Dark Sky (Keiko)

by Mike Brooks

  ‘A couple of them might think twice about trying something again,’ Drift conceded, ‘but I won’t believe Moutinho’s out of our hair until I see him take off or we leave him in our trails. They haven’t been up to anything, I take it?’

  ‘Saw him and that big guy you mentioned unloading some cargo,’ Rourke replied, ‘but they didn’t so much as look this way. I don’t like it, the bastard’s up to something. He’d be pissing up against the side of our ship, normally.’

  ‘He’s welcome to,’ Drift laughed, showing the first sign of genuine good humour Jenna had seen in him since they’d set foot in Uragan City, ‘petty malice doesn’t worry me. We’ll just have to stay sharp in case he tries anything more meaningful.’ He started to fold the plaspaper and nudged the comm on with his elbow. ‘A., get your boots; we’re going back in.’

  Ten minutes later Jenna was watching Apirana carefully slide her forgeries into the secret compartment in the sole of one boot. The Maori was so tall that the extra half-inch of height given by the slightly thicker soles of this pair didn’t look at all incongruous, and since he had the biggest feet on the crew it provided slightly more space in which to smuggle sensitive items. Nothing big, of course … but things didn’t have to be large to be valuable.

  ‘Right,’ Drift was saying, checking his wrist chrono, ‘same set-up as before. A., Jenna, Jia and I are going in to find the Shirokovs, Tamara and Kuai will watch the ship and be ready to leave as soon as we get back. We have—’

  ‘Three standard hours,’ Rourke put in.

  ‘—at the most until the next storm hits and this place closes for three days or so,’ Drift continued, ‘so we can’t afford any delays. This has already taken longer than it should have done.’

  ‘Let’s go, then,’ Apirana grunted, and hit the door release. Was it Jenna’s imagination, or was he avoiding eye contact with her? She was sure she’d already caught him looking at her oddly once, when he’d seemed to think that she was looking somewhere else.

  Maybe he thought she should have done a better job with the forgeries, too. She was getting a little tired of feeling like everyone expected her to work miracles, for all that it was sort of flattering.

  Uragan City didn’t get any more inviting on the second visit. She tried to look at it differently, seeing the positives Apirana had listed, but she still couldn’t get past her initial impression of the entire place as a giant, underground morgue with a populace that just happened to be walking about at the moment. Glass City on Hroza Major had been far more to her liking, with its views of the skies and its natural light, or New Samara and its fresh air.

  So, the wealthy places we’ve been to recently. Yeah, not like you’re showing your background at all, rich kid.

  Drift wasn’t wasting any time; he made his way to the same public comm that he’d called Shirokov from before and punched in the Uragan’s contact code, then switched the unit to its speaker setting again. Jenna leaned against the wall, a faintly coarse artificial surface of some sort rendered in a mild cream, and cast a deliberately casual glance up the street in the direction they’d just come from. Seeing no immediate signs of Jacare crew or roving law enforcers, she turned her head to check the other way and found Apirana looking back at her, apparently having had the same idea. To her surprise, the Maori dropped his gaze and seemed to find an immediate interest in the comm riveted to the wall. Yes, this was definitely getting weird now.

  The comm stopped ringing. +Privetstviye?+

  ‘Mr Shirokov, we’re ready for you,’ Drift said briskly, managing to keep most of the annoyance out of his voice. ‘We’ll meet you at the same place as before to go over final arrangements. When can you be there?’

  +I … One moment, please.+ There was a quick buzz of muffled conversation in fast Russian; Shirokov had presumably placed a hand over his comm’s mouthpiece, but it probably wouldn’t have made much difference to the crew’s ability to understand. +Thirty minutes.+

  Drift winced. ‘Don’t be late. We’re working to a tight schedule here.’

  +I understand, Captain. I assure you, I do not wish delay.+

  ‘Best get moving, then,’ Drift said, and killed the connection. He exhaled, and grimaced in obvious frustration as he checked his chrono.

  ‘Easy, Cap,’ Apirana rumbled, ‘we got plenty of time.’

  ‘Only if nothing goes wrong,’ Drift countered, ‘and given our luck so far, I’m not holding my breath on that front.’

