by Jeremy Szal
And his bosses? Animal Kingdom.
His parents would be watching all of this. Wondering why we were up here instead of protecting innocents. Wondering what the hell it mattered that we’d stopped one stormdealer, when we couldn’t stop the rest of them.
My teeth were clenched. Everything we’d just achieved here felt empty and as useless as a breached airlock. One step forward, three steps back. How the hell do you fight an entire drug industry? How could we fight the Suns like this? Hell, they could be watching now. Through a cam-feed, a drone, anything. Gathering up intel to weaponise our own plans against us.
I stomped out of the room, distinctly aware that Katherine was watching me go.
34
Night Hunters
Kowalski had told me to hold off until she and Grim had broken through the data as they would need my help to trawl through it. I had a few hours to kill in the meantime and decided to attempt the local bathhouse, abandoned at the late hour. I sat sweating in the spherical clay sauna. Water dripped from me and splashed to the wooden floorboards. Somewhere, quiet ambient music was playing. I sipped from a bottle of gin beside me. You weren’t meant to bring alcohol in here, but I’ve never paid much attention to the rules when it comes to alcohol consumption. The stormtech seemed to enjoy the heat, and was spasming in furious bursts through my body. Tonight, it had also decided to wedge itself in my left armpit, writhing there with a furious tickling sensation. I’ve long learned you can’t dislodge the stuff from going where it wants to go: I rode the feeling out until it grew bored and decided to explore elsewhere.
I polished off the remainder of the bottle and got up to shower when I felt something slimy and slick wedged in my throat. I wriggled my jaw, tried to budge it with my tongue. I balled up a mouthful of saliva and spat it out. No dice, it was stuck fast. My chest heaved as I gagged on it, feeling my throat moisten and clench with the effort, until a slimy ball landed on my tongue. I spat it straight out. It looked like a piece of thick, rubbery phlegm, the size of my thumb. Except it was glowing blue. And seemed to be squirming. I slowly spat again and saw my saliva was flecked with the same glowing mucus. I looked in the mirror. Chunks of phlegm were wedged between my teeth, swimming along my tongue.
This wasn’t totally abnormal – my saliva and phlegm had been blue before. But that was years ago, before rehab had smoothed it out. Even with the Jackal forcibly injecting me, it was happening again too quickly. I didn’t want to dwell on it and began the process of scrubbing out my mouth, spitting and heaving all the mucus I could. No matter how much I spat, my body kept churning out a never-ending supply. And maybe it was my imagination, but it seemed to be grower thicker, congealing to my tongue.
Feeling solidly grossed out by my own body, I finished showering and slipped into a fresh underskin. I caught three different traveltubes to throw off any pursuers before heading over to our rendezvous point. The room we’d booked was skimming the outer edge of the asteroid in one of those half-completed floors still in the process of being assembled. The floor-to-ceiling viewport showed a ruffled dark green ocean, heaving with curves and swells. The water rippled as ships from a dozen species and a dozen classes shot out over the ocean in bright blue streams, steering up towards the circular spacecraft tubes jutting from the ceiling.
Katherine was standing on the balcony. ‘You’re here early,’ she said without turning around. She was out of her work clothes, wearing a loose red shirt and woolly scarf.
I joined her at the rails, dangling my arms over the sides, our shoulders touching. ‘Just wanted to check in on you.’
She tilted her gaze up to follow the flight path of a yellow Torven ship until it melted lazily into the horizon. ‘I don’t even know anymore. It’s just all so numb.’ She was a dark outline against the darkening sky. Her hair was being blown around her face by the salty ocean breeze. ‘You know what I hate? People say the right things. They act the way they should. But when they look at me, they’re waiting for me to explode. They look at me like I’m a bomb about to go off, and they keep their distance. It just gets everything crashing back down again, and again, and again. And then I go and do what I did to that stormdealer and I wonder if they’ve got the right of it. Maybe I am a ticking bomb.’ She blinked hard and turned towards me. ‘I thought confronting him would make me feel better. Give me some sort of closure. And it did, in a way. But it tears a different hole inside you. And you wonder why you didn’t fix it sooner. Why you didn’t do things differently. And then you run out of ways to hate them and just start hating yourself. My nephew’s gone. So is the man that killed him. He tore our lives apart, and yet it’s me who’s been left behind to pick up the pieces and deal with the consequences. It took him a minute to do damage that’ll last a lifetime.’ She gave a mirthless snort. ‘And that’s what’s so unfair.’
