Stormblood

by Jeremy Szal

  My target owned Venue 291A, deep in the floor. Although we didn’t have an image, the collective description from the three Harmony operatives had been assembled into a computer-generated impression. The name Ramsey Montenegro floated above a thin man with a faintly avian face, dark hair sculpted into a permanent wave that never crashed, sideburns razored into sharp, jagged edges.

  I closed the image down as I eased my way through the crowded boulevard. With the stormtech twitching up a glowing hurricane through my underskin, I felt every third pair of eyes darting my way. As if reminding me I didn’t belong here. I walked past a series of spacious first-class lounges and cheery outdoor restaurants, past people queuing to board an interplanetary cruiser-liner, before entering a shopping centre with a design that echoed back to some art-deco aesthetic, updated for the space-era. The walls were a polished brown wood that shifted like water when I approached. The parquet flooring was covered with a velvety red carpet, perforated with asteroid fragments the size of a child. They were carved into conical and cubical shapes, pyrite and sphalerite gleaming under their rocky flesh, gently glowing readouts detailing their mineral compositions and which star systems they’d been harvested from. Marbled columns veined with gold swept upwards to higher floors, where customers in fancy coffeehouses and classical bars sat on balconies overlooking shoppers zigzagging between boutique outfitters and designer shops, spending someone else’s yearly wage on a single purchase. There were no price tags on anything, of course. I guess if you had to ask, you couldn’t afford it.

  The place looked fancy. But like anything pristine, had a dark history. The floor had been hit by a protest against Harvest refugees a few years back. Researching the event detailed images of the bloodstained floors, the walls pockmarked with bullet-holes, as well as listing the armouries selling the weapons that had fired them. A few years later, this is what we had.

  I ticked off the shop numbers I passed, banks, medclinics offering limb extensions and biomechanical surgery, retailers selling all variety of spacecrafts. Head offices for interstellar companies. One look at how deep the drug-trade industry went on Compass and you were kidding yourself if you thought stormdealers didn’t have links to the highest echelons of legitimate businesses. Companies that held Compass together economically by trading billions of Commoners through their infrastructure every day, using their connections to reroute and distribute stormtech through the asteroid, fronting the proceeds through their many sub-channels.

  How the hell do you dig something like that out?

  Once, I could have sworn there wasn’t a hope in hell of causing so much as a dent in the drug-trafficking business. But seeing Kowalski at work, making headway with all her fury had altered my opinion. She was genuine. She cared. And that’s not something you can fabricate, you’d see through it like a thermal scanner. I found I believed, if anyone could make a difference, if there was anyone determined enough to hold back the spread of stormtech, it was her. She’d only needed to look at her own family to see how much damage it could do. Which meant she knew how much damage it could do to me.

  I glanced down at my own stormtech, inching up my ribs like dozens of little hands, using my bones as ladders. Living with stormtech isn’t hard because of what it does to you. It’s because of what it makes you do to the people you care about. The look on Grim’s face in the Pits, in the apartment when I clutched the scattershot trigger, burned behind my eyelids. Thinking about what situation my body would throw me into next scared me more than I wanted to admit. I’d never liked subscribing to the theory that stormtech nurtures aggression. That those animalistic tendencies are buried inside each of us and the drug allows them to grow. It would mean most humans are natural born sociopathic killers, only held in check by social conventions. But the more I enjoyed the sensation of power flooding through my muscles and brain, I wondered. No matter how many people spoke out against stormtech, no matter how many rehab centres popped up, no matter how many tortured, damaged bodies dropped dead, people still flocked towards it. If the countless civilisations had walked the same self-destructive path, perhaps our own was inevitable.

  That didn’t matter. But I was going to keep fighting this, keep looking for ways to cope with what was inside me. To keep trying to do better.

  Because at the end of the day, that’s really all you can ask of someone.

  I told myself all this, so I knew exactly what I was going to do with our stormdealer.

