by Jeremy Szal
Kowalski shot a glance at me. ‘We should look—’
I broke into a run and tackled her to the floor as the razornade we’d been standing on activated. A controlled explosion of slashing nanometal wires writhed like a squirming monster, catching the gunrunner behind us. He screamed as the nanoflaked edges sliced him apart, cutting through armour, skin and bone like cheese wire. A burst of red and he was smeared thick on the walls and floor, his right arm thunking near my foot with a clean-sliced, chalky bone jutting out.
We picked ourselves up as everyone backed away. Only the Sub Zeros seemed unshaken. The glinting wires settled to the ground like lifeless tentacles. ‘They knew we’d come,’ I said, thick ropes of blood dripping from the ceiling.
Jasken stooped down to poke at the razornade, ignoring everyone’s instructions to do the opposite. ‘That’s darkmarket munitions tech, military-grade. Heavy ordnance. Blade Hunters plant these on their hulls to stop hijackers,’ he said, referring to the mercenaries and pirates that roamed the lawless fringes of the Common.
‘I’m not going to ask how you know that,’ Saren muttered.
‘Doesn’t matter where the trap came from right now. What matters is there could be more,’ Kowalski said. ‘Infrared and subsonic detectors on, now. Find the rest of these.’ She laid a heavy hand on my shoulder. It was shaking, just slightly, as she offered that half smile of hers. ‘Thanks for that.’
‘Any time,’ I said. Paused. ‘Well, maybe not.’
‘No,’ she agreed. ‘Maybe not.’
A few minutes more of searching and we struck diamond. ‘That’s it,’ I said, pointing to a doorway. ‘The door guarded by nanoflakes.’ Though the dangerous barrier in question was long gone.
‘No more mines or razornades in the area,’ Saren said, but we were too focused to listen. A grey smudge flickered past the doorframe.
Someone was still inside.
Holes exploded in the doorframe and sizzled past us, the distinct smell of ozone wafting out. We scrambled to hug the walls as whoever was inside unloaded their firepower. When it was empty and we heard the dull click, I charged forward, splintering through the weakened door to find Hausk staring at me down the sights of his particle blaster. I’m a hard guy to miss, and he recognised me in an instant.
We moved at the same time. Him throwing the empty blaster in my face, me lunging for him. He rammed me aside and punched Kuen in the neck, kicked him backwards into two more Shocktroopers. He might have even escaped, only Jasken casually thrust his leg out, killing his momentum and sending him stumbling straight into a Sub Zero’s fist. I felt the blow in my bones as Hausk was punched to the ground, his slingshiv clattering away.
‘Oops,’ said Jasken.
‘Bad, bad move,’ whispered the Sub Zero as he hauled Hausk to his feet. ‘You really shouldn’t have done that.’
Kowalski stood in front of Hausk while they restrained him with electracuffs. ‘You’ve got one chance to make your life much easier.’ I could hear her biting back her rage. ‘Talk. Now.’
But he wasn’t going to say anything, I could see it in his eyes. The same die-hard look so many Reapers and Harmony and Harvest soldiers wore – that I had worn. Absolute, single-minded dedication to the cause, hard as chainmetal. We weren’t going to crack him here.
‘Get him out of my sight,’ Kowalski said, before checking in on Kuen. Any other Harmony squad leader would have chewed their squad out for being caught off guard and almost letting Hausk slither away, but her approach was different. This squad was her family, I realised.
‘Just a second.’ I shouldered my way through the armoured men before anyone could object. The stormtech blazed in my chest as I stood in front of Hausk, his smug expression stoking the coals in the pit of my stomach. ‘Remember me?’
‘I knew we should have killed you,’ Hausk said. ‘I told them—’
I headbutted him. His nose broke against my helmet, trickling blood as the Harmony men struggled to hold him up. He laughed as they hauled him away.
Kowalski was suddenly at my elbow, arms folded. ‘I’d reprimand you,’ she said dryly, ‘but I don’t have the energy and I’d be lying if I said he didn’t deserve it.’
