Stormblood

by Jeremy Szal

  Jasken stumbled to his feet. ‘You crazy son of a bitch,’ he panted, slapping my back. ‘That actually worked.’

  But Grim was already warning us of incoming hostiles, the IFF tags on our HUDs blinking crimson. We lost a few seconds checking each other’s gear for breaches and damage before jumping through the superheated edges of the bulkhead door, readying our next attack. Burning down the corridor, I couldn’t help but glance at what was happening across Compass. Kirribuli was unadulterated chaos. The once-golden sand was streaked with bloody arcs and littered with dead bodies. Skinnies twitched on the ground or chased after others. A young boy screamed for his mother as he ran from two skinnies who were frothing blue at the mouth. Others were straight-up Bluing Out on the streets. A group of people were perched atop the cruiser-liner I’d seen Samantha Wong’s body in, rifles barking as they targeted skinnies. Folks were boarding themselves up in shops, fighting for space. Something cracked inside me as a skinnie was cut down moments before she got her hands on a crying girl.

  Harmony was trying to get a handle on the situation; tranquilising skinnies in the streets and creating quarantine zones. But it was never going to be enough.

  Back in the corridor, we hacked and fought for every inch of space. Enemies ambushed us at every turn. We began making snap decisions and executing crazy battlefield manoeuvres that only the stupid or desperate ever used. We lurched around corners into firing squads or kamikaze bombers, going out in a blaze of bloody glory for their beloved aliens. Grim worked furiously from his technest to disable and spring traps. We broke through bulkhead after bulkhead, navigating the labyrinth of dimly lit tunnels. All the while, my body kept tearing me towards the onslaught, eyes darting back and forth as I dissected the battlefield.

  A channel from Ark Squad, Fourth Division, broke into our commslink, his callsign lighting up. ‘Saren! This is Ark Leader. We’re pinned down on a bridgeway, taking heavy fire.’ Screams and gunfire echoing violently in the background. ‘Casualties high and about to get a hell of a lot higher.’

  ‘Hold tight, we’re on our way,’ Saren responded. The callsign corresponded to a waypoint icon, shared with our entire division. Fifty metres ahead, we got to a bridgeway. Below us, Harmony and the Suns fought on similar bridgeways in little worlds of chaos. One was wreathed in smoke, flashes of red and blue as gunfire and grenades were exchanged down the screaming corridor. Another had Ark Squad pinned down by volleys of gunfire. The one below had four Harmony fireteams ravaged and broken. The ones that were still alive were groaning on their backs. The Suns laughed as they moved among the bodies. Taking their time as they jabbed them with slingshivs and electropoles, bullies tormenting a beached turtle. Letting them bleed out slowly before dragging them away.

  We swapped for long-range marksman rifles, picking the cultists off level by level. The Suns pinning Ark Squad down whipped around in confusion as a hailstorm of superheated projectiles rained down, cutting them down. ‘We owe you one!’ Ark Leader said, once they’d peeled out of cover. We advanced together, maintaining pace with the other fireteams as we fought across the bridgeways, the battlefield turning vertical as we exchanged gunfire between the floors. Two at the back, two covering the bridgeway below. Our strategy rippled from level to level, creating a chain of fireteams covering each other’s flank. Don’t know how it worked, but it did. It was a team effort. Something the Suns would never have; a concept they couldn’t wrap their minds around. At my side, Katherine focused her fire on a cultist in grey armour, chiselling away at his shielding until she nailed him in the head, flecks of blue spattering our helmets.

  Sweat half-blinding me, I stabbed a cultist through the back of his helmet. For Alcatraz. Dropped him, angling my Titan up and slamming two rounds home into a cultist’s chest. For Wong. For all the Reapers that died at the hands of people like these. My body prickled with tension and I spun to see a kamikaze cultist leaping across the scaffolding towards us, heard the whine of the smelter-grenade strapped to his chest. Before I could shoot, a fusillade of red blaster bolts streaked upwards. The torn scaffolding groaned, tilting sideways over the ledge, the kamikaze cultist screaming as he fell in a clatter of metal beams. He exploded into red mist in mid-air, the scaffolding clanging down to crush a squad of cultists on a bridgeway below. Panting, I turned to face Ark Leader. We exchanged a nod of mutual gratitude, each of us returning to our fireteams as we ran through the bulkhead and back into the tunnels.

