Dark Sky (Keiko)

by Mike Brooks

  ‘Nope,’ Apirana admitted, ‘but that’s why I’m asking you to do it.’ He was no stranger to the Spine, but his technological skills were more focused towards spanners than terminals. ‘I’m gonna go find Rourke.’

  ‘No need.’

  Apirana’s ears were still ringing in the aftermath of the siren, which was probably why he hadn’t heard footsteps behind him. He turned to see Rourke standing in the doorway to the games room, her face grim and looking past him at Jenna. ‘You got anything?’

  ‘Working on it,’ Jenna muttered. ‘It has to be something either big or local to us though, right? I mean, the levels can be sealed off from each other, so if there was a fire one level down or something, that wouldn’t be anything to worry about here.’

  ‘I’m gonna call the Captain,’ Apirana said, keying his comm, ‘see if they’re okay.’ The call tone buzzed in his ear, and kept buzzing.

  There was no answer.

  Rourke was already frowning, and trying her own comm. She waited for a few seconds, then looked up. ‘Jia’s not answering either.’

  ‘Shit.’ Apirana looked from one woman to the other. ‘So do we stay here an’ hope they come back, or head out an’ try to find ’em?’

  Rourke looked indecisive, one of only a handful of times Apirana could remember the former GIA agent being uncertain. ‘I don’t know … I’m not sure it’s a good idea to go out there without knowing what’s going on, but the worse it is the more likely the others will need our help.’

  ‘And what happens if we go out and they come back?’ Jenna put in without looking up from her console.

  Rourke pursed her lips and seemed to come to a decision. ‘I’ll go and check a couple of the nearest bars; I’ve got the best Russian of the three of us anyway. You two stay here and call me if the others show up.’

  Apirana grimaced. ‘Okay, but keep in touch, yeah? Last thing we want is for you to get arrested for breaking curfew, or whatever this is, and we didn’t—’

  He was cut off by an angry explosion of Russian from the hallway behind Rourke, at a pitch and pace that ruled out any chance of him being able to decipher it: a male voice, and clearly unhappy. Rourke whirled around and took two quick but unhurried steps backwards. Moments later the doorway she had been standing in was filled by the shouting shape of Mr Vershinin, the hotel’s proprietor.

  Apirana supposed that most people would consider Vershinin to be a big man; he certainly towered over Rourke and was comfortably taller than Jenna, who was far from the shortest girl Apirana had ever seen. He was also obviously agitated. Apirana surreptitiously adjusted his grip on the light-pool cue, just in case.

  Vershinin shouted something again, and Rourke raised her hands to try to placate him a little. ‘Please, sir! Slowly, or in English!’

  Apirana hadn’t thought that the hotel owner’s face could get any more thunderous, but he’d been wrong. The burly Uragan’s mouth twisted, and he spat out some heavily accented words.

  ‘You leave! Now! Foreign otmorozki, get out! Out! Go join your friends!’

  ‘Sir,’ Rourke said, keeping her voice calm with what was clearly some effort, ‘we don’t know exactly where our friends are—’

  ‘They’re outside!’ Vershinin roared, gesturing back the way he’d come while advancing into the room, circling around as though to herd them towards the door. ‘Get out! Police come! I have no foreigners here!’

  Apirana caught Rourke’s eye and inclined his head, very slightly, in the direction of the apoplectic proprietor. Rourke gave an infinitesimal shake of her head in response, and a splay of the fingers of her left hand. Wait.

  ‘Sir,’ Rourke tried again, addressing Vershinin, ‘if you’ll allow us to return to our rooms and get our things—’

  ‘Nyet!’ Vershinin lunged for Jenna, grabbing her by the shoulder and shoving her in the direction of the door. Jenna slapped his hand away, but Apirana had abruptly had enough. He whipped the cue up, holding it across the Uragan’s chest crosswise and pushing him firmly backwards.

