I nodded. RWAUs had sprung up all over the Common post-Reaper War. Since warpdrives, people tend to forget how terribly vast and empty space is. Even if your spacecraft’s packing high-burn engines and the usual fancy tech, getting anywhere of note takes a hell of a long time. In the event of another war, or an invasion of a less than friendly alien species, Harmony had safety deposits scattered across the Common in asteroids and stations, stockpiled with warships, weaponry, battlecruisers, suits, munitions, and factories, for back-up use until the bigger guns arrived.
A diagrammatic projection of this galactic region grew around us. Customized to Grim’s aesthetic tastes, the perpetually-moving image was an exaggerated explosion of colour, with the stars exaggerated spheres of light and various local stations and installations little glowing cubes. An overlay showed the course schedules of all recent spacecraft skimming around this part of the galaxy. Their course trajectories were shown in long, arcing circles and ellipses and zigzags, braided like thick cables and colour-coded by class, size and which species or syndicate owned them. One strand highlighted in neon-blue as the ship swerved around to one of these RWAUs before shooting back off to Compass, symbolized as an ever-rotating ball of soot-black spikes.
‘It should have ended there. Only, they screwed up, and didn’t scrub the substrates deep enough. We traced it back to one of the stormdealers on Compass, got a few of our men undercover to buy some stock. Every time, we got an identical match with the stormtech produced by Tipei Corporation.’ Kowalski broke into a wide smile. ‘We got him.’
‘Where?’
‘Cloudstern, of all places. One of the wealthiest levels in the whole of Compass.’
Grim shook his head. ‘Folks up there are bleeding Commoners. Bleeding, I tell you. And they still try to get a discount on packaged goods. Greedy bastards.’
I stopped Grim before he could confess to any other crimes in front of a Harmony operative. ‘They’re wealthy, then?’
‘They can afford top product.’ A datasphere burst apart on-screen, the shrapnel resolving into statistics that detailed the stormtech’s potency, reaction time, longevity. ‘This stuff is so pure it’s almost crystallised. The comedown would be horrendous. We’ve identified a cabal of high profile stormdealers called the Animal Kingdom. They each get their own slice of Compass to operate in. We’re targeting one of their most successful stormdealers: the Ratking.’
‘Why haven’t you arrested him already?’ I asked.
‘Kindosh wants it done quietly. If we send the Sub Zeros storming in, he’ll run. Maybe put a bullet in his own head rather than be interrogated.’
‘He’s not wired up with a bioaug?’
‘If he is, he won’t have anyone else holding the trigger. The guys high up tend to decide their own fates.’
‘What about the people that work for him? Mules, informers, blademen, dockhands he bribes?’
‘They’ll never breathe a word. These guys own neighbourhoods. The ones who aren’t loyalists are light years more afraid of them than us. No, we go for the top dog. Which is why we need to play it safe.’ Kowalski levelled a serious gaze at me. ‘These are some of the most brutal stormdealers on the asteroid. They’ve got zero tolerance for selling or any infringement on their territory. They’ve marched into rival stormdealer hideouts and massacred anyone inside, strung up their leaders and hung their dead bodies from their ships. No one’s going to talk. Getting this guy could be the start of bringing it all down. Can I trust you to bring this home?’
I gave no indication of the throb of stormtech deep in my belly. ‘You can.’
‘I mean it, Vak. This guy is our last lead. If we lose him, we may be finished.’
Cloudstern was one of those places that everyone knows about, but few have visited. Prestigious, expensive and premium, always seen and ever-present in adboards as the go-to destination for parties, shopping and exclusive clubs for the wealthy, elite and famous. If you didn’t already have the means, it was unlikely you’d ever live there. Located in the upper echelons of the asteroid, it was economically quartered in a sector spanning two dozen floors. It wasn’t reachable via any accessways or cross-transit routes, only by a specialised chainrail. The slim, bullet-shaped tube was outfitted to travel the entire length of the superstructure in under forty minutes, with relatively easy access between its vast floors.
But convenience never comes cheap. Security at the Travel Depot was heightened after the recent bombing and every third traveller was being submitted to a full dermal scan. Kowalski had given me credentials that permitted me to bypass the security, but not the queue. It was nearly an hour before I boarded the white-walled and spacious compartment, squeezing into a bucket seat next to a Rhivik. I was without armour, only dressed in my usual underskin. The alien’s thick scales jutted and jabbed into my right shoulder. I turned to say something when his nostrils flared, as if displeased to be sitting next to someone with stormtech. I wasn’t too keen on his earthy, sour smell either, so we’d both have to suck it up. I strapped into my safety harness, waiting for departure.
‘Don’t take the hardskins personally,’ a grey-skinned, black-suited Torven sitting to my left muttered, low enough for only me to hear. ‘They’re a slow bunch.’
I turned towards him. ‘Hardskin?’
The Torven slyly nodded towards the oblivious Rhivik, indicating his scales. ‘It’s what we call them. Hard in the skin, hard in the head.’
I was about to respond when the chainrail lighting dimmed and engines stirred to life beneath my feet. The walls and flooring turned opaque, pulsing with a honeycomb pattern as our transport got clearance and we shot
