Stormblood

by Jeremy Szal

  The minutes trickled by, the whole situation horribly familiar. Unwanted memories of being captured by Harvest surfaced. At least then I’d been brimming with stormtech, letting me hold out against advanced torture techniques that would have broken most men. Now I had nothing. My stormtech was wild and unharnessed. It did nothing to suppress the sour dread growing in my gut.

  I was being held in a server room. Humming mainframes and cabinets lined the membrane-patterned walls. Ribbed cables fed into the dermis of crackling substrates beneath me and the stink of supercooling fluids hung heavy in the air. A winking red terminal connected to the cradle caught my eye, but when I tried to lean in for a better look the restraints crisscrossing my chest pushed back, holding me tighter. My comms were dead, like my suit, access to the net cut off. No, I wasn’t going anywhere.

  I don’t know how many hours they left me strapped there, but it was long enough for my arse to turn to rock before the door crashed open and my two least favourite people in the world strolled in. Lasky had a lanyard draped around his neck, a keycard at the end.

  ‘Comfortable?’ He rapped my armoured shoulder, as if it might echo. To me, it felt like he was touching my flesh. ‘You better be. These cradles are built to take damage.’ He held up the keycard around his neck. ‘Only way you’re getting free is with one of these.’

  Hideko rolled her eyes. ‘Just tell us who sent you, we can go from there.’ She unwrapped another stick of gum and slid it into her mouth. ‘No need to die for people who don’t give a toss about you.’

  Me and Harmony didn’t see eye to eye, no. But they weren’t my enemies, either. Whatever their broader motives were, they wanted to stop stormtech spreading on the streets, stop more people from dying, stop it from becoming a destructive, franchised drug. Hard to argue with that. Made them the lesser of a million other evils in my book.

  These people didn’t know I was onto them, or that Artyom had been my way in. Had to keep it that way. Vital battlefield intel isn’t always about what you know. It’s about what the enemy doesn’t know.

  Lasky made a little choking laugh that sounded like someone trying to give birth to a tractor. ‘We’ve got time.’ He clutched my shoulders as the stormtech leaked through the cracks in my common sense. ‘You don’t. I wonder, how many days can we leave you sitting here without food and water? Without sleep?’

  I said, very quietly and very calmly, ‘Listen here, you stinking sack of stupid, you touch me again and I’ll break your hand.’

  Lasky smiled. Then slammed a wrench into the side of my helmet – once, twice, three times – square on my ear. I choked on my own breath as white-hot pain went rattling through my skull.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ the little sociopath said, ‘what did you say?’

  ‘Just tell us who you are.’ Hideko sounded bored to tears. ‘It’ll make all our lives easier.’

  But the stormtech was whiplashing me into a frenzy and I wasn’t about to cave now. ‘Go rot in hell, you insufferable waste of oxygen,’ I snapped, breath burning in my throat.

  ‘This is pointless,’ Hideko sighed, twisting her gum wrapper.

  ‘Then we use the nightware.’ Lasky stooped down next to me with a smile I really didn’t like. ‘Torturing another human is draining stuff, you know. There’s the screaming. The long hours. The broken bits everywhere. Worst of all: the empathy. After a couple of hours of blood, broken bones, smashed fingers, screams and pleas for mercy, people start to go easy. They might slow down. They might take pity.’ Lasky’s stale breath reeked as he stared at me through my visor. ‘A nightware Rubix won’t.’

  Lasky reached behind one of the mainframes to bring out a fat armoured case and pass it over to Hideko. Inside was an array of blinking knobs connected to a cluster of powerful processors I really didn’t like the look of.

  ‘It’ll infect every inch of your suit’s circuitry. There’s no pleading or bargaining with this,’ Lasky said, savouring every word as Hideko began jacking the nightware into my armour. ‘It’s not programmed to have morals or limits. These Rubix AIs were built up from the brains of psychopaths and serial killers. And that’s before they were tweaked. Mercs and pirates in deepspace use these suckers for advanced interrogation. Most folks are lucky to survive an hour. The AIs need to be kept in a constant state of perpetual pain, to keep them fresh and eager in the tank.’