  ‘Listen bro, we—’

  He didn’t get any further with the sentence because Vershinin yelled in rage and slammed both hands into Apirana’s chest in what was half a shove and half a double palm strike. It didn’t take Apirana off his feet or even knock him back much, and the sensible thing to do would be to back away from the incandescent proprietor and get all three of them out of the room before things escalated further … all of which he realised about half a second after he’d dropped the cue and slammed his fist into Vershinin’s enraged face.

  The Uragan dropped like he was a puppet whose strings had abruptly been cut. Apirana backed away from the fallen man, his knuckles stinging and bitter recriminations already rising in the back of his mind. ‘Guys, I’m sorry, I—’

  ‘Don’t be,’ Rourke cut him off clinically, ‘we don’t have time.’

  ‘Let me at least check he’s okay,’ Apirana asked, hearing the pleading in his own voice. A small hand took his arm in a firm grip, and he looked back to see Rourke’s dark eyes regarding him steadily from beneath the shadow of her hat.

  ‘A., you just hit him as hard as you could. Either you’ve simply knocked him out, in which case he’s going to wake up in a few seconds and we need to get out of here, or he’s not going to wake up any time soon, in which case we still need to get out of here.’ Her jaw tightened slightly. ‘If it makes you feel better, I was about to do the same thing anyway. No one touches my crew.’

  Apirana looked back down at Vershinin and thought he caught a faint flutter of eyelids. Something seemed to loosen a grip on his heart; not completely, but enough. ‘Okay,’ he found himself saying, ‘let’s go.’

  ‘What about our things?’ Jenna asked, looking from him to Rourke. They’d only been allowed to take a bare minimum of items from the Jonah, chivvied as they had been by impatient politsiya officers.

  Rourke grimaced. ‘Thirty seconds, then we’re out the front door. Essentials only!’ she yelled after them as Apirana and Jenna sprinted out of the games room and towards the main stairs, located in the foyer. Jenna swung herself around the bannister pole at the bottom and onto the second riser, an action Apirana would have normally expected to draw the disapproving attention of the sour-faced check-in clerk standing behind the reception desk, but she wasn’t even looking at them. His gaze followed hers, out through the glass panes in the double doors and onto the plaza outside, and suddenly he forgot all about getting anything from their rooms.

  The plaza was a mass of people, with more streaming in even as he watched. There seemed a roughly even split of men and women of varying ages, with even a few children present, but what they pretty much all had in common was their appearance: cheap, plain clothing, many still in dust-caked mining gear after however many hours at the face.

  Well, and the Free Systems banners and placards.

  Apirana winced as the reasons for Vershinin’s attitude suddenly became a little clearer. Governments liked to blame each other for stirring up discontent in their own populations, since that was easier than admitting a planet’s people had spontaneously decided to rebel. Off-worlders might well be detained on suspicion of being involved in rabble-rousing, and their choice of accommodation would likely be scrutinised closely. With this sort of gathering outside his business’s front door, it was little wonder Vershinin had got edgy about his foreign guests.

  ‘Tamara!’ He raised his voice and looked back over his shoulder, ignoring the start of surprise the sudden noise elicited from the clerk. ‘I think we gotta problem!’

  Rourke was already approaching, having shut the door of the games room to hide Vershinin’s prone body for at least a few more seconds, but she quickened her stride at his shout and came alongside him with her coat billowing behind her. He saw her lips purse as she assessed the situation.

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘Yeah, that was pretty much what I was thinking,’ Apirana agreed. ‘You still wanna go out there?’

  ‘I d
on’t really see that we have much choice,’ Rourke admitted. ‘We won’t have long, though; the politsiya will be here soon, and they’ll be armed to the teeth. Standard Red Star protocol for a protest gathering of more than thirty people is full riot gear and a maximum ten-minute response time.’

  Apirana frowned at the matter-of-fact way Rourke had delivered that piece of information. ‘How’d you know that?’

  Rourke looked at him sideways, with perhaps the faintest flicker of amusement in her eyes. ‘Once upon a time, it was my job to organise things like this.’

  Apirana wasn’t certain if he’d missed something. ‘Organise what? The response?’

  ‘The riots.’ Rourke turned away from him towards the stairs. ‘Jenna! We need to go now!’