  32

  The Ratking

  Venue 291A was one of those shops that reeks of money. Small readout touchscreens. Walls and floors polished to a headache-inducing sheen. A few display cabinets, holding indeterminate pieces of tech so small and innocuous you knew they had to be something special and obscenely expensive.

  When it wasn’t dealing alien drugs for a sadistic cult, the shop appeared to be selling neural-laces. A bleeding edge, experimental tech allowing users to share sensory experiences, like smell, sound, and even sight over long distances. Want to smell what’s cooking in a restaurant on the other end of Compass, or watch a crew at work on an incoming chainship? Get it sent straight into your brain, as if you’re really there. The stormtech swelled in my abdomen as I crossed the floor, responding to my nerves. I locked it down. It helped, but not much. I could still feel thick tendrils squirming against my inner ribs.

  ‘Can I help you?’

  I didn’t have to feed Montenegro’s face into the algorithm to know this was the Ratking, I recognised him just fine. He adopted a pleasant, neutral smile. He was impeccably dressed in some kind of dark, high-collared shirt, embroidered with geometrical patterns. A full spectrum-implant in his skull pulsed cyan like the blinking of a distant star. Not a quickpatch job like the ones down in Changhao. This was authentic neuralware.

  ‘I’m after something special today,’ I said, matching his smile.

  A subsurface device beamed a holodisplay between us, blinking with icons and datastreams. Montenegro enhanced a neural-lace that looked like an explosion of black ink, frozen moments after discharging. ‘Latest shipment came in from offworld. Feeds straight into a drone’s matrix terminal, delivering a full-spectrum of sensory feeds. The long-range edition lets you hook into astro-exploration drones performing deep-sea excavations across the Common. There’s enough radiation on these planets to wither your DNA in hours. With these, you can smell the ozone, hear the—’

  ‘Not after any of that,’ I interrupted. Without breaking eye contact, I said, ‘I’m after a G17 Module with Systems-Wide Range and full haptic support.’

  Montenegro didn’t bat an eye, but his pleasant veneer dissolved into cautious suspicion. Stormdealers and buyers aren’t stupid enough to just say what they’re buying and selling. They’ve got codes, key-phrases rotating on a weekly basis, used so customer and buyer recognised each other. Grim had found this week’s phrase on the database.

  ‘Never seen you around here before,’ he told me. ‘Need some verification.’

  ‘Of course.’ My shib chimed as I flicked over the virtual passkey stamped with Animal Kingdom’s passcode that told Montenegro I was a verified purchaser who had history with his stormdealer syndicate. It had taken Grim less than three hours to create a very good duplicate and rack up a solid history of purchases. He’d quite enjoyed turning me into the drug-addled psychopath.

  Montenegro’s eyes glazed as he took his sweet time inspecting the passkey, routinely levelling a stare my way. I feigned irritation and folded my arms. Only I knew he was already reaching out to his fellow stormdealers, authenticating the passkey. I also knew Grim would be waiting on the other end, like a grinning panther in the long grass of the virtual landscape. He’d intercept the transmission, feeding Montenegro falsified intel to confirm my identity and answer any queries Montenegro had. They’d better be good enough, because now I’d entered negotiations, if Montenegro got suspicious, I wouldn’t leave this floor alive.

>   The virtual panes dissolved and swept away like ash in the wind. The Ratking’s eyes flicked up at me, an undercurrent of steel in his expression. ‘We’re good. How much colour did you want?’

  ‘It worked,’ Grim breathed down the other end of my commslink.

  He never used the phrase stormtech. Smart. ‘Three phials,’ I said. I scratched at my chest, a flare of blue spiralling up along my ribcage. Montenegro nodded and stabbed a button under the counter, a partition of the white tiled wall swinging backwards without any visible mechanisms. I locked my nerves down as I followed him into the room. Taking my suit would have attracted too much attention. But without it, the stormtech was amplifying my every twitch of body-language with big neon signs. If I was used to buying from stormdealers, dealing with one more wouldn’t raise any issues. Had to lock it down, hard.

