Dark Run

by Mike Brooks

  ‘Why . . .’ Drift found there were at least a dozen possible ways he could end this question, so went with ‘. . . are you here?’

  ‘Because you are here,’ Kelsier replied, taking a sip of his beverage and replacing the cup in its saucer with a faint clink. ‘I need to employ you. Again.’

  Drift felt a pit open up in his stomach. This had been on the cards from the moment he realised that Nicolas Kelsier was in front of him, but he’d been clinging to the faint possibility that . . . what? The old man had come here for a chat and a catch-up? No, he’d been deluding himself. Self-delusion is the worst trait I can think of, the man in front of him had said once, because if you can fool yourself then every other bastard has the easiest job in the world.

  ‘I don’t do that work anymore,’ he said, proud of how level his voice was. He picked up a very faint tensing in the posture of the man called Marcus. Yes, he was on a hair trigger, there was no doubt about it. If anything, Kelsier’s associates had gotten deadlier.

  ‘I heard,’ Kelsier said, a small smile tugging at one corner of his mouth. ‘Death does tend to limit one’s employability somewhat. And yet here you are! Nowhere near as dead as everyone thought and hoped. Well,’ he corrected himself, ‘nearly everyone.’ He took another sip of tea, set the cup down once more and waved a hand dismissively at Drift’s stubborn expression. ‘Oh, do relax and stop looking so constipated. I don’t do that work anymore, either.’

  ‘You don’t?’ Drift had always prided himself on his poker face in tense situations, but he couldn’t stop the surprise from showing. The momentary relief which surged through him was almost instantly stabbed in the back by sudden doubts, however.

  ‘You don’t follow the news, do you?’ Kelsier asked, somewhat rhetorically.‘Well, why should you? There’s an awful lot of galaxy to cover, after all, and the departure of one old Europan politician is hardly going to get much airtime. Even when it was due to “corruption”.’ He made fingerquotes as he said the last word, burnished metal fingers moving in time with the slightly swollen-looking joints of his natural hand.

  ‘“Corruption”?’ Drift asked, mimicking his movement. Kelsier’s smile turned wolfish.

  ‘Well, they had to give some reason for me disappearing out of sight, didn’t they?’ He coughed, frowned, and took another sip of tea. ‘Anyway, I am on a schedule. I’d ask how you’ve been, but you and I both know that’s just meaningless window dressing when it comes to business, and if you’ve got any sense you’ll realise that I knew enough about how you’ve been to track you down.’ The icy blue eyes flickered up and speared Drift with their gaze.

  ‘I need a smuggler.’

  ‘Right . . .’

  ‘More specifically,’ Kelsier continued when it became clear that Drift wasn’t going to offer anything else, ‘I need you to smuggle something for me.’

  ‘Why me?’

  ‘Because the word on, under, over and around the street is that you’re damn good at it,’ Kelsier replied simply. The grin returned for a second, fast as a shooting star, as he saw Drift’s expression. ‘I said, I’m in a different line of work now. I have different contacts in different areas. These people think that you’re reliable, insofar as a thief-cum-smuggler-cummerchant-cum-bounty-hunter-cum-goodness-knowswhat-else can be reliable. Personally I’d be more inclined to wonder how many different hats your head can support, but then again this is your head we’re talking about.’ He sniffed. ‘I need a cargo delivered to an address in Amsterdam on Old Earth, at a certain time, on a certain day.’

  ‘And you don’t trust the mail service?’ Drift asked dryly.

  ‘You must evade all customs checks,’ Kelsier continued, as though Drift hadn’t spoken, ‘and I mean all. It goes to the address at the right time on the right day, and no one so much as sees it apart from your crew until you hand it over.’ He tutted. ‘Don’t look at me like that, Ichabod; yes, I’m smuggling something into Europa. I’m not a minister any longer, and while I do have some rather interesting new resources I don’t have some of the ones I used to. If I could stick this cargo in a diplomatic vessel and get it taken to its destination I would, but I can’t, so I need to do this the hard way. You’ll need—’

  ‘Don’t you think you’re jumping the gun a little bit here, Nicolas?’ Drift interrupted him. The look on Kelsier’s face was almost worth the indignity of his abduction off the street and being disarmed at gunpoint.

