Dark Run

by Mike Brooks

  ‘I understand,’ Jenna replied firmly. Her eyes flicked past him, to Micah, Apirana and Rourke, all of whom were hanging back and looking as unobtrusive as possible . . . which wasn’t very, especially when one of them was the big Maori. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me?’

  She turned away and disappeared from view, back towards the cabins. It shouldn’t have been possible to slam a button-activated airlock behind her, but Drift got the distinct impression that she’d tried.

  ‘Well, that was just the piece of weird we needed to top this day off,’ Micah opined dryly, then shrugged dismissively. ‘Eh, whatever.’

  ‘Actually, I think we could stand to know a little more about exactly what’s going on inside our slicer’s head,’ Drift countered. Not least because it’ll focus attention away from me. He looked at Rourke. ‘Do you want to have a word with Jenna, see if you can find out what that fuss was about?’

  ‘Not particularly,’ his partner replied, frowning in confusion. ‘What makes you think I’d be any good at that?’

  Drift looked at her for a second, then nodded. ‘Good point. Still, we need to have some idea what it was that set her off. I’ve blown it once, Micah’s an asshole—’

  ‘You only pay me to shoot things,’ the Dutch mercenary grumbled,‘I don’t see where being polite comes into it.’

  ‘—Jia’s going to be busy—’

  ‘And is a raging egomaniac,’ Rourke put in.

  ‘—and Kuai is . . . well, Kuai,’ Drift finished lamely. Their mechanic was good with machines and would win an inter-system passive-aggressive championship, but he wasn’t the sort of person Drift would ever turn to for wheedling a secret out of an unpredictably prickly young slicer. Handling people was usually his strongpoint. ‘Who’s left?’

  There was a moment of silent consideration. Then, as they all turned in unison, Apirana Wahawaha folded arms which were roughly as thick as Rourke’s thighs and glowered at them.

  ‘You guys gotta be kidding me.’

  ALL ABOARD

  ‘There she is,’ Apirana rumbled, startling Jenna out of her reverie. ‘Home sweet home.’

  She’d sat in her cabin for an hour or so, but it wasn’t a large space and she’d started to feel claustrophobic – thankfully not a common occurrence, or space travel would not have been a good option – and had come back to the canteen. She’d expected to be confronted by Drift again, but apart from Kuai grabbing a coffee the rest of the crew had been absent until Apirana had appeared a few minutes previously and begun to do something with a pan. She could see a blaze of lights through the porthole, but one cluster in particular was growing as the Jonah swung in towards it.

  ‘You actually think of it as home?’ Jenna asked. Starship crews rarely had homes planetside of course, but she was still adjusting to this transient life. The notion that she might one day view the Keiko as the place she belonged was both distant and mildly alarming.

  ‘Her,’ Apirana corrected gently. ‘Yup, pretty much. Been on the Keiko five years now, longest I’ve been anywhere since . . . well . . .’ He tailed off and busied himself stirring his pan again, leaving Jenna to focus on the ship looming up to meet them.

  The Jonah was a skiff, nothing more; a small, atmosphere-going vessel which could survive re-entry into a planet’s atmosphere and with enough kick to achieve escape velocity again, but it couldn’t make the jumps between star systems. To do that, you needed a much bigger craft. The Keiko, left parked at one of the Carmella System’s huge waystations, was just such a beast.

  The universal feature of any inter-system vessel was an Alcubierre drive and its ability to warp space-time around the ship, but that had to be generated by the large, encircling doughnut-shaped construct which meant such a vessel would never be able to survive atmospheric re-entry intact. As a result the Keiko, like the rest of its ilk, would never encounter anything except the void and so had no need for aerodynamics. This model had been built to be a sort of rounded cube, with only faint cosmetic curves and the position of the thrusters giving an indication as to which end was the nominal front.

  ‘Hope the bloody door opens this time,’ Apirana ventured from by the hob. ‘Coupla years ago the system had gone offline or something. Me an’ Kuai had to suit up and go out t’do a manual override.’

  Jenna watched the Keiko grow larger, and saw a crack appear in the dark grey surface as bay doors began to pull apart in response to a remote signal sent by Jia in the Jonah’s cockpit. The gape was cavernously dark for a few moments before internal lights flickered on in response to the motion. ‘Well, you won’t have to do that this time.’