  ‘Okay, okay!’ Jenna appeared at the top of the stairs, clutching a couple of overstuffed bags she must have hastily rescued from their suites. She stopped when she saw Apirana and glowered at him. ‘Weren’t you going to help me?’

  ‘Yeah, uh …’ He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. ‘Something came up.’

  ‘Now, Jenna,’ Rourke snapped, making an impatient beckoning motion, but the young slicer was already taking the stairs two at a time.

  ‘Fine, fine, what—?’ She stopped when she reached the bottom and looked out at the gathering crowd. ‘Oh.’

  ‘Yes.’ Rourke snatched a bag from her. She passed it to Apirana without looking, who slung the strap across his chest so it rested on his left hip. Rourke also took one and so, relatively equally loaded, they looked out at the mass of people.

  ‘Want me to clear a path?’ Apirana asked, pointing at the mouth of a street directly opposite them. That was the way Drift and the Changs had gone earlier, although whether they were still in that direction was anyone’s guess.

  Rourke shook her head. ‘It’s too thick, and the crowd looks tightly wound. We don’t want them turning on you for giving them a shove. We’ll have to go around …’ she paused for a moment, apparently thinking, ‘… the right-hand edge. Circle about and get down that street in the corner if we can so we’re at least going sort of the right way, but I don’t want to stick around any longer than we have to.’

  ‘Works for me,’ Apirana nodded. He took a deep breath, cast a fervent wish for good fortune towards any form of deity that might be listening, and pushed open the big glass door.

  There were four steps down from the frontage of the Otpusk Gostinitsa, and as soon as he’d stepped off the last one Apirana was in among the crowd. They were busy chanting in Russian and waving home-made banners and placards – simple cloth or plascard ones, nothing fancy like the 3D holos he’d seen used outside the G2000 summit on the news as a kid – but they still stood aside when they saw him bearing down on them with the two women at his heels. He quickly saw that Rourke was right to suggest taking the outside route, as he could almost taste the powder-keg atmosphere around them. Had a large, strange-looking foreigner tried to barge through the middle of the protesters … well, he didn’t like to think what the reaction of this mob might have been.

  ‘Do you want me to try the Captain again?’ he heard Jenna ask behind him.

  ‘Don’t bother,’ Rourke replied, ‘he’ll see A. called him. If he can make contact, he will. Besides, I doubt the comm network is even still functioning right now.’

  ‘What?’ Apirana turned his head to look at her, jogging along in his wake with a grim expression on what he could see of her face beneath her hat. ‘Why not?’

  ‘The Red Stars almost always cut public communication channels during civil unrest to prevent dissenters from being able to coordinate their movements,’ Rourke explained, swerving around two youths with bright dyed hair and everything below the bridge of their noses obscured by makeshift cloth masks.

  ‘Great,’ Apirana snorted, ‘so how are we going to find the others now?’

  ‘I ask people if they’ve seen a tall, blue-haired Mexican who was with Chinese siblings!’ Rourke called back. Apirana had to concede that might have some merit to it. It wasn’t like their crew weren’t distinctive in this largely homogenous city.

  ‘Or we could just head for the Jonah,’ Jenna suggested, ‘if there was trouble kicking off, the Captain would probably go there to make sure our ship’s okay.’

  Rourke growled something in a language Apirana didn’t speak, but it sounded like a curse of some sort. ‘You’re right. Hold up!’

  Apirana slowed – there was entirely too much of him to arrest his momentum with any alacrity – and turned back to find the other two standing in place. ‘What?’

  ‘Jenna’s right,’ Rourke said uncomfortably, her eyes scanning the crowd, although Apirana guessed that was probably more out of habit than because she expected to see Drift making his way towards them. ‘He’ll try the hotel first, but after that his first instinct will be to make sure we keep a way off this rock.’

  ‘Plus he loves that ship,’ Apirana put in, trying not to sound too breathless. It wasn’t that he was out of shape, as such, more that he was only in shape for certain things.