‘I get it,’ I told her. ‘Doing what I did to that boy who killed Kasia helped. But it made me angry. Angry with the whole world, the injustice of it all.’
‘How it seems like no one cares,’ Katherine muttered.
‘Yeah. All of that. But it was nothing compared to how angry I was with myself. And at the end of the day, that’s the hardest part. Fighting the urge to never forgive yourself.’
Katherine eyed me through strands of her wind-whipped hair. ‘How’d you win it?’
‘I didn’t. I just learned to stop fighting. I learned that’s the way things are, and that I’m going to have to find a way to live with it.’ I met her eyes. ‘And I learned to find people like me and talk about it. Help them along the way.’
A quiet moment passed between us. Eventually, a sad smile tugged at Kowalski’s lips. ‘I’d like that.’
I matched her smile, pleased she’d agreed to the idea. The wind howled around us. The slow trickle of ships like a glowing ribbons streaming out of the tubes. ‘It took me for ever to learn the worst thing you can do is try and forget about them. You do that, you rob yourself of everything they ever gave you. You bottle it up, something inside you will break.’ I felt a faint rip in my chest, like old stitching tearing loose. ‘The people that matter to us aren’t always meant to be in our lives for ever. But the things they did to make you a better person can be. Nothing’s ever going to fill the hole they left behind, but keeping them in mind makes it a little easier.’
Kowalski nodded, her gaze fixed on the endless curve of rippling waves along the false horizon like a long-lost dream. She withdrew and brushed the hair out of her face to offer me a watery smile. ‘Thanks, Vak. Really. This helped. More than I thought it would.’
Everyone grieves in different ways. We all have different shaped holes left in our lives when people we love are gone. But when grief hits hard, it’s not about dimensions or angles. Grief numbs. Turns everything so cold you don’t know what to feel. I could connect with that, even though I couldn’t articulate how it feels. Some days, I woke up realising friends I’d known in the Reaper War were dead. Gone for a decade, buried in some mudhole on a distant war-torn planet I’d never see again, and the pain hit me all over again. Because trauma never goes away. Loss never goes away. Not really. But trying to do your best to face up to it, finding comfort in each other, maybe we could survive it.
We continued our conversation until Grim arrived an hour later, and promptly got to work. We sat in a semi-circle around a wide flexiscreen. The virtual space around us was so cluttered with papers, spreadsheets and comparisons I had to fight the urge to swat them away. ‘I’m guessing you have nothing about their base, right?’ I asked.
‘Nothing. No trace, no log, nothing.’ Grim rotated the orrery of pages around. ‘But there might still be a clue to its location.’
I expanded the image of the chainship until the small spacecraft filled the room. ‘This has to be on Compass,’ I said. ‘Look at the design of the hangar and the flag in the background. I think their base is offworld and they’re using this dock to acc
ess Compass.’
‘The only person who could tell us either way is dead,’ Katherine told us. I’d drawn my chair close to hers, our legs touching as we inspected the data together. I saw a slight smile pull across her lips as I brushed my arm against hers. ‘I can’t say I’m mourning his passing.’
‘Wait, wait, wait.’ Grim leaned forward. ‘There’s a “J” at the bottom.’
‘A signature. Jae Myouk-soon,’ I said.
‘We searched the archives for her,’ Katherine told me. ‘Got no results.’
‘Either she’s no got no record, or someone inside Harmony is protecting her.’
‘The more this goes on, the more I’m starting to think you’re right.’
