Stormblood

by Jeremy Szal

  I changed the subject. ‘Why did Kindosh put you on my tail?’

  Kowalski gave a hard sigh, as if it was inevitable I’d find out. ‘Remember I said I’d joined Harmony young? I was on the Narcotics Squad. Not just stormtech, but grimwire, synthsilver, bluesmoke, cloud, devilweed, whatever’s fresh out of the labs. One day we raided a junknest, where they manufacture drugs. Found a woman injecting her three-year-old kid with synthsilver from a second-hand needle. Thought it’d get her to stop screaming.’ Kowalski’s hands were tight and twitchy on the table. ‘I shot that woman seven times.’

  I was silent for a moment as the restaurant clattered around us. ‘I might have done the same.’

  There was a flicker of gratitude in Kowalski’s eyes, that I hadn’t judged her, hadn’t condemned her as others had done. I felt some of the tension deflate. ‘Not everyone at Harmony felt that way,’ she said. ‘My unit didn’t want a bar on me. It should have killed my career, but Kindosh pulled some strings and got me reassigned to her. And now I get babysitting jobs like this.’ She gulped down her steaming tea. ‘And you know the funny thing? My nephew Andrezj is a skinnie. I can rescue a whole shipment of stormtech at any dockyard, I can crack down on a stormdealer, I can wring a confession from a distributor. But I can’t stop my own family from using the stuff.’

  The Reaper War had ended in 2429, two years ago now. It still didn’t feel like we’d won it. We’d just swapped one enemy for another.

  ‘You know why they call us Reapers?’ I asked her. ‘Because we were the only ones who could stop the Harvest from digging their roots in like weeds and choking everything. It’s a wonder they didn’t give us scythes instead of rifles. “Reapers to clear the Harvest away.” That’s what we’d chant before battle.’ I sipped at my tea, cooling my dried throat as I stared down at my arm where the stormtech had pooled, flickering like tongues of flame along my fingers. ‘No one thought about what happens afterwards when the Harvest is clear but the Reapers remain. No one had a chant for that.’

  I was suddenly whirled back to the laboratory where I’d been transformed into a Reaper. Metal walls, white tiles, churning machinery. Plugged up to life-support systems, flat on my back and strapped to an operating table and listening to my friends scream and thrash around me as stormtech shredded their organs, poisoned their blood vessels and twisted their muscles. You can leave a battlefield behind, but you can’t do the same for your body. And that’s where the real, unwinnable war was being fought. Where we all kept fighting until we couldn’t. How many Reapers and skinnies had passed through the rehab centres in the hope of taming this addiction, only to end up killing both themselves and the people around them?

  How much of a hand did my brother really have in this?

  ‘Local, small-time dealers initiating a turf-war or selling their product to a Common Official is one thing.’ Kowalski elbowed her way through my thoughts, as if she could read them. ‘That we can handle. But this is beyond dealing a tainted product when we’re seeing Reapers being poisoned – brutally, publicly killed, and framed as the villains – all over Compass. Poisoning the suppressors is methodical, deliberate, and it’s got force behind it. They’re attacking Harmony and laughing in our faces. That’s not something we can ignore, just as we can’t ignore your brother’s involvement.’ The edges of Kowalski’s eyes were ringed with exhaustion, frustration. ‘I’m at my wits end here, Fukasawa. We all are. So I’m asking you again, to please help us out. You want to help Reapers? You want to help your brother out? Then work with us.’

  For years, I’d known I should have stayed with Artyom. Done my duty as the older brother, as I’d promised. I’d failed miserably. Maybe this was my shot to correct that mistake.

  ‘There are some things I’ll need in return,’ I said slowly.

  Kowalski gave a small laugh. ‘Kindosh isn’t the flexible type.’

  I knew exactly what type Kindosh was, which was why I was negotiating with Kowalski instead.

  ‘She’s made me promises. She’ll give me some leeway.’ I took Kowalski’s silence as an invitation to continue. ‘So: this won’t work if Harmony is breathing down my back, or if I keep being summoned to Kindosh’s office like an errand boy. I’ll work with you, no one else. You can pass along my updates. Once this is done, I’m out. I’m not going to owe her any surprise favours in the future, nothing hanging over me.’ She nodded. So far so good. ‘And if … if my brother is involved, he gets immunity. No one coerces him, no one talks to him before me.’

