by Mike Brooks
‘What’s the cargo?’
‘Four standard small shipping containers,’ Kelsier replied instantly, ‘the contents of which are classified. Don’t let your curiosity get the better of you, Ichabod; my factors in Amsterdam will be checking for signs of tampering or opening before they hand over your second payment, and if they’re not happy then you will be unpopular in a thoroughly terminal way.’
Drift grimaced. ‘It’s going to be hard enough to convince my crew to take on a job from an employer they’ll never meet, let alone a mystery cargo.’
‘Your crew?’ Kelsier snorted in what seemed to be genuine amusement. ‘I’m sorry; are you a captain or a butler? Do you or do you not have final say in what your ship does?’ He waved his mechanical hand as though to brush his own question from the air. ‘No matter, that’s your concern rather than mine. Tell them whatever lies or misdirections you need to tell them. You said you don’t want to involve them in politics; don’t ask for more details than you need, then. Do the job and have done.’
The sinking feeling in Drift’s stomach was growing stronger but his brain was whirring away, judging the angles, rehearsing the conversations. Sometimes the only way out was through. There was one more question he had to ask, though.
‘What’s the timescale?’
‘Three weeks, Old Earth standard,’ Kelsier replied. ‘One p.m. on the twenty-first of June local time, to be precise.’
Drift checked his wrist chrono – each system tended to adopt the time frame of its principal occupied planet, but everyone used Old Earth as a universal measurement – and winced inwardly. It would be tight, but it was definitely possible, and that meant his last potential objection had fallen. Now it was down to his choices. Refuse the old man and watch his crew turn their backs on him when they found out about his past, and swap his cherished freedom for a life on the run hunted by the FAS? Go out ingloriously in a stinking shithole of a Carmellan bar, one of the Laughing Man’s stardiscs lodged in his vertebrae or brainpan? Or take the job, with all the dangers that involved?
There was only one option which held a possibility of everything working out. He gritted his teeth and met the old man’s icy gaze.
‘Where’s your cargo?’
TALKING SHOP
‘A dark run? To Old Earth?’
Jia Chang rubbed her index finger thoughtfully across her chin, the minute rubber studs on her flying gloves raising a slight whisper as she did so. Drift tried to ignore the sound and smiled easily. The crew were assembled in the Jonah’s canteen, the only space other than the cargo bay which was large enough for them to all come together comfortably, and which had the additional bonus of seats. Jenna, Jia, Kuai and Micah were sitting around the bench-like table, Apirana was in one corner, sunk into the massive armchair he’d bought himself, while Rourke had – probably unconsciously – taken up guard position against the wall next to the door. Drift was leaning back against the food prep bar and trying to look considerably more at ease than he felt.
‘That’s the shape of it,’ he nodded to the Chineseborn pilot. ‘You up to it?’
Jia snorted. ‘Only reason I’m working for you instead of pulling down squadron leader wages with the Red Starfighters is because I’d have broken mother’s heart if I’d gone into the military.’
‘That and you hate authority,’ her brother put in, not looking up from where he was cleaning under his nails with a small screwdriver. ‘You haven’t kept a clean licence since you were busted for buzzing a control tower on the moon the day after you passed—’
‘Kuai,’ Jia said, warning in her tone. Her brother shrugged, but still didn’t look at her.
‘Just saying, we could be working for a respectable shipping company instead of dodging customs officials if you weren’t such a thrusterhead—’
‘Enough!’ Drift barked, pushing the angrily rising Jia back into her chair with one hand while pointing the other at Kuai. The Changs were hard-working and generally undemanding as crew members, but he regularly had to fight the urge to bang their heads together when they started bickering, and his conversation with Nicolas Kelsier had left him decidedly on edge. ‘I’m not after family history or sibling rivalry—’
‘Not much rivalry to be had with a grease monkey!’ Jia cut in acidly.
‘Me cago en la puta, just tell me if you can do the fucking job!’ Drift snapped. The canteen went quiet for a moment. Drift felt Tamara Rourke’s eyes on him, and he did his best to bite back the anxiety which had momentarily taken hold of his tongue. ‘Dark run,’ he continued, more levelly. ‘We get there and get in without even being seen by customs flights or security checks.’