I noticed a few approving nods from the Shocktroopers. But as I walked back to the room, the gunrunners didn’t stand quite as close to me as before. They’d no doubt formed their own impressions of Reapers over the years, fuelled by rumour and exaggeration. Seeing me in action, no doubt they were also fearful of what else I’d get up to if I was in a sour mood.
‘Thought you’d find this interesting.’ Saren pointed to a rack of canisters in the corner. All stamped with Harmony’s blue and white flag. The stolen stormtech canisters.
Katherine gingerly picked one up in her gloved hands. ‘They’re empty. So what was he still doing back here?’
‘Trying to destroy all the remaining evidence,’ Saren said. ‘He did a pretty good job, too. Almost everything’s torched.’
‘We’re too late,’ I said.
‘Maybe not.’ Saren had a widescreen palmerlog in his hand. The screen flipped out, showing a swirl of geometric particles. ‘Most of the data’s been scrambled and shredded,’ he said, indicating blocks of data on the screen encased in black crystal. He pointed to another sector, where glowing clusters were haloed in a gentle golden outline. ‘But there’re plenty of subroutines still salvageable down in the mainframe. We’ll get the tech boys onto it.’
‘That’s it.’ I pointed to a glowing symbol. ‘That’s the glyph that I saw.’
Katherine scanned the symbol and performed a quick cross match through her shib. ‘No affiliations with any known factions or syndicates. Not in this galactic region, at least. Maybe some other species uses it. Did you see any aliens here, Vak?’
‘No. Only humans.’
‘It might not matter. There’re plenty of aliens running around and selling all sorts of unknown tech. We’ll do a boarder search later.’
Meanwhile, Saren had been doing some more digging through the salvageable parts of the mainframe and projected our findings into the air. Spidery lines sprouted from nothing like silvery roots in fast-forward. ‘Looks like they were delivering packages throughout Compass. Along the way they’ve got stashhouses, mothballed storage units, weapon caches.’
‘Three guesses what they were delivering,’ I said.
‘They’ll be long gone by now,’ Jasken grumbled from the corner of the room, fidgeting with his rifle.
‘A little optimism never killed anyone,’ Saren said.
We caught the failsafe denotations rigged up on the canisters and stripped them down before they were tagged and wheeled away. Warbling noises echoed from above as short-range transit craft swooped down to deliver additional Harmony personnel, starting to swarm the hallways. ‘We’ll raid those locations, see if there’s anything we can work with,’ Kowalski said. ‘Call in any suspected affiliates, known stormdealers, informers, see if they know who these guys are. That includes Artyom Fukasawa.’
‘On it,’ someone said, deliberately not looking at me. I said nothing. What the hell could I have said anyway?’ Kowalski dropped her hand on my shoulder again. ‘I’m sorry you went through … all that for this.’
‘I’ve survived worse,’ I said, hoping she wouldn’t pry. Images of Reaper battlefields, dead Harvest combatants and stormtech in action writhed at the fringes of my consciousness. Artyom’s dead face looming large in my memory. ‘If the next few drinks are on you, all’s forgiven.’
‘If we get these guys, it’ll be more than a few.’ Kowalski cast a smile at me before it smoothed over into a serious expression. ‘Sub Zeros will get our prisoner to talk. The mainframe has to hold something we can use. Take a break, Vakov. You’ve earned it. Let us get take it from here.’
I truly wanted to believe her. But my mistrust of Harmony was deep-rooted for a reaso
n. Stormtech stitches an extra layer of survival resistance into the fibres of your flesh. Whatever you called it – animal instinct, a sixth sense – it was real. I’d survived the Reaper War because I’d learned to trust my gut, not my surroundings. I’d listened to my rising hackles and tensing muscles and acted on them, sometimes escaping a trap non-Reapers claimed didn’t exist. And now the stormtech squirming in my gut was a pretty good indicator the search wasn’t going to run as smoothly as Harmony thought.
But I was smart enough to shut up about that.
