. A distant twinkling caught Marten’s eye and he glanced skyward. Section Seven must be welding again, replacing the gantry that collapsed last month. He’d be glad when it was done, and the familiar little line of stars was back in place among the glittering web.

Marten had wanted to join Seven as a child and become one of the people who set the stars. The Gantrymen were respected, adored even. But he’d always hated heights. They turned his stomach to lead and his legs to wet cardboard. Between that and his tenuous grasp on maths putting the Ordnance Board out of reach, there weren’t many careers open to him.

While he had been thinking, his feet had carried him to the kit sheds. Squat, ugly lean-tos backing onto the support column like corrugated-iron barnacles. The thick, rubberised-cotton dust suits were hot and unwieldy, and he was happy to put off getting changed until Ramona caught up with the day’s orders.

#

‘Lieutenant d’Armilly and Ensign Morrel.’ called Captain Doré.

‘d’Armilly reporting for duty, sir.’ Ramona replied, giving a lazy salute. Doré waved it away, scratching at his patchy beard.

‘Your orders, Lieutenant,’ he passed her a clipboard from the stack carried by his aide, glancing at it as he did. ‘You’ll be out by hydroponics today. Maybe snag some carrots for us, eh?’

With a huffed laugh, the Captain called for the next crew. For all his flaws, Ramona thought him decent, as superiors went. Older, stocky, and entirely content to remain a junior officer for the rest of his life. She’d been taught that being the direct subordinate of a young and ambitious officer was dangerous. There might be a set of coat-tails you could ride to the Staff Office, but nine times out of ten you’d get left behind in some dead-end commission, a stepping stone in someone else’s career. Better to work under someone competent but content.

The day’s orders looked routine at first glance. Filters to replace, a leaking radiator to patch. Then she caught it, and her shoulders sagged. An arterial to refurbish; she’d need the harness. At least it could be gotten out of the way at the beginning of the shift.

Irritated at the complex and dangerous assignment, she checked who had submitted the order. Section Nine, the provosts. A maintenance issue being raised using disciplinary protocols meant that either the fault was causing a breakdown of order, or whoever wanted it fixed was well-connected enough to arrange a high-priority listing. The potatoes weren’t likely to riot over air quality, so this was for someone important. Important enough to cause her problems if the job got botched.

That put paid to her half-formed idea to use this as an opportunity to help Marty with his fear of heights. One of their first jobs together had been in one of the gun rooms in the south-eastern turret. They’d ridden up in the ammo hoist, and when they’d reached the top Marty looked over the railing. She’d never seen someone so utterly terrified. It took her several minutes to coax him out into the turret itself, and the best part of half an hour to get him functional again. Thankfully, the job had been pretty simple, and it wasn’t long before they were on the way back down, Marty’s eyes tightly shut and her distracting him with small talk. Over time he’d gotten better with the lifts, but she hadn’t yet been able to cajole him into any harness work.

The harnesses themselves weren’t kept in the main kit sheds, so Ramona signed a set out from the quartermaster before heading to where Marten would be waiting. He looked up at the sound of her approach and grimaced at the lumpy orange kit bag.

‘Oh no.’

‘Afraid so,’ she replied, dropping it with a clunk. ‘I’ll be on the wire today. This job’s important to someone in brass, not the kind of thing to give to a first-timer. No offence, Marty.’

‘None taken. It’s a relief, to be honest.’

She hummed in noncommittal assent as she punched in the door code. The lock squealed, and the door swung inward. The cramped space beyond was half-filled by their dust suits and the little changing bench, but the pair had long since shed any awkwardness they might have felt about seeing one another’s regulation underwear.

Once they were dressed, Ramona grabbed the clipboard and gestured at Marten to get the kit bag and toolbox. Most of the walk to hydroponics passed in companionable silence, broken up by the usual small talk, muffled slightly by their masks. Complaining about the habits and personal hygiene of various bunkmates, speculating on the state of the war, and Ramona’s latest success at the card table. She was halfway through explaining how she had last won Captain Doré’s cigarette ration when around the corner of the next building strode a man wearing the unmistakable gold-braided capelet of the General Staff, his entourage several paces behind.

Ramona shoved Marten to the side of the path and snapped to attention, him following suit a second slower. Provost Marshal Jules Tournachon looked up sharply, but kept his swift, even pace. Once directly in front of Ramona he spun on his heel and stood facing her, his followers jostling to a stop at a respectful distance. He regarded her with piercing green eyes, then returned the salute.

‘You are in good health, Lieutenant d’Armilly?’

‘The best, thank you sir.’

