by Jeremy Szal
Rage that my brother was helping them do it.
I was done.
Screw them all.
My mouth tightened, saliva swelling in my gums. The stormtech clawing hard and wet against my ribcage. My left hand tightening around the textured grip of my handcannon.
Harmony wanted answers? Fine.
I’d get them.
17
The Lone Wolf
If you can, choose your battleground. And if you can, fight in small, controlled spaces. Never out in the open. Never where your flank’s unguarded. Never give your enemy a clean target. You only get one chance at a first encounter on the battlefield, so pick your terrain wisely. Which is why I waited until I spotted a dark, disused alleyway before setting my trap. I hid in the doorframe of the back entrance to a stormtech simulation lab, where folks who wanted to try the real thing could be discouraged by discovering what having the stuff kicking around in your system was really like.
I shoved the handcannon under Hairless’ chin as he turned the corner, a glow from a lightwell giving him an unhealthy, pallid look. ‘If you wanted something,’ I said, ‘you should have asked.’
Hairless did a good impression of a man choking on his surprise as the stormtech slid up my arm, the urge to shoot coming with it. One squeeze. One squeeze and the antipersonnel shells would punch through blood and bone and turn his head to a dripping smear on the walls. After the hurt Artyom had dealt to me, my body was eager to pass the pain along. I readjusted my grip and fought the sensations back. ‘Now, you’re going to take me to whoever’s been getting you to follow me around.’
His mouth opened with terror. ‘I— I can’t!’
‘You can,’ I said patiently, nudging the muzzle against his throat and adding an edge of venom to my voice. ‘Either I let this handcannon finish our conversation, or you take me on a little trip to your boss.’
Didn’t take him long to decide.
I frisked him and confiscated a thin-gun and a slingshiv – probably the same one he’d used to slice me open last time, as well as an ID card. Avin Simmons turned out to be his name. I nudged the handcannon upwards to strip off his coat, and Simmons reared backwards and spat out a vile yellow liquid. I ducked sideways, the stream missing me by inches, spattering against the wall. The metalwork hissed, melted inwards. He had acid glands. The irony. He drew his head to go for round two, when I slammed the full weight of my armour into him, crushing him against the wall, his claws breaking off as they were scraped across the brickwork. I hauled him over to the railing and forced him half over, letting him stare down the barrel of a hard floor with eight storeys of the Upper Markets between them. ‘If I drop you, do you explode into acid when you hit the bottom? Or do you just melt through the floor? Got to say, I’m curious.’ He struggled feebly in my grip, which was probably the worst thing he could do. ‘Maybe you should have been outfitted with wings, instead.’
‘Get shot,’ Simmons growled, the ends of his splintered fingers bleeding.
I could have questioned him right here. It would have been the Harmony way. But I was sick of running with whatever scraps others had seen fit to feed me. You’ve got to do things your own way. In my case, that means grabbing the bull by the horns. ‘Let’s try again. You’ll walk slowly ahead of me. If you try anything, if you warn anyone, or try that spitting trick again …’ I shoved him a little further, as if I was really going to let him fall.
He frantically nodded.
For the first time since all this started, I was in charge.
My hand felt fused to the handcannon grip by the time we spiralled up to a high-floor called Ruskin. Townhouses, local hotels, small concert halls and multicultural bistros stood along the wide cobblestone streets. Shavings of dawn light were prickling over the artificial horizon, a smattering of people visible through the glass of dimly lit coffeehouses. Everything had the soft, gunmetal sheen of recent rain. Beyond the buildings, you could just see a rolling grassland, dotted with life-sized pieces of bio-organic artwork and sculptures carved from condensed cosmic dust. This was the sort of place that fostered creativity, community living. Even the air was tuned to simulate a fresh spring morning, scented with lime and saffron.
So what the hell were we doing here?
I stuck the handcannon into the small of Simmons’ back. ‘If you’re screwing around with me …’
‘It’s around the next corner,’ he said, almost begrudgingly.
It was. And it smacked the words out of my mouth. I started laughing. ‘You’ve got to be kidding me.’