  ‘Why you wanna meet him there again, anyway?’ Jia asked as they began to move towards the nearest tram stop. ‘Ain’t this just gonna cost us more money?’

  ‘Yeah, but we need somewhere to hand over the documents out of sight,’ Drift muttered, nodding slightly in the direction of Apirana’s feet, ‘and I don’t trust that someone isn’t listening in. I don’t want to name locations or mention us taking them off-world, so that leaves us with precisely one option of where to meet.’ He sighed. ‘Well, at least the landlady’s pretty.’

  Cherdak was still open, and busier. The slightly dimmed lighting in the streets was an indication that Uragan’s artificially imposed day cycle was moving towards its arbitrary ‘night’, and while Jenna suspected that shift work would be continuing down at the mine faces it seemed that a lot of the population were taking the chance to sink a few before turning in. The bar was thick with the sound of chatter, almost all of it in Russian, and the locals now outnumbered the off-worlders.

  Despite the crowd, it only took a moment to spot the Shirokovs. Jenna nudged Drift in the ribs and pointed to where two men were sitting, each with a wheeled suitcase beside them. ‘That them?’ She hadn’t got a close look at Shirokov before – or Aleksandr, as she supposed she should think of him, given that there were now two – but these were the only people in the bar who looked ready to travel anywhere.

  ‘That’s them,’ Drift nodded, and began to make his way through the bar. Jenna followed, slipping easily past crowded tables and rowdy punters, and found herself looking at the two men for whom she had recently spent so much time forging documents.

  Aleksandr was the older man, that much was clear immediately. Dark-haired and with grey showing both on his head and in his stubble, his face carried deep-scored lines of fatigue or stress, or possibly both. He was wearing a turtle-necked, long-sleeved top in a very dark blue, worn black trousers with smart black boots, and the face he turned to them carried a warring, badly concealed mix of eagerness and apprehension.

  His partner, Pavel, was a contrast; at least ten years younger, if Jenna was any judge, and with a shaggy mop of light blond hair framing smooth-cheeked, clean-cut features that were decidedly easy on the eye. He wore a sleeveless, collarless white shirt that displayed well-developed arms, and dark green dungarees with one strap left carelessly unfastened. However, he too looked tired. If he was a miner, as Jenna suspected, then while the work might have benefitted his physique it didn’t seem to have done much for his general well-being.

  ‘Señores.’ Drift sat down without preamble and nodded for Apirana to do the same on the other unoccupied stool. The big Maori did so and crossed his right leg over his left, leaning forwards as if to massage his ankle. Jenna and Jia were left standing, although they were far from the only ones in the room to be on their feet, and the pilot sidled around until she was blocking all lines of sight to Apirana and his boot.

  ‘Captain,’ Aleksandr nodded. Nervousness was currently winning out on his face. ‘Do you have what we need?’

  Drift nodded. ‘We do.’ Apirana’s huge hand appeared from beneath the table, two folded sheets of plaspaper gripped in his fingers. He opened them up enough for the Shirokovs to see the holographic watermark, but drew his hand back as Aleksandr reached for them.

  ‘Captain?’ Aleksandr’s voice was level but his eyes were on Apirana, and not happy. Still, he wasn’t foolish enough to make a grab. People rarely tried to take things from Apirana by force.

  ‘You got what we need?’ Drift asked, his voice
cold. Aleksandr’s jaw moved for a second, but then he pulled out a small datachip.

  ‘Here. All schedules for next shipments after storm clears.’

  Drift held out his hand.

  ‘Captain, you must think me a fool,’ Aleksandr said, his eyes narrowing.

  ‘You’re the fool, Mr Shirokov, if you think I’m letting you on my boat with nothing but your say-so that you have what I need,’ Drift replied, leaning forwards slightly. ‘Give me the chip, and we will verify its contents. Then, and only then, will we go to the spaceport and you’ll get off this rock.’

  Jenna watched Aleksandr while he chewed that over for a few seconds. She couldn’t exactly blame him for his reticence, since the information was literally the only leverage he had. For a moment she thought he was going to hold out and deny the Captain, but then the older man’s face folded and he pushed the small piece of plastic and silicon grudgingly across the table’s surface.