‘I am glad to hear it. Come by my office when you get off-duty, it has been entirely too long.’

‘I’d be honoured to, sir.’

‘Very well, twenty-hundred hours. Until then, Lieutenant.’

He nodded curtly, and acknowledged Marten with a sideways glance, then turned away and resumed his course, aides in-tow. Once the last of them, a short bespectacled man hurriedly scribbling a note in a leather-backed pocketbook, had passed by, the pair relaxed.

‘You know the Provost Marshal?’ Marten demanded.

‘I don’t like to bring it up, gives the wrong impression,’ Ramona said. ‘But he was my mentor back at the academy. Pretty good one, too. Taught me a lot.’

‘Like what?’

‘Politics. How to keep my head down and my eyes open, how not to get passed over or stepped on by superiors. That kinda thing. Wanted me to join Nine when I graduated.’

‘Why didn’t you? Would have been a more comfortable job than dragging yourself around in these damn suits. Safer, too.’

‘You’d be surprised. Plenty of nasty ways to get killed nosing around in other people’s business. Besides, I’m good at what I do, and it doesn’t get anyone hurt. Nobody’s scared or angry to see a Three, and you can’t say that about a Nine.’

Marten didn’t have anything to say, so the conversation lapsed. Before long, they reached the hydroponics and water treatment complex. It was a well-beaten track for Section Three, given that the plant beds provided most of the fortress-city’s fresh air. The gate sentries waved them in with indifferent familiarity, and the duo reached the designated access hatch without incident.

The hatch was circular, around two and a half feet in diameter. Ramona opened it once she and Marten had secured the filter canisters to their masks. The heavy steel squealed outward to reveal a confined vestibule with an identical hatch at the other end. Every level surface in the space was covered in pale grey dust; the bane of Section Three. A neurotoxic amalgam of mercury, lead, earth metals and soot. Necessary byproducts of the processes that kept the guns firing.

Careful not to disturb the dust more than necessary, Marten and Ramona crawled through the hatch and secured it behind them.

‘Ready?’ she asked, grimacing at the musty taste of filtered air.

Marten double checked the carabiners holding their gear to his suit and nodded, so she opened the inner A rush of air howled through the opening. Dust rose in a vicious swirl, battering their suits with countless tiny crashes.

‘I’ll lead!’ Ramona called over the din.

Marten followed, leaving their exit open. The handholds on the cylindrical tunnel were small, worn smooth by the constant rush of dust. They were going with the flow for now, and neither of them looked forward to the return journey. For several unpleasant minutes the world was nothing but grunting, crawling, and the gritty gale at their backs.

At length, the tunnel opened to a wide chamber shaped like an upturned bowl, with many other pipes leading into it. Most of the floorspace was taken up by the vast, shallow funnel that led into the arterial itself, a circular void twenty meters across, descending over three hundred metres to the filtration chamber below. The only level footing was a strip just wide enough for Ramona and Marten to walk side-by-side, a thin safety rail between them and the abyss. Unnerving as it was, the larger space had the benefit of dispersing the dust-laden blasts from the dozen or so inlets.

As they made their way to the platform that jutted out over the edge of the arterial, Ramona observed her junior. He seemed to be holding up well enough. ‘Got the harness, Marty?’ she called gently.

‘Oh, er.’ he fumbled for a moment, then set the kit bag down and opened it. ‘Sorry.’

‘No worries. Just take it easy, yeah? Remember your training and it’s all gonna be fine.’ she gave him a moment to fiddle around and ratchet down his nerves. ‘Ok, all good?’ he nodded. ‘Good. Now let’s get me strapped up. Sooner I’m in, sooner we’re outta here.’

Attaching the harness to the suit took little time or effort, as Marten fell back onto muscle memory. The cable motor was in good order too, and the pulley on the chamber roof secure. All that remained was to attach the cord itself, and the descent could begin.

As Ramona double-checked the equipment, she ran through procedures with Marten, mostly for his reassurance. ‘…and be ready to pull me up, ok? Oh, and make sure you give me some extra slack once I’m down. The cable will shrink a bit without my weight on it.’

‘Got it. Good luck down there.’

‘Thanks, Marty. Here goes.’ Ramona checked she was securely tied one last time and stepped off the platform.

Marten watched from behind the motor’s controls as Ramona swung in a rough, pendulous circle ten feet above the darkness. Once she stabilised and gave him the thumbs up, he eased down on the lever and watched her slowly drop from view.