Grim raised a finger, his Harvest tattoos gleaming in the light. ‘Okay. Backtrack. How do you know that name?’
‘It came up in the files. Why? You’ve heard of her?’
Grim eased his body into a bean-bag big enough to swallow him up. ‘Yeah. Myouk-soon was one of the most feared espionage agents for hire on Harvest. Contract killer, you know? She rooted out traitors and threats to Harvest, led the crackdown on Harvest immigrants and war refugees. Made sure that no one could desert or feed information to Harmony. Even before the war, she made her living rooting out security threats.’ My friend’s hands were white, clasped tightly together. ‘They called her The Killer Chemist. She was the only reason I didn’t defect sooner. I was too afraid she’d catch me.’
‘What did she do?’ I asked.
‘If she suspected someone of selling state secrets, or those who had links to threats to Harvest? She’d inject them with genetic viruses, customised to her victim. One made you tear your own eyes out. Another made breathing feel like having glass shards poured down your throat. It’d take her just a few chemicals to drive you insane, or make you kill yourself. The worse the crime, the more imaginative the punishment. She was seventeen when she started. Seventeen.’
I remembered our brief conversation. That blubbering Bulkava was right, you really do look like your brother. What had she done to that poor alien because he’d helped us? Had she punished Artyom too, for not revealing our connection? ‘If she’s a biochemist,’ I said, stamping the thoughts away, ‘she could easily be manufacturing the stormtech, poisoned and clean.’
Grim nodded. Despite the warm room, I felt a chill clamping around my blood and bones like rust, and only partly because of Jae. My body temperature had been spiking into either extremity over the past few days. With the stormtech beaming through my body, there was no secret as to why. I quietly wished I could hide in the dark, tight, isolating embrace of my armour.
‘Whether it’s her or not,’ Katherine was saying from a million miles away, ‘we’ve already prioritised stopping the next attack. We’ve got a strike team looking into it, but maybe we can find something here.’
I got Grim doing an initial quick search in the hopes there was something surface level he could find in a matter of minutes. As he did, Katherine turned to me. ‘You okay, Vak?’ She felt along my shoulder and the back of my neck. ‘You’re burning up.’
‘I’m fine,’ I lied. But her touching me had broken through the webs of stormtech cocooning around my body and mind. Just a little, but enough.
‘No, no you’re not. You need to look after yourself.’
Ropes of blue saliva drooling from my mouth. Glowing flecks in the phlegm. ‘I told you, I’m fine.’
Katherine locked sights with me as she slowly stood. ‘Vak, you level with me, or I’ll do this on my own. I can’t work with you if you can’t give me a straight answer. Do you understand?’
I rolled my shoulders and exhaled, huskily. ‘It feels like my organs are getting chewed up,’ I told her. ‘But it doesn’t hurt. It’s almost the opposite.’ I clamped a hand against my ribs and watched the stormtech flare up like forks of lightning through sky-obscuring clouds. ‘It’s solidifying inside me. Working deeper and deeper until I can’t tell the difference between it and my body anymore. I’m fighting it with everything I’ve got, Katherine. But it’s not enough. It’s never enough.’
Katherine sat back down again next to me. ‘Okay. That’s how we do things, Vakov. We talk about it. It’s the only way this can work.’
‘I don’t know what it’ll do to you.’ I had to fishhook each word from my gut. ‘This stuff … it’s a time bomb. I don’t want it to hurt you.’
Katherine’s expression changed. ‘Don’t give me that. Don’t play the victim card so you can push me away. If you don’t think we can make this work between us, fine. I’ll walk. But don’t tell me I’m not strong enough to see this through with you. It doesn’t work that way. Understand?’
I formed a dozen responses, all of them catching in my throat. Our breathing seemed to be the only sound in this place. Then, sliding my hand in her’s, I managed to say, ‘I don’t want you to go. I just … I don’t want you to see me that way.’ Blue throbbed along my knuckles and I knew she could feel it, too, pulsing and pushing against her skin. ‘I care about you, Katherine. I do. And I don’t want you to see what happens to me if the stormtech wins.’
