Stormblood
Page 45
‘Felt like it, too,’ I said. The stormtech wasn’t trying to rearrange my anatomy for the hell of it anymore, but I still felt its raw power itching through my body like a second musculoskeletal system. My limbs felt like they’d been reinforced with nanofilament carbon fibre, a latticework of protective armour woven into my flesh. My sense of smell and hearing was so blisteringly strong it hurt. I was probably half alien by now. Maybe more. Blue, rocky scabs were starting to erupt from my skin. Overnight, my body hairs had thickened and grown denser. I smelled more pungent. I could only imagine what other gross side effects my body was gleefully racking up for me down the line.
The bite of the restraining harness clamped around me was a raw memory. The altered stormtech pumping like molten lava into my veins. The trauma had, quite literally, been permanently fused into my body. But if you’ve got scars, it’s better to learn to live with them than pretend they don’t exist.
‘There’s no way to stop you doing this, is there?’ Grim asked.
‘Nope. If I don’t make it—’ I held up a hand as my friend objected, ‘If I don’t make it, Harmony will take care of you. Kowalski will see to it. Will you let her?’
Grim gave it some thought. Then finally: ‘If you trust ’em, so do I.’
‘I trust Jae and her gang far less, let’s put it that way.’
Grim dangled his legs from the bed next to me. Simulated wind tousled his hair. ‘I’m scared, man,’ he said, serious for once. It wasn’t until I saw his hands were shaking that I realised how scared. ‘I’m so scared I want to puke.’
I raised a small smile. ‘So am I.’
‘It’s the unknown, you know? Not knowing where things are going to land.’ He glanced up at me. ‘I just don’t want this to be the end.’
‘It won’t be,’ I told my friend. ‘This is just the start for you and me. We’re going to explore every floor of this asteroid together, every crazy bar, every little world, and drink until you’re sick and puking again.’
A faint smile traced across Grim’s lips. ‘How do you know all that?’
‘I don’t. But I’ve got to remind myself who I’m fighting for, who I’m returning home to. Otherwise, what’s the point to any of it?’ I bumped my shoulder into his. ‘We’re going to make it out of this.’
‘That’s a promise?’
‘It’s a promise.’
Walking into Harmony’s Tactical Command Centre was a hell of a nostalgia trip.
The sprawling room was lit up in turquoise greens, ultramarine blues and vermillion reds. The reinforced walls were a smear of machinery and glowing flexiscreens. Substrates whined between mirror-smooth panelling that glistened like quicksilver. Tactical command tables beamed with holographic orbital data and incoming updates in electric blues and sun-bright golds. On raised walkways, men and women were plugged into circular tactical command pods, pearlescent light from consoles glowing across their faces. The smell of heated machinery, metallic dust and sweat was heavy in the air. Out through a floor-to-ceiling viewport were the tiered levels of the primary hangar bay, the polished decking clustered with ships and frantic with activity.
All bearing a striking resemblance to the Command Centre I’d walked into when I first became a Reaper.
Only difference? Since then, everything had changed.
I stood next to Kowalski as Saren addressed the scattering of Harmony SSC personnel in front of him. Strikers, Shocktroopers, Primers, Reapers and several Sub Zeros stood listening. Their armour was a sea of colours and models, plastered with engravings, rankings, indications of campaigns completed or involvement in certain operations across the Common. Tilted flexiscreens spiderwebbed into multicoloured strands of data: long-range scanners and orbital probes had confirmed the House of Suns’ activity in the Void Zones. Harmony research analysists had dredged up ancient schematics of the areas long thought uninhabitable after the war. A three-dee topographical outline of a floor plan was blinked onto the screens in a riot of greens and blacks, spiralling walkways and tunnels carving their way through ancient asteroid rock.
‘The Suns must have rigged up a rudimentary life-support system and repressurised the zones,’ Saren explained. ‘They’ve fixed the grav-plates and have been siphoning oxygen and power from solar farms for almost a year now. They’ve been hijacking cargo-haulers, killing the crews and stealing their supplies to sustain the areas.’
