by Jeremy Szal
I didn’t have to look at the details to know he was an addict, poisoned by darkmarket stormtech. Nor did I have to wait long for the headlines blaming Harmony, demanding an answer for this, demanding retribution against anyone with stormtech. The newsfeeds clogged with angry retorts as the report spread like a virus across the asteroid and then the entire system. Politicians, security personnel, bureaucrats and media spokespeople from various space stations and boards of operation chipping in.
Whoever the House of Suns were, whatever they wanted, they were weaponising terrorism and public outrage against Harmony. This was a victory for them. I had a feeling it’d be the first of many.
I’d found myself a tiny alcove in a packed-out restaurant, hunched over a bowl of cheese and onion pierogi and a shot of vodka. With the stormtech threading through me like crazy, I was ravenous. Too hungry to trawl all the way down to the Upper Markets, I made a beeline for the first level that caught my attention. It was fashioned after an Eastern European city, complete with onion-domed buildings garlanded with flowers and engraved with stern wooden carvings. I’d followed signs in Polish, Russian and Ukrainian pointing me towards a quiet place to eat.
I watched the lunch crowd, made up of more aliens than humans, and took my first bite of pierogi. It tasted much better, more pronounced, than I’d expected. The onions were spicier. The cheese creamer. The meat juicer. I hunched deeper into my seat. Were the conversations in here louder? My nostrils twitched. The smells more potent?
The realisation hit me hard as a slug round. The stormtech was still sharpening my senses, letting me hear the hushed conversation about chainship schematics two Torven were having in the back of the restaurant, letting me see the individual feathers on birds wheeling around the domes outside. Every clatter of utensils, every hiss of steam, every breath. I felt it all. I clenched my fist and felt the stormtech instantly swirl under my skin. This was how I’d felt when I came home from the war. The heightened effects of the stormtech slowly dissolving, while still desperately searching for something to hang onto, a way to keep itself active.
As long as I let it dissolve and didn’t give it anything it could work with, I’d be fine.
I’d be fine.
I leaned into my wooden seat, gazing through the flexiscreen porthole that showed chainships, frigates and cargoships ducking in and out of various glowing dockyards honeycombed in the lower regions of the asteroid. I watched the stream of ships, unable to help wondering if any had New Vladivostok on their course schedule. I hadn’t been home in years now. Couldn’t say I sorely missed it, but there’s a sense of comfort in the familiar, in a space that’s shaped and nurtured you. Kuraishiguro, New Vladi’s largest settlement, was big enough to get lost in, but small enough that you could learn every street, roadway and mountain pass.
It was ironic I’d been drawn here. Kasia and I had always wanted to escape Kuraishiguro. Take Artyom and our mother and escape our father for good. But we knew he’d hunt us down and kill us if we did. He’d said as much, usually while delivering one of his thrashings. Just try it, Vakov. I’ll find you. See if I don’t. He had connections with every criminal enterprise he’d worked for. People he’d use to find us, the same people who protected him whenever we reported his violence. But we were planning to risk it anyway. Only then Kasia had been taken from us. I’d held Artyom tight against my chest as he sobbed and sobbed for hours, while I held back my own tears because I was the oldest now, and I had to be stable and strong for him. More than ever. Our mother couldn’t protect us – she was too afraid of my father to do anything but jump to obey when he barked at her. She never had the guts Kasia did. Never raised us like our sister had.
I’d thought bringing justice to our sister’s killer would bring us some sort of peace. It only made me angry. Angry with the people who allowed it to happen. Angry with the people who’d sighed and shaken their heads and muttered appropriate things and forgotten about her the next day. Angry with the whole planet. I don’t know how many nights I spent on the streets, full of too much booze and too little sense, sniffing out a fight. Didn’t know what to do with myself, except get into trouble.
