Dark Run (2 page)

‘Rourke, you shouldn’t be as loyal as you are,’ Xanth snarled. The gang leader wasn’t even pretending to be conversational now there was a weapon pointing at his head, which Drift couldn’t really fault him for. ‘Might be you could’ve got outta this hole while we were busy with this worm, but you had to come sticking your nose in again.’

‘You’d only have chased me down anyway,’ Rourke retorted, somehow managing to shrug without losing her aim. ‘Could say the same about you, though. You were reported as dead to the authorities. You could have given up terrorising war widows and extorting merchants and crawled off to a retirement somewhere with the money you stole. You wouldn’t have been the first.’

‘And maybe I woulda done that,’ Xanth growled, ‘gone off and laughed up my sleeve at the Justices while I was spending my money, but there’s some things you don’t let lie. One thing would be the two of
you
claiming that you killed
me
.’ His scarred face set into an expression of murderous hatred.‘The other is that you needed a body to claim that bounty, and there was only one man this side of the surface who was as big as me. You bastards killed my boy Abe, and dragged his corpse to those scum-suckers in High Under.’

‘Told you we should’ve shaved a dead bear and put it in a coat,’ Drift remarked, looking sidelong at his partner.

‘The import costs would’ve swallowed the bounty,’ Rourke replied evenly.

‘Shut up, you!’ one of the Spiders snapped at her, trying to aim his shotgun even more emphatically. Drift attempted to match him against the descriptions circulated of Xanth’s known associates, and failed. Either a relatively new recruit, then, or simply someone no one had ever bothered to identify.

‘Or you’ll do what?’ Rourke demanded. ‘One of you so much as sneezes, Gideon here’s missing his head.’

‘You think I care about that?’ Xanth roared. ‘
You killed my boy!
You can shoot me, but the two of you ain’t leaving here alive!’

Had it been Ichabod Drift on the other end of that firearm, he would have said something snappy. Something memorable. Something that anyone who’d heard it would have been forced to repeat so the story would have grown in the telling, and listeners would have been astounded at his wit in a dangerous situation.

Of course, that would have given the Spiders a second or so of warning, and Tamara Rourke had never been a gambler. As a result, the moment the last syllable signing their death warrant had left Gideon Xanth’s lips, the Crusader barked once and half of the big man’s skull exploded sideways in a shower of blood, bone and displaced neurones.

The Wild Spiders, crucially, hesitated for half a second. They were gang fighters and used to bullying barkeeps, extorting tolls from travellers or engaging in piecemeal shootouts with others like themselves, preferably when they had a numerical advantage. The notion of a lone woman casually shooting their leader dead was completely alien to them.

As a result, none of them reacted in time.

Drift hauled his pistols out and started blazing away; he saw two Spiders drop from hits of some sort, but then he had to roll desperately aside as Xanth’s bulk slumped forwards onto the controls of his walker and sent the gyroscopically stabilised machine stamping forwards, directly towards him. His weren’t the only shots to ring out, however; a hailstorm of fire exploded from the buildings around them, with the suddenly exposed Spiders at its centre. Several of the gang started shooting back, but their misguided attempt at making a stand came to an abrupt end when a whistling noise heralded the arrival of a shell which detonated on the back of one of their number. Virulent orange flames licked up instantly, and the splash from the blast set alight the clothing and flesh of two more.

Some spatters of volatile gel landed mere inches from Drift and he scrambled away from them, cursing Micah as he did so. The immolation cannon carried by the former soldier was far from a precise weapon; it was, however, a devastatingly effective one. As the howling, burning gang member’s futile attempt at flight was cut short by a merciful bullet to the head from someone somewhere, the surviving gang members not currently flailing at flames on their own bodies hurriedly threw down their guns and thrust their hands determinedly into the air.

The shooting stopped. Drift got back to his feet, holstered his guns and dusted himself down. He caught sight of one of the Spiders glowering at him.

‘What?’

‘Everyone said your crew’d left you!’ the man accused, his tone one of a six-year-old being told that there was no pudding after all. ‘You was meant to have stiffed them on a share of the bounty!’ Figures were emerging from the buildings around them; Micah still covering the cowed gangers with the intimidating mouth of his weapon, Apirana’s rifle looking like a toy in his huge hands, the Chang siblings carrying pistols like they might even know how to use them and, alongside them, the half-dozen black-clad and mirror-visored Justices with whom they’d planned this whole sting.

