Dark Run (3 page)

‘I reckon we’re about done here,’ Apirana disagreed. ‘Grabbing a few small fry an’ then taking Xanth down, that’s one thing. Ain’t no one gonna be welcoming us now our names are known, though. Xanth was easy to find. Smaller marks won’t be; anyone who knows anythin’ll clam up, an’ then we’re no better off than the Justices. Worse, because they’ve got authority and we’ve got nothing except guns.’

‘Guns can work,’ Micah said.

‘Only if we wanna break the law ourselves,’ Apirana pointed out acidly. Micah just shrugged and returned his attention to his lager: so far as the mercenary was concerned, violence was a language everyone understood.

‘I’m enjoying being on the
right
side of the law,’ Kuai put in, fingering the dragon talisman which hung around his throat. He didn’t add ‘for once’, but then he barely needed to. Drift and Rourke’s approach to the laws of the various governments across the galaxy had always been one of convenience over obedience.

‘Because you do so much dangerous work in that engine room,’ Jia snorted. She tapped herself firmly on the chest. ‘
I
judge the radar shadows, dodge security craft, hug a freighter’s drive cone to mask our emission trail, risk frying us all in the backwash, plot the jumps between systems—’

‘And if
you
get it wrong
I
still get arrested or killed,’ Kuai pointed out.

‘Whiner.’

‘Just saying, I prefer when there’s less risk of death or prison, I don’t think that’s—’

‘
Cállate
,’ Drift sighed, and the Chang siblings obediently fell silent. He tipped another two fingers of whisky into his glass, sniffed, sipped, then set it down on the table again. ‘Tomorrow morning I’ll go back to the Justices’ office and see if there’s anything which looks feasible and worth our time. If there is, we Do Some Good and get paid for it. If not . . .’ He shrugged. ‘We’ll see what our options are.’

There was a definite social strata on many of the mining and ex-mining worlds Drift had been to, and indeed ‘strata’ was the most accurate word for it. The government offices and the rich, well-to-do and well-connected lived on the surface. Even when the surface didn’t yet have a breathable atmosphere, like on Carmella II, hermetically sealed mansions, atmo-scrapers and government office buildings with their faux-Gothic cladding still sprawled in a mess of money and authority, interconnected by a web of elevated pedestrian walkways. Meanwhile, airtight buggies and crawlers drove between ground-level airlocks, tracks and tyres kicking up clouds of dust and dirt into the . . . carbon dioxide, or nitrogen, or whatever the air outside was currently composed of. Drift wasn’t sure and didn’t really care; if he tried to breathe it then he’d suffocate and that was all he really needed to know.

Below ground, though, people got poorer. Once a mineshaft had been stripped of whatever the locally available mineral was, the company could make a second income by opening it, widening it and selling it on to a developer, who would put in basic prefab living quarters. In somewhere like Carmella II, where the crust had been plundered widely and deeply, there was a veritable honeycomb of passageways and chambers, and no shortage of people to fill them. This was despite the claustrophobic conditions and the dependence on electricity not just for luxuries but for simple survival: the Air Rent scandals of fifty years ago might have been a thing of the past, but if the atmospheric seals failed or the pumps died then the whole shaft could still be at risk of asphyxiation.

‘Why would anyone choose to live down there?’ Jenna asked, fiddling absent-mindedly with the chunky metal bracelet she always wore on her right forearm and nodding towards one of the maglift platforms which led down into the Underside. They were standing in the brightly lit access hall – a cavernous building almost the size of an aircraft hangar – and watching people bustling to and fro: miners, Justices, cleaners, office personnel and others with less obvious roles and purposes.

‘There’s not many that do,’ Drift replied easily. He was slightly hung-over, but the afterbuzz of yesterday’s successful job was keeping him from feeling too sorry for himself. That and the sizeable bounty they’d netted: Gideon Xanth on his own had been worth fifty thousand USNA dollars, although their cut had been reduced since they’d been working with the Justices. Even so, he winced slightly as a growling six-wheeler headed towards one of the larger, vehicleonly shafts with a throbbing roar which seemed to reverberate off the inside of his skull. ‘But mining doesn’t pay that well, and if you want to save up enough to get off this rock then you need to keep your living costs down. It’s cheap down there, and that’s the truth.’

