Stormblood

by Jeremy Szal

  Seven years since Harmony had injected it into me.

  Felt like a hundred.

  The men behind me shifted uneasily at the sight of it. I folded into the seat indicated, then noticed the grooves in the arm and leg rests of the chair, where restraints would clack around me if I tried anything.

  They’d created me, but they didn’t trust me. Good to know where we stood.

  ‘Vakov Fukasawa.’ Kindosh looked at me like I was a particularly difficult puzzle piece that didn’t fit her worldview rather than a person. ‘Reaper turned thief and smuggler.’

  Former Reaper, I almost corrected. I was no longer one of their biosoldiers, engineered by hostile alien technology to fight their war. But telling them that would have been pointless. Once Harmony, always Harmony, as the saying went. ‘What’s my business to you?’

  ‘It’s illegal, for starters.’

  I laughed and the stormtech in my chest seemed to laugh with me. I gestured at it. ‘Please. Don’t tell me Harmony got an attack of conscience.’

  Kindosh didn’t flinch. ‘You’re not here to discuss the Reaper War, Fukasawa.’ I couldn’t help staring at her coffee-stained teeth as she spoke. ‘We didn’t force you to join the Reaper programme, or to accept the stormtech. That’s done. We’re dealing with present problems now.’

  ‘What problems?’ I tensed. Were they after the genome I’d stolen? My smuggling record? The stormtech curled around my tightening muscles, twitching in the joints of my fingers, throbbing in my armpits. I hated everyone being able to see it.

  Kindosh leaned back. ‘Have you or any of your contacts been involved in smuggling or selling stormtech substances, on or off Compass?’

  If I wasn’t used to Harmony’s behaviour, I’d probably have been more taken aback. ‘You must be mad,’ I said. ‘I’d never mess with that poison, never spread it around. You’ve done enough damage with it already.’

  Stormtech wasn’t a drug like synthsilver or bluesmoke. It was a literal weaponised virus. Experimental biotechnology that increased every physical and mental facet of the human body. It rewired our bodies with a hunger for adrenaline, dopamine and endorphins, earning their release through physical effort, risk-taking and, above all, aggression. The high others got from a good gym work-out, we got from throwing ourselves into danger, multiplied by a thousand. It made us crave the rush of fight-or-flight, the thrill of near-death and conquering opponents, let us soak up damage as fast as we could deal it out. One dose was enough to get you permanently hooked, the cocktail of your body chemicals constantly delivering the high as long as you continued giving into it.

  We became addicted to our own bodies.

  So it wasn’t exactly a surprise that we fared well in battle. We smashed Harvest to pieces, reclaimed our fallen planets and won the Reaper War because we didn’t know when to stop fighting.

  We still don’t.

  Once stormtech worms its way into your system, it’s there to stick around. It had fused with my nervous system, in every blood cell, wrapped around every bone. Even now, I could feel the hunger for danger zigzagging between my ribs, my mouth coated with sticky saliva, hands twitching. My eyes wandered to the autorifle dangling loosely in the nearest guard’s hand and I quickly tore them away, squashing any thoughts about making a lunge for it. There’s no such thing as a fantasy for me. If I think about doing something for long enough, I end up doing it.

  Harmony knew all this but they wanted to win the war desperately enough to pump us with bleeding edge alien biotechnology. I hated their guts for it and always would. And I’d rather step into open vacuum than spread that stuff into other people’s bodies.

  Kindosh gave a sage nod. ‘Good to know. Good to know.’

  There was something they weren’t telling me. ‘What’s this about?’ I asked. ‘You can’t honestly think I’d be peddling stormtech around Compass.’

  ‘Why not? It’s the biggest drug on the market,’ Kindosh said. ‘The current craze. Hundreds of years ago it was alcohol. Prohibition period, you ever hear about that? Nucky Johnson and Al Capone – look them up. Then it was cocaine. Then synthsilver. And now this. I can imagine you wanting a slice of that very profitable pie.’

  You’d think people would avoid stormtech like the plague the moment they heard horror stories from the Reaper War. But humanity’s greatest vices have always been the ones most likely to kill you. Besides, we don’t exactly have a history of playing smart with things we don’t understand. Some people who tried stormtech were just sniffing out the next high. Others were simply curious. Others had run their full course with other narcotics and wanted the peak of the psychotropic mountain. But most who voluntarily took stormtech liked the idea of tweaking their physiology. Of being rewired to crave tension, excitement, danger. They wanted their biochemistry to reward them for taking risks, for pursuing excitement. Stormtech didn’t just enhance those cravings. It made them addictive; it made people enjoy being addicted. Maybe they wanted to add some colour to their lives. Or escape depression. Or have the stormtech eat some yet-incurable sickness out of their bodies. Or have the courage to do what they’d never do without alien biotech urging them along.

  There were as many reasons take stormtech as people who took it. But the results were always the same.

  ‘You want a likely candidate, ask the Jackal,’ I said. ‘Don’t waste your time with me.’

  ‘We’ve got our eye on him,’ Kindosh said in a tone that revealed how little she liked being told how to do her job. ‘But I like to cover all the angles. Right now, we’re fighting an uphill battle and losing.’

  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, we were brothers. Family. And now someone was poisoning the drugs which kept ex-Reapers sane. Trying to turn us into trigger-happy, walking stormtech time-bombs, a threat to themselves and everyone around them, all the while driving us to the brink of insanity and death.

  We’d saved the Common. And this is how we were being repaid.