  The old man’s lips pursed. ‘How so?’

  ‘You said you wanted to employ me,’ Drift said quietly. ‘In fact, you said you needed to employ me.’

  ‘You did good work for me before, at least until that unfortunate incident in the Ngwena System after which you apparently decided to quit,’ Kelsier rasped, ‘and my sources say that your ship and crew are capable of pulling this job off. What’s the problem?’

  ‘The problem is that I haven’t agreed to it,’ Drift replied, watching the man called Marcus carefully out of the corner of his eye. ‘Employment isn’t the same as slavery, you know.’

  Kelsier set his teacup down and steepled his fingers, metal digits interlocking with flesh, then looked at Drift over the top. Drift forced himself to return the stare.

  ‘I know it’s not the same,’ Kelsier said, and his voice was suddenly ice-cold without even the dry humour remaining. ‘I’ll thank you not to try lecturing me. There are many ways I could persuade you of why you might want this job, Ichabod. First of all, and let’s not ignore what we might call the elephant in the room, there’s the fact that sitting on my left is a man whom I could tell to kill you and you’d be dead before you hit the ground. Even from a stool.’

  The man called Marcus’s lips twitched. Drift eyed him for half a second, then turned his attention back to Kelsier. Never watch the gun; watch the man holding the gun.

  ‘Better men have tried and failed.’

  ‘Better? I doubt it,’ Kelsier replied crisply. He looked at Drift for a second, then sighed. ‘Very well. Marcus?’

  Marcus didn’t move a muscle, but his face was abruptly replaced by a blaze of colour; a warped vision of a skull painted in a palette of violent, bilious neons by a tortured mind, dominated by a deranged, lopsided grin of blunt fangs. It lasted for perhaps half a second before fading, but it had succeeded in causing Drift’s heart rate to rocket. It was an electat, a neurally activated sub-dermal tattoo: some gangs used them as membership badges, some governments used them as identity badges, some people used them to achieve the kind of body art which would be impractical or unwise to display all the time. This particular electat, however, was famous. Or notorious.

  ‘The Laughing Man,’ he muttered. Marcus Hall, the Laughing Man, gave a very slight nod. Ichabod Drift was looking at the most infamous hitman in the galaxy, a man wanted by every government conglomerate and with several personal bounties set on him by various corporations besides. Yet even with all that money hanging over his head, Hall remained alive and free, presumably because if you knew who and where the Laughing Man was, he probably knew who and where you were, and that was a gamble no one wanted to take. Besides which, Drift had long since decided that, despite the rewards, no government actually wanted to take this most notoriously skilled of assassins permanently out of the picture just in case they needed to employ him one day.

  He swallowed, and turned back to Kelsier. ‘If he kills me, I can’t do the job for you.’

  ‘If you aren’t going to do the job anyway, what do I lose?’ Kelsier shrugged. ‘But let’s dispense with that notion. I’m not going to lie and say you’re like a son to me, Ichabod, but you were a solid if somewhat . . . aggravating . . . contractor in the past, for whom I developed something of a fondness. I’d prefer not to leave you in a pool of your own blood in a gin-soaked dive on a Carmellan moon, even to make a point. Shall we perhaps move on to more pleasant matters, like the opportunities I gave you?’

  Drift eyed the old man warily. ‘You’re trying to guilt-trip me?’

  ‘Far f
rom it,’ Kelsier sighed, ‘but I don’t think it’s remiss of me to point out that without my intervention you would have gone to prison, and quite possibly still be rotting there to this day.’

  ‘And that was such a selfless move on your part,’ Drift snorted.

  ‘Do you really want to sit here and squabble about motives?’ Kelsier asked. ‘You were stupid enough to commit a violent mutiny and then breeze into port without even taking the trouble to cover your tracks—’

  ‘That’s not how it happened,’ Drift bit out, ‘and you know it.’