  Jenna snatched it up before he could change his mind and pulled back the sleeve of her jumpsuit to expose the dataport of her wrist-mounted console. The chip slotted in neatly and the console immediately began scanning it. Cyrillic characters scrolled across the screen for a moment, but then her translation program kicked in and it resolved into lines of familiar letters and numbers. She searched them for meaning, feeling her forehead crease into a frown as she did so.

  ‘Jenna?’ Drift asked.

  She nodded. ‘Looks like we’ve got amounts, product codes, dates and destinations …’ She pulled the chip back out and handed it to him. ‘I’d say it’s good.’

  ‘I hope so.’ Drift took the chip between thumbs and forefingers and snapped it.

  Aleksandr spat something in Russian which Jenna didn’t need a translator to catch the general gist of. Pavel even started to rise to his feet, but Apirana landed one massive hand on his shoulder and pushed him gently but firmly back into his seat. The blond lifted his arm as though to swat the obstacle aside, but whatever he saw in the Maori’s tattooed face clearly made him think better of it.

  ‘We don’t know what sort of searches you’d be subjected to, going through security as emigrants,’ Drift explained calmly, letting the halves of the chip drop. ‘I certainly can’t risk this being found on you. So now it’s with us.’

  Jenna was only half listening as Drift continued talking. Instead, her fingers were dancing over the keys on her console to activate encryption and disguise programs. Simply encrypting data might protect it but it was suspicious as all hell, so she’d developed a further tactic: hide it as something innocuous. Her three go-to options were the schematics of the Keiko, a series of pictures of attractive men wearing very little clothing, and the beginnings of a hilariously bad amateur screenplay cobbled together for this exact purpose by her and Jia when they’d both been rather drunk.

  She went for the men. It was that sort of day.

  ‘A.,’ Drift was saying, ‘I think they can have their documents now.’

  Apirana passed the emigration plastics over to the Shirokovs, who took them with badly concealed haste. Pavel frowned at his as he opened it, then spoke in a light tenor which Jenna found slightly surprising given his frame, his words heavily accented. ‘This … will work?’

  ‘They don’t come with any damn guarantees,’ Drift replied testily. ‘You wanted the impossible on very short notice, you’ve got the best we have. Jenna?’

  ‘Data’s coded,’ she replied, watching the last set of impressive pectorals resolve. ‘I can transmit it to the shuttle now, or …’

  ‘Not yet,’ Drift told her, ‘I don’t want to throw anything into the Uragan system if we don’t have to.’ He looked back at the Shirokovs. ‘Well, señores, time to get moving.’

  Jenna let out a small breath she’d not really been aware she’d been holding. She hadn’t been sure if Drift would follow through on his end of the deal once they had the data, given how angry he’d been about being seemingly manoeuvred into a corner. It was probably the wiser course of action rather than risk a scene here which might delay them, of course, but every now and then the Captain did something a little irrational in a fit of pique.

  The Shirokovs didn’t need telling twice: they rose to their feet and took hold of their suitcases, and were heading for the door almost before Drift and Apirana had joined them. Jenna fell into their wake, then frowned to herself as her wrist console vibrated. But she’d turned all notifications off except …

  Shit.

  Her throat was suddenly dry as she clawed back the fabric of her sleeve again, then swiped the display.

  Shitshitshit.

  ‘Captain!’ Several heads turned towards her in addition to her crew, but she didn’t care. Drift’s expression was already grim; he must have known automatically that she wouldn’t risk drawing attention to them if the need weren’t dire.

  ‘What?’

  ‘We …’ Jenna trailed off hopelessly as both doors to Cherdak burst inwards, disgorging black-clad politsiya in body armour and riot masks with guns trained on them. She hit the key that would send Shirokov’s information winging through the Uragan Spine and – hopefully – to the databanks of the Jonah. ‘Never mind.’

