Stormblood, стр. 150
She was right. I’d seen the data-packet they’d released, explaining the general gist of the situation. The House of Suns might not have spread their beliefs, but they had poisoned Compass, just as Harmony had poisoned our bodies with Shenoi DNA. Drug-trafficking was at an all-time high and rapidly climbing. The long-lasting consequences were yet to be seen.
‘We’re spread thin. We’re vulnerable. There’s offworld syndicates and species who’ll use this as an opening to get rid of us. And then there’s the Shenoi threat the Kaiji alerted us to. We have to stay vigilant, gather our allies,’ she said. ‘I did not survive the Reaper War to lose now.’
‘It’s not just about winning. It’s about how you win.’ I levelled my stare at Kindosh until she met it. ‘Harmony created Jae Myouk-soon. She fought back the only way she could, because she didn’t know any other way. She believed her actions were justified. The House of Suns wouldn’t exist without us.’ I held up my arm, where long liquid splinters of blue were shooting upwards like glowing arrows. ‘We have to change the paradigm. Learn not to make the same mistakes. Or we’ll have nothing worth fighting for.’
I’d never trust Harmony completely. They were an interstellar government agency with enough military and scientific power to blast Compass to hell twice over. You’d have to be mad to put unquestioning faith in any organisation of that calibre. But they were also one of the few things holding the stitching of the galaxy together. If I had to bet on something, it’d be them. You learn to work with the intel you’re given. Like it or not, they were the best chance we had, and I was going to give them that chance.
If I didn’t believe it, who would?
Kindosh took all this in with a slow, deliberate nod. Perhaps listening to me, really listening, for the first time. Then her face assembled itself to its usual stoicism. ‘Noted. Now, if there’s nothing else, I’ve got a month’s worth of Galactic Common meetings to arrange and—’
‘There is something else,’ I interrupted. ‘I want to see him.’
Artyom’s cell was in the innermost sector of the prison barracks and was roughly the same size as our shared room on New Vladi. Locked behind a crackling electranet, his only possessions were a stained mattress, a stained chair and a stained desk. The cleaning fluid failed to mask the stink of sweat and piss, drilling into my nose.
Compared to my Harvest prison cell, it was a palace.
‘Hey.’ Artyom wore an orange prisoner’s jumpsuit. Fibres running through the thick fabric would seize up if he tried to escape. Licks of blue were faintly visible underneath the jumpsuit.
I held my hands behind my back. ‘How you holding up?’
‘Could be better.’ He looked up. Pain creased the lines of his face. ‘You know what’s going to happen to me?’
It had been the talk of Harmony. People had taken to looking away when I entered a room, conversations chopped short. Saren told me they’d get over it, but I didn’t buy that. I’d been talking it over with Kindosh for hours. Well, more like arguing. ‘I don’t know,’ I admitted. ‘Though your death is in your favour.’
‘Yeah, there’s that.’
‘But you were involved in the most serious attack on Compass since the Reaper War. You were given chances to come clean. You ignored them. The Harmony Intelligence Committee will decide what happens to you.’
It didn’t need saying that he’d already have been executed if he wasn’t my brother.
‘Why did you join them?’ I’d kept the question bottled up for months now. Sokolav had told me, but I needed to hear this from my brother’s lips.
Artyom stared intently at his scarred hands, as if searching for a shred of wisdom there. He looked so thin and frail, like he’d been forced to grow up overnight and the rest of him hadn’t quite caught up yet. ‘You don’t understand how big a gap you left in my life. First I hated you. Then I hated Harmony for stealing you away and rejecting me. Then I hated both. One day, I got tired of waking up alone and checking Harvest correspondent newsfeeds to see if you’d been killed, I started hating the whole world.’
I imagined him sitting alone, watching the smoking battlefields piled with dead soldiers, leaking red, and knowing I had chosen that instead of him. The rage and injustice forced onto him, spurring him on to force it on someone else. ‘They brought injured Reapers back to New Vladi. So drugged out of their minds that their bodies had grown into blue gills, their families grieving over them. But they had something to grieve over. They got closure. I didn’t. It was like being in limbo. They wouldn’t tell me where you were. My own brother, and it was too big a risk to tell me if you were alive or dead or captured. I lost it, Vak. I just lost it. I couldn’t swallow the propaganda about stormtech doing what ordinary men couldn’t. Remember when Dad would tell us what happened to us was actually our fault? It was like that. Sokolav found me, told me I wasn’t the only one feeling that way. For the first time, I didn’t feel alone anymore. He said he’d found a source of comfort. It made sense at first. These people wanted answers, like we all do. The longer I stuck around, the deeper and deeper it went and I couldn’t get out.’ His voice adopted a raw, strained tone. ‘I never meant to hurt anyone, Vak.’
‘But you did.’ The words were