by Jeremy Szal
Dedication
For Mum and Dad
Thank you for everything, and a little bit extra.
JEREMY SZAL
Contents
Cover
Dedication
Title Page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Acknowledgements
Credits
Copyright
1
The Reaper
I realised this was a bad idea at around the time the alien biotech started pulsing with dark pleasure under my ribs.
Not that it had ever been a good idea, of course. When you boil it down, there’re two types of plans: the ones that get you killed, and the ones that don’t. When you’re in the business of stealing illegal goods from dangerous people and selling them to other dangerous people, risk is part of the deal. But it was only since I’d been injected with stormtech that I’d started enjoying it. The rush of adrenaline. The thrill of danger. The heat of aggression.
The polymer atrium of the spaceport with its recycled oxygen and pallid lighting was freezing, but my skin was flushed and prickling with fresh sweat, my breathing shallow, my hands twitching by my sides. I think I was even salivating for some action. Moist, sticky saliva filling my mouth like treacle. I grimaced. I hated when my body did that. Twitchy hands were acceptable and sweaty skin I could handle, but I was never going to get used to a sudden mouthful of saliva. The stormtech only got this keyed up when I was walking into something no sane person would consider.
Nothing for it but to press on, keeping a watch on my body and my surroundings. Breathing hard, sweat snaking down my spine, I stepped into the spaceport terminal. It was frantic in the way only spaceports can be: people wandering around and clutching e-tickets, queuing for zero-gravity nausea meds, whirling to meet flight schedules, all while drones jostled overhead. I cut a path through the crowded chaos. No easy feat for a guy my size, though folks tended to edge out of my way, especially since I was wearing heavy armour, my face concealed behind a helmet with a wide, mirrored visor.
The humid, hot stench clung to every surface of the spaceport like a bad reputation. The stormtech had elevated my senses, letting me smell the difference between the spicy, gunpowdery stink of a suit lined with asteroid dust and the greasy odour of a suit worn by an engine-room worker. Between the familiar smell of a human and unfamiliar one of some alien species. The smells all tumbling and blending together and oozing into every pore. Didn’t matter which planets or outposts or habitats you went to in the universe, all spaceports smelled like this. I’d visited enough of them, back when I was a soldier.
This spaceport was in the bottom floor of Compass, a colossal, hollowed-out asteroid. I’d never been to anything like this asteroid, and it was hard to believe, even standing in the flight terminal and seeing the geometries of chiselled rock gouged out high above, hollows sparkling with metals and threaded with girderwork and support struts like the ribcage of some giant, celestial creature.
Golden lights glistened down on tiles shiny with engine grease as I stepped into the tumultuous streets. Only now did my body-heat drop, my breathing returning to normal. Slowly, I started to think more clearly as my focus unclouded. Eyes on the corners. Ears open. Mapping escape routes and points of interest. Scanning the crowd for weapons and possible assailants.
Paranoid, perhaps. But paranoia is always preferable to a bullet in the face. I had to assume the Jackal had look-outs and was packing surveillance gear. You don’t become one of the most notorious crimelords on an asteroid of half a billion people without your own healthy dose of paranoia.
People clustered around a hexagonal viewport to watch a kilometre-long chainship soaring by, blue starlight glinting off its silver flank. Highrises towered above the spaceport, radiant with blinking lights. Multilevel shop readouts advertised ship parts, engine repairs, navsystem charts, spacesuits, cheap flights and cheaper booze in English, Chinese, Russian, Spanish and a smattering of alien and offworld dialects, bleeding stains of neon green and crimson like angry mist into the air.
A crackle echoed from the spaceport. A busted chainship engine, probably. I was the only one on the street who turned towards it. Without the stormtech bolstering their senses like mine, the average human wouldn’t have heard it, or the distant warble of engines entering and exiting the spaceport, or seen the guy in a high window shooting a needle of synthsilver into his arm. Thanks to the organic blue matter shimmying down my throat, wrapped around my bones, slithering down my ribs like ladder rungs, and fused into the fibres of my organs and muscles, I could.
A sudden commslink burst filled my eardrums. ‘Grim! Turn the frequency down,’ I managed to growl.
The intense static quietened until it disappeared entirely. ‘Sorry, Vakov,’ Grim said.
‘I thought we agreed you’d wait for my signal,’ I said, ears still ringing.
‘Yeah, well.’ I could practically hear the ear-splitting grin in his voice. My friend’s face popped into the bottom right corner of my heads-up display. He was short and weedy where I was tall and broad, pale with a shock of red hair that was the opposite of my tanned skin and black hair. We were opposites in many ways. But I’ve found friends to occasionally be like magnets: opposing forces attract. With the emphasis on occasionally. Grim was snacking away, every crunch amplified in my ear. But telling him to stop eating would be like telling me to stop drinking. ‘Everything else is ready … and I got bored. You know how it is, big guy.’
Unfortunately, I did.
