Stormblood

by Jeremy Szal

  A sound from behind. I swung around, aiming down my handcannon sights, finger tight on the trigger. It was Grim. He was lying on the floor and his face was speckled with blood. I blinked. His expression was somewhere between confusion and fear – the same wary look he’d worn in the arena. I reached down to help him up, but he’d climbed to his feet himself. He’d been hiding behind the door ever since the autocannon went ballistic. ‘How’d they get in?’ he croaked.

  I picked up a membrane-thin pad, filaments squirming in the translucent gel like trapped nerves. ‘Overrode the security system.’

  ‘How’d they find us?’ Grim was slowly stepping away from the bodies and their spreading blood. The room was a shattered mess behind us, rapidly filling with wastewater from the burst kitchen pipework.

  ‘Well,’ I said, pointing to the bodies, ‘you can ask, but I don’t think we’ll get much of an answer.’

  I’d expected a weary chuckle. But I got no response. Grim was instead muttering what sounded like oh dear oh god oh no under his breath. I suppose I’d be panicking too if the stormtech hadn’t rewired me to cope with shellshock.

  ‘We have to clear out,’ I told Grim. ‘Find somewhere else to stay.’

  ‘I think I know a safehouse,’ Grim said. ‘It’s not comfortable, though.’

  ‘We’ll make do.’ I bent down to rifle through the belongings of the would-be killers. They carried a palmerlog each. I flicked one on and opened a recent transmission and the House of Suns symbol projected in the air, brightening the room. If this had been from the Jackal, he’d have come along to pull the trigger himself. Jae, or someone high-ranking within the Suns, must have decided to put the two of us down.

  We were getting quite popular.

  I sent a transmission to Kowalski, warning her in case she’d be getting any unpleasant visitors tonight, before pocketing the devices. The rabbit avatar was sitting atop the mangled, bullet-ridden man it had killed, whiskers twitching in triumph. Between then and the conversation I’d had with Grim, it had found the time to spatter its fur with fake-looking blood.

  ‘If anyone except Kowalski comes in, feel free to take care of them,’ I told it.

  ‘That would please me very much,’ said the rabbit. Its ears twitched. ‘May I ask when you will return?’

  I was about to respond when I realised we’d never be coming back. We were hunted men, now. It wouldn’t be over until the Suns were defeated, or the two of us ended up like the corpses piled at my feet.

  29

  Hideout

  We took only the bare necessities with us. We slithered out the window, navigating through the rain-drenched back alleys and taking three separate autocabs before arriving at Starkland’s Travel Depot. Couldn’t risk being tailed by anyone the Suns had stationed outside. We bought two tickets to a lowlevel called Saharatown and sat in a private cubicle as our chainrail plummeted down through the asteroid. I was back in armour, while Grim had printed himself a closefitting spacesuit with a helmet that obscured his face.

  Getting to Grim’s secure location involved walking through a Middle-Eastern style bazaar, where the stalls were crammed together like seeds in a pomegranate and the Rubixs had been programmed to appear as djinn: swirling, muscled, mythical creatures that hefted curved swords that crackled with lightning and threatened passers-by not to steal anything. We took a set of narrow alleyways packed with foodbooths selling baklava and kebabs, the rich smell of meat following us as we looped around to the outermost edge of the level and into a warren of storage units.

  It was like a giant filing cabinet, stretching hundreds of metres across and down, cocooned in creaking walkways and disappearing into the mesh of the asteroid superstructure. Half of them winked red, indicating they were in use. Others were empty or being used as temporary dens. Faces wrapped in cowls and protective optics poked out as we clanked along the walkways. Toxins leaked out of swollen pipes strung along the streets like mechanical intestines. Grim approached a Torven sitting in one of the vacated units, wearing heavy hooded clothing and watching something in her shib. I’d since learned to discern between alien genders, and the slimmer shoulders and sharper face told me this one was female. The display vanished as she noticed Grim.

  ‘Oh, it’s you again.’ I hadn’t heard many Torven speak, but this one sounded like her daily diet was nothing but whisky and bluesmokes. ‘What is it this time?’ She leaned towards me and took a long sniff. ‘Ah. With a blue friend, too.’

