And I’d thought this would be easy.
‘So, Vak.’ Grim still hadn’t woken up yet and the sight of this hadn’t helped his mood. ‘Did you want to search alphabetically, or by genre?’
‘Not helping,’ I said.
‘Hey, this was your idea.’
‘Welcome.’ The Rubix’s voice carried clear across the marbled floor. I’m not sure what the librarian stereotype is, but it appeared to be a gaunt-faced woman with long grey hair and flowing robes, her glare demanding complete silence. ‘Do you have a booking?’
From the way she said it, it was clear she didn’t expect us to have one, though she showed no surprise when I handed over my reservation details. She took us past quiet alcoves, giant terrariums filled with miniature environments, and various mechanisms wheeling on little gyroscopes, before we reached our study room. A leather sofa, computer system with archive access, an elliptical desk flanked by wooden chairs. I’d handle the physical side of our search while Grim dug up his digital underworld. ‘Find me everything to do with Viklun Ryken,’ I told Grim.
Trawling through the archives was like looking for a white rabbit in a snowstorm. A very, very small white rabbit. But Grim’s never one to let me down and we shortly had an answer.
‘Look at this,’ I said as relevant dataspheres materialised around us in an orrery of multicoloured globes. When I touched one, it splintered outwards like snowflakes in a blizzard, before coalescing into scrolling sheets of paper. Digital ink swirled into words like black ivy in fast-forward. ‘Ryken isn’t just studying the Shenoi: he’s an expert on them. Wrote several books about them.’
‘That’s one hell of a subject to devote your life to,’ Grim said, fully roused from his torpor.
‘It gets better.’ The digital pages hissed and crackled as I turned them. ‘He’s researched which systems and planets the Shenoi might have occupied, and whether they were a spacefaring species, their civilisation and culture, if they were physical or energy beings, their artefacts.’
‘There are Shenoi artefacts? I thought all traces of them vanished.’
‘He says they left artefacts behind. They could be Shenoi, or they could belong to some other alien species that jumped the rail or were wiped out by some disaster.’ I scanned the next page, doing my best to ignore the stormtech grating along my ribs. ‘One of his most controversial theories is that the stormtech is their blood.’
‘Folks back on Earth used to drink the blood of their enemies.’ Grim sniffed and scratched his chest with a dripping black claw. ‘Sound like decent folks.’
‘He argues that taking the stormtech is pretty much the same thing. Not exactly the most positive of analogies.’
‘The bloke spent his life writing about dead aliens. How much fun do you think he’d be at a party?’ Grim sniffed and flicked a sheet of data to me. ‘Interesting … all of his books were given the seal of approval by the Shenoi Collective.’
‘The Shenoi Collective?’
‘Seems to be a slice of academia who specifically investigate, analyse and theorise about the Shenoi.’
‘So it’s not just Ryken who’s doing in-depth research, there’s a whole curriculum based on it?’
‘Yeah. These guys are borderline obsessive, by the looks of it. They’ve systematically added his work to their official archives, and those loons rarely seem to accept third-party submissions.’
I looked warily at the digital mountain of articles, books and transcripts Ryken had written, feeling crushed. I don’t have much patience for reading, even less when I’m not sure what I’m looking for. No way was I going to probe through all this while the House of Suns were still on the prowl. The stormtech likes mental stimuli and activity as much as physical, and I was itching to find something. I knew pieces were missing, I just couldn’t see what shape they took or where they went.
Maybe Viklun Ryken himself could give me the answers. We plunged back into the Tungyian System, Quyn Research Station expanding to fill the room. I watched the visualisation package as three corvettes broke out of warpspace, their hulls distorted with a dark haze, before making a beeline for the space station. At an optimal distance, they aligned in battle-formation, gimballed multicannons rotating forward. They unleashed a simultaneous bombardment of Antimatter Missiles, blasting the dockyard into debris. A timestamp showed it had happened three years ago. Grim watched with me, in silence. ‘Ryken was on it at the time,’ I said quietly.
‘That doesn’t sound like a coincidence.’
Of course it wasn’t. Quyn Research Station had been mentioned in my assailants’ databanks. Didn’t take a genius to stumble to the conclusion they’d been the cause of its destruction.
Just when you’re making progress, the universe bends over backwards to kick you in the urethra.
I leaned back in my chair. ‘So, let’s say the House of Suns killed him. They went to the trouble of arming themselves with military-grade weapons used in space warfare and flying into regions of deepspace swarming with Blade Hunters, smuggler crews, hostile species, and god knows what else. They knew there’d be questions, evidence tracing back to them, and they risked killing him anyway.’
‘They were afraid of him.’
‘Or they were afraid of what he’d discovered. Something in his work as xenobiologist.’
Grim slumped back in his seat, feet propped up on the table, gesturing to the vast array of data. ‘Hate to break it you, but even if the answer is here, we’re not going to find it. We might not even recognise it if we did.’
That much I could agree with. ‘I think someone else might be able to help us,’ I said. I thought of the symbol I’d seen in their hideout. It was a long shot, but there was a chance. ‘Stay here, dig into anything that could be useful. Ryken’s key areas of study, his pet projects.’
Grim pulled a face that said there were other things he’d rather be doing. He held up a tome. ‘Vak, the
