by Jeremy Szal
It was an unspoken truth that Harmony had targeted underprivileged families on backwater planets during the war, pitching the Reaper programme as the most innovative technology since spaceflight. They’d found prime candidates as young as fourteen and all but kidnapped them. The ones their psychoanalysts believed were the best match got put through their stormtech experiments. They called it conscription, but in my book it was evil no matter what you called it. Sure, the Intelligence Officers and xenochemists responsible had been court-martialled, but that didn’t undo damage they’d done. But I’d been furious about it half a hundred times in the past. I didn’t need to rehash it tonight. ‘I know, Grim. But circumstances change.’
‘It’s your choice, mate. Not like I could dissuade you anyway.’ He reclined against the soft leather, legs folded beneath him. ‘Did you watch the films on that memorycrystal I gave you?’
Grim had an unabashed love of cult films and serials, particularly the ones that had originated on Earth, with several libraries’ worth stored up. He had a side-business selling them to people looking to be entertained by something on the weirder side. Occasionally, he passed them to me. Not all of them were terrible.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ve been too busy being kidnapped by Harmony.’
‘Maybe you’ve earned some R&R.’
‘Can’t see that happening any time soon.’
He dropped a hand on my shoulder where it blinked between gold and purple. My knee-jerk response was to shrug it off. The sensitive, overloading nature of the stormtech means Reapers don’t like being touched. But this was Grim, so I overcame the sensation. ‘Then if you have to play with fire,’ he said, ‘let me share the heat.’
‘Grim, I don’t want you to get hurt.’
‘It’s never been a problem before.’
‘This is Harmony, Grim. Not darkmarket smuggling.’
But his mind was made up. Grim’s as loyal as a dog, and whatever I was going through, he’d refuse to let me do it alone because he knew I’d do the same for him. He gave my shoulder a final squeeze before downing his drink and heading for the door. ‘Don’t worry about your brother, yeah? He’ll come around eventually.’
I downed my own drink as the door closed behind him, then stripped my sodden underskin and padded to the bathroom to shower. I stank with an overripe, sickly-sweet stench. The stormtech doesn’t just change the way you smell, it makes your pheromones sharper, more powerful. Skinnies have been known to lick blue sweat off their own bodies, getting high on the sweet-sour toxins secreted from their pores.
My freshly upgraded bathroom was decorated with black and white marble and equipped with an immense steam jet-shower. Fibres in the floors warmed up against my bare feet as I examined my latest collection of wounds and bruises in the curving mirror, stark against my patchwork tapestry of old scars, burns and lacerations. Stormtech might heal the flesh, but it’s going to leave a mark. Thick ropes of stormtech swirled down my stomach and streamed up my breastbone like a comet. I bunched my fist, watching the blue strands flare up along my arm in response. A layer of sticky alien circuitry forever fused to every part of my anatomy. I’d done the best I could not to hate it, try to live with it. Others had fared far worse when trying to adapt to it. If they adapted at all.
I knew some Reapers who’d spent years in rehab as Harmony tried to weaken the stormtech’s grasp on them, reconditioning them to resist their body’s visceral urges, rewiring their brains against their addiction to their own bodies. Others had slipped off the deep end, caving into it. They were Husks, their minds broken, swallowed by the sensations of their bodies, even if it meant hurting themselves just to feel something. They were beyond saving.
I unclenched my hand and stepped into the shower. Usually, the apartment complex Rubix warned me not to use too much water, but those restrictions seemed to have been lifted with the upgrade. I let myself be blasted by scalding jetstreams of water, feeling my muscles slowly, slowly unwind, the tension leaving my body as I breathed the steamy air. I allowed myself a luxurious half-hour before towelling off and heading into the bedroom. I cranked up the aircon and sprawled naked on the king-sized memory-foam mattress, sinking into its body-moulding softness. The bed released a calming scent and I sighed deeply into the cool darkness. Listening to my rapid heartbeat, the rhythm of my breathing, trying to decompress and compartmentalise the day. But the image of my brother with that canister kept churning over and over in my mind. After an hour of tossing and turning I gave up any attempt at sleep, returned to the liquor cabinet and poured myself a tall glass of the same local gin.