#

As she approached the throat of the chasm, the sound of rushing air and dust battering against Ramona’s suit grew steadily louder. The platform rose past her, and she was alone in the howling, spraying void. She reached for her head-torch as the circle of light from above grew distant.

The orange-yellow glow cast a hazy shadow on the wall, the dust rushing through the beam like a swarm of tiny biting insects. The noise was deafening, and she knew it would get worse closer to the turbine. Already, the motor’s hum was swelling under the rest of the din. Unable to look below without the risk of tilting head-first, the shifting noise-scape was her only clue to her position.

Sooner than she expected, her feet brushed the mesh floor that divided the maintenance platform from the flashing steel below. Once her footing was firm, she unclipped herself, headed to the comms box, and swung it open. A press of the button, and the cable stopped descending.

Good, she thought. Marty knew she was down safe. Now to business.

The door beside the panel was handleless on this side and pushed open smoothly. She hit a switch and cold fluorescent lighting flickered on to reveal the long, broad hall beyond, with enormous glass-walled chambers to either side, stretching into the distance. The sound here was more subdued, and her ears popped.

The chambers were the dry filters, thousands of angled metal blades which the turbine’s blast was forced through and around to separate the heavy, toxic dust from the air. These seemed to be working, though Ramona grimaced at the caked-on grime. The system had clearly not been shut down in years.

Each chamber was supposed to be a redundant system, the control circuit switching between each of them every twelve hours to reduce wear and strain. The fact that both had obviously been active for so long made Ramona uneasy. She followed the hallway down to the wet filters.

It was immediately obvious that something was wrong. The wet filters were supposed to be much the same as the dry, except their blades were misted with a fine spray of wastewater from hydroponics. The filters were completely flooded with fetid, foaming liquid. In mute horror, Ramona continued. The further she got, the more obvious the source of the problem became. Prolonged use of both chambers had overwhelmed their drains, which were now completely silted up. The wet filters were essentially useless, utterly drowned in sludge. That meant the air in this node was venting through the emergency valve, dumped back into the system almost completely untreated.

‘Oh fuck,’ Ramona heard herself say. That meant the air that was getting pumped straight into the plant beds. The crops, the water, everything. ‘Fuck, fuck!’ this couldn’t be happening. It was right in front of her. She launched herself at the plate that covered the drain on the closest chamber, wrenching it free.

Casting the cover aside, she dug with her gloved hands at the sucking mud, gouging deep clawmarks into it as she hauled out globs of muck, splattering them on the floor. It felt like hours until she finally felt her fingertips brush the underside of the closest filter plate, but she eventually managed to expose it.

She sat back, and could feel the sweat in her boots. This wasn’t going to work. She had no idea how long she had been down here, and despite all her work, the silt was showing no signs of softening. No water was coming through at all, and she couldn’t reach any deeper. The entire system would have to be shut down and refurbished, which effectively meant turning off hydroponics as well. There’d be food shortages. Stale air. A mass panic. A mutiny.

‘I have to tell Captain Doré.’ She stumbled back through the hall. He was her superior officer.

‘I can’t tell Doré.’ She reached the light switch and banished the cold light. He couldn’t bluff to save his life. People would ask what the matter was and he’d fold in an instant.

‘I can’t not tell Doré.’ She re-attached her cord and pressed the button in the comms box again. If she went over his head it would destroy his career, and he didn’t deserve that.

‘Tournachon!’ she gasped, unheard over the turbine and the dust as she stared up at the growing ring of light. She was seeing Tournachon that evening! Who better than the Provost Marshal to tell? The more she thought about it, struggling against the wind in the access tunnel, the better the idea became. Now all she had to do was get through the shift and hold it together until twenty hundred hours.

#

Ramona had been strange all afternoon, and despite Marten’s attempts, she wouldn’t go into any detail about what had happened down in the arterial. Not a word until they were back in the cramped dustlock, and all he’d gotten then was the barest account of ‘A filter needed unclogging, took longer than I thought.’. She’d furnished him with no information at all. And she’d barely touched lunch.

He couldn’t risk damaging her opinion of him by badgering her, that would be disastrous, but would it be as disastrous as losing her confidence? This assignment was his last shot at avoiding being reduced to an enlistee. Without Ramona there’d be nothing standing between him and a life of slaving away on an assembly line, or down in the mines. If she wasn’t going to confide in him, what had these past few years even meant? The point was moot. She wasn’t going to tell him anything until she had a chance to think things through. He had to believe that she would come around. He could get through this. Mind over matter.

#

The approach of twenty hundred hours had been slow, at first. Ramona had been stewing in anxiety from the moment she saw the filters. Things had gotten a little easier after lunch. Marten had stopped digging for details, and the reassurance of having a plan had done wonders for her composure.

