Stormblood

by Jeremy Szal

  I didn’t realise I’d closed my eyes.

  When I opened them again, everything glowed.

  The world had taken on the crisp, shiny edge of raw data. Everything sharper, more precise. I could hear every step of the oncoming men, smell the acid in their sweat. See the microscopic films of dust coating the workstations. My chest heaved and I felt my body crackle and tighten with purpose. The air flowing into my lungs tasted like alcohol fumes. My muscles were tingling, my mouth stretched in a splitting grin as I felt every fibre of my body coalesce under my control. My legs poised in a fighter’s stance. My powerful hands squeezed into trembling fists. Ready to fight.

  This was what I remembered. This was what I’d been.

  I’d never realised how much I’d missed it. How good it felt.

  Scraping of boots overhead. Two people. Maybe three. Coming down the stairs.

  I pressed my back to the wall as the door slid open. Breathing and footsteps echoed from the corridor. My muscles tensed. Had to wait for them to advance, to come to me. My heart was thumping so hard in my chest I thought they would hear it.

  A shadow fell across the doorway, and with two steps the figure stepped clear. I shot him in the head, the handcannon echoing loud and flat. He smashed into a workstation, the second figure yelling as I charged out through the doorway. Her shot burst above me and the stormtech leaped along my breastbone in excitement. I ducked and shot her twice in the chest, throwing her backwards as, beyond her, I heard the high-pitched whine of weapons priming. I took my chance and dived across the hall into a fully furnished conference area, hoping to split them up instead of fighting them all head-on. There was a yell as one of them saw me, then a crackle of communication, and suddenly footsteps were heading towards me from all sides, pinning me dead in the centre of their sights.

  The room erupted into chaos.

  Sun-bright muzzle flashes around me, gunfire ripping out from high-calibre rifles and rattling my teeth. Chairs and tables turning into gnarled chunks, pillars smashing apart, workstations blasted across the room and glass showering around me. I hunkered down, aware of men to my left slowly closing in on me. The handcannon jerked in my hands as I nailed the first shooter, sending him crashing through a glass wall. I missed the second, shattering a wooden pillar apart in a flurry of splinters. Return fire hammered around me, rattling off my shoulder, but the armour soaked up the damage, spreading the force of the impact over my body. The room was wreathed in smoke and crisscrossed with volleys of gunfire. I leaned forward, squeezing off a round that punched through a man’s helmet visor. Motion stabilisers in the armour giving me perfect, clean shots as I drove two handcannon rounds into another shooter’s chest, sending them crashing backwards over a desk.

  A high-calibre round whined past, inches from my helmet, and crunched into a guard’s kneecap behind me. He rolled screaming on the floor as I darted to a concrete pillar for cover, a salvo of blaster bolts streaming down from above. My pulse pounded in my fingers as walls exploded inwards, showering splinters of metal and plaster around the room in angry bursts, stray projectiles ricocheting off me and the guards’ armour alike.

  ‘We want him alive!’ someone screamed. Not that anyone in the room seemed to be listening as the room plunged into darkness. A siren screeched around us, the noise catapulting me back to the war for a moment, the ghostly outlines of my fireteam around me between blinks. The air felt denser, gravity higher. Poisonous yellow lighting turned the hallways into a shuttered nightmare. Barely able to hear or think. All rational fear squashed to a pulp by the stormtech grinding against my ribs.

  I was slammed hard against the wall, knocking me back to Compass. Felt like I’d been hit in the chest with a sledgehammer. I saw the scattershot shooter the moment he squeezed off another round square into my midriff. I choked on my own breath, panting in my cover, splattering the inside of my visor with saliva. There was a warm prickle as the hydrostatic gel inside my armour tightened for protection, a stinging sensation as biofoam oozed into my wounds.

  A table beside me erupted into smoking splinters, the scattershot shooter charging. But now I knew where he was. I sprang forward, the armour giving me inhuman speed. My armoured bulk smashed into his, sending him staggering off-balance. I jammed the handcannon under his chin and fired, black blood splattering out.

