Stormblood

by Jeremy Szal

  I glanced at the digital timer in my shib. Dawn was fast approaching. ‘That doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘We have to keep trying.’

  ‘Yeah. I get that. But our options are limited right now, you know?’ Grim stooped down next to me, close enough for me to see the ache for sleep in his red-rimmed eyes. ‘We’re looking for an attack that could take place anywhere. In an asteroid. It could be outside our door, or down in Changhao, down in Starklands, up in the Greenlakes suburb, anywhere in between. We’re not going to find it. Not tonight.’

  Images flashed through my head like a flexiscreen burn-in. Katherine’s body, shaking against mine. Us standing on the windy balcony, finding solidarity in sharing our grief. ‘No. Dozens, maybe hundreds will die if the Suns launch their attack.’ I was aware my voice was rising, louder than I realised. And why was my face so flushed? ‘Those pricks don’t care who dies. Don’t you care about them?’

  ‘Hey, hey! Of course I care!’ Grim frowned, leaned forward so close our bodies were almost touching. ‘Mate, you all right?’ He stretched out a hand. ‘Your neck … you’re so blue.’

  I slapped his hand away. ‘Don’t,’ I rasped. ‘Don’t touch me.’

  Grim took a breath. ‘Vak, I hear you leaving in the middle of the night. Going out for hours, coming back restless and reeking of booze and sweat. Sometimes you don’t come back until dawn. I don’t want to get on your case about it, you know? But it’s hard not to. When was the last time you had a full night’s sleep?’

  I felt my neck and tried not to react to the slithering mass under the skin. ‘No. We need to keep working, we need to find this—’

  ‘Not gonna happen, Vak. Not tonight. Let it go. Just for a minute, okay?’

  My knuckles turned white at my sides. ‘Don’t,’ I heaved out. Sweat slithered down my armpits. ‘Don’t treat me like I’m going to explode. Not you.’

  ‘I’m not! I’m—’

  ‘Stop, Grim. Just stop.’

  ‘Or what?’ Grim was on his feet. ‘You going to hurt me? Like you almost did in the arena? Or in the apartment? I saw it in you. You wanted to. So go ahead.’ Grim spread his arms. His eyes, usually mischievous and sly, were glistening and wide with fear. ‘Take a swing.’

  I backed away, the scene crashing down on me. It was like retreating from a mountain ledge, roaring with wind. The world tilted, swam with black spots. No, blue spots. They swarmed my vision until I was drowning in them. My friend stood still, eyes fixed on me.

  I was going to destroy him.

  I was going to destroy everyone around me.

  The twitching virus in my body wasn’t just altering me, it was eating me away. I was poison. Had Artyom seen it? Had he left New Vladi not because of what our father was, but because of what I’d become?

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I told Grim. The words unlocked something that had been unconsciously building up in me, and all my rage evaporated at once. My arms dropped to my sides. ‘This stuff, it isn’t me. It’s doing things to my head. But that’s no excuse. I’m going to fix this, Grim. I swear it. If it’s the last thing I do. I’m not going to lose you.’

  Grim’s shoulders drooped. I hated the way I tore him down and exposed this sensitive core he tried so hard to armour up. With all his jokes and mischief, I often forgot how vulnerable he was. He was more adrift than I was, his home, family and everything he knew destroyed.

  ‘I’m sorry. That wasn’t fair of me either,’ he sniffed.

  I shook my head. ‘You’ve got every right to be angry with me.’

  ‘Maybe.’ A watery grin climbed across my friend’s face. ‘Sometimes it’s hard not to be. But someone’s gotta say it, right?’

  I attempted a smile. ‘Right.’

  The workspace had two mattresses tucked away in a subsurface compartment and we took one each. Flat on my back, I watched the curving ribbon of departing ships framed by the V made by my feet as I tried to think. The House of Suns wouldn’t launch an attack on a facility that had no immediate value to their cause. They were deliberate and precise. So what did they most want to gain from their next attack?

  Sell to as many aliens as possible.