  ‘That too,’ Rourke acknowledged. ‘Okay; we’ll try to find them quickly, but if we get no luck we’ll head for the Jonah and hope they do the—’

  Her last word was drowned out by a loud crack from the other end of the square, and her head whipped around so fast Apirana thought her hat was going to fly off, but frustration clouded her features as she stood futilely on tiptoe. ‘Damn it! A.?’

  The shouting of the crowd had taken on an uglier, angrier edge, at least in that direction. Apirana drew himself up to his full height, but although he could see over most of the gathering his vision was still obstructed by the furiously waving signs many protesters had brought with them. ‘I’m not sure, I …’

  There. Between two banners he caught sight of a black-helmeted head, then another and another. The crowd was roiling, some pushing forwards and others trying to retreat. ‘Cops,’ he summarised.

  ‘That sounded like a gunshot,’ Rourke said uneasily. ‘Never mind trying to reach the others for now, let’s just—’

  More cracking noises cut through the air, and their repetition brought certainty into Apirana’s mind: definitely gunfire. Shouts were replaced by screams and then cries of warning as dark shapes trailing greenish-white fumes arced into the air above the plaza.

  The mood of the protest shifted direction quicker than Jia trying to outmanoeuvre a missile. Ten seconds ago the plaza had been filled with righteous anger, the sort that could spiral out of control into full-blown aggression if handled incorrectly. Whoever was in charge of the politsiya had clearly decided that the softly-softly approach was not for them, and that the only course of action was to hammer the protest so hard that it cracked before it evolved into a riot under its own steam. The security officers opened up with live ammunition and gas grenades, and the cauldron of simmering resentment abruptly swirled into a frenzy of fear and self-preservation that responded by stampeding directly away from the threat.

  Which meant that, all of a sudden, a few hundred panicking people were heading directly for the three crew.

  ‘Run!’ Rourke yelled, and Apirana obeyed. There was no standing against a tide like this, big though he was. He didn’t even set out for a destination, just went with the flow towards the nearest street which led off the plaza, but he was being outpaced. Desperate men and women clawed past him, many of them cursing him in Russian, towards the inevitable bottleneck forming ahead of them as half a plaza of people tried to fit down one street. His shoulder blades were itching, expecting a politsiya bullet to strike between them at any moment. He looked back to see if there was anyone left between him and the guns, caught a brief glimpse of the sea of faces still behind him …

  … and tripped over something unseen. He hit the ground hard, palms stinging and forearms jarring as they took the brunt of the impact, but that was the least of his worries now. He hadn’t even landed properly before someone tripped over his leg; then someone stood on hi
s arm, causing a spike of pain so bad he wondered momentarily if they’d broken it, then someone landed on his back and drove the breath from his lungs.

  The anger flared up inside him and he tried to roar, tried to surge up to his feet flailing at anyone within reach in revenge for the pain he was suffering, but he simply couldn’t. Every second brought a new impact on a leg, an arm, his head, his back, knocking him back down again. Someone landed across his shoulders and smashed his face into the ground, bringing a new flare of agony married to a sudden sick wooziness, but for the first time he could remember there was no corresponding surge of rage-filled adrenaline.

  His left side had taken a blow somewhere and he felt like he’d been shot again; had his wound ripped open? He tried to brace his arms beneath him and push up, no longer in a fury but now simply mechanically attempting to rise, but a body landed on top of him and crushed him back down, then another before the first had even managed to scramble away.

  His ribs were burning from the weight. His lungs were burning from lack of air. His head was swimming. Every limb felt like it had been beaten by a team of men with sledgehammers.

  Somewhere on the hard rock floor of Level Five of Uragan City, for the first time since he was fifteen, Apirana Wahawaha stopped fighting.

  WEIGHING THE ODDS

  THERE HAD BEEN one chance for a good, deep gulp of air before the gas had flooded everywhere, and Ichabod Drift had taken it with both lungs. The fumes weren’t just unbreathable, they stung the eyes and made it impossible to see clearly as well: that was, unless you happened to have at least one mechanical one. As a result Drift found himself to be in considerably better shape than pretty much anyone else inside Labirint, which was why he was able to get to his feet, hoist up a bar stool and crack it over the head of the balding man who’d been holding a gun on them scant seconds before.