  She stopped nodding. ‘That might not be possible.’

  ‘Tell Kindosh to make it possible. If there’s any misunderstanding, if he’s held against his will or being blackmailed, I won’t risk him getting lost in the bureaucracy because Kindosh needs a scapegoat.’ My armour creaked as I settled back into my seat. I hadn’t realised I was leaning forward. ‘We’re talking about rehab centres being targeted, Reapers being murdered in public. You don’t pull that off without a hell of an organisation backing you up. These people would have years, decades worth of work behind them. Artyom hasn’t been on Compass long enough to be anything but a part of someone else’s plan. I don’t want that forgotten.’

  Kowalski gently twirled her mug, the motion reflected in the viewport. ‘I’ll talk to Kindosh. She’s not going to be happy, but I think she’ll find your terms acceptable.’ I had no doubt she would. She wanted me involved badly enough to make allowances. ‘What matters is that we get this solved.’

  ‘This isn’t for Kindosh,’ I said. ‘It’s not for her alien buddies or her career or Harmony. That’s your screw-up. I’m doing this for the Reapers I fought with. I’m doing this for my brother.’

  It was ironic that it had taken a stormtech outbreak that threatened thousands of people, the very thing that split my brother and I apart, to bring our lives crashing together again, but you don’t choose the cards you’re dealt. I’d hoped that time would have eased things, or that Artyom might have forgiven me, even if I hadn’t forgiven myself. This was far from how I’d envisaged reuniting. But while Artyom’s view on me hadn’t changed, the situation sure as hell had. Ugly as it was, I had to follow this problem to its roots, even if I unearthed things I’d rather leave buried.

  Of all people, it had to be my brother.

  Kowalski nodded. ‘You’re doing a good thing, Fukasawa.’

  I wondered.

  Whatever hells the war had thrown at us, it had created an ironclad, unbreakable bond between Reapers. We stuck together no matter what, because no one else understood how it felt to have an alien organism slither up your backbone and into your brain. What it was like to be excited at the prospect of charging head-on into a maelstrom of Harvest gunfire and Berserker killsquads. How your adrenaline spiked when enemy sniper rounds began chewing your cover away. Or what it felt like to be struck with a stormtech-induced seizure in the middle of a tactical operation, your hands clenching with the urge to kill every living thing on the planet, including the members of your own Battalion.

  No one who’s not been there themselves can wrap their heads around a nightmare like that. No one but the men and women who stood by your side and survived it with you.

  I’d been badly injured in my first skirmish with Harvest, a plasma blast searing across my thigh, leaving a scar I still have. Our intel was compromised, the terrain unfamiliar and access to SSC aerial support jammed. My armour had been fried, my weapons lost in the fray, my leg broken. I was dead in the mud. Alcatraz, multicoloured artillery fire glaring off his armour, scooped me up and carried me over his shoulder for three hours, blasting Harvesters one-handed like something out of a Harmony propaganda piece, until we reached the safety of our buffer-zone. I lay panting on the cold floor as he unstrapped me from my armour and asked him why he’d risked his skin for someone he didn’t even know. He looked at me for a long time before saying we were both Reapers. That made us brothers. ‘To Harmony, to the
Common, we’re nothing,’ he’d said, sinking down on his haunches next to me. ‘A bunch of freak experiments, fighting their war for them. And if we don’t look out for each other, who will?’

  Wasn’t until he’d limped away I’d seen he’d been shot in the shoulder. He hadn’t breathed a word about it.

  We didn’t survive because we had better guns, better wartech, better tacticians, better orbital dogfighters. We survived because we trusted each other with our lives, through every bloody step of the screaming, unflinching darkness of the Reaper War. You don’t survive the traumas we’d endured and the horrific, gut-wrenching things we’d seen without being scarred. Without forming a bond. So, no matter what battlefields we faced, no matter what horrors Harvest would throw at us, we relied on each other. We shared an unbreakable loyalty and honour that every Reaper would shoulder for the rest of their lives.