  I remember being on campaign, stalking through an evacuated city with the rest of my fireteam. Can’t remember the name of the planet, or how long we spent there. I do remember how our armoured buggy bounced as it rode over the potholes and cracked asphalt, my back aching for weeks afterwards. Reconnaissance teams had sighted Harvesters around the city museum, intel suggesting it was a munitions base for Anti-Hull ordnance. We’d scoured the entire museum and found nothing. Nothing except destruction.

  Harvesters had been there, all right. They’d meticulously gathered up every piece of artwork in the gallery and destroyed it. Paintings, sculptures, artefacts, memorials, transcripts. Spacesuits, hull-pieces, machinery models, orbital data, spaceflight records, terraforming intel. Anything pertaining to the establishment of the colony, its position within the greater Common universe, or the people who’d settled it: dragged into the vestibule and torched.

  They didn’t steal a single thing.

  Just destroyed it.

  ‘Bastards, aren’t they?’ Myra had said, her voice echoing among the shredded ruins of half-burnt tapestries. The stink of smoke was ripe in the air, the tiles stained soot-black. ‘If they can’t have it, no one can.’

  ‘That’s not it,’ Alcatraz countered. His armour plates grinding as he gathered ash up in his gloved hand and watched it bleed through his fingers like black snow. ‘It’s about erasure from history. Wiping out everything about the people that discovered, established, and built this colony. It’s not enough to take this planet. They want to clean the slate.’

  ‘That’s crazy,’ Cable muttered.

  ‘That’s how Harvest wins. Not by taking their enemy’s planet. By pretending they never existed on it at all.’ Alcatraz gestured towards the forlorn museum. ‘Culture is the heart of any society. So they go for the heart.’

  Now, years later, on the other side of the galaxy, I was facing a very different enemy. Yet it was one with the same tenacity. The same ruthless determination burning in their eyes, going for the heart.

  This whole bloody time, it was staring at us, point-blank in the face. I don’t know how we didn’t see it.

  I bolted up, startling Grim, powering up the flexiscreen. My heart thudded in my chest as I crawled past the streams of data towards the place I suspected was their true target. I matched their data with the Suns’ traffic circulating the location, eager to see how much time and activity our cultists had spent in this location. If I was right, we’d have our next target.

  I was.

  The traffic was higher than any other venue on Compass by a mile. The Suns had been obsessed with this place. Wasn’t a stretch of the imagination to understand why.

  I didn’t waste any time contacting Kowalski. ‘Seriously?’ Kowalski slurred, her eyes bleary, ‘You boys couldn’t let me have five hours sleep?’

  ‘I know what their next target is,’ I said.

  In the cam’s reflection I could see the blue thrumming across my stomach with excitement. Kowalski fought back a yawn. ‘Where?’

  ‘That file, telling the stormdealer to sell to as many aliens as possible,’ I said. ‘They hate other species. Hell, it’s probably in their teachings. In a way they’re continuing the Shenoi’s war against them. So they’re going to attack the place most precious to them, the symbol of integration: the xenomuseum.’

  35

  Denial

  I don’t think Kowalski believed me. Not at first. ‘And you’re sure about this?’ she asked. Grim planted himself beside me, only half conscious.

  I shot over the traffic data to Kowalski. ‘Something tells me they’re not looking into the xenomuseum to donate funding,’ I said. ‘If they really hate the aliens as much as they say, an archive to t
heir achievements, history and culture will be their next target.’

  Kowalski assessed the evidence I’d provided, slowly joining the dots as I had. She pulled on a stretch top. ‘All right, Vakov. We’re out in five.’

  I’d have been lying if I said I felt comfortable around the Sub Zeros at the best of times. But gathered in this confined office space together, standing abreast like we were in a line-up, I couldn’t help but shift on the balls of my feet, gloved fingers twisting and turning behind my back. I was glad my mirrored visor concealed my face. I had to keep reminding myself that these beasts in their rock-like armour were on my side.

  Which meant I was on theirs.