A round of murmurs and the slow grind of armour plates against each other. They’d all heard the House of Suns’ plans for us non-cultists, and what they’d done to me. Jae had kidnapped and tortured a Reaper, and, by extension, touched them too. Pack loyalty is a hell of a good thing to have at your back.
Saren and his SubPrimers began the tactical formation, allocating his Division into squads, Companies, Battalions. Allocating their attack formations and discussing tactical approaches and battleplans. Those already assigned with a unit departed with their comrades. Battle strategists, weapon suppliers, scientists and mass kineticists whirled around us. Equations and metrics zapping through the air in bright neon reds and blues. Made my head spin just to be in the middle of all this seemingly co-ordinated madness again.
My name was called. I was to be allocated into the Cobalt Squad, Fourth Division, with Saren leading the charge.
There was no telling when Jae would launch her assault, and Harmony wasn’t about to let her make the first move. Damage control squads were assembled to deal with the fallout if the House of Suns succeeded in activating the Surge. They were already quarantining infected civilians, supplying them with stormtech suppressors under the watchful care of first-class xenobiologists and medics. Compass was honeycombed and striated with bulkheads and backup life-support systems that would kick in if a floor was breached or required quarantine. Rehab centres were being fully staffed and operational around the clock. Media departments were preparing vid-transcripts explaining the situation to the public.
Wasn’t about to say it, but I had an inkling they were wasting their time. If Jae really did succeed in turning Compass into a beacon for the Shenoi, we were all finished anyway. But looking out at the wide gathering that made up Harmony’s Special Service Command, I let the thoughts melt away. All these people were going to dive face-first into hell, knowing many would never return home and leaving behind friends, family, loved ones. I told myself to trust in them. Trust that we’d give everything we had to make this work. Because, at the end of the day, it’s not machines or power or big ships or big guns that makes a difference. It’s people. People willing to fight like hell for the ones they care about.
As Saren delved into some complicated tactical formation, Katherine leaned in to ask if I’d made all the calls. I told her I had.
The briefing ended. Fincher, Harmony’s chief armourer, came to inform me my new suit was ready. A blade-thin woman with sweeping dark hair who seemed more in place at the head of a business empire than a grease-spattered workshop. She led me to the armoury on the outermost section of the Station and towards the podium where the armour awaited. Gunpowder Milkshake had sent me a new suit. Since Harmony was footing the bill this time, I wasn’t about to go for anything but the best. It was a towering beast of black and dark gold plating, so bulky it took a team of several armourers to strap me into it. The helmet had drag-fins and a slick, mirrored curve for a faceplate, glowing with pulsating lights. The inner gel-padding spilled like oily liquid down my back, before forming a resin-like substance that tightened against my body for extra mobility and dexterity. I felt the silicon plating expand with the clenching of my muscles, the close biochemical calibration and hydraulics fine-tuned to strike the balance between mobility and protection. I could feel the composite layers of inner materials, hydrostatic gels, pressure seals, titanium alloy shells, superconductors, microelectric fields, nanoparticle surfacing and shielding, all slotting together like three-dee puzzle pieces, wrapped up and locked with airtig
ht firmness around me. I couldn’t stop grinning. I could practically feel the thing snorting like a bull, ready to rampage.
Fincher rattled off some of the perks. Blades hidden in the sleeves. Emergency ejection. Additional magnetic weapons holsters. Kinetically rechargeable nanoshielding – good against bullets and plasma rounds, but not against diamond-edged slingshivs.
Fully armoured, I walked across the scuffed decking towards the utility-cluttered armoury to meet the rest of my fireteam. Led by Saren, it was composed of Kowalski, Jasken and the Shocktroopers from our assault on the Warren – Arya, Kuen and Vanto. Jasken lumbered over in his scarred and blackened gear, lugging a crate of scattershots, handcannons, autofiles, carbines and railguns. ‘Planning a good night out?’ I asked.
Jasken shrugged. ‘Why shoot something once when you can shoot it fifty times?’
‘Let’s hope our enemies don’t have the same philosophy.’
Jasken hefted the meanest looking scattershot I’d ever seen. ‘Actually, I hope they do.’
‘You want them to kill you?’