  ‘Thank the skies,’ the Maori grunted, looking over his shoulder, ‘I hate void suits. Only ever found one that even sort of fits me, and it’s hot as hell.’

  Jenna sighed. Apirana had never been unfriendly, but this smacked of conversation for conversation’s sake, and she could only think of one reason why he had suddenly become chatty. ‘The Captain asked you to talk to me, didn’t he?’

  ‘That obvious?’ Apirana asked, looking up with a wry grin. Jenna nodded, and the big man shrugged. ‘Well, I ain’t gonna lie, he asked me to have a word, yeah. Which ain’t to say I didn’t have concerns of me own, but I might’ve waited a little before broaching them with you.’

  ‘No one here is eager to talk about their past,’ Jenna pointed out, trying not to let her irritation show too much, ‘why do I have to be the exception?’

  ‘Well, if that’s what’s bothering you,’ Apirana shrugged. ‘Can’t say as I know much about the others, nor is it my place to say anything even if I did. Can tell you about why I’m here though, although it ain’t exactly a pretty story.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean I have to tell you anything,’

  Jenna warned, but the big Maori just shrugged again. ‘Gotta show trust to get trust, I know that well enough. Don’t see a problem with you knowing, anyhow.’ He turned the hob off, scraped the pan’s contents – eggs, as it turned out – onto a plate and came over to sit opposite her.

  ‘Don’t know about yourself, but apart from the Changs I’m the only one on this boat who was born on Old Earth,’ the Maori began. ‘Little place called Rotorua in New Zealand’s North Island. Far as I’m concerned, New Zealand is the most beautiful country in the galaxy.’ He looked up at her, eyes bright in his dark, tattooed face. ‘You ever been to Japan?’

  Jenna shook her head. ‘I’ve never been to the First System.’

  ‘They ran out of room there before the Great Expansion,’ Apirana said, applying his fork to his eggs, ‘built on damn near every inch of land they had. New Zealand never got like that. There’s still wilderness there: forests, valleys, mountains. An’ a bloody great lake o’ sulphur, which is where Rotorua is.’ The Maori’s mouth quirked in a grin, but there was a wistfulness there too. Jenna was a child of Franklin Minor, a world sculpted into a pale shadow of Old Earth with a breathable atmosphere but the barest fraction of its biodiversity imported, yet she’d still felt pangs of homesickness since leaving so abruptly. She could only imagine what the big Maori might feel, looking back through the years at his beautiful, ancestral homeland.

  ‘I’d have loved to grow up there,’ she said, honestly.

  Apirana’s face twisted.

  ‘Even the best places can be hell, if you make ’em that way.’ His fork scraped across the plate. ‘My father was a demon, and a drunkard. He thought the world was out t’get him cos he was Maori. Could be there were some truth to it, too. But that didn’t excuse how he treated me mother. An’ me.’

  ‘Did you run away?’ Jenna asked softly, trying to picture the hulking man in front of her as a frightened child. It wasn’t an easy feat.

  ‘Sort of,’ Apirana shrugged, ‘but . . . maybe not soon enough. You gotta understand, my father weren’t a big man. I get my size from the men on my mother’s side, apparently, but they cut all ties to her when she married him. So yeah, he weren’t big, but he had this . . . way about him, I guess. You didn�
��t stand up t’my father. My mother got the t a¯ moko here,’ he gestured at his own face, ‘which a lot o’ people don’t care for. But it hid the bruises better.’

  Jenna winced.

  ‘So one day when I’m fifteen, he has a bottle or two and cuts loose again,’ the big Maori continued, ‘but for some reason, this time I stood in front of me mother an’ told him t’fuck off.’ His lip curled.

  ‘He didn’t take it well.’

  ‘What happened?’ Jenna breathed.

  ‘Well, my father thought he could put me in my place like he could when I was a kid. He belted me enough when I were small that since then, one look and a word would shut my face right up. So he swung for me again.’ He swallowed, although there’d been no food in his mouth. ‘But I was big by the time I was fifteen, bigger than him. An’ when he hit me, an’

  I was still standing afterwards, suddenly I realised that. Another thing I realised, too late, was that I’d got his temper, an’ I din’t need the beer to bring it out.’

