My target owned Venue 291A, deep in the floor. Although we didn’t have an image, the collective description from the three Harmony operatives had been assembled into a computer-generated impression. The name Ramsey Montenegro floated above a thin man with a faintly avian face, dark hair sculpted into a permanent wave that never crashed, sideburns razored into sharp, jagged edges.
I closed the image down as I eased my way through the crowded boulevard. With the stormtech twitching up a glowing hurricane through my underskin, I felt every third pair of eyes darting my way. As if reminding me I didn’t belong here. I walked past a series of spacious first-class lounges and cheery outdoor restaurants, past people queuing to board an interplanetary cruiser-liner, before entering a shopping centre with a design that echoed back to some art-deco aesthetic, updated for the space-era. The walls were a polished brown wood that shifted like water when I approached. The parquet flooring was covered with a velvety red carpet, perforated with asteroid fragments the size of a child. They were carved into conical and cubical shapes, pyrite and sphalerite gleaming under their rocky flesh, gently glowing readouts detailing their mineral compositions and which star systems they’d been harvested from. Marbled columns veined with gold swept upwards to higher floors, where customers in fancy coffeehouses and classical bars sat on balconies overlooking shoppers zigzagging between boutique outfitters and designer shops, spending someone else’s yearly wage on a single purchase. There were no price tags on anything, of course. I guess if you had to ask, you couldn’t afford it.
The place looked fancy. But like anything pristine, had a dark history. The floor had been hit by a protest against Harvest refugees a few years back. Researching the event detailed images of the bloodstained floors, the walls pockmarked with bullet-holes, as well as listing the armouries selling the weapons that had fired them. A few years later, this is what we had.
I ticked off the shop numbers I passed, banks, medclinics offering limb extensions and biomechanical surgery, retailers selling all variety of spacecrafts. Head offices for interstellar companies. One look at how deep the drug-trade industry went on Compass and you were kidding yourself if you thought stormdealers didn’t have links to the highest echelons of legitimate businesses. Companies that held Compass together economically by trading billions of Commoners through their infrastructure every day, using their connections to reroute and distribute stormtech through the asteroid, fronting the proceeds through their many sub-channels.
How the hell do you dig something like that out?
Once, I could have sworn there wasn’t a hope in hell of causing so much as a dent in the drug-trafficking business. But seeing Kowalski at work, making headway with all her fury had altered my opinion. She was genuine. She cared. And that’s not something you can fabricate, you’d see through it like a thermal scanner. I found I believed, if anyone could make a difference, if there was anyone determined enough to hold back the spread of stormtech, it was her. She’d only needed to look at her own family to see how much damage it could do. Which meant she knew how much damage it could do to me.
I glanced down at my own stormtech, inching up my ribs like dozens of little hands, using my bones as ladders. Living with stormtech isn’t hard because of what it does to you. It’s because of what it makes you do to the people you care about. The look on Grim’s face in the Pits, in the apartment when I clutched the scattershot trigger, burned behind my eyelids. Thinking about what situation my body would throw me into next scared me more than I wanted to admit. I’d never liked subscribing to the theory that stormtech nurtures aggression. That those animalistic tendencies are buried inside each of us and the drug allows them to grow. It would mean most humans are natural born sociopathic killers, only held in check by social conventions. But the more I enjoyed the sensation of power flooding through my muscles and brain, I wondered. No matter how many people spoke out against stormtech, no matter how many rehab centres popped up, no matter how many tortured, damaged bodies dropped dead, people still flocked towards it. If the countless civilisations had walked the same self-destructive path, perhaps our own was inevitable.
That didn’t matter. But I was going to keep fighting this, keep looking for ways to cope with what was inside me. To keep trying to do better.
Because at the end of the day, that’s really all you can ask of someone.
I told myself all this, so I knew exactly what I was going to do with our stormdealer.
32
The Ratking
Venue 291A was one of those shops that reeks of money. Small readout touchscreens. Walls and floors polished to a headache-inducing sheen. A few display cabinets, holding indeterminate pieces of tech so small and innocuous you knew they had to be something special and obscenely expensive.
When it wasn’t dealing alien drugs for a sadistic cult, the shop appeared to be selling neural-laces. A bleeding edge, experimental tech allowing users to share sensory experiences, like