  We heard the heavy rumble of artillery fire echoing around us. ‘Juvens wasn’t kidding about taking out a few of the Suns,’ Katherine muttered.

  ‘Sounds like he’s enjoying himself,’ I said over a pulse-pounding explosion. The words were barely out of my mouth before the corridor sputtered into darkness and flaring bursts of light from enemy barrels flashed in the gloom, bullets pinging off my armour. Yells as we returned fire, something heavy and wet thudding to the ground. My fingers twitched, my heart thundering. A squad of cultists armed with flamethrowers were charging towards us. Bulkheads locked down behind us. ‘Grim!’ I screamed down the channel. ‘Close the door in front of us. Now!’

  The transparent door slammed down. Not fast enough. A cultist had slipped through, a roaring eruption of fire streaming from his flamethrower and enveloping Arya, the crackling heat so fierce I felt it through my suit. Arya’s arms flailed and she screamed as she toppled backwards, her suit turned into a blackened shell. The fire whiplashing sideways us as the cultist swerved towards us, but Vanto ducked under the immolating stream, shields flickering as he cut the cultist down. Arya was unmoving, smoke rising from her suit. Only the five of us left.

  No time to mourn now. We pressed on in a five-man formation, punching through bulkhead after bulkhead as Grim disabled traps, only to reactivate them when the Suns tried to flank us from behind. Limbs aching and soaked in sweat, I checked the HUD. We were almost there. The next bulkhead led directly to Jae’s base.

  We were about twenty metres away when chainglass barricades began sealing the entrance, the start of a razorstorm flickering to life. Jasken was already contacting Juvens to help take the barricade out. But by that time, it’d be too late for Compass. There was only one thing to do.

  Cut the head off and the body falls.

  Explosions rumbled and distant screams swelled as I turned towards the closing barricade.

  ‘Vakov! Don’t you dare!’ Kowalski snapped. The others turned around towards me, puzzled.

  ‘They’ll kill you, Vak!’ Grim echoed through the comms. ‘Don’t do this! Vak!’

  But I had to. I couldn’t risk throwing anyone else into the meatgrinder. Too much blood had been spilt today. Too many good men and women lost because of my brother and the Suns.

  I’m sorry, Katherine. I’m sorry, Grim.

  I’m sorry, everyone.

  I broke into a run; moving faster than I ever had in my life. Gunfire drowned out my friends yelling my name. I didn’t even glance back. If I did, I might stop.

  This ended here.

  I raced for the narrowly closing hatch winking above me, leaping up the scaffolding and propelling myself up. Lining myself up just right, I stabbed the emergency eject and the armour threw me past the barricade and through the flickering razornade. I landed hard and heavy, rolling to a stop as the gate sealed me inside with the most dangerous woman in the Common.

  48

  There Will be Blood

  I felt the cold first. Freezing, icy cold, creeping to every part of my unarmoured body. I suppressed a shiver, my stormtech spiking as I swept down the hall. My breathing began to slow and I found myself in a half-completed observation deck. The floor was hard, utilitarian spacedecking, but the walls were skinned in pure asteroid rock. The granite-coloured surface had been crudely chiselled back, so the wall looked like overlapping clusters of dark grey spears, about to come raining down. Spacesuits and EVA packs were webbed to metal surfaces. Wrap-around viewpo
rts revealed the rough curve of Compass’ outer surface. Men were hooked into makeshift battle stations and data feeds trickled down a wall of flexiscreens in bright spasms of colour while secondary screens broadcast the tsunami of chaos below.

  Jae wore a vintage dress patterned with bold curlicues, her hair let down in waves. I could hear her conversing with the Jackal through her commslink, checking on progress from some secondary safehouse. She was standing with Sokolav in front of an incongruous spherical box on a tripod, interlocked with whirring black gears and crawling with internal machinery. Twisted streams of cables erupted out of the device like pythons, plugged into a mass of stormtech canisters. The device was all hard, alien edges and I knew, without knowing how, that Jae was using it to contact the Shenoi.

