Dark Run (17 page)

‘Off you went?’ Kuai said, looking a little sick. ‘Off to kill people? Just like that?’

‘No!’ Drift snapped, eyes flashing, ‘Our brief was to
steal resources
. You don’t need to kill people for that. One good hit to the Alcubierre ring and a ship can’t make a jump away from you. Usually we’d get them to launch a shuttle with the cargo on board which we’d pick up, then let them go on their way. A couple made a fight of it, of course, but once crews realised they’d be left alive if they handed over their cargos . . .’ He tailed off, looking uncomfortable.

‘There’s only a couple of pirates who had that rep,’ Rourke said, picking up on what Drift had apparently unintentionally revealed. She was studying him intently, dark eyes fixed on his face. ‘What name did
you
fly under?’

Drift looked back at her, and Jenna saw what looked like resignation settle over his features. ‘The ship I took from Captain Swift was called the
Thirty-Six Degrees
.’

Jenna felt her eyes widening. But that meant . . .

‘And your name?’ Rourke demanded, although she must have already known.

Drift folded his arms and stared at her defiantly. ‘I took the name Gabriel Drake.’

‘
Bullshit!
’ Jia erupted. She pointed a quivering finger at Drift. ‘You are
not
Gabriel Drake! Drake’s dead! The FAS killed him and his crew and captured the
Thirty-Six Degrees
in the Ngwena System ten years ago!’

‘They
think
they did,’ Drift replied coldly, ‘but they never had a description or geneprint of me. I escaped.’

‘Except that the FAS never killed them,’ Rourke said quietly. ‘The
Thirty-Six Degrees
was found in orbit in an ice belt around Ngwena Prime, all hands suffocated due to a catastrophic air leak. Everything else is just FAS propaganda.’

‘And how would you know that?’ Drift asked, his voice no louder than hers. The Captain and his business partner stared at each other across the room for a couple of seconds, eyes searching each other’s faces. Then Rourke shrugged, an almost mocking twitch of her shoulders.

‘You’re not the only one with contacts, Ichabod. Their story’s a lie. Do you want to tell us what
actually
happened?’

Jenna saw Drift’s jaw clench, and for a terrifying moment she thought he was going to launch himself at Rourke. ‘How do you know it’s a lie, Tamara?’

‘The FAS don’t guard their secrets as well as they should, and I had a reason to go looking,’ Rourke replied sharply. Her palmgun was visible again, although she wasn’t directly pointing it at Drift yet. ‘What happened off Ngwena Prime, Ichabod?’

‘Damn it Tamara, I’ve told you what you wanted to know!’ Drift yelled, pushing away from the counter and taking a step towards her. Rourke brought the gun up instantly to point at his face: Drift stopped moving, but didn’t stop shouting. ‘Kelsier saved me from prison but kept it over my head as a threat to make me commit more crimes! Then I thought I’d got away from him, but he found me again on Carmella and threatened to go public if I didn’t take this job! I’d have been arrested, everyone else probably would have too, and the
Keiko
would have been confiscated!’

‘So you were trying to protect us?’ The note of sarcasm in Rourke’s voice was strong.

‘You, me, all of us!’ Drift protested. ‘Is that so hard to believe?’

‘I don’t know,’ Rourke said softly. ‘Tell me how your last crew died, Ichabod.’

Drift glared at her, jaw working as he chewed the inside of his cheek.

‘Now!’ Rourke snapped, gesturing with her gun. ‘I’m not giving you time to think up a cover story! I’ve read the file: the FAS used a merchantman as bait for Gabriel Drake then sprung a trap with two frigates which crippled the
Thirty-Six Degrees
’ Alcubierre drive. It limped off and hid in the rings of Ngwena Prime, but by the time they tracked it down everyone on board had suffocated. Tell me what happened, or—’

‘
I didn’t want to die!
’ Drift roared. ‘That’s what happened!’ Jenna shrank back involuntarily from the fury in the Captain’s face, but Rourke stood firm and her gun didn’t waver.

‘If the FAS found us, we were dead,’ Drift continued, the words tumbling out fast and harsh, ‘and if they didn’t we were still dead, because we couldn’t make port in that system without being caught, couldn’t jump anywhere else, and we would run out of air, water and food.’ His face had a hunted look, and for a moment Jenna pictured what it must be like to be stranded in the stars waiting for the end. ‘So I grabbed an escape pod and spent three weeks in it on my own, nearly going mad while I waited to see if the frigates would notice me and shoot me down, and whether I’d calculated right and I’d intersect the orbit of a little shithole of a moon called Ngwena III.’

