Stormblood

by Jeremy Szal

  I reached to put the nearest one on when a single word froze me solid. ‘You!’

  Lasky had noticed the seat was empty. Now, he raced towards me, fumbling for a weapon. I jerked back, scooping up a nearby munitions canister and sending it smashing into his face with a wet crunch. He was slammed screaming to the floor, clawing at his face. His nose was broken, twisted at a hideous angle, several teeth smashed and splintered. ‘Get him! Get him!’ he screamed like an animalistic child in hysterics, spitting and smashing the decking with his fists.

  Hideko screamed at the sight of Lasky. But the Jackal didn’t even seem to notice his injured comrade. His gaze latched onto me as he unstrapped himself with frightening speed. I shoved my body into the spacesuit and reached for the emergency hatch with numb fingers, but Hideko was faster. She flipped the ship into a barrel roll. The world spun as I slammed into the ceiling and plummeted back down again so hard I swore I heard a rib crack. Another flip and me and the still-screaming Lasky went smashing into the bulkhead. The Jackal was on his feet and speeding for me, slingshiv glinting in his hand. But he mistimed his lunge and went slipping on Lasky’s blood, skidding past us, the hooked curve of the slingshiv missing my eyes by inches. I leaped through the open barrier, stabbing a button to slam it down. The armoured doors began pinching together as the emergency exit hatch slowly peeled open. Wind howled in, fast-freezing my sweat. A pit opened in my gut as the distant streets yawned beneath me.

  A scream behind me. Lasky was crawling furiously towards me, his mangled face plastered with hair and blood, twisted in a vicious sneer.

  He was so obsessed with tearing me apart, he didn’t notice the barricade.

  He glanced up just as the armoured barricade pinned him in place, crushing him to the floor. Anger melted into horror and horror melted into agony as the barricade’s magnetic seals clamped down. His body twitching as his ribcage and then his spine splintered like rotten twigs.

  There’s the answer to the age-old question: how do you get Lasky juice?

  You squeeze.

  I spilled out into open space, spinning in freefall as the Jackal roared my name. The spacesuit used its anti-grav systems and thrusters in small, controlled bursts to guide me down to the hard concrete of the rooftop. I rolled to my back, alive and intact, bloody and sobbing with relief. My bruised body was trembling. Whether from relief or trauma I didn’t know and I didn’t care. I was alive.

  I did it, guys. I did it.

  Couldn’t afford to sit around, in the likely event the Jackal decided to swing around and finish me off with a railgun. I struggled to my feet, scanning for an exit. I stumbled, pitching over as a hot mass of glutinous stormtech came surging up my throat, splattering wet and thick around my knees.

  Make that barely alive.

  The unfamiliar streets spun around me. Every noise and smell crammed so hard into my skull I was waiting for the moment I’d hear it crack open. My skin was rubbery and translucent as wax, giving me the bizarre notion that if I approached a heat source my flesh would melt and peel off my bones. My bruised arms dangled by my sides like lead pipes. My head pulsed in throbbing waves of pain so deep they knocked me to my knees. My vision was a hazy fog. My insides were clenching so hard it felt like my guts were dissolving in acid, molecule by molecule. My body had suppressed Jae’s overdosing to help me survive, but the comedown always swung around, and this time I might not survive it. It felt as if I were already dead, parts of my body slowing and shutting down, while others hadn’t realised what was happening.

  Go to sleep. Go to sleep and rest for ever.

  But the stormtech and my own stubborn pride wouldn’t let me.

  I had enough sense to tear away my harness and prisoner’s suit. Cutting the muzzle from my face was another matter. I netted a dozen fresh wounds and nearly gouged my eye out in the attempt, but the broken strip of steel I’d found eventually cut through the thing and I tugged it off my face. I slipped into an underskin shoved into a broken printer, smelling of someone else’s sweat. Judging by the shape, the previous owner had been an alien, but I didn’t care. Couldn’t care about anything but surviving this nightmare.

