by Jeremy Szal
I wished Katherine would call, even just for the chance for us to talk. But the lines remained silent. It made me realise how she’d felt when I’d gone out on my solo hunting expedition, leaving her to rely on me occasionally forwarding a few scraps of intel. Now, perhaps for the first time, I understood how much of a limb she’d gone out on to trust me. And how she’d swung around to give me a second chance, even after I’d betrayed her.
I wouldn’t repeat that mistake.
Kowalski had made good on asking Grim to trace the supplier-chains. All acquired intel, manifestos, datastacks and substrates were made accessible to him. I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone so excited to work. He’d wasted no time setting up his technest, adding even more clutter to the room. Grim was seated in the centre of a wrap-around terminal, membrane-thin display panes swirling around him like interstellar bodies in orbit. Data feeds streamed in rivers of neon blue, complex graphics and icons churning over the display facets. Grim’s eyes were that creepy milk-white, arm hairs stiffening, body jerking as he trawled through search parameters, codewords, logs across a dozen spaceports. I swear I could hear the firehose pressure of data flooding through the stream of ribbed cables.
‘Why is this taking so long?’ I asked on the third or fourth day. I was flat on my back, lying in my armour. The inner tendrils and gritty abrasives were set to massage-mode, the vibrations shuddering up and down my body.
‘Lot of variables, Vak,’ Grim called out. ‘You know how difficult it is to do a Deep Dive across space? With a tightbeam commsline?’
‘No, Grim. I don’t.’
‘And allowing for infra-species spelling, mistranslations, broken waybills, faulty substrates? Or maybe I could sit around, and you can be the one translating alien space-jargon and their systems of record-keeping.’
I swallowed a retort, blackened my visor and interior lights and submerged into my thoughts. You don’t get much time alone as a Reaper. Any moments during travel, holing up at wayward outposts, or waiting to be relieved were the best you got. I used the moment to think. House of Suns had to have a base; a centralised core of operations. The Warren and Tipei Corporation had just been temporary outposts. If they were stationed elsewhere and shipping to the asteroid, that presented another problem: there was no way they could be sneaking stormtech through the spaceports. Compass had insane security, handled by firms I’d heard of even when I was on New Vladi. Armed with thermal detectors, pheromone-sniffers, and scanners that went down into skin-flakes and dust motes. Unless they had someone high on the ladder who was being bribed to turn a blind eye, which I found very unlikely, they had to be manufacturing their product on the asteroid.
For an insane moment, I wondered if Artyom would help me out, if I asked. In the next moment I wondered if he was still alive. Jae had known we were brothers, and it hadn’t been Artyom who’d informed her of that inconvenience. But in our brief conversation, she’d struck me as the pragmatic type. A businesswoman. If Artyom was as much of an asset as he appeared to be, they wouldn’t have axed him.
But I also felt sure if they had, that I’d have known. Somehow, I’d feel it. He’d almost died when we were kids. I’d had to go into the mountains for three nights, as everyone did when they came of age, to live in the wilderness of New Vladi’s mountain ranges. Didn’t matter if there was a blizzard, or wild animals stalking about. When you came of age, you went. It was to remind us of Siberia, our ancestral land.
Frostbite had nearly gnawed my fingers off, but I’d done it. I was climbing back down the tree-studded slopes when I saw someone stumbling towards the frozen lake near our home. At first I thought it was a drunk, struggling home after a hard night. Something told me to take another look.
That’s when I saw Artyom holding the knife.
By the time I’d caught up with him, he’d cut his wrist open and was trying to start on the other. I wrestled the dripping blade away, one hand clamped over the wound as the other rummaged for the bandages in my emergency pack. His blood dripped warm between my fingers as I fought to get him patched up. I’d only been away for three days, but the fresh bruises on his tear-stained face told me the whole story. He’d been trying to end the nightmare first, to at least have that tiny measure of control over his life. The cut wasn’t deep enough to do significant damage, but bad enough.
‘You can’t ever do this, Artyom,’ I’d told him gently. ‘What about me?’ I knelt in front of him. My hands on his shoulders. ‘What about Kasia? What would she say if you went away for ever?’
‘I’m s-s-sorry,’ he’d said through chattering teeth. ‘Please don’t love me less for this.’
