Lasky stood in front of the cells with a perverted curiosity sketched on his child-like face, making him appear both young and horribly old and rotten at the same time. A playful cruelty you’d see on kids that liked making routine trips to zoos, just so they could throw rocks at the animals and enjoy their confinement. He gleefully surveyed the tortured aliens, some tensing in fear as they noticed him. He rapped his fingers on the chainglass of the Rhivik’s cell. The alien, tormented to breaking point, peeled his lips back in a deep, furious growl that echoed hard in my chest. He slammed his head into the glass so hard the wallframe shuddered. Lasky just grinned and walked away.
I was breathing heavily through my nose. Harmony was going to hear about this. Everyone was.
From my cover, I watched a door dilate open, a man walking through. He was bursting with stormtech. The crawling mass should have torn his body apart, split his skin open, shrivelled his organs into husks. My eyes watered just looking at him. He was in the middle of a diagnostics check when his muscles abruptly locked up. I didn’t dare breathe as he scanned the room, as if he’d sensed me. After a while, he shrugged it off and departed.
I found myself moving with him, almost not of my own volition, hugging cover. Every step closer to him made my stormtech pulse harder. He went clattering down a flight of stairs to a raised circular walkway where there were more like him, the ravaging blue choking out their natural skin tones. They seemed to be trying to drown themselves with the stormtech – smothering their human biochemistry with the alien organism until they had more alien organic matter twitching inside their biology than human-based DNA. Trying so hard to become like the Shenoi there wasn’t a difference. Had to be the ultra-zealots. Probably also the soldiers.
My body tensed the longer I looked. Half of me wanted to hide. The other half was roping me closer, telling me I needed to be like them. Maybe I’d have kept closing in, had a familiar figure not clattered by on the walkway below.
Sokolav.
I tore away from the men glowing with stormtech, hugging the shadows and making sure we were unseen as I swept up behind my former Commander. He stiffened as I parked the business end of the Titan against the back of his neck. ‘Next room on your right,’ I whispered as I ripped the palmerlog out of his hand. ‘Not a word.’
I knew my former Commander too well to give him an opportunity to retaliate. I shoved him into the deserted server room and sealed us inside.
‘Vakov? Vakov Fukasawa? Is that really you, my boy?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘the real Vakov died back in the Reaper War. Memory of pre-death is a little fuzzy, but I seem to recall you being on the other side.’
The last four words came out as a snarl. Anyone else would have shrunk away. But Sokolav stood solid and firm as a mountain peak. He gave a great, pent-up sigh. ‘A great many things have happened since then, Vakov.’
‘Oh, I’m sure,’ I said. ‘Let me tell you what’s going to happen now. We’re going to march out of here and you’re going to explain all these great many things to Kindosh and the rest of Harmony.’ I tilted the Titan. ‘I’ll be there to make sure you don’t leave out any details.’
We waited until most of the cultists retired for the night before making our move. My heartbeat threatened to swallow my entire body as I marched Sokolav at gunpoint down the quiet hallways and past the cells packed full of rotting prisoners. I couldn’t help but picture myself strapped beside them, operated on until I went insane or Blued Out.
I pulled Sokolav behind a wall while a trio of cultists in scuffed spacesuits walked past. I shoved my weapon under Sokolav’s chin, not daring to breathe, not daring to believe Sokolav wouldn’t call out to them and sacrifice himself. But his manner was totally languid, and it was starting to gnaw at me.
The cultists disappeared around a corner and I hustled Sokolav through a series of barricades, each taking for ever to open for us, concealing ourselves whenever someone was in the vicinity.
‘If only you’d open your eyes, son,’ Sokolav said gently.
‘Shut it,’ I growled.
‘You’d see why we do what we do. Why all this is necessary.’
I shoved the handcannon harder against him. ‘Just give me an excuse.’
Sokolav fell silent. Sweat slithered down my ribs, my head throbbing so hard I felt the onset of a migraine as we strode into the docking bay with its ring of House of Suns symbols. The chainship I’d arrived in was still sitting in its berth. We were about to climb the disembarkation ramp when a word rang out behind me.
‘Vakov?’
I froze. Turned in what felt like slow motion to the lone figure positioned behind us in a spacesuit.
It was my brother.
I don’t know which of the two of us was more taken aback. The pounding in my head spilled out to the rest of my body. ‘Artyom.’
‘How did you find us?’ The confusion and dismay on his face melted back into anger, his eyes hardening, hands held tight behind his back. ‘I told you what would happen to you if you came here. What’s it going to take for you to listen to me?’
‘Artyom, there’s a way out of this.’ I kept my handcannon firmly glued to Sokolav’s neck. The old dog would try