  ‘I know nothing of the sort,’ Kelsier retorted, ‘and it doesn’t matter anyway. You had no evidence for your defence and were guilty in the eyes of the law. I made you an offer which would keep you free and flying, not to mention keeping you in charge of the ship you’d taken by force, and you accepted it.’ Drift grimaced. ‘It’s not like I had—’

  ‘You accepted it,’ Kelsier snapped. He sat back in his seat. ‘I must admit, I never thought I’d see you without that ship, given how attached to it you proved to be. It must have killed you to abandon it like you did . . . although not literally, obviously,’ he conceded, gesturing lazily with his mechanical hand.

  Drift felt his teeth grinding together as Kelsier’s smile turned slightly wicked. The man knew and he made jokes about it!

  ‘I see that this isn’t a line of persuasion which is going to work,’ Kelsier acknowledged.‘You’re a proud man and not that easily cowed, and I’ve been too long out of the public face of politics to talk bullshit and smile convincingly at the same time. So, where does that leave us?’ He rubbed idly at a faint smear on the back of his metal hand. ‘Money, I suppose. The job is, as I’ve mentioned, quite specific, and has a very narrow delivery window. It will take considerable expertise to get to the First System with enough time to get around all the security checks, but without lingering so long that someone catches up with you as you dawdle. It needs to be a swift in-and-out job; your speciality, or so I’ve heard.’

  ‘If that’s a slur on—’

  ‘It’s a slur on nothing unless you wish to take it as such,’ Kelsier interrupted before he could finished his sentence. ‘Don’t be so protective about your cock, it’s nowhere near as important as you think. You and your crew can do fast, time-critical shipping work where, shall we say, discretion is of the utmost importance. Is that correct?’

  ‘Well, yes,’ Drift found himself agreeing.

  ‘Then you’re the perfect fit for this job,’ Kelsier said flatly, ‘and since my deadline is fast approaching and trying to find someone else to fit the bill would not be easy, I will make this decision simple for you and appeal directly to your well-developed sense of greed. One hundred thousand USNA, up front, from me, today. You’ll have expenses to cover: fuel, possibly repairs, maybe bribes. I know well enough how this game is played.’ He sat back and watched those sentences sink in for a moment, then leaned forwards again. ‘Another one hundred thousand, Europan, upon delivery.’

  Drift forced himself to concentrate as those numbers danced inside his head. ‘And your cut from the delivery fee is . . . ?’

  ‘No cut,’ Kelsier said, shaking his head. ‘I’m not moving contraband to a buyer and expecting you to come back with the sale fee, I’m paying you to deliver something. The two hundred thousand is all yours.’

  ‘Right,’ Drift nodded, watching the old man carefully. ‘And the catch . . . ?’

  ‘You’re smuggling something diplomatically sensitive on a tight timescale onto the most heavily regulated planet in the galaxy,’ Kelsier drawled. ‘I’d have thought the catch would be fairly bloody obvious. The money up front is to show I’m good for it, the money at the other end is to make sure your crew don’t decide to bugger off with my hundred thousand and my cargo between here and there.’

  ‘My crew?’ Drift repeated. ‘So you trust me, then?’

  ‘Should I not?’ Kelsier asked airily. ‘What do you say, Ichabod? One more contract, for old times’ sake? I suspect two hundred thousand would be of great use to you, even in mixed currencies.’

  Drift turned the deal this way and that in his head. The hundred grand up front would be easy to verify, and since the Xanth bounty had taken care of their immediate needs, Kelsier’s money could be put to use preparing for the possibility of a double-cross at the other end. His crew could do smuggling jobs well; they’d had some close shaves on occasions, but they’d sneaked cargos in and out of systems and on and off planets most other runners had sworn were sewn up tight by the authorities. If anything played to their strengths, this was it. The Changs could even call their parents from in-system, which would please them.

  Then there was the Laughing Man to consider. The notion of someone hiring the galaxy’s most feared hitman just to use as a threat made Drift slightly uneasy in his bones, and he had no doubt it had been planned as such. Whatever Kelsier was doing these days his resources had to be considerable, and that meant he could afford for his patience to be finite. For all that his former employer had claimed to have ‘dispensed’ with the notion of having the Laughing Man kill him here and now, Drift wasn’t prepared to ignore it. If he tried to turn this job down, he didn’t fancy his chances of getting out of this booth alive.

