Dark Run (29 page)

It took barely two minutes for the ore containers to be unloaded, although Drift’s ears and fingers were already complaining about the cold by the time the work was done. He sealed the
Jonah
behind him and threaded his way through the docks towards where the rest of the crew were already waiting for him on the other side of a pedestrian airlock. The gust of warm air which hit him when the inner doors opened practically brought him out in a sweat.

Glass City was in some ways very similar to the underground warrens of Carmella II, yet totally unlike. Both consisted of townships constructed inside arcing roofs, but the Hrozan settlement lacked the claustrophobic, dank atmosphere. Instead, the views of open sky above lent it a feeling of space despite the constraining glass structure. There were no atmo-scrapers here either, as the architects behind Glass City had envisaged a relatively lowlevel, low-density settlement. In short, the entire place felt like a middle-class suburb and Drift kept finding himself fighting the urge to track down something valuable to steal.

‘All okay?’ Apirana asked as Drift removed his mask and they headed for the nearest tram terminal, which would take them through the city to where Rourke was waiting for them.

‘Fine,’ he replied, patting a pocket: not the one where he’d actually concealed the credit chip, as he had no illusions that the crowd around them wouldn’t conceal pickpockets despite the city’s genteel appearance. ‘Say what you will about honest work, at least you rarely have to shake anyone down for your wage. Given recent events, it’s almost enough to make me consider registering as a haulage ship and becoming . . . respectable.’

‘You’d get bored,’ Jia sniffed.

‘I’d get bored,’ Drift admitted.

‘An’ too easy to find,’ Apirana added.

‘Also that.’

The Low Docks tram stop was busy, despite the spaceport being only one of three in Glass City: Hroza Major’s three cities were tourist attractions for those with the money to travel and an interest in eclectic architecture which blended function with aesthetics. The crew of the
Jonah
joined the throng to wait for the maglev, a silver, bullet-nosed affair with enclosing walls and roof, not to protect passengers from the non-existent elements but for the rather more mundane purpose of preventing people jumping on and off between stops.

They’d rented a small suite of rooms in the grandly named Lakeview Royale, which succeeded in having a view of one of Glass City’s artificial bodies of water but utterly failed in providing anything other than decidedly standard accommodation for what was still a substantial price: Hroza Major was not a place for those of limited means. Drift and his crew would normally have stayed in their bunks aboard the
Jonah
, for the security of the ship as much as to save money, but the hunt they were on required them to be somewhere more immediately approachable than behind a couple of feet of metal and surrounded by an unbreathable atmosphere.

‘How do we know Nana Bastard was even telling the truth?’ Micah asked as the tram wound its way up through the Low Markets. ‘We’ve come halfway across the galaxy on her say-so but Kelsier might not be anywhere near here. She might not even know who he is!’

‘Everything I found out about her before we went there suggested she’s honest,’ Drift assured him with the conviction of a man who’d stepped into a fighting cage off the back of that information. ‘She’s been known to admit ignorance when people have asked her stuff she doesn’t know. It won’t help her rep if we poke around out here a while, find nothing and then go back and denounce her as a cheat. If she made a habit of doing that then I’m pretty sure her custom would have dried up a long time ago.’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ Micah muttered, although there was some genuine acquiescence in his manner, ‘I
know
that, it’s just . . .’

‘It would be nice to be sure,’ Drift finished for him. ‘Well, that’s an inconvenience we’re going to have to live with until we get a solid lead, so—’

‘Boss,’ Apirana broke in, his deep voice lowered until it was nothing more than a gravelly whisper. Drift glanced up at him, saw the Maori’s eyes flicker sideways for a second. ‘Looks like someone’s scoping us out.’

Drift turned to follow the direction the big man had looked in and found his gaze meeting that of a young woman, perhaps in her early twenties. She was pale-skinned with straight, nut-brown hair cut in an asymmetrically choppy style which didn’t reach her shoulders, and was dressed in dark blue overalls with a logo over her left breast. She could have worked for any one of the numerous warehouses or goods merchants scattered throughout the market districts, and as such would have had perfectly good reason to be aboard the same tram as them, holding onto an overhead rail at the other end of the carriage. However, she didn’t look away from him and in fact started to make her way down the tram towards them, bracing herself against the turns to avoid being dumped into the laps of fellow passengers.