When I was about sixteen, one of the few hotel highrises on the planet hosted a soiree for businessmen and entrepreneurs. On New Vladi, that meant organised crime families. Me and Artyom had explored all the underground bars and seedy vidgame dens, and we wanted a bigger adventure. So we’d walked into the marbled lobby, pretending to be related to one of the smaller families. Somehow, we got access to the opulent penthouse bar, where hundreds of the most dangerous and violent people on the planet had gathered to talk business. Swirling, intricate tattoos of animals and bones indicated their ranks. They didn’t suspect a thing as we mingled among them, enjoying free food and drink that’d have cost us half a year’s wages. I still remember sipping a silver-dusted vodka sour, leaning against the balustrade and taking in the sprawling view. Overlooking the dark wilderness of the silent forests and brooding black mountains on one side, the concrete cityscape on the other. Lonely highways winding through mountain passes like black veins through to hinterlands populated with dormant volcanoes and glaciers. Neon signs ten storeys tall plastered across brutalist buildings, blinking through the fog. I’d never seen my city like that before. Never realised how small it was. How isolated. Or how many stars there were in the sky, glinting like neon dust. I’d glanced up to see the green concentric lights of a chainship lifting off from its shuttle pad and sailing into the dark skies, disappearing into the infinite ocean of stars and galaxies. I wondered where else I could go. What places in the universe that offered escape from the poverty and violence I’d known all my life.
As the night had worn on, the arriving guests became more and more notorious. We’d glance at each other across the lounge, both wondering if we should slip out now or risk staying longer. Giddy with the rush of adrenaline and expensive vodka, we’d kept pushing it. Ordering crazier and crazier drinks from the bar, trying the most expensive dishes while we could get away with it. It was only around 2am, when the older members had begun to bleed out of the venue, that people noticed us. Including men with irezumi tattoos.
I saw them approaching before Artyom did. They’d made a mistake in waiting for the superior families to leave. We made our escape down a side stairwell, our footsteps echoing as we raced through the hotel corridors. My head foggy with booze, I’d pushed us into the sauna, dark and abandoned at this hour, and we’d leaped fully clothed into the plunge pool. Treading water in the darkness, shocked sober by the cold as we listened for their footsteps. This was New Vladi. Neither of us harboured any illusions about what would happen to us if we were caught, underage or not.
We submerged, flattening ourselves against the side of the pool when someone barged in. My heartbeat had thundered in my ears as we held each other down under the water, locking gazes as the flashlight arced around the room, each of us trying to stop the other from moving, from giving us away.
An eternity later, the light had vanished. We surfaced in the same moment, both of us desperate for air, both of us still trying to be quiet. We must have stayed in the water for an hour before the coast was clear. We’d dried off on the hotel towels before slipping out of the highrise and onto the predawn streets. Leaning against each other, hungover and high with the thrill of danger, trickles of faint light yawning down to the streets around us. We couldn’t quite believe we’d got away with it. We’d stumbled to the shabby train terminal and collapsed into hard plastic seats. ‘How many shots did you have?’ I asked Artyom.
‘Eight,’ he mumbled. Blinked. ‘No, nine.’
I shook him playfully by the shoulder. ‘Liar.’
‘Ten! Who cares, we didn’t pay for it.’ Artyom shook water out of his hair and grinned up at me. ‘Same again next week?’
But I’d been looking up at the brightening sky. Searching for the chainship I’d seen, while knowing it wouldn’t be
there, knowing I’d never see it again. I remembered the little moment of quiet peace I’d experienced, seeing it gently soar away to be swallowed up by the stars, imagining for a moment that I was escaping on it. And I remembered too, the harsh reality that came crashing down when the moment passed and I was still a sixteen-year-old boy stuck on a backwater planet. It made me realise how truly confined I was on New Vladi and that I’d never find that peace here.
It wasn’t until Harvest declared war and Harmony put out the call for combatants that I’d found my chance to be free.
All these years later, here we were.