‘Never,’ I told him fiercely. ‘Never.’ I held him close as the wind howled over the mountains, the first flakes of snowfall swirling down from the skies. I did what little I could to make it the best week of Artyom’s life. But his favourite was always listening to music in the afternoons, before our father came back and we had the house to ourselves. We’d sit with our backs to the peeling walls. The gunmetal sky bruised with clouds, the windows streaking with little drops of rain while the sound of instruments filled the room. He’d close his eyes and tuck his knees to his chest. Nodding along with the rhythm, lost in the little moment of peace I’d given him. I sat beside him, knowing it couldn’t last. I remember my heart warming and cracking at the same time. Just wishing there was more I could do for him, but knowing the only thing I could afford was staying beside him, being the best brother I could be.
And I promised myself I’d always be around to do exactly that.
Grim came up with a result on the fifth day and Kowalski wasted no time coming over to discuss it. ‘Remember that compound in the Warren where the Suns were hiding out?’ she asked me.
‘Not likely to forget it,’ I said evenly.
Kowalski winced. ‘Yeah. Sorry. Anyway. The compound belonged to Crimson Star Industries. They customised graphic designs on chainships and spacecraft, made them look tattooed. They went bankrupt in the Reaper War and stormtech suppliers have been using them as a front ever since, shuttling shipments of stormtech between docks. Grim traced the manifesto logs to a Remote War Arsenal Unit they’d occupied.’
I nodded. RWAUs had sprung up all over the Common post-Reaper War. Since warpdrives, people tend to forget how terribly vast and empty space is. Even if your spacecraft’s packing high-burn engines and the usual fancy tech, getting anywhere of note takes a hell of a long time. In the event of another war, or an invasion of a less than friendly alien species, Harmony had safety deposits scattered across the Common in asteroids and stations, stockpiled with warships, weaponry, battlecruisers, suits, munitions, and factories, for back-up use until the bigger guns arrived.
A diagrammatic projection of this galactic region grew around us. Customized to Grim’s aesthetic tastes, the perpetually-moving image was an exaggerated explosion of colour, with the stars exaggerated spheres of light and various local stations and installations little glowing cubes. An overlay showed the course schedules of all recent spacecraft skimming around this part of the galaxy. Their course trajectories were shown in long, arcing circles and ellipses and zigzags, braided like thick cables and colour-coded by class, size and which species or syndicate owned them. One strand highlighted in neon-blue as the ship swerved around to one of these RWAUs before shooting back off to Compass, symbolized as an ever-rotating ball of soot-black spikes.
‘It should have ended there. Only, they screwed up, and didn’t scrub the substrates deep enough. We traced it back to one of the stormdealers on Compass, got a few of our men undercover to buy some stock. Every time, we got an identical match with the stormtech produced by Tipei Corporation.’ Kowalski broke into a wide smile. ‘We got him.’
‘Where?’
‘Cloudstern, of all places. One of the wealthiest levels in the whole of Compass.’
Grim shook his head. ‘Folks up there are bleeding Com
moners. Bleeding, I tell you. And they still try to get a discount on packaged goods. Greedy bastards.’
I stopped Grim before he could confess to any other crimes in front of a Harmony operative. ‘They’re wealthy, then?’
‘They can afford top product.’ A datasphere burst apart on-screen, the shrapnel resolving into statistics that detailed the stormtech’s potency, reaction time, longevity. ‘This stuff is so pure it’s almost crystallised. The comedown would be horrendous. We’ve identified a cabal of high profile stormdealers called the Animal Kingdom. They each get their own slice of Compass to operate in. We’re targeting one of their most successful stormdealers: the Ratking.’
‘Why haven’t you arrested him already?’ I asked.
‘Kindosh wants it done quietly. If we send the Sub Zeros storming in, he’ll run. Maybe put a bullet in his own head rather than be interrogated.’
‘He’s not wired up with a bioaug?’
‘If he is, he won’t have anyone else holding the trigger. The guys high up tend to decide their own fates.’
‘What about the people that work for him? Mules, informers, blademen, dockhands he bribes?’