It was the Tipei Corporation facility. The heart of the Jackal’s operation. Was this just his revenge? Nothing to do with the stormtech? No, he wouldn’t be that sloppy. If it was personal, he’d be doing the hunting himself. Me and Grim had stolen his tech. He wouldn’t send a goon to stalk me over Compass. Something stank.
Just as well I was in the mood for answers today.
The facility was a bizarre fusion of chainglass, solid steel and dark wood, the edges deliberately slanted so the entire building appeared to be tilting to the side. The back was one of those buildings built into the asteroid’s rockface. Perfect if they didn’t want someone sniffing out a back door. I weighed up patching Kowalski into my discovery. I wanted her input, wanted her to know I was making progress. But she could just as easily tell me to stand down and turn Simmons in. Get a search warrant approved. Launch a proper investigation. There was no evidence of anything dodgy going on in this place, only the word of a would-be assassin. I was still riding out the fog of rage I’d felt at Artyom’s behaviour and I wasn’t in the mood to bail out now.
I dragged Simmons up a side stairwell to a employee-entrance, where a scanner pad surfaced out of the wall. Once Simmons had keyed in the code and the door cracked open I sank a neurotoxin needle deep into his neck, letting him fold to the grillwork floor. It wouldn’t kill him, but he’d wake up with a hell of a headache.
I stole inside.
I stared down the barrel of my handcannon into a carpeted hallway with clinical white walls. I walked across, almost silent in my armour. The peace unsettled me. Stairwells crisscrossed above and below me, forking into separate branches of the building. I descended the nearest one. I was about halfway down when the stormtech kicked furiously against my torso. I pressed a hand to my chest. What was wrong? My heartrate was steady, my adrenaline levels weren’t up, but it was reacting to something. I scanned the area again. Nothing to see. Yet, the stormtech continued strumming along my nervous system. Something in the facility had to be triggering it.
I heard a pair of voices approaching. I stooped down, peering through the staircase. A figure walked by, deep in conversation with a blue-haired woman in a utilitarian grey suit. I snatched a glimpse of the man. Grey eyes, hard face like ocean-weathered rocks. A familiar accent as he spoke.
No. It couldn’t be Sokolav.
Kindosh had said he’d been MIA for two years and counting. And what would my former instructor possibly be doing here, anyway? Even if he was alive, he’d been too smart, too loyal to Harmony to consider working for them like Artyom. Hadn’t he?
Nothing I could do about it now.
I filed it away for later, waited until they passed before continuing down the stairs, sweeping past corridors with the stormtech maintaining its frantic beat inside me. I followed its intensity until it jolted in my chest on the second last door. I slid inside and found a long line of stormtech canisters, each marked with Harmony’s symbol, locked in place. Above them were racks of little stormtech flasks, blue swirling inside like trapped smoke. Just waiting to be opened and inhaled. I had to tear my eyes away before I made a decision I couldn’t undo.
The canisters were just the start. A long smear of workstations were cluttered with flexiscreens, printers, databanks and stacks of servers, all tethered together with a web of snaking cables. My HUD detonated with d
etections of synthsilver, bluesmoke, grimwire and even cloudhead, chemical compositions rising out of the stained desks and glassware. The stormtech continued tying frantic knots inside my chest. Arytom said their operations had moved, but this couldn’t be their new base. Too small and too conspicuous. They wouldn’t be stupid enough to plant the heart of their operations in the dead centre of Harmony’s busiest highfloors. Had to assume this was a third-party operation, maybe a glorified storage base.
There was one person who’d tell me for sure.
Grim answered my call on the fourth ring. He rubbed bloodshot eyes, the glow of a paused filmlog showering across his pale face. ‘Vak. What the hell? It’s only—’
‘Grim. Shut up and look at this.’ I accessed the nearest flexiscreen, sending the terminal ID over to Grim. ‘Quickly.’
Still grumbling, Grim cracked his knuckles and did his Deep Dive. Using the data I’d provided to scour the databanks for backdoors and previous passkeys on the mainframes. In his skeleton underskin and white eyes, he looked like a demented techghost in some lost nightmare.
