Grim nodded. Despite the warm room, I felt a chill clamping around my blood and bones like rust, and only partly because of Jae. My body temperature had been spiking into either extremity over the past few days. With the stormtech beaming through my body, there was no secret as to why. I quietly wished I could hide in the dark, tight, isolating embrace of my armour.
‘Whether it’s her or not,’ Katherine was saying from a million miles away, ‘we’ve already prioritised stopping the next attack. We’ve got a strike team looking into it, but maybe we can find something here.’
I got Grim doing an initial quick search in the hopes there was something surface level he could find in a matter of minutes. As he did, Katherine turned to me. ‘You okay, Vak?’ She felt along my shoulder and the back of my neck. ‘You’re burning up.’
‘I’m fine,’ I lied. But her touching me had broken through the webs of stormtech cocooning around my body and mind. Just a little, but enough.
‘No, no you’re not. You need to look after yourself.’
Ropes of blue saliva drooling from my mouth. Glowing flecks in the phlegm. ‘I told you, I’m fine.’
Katherine locked sights with me as she slowly stood. ‘Vak, you level with me, or I’ll do this on my own. I can’t work with you if you can’t give me a straight answer. Do you understand?’
I rolled my shoulders and exhaled, huskily. ‘It feels like my organs are getting chewed up,’ I told her. ‘But it doesn’t hurt. It’s almost the opposite.’ I clamped a hand against my ribs and watched the stormtech flare up like forks of lightning through sky-obscuring clouds. ‘It’s solidifying inside me. Working deeper and deeper until I can’t tell the difference between it and my body anymore. I’m fighting it with everything I’ve got, Katherine. But it’s not enough. It’s never enough.’
Katherine sat back down again next to me. ‘Okay. That’s how we do things, Vakov. We talk about it. It’s the only way this can work.’
‘I don’t know what it’ll do to you.’ I had to fishhook each word from my gut. ‘This stuff … it’s a time bomb. I don’t want it to hurt you.’
Katherine’s expression changed. ‘Don’t give me that. Don’t play the victim card so you can push me away. If you don’t think we can make this work between us, fine. I’ll walk. But don’t tell me I’m not strong enough to see this through with you. It doesn’t work that way. Understand?’
I formed a dozen responses, all of them catching in my throat. Our breathing seemed to be the only sound in this place. Then, sliding my hand in her’s, I managed to say, ‘I don’t want you to go. I just … I don’t want you to see me that way.’ Blue throbbed along my knuckles and I knew she could feel it, too, pulsing and pushing against her skin. ‘I care about you, Katherine. I do. And I don’t want you to see what happens to me if the stormtech wins.’
‘We won’t let it win,’ she said. ‘We’ll fight it together, Vakov. I promise. I don’t care how long we have to look, we’ll find a way.’
I could only nod, my throat raw and filled with things I didn’t know how to say, the words all tangled up in this mess.
Grim broke away from his search and enhanced a datasheet for me to see. ‘Vak, look at this endnote. “Target young adult males, those in high-stress roles, Reapers, and if possible, aliens. The more of those scum we pick off Compass the better”.’
‘They’re trying to spread it to aliens?’ I asked. ‘The House of Suns hate aliens?’
‘You think it’s as simple as that?’ Katherine asked.
‘“Picking the scum off Compass” doesn’t strike me as terribly peaceful.’
‘They’re one of those pro-human groups, then. There’s been an uptick in them, lately.’
‘Yeah, but they are an alien-worshipping cult,’ Grim butted in. ‘Hating other aliens doesn’t make sense.’
Kowalski cracked a weak smile. ‘They’re extremists, Grim. Let’s hazard a guess and say they’re not operating on sense.’
‘In all their science texts and data-readings they’ve only mentioned Shenoi,’ I said. ‘No other aliens. And if the Shenoi were at war with other species, as the Kaiji said they were, it’s not far-fetched to imagine the House of Suns disliking the idea of aliens running businesses and occupying entire Compass floors, either. Especially not with the Rhivik talking about joining, too.’
‘There’ve been a few stormtech alien causalities,’ Kowalski said slowly.
Grim toggled some unseen mechanism. All the gathered datasheets whirled apart, then reassembled themselves into a three-dee visualisation of Compass. The schematic was spliced down the middle like a brain, showcasing the vast, intricate network of floors, levels, compartments, interior mechanisms and architecture, spread across hundreds of kilometres. ‘Oh man. And we’ve got this monster to search through,’ he said, rubbing his eyes with his knuckles. He craned his head towards me. ‘Out of all the people in the Common, why’d I have to make friends with you?’
Grim had tagged high-priority intel we’d already salvaged. Allowing for multiple dialects and interspecies spelling, we cross-matched it with hits matching the House of Suns’ frequency across Compass. It was a hell of a mess, trawling through dockyard waybills, spaceport manifestos, shipping routes. Anything that the Suns could be using to disguise themselves. The comment about hating aliens prompted us to check rare interactions between rival species that got the Alien Embassy raising red flags. Maybe some new spacefaring species had been labelled as a potential threat, and the Suns could pin them with their next terrorist attack. It’d be just like them to use a third party as a scapegoat. But trawling through the endless transmissions and trade-requests made by various alien species got us nothing.
‘The House of Suns is spreading fatal stormtech to seed fear and turn people