  Angry Russian filled the air, none of it coming from the other punters who were all busily throwing themselves to the floor to get out of any possible line of fire. The Shirokovs tried that as well, but were clearly viewed to be guilty by association judging by the way they were hauled back up again. Jenna found herself staring down at least three gun barrels belonging to men shouting words she didn’t understand, and made an assumption that raising her hands with her palms outwards was a universal gesture for ‘please don’t shoot me’.

  ‘Drift!’

  That shout was clear enough, although Jenna couldn’t work out which mask it had come from. The Captain, who had already raised his own hands, coughed slightly.

  ‘Uh … yeah?’

  Two men approached Jenna while the third kept her covered. Her arms were wrenched down and cuffed behind her back with some sort of auto-constricting, segmented metal manacle. The same thing was happening to the others, including the Shirokovs. She noticed Apirana resisting for a moment, just to show that it would take more than one man on each arm to budge him, before he relented and allowed himself to be secured.

  One of their captors stepped forwards and shouted in Russian again, leaving Drift looking uncomfortable and blank all at the same time. ‘Uh, I’m sorry, I don’t—’

  ‘He says we’re under arrest,’ Jia provided miserably.

  ‘I kinda got that,’ Drift snapped, clearly exasperated, ‘but my translator’s not working properly with all this noise. What the hell for?’

  ‘Uh …’ Jia raised her voice. ‘Za chto?’

  ‘Kontrabanda oruzhiem!’

  Jenna knew the expression that flooded Jia’s face then. It was one of complete and total bafflement.

  ‘Guys, you ain’t gonna believe this …’

  MURADOV

  ‘GUN-RUNNING?!’ DRIFT SPLUTTERED. ‘That’s ridiculous!’

  Security Chief Alim Muradov looked at him levelly across the desk in the small, grey-walled interview room. He was probably somewhere in his forties, with his black hair slicked back and his moustache neatly trimmed. His skin held a richer tone than most of the other Uragan natives Drift had seen, and if the crescent moon pendant at his throat was anything to go by, he was a Muslim: at a guess, Drift would have put his ancestry somewhere in the historically Russian-influenced Middle East. Given that bigotry was far from absent in the galaxy, especially on more insular worlds like Uragan with largely homogenous populations – ethnic Russian Orthodox Christian, in this case – the odds were that to reach the rank of security chief Muradov would either have to be a corrupt toady or formidable at his job.

  Drift didn’t get the feeling it would be the former. He relaxed a little, despite the cold metal around his wrists. For once, his crew were completely innocent of all charges being brought against them, and
any halfway-competent investigation would show that. His nerves were jangling at the time they were wasting, though. It had been two hours since they’d been arrested in Cherdak, and the storm would be closing in fast.

  ‘Ridiculous or not, Captain, these are not allegations my force can ignore,’ Muradov replied calmly. His English was good, although his accent seemed to remove a lot of the emotion from the words. Or maybe there just wasn’t that much there to begin with. ‘This is your crew’s first visit to Uragan, yes?’

  ‘Mine, certainly,’ Drift nodded, ‘as for my crew, no one said they’d been here before. It’s not the sort of place you’d forget about, I think it’s fair to say.’

  ‘Nor one you would visit twice without good reason,’ Muradov replied. Drift started to nod again, then caught himself; was that dry humour, or a camouflaged accusation? The Chief seemed to notice his momentary confusion, and snorted. ‘Come, Captain, we are hardly a tourist destination. Still, utilitarian though my planet is, it is my job to keep it secure and its people safe.’

  ‘Of course,’ Drift agreed, ‘but if you’ve searched my shuttle you’ll know the only weapons we have are for personal use, and while in your spaceport they’re locked away securely, in compliance with your laws.’

  Muradov’s teeth showed for a moment beneath his moustache, a flash of a grin that didn’t reach his eyes. ‘And there speaks a man who has had to talk his way out of trouble with the law before, I feel.’

  ‘Not your law and not your planet,’ Drift countered, ‘I’ve done nothing wrong here.’ Well, apart from furnishing two citizens with fraudulent documents, but we’ll say nothing of that. ‘If you have any evidence to the contrary, please …’ He spread his hands invitingly in front of him.

  Muradov looked at him for a second, and Drift fought the urge to smile. You’ve got nothing. If you had, you’d have brought it out by now.