Stormblood

by Jeremy Szal

  Got to start somewhere.

  I dropped a hand to my chest and felt the stormtech snuggling up against my ribs. If it wasn’t for the alien DNA I had no doubt that the trauma would have sent me into shock. For the first time in years, now I felt it slithering through me with concentrated purpose. Swelling my veins and muscles with fury as I thought about the people who had done this to me.

  And what do you know? One of them opened the door.

  12

  Prey

  Lasky’s small mouth hung open, body tensed as he gaped at the cradle, empty of one very angry, very dangerous captive. But he cottoned on fast. Fast enough that he could have bolted out the room and raised the alarm and recaptured me.

  Not fast enough for a Reaper.

  I slammed my foot into his kneecap. He toppled like a felled pillar, head thunking off the terminal as he tumbled to the floor. He tried to scramble away but I yanked him back, wrapping my arm around his neck and kicking the door shut. He spluttered, legs thrashing against the metal floor. ‘Soundproof, you say?’

  Strength charged into my battered limbs as I twisted my legs around his, using my weight to lock him down. The little bastard was stronger than he looked, but against my armour and my training, really, what chance did he have?

  I slammed him against a server cabinet, grabbed his wrist and gave a sharp, practised twist. ‘I told you I’d break it,’ I panted. But he was too busy whimpering on the floor to hear. The stormtech spiked and I drove the heel of my armoured foot into his other hand, the bones shattering like breadsticks. He shrieked again as I hauled him up and dumped him into the cradle, restraints that had held me now locked tight around him.

  ‘Who the hell are you people?’ I croaked out.

  Lasky spat at me, globs of saliva flecking my visor.

  ‘Really?’ My voice was still husky and choked up after my torture, scant wires still lodged in my teeth and around my tongue, but Lasky whimpered all the same. All his bravado up in smoke. A coward, like all bullies once the tables are turned. My body told me to kill him, and I knew I would if I stuck around. Instead, I pocketed his keycard and bundled out the door.

  I was in a telescopic passageway, tangled with tight jungles of powerlines that plunged into ducts and cableways. I breathed deep, still furiously hot inside my armour despite the cooling-fans whirling away. Voices floated from further down the hall. It was tempting to stay and see what I could learn, but I was alone, cut off and surrounded by people who wanted my head on a spike. There was no telling how badly I was injured. And whoever Lasky’s boss was, meeting her was low on my list.

  Time I was long gone.

  I slipped down the passageway, eyes peeled for an exit, and noticed a room where it looked as if it was snowing as I passed. Razorstorms. Serious, high-end tech. Microscopic, artificial snowflakes swirled around the space, programmed not to float past the constraints of their allocated boundaries. The dark-red light in the room indicated they were deactivated, but the moment that changed the nanoflakes would whirl around, shredding anything and everything in their path. Even deactivated they were a significant deterrent. Someone really didn’t want people entering that room.

  Aware that precious seconds for my escape were burning away, I got my visor to snap a photo on repeat every five seconds. Harmony would make more sense of this than I could.

  Chatter floated up from the staircase, abnormally clear. My hearing had sharpened, enough for me to notice it was the stormtech doing it. It was enhancing my auditory senses, letting me detect footfalls and the clanging of objects a room or two further away than usual. At the end of the room, embedded in concrete, was the same pattern I’d glimpsed coming in here. Now, I had the opportunity to expect it in greater detail. A blue crosspiece, a little like an inverted letter Y. Didn’t look like any glyph I’d seen around Compass. Could have been an offworld design, maybe even outside the Common.

  My visor took a snapshot, and that’s when everything went to hell.

  The quiet was shattered by a skirling siren pounding through the compound and turning the walls an ugly, strobing yellow. Someone must have discovered Lasky. If they recaptured me now, I was dead. The stairs were a concrete blur as I tore down them, clearing floor after floor.