  The Ratking didn’t have a room. He was the room. The walls were laced with a fibre-optic system underneath some sort of pliable material, glistening like rubbery obsidian. It was breathing, moving up and down like a torso. A steady pulse pounding out of the speakers. The room was wired to his heartbeat, his breathing. Spindly dark fibres thick as my fingers jutted from the walls like crystalline hairs. They quivered with excitement and tension as the Ratking approached, before swerving around to me. Don’t know how I knew, but they were inspecting me with suspicion. It was like getting sniffed at by a pack of dangerous, rabid animals. Unsettling didn’t even begin to cover it.

  I heard Grim whistle down the commslink. ‘He’s running a full-body skinroom. They grew the walls from his skin cells, laced every circuit of this place to his DNA, his biometrics. It’s a darkmarket, military-grade defence system. Vak, you’re literally standing inside him.’ He snorted so hard he almost choked. ‘This guy’s got some really messed up issues.’

  I really love when a world of complication just gets dumped on your head without warning. Makes life that much more interesting.

  I swallowed a grimace and made a note not to touch anything that resembled anything remotely organic. Hunks of black machinery were growing in the corners of the room, twitching like the foetus of a biomechanical monster that hadn’t yet hatched. The room was still developing. Flexiscreens with dark gold trimmings extended out of the ceiling on spindly supports. A mainframe, dripping with cables. A geometric glass desk, littered with fibre-optic wire. No idea if they too were infused with his biometrics, but always better to be sure.

  I made to follow the Ratking into the adjoining annex, but he wasn’t having it. ‘You can wait here.’ He gestured at a pale pink armchair, expecting me to sit. I didn’t. ‘I don’t show my stash to customers.’

  I smiled thinly. ‘Might be I want to check the quality of your stock.’ If the Ratking was smart, his stashroom would be in lockdown, wired with a self-destructive sequence that would trigger if anything went wrong. All our data and leads would go up in smoke. Capturing him wasn’t enough; we needed his wares as well. Once he retrieved the drugs I’d asked for, I’d never see it open again.

  The Ratking didn’t bat an eye. ‘That wasn’t on the manifest.’

  ‘It is now,’ I said.

  We stared at each other before he nodded begrudgingly. He scanned his biometrics to unlock the stashroom door before ushering me in. The room was cluttered with workstations, piled high with burners, tubes, cartons and chemicals. The Ratking made his own supply, it seemed. ‘We’re overstocked on synthsilver,’ the Ratking was saying. ‘I’ll give you a discount if you buy in bulk. Just don’t shoot up here. Some guy tried that, nearly OD’d in my shop.’

  But I wasn’t listening. I could already smell the sickly-sweet stench of stormtech, the canisters concealed under the floor somewhere. The metallic, almost blood-like smell of synthsilver, the lemony-tang of grimwire, the musky, herbal stink of bluesmoke. Had to be millions worth of Commoners stored up in here.

  I untangled myself from the arousing senses and noticed the room. The wall-fibres were erect and quivering, like their hackles were raised. The pulse pounding of the speakers was slowly escalating to a volume I felt vibrating in my bones. He’d become suspicious.

  And that’s when I heard the clickclickclick of internal machinery churning.

  I snatched up the workstation and held it to my chest as a mass of supercharged fibres came spitting out like hot spears. They thudded through the workstation, the hot, squirming tips inches from my face. Teeth gritted, I hurled the workstation towards the Ratking, the edge smashing into his kneecap, shattering the bone with a sharp crack. He screamed and tumbled to the floor, then groaned, crawling forward on his elbows. My body throbbed with warning as I dragged him back, his hand outstretched. He’d almost activated the self-destruct sequence that would have shredded all evidence in the room.

  Almost.

  I pressed my fingers hard into his throat, letting him know what would happen if his skinroom tried to play any more tricks on me. One-handed, I jammed Grim’s membrane-thin override passkey into the computer system. The fibres on the wall growled like dogs, but didn’t fire. The pulse continued pounding, echoing furiously through the room until I could barely think. ‘Deactivated the self-defence mechanisms,’ Grim told me. ‘You don’t have to worry about dangerous hairs anymore.’