  Around them, Jenna was dimly away of the blackness of space being replaced by the lights of the Keiko’s docking bay, but she found her eyes fixed on the man in front of her.

  ‘I’m not entirely sure exactly what happened next,’

  Apirana admitted, looking down at his plate. ‘After a while, I realised my mother was screaming. At me.

  To stop.’ He sat back, fiddling with the fork which suddenly looked tiny as Jenna registered just how big his hands were. Those fists were nearly as big as her head, and the knuckles were battered and scarred. ‘’Course, now when I look back at it, I see it from her side,’ the Maori said, a bone-deep weariness in his voice. ‘She’d lived in fear o’ this man for years, hoping every time he told her he loved her that this time it would stop him from doing what he’d done before. Watching for every little sign he might be turning aggressive again. Blaming herself every time he blew up. I don’t think she cared about herself after a while, just for me when he hit me, or when I saw him hit her. She must’ve hoped that I could get clear of him some day. And then that day . . .’

  His voice had grown thick. Jenna found herself looking at his cheek, at the way the whorls of his tattoos moved as he spoke. She couldn’t bring herself to meet his eyes.

  ‘That day, she saw me do worse to him than he ever had to her, or to me, an’ without even the alcohol for an excuse. She must’ve despaired. But t’me, all I heard was that I’d finally grown a pair big enough to protect her, an’ now she wanted to protect him.

  I was an angry kid in a man’s body, so I turned on her, yelled at her. An’ just like that, she was looking at me like she’d always looked at him.’ His mouth twisted. ‘Then I ran. Out our front door and into the streets, with just the clothes on me back.’ Jenna wanted to say something, but couldn’t find the words.

  ‘You’d think the streets are no place for a kid, an’ you’d be right,’ Apirana continued, ‘but for a big, angry young Maori, there’s people who’ll take you in, shelter you from the cops, give you food an’ a place to sleep. ’Course, they got their own reasons for doing it, and by the time you realise what they are you’re in too deep to find an easy way out. For me, it were a gang called the Mongrel Mob. Started up middle of the twentieth century an’ the authorities have been trying to stamp ’em out since, but it never worked. Once the Great Expansion started, well, that were that. The Yakuza are the power in the West Pacific Nation systems, sure enough, but the Mongrels run an operation too.’

  Jenna found her voice. ‘So you . . . became a criminal?’

  ‘I was more’n a criminal,’ Apirana rumbled, ‘I was a gangster. Once they’d worked out I had a fuse, well, all they had to do was point me at someone and I’d go off. Thug, bodyguard . . . anything that involved violence, I could do. Bought into the myth that Maori were meant to be warriors. Picked up a way of speaking which stuck. Got my face done. Part o’ me knew what I was doing were wrong, o’course, but they were the only wh a¯nau I had, an’ the only thing shelterin’ me from the law. It was do what they said, or do time.’

  ‘So what changed?’ Jenna asked. The Jonah was setting down, guided by Jia’s expert ministrations. Apirana laughed humourlessly. ‘I did time. I was running drugs by that point, out in Farport. Cops caught up with me, an’ so did about seven years of crimes. They pinned everything they could on me.

  Sentenced to thirty years, served fifteen. First two years, I raged against the system. Next five or so, I blamed my father. For a couple o’ years after that I was blaming the Mongrels, but finally I ended up putting the blame where it belonged.’ He tapped his massive chest with one finger. ‘Here. Weren’t easy.

  When you got a powerful anger like I do you can end up self-destructing if you turn that on yourself, but I reached a balance in the end. When I came out o’ jail, I was gonna make a new life.’

  ‘So you took up with this crew?’ Jenna frowned.

  The Keiko might not have been organised crime, but it was hardly like they only ever took on legal employment.

  ‘Didn’t exactly mean to,’ Apirana admitted, looking a bit shamefaced. ‘Ended up in a bar on Farport. I weren’t drinking, but trouble found me anyway. Three Mongrels had tracked me down. Even after all that time they wanted me back working for ’em, and they didn’t fancy taking no for an answer.’ He shrugged, idly massaging the knuckles of his right fist with his left hand. ‘You can probably guess how that turned out.’

