But he wasn’t going to say anything, I could see it in his eyes. The same die-hard look so many Reapers and Harmony and Harvest soldiers wore – that I had worn. Absolute, single-minded dedication to the cause, hard as chainmetal. We weren’t going to crack him here.
‘Get him out of my sight,’ Kowalski said, before checking in on Kuen. Any other Harmony squad leader would have chewed their squad out for being caught off guard and almost letting Hausk slither away, but her approach was different. This squad was her family, I realised.
‘Just a second.’ I shouldered my way through the armoured men before anyone could object. The stormtech blazed in my chest as I stood in front of Hausk, his smug expression stoking the coals in the pit of my stomach. ‘Remember me?’
‘I knew we should have killed you,’ Hausk said. ‘I told them—’
I headbutted him. His nose broke against my helmet, trickling blood as the Harmony men struggled to hold him up. He laughed as they hauled him away.
Kowalski was suddenly at my elbow, arms folded. ‘I’d reprimand you,’ she said dryly, ‘but I don’t have the energy and I’d be lying if I said he didn’t deserve it.’
I noticed a few approving nods from the Shocktroopers. But as I walked back to the room, the gunrunners didn’t stand quite as close to me as before. They’d no doubt formed their own impressions of Reapers over the years, fuelled by rumour and exaggeration. Seeing me in action, no doubt they were also fearful of what else I’d get up to if I was in a sour mood.
‘Thought you’d find this interesting.’ Saren pointed to a rack of canisters in the corner. All stamped with Harmony’s blue and white flag. The stolen stormtech canisters.
Katherine gingerly picked one up in her gloved hands. ‘They’re empty. So what was he still doing back here?’
‘Trying to destroy all the remaining evidence,’ Saren said. ‘He did a pretty good job, too. Almost everything’s torched.’
‘We’re too late,’ I said.
‘Maybe not.’ Saren had a widescreen palmerlog in his hand. The screen flipped out, showing a swirl of geometric particles. ‘Most of the data’s been scrambled and shredded,’ he said, indicating blocks of data on the screen encased in black crystal. He pointed to another sector, where glowing clusters were haloed in a gentle golden outline. ‘But there’re plenty of subroutines still salvageable down in the mainframe. We’ll get the tech boys onto it.’
‘That’s it.’ I pointed to a glowing symbol. ‘That’s the glyph that I saw.’
Katherine scanned the symbol and performed a quick cross match through her shib. ‘No affiliations with any known factions or syndicates. Not in this galactic region, at least. Maybe some other species uses it. Did you see any aliens here, Vak?’
‘No. Only humans.’
‘It might not matter. There’re plenty of aliens running around and selling all sorts of unknown tech. We’ll do a boarder search later.’
Meanwhile, Saren had been doing some more digging through the salvageable parts of the mainframe and projected our findings into the air. Spidery lines sprouted from nothing like silvery roots in fast-forward. ‘Looks like they were delivering packages throughout Compass. Along the way they’ve got stashhouses, mothballed storage units, weapon caches.’
‘Three guesses what they were delivering,’ I said.
‘They’ll be long gone by now,’ Jasken grumbled from the corner of the room, fidgeting with his rifle.
‘A little optimism never killed anyone,’ Saren said.
We caught the failsafe denotations rigged up on the canisters and stripped them down before they were tagged and wheeled away. Warbling noises echoed from above as short-range transit craft swooped down to deliver additional Harmony personnel, starting to swarm the hallways. ‘We’ll raid those locations, see if there’s anything we can work with,’ Kowalski said. ‘Call in any suspected affiliates, known stormdealers, informers, see if they know who these guys are. That includes Artyom Fukasawa.’
‘On it,’ someone said, deliberately not looking at me. I said nothing. What the hell could I have said anyway?’ Kowalski dropped her hand on my shoulder again. ‘I’m sorry you went through … all that for this.’
‘I’ve survived worse,’ I said, hoping she wouldn’t pry. Images of Reaper battlefields, dead Harvest combatants and stormtech in action writhed at the fringes of my consciousness. Artyom’s dead face looming large in my memory. ‘If the next few drinks are on you, all’s forgiven.’
‘If we get these guys, it’ll be more than a few.’ Kowalski cast a smile at me before it smoothed over into a serious expression. ‘Sub Zeros will get our prisoner to talk. The mainframe has to hold something we can use. Take a break, Vakov. You’ve earned it. Let us get take it from here.’
I truly wanted to believe her. But my mistrust of Harmony was deep-rooted for a reason. Stormtech stitches an extra layer of survival resistance into the fibres of your flesh. Whatever you called it – animal instinct, a sixth sense – it was real. I’d survived the Reaper War because I’d learned to trust my gut, not my surroundings. I’d listened to my rising hackles and tensing muscles and acted on them, sometimes escaping a trap non-Reapers claimed didn’t exist. And now the stormtech squirming in my gut was a pretty good indicator the search wasn’t going to run as smoothly as Harmony thought.
But I was smart enough to shut up about that.
16
Gunpowder Milkshake
The world was a slow-motion blur by the time I crawled into bed. I don’t even remember undressing. But I emerged, groggy, twenty-five hours later from the trenches of unconsciousness. I gulped down some water, wrapped myself back in the duvet and dozed for another eight hours before my palmerlog chimed me awake. It was Kowalski, inviting me out for breakfast.
Since I couldn’t remember my last proper meal, I agreed.
I was pulling on something decent when I heard the rattle of footsteps outside. Still shrugging into an underskin, I opened the door to see Arya leaning against the opposite wall.
The over-enthusiastic stormtech shivered down my muscles. ‘I don’t need
