‘Well,’ I said, pointing to the bodies, ‘you can ask, but I don’t think we’ll get much of an answer.’
I’d expected a weary chuckle. But I got no response. Grim was instead muttering what sounded like oh dear oh god oh no under his breath. I suppose I’d be panicking too if the stormtech hadn’t rewired me to cope with shellshock.
‘We have to clear out,’ I told Grim. ‘Find somewhere else to stay.’
‘I think I know a safehouse,’ Grim said. ‘It’s not comfortable, though.’
‘We’ll make do.’ I bent down to rifle through the belongings of the would-be killers. They carried a palmerlog each. I flicked one on and opened a recent transmission and the House of Suns symbol projected in the air, brightening the room. If this had been from the Jackal, he’d have come along to pull the trigger himself. Jae, or someone high-ranking within the Suns, must have decided to put the two of us down.
We were getting quite popular.
I sent a transmission to Kowalski, warning her in case she’d be getting any unpleasant visitors tonight, before pocketing the devices. The rabbit avatar was sitting atop the mangled, bullet-ridden man it had killed, whiskers twitching in triumph. Between then and the conversation I’d had with Grim, it had found the time to spatter its fur with fake-looking blood.
‘If anyone except Kowalski comes in, feel free to take care of them,’ I told it.
‘That would please me very much,’ said the rabbit. Its ears twitched. ‘May I ask when you will return?’
I was about to respond when I realised we’d never be coming back. We were hunted men, now. It wouldn’t be over until the Suns were defeated, or the two of us ended up like the corpses piled at my feet.
29
Hideout
We took only the bare necessities with us. We slithered out the window, navigating through the rain-drenched back alleys and taking three separate autocabs before arriving at Starkland’s Travel Depot. Couldn’t risk being tailed by anyone the Suns had stationed outside. We bought two tickets to a lowlevel called Saharatown and sat in a private cubicle as our chainrail plummeted down through the asteroid. I was back in armour, while Grim had printed himself a closefitting spacesuit with a helmet that obscured his face.
Getting to Grim’s secure location involved walking through a Middle-Eastern style bazaar, where the stalls were crammed together like seeds in a pomegranate and the Rubixs had been programmed to appear as djinn: swirling, muscled, mythical creatures that hefted curved swords that crackled with lightning and threatened passers-by not to steal anything. We took a set of narrow alleyways packed with foodbooths selling baklava and kebabs, the rich smell of meat following us as we looped around to the outermost edge of the level and into a warren of storage units.
It was like a giant filing cabinet, stretching hundreds of metres across and down, cocooned in creaking walkways and disappearing into the mesh of the asteroid superstructure. Half of them winked red, indicating they were in use. Others were empty or being used as temporary dens. Faces wrapped in cowls and protective optics poked out as we clanked along the walkways. Toxins leaked out of swollen pipes strung along the streets like mechanical intestines. Grim approached a Torven sitting in one of the vacated units, wearing heavy hooded clothing and watching something in her shib. I’d since learned to discern between alien genders, and the slimmer shoulders and sharper face told me this one was female. The display vanished as she noticed Grim.
‘Oh, it’s you again.’ I hadn’t heard many Torven speak, but this one sounded like her daily diet was nothing but whisky and bluesmokes. ‘What is it this time?’ She leaned towards me and took a long sniff. ‘Ah. With a blue friend, too.’
I raised an eyebrow behind my visor. ‘How can you tell?’ I asked.
‘You smell bad, even for a human.’ She sniffed again, wrinkled her small nostrils. ‘Overripe. Soiled. You smell worse than a Rhivik’s underskin.’
Grim elbowed his way into the conversation. ‘Nice to see you too, Mugalesh. You been enjoying those films I gave you?’
Mugalesh’s curved mouth twitched into what I thought was a smile. I noticed she wore a nasty-looking handgun holstered at her hip. ‘They’re all right for human entertainment. What do you want?’
‘Me and my blue friend need to stay hidden for a while,’ said Grim.
Mugalesh’s sulphur-coloured eyes narrowed to slits. ‘Is it going to bring me grief?’
Grim offered a nervous laugh. ‘Me bring trouble? No, no, no. Nothing like that. No trouble at all.’
The alien snorted. ‘Like the incident with the octodrones was no trouble?’
‘That wasn’t my fault!’ Grim protested.
‘And the shipment of rat poisons?’
Grim’s face went red as he winced. ‘That … was a misunderstanding.’
‘Oh, I’m sure. And the chainship job? They’re still after us for that.’
Grim winced again, harder this time. ‘Yeah … that wasn’t my finest hour.’
Mugalesh spat on the ground. ‘You, Grim, are an impenetrable wall of problems. A tower of trouble. A skyscraper of setbacks. I’m not stupid enough to have it come crashing down on my head.’
Grim dropped a Commoner currency card into the alien’s calloused palm. ‘Does this help things?’
Mugalesh glared up at Grim, weighing up the decision before pocketing the card and rocking to her feet with a roll of her eyes. ‘This way, this way.’ She led us through the winding maze of stairwells and balconies squeezing between the towers. Colourful clothes and streamers snapped in the dry breeze. Each storage unit was filled with little knots of people, staring intently at flexiscreens or tabletop vidgames. In one of them, aliens wearing layers of hooded clothing so thick I couldn’t tell what species they were, had crammed a dozen printers into a shelled-out office space, forming a lucrative printing farm, glancing up at us with thick, wrap-around optics as we passed. They were packaging freshly printed goods, I guessed for sale in the Upper
