Stormblood

by Jeremy Szal

  The message disintegrated into space. I passed by two oversized robots standing guard outside a building covered in gang glyphs. Their cinderblock heads, black metal bodies and claw-like hands were beaded with oily water like thousands of tiny liquid eyes. Behind them, a creaking staircase led down to a fighting pit, yells and cheers echoing up the stairwell. Grim had dragged me to one of those on my first day here. ‘They’ve just managed to make them legal,’ he’d screamed over the tumult.

  Sweat and death had hung in the air like a weight on our shoulders. I’d heard about null-gravity knife fighting arenas, but never seen anything like that. People would bring robots, custom-built droids, even exotic creatures captured from all over the Common. The rarer the creature, the bigger the bet. I’d stared at the cages and a freak show of claws, oily feathers, scales, clacking mandibles, hissing fangs and bulging eyes stared back. The nearest cage had housed a little monster with a leathery, carmine-spotted hide and a retractable jaw. It went berserk when it saw me. The owner, a cowl-wearing Torven, had shoved me away and tried to calm his pet down.

  But the real attraction was human fights.

  ‘Bets double when they’ve got stormtech,’ Grim told me as two men battled it out in the pit below us while people cheered them on in a dozen languages. ‘They’ve been trying to get the ban lifted since the Reaper War ended. Said it was insensitive while the war was going on, but now the war is over …’

  My hands were sweaty and tight now as the sound of fists striking flesh reached me on the street and the stormtech leaped up inside me. I’d forced the sensations back then as I did now, the crowd’s roars echoing behind me as I homed in on Wong’s quarters. The waypoint took me through a flashy club to get to the housing blocks, all other access points blocked off. Done intentionally to drum up business, of course. Wasn’t like anyone would be swinging by to change it.

  The club was packed, people crowding around stained tables cluttered with drinks and nasty-looking stains. This floor was known for its body augmentations, with plenty of its participants gathered up here. I saw chrome and alloy hands gripping glasses and tumblers. Arms and legs that were whirling meshes of gears, tubes and artificial nerve joints. Bionic eyes twitching in metallic faces and torsos crawling with internal machinery. Subsurface lighting scattered reflections across flesh injected with skingrafts, turned scaly and leathery, growing horns and antlers and wings or sprouting silicone feathers. In the smoky glow, it looked like I’d stumbled into a nightmare, like a demented child had stitched together random parts of animals and machines and people. Most of these people were unable to afford to have fingers or limbs reprinted in a medclinic, so they had volunteered to be experiments. They’d let scientists and cyberneticists test unorthodox and bleeding-edge procedures on them, either for their own personal fascination or so they could be perfected for those who could afford it.

  Like that was ever going to go well.

  Several rotated to look at me. The only defence I had was a metal projectile I could shoot out of my armour’s sleeve, but I’d hoped not to use it.

  The bartender was a skinnie, the blue thrumming up and down his chest as he mixed expensive drinks from cheap ingredients. The bright-red pockmarks along his arms were tell-tale signs of a synthsilver user. The liquid was meant to be squeezed into the eye, but hardcore addicts always went for the veins. Hunched on a battered couch next to me, a man rubbed a smear of dark-grey grimwire along his stained gums. His body shuddered, eyes rolling back as the hit spread through his system. He’d have hallucinations for hours.

  Doesn’t matter where you go in the universe, places like this are going to exist.

  I could feel people watching me as I exited the club and climbed a rusty stairwell through the guts of tenements plastered with neon. Beyond grimy and smashed windows, the floor stretched into a rabbit warren of makeshift housing and prefab metal cubes, crisscrossing staircases and ladders snaking through the fissures between the building. The clanging of metal and revving of engines echoed through the network. I felt like a rat trapped in an endless metal maze.

  I passed by at least a dozen more stormdealers selling their wares from dimly lit storage units, before I found Sam’s door. I swiped her card and stepped in.