  Artyom was standing next to her.

  My hands tightened into fists. I should have hated him. The stormtech wanted me to hurt him for the web of lies he’d spun. The grief he’d caused all of us. It wanted me to kill him along with everyone else.

  But I couldn’t do it. I was not my father.

  Artyom might be taller and wider than Jae, but she dwarfed him and everyone else in the room with her presence. I gripped my handcannon hard enough to break it. One shot. That’s all it would take. All this could end right here, right now.

  I stepped forward. Then I remembered who wasn’t there.

  Hideko’s electropole jabbed into my side. My muscles seized up. I tried to fight back but the electrocution came again, the voltage twice as high. My legs lost interest in holding me up and I toppled with a loud thud, my handcannon skidding out of reach.

  Everyone snapped around at once. A splinter of a smile appeared on Jae’s stony visage, as if she’d expected nothing less. ‘And the dog returns to his master.’ She was like the mountain ranges I’d grown up around: gentle from a distance, but vast and full of unknown depths and edges that could shred you to pieces.

  ‘Vak?’ Artyom was just staring at me. Sokolav’s mouth was set in a grim line; as if angry I hadn’t escaped when I could.

  ‘Who else?’ snapped Jae as two men in armour dragged my limp body towards the centre of the room. They forced me to my knees, one locking my arms behind me so tightly my shoulders ground in their sockets. Hideko smiled at the sight of me in pain. The other guard stripped me of my palmerlog and slingshiv.

  A sea of emotions spilled across my brother’s face. ‘Hey,’ I choked out to him. ‘How’s things?’

  ‘I told you to stay away,’ he said. ‘Why couldn’t you listen?’

  ‘Because he’s a fool, like all his kind,’ Jae said. ‘What did you think you could do in here, Fukasawa? Take on the whole of the House of Suns by yourself? You can’t hold back an avalanche with a broom.’ She gestured at the flexiscreens. ‘Have a good, long look. This is only temporary, you know that. We’ll step in with the cure, fix what Harmony could not. There will be blood. They’ll fall as we show the world the truth.’

  Hideko and her guards murmured a slow, eerie chant of agreement.

  ‘You think you’re getting away with any of this? We are coming for you.’ I nodded towards the flexiscreens showing Harmony fireteams clawing their way through the hallways. I twisted my face into a wolfish grin. ‘What, you Harvesters losing to Harmony once wasn’t enough?’

  ‘“We”,’ Jae mocked as she cupped my jaw. ‘You really believe that Harmony is on your side.’ Another knife of a smile. ‘You tiny, tiny thing. Harmony is not your friend. They are no one’s friend. They let you bloody your hands for them. And for what? Revenge? They’re a parasite. They destroy everything they touch. They’re not coming to save you.’ She pitied me. She actually pitied me. ‘You’re alone, Vakov. You’ve been alone from the day you became a Reaper.’

  But she was wrong.

  There were people who’d fight with me, die with me. My new fireteam, walking into hell with me to do right by others. The Kaiji who thought Harmony deserved a second chance. Grim, who’d stuck with me even when I’d almost driven him away. And Katherine. Who treated her men like family, who’d seen past the blue parasite twitching through my body, to the person she wanted me to become. All of them fighting towards me even now.

  Most of the Reapers who’d fought with me in the war were gone. But their spirit, their courage and sacrifice had remained with me, remained in others, and always would. Jae and her people only understood blind devotion, a faux-unity that stemmed from hatred and a desire to cause harm.

  ‘You’re not just a walking disease, Jae. You’re not just an untidy afterbirth. You’re stupid. And you’ll never understand what we have.’ The stormtech was boiling like thunderclouds in my chest, swaddling me in an unnatural cloak of heat. My lips peeled back from my bared teeth as I swung up to look at her. ‘I can’t wait to watch Harmony nuke you and your psycho cult from orbit until you glow.’

  Jae didn’t flinch. Instead she gave a laconic smile and leaned in to whisper, ‘You won’t get the chance.’