‘You Captain Torres?’ she asked in a low voice, when she was about three feet away from him.

‘That’s me,’ Drift nodded easily, his mind already sorting through the names he’d used. ‘Torres’ had been asking about Nicolas Kelsier and a niqabwearing woman possibly called Sibaal in the Flats Markets. The markets themselves were no flatter than the rest of Glass City’s gently undulating ground, but had gained the name due to mainly selling the fruits, vegetables and other edible plantstuffs grown in the artificially enriched soils of the Equatorial Flats to the south, where Perun’s light and heat was at its greatest and most easily collected by the moon’s glass structures.

‘My boss said you were in last week,’ the girl continued, ‘he told me to come find you and say he might be able to help you now.’

‘Is that so?’ Drift couldn’t keep a slight smile from his face. He glanced at the badge on her overall – trying not to let his eyes linger too long on the curves beneath, which the sturdy fabric did not entirely hide – and nodded thoughtfully. ‘Lavric’s, eh?’ He searched his memory. ‘Tall guy, looks about sixty or so? Grey hair, dark eyebrows?’

‘Yeah, that’s him,’ the girl nodded. ‘So, you wanna come talk to him? He said he’s going to be very busy after today and he might not be able to see you.’

‘That so?’ Drift scratched at the skin around his right eye. He cast a glance sideways at Micah, who nodded fractionally. ‘Okay then. We need to go and pick up the last member of our crew, because if your boss can help us we might need to leave fast.’ He looked out of the window as he felt the tram slow and smiled when he saw a stop approaching. ‘We’ll come find him this afternoon, I think I can remember where your business is. It’s on, ah . . .’

‘Mr Lavric said to bring you myself,’ the girl replied, shrugging. ‘I don’t know why.’

‘Okay then,’ Drift gestured towards the approaching stop. ‘Why don’t you get out and wait for us here? We’ll pick you up on the way back and then you lead us like you’re meant to. What’s your name, anyway?’

‘Natalija,’ the girl replied, flicking her hair out of one eye.

‘A pleasure to meet you, Natalija.’ Drift gave her a smile which sat somewhere between friendly and flirtatious; she was probably technically too young for him, but that had never really mattered a damn. She smiled back, perhaps out of polite reflex and perhaps not, and he casually nudged the door release with his elbow as the tram slowed to a stop in the area known as South Lake Shore, picturesque even by Glass City standards. ‘We’ll try not to keep you waiting too long.’

‘Don’t hurry for me,’ the girl grinned, ‘I’m getting paid anyway, and this beats hauling shit around the warehouse. See ya.’ Drift stood aside and she slipped through the door, then headed towards a bench just vacated by would-be passengers now waiting to board. Drift didn’t even try to disguise watching her backside as she threaded her way through the crowd.

‘You’re impossible,’ Jia told him severely.

‘Merely improbable,’ Drift replied cheerfully, folding his arms. ‘So . . . trap?’

‘Trap,’ Apirana grunted, while the others nodded soberly. Drift sighed, and activated his comm. The call was answered almost immediately.

+About damn time.+

‘Nice to hear your voice again, too,’ Drift replied happily to Rourke’s grumpy tones. ‘It looks like Lavric’s in the Flats Markets may have something for us.’

+I see. What’s the arrangement?+

‘We have a guide,’ Drift informed her. ‘She’s been told to take us to see her boss. We’ve left her at the South Lake Shore tram stop and we should be with you in about ten minutes.’

+I’ll start putting our affairs here in order then.+
There was a pause.
+This ‘guide’. What’s she like?+

‘Oh you know; young, pretty . . .’ Drift grinned. ‘Nice ass.’

+It’s almost like the person who sent her
knows
you, Captain Torres.+

The van parked at the edge of the Flats Markets was cramped, over-warm and not exactly fragrant, what with the various bodies which had been packed into it for some time now. It was also not a van, apparently; it was, in fact, an Unmarked Mobile Technical Support Unit, but so far as Jenna could see it was a goddamned van, and that was how she was going to persist in thinking of it.

Her five companions in the van’s interior were a mixed bag. Captain Rybak had two troopers with her, kitted out with armavests and open-face helmets, which reminded Jenna slightly of the void-station enforcers Drift had gunned down at point-blank range. However, these two had uniforms of slate-blue instead of red, and rather than starguns they carried a dual-purpose weapon combining a high-powered semi-automatic rifle with a tazer, depending on what manner of response was needed.

