My hand tightened around my handcannon. Jae Myouk-soon would be here somewhere. Cut off the head, and the body withers and dies. She might be stinking rich and possess a fancy collection of weaponised bio-chemicals, but she’d bleed just like anyone else.
I allowed my body to guide me. Wherever the stormtech was, she’d be. I was walking through a hydroponics chamber when I heard heavy footsteps. I dived under a table just in time to see a series of armed and armoured figures enter the room, with two pairs of armed robots trotting behind them, the decking rattling with the echo of their metal feet. I didn’t like the look of the heavy assault rifles they were holding, so I stayed low and slipped through the nearest door.
The stormtech physically kicked inside me, like an impatient foetus, desperate to struggle free. Shaking it off, I took a set of backlit stairs up to a vantage point. A honeycombed network of polished laboratories sprawled in front of me, connected by sloping corridors and walkways. In the nearest sector was some sort of processing facility. Figures clad in thick protective suits handled stormtech canisters. Each chrome cylinder was scanned, checked, tagged and inserted through a series of churning machinery before being magnetically sealed in shipping crates. Statistics scrolled in gentle white text across the flexiscreens. Listing where the stormtech would be going on Compass, which stormdealers would be receiving it, how much it had sold for.
My teeth clenched hard enough to crack. Street drugs like grimwire and bluesmoke were typically processed in dingy dungeons and mouldy apartments that were thick with smoke and littered with dirty workstations. Stormtech had an entire station dedicated to it, as if that made the drug any less evil. It didn’t deserve this place.
The central area of the laboratories was the largest. Flexiscreens and panels covered the cavernous space like a ring of blue light. Streamlined superconductor cables were plugged into thick sockets, churning with energy. Towers of gleaming surgery equipment were built into outlines in the wall. Tubes as thick as my arm wired up into a vat with a flanged base, tangled with intricate pipework and tightly bound wiring, sprawled over the room like the multicoloured roots of an overgrown tree. I watched a scientist extract stormtech from the vat, blue surging into a hypodermic.
And meshed between the mass of machinery, like fleshy seeds buried within the core of mechanical fruit, were people. Some standing, some strapped to gurneys, some suspended in mid-air by harnesses. Each one filled with stormtech and surrounded by half a dozen suited scientists. In some it was in the infancy stages. In others, they looked like they’d been infected for months, maybe years. Most were twitching in their restraints. Low moans filled the room. Flexiscreens hoisted above each person measured their vitals in bright blue text.
Except … they were offering their arms and legs. Smiling as the white-clad scientists emptied stormtech hypodermics into them. They wanted to be here and be experimented on.
But the Suns were poisoning stormtech. Surely no one in their right mind would subject themselves to that level of self-mutilation. Unless the House of Suns weren’t poisoning this batch. And if they weren’t, they were doing the opposite. Enhancing it.
They wouldn’t be the first. Stormdealers all had xenochemists and biologists trying to bolster their product to provide more of a kick. The Suns were clearly no strangers to tweaking the stormtech in their favour. If these nutjobs had rigged up an entire space station to house their experiments, they were successful, and had people to show for it.
Still, these guys were a cult, not a military operation. Why did they need an army?
It turned out, not everyone was here willingly. I crept further along the lab, past prison cells and operating rooms containing little worlds of horrors. A man floated in a tank filled with squirming black machinery, cables erupting out of his flesh as the stormtech was funnelled in through a drip feed. A woman with jet-black hair was screaming, her body literally being torn apart, the stormtech ripping out of her like wet, blue stuffing. Four scientists quickly restrained her to a cot as she jerked and howled. More victims thrashed against their restraints, unable to do anything as cables and tubes fused more and more stormtech to their bodies. Others were curled up into a ball, sobbing into the floor. Hundreds of people helpless, suffering as the stormtech tore, ripped, poisoned, mutilated, violated their bodies. Bulkava, Torven and Rhivik were among the prisoners, strapped to tables outfitted with species-specific restraints. To engineer stormtech that was deadly to aliens, they’d obviously needed alien test subjects. A Rhivik had been anchored to the floor with a series of thick chains, a glowing collar clamped around his neck and storms of blue shuddering up his muscle-bound arms. White-hot outrage burned in the alien’s eyes as he bashed his head against the chainglass with thudding echoes. A young Torven had been savagely beaten and sealed into a black immobilising suit that was welded to a restraining chair. It wasn’t until I saw the bandaged wounds across his arms that I’d realised he’d tried to kill himself, but the cultists weren’t letting a single prisoner slip away from them. He watched, glassy-eyed, as more stormtech streamed into his broken and battered body.
Others were simply long dead, stormtech twitching under lifeless flesh.
It was a stormtech farm. A nightmare factory.
Cold shock ignited from my nipples, carving down through my guts and into my toes. I was swimming in sweat inside my suit. Only the armour and its controlled environment kept me safe. They were running experiments to discover how far they could push the stormtech. How much damage they could stack on a body before the dosage made them