‘Cheap and grim,’ Jenna muttered. Drift allowed himself a smile. Jenna had been guarded about her history but he was fairly certain she’d originally come from either Franklin Major, where they’d taken her on, or its sister planet Franklin Minor. Both had needed little in the way of terraforming to be surface habitable and so were occupied almost exclusively by the middle classes or higher, barring the service staff such well-offs always needed. The odds were good that Jenna came from a monied background, and Drift couldn’t help wondering if it was high-level tutoring or teenage rebelliousness which had led her to becoming quite so expert with tech.

‘You should see it lower down,’ he told her. ‘There’s less lights and the air’s even worse. Down there, you get the shadow communities.’

Jenna looked sideways at him. ‘The
what
?’ Drift grinned. He was quite enjoying showing Jenna the galaxy, but couldn’t help taking some amusement from her lack of knowledge of some parts of it; it seemed the news holos on the United States of North America’s more affluent planets glossed over a lot of the more insalubrious details.

‘You know, the people who scratch out a living from the spoil heaps, or the little bits of mineral vein the mining companies didn’t think were worth their time.’ He tucked his thumbs into his gunbelt, warming to his theme. ‘Yup, that’s a place where names aren’t given and histories aren’t questioned, and you might be lucky to even wake up tomorrow morning, depended on how careful you’ve been about where you went to sleep. That’s where the worst sort of criminal hides out, you know. Of course, if you
do
wake up then you could decide to be someone else entirely.’ He stole a sideways glance at her. ‘It’s not entirely different to the
Keiko
, in that respect.’

‘You think we have the worst sort of criminal on board?’ Jenna asked, affecting a shocked expression.

‘That’s not what I meant, and you know it,’ Drift grinned. ‘Although if you define “worst” as “very bad at it” then Micah might qualify.’ He sighed contentedly. ‘No, that’s one of the great things about being alive now. There’s always room to be someone else, and there’s always somewhere people will be willing to let the past slide.’

He waited, but Jenna merely nodded soberly and didn’t suddenly volunteer any backstory to her life, which disappointed Drift a little. The
Keiko
’s rule that you didn’t ask about another crew member’s history was only unwritten because he was certain no one would bother to read it, but he at least had an idea of what had brought most of the others together.

Rourke was the same enigma she’d always been, of course, despite running with him for the longest time. It had only been a year or so after joining forces that the pair of them had bailed a thenteenaged Jia out of a Shanghai jail on Old Earth. She’d been on a charge of joyriding a shuttle, and he and Rourke had felt strongly that someone with such obvious natural talent shouldn’t be left to rot. The fact that they’d used false identities to do so was by-the-by, as was the fact that they’d jumped her bail the very next day with her brother hired as mechanic.

Apirana had been an ex-con and former gang member looking to go straight: Drift sometimes felt guilty about hiring him as muscle on their ship of questionable repute, but the big Maori had always been grateful so he figured it wasn’t that much of a problem. Micah was a more recent addition and had only been with them for about two years. He hadn’t talked much about his past in the FDU, but Drift would have put good money on the mercenary’s face being on desertion papers somewhere. Jenna, however, was a puzzle. What would make a rich girl who might have just about hit twenty get blind drunk and leave her comfortable home with its breathable atmosphere to enlist with a bunch of ne’er-do-wells?

Normally, Drift would have idly seduced her to get her to talk about it, but to his surprise he’d realised over the last couple of months that although Jenna was pretty he wasn’t attracted to her. Even more shockingly,
she
didn’t seem attracted to
him
. Instead he’d found himself playing a combined role of tour guide and teacher, and feeling . . . protective.

He must be getting old.

‘Well,’ he said, when it became clear that the girl wasn’t going to confide exactly why she’d joined them, ‘I’d best get on. Don’t let Kuai spend all our money on parts, you hear me? I don’t want him going to town, we just need what’s essential.’

‘He says it’s
all
essential,’ Jenna replied, rolling her eyes. ‘Don’t worry; if he gets uppity I’ll just beat him up.’

‘Atta girl,’ Drift laughed. He fought down an urge to ruffle her hair, and clapped her on the shoulder instead. ‘I’ll be back at the
Jonah
in an hour or so. See you then.’

