by Jeremy Szal
What good do you really learn from your mistakes if you never learn how to stop making them?
I glanced up at the snapshot of Jae Myouk-soon. Turning over all the misery she and her empire of drugs had caused. My muscles swelled and the stormtech gleamed blue all over my body. I was to blame for the situation my brother and I had landed ourselves in. No question of that. But so was Jae. So was Sokolav. So was my father. So were all the Suns. None of us are innocent, after all. And whatever happened to my brother at the end of this bloody affair, she’d answer for it. As would they all.
As would I.
36
Suit Up
The drop-off was in an apartment building located in north Starklands. One of those spacious and opulent penthouses you constantly saw in adboards. Half a dozen bedrooms, elaborate kitchen, state of the art appliances, a private chainship garage. I stared down the vertiginous drop, where the city blocks I’d walked to get to my own apartment had been turned into a glowing circuit board of streets and buildings. Aerial traffic whistled past lazily in the late afternoon sunlight. Harmony used this place as a safehouse for stormdealer informants, spending a fortune and a half to make them feel comfortable. After dumping our bags down, I realised another reason they’d splurged. A gaping chunk of the back wall had been gouged out, leading down into the hollow of the asteroid.
Compass isn’t solid rock. Just as planetside buildings have basements and back doors for shipments and secure entries and exits, Compass has a network of tunnels, tubes, pipelines and accessways worming under its rocky flesh called the Hollow. Connecting to buildings and enterprises for deliveries, operative cells, emergency escape rooms, and quick access to spacedocks, the Hollow was a haven for criminals to use for hideouts and dead-drops, and also attracted thrill-seekers who got the smart idea of going on long and illegal expeditions through sectors of the asteroid only explored by drones. Little surprise Harmony had access.
Kowalski had told me to get cleaned up. After a quick scrub down in the jet-shower, I was dressing when I noticed myself in the floor-to-ceiling mirror and barely recognised the feral figure staring back. My hair tumbled down to my jaw. Black, bristly stubble was fast becoming a beard. My body was a series of sharp angles, muscles tight and straining beneath my scarred skin. Even after the shower, I could smell my own sickly-sweet reek. When I breathed I could feel the stormtech stretching with my lungs.
I was about to turn away when I noticed something in my eye. Grit? No. This was inside my eye. I pinched the flesh down for a better look. Small, blue tendrils were contorting in the white of my eye and fumbling at my iris like a writhing blue sea anemone. I couldn’t see them in my vision, but I could feel them like tiny worms squirming and thrashing inside me. Soon they’d crawl into my brain like a parasite chews through rotting cauliflower. I shut my eyes. The House of Suns wouldn’t need to destroy the people I cared about; I could end up doing that all on my own.
I’d become what I was in the Reaper War. A savage, uncontrollable monster who only knew how to hurt and be hurt. Back then, I hadn’t realised how bad it was going to get. But this time, I’d already walked this path with my body and knew I was in unmarked territory. My urges were less immediate, but more deeply worked into my body, harder to resist in the long run. The stormtech’s a jealous organism, and I’d already withdrawn from it once. Maybe now it was taking the necessary steps to ensure I was locked and wrapped up too tightly in its smothering folds to ever tear myself free again.
Don’t think about that. Can’t think about that. This first.
I walked back into the kitchen. The printer had been furiously at work well before we arrived. ‘We’ve found you a route in through the Hollow,’ Kowalski said, once we’d set up a connection. ‘It’s how the Academy takes deliveries. Only problem is, the whole museum’s rigged up with cams, sensors and top-grade security systems. So you’re going in a stealthskin.’
This sounded promising. ‘A stealthskin?’
‘Yes. They’re not cheap, so be careful with it.’
‘Since when was Harmony so parsimonious?’
‘Since we started dealing with Sector Prone. Printing something that complex will takes hours and a lot of resources. So don’t spill anything on it.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t dare.’
