The Kaiji swiftly dropped me back to Compass. I made a beeline for my apartment, where Grim and Kowalski were waiting impatiently. I told them everything. They took it better than I’d imagined.
‘All right,’ Kowalski said slowly, running a hand through her hair. ‘You know I have to tell Kindosh. If she doesn’t know already – there’s probably surveillance equipment in here.’
‘There was.’ Back in his neon skeleton underskin, Grim poked his head out of the kitchen – a grinning red skull – and glanced at us. ‘Until I disabled it.’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘But this changes nothing. We have to take down the House of Suns, exactly as planned, and quickly.’
‘I guess we’re unofficially officially in bed with the Kaiji,’ Katherine muttered as Grim emerged from the kitchen with three mugs of tempered glass, containing coffee. We both took one. ‘I’m surprised they didn’t ask for a seat on the Harmony Command Board in return.’
‘If the Kaiji are right, more than a dozen civilisations have been killed because of stormtech. No other spacefaring species we know of has had prior combat experience with the Shenoi, let alone achieved a victory. They could be demanding servitude or worship or whatever it is aliens want. Instead, they’re offering us help. We’d be stupid to turn them down.’
Kowalski fixed me with a sceptical look. ‘You saw the size of their armada, the level of their tech and materiel. You don’t raise your civilisation to that stage by having the interests of other species at heart. We don’t know what they got up to in the greater galactic community. We get dozens of alien species every standard year requesting to join the Common or seeking refuge, trade agreements, alliances, whatever. First rule of interspecies diplomacy: if an offer sounds too good to be true, then it probably is.’
‘We know they’ve got demands. They made that clear the moment they asked to join the Common. Doesn’t mean they won’t have an offer of their own on the table.’
‘There’s a difference between genuine concern and professional manipulation.’
‘You think that’s what’s going on here?’
‘I think we’d be naive not to consider it.’
I thought of Juvens, and how the big, sly Space Marshall had been willing to share private information and risk the wrath of his Ambassadors, just to give us a leg up. If they were giving us a chance, we had to return the favour. ‘You’re the ones who wanted a peace alliance with these guys,’ I said. ‘Here’s your shot.’
Kowalski nodded reluctantly. I could hear the air rising from her lungs, steaming out of her mouth. My skin rippled with goosebumps, my arm hairs all standing up. My senses had been heightened since the fight in the arena. The metallic stink of the spaceport, the spicy scent of the Kaiji, the smoky stench wafting from nearby ventilation shafts were all bouncing around in my skull. The world swayed in sticky and surreal motion, everything hyper-elevated, like fragments of a dream. It was all the stormtech.
If I stopped feeding it entirely, I could start Shredding again. I hated the idea of it. The process would cripple me for weeks, maybe months, as my body wrung the alien DNA out of me. The stormtech would put up one hell of a fight with every agonizing day. Harmony’s suppressors were off the table, and I wasn’t about to risk darkmarket meds.
Whatever my body was doing to me, I was stuck with it.
Would Artyom still be doing this if he knew he was pouring gasoline on the fire? Had my brother looked me dead in the eye, knowing what was really in those stormtech canisters and swirling around in my bloodstream? I felt the cold metal of the pendant against my collarbone and for a moment I wanted to tear the cord away completely. Cut him out as he had me. But I couldn’t give up on him. If only for Kasia’s sake.
Kowalski’s voice floated up from somewhere distant, as if on the other end of a crackly comms line. ‘Vakov?’
I snapped up. ‘What?’
‘Remember those stormdealer trafficking routes we picked up in the Warren? Well, they got results. Took a hell of a paper trail, tracking them across shell companies, orbital refineries, space-factories, dockyards, distribution channels in and out of Compass, but we got them. Most of them were operating out of a dockyard front, concealing stormtech supplies in shuttlecraft and carrier-pods going to half a hundred spacedocks. We did a raid last night, nabbed half a dozen stormdealers with direct connections to Reaper deaths. These guys aren’t working alone. It’s one tiny cog in an entire syndicate of stormdealers, running like clockwork. Suppliers, distributors, factories, everything.’
‘But you found a source.’
‘We did better than that. The dockyard manifesto led us straight to several House of Suns suppliers.’
‘They’re not cultists, though.’
‘No. They’re third parties, operating on Compass and across several systems worth of outposts and stations. But they’re just as responsible for the Reaper deaths. Caught them in the act and hauled the whole lot in for questioning.’
‘What about those biolaces? The suicide triggers?’
‘Sector Prone’s been working on an override key. It neutralises the hardware, but they’re constantly supplying updates to get around us. We had two suppliers die on us, both killed remotely. When the rest survived, they sent a squadron of gunships armed with heat-seeking missiles after us. Fortunately, we’ve got better combat pilots then they do, and blasted them away. We’ve got the other four suppliers, nice and secure in lockup. If asking nicely doesn’t work, we’ll apply pressure until someone cracks. There’re thousands of other stormdealers out there. We can only guess how many of them are shipping the Suns’ product. But it’s a start.’
‘What about the stormtech canisters? You tried tracing those back?’ Grim asked.
‘Dead ends, false leads,’ said Katherine, taking a long swallow of coffee. ‘Informers who come forward with intel in exchange for a fresh start go missing or end up shot to death on the street the next day. Space-factories
