Stormblood

by Jeremy Szal

  The sun glints off Alcatraz’s visor as he turns back to us. ‘Are you with me?’ he asks quietly, my dog tag gleaming around his neck.

  ‘Always,’ Myra says with a sniff.

  ‘Always,’ Ratchet says, his tears leaving muddy tracks down his face.

  ‘Always,’ I croak out, my own tears coming.

  We gather in a tight hug. Holding each other against this never-ending nightmare. Then we slide our helmets on, scoop up our weapons and move out, marching with our fellow Reapers into whatever fresh hell’s waiting for us. We’re all broken, no question about it. But, for now, we’re still human, and we’re going to make what we do count.

  I don’t know if the stormtech will let me live long enough to fulfil my promises, but I’m going to fight until my dying breath to do it. That’s what a Reaper would do.

  I’m stormblood.

  Until I’m dirt and dust.

  39

  Back to Base

  I didn’t want to watch the news. But it’s not like you get a chance to decide what people say about you. There was no footage of me, but plenty of descriptions of an armed Reaper who threatened a crowd of innocent bystanders and was now a suspect in this appalling act of cultural terrorism. Several very distressed eyewitnesses were babbling that I’d been about to gun them all down. The stories were getting crazier and crazier, prompted by newscasters feigning duty but delighting in the public outrage, exaggerating and distorting the events to boost their ratings, sensationalizing tragedy, their race for the headlines churning nuance and fact into obscene fiction. It would have been worrying enough, but became anxiety-inducing when I remembered the hatred seething from the crowd as they stepped towards me. It was hard not to correlate the events with two recent reports of hate-related crimes perpetrated against stormtech users.

  Was it my fault? I’d played into the House of Suns’ hands. Seemed impossible not to shoulder some of this blame. That’s a Harmony trick: to swoop in, do terrible damage, and then eschew any responsibility.

  Kowalski didn’t seem to think so when I called her up. ‘If you hadn’t been there, we’d be none the wiser,’ she said. ‘We have a lead now, and you’re okay. That’s all that matters.’

  ‘We need to get over to the Warren,’ I told her.

  ‘Got men heading over already. But we can’t afford to waste time. You and Grim swing by as soon as you’re able.’

  Grim helped me strip out of the stealthskin. The thick fabric made a liquid squelching as it peeled from my sweaty skin, like tape being torn away. I noted the inner suit was soaked blue with sweat and blood as I slipped back into my underskin. But besides the stormtech-healed bullet wound, I’d hardly any injuries to show for my work. The bruises, burns and even the fractured knuckles had all disappeared and my body knew what to thank. What to depend on next time. There was a sweet, sticky stench in the air. The stronger the stormtech, the stronger the smell. I could feel my pores clogging with it, the clammy odour caked and plastered over me like a second layer of slimy skin. My body already responding to the arousing smell.

  My senses had been sharpening ever since the arena fight, but now everything was turned up to eleven. Every clatter, shout, smell, gust of air was a micro-assault on my body. Too much for my mind to compartmentalise.

  I slipped back into my armour, reassured by the solid, hard surface of the suit. The familiar tightness clamped hard over my back, my shoulders, locking around my thighs and legs, the balancing chemicals releasing. The tendrils squirmed and pulsed against my flesh, in my armpits, under the soles of my feet, combating the stormtech writhing inside my inner flesh. I breathed out in slow, controlled bursts, letting my muscles loosen. My body temperature dialed back down. The smell wafting out of me began to lose its potency.

  But I still didn’t dare remove the armour, still keeping a careful gauge on my body as Grim and I hurried back to the abandoned House of Suns compound in the war-torn Latin Quarter. Standing on the concourse where I’d been held at gunpoint started to dredge the memories back, my body stirring up with it. Not helping.

  Kowalski was waiting for us inside.

  ‘It could still be a dead end,’ I said as we headed down the halls.

  ‘Don’t give them too much credit,’ Kowalski said as I removed my helmet. ‘We’re going to tear the place apart.’