‘Please tell me you’re not watching me through street cams again,’ I said as I brought my waypoint up. ‘If they backtrace—’
‘You worry too much. My tech’s airtight, always has been,’ came the hacker’s easy drawl. Grim was my best friend, but in moments like these I wanted to wring his scrawny neck. ‘Just making sure you don’t do anything stupid. Like on Kaddus Station.’
I winced. ‘You and I remember Kaddus very differently.’
Grim gave a knowing mhm. I changed the subject. ‘Make yourself useful and watch for nasty surprises at the waypoint.’
That was our deal. I handled the physical end of the business, while he worked his tech magic from twenty floors above. Grim grumbled but eventually settled down to work. He might wh
ine about it, but he always comes around in the end. If I need him at my side he’ll be there, though sometimes the convincing gave me a headache.
He reminded me of my little brother.
I willed those painful memories away as Grim piped up: ‘Vak, why are we messing with the Jackal?’ The waypoint beamed a neon-green hexagon on my visor, measuring the distance as I walked. Broken glass crunched under my armoured boots. ‘You know he hunts down anyone who messes with him. He takes half of them.’
‘Half?’
‘Half of everything. One eye, one ear, five fingers, five toes. He leaves the tongue, so they can warn others.’
Wasn’t like I didn’t already know all this. ‘Your point being?’
‘My point being, why are we putting our heads on the chopping block?’
One of the Jackal’s less lethal enterprises was a biochem laboratory that sold experimental biotech on the darkmarket. One of our contacts wanted one of his genomes for a prototype called Hendrix – a male hormonal stimulant – enough to pay us to steal it. I make no excuses: stealing from crimelords is no less illegal than stealing from anyone else. Theft might not be my proudest work, but it’s the least dangerous and least bloody kind I do.
I hadn’t told Grim I only took this job to pay for his Compass residency card. He always buried the problem beneath jokes when I brought it up, but I caught the nervous flash in his eyes, worrying if this was the week he’d be deported from the asteroid.
I’ve not had not much stability in my life, not many people who stuck by me. Grim had. And I don’t let go of my friends easily.
‘Jackal boy isn’t home,’ Grim said over the sucking roar of a chainship departing the spaceport and punching through the hangar’s electric-blue shield-barrier into vacuum. ‘Probably won’t be until work hours are over, so it’s unlikely we’ll cross paths.’
‘You won’t,’ I rasped. The stormtech had slithered up to fold like wet cement in my throat, turning my voice husky and thick. I wasn’t suicidal or stupid enough to break into the Jackal’s biotech lab. But crimelords are usually paranoid enough not to trust their own security completely, and predictable enough to keep their closest secrets close: at home. ‘I’m the one breaking into the place.’
Although, we both knew I’d partially taken this job because of the risk. It was a challenge. A gamble. It’s no secret that my body’s wired to sniff out danger for the thrill of an adrenaline rush pumping through my system. It was why I handled this end alone. I’ll put myself in harm’s way, but I won’t risk my friends.
The chaos of the spaceport evaporated behind me as I slid deeper into residential sectors. Past colourful smears of digital ink, beneath the vertical labyrinth of jutting balconies and tangled walkways spiralling up through the buildings. I thought over the plan, my brain cycling through the risks and anticipating the possible dangers I’d confront and the kick I’d get out of them. My hands clenching and unclenching, my muscles tensing, the burning glow of adrenaline and androgen trickling through my system, feeding the alien plumbing hardwired into my body chemistry. I tried to shrug out of my body’s sticky sensations and ground myself in the hard details, the schematics.
Sometimes, my body is my own worst enemy.
I passed a group of stinking drunks slumped in a doorway in one of those seedy spaceport bars that only smuggler crews visit. Glancing up, I saw a flag displaying the atom-shaped insignia of Harmony snapping in a simulated breeze up near the vaulted ceiling. Harmony was the governing body that controlled this asteroid and many others, and back when I was a soldier, that insignia had meant something to me. My body heat rocketed sky-high as I gazed at it now, stormtech clenching inside me. No surprises there. They’d injected the drug into me, after all.
I looked away, jaw hard, just as one of the drunks flicked his gaze towards me. As if despite my ash-grey armour and one-way helmet visor he knew what I was. Some folks know something’s off. Wrong. Something down in the brain stem lets them sense the rottenness of alien biotech with no business being bottled in human flesh. Maybe he could smell me. He threw an empty beer bottle that glanced off my armoured shoulder. The stormtech instantly flared up in response. An invitation for violence. I turned away before I was tempted to accept it. Already raring for danger like I was, walking away was harder than I liked.
I could feel my armour responding to me now. Covering me sole to scalp, the toughened nanoparticle surface was supercharged at my touch. Inside the armour, the interface tendrils shifted along my back, the electrostatic charges crackling along the nape of my neck.
