With the fog wrapped around my mind rapidly evaporating, I pasted my shredded thoughts back together. I wasn’t dealing with some drug syndicate, it was clear they were studying and modifying stormtech. But for what? Altering it for increased sales was one thing. Flooding the market with a substance they knew was toxic was another. These deaths had to be significant to them. Running with the assumption that they were deliberately undermining Harmony’s rule by showing Reapers and skinnies to be loose cannons, they were hell-bent on keeping people away from rehab and keeping them dosed high on stormtech. If this wasn’t for money, then what was it for? Political gain? It’d explain why they were trying to pin the deaths on Harmony. But there were plenty of ways to go about doing that without sending Reapers on a kamikaze rampage. Or the very great risk that came with getting on Harmony’s radar. Had to be someone with a personal grudge. Didn’t much help narrow down my suspects at all. The Common and the greater galaxy at large were scattered with multispecies militia groups, insurrectionists, and cabals who hated Harmony’s guts as much as they hated Harvest’s. I thought again of the symbol I’d seen. Of the scale of what I’d uncovered. This was an organisation with roots deep in the asteroid’s underworld infrastructure.
And Sokolav. Not only was my old Commander not dead, as Harmony thought, he was working with these people. The man who’d noticed me struggling when I first arrived at the Harmony Training Station, a dozen light years from my home in a world I didn’t understand, and guided me through the Reaper Programme he’d helped design. Who put his reassuring hand on my shoulder as they pumped me with chemicals and locked me in restraints before shooting the stormtech into my body, swearing he’d never leave my side for a second. Who stood in the early dawn light with the wind in his hair and a devilish fire in his eyes and told his entire Battalion he was proud of us, prouder than he’d ever been of anyone in his life, and would do whatever it took to get us through the war. He was the father I never had.
Now he was with the people killing my family, the Reapers he’d built. Destroying his entire legacy and everything he ever stood for. And I still had no idea why.
My fists tightened. Why I did have to be involved in this? Why did Artyom have to be?
I glanced out at the rolling grasslands, hearing the susurrus of trees in the wind. I watched a family over by the undercover playground: two boys laughing and wrestling cheerfully with each other for a ball, and their mother sitting on a picnic mat. I watched them for a little, an unbidden smile on my face.
I stood, turning to go when a seismic craaaack! shattered the soundscape, a high-pitched whine rupturing through my head. The windows of storefronts and autovehicles exploded, a blizzard of glass raining down on the crowds. I saw people’s mouths moving. Everything a muffled, high-pitched whine. Figures stumbling by me, bleeding from their ears, bleeding from the glass. Dust and fire were gouting out of a medium-sized building across the lake. At first it looked like the building was wrapped in a heat haze, until I realised it was toppling forward. Cables snapping, concrete crumbling, glass splintering. I saw black shapes spilling from the broken windows, thudding into the pavement.
People. They were people.
Screams and sirens punched through the white noise in muffled blasts, but I was already racing through the wet grass, the crowds running with me, heading for the safety of the concourse as the building’s foundation made one last tortured groan and crashed into the lake. The shockwave shuddered up my legs and up my spine, throwing huge dark waves up from the lake like towering monstrosities of water, showering over the grassland in great splattering heaves. Lake water surged towards and through the crowd, up to my knees and already flooding coffeehouses. Panicked people sloshed past me, emergency and medical drones streaming the other way to the collapse site. Black smoke rings slowly corkscrewed into the sky.
The two boys and their mother were nowhere to be seen.
Terrorist attack. That’s what the constant trickle of newsfeeds popping up in my shib said. Terrorist attack by a skinnie, high on stormtech, who’d threatened to blow up the bank unless they gave him half a million Commoners. They’d complied and he’d pulled the plug anyway. Killing thousands and toppling the building. The whole Ruskin floor was slowly being sectioned off, the floor’s spaceport closing, rerouting hundreds of ships.
I didn’t have to look at the details to know he was an addict, poisoned by darkmarket stormtech. Nor did I have to wait long for the headlines blaming Harmony, demanding an answer for this, demanding retribution against anyone with stormtech. The newsfeeds clogged with angry retorts as the report spread like a virus across the asteroid and then the entire system. Politicians, security personnel, bureaucrats and media spokespeople from various space stations and boards of operation chipping in.
Whoever the House of Suns were, whatever they wanted, they were weaponising terrorism and public outrage against Harmony. This was a victory for them. I had a feeling it’d be the first of many.
I’d found myself a tiny alcove in a packed-out restaurant, hunched over a bowl of cheese and onion pierogi and a shot of vodka. With the stormtech threading through me like crazy, I was ravenous. Too hungry to trawl all the way down to the Upper Markets, I made a beeline for the first level that caught my attention. It was fashioned after an Eastern European city, complete with onion-domed buildings garlanded with flowers and engraved
