Dark Sky (Keiko)

by Mike Brooks

  With communication systems out it took a little time to get the necessary equipment together, but soon enough Rourke was being raised up towards the ventilation ducts on the work platform of a maintenance vehicle. They were hidden from the broadcast hub by another building to avoid their plan being immediately exposed, which meant Rourke was going to have to navigate through a couple of bends instead of getting a clear run at her target, but it was nothing she hadn’t done before. The echoes of a slightly distorted voice informed her that Marya had found some sort of vocal amplification equipment from somewhere and was hailing the hub. Good. I’d put money on her being able to talk at a wall for at least an hour.

  She activated the laser cutter and set to work slicing through the galvanised metal above her head, idly trying to remember the last time she’d had to go into a building through the ventilation system. New Ghayathi? Recovering some sort of weapon plans, I think. I probably should have convinced Ichabod to take a peek at what they were, but I was likely happier not knowing.

  The last cut was nearly done: she braced the panel with her free hand, directing it so it fell safely into the rail-bordered work platform instead of plummeting three storeys to potentially hit someone below her. A gust of wind hit her as some of the air coursing along the pipe’s length escaped, and she ducked down to check her bag while she gave the super-heated sides of the new void above her some time to cool. As well as some more general-purpose tools, she had a shockgun taken from the politsiya armoury and two full magazines of shockbolts, a pistol firing regular ammunition as a backup in case she needed the threat of lethal force, several restraints to keep troublemakers out of the way and, perhaps most crucially, a two-way radio scavenged from somewhere. It was short-range and prone to interference or having its signal blocked by walls, but unlike the more sophisticated comms it didn’t rely on piggybacking through a planetary communication system or that of an orbiting satellite or ship. She looked over the edge of her platform and saw Jenna’s red-blonde hair beneath her.

  ‘Jenna, do you read? Over.’

  A pale face turned up towards her. +Loud and clear. Are you going in? Over.+

  ‘Any second.’ The metal was no longer glowing but would still be hot, and she had no wish to burn her hands. ‘Stay alert, I don’t know how good the signal will be from in there. I’ll basically be opening a window and hoping, over.’

  +Roger that, I’ll be listening. Over and out.+

  Rourke clipped the radio to the belt of her bodysuit and reached up to cautiously pat at the hole she’d cut. The metal was still warm but not enough to hurt, so she pushed her bag up into the hole ahead of her, then pulled herself up after it and flicked on the flashlight strapped to her forehead.

  The pipe stretched away in front of her: a narrow, more-or-less rectangular space which made her feel momentarily as though she’d been swallowed by a whale of Old Earth, had they been made of metal. It was dirty, too, where dust had built up along the welding lines despite the stiff breeze she could feel pushing on the backs of her thighs. She gave her bag an experimental push and it slid away from her for a couple of feet before its progress was arrested by one of those welding lines, which stood just proud enough of the silvery surface to snag on the irregularly shaped contents.

  Rourke sighed. This minor detail of careless engineering was going to exponentially increase the effort she would need to expend to reach her destination. She nudged her bag over the obstacle and pushed it on again, then followed it using her elbows and knees. Lift, shove, crawl, repeat. Lift, shove, crawl …

  This is ridiculous. I could have been getting paid for this bullshit instead of just doing it because we happened to wind up on the wrong planet at the wrong time. I could have had a pension to look forward to, maybe somewhere to retire to. But no, I had to take issue with the morality of it, like I ever thought the Agency would be a bastion of ethics, then go and find a job with a stars-damned ex-pirate. She sighed, trying to ignore the ache in her shoulders that wouldn’t have been there twenty years ago. She’d been lucky, but age was starting to catch up even with her. Maybe I should look into sourcing some Boost and take a few years off my joints. I’m sure it’s not being vain if you’re only doing it to make sure you can still crawl through air ducts.

