Dark Run (35 page)

‘There’s no getting off; we’re in orbit now, and they’ll be making an Alcubierre jump as soon as they can.’

‘We can’t keep hiding here forever!’ Sara protested, clearly horrified.

‘We shouldn’t need to,’ Jenna countered. ‘They’ll leave the shuttle now, and we
should
have it to ourselves until they get to wherever they’re going.’ She checked her wrist chrono. ‘Give them five more minutes to get off this boat, and then I think we can risk heading out.’

It was possibly the longest five minutes of Jenna’s life.

Finally, when the display showed that her self-set timescale had expired, she forced herself up to her feet. Muscles screamed and protested after being bunched up for so long, and the less said about her spine the better. She groaned and staggered sideways, catching herself on the metal bank Sara had been hiding behind.

‘Oh God, I am too young to be making noises like this,’ Jenna muttered. She reached down and offered Sara a hand. ‘Coming?’

‘You should . . .
ow
. . . try yoga,’ Sara offered, clearly not experiencing an entirely pain-free transition to vertical herself.

‘Yoga? Seriously?’ Jenna blinked at her. ‘I’m not fifty.’

‘Trust me, it might be different for you GIA types when you’re running around all over the place,’ Sara said, ‘but when you’re sitting in front of a terminal all day every day you need something to help you stay mobile.’ She arched her back, and Jenna heard something click. ‘Ohh, that wasn’t good, that wasn’t good . . .’

Jenna thought about pointing out the sudden banal bent their conversation had taken, but decided against it. If talking about an exercise regime kept Sara’s mind off their situation and prevented her from freaking out and running through the
Early Dawn
screaming to be let off, it was a price well worth paying.

‘You know, my life isn’t exactly like you think,’ she said as they made their way cautiously towards the door. There was no sign of movement in the corridor from what she could see through the small window, and right at this moment she wasn’t necessarily certain that she’d care if there was. Sara had been right, they could hardly stay huddled up in the engine room forever. ‘I do a lot of sitting in front of terminals as well.’

‘You say that,’ Sara replied, her voice dropping as Jenna reached out to hit the door release, ‘but I only met you this morning, and look where I am now!’

‘Point taken,’ Jenna acknowledged. The door slid open without any immediate shouts of alarm from the other side, so she stepped through and tried to match her movements to how she vaguely remembered Rourke behaving whenever she’d followed the older woman into potential trouble. Gun in both hands for stability, pointing low (‘People start on the ground; you pull the trigger too early when you’re bringing a gun up and you might hit a leg, which is better than shooting above someone’s head when you’re bringing a gun down’), sidling up to a corner and peering around it before moving into the open . . . she was certain that her interpretation would have caused Rourke to despair, but it was better than nothing, and it would hopefully give Sara some confidence if she looked like she had a vague idea of what she was doing.

Each section of corridor was dark as they approached, before being bathed in light as the lamps flickered on. On the one hand this at least meant that no one had been this way for a few minutes, probably since Marone had left the engine room; on the other, it was going to be very obvious to anyone left on board that someone was approaching. Still, they got past the infirmary without meeting anyone, and Jenna was able to sidle up to the airlock which overlooked the cargo bay to peer through the window.

‘Clear,’ she breathed with relief. Sure enough, there was no sign of activity beneath them. ‘Come on, let’s get to one of the cabins.’

The corridor atop the cargo bay was deserted as well. To Jenna’s immense relief the door for the first cabin they tried was not coded, and opened the moment they tried the release. She leaped in, gun waving in arcs to try to cover all angles, but she needn’t have bothered. There was a single fold-down bed built into one wall, a desk with a simple terminal and detachable pad, some drawers bolted to another wall, and a door to the bathroom cubicle which, upon investigation, proved to contain not only a toilet and wash basin but also a shower pod just about big enough for a medium-sized adult to turn around in.

‘I need to get this secured,’ Jenna said, kneeling down and firing up her wrist-mounted hacking rig to connect it to the cabin door’s simple computer brain. ‘Can you black out the windows, or something?’ Anyone could lock the door from the inside – that was the point of doors, after all – but there was always an override code to open it from the outside which the captain of the ship would normally have set; it was the work of thirty seconds to remove that from the memory and install a new access code. Later on she’d just rewrite the programming so someone familiar with the system wouldn’t be able to pull the same trick, but for now they were still reasonably secure from anyone without heavy-duty cutting gear.

A few minutes later they’d activated the self-tinting glass in the cabin’s porthole to prevent anyone outside noticing the light and were both sitting on the bed with a mug of water to combat the thirst which had built up during their self-imposed imprisonment in the engine room. Jenna found herself feeling relaxed and safe, and nearly laughed; they were nowhere near safe, but everything was relative.

‘So . . . what now?’ Sara asked. Jenna was getting a little sick of hearing that question, but snapping at her only ally wasn’t going to do any good, so she took another sip of water and started to lay out their situation.

‘Well, odds are they’re running away to wherever they normally hide out, which will be somewhere in the nav log data I transmitted. If our guess was right then the jump shouldn’t be more than a couple of days, but for that long we’ve probably got this place to ourselves.’

‘What happens when they come back on board?’ Sara asked. Her hands had found her braid of hair again, which was looking decidedly sorry around the end.

‘With any luck it’ll be a short run to wherever they’re docking,’ Jenna said. ‘Actually, if our info’s right and their boss hides out in an asteroid then they might just fly the parent ship right up to it and anchor to it with a cable, then shuttle inside in this. If it’s a short trip they won’t even need to come into a cabin, and if the door for this one seems stuck they’ll hopefully just assume it’s a malfunction and leave it.’