  I stumbled. Grabbed someone. ‘Find Katherine,’ I slurred. I was shoved away, slapped against the wall. Bloody skinnie, someone spat as the world tilted into stabbing whiteness. I blinked, and I was lying in an alley. Shivering under a blanket of garbage. Freezing wastewater was dripping on me from a broken pipe and I was covered in clammy sweat. My body was still adjusting to the new stormtech, diverting toxic flood water down the sewer pipes of my arteries. I coughed, retching up a sticky glob that was practically fluorescent. I burst into stuttered laughter that morphed into racking, miserable sobs. In the distance I heard the crackle of Harvest gunfire, the dull smack of my father’s fists hitting flesh. Felt bruises erupting along my arms like the mushrooming clouds of artillery fire from orbit. Artyom refusing to leave my side when I was sick with fever. Kasia hugging me. My fellow Reapers standing with me in the dawning light.

  Someone kicked me out of the alleyway. I snuffled through a garbage disposal for food, soaked up to my elbows in dripping trash. I tried to hunker down in a spaceport shanty, but a group of bored bullies dragged me out to the streets. Punched me a few times before leaving me curled up in a gutter. Blackness came in between blinks. Rain drizzled down. Made myself move before I drowned.

  Neon lights from a club stabbing me in the eyes. The guard outside shoved me backwards as I tried to enter. Staggering into an alleyway, sliding to the ground, back scraping bricks. I puked again, lying in my own sick.

  Walking. Endless walking. Looking up to see a language I didn’t know smudged high above me. People and faces turned into discoloured, nightmarish smears. A hand on my shoulder, quickly starting to melt and drip away. Was I all right? Did I need help? ‘Never better,’ I said, and threw up again.

  I imagined my friends were here with me. Grim urging me forward, Katherine telling me to stay strong, pulling me back up when I sank to the cold, concrete floor. And Artyom, always Artyom, watching me from the end of every alley and vanishing into smoke as I came close.

  More walking. Almost hit by an autovehicle. Meandering endlessly through a maze of blurry and dripping back alleys. Heaving, sweating, crying. My skin greyer than New Vladi winter streets after a snowfall. Slowly withering away on the inside.

  I took another step, staggered, and my body crumbled. I couldn’t move. Could barely breathe. Every limb and muscle had locked up. My head was one planet-sized throb. Panic fluttered like a trapped animal in my chest, quickly swallowed by a warm, fuzzy glow spreading through me.

  Go to sleep. Go to sleep and rest.

  I closed my eyes.

  ‘Vakov?’ Calloused hands rolled me onto my back. A narrow slit of light, eyes creaking open. Someone towering over me and silhouetted against harsh lights. A Torven in a heavy hooded coat. Mugalesh. It was Mugalesh.

  ‘What have you done to yourself, blue one?’ she rasped, clothes creaking as she stooped on her haunches next to me. She tsked at the sight of me and hooked me back up, nails digging in my armpits. I wobbled to my feet and somehow managed to take one aching step at a time. I stopped twice to puke. Ropes of blue drool clung to my lips, my insides turning numb. I tried to break away and curl up to sleep. Mugalesh slapped me across the face until the idea of doing that passed.

  An eternity later, she pushed me through Grim’s door. He rushed towards me, eyes wide, his mouth making shapes. ‘Get Katherine,’ is all I managed before the blue dragged me under.

  44

  Second Chance

  Flickers of light showed me a white Harmony medclinic, medics and octodrones swarming above me. The hiss of oxygen filters. Someone breathing frantically in my ear. Probably me. I don’t know how many times I dropped in and out of consciousness until I stirred fully awake. I was wearing a medskin and attached to a system of whirri
ng white medical machinery that was providing life-support and leeching the stormtech from my body.

  The room’s visual package had been set to a winter mountaintop. Thick dark pines as old as the galaxy stretched high among carpets of moss and undergrowth, sloping away into mist. The gentle breath of wind whistling over the snowcapped mountain wafted from the speakers, a simulated breeze tousling my hair. The earthy smell of fresh petrichor filled my nose. Somewhere, a dreamy acoustic soundtrack that recalled distant and peaceful landscapes was playing.

  White-coated medics came and went. I was to drink as much fluid as I could, to help drain the excess stormtech. My cheeks were still lacerated from the steel muzzle. Didn’t want to think about the state the rest of my body was in. My sheets became heavy with blue sweat, needing a routine change every few hours. But I wasn’t dead. I wasn’t dead. Zero points to Jae, one to me.