The stealthskin was a white one-piece with a hexagonal pattern woven into the stitching, splashed with droplets of colour. Several layers thicker and sturdier than an underskin, equipped with textured padding along the elbows, knees, hands and buttocks. When you gripped it you could almost feel it gripping back, like a handshake. I stripped and Grim helped me pull it on. It was like sinking into the depths of cool water before it hardened over my flesh like drying wax. My body was soothed as the gellish substance inside made contact. Grim had to help me smooth it down, working out all the creases until the suit was leeched to me like a second skin. No loose spots. No places where you could even pinch the fabric. It seemed to have its own muscle system, moving in perfect accord with mine, as if designed for my body. I ran my gloved hands over it, grinning at the touch of flexible but firm material. I threw the hood over my face, the suit growing two black lenses over my eyes. A hiss of pressurised air as it sealed to my neck. It lacked the mechanical firmness of my armour, the flexible material unfamiliar against my skin. Wasn’t sure how secure something like this could be. But as it charged up, pressuring firmly against my body, I could feel the warm strength coiled inside its nanofibres. Amplifying my abilities, boosting dexterity.
Wrapped up in this cutting-edge suit, I felt a whole new world of tactical agility flooding open before me. My hands and feet were rippling like a light display, before resolving into a mathematical pattern, tipped with thousands of gill-like slits. This thing came with gecko gloves, too.
And as a bonus? The alien plumbing inside me didn’t shine through the fabric. Had to invest in this thing.
‘It’s syncing to your nervous system,’ Kowalski explained as an electrostatic pulse crackled along the nape of my neck like liquid bristles. ‘It’ll conceal you and anything you’ve got equipped. Try it now.’
I toggled the option on my shib, my body melting abruptly into the background. Grim burst out laughing, as my mouth dropped open. My lenses blinked and a blood-coloured overlay scrolled down my vision. There I was, outlined in a greenish haze in my augmented vision. Just as well. Without the ability to unzip myself out of this suit I’d be royally screwed if I couldn’t see my own hands. Cranking the overlay off, on lifting my arm there was a distinct oily smear in the air. ‘Not complete invisibility, then.’
‘By all means tell Kindosh to pour more funds into science and tech instead of politics, because you want a better suit,’ Kowalski said. ‘I firmly suggest you don’t ruin this one. Be aware it doesn’t have limitless energy, but it does self-recharge as long as you’re moving, even if it’s just flexing a muscle.’
I winked back into existence as the printer finished a weapons harness. I clipped the black straps over my back and torso, the buckles securing tight over my waist and thighs. ‘We’re sending you in armed, but no casualities,’ said Kowalski as I attached my thin-gun and handcannon.
‘Now where’s the fun in that?’ I asked wistfully.
Grim gripped my hand in his as a farewell. ‘Take care of yourself, big guy.’ He slapped me on the shoulder. ‘Make sure no one gouges those pretty eyes out, understand? I’ve still got films to show you.’
‘I’ll do my best to keep my eyes ungouged,’ I said.
I turned away into the Hollow.
Whoever described this place as a network needed a serious smack upside the head. It wasn’t a network. Wasn’t even a maze. It was a labyrinth. A vertical nightmare of a space-construction site: intersected with a webwork of wires, crane gantries, jutting beams, disused access tunnels, creaking ladders and so many walkways I didn’t know which way was up. Superconductor cab
les and industrial pipes five metres wide and churning with internal fluids plunged in haphazard spirals. There were sporadic glimpses of sulphur-coloured lights in the darkness, but it was the night optic vision built into my lenses that lent me some semblance of guidance. That, and the tactical interface streaming in my shib in the form of a cyan pathway, leading me like a guide rope through the metal jungle. It’d be so easy to take a wrong turn, slip through the cracks and vanish into these infinite depths, knowing freedom was just on the other side of this rock, but with no way of finding your way out.
Inching up through a crumbling access tunnel that dated back to the Construction Era, I found my first skeleton and realised that plenty had done exactly that. Cold, slimy water dripped everywhere. The stink of mould and slime was ripe in the air. It was precarious going as I crawled over a rusty pipe that’d have shredded my skin to ribbons without the suit. When I slipped, I just managed to snag some loose cabling. My falling weight yanked one end out of its socket, my armpits straining as I swung on it like a vine to safety, with a mental apology to whichever restaurant or shop just lost power.
