Stormblood, стр. 5
I peered suspiciously at my saviours as they cut the electranet off me. ‘What’d you want?’
‘Harmony wants a chat, Vakov Fukasawa. A long, long overdue chat,’ the woman told me as I pulled my arms free. ‘I don’t appreciate having to backtrace your friend’s feed just to find you.’
Of course that was how they’d found me. At long last, Grim’s outrageous confidence in his own abilities had conspired with pure happenstance to completely screw me over.
But Harmony didn’t waste time with petty smuggling. They had a galaxy to run, after all. The stormtech sparked in my chest and I had the impulse to make a dash for it. Scramble to my feet and get a head start before they caught up. Wasn’t like I owed these people anything. Not after the poison they’d pumped into my body.
But they wouldn’t have dug me up unless it was important. Really important. I had to find out why. So I swallowed the urge and asked, ‘I don’t suppose I have a choice?’
‘No,’ she confirmed. ‘You do not.’
2
Blood, Politics and Coffee
As we walked through the brightly lit hallways towards the spaceport, I got a proper look my saviour. The shib interface implanted in my skull and overlaying my vision told me she was Katherine Kowalski, of the First Class Primer rank. While her black, one-piece underskin with its liquorice-like sheen was typical Harmony field gear, her loose leather jacket and salt and pepper scarf weren’t, especially not for someone so high up the chain. She was Slavic; fair skinned with sandy hair and grey eyes that had a wild, bright look that didn’t usually last long with Harmony types. At over two metres tall, she stood eye to eye with me. Unusual. Had she maybe come from New Vladivostok? No. People from my homeplanet are less forthcoming, more habitually hunched over to shield themselves from the razor-like winds and freezing temperatures.
Watching her stride in front of us, I was acutely aware of the gunrunners maintaining pace behind me, ensuring I didn’t get any ideas about slipping away.
‘Stupid move, stealing from those guys,’ Kowalski said over her shoulder. ‘The Jackal runs Tipei-Corporation. Other darkmarket syndicates won’t even risk selling in their territory, let alone rob them.’
‘I’m not from here,’ I told her, unwilling to explain I was only doing it for a friend.
‘Tell that to the Jackal.’ She slid a chrome vaper out of a pocket, breathing deep and exhaling a thick plume of scented smoke. Hardly your standard Harmony accessory either. ‘He enjoys hunting thieves.’
‘I’m not a thief,’ I corrected. ‘I’m a smuggler.’
‘Don’t want to hear the excuses,’ she replied.
I could see we were going to get along just fine.
We bypassed the crowded spaceport and headed straight to a polished hangar bay. The metallic causeways were clustered with Hangarmasters and Shipmasters wearing flight suits. Flight schedules and docking designations for arrival ships were blaring out over the speakers. A vast viewport showed a black canvas, stained blue with stars and frantic with chainships and deepsystem spacecraft rendered in various metallic colours and swirling patterns. Their engines roared and left contrails of bright blue streaks as they shot out of view. There was even a lungship: a bulky, geometrical spacecraft several kilometres in length and built to traverse galaxies. More of Harmony’s signature flags hung from gleaming walkways and observation decks. As if anyone would forget who’d won the Reaper War.
We passed through unseen and boarded a Comet-class Harmony chainship, aerodynamic in build with a vanilla-white paintjob and a black trim along the elongated flank. Antigrav-nets kicked into gear as we strapped in, the ship smoothly disembarking from the berth and exiting the spaceport. Holographic icons glowed across the control screens, the viewport expanding to allow an unobstructed view of space. I folded my arms, content to travel in silence as the gunrunners gossiped about me in Japanese. My face was hidden behind my helmet, so they had no way of knowing I understood every word.
‘You think he’ll attack us?’ one asked, fidgeting with his thin-gun. ‘Stormtech screws with their heads, right? Gets them high on danger? Probably why he was messing with the Jackal in the first place.’
The stormtech swirled around my ribcage, as if it knew it was being talked about. I shifted against my five-point seat harness, tightening my hands around the shoulder straps.
‘Hard to think of any other reason. He fought in the Reaper War, after all,’ said the other, folding his hands around his bulging gut. ‘Besides, you get that alien DNA shot into your bloodstream and sooner or later you’re bound to go off the deep end.’
I knew they were waiting for me to remove my armour and expose my alien-infused flesh so they could see the blue zigzagging and looping through me. They were going to be disappointed. Stormtech increases the sensitivity of my skin, particularly my hands, feet and face, making my body temperature usually too cold or too hot. My armour was rigged up to counter this, actively scanning my biorhythms and stormtech, automatically adjusting the temperature to fit my conditions. The armour would press in on my body like an embrace, using a combination of gel-padding, thick tendrils and gritty abrasives to provide hard friction against my flesh, combating the stormtech’s influence with external stimuli. Right now it was dropping the temperature to cool me, my body heat declining and the tension in my muscles ebbing away as the stormtech settled. No matter how many times I used them, the suit’s custom-built functions never got old.
I exited the temperature controls as the chainship curved and the view of Compass took my breath away. The cratered surface of the gargantuan asteroid was spiked with titanic clusters of jutting, icy metal. Soaring kilometres tall, the dark spikes scintillating in the sun, it looked like the universe’s biggest sea urchin. All the damaged dreadnoughts, frigates, corvettes, spacecraft, warships and ordnance from our galactic region of the Reaper War had been wilted to slag and