  Search beams slashed across the darkened room, hunting me. I hugged the floor and gripped my weapon as I had in the Reaper War. Close, tight, familiar. The handcannon crackled as I aimed down the sights towards incoming guards, throttling the trigger, blasting through a kneecap, the guard’s legs thrashing as he smashed to the floor. Heart in my throat, I fired up through the walkways, shedding sparks and chunks of metal. Someone collapsed, legs mangled, screaming until a stray bullet from a comrade shattered his face apart.

  A warning beamed up on my HUD: out of ammo. The handcannon hummed in my hands, autoprinting bullets. I couldn’t afford to wait and reached to grab a scattershot dropped by one of the guards when a furious spear of pain shivered down my shoulder, a high-calibre round hitting home. I scrambled forward, scooped up the chunky scattershot, grips readjusting to my hand-size as I blasted away with ear-splitting echoes. Chunks of plaster ripping and spraying from the wall as I tracked the shooter with my sights, nailing him on the fifth shot and sending him spluttering against the wall.

  I heaved in a series of gulping breaths as sirens continued to scream overhead. My eardrums were throbbing. Plaster rained down on the dead and injured among the wrecked room. Handcannon recharge at twenty-three percent. Had to get out of here.

  I burst out of the room, spraying blind fire into the stairwell. Yells sounded as the stairwell collapsed in a screech of tortured metal. I leaped clear with a heavy thud, running for the second stairwell, cocooned in a world of adrenaline and the throttling joy spiking through my body. Had to retrace my steps to find the exit before they trapped me in here.

  I reached the second landing, a grenade going off, violent shockwaves spreading out as a salvo of gunfire hammered into my chest. I was slammed flat on my back, ears rippling with white noise, throbbing with so much pain that for a moment I thought I’d been killed. My armour went rock-hard around me, pumping me with drugs. The world blurring into monochrome. Blinking hard, trying to focus, gunfire growing from a muted rumble into a thundering echo as my hearing slammed back to me. A three-round burst tore a chunk out of the wall by my head. I crouched and fired blind bursts into the smoke, my muzzle flash giving me away. Gunfire returned, clattering against my shoulder. Teeth clenched hard enough to crack, the handcannon coughed as I aimed down the holographic sights and fired. There was a wet splatter and the guard collapsed, twitching on the ground before going still.

  Mangled yells tore through the constant shriek of the siren. My body clenched, soaking up the dread and excitement of this war-torn nightmare. Given the chance, the stormtech would make me hack and blast my way through every last man, make me do anything to survive and to sustain this rush of adrenaline. That’s what made it so invaluable: it wouldn’t let me stop until I was dead, or they were.

  But I needed to be smarter than that.

  The exit loomed above: a neon-white rectangle shrouded in the smoky darkness. My palms were sweaty and my throat was tight with hunger. Body curved like a predator as my prey came galloping into my outstretched claws.

  Had to remember my training. Years of battling these desires, dodging the pitfalls. Remember my Reaper brothers, telling me not to cave, to be stronger than that. For Alcatraz, Cable, Ratchet, Myra, all the others in that bloody nightmare. The people that had fought beside me. Pushing away my body’s desires. Lifting me back up to the light.

  Think of my brother. I couldn’t give in now. I never had before. And if I stayed, I’d be lost.

  Something rumbled in my throat, my body battling itself for control. I tore myself away with bone-wrenching force, tendrils of desire sti
ll squirming inside me as I ran through the exit, bullets chasing me into blinding white light.

  19

  The Locked Brain

  The world blinked and stuttered around me in electric waves. My body was as taut as a chainmetal cable, my heart jackhammering against my chest. My vision tilted, my legs wobbling as I stumbled into the shadow of a droid docking pod. Safe. I’d had enough sense to smash the access panel before I’d dived out of the facility, locking them inside. I’d been madly sprinting for at least an hour, my body still geared up after the fight. No one would find me here.