A corona of winking lights beamed above me like stars. On closer look, it was a series of server cabinets. Either someone had something digital to hide, or they didn’t want to pay for extra storage space on their property. Whatever their reason, I had to spend a frustrating hour shimmying through suffocating cable ducts, and navigating through stacks of servers, databanks and substrates that crackled with heat and static. It was like crawling through the twitching guts of a whale. The temperature-regulating tubing was broken and I got hosed with a face-full of white, glossy gel. So much for not getting anything on the suit. Sweating, my back and bones aching, I finally pulled my body free into the welcoming chill of the tunnels.
Another hour of crawling through the darkness before I reached my waypoint. Ten metres below was a walkway leading to a door, haloed with a purple-blue outline. Using a beam as a fulcrum, I flicked on stealth mode, my body vanishing as I hopped down and approached carefully. I waited until a tubby woman came through, wheeling a gurney of box-shaped drones of Torven-design. I was directly in her line of sight but her gaze skimmed over me as she waddled by. I grinned behind my stealthskin. One gold star to Sector Prone.
I sliced past and found myself in a darkened hallway. Dull light glared across serried rows of Torven, Bulkava and Rhivik artefacts. Racked up behind chainglass were alien flora, wildlife, history, virtual models of their homeworlds, texts, weapons, gossamer fabrics, suits and armour, and other fragments of their technology and culture.
‘I’m in!’ I told Kowalski and Grim over the commslink.
‘Good work,’ Kowalski said. ‘It’s closed, but that doesn’t mean no one’s around. Keep us updated.’
I drew on the stormtech. My senses expanded in widening waves until I could hear anything around me. Feet slapping on the pavement outside. Autovehicles slamming by, the vibration echoing up through the walls like sonar. Foosteps and muffled voices in the immediate vicinity. I focused. Drawing tighter. Downstairs. Maybe two storeys down. I detected nothing from the next-door Academy.
It was like listening in for Harvest enemies on the battlefield all over again.
My ocular vision also allowed me to see the floors were crisscrossed with invisible tripwires and pressure pads. Not a problem. I pressed my hands to the tiled walls, feeling the hard suction against my fingers. I don’t know how much I weigh, but I’m a big guy, and I doubted these little sticky paws would do any good. But I seemed light as a monomolecular blade as I scaled upwards, going hand over hand. I found myself grinning as I climbed diagonally across the walls, my hands and feet making little sucking noises. I felt like a high-tech animal, wrapped in killer gear light years ahead of the competition. I crawled above the lasers and ghosted past cams and security equipment, sticking upside-down to the ceiling and inching into a room dedicated to alien biology. Skeletons of aliens in various stages of growth, reconstructed with nanofilaments, grinned at me in the pale light. My harness groaned as I grappled around a stone pillar, the buckles tinkling.
The golden glow of subsurface powerlines in my oculars pointed towards the central office. I crawled past podiums for smaller species and incomplete collections donated by visiting aliens hoping to make their mark on Compass. Past artefacts unearthed from archaeological digs, belonging to civilisations yet to be named or discovered. I slipped through a cable duct and dropped silently into the ventricle of the xenomuseum office. It was a high-tech utility hub, the size of a small cruiser-liner cabin, and it was a mess. Gunmetal servers and hard drives were squeezed in countless rows and plugged into a smear of flexiscreens, guts of wiring and coolant tubing spilling out. Lurid red and aquamarine lights winked at me in the gloom. Even in my suit, the heat was unbearable. The projection of an unending virtual world, crammed into this tiny physical space, was complete.