16
Gunpowder Milkshake
The world was a slow-motion blur by the time I crawled into bed. I don’t even remember undressing. But I emerged, groggy, twenty-five hours later from the trenches of unconsciousness. I gulped down some water, wrapped myself back in the duvet and dozed for another eight hours before my palmerlog chimed me awake. It was Kowalski, inviting me out for breakfast.
Since I couldn’t remember my last proper meal, I agreed.
I was pulling on something decent when I heard the rattle of footsteps outside. Still shrugging into an underskin, I opened the door to see Arya leaning against the opposite wall.
The over-enthusiastic stormtech shivered down my muscles. ‘I don’t need protection,’ I grumbled, wiping my face. I’m not a morning person.
Arya shrugged. ‘Kowalski wanted me here, in case they came after you.’
‘Got a Rubix for that.’
I invited her in as I made coffee and began lacing up my boots. Arya paused to dismiss the two Strikers hovering at the base of the apartment complex. Their mottled white armour was designed to allow movement and dexterity over protection. Blade-thin and lithe, they were lightning-fast operatives trained for operations that required a stealthy sharp edge.
Arya raised an eyebrow at me as I handed her a steaming mug of coffee. ‘I’m not a Reaper, if you were wondering.’ I must have been staring. ‘Just a skinnie, plain and simple.’
‘Sorry,’ I said, and meant it. ‘How long?’
‘Three years. I was offered a tiny shot by some guy at a party. I always thought I’d know better.’ She pulled a face. ‘But one mistake, one slip-up, and you’re paying a life-long debt.’
Wasn’t the first time I’d heard that story and it wouldn’t be the last. ‘Isn’t Harmony the last place you’d want to be?’ I asked as I sipped my coffee.
‘My family said I disgraced them.’ Arya was counting down on her fingers. ‘I lost my job, and then my friends. I had nowhere to turn. Nothing to do with myself. Not until Kowalski recruited me. She said she needed people who knew first-hand what the stormtech did, who had empathy when dealing with victims of drug trafficking.’
‘And that’s enough?’
‘Of course not. But it helps, and that means something.’
Arya wasn’t the first skinnie, or Reaper, I’d met who’d fought to retake some residue of control over their body. I’d spoken to skinnies throughout Compass who’d found a way to cobble together something resembling a life. They were doing better than hundreds of thousands who’d simply surrendered to the stormtech. Whether or not it truly won you over sometimes depended on how determined you were to keep fighting back.
For every exception like Arya there were thousands of desperate skinnies prowling the streets and recycling centres of spaceports. And even for someone like Arya, years of work could all be undone with one bad day, one mood swing. People compare overcoming addiction to climbing a mountain, but that assumes there’s a peak to climb towards. Stormtech was more like swimming in an endless, churning sea. You never truly beat it. You just found temporary ways not to drown.
‘Harmony paid for all my therapy,’ continued Arya.
I smiled. ‘How nice of them.’
‘I’d heard Reapers are a cynical bunch.’
‘You would be too, if you’d seen what I’d seen.’
‘I saw enough of Harvest to know Harmony made the right decision,’ she said. ‘You really think we should have let Harvest bulldoze us? Nuke our planets with cobalt-clad warheads, fill our stations and habitats with toxic gas, butcher entire populations? You saw what they did on Arcadius. Whole cities razed to the ground, water sources poisoned, crop fields burned, families dragged onto the streets and slaughtered. They forced civilians to walk through minefields, then set their hunting dogs on the ones that survived. Made a sport of chasing them through the burning forests. That’s what would have happened all over the galaxy. We’d be standing in the ashes of billions upon billions. And for what? To say we’re the better people?’
‘You don’t get to tell me what it was like,’ I snapped. No one can begin to imagine the experience of being on one of the Dead Zones – the planets that sustained the most damage from Harvest’s onslaught. Bodies piled up as far as the eye could see. Refugees scrambling over razorwire to get into the overcrowded camps. Civilians covered in grime and blood, screaming for help, others dead-eyed and clutching at whatever was left of their families. Harmony SSC men collapsing with exhaustion. Reapers on the verge of insanity. ‘Don’t lecture me about something you can’t understand.’