‘And the way out?’ Jia asked, her expression slightly sullen but her tone level, possibly because she was studiously ignoring her brother’s very existence.‘Have to ghost out too, or we get difficult questions about why we’re not on their flight logs.’
‘I can probably steal another ship’s ID off the central database and we can use that as a patch,’ Jenna spoke up. ‘So long as the real one doesn’t try to leave while we’re still nearby, we should be fine.’
‘“Probably”? “Should be”?’ Jia grimaced. ‘Not encouraging. A dark run’s doable, sure, but it’ll be tough. Not saying it’s impossible, even on Old Earth, but we need to be prepared. If we try some fancy ID trick, it fails and we need to go full burn out of there, First System is the last place we want to be.’
‘Have you ever sliced a system that big before?’ Drift asked Jenna dubiously. The girl was good, no doubt about it, but she was still relatively new and he hadn’t yet seen her react to real adversity. If she lost the plot at a bad time then this whole venture could take a rapid nosedive. And that just isn’t an option . . .
‘No, but the bigger a system is, the more holes in it there are.’ Jenna shrugged. ‘When you’ve got that many people with access authority there’s always a way in, if you know your way around the tech.’
‘If you’re that good with tech, how come you’re riding with us instead of skimming yourself a wage out of someone’s bank funds?’ Micah asked, reaching across her to pour himself a cup of coffee from the steaming flagon on the table. ‘Hell of a lot less dangerous than smuggling.’
Jenna flushed, but it was Tamara Rourke who spoke up, her low voice cutting across the room. ‘You’re forgetting the rules, Micah. You don’t ask about someone’s history.’
The mercenary snorted. ‘That’s not “history”, that’s—’
‘It’s close enough,’ Drift cut him off, backing his partner up. Micah rolled his eyes but said nothing, so Drift turned back to the slicer. ‘Jenna: how long will it take you to get us a new ident ready to use?’
‘This is just for the way out, right?’ the girl asked. Drift nodded, and Jenna’s blue eyes lost their focus slightly, as they usually did when she was thinking about tech. ‘Okay. I can do the initial connection as soon as we’re out of the comms blackout when we hit atmo on the way in, so ninety seconds tops to hit their system, thirty seconds to make sure I know what program it’s running. Call it a minute to send the ping and find any tracer echo—’
‘I don’t need the details,’ Drift said, not unkindly. He’d let Jenna go off thinking out loud before, and everyone else had been lost by the third sentence. ‘Just give me an estimate.’
‘I’m giving you an estimate,’ Jenna replied patiently, eyes refocusing on his face. ‘It all depends. Two minutes, and I can tell you whether or not I’ll be able to get in at all. If I get a tracer echo then someone’s been careless and I’ve got an open line to the system after three. If not I’ll have to slice it, so,’ she pulled a face to indicate a skilled professional straying into the dreaded realm of guesswork, ‘unless they’ve got anything seriously hardcore going on, I’ll have access to the ident logs in five. From there, I can pull a basic name-and-number patch in thirty seconds, or spend two minutes to tidy it up and fool anything but them pulling our complete data logs. Well,’ she added, ‘or them
coming aboard and reading the paperwork. Can’t do shit about that.’ She looked at his blank expression and sighed. ‘I can give you a yes or no before we get into the lower atmosphere. After that, I can have a full ident patch for a logged ship five minutes tops after you give me the green light.’
Drift whistled.‘That’s fast work.’ He threw a glance at Jia, who nodded. ‘Okay, we go in dark, we plan to come out as someone else with nothing to hide. If Jenna can’t give us what we need for that, we have plenty of warning to plan sneaking out instead.’ He looked around at the rest of them. ‘Any questions?’
‘What’re we moving, bro?’ Apirana rumbled. Drift felt his stomach shift uneasily. He’d debated making something up, but skilled liar though he was he’d decided to stick as close to the truth as possible. He didn’t want to have to pull the wool over his crew’s eyes, even though it was in everyone’s best interests.
‘Something worth two hundred grand for us not to ask about or look at.’
‘Sheeit,’ the Maori grunted. ‘Gotta be worth a helluva lot more to your contact if he’s willing to pay that much for us to shift it.’