‘Well,’ Drift sighed, ‘I guess that’s what you get for listening to rumours.’

The Velvet Lounge was a somewhat more upmarket affair than Randall’s. For one thing, the spirits came out of branded bottles and didn’t taste like more than two glasses would send you blind for a week. For another, it had actual upholstery instead of bare boards, although you’d need a thing for velvet to consider it tasteful. And for a third, instead of being buried deep in the warren of tunnels beneath the crust of Carmella II, it was on the surface, actual stars visible in the sky alongside the winking lights of the atmo-scrapers which towered around them like some sort of glittering fungal growths. Jenna McIlroy kept finding her eyes drawn to them as they flashed in her peripheral vision, occasionally mixed with the running lights of some cargo freighter or passenger liner. She tried to stop herself from wondering what the ships were, where they came from, what their purpose was. There was too much galaxy for her guesses to be anything but wild, and it was a good way to make herself paranoid.

‘You’d have thought they’d have made the atmo safe by now,’ Apirana Wahawaha opined in his curiously soft-mouthed, lilting Maori accent, nursing his solitary beer and scratching the dark whorls of the
t a¯ moko
on his cheek. ‘Big A’ was without doubt the most immediately intimidating member of the crew of the
Keiko
, the jack-of-all-trades interstellar freighter which had been Jenna’s home for the last four standard months; he was huge in many ways, from build to voice to personality, and the tribal tattoos which covered much of his skin lent him an alien air to Jenna’s eyes, even out in this galaxy of wonders. However, he rarely drank alcohol and never had more than one even when he did, so he sipped quietly and slowly. ‘Seeing the stars is all well an’ good, but I like to take a walk outside every now an’ then, know what I mean?’

‘Last I heard, they’re still working on it,’ Ichabod Drift replied. In stark contrast to the virtually teetotal Maori, the
Keiko
’s whip-thin captain was a third of the way down a bottle of whisky and showing little sign of slowing. ‘There are plants out there now, or something. Stars only know how long it will take to get it so we can breathe, though.’

‘They won’t be trying too hard,’ Micah van Schaken put in, taking a pull from the tall glass containing the Dutch lager which he swore was the finest in the galaxy, despite the rest of the crew’s repeated assertions that it tasted like thin piss. ‘Once a person gets outside he gets all these ideas of being free, and that plays merry hell for a government.’ He nodded firmly. ‘Keep a man inside behind steel walls and thick windows, tell him that what you do, it’s for his own protection. Make him think he relies on you, let him think the prison is his home, and he’ll thank you for it.’

‘You’re a fountain of light and cheer, d’you know that?’ Drift grinned at him, his silver tooth shining in the white of his smile.

The former soldier just clucked his tongue. ‘You can laugh, but I’ve seen what freedom does to a man. Kills him, like as not.’ He trailed off and stared at his drink, seemingly fascinated by the rising bubbles.

What does he see there?
Jenna wondered.
Antiaircraft fire? Blood spatters?
Humanity’s expansion across the galaxy had not been the expansion into a peaceful utopia the idealists might have hoped. Once away from the First Solar System there were few laws to constrain people, and those rare planets or planetsized moons which boasted atmospheres habitable to Earth-raised organisms without extensive terraforming were valuable in the extreme.

It was small wonder unofficial wars over viable agriworlds or mineral-rich moons had been bloody, with all sides sending in troops, under blanket declarations of
protecting our interests
. Micah had once been part of the Europan Commonwealth Frontier Defence Unit but had apparently grown weary of spilling blood to make anyone richer but himself. He was far from the only former soldier to have come to that conclusion, and Jenna couldn’t blame any of them.

‘You think freedom’s so bad? Try the alternative sometime,’ Jia Chang said pointedly. The Red Star Confederate was one of the more heavily authoritarian interstellar governmental conglomerates, and Jia and her brother Kuai made no secret of their desire to earn enough money to move their parents out of Chengdu on Old Earth. The
Keiko
apparently hadn’t been to that many Red Star systems, since Drift’s Mandarin was poor and his Russian not much better, but by all accounts legitimate shipping was so heavily regulated it was virtually impossible to get work as an independent contractor. And the shadier types of employment were, if anything, even more tightly controlled by the gang bosses.