  He turned to Hideko, drumming his fingers across my knee. ‘What do you think it’ll do first? Raise his temperature? Crush him inside? Start the internal wiring and cables growing through his skin?’

  Hideko’s gum bubble burst like a gunshot. ‘Difficult to say. Who knows, maybe all three at the same time?’

  These people were not in charge. They were bullies who hid behind others, who took as much pleasure in sadism as in knowing they were untouchable.

  I knew these types all too well. And knew they meant every word of what they’d said.

  ‘If it were up to me, I’d put a bullet in your face and be done with you, let someone else play with your corpse,’ Hideko told me, stooped over the nightware case. ‘But not until we know who you are and who’s coming after us. Since you’re not in a talking mood, we’ll get you nice and loosened up for some friends who’d like a chat. See how communicative you are after the nightware’s done its business with you.’

  ‘How long shall we give him?’ I couldn’t help but watch as Lasky reached for the dial. Cranking up, up, up, past ten hours, past twenty, all the way to thirty. ‘There. Thirty hours sounds like a good round number.’ Lasky patted my chest, pressed his face inches from mine. ‘Don’t worry, big guy, it won’t kill you. We need you alive. But then, alive has a pretty broad range of conditions, doesn’t it?’

  The Rubix at Artyom’s bar had been a caterer, working in a public space. What would a Rubix designed for torture and advanced interrogation do to me, given complete control of my suit?

  I held my silence as the switches were flicked, snapped and locked into position. Was there anything I could tell them? No. Every piece of information led back to Artyom. And the moment they realised the connection between me, him and Harmony, we were all dead. I’d protected him from our father, from gangsters. I was going to protect him now.

  My shib display flickered as my suit jumped to life, ghostly warnings squirming along the voxels. The readouts of my HUD disintegrated into dust. Instead, the surfaces were oozing with black mould, growing thorns that glistened wet with toxins, icons reforming into cracked skulls. The nightware was already inside.

  Lasky’s fingers danced over a panel. Additional straps shot out of the cradle, clamping tight around my elbows, waist and knees. Going tight, tighter, crushing me down. I gritted my teeth, twitching hard in my restraints. ‘No need to be tough in here.’ Lasky tapped the wall. ‘Soundproof. Scream as much as you like. You’re on your own, big guy.’

  They were about to file out when Hideko pointed to the chair’s keycard. ‘Hey, sling that around his neck. He’ll go bonkers trying to get at it.’

  ‘Good idea!’ Lasky carefully draped the lanyard around my neck, leaving the keycard resting on my heaving chest. Their footsteps echoed away and I was left alone with the nightware.

  I couldn’t break out of my restraints, but I wasn’t going down without a fight. I worked up a feverish sweat as I struggled in my cradle, breath sawing in my throat. The stormtech lanced from rib to rib, battering against the closed cage of my chest like it was trying to smash through. The keycard drew my gaze like gravity. I made a desperate attempt to wriggle out of my wrist restraints and grab it, but what the hell was the use? I went limp in my cradle.

  I was utterly and completely screwed.

  I choked out a laugh. Earlier today I’d been browsing a shopping plaza with Grim and arguing about what to get for lunch. In following my brother, I’d made one hell of a misstep. And the worst part? No one was coming to save me. I’d be screaming insa
ne by the time Grim alerted Harmony. Assuming they even found me in the broken maze of the Warren.

  I could only try and hold out. If I survived the nightware, maybe I’d find a way out of here.

  My HUD thickened with dark smoke. The server room walls peeled back, as if they were a mere illusion and the true, bleak reality of the world was being revealed, some place I’d never escape. I was in the decrepit hallway of some abandoned house or mansion, full of rotten timbers and flaking walls. I could see the mangled remains of animals, piled up in the corners. Razorwire and creaking cages dangled from the ceiling, full of slithering, unrecognisable monstrosities. Behind me, something skittering, writhing, feeding in the darkness. Fresh sweat broke out on my forehead, my chest and neck, but it wasn’t until I gasped the warm, muggy air that I realised my armour was heating up, my rebreathing filter lowered, cutting off fresh air.