  Kowalski had called Hillyn Joreth, the xenomuseum’s director, to arrange a meeting. I shouldn’t have been surprised to see a Torven running a museum of alien artefacts, but I was. The alien’s skin was the colour of earthy red clay, his slender face gaunt and cynical in a way that bizarrely reminded me of Kindosh. He wore a dark, high-collared suit that was constantly rippling and snapping in an unseen breeze. What might have been blue ancestral tattoos crawled up his wrist in thin curlicues. He was sitting across from Kowalski and Saren behind a featureless black desk, hands folded in an eerily human-like manner while the rest of us stood around them like a crescent wall of armour. What were presumably Torven artefacts were piled up in great sweeping shelves around him. Joreth’s secretaries and guards were all pretending not to listen as they catalogued submissions and inspected the archives.

  ‘And what did you say your evidence was again?’ Joreth had a way of making everything you said sound suspicious and ridiculous, just by quoting it. He leaned back in his highbacked chair, seemingly built for alien bone structure and ergonomics.

  Katherine leaned forward. ‘One of our research analysts found a pattern of chatter indicating your museum was the next most likely target of a terrorist attack.’ I raised an eyebrow behind my visor. Research analyst, really? Grim, hooked on the other end of the commslink despite my protests, sniggered loudly.

  ‘Given the scale of the threat, we have to take this seriously.’

  ‘And why would anyone want to blow up a museum of artefacts?’ Joreth demanded, with an air of presumptuous amusement only people in power can wield. ‘We survive purely on our very generous donations from the community. The Cultural Centre books out a month in advance, the simulation in three. Visitors of all species make long journeys to Compass just to see it.’

  ‘The threat is genuine and tagged as high-priority.’

  Joreth narrowed his eyes. ‘And you’re sure of this?’

  ‘We wouldn’t be here if we weren’t.’

  ‘Very well. What do you propose to do?’

  ‘We’d sweep this part of the Academy building. Scan for explosives, biohazards, chemical agents, signs of tampering or hostile devices. Install surveillance, armed personnel.’

  ‘For how long?’

  ‘Until you are no longer under threat,’ Saren butted in without bothering to hide his frustration. ‘Two attacks within less than a month is more than we need.’

  ‘The search you suggest could take days, weeks. Months, even. Your evidence is insubstantial.’ Joreth looked at each of them in turn with his beady brown eyes and I knew right then that we were done. There are some citizens so cemented in their ways that nothing’s going to change their mind. Nothing short of a terrorist attack. ‘There is no reason for us to be targeted, among the tens of thousands of facilities on Compass. The human boy who blew up the bank was a Blued-Up freak demanding drug money.’ Katherine’s shoulders tensed. ‘Having your metalheads parading around a museum will drive away the very community we wish to help. Bad for morale. No offence.’

  ‘None taken.’ Kowalski didn’t even try to sound pleasant about it. I’ve observed it’s people deciding what is and isn’t a matter of offence who are often the ones doling it out.

  ‘It’s taken years of work from Compass, the Alien Embassy, our homeworld and generous donations from a multitude of species to establish this museum. We’re the only one of its kind run by my people,’ Joreth followed up. ‘We’ve received threats from pro-human establishments before. And yet we’re still standing. I won’t see its reputation destroyed because of chatterboard gossip. Harmony can’t control or protect their own Reapers. What makes you think you can protect us?’

  I’d thought the looks he and his staff were giving Harmony – us – had been of cold fascination. Now I realised it was distrust. The House of Suns had already succeeded in driving a wedge between Harmony and the common people. Having an armoured presence, with Harmony’s current reputation attached, would do him no good.

  Of course, having his building become a smouldering pile of rubble would do him even less good.

  ‘You’re welcome to scan the building, quickly,’ offered Joreth, as if he were doing us the favour. ‘But I believe you’ll be wasting your time.’

  Turned out he was right. Four hours later, the minesweepers, infrared, thermal, subsonic sweepers, bio-hazard detectors and sensor-scanners revealed nothing, as I’d known they would. The House of Suns were too smart to leave their fingerprints lying around. They hadn’t launched their attack. But they would. Soon.

  ‘You heard him,’ Kowalski said. ‘There’s nothing to be done.’

  ‘And we’re listening to Joreth?’ I asked. ‘He couldn’t find his own arse in the dark. We don’t need his permission to investigate.’