I leaned out the fogged window to watch the flickering cityscape. Roads winding over neon-stained alleyways and streets, past the hunched shoulders of tenements and apartment complexes to the mesh of the sprawling city beyond. The constant flow of aerial traffic formed a multicoloured strip between the megastructures and soaring highrises. Branching passageways tethered the bones of the cityscape together like joints. Organic art installations oscillated over galleries, clubs and expansive parklands. Glinting clatterlifts and traveltubes thrust into rock, plunging towards adjoining Compass floors and punctured with apertures leading towards parking bays and other hidden areas. Chainships and quickships peeled out of the traffic flow, swooping around overpasses and towards spaceports and massive circular tubes jutting from the ceiling that acted as elevator shafts for ships between floors. The concentric rings blinked white and red in the darkness, ships slipping in and out of its wide mouth. City lights glittering like stars from a million sources.
Maybe I’d have marvelled at it all some other time. Now, it was a poor distraction from my thoughts.
Blinking neon adboards four storeys high shattered through the prism of my glass, turning my gin into molten liquid fluorescence. I slammed half the drink down in a single hit, wishing the booze would dull my senses as the seething metropolis whirled on into the night.
As hellish as our father had made our childhood, Artyom, Kasia and I had always had each other. In a way, it had tightened our relationship. No matter how hard someone tries to knock you down, having someone to lean against, someone who’s got your back, makes it possible to stand up again. When I was twelve, I’d come down with pneumonia, the kind that clogs your nose and turns your lungs into sandpaper. I’d lain in bed, sniffing and miserable and beyond frustrated when Artyom came into the room and sat down on my bed next to me. ‘Leave me alone,’ I’d grumpily told him at some point, a soggy tissue pressed to my leaking nose.
‘Someone’s got to take care of you,’ he’d said with a small smile. He’d cut school to keep me company the whole day. He’d brought his portable speakers with him and the two of us sat there, drinking coffee, talking and listening to music and watching the snowstorm whirl outside. It was one of the most uneventful days of my life. But for some reason, it was also one of the best.
In a blink of a bloody eye, we’d gone from that to here.
We never see the important moments as they happen. Never realise when things start to change. It’s only when we look back on those years and see all the tiny, inevitable steps we took. The things we wished we said. The things we wished we hadn’t done. The opportunities we watched go past.
Maybe it had started when my sister had been killed. When rage for her and fear for my brother had driven me up the windswept mountain to the old observatory. When I’d asked permission to do something I knew couldn’t be undone. Even if I survived, I knew it’d change me. Was that when we began drifting apart? Even before I started rifling through the Reaper conscription benefits, and believing the interstellar progress reports about Harmony using alien biotech to repel the Harvest invasion fleets? Before I started looking for a way off the miserable, backwater planet I’d been trapped on my entire life?
Didn’t matter, now. This was the hand the universe had dealt us and I had to do right by the people that mattered to me. I drained the gin, ima
ges stabbing through my mind. My brother getting caught with those stolen stormtech canisters. Reapers going viciously insane, dying on the street because they’d trusted Harmony’s suppressors. Harmony dragging Artyom to a dark cell and cutting away until they dug out the truth.
Unless I found it first.
6
The Unforgiven
The early morning bells chime as I pick my way up to the observatory, the wind howling around the ragged edges of the mountain, slicing on rocky teeth. Snowdrifts are piled around me on the stone steps. Snowflakes rush into my eyes. I wipe them away with trembling fingers that come back wet with tears.
I can’t let her see this. Otherwise she’ll see me for the child I am, not the man I want to be. Not the man my sister made me.
The observatory looms over me. Onion-domed, crimson-red and decorated with paper lanterns. Kanji, Hangul and Cyrillic flowing into one cohesive mosaic. It was an old monastery before she took over. Wild animals still roam these parts, old skeletons peeking out of the snow. I close my eyes and imagine hundreds, thousands of footsteps crossing these timbers, coming to demand the impossible, the unforgivable.