  I raised an eyebrow behind my visor. ‘How can you tell?’ I asked.

  ‘You smell bad, even for a human.’ She sniffed again, wrinkled her small nostrils. ‘Overripe. Soiled. You smell worse than a Rhivik’s underskin.’

  Grim elbowed his way into the conversation. ‘Nice to see you too, Mugalesh. You been enjoying those films I gave you?’

  Mugalesh’s curved mouth twitched into what I thought was a smile. I noticed she wore a nasty-looking handgun holstered at her hip. ‘They’re all right for human entertainment. What do you want?’

  ‘Me and my blue friend need to stay hidden for a while,’ said Grim.

  Mugalesh’s sulphur-coloured eyes narrowed to slits. ‘Is it going to bring me grief?’

  Grim offered a nervous laugh. ‘Me bring trouble? No, no, no. Nothing like that. No trouble at all.’

  The alien snorted. ‘Like the incident with the octodrones was no trouble?’

  ‘That wasn’t my fault!’ Grim protested.

  ‘And the shipment of rat poisons?’

  Grim’s face went red as he winced. ‘That … was a misunderstanding.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure. And the chainship job? They’re still after us for that.’

  Grim winced again, harder this time. ‘Yeah … that wasn’t my finest hour.’

  Mugalesh spat on the ground. ‘You, Grim, are an impenetrable wall of problems. A tower of trouble. A skyscraper of setbacks. I’m not stupid enough to have it come crashing down on my head.’

  Grim dropped a Commoner currency card into the alien’s calloused palm. ‘Does this help things?’

  Mugalesh glared up at Grim, weighing up the decision before pocketing the card and rocking to her feet with a roll of her eyes. ‘This way, this way.’ She led us through the winding maze of stairwells and balconies squeezing between the towers. Colourful clothes and streamers snapped in the dry breeze. Each storage unit was filled with little knots of people, staring intently at flexiscreens or tabletop vidgames. In one of them, aliens wearing layers of hooded clothing so thick I couldn’t tell what species they were, had crammed a dozen printers into a shelled-out office space, forming a lucrative printing farm, glancing up at us with thick, wrap-around optics as we passed. They were packaging freshly printed goods, I guessed for sale in the Upper Markets. Mustang turned her glare on them, and suddenly they all doubled their speed.

  We arrived in a storage compartment in the heart of the level. Mustang slapped the access card into Grim’s hand. ‘Steal so much as a nanofibre cable and I’ll rip your kidneys out and use them as footrests,’ she told Grim. ‘Understood?’

  ‘You’re a darling,’ he said as she scowled, tugging her hood over her head and disappearing into the streets.

  ‘How do you know her?’

  ‘Smuggled some stuff for her a few times. She’s all bark and no bite. Unless she doesn’t like you.’

  ‘How do you know if she doesn’t like you?

  ‘You get bitten.’

  Grim had described the place as a room, but it was closer to a storage unit, the sort you found at the bottom of cargo-haulers. It was packed to the ceiling with boxes and magnetically locked crates. A hundred lights twinkled at us from databanks and computers. At least there was a decent printer in the corner. Cramped, but good enough.

  I sent a secure transmission to Kowalski with our co-ordinates. By the time I slipped out of my suit and unpack
ed my gear, she had arrived. ‘Did you find anything?’ I asked her. She dodged the ropes of filaments, flailing like octopus tentacles seeking out a socket, to stand next to me.

  ‘One step ahead of you. We traced their suits and weapons. Your assassins aren’t from the Suns. They’re not even on Compass. They’re Blade Hunters, those offworld mercenaries who serve whoever’s paying them the most. In this case, the House of Suns.’

  ‘So they slipped through customs?’

  ‘Must have. Contract killers, most likely.’

  ‘I’m guessing the House of Suns isn’t going to come calling for them?’

  ‘Wouldn’t it make life easier if they did?’ Kowalski settled into a cream leather chair that had certainly been stolen from some penthouse apartment from the highest Compass levels. ‘The House of Suns don’t know where either of you two are, and we should keep it that way. If they’re sending deepspace mercenaries out in the dead of night to silence you instead of doing the deed themselves, they’re trying to play it safe. More importantly, they’re scared. They saw what you could do in that arena, Vak. They thought they had you on a leash.’