‘What, and your crew just let you go?’ Jia scoffed.

‘My crew by that point were a bunch of violent bastards who’d signed on to get rich, not because some Nordic bastard had blackmailed them,’ Drift spat. ‘They blamed me for things going wrong, and I didn’t have to be a genius to see what was happening. When I heard them talking about trying to buy their way free by handing me over to the FAS, that was it.’ He grimaced. When he spoke again, every word seemed to carry the weight of a bullet.

‘So that night, when it was my watch, I put on a sealed suit, overrode the safety mechanisms and opened the airlocks.’

‘You did
what
?’ Apirana rumbled dangerously. Jenna stole a glance at him and saw his huge fingers starting to curl into fists. Drift didn’t seem to have noticed; his gaze was locked with that of Tamara Rourke.

‘And did they all deserve that, Ichabod?’ Rourke asked softly. ‘Were they all looking to betray you? Every last one of them?’

Drift’s lip curled, but his voice was ragged. ‘You know I don’t have an answer for that, Tamara. And don’t think I haven’t asked myself the same question, every night for years.’

Jenna just stared at him. Ichabod Drift, the Captain, the man with the ready smile and a lazy quip, the man who’d taken her on with no questions asked, was one of the most notorious pirates in the skies. A sudden memory hit her, almost dizzying in its intensity: she was still a child, sitting eating dinner with her parents and her brother, and the newsfeed was on. The announcer’s voice was speaking in clipped, measured tones about an FAS transport ship attacked by Gabriel Drake, the crew killed. Her father looking up from his meal and declaring that ‘someone should do something about that monster’ and Jenna knew, even at that age, that the someone was never going to be
him
. Her father lived in a world where ‘someone’ was always ‘someone else’.

Of course, Drift had said he didn’t kill the crews. Maybe that had been another bit of FAS propaganda, which the USNA broadcasts had repeated unquestioned?
No
, her mind whispered to her,
he never said he didn’t kill the crews. He said he didn’t
need
to . . . and he’s just admitted to killing all his old crew. Every single one of them.

Rourke was just staring at Drift, her face unreadable. Drift held her gaze, defiance in his eyes. The rest of the crew simply stood hushed, unwilling to move or make a noise which might shatter the delicate tension in the air.

Except for one.

‘E kai nga tutae me e mate! Upoko kohua!’

Apirana shouldered forwards, face contorted with rage and, before anyone could react, had reached one huge hand out to clamp it around Drift’s neck.

Drift’s hands flew up reflexively but uselessly as he was slammed back against the galley’s worktop: the Maori’s wrist was as thick around as his Captain’s biceps, and beneath the fat layered over his frame Apirana had slabs of iron-hard muscle and tendons you could anchor a spaceship with. Jenna heard a wheeze as the Captain tried to speak, but Apirana’s fingers were squeezing off his air.

‘A.!’ Rourke snapped, and suddenly the one-shot was aimed at him. ‘Let him go! We might need him to—’

She never got to finish the sentence. Apirana’s tattooed face snapped towards her and his other hand flew out with shocking speed, seizing her wrist and twisting it viciously. Rourke cried out in pain and the gun clattered to the floor, which caused the Chang siblings to dance aside, presumably out of worry about it going off and shooting one of them in the foot. The huge Maori then wrenched Rourke effortlessly towards him, releasing her wrist at the last moment and throwing his arm up to clamp around her neck. Crushed against his ribcage, Rourke tried to punch him in the back but he didn’t so much as grunt.

‘You
fucking
bastard!’ Apirana roared at Drift, having switched back into English. Ignoring Rourke except to almost casually restrain her with one arm, he wrenched the Captain bodily across the room and onto the galley’s table, pinning him there by the throat. ‘All this fucking time I’ve been working for you!’

Jenna looked around desperately as the Maori continued to rant and Drift’s face grew redder and redder, despite the best efforts of his clutching fingers on Apirana’s wrist. The Changs had backed away as far as they could, while Micah had reached down to pick Rourke’s one-shot up but then casually pocketed it and stood back again with an unconcerned air. None of them looked like they were going to jump in and stop what was rapidly progressing towards murder.