  Finally, Kelsier had always played him straight before. Harsh, yes. Uncompromising, certainly. But the old man had always laid his terms down clearly and stuck to his side of the deal. Honour among thieves was ten-a-penny compared to honour among politicians, but whatever Kelsier had been or whatever new shadowy game he was playing now, he’d always had that honour.

  And yet . . .

  ‘Sorry, Mr Kelsier,’ he said carefully, keeping one eye on the Laughing Man, ‘I don’t think I can help you.’

  Kelsier’s expression didn’t change. ‘If this is an attempt to push the price even higher, Ichabod—’

  ‘It isn’t,’ Drift cut him off. ‘I’m not interested. I appreciate you coming to offer me this job, but it’s not for me. For us. My crew and I try to stay out of politics as much as possible, and this . . .’ He grimaced, shaking his head. ‘I think you’re further in than you ever were. I can give you some names of other captains who might be able to assist you, but I don’t think it’s a good move for us.’

  ‘How about getting shot in the head?’ Kelsier asked, his tone matter of fact. ‘Would that be a good move for you?’

  ‘Not particularly,’ Drift conceded, stomach churning, ‘but it might be less painful in the long run.’ He eyed the Laughing Man. Maybe if he grabbed Kelsier’s tea and threw it into the assassin’s eyes he’d have enough time to get clear . . . well, if it hadn’t been for the two cybernetic thugs. And assuming that the woman in the niqab didn’t pull one of his own confiscated guns on him.

  ‘You know,’ Kelsier said conversationally,‘when I first realised you were still alive, I must admit I wondered how on Old Earth you’d escaped unnoticed when the Federation of African States massacred your entire former crew. But then again, even at the time it seemed strange to me that they would have done that. Surely at least some would have been captured to face charges, be made an example of, answer interrogations and so forth?’

  Drift stared at the old man, trying to swallow back the bile rising in his throat.

  ‘Unless, of course,’ Kelsier continued, ‘they were actually already dead by the time the FAS found them, and everything after that was the best PR exercise the Africans could spin on it. They wouldn’t have known you by sight, I suppose, and must have assumed that you were present among the corpses. I wonder who or what might have killed so many people but left one man alive?’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘You’ve worked very hard to build yourself a new life, Ichabod. Got yourself a new crew who you seem quite attached to. How do you suppose they would react if I make public who you used to be? Not to mention the interest the FAS would have in the whole affair. I’d wager it would be a toss-up over what did you in first: your crew stabbing you in the back or some African hit squad dispa
tched to . . . well, dispatch you. And you might not find a way out a second time.’

  Drift glared at him, impotent rage warring with a chill in his gut, and didn’t trust himself to speak.

  ‘So here’s what I propose,’ Kelsier continued in his rasping voice. ‘You do this job, and do it to schedule. You get paid rather handsomely for it and we say no more about any of this or who you might have been, once upon a time. Refuse me, and I’ll bring your little world crashing down. Do the job wrong or miss my deadline and the same thing happens, plus I might just send Marcus here to make certain you come to a very sticky end.’

  He smiled pleasantly. ‘So I’ll ask again: what do you say, Ichabod? One more contract, for old times’ sake?’

  Drift inhaled and exhaled again, trying to banish thoughts of putting his fist right through Kelsier’s face, then stopped and seriously considered the notion for a moment. He’d be killed by Kelsier’s goons, but would it be better to die instantly at the hands of an expert assassin than to give up the freedom he’d sacrificed so much to obtain?

  No. No, probably not.

  ‘One job,’ he said, fighting to keep his voice level. ‘I’ll have your word on this, you slippery bastard. This is the only job you will have me do for you.’

  Kelsier smiled easily. ‘My word, my promise and my bond. Successful or failed, this will be the very last time I call upon your services.’

  There was no hint of deceit that Drift could detect, and the last decade of his work had of necessity seen him become an expert in spotting the telltale signs. Of course, Kelsier’s background in the shadier side of politics had made him an expert at this game too, but Drift’s gut was telling him that the old man was being entirely truthful.