  ‘And I chewed through it.’ I grinned.

  ‘Unfortunately, it also means they’ve limited any way of tracing them back. The only leads we have are the stormtech supply-lines. We’re chiselling away at those, but it’ll definitely be a route directly to the Suns. Grim, maybe there’s some back-tracing you can do from here, but otherwise you two should lay low. You’re in the wind. Make the House of Suns sweat, maybe tip their hand in trying to find you.’

  ‘You think the Suns know about the meeting with the Kaiji?’ I asked.

  ‘I doubt it. The aliens would never expose themselves like that.’

  ‘Kind of hard to miss the Kaiji, floating out there with their dreadnought,’ I said.

  ‘That’s nothing of consequence. There’s probably spacecraft from five different species docked in spaceports around the asteroid this very moment, with five more requesting clearance. A third of all intragalactic trade on Compass is done with non-Commoner species. Even within Harmony, our talks with the Kaiji are restricted to the Intelligence Officers and the Command Board.’

  ‘Doesn’t mean they don’t suspect what we’re doing. If they’re as well-researched as we’re led to believe they are, they could know about the Kaiji’s involvement in the war against the stormtech. And if they know, they’ll want to kill this alliance before it bears fruit.’

  Katherine nodded and settled deeper into her seat. ‘I’ve been thinking about what the Kaiji said to you. Even if the Shenoi aren’t coming back, even if we put the House of Suns down, the stormtech will always be here. How do you weed something like that out of society?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I admitted, ‘but we have to try. We had days on the battlefields where we thought we would surely lose. But we strapped on our armour, got into our fireteams and fought anyway. Sokolav made sure we never had any doubts what would happen if we lost.’

  ‘And you think Sokolav’s involved like Artyom is,’ Katherine said.

  ‘I don’t know why. But if he’s doing something, he’s committed to it.’

  ‘I’ve never met the man. But if a former Commander is in their labs, he knows what they are and what they’re getting up to. He knows he’s associating with people directly opposed to Harmony.’ Katherine rubbed her eyes with her knuckles. ‘Your old instructor went missing so he could join them. It’s the only way this fits.’

  I’ve learned to know when I’m hearing the truth: because it always hurts. This was no accident: Sokolav had to have known exactly what the House of Suns were up to, which meant that Artyom did, too.

  I got Grim to go off on a food errand while Kowalski and I talked.

  ‘I’m really glad you told me everything about the Kaiji,’ she said.

  I looked up. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you didn’t have to. You could have sold the information to us, bargained for a better deal for your brother. But you offered it freely to me first. Maybe you wouldn’t have, at one point. I know you meant what you said being a team. I need to see more of that. Can you manage that for me?’

  The Harmony way wasn’t how I did things, or how I wanted to do things. But I had to trust someone, and I trusted Kowalski’s judgement. Same as before, I saw she sincerely wanted me to trust her, for us to build that relationship together. And I wanted to help her do it. ‘I can do that,’ I said.

  Kowalski was off the clock today, and without an immediate link to a supplier there wasn’t much we could do. We started talking again. Our conversation drifted through half a dozen subjects before we came around to the city of my birth. Like most people who knew about New Vladi, she’d never visited but was fascinated by it. I told her about its high mountain ranges, the sloping forests with biodiversity and constellations of ecotones unseen on any other planet. The wild, beautiful tundra stretching under the sky, where the only sound was the howling wind. The ragged coastline composed of beaches of black sand where millennia of ocean spray had shaped rocks into sculptures of lumbering monsters and towering giants.

  ‘Now it’s your turn,’ I told her.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Tell me something about you.’ I folded my legs under me. ‘You’ve never told me what you folks get up to. You Harmony folk try to be squeaky clean. Surely you’ve got skeletons in the closet.’

  Katherine looked as if to deny it at first, but changed her mind. ‘Gambling,’ she admitted, a sly smile spreading across her face. ‘And not just your average CreditParlors. This stuff was high-stakes, played with games that came from the corners of the Common. Half of them aren’t even legal anymore.’

