It took me less than a minute of rifling through the cabinets to dig them out.
Plastic explosives. Alcoholic fluid. Reactive powder used in mineral mining. A glass jar of nanonites –metallic balls you could resize to be microscopic, or large as a marble. Medclinics printed them up, filled them with medjel, osteopathics and antibiotics and shot them into patients to target specific areas of the body. Something told me the House of Suns weren’t investing in medical technology.
This was the sort of gear you used when you wanted to blow something up. Like a building. Fill the nanonites with an explosive mixture, eject them into the pipes and cable ducts of a building and detonate remotely.
I shook the nanonite jar. ‘You were helping prepare for the next terrorist attack, weren’t you?’
Montenegro said nothing. I asked again. No response. If the Suns were collaborating with stormdealer syndicates, throwing us off their scent, they’d be doing the same with anything related to terrorism, which would be an even higher risk.
‘What’s the attack site?’ I asked. Montenegro’s scoff vanished as I clenched my hand around his shattered kneecap. He jerked back, his eyes watering in confusion and shock. Pain was unfamiliar to him in his little world of espressos and temperature-regulated offices. He’d never fought tooth and claw for scraps in the back alleys of Changhao. Didn’t care about the rundown families and child foot soldiers living in stormdealer-controlled neighbourhoods. Barely even heard of the Warren where skinnies with broken bodies shivered and twitched in the freezing darkness. None of the pain and addiction he spread ever touched him. It was totally alien.
It seemed prudent to relieve him of his ignorance.
I squeezed harder. The background pulse throbbed louder and louder, shuddering up through my skeleton so hard I half-expected to hear my joints popping loose. My chest was heaving, my skin plastered with sticky sweat. ‘I’m not hearing an answer,’ I growled.
‘Vak,’ Grim warned over my commslink.
‘What?’ I asked. My breathing heavy, slurred.
‘Ease up, man. I don’t like this.’
‘He knows something,’ I told Grim, my hand still clamped around the Ratking’s knee. ‘If we don’t dig it out of him, thousands more are going to die.’
Grim had nothing to say to that. The Ratking mistook my hesitation for indecision, defiance building up in his expression. I gritted my teeth, squeezing hard enough to hear the broken bones grind and crunch together. I didn’t even realise I’d done it. ‘I don’t know!’ Montenegro screamed.
I drew my face close to his. He recoiled but couldn’t squirm away. ‘I think someone like the Ratking leaves nothing to chance. I think you prepare everything down to the finest detail.’ I stabbed his implant with a finger. ‘How about you tell me before I open you up and take a look?’
‘I don’t know!’ Montenegro’s eyes rolled to the implant. ‘They wire instructions over to me. I only get the time and location a few hours before they’re ready to go. The message is biometrically encoded to me. Disappears shortly afterwards. I’d tell you if I knew, I swear.’
Was the data actually locked into him? I removed my hand from his shattered knee. ‘And you have no idea when the next attack is coming?’ I asked. I had no logical reason to hit him. But the stormtech wanted me to, dearly. And keep hitting until I heard things crack and go soft.
If he was wondering why a stormdealer gave a toss about terrorist attacks, he didn’t say so. Better to have him confused. ‘No. I sit tight until I get the order.’
If this was true, we were screwed. I growled again. Every time we took a step, they were three ahead. Every thread, every investigation, every lead left us further behind. They were manipulating us like a Harvest war tactician. While Reapers continued going insane and Bluing Out and the drug-trafficking market continued to build it’s empire on the broken, addicted bodies of Compass citizens.
Unless I did something.
I spun Montenegro’s chair around and held up a primed razornade between us. ‘You’re going to start talking. If I decide you’re lying, you and your revolting skinroom here end up as sausage meat. Understand?’
‘You’re crazy,’ he spluttered, eyes big as moons.
‘Worse,’ I said. ‘I’m a Reaper.’
‘You’d never do it.’
I glanced at the beeping device clenched in my hand. Would I? ‘How often did you get a stormtech delivery from the House of Suns?’ I asked.
‘I’m the main distributor on this floor,’ he said, his voice slurred and rushed. ‘I took deliveries as often as I could.’
‘Did you have a quota?’
‘What?’
‘I know the way you people work. What was your daily sales quota?’
‘Twenty-five sales a day.’
Twenty-five. Twenty-five people, every day, with stormtech fusing with their organs, their skin, their brains. Twenty-five people who could wind up become Blued-Up killers, crippled in mind and body. And Montenegro here was one of hundreds, maybe thousands of stormdealers.
‘How many doses were altered to kill?’ I forced the words out through my growing horror.
‘How did you know about that?’ He spluttered. I thrust the razornade in his face. ‘No, not all. Only a very few, for specific people.’
‘They told you who,’ I managed. A quick nod. ‘Open your databanks for me. Now.’
‘They’ll kill me,’ Montenegro whispered. ‘You have no idea what these people can do.’
I dropped my hand against his shattered kneecap. ‘Let’s compare, see who’s got the darker imagination.’
The guilt welled inside me and I just as quickly shoved it back down. I thought about the families, couples, brothers, who’d been torn apart by this evil. I thought about the girl who’d stabbed her roommate to death for another quick fix. If I looked at the nearest newsfeed, no doubt I’d hear about a skinnie Bluing Out in their sleep, a parent who’d traded their children’s livelihood for one more hit, some Academy student who’d dropped out rather than get help. Reapers who’d survived an interstellar war going insane on the streets, murdering the very people they’d fought to protect, before