  The smell slapped me like a soggy towel in the face. A sweet, syrupy smell like wet hot glucose crusted on skin, triggering my stormtech. I snapped off my helmet filters and flicked my rebreather on, chopping the smell off. Cool, clean oxygen flooded my lungs. I swallowed and reached a hand to the wall to steady myself.

  Wong might have been doing Harmony’s rehab, but she hadn’t been quitting by a long shot.

  The room was practically dripping with stormtech. Constellations of chemical attributions popped up on my HUD. Her furniture was overturned and smashed apart, mostly stained with grimwire and synthsilver. Empty phials and hypodermic needles crunched under my heavy boots. Almost everyone who Shreds turns to some other vice to achieve the same high. I knew first-hand it never works. Because nothing’s ever, ever good enough.

  I still remember surrendering myself to rehab. The wet, skintight fabric of the sensory-deprivation suit sealing around me. The tendrils and inner abrasives stirring to life against my flesh. The multitude of buckles and full-body restraints biting into my skin as they strapped me down, secured blinders and mufflers over my eyes and ears. The algae stink as they lowered me into the soundproof tank and pumped me with anti-stimulant chemicals to combat the stormtech and ease the withdrawal symptoms. No matter how I begged or thrashed, they wouldn’t untie me, wouldn’t free me from the tank. If they had, I’d probably have killed myself.

  That was Stage One. Stage Two had been a series of training and rehabilitation exercises, working my muscles, psychotherapy, counselling. Reconditioning my mind and de-programming my body, freeing me from seeking physical exertion. Prying free all the instincts the stormtech had hammered into me until I had a grip on my urges again.

  If I opened my suit one crack, breathed the air in this stormtech-drenched room, years of agonizing work could be undone. My skin itched and demanded it with pheromone-induced hunger. But this mattered more. The Reapers mattered more.

  I quickly sifted through the gutted room. Harmony couldn’t have realised it was this bad or they’d never have sent me here. Too great a risk of losing me down the gravity well.

  Sam’s sanity levels were scrawled across the room. The scratches and fist-sized dents in the walls. The dry blood in the bathroom. The sweat-stained bed sheets. I could almost see her in here, screaming and weeping and slowly driving herself mad, knowing she’d kill anyone who walked through her door and probably then herself. There are a million symptoms that come with Shredding, none of them pretty. Rehab had been her last resort. Someone had noticed she’d relapsed into taking stormtech and used her weakness to murder her.

  If that person had been standing in front of me now, I’d have my own murder to explain to Kowalski.

  Unless I found the source, Wong wouldn’t be the last Reaper or skinnie to die like this. At least I now knew why Wong had machinery jammed inside her hands. She’d volunteered for human-modification experiments just like the people outside. Some cyberneticist in a backalley clinic had used her as a human lab rat in exchange for some meagre drug money.

  The only source of luxury in the room was a small curving viewport that peered out into a star-speckled space. Wasn’t a real view of space, of course, only a live-feed. Most of Compass was buried deep inside the asteroid; only a lucky few apartments on the fringes got a direct view into space. I switched it off and searched through the drawers and compartments built into the walls to conserve space, trying to be impersonal as I rifled through my dead friend’s possessions. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for until I found it. A small case tucked under the bed, filled with half a dozen empty stormtech phials. It hadn’t been the suppressors that had killed her. Poisoned stormtech had done the same tr
ick.

  At the bottom of the case was a small strip of paper with a number and code punched into it. I angled the paper in the light and caught the words Upper Market in iridescent small print. I had no idea where the hell that was. Kowalski would. A white window expanded on my shib, filled with glowing blue text as I sent Kowalski the details. No response. It was well into the night and she was offline at this hour. Couldn’t afford to wait around. Grim had to know where this place was.

  There was also a small metal tag, hanging by a length of chain. It was emblazoned with the Reaper symbol: a crossed pair of arms, forked with blue lightning. Couldn’t believe Wong still had hers. In the field, we were always sealed up in full armour and rarely removed our helmets. So we’d improvised with crossing our arms over our chests gesture. The rest of the Common thought the gesture was a salute, a greeting. But they’d never understand. It had been how we recognised family. A sudden lump surfaced in my throat. Wong had been a Reaper until the very end. Like Alcatraz. Like all of us.