  The smoke coalesced, with agonising slowness, into a twitching figure. The monster was a grotesque amalgamation, as if parts of different predators had been grafted together in a horrific experiment. It stalked towards me on four mangled legs, claws scraping wood, a blood-curdling growl building in its massive chest. Yellowed bones jutted out through torn, muscle-bound fur. A rotten spine peeked through the mottled skin like the ridgeline of a mountain. Parts of its body were violently fused in a gristle-coloured exoskeleton. The monster’s mouth was locked behind a rusted metal cage, stitched into the flesh. Behind the wide bars, jagged lips peeled back, revealing rows of black, tombstone teeth. Its torn nostrils flared as if smelling my scent while small, furious eyes rattled inside a hollow skull. Its jaw opened wide with a sickening oozing sound. Acid, gristle and ropes of bloody drool blasted through the cage and into my face.

  Nothing more than a cheap visual effect, cooked up with a few lines of code.

  It wasn’t real. It wasn’t real.

  The monster’s eyes glinted as I went rigid with tension, restraints working hard to keep me cemented in place. The temperature was rising and rising, breathing becoming harder and harder.

  It was turning my suit into a furnace.

  The nightware construct burst into a raging fire. Thrashing flames blazing up its twisted body, its flesh and fur burning, bones crackling. It hunched over me like a towering inferno and pressed its dripping, burning face inches from mine. Locked my gaze before roaring out an evil, ear-splitting shriek, smoke streaming out of its mangled jaw and into my lungs. I jerked back on panicked reflex, away from this blazing world of smoke and fire. In my augmented vision, my armour was beginning to melt into my flesh with the heat, as if to prove it was real.

  My chest tightened, stormtech rolling inside me and any shreds of thought evaporated as I battled to breathe, my throat and lungs burning. The Rubix was testing how little oxygen I could survive with, how fast it could dehydrate me. My body churning sweat out like a pump as I fought for breath.

  Then the noise started. Talons raking metal, the shrieking of tortured animals, punching through my ear drums. Growing louder, louder, until I didn’t think there could be any louder sound in the universe, then louder still. I thrashed helplessly, aware that I was screaming, though my own voice was drowned out, cocooned in this infinite sound. A vibration kicked into my suit. Crawling up my spine into my nervous system. Every centimetre of my inner suit was shuddering, sandpapering my skin. Shaking me until my vision blurred and my teeth rattled together. I tried to set my jaw. I wouldn’t beg. I’d won the Reaper War. I’d survived the battlefield and seeing my friends being blown to bloody pieces around me. I hadn’t broken when Harvest hauled me back to their base for interrogation, stuffed me into a prisoner’s suit and hung me from the ceiling of a concrete cell.

  No way was I going to break now.

  I tried to think of the New Vladi mountains. The whisper of snow and wind. My brother’s weight leaning against me. The smell of fresh pine and the taste of vodka on my tongue. The logs crackling in our campfire, embers whirling into the sky. I wrapped myself in my memories, held on to them like a lifeline until the monster lurched out of the darkness, claws hooking around my shoulders as it leaned over me and bellowed in my ears to jolt me out of them, louder than a screeching hurricane, louder than anything in the universe.

  The juddering of the armour increased threefold. Tightened around me. My suit boiling, burning against my skin as the screeching spiked into my brain like a needle. Animal growls and screams spewed from my throat, spraying my visor with saliva.

  I almost didn’t notice the scratching running down my palms and over the soles of my feet but then I remembered what Lasky had said about internal wiring. I bucked in the cradle as my suit’s inner wires and tendrils fed between my toes, wrapping around my feet and scratching at my soles like raked fingernails. Coiling under my armpits. I snapped my jaw shut as it prodded around my mouth, forcing myself not to scream even as the wires pried my lips open. Curious cables slithered in like playful metal snakes between my teeth, scratching at the roof of my mouth and inching towards the back of my throat. I was exhausted, terrified, shaking, every heaving breath filled with dread for the moment they’d tunnel down my oesophagus and start inflicting permanent damage.

  It kept me like that for hours.

  It waited until I was on the precipice of passing out before trying something new.