  Grim was fast asleep in the corner, head sagging against the wall, while Katherine was asleep at the foot of my bed. Her blonde hair sprawled messy and loose around her face. She’d probably been there from the moment I arrived. No doubt the medics had told her to keep out, and no doubt she’d barged in anyway.

  I stayed still, listening to the gentle rhythm of her breathing. How long had she waited here, hoping and praying I’d make a recovery?

  A lump formed in my throat as everything came crashing down in slow, concussive waves. The friends I’d lost. The Reapers broken and shattered, dying in my arms. The people around me I’d hurt and pushed away because I thought I didn’t know anything else, because I wasn’t brave enough to listen to their help.

  And my brother. The hurt we’d dealt each other because of the hurt the world had dealt us. How I’d failed him in ways I couldn’t possibly count. So many brusies and wounds, all tangled up in this mess.

  I was a broken man. A poisonous pit that sucked everyone and everything down around me. And somehow, for whatever reason, my friends had seen something worthwhile in me. Something that made them stay by my side in this medclinic, continuing to believe in me, even if I didn’t.

  Tears welled in my eyes, the lump hardening in my throat as I tilted back towards unconsciousness.

  Katherine was waiting for me when I woke up. I could see her body was stiff and her eyes were heavy, but they lit up when she saw me. She wrapped her slim arms around me in a crushing hug, not caring how sticky and sweaty I was. Eventually, she untangled herself and punched me hard on the shoulder. ‘What was that for?’ I rasped, my throat still raw.

  ‘For leaving us like that.’ Her eyes were red from crying. She lifted my arm, where traces of the restraints and needle punctures lingered on my flesh like dissection markings. ‘What she did to you … if you hadn’t come back from that, what would I have done? What would Grim have done?’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ I croaked. I noticed I’d been freed of the med-machines sometime during my sleep. Grim was still asleep, still sagging against the wall.

  ‘Even Kindosh was worried about you. Grim’s been frantically tracing the routes of every spacecraft leaving Compass. Saren’s had search teams searching them out, and Jasken’s been pacing and threatening to tear the Suns a new one for hours. And there’s an angry Kaiji that won’t stop calling and asking about you.’

  Juvens. I couldn’t help but smile. ‘You’ve all got my back.’

  ‘You’re one of us, Vak.’ Her hand tightened around mine. ‘You’re part of the team.’

  ‘That’s good,’ I said, ‘because we’re going to need all the help we can get.’

  Katherine drew back. ‘No. No. No. You’re staying right here. The doctors still don’t know how your system recovered. You nearly died, Vak.’

  ‘Yeah, I’m aware of that,’ I said as the stormtech spiralled down my ribs with a newfound vigour. It would take weeks, maybe months to fully integrate into my body, even longer to control it. But I’d learn. I’d learn because there was no other option. ‘I’m not sitting here while you go after them.’

  ‘Vak, I will personally strap you down to this bed if I have to.’

  I grinned at her. ‘You can try.’

  But she wasn’t kidding. ‘The side effects could still be fatal. No one’s ever survived a stormtech infestation like that.’

  ‘Which is exactly why I need to help.’ I readjusted the universe’s itchiest pillow against my back. Like my medskin, it was already saturated with blue sweat. ‘I know Jae, and she knows I survived. She’ll be expecting us. I saw all the equipment they were using. And this is my brother, my responsibility.’

  Katherine placed a hand on my forearm. The rumble of a lungship travelled up from some spaceport below us. ‘Artyom is his own man, Vak. None of this is you on.’

  ‘Maybe not. But maybe I can still reach him. I owe it to him to try.’ Taking down the Suns would mean consequences for my brother. If he survived, he’d continue to hate me for it. But if I didn’t do anything, I’d be damning him to be a part of something he would regret until his dying day. Kowalski knew me well enough to know I’d never forgive myself if that happened.

  No more running from my demons. No more pretending I wasn’t a part of Harmony. There were only two sides, and my brother and I were on opposing ones. I lifted my arm and watched a trail of stormtech slither up my muscles like smoke. I’d carry this dark gift, along with all the memories and sacrifices that made me who I am, for the rest of my life.