We don’t choose the cards we’re dealt. We can only choose how we play them. No matter what the universe throws at you, you’ve got to keep swimming. Doesn’t matter how bruised and broken and bloody you’ll be by the end. We’re all orchestrations of carbon. Blood and bone and dreams and madness and love and hate swirling inside us all. And with it, the capacity to destroy or save ourselves and everyone around us. You just have hope you won’t destroy, because, in the end, hope’s all we have. Hope that you won’t self-destruct. Hope you’ll do right by the people you love. Hope that you’ll be a better man tomorrow than you were today. You lose sight of hope, and you’ve already lost.
20
The Book of the Dead
The Compass Academy building was a mad hybrid of animal and architecture. Merging squid, elk, wolf, bat, its flesh was made out of sheer cliffs of bright steel, columns of black marble and glass. The wings were forged of hollowed obsidian, the thrashing tentacles from an alloy threaded with grinding machinery, the howling jaws a dense polymer, the antlers a sparkling cobalt. It was twenty kilometres in diameter, carved with angles and wacky, geometric complexities. Everything was disorderly, nothing symmetrical. You couldn’t tell where one animal’s biology began to fuse and bleed into the next. They sported bizarre fungal growths and jutting body-modifications. A series of black spires burst out of the creature’s shoulders and back at random intervals, extending from its spine like spikes and turning the whole building into a gothic superstructure for the space-age. It was as if they were trying to look monstrous but had fallen just short of succeeding.
If you didn’t know its backstory, you’d assume it was the creation of insane architects, who’d fought each other over every metre of space. The truth was, this sector of the inner asteroid had been particularly rich in minerals. Instead of gutting it, the architects had hollowed the rocks out, carving the exterior into this bizarre mesh of creatures and honeycombing the interior with walls, gaskets, supports, electricity, all the usual plumbing, turning it into the asteroid’s biggest and most prestigious place of study.
If you ask me, it was an outrageous and bizarre expense. But no one was asking me.
Determined to stick out like a bloodied thumb, Grim was dressed in an underskin that gave him the appearance of being made of charcoal and perpetually moving black ink, as if he was a hand-drawn figure in some grotesque artbook. Drones designed to look like flying gargoyles swooped overhead. We’d hiked up steps carved into the wolf’s claws and into an elevator climbing its hind leg. In the southwest quadrant, the xenomuseum had been built inside one of one extended squid tentacles. Dedicated to showcasing the diversity of known civilisations, cultures and history of intelligent life across the Common, it was designed to allow humans and aliens alike to learn about their own and other species. Could be our next port of call if this didn’t work out.
We crossed the gently lit atrium, past departments dedicated to astrophysics, dark-matter energy, megastructures and xenobiology. Groups of students, technicians and teachers walked past, deep in conversation. The modern gothic aesthetic didn’t let up as we entered the huge, catherdral-like space of the Academy library. Sweeping shelves stretched all the way up to the arched ceiling, packed with stained glass windows and intricate machinery like dark grey clockwork that appeared to be dripping with slime-coloured wax. Rows and rows and rows of books, folders, dossiers, articles covered the shelves, each shelf attached with a robotic appendage, gears and cogs whirling and sending them tunnelling away through silver chutes that crisscrossed over the architecture. They catalogued these soaring skyscrapers of data: an ecosystem of information.
And I’d thought this would be easy.
‘So, Vak.’ Grim still hadn’t woken up yet and the sight of this hadn’t helped his mood. ‘Did you want to search alphabetically, or by genre?’
‘Not helping,’ I said.
‘Hey, this was your idea.’
‘Welcome.’ The Rubix’s voice carried clear across the marbled floor. I’m not sure what the librarian stereotype is, but it appeared to be a gaunt-faced woman with long grey hair and flowing robes, her glare demanding complete silence. ‘Do you have a booking?’
From the way she said it, it was clear she didn’t expect us to have one, though she showed no surprise when I handed over my reservation details. She took us past quiet alcoves, giant terrariums filled with miniature environments, and various mechanisms wheeling on little gyroscopes, before we reached our study room. A leather sofa, computer system with archive access, an elliptical desk flanked by wooden chairs. I’d handle the physical side of our search while Grim dug up his digital underworld. ‘Find me everything to do with Viklun Ryken,’ I told Grim.