‘I wonder how much?’ Micah said, his expression brightening.
‘Don’t even think about it!’ Drift snapped, turning to the mercenary. ‘We’re making a small fortune off this job already. Let’s say the cargo’s worth half a mil, Europan; where would we even fence something that valuable? We don’t know anyone who’d touch it.’
‘I don’t,’ Micah agreed, ‘but it’s my job to shoot a gun. It’s your job to know things like that.’ He raised his eyebrows expectantly, but Drift just glared at him. It wasn’t like he hadn’t been thinking about what might be in Kelsier’s crates, but he’d decided that he didn’t want to know. Sometimes ignorance really was bliss. Do the job, get paid, move on: the old man had the right of that, if nothing else.
‘It’s also my job to know when we should just stick to a contract and do a job,’ he said flatly, ‘and this is one of those times. We’re not going to make life any easier for ourselves if we get a rep for breaking deals and running off with cargoes.’ He saw Micah’s mouth opening again, and sighed. ‘Fine, think of it like this: if my contact is willing to pay two hundred grand for us to move this cargo, how much more will he be willing to pay for us to be hunted down if we decide to stiff him?’
There was a general chorus of muttering and nods from around the galley, but Micah still wasn’t convinced. ‘Hey, accidents happen,’ the Dutch mercenary said, spreading his hands innocently, ‘maybe we all tragically died. You’re telling me Jenna here can’t rustle us up some new names and histories?’
Something unpleasant clawed at Drift’s stomach. He shook his head. ‘That wouldn’t work.’ Not again.
‘But—’
‘I’m through with the discussion here,’ Drift told him bluntly. ‘Are you in or out?’
He still grumbled, but there was no question of Micah turning down a cut of two hundred grand. Which was just as well; Drift didn’t want to have to find another gun hand on short notice, and for all his abrasive nature Micah was at least a known quantity. On a run like this, where so much was going to be unknown, the last thing Drift wanted was an unfamiliar face with untested merits. It’s going to be bad enough hoping that Jenna pulls through in the clinch . . .
‘Ichabod.’
The crew had separated, going to their stations as they prepared the Jonah for take-off, ready to fly as unobtrusively as possible to where Kelsier’s cargo awaited them. Rourke, however, had apparently followed Drift back towards his cabin.
‘Jesus!’ He jumped and turned to face her. ‘I’ve told you not to sneak up on me!’ He tried to make it sound joking, but it came out harder than he’d intended. Stars, but the woman could move quietly when she wanted to! He took in Rourke’s solemn expression and composed himself with an effort. ‘Problem?’
‘Maybe,’ Rourke nodded soberly. She nodded at his cabin door. ‘In there?’
Drift palmed the door open and stepped through as it moved aside with the slightest of hisses. Rourke followed him, then leaned back against the greenpainted metal surface as it slid shut behind her, and regarded him with folded arms.
‘So, what’s up?’ Drift asked, absent-mindedly pulling a stopper from a bottle of whisky he kept by his bunk.
‘We’re about to get paid an awful lot of money,’ Rourke said flatly. Drift blinked at her, bottle paused halfway to a fingerprint-smeared tumbler.
‘And that strikes you as a problem?’
‘On general principle?’ She shook her head. ‘No. But when I don’t know the cargo and I don’t know the employer, I start to get a little . . . twitchy.’
‘A long time ago, when we first started working together, you said the only thing you wouldn’t ’port is slaves,’ Drift reminded her. ‘The cargo isn’t alive, so . . .’ He shrugged, trying to hide the sudden uncomfortable realisation that actually he had no idea if that was true. He’d have assumed that Kelsier would have said, but . . .
‘I also don’t like not knowing who I’m working for,’ Rourke sighed, eyes drifting along the ceiling, from ventilation unit to light fitting. Her gaze had a tendency to wander upwards no matter where she was, Drift had noticed. It had confused him until he’d realised it was probably an old reflex; looking for bugging devices indoors, searching for snipers on rooftops outside. ‘And I’ve got to say, given that, I think you should have gotten my opinion before you committed to this.’ Her eyes snapped back to his. ‘Or did you forget the last time we took on a job without knowing our employer?’