  I drew back my helmet and raked deep, shuddering breaths, aware of my body and the sticky, fluid warmth flushing through it. Every sensation heightened to the hilt: the shuddering of my heart, the sweet-sour scent of my sweat, the blood rushing to my muscles. Blue mist swarmed at the edges of my vision and there was a sickly-sweet taste tickling the back of my throat. If I didn’t get a grip on myself the stormtech would swallow me and I’d be lost to it again.

  I had to go through the steps to comedown. I let the armour’s inner tendrils and abrasive surfaces press up against my body, itching, tickling, grounding me with stimuli to loosen the stormtech’s grip while I inhaled deeply. It had started to rain and I tilted my face upwards, letting the cool drizzle of water trickle down my cheeks. I ran through a set of stretches and cast my mind to the calming landscapes of my childhood home, exactly as I’d been trained. The peaceful tops of snowy, razorbacked mountains stretching over the horizon. A cold breeze whistling through the windswept tundra, through beaches of black sand and soaring cliffs. Taking myself elsewhere, beyond the suffocating cage of my body.

  I breathed out, hard. I’d passed the worst of it. I blinked, able to think straight again.

  Had to get out of this place.

  The blood and smoke coating my armour was a dead give away. They hadn’t seen me outside of my suit yet. I assessed it, and decided I’d done enough to loosen the stormtech’s grip. I released myself from the suit’s protective embrace and stepped out into open air. I shivered at the cold and suppressed the urge to slide back into the armour’s warm insides. Instead, I smeared the blood off its chest and sent it home with my weapons. Now, I was able to get a good look at myself through the underskin. Before, the stormtech had been faintly visible on my body. Now I was livid with it. Thick blue strands inched along my ribs and spine like curious fingers. It spun vicious patterns along my chest and stomach, globules dripping down my legs.

  Stormtech doesn’t just enhance your body, it submerges you in it. Fills your entire conscious being. It’s literally like being cocooned in power. But it can also drown you. I was through the worst of it, but still dangerously within range. Had to be somewhere public, keep following my training, where I could feel human again. Even though my flesh crawled as I stepped onto the people-packed promenade. I felt every glance, every smell and gush of air, every brush against my skin.

  I found myself stumbling back towards the sweeping parkland I’d noted earlier. It was distant and public enough that they wouldn’t look for me here. I rubbed my eyes and blinked at my surroundings. I’d gone further than I realised. A line of coffeehouses and bakeries rose upwards to form small glass cube-shaped structures tilting sideways at precarious angles. Creatures that looked like jellyfish floated in the air, dust motes falling from their tentacles. They’d been brought from some local planet to add to the rich biodiversity here. Loose knots of people were scattered around me on benches, enjoying a day out.

  I sprawled out on the long, damp grass like a star. Chest rising and falling, my breathing starting to slow. Feeling the stormtech rumble through me in long echoes before gradually seeping and fading away again, as it had always done. You can’t go instantly high and stay there, it doesn’t work that way. It takes time, consistent use and aggressive feeding to crank the stormtech up to maximum output levels, just as it takes time to dial it back down. Always being surrounded by combat during the Reaper War meant I was kept on what we called Cloud Infinite. It hypersensitised you and dulled your empathy, your humanity. The most terrifying Reapers were always the least human. Organic killing machines wrapped in flesh. By that stage, they had to be kept drugged up to their eyeballs with mood-controlling meds before being unleashed on the enemy like hunting dogs.

  Was I headed that way before this was over? If I managed to save Artyom, would he even recognise me? Would I?

  I wasn’t back at Reaper levels. But I’d torn through the mental and physical suppression that held the stormtech at bay, wedging myself back open to it. Stormtech was like any other drug: the harder and longer you used it, the stronger it became, the more difficult to quell its urges. After the whole Tipei payroll had tried to blast me into pieces, the stormtech was wrapped all that much tighter around my body, all that much harder to resist it again. I felt it scrape against my bones, claw up my bloodstream. I closed my eyes and concentrated on the tickle of grass against my neck, the cool wind against my sweat. Thick, slow drops of rainwater pattered across my torso. Slowly, slowly I felt my senses rolling back down, my sight, smell and hearing growing duller, like I was gently descending from high altitude on a low-gravity world. The raging aggression churning in the pit of my stomach like flickering flames slowly being doused. I breathed deep. If I could control this, I maybe had a chance.