‘Have fun,’ Jenna grinned, and turned to make her way towards where their engineer was waiting with what might have been impatience. Not that Drift was particularly bothered; for all of Micah’s abrasiveness and Jia’s arrogance, Kuai’s needling passive-aggressiveness was the most tiresome personal trait of any crew member. Still, the man was good enough at his job to make it a price worth paying.

Drift took a deep breath to try to clear his head of the hangover fuzziness and walked over to the nearest pedestrian maglift platform with an undeniable spring in his step. He might not be rich at this precise moment but he was at least well-resourced, and that would make it easier to
get
rich.

The fact that he’d been trying to get rich without much notable long-term success for the last twenty years wasn’t really anything he felt like worrying about right now.

The platform, a rectangle of scuffed metal plates, started its smooth descent into the shaft; a far quicker and more direct route than the meandering tunnels dug by the miners as they chased down seams. Sliding doors flowed together above, but the many small lights in the walls threw illumination over Drift and his fellow passengers: two Justices, rifles slung so they could be accessed quickly but leaving a hand free for the shock sticks at their sides, perhaps going to take up shift at the station below; a small woman in a niqab, her left thumb dancing over the remote operating the datalens which obscured her left eye, brows occasionally lowering into view as she tutted quietly and frowned at whatever she was seeing; a gaggle of teenagers, loudly dressed in clothes which flashed corporation logos brightly enough to challenge the lights around them, the images and slogans crawling across their shoulders on the microweaves just beneath the transparent surface layer; half a dozen miners, destined for some far-off tunnel where the machines still roared and chewed; over in the corner, three hard-looking men who tried to watch the Justices without making it obvious, while radiating an aura even the teenagers seemed to recognise and respect.

Drift kept his eyes fixed somewhere on the floor and listened as hard as he could. The maglift was virtually silent in operation, and he wanted to hear any cough, mutter, whisper or rustle of movement which might indicate that the trio had figured him to be the man who’d taken Gideon Xanth down in Drowning Bend, but he didn’t want to look at them for exactly the same reason as they weren’t looking at the Justices. Thankfully, it seemed they were concentrating too hard on looking innocent to pay much attention to him.

The maglift glided to a halt in High Under and the security doors slid back, allowing them to exit the shaft. Everyone except the miners and the trio Drift had pegged as dangerous disembarked, the light from behind them casting their own shadows forwards as they emerged into the comparative gloom. Drift sniffed and grimaced slightly; the air ‘upstairs’ had the faint tang of purification after-effects but it still tasted cleaner than down here. He sucked down a lungful to get used to it again, then headed off after the receding shapes of the Justices who’d ridden the platform with him.

High Under was relatively affluent as Carmella II went, despite being below ground, but it was still one of the deepest Justice stations on this part of the moon; once you got much further from the surface the patrols started to thin and the response times were measured in days rather than minutes. Still, the pockets of deep shadow were rarer than the pools of illumination here, the stores sold virtually fresh produce shipped in from systems with agriworlds, and the locals gave the Justices he was following no more than a glance instead of challenging stares, or disappearing like cockroaches on a bathroom floor when the light was flicked on.

The two lawmen cut right into a side street, then as he rounded the corner after them they walked through the mirrored double doors which looked almost like a giant representation of a Justice’s visor (Drift had never worked out if that was intentional or not, but either way it reminded him of a ghost train he’d ridden on as a kid where you went through the mouth of a skull at the start). He slowed his step slightly to let the doors stop swinging – Ichabod Drift didn’t follow Justices like a puppy, he was his own man and would be seen to enter in his own time – then strode boldly up to them and pushed the righthand one open without a break in his stride.

That was the plan, anyway. As it turned out the door was stiffer than he remembered, so he had to slow to avoid walking his face right into it. Still, he didn’t trip over and fall on said face or just end up pushing a ‘pull’ door, so he counted it as a sort-of win.

‘Captain Drift,’ Officer Morley greeted him from behind the counter, looking up. ‘Brought in another menace to society already?’ The mocking tone in her voice was playful, and totally negated by the slight grin; the Justices had, in general, been fairly impressed by Drift’s willingness to play bait and with his crew’s contribution to the efforts, and the bounty settlement had taken place without the usual twist of resentment as the clerk tried to work out whether he was paying one criminal for bringing in another.