  A marrow-deep rage I hadn’t known I was still capable of built up in my chest. The white-hot anger at whoever was doing this eclipsing my distrust and dislike of Harmony and their manipulative games.

  ‘You want me to hunt down the people doing this?’ I asked levelly.

  ‘You’re the best candidate for the job.’ I followed Kindosh’s line of sight out the viewport towards the alien dreadnought as she spoke. ‘And timing couldn’t be worse. The Kaiji always insisted tampering with stormtech was too dangerous. Their entire species, their entire civilization, joining the Common depends on us killing this at the source. Their Ambassadors come here regularly to inquire about our progress. I intend to show evidence of it.’

  I had to ask. ‘Why me?’

  ‘Two reasons: because you’re a Reaper who has their stormtech under control. You were even captured by Harvest and escaped.’

  I shouldn’t have been surprised she had that knowledge tucked away. Harmony knew my muscles’ density, my blood pressure, the pH of my saliva, so she’d clearly pulled my records.

  ‘And because we already have a suspect.’

  My fingers went bone-white around the armrests. ‘Who? Who’s killing Reapers?’

  ‘We have some swarmbot footage. It’s inconclusive from the break-in’ – the flexiscreen brought up a hazy shot of two men, faces averted – ‘but we’ve got something much clearer from a stormtech theft down near Limefields.’

  ‘Don’t know where that is.’

  Kindosh took a slow sip of coffee and meticulously savoured the taste. ‘Of course. I forget you’re not a local. It’s on the eighty-second floor of Compass.’ Another still image grew on-screen to show the same figure hunched over the stormtech canisters. It focused with crystalline clearness on a young man with the same black hair, tilted dark eyes and bulky, muscular build as mine.

  It was my brother.

  Artyom.

  All the staring, the guards and weapons, suddenly made sense. A tsunami of stormtech rolled down my chest, crashing down into my stomach and washing away the rage working up inside, leaving me with sour, hollow dread.

  ‘Artyom could have stumbled across it. He might not have known—’ The words became ash in my throat and I knew she had me.

  Kindosh held my gaze long enough for me to feel uncomfortable. ‘Artyom Fukasawa works at an alehouse in Limefields and leaves each night at around the same time this image was taken. We need someone to poke around, find out the details.’

  ‘We’ve barely spoken in years,’ I managed. I was grasping for anything but the obvious explanation. I thought back to our last happy evening together. Sitting by a campfire on the mountain, the logs in our makeshift fire crackling and spitting scintillating orange sparks as we traded stories over a bottle of vodka. What was my brother doing with a stolen canister of the universe’s most dangerous drug?

  Kindosh shrugged. ‘Saving Reaper lives matters to you. I suspect keeping your little brother out of prison does, too. If there’s anyone who can navigate both sides and help deliver a solution, it’s you.’

  The rage began trickling back, but this time it was channelled in a very different direction. Beneath this veneer of sincerity and smiles, Harmony was just as manipulative as ever. Using Alcatraz against me. Using my brother against me.

  It was clever. And it was Harmony to the core.

  Except, Kindosh had made one tiny, crucial mistake.

  She didn’t know me. And I don’t play ball with people like this. I’ve got zero patience for Harmony’s crap. I wasn’t about to be another cog in their meat machine. I desperately needed to talk to my brother, unravel whatever he’d got tangled up in. I’d try to protect my fellow Reapers. But not on Harmony’s terms. I’d find my own.

  ‘Allow me to put this as delicately as I can. I’d rather eat a bucket of razorwire than do anything for you.’ I held Kindosh’s gaze as I stood. I spread my arms, displaying the writhing electric blue. ‘Harmony has done enough damage to the universe. I’m done taking orders.’

  I expected disappointment. Perhaps anger. Instead, Kindosh’s lips twitched into a smile colder than a New Vladi winter. ‘Well. We’ll have to find a way to convince you, won’t we?’

  That sounded unpleasant. ‘I don’t do charity,’ I said, as haunting images of Blued-Out Reapers tumbled away on the flexiscreen. So many good men and women, all wasted flesh.<
br />
  ‘There are many alternative provisions we can make for our allies.’ There was subtle emphasis on the last two words. ‘Nothing so … trite as money.’

  It was good to see Harmony hadn’t lost their inability to take no for an answer. I don’t think Kindosh understood the notion. ‘You’ve got nothing I want. Nothing of value.’

  ‘Really, Fukasawa? What if we can offer information? Answers. Solutions. Things you cannot find on your own. Surely, when it comes to your brother, those become of value.’ She traced my gaze as the images swapped back to the shots of my brother, caught in the moment of his crime, again and again on a loop. She set her coffee down with a final, deliberate tap. ‘Or perhaps that Harvester friend of yours. What’s his name?’ She continued without waiting for an answer. ‘I believe he’s lacking in a Compass residency card. That can be easily remedied. As can all those charges of smuggling. I don’t imagine you’d want to him see him arrested or deported.’

  My face split in a humourless, dour grin. This was the Harmony I knew. Nothing so low it was beneath them, no act of extortion too undignified. I opened my mouth and prepared to say something I’d later regret when Kindosh talked over me. ‘Think on it, Fukasawa. In the meantime, I think it’s best if Kowalski acts as your liaison. With Reapers dying, we can’t very well have you wandering around without protection, can we? She’ll make sure you don’t run into trouble. Perhaps even help you along the way.’

  ‘What?’ Kowalski spluttered as a sinking frustration plummeted through my gut. It wasn’t enough for Kindosh to corner me into doing her work; she had to lock me out of any other options, too. ‘We never discussed this.’