Another hour of crawling through the darkness before I reached my waypoint. Ten metres below was a walkway leading to a door, haloed with a purple-blue outline. Using a beam as a fulcrum, I flicked on stealth mode, my body vanishing as I hopped down and approached carefully. I waited until a tubby woman came through, wheeling a gurney of box-shaped drones of Torven-design. I was directly in her line of sight but her gaze skimmed over me as she waddled by. I grinned behind my stealthskin. One gold star to Sector Prone.
I sliced past and found myself in a darkened hallway. Dull light glared across serried rows of Torven, Bulkava and Rhivik artefacts. Racked up behind chainglass were alien flora, wildlife, history, virtual models of their homeworlds, texts, weapons, gossamer fabrics, suits and armour, and other fragments of their technology and culture.
‘I’m in!’ I told Kowalski and Grim over the commslink.
‘Good work,’ Kowalski said. ‘It’s closed, but that doesn’t mean no one’s around. Keep us updated.’
I drew on the stormtech. My senses expanded in widening waves until I could hear anything around me. Feet slapping on the pavement outside. Autovehicles slamming by, the vibration echoing up through the walls like sonar. Foosteps and muffled voices in the immediate vicinity. I focused. Drawing tighter. Downstairs. Maybe two storeys down. I detected nothing from the next-door Academy.
It was like listening in for Harvest enemies on the battlefield all over again.
My ocular vision also allowed me to see the floors were crisscrossed with invisible tripwires and pressure pads. Not a problem. I pressed my hands to the tiled walls, feeling the hard suction against my fingers. I don’t know how much I weigh, but I’m a big guy, and I doubted these little sticky paws would do any good. But I seemed light as a monomolecular blade as I scaled upwards, going hand over hand. I found myself grinning as I climbed diagonally across the walls, my hands and feet making little sucking noises. I felt like a high-tech animal, wrapped in killer gear light years ahead of the competition. I crawled above the lasers and ghosted past cams and security equipment, sticking upside-down to the ceiling and inching into a room dedicated to alien biology. Skeletons of aliens in various stages of growth, reconstructed with nanofilaments, grinned at me in the pale light. My harness groaned as I grappled around a stone pillar, the buckles tinkling.
The golden glow of subsurface powerlines in my oculars pointed towards the central office. I crawled past podiums for smaller species and incomplete collections donated by visiting aliens hoping to make their mark on Compass. Past artefacts unearthed from archaeological digs, belonging to civilisations yet to be named or discovered. I slipped through a cable duct and dropped silently into the ventricle of the xenomuseum office. It was a high-tech utility hub, the size of a small cruiser-liner cabin, and it was a mess. Gunmetal servers and hard drives were squeezed in countless rows and plugged into a smear of flexiscreens, guts of wiring and coolant tubing spilling out. Lurid red and aquamarine lights winked at me in the gloom. Even in my suit, the heat was unbearable. The projection of an unending virtual world, crammed into this tiny physical space, was complete.
I moved to get to work when I stopped. Sniffed. An excited glow spread through my body, the stormtech rocketing through me in feverish bursts. Even breathing through the suit fabric, the sickly-sweet smell was unmistakable. Like a dog, I followed the scent to some discarded crates. Nothing out of the ordinary, given how much of a wreck the room was, but I began sweating, my hands and feet going clammy. The crates were solid moonrock. You could unload a whole magazine of tungsten rounds into that and barely dent the surface. One whiff of the nearest crate and the earthy, mineral tang knocked me right back to Montenegro’s little stashroom. I ran an invisible finger down the sides of another box and sniffed. My stomach muscles cramped. Stormtech. They’d used these boxes to transport stormtech.
‘We’ve found it, guys,’ I whispered. I was shaking. Whether with anticipation or fear I couldn’t tell. I flipped the crate over and read out the serial number stencilled on the bottom.
Grim punched the number into his search engines. ‘If these passed through any spaceport or dock, we’ll have a register,’ Kowalski said over the metallic pattering of keystrokes.
‘Got it,’ Grim said in triumph.
My hands tightened around the chest straps of my harness. ‘What’s the story, Grim?’
‘These crates came through the Hovergardens. Spaceport 27B, Hangar Bay 1,’ Grim said breezily. ‘Now, all we gotta do is narrow down the timestamp, find the itinerary, and we’ll have the ship’s manifest, which stations it’s stopped at, and who owns it. Smooth sailing from here, guys.’
‘That can’t be right,’ I heard Kowalski mutter.
My hands wrapped harder around the harness. ‘What is it?’
‘There’s no spaceport in the Hovergardens,’ Kowalski said. The defeat was already evident in her voice. ‘They’ve played us.’
I resisted the sudden urge to take my handcannon out and start laying into the cranking mesh of servers around me. I slumped into a seat, my teeth gritted. ‘Another dead end.’
‘Hold your horses,’ Grim cautioned. Something in his voice supercooled my rage. ‘We discovered earlier that the Suns were using Crimson Star Industries as a front, yeah?’
‘The compound they used as their old hideout in the Warren?’ I leaned forward in my seat, stitching the threads of logic together. ‘You mean—’
‘The spaceport must be there,’ Kowalski cut in. I could imagine her and Grim glancing at each other over the blinking web of data. ‘That’s how they’ve been shipping stormtech to Compass. Through their private little spaceport.’
‘A spaceport you don’t know about?’ Grim asked, incredulously.
‘Compass is a big place, Grim. Some spaceports get mothballed over the years, retrofitted or