  She reached a junction and turned left. Lift, shove, crawl, repeat. She needed to be as quiet and careful as she could, since sound would travel easily along this giant metal tube, but she didn’t have limitless time. Marya’s distraction would only work for so long before someone got suspicious, and Rourke didn’t fancy dropping into a building where people were on the alert for intruders.

  There. Ahead of her was an upwelling of light, distinct from the jerky beam of her forehead-mounted flashlight: a vent into an illuminated building, and that meant the communications hub. She advanced cautiously, listening for voices as best she could over the echoed sounds of her own breathing and shuffling, but not hearing anything. This was where she trusted to luck, because even someone as light as she couldn’t crawl along a ventilation duct, while pushing a bag of equipment, without making enough noise to alert anyone standing beneath it. Hopefully the vent was only just inside the building.

  Ten feet away. Now she could afford to slow down a little, and she crept the last distance as silently as possible until she was directly over the grate that blew fresh air down into the building beneath.

  It looked to be a corridor, which was exactly what she’d hoped for as it would avoid the potential nuisance of being locked inside a room. No one was standing directly beneath the vent, certainly, and there were no shouts of alarm, but she wanted a little more certainty. She pulled an engineer’s imager from her bag and tapped the display to turn it on, then cautiously threaded the narrow camera wire though the grate. The device was intended to allow mechanics, engineers or electricians to see into narrow, enclosed spaces and around corners, but it also served admirably as a way to reconnoitre a potentially hostile environment.

  All clear in all directions. She dropped the imager back into her bag and tested the vent, which shifted agreeably. Not screwed in. Good: cutting through it would have taken more time than she’d have liked, as well as hardly being subtle. It took both hands and a braced foot for leverage, but she pulled it up and away from its fitting, slid it out of the way and followed her bag down through the gap. The corridor was some six feet wide with rooms on either side and was perhaps thirty feet from end to end, where it took sixty-degree turns inwards as it followed the building’s hexagonal shape.

  The appearance of a shadow on the carpet of the corner to her right was the only warning she had that someone was approaching. Short of them showing up at the very moment she’d started to lower herself down from the vent, it was about the worst possible timing. She had no cover, no plan, and no time to prepare.

  What she did have was a shockgun, and hopefully the very faint element of surprise.

  She’d yanked the weapon out of her bag, flicked the safety off and aimed it down the corridor in about the time it took for the shadow to be caught up by its owner. He turned out to be a security guard, six feet two inches, early thirties, physically fit, slightly over 200 pounds, with a shockstick at his belt and a commpiece in his left ear.

  Rourke shot him before his eyes had finished widening at her presence. She had no way of knowing if his transmitter was already activated, and, if it was, then he’d have blurted something to whoever was listening before she could threaten him into silence. He spasmed as the shockbolt delivered its electric payload, and his collapse brought into view his colleague who’d been a step or so behind him. Five feet nine inches, early fifties, well over 200 pounds which is mostly fat, probably at considerably higher risk of heart attack when exposed to strong electrical stimulus.

  A good thing she’d started running towards him as soon as she’d pulled the trigger on his colleague, then.

  Rourke hadn’t known there’d been two guards, but she’d known that if there was anyone else then she n
eeded to narrow the angle so they couldn’t put the corner of the corridor between them and her for long enough to get off a shout for help. She didn’t want to shockbolt this man, but she also couldn’t have him raising the alarm any more than his colleague’s spasmodic grunts already might have, so she dropped the gun and put all of her momentum into a running kick to his sizeable gut. The breath huffed out of him and he doubled over, momentarily unable to speak, but his fingers clutched at the shockstick on his belt.

  He was wide and her legs comparatively short: if she got behind him then she could certainly get an arm around his neck for a blood choke, but her legs might not be able to reach around him to prevent him from shaking her off. She leapt upwards instead, wrapping her legs around his neck and right shoulder and locking her right foot into the crook of her left knee in a flying triangle choke. She took a moment to rip the commpiece out of his ear, then pulled his head down with both hands.