The main reason they were so cramped was the large, powerful terminal, which took up a fair part of what would normally have been a roomy cargo area. Sitting in front of it and surveying a plethora of display holos were Martin Karhan and Sara Vankova, two local officers who were a study in contrasts. Karhan was older, greying and had the rounded physique of someone who’d been sitting doing hi-tech surveillance work for most of his working life, often in extended bouts with little exercise and poor access to appropriate nutrition; Vankova was close to Jenna’s age, had her dark brown hair done up in a complicated plait at the back of her head and appeared to so far be staving off an expanding waistline to match her supervisor’s through the combined forces of a youthful metabolism and boundless enthusiasm. Jenna had already fielded several excited questions from her on what it was like to be part of a GIA field team with variations of ‘I’m not supposed to talk about that’.

Of more immediate concern was the fact that everyone they were working with in Glass City, from Vankova and Karhan to Rybak and her unit with all their associated guns, were only helping them because of one particular communiqué indisputably sent with the authorisation of Anna-Marie Císa r˘. That message, which had preceded the
Keiko
’s arrival by about a week, instructed them to aid the GIA team led by Tamara Rourke in bringing Nicolas Kelsier to justice for his role in the near-bombing of Amsterdam . . . but it had been sent by Jenna using the access protocols she’d gleaned from Císa r˘
’
s home terminal, and was as fake as one of the
Jonah
’s ident overlays.

They’d been hoping to get the Europan Defence Minister to buy their scheme, but Jenna had always been the fail-safe. The question was how long they had before their deception was realised. Even if Rybak had responded with an affirmative immediately, that would probably not have reached Old Earth yet, and it would take more time for any message or arresting force to return . . . assuming, of course, that no one ever found traces of the slicing she’d done in Císa r˘ ’s apartment.

Jenna had been gone from Císa r˘ ’s flat well before the minister had returned for her ill-fated conversation with Rourke. She also knew she was good; better than that, she was
really
good. But good enough to have left absolutely no virtual fingerprints on a terminal’s datalogs? Nothing to be detected if the best tech security experts in the Europan conglomerate were called in to double-check that a rogue GIA agent hadn’t gone snooping around where she shouldn’t?

Probably not.

So she sat in the van, within five feet of two men with guns who were more than qualified to use them, and waited for the call she wouldn’t hear over the comm system she didn’t have access to which would bring everything to an abrupt and almost certainly bloody close, simply because she’d somehow slipped up in Prague. All in all, it was good that she could blame the temperature of the van for the sweat beading her brow and forming damp circles beneath her arms.

‘This has got to be the most backwards way to conduct an operation I’ve ever heard of,’ Martin Karhan muttered, adjusting the focus on one of the surveillance feeds from a camera embedded in the frame of the glass roof high above them. The market was a press of bodies funnelled through streets narrowed by the presence of stalls, and from this top-down viewpoint it put Jenna somewhat in mind of diagrams of blood cells flowing through veins, albeit more geometric in layout.

‘It’s a sting,’ Vankova argued, ‘it’s just a pretty daring one. They got any tails yet?’

‘Nothing yet,’ Karhan replied, shaking his grizzled head. ‘And yes, it’s a sting, but whoever heard of throwing a whole team in as bait? No disrespect to Agent Rourke,’ he added, glancing briefly over his shoulder at Jenna,‘but how do you know this Kelsier’s guys won’t just shoot them all straight off?’

‘Because I’m not with them,’ Jenna replied, feeling her stomach tighten and hoping to hell that their gamble would pay off. ‘Kelsier knows I’m part of the team hunting him, and wants to get us all; if they kill the others they won’t find me. Besides, we’ve done this before.’
Except it was only the Captain in the net that time, and I don’t think Gideon Xanth was as smart as Kelsier.

‘That seems like a big risk, if you don’t mind me saying,’ Karhan shrugged, ‘but it’s not my team or my life, so . . .’ He broke off, frowning. ‘Okay, we’ve got movement; looks like two tails have joined from Trader’s Way.’ His finger traced the progress of two heads, now following the cluster of
Keiko
crew through the crowd at a slight distance.