  With the fog wrapped around my mind rapidly evaporating, I pasted my shredded thoughts back together. I wasn’t dealing with some drug syndicate, it was clear they were studying and modifying stormtech. But for what? Altering it for increased sales was one thing. Flooding the market with a substance they knew was toxic was another. These deaths had to be significant to them. Running with the assumption that they were deliberately undermining Harmony’s rule by showing Reapers and skinnies to be loose cannons, they were hell-bent on keeping people away from rehab and keeping them dosed high on stormtech. If this wasn’t for money, then what was it for? Political gain? It’d explain why they were trying to pin the deaths on Harmony. But there were plenty of ways to go about doing that without sending Reapers on a kamikaze rampage. Or the very great risk that came with getting on Harmony’s radar. Had to be someone with a personal grudge. Didn’t much help narrow down my suspects at all. The Common and the greater galaxy at large were scattered with multispecies militia groups, insurrectionists, and cabals who hated Harmony’s guts as much as they hated Harvest’s. I thought again of the symbol I’d seen. Of the scale of what I’d uncovered. This was an organisation with roots deep in the asteroid’s underworld infrastructure.

  And Sokolav. Not only was my old Commander not dead, as Harmony thought, he was working with these people. The man who’d noticed me struggling when I first arrived at the Harmony Training Station, a dozen light years from my home in a world I didn’t understand, and guided me through the Reaper Programme he’d helped design. Who put his reassuring hand on my shoulder as they pumped me with chemicals and locked me in restraints before shooting the stormtech into my body, swearing he’d never leave my side for a second. Who stood in the early dawn light with the wind in his hair and a devilish fire in his eyes and told his entire Battalion he was proud of us, prouder than he’d ever been of anyone in his life, and would do whatever it took to get us through the war. He was the father I never had.

  Now he was with the people killing my family, the Reapers he’d built. Destroying his entire legacy and everything he ever stood for. And I still had no idea why.

  My fists tightened. Why I did have to be involved in this? Why did Artyom have to be?

  I glanced out at the rolling grasslands, hearing the susurrus of trees in the wind. I watched a family over by the undercover playground: two boys laughing and wrestling cheerfully with each other for a ball, and their mother sitting on a picnic mat. I watched them for a little, an unbidden smile on my face.

  I stood, turning to go when a seismic craaaack! shattered the soundscape, a high-pitched whine
rupturing through my head. The windows of storefronts and autovehicles exploded, a blizzard of glass raining down on the crowds. I saw people’s mouths moving. Everything a muffled, high-pitched whine. Figures stumbling by me, bleeding from their ears, bleeding from the glass. Dust and fire were gouting out of a medium-sized building across the lake. At first it looked like the building was wrapped in a heat haze, until I realised it was toppling forward. Cables snapping, concrete crumbling, glass splintering. I saw black shapes spilling from the broken windows, thudding into the pavement.

  People. They were people.

  Screams and sirens punched through the white noise in muffled blasts, but I was already racing through the wet grass, the crowds running with me, heading for the safety of the concourse as the building’s foundation made one last tortured groan and crashed into the lake. The shockwave shuddered up my legs and up my spine, throwing huge dark waves up from the lake like towering monstrosities of water, showering over the grassland in great splattering heaves. Lake water surged towards and through the crowd, up to my knees and already flooding coffeehouses. Panicked people sloshed past me, emergency and medical drones streaming the other way to the collapse site. Black smoke rings slowly corkscrewed into the sky.

  The two boys and their mother were nowhere to be seen.

  Terrorist attack. That’s what the constant trickle of newsfeeds popping up in my shib said. Terrorist attack by a skinnie, high on stormtech, who’d threatened to blow up the bank unless they gave him half a million Commoners. They’d complied and he’d pulled the plug anyway. Killing thousands and toppling the building. The whole Ruskin floor was slowly being sectioned off, the floor’s spaceport closing, rerouting hundreds of ships.