‘No, I want to see them try.’ He planted himself on a munitions crate, scattershot balanced on his armoured knee. ‘Listen, kid. I’m glad you could make all this work. Couldn’t have been easy.’
‘Just doing what needs to be done,’ I said.
Jasken snorted and wolfed down an energy bar. ‘I don’t believe that, and I’m not sure you do either. But to hell with that, we’ve got cultists to kill.’ He jabbed the energy bar in my direction. ‘Want some?’
‘How the hell can you eat at a time like this?’
‘I always eat before battle,’ Jasken said. ‘Can’t imagine a worse way to go than dying on an empty stomach.’
I collected my weapons from the gleaming racks, strapping appropriate utilities and blades to the magnetic holders on my waist. Quickmatter clips and energy cartridges being slotted in like knuckles cracking. Voices streamed from the speakers, ordering Cobalt Squad to move out. Thudding down the corridor with my fireteam, armed and armoured to the teeth, I was suddenly whipped back to my Reaper fireteam. Us pulling on our armour, trading jokes or insults, moving out to fight on some new, alien landscape. Most of them were dead and buried and I wished more than anything they’d lived to see the future they’d given so much for.
Which meant it was up to me to make it count.
46
Into the Dark
We rode up to the Void Zones in tense silence, all of us outfitted in Harmony’s best. Our headlamps cut narrow beams through the derelict tunnels of the Void Zones. The uninviting hallways of exposed asteroid rock were strung up with scaffolding like the weathered remains of an immense whale skeleton, littered with discarded clawdrills, power tools and vacuum-pressurised spacesuits. A gritty blanket of asteroid dust and soot coated everything. Bulkheads were plastered with warning decals, the areas beyond exposed to hard vacuum. One of those abandoned areas of the asteroid that was still under repair all these years after the war had stuttered to a halt.
The wide smears of familiar, ominous House of Suns symbols painted crudely on the bulkheads told us the place wasn’t as empty as it appeared. Left little to imagine what had happened to the construction workers here.
Dread tightened in my stomach. Please let everyone survive this. Please let everyone just survive this.
Kowalski wore gunmetal-grey armour, bulky and razor-trimmed; she’d swapped out her helmet visor for sulphur-coloured magnifying optic lenses that completely obscured her face.
‘You’d think we were on a deserted station or something,’ said Kuen. He had hawk wings carved into his helmet, and he peered around with interest as we walked in lockstep. Vanto, a huge brute of a man in bright-red armour, took no such notice and stomped down the silent corridors, his heavy assault slugrifle angled around every corner.
‘Eyes open,’ Saren muttered. ‘The Suns could be lying in ambush.’
‘Oh, I hope they are. Let them try and get past me,’ Jasken drawled. The spacedecking trembled under his ungainly footsteps, the skullface etching on his helmet turning him into an armoured ghoul in the dark. He wore a harness pimped out with bizarre grenades and experimental-looking explosives.
We couldn’t pinpoint the House of Suns’ exact location, but probe scanners placed them in the vicinity of the asteroid’s pinnacle, deep in the Void Zones. Our forces were represented as clusters of red dots in the half-completed blueprint of the Void Zones, slowly expanding across my HUD as we headed towards our agreed rendezvous. Jae expected another assault. I doubted she’d anticipate the stealthy approach we were taking.
The massive lifts around us were rigged to transport chainships up to the most damaged Void Zones. I shifted impatiently as we climbed in and activated for the top floor, the age-old mechanisms groaning. Suddenly, the stormtech hammered inside me, frantic and fast. I frowned, but the sensation grew as we inched upwards, until it felt like I was attached to an electrical charge.
Then I knew.
‘Jae’s starting it,’ I snapped into my commslink, swapping to the all-units channel. ‘She’s activating the Surge now!’
Kowalski swore. We’d all known it was going to happen, but had hoped for more time, maybe even to get there before she started.
The lift shuddered to a halt. The lights spluttering and dying as the ancient mechanism groaned and conked out.
Our armour lights winked in the dark. The stormtech was beating inside me, but didn’t feel like it was growing now. Jae had pumped me full of the enhanced stormtech she was using for her own men, not the Surge-stormtech she was spreading through Compass civilians. I was in the clear, but my body could still feel the ripple effect, like a ghostly transmission on some untapped radio frequency.
