Stormblood, стр. 19

called Reaper’s Bane. Three measures chilled gin, berry liqueur, a squeeze of lemon, a good splash of blue Curaçao. It was the drink me and Grim had discovered the night we’d met in an offworld spaceport bar. Grim had been caught hacking a gambling terminal. I’d flashed my Reaper credentials, saved him getting his face caved in by a bloodthirsty bodyguard. However people might look at us on the street, Reapers are widely revered for standing on the frontlines of our besieged planets and making a difference in the war. Doesn’t matter where I show my credentials, I’ve got some pull. No one wants to get in a fight with us, not if they want to keep their teeth. Grim’s assailants backed down. He’d bought me the first Reaper’s Bane in gratitude. I liked the guy enough to buy the second round. By the time the fourth swung around, we were partners.

Grim apprehended the square-cut glass with a skeletal hand. ‘Spill the beans, Vak. What’s going on?’

I told him. Harmony hadn’t sworn me to secrecy, and Grim was the only one I could talk to about this mess.

‘Don’t know if I like this,’ he said when I was done.

‘My take? It’s a takeover bid by a drug syndicate. In the end, I’d rather have Harmony control stormtech than let someone new monopolise the market. They’re the lesser of two evils.’ I thought of Alcatraz’s broken body, poisoned and mutilated by stormtech my brother might have helped move, and a chill trickled down my spine. I sipped the gin, the pungent liquid giving my throat a warm, pleasant glow. ‘Got no choice but to trust them.’

‘I wouldn’t,’ muttered Grim.

‘You’re hardly unbiased.’

‘Harmony bombed my homeplanet, Vak.’ Grim was serious for once, his thin shoulders slumped. ‘They tore families apart. They took children.’

It was an unspoken truth that Harmony had targeted underprivileged families on backwater planets during the war, pitching the Reaper programme as the most innovative technology since spaceflight. They’d found prime candidates as young as fourteen and all but kidnapped them. The ones their psychoanalysts believed were the best match got put through their stormtech experiments. They called it conscription, but in my book it was evil no matter what you called it. Sure, the Intelligence Officers and xenochemists responsible had been court-martialled, but that didn’t undo damage they’d done. But I’d been furious about it half a hundred times in the past. I didn’t need to rehash it tonight. ‘I know, Grim. But circumstances change.’

‘It’s your choice, mate. Not like I could dissuade you anyway.’ He reclined against the soft leather, legs folded beneath him. ‘Did you watch the films on that memorycrystal I gave you?’

Grim had an unabashed love of cult films and serials, particularly the ones that had originated on Earth, with several libraries’ worth stored up. He had a side-business selling them to people looking to be entertained by something on the weirder side. Occasionally, he passed them to me. Not all of them were terrible.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ve been too busy being kidnapped by Harmony.’

‘Maybe you’ve earned some R&R.’

‘Can’t see that happening any time soon.’

He dropped a hand on my shoulder where it blinked between gold and purple. My knee-jerk response was to shrug it off. The sensitive, overloading nature of the stormtech means Reapers don’t like being touched. But this was Grim, so I overcame the sensation. ‘Then if you have to play with fire,’ he said, ‘let me share the heat.’

‘Grim, I don’t want you to get hurt.’

‘It’s never been a problem before.’

‘This is Harmony, Grim. Not darkmarket smuggling.’

But his mind was made up. Grim’s as loyal as a dog, and whatever I was going through, he’d refuse to let me do it alone because he knew I’d do the same for him. He gave my shoulder a final squeeze before downing his drink and heading for the door. ‘Don’t worry about your brother, yeah? He’ll come around eventually.’

I downed my own drink as the door closed behind him, then stripped my sodden underskin and padded to the bathroom to shower. I stank with an overripe, sickly-sweet stench. The stormtech doesn’t just change the way you smell, it makes your pheromones sharper, more powerful. Skinnies have been known to lick blue sweat off their own bodies, getting high on the sweet-sour toxins secreted from their pores.

My freshly upgraded bathroom was decorated with black and white marble and equipped with an immense steam jet-shower. Fibres in the floors warmed up against my bare feet as I examined my latest collection of wounds and bruises in the curving mirror, stark against my patchwork tapestry of old scars, burns and lacerations. Stormtech might heal the flesh, but it’s going to leave a mark. Thick ropes of stormtech swirled down my stomach and streamed up my breastbone like a comet. I bunched my fist, watching the blue strands flare up along my arm in response. A layer of sticky alien circuitry forever fused to every part of my anatomy. I’d done the best I could not to hate it, try to live with it. Others had fared far worse when trying to adapt to it. If they adapted at all.

I knew some Reapers who’d spent years in rehab as Harmony tried to weaken the stormtech’s grasp on them, reconditioning them to resist their body’s visceral urges, rewiring their brains against their addiction to their own bodies. Others had slipped off the deep end, caving into it. They were Husks, their minds broken, swallowed by the sensations of their bodies, even if it meant hurting themselves just to feel something. They were beyond saving.

I unclenched my hand and stepped into the shower. Usually, the apartment complex Rubix warned me not to use too much water, but those restrictions seemed to have been lifted with the upgrade. I let myself be blasted by scalding jetstreams of water, feeling my muscles slowly, slowly unwind, the tension leaving my body as I breathed the steamy air. I allowed myself a luxurious half-hour