  ‘Not well?’ Jenna ventured.

  ‘Could say that,’ Apirana chuckled ruefully. ‘About the time the third one went through a table I remember thinking to meself, “A., this has got to be the shortest resolution ever.” But the Captain were in the bar that night, an’ he hustled me out before any of ’em got back up again an’ before the cops arrived. Offered me a berth on his ship if I were willing to lift when stuff needed lifting, look menacing when we needed to hold our own, and get stuck in if someone tried to take what was ours. Seemed like about as fair a deal as an ex-con like me could’ve hoped for, so I signed up.’ He shrugged. ‘An’ here I am, five years later. This is my wh a¯nau now.’ Jenna thought back to what she could remember of the night she joined the crew. ‘Do all starships recruit from bars?’

  ‘More’n you might think,’ Apirana grunted. He looked down at his plate, and at the now-cold eggs on it. ‘Hell, I never was much of a cook. Think I’ll ditch this and see if I left any chocolate stashed in me cabin on the big girl.’ He stood up, made his way to the waste disposal in the galley and scraped the eggs off into it. ‘You coming?’

  ‘I thought you’d be asking me about . . . things,’

  Jenna said in surprise. The big Maori shrugged. ‘Captain asked me to talk to you. I’ve talked to you. Well, talked at you, really.’ He stepped back around the galley, briefly blocking out the light as he did so. ‘You ain’t the only one with a past, it’s true.

  Maybe there’s things you’re ashamed of, I dunno. But as far as I can see, on this boat that just means you know you ain’t alone in that. I got my temper under better control these days – much better – but that don’t mean I’ve mastered it. Every now an’ then, I’ll still lose it. The others know that, they understand it, they can make allowances for it. But we can’t plan for what we don’t understand. You wanna be understood, you’re gonna need to talk t’someone. Maybe that’ll be me, maybe that’ll be someone else. But I’m telling you that I will listen t’you. An’ now you know that no matter what is in your past, I am in no pos ition to judge you.’

  He turned and walked away, his heavy tread receding down the corridor.

  VOID STATION PUNDAMILIA

  The lights above the crew hatch turned green and Drift spun the wheel which released it, then swung it inwards to reveal the short docking corridor beyond. He turned back to face the rest of the crew, leaning on the hatch with his usual lazy grin.‘Everyone know what they’re shopping for?’

  Jenna nudged Apirana. ‘Why don’t we get supplies at a registered supply s
tation?’

  ‘Because all of the registered supply stations are on government-controlled worlds,’ Drift replied before Apirana could speak.

  ‘An’ since there’s jackshit of use to anyone in this part o’ the galaxy there’s no government-controlled worlds here,’ Apirana explained, looking down at the slicer, ‘so we’d have to take the long way around t’get to Old Earth, an’ that’d mean not making our delivery deadline.’

  From his other side, Kuai sighed in a long-suffering manner. Apirana couldn’t exactly blame him; void stations, those metal monstrosities thrown together by enterprising ‘businessmen’ to fill the gaps where no government had colonised, were in International Space and therefore, at least theoretically, beyond any government’s jurisdiction. What that meant in practice was that any laws they might have were set and enforced by the owner and whatever security he’d hired, so such trifling niceties as trade descriptions and quality control were often more myth than reality. That would obviously be of some concern when purchasing things like engine parts, fuel and, of course, air.

  Then again, rogue traders on government-controlled worlds would usually have some sort of legal protection from an outraged mob of disgruntled customers, even if it was only the threat of theoretical arrest and sentencing after the event, while merchants with a pitch on a void station enjoyed no such luck. In addition, there was always the risk that the person you’d just cheated might turn out to be a mafioso or similar, in which case you might just as well walk out of an airlock without a suit and save yourself some hassle. As a result, the only sensible course of action for trade on a void station was to talk loudly, swagger noticeably, wear your weapons openly and check everything twice; or, failing that, see who the people who could manage those things bought from and do the same, on the basis that those merchants were likely to be fairly honest at least some of the time.