‘They’ll green this world if they can,’ Tamara Rourke said firmly. She nodded at the looming shadow of Carmella Prime, the mighty gas giant visible as a blue-green crescent through a couple of the higher windows. ‘Most of this place would get enough light for crops to grow even with the orbit cycle, and the chance of an agriworld is too good to pass up.’

Micah just grunted. The dour Dutchman had a tendency to do that, Jenna had noticed; give his opinion, then refuse to engage in subsequent debate. Then again, military service was unlikely to install much in the way of back-and-forth reasoning in a person, preferring instead the approach of ‘Is it still moving? Shoot it again, then.’ Which, to be fair, was what Micah was on the team for.

‘So what’s the plan now?’ Jenna asked. She was the youngest and newest of the crew, and still keenly felt her junior status even if the others didn’t really treat her like it.

She’d been in a bar on Franklin Major, desperately trying to find a way off-planet despite having nowhere near enough money for a fare, but her fruitless search for a ship prepared to take her on had turned into an apparent attempt to drown herself in alcohol instead with what little cash she had.

She didn’t remember the evening well, but it seemed that at some point she’d ended up talking to Tamara Rourke and had dragged the older woman outside to demonstrate her ability to hack her way through an electronic lock while apparently blind drunk. That trick had got her a berth with them (as well as nearly bringing down the local law enforcement on their heads, but it seemed that Drift was willing to put that down to teething troubles), and so far she’d proved adept at accessing information they had no right to, patching them a new broadcast ident on the fly when they’d suddenly needed their ship to be something else, and finally fixing the bug which had been causing the holo-display to wobble like an shivering epileptic whenever anyone wasn’t leaning on one side of the board. She couldn’t shoot straight for love nor money, however, which was why she’d been left on board the planet-going skiff called the
Jonah
during the crew’s most recent escapade.

‘The plan,’ Drift said, sipping his whisky and pausing a moment to roll the smoky flavours around his mouth with what looked to be something approaching genuine pleasure, ‘is to head back to the Justice offices tomorrow and see if there are any more tasty-looking bounties posted.’

‘The same trick won’t work twice,’ Rourke warned. She’d removed her hat to reveal her close-cropped hair, a solid mass of black unbroken by any grey. No one seemed to know exactly how old Tamara Rourke was; not even Drift, who’d been running with her for the best part of eight years. Jenna suspected that she was well into her fifth decade, probably a few years older than the Captain, but her face could have belonged to someone twenty years either side of that depending on what sort of life they’d had, not to mention if they’d taken Boost to slow the ageing processes. That, combined with features which were more slightly delicate than overtly feminine, her boyish figure and a surprisingly deep voice, meant that if needed to she had a fairly good chance of passing for a male. Although Rourke had never said anything, Jenna had the faint ghost of a memory and a rather stronger sense of worry that she’d actually made her first contact with the
Keiko
’s crew by drunkenly trying to chat ‘him’ up.

‘Don’t be negative,’ Drift chided his partner with a clucking noise of his tongue and a wagging finger. ‘Think of what we could earn here! I mean, take the money we made today.’ He checked items off. ‘We made enough to fix the grav-plate on the cargo bay Heim generator, redo the heat shields on the
Jonah
, refuel, and still have some left over for a few drinks. For one day’s work!’

‘A day’s work which could have got us both killed,’ Rourke said flatly. Jenna was still learning the minute variations in the older woman’s expressions, which were the only indication whether she was being dryly deadpan or deadly serious. Usually, as now, she played it safe and assumed serious. Apirana said he’d seen Rourke laugh once, but Jenna wasn’t sure she believed him.

‘Everything was completely under control,’ Drift insisted, raising a glass with one of his dazzling grins. He was the natural showman of the pair, the carnival barker to Rourke’s quartermaster. By the time people realised that they should have been paying attention to the slight, dark figure in the background they’d usually been scammed, bluffed or violently inconvenienced. ‘Here’s to doing the law’s work for them!’