Someone should do something.
The words echoed in her head, one of any number of times she’d heard her father say them, each time with the same emptiness of meaning. It had always been the verbal equivalent of a shrug: once voiced, the responsibility had been passed elsewhere.

She gritted her teeth and stepped forwards.‘
Apirana Wahawaha!
’

The big man’s face turned to her, twisted in anger and lips flecked with spittle from the force of his bellowing. His eyes practically bulged from their sockets, white and furious, framed by the dark lines of tattoos which no longer looked like body art but instead turned his features into something savage and primal. Jenna felt like she was staring down the throat of a volcano or at an onrushing tsunami; a force of nature untameable and unchallengeable, by which mere humans like her would be crushed and thrown aside.

She slapped him on the jaw, as hard as she could.

Apirana had told her once that the head was sacred to the Maori. The worst curse in the Maori language was telling someone else to ‘go boil your head and eat it’, not just for the disrespect of the original act but also the indignity of shitting it out again afterwards. To touch anyone’s head without permission was a long way from polite, but to a Maori it went far beyond that.

Apirana’s right hand left Drift’s throat and drew back, fingers clenching into a fist roughly the size of Jenna’s head. She took a deep breath, shut her eyes and waited.

Two seconds later, she cautiously opened them again. To her left, Drift was still on his back on the table and making a noise like a malfunctioning air- con unit as he desperately sucked in oxygen. In front of her, and far more prominent, the massive form of Apirana stood frozen in place. The big man’s face was still wild, but there was recognition in his eyes. Recognition, and desperate indecision.

‘I’m sorry,’ Jenna said quickly, ‘I’m sorry but you were going to
kill
him! And I don’t think you want to do that. Not really.’

Apirana stared at her, teeth audibly grinding.

‘Let her go,’ Jenna said gently, nodding towards Rourke. ‘Micah’s got her gun. She won’t shoot you.’

The big Maori just looked at her for a moment longer, then abruptly lowered his raised fist and shoved Rourke away. She fell to the floor and hit it groggily, breaking her fall with her hands but staying down.

‘
Fuck!
’ Apirana screamed. He seized the plastic seat of one of the chairs which were, like the table, welded to the canteen floor to prevent them from flying around during mid-air manoeuvres in a planet’s gravity well; there was an ugly snapping noise and he wrenched it clean off its metal base, then hurled it at the galley where it impacted with a crash of pans.

‘
Fuck!
’

Drift’s coffee mug was seized up and shattered against the far wall a second later, leaving brown spatters where it hit. Jenna stood aside as the Maori stormed forwards, and felt the gust of air as his left arm passed within a couple of inches of her. That same arm rose up to slam a palm into the wall with a sound like a gunshot as he reached the doorway; then he was through and disappearing down the corridor, although a series of bangs and roared swearwords marked his departure towards his cabin.

Jenna took a deep breath, trying to calm her racing heart. Beside her, Drift struggled up to a sitting position, legs dangling over the edge of the table.

‘Thank you,’ he rasped, the wheezing tone not concealing the gratitude in his voice. ‘I thought the big bastard had my number there.’

‘I didn’t do it for you,’ Jenna told him, still staring at the doorway. ‘I did it for him.’

‘I don’t care,’ Drift said, getting to his feet, ‘you still probably saved my life. How did you know he wouldn’t hit you?’

‘I didn’t,’ Jenna admitted, ‘but A. seems to have issues about having his trust betrayed by people he sees as authority . . . or with being threatened,’ she added, nodding at Rourke who was getting back to her feet.‘He’s three times my size and I’m the youngest member of this crew. I have no authority, and I’m no threat to him.’
Plus we seem to get along well
, she added silently. She was in no hurry to repeat the experience, though.

Drift’s eyes were studying her; the mechanical one was as unreadable as always but the living one looked to be weighing her up. Then he nodded slightly. ‘Well, thank God you’ve got some brains, and guts enough to use
’
em.’ He glanced over at Tamara Rourke. ‘You alright?’

‘I’ve been better,’ she muttered, rubbing at her neck.

‘Yeah, well, join the club,’ Drift told her. He looked up at the rest of the crew, eyes scanning over Micah and the Changs and coming to rest on Jenna. ‘Well? Anyone else looking to kill me?’

His words were met with silence.