  I wasn’t so sure what we’d find this time around, given we’d failed on the first try. And then I remembered our simple, singular addition.

  We had Grim.

  We parked him in the server room, doing his Deep Dive. He was barely ten seconds in before he resurfaced with a result. ‘It was buried deep in the mainframe metadata,’ Grim told us, smearing the dust off his hands and across the thighs of his skeleton underskin. ‘They totally erased any traces of its existence, but forgot to erase any traces of them erasing it. Amateur move.’

  Katherine shook her head. ‘Our people spent weeks trawling through the mainframe.’

  I stepped towards him. ‘Grim, what did you find?’

  As if in answer, we heard unseen mechanisms squirming beneath our feet and echoing somewhere deep in the compound. Grim sliced between us, following the sound with a childish eagerness. ‘If you good people will follow me …’

  He led us to some mothballed storage unit on the edge of the compound in time to see an impenetrable-looking wall irising backwards. Layer upon layer of armoured latticework, vacuum-approved barricades, and firearm-absorbing barriers peeled back with echoing steel clangs, like layers of metallic fruit, finally revealing a spiralling corridor. Looking at each other, we walked through a cold access tunnel until we faced an armoured door. White block letters gleamed on silver chainmetal.

  Spaceport 27B, Hangar Bay 1.

  Unholstering our weapons, we glanced at each other and entered. We were standing in the smallest spaceport on Compass; so small it resembled a rudimentary docking bay. One landing pad, one control central office, one row of docking berths, crudely carved out of asteroid rock.

  And sitting in the middle of the landing pad was the chainship we were hunting.

  Kowalski clutching at my arm. ‘We did it, boys,’ she said as she turned to plant a kiss on my cheek. ‘You did it, Vak.’ She turned down to Grim, patting him on the shoulder. ‘You too, Grim. Both of you got us here.’

  Colour had returned to Katherine’s cheeks. Seeing her so happy made me happy, enough to forget, just for a moment, all about the alien strings sawing up and down my guts.

  Kowalski gave me another slap on the back before reviewing the sleek, charcoal-coloured chainship. ‘Turret-class spacecraft. Older model, by the looks of it.’ She gestured at me. ‘We’ll need to secure the area. If we pull the mainframe, the metadata will pinpoint the—’

  ‘Wait.’ I held up a hand. ‘Do you hear that?’

  Kowalski and Grim just stared. ‘Hear what?’

  Hear the slow clanking and whirling of machinery warming to life. Hear the dull whine of life-support systems and readouts switching on. Hear the chainship readying for departure.

  Our one and only lead was preparing to fly away.

  One step forward, three steps back.

  I was running before I even realised I’d started moving, helmet folding over my face. I was focused completely on the side hatch that was slowly closing as the chainship lifted off gently on her dampers. I hurled myself inside, pulling my leg through as the hatch hissed shut. ‘Vak, don’t!’ Kowalski shouted down my commslink.

  ‘If they get away we’ll never find them again,’ I said, lying flat on my back in the darkness. ‘I’ll signal you as soon as I can. I—’

  But my transmission abruptly cut off. The chainship gathering speed and velocity as we shuttled out into the deep blackness of open space.

  40

  Dark Stars

  Why did I do that?

  I turned the
question over in my mind half a hundred times as I lay in the cramped, dark confines. Hard to really break anything down to easy logic when your hormones are fired up and you’re running hot on rage. Could have been I was sick of sitting on my arse and watching the Suns run rings around us. Could be the stormtech had given me that little shove forward and I’d taken myself the rest of the way.

  Or, it could be I was done with being the hunted. And now, I was the hunter.

  I was waiting for the bone-shuddering rumble that would indicate we were entering warpspace. It never came. A Turret-class chainship this small and battered probably wasn’t even outfitted with a warpdrive. Couldn’t be flying anywhere far beyond the local system, then. Didn’t eliminate much, but at least we weren’t firing off into deepspace. I don’t know how long I waited before I felt the chainship slowing down. External cams would have activated.

