I swallowed a face-splitting smirk. Until I ran through what Juvens had said.
‘What do you mean, an upcoming war?’ I asked.
Szev and Chwekli’s eyes were narrowed into dark slits, but they were too proud to speak up again in defiance. Juvens’ chest swelled and deflated as he snorted out a gust of air. ‘We suspect the Shenoi are still out there,’ he said. ‘We believe they are planning a return.’
28
Ruins of the Future
I wanted to laugh. I almost did. I actually felt my insides shaking. Instead I managed, ‘What?’
‘Our long-range scanners have detected navigational trajectories and bio-signals matching the Shenoi’s, approaching Compass.’
‘You said you destroyed them,’ I said.
‘Every species has attempted to destroy viruses and hostile organisms. Winning one skirmish doesn’t mean you’ve won the war,’ Juvens said crisply. ‘The Shenoi are largely energy based, operating on a hivemind. They could easily have stored parts of themselves within stormtech, deep inside a planet somewhere. They’re not flesh and bone like us. They have to construct bodies out of living tissue infected with stormtech. If they had enough, they could rebuild themselves.’
‘And just when I thought we didn’t have enough problems.’ As I spoke, I noticed the stormtech throbbing in my arm. As if the evil little parasite knew I was talking about it.
I understood why they had come to me about this. If this information went public, the damage would be unimaginable. Skinnies being killed in the streets. The conflicts between stormdealers exploding over into outright warfare.
‘There have been humans,’ said Szev, ‘interacting with stormtech for more than recreational use.’
‘The House of Suns,’ I said. The image was coming together, focusing slowly. ‘You’re after the House of Suns.’
Another shared glance between the aliens. ‘What do you know of them?’
I gathered up my scattershot thoughts. ‘They’re psychopaths, obsessed with the Shenoi. They’ve been spending a fortune on researching stormtech. I think they’ve been working themselves into the stormtech drug industry, spreading it through Compass. It’s not about beliefs or values or even money. It’s a pseudoscience cult. I don’t know what they’re planning, but they’ve been undermining Harmony and stirring public outrage to get it.’
I suddenly saw it from the Kaiji’s perspective. Through the millennia, they’d watched stormtech slowly but surely gnaw its way through over a dozen other species. They were seeing the same happen to us humans, now with the looming threat of the Shenoi, speeding across the galaxy to make a return, likely hell-bent on revenge.
‘There’s no way to put it delicately. You’ll never be free of stormtech entirely,’ Juvens told me, armour creaking as he leaned forward. ‘No species that’s made contact with it ever will. But you can contain the explosion, stop it spreading further, treat those afflicted. And you do that by putting the House of Suns down. If you don’t, humanity’s going to tear itself apart from the inside.’
‘We cannot finalise peace negotiations, only to pair ourselves with a society on the verge of collapse,’ Szev added. ‘It would be like boarding an infected ship. You understand first-hand the extent of the stormtech’s damage, yes?’
‘We can help you if you do this,’ Juvens said. ‘I wish we could anyway, but there are … complications. Bureaucratic complications.’ The alien’s mismatched eyes flickered back to the Ambassadors before glancing back to me. Like me, he was a soldier. A hands-on guy that saw a problem to fix and wanted to get it done. ‘We have an armada ready, prepared to join forces with yours. Get rid of these Suns bastards, and we can move forward.’
‘The Shenoi threaten both our species,’ Chwekli said. ‘A mutual threat. Should they consume you, the threat to us will multiply.’
I raked in a hard breath, as if I could somehow shrug off my new knowledge of stormtech, as if hearing that the Shenoi were still alive and kicking in the far corners of the galaxy and gunning for the human race was no big deal. In the span of a brief few hours, I’d gone from drinking the night away to playing politics with alien galactic affairs. I had a feeling I’d just locked Harmony into a human-Kaiji alliance that Kindosh would kill me for making, if Kowalski didn’t get there first.
Juvens removed a torus-shaped device from a slot in his armour and pressed it into my palm. I flicked my shib on and an encryption key blurred into my system. The device shuddered and died in my hand and I set it aside. ‘In the meantime, if you ever need us desperately, you know how to call.’ The Space Marshall had a wicked gleam in his eyes, as if he wasn’t supposed to do what he just did and couldn’t have cared less for it. ‘I’m not going to assume I can understand what your people are dealing with. But I’ve seen what stormtech does to human bodies. Anyone who has, and keeps selling it for profit, is a monster. The exact sort of people the Shenoi love. So when you find these Suns—’ his teeth clenched together, jaw tightening ‘—do me a favour and deal with them … brutally.’
I locked gazes with the big alien, my own jaw tightening. ‘I wouldn’t have it any other way.’
Juvens watched me for a moment. ‘You know what every species has in common, Fukasawa? We all can get very, very angry.’ A grim smirk began to spread across his face. ‘And that’s good. Because angry gets ugly
