by Jeremy Szal
A single Kaiji stood at the far end of the craft. He was taller than me, just over two metres by my reckoning. He was broad-shouldered and barrel-chested, clad in a heavy tower of gold and black armour. His chestplate glistened with sun-bright intensity, a line of sweeping lights stencilled from the shoulders down to the angular gauntlets. His eyes were piercing and intelligent as they flicked over me: one black, the other a dirty gold that matched his armour. Two large horns jutted from either side of his skull, like the horns of a bull or a yak. He pressed a fist to his armoured chest. ‘Thanks for showing up.’
I’d been so accustomed to the idea of Kaiji being slender and lanky that I had to mask my surprise. Seemed there was as much diversity within their own species as there was within humans. ‘Happy to be here,’ I told him as I strapped myself into a full-body seat that clearly wasn’t built for human bone structure, while one of them tapped a few buttons on the controls and had us jetting away. The one with blue eyes introduced himself as Ambassador Nsurev van Jorren before glancing at the bigger Kaiji. ‘May I introduce Space Marshall Xanrimaeyr dan Juvens. He is in charge of military tactics and Elite Tactical Force regiments in this sector.’
I sure as hell hadn’t expected to be meeting with one of the top dogs, especially not informally. Still, Harmony had been clear: they would get whatever they wanted. ‘Good to meet you, Space Marshall,’ I said vigilantly.
The big alien made an indignant snorting sound and waved a hand. ‘Juvens is quite fine here,’ he grumbled out. ‘Formalities give me a headache.’
I allowed myself a grin. Perhaps this visit wouldn’t be so bad after all.
The other two made no efforts to introduce themselves, but Harmony wouldn’t have allowed them on Compass without clearance, which had been passed onto me. Their names appeared over their heads on my HUD: Maadichi van Szev and Petrych van Chwekli. I kept my knowledge to myself. Never knew where it could come in handy.
Nothing more was said as the transit craft jetted out into space. The Kaiji seemed very good at not looking at me, but I knew they were. They had a spicy, gunpowder sort of smell to them. It wasn’t quite unpleasant. Juvens fidgeted next to me in his seat as if he were unused to remaining idle.
The small spacecraft was monochromatic. The walls were skinned with a concave geometrical pattern and scattered with little gleaming strips of light. What few devices I could see were angular and weirdly gothic. Szev stretched out a bony hand near the wall and a panel of intricate knobs surfaced like smooth stones in ink-coloured water. Nothing like the bright and complicated design of Torven technology.
I glanced out the viewport as we approached the Kaiji dreadnought. It was shaped like an elongated bullet that slowly curved upwards to form a bulky, sharpened point, scintillating like a sword’s edge in the sun. The hull was purple-black with armoured plates slotting over each other, coated with a hexagonal matte-black surface that twitched, as if alive. A vibrant blue pulsed between them, like thousands of heaving gills. It looked like it had been created with the brush strokes of an oil painting. I suddenly had the impression of stumbling across a mythological monster in the depths of an ocean trench, biochemically modified to withstand the crushing pressure of its atmosphere.
But I know a warship when I see one. Between the scattering of docks and hangars was an arsenal of railguns, plasma cannons, nanoguns, heat-seeking launchers, devastating smatter-shells, and anti-ship weaponry that fired high-velocity tungsten rods. They bristled out from the hull like hostile creatures peeking out between beds of coral. The pod slowed to a standstill as stabilising thrusters balanced us in the void of space, leaving us within the dreadnought’s vicinity. I felt its full mass; dozens of cubic tonnes of this massive alien warship pressing down on my shoulders. ‘We’re not entering the ship?’ I asked.
‘No.’ I’m hardly an expert on alien emotions but Szev seemed to adopt an expression of dour amusement. The pod lights dimmed, as if going into power-conversation mode. ‘We would not allow a human onboard our ship without quarantine.’
No. But by being in the proximity of their dreadnought and seeing their full might of ship-shattering military hardware on display, they’d made it clear we were in their territory, their world, playing by their rules. I’d played this game with people above my rank before. I could play it with these aliens now.