  And maybe for the first time, I was okay with that.

  Kowalski briefed me about the preparations in place: the squads of Shocktroopers they were assembling, the SSC Battalions being prepped, the tactical plan, the damage control Harmony was installing throughout Compass should the plan go south. It seemed insane, even assuming it all worked out. I didn’t know how we were going to repair the damage the Suns had inflicted on Compass. But we had to try.

  ‘We all deserved better,’ I told her through my tight throat.

  ‘Who?’ Katherine asked.

  ‘Reapers,’ I said. ‘We stormed into a new hell every day, knowing what Harvesters, what our own bodies, would do to do us. But we kept at it, because we were doing it for each other. And Harmony lied to us. Used us. We were treated like monsters. So we became monsters.’

  ‘I know,’ Katherine whispered. ‘That’s on us, Vak. And we owe it to you all to try again. I owe it to you.’

  I gave her a long look. ‘You knew about the things stormtech made me do. What it could make me do again. And you never treated me differently for it. You never gave up on me. Why?’

  Katherine paused. The simulated wind brushing strands of blonde hair across her face. ‘Because I saw you trying, Vak. Even after all you’ve been through, I saw you wanting so hard to do the right thing, to do right by the people you care about. Even if it hurt, even if it killed you. It showed me the sort of man you are. And I knew I owed it to do right by you, too.’ Her hand tightened in mine. ‘I’m proud of you, Vak. And I want you to know we’re going to do better. Right here, right now. Doing better starts with us.’

  I felt the tears beading behind my eyes. ‘Vak,’ Katherine whispered.

  ‘When Jae began injecting me, I thought I was never going to see you again,’ I croaked. ‘That we’d never get a real shot at this together. You have no idea how much that scared me. I’m not going to let this go by, Katherine. I swear it.’

  A mellow expression came across Katherine’s face, as if everything else was melting away, laying bare her bedrock of emotions underneath. There was just her, there. Raw and honest. The person she wanted to become, wanted me to become. I wanted so hard to return it that it ached. My throat closed up as I cradled her second hand in mine, feeling the warmth of her skin. The rest of the world seemed to gently fall away from us, a sudden peace washing over me. One I hadn’t realised I’d spent so many hard years searching for. A peace I thought I’ve never have again, ever since I buried my sister with my own
trembling hands and looked out at the frozen hellhole that was my home, feeling in my heart there wasn’t a place for someone like me in the world.

  For the first time in years, the future seemed to have hope.

  45

  Hellbound

  Grim almost knocked me over when he finally stirred awake, hugging me with brute strength I didn’t know he possessed. He was so happy he kept tripping over his sentences, sometimes abandoning them completely to embrace me again. His eyes were wild and happy as he sat next to me and picked at my breakfast. ‘You gave me a hell of a scare,’ he told me through a mouthful of spiced eggs.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I mean, if you’d died, who would listen to my whining?’

  I grinned at him. ‘Who said I ever listened to it?’

  Grim wasn’t my only visitor, of course. Shocktroopers, Strikers, gunrunners, Primers and various other Harmony operatives came to offer congratulations, clap me on the back, or just to pay their respects. A few Reapers stopped by, although none from my former Battalion. News travels fast among SSC ranks. Saving Kowalski from the razornade in the Warren had done me a world of favours. I’d asked Jasken to pass on a request of mine to Harmony’s chief armourer and he promptly agreed to it.

  Eventually, the conversation with Grim turned serious.

  ‘We’re going to be forming a co-ordinated assault on the Suns’ home base,’ I explained. ‘Jae’s going to be expecting us, forming defence systems against our forces. I need you wired into your technest, ten steps ahead of the Suns, overriding their traps and defences, whatever they throw at us. Any darkmarket tech you shouldn’t have, any remote access you shouldn’t be using, now’s the time to use it.’

  ‘I’m sure I can manage that,’ Grim said.

  ‘Don’t disconnect for a moment. I don’t care if Mugalesh tries to drag you out, you stay in contact.’

  ‘Got it.’ He flashed his hacksaw teeth at me, filled with bits of egg and bacon. ‘Thank goodness for her, eh? Said you looked like death when she found you in the alley.’