I pause at the top. My chest heaves as I peer out at New Vladivostok, flanked by the primordial blue mountains as if sheltered from the rest of the universe. Watery sunlight glints off windswept cliffs of black rock. Thick, dark forests stab upwards like swords on the horizon. It is everything I have ever known. Looking at it, I feel so small and alone.
I steady my hands, breathe deep, remember my purpose here and enter.
Two guards stand in the atrium like samurai. Arms crossed, they’re wearing traditional dress over their thermal suits. All they need are katanas and sangu armour to become ancient warriors. They’re silent as statues, but I know they’re not here for show.
I slip my shoes off in the genkan as is custom, then spread my bare toes on the warm, comforting timber. I’m hot inside my thermal suit, but I don’t unzip it. I won’t be staying long. The reception is minimalist and stripped of all but the essential life-support technology. Edo-style ukiyo-e prints sit on the wall. The first showcases the evolution of human space travel across the ages, ending at our establishment of the colony on this frontier planet. The second portrays the Russo-Japanese war back on Earth, hundreds of years ago. Artyom always thought it funny that so many of us are a mix of ethnicities that wanted to kill each other not so long ago. But my brother hasn’t laughed or smiled in a month now. I don’t think he even listens to music anymore.
A painted wooden door opens silently, and I go to see the Babushka.
She doesn’t look up from her papers as I seat myself on the hard, wooden chair opposite her. Smoky incense drifts past overflowing bookshelves and relics from Earth. The room is silent for what feels like an eternity before, with her head still bowed, she asks, ‘Do you understand what it means to come to me, Vakov Fukasawa?’
I nod slowly. She knows why I am here. She would not see me otherwise.
‘Good.’ She looks up for the first time. She’s still young for this position. Most are at least sixty when they are chosen by the previous Babushka on her deathbed. Her blonde hair is faded. Her skin is as pale as the papers she reads, her eyes grey like my mother’s, but there’s a tilt in the edge of her eye that hints at an Asian grandparent. She is the average, everyday face of New Vladi. But there’s solidity underneath those bones. Like hard, jagged stone underneath a thin layer of snow.
‘I heard what that Szymanski boy did to your sister,’ she says.
‘Kasia.’ My voice is raspy and hoarse. I clear my throat and try again. ‘Her name was Kasia.’
‘I know, child. I know.’
Joon Szymanski is infamous across New Vladi. The boy who, at age twelve, had cut open a pregnant cat’s belly and pulled out its unborn babies to see what they looked like. After he began chopping their heads off with a shovel, people stopped pretending it was a childish phase. But his rich, privileged family protected him then. And again when he threw acid in a girl’s face for mocking his height. She is scarred for life. The memory will haunt her every time she looks in the mirror. But at least she is still alive.
The Babushka creaks back in her chair. ‘Are you sure you do not wish to seek an agreement?’
‘I’m sure,’ I say, the words brittle. I will not settle. Not after he killed my sister.
‘Very well.’ The Babushka’s voice doesn’t change, doesn’t betray any emotion. ‘No direct action will be taken by my office, but you have permission seek justice as you see fit. The Five Courts of New Vladivostok will protect you. No punishment will befall you, so long as you do not harm any other party.’
My hands tighten on the arms of the chair. My sister had been nothing to that Szymanski boy. All her promises, her spirit, her laughter, dying out like lonely echoes in these cold mountains.
The Babushka places a number of objects on the table. A tube, connected to a series of wires. Hypodermics. A vacuum-sealed bag of liquid silver. An untraceable thin-gun.
‘Do what you need to do,’ she says. ‘And do it freely.’
Heart pounding in my chest, I collect each item. I don’t feel the cold as I carry them with me down the mountain. With every step my anger and resolve hardens. And by the time I reach the bottom, I know not just what I have to do, but how.