The screen blinked. He’d broken in. A galaxy of data erupted around me. Literally. A universe of stars, comets, planets, moons, supergiants, swirling blackholes, each size and shape indicating their data size and type. A carmine datasphere, patterned like a gas-giant, ghosted straight through the sights of my handcannon before peeling open to expose a network of data. ‘Oh, these boys have been busy,’ muttered Grim as multicoloured papers, transcripts, blueprints, video and sound files scrawled around us in mid-air. ‘These are our guys, Vak. There’s five substrates worth of academic papers and intel here. Most of it has been classified.’
‘Classified?’
‘Classified by Harmony, anti-narcotics institutions, militia groups, and scientists. Not banned, just highly sensitive data.’ A twisting comet, ringed with spiralling intel, froze in front of me. ‘Vak, this is thirty years’ worth of—’
‘—research,’ I finished, figuring it out as he did. ‘Their research and experiments on the stormtech. They’re looking for ways to strengthen and bolster its potency.’ My hand dropped to my weapon. ‘And how to poison it.’
‘Yeah.’ Grim’s voice was low and quiet.
Compass was ripe with stormdealer syndicates, cartels, and networks that operated across the criminal underbelly of the asteroid. Doing business, selling their products in clubs and street corners, in spaceports and dockside bars, in skyscrapers and business districts. Some so powerful they fronted businesses that dominated the economy of entire neighbourhoods, sometimes entire floors. It was a business, and like any other business, they had three particular interests: money, power, influence.
If this whirling galaxy of data was telling me anything, it was that these guys operated on an entirely different level. One with an agenda: a deep-seated grudge against Harmony. Stormdealers tended to take the view that customers going on a killing spree, dying on the streets and attracting the attention of galaxy-wide government forces with a zero-drug policy were bad for business. Not this group. This was about something other than getting rich. Something they needed a darkmarket pharmaceutical company up their sleeve for.
The door jerked open and a gaunt-faced man in system technician gear gaped at me. I had him in my handcannon sights already, his mouth gaping wider once he saw it. ‘Not a word. Stand facing the wall, hands behind your head.’ I used the voice-masking feature in my armour, turning my voice into a menacing rasp. It made him move faster than he’d probably ever moved in his life. I gritted my teeth. I’d been seen, and now had a hostage to deal with.
‘Hmm.’ Grim’s voice broke back into my commslink. ‘Looks like we’ve got ourselves a name.’
‘A name?’ Artyom had mentioned a Jae.
‘Yeah. Some egghead called Viklun Ryken. Worked at a deepspace dockyard called Quyn, in the Tungyian System, owned by the Rhivik. Used to be a betting house for illegal chainship races through asteroid fields.’ A neutron star swung out of its orbit, ripping open in a blur of glowing prisms. It materialised into an elongated space station, equipped with a sprawling dockyard. Beyond, chainships were on their way to the asteroid field, framed by a small cluster of stars. ‘Harmony had a few things to say about that, of course. The Rhivik caused a hell of a fuss, bitched about humans to other species for a while, but the place got retrofitted into Quyn Research Station, studying nearby cosmic events.’
‘Sounds too clean to me.’
‘Oh. Now, that’s interesting.’
‘What is it, Grim?’
‘I did a little searching on public search engines. This Ryken guy isn’t just a xenobiologist. He’s one of the few people studying the Shenoi.’
And maybe the very guy telling our stormdealer friends how to poison the stormtech.
I went about looping a set of plastic cables around my hostage’s wrists, tying him to a workstation while Grim did what he did best: find data he shouldn’t. He relayed his findings to me as fast as he found them. They had shops fronting their business scattered over Compass. Dead-drops for picking up canisters. Shipping routes. Distribution channels that flowed through at least four spaceports, ten floors and twelve business chains. A hit-list of rival stormdealers. Two stormdealer syndicates interested in handling their product. An offworld spacecraft manufacturer building chainships honeycombed with compartments to smuggle canisters off Compass, with a conceptual schematic of a chainship attached to the transmission. And at the very bottom of the transmission was the same symbol I’d seen in the Warren. An inverted Y, the edges squared off.