  My armour creaked as I stood. My ragged breathing echoed in my helmet, sweat running in rivulets down my arms. My heart was beating unusually loud and fast against my ribs. I placed my hand on the wall, soaking up the last, miserable memories of my friend. She had deserved so much better.

  Why would someone do this to you, Wong?

  9

  Needle in an Asteroid

  The Upper Market wasn’t just a few shops. That would have been too easy. It was an entire floor of Compass dedicated to them. It was never closed, never empty. It formed a honeycomb of thousands of shops, stalls and alleys, access tunnels and looping passageways, stairwells and multilevels. An urban jigsaw, all its pieces twisting and bleeding into one another, squeezing the geometries of their architecture into the space. I could spend hours exploring.

  At any other time.

  ‘You weren’t kidding,’ I said to Grim as we entered the floor. ‘It’s huge.’

  His grin ate up his whole face. ‘Told you.’

  Grim had insisted on wearing his neon skeleton underskin, and I’d long learned that you can’t talk Grim out of something he’s into. So we made a hell of an odd couple: me a two-metre tall guy covered in heavy armour, walking beside a skeleton flickering with colours. Following the attack yesterday, I kept scanning our surroundings. It didn’t escape Grim’s notice. ‘If you’re trying to make me feel safe, it’s not working.’

  ‘Just being cautious,’ I told him.

  ‘What’d he look like, anyway?’ Grim asked as we entered the network of shops.

  ‘Well, he was hairless.’

  ‘Did you check everywhere?’ Grim asked breezily.

  ‘Sure. Got him to strip down for inspection when he wasn’t trying to stab me in the face with his big, ugly claws.’

  ‘Claws, you say?’

  ‘Yeah. Looked like he’d escaped from a body-splicing lab.’

  ‘Almost. He was probably a Shifter.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A Shifter, Vak.’ Grim threw two bone-arms up into the air with strained patience, as if this was common knowledge. ‘They’re into cybernetics. You know, tweaking their physiology and biochemistry, trying to become human-animal hybrids.’

  ‘Very interesting. Maybe we should focus instead on the part where the tosser tried to kill me?’

  ‘Why didn’t you take this to Kowalski?’

  ‘I don’t want it getting to Kindosh just yet,’ I said. ‘Not without knowing for sure why I was attacked. Same goes for Wong’s death being stormtech-related, not a result of poisoned rehab suppressors – I want to know for sure what happened before going back to them.’

  That was part of it. But these were also Reapers, and I was going to do right by them. The war was over, so many of the good men and women I’d fought with had turned to ash and blood in the wind, buried in an unmarked grave on distant planets. But that didn’t mean our debts to each other were gone, or forgotten.

  A million Upper Market smells swirled around me: the earthy bite of burnt coffee and freshly brewed sticky chai, spices and sizzling chicken, sickly-sweet candies and dairy. Around-the-clock eateries spun food and drink for the crush of people, offering delicacies from faraway locales. The display windows of booths and stalls were lined up one sweeping row, showcasing tropical fruit and dripping green noodles, sweet pastries and sticky rice, bubbling vats of meat marinating in their own juices, as well as less tempting fare like spongy red moss, deep-fried insects, vacuum-sealed meats from offworld colonies, and a squirming jelly that looked about as appetising as nutrition cubes.

  We burrowed down the narrow, tangled streets, pipework and ribbed cabling squeezing past the crowd. The pixelsheeting above us had been set to mimic multicoloured tent-cloth, snapping and billowing in an imaginary breeze. On New Vladi we’d had big, sprawling markets like this on the first day of each month. No matter the weather, you could guarantee that wizened old babushkas and young smokeheads alike would be setting up and selling everything from robots that could shapeshift into different animals to replicas of old samurai weapons. I’d taken Artyom to one a few times, on weekends. Though once I’d turned my back for three seconds to look longingly at a katana I’d never afford, and he’d disappeared. Just vanished. I’d scoured the crowded market for him for hours, terrified he’d been picked up by one of the gangs. I’d imagined them holding him down and pouring lye into his eyes like they’d done to a girl the previous month.