‘Then why are we out here?’ I asked, feeling uncomfortable in the rigid mould of the chair and the awkward five-point harness. I noticed the wide straps had locked tight in place, securing me into my seat. Hopefully so I couldn’t tamper with the controls or see anything they didn’t want me to see, rather than because they planned to take me out.
Juvens inclined his head, jutting horns gleaming in the light. ‘We can’t risk anyone overhearing us. Not with what we’re about to discuss,’ he said. His English was light years ahead of the Ambassador’s, his tone casual and confident, as if he were a native speaker. He had to have spent time at alien cultural centres to learn the language.
‘We have been observing you,’ Szev declared, ‘since Harmony asked you to help prevent the spread of the Shenoi DNA on Compass.’
I caught myself nodding and said, ‘Yes. We call it stormtech. I understand you’ve asked Harmony to stop it spreading.’
‘Stormtech.’ I wasn’t sure if the Ambassador was amused by the phrase or not. ‘Using stormtech may have won a war, but it was still unwise. Your people did not listen then. Perhaps they will now.’
‘Why did you object to the use of stormtech from the very start?’ I’d lived too long with this mystery to keep my curiosity bottled up any longer. ‘How could you possibly know what it would do?’
The Kaiji all seemed to weigh up their response, but Juvens was the first to speak. ‘Show us,’ he said.
I wasn’t overwhelmed with enthusiasm at the idea, but I’d known it was coming. I allowed the armour plates on my arm to peel back, revealing the swirl of blue under my flesh. The Ambassadors inhaled sharply, as if the stormtech would leap out and bite them. All except Juvens, who was watching in fascination as it curled between my bones. The stormtech had been itchy ever since the arena fight, and seeing it made me want to scratch furiously.
Juvens unstrapped from his seat and strode to the viewport, hands behind his back. Different species or not, I recognised the ease with which he wore his armour. Like me, he was more comfortable in his suit than his own skin. ‘I don’t mince my words, and I don’t think you do either, Fukasawa. Honesty’s in short supply around here, and that’s no way for our two species to form an alliance. So I’ll say it directly.’ Juvens glanced over his shoulder at me. ‘Stormtech is a piece of the Shenoi themselves, living on inside other organisms.’
I raised my arm. ‘You mean, this isn’t just DNA scraps … it’s active, living pieces of the Shenoi?’
‘Yes.’
It wasn’t a dawning realisation. More like a complete re-imagining of my situation, hitting me with the force of truth. I had a long-dead alien race trickling through my bloodstream and nervous system, swimming around my organs, coursing through the hands and feet that killed and hurt people at their command. And it was grafted inside every Reaper, every skinnie, everyone who’d ever dabbled in stormtech.
All diseased. All tainted.
Was this why it seemed to have a mind of its own? I balled my hand into a fist, watching the stormtech – the Shenoi – accelerate to the crook of my elbow at the sudden flexing of sinew. ‘You knew the aliens lived on all this time.’ My voice was husky, raw. ‘You knew the stormtech wasn’t just leftovers. And you didn’t tell us?’
‘We informed some senior Harmony dignitaries about our suspicion,’ said Chwekli, hands folded together. ‘Either they did not believe us, or they decided not to share that information. But humanity was warned.’
I had a pretty strong suspicion it was the latter, because dismissing inconvenient information was exactly what Har
mony would have done. They hadn’t needed another complication, especially not one that’d have made willing men and women stop and think twice about becoming Reapers. Rage built in my chest as Juvens laid his seven-fingered hand on my wrist. I could read the other three Kaiji’s disapproval as easily as Cyrillic script. They hadn’t wanted the Space Marshall to come. They’d wanted to keep this discussion political, under their control. He knew it, and that’s exactly why he’d come.
‘Harmony continued the Shenoi’s existence, spread them around,’ said Szev with an undercurrent of steel. ‘The Shenoi were an all-powerful, all-consuming, savage race with no regard for life or mutual existence.’
‘That’s putting it lightly,’ Juvens grumbled. ‘They refused to engage in negotiations or consider a truce. Too many species and galactic councils have tried over the millennia. The Shenoi are a parasite, by nature and by culture, infecting living tissue and taking life-forms as their vessels, slowly seizing control until they’ve eaten cites, planets, solar systems.’ His armoured fingers traced the swirling strands of stormtech, his voice adopting a dark, thunderous tone. ‘They’ve destroyed fourteen civilisations this way. Maybe more. And with the stormtech plague humanity’s dealing with, they could make it fifteen.’