  And now, in order to save them, I had to turn on my brother. Believe that the boy who’d been beside me and Kasia since we were children was involved in their murders. It felt like a betrayal. Worse: the soldier in me shouldn’t have thought twice. I was dead to Artyom. My fellow Reapers had been my only family for half a decade.

  But that’s the burden of being human – doing right by the people you love, long after it’s stopped making sense.

  5

  Grim

  We got as far as the Starklands Central Station before I was sure someone was following us.

  The stormtech sharpens your senses with a permanent extra edge, so I was distinctly aware someone had kept pace with us since the restaurant. I almost mentioned it to Kowalski, but by the time we got back to my apartment complex there was no one in sight.

  I unlocked the door, only to find the turret had unfolded from the wall and was spinning around like a disco ball, gears whirring. Kowalski swore and was reaching for the thin-gun holstered at her hip when I stopped her, seeing a figure sprawled on my couch, chomping away at a bowl of cereal. There was only one person who’d dare to pull something like this.

  I sighed. ‘Grim? What did we say about locked doors?’

  ‘Hey, Vak! Your place is nicer than I remembered. Good to see you made it out, by the way.’ His sly, foxy grin died when he saw I had company. He tumbled off the lounger, his gaze on Kowalski. ‘… and you are?’

  ‘How did you get in without triggering the alarms?’ Kowalski spluttered, bringing her palmerlog up. ‘This security system is airtight. And what the hell did you do to the turret?’ Knowing Grim, I was glad he’d not chosen to test its firing capacity.

  ‘Oh.’ He had the decency to look a little embarrassed as he flexed his spindly fingers. ‘I disabled it. Couldn’t have it stopping me from getting inside.’

  For the first time, I noticed the AI rabbit in the corner of the room, reared up on its hind legs, its eyes engulfed in burning flames, stamping its foot and issuing clouds of smoke. ‘This vagabond has locked me out of my system!’ The rabbit sniffed. ‘He’s tearing my mainframe apart.’

  ‘Shut up, furball. I hardly did any rerouting!’ Grim protested.

  ‘Furball?’ the AI spluttered indignantly, holographic flames jetting from its eyes, nails extending from its paws. ‘I’m a Nova-Class, Pure Core Rubix with a platinum substrate rating, and I will—’

  ‘Oh, shut up. It’s not my fault your safeguard software sucks.’

  The rabbit puffed its chest up. ‘You shut up, and you listen here; I’ll have you know—’

  I interrupted before the argument spiralled out of control and told Grim to quit it. Grim gave me a cheeky, innocent smile I knew all too well and deactivated something remotely in his shib. The autocannon above me stopped spinning. The AI levelled one last demonic-looking death stare in Grim’s direction before vanishing in a puff of angry black smoke.

  I strip-mined my brain for an appropriate response, but returned empty handed. I turned to Kowalski and mumbled an apology instead.

  ‘That’s top-tier Harmony security software. Supposed to be unhackable.’ She rubbed her face with the air of someone who doesn’t want to know any more. She threw me one last look as she steered for the door. ‘Get some rest, Fukasawa. I’ll see you tomorrow.’

  ‘Oh boy.’ Grim sucked air through his hacksaw teeth and scraped both hands through his wild hair, tangled in a permanent mess. He was habitually seeking out weird new gadgets from across the Common. Today, he was dressed in an underskin with a nanoweave stitching that turned him into a neon skeleton from the neck down, his ribcage stuttering red and green like an adboard. ‘Man, I leave you alone for a few hours, and you get in bed with Harmony?’ he asked, slapping my arm.

  ‘It’s not like that,’ I protested.

  ‘What’s it like, then?’

  ‘They only found me because of you.’ Grim’s cheerful face turned pallid. ‘Yeah, they traced your untraceable feed back to me.’

  ‘That means—’

  ‘That means they know who you are, and that you don’t have Compass residency.’

  Grim groaned. ‘Oh god.’

  ‘I’m handling it, don’t worry.’

  Grim rubbed at his eyes with his knuckles. ‘Do you have the genome at least?

