Stormblood, стр. 25

I’d never believed Compass could really function until I arrived here. Cities stacked on top of cities on top of more cities, squeezed inside an asteroid. It sounded like one hell of an eyesore, and a complicated one at that. Only when I’d been here for a month and had done some exploring did I understand how wrong I’d been. The floorplan had been meticulously designed from top to bottom. The architects hadn’t been messing around. Turns out, they did exactly what countless habitats, orbitals, moonbases, stations and planets did all over the Common: developed economic infrastructures.

The poorer, less privileged folks live towards the lower levels of Compass, typically on floors infested with industrial centres, dockyards, factories, printing farms, flophouses and slums that are just as shabby as they were in the Construction Era, when Compass was first formed. A little further up the social ladder are lowlevels teeming with marketplaces, seedy hangouts, spacedocks run by crimelords, and crowded metropolitan streets. Go higher and you’ll find the majority of Compass inhabitants on midlevels, cleaner cities containing coffeehouses, bars, sprawling apartment blocks, lively entertainment, trading centres, shopping plazas, areas of community living. Higher still are the central business districts, townhouses, opulent spaceports, theatres, waterfront restaurants, and well-off suburbs. The pinnacle of the asteroid is honeycombed with floors terraformed with beaches, parklands, forests, snowy mountains, vacation resorts, private hangar bays, hotels, and extreme superstructures only the stinking rich could afford. Scattered between them are smatterings of private spaces, subsectors and random floors no one quite knew what to do with or how to place. Alien species can be found either living in their own designated spaces rigged with species-appropriate life-support systems, or spread throughout the infrastructure. Nothing is quarantined or as strictly defined as people like to think, with the ecosystem of lifestyles, micro-societies, peoples and species bleeding and meshing into each other. You’d need a lifetime to explore all of it, let alone the several, kilometre-long empty spaces still under construction. Not to mention the Void Zones, still sealed off and under repair after Harvest artillery fire had shredded any chance of them being habitable.

So, when I emerged from a winding maze of stairwells, access tunnels and transit hallways to arrive on Changhao, one of the lowest levels of Compass, where Wong had her apartment, I knew what to expect. Cubed, windowless compartments had been stacked six or seven storeys high like discoloured boxes. Mostly shipping containers from the dockyard, retrofitted into living spaces. Purple smoke slithered from burner stubs and up through crisscrossing stairways and balconies jutting like rusty ribcages. Powerlines and pipes thick as my arm scaled buildings, a good half of them frayed or leaking onto the streets. Hippomechs, used for transporting heavy objects, rested on polished bogies. Neon words writhing in mid-air advertised cheap accommodation, clubs, vidgame arcades and sensory simulation cubes. Thick steam billowed from grimy kitchens and street stalls. Only a little of the atmosphere’s damp, hot scent leaked through my helmet filters, but it was enough to make me gag.

Amateur stormdealers and drug lords weren’t even bothering to hide here. Every second corner had sellers lingering on the streets. Customers swapping cards filled with Commoner-credits for sealed bags. Grimy drug-dens and distribution centres sat out in the open in alleyways, the chemical reek spreading like fog, their presence fused to the infrastructure like cancer clinging to the bone. If you worked out in the open, you were either stupid, or knew there was no chance of getting caught, because you owned the floor. I’d missed the warning in my shib alerting me that I was in dangerous, controlled territory. I’d probably already been spotted. Just as well I was fully suited up in my armour again. If they wanted to take me on, they’d have one hell of a time.

My palmerlog chimed, a message from Kowalski growing in blue text across my overlay. Scattered water droplets punched through the visualisation. I was afraid she had another Reaper death for me, but she was just fishing for an update. I replied I’d examined the body and would keep her informed on any leads I followed up. Mentioning the fight would only invite questions, and I wanted to take all factors into account before I made a move.

The message disintegrated into space. I passed by two oversized robots standing guard outside a building covered in gang glyphs. Their cinderblock heads, black metal bodies and claw-like hands were beaded with oily water like thousands of tiny liquid eyes. Behind them, a creaking staircase led down to a fighting pit, yells and cheers echoing up the stairwell. Grim had dragged me to one of those on my first day here. ‘They’ve just managed to make them legal,’ he’d screamed over the tumult.

Sweat and death had hung in the air like a weight on our shoulders. I’d heard about null-gravity knife fighting arenas, but never seen anything like that. People would bring robots, custom-built droids, even exotic creatures captured from all over the Common. The rarer the creature, the bigger the bet. I’d stared at the cages and a freak show of claws, oily feathers, scales, clacking mandibles, hissing fangs and bulging eyes stared back. The nearest cage had housed a little monster with a leathery, carmine-spotted hide and a retractable jaw. It went berserk when it saw me. The owner, a cowl-wearing Torven, had shoved me away and tried to calm his pet down.

But the real attraction was human fights.

‘Bets double when they’ve got stormtech,’ Grim told me as two men battled it out in the pit below us while people cheered them on in a dozen languages. ‘They’ve been trying to get the ban lifted since the Reaper War ended. Said it was insensitive while the war was going on, but now the war is over …’

My hands were sweaty and tight now as the sound of fists striking flesh reached me on the street and the stormtech leaped up inside me. I’d forced the sensations back