‘I didn’t mean—’
‘And don’t tell me there was no choice. I couldn’t live with myself doing half the things Harmony people did.’ My fingers turned white around the laces of my boots. ‘They performed experiments on children. With biotech they knew was dangerous.’
‘They were wrong. We all know that, now. Maybe there was another way. Maybe, at the time, there wasn’t.’
‘Doesn’t give Harmony a free pass.’
Arya nursed her steaming coffee in silence as I stood. ‘Do you know about Kindosh? How she came to be where she is today?’
‘No. I don’t.’
‘Do you want to?’
‘Not particularly.’
‘Maybe you should. It’s relevant. She grew up on a station called Petroni, in the Sumikem System. They got rich from mining the local asteroid belt. Until Blade Hunters came along and forced them into quarantine with minimal life-support while they stripped their station bare. Five hundred people and food for fifty. Until Kindosh discovered a secret stash of emergency rations. The way she tells it, she divided up the rations day by day, eating exactly what she needed and no more. All done in secret. If anyone had discovered her stash it would have been stolen and fought over and no one would have eaten. She survived when half the station went mad, killing each other for scraps, until the day they were rescued.’
I was starting to see where this was leading. Arya set her half-finished coffee down. ‘Kindosh knows the cost of survival better than most of us ever will, and when she says it’s a price worth paying, I believe her. So every time I look at the worlds Harvest killed, the cities they levelled, the people they destroyed, I know where I stand.’
Kowalski’s breakfast venue turned out to be a French dessert bar on a Compass high-floor that also happened to do breakfast. The walls and furniture were a lavish baroque, festooned with gold filigree. Vast classical paintings peered down at us while soft Vivaldi carried across the room and echoed up to the swirling, vaulted ceiling. There were so many intricate patterns in the artwork I couldn’t stop staring.
Kowalski followed my gaze upwards. ‘That’s all handcrafted.’
‘It’s not printed? Not even installed by octodrones?’
She shook her head. ‘It’s all designed, drawn, and created by hand, exactly as it was back in the seventeenth century. That’s why this place is so special.’
We sat at a table overlooking a sun-washed courtyard full of flapping awnings, rose gardens and an ivy-covered trellis. Kowalski had already ordered macaroons and pastries for our entree. I scrolled through hundreds of menu items before settling on French toast with butterscotch and a side helping of fresh fruit and yoghurt. Kowalski had the same.
‘It’s not much of an apology,’ she to
ld me as she poured coffee for the both of us. ‘But I honestly thought we’d destroyed all nightware constructs decades ago. I’m so sorry you had to endure that.’
Strapped into the cradle with an insane AI, I’d not expected to ever chew solid food again, so I was grateful for the meal all the same. ‘Not too shabby a job, tracking them so quickly,’ Katherine continued. ‘I just wish we’d seized the base faster. We could have wrapped this up with a bow.’
‘We did what we could, all considered,’ I said.
‘You think?’ she asked. She must have seen something on my face. ‘Do tell.’
Was I really going to open up to someone from Harmony? I so expected their games and exploits and micromanipulation it was hard to pin down what was genuine. But I thought of the way Kowalski led her men, protected them when they needed it, how they’d instinctively protected her when Hausk had barged out. She commanded respect. Not fear, not blind obedience. Respect. It was the same intangible loyalty that Commander Sokolav had wielded, that got us through our eternal nightmare. You’ve got to admire that in a person.
‘People need figureheads to give them stability, someone to look up to, to survive the chaos the world throws at them,’ I told her. ‘It’s a messy job, and Harmony needs people with guts to get stormtech off the streets. Otherwise, we’re all dead in the water.’
Katherine took a few seconds to weigh my response up. A spray of piano key notes activated in my shib as the soundtrack changed to Debussy. ‘That’s some praise, coming from a Reaper. My men are a stubborn, rock-headed bunch, but I’ve made do with them. Harmony or not, we all want the same thing.’
‘But very different ways of achieving it.’