Trawling through the archives was like looking for a white rabbit in a snowstorm. A very, very small white rabbit. But Grim’s never one to let me down and we shortly had an answer.
‘Look at this,’ I said as relevant dataspheres materialised around us in an orrery of multicoloured globes. When I touched one, it splintered outwards like snowflakes in a blizzard, before coalescing into scrolling sheets of paper. Digital ink swirled into words like black ivy in fast-forward. ‘Ryken isn’t just studying the Shenoi: he’s an expert on them. Wrote several books about them.’
‘That’s one hell of a subject to devote your life to,’ Grim said, fully roused from his torpor.
‘It gets better.’ The digital pages hissed and crackled as I turned them. ‘He’s researched which systems and planets the Shenoi might have occupied, and whether they were a spacefaring species, their civilisation and culture, if they were physical or energy beings, their artefacts.’
‘There are Shenoi artefacts? I thought all traces of them vanished.’
‘He says they left artefacts behind. They could be Shenoi, or they could belong to some other alien species that jumped the rail or were wiped out by some disaster.’ I scanned the next page, doing my best to ignore the stormtech grating along my ribs. ‘One of his most controversial theories is that the stormtech is their blood.’
‘Folks back on Earth used to drink the blood of their enemies.’ Grim sniffed and scratched his chest with a dripping black claw. ‘Sound like decent folks.’
‘He argues that taking the stormtech is pretty much the same thing. Not exactly the most positive of analogies.’
‘The bloke spent his life writing about dead aliens. How much fun do you think he’d be at a party?’ Grim sniffed and flicked a sheet of data to me. ‘Interesting … all of his books were given the seal of approval by the Shenoi Collective.’
‘The Shenoi Collective?’
‘Seems to be a slice of academia who specifically investigate, analyse and theorise about the Shenoi.’
‘So it’s not just Ryken who’s doing in-depth research, there’s a whole curriculum based on it?’
‘Yeah. These guys are borderline obsessive, by the looks of it. They’ve systematically added his work to their official archives, and those loons rarely seem to accept third-party submissions.’
I looked warily at the digital mountain of articles, books and transcripts Ryken had written, feeling crushed. I don’t have much patience for reading, even less when I’m not sure what I’m looking for. No way was I going to probe through all this while the House of Suns were still on the prowl. The s
tormtech likes mental stimuli and activity as much as physical, and I was itching to find something. I knew pieces were missing, I just couldn’t see what shape they took or where they went.
Maybe Viklun Ryken himself could give me the answers. We plunged back into the Tungyian System, Quyn Research Station expanding to fill the room. I watched the visualisation package as three corvettes broke out of warpspace, their hulls distorted with a dark haze, before making a beeline for the space station. At an optimal distance, they aligned in battle-formation, gimballed multicannons rotating forward. They unleashed a simultaneous bombardment of Antimatter Missiles, blasting the dockyard into debris. A timestamp showed it had happened three years ago. Grim watched with me, in silence. ‘Ryken was on it at the time,’ I said quietly.
‘That doesn’t sound like a coincidence.’
Of course it wasn’t. Quyn Research Station had been mentioned in my assailants’ databanks. Didn’t take a genius to stumble to the conclusion they’d been the cause of its destruction.
Just when you’re making progress, the universe bends over backwards to kick you in the urethra.
I leaned back in my chair. ‘So, let’s say the House of Suns killed him. They went to the trouble of arming themselves with military-grade weapons used in space warfare and flying into regions of deepspace swarming with Blade Hunters, smuggler crews, hostile species, and god knows what else. They knew there’d be questions, evidence tracing back to them, and they risked killing him anyway.’
‘They were afraid of him.’
‘Or they were afraid of what he’d discovered. Something in his work as xenobiologist.’
Grim slumped back in his seat, feet propped up on the table, gesturing to the vast array of data. ‘Hate to break it you, but even if the answer is here, we’re not going to find it. We might not even recognise it if we did.’