Harvesters had been there, all right. They’d meticulously gathered up every piece of artwork in the gallery and destroyed it. Paintings, sculptures, artefacts, memorials, transcripts. Spacesuits, hull-pieces, machinery models, orbital data, spaceflight records, terraforming intel. Anything pertaining to the establishment of the colony, its position within the greater Common universe, or the people who’d settled it: dragged into the vestibule and torched.
They didn’t steal a single thing.
Just destroyed it.
‘Bastards, aren’t they?’ Myra had said, her voice echoing among the shredded ruins of half-burnt tapestries. The stink of smoke was ripe in the air, the tiles stained soot-black. ‘If they can’t have it, no one can.’
‘That’s not it,’ Alcatraz countered. His armour plates grinding as he gathered ash up in his gloved hand and watched it bleed through his fingers like black snow. ‘It’s about erasure from history. Wiping out everything about the people that discovered, established, and built this colony. It’s not enough to take this planet. They want to clean the slate.’
‘That’s crazy,’ Cable muttered.
‘That’s how Harvest wins. Not by taking their enemy’s planet. By pretending they never existed on it at all.’ Alcatraz gestured towards the forlorn museum. ‘Culture is the heart of any society. So they go for the heart.’
Now, years later, on the other side of the galaxy, I was facing a very different enemy. Yet it was one with the same tenacity. The same ruthless determination burning in their eyes, going for the heart.
This whole bloody time, it was staring at us, point-blank in the face. I don’t know how we didn’t see it.
I bolted up, startling Grim, powering up the flexiscreen. My heart thudded in my chest as I crawled past the streams of data towards the place I suspected was their true target. I matched their data with the Suns’ traffic circulating the location, eager to see how much time and activity our cultists had spent in this location. If I was right, we’d have our next target.
I was.
The traffic was higher than any other venue on Compass by a mile. The Suns had been obsessed with this place. Wasn’t a stretch of the imagination to understand why.
I didn’t waste any time contacting Kowalski. ‘Seriously?’ Kowalski slurred, her eyes bleary, ‘You boys couldn’t let me have five hours sleep?’
‘I know what their next target is,’ I said.
In the cam’s reflection I could see the blue thrumming across my stomach with excitement. Kowalski fought back a yawn. ‘Where?’
‘That file, telling the stormdealer to sell to as many aliens as possible,’ I said. ‘They hate other species. Hell, it’s probably in their teachings. In a way they’re continuing the Shenoi’s war against them. So they’re going to attack the place most precious to them, the symbol of integration: the xenomuseum.’
35
Denial
I don’t think Kowalski believed me. Not at first. ‘And you’re sure about this?’ she asked. Grim planted himself beside me, only half conscious.
I shot over the traffic data to Kowalski. ‘Something tells me they’re not looking into the xenomuseum to donate funding,’ I said. ‘If they really hate the aliens as much as they say, an archive to their achievements, history and culture will be their next target.’
Kowalski assessed the evidence I’d provided, slowly joining the dots as I had. She pulled on a stretch top. ‘All right, Vakov. We’re out in five.’
I’d have been lying if I said I felt comfortable around the Sub Zeros at the best of times. But gathered in this confined office space together, standing abreast like we were in a line-up, I couldn’t help but shift on the balls of my feet, gloved fingers twisting and turning behind my back. I was glad my mirrored visor concealed my face. I had to keep reminding myself that these beasts in their rock-like armour were on my side.
Which meant I was on theirs.
Kowalski had called Hillyn Joreth, the xenomuseum’s director, to arrange a meeting. I shouldn’t have been surprised to see a Torven running a museum of alien artefacts, but I was. The alien’s skin was the colour of earthy red clay, his slender face gaunt and cynical in a way that bizarrely reminded me of Kindosh. He wore a dark, high-collared suit that was constantly rippling and snapping in an unseen breeze. What might have been blue ancestral tattoos crawled up his wrist in thin curlicues. He was sitting across from Kowalski and Saren behind a featureless black desk, hands folded in an eerily human-like manner while the rest of us stood around them like a crescent wall of armour. What were presumably Torven artefacts were piled up in great sweeping shelves around him. Joreth’s secretaries and guards were all pretending not to listen as they catalogued submissions and inspected the archives.
‘And what did you say your evidence was again?’ Joreth had a way of making everything you said sound suspicious and ridiculous, just by quoting it. He leaned back in his highbacked chair, seemingly built for alien bone structure and ergonomics.
Katherine leaned forward. ‘One of our research analysts found a pattern of chatter indicating your museum was the next most likely target of a terrorist attack.’ I raised an eyebrow behind my visor. Research analyst, really? Grim, hooked on the other end of the commslink despite my protests, sniggered loudly.
‘Given the scale of the threat, we have to take this seriously.’
‘And why would anyone want to blow up a museum of artefacts?’ Joreth demanded, with an air of presumptuous amusement only people in power can wield. ‘We survive purely on our very generous donations from the community. The Cultural Centre books out a month in advance, the simulation in three. Visitors of all species make long journeys to Compass just to see it.’
‘The threat is genuine and tagged as high-priority.’
Joreth narrowed his eyes. ‘And you’re sure of this?’
‘We wouldn’t be here if we weren’t.’
‘Very well. What do you propose to do?’
‘We’d sweep this part of