  ‘Good to know.’ Keeping the Ratking in view, I locked the office and shop doors before returning. The walls began heaving back and forth, in synchronisation with his chest. ‘I’m not an expert,’ I told him, making no effort to be gentle as I dumped him into his armchair, ‘but killing your customers can’t be good for business.’

  ‘You back-stabbing dog,’ Montenegro spat at me. ‘We had an agreement. We own this floor, every damn metre of it. You’re going to cop hell for this.’

  He thought I was from a rival stormdealer gang. Didn’t realise I was Harmony. I could swing that to our advantage.

  ‘Shut up. You don’t talk unless you’ve got something useful to tell me.’ I jabbed a thumb at the flexiscreen, and the mainframe tethered to it by a string of ribbed cables.

  Montenegro scowled, no doubt imagining all the gory ways he’d hack me apart, but held his silence. I couldn’t resist messing with him. ‘Shipping routes, perhaps? Crimson Star Industries? Stashhouses you’ve been using on chainships?’

  More scowling.

  ‘Come, come, now,’ I said, leaning close, ‘don’t tell me everything. I can’t possibly take it all in.’

  Montenegro spat at me, the thick glob of saliva landing straight in my eye. The stormtech rolled down into my clenching fist. With effort, I unclenched it and tore myself away before I did something I’d regret. ‘You move and you’re dead,’ I told him, as much for his own sake as mine. I smeared the saliva away. If he made any sudden movements or came at me my body would react defensively, and I didn’t trust I could control my own strength.

  Or maybe I didn’t want to hold back? Montenegro here was one of the top dogs. Wasn’t like anyone owed him any sympathy. Keeping one eye on him, I called Kowalski. ‘Got our prize pig here, awaiting your knife and fork.’

  ‘Good work, Vak.’ I could hear the relief in her voice. But it was a different kind of relief, too. ‘Is he secure?’

  I glanced down at his shattered knee. ‘He’ll have to break a leg to get out of here.’

  If looks could kill, his glower would have skewered me. Kowalski took me at my word. ‘We’ll be there soon.’ I disconnected from her and waited for Grim to continue trawling through the local files before anyone got too curious and realised the Ratking was compromised.

  My hope didn’t last long.

  ‘We may have a problem,’ Grim told me.

  I winced. It’s never a good thing when Grim says that. ‘What?’

  ‘The databanks are biometrically locked to our stormdealer, requiring a direct neural transmission to open.’

  ‘Are you telling me this wanker loves his body so much he’s encoded
the system to his brain?’

  ‘Yeah. Before you lose your temper and go smashing his skull open for it, it still wouldn’t work. He needs be alive. You kill him, his wetware implant starts to cannibalise itself. I can’t do a thing remotely.’

  I cursed under my breath. Just when I thought we were making headway.

  ‘You leave now, I’ll give you my stash for free,’ Montenegro offered.

  ‘I thought I told you to shut it,’ I growled.

  ‘No one has to know. Let’s work something out.’ Montenegro made as if to lever himself upwards, forgetting his injury and collapsing to the ground in pain.

  I grabbed two fistfuls of his shirt and shoved him back into his seat. ‘You open your mouth again without being asked, I’ll go for your second knee. And don’t try to play me. Every phial is counted. If so much as one is misplaced, people are going to know you screwed them over. You’re just stalling.’ A smile spread over my face. ‘There’s something in the room you don’t want me to find.’

  It took me less than a minute of rifling through the cabinets to dig them out.

  Plastic explosives. Alcoholic fluid. Reactive powder used in mineral mining. A glass jar of nanonites –metallic balls you could resize to be microscopic, or large as a marble. Medclinics printed them up, filled them with medjel, osteopathics and antibiotics and shot them into patients to target specific areas of the body. Something told me the House of Suns weren’t investing in medical technology.