Montenegro’s face moulded into a rictus of ironclad resolve. I froze. I knew that look all too well. ‘You’re right about the first part,’ he said, his swollen eye darting between me and Kowalski. He’d figured out who we really were, and knew there was no coming back from it. ‘But you two maggots aren’t getting a damn thing from me.’
‘Don’t!’ I yelled. But it was already done. Montenegro’s body jerked forward, head snapping backwards, limbs twitching as if suddenly electrocuted. His implant stuttered with lights, his eyes going glassy. His face twisted into a fierce snarl, saliva and blood trickling out of his mouth.
He’d activated the suicide trigger.
‘Grim!’ I yelled, unable to tear my eyes away from the horrific sight. Around us, the walls and floors spasmed like a dying animal, the fibres in the walls palpitating. The pulse boomed at such a high-pitch I could feel the soundwaves ticking up the back of my skull, trying to crack it open like a walnut. Kowalski was yelling for backup that would arrive centuries too late.
‘He’s triggered an alert,’ Grim said. Montenegro slumped lifelessly in his chair, his legs giving out their last muscle spasms. ‘The Suns know we’re onto them. They’re probably shredding the databanks now. Tether him to it! It’s our only chance.’
But I was already snatching up the fibre-optic cable I’d spotted in the mainframe earlier. I jammed it into the dead man’s implant, the socket plugging in with a sucking noise. Violent streams of data twitched over the flexiscreens. Superimposed over them was a perverted approximation of rat’s face, nightmarish and cartoon-like in appearance. The matted fur half ripped back from its skull and dripping with glossy black wax, black eyes twitching back and forth, black jaws peeling back in a mocking laugh. Violent bursts of electricity crackled between its teeth. The skinroom’s secondary defence mechanism, the one Grim hadn’t disabled, was booting to life. Bars rattled down across each door, caging us in the room.
We were trapped inside the body of a dying man.
‘I’m salvaging what I can, but they’re eating it up fast,’ Grim said.
‘Go faster!’ I yelled. The optic cable writhed like a dying python, trying to rip itself free from Montenegro’s skull. Kowalski and I held onto the thrashing cable, shoving it deeper into its socket. The ribbed edge slicing into my fingers. Blood welled against the wire. The rat’s face curdled into a vicious, hungry snarl. The squirming fibres in the walls screeching as they stretched out towards us. There was a vicious tearing as the black walls swelled. As if there were hundreds of screaming, crawling monstrosities and machines trapped here, thrashing to break free and tear us apart. I caught a glimpse of a robotic claw, tipped with skin-shredding pincers, hauling itself out. The cable thrashed harder in our hands. We gritted our teeth, shoulder to shoulder, our bloodied fingers turning white. Montenegro’s body twitched around us with nightmarish spasms, arms and legs slamming against metal.
‘Got it!’ Grim yelled.
‘Now!’ I yelled. We let go of the cable simultaneously, throwing ourselves backwards and collapsing on top of each other. The cable thrashed back like a whip with a sharp crack, embedding itself in the mainframe, machinery shattering. The walls’ twitches slowed, the screams rapidly distorting and garbling, the rat’s snarling face being clawed away in vicious tearing strokes, as if someone were furiously scratching out a person’s face on a painting, before disappearing and the room dying down for good. Montenegro’s body slumped lifelessly with it.
The tension flooded from my body in one great, heaving rush. I managed to clap Kowalski on the back, unable to say anything coherent. She reached to touch my hand before helping me to my feet, breathing hard and meeting my eyes. I wanted to get the hell out of this room and never come back, but we couldn’t risk leaving until backup arrived.
I was almost afraid to ask Grim what he’d salvaged. Instead of telling me, he showed me. Sales figures, distribution channels, waybills routing all over Compass. The image of a chainship, sitting in a dry berth in an unidentifiable dock. The type you saw everyday around Compass.
Except I’d seen exactly that image in the stormtech factory and wasn’t about to dismiss it as a coincidence. Were they using chainships like this to transfer stormtech on and off the asteroid? If so, they were operating offworld, but within shipping range of Compass. Probably somewhere in the system.
The image had a sender. Jae Myouk-soon.
Jae.
The person who’d called me up in the Pits. The one in charge of this entire operation.
‘Anything on future terrorist attacks?’ I asked Grim.
‘The system’s totally clean,’ Grim said. ‘Nothing that even hints at it. They don’t even reference any attacks that already occurred.’
‘But we know there’s going to be another attack,’ Kowalski said.
‘You don’t think it’ll be the Harmony base, do you?’ I asked.
‘Not even they could punch through that level of security. I’ll get our departments to do a check anyway. But these attacks have been about public sabotage. Driving fear into the population and undermining Harmony. Attacking us would do the opposite. We’d become martyrs.’
Further discussion was halted by the arrival of Harmony SSC squads, spearheaded by Saren’s fireteam. I went to the corridor to meet them, the knots in my stomach unravelling as I stood in clean, lush hallways. That nightmare room with all its squirming technology had messed around in my head. Made me feel like I was never going to leave.
The SSC servicemen didn’t waste any time removing Montenegro’s corpse while others peeled apart the room’s internal organic machinery for answers they wouldn’t find in time. Gunrunners cordoned off the area. Salvaging footage captured by cams or drones. By now a crowd of shoppers were starting to congregate, rubbernecking with morbid curiosity at the shop’s front. Fasincated by the terrible, terrible things people do to each