And three words: House of Suns.
‘That’s it,’ I breathed.
Grim glanced up. ‘What’s it?’
‘House of Suns,’ I said quietly. ‘That’s their name. And their symbol. That’s who we’re after.’
Quyn Research Station was winked away, and a cluster of ice-giants grew around me as Grim plugged the names into his network. ‘That’s impossible.’
‘What?’
‘Vak, there’re no search results for these freaks. Absolutely zero. That’s never happened before.’
The stormtech trickled down my spine like molten lead as the pieces finally snapped into place. The House of Suns couldn’t be based exclusively on Compass. Compass was a minor part of their ecosystem of operations. This could have come from anywhere in the Common. I thought back to the Warren. The substrates, the cradle, the darkmarket razornade. Now, offworld research stations, spacecraft manufacturers, stormdealer syndicates. They were heavy-hitting, professional, and brutally efficient. You didn’t look beyond Compass unless you had to. Shuttling goods across galactic regions of deepspace is insanely expensive and borderline suicidal – at least without a heavily armed effort – when smugglers and Blade Hunters are swarming along the moons and waystations, looking for easy pickings.
So this was bigger than Compass. Bigger than us.
Artyom had known how dangerous and far-reaching this was. He’d been so furious because he understood the magnitude of this operation. My guts felt like they were melting inside me as I realised how little I knew my brother.
We weren’t going to find anything more here. More importantly, I knew where we had to go next. I was telling Grim when I heard the approaching footsteps, disconnected him, and snapped away from the flexiscreen. Poised in a crouched position as the door dilated open and I found myself staring at a guard. He had a shock of dishevelled hair, a local militia insignia stamped on the shoulder of his tactical gear.
My handcannon cracked twice, punching into the guard’s chest as he fired his thin-gun from the hip, mistaking the technician for an attacker and blasting him in the head. The two bodies hit the ground one after the other, the echo of the gunshot crackling down the halls.
18
Bulletstorm
There’s a unique kind of silence after the echo of a gunshot dies down.
Pure. Complete. As if every living thing is scared of drawing any attention to itself. It gets the survival mechanism kicking in like no other sound does. So I knew I wasn’t mistaken when I picked up the clatter of heavy footsteps heading my way. If that wasn’t enough, the stormtech sparked like electricity in my chest, welcoming the incoming attack. Eight, ten, fifteen assailants. All coming to carve me up.
I was screwed. No way could I battle my way through that many men.
Or maybe I could.
The flasks of stormtech glistened at me from the shelves. Before I knew it, I was holding one. My hand was twitching. My mouth webbed with sticky saliva, sweat prickling across the nape of my neck. I couldn’t. I couldn’t take a dose like this, not after spending so long wrenching every possible drop of it out of me. Not after the rehab centres had pounded and strained me to the breaking point to be almost clean of it. I couldn’t predict what I’d do. It could be tainted. Even if it wasn’t, the knockback might fry my brains, melt my organs into my guts.
A gruff, muffled voice echoed from a few storeys above. ‘He’s downstairs. Direct shots only, can’t risk hitting—’
The words went out of earshot, but I’d heard enough. My new armour was top-market quality, but even it wouldn’t repel sustained fire for long.
I looked back at the stormtech.
It was like standing on the edge of a roaring cliff, the wind hard at my back, peering into a thrashing ocean below. This dosage could kill me in minutes. Or it could save me.
Not worth the risk. Slowly, almost painfully, I put it down.
There was only one other thing to try.
I spread my arms. Blocked out the world around me and focused inward. Focused on the depths of my body. I felt the stormtech surging up my arms, up my legs and chest like oil. I invited it to rush unobstructed through my veins, strumming my nerves and circling my heart. I gritted my teeth as I dredged up everything that had happened: my brother, my Reaper brothers dying, the war. I fed the stormtech my fear, frustration and white-hot, abject rage. I let the stormtech burn through me like wildfire.