‘We won’t let it win,’ she said. ‘We’ll fight it together, Vakov. I promise. I don’t care how long we have to look, we’ll find a way.’
I could only nod, my throat raw and filled with things I didn’t know how to say, the words all tangled up in this mess.
Grim broke away from his search and enhanced a datasheet for me to see. ‘Vak, look at this endnote. “Target young adult males, those in high-stress roles, Reapers, and if possible, aliens. The more of those scum we pick off Compass the better”.’
‘They’re trying to spread it to aliens?’ I asked. ‘The House of Suns hate aliens?’
‘You think it’s as simple as that?’ Katherine asked.
‘“Picking the scum off Compass” doesn’t strike me as terribly peaceful.’
‘They’re one of those pro-human groups, then. There’s been an uptick in them, lately.’
‘Yeah, but they are an alien-worshipping cult,’ Grim butted in. ‘Hating other aliens doesn’t make sense.’
Kowalski cracked a weak smile. ‘They’re extremists, Grim. Let’s hazard a guess and say they’re not operating on sense.’
‘In all their science texts and data-readings they’ve only mentioned Shenoi,’ I said. ‘No other aliens. And if the Shenoi were at war with other species, as the Kaiji said they were, it’s not far-fetched to imagine the House of Suns disliking the idea of aliens running businesses and occupying entire Compass floors, either. Especially not with the Rhivik talking about joining, too.’
‘There’ve been a few stormtech alien causalities,’ Kowalski said slowly.
Grim toggled some unseen mechanism. All the gathered datasheets whirled apart, then reassembled themselves into a three-dee visualisation of Compass. The schematic was spliced down the middle like a brain, showcasing the vast, intricate network of floors, levels, compartments, interior mechanisms and architecture, spread across hundreds of kilometres. ‘Oh man. And we’ve got this monster to search through,’ he said, rubbing his eyes with his knuckles. He craned his head towards me. ‘Out of all the people in the Common, why’d I have to make friends with you?’
Grim had tagged high-priority intel we’d already salvaged. Allowing for multiple dialects and interspecies spelling, we cross-matched it with hits matching the House of Suns’ frequency across Compass. It was a hell of a mess, trawling through dockyard waybills, spaceport manifestos, shipping routes. Anything that the Suns could be using to disguise themselves. The comment about hating aliens prompted us to check rare interactions between rival species that got the Alien Embassy raising red flags. Maybe some new spacefaring species had been labelled as a potential threat, and the Suns could pin them with their next terrorist attack. It’d be just like them to use a third party as a scapegoat. But trawling thro
ugh the endless transmissions and trade-requests made by various alien species got us nothing.
‘The House of Suns is spreading fatal stormtech to seed fear and turn people against Harmony,’ I said. ‘They just attacked a bank on one of the wealthiest floors on Compass. They’ll escalate, not dial back from that.’
‘Maybe it’s not size they’re after,’ Kowalski countered. ‘Could be significance. Something in a peculiarly crowded area.’
Hours later, we were still nowhere. The dusty-red colour of the artificial skies were slowly bleeding away into darkness. My arse was numb from squatting, my eyes sore from staring at the flexiscreen. I needed a drink, badly. I kept scanning each dossier, each particle, each file, running through the parameters in hopes something would click. Nothing. Only vague traces and patterns that trailed off into dead ends. Kowalski’s sporadic yawns had become continuous, until she rose to go, planning to be back in the morning. She patted my shoulder as she left. The room was silent except for the humming of the mainframes and computational substrates hidden behind the mirror-smooth walls. The distant tubes continued to wink like the eye of some mischievous neon creature, scattering colours across the frothing water. I was vaguely aware my spine was aching, but I was still focused, enough that it took Grim a few tries to snag my attention.
‘Listen, Vak.’ Grim was scratching at his pits. ‘We’ve been hacking away at this for hours. Hours. It’s not happening tonight.’