  Out of uniform and back in our storage unit, Katherine was sitting next to me and wore a loose cream shirt under a grey jacket, a cherry-red scarf slung around her neck. Her hair was wet from a recent shower and smelling of something pleasantly sweet. ‘Actually, we kind of do. It’s against the Galactic Common’s constitutional rights. In case you’ve forgotten, Harmony isn’t too popular.’

  ‘That’s nothing new.’

  ‘It is since the terror attack happened. Strong-arming a xenomuseum director isn’t going to help much with our reputation. I wish we could force our way in there and insist on installing a full security operation, but it’s not going to happen. Until we’ve got concrete evidence of a planned terrorist attack, our hands are tied. There are other angles we can cover, but not this one. Backs are to the wall, boys.’

  ‘Harmony can’t,’ I said with a smile.

  Katherine shook her head. ‘No. No lone wolf antics, Vakov.’

  ‘Who said I’d be alone?’ I leaned forward, all business. ‘Look, you guys can’t get in. Bad for PR, I get it. But I can. Let’s say they are planning something in the xenomuseum. They’re going to have to break in and set themselves up, right? They’re too diligent to leave anything to chance with a quickpatch job. We know there’s nothing in place now. So, if I’m right, all the materials are still to be delivered. We get the manifesto of upcoming deliveries and trace it back to their munitions storage base, and from there …’ I squeezed my hands together.

  ‘Okay,’ Katherine said slowly, as if hesitant to commit. ‘So we just need the museum’s delivery schedule. And you understand the risk if you’re wrong and get caught? Not just to Harmony, but to you?’

  Sitting so close together, I could see the concern lining her face. I wanted to reach out and reassure her. But the runnels of blue stripes along my arm wanted to pull me back. I could almost feel the tendrils worming into my muscles, tearing them apart.

  ‘You’ll need me on the other end,’ Grim said from his seat. ‘Someone’s got to make sure you don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.’

  ‘Oh, good,’ Katherine said. ‘That’s reassuring.’

  ‘I’ll be careful,’ I promised. ‘But we have to do this. Especially with her involved.’

  ‘Speaking of which, you might want to see this.’ An holographic image grew around us. A figure, clad in a tightfitting suit. Slim, athletic, female. Her face obscured by a space helmet that resembled a black oval, the edges rid
ged with splinter-like serrations, swept back by the force of an invisible wind. I recalled the voice on the phone and mentally stitched it together with the image. ‘This was taken by a Harmony correspondent early in the Reaper War. Look familiar, Grim?’

  ‘Yeah.’ His voice was carefully neutral. ‘Yeah, it’s her. The Killer Chemist.’

  It was maybe the only known image in existence. It was good news. But not the kind I needed right now. ‘You said we have to work together,’ I said to Katherine. ‘Well, this is me trying. We’ve tried it your way. Now let’s get this done. Before that museum is a smoking ruin.’

  I couldn’t read her. Was she weighing the risks? Weighing the consequences if I fouled this up? Or maybe weighing how much danger she’d be putting me in. If I was caught again, they’d kill me. But only after they got tired of torturing me. And if the Jackal held grudges like I think he did, it would not be for a very, very long time.

  ‘If we do this,’ Katherine said, and held up a finger before I could reply. ‘If, then there are some conditions. Understood?’

  I made myself nod.

  ‘I need to know you can do this,’ she said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, what if it’s your brother in there? What if it’s between you and him, and he’s about to plant a bomb?’

  There were a hundred things I could have said. The stormtech nuzzled against my inner ribs. Telling me I didn’t need Artyom, or Grim or Katherine or anyone else. That they were anchors holding me down. I wished I could shut my eyes and have all the demands on me fade away, but life never works like that.

  ‘I’ll do what needs to be done.’ My voice sounded hard and rusty. When I’d first agreed to investigate the Reaper deaths and dived back into the world I swore I’d left behind, I knew it might come to choosing between my brother and my loyalty to the Reapers. That this could end with me and my brother staring at each other down the barrel of a weapon. In a world of terrible men, I’d tried to be a good man for him. Instead, I’d hurt him beyond repair. Choosing the Reaper War over my brother was the biggest mistake I’d ever made. No matter how hard I tried to fix that mistake, as a direct consequence of it, I might have to choose taking the Suns down over saving him.