  I’d eventually found him sitting by the water fountain, watching a three-dee display. I’d been relieved and wanted to pound some sense into him in equal measure. I probably would have, if Kasia hadn’t taught me better. He’d seen me and grinned his cheeky grin before asking if I’d buy an album for him.

  He seemed so different now. Could Kowalski be onto something, suspecting he was laced with a biochemical targeting agent or suicide trigger? Could it be he was trying to protect me? Or was he in it with both feet, and genuinely wanted nothing to do with me?

  I wouldn’t find out unless I kept investigating.

  People and aliens from across the Common filled the network of shops around us, text in over a dozen languages vying for our attention. Everything was on sale, from home decor and designer underskins to Rubix upgrades and the latest hardware. A squinting, grumpy woman sat buried in a nest of squirming wires, fibre-optic cables and multi-adapters. Children squatted atop teetering piles of storage crates, sneaking baklava and halva from the Middle-Eastern grocery, while a nearby Torven claimed to offer the best prices on lungship modifications across Compass. Graphic designers sketched paintjobs for chainships and men tinkered with hardware at cluttered workstations. A Torven wearing protective optics and a thick utility harness used a laser chisel to sculpt asteroidal debris into jewellery. Everything was in motion, every available square inch filled.

  ‘There’re a lot of Torven here,’ I said. I’d never been so surrounded by aliens before.

  ‘They have a nose for business,’ Grim told me. ‘When they first made contact with us, one look at our shipyards and spaceports and they knew there was money to be made that they’d never get from trading with other species.’

  Something caught my eye in a shop. Someone was actually selling figurines of fully armoured Reapers, replica Reaper weapons, and what I could only assume were Shenoi plushies. I shook my head and glanced through the frosted glass of a Rubix mindmeld station. People sitting in uncomfortable-looking chairs, neuragel readers plugged into their skull sockets. Building AI was one thing, but every smart Rubix had a human mind behind it: their personalities and kinks were copied directly from human brains. It was living on after death, in a way. Grim had pondered doing it and I’d said that one of him was more than enough.

  We reached the central market plaza, its full weight and scale almost crushing. Somehow, we had to find one seller in all this. We might have a stand number, but half the s
talls had their tags torn off or faded away with use, and Grim had been unable to find any coherent system. With multiple levels, sub-flooring, and the haphazard geometry of the plaza, I didn’t know how the hell anyone functioned.

  We paused so Grim could pick up some films in a shop dedicated to them, while I tried to get our bearings. Even the shop was a maze. A shoddy staircase spiralled up through multiple floors of towering shelves and platforms. Each platform was an access point for films, soundtracks, collector’s items, records, framed posters, and memorabilia from specific decades of Earth’s history, each shelf sagging under the weight. I asked the owner for directions while Grim was busy, but he seemed as mystified as us by the system. ‘I’ve been looking for these everywhere,’ Grim said when we finally left, a bundle of discs in his hands. ‘Didn’t think they even existed anymore.’

  That was our only success. The maze of cluttered corridors and stairwells began to smear together. I swear the only thing we didn’t see was the stall number I was looking for. After walking past endless software stations, budget beauticians, shib installers, snackbars, parlours where aliens of multiple species lounged in micro-massage cradles, graphic designers for chainships, and tailors selling nanothreads that changed fabric and style by the hour to match the latest fashion, I was fed up. At this rate we’d still be searching as the next Reaper Blued Out on the streets.

  Sometimes, you’ve got to grab the bull by the horns.

  ‘Grim,’ I said, ‘could you do some slightly illegal hacking for me?’

  Grim wolfed down the last few bites of the crepe he’d been eating, smearing a thick glob of cream from the corner of his mouth. ‘For you, Vak, anything.’