  There was a small widescreen monitor above my head. I switched it on.

  We were fast approaching a space station. The bulk of the station was shaped like a truncated skull, with a greyish texture like it had been dipped in old wax and then rolled in ash. The rest of the station sprouted from the top in a series of spires, corridors and docking gantries forming a jutting crown of black crystal. The skull’s eye-sockets were hollowed out, but I got the feeling it was staring back at me.

  The ship tilted down towards the jawline, where a hangar was already opening, the blue shield-barrier crackling. My breath steamed hot in my face as the chainship swerved around in a sluggish circle before settling with a jolt. What if they decided to open the hatch? What if they’d picked me up on thermal-scanners? I held my handcannon tight to my chest, listening hard, waiting to be dragged out.

  Muffled voices. Feet scuffling metal. Fading footsteps. Clanging and shuttering of metal.

  Silence.

  I waited for a good half hour before deciding to risk it. I stabbed the emergency opening switch. The hatch opened and I slid out and into cover.

  The hangar bay was immense enough to easily hold the scattering of chainships, corvettes and slipships sitting in their drydocks, their hulls scuffed and scarred with age. Rusted chains and hooks dangled from eyeball-shaped apertures in the walls. The House of Suns symbol had been daubed across the utilitarian grey walls of the hangar bay, dozens of them smeared tens of metres high in fluorescent white paint. Subtle.

  Behind me, a huge viewport looked out into a sweeping asteroid field. Hundred, thousands, of broken chunks of primordial rock, swirling past the length of my sight and pockmarked with gaping craters. No matter how often I saw them, I’d never been able to understand how something so vast could be so silent.

  I peered past them, but could see nothing. No commercial spacecraft, no flybys, definitely no Compass. We’ve all heard about those wayward stations and semi-abandoned outposts. Hard to believe I was in one of them now. No connection appeared in the upper-right corner of my HUD, as if to confirm I was truly off the beaten path. No way of calling in help if this went sour. But I couldn’t waste time worrying about that now.

  I slipped out of the hangar and into a telescopic corridor. It was dark and uninviting, the only light coming from blinking terminals and more symbols painted across the mirror-smooth walls. In the darkness, the glowing symbols looked like the mouths and eyes of some midnight predator from the depths of space. I felt the gentle hum of whirling machinery between my feet, the rhythmic heave of oxygen pipes and superconductor cables. Not a smear of dirt nor speck of grime anywhere. It was artificially serene. Like something vital was missing here. A body without a pulse. A great old mansion without inhabitants, wind howling down its empty hallways in the dead of the night.

  You know that feeling you get when you know something’s wrong, but you can’t put your finger on it?

  Yeah, that.

  This place was infested with that feeling. And it was making me horribly uneasy.

  My hands and feet flared up as the stormtech throbbed like a heartbeat. The same reaction as when I’d broken into the Tipei Corporation and discovered the storage of stormtech canisters. But this was gnawing at me like heartburn, all over my body.

  I almost didn’t want to know what they had stored here.

  Almost.

  Senses sharpened, I mentally mapped the facility as I slipped into what looked like a dimly lit library. Tight staircases spiralled up past towering bookshelves, the room scattered with dark, brooding decor. The air was perfumed with something sickly-sweet. It took me longer than it should have to realise it was trying to replicate the smell of stormtech. Maybe even the smell of a person infused with stormtech.

  Dread knotted in my stomach as I glanced at the onyx walls decorated with artistic impressions of the Shenoi, quotes and eulogies framed in block fonts. Documentaries and reports about the Shenoi played on a loop, the sound muted. Mats had been stretched out in front of teapots filled with hallucinogenic herbs and various chemicals used to crank your mind into hyperaware mode. Some sound-absorbing tech had been meshed into the walls, making the room as silent as a crypt. The ominous feeling I’d had in the corridor returned, only stronger. Like I was somewhere no one should be and surrounded by malevolent information no one should have access to.