7
Claws
I must have finally dozed off, because I woke to my palmerlog ringing. Kowalski had sent me the details of the latest Bluing Out incident. I was to analyse the scene and circumstances around the death. What the victim had been doing at the time, and before, their death. Dig up any enemies or reasons someone might want her dead. Damage control, if necessary. There was a thanks attached to the message. I sighed and blinked at the shavings of pale dawn light angling through the louvred windows. I’m really doing this, I thought as I dressed. When I got outside, I grabbed a bacon and egg roll from a street-vendor and hurried over to the traveltube station, heading for Kirribuli.
It was a resort highfloor, the kind tourists and rich people frequent. The asteroid was a little wider in this sector, allowing the floor to spread outwards, big enough to construct a multitude of linked seas, rivers and beaches across this colossal space. Great stalwart cruiser-liners were constantly setting sail across the waters, sometimes taking days to do a complete circuit of the level. I’d barely had a chance to take it all in before being led past the security cordon to a cruiser-liner, docked in its berth, the corpse waiting for me at the sundeck cafe on the ship’s top floor.
I don’t think I realised how much of an emotional marathon this was going to be. Not until I recognised who the body belonged to.
Samantha Wong had always insisted we call her Sam, but it had never quite stuck. I’d last seen her a few days after Harvest surrendered, her loud, throaty laughter filling the room. Now her cold body was stretched out on the stone floor, and she’d never laugh again.
She’d died hours ago, though the stormtech was still active in her body. Blue squirming under her lifeless flesh, attempting a post-mortem reboot. Stormtech needs a living host, and it’ll do anything to ensure it has one. It was still frantically tunnelling through her veins and ligaments, searching for any spark it could use to jumpstart her like a chainship engine. But humans don’t work that way. There was no bringing her back.
Like Alcatraz, Wong had been taking suppressors from Harmony’s clinics. And if the furious articles popping up on my shib newsfeed were any indicator, Harmony was already copping the blame for her death.
I’d already viewed the security footage of the incident. She’d been sipping a coffee by the viewport when she’d collapsed, twitching and spasming on the floor. There were vivid, raked gouges along her arms where she’d tried to claw the stormtech out. When that failed and it overwhelmed her, she’d turned on the people around her. Leaped at a man twice her size, slamming his face agains
t the glass so hard she’d broken his nose. The security robot had been forced to shoot her, or risk her killing someone.
First Alcatraz. Now Wong. How many more of my friends would I have to stand over, staring at them like broken puzzle pieces? I remembered Wong sitting next to me after an operation went sour. A smelter-grenade had just blasted good men and women into a pile of guts and gristle. She told me we’d get through this, that we’d look back on it some day like a distant nightmare, realising how far we’d come since. Looking at her corpse spread in front me now, the memory almost felt cruel.
A cool salt breeze drifted through the cruiser-liner’s porthole. An artificial beach stretched below us, aquamarine waves crashing on a curve of golden sand, scattered with sunbathers and people striding along a sun-bleached boardwalk. Even the air smelled salty and fresh, the way the real thing was meant to. I rubbed my neck. I’d left my suit charging at home, thinking it probably wasn’t a great idea to show up to a crime scene armed to the teeth, especially in this district. No need to freak these people out even more. It meant that the alien plumbing zigzagging through my flesh shone through my clothes, but it was no secret I was here on Harmony’s behalf.
The owner of the cruiser-liner was a soft-spoken giant with a sharp jawline and purple bags under his eyes. Probably hadn’t slept since the incident last night. ‘Did she come here often?’ I asked, remembering how Wong would give someone a piece of her mind if they stepped out of line, but would give them the shirt off her back if they needed it. You couldn’t hate her if you tried.
‘All the time.’ He pointed to a stool in the corner. ‘She’d sit there. Liked three sugars in her coffee. Full-cream milk, always. And yesterday she just … snapped.’ His Adam’s apple bobbed and he shook his head. ‘She was good. Wouldn’t have hurt anyone. Offered to help clean up a few times. This isn’t right.’
‘You don’t have to tell me,’ I said. Reapers didn’t just snap. Not when they were clean. She’d been targeted like the rest.