Drift grimaced. They hadn’t even been doing anything that illegal: the booze they’d been moving wasn’t contraband in and of itself, they’d just been asked to slip it past customs to avoid tax. Unfortunately it had transpired that the warehouse they were delivering to belonged to the gang Apirana had run with in his younger days, and they didn’t take kindly to ‘deserters’. The sight of the big Maori’s distinctive t a¯ moko when he appeared with a crate over each shoulder had sparked off a fight which had left Rourke with a bullet in her shoulder, two of the warehousemen bleeding and one probably dead, and Apirana in a blistering rage which had seen him destroy most of the galley before Kuai had been able to calm him down. The only mercy was that the incident had flown completely under the radar of the local Justices, since neither side had been eager to attract their attention.
‘There won’t be anything like that,’ Drift assured her.
‘Then why are you so twitchy?’
Drift adopted an expression of puzzlement.‘What?’
‘I’ve flown with you longer than anyone else,’ Rourke said levelly, ‘and I know you better than anyone on this boat does. You haven’t been yourself since you came back from High Under.’
‘I . . .’ Drift’s usual carefree grin didn’t seem to want to materialise. He was so used to Rourke’s emotions being virtually unreadable that he’d almost forgotten she could still pick up on other people’s. ‘No, that’s . . .’
‘The way you yelled at the Changs,’ Rourke said, ‘the way you fronted up to Micah; you’ve never given him an ultimatum like that before.’
‘Maybe I should have,’ Drift muttered.
‘I’m not necessarily disagreeing,’ Rourke allowed, ‘but it’s not like you. You can’t even string a sentence together to try to convince me you’re fine. The only time your silver tongue usually stops is when you’re asleep, and I’m not even certain about that.’
Drift affected an affronted glare. ‘When have you watched me sleeping?’
‘Don’t try to change the subject.’ Rourke’s dark eyes were steady, but there was something odd in the lines of her face. Sweet Jesu, I’ve kept her in the dark about this job and she’s worried about me! His stomach twisted again. He’d always tried to be careful about developing attachments to his crew, because if someone wasn’t pulling their weight then sentimentality could endanger everyone, but he couldn’t even pretend to himself that Rourk
e hadn’t become a friend. A taciturn and reserved friend, certainly, and not exactly a shoulder to cry on, but a friend nonetheless. For a moment he had an impulse to tell her everything, to explain about the barrel Kelsier had him over and the threats which had been made.
But for someone to understand all of the threats, they need to understand what’s at stake for me. And that’s what I have to avoid in the first place.
He took a deep breath. He didn’t want to lie to Rourke. But he would, if he needed to. However, maybe he could ease by with just enough of the truth to placate her . . . ‘Okay, look, I know who we’re working for. It’s just not something I’m in a position to share.’
A lot of people would have grown angry with their business partner at this point. Tamara Rourke, however, was not prone to emotional outbursts of any sort without severe provocation, and her face adopted the look which Drift had privately dubbed her ‘holding pattern’: a blank poker mask while she waited for more information on which to base an eventual decision.
‘Why not?’
Drift took a sip of whisky, in the hope it would help him navigate his way through this mess. ‘It’s . . . someone I used to work for. A long time ago. Different life.’
Rourke’s face didn’t move. ‘That doesn’t sound massively reassuring. I’m guessing there’s a reason you haven’t done business with them for so long?’
‘A few,’ Drift nodded levelly, feeling the burn of the liquor in the back of his throat. ‘But . . . things have changed. I never had a problem with him as an employer, it was just the work I was doing.’ True enough. ‘Now he’s simply asking me to take something from one place to another. He never saw me wrong before.’ Also true. Mainly.
Rourke nodded slowly. ‘And you don’t want to tell me his name?’
‘Not particularly,’ Drift acknowledged, watching her face. ‘There’re things in my past I’d rather not bring up. Same as everyone on this boat.’ The same as you, he nearly added, but that would have been needlessly antagonistic. So far as Tamara Rourke’s history was concerned, she’d apparently sprung into being fully formed, fully clothed and fully armed eight years ago, like Athena from the brow of Zeus, and any mention of her life before that simply got you a blank stare.