  I slipped a leather-bound tome off the shelf and confirmed my suspicions. This was the cult’s collection of relevant texts. Viklun Ryken’s scientific papers were probably here, along with dozens of other works pertaining to the Shenoi. Theories, histories of alien civilisations, possible Shenoi homeplanets, the mysteries surrounding them, articles about the stormtech, collected testimonies from other aliens about the Shenoi. Collected listings about the cult itself, its dogmas, people who had promoted it and founded it, those who had opposed it and how they should have – or had been – dealt with.

  I looked up through a layer of shielding that formed the ceiling, straight into the dark canvas of space. Constellations of unfamiliar stars stared back at me, winking in muted colours. It should have been beautiful, but here it felt like I was dipping my head into a dark ocean, teeming with crawling parasites and unknown dangers lurking in the depths.

  Because that’s exactly what they’d come here to find. This was their place of contemplation, where they gazed up to the countless stars, systems and celestial bodies the Shenoi had once infested like an interstellar fungus. They marvelled at it. Respected the aliens’ strength and audacity. They came here to wait until the aliens went for round two.

  These people were off their rockers. Fundamentalist in every sense, living inside a narrative of confusion and fear they’d created and projected. Luciano hadn’t been kidding. They weren’t going to be reasoned with. Which was great, because I’d ticked reasoning with these people off the list a long, long time ago.

  My hand tightened around my handcannon. Jae Myouk-soon would be here somewhere. Cut off the head, and the body withers and dies. She might be stinking rich and possess a fancy collection of weaponised bio-chemicals, but she’d bleed just like anyone else.

  I allowed my body to guide me. Wherever the stormtech was, she’d be. I was walking through a hydroponics chamber when I heard heavy footsteps. I dived under a table just in time to see a series of armed and armoured figures enter the room, with two pairs of armed robots trotting behind them, the decking rattling with the echo of their metal feet. I didn’t like the look of the heavy assault rifles they were holding, so I stayed low and slipped through the nearest door.

  The stormtech physically kicked inside me, like an impatient foetus, desperate to struggle free. Shaking it off, I took a set of backlit stairs up to a vantage point. A honeycombed network of polished laboratories sprawled in front of me, connected by sloping corridors and walkways. In the nearest sector was some sort of processing facility. Figures clad in thick protective suits handled stormtech canisters. Each chrome cylinder was scanned, checked, tagged and inserted through a series of churning machinery before being
magnetically sealed in shipping crates. Statistics scrolled in gentle white text across the flexiscreens. Listing where the stormtech would be going on Compass, which stormdealers would be receiving it, how much it had sold for.

  My teeth clenched hard enough to crack. Street drugs like grimwire and bluesmoke were typically processed in dingy dungeons and mouldy apartments that were thick with smoke and littered with dirty workstations. Stormtech had an entire station dedicated to it, as if that made the drug any less evil. It didn’t deserve this place.

  The central area of the laboratories was the largest. Flexiscreens and panels covered the cavernous space like a ring of blue light. Streamlined superconductor cables were plugged into thick sockets, churning with energy. Towers of gleaming surgery equipment were built into outlines in the wall. Tubes as thick as my arm wired up into a vat with a flanged base, tangled with intricate pipework and tightly bound wiring, sprawled over the room like the multicoloured roots of an overgrown tree. I watched a scientist extract stormtech from the vat, blue surging into a hypodermic.

  And meshed between the mass of machinery, like fleshy seeds buried within the core of mechanical fruit, were people. Some standing, some strapped to gurneys, some suspended in mid-air by harnesses. Each one filled with stormtech and surrounded by half a dozen suited scientists. In some it was in the infancy stages. In others, they looked like they’d been infected for months, maybe years. Most were twitching in their restraints. Low moans filled the room. Flexiscreens hoisted above each person measured their vitals in bright blue text.

  Except … they were offering their arms and legs. Smiling as the white-clad scientists emptied stormtech hypodermics into them. They wanted to be here and be experimented on.