‘They’ll never breathe a word. These guys own neighbourhoods. The ones who aren’t loyalists are light years more afraid of them than us. No, we go for the top dog. Which is why we need to play it safe.’ Kowalski levelled a serious gaze at me. ‘These are some of the most brutal stormdealers on the asteroid. They’ve got zero tolerance for selling or any infringement on their territory. They’ve marched into rival stormdealer hideouts and massacred anyone inside, strung up their leaders and hung their dead bodies from their ships. No one’s going to talk. Getting this guy could be the start of bringing it all down. Can I trust you to bring this home?’
I gave no indication of the throb of stormtech deep in my belly. ‘You can.’
‘I mean it, Vak. This guy is our last lead. If we lose him, we may be finished.’
Cloudstern was one of those places that everyone knows about, but few have visited. Prestigious, expensive and premium, always seen and ever-present in adboards as the go-to destination for parties, shopping and exclusive clubs for the wealthy, elite and famous. If you didn’t already have the means, it was unlikely you’d ever live there. Located in the upper echelons of the asteroid, it was economically quartered in a sector spanning two dozen floors. It wasn’t reachable via any accessways or cross-transit routes, only by a specialised chainrail. The slim, bullet-shaped tube was outfitted to travel the entire length of the superstructure in under forty minutes, with relatively easy access between its vast floors.
But convenience never comes cheap. Security at the Travel Depot was heightened after the recent bombing and every third traveller was being submitted to a full dermal scan. Kowalski had given me credentials that permitted me to bypass the security, but not the queue. It was nearly an hour before I boarded the white-walled and spacious compartment, squeezing into a bucket seat next to a Rhivik. I was without armour, only dressed in my usual underskin. The alien’s thick scales jutted and jabbed into my right shoulder. I turned to say something when his nostrils flared, as if displeased to be sitting next to someone with stormtech. I wasn’t too keen on his earthy, sour smell either, so we’d both have to suck it up. I strapped into my safety harness, waiting for departure.
‘Don’t take the hardskins personally,’ a grey-skinned, black-suited Torven sitting to my left muttered, low enough for only me to hear. ‘They’re a slow bunch.’
I turned towards him. ‘Hardskin?’
The Torven slyly nodded towards the oblivious Rhivik, indicating his scales. ‘It’s what we call them. Hard in the skin, hard in the head.’
I was about to respond when the chainrail lighting dimmed and engines stirred to life beneath my feet. The walls and flooring turned opaque, pulsing with a honeycomb pattern as our transport got clearance and we shot along the maglev like a bullet in a chamber. I was pushed back into my seat by the force of acceleration, clamping my hands around my shoulder straps as we tunnelled through the veins of the asteroid superstructure.
We were hardly a minute into the journey before a newsfeed flickered on above me. A stormtech-related incident, of course. A woman who thought her roommate had taken her stash had stolen into his room when he was asleep. She’d stabbed him seventeen times with a serrated blade before she’d been wrestled off him, still screaming and howling.
She was only twenty. Now a murderer. Blue strands flared on her neck as she stared at the camera through ropes of matted, blood-streaked hair in paralysed disbelief. Like some mechanism in her brain had malfunctioned and refused to acknowledge what she’d done. In a way, she was correct. Her mind insisted it wasn’t her, that she didn’t have the capacity for coldblooded murder. But her stormtech-infused body told a different story. She didn’t know who she was anymore, what else she would do. The two contradictions could tear her apart.
The newslog flickered off as the chainrail slowed to a more leisurely pace to showcase the diversity of floors for newcomers and tourists. The exterior had been an indescribable blur, but now I got a glance at the levels as we looped in a slow ascent. We coasted through a tropical floor made entirely of rivers, waterways and small oceans, and home to a wide-spectrum of alien aquatic species. I could smell the briny stink of the ocean. Dark waves curled and swelled through a mass of dark, jutting rocks, spray leaping five metres high before crashing to a shingled shore. A creature with pale grey skin and a long bulbous snout surfaced, its gills glowing an eerie pale pink. It didn’t seem to have eyes, but I got the sense it was watching. Several more of its kin joined, swimming along the chainrail with cautious curiosity before diving back into the depths.
