Stormblood, стр. 8
At the mention of battle, a strand of stormtech split apart, threads chasing each other up and down my forearms like turquoise stormclouds in fast forward. ‘Are you surprised? You created that drug market the moment you shot stormtech into us.’
‘We did what was necessary,’ Kindosh said crisply. ‘We won. Now we’re dealing with the fallout.’
‘We get Reapers and skinnies coming here every day,’ Kowalski interjected from behind me. ‘We’ve set up a dozen rehab facilities to help. They can get everything they need to get clean. Like you did. Ritalin, sedatives, muscle relaxants, emotion-suppressing stims, all of it.’ She paused, as if to compose herself. Kindosh gave the tiniest of frowns. ‘Only there’re two dozen stormtech products on the market, and we’ve got more people Bluing Out every week.’
Bluing Out. I managed a dry smile. Hundreds of years ago, when computers crashed they called it the Blue Screen of Death. Now human beings crashed. Only difference was that there was no rebooting them. The phrase had been Reaper gallows humour. A way of coping with the torture chambers our bodies had morphed into. Now it was common usage. Wasn’t too sure what to think of that.
‘Only they’re not just Bluing Out,’ said Kindosh. ‘They’re contracting some sort of hostile biovirus.’
‘Biovirus?’ I asked before I could stop myself.
‘First our stormtech shipments have been going missing.’ The wrap-around flexiscreen monitor flickered back to life and expanded in a semi-circle. ‘Then someone broke into our rehab centres. We thought it was a failed robbery. Wouldn’t be the first addicts who’ve broken in. Now we think they deliberately tampered with our suppressors and chemical stockpiles, since everyone who took them Blued Out. We think it’s the same story for our stolen stormtech: it’s being poisoned, altered to be lethal.’ On the flexiscreen, whirling, multicoloured fragments coalesced into an image. A tall, black-skinned man with a shaved head. I realised with a cold jolt that I knew him. It was Alcatraz. He’d been in my squad, my fireteam. We’d survived the Reaper War together. Now he was sprawled out on hard concrete. His veins were a dark spiderweb, his skin rippled and his eyes a glassy blue-black that told me he’d died in agony.
I felt an instant flare of anger for my friend. Crushed it and tried to think. Harmony weren’t showing me this by accident. They knew about our friendship. Our years of hard service together. They were manipulating me and I didn’t even know why.
‘The ex-Reapers Bluing Out is what tipped us off. They either drop dead or go on a rampage,’ continued Kindosh. Kowalski had her eyes averted from the image. ‘No visible overdose, no warning signs, no prior evidence of self-destructive behaviour. The only thing they had in common was their visits to rehab and taking suppressors.’
I saw what they were getting at. Harmony’s reputation, both as a galaxy-wide government and military force, had been shattered once the sprawling systems and species in the galactic community comprising the Common figured out just how we’d won the Reaper War, and Harmony was desperate to rebuild it. I wasn’t about to forgive them, or forget the friends I’d lost as Harmony’s untested, experimental drug violently fused with their systems on a molecular level. We’d taken losses without even hitting the battlefields. Their tortured screams as they thrashed in their restraints around me still echoed in the back of my head.
Our rehabilitation was one of Harmony’s major point-scoring PR campaigns. Harmony couldn’t let thousands of biosoldiers wander the Common ready to explode into action at the slightest provocation. So they’d introduced the rehab centres, which had worked a charm. Going through withdrawal – Shredding – had nearly killed me. It’s a hell of a difficult thing to deprogramme a human body. It had taken endless rehab, discipline and training not to slip into the vortex of using aggression as my primary method of solving problems. Gradually, the stormtech’s control over my body had weakened, as had my additional strength, healing and pain tolerance. Not completely gone, of course. The alien biotech’s as much a part of my anatomy as my nerves, my musculoskeletal system. Combating my body’s most dangerous urges is an active, daily battle. But rehab had made it a winnable one. What had also stuck around were the dozens of micro-effects the stormtech had on my body. It accelerated my pheromones, the growth of my body hair and nails, bloated my sweat and saliva glands, hammered me with skin rashes.
Compared to others, I’d got off easy.
Kindosh poured herself another coffee, her black three-dee printer whirling as it conjured up synthetic brown sugar. ‘Any drug can have a bad batch. But if people stop trusting the rehab centres, they’ll go to street stormdealers instead. Then the addiction will keep spreading and spreading. There’ll be more people shooting all we have left of the Shenoi into their veins and turning themselves into ticking time bombs. We’ll have an epidemic on our hands. And if no one trusts the treatments, we won’t be able to stop it.’
I swung my gaze back around to Alcatraz. We’d promised each other that if one of us fell in battle, the other would get their body sent to their homeplanet to be buried. But we’d said nothing about after the war. I looked at the blue foam oozing from his gaping mouth, stormtech slicing his chest open from the inside. Someone had done this to my friend. To a man who’d saved my life as many times as I’d saved his. Who’d got me through the worst war can throw at you, as all my fellow Reapers had. I’d be hacked to pieces and buried in the mud on some war-torn planet without them. We owed a life debt to each other in more ways than we could possibly count. We weren’t just soldiers,