  Someone suddenly slammed into me from the side, sending us crashing to the concrete and my head smacking against the wall. Lyndon. He was out of his armour but we both wore the same shocked expression as we picked ourselves up. And then it connected. ‘He’s over here! He’s—’

  He choked as I slammed my fist into his sternum. I dove in for another swing when he feinted left, tangled one leg and let the momentum clang me into the railing. My weight warped the metal inwards with a great creaking groan. I tried to right myself, but he kicked me down the stairs, concrete scraping against my armour. I rolled away as he fired his particle blaster with a low, warbling crack, burning a crater-sized hole where my shoulder should have been and spraying flecks of concrete in my face. He swept closer, getting a better aim in the darkness. His mistake. I ducked low, lurching upwards at the last moment to ram my elbow into the crook of his arm and drive my heel into his kneecap. He tottered backwards, the blaster clattering away down the steps. I leaped for it, scooping it up as he came charging.

  I squeezed.

  A burst of blue energy punched clean through Lyndon’s face.

  He twitched, still flying towards me, as if his body was figuring out what had happened to it, before slapping down on the concrete next to me. My chest shivered with stormtech, the beginning of its chemical calmness lapping at my senses. Sliding me into the rhythm of combat-readiness. I felt good. Peaceful.

  I jerked myself back out of it, resisting the stormtech, the alarms still pulsing like a seizure around me. The fight had cost me time I didn’t have.

  Someone had heard the shot and now the corridors were starting to swarm with assailants. I was already sprinting away down the hall when I heard screams at my back. The rapid fire of weapons crackled, bullets spraying across the walls behind me, pinging off my armour as I put my head down and ran faster, breath echoing in my skull. The corridors burst with sun-bright flares of light, concrete spraying around me. Every shot felt like being smacked with a hammer, but the hard-sheeted plating of my armour stopped any from punching through—

  —until a flash of immense pain, as if someone had stabbed a hot rod into my flesh.

  Armour-piercing rounds.

  If they’d hit my spine, I’d be done for. But my limbs were still pumping and I was still moving. I burst into the massive ship garage I’d seen on my arrival, the footfall of my pursuers behind me. I whipped around, barely registering the charging figure before he slammed into me with bone-crushing force. Crates shattered and went skidding away as we crashed into the chainship skeleton, the hull buckling around my armour. My assailant hooked my legs out from behind me and tried to pin me in place as someone in an exoskeleton came running to help.

  ‘I got him!’ he yelled, fumbling out another one of the soot-black gizmos to paralyse my suit. It whined to life, inches from my face. ‘Now, hold him! Hold—’

  I wriggled a leg free, gritted my teeth and kicked him in the stomach, sending him windmilling away. I punched my second assailant in the sternum in a wild, blind panic, slamming the gizmo against his head. He didn’t have time to scream as it latched onto his skull and blasted him with a healthy dosage of EMP. Barely unconscious, his exoskeleton smoking, I hefted him up and threw his bulk into the incoming path of my pursuers. They yelled as two hundred kilos of metal and meat slammed them to the floor. I tore ahead, feet skidding across the polished decking, heart pounding in my throat.

  There was no exit. No convenient doors leading to freedom. I was trapped and had no time to double back. The only other option was an inconspicuous, boxy garage holding an autovehicle. Its bloody chainglass door was locked. The footsteps pounded closer a
s, not daring to get my hopes up, I fumbled Lasky’s keycard out and swiped it.

  The garage door chimed open. I plunged inside and into the autovehicle. Hands shaking as I boost-started the engine. The display warmed to life with an array of icons as the windscreen shattered, glass and bullets bursting around me. Someone yelled as I revved the engine and stabbed in an address, overriding every option I could see.

  The autovehicle roared forward, punching through the garage door with a great wrenching crack. I hunkered as far down as I could as a salvo of gunfire shattered the rear window and clawed at the sides. Dust and ash swirled through the windows as we went swerving around a turn. Bullets crackling along the bumper, and then tailing off as the autovehicle curved onto the main road. No one followed as we negotiated the cracked roads of the Warren and calmly merged into the traffic on the main streets.

  My visor fogged up as I breathed a belly-deep sigh of relief. I heaved myself up, strapped myself into the bucket seat and breathed easier as we slipped deeper into the floor.

  Then I remembered that whoever those people were, Artyom was with them.

  I spent the rest of the ride in sour silence.