‘Out, out, out!’ I engaged the armour’s hydraulics and used the boost to spring the whole four metres to punch through a hatch on the elevator roof. We were in a deep, echoing shaft, simulated wind howling down. My armour lent me the strength to wrench open the rusted door and slip through. I stabbed the emergency override button and the elevator started grinding up again.
I tapped into Compass’ frequency as it rose, getting a feed from Starkland’s main square. There were two dozen skinnies and Reapers convulsing on the ground. Another dozen were stumbling along the street, eyes turning blue as they threw themselves at people, broke windows, and set themselves to destroying everything in their path. One stumbled into the path of an autocar and went flying, crashing down on the pavement in a blue smear. Someone screamed as a skinnie dragged an old woman by her hair across the street.
‘Saren, we have to move!’ I said as the others arrived, already moving ahead down the dim hall plastered with more Suns symbols.
‘I hear you,’ Saren said. Similar affirmatives echoed down the commslink.
I was about halfway down the hall when my body pulsed a warning. I dropped as a dark muzzle aimed towards me and spat three-round burst, crackling past my head and thudding into the wall. The figure poked out of cover, training her rifle on me again, but I’d already bounded forward and driven my slingshiv into her heart. She collapsed at my feet with a thud, yells ricocheting down the halls.
We’d arrived.
My fireteam scrambled around me, weapons primed and readied. The familiar rhythm of sliding into formation, dissecting the battlefield, working alongside my squad, buzzed through me like a long-lost memory as we burst together into an area clustered with a jungle of scaffolding. Two or three fireteams’ worth of cultists stared at us down the barrel of their weapons.
The room erupted into chaos. Streams of gunfire shredded wooden beams to splinters, smashed metal into hot red chunks and crumpled scaffolds into gnarled scrap. Multicoloured bursts of gunfire crisscrossed the room in rapid streaks. We slammed into our positions, Arya, Vanto and Katherine performing a wide flank, issuing bursts of suppressing fire and drawing the S
uns’ attention. The rest split in two: Saren and Kuen, and me and Jasken, each mini-division covering each other. Jasken was roaring insults and taunts, throwing micronades, the room heaving with violent shockwaves and detonating with fiery explosions, frying optic nerves and photoreceptors. Supercharged projectiles sliced past my head, tearing a mouthful of metal from the walls. My armour’s shielding rippled in bright blue clouds, a Harvester leaning over a banister and pouring small-arms fire into my chest. I angled my high-calibre autorifle upwards and returned a salvo of superheated rounds, tearing through the scaffolding and through the shooter’s face like wet bark. A hailstorm of gunfire clattered on the metal around me, cultists already swinging around to target me. Vanto let rip a burst of covering fire, sending the assailants scrambling for cover, giving me time to tear up through the scaffolding to the next floor. My visor flashing urgent warnings. I ducked into cover, blind firing to give Jasken the time to reach me. A round sparked off Jasken’s helmet, knocking him sideways with a grunt. I slammed my shoulder into the cultist who’d done the deed, sending her flailing backwards, before blasting her twice in the head. She tumbled from the scaffold and went smashing to the floor. Panting, I helped Jasken to his feet, already leaning down my autorifle’s circular sights, watching for my fireteam, picking off cultists.
Something was wrong.
These people weren’t trained. They were barely armoured. It was poor defence. Jae wasn’t a soldier, but she wasn’t stupid, either. If she’d anticipated our strategy, there was a chance she’d drawn us into a trap.
I called for Grim, but he’d already seen it. ‘The room’s rigged with explosives!’ he said. ‘Disabling as fast as I can, but be ready!’
I yelled for the rest of the fireteam to get down. I burst towards Jasken, smashing the two of us to the grillwork flooring as the world above us exploded like hellfire, thunderclaps going off in my skull and shuddering down my spine. The flare was so strong my visor autopolarised. A loose grenade clattered down to explode near a shrieking cultist, turning bone and flesh into a shower of bloody mist. Jae had sent the worst of her men in here to be sacrificed. Poisoned meat for the wolves.