  He realised what was going on and staggered forwards as the blood flow to his brain was restricted, perhaps intending to ram her against the wall. She leaned back instead, turning his unsteady forwards momentum into a full-blown roll which ended up with him on his back and her on top, her legs still locked in place. He tried to batter at her with his free left arm, but he was already going red in the face and his eyes were starting to glaze over, so she took the hits and gritted her teeth against the pain in her ribs.

  He went limp a moment later. She kept the choke on for another second to ensure he wasn’t faking, then hastily disentangled herself, as there was little point in avoiding shocking someone for fear of giving them a heart attack only to inflict brain damage with an overzealous blood choke. Both guards had restraints on their belts but she didn’t risk attempting to use those, in case they were voice or thumbprint activated. She took some constrictor bands from her belt pouch instead: the autoshrinking plastic strips were designed for easily securing cables and the like, but anyone who’d spent time in any sort of situation where you needed a quick, easy and not necessarily legal way to restrain humans knew them as reliable for this alternative use, and one which was less likely to cause comment than traditional cuffs if found on you.

  She did the second guard first, pulling his arms up behind him and tying his wrists in the small of his back, then doing the same to his ankles. He came around a moment later, still instinctively fighting against the choke which was the last thing his body remembered, and let out a panicked whine as he found himself trussed and face down on the carpet.

  ‘Quiet!’ Rourke snapped in Russian, fitting his commpiece into her ear and moving on to his partner. ‘Don’t make me knock you out again.’ To her surprise he fell silent.

  The first guard had never lost consciousness, but the shockbolt had done its work and right now he would be feeling like a team of men had worked his body over with clubs. He put up a half-hearted attempt at resistance when she pulled his arms behind him, but despite their size discrepancy she barely had to exert herself. She quickly had him tied up as well, although she had nothing to gag either of them with and nor would she be able to move them anywhere less obvious: she might be able to incapacitate two men twice her size, but hauling them around afterwards was beyond her. They’d have to stay here in the corridor, and she just had to hope that no one happened upon them too soon.

  She returned to her pack and withdrew her pistol, then slung the bag over her shoulder and walked back to the older guard. He looked up at her with a fearful expression which didn’t alleviate in any way when she pointed the gun at his face.

  ‘Which way to the front door?’ She disabled the safety with an audible buzz. ‘If I have to come back this way because you lied to me, I will not be happy.’

  ‘That way!’ the man whimpered, nodding desperately in the other direction to where the two of them had come from. ‘First stairwell on your left, it leads straight down.’

  Rourke nodded. ‘Thank you.’ Another thought struck her. ‘And the main broadcast suite?’

  ‘First floor, centre of the building.’

  ‘Thank you again.’ She activated the safety again and tucked the pistol into a belt pouch, then retrieved her shockgun from where it had been lying on the floor. ‘I’ll send someone to release you as soon as we have this building under control.’

  She had no way of knowing if he’d been telling the truth, of course, but having asked for the information it made sense to use it, so she made for the stairwell and found it just around the next bend in the corridor. She went through the door cautiously, shockgun poised, but no one was waiting on the other side. Her ear was empty of comm-traffic, too: how many guards were there in this building? She had no doubt that there would be surveillance cameras in the corridors and stairwells, but was anyone watching them? Or was everyone concentrating on the large, noisy distraction orchestrated by Marya?

  She descended the stairs to the first floor by her usual method of sliding down the handrails, then paused. She needed to get the doors open, but she was having second thoughts about trying to do it all herself. If whoever was in charge of the controls wasn’t paying attention to their surveillance feeds, then she might be able to walk up and take them by surprise, but that was a big gamble. The shockgun was a useful tool, but a glancing hit wouldn’t deliver the charge and some people were simply more resilient to its effects anyway. The pistol’s threat of lethal force was only effective for as long as she proved willing to utilise it, and when it came down to it she didn’t particularly want to start leaving corpses in the name of someone else’s cause. Besides which, she had a notion that although the revolution might turn a blind eye to Uragan casualties caused by its members, they might not be so forgiving to an off-worlder. She had to minimise their excuses for turning on her and her crew.