  You wouldn’t find anyone with stormtech gambling – it’s hard to maintain a poker face when your body literally glows when you’ve picked up a winning hand. ‘And how did that happen?’

  ‘There’s a small ski resort on the top floors of Compass,’ she said. ‘All my friends were going. This was when it was just opening up and the waiting list was hundreds long. You could get the express entry, but only for the right price. Then there were all the snowboards, the snowskins with thermal stitching, all the equipment. A small fortune.

  ‘Not many ways to get hundreds of Commoners when you’re still a teenager studying at the Academy. So I taught myself gambling. The games to start out with, the safest bets, the fastest earnings, and the most popular ones. The loopholes, the exploits, everything. There’s no such thing as a fair game, Vak. There’s always a back door, always a crack you can slip through. And while everyone else was out drinking and having boyfriends, I was sitting on the itchy carpet on the floor of my cramped little bedroom, finding a way in.’

  ‘And did you?’

  Katherine’s eyes shone with mischief and memory. ‘You should have seen their faces when they called the scoreboard with me in top place. A week later and I was tearing down the slopes with the edgiest snowboard the store had. There’s nothing like feeling the snow shredding beneath your feet as you cut down a mountain, feeling the wind in your hair. I fell over a hundred times, had bruises all over my legs for ages. But it was the best week of my life.

  ‘But I never went back there. Whenever I see a gambling house, I think about it. And every year, I make plans to get the old board out and give the snow another shot, but it never works out.’ She looked up, offered me a little smile. ‘I’ve never told anyone that story before.’

  ‘I’m glad you told me,’ I said, returning the smile. ‘I’m glad I got to know you better.’

  Katherine looked at me for a moment before reaching out and placing her hand on my arm. My knee-jerk instinct was to move away, not let anyone touch me. But I fought it back despite the stormtech, liking the feel of her, liking that Katherine with her piercing grey eyes and wicked little smile and sandy hair tumbling down her shoulder, was sitting so close to me. ‘You
know, when this is all over, maybe I’ll grab a snowboard and get back on the slopes again for a whole week, just like before. Maybe I’ll even take you with me.’

  ‘That’d be nice,’ I said, and meant it. And for a minute, I almost forgot about the stormtech. ‘That’d be really nice.’

  30

  Ghosts and Glass

  The thrusters beneath my armoured feet erupt as I launch upwards, punching through the high mountain rainforests. I cover forty, fifty, sixty metres like a human rocket before gravity yanks me back down. Dust billows up as I land on a jutting ledge of rock, my armour’s absorbers soaking up the impact, thrusting me back up over the swaying treetops and into the sky. There’s the rhythmic metallic echo of my fireteam doing the same behind me. We go skimming like stones across the top of the forest.

  It’s in all the timing. Too fast, you’ll smash your skull and splatter your brains over the rocks. Too slow, the railguns and pulse-rifles Harvesters are fond of scattering around the planet will smack us out of the sky. Good incentive to learn and learn fast.

  I listen to my body. Temperature. Pulse. Heartbeat. The ever-present stormtech circulating through me, slithering from my armpits to the soles of my feet. I’m starting to learn it’s always speaking to me. It’s just a matter of tuning in to the right wavelength. I burn and streak through the muggy air. Accelerating to optimal speed, pumping my body up to lend me that extra edge that lets me glance sideways off the slope and go shooting through a narrow cleft in the treetops, narrowly avoiding a jutting chunk of cliff face. Leaves and branches are left smouldering under my boots as I burst back out into the open sky. It’s like I’m on autopilot. Trees, foliage, rivers, terrain whipping past my visor. The ground rushing up and down so fast it’s like it’s heaving beneath me. I grin wildly. I could do this for ever.

  Our HUD waypoint blinks on. I touch down, my fireteam landing around me in a series of successive shudders on the stone shelf. There’re millions of vibrating metal bubbles itching beneath my skin, each one releasing a tiny burst of adrenaline. Even shelled in armour, with their faces hidden behind visors, I know my teammates are running on the same wavelength.