There was one person who’d tell me for sure.
Grim answered my call on the fourth ring. He rubbed bloodshot eyes, the glow of a paused filmlog showering across his pale face. ‘Vak. What the hell? It’s only—’
‘Grim. Shut up and look at this.’ I accessed the nearest flexiscreen, sending the terminal ID over to Grim. ‘Quickly.’
Still grumbling, Grim cracked his knuckles and did his Deep Dive. Using the data I’d provided to scour the databanks for backdoors and previous passkeys on the mainframes. In his skeleton underskin and white eyes, he looked like a demented techghost in some lost nightmare.
The screen blinked. He’d broken in. A galaxy of data erupted around me. Literally. A universe of stars, comets, planets, moons, supergiants, swirling blackholes, each size and shape indicating their data size and type. A carmine datasphere, patterned like a gas-giant, ghosted straight through the sights of my handcannon before peeling open to expose a network of data. ‘Oh, these boys have been busy,’ muttered Grim as multicoloured papers, transcripts, blueprints, video and sound files scrawled around us in mid-air. ‘These are our guys, Vak. There’s five substrates worth of academic papers and intel here. Most of it has been classified.’
‘Classified?’
‘Classified by Harmony, anti-narcotics institutions, militia groups, and scientists. Not banned, just highly sensitive data.’ A twisting comet, ringed with spiralling intel, froze in front of me. ‘Vak, this is thirty years’ worth of—’
‘—research,’ I finished, figuring it out as he did. ‘Their research and experiments on the stormtech. They’re looking for ways to strengthen and bolster its potency.’ My hand dropped to my weapon. ‘And how to poison it.’
‘Yeah.’ Grim’s voice was low and quiet.
Compass was ripe with stormdealer syndicates, cartels, and networks that operated across the criminal underbelly of the asteroid. Doing business, selling their products in clubs and street corners, in spaceports and dockside bars, in skyscrapers and business districts. Some so powerful they fronted businesses that dominated the economy of entire neighbourhoods, sometimes entire floors. It was a business, and like any other business, they had three particular interests: money, power, influence.
If this whirling galaxy of data was telling me anything, it was that these guys operated on an entirely different level. One with an agenda: a deep-seated grudge against Harmony. Stormdealers tended to take the view that customers going on a killing spree, dying on the streets and attracting the attention of galaxy-wide government forces with a zero-drug policy were bad for business. Not this group. This was about something other than getting rich. Something they needed a darkmarket pharmaceutical company up their sleeve for.
The door jerked open and a gaunt-faced man in system technician gear gaped at me. I had him in my handcannon sights already, his mouth gaping wider once he saw it. ‘Not a word. Stand facing the wall, hands behind your head.’ I used the voice-masking feature in my armour, turning my voice into a menacing rasp. It made him move faster than he’d probably ever moved in his life. I gritted my teeth. I’d been seen, and now had a hostage to deal with.
‘Hmm.’ Grim’s voice broke back into my commslink. ‘Looks like we’ve got ourselves a name.’
‘A name?’ Artyom had mentioned a Jae.
‘Yeah. Some egghead called Viklun Ryken. Worked at a deepspace dockyard called Quyn, in the Tungyian System, owned by the Rhivik. Used to be a betting house for illegal chainship races through asteroid fields.’ A neutron star swung out of its orbit, ripping open in a blur of glowing prisms. It materialised into an elongated space station, equipped with a sprawling dockyard. Beyond, chainships were on their way to the asteroid field, framed by a small cluster of stars. ‘Harmony had a few things to say about that, of course. The Rhivik caused a hell of a fuss, bitched about humans to other species for a while, but the place got retrofitted into Quyn Research Station, studying nearby cosmic events.’
‘Sounds too clean to me.’
‘Oh. Now, that’s interesting.’
‘What is it, Grim?’
‘I did a little searching on public search engines. This Ryken guy isn’t just a xenobiologist. He’s one of the few people studying the Shenoi.’
And maybe the very guy telling our stormdealer friends how to poison the stormtech.
I went about looping a set of plastic cables around my hostage’s wrists, tying him to a workstation while Grim did what he did best: find data he shouldn’t. He relayed his findings to me as fast as he found them. They had shops fronting their business scattered over Compass. Dead-drops for picking up canisters. Shipping routes. Distribution channels that flowed through at least four spaceports, ten floors and twelve business chains. A hit-list of rival stormdealers. Two stormdealer syndicates interested in handling their product. An offworld spacecraft manufacturer building chainships honeycombed with compartments to smuggle canisters off Compass, with a conceptual schematic of a chainship attached to the transmission. And at the very bottom of the transmission was the same symbol I’d seen in the Warren. An inverted Y, the edges squared off.
And three words: House of Suns.
‘That’s it,’ I breathed.
Grim glanced up. ‘What’s it?’
‘House of Suns,’ I said quietly. ‘That’s their name. And their symbol. That’s who we’re after.’
Quyn Research Station was winked away, and a cluster of ice-giants grew around me as Grim plugged the names into his network. ‘That’s impossible.’
‘What?’
‘Vak, there’re no search results for these freaks. Absolutely zero. That’s never happened before.’
The stormtech trickled down my spine like molten lead as the pieces finally snapped into place. The House of Suns couldn’t be based exclusively on Compass. Compass was a minor part of their ecosystem of operations. This could have come from anywhere in the Common. I thought back to the Warren. The substrates, the cradle, the darkmarket razornade. Now, offworld research stations, spacecraft manufacturers, stormdealer syndicates. They