  13

  Skin & Bone

  I don’t remember where I parked the autovehicle. I didn’t care. Don’t even know how long it took me to get home. The stormtech boost had dissolved into my guts, taking my high with it. I barely had the energy to walk and ordered my damaged armour to do the job, hydraulics moving on autopilot.

  The bullets in my back ground like bone fragments with every burning step. Impossible to tell how injured I was with adrenaline masking the worst of the pain. But I’d managed to contact Grim and, for once, he hadn’t argued and had agreed to come straight over. It’s almost night, I realised, staring up at the gloaming in the artificial sky as my armour marched me up the stairs. It’d been almost twenty-four hours since I’d first spotted Artyom.

  I collapsed out of my suit the moment I got through the door. It was like shedding a layer of stone flesh. I spluttered and gagged as I tugged the wires out from my mouth and painfully dislodged them from my teeth. I gasped, finally able to close my mouth, before unwrapping the wires from my feet and hands. Light-headed with exhaustion, I staggered to the sink and gulped down ice-cold water from the tap, letting it burn down my swollen throat. I drank until I was on the verge of being sick before sprawling out on the floor. My underskin was drenched in so much sweat it was like I’d been swimming. I peeled it off, kicked it away and let the coldness of the floor seep into my back, lowering my temperature, aching limbs spread out as I breathed in fresh air.

  ‘Goodness me. Is everything quite all right?’ I peeled one eye open to watch the Rubix’s rabbit avatar hop towards me and sit by my side, its ears pricked and whiskers twitching, a note of genuine concern in its voice. I bit back a groan. A Rubix was possibly the last thing I wanted to speak to right now.

  ‘Never better.’

  I didn’t want to ever move again, but I had injuries to deal with. The armour-piercing bullets had punched into my skin, but they’d not reached bone or nerve. I got the printer to print me up a medskin as I headed for the shower. I examined my wounds as I scrubbed away the layers of grime coating my body. There were neat incisions around my ankles and wrists where the Rubix had cut off my circulation. I was covered in plum-purple contusions, a showcase of lacerations, bullet wounds and sprained muscles. So many crisscrossing aches and pains it was easier to call my body one big bruise. Physical exhaustion crashed down on me like a scattershot blast, the world fading and blurring between blinks. I blinked hard and wiped my face with both hands.

  Stormtech is like a muscle. Don’t use it and it atrophies. Mine had grown slow and sluggish – weak tendrils of blue wriggling up my left side in slow motion. After its bout of excitement, its reserves were depleted. Nothing left in the tank to heal me.

  Finally clean, I was ravenous as I stumbled into the kitchen, found nothing but a box of ultra-sugary cereal. I hadn’t eaten in twenty-four hours so I wolfed it down anyway. When I wasn’t being kidnapped by Harmony, chased by knife-wielding Shifters, or tortured by psychopaths, I was really going to have to go shopping.

  The printer pinged! behind me. My medskin was done. I slipped into its warm, skin-hugging embrace. The thick material tightened to my flesh as it vacuum-sealed around me from the neck down. Developed by Sector Prone, Harmony’s science and research department, to treat serious injuries, it was a pupil-black, rubbery suit with a hexagonal pattern system, capable of pinpointing and treating all kinds of pains and injuries. The interior was covered with a carpet of gel-coated tendrils, stirring to life like sea anemones on contact with flesh.

  Never much liked this part. I shivered as the tendrils tickled my skin, searching me for wounds as it prepped the necessary antibodies, chemicals and healing ointments. Its jellyfish tentacles curled warm and wet around my limbs.

  I sprawled out on the bed and did my best to ignore the pinch and prickle of the medskin getting to work. Having been strapped into a single, immobilised position for so long, I felt the searing pleasure of joints popping as I stretched my aching limbs.

  My lead-heavy eyes fluttered closed. ‘Hey, pesky rabbit?’

  ‘Yes?’ the AI asked immediately.

  ‘If anyone I don’t like comes through that door, please murder them.’