I leaned back. No wonder the stormtech was able to heal us and regrow biomass, it was their own DNA. Our DNA. I was sharing my body with a power-hungry, parasitic alien species whose life goal was to consume me. Little wonder stormtech sent our aggression rocketing sky-high. They needed us to be the strongest organisms walking around. Top of the galactic food chain.
Of course, this changed nothing. It’d make little difference to the stormdealers selling their goods in back alleys and underground workshops, and even less to folks hooked on it. No matter how deadly it was, as long as there were people willing to buy and people willing to sell, the drug market would exist.
‘Why are you telling me this now?’ I asked. ‘Why not someone else from Harmony?’
Juvens snorted. ‘We tried, once. It didn’t work out so well. You’re a soldier. You’ve seen what the stormtech does in the war, and what it’s still doing to your asteroid. You can make a practical difference the others can’t.’
I was starting to see what Saren meant about the Kaiji respecting military hierarchy. In giving us another chance to make this right, they were going to someone they believed wouldn’t ignore them again.
‘What happened to the Shenoi?’ It wasn’t as important, but I had to know.
‘We destroyed the bastards,’ Juvens boomed with undeniable pride. ‘We took the full force of our fleets and armadas and met them on the battlefield before they reached our homeworld. It was a bloody, brutal war. It cost us almost all our munitions, resources, everything. Took centuries to rebuild. But we halted their rampage across space.’ The Space Marshall made an exasperated, snorting sigh. ‘We were naive enough to think that was the end of it. Then we found that even fragments of stormtech scattered across the galaxy have done plenty of damage on their own.’
‘There’re tens of millions of people infected with stormtech,’ I said. ‘If they’re kicking around inside us all, shouldn’t they have taken over already?’
‘If that were true,’ Juvens said evenly. ‘You’d already be dead. Remember, stormtech is like any other virus or parasitic organism. The more accelerated and late-stage the disease is, the higher the impact on your body. If you combat it, the virus dies down. Fukasawa, if the Shenoi had fully possessed your body, you’d know, because you’d be busy trying to tear me limb from limb.’
‘Trying?’ I asked.
Juvens nodded towards a slim, black-bodied handgun that emerged out of his thigh-armour. The alien gave a grim smile as he tapped my chestplate with an armoured finger. ‘I don’t miss.’
My rehab had weakened the stormtech, allowed the organism to die down. Now I had given it a sudden boost, I was in a hell of a lot more trouble than I’d originally thought. ‘It can’t … hear me, can it?’ It was stupid question, but I had to ask.
‘Fortunately for all of us, no. Without contact with a Shenoi mind, the organism’s about as smart as a slab of fungus.’
‘But the risk is still present,’ interjected Szev, as if we didn’t all already know this. ‘It’ll still influence your behaviour. In that sense, it controls you, and always will.’
Little wonder they’d been so desperate to get stormtech off the market. I wondered if they had their own people addicted to this drug back on their homeworld like other species. ‘How much stormtech is swimming around in the universe?’ I asked them.
They all glanced at each other again. Szev burst into rapid-fire conversation that I couldn’t understand a word of, and suddenly all four were wrapped up in a fierce debate. Juvens gave that exasperated snorting sound and thumped the side of the pod with his armoured fist. The others were instantly silenced.
‘Enough of this drivel,’ he said, speaking to them but glancing at me. ‘He has the right to know.’
‘No.’ Szev’s voice was cold enough to freeze water. ‘The human has no right. You have no right. Your generation has no idea what our ancestors went through, you—’
‘Don’t you dare say that to me. Not now, not ever.’ Juvens spoke with thunderous rage, his eyes hard as granite. He lowered his head, thrusting his horns towards them. Regardless of species, I know what a threatening gesture of dominance looks like. ‘I have every right. I understand the sacrifice our people made. I’ve stood on the ruins of planets ravished by the Shenoi. I’ve seen the civilisations and species they turned to ash, knowing that could have been us. Could still be us. I’ve spent my entire life training for a war to make sure that never happens. Now that it might happen, now we’re facing them again, do you really think I’m going to allow snivelling politicians to get in my way?’ His mismatched eyes ricocheted between the three Ambassadors, daring them to argue, daring them to give him an excuse to tear them apart. But they took the hint and shut right up.