‘And when we’re in the asteroid?’ Sara said, her face betraying her nervousness. ‘Doesn’t that mean we’re basically sitting inside a base full of people who’ll kill us if they find us?’

‘Essentially, yes,’ Jenna shrugged, trying to sound more confident than she felt, ‘but we’ve got two advantages over them.’

‘They don’t know we’re here?’ Sara asked.

‘That’s one,’ Jenna nodded. ‘The other one is that everything – this shuttle, the main ship, the asteroid – are all going to be controlled by computers.’ She held up the arm with her hacking rig on and tapped it meaningfully. ‘And what’s controlled by computers can be controlled by
me
.’

Something was digging into her ribs.

Repeatedly.

Jenna tried to ignore it but the sensation was an insistent one, and distantly familiar at that. She rolled over under the covers and flailed an arm to shoo Missy away. ‘Damn it, cat . . .’

‘Uh, Jenna?’

Wait . . .

Jenna reluctantly opened her eyes and found a bright blue pair staring worriedly back at her, above a mouth chewing on the end of a thick brown braid. The room she was in wasn’t one she knew, either.

Shit. How drunk was I last night?

She experienced a half-second of terrified confusion until she realised that the person facing her was at right angles and therefore kneeling on the floor, rather than in the bed with her, and her memory threw up a name to go with the face as well as, thank God, some context.

‘Sara? What . . . what’s going on?’ She yawned and sat up, and everything else fell back into place: the attempted trap, their unintended kidnapping by the remnants of Kelsier’s thugs, taking shelter in the cabin . . . then the memory of Micah’s death hit her like a bowling ball in the gut again, and her eyes misted momentarily.

‘You said to wake you when we came out of the jump,’ Sara said, pointing at the terminal in the corner of the room. ‘It just pinged at me, so I think we’re . . . oh.’ The Hrozan trailed off as Jenna rolled out of bed, then belatedly remembered that she’d stripped off her jumpsuit before she’d gotten in. She covered her embarrassment as best she could by reaching for it casually – she had underwear on, damn it! – and pretending she wasn’t embarrassed at all.

She checked her wrist chrono.‘Nineteen-hour jump. Sounds about right.’ A quick zip-up and she was once more decent – albeit conscious that her underclothes hadn’t been washed – and ready to face the world.

Whichever world that happened to be.

‘There’s no inhabited systems within nineteen hours of Perun,’ Sara offered from her seat on the floor. ‘I might not have left the system before but I know that much; it’s at least four days’ travel.’

‘Then with any luck, we’re in the Olorun system,’ Jenna muttered, crossing to the terminal and tapping it. Before she’d fallen into an exhausted slumber she’d been keeping watch to allow Sara to sleep first, and she’d used that time to thoroughly poke around the systems of the
Early Dawn
– and by extension, those of the
Half Light
, the carrier ship they were currently riding inside. Their cabin’s terminal was linked to the mainframe in the bridge, and while it might not have had admin access eighteen hours ago it most certainly did now. What was more, the same linking protocols which, among other things, enabled the Heim drives of the two crafts to be (clumsily) synchronised had given her a pathway to access the larger craft’s systems. There weren’t even any software defences in place, but then who would anticipate needing to defend a slicing attack from their own shuttle?

When I get back to the
Keiko
, that’s the first thing I’m setting up.

The nav data flashed up at her request. Jenna was no pilot, but while a veteran stardog might have committed up to a dozen regularly used jump coordinates to memory or be able to work out roughly what part of the galaxy they were in from the pattern of the numbers thrown out by the nav system, most people would be blind without the computer’s assistance. She ignored the meaningless stream of figures and focused on the annotated diagram.

‘On target!’ she muttered, unconsciously giving it the same emphasis as Chiquita Martinez, everbeaming hostess of the popular Serenitan game show of the same title. She looked over at Sara and inclined her head toward the display. ‘Approaching the fourth planet of the Olorun system. Did you fit the tracker?’

‘Yeah, it’s ready whenever we want it,’ Sara replied, patting her bag. The device would now be snugly attached to the internal coils of
Early Dawn
’s main transmitter array. Originally it had been intended not only to pinpoint the shuttle’s location when activated but also piggyback Jenna in to take control of whatever systems she could, but she now had a far better vantage point.

Of course, it came at the cost of being within the reach of a bunch of very unsavoury people, but she was trying not to think about that.

‘Wonderful.’ She sat down in the chair in front of the terminal, thinking. ‘I guess we wait, then.’

‘For what?’ Sara asked.

Jenna looked at her and shrugged. ‘Whatever seems like a good idea. I’m making this up as I go, you know.’

‘You’re doing an amazing job,’ Sara said earnestly. ‘Do they teach all GIA operatives to be so self-reliant?’

‘Probably,’ Jenna muttered. She felt bad continually lying to Sara, but what other option did she have? Admit that she and the rest of the
Keiko
’s crew were a group of chancers who were duping the Europans into clearing up their own mess for them? No, there was nothing to do but play the role she’d been assigned to the best of her ability, and hope to hell that Drift, Rourke and the rest would be following. Preferably with some sort of backup.

Time dragged on. They’d come out of the Alcubierre jump virtually on top of the gas-giant fourth planet, far closer than Jenna would have expected – presumably the
Half Light
’s crew were running scared of pursuit and didn’t want to get caught in the open if they could help it – and it quickly became clear that their destination was not going to be the isolated, mid-system asteroid they’d thought.

‘We’re heading for the ring system,’ she said after a while, checking the nav display.

‘We are?’ Sara came to look over her shoulder, although there was little to see.

‘This course won’t intersect any of the moons,’ Jenna replied, tracing their approach with