I turned a corner and saw a skinnie slumped in one of the asteroid’s hollows. He was birth-naked and striated with what looked like blue gills. They rippled in violent bursts along his tattered chest, his wire-thin arms, his malnourished face. Each breath sounded like stones rattling. His sweat was nearly black, oozing out of clogged pores, releasing the sickly-sweet stench of wet overripe fruit. Skinnies were stormtech addicts, some of them so consumed by their own body’s sensations they’d spiralled into the deep end, beyond the point of return.
One too many missteps, I’d end up this way, too.
I swallowed hard and eased past the poor guy, glad Grim had the sense to shut up. A few minutes later, I came to the Jackal’s house in the laneway below me. One of those standard living spaces you see everywhere: two storeys high, olive-green walls, largely inconspicuous. I perched on the walkway some three floors above, scanning the exterior of the building. No camera, no guards, no nasty hidden autocannons packing high-calibre armour-piercing rounds or any other fatal surprises. I vaulted over the guardrail and fell towards the roof. I landed on my feet, rolled clear to my knees. The three-storey drop should have hurt like hell, but the surface of my armour sparked as the shock absorbers cushioned the fall. So far so good.
Grim cracked his knuckles. ‘Surveillance cams, sub-dermals, alarms, thermals, laser tripwires, pressure points, and micro-detectors all off.’ Hazy gold outlines of the security tech that branched throughout the building began to discolour, oozing back into their honeycombed sockets as Grim disabled them. ‘Happy thieving.’
The vent slithered open and I dropped in.
I don’t know what I was expecting but given the rundown surroundings, it wasn’t for the place to be decked out. Ebony floors, grey angular chairs, and a huge viewport peering out to the dockyard, frantic with ships from a dozen solar systems and half a dozen alien species. I eyed an impressive gin collection sitting in a glass cabinet.
Grim gave a low whistle. ‘Vak, I think we’re in the wrong business.’ But my body heat had skyrocketed, my elevated pulse throbbing hard and fast in my skull, warning me of the real risk. If I had been doing this for anyone but Grim, I might have reconsidered.
But it was for Grim.
I made a beeline for the Jackal’s workstation, unplugged the overriding port from my suit and jammed it into the central port so Grim could get to work trawling through the mainframe while I stayed alert for visitors. A convulsion of colourful geometrical images and complex code flashed across the flexiscreen. Grim muttered to himself. ‘Still searching … still looking for it … man, there’s a lot of data on here … our Jackal is busy, busy boy … oh, oh, that’s not good.’ An image of a young man appeared on-screen. He was spattered with blood, missing an eye and an ear, and the fingers and toes from the left side of his body. His remaining eye was glassy and broken and full of fear. A reminder of the Jackal’s work for his own private collection. My blood pressure spiked.
‘Grim?’
‘Almost,’ he whispered. ‘Almost … almost. Found it!’ A genome sequence labelled Hendrix materialised on-screen as a clutter of colours and statistics. Hands twitchy again, a trickle of sweat running down my arms, I retethered the port to my suit and the transfer commenced. ‘That’s right, come to Grim, nice and easy.’
The screen chimed again and the Hendrix dematerialis
ed. Finally.
‘Got it.’ said Grim. Sticky, hot relief flushed through my body. I’d earned a drink now. I had half a mind to swipe one of the Jackal’s vintage gin bottles. As I passed the gleaming collection, the stormtech coiled in my throat and my thirst became raging dehydration. I couldn’t resist. I eased open the cabinet, three dozen bottles of liquid gold glinting inside. All begging to be taken away.
I scooped up the most expensive looking one and headed to the front door. If I’d been paying more attention, I’d have heard the approaching footsteps, the conversation. So I was as unprepared for the three men ascending the porch steps as they were to see me. The echoes of their conversation withered out into stony silence.
I wasn’t thirsty anymore.
All three men were about as handsome as backalley dogs, but I picked out the Jackal instantly. It was his casual slouch, the relaxed demeanour and controlled reaction that set him apart as the naked surprise on the other men’s faces quickly curdled into rage. They were Sniffers, their bodies crawling with canine augmentations that helped them seek out threats and hunt down enemies. Their wide nostrils twitched and flared in unison. They’d locked onto my scent already.
‘I see you have something of mine,’ the Jackal said in a vaguely disinterested tone, glancing past me towards his workstation. His slender face was sharp and jagged as a mountain peak, as if the bones had been carved with a diamond-edged blade. His wavy black hair was slicked back, his moustache oiled. His soot-black eyes constantly moving, drinking in everything, missing nothing. Like me, he was half-Japanese, although I doubted that’d give me any slack. A small knife of a smile appeared on his face, as he thrust his hands into the pockets of his trenchcoat. ‘And I believe that’s my gin.’
‘Get out of there,’ Grim snapped.
The image of severed fingers and sliced ears flitted through my mind as a strip of metal unfolded in one of the Sniffers’ hands. It snapped into position as a half-metre-long blade, sizzling with white-hot heat. Wielded with enough strength, it’d carve my armour into scrap metal with me inside it. He took a step forward. My muscles tightened, legs bracing in a combat position, instincts kicking in.