  The nightware flipped through fragments of the Reaper War, dragging me through the memories. The pockmarked, scorched battlefields, the Dead Zones where we’d waited in ambush. The towns where we were too late to evac the civilians and found them lying mangled on the streets. The med bays. The rotting corpse pits, stretching through the wastelands, ash raining on their pallid faces. Hellfire thundering down from orbit in the Battle of Lysven. Men in my Battalion screaming as they were vaporized. The stink of ozone, of grasslands burning. The stormtech crackled through me with spitting, furious sparks as the remembered sensations came flooding back, triggering it hard. The whirlpool was dragging me back. My grip weakening.

  The videos played on and on and on until it felt like my skull would burst – and then it started up again. And again. Until they slowed, swooping down to focus on a dead Berserker, his bloodied uniform embossed with the Harvest glyph. Except, it wasn’t a Harvester. It was Artyom. My brother’s pale, lifeless face, during a battle five years ago on a planet millions of klicks away.

  The Rubix knew me. It was inside my suit; now it knew who I was. Didn’t matter how long I held out. If the Rubix knew, they’d know very soon.

  I had to get out of here.

  The armour crushed my chest, my spine, growing tighter and tighter, as if it knew what I was thinking. The cradle vibrated against my back, sending bone-shuddering pain scattering up my body. A cold numbness spreading along the soles of my feet and palms, up my legs and arms. An image of the suit’s inner wiring, metal and matte, worming into my flesh like tendrils festered in my skull as my hearing faded. Darkness smearing along the fringes of my HUD, biting off my senses one at a time, ensuring I only saw and heard and felt what it wanted me to.

  Sweat clouded my vision as fast I could blink it away. I looked at the red terminal pad connected to the cradle, the peacefully blinking button that would release me. It was a straight shot – a mere metre away. But strapped down like this, a metre might as well be a lightyear.

  I still had an iron projectile hidden in the sleeve of my armour. But could I even get close to the right angle from here?

  There was nothing more I could lose.

  The numbness had reached my armpits like frostburn and was busy inking across my collarbone. I drew a breath around the wires in my mouth. Tried to steady my shaking arm as I aimed with my wrist, barely able to see that red panel. Blinking away as if daring me to miss. I had one shot at this. If I missed, the next few hours would slowly churn my brain into mush.

  I reached for the stormtech for the first time in years. Pulled on it to sharpen my focus like it h
ad on the battlefield; let it drench me in calm and clarity. Took a slow, calming breath before I toggled the command to fire.

  The missile whistled out of my wrist.

  Thudded into the panel.

  My restraints popped open and I hurled myself clear of the cradle. Every limb was a numb, dead weight, my hearing gone. The nightware construct burst from the darkness into my vision, clawing and shrieking with the garbled voices of a hundred dying creatures in my face. It drowned me in blackness, filling my helmet with ruptures of ear-splitting sound. I scrambled in a moment of blind panic, unable to find the case and knocking it away with numb hands when I did. When I finally managed to grab the case, I brought it slamming down on the rotten floorboards. The monster construct was sent smashing backwards, as if kicked with a hammer. Chunks of its thrashing body smeared into stuttering pixels as I smashed the case down, again, again, again. Its mangled face shuddered, warped with black static, its outstretched claws peeling back into strips of writhing circuitry, legs hacked into broken metal stumps. It looked like something was trying to tear and claw its way out of it. Gritting my teeth, eyes locked with the monster, I brought the case down with one final, splintering crack. The monster’s dripping, roaring jaw was blasted into a screaming void of violent dark matter, its body disintegrating chunk by chunk until it was gone.

  A sob burst out of me. Pieces of the casing crunched as I sprawled on my back. My senses returned, numbness dissipating like mist, the decrepit hallway peeling away to become the server room once more. My armour slowly resumed normal functionality as the HUD and all standard readouts regrew. The wires stopped writhing against my flesh. I didn’t even have the strength to kick the case again.

  I was free. And weak. And disoriented. And on the verge of puking in my helmet. And still in the middle of a maze, in the middle of an abandoned floor, surrounded by my captors.