I moved to get to work when I stopped. Sniffed. An excited glow spread through my body, the stormtech rocketing through me in feverish bursts. Even breathing through the suit fabric, the sickly-sweet smell was unmistakable. Like a dog, I followed the scent to some discarded crates. Nothing out of the ordinary, given how much of a wreck the room was, but I began sweating, my hands and feet going clammy. The crates were solid moonrock. You could unload a whole magazine of tungsten rounds into that and barely dent the surface. One whiff of the nearest crate and the earthy, mineral tang knocked me right back to Montenegro’s little stashroom. I ran an invisible finger down the sides of another box and sniffed. My stomach muscles cramped. Stormtech. They’d used these boxes to transport stormtech.
‘We’ve found it, guys,’ I whispered. I was shaking. Whether with anticipation or fear I couldn’t tell. I flipped the crate over and read out the serial number stencilled on the bottom.
Grim punched the number into his search engines. ‘If these passed through any spaceport or dock, we’ll have a register,’ Kowalski said over the metallic pattering of keystrokes.
‘Got it,’ Grim said in triumph.
My hands tightened around the chest straps of my harness. ‘What’s the story, Grim?’
‘These crates came through the Hovergardens. Spaceport 27B, Hangar Bay 1,’ Grim said breezily. ‘Now, all we gotta do is narrow down the timestamp, find the itinerary, and we’ll have the ship’s manifest, which stations it’s stopped at, and who owns it. Smooth sailing from here, guys.’
‘That can’t be right,’ I heard Kowalski mutter.
My hands wrapped harder around the harness. ‘What is it?’
‘There’s no spaceport in the Hovergardens,’ Kowalski said. The defeat was already evident in her voice. ‘They’ve played us.’
I resisted the sudden urge to take my handcannon out and start laying into the cranking mesh of servers around me. I slumped into a seat, my teeth gritted. ‘Another dead end.’
‘Hold your horses,’ Grim cautioned. Something in his voice supercooled my rage. ‘We discovered earlier that the Suns were using Crimson Star Industries as a front, yeah?’
‘The compound they used as their old hideout in the Warren?’ I leaned forward in my seat, stitching the threads of logic together. ‘You mean—’
‘The spaceport must be there,’ Kowalski cut in. I could imagine her and Grim glancing at each other over the blinking web of data. ‘That’s how they’ve been shipping stormtech to Compass. Through their private little spaceport.’
‘A spaceport you don’t know about?’ Grim asked, incredulously.
‘Compass is a big place, Grim. Some spaceports get mothballed over the years, retrofitted or reconstructed for bigger ones. Sometimes outright abandoned. The archives don’t always keep up.’
‘But we searched the place top to bottom!’ I said.
‘Not hard enough,’ Kowalski said. ‘We’ve got a lock on them. Let’s move out, before they know we’re onto them.’
I scrap
ed off the seat. As I reached an arm out, I realised I’d been immobile for too long and the suit’s energy system had guttered out. I was exposed. Time I was long gone.
Then I saw the coil of platinum cabling feeding into the wall from a few strategically placed crates. A box wired up to the operation, familiar-looking knobs gleaming.
Fusebombs.
It’d had been half a decade since I’d witnessed the devastating effects of one of these things but I was never going to forget the immolating blast of heat that fried every photoreceptor in my eye. The acrid stink of smoke. How quickly the explosion spread in burning arcs along the grasslands.
I swallowed and nudged a few server cabinets aside to unearth half a dozen more fusebombs, all rigged up and ready to blow.
Oh hell.
I heard the muffled whine of a thin-gun priming behind my back. ‘Don’t move. Throw down the weapons.’
A small tightness clenched around my stomach. The voice was muffled by a helmet, giving me no clue who it was. ‘What gave me away?’ I asked. I heard Kowalski and Grim curse as they cottoned on.
‘Motion-detectors in the office. There was nothing on the cams so I almost didn’t investigate. Now, get moving.’
I’d have kicked myself if I wouldn’t get shot for doing it. I unstrapped the weapons from my harness and let them thunk to the floor. I raised my hands, fingers spread.
‘Who are you?’ he demanded. ‘What do you want?’
‘I was in the room when we offered you protection against terrorists. Remember that?’ I chuckled without humour. ‘You must have been laughing at us the whole time.’ I turned around.