  ‘If you were going to kill me, you’d have done it already.’

  Jae looked surprised. ‘Oh, you’re not going to die. Not for a very, very long time. I’m told you’re very familiar with the torture rooms that Harvest used in the war. I don’t think you spent nearly enough time in there. We’ll prepare another one. I hope you got a good look at our stormtech experiments on the station, because you’re going to get very familiar with them. How long do you think you’ll hold out in there? Three months? A year? More?’ She smoothed my hair back, gently. ‘Maybe we’ll hunt down a few of these friends of yours and put their severed heads in there with you for company.’

  Hideko jabbed the pole between my shoulder blades. I was sent writhing and spasming on the cold floor again before being jerked back to my knees. Artyom’s breathing seemed to get a little tighter. A sudden cold wetness stabbed down into my neck. An immobilising agent. Numbness spread through my limbs, turning them to stone. Within seconds I was limp.

  The floor rocked beneath me. Harmony, desperately trying to carve a way inside.

  ‘Should we take him now?’ one of the men suggested, kicking me until I rolled onto my back. Crooked yellow teeth gleamed behind a veil of scruffy dark hair that came down to his shoulders. ‘Get him tied up on a ship in the meantime. They’ll never find him that way.’

  ‘No. Let him see Harmony fall. Pack up what we need and get it to the next base, those dogs might be here soon. They will not get their hands on the databanks.’ Jae gave me another smile. ‘We have cells and data storages scattered all around Compass, slowly growing into the roots. We’re here to stay, Vakov.’

  ‘Don’t you need someone to protect you against him?’ he asked.

  Artyom raised my arm, limp and heavy with paralysis. ‘He’s not going anywhere.’

  The two armoured cultists exchanged a bow, hands clasped into fists. There was a chainship parked nearby, next to an old-fashioned airlock. They began loading most of the canisters and databanks into the chainship’s open hatch. Jae turned to Sokolav, laying a hand on his arm. He reached back to touch her, his features mellowing into the brave and loyal man I’d once known. Bile rose in my throat. So that was the nature of their relationship. Sokolav’s fingers tightened in Jae’s hand before the two drifted apart. He tilted his head to deal me a long, resolute look before sealing his spherical spacesuit helmet and following the cultists into the chainship. My hands shook and I tried to squirm into a sitting position. Nothing. Even if Harmony did get in here, the Suns would slither away with all their research and equipment and continue on somewhere else.

  I locked sights with my brother. Pleading for him to do something, anything. He glanced away.

  ‘You actually thought your brother was going to help you.’ Jae slipped to his side, hand on his shoulder. My teeth clenched hard enough to crack. ‘Artyom has been fully committed to our cause since we became his family, one which wouldn’t abandon him. You took a
beating and ran away to war. He stayed and faced your father. And now, he’s standing up to the evil of Harmony as you never could.’

  And the thing was: she was right. My brother was standing with this little snake because I’d run like a coward and let the wolves of the world tear him apart. We were here because I’d failed him.

  Yells. Gunfire rumbling through the stone.

  On a flexiscreen, a highrise disappeared in a fiery explosion. Dust poured out the broken windows like streams of smoky tears, the hot ruins shedding fire and rubble onto the crowded streets as they collapsed with a great shuddering roar, screams ringing through the speakers.

  The chainship winked to life. Ungluing from its berth, the cycling chamber irised open to allow them access to open space, where they’d continue to spread the House of Suns’ poison and lies to outposts and stations and habitats all across the Common.

  I’d failed.

  I almost looked away. A white-hot streak jerked my attention back. A guided Anti-Hull micro-missile, programmed by Juvens to target any unidentified ships making a sneaky getaway. Jae’s head snapped around as the missile rammed into the chainship. The hull crumbled like paper as it exploded. Chunks of debris showered outwards, bleeding liquids into space. Sudden streamlined bursts of red plasma fire zapped out from the alien gunship, vaporising whatever was left of the ship and everything inside it.

  ‘No,’ Jae gasped, stepping backwards as she watched the man she loved turned to atoms and ash, spilling out into space.