We arrived in a storage compartment in the heart of the level. Mustang slapped the access card into Grim’s hand. ‘Steal so much as a nanofibre cable and I’ll rip your kidneys out and use them as footrests,’ she told Grim. ‘Understood?’
‘You’re a darling,’ he said as she scowled, tugging her hood over her head and disappearing into the streets.
‘How do you know her?’
‘Smuggled some stuff for her a few times. She’s all bark and no bite. Unless she doesn’t like you.’
‘How do you know if she doesn’t like you?
‘You get bitten.’
Grim had described the place as a room, but it was closer to a storage unit, the sort you found at the bottom of cargo-haulers. It was packed to the ceiling with boxes and magnetically locked crates. A hundred lights twinkled at us from databanks and computers. At least there was a decent printer in the corner. Cramped, but good enough.
I sent a secure transmission to Kowalski with our co-ordinates. By the time I slipped out of my suit and unpacked my gear, she had arrived. ‘Did you find anything?’ I asked her. She dodged the ropes of filaments, flailing like octopus tentacles seeking out a socket, to stand next to me.
‘One step ahead of you. We traced their suits and weapons. Your assassins aren’t from the Suns. They’re not even on Compass. They’re Blade Hunters, those offworld mercenaries who serve whoever’s paying them the most. In this case, the House of Suns.’
‘So they slipped through customs?’
‘Must have. Contract killers, most likely.’
‘I’m guessing the House of Suns isn’t going to come calling for them?’
‘Wouldn’t it make life easier if they did?’ Kowalski settled into a cream leather chair that had certainly been stolen from some penthouse apartment from the highest Compass levels. ‘The House of Suns don’t know where either of you two are, and we should keep it that way. If they’re sending deepspace mercenaries out in the dead of night to silence you instead of doing the deed themselves, they’re trying to play it safe. More importantly, they’re scared. They saw what you could do in that arena, Vak. They thought they had you on a leash.’
‘And I chewed through it.’ I grinned.
‘Unfortunately, it also means they’ve limited any way of tracing them back. The only leads we have are the stormtech supply-lines. We’re chiselling away at those, but it’ll definitely be a route directly to the Suns. Grim, maybe there’s some back-tracing you can do from here, but otherwise you two should lay low. You’re in the wind. Make the House of Suns sweat, maybe tip their hand in trying to find you.’
‘You think the Suns know about the meeting with the Kaiji?’ I asked.
‘I doubt it. The aliens would never expose themselves like that.’
‘Kind of hard to miss the Kaiji, floating out there with their dreadnought,’ I said.
‘That’s nothing of consequence. There’s probably spacecraft from five different species docked in spaceports around the asteroid this very moment, with five more requesting clearance. A third of all intragalactic trade on Compass is done with non-Commoner species. Even within Harmony, our talks with the Kaiji are restricted to the Intelligence Officers and the Command Board.’
‘Doesn’t mean they don’t suspect what we’re doing. If they’re as well-researched as we’re led to believe they are, they could know about the Kaiji’s involvement in the war against the stormtech. And if they know, they’ll want to kill this alliance before it bears fruit.’
Katherine nodded and settled deeper into her seat. ‘I’ve been thinking about what the Kaiji said to you. Even if the Shenoi aren’t coming back, even if we put the House of Suns down, the stormtech will always be here. How do you weed something like that out of society?’
‘I don’t know,’ I admitted, ‘but we have to try. We had days on the battlefields where we thought we would surely lose. But we strapped on our armour, got into our fireteams and fought anyway. Sokolav made sure we never had any doubts what would happen if we lost.’
‘And you think Sokolav’s involved like Artyom is,’ Katherine said.
‘I don’t know why. But if he’s doing something, he’s committed to it.’
‘I’ve never met the man. But if a former Commander is in their labs, he knows what they are and what they’re getting up to. He knows he’s associating with people directly opposed to Harmony.’ Katherine rubbed her eyes with her knuckles. ‘Your old instructor went missing so he could join them. It’s the only way this fits.’
I’ve learned to know when I’m hearing the truth: because it always hurts. This was no accident: Sokolav had to have known exactly what the House of Suns were up to, which meant that Artyom did, too.
I got Grim to go off on a food errand while Kowalski and I talked.
‘I’m really glad you told me everything about the Kaiji,’ she said.
I looked up. ‘Why?’
‘Because you didn’t have to. You could have sold the information to us, bargained for a better deal for your brother. But you offered it freely to me first. Maybe you wouldn’t have, at one point. I know you meant what you said being a team. I need to see more of that. Can you manage that for me?’
The Harmony way wasn’t how I did things, or how I wanted to do things. But I had to trust someone, and I trusted Kowalski’s judgement. Same as before, I saw she sincerely wanted me to trust her, for us to build that relationship together. And I wanted to help her do it. ‘I can do that,’ I said.
Kowalski was off the clock today, and without an immediate link to a supplier there wasn’t much we could do. We started talking again. Our conversation drifted through half a dozen subjects before we came around to the city of my birth. Like most people who knew about New Vladi, she’d never visited but was fascinated by it. I
