Stormblood, стр. 2

‘You worry too much. My tech’s airtight, always has been,’ came the hacker’s easy drawl. Grim was my best friend, but in moments like these I wanted to wring his scrawny neck. ‘Just making sure you don’t do anything stupid. Like on Kaddus Station.’

I winced. ‘You and I remember Kaddus very differently.’

Grim gave a knowing mhm. I changed the subject. ‘Make yourself useful and watch for nasty surprises at the waypoint.’

That was our deal. I handled the physical end of the business, while he worked his tech magic from twenty floors above. Grim grumbled but eventually settled down to work. He might whine about it, but he always comes around in the end. If I need him at my side he’ll be there, though sometimes the convincing gave me a headache.

He reminded me of my little brother.

I willed those painful memories away as Grim piped up: ‘Vak, why are we messing with the Jackal?’ The waypoint beamed a neon-green hexagon on my visor, measuring the distance as I walked. Broken glass crunched under my armoured boots. ‘You know he hunts down anyone who messes with him. He takes half of them.’

‘Half?’

‘Half of everything. One eye, one ear, five fingers, five toes. He leaves the tongue, so they can warn others.’

Wasn’t like I didn’t already know all this. ‘Your point being?’

‘My point being, why are we putting our heads on the chopping block?’

One of the Jackal’s less lethal enterprises was a biochem laboratory that sold experimental biotech on the darkmarket. One of our contacts wanted one of his genomes for a prototype called Hendrix – a male hormonal stimulant – enough to pay us to steal it. I make no excuses: stealing from crimelords is no less illegal than stealing from anyone else. Theft might not be my proudest work, but it’s the least dangerous and least bloody kind I do.

I hadn’t told Grim I only took this job to pay for his Compass residency card. He always buried the problem beneath jokes when I brought it up, but I caught the nervous flash in his eyes, worrying if this was the week he’d be deported from the asteroid.

I’ve not had not much stability in my life, not many people who stuck by me. Grim had. And I don’t let go of my friends easily.

‘Jackal boy isn’t home,’ Grim said over the sucking roar of a chainship departing the spaceport and punching through the hangar’s electric-blue shield-barrier into vacuum. ‘Probably won’t be until work hours are over, so it’s unlikely we’ll cross paths.’

‘You won’t,’ I rasped. The stormtech had slithered up to fold like wet cement in my throat, turning my voice husky and thick. I wasn’t suicidal or stupid enough to break into the Jackal’s biotech lab. But crimelords are usually paranoid enough not to trust their own security completely, and predictable enough to keep their closest secrets close: at home. ‘I’m the one breaking into the place.’

Although, we both knew I’d partially taken this job because of the risk. It was a challenge. A gamble. It’s no secret that my body’s wired to sniff out danger for the thrill of an adrenaline rush pumping through my system. It was why I handled this end alone. I’ll put myself in harm’s way, but I won’t risk my friends.

The chaos of the spaceport evaporated behind me as I slid deeper into residential sectors. Past colourful smears of digital ink, beneath the vertical labyrinth of jutting balconies and tangled walkways spiralling up through the buildings. I thought over the plan, my brain cycling through the risks and anticipating the possible dangers I’d confront and the kick I’d get out of them. My hands clenching and unclenching, my muscles tensing, the burning glow of adrenaline and androgen trickling through my system, feeding the alien plumbing hardwired into my body chemistry. I tried to shrug out of my body’s sticky sensations and ground myself in the hard details, the schematics.

Sometimes, my body is my own worst enemy.

I passed a group of stinking drunks slumped in a doorway in one of those seedy spaceport bars that only smuggler crews visit. Glancing up, I saw a flag displaying the atom-shaped insignia of Harmony snapping in a simulated breeze up near the vaulted ceiling. Harmony was the governing body that controlled this asteroid and many others, and back when I was a soldier, that insignia had meant something to me. My body heat rocketed sky-high as I gazed at it now, stormtech clenching inside me. No surprises there. They’d injected the drug into me, after all.

I looked away, jaw hard, just as one of the drunks flicked his gaze towards me. As if despite my ash-grey armour and one-way helmet visor he knew what I was. Some folks know something’s off. Wrong. Something down in the brain stem lets them sense the rottenness of alien biotech with no business being bottled in human flesh. Maybe he could smell me. He threw an empty beer bottle that glanced off my armoured shoulder. The stormtech instantly flared up in response. An invitation for violence. I turned away before I was tempted to accept it. Already raring for danger like I was, walking away was harder than I liked.

I could feel my armour responding to me now. Covering me sole to scalp, the toughened nanoparticle surface was supercharged at my touch. Inside the armour, the interface tendrils shifted along my back, the electrostatic charges crackling along the nape of my neck.

I turned a corner and saw a skinnie slumped in one of the asteroid’s hollows. He was birth-naked and striated with what looked like blue gills. They rippled in violent bursts along his tattered chest, his wire-thin arms, his malnourished face. Each breath sounded like stones rattling. His sweat was nearly black, oozing out of clogged pores, releasing the sickly-sweet stench of wet overripe fruit. Skinnies were stormtech addicts, some of them so consumed by their own body’s sensations they’d