The next floor resembled a forest planet. Slabs of land masses gave way to a scattering of archipelagos, peninsulas, islands and promontories, the water a muddy green. The land was thick with dark green rainforests and towering spears of mountains wreathed in hoary mist. The trees seemed to be hundreds of metres tall, sutured with walkways, swaying bridges and huts. The onboard Rubix played a pre-recorded message, informing us that this was a recreation of the Torven homeworld, Kereov. The scattered nature of the planet’s land mass had required the species to innovate: building boats, pulleys, bridges, walkways, modes of transport, discovering easier modes of accessing resources, trading with neighbouring species. It had significantly increased their survival rate, making the Torven value innovation and business above all else, forming the backbone of their culture. This leading to the eventual flourishing of cities and industry across the planet. In the span of a few short centuries, they had achieved space flight, established colonies in neighbouring systems and eventually made contact with humans. Even today, the onboard Rubix finished as we coasted away from the floor, Torven ships and architecture drew heavily from the nature of their homeworld. The Rhivik sitting next to me made a deep scoffing sound that didn’t go unnoticed by the Torven sitting on the other side. I’d heard the two species weren’t on friendly terms, but with them cooking insults up for each other, I was starting to see exactly what that entailed.
The chainrail coasted to a polished industrial conurbation of the asteroid. Vast echoing spaces yawned out for dozens of klicks in all directions, used as construction berths for spacecraft. Glinting gantries, beams, cranes and powerlines crisscrossed the manufactory, powerful machinery scattered across the shipyard and crawling with suited mechanics of multiple species. Soot-black tubes several dozen metres wide curled through the length of the hangar like a nervous system, the overhead vanilla-grey light glinting gently off its surface.
A silvery skeletal frame of a Diver-Class Corvette hung suspended by a complication of taut silvery filaments. Interlocking clockwork mechanisms ran up and down the length of the asteroid, imbedded in the rock, indicating kilometres of dense, squirming machinery, meshed into the dermis of the asteroid like intestines. The machinery extended out
, growing what looked like massive claws, reassembling to fit some sort of size dimensions. Kilometres away, from a different area of the asteroid, components of the corvette were sent tunnelling down the tubes and sprouting out the other end. Mechanics used the claws to scoop up the ship parts, the apparatus whirling down to lock them to the skeletal hull. Other mechanics in grav-harnesses scrambled over the half-assembled ship in a flurry of drilling, securing, wiring, calibrating. A robotic appendage was inscribing the name Grey Area on the starboard hull. The entire thing was one giant complex mechanism, part organic, part mechanical, with the impression of more gigantic open hangars and manufactories nestled out of sight.
The onboard Rubix chimed in again to tell us that this was an exclusive Shipyard, producing up to seventy thousand fully equipped ships of every class, model and purpose, bespoke for orders across the galaxy. I glanced at a side readout displaying the prices in disbelief. Grim was right, this part of the asteroid really was reserved for rich bastards.
We shot out of the shipyard manufactory and continued spiralling upwards, little worlds of wonder slamming past. The higher we went, the more pristine, the more ridiculously extravagant, and less populated the floors became. Until we finally docked at Cloudstern’s Travel Depot. I unstrapped from my seat and navigated past the spaceport terminal, standing on the outside boulevard.
It was like Compass knew it had one chance to make an impression on newcomers and pulled out all the stops to make it happen. Giant white latticework loomed over me, stretching for kilometres along the roof of the asteroid like an umbrella made entirely of coral. Slices of brilliant blue artificial sky appeared between the gaps. Experimental-looking chainships glided gently in lazy arcs through the sky. The streets had no roads. No traffic. Just public squares and boulevards, every surface polished and glistening with lights. Hotels, attractions and great glass structures rose up in complex designs: honeycombs and swirling patterns and wood cocoons, painted all manner of greys, whites, deep blues, rich reds. Colourful artworks had been strung up between the buildings. Small hissing rivers filled with gleaming fish rushed along the boulevard. Bars, cinemas, tourist attractions, state-of-the-art restaurants, exclusive clubs designed for space-lagged travellers, tourists, and the wealthy. Everything felt slick, made for quick access and slotted perfectly together, like plating on armour. It was the sort of place that banished the derelict slums and greasy spaceports into distant, dreamlike memories. The buildings were so deliberately extravagant and lavish you couldn’t help but marvel.