My senses had been sharpening ever since the arena fight, but now everything was turned up to eleven. Every clatter, shout, smell, gust of air was a micro-assault on my body. Too much for my mind to compartmentalise.
I slipped back into my armour, reassured by the solid, hard surface of the suit. The familiar tightness clamped hard over my back, my shoulders, locking around my thighs and legs, the balancing chemicals releasing. The tendrils squirmed and pulsed against my flesh, in my armpits, under the soles of my feet, combating the stormtech writhing inside my inner flesh. I breathed out in slow, controlled bursts, letting my muscles loosen. My body temperature dialed back down. The smell wafting out of me began to lose its potency.
But I still didn’t dare remove the armour, still keeping a careful gauge on my body as Grim and I hurried back to the abandoned House of Suns compound in the war-torn Latin Quarter. Standing on the concourse where I’d been held at gunpoint started to dredge the memories back, my body stirring up with it. Not helping.
Kowalski was waiting for us inside.
‘It could still be a dead end,’ I said as we headed down the halls.
‘Don’t give them too much credit,’ Kowalski said as I removed my helmet. ‘We’re going to tear the place apart.’
I wasn’t so sure what we’d find this time around, given we’d failed on the first try. And then I remembered our simple, singular addition.
We had Grim.
We parked him in the server room, doing his Deep Dive. He was barely ten seconds in before he resurfaced with a result. ‘It was buried deep in the mainframe metadata,’ Grim told us, smearing the dust off his hands and across the thighs of his skeleton underskin. ‘They totally erased any traces of its existence, but forgot to erase any traces of them erasing it. Amateur move.’
Katherine shook her head. ‘Our people spent weeks trawling through the mainframe.’
I stepped towards him. ‘Grim, what did you find?’
As if in answer, we heard unseen mechanisms squirming beneath our feet and echoing somewhere deep in the compound. Grim sliced between us, following the sound with a childish eagerness. ‘If you good people will follow me …’
He led us to some mothballed storage unit on the edge of the compound in time to see an impenetrable-looking wall irising backwards. Layer upon layer of armoured latticework, vacuum-approved barricades, and firearm-absorbing barriers peeled back with echoing steel clangs, like layers of metallic fruit, finally revealing a spiralling corridor. Looking at each other, we walked through a cold access tunnel until we faced an armoured door. White block letters gleamed on silver chainmetal.
Spaceport 27B, Hangar Bay 1.
Unholstering our weapons, we glanced at each other and entered. We were standing in the smallest spaceport on Compass; so small it resembled a rudimentary docking bay. One landing pad, one control central office, one row of docking berths, crudely carved out of asteroid rock.
And sitting in the middle of the landing pad was the chainship we were hunting.
Kowalski clutching at my arm. ‘We did it, boys,’ she said as she turned to plant a kiss on my cheek. ‘You did it, Vak.’ She turned down to Grim, patting him on the shoulder. ‘You too, Grim. Both of you got us here.’
Colour had returned to Katherine’s cheeks. Seeing her so happy made me happy, enough to forget, just for a moment, all about the alien strings sawing up and down my guts.
Kowalski gave me another slap on the back before reviewing the sleek, charcoal-coloured chainship. ‘Turret-class spacecraft. Older model, by the looks of it.’ She gestured at me. ‘We’ll need to secure the area. If we pull the mainframe, the metadata will pinpoint the—’
‘Wait.’ I held up a hand. ‘Do you hear that?’
Kowalski and Grim just stared. ‘Hear what?’
Hear the slow clanking and whirling of machinery warming to life. Hear the dull whine of life-support systems and readouts switching on. Hear the chainship readying for departure.
Our one and only lead was preparing to fly away.
One step forward, three steps back.
I was running before I even realised I’d started moving, helmet folding over my face. I was focused completely on the side hatch that was slowly closing as the chainship lifted off gently on her dampers. I hurled myself inside, pulling my leg through as the hatch hissed shut. ‘Vak, don’t!’ Kowalski shouted down my commslink.
‘If they get away we’ll never find them again,’ I said, lying flat on my back in the darkness. ‘I’ll signal you as soon as I can. I—’
But my transmission abruptly cut off. The chainship gathering speed and velocity as we shuttled out into the deep blackness of open space.
40
Dark Stars
Why did I do that?
I turned the question over in my mind half a hundred times as I lay in the cramped, dark confines. Hard to really break anything down to easy logic when your hormones are fired up and you’re running hot on rage. Could have been I was sick of sitting on my arse and watching the Suns run rings around us. Could be the stormtech had given me that little shove forward and I’d taken myself the rest of the way.
Or, it could be I was done with being the hunted. And now, I was the hunter.
I was waiting for the bone-shuddering rumble that would indicate we were entering warpspace. It never came. A Turret-class chainship this small and battered probably wasn’t even outfitted with a warpdrive. Couldn’t be flying anywhere far beyond the local system, then. Didn’t eliminate much, but at least we weren’t firing off into deepspace. I don’t know how long I waited before