  ‘Smuggled it out right under Harmony’s nose.’ I grinned as I extracted the datapoint from my suit sleeve and tossed it to Grim.

  A scattermash of HUD icons and multicoloured overlays grew over Grim’s retinas as he used his shib to send the genome to our buyer. ‘Done. They’re not too happy about us being late, but we’re in the clear.’ Grim scratched at a scab on his temple. ‘Now we’ve only got the Jackal to worry about.’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘Well, word is, he wants to strangle you with your own guts.’

  ‘I’m well aware, Grim.’

  ‘But he’s the Jackal. Most crimelords get their blademen to take care of loose ends. This guy does his own dirty work, does his own finger and toe slicing. Up close and personal.’ Grim sniffed. ‘He enjoys hunting people down around Compass. Makes a game of it.’

  My body remembered and tensed, expecting incoming danger. I clamped down on the sensation and focused on peeling out of my armour before pinching into the seat next to Grim. There’s only so many times you can be creatively threatened in a day before the novelty starts to wear off. ‘If selling the genome isn’t enough I can get Kindosh to get you Compass citizenship as part of our deal.’

  Grim stopped scratching his head to stare at me. He must have realised the real reason I’d taken this job. ‘Wait. You’d do that for me?’

  ‘Consider it done,’ I said.

  ‘While you’re at it, get Harmony to upgrade my place, too?’

  ‘Now you’re pushing it.’

  ‘Can I move into yours, at least?’

  ‘Not if you keep breaking into it!’

  ‘It won’t happen again,’ the Rubix interjected in its usual sniffy voice. ‘I’ll do my utmost to keep this horrid ruffian away.’

  ‘Oh, good. I love a challenge,’ Grim shot back, wearing that infuriating grin of his that had nearly got us killed at the wrong checkpoint.

  I went for the liquor cabinet to make us drinks to celebrate. The stormtech negates the effect of alcohol, meaning I could drink every drop of booze on the asteroid and not get tipsy. Doesn’t mean that I don’t enjoy the taste of alcohol, though.

  The glass shelves were stocked with the classiest labels, courtesy of Harmony. And they’d stocked the bar with everything: whiskey, bourbon, vodka, gin, rum, genever, brandy, tequila, many bespoke Compass varieties. A terminal listed the botanicals and recommended mixers for each drink. I went straight for the gin. I always like to try the local colour so I settled on an unfamiliar label from a small distillery a few floors up from here. I built a cocktail called Reaper’s Bane. Three measures chilled gin, berry liqueur, a squeeze of lemon, a good splash of blue Curaçao. It was
the drink me and Grim had discovered the night we’d met in an offworld spaceport bar. Grim had been caught hacking a gambling terminal. I’d flashed my Reaper credentials, saved him getting his face caved in by a bloodthirsty bodyguard. However people might look at us on the street, Reapers are widely revered for standing on the frontlines of our besieged planets and making a difference in the war. Doesn’t matter where I show my credentials, I’ve got some pull. No one wants to get in a fight with us, not if they want to keep their teeth. Grim’s assailants backed down. He’d bought me the first Reaper’s Bane in gratitude. I liked the guy enough to buy the second round. By the time the fourth swung around, we were partners.

  Grim apprehended the square-cut glass with a skeletal hand. ‘Spill the beans, Vak. What’s going on?’

  I told him. Harmony hadn’t sworn me to secrecy, and Grim was the only one I could talk to about this mess.

  ‘Don’t know if I like this,’ he said when I was done.

  ‘My take? It’s a takeover bid by a drug syndicate. In the end, I’d rather have Harmony control stormtech than let someone new monopolise the market. They’re the lesser of two evils.’ I thought of Alcatraz’s broken body, poisoned and mutilated by stormtech my brother might have helped move, and a chill trickled down my spine. I sipped the gin, the pungent liquid giving my throat a warm, pleasant glow. ‘Got no choice but to trust them.’

  ‘I wouldn’t,’ muttered Grim.

  ‘You’re hardly unbiased.’

  ‘Harmony bombed my homeplanet, Vak.’ Grim was serious for once, his thin shoulders slumped. ‘They tore families apart. They took children.’