  ‘Oh, certainly. It would be my pleasure,’ the rabbit said, as if I’d asked it for coffee. It hopped away and disappeared. The autocannon slithered out of the ceiling, targeting software switching on. I slowly sank towards unconsciousness. It’s amazing how well you sleep when you’ve got a military-grade, high-velocity autocannon watching your flank.

  It felt like a nanosecond later when someone prodded me in the chest. I forced my sticky eyes open to see Grim standing over me.

  I’d snatched a forty-minute nap. I needed more like forty hours. There was a nasty dryness in my chest and my head was pounding with white-hot stars. I blinked away gauzy webs of sleep as Grim glanced at the oscillating patterns of red and purple flickering across the hexagonal fabric of my medskin.

  ‘Man, they really messed you up.’

  ‘No, really? What gives you that idea?’ I coughed and my body gave an involuntary shiver as the tendrils massaged the muscles under my back to smooth out the knots. ‘It’s a big operation, Grim. This isn’t a couple of guys stealing stormtech to shoot up at their academy house parties. Their product isn’t killing Reapers by accident. It’s an industry. And Artyom’s part of it.’

  I attempted to sit up, but the medskin had immobilised me. It was like I had a kilo of lead in my limbs. I felt my hands balling into fists. ‘I don’t know what to do.’

  Grim perched on my bedframe. ‘Can I talk you out of pursuing this now?’

  ‘Can’t see it working.’ I winced as the tendrils sniffed along my shoulder blades with a slimy wriggling sensation, easing writhing silica inside my entry wounds. I jolted as the medskin applied antibodies, sterilisers, collagen, fibrinogen and military-grade morphine to numb the pain, the names popping off on my shib. There was a distinct crunch as it started gouging the bullets out. My back arched, creaking at the abrupt agony. I had a sudden memory of when I’d first been turned into a Reaper, having all sorts of uncomfortable apparatus plugged, rammed and inserted into all sorts of places. ‘I’m not letting them get away with this,’ I managed through gritted teeth.

  ‘You bet they won’t.’ I don’t know when Kowalski had entered my apartment. I only knew that when my body went numb, it wasn’t the medskin. Apparently the Rubix had decided I liked her.

  She was wearing the same leather jacket over her Harmony underskin, open at the neck. Her look of quiet fury flickered between me and Grim, as if weighing up who was getting dragged through the verbal slaughterhouse first.

  ‘How did you get in here?’ Grim’s humour and easy posture had vanishe
d. He was up and taking slow steps backwards, hands bunching into fists as Kowalski and the organization she represented came deeper into the room.

  Kowalski began undoing her scarf. ‘The Rubix alerted me to a medical emergency. Standard protocol.’

  ‘Thanks a lot,’ I growled.

  ‘Oh, you’re quite welcome,’ the rabbit said.

  Grim folded his arms. ‘You should have let me shut it down.’

  ‘I heard that,’ the rabbit sniffed.

  Kowalski poured herself a steaming mug of coffee. ‘Come on, then, Fukasawa. The full story: out with it.’

  ‘This isn’t the best moment.’ There was an audible squelching, like squeezing raw mince paste. I sank into a full-body spasm.

  ‘Hey, it’s not a great time for me either. That’s the job. Talk.’

  ‘It wasn’t anything serious,’ I rasped. Then stopped as the medskin expelled two silvery objects as if it was spitting out watermelon seeds. They hit the floorboards with a distinct tap, one after the other.

  The bloody, armour-piercing bullets gleamed up at us like two little lies.

  The room was very, very quiet. I opened my mouth to speak and closed it again.

  ‘So I see.’ Anger rippled over her face, before rapidly dissolving into exasperation. ‘I’m going to hazard a guess and say you didn’t forget our conversation, the one where we agreed to work as allies and share information. You just chose to ignore it and risked compromising this whole investigation before it even began.’

  The medskin permitted movement now and I rolled to a sitting position, my body still on fire. ‘Compromise it how, exactly? This organisation is too smart, too well organised not to know Harmony’s looking into them. They’ve been provoking you by taking out Reapers. You’re the ones firing blind in the dark here, with no idea what who you’re hitting or what dealing with.’

  Kowalski folded her hands. ‘Then, please. Enlighten me.’