By the time she hit the showers that evening, she was almost back to her usual self, the afternoon pressed into a blur by routine. Under the warm spray everything finally fell back into place. She was the agent of her own existence, not a passenger. This was a problem, a big problem, but it was one that could be solved, and she was the one in position to instigate that solution.

Having allowed herself just one scream into her balled-up, scratchy towel, she donned her dress uniform. She’d had no cause to wear it since the memorial service for Doré’s predecessor four years ago, and the powder-blue linen was slightly creased, and carrying a faint smell of mothballs. Thankfully, the fit was as good as the day she’d collected it from Tournachon’s tailor, a courtesy he had extended to favoured students. She’d never forget the pride she felt accepting her diploma and commission, her sleeves neither drooping over her hands nor halfway up her forearm, unlike some of her less fortunate classmates. But enough of the past. She checked her reflection in the dorm’s mirror one last time and brushed some imaginary fluff from her shoulder. It was time to meet her old teacher.

The General Staff Headquarters was one of the grandest buildings in the entire fortress-city, surpassed only by the palatial complex of the Ordnance Board. It was also one of the oldest, built well before the firmament, as its long-dead gardens of cracked earth and skeletal trees demonstrated. Ramona would choose the dome every time, over the empty sky she’d only ever read about. Having the constant warm glow of the gantry lights and a thick concrete wall between her and the enemy was worth a few dead plants.

These sentries were less used to strangers, and far less friendly than the ones at the Section Five complex, so getting in was somewhat laborious. Eventually though, Ramona found herself at the Provost Marshal’s tall stained-oak door. She sucked in a breath and knocked firmly.

‘Enter.’ came Tournachon’s formal, dispassionate voice. She obeyed. ‘Ah, Lieutenant d’Armilly’ he said with a hint more warmth, looking up from his paperwork. ‘Have a seat, I will be with you in a moment.’

She nodded, but he was already looking back at his desk. There was a small row of spindle-legged wooden chairs near the door, and she perched on the one that looked most stable. The room was quiet aside from the scratching of the Provost Marshal’s pen, and the ticking of a handsome grandfather clock.

Ramona looked around, trying to suppress her urge to fidget. She’d never been inside Staff Headquarters before, and she wished there’d been a chance to see more of the place. Tournachon’s office was remarkably similar to the one he had kept as an academy instructor, though grander. Behind his desk there were several glass-fronted cabinets, their shelves weighed down with honours, accolades, and trophies. At the opposite end of the room to his expansive desk was a large fireplace, and a coffee table with several green leather armchairs. The glowing coals held her gaze until the creak of the Provost Marshal’s chair drew her to her feet.

‘At ease, Lieutenant. You are, after all, off duty.’ he said. She relaxed a little as he locked whatever he had been working on in his desk drawer. Once he was finished, he stood and approached her. His eyes were critical, his expression pensive. ‘I am glad that uniform still fits you, but I cannot help but think you would look better in indigo than powder-blue. I believe I said so at the time?’

‘You did, sir. You also told me it was dangerous to have a young and ambitious superior.’

A slight smile twisted at the corner of his mouth. ‘That I did. I admit I have debated the wisdom of giving you that lesson, these years I have not had your talent at my disposal.’

‘Thank you, sir. But I have something to tell you, something horribly important.’

‘Important, is it? We had best get comfortable, then. Cigar?’

‘No, thank you.’

He gestured her toward one of the fireside chairs, and busied himself with the cigar box. Once he was settled in his own seat, glowing tobacco in hand, she sat too, and explained everything. Throughout the telling, Tournachon’s expression was neutral, unreadable. He spoke only to request clarification and further detail, and after she finished, they sat in silence for several minutes. Eventually, he stubbed his cigar into the glass ashtray and opened his mouth.

‘And what should we do about this, to preserve the operational integrity of the Army?’ he said evenly.

‘We need to shut down and clean the wet filters. Completely cycle the water in hydroponics. Junk the current harvest. The shortages should be manageable if we act fast, before anything else gets contaminated.’

‘What else?’

She inhaled deeply. This was not going to be easy to say. ‘The entire dust system is overstrained. It’s running at over double its sustainable capacity. This would never have happened if whoever was last down there hadn’t been forced to activate both filter banks simultaneously. From that day, it was only a matter of time until something like this happened.’ she swallowed. It was now or never. ‘We need to slow down arms production.’

‘Absolutely unacceptable.’ his reply was instant, his tone uncompromising. ‘Ordnance demands that production increase. We are finally surpassing enemy rates of fire.’