  Sometimes, solving a problem wasn’t a case of how much brute force you could bring to bear. Rather like a chokehold, knowing exactly where to apply the pressure was usually more valuable.

  She pushed the stairwell door open and edged cautiously into the corridor on the other side of it. Directly opposite her was another door, this one with a sign over it reading ‘Production Suite’ in Cyrillic script.

  Standing in the doorway was another security guard: a stocky, black-haired woman over whose face an expression of surprise was rapidly stealing.

  Rourke fired the shockgun from the hip and the bolt struck the other woman in her belly. She gasped and started to spasm, but Rourke had no intention of waiting and swept her right leg up in a roundhouse kick. The point of her boot caught the guard behind her ear and the other woman collapsed bonelessly, muscles still twitching even in unconsciousness thanks to the shockbolt’s discharge. Rourke waited a couple of seconds for the current to dispel, then quickly used two more contraction bands to secure her and pulled an access card from the guard’s belt. Shockgun once more in hand, she swept the card through the reader and stepped through the door.

  She was greeted with the sight of a large room full of terminals and the sound of a raging argument consisting of at least four different people. She was on a raised area that ran around the edge of the room, which was hexagonal. In the sunken hexagon in the middle, and clustered around what looked to be the equipment that was the main focus of the place, were a group of Uragans yelling at each other so continuously that she couldn’t make head nor tail of what they were actually arguing about.

  There were several other techs in the room, watching the show put on by their probable superiors with airs ranging from the amused to the annoyed to the downright worried. One of the worried-looking ones, a girl with curly blonde hair and a prosthetic eye, glanced towards the new arrival. Her natural eye widened comically for a moment as she saw Rourke, and then she screamed.

  The sound achieved what no amount of aggressive shouting had apparently succeeded in doing, and the argument in the middle of the room abruptly ceased as every head turned first towards the sound, and then towards the small, dark-skinned intruder clad in a bodysuit and holding a s
hockgun. Rourke took in their faces for a second and wondered if this was such a good idea after all, but the die was cast now. She wished that Ichabod was here with her; his natural talent for wordsmithery would have been very useful right about now.

  She raised her voice enough to hopefully be heard by everyone, and hefted the shockgun just enough to let people know that they shouldn’t try anything funny. ‘Good evening. I represent the revolution that is currently taking place outside your building.’

  Sharp breaths, worried glances, a whimper from somewhere … but thoughtful, evaluating expressions on some faces. Exactly what she’d hoped for. She let her eyes travel around the room. Government employees these people might be, but they were still broadcasters. Their lives were about creating content and transmitting it to an audience. Surely, this deep on a backwater mining planet, there must be someone yearning to be noticed?

  ‘Who wants to get the exclusive on the Rassvet System’s most shocking political event of the century?’

  THE GAME CHANGES

  DRIFT COULD TASTE the tension in the air.

  Uragan City’s Level Four was obviously supposed to be functioning normally, but even an off-worlder like him could feel that wasn’t the case. They’d stopped at the first big politsiya station they’d come to after exiting the vehicle ramps and passing through the heavily guarded checkpoints, and Alim Muradov had disappeared to presumably lead an emergency briefing. That left Drift and his motley collection of tag-alongs somewhat in limbo, and with the Chief not keeping a close eye on them, Drift had stepped outside to get a feel for the air.

  There were people everywhere, many more than he supposed was normal at this hour of the early morning. These weren’t the chanting mobs of the revolution further down but worried-looking clumps of citizens that formed on street corners, then drifted apart and reformed again elsewhere with different members. Drift didn’t need to be fluent in Russian to understand why everyone was so concerned: as he well knew, all communication with Level Five and below had ceased.