I swallowed a face-splitting smirk. Until I ran through what Juvens had said.
‘What do you mean, an upcoming war?’ I asked.
Szev and Chwekli’s eyes were narrowed into dark slits, but they were too proud to speak up again in defiance. Juvens’ chest swelled and deflated as he snorted out a gust of air. ‘We suspect the Shenoi are still out there,’ he said. ‘We believe they are planning a return.’
28
Ruins of the Future
I wanted to laugh. I almost did. I actually felt my insides shaking. Instead I managed, ‘What?’
‘Our long-range scanners have detected navigational trajectories and bio-signals matching the Shenoi’s, approaching Compass.’
‘You said you destroyed them,’ I said.
‘Every species has attempted to destroy viruses and hostile organisms. Winning one skirmish doesn’t mean you’ve won the war,’ Juvens said crisply. ‘The Shenoi are largely energy based, operating on a hivemind. They could easily have stored parts of themselves within stormtech, deep inside a planet somewhere. They’re not flesh and bone like us. They have to construct bodies out of living tissue infected with stormtech. If they had enough, they could rebuild themselves.’
‘And just when I thought we didn’t have enough problems.’ As I spoke, I noticed the stormtech throbbing in my arm. As if the evil little parasite knew I was talking about it.
I understood why they had come to me about this. If this information went public, the damage would be unimaginable. Skinnies being killed in the streets. The conflicts between stormdealers exploding over into outright warfare.
‘There have been humans,’ said Szev, ‘interacting with stormtech for more than recreational use.’
‘The House of Suns,’ I said. The image was coming together, focusing slowly. ‘You’re after the House of Suns.’
Another shared glance between the aliens. ‘What do y
ou know of them?’
I gathered up my scattershot thoughts. ‘They’re psychopaths, obsessed with the Shenoi. They’ve been spending a fortune on researching stormtech. I think they’ve been working themselves into the stormtech drug industry, spreading it through Compass. It’s not about beliefs or values or even money. It’s a pseudoscience cult. I don’t know what they’re planning, but they’ve been undermining Harmony and stirring public outrage to get it.’
I suddenly saw it from the Kaiji’s perspective. Through the millennia, they’d watched stormtech slowly but surely gnaw its way through over a dozen other species. They were seeing the same happen to us humans, now with the looming threat of the Shenoi, speeding across the galaxy to make a return, likely hell-bent on revenge.
‘There’s no way to put it delicately. You’ll never be free of stormtech entirely,’ Juvens told me, armour creaking as he leaned forward. ‘No species that’s made contact with it ever will. But you can contain the explosion, stop it spreading further, treat those afflicted. And you do that by putting the House of Suns down. If you don’t, humanity’s going to tear itself apart from the inside.’
‘We cannot finalise peace negotiations, only to pair ourselves with a society on the verge of collapse,’ Szev added. ‘It would be like boarding an infected ship. You understand first-hand the extent of the stormtech’s damage, yes?’
‘We can help you if you do this,’ Juvens said. ‘I wish we could anyway, but there are … complications. Bureaucratic complications.’ The alien’s mismatched eyes flickered back to the Ambassadors before glancing back to me. Like me, he was a soldier. A hands-on guy that saw a problem to fix and wanted to get it done. ‘We have an armada ready, prepared to join forces with yours. Get rid of these Suns bastards, and we can move forward.’
‘The Shenoi threaten both our species,’ Chwekli said. ‘A mutual threat. Should they consume you, the threat to us will multiply.’
I raked in a hard breath, as if I could somehow shrug off my new knowledge of stormtech, as if hearing that the Shenoi were still alive and kicking in the far corners of the galaxy and gunning for the human race was no big deal. In the span of a brief few hours, I’d gone from drinking the night away to playing politics with alien galactic affairs. I had a feeling I’d just locked Harmony into a human-Kaiji alliance that Kindosh would kill me for making, if Kowalski didn’t get there first.