‘But sir, without reducing the amount of dust produced, there’s simply no way to get rid of it all. We might as well just leave the filters blocked.’

‘Now there, Lieutenant, is an interesting proposal. What would that entail?’

Ramona jolted in horror, it felt as if she had been electrocuted. She must have misheard him, and she said as much.

‘I said ‘what would that entail?’, Lieutenant.’ he said with almost tranquil sincerity.

‘I- it wasn’t serious, I mean to say I wouldn’t-’

‘Please, d’Armilly. I would like to know.’

‘It would mean the smaller dust particles would continually cycle back into the air. The water, too. The poisoning would be slow, barely noticeable at first, and spread across the entire population. It would affect the enlistees worst, especially the munitions workers. They get a nasty amount of exposure as it is. The miners, too. Organ damage from high doses, cognitive decline from low doses over a long time. Death, eventually.’

‘And how would that impact production?’

That stumped her for a moment. ‘Well, it wouldn’t. Not for a long time, at least.’ the cogs of her brain were turning, and a horrible revelation began to unfurl. ‘Wait, this isn’t hypothetical, is it?’ Ramona looked up to see a sly smile on Tournachon’s face. ‘You already knew.’

‘Well done, my girl,’ he purred. ‘I knew there was the makings of a provost in that pretty head of yours.’

‘The maintenance order was from Section Nine. You sent me down there.’

‘I did. You needed to see it for yourself, or you would never have been able to accept the necessity of it. You would not have been able to admit to yourself that the problem is insoluble.’

‘But it isn’t!’ she burst, leaping to her feet. ‘It can be solved! We just need to pause production for a few weeks, a month at most, and limit it going forward!’

The Provost Marshal remained seated. ‘You mean cripple our production line, leave us with thousands of unoccupied, undisciplined rabble, and cease fire on the enemy?’

His last words had been with such venom that it gave Ramona pause. But this was too important to allow herself to be intimidated. ‘What alternative is there? It’s our duty as Officers to be compassionate guardians of our inferiors!’

At that, he let out a humourless chuckle. ‘Compassionate guardians? Spare me the first-year ethics lecture, d’Armilly. It was nonsense when I taught it to you, and it is nonsense now. The enlistees are tools. The junior officers are tools. I am a tool. Our functions are set by our ranks and our designations, and all bend to the same purpose; To destroy the enemy.

‘That is the point of all of this!’ he stood, and waved his arms as if to encompass the entire world. ‘It is why our forebears raised the firmament, and dug the mines, and built this room!’

He was shouting now, and Ramona found herself unconsciously backing away as he advanced on her. ‘And you would have their entire vision, their entire world, the reason for all of this-’ another expansive gesture ‘-abandoned, and for what? Because you are too weak to accept that we are the dust! All of us!’

He stopped and turned away. The only sounds Ramona could hear were the ticking clock, his heavy breathing, and the pounding of her own heart. ‘You’re insane.’ she murmured.

‘I know my place, d’Armilly.’ he said, his voice low and hoarse. ‘I understand it. Call that insanity if you must. I see that you need some time to think this all through.’

‘You think I’m just going to keep quiet about all this?’ she said with a slight tremor. ‘The second I’m out of this office I’m going to tell everyone what you’re hiding. What you’re allowing to continue.’

‘No, you won’t,’ he sighed, still not facing her. ‘Section Nine would see to that, which is why I know that you will not. Remember that you came to me. Not to Doré, or to the enlistees, but to me. There was a part of you that already knew the truth before you walked into this room.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, d’Armilly, that you’re up for promotion. You are the best student I ever had. That is why I arranged this opportunity for you to get on board. So you could be part of the things to come.’

He turned around at last, face still flushed from his earlier outburst. ‘You still can, provided that you can demonstrate to me that you have the ability to put that wonderful mind of yours above your compassion. Thought over instinct, my girl. That is how to become part of something greater than yourself.’

#

Marten startled awake at the feeling of someone shaking his shoulder. The yellow-orange starlight was a strange colour against Ramona’s powder-blue dress uniform.

‘Sorry to wake you Marty,’ she whispered. ‘But this can’t wait. I’ve got to tell you something important. Meet me outside?’

‘Alright.’ he replied, just as softly. ‘Just give me a minute to get dressed.’

Once she was gone, Marten slipped into his fatigues in record speed. He spared a glance out the window, and smiled at the freshly-set little line of stars, as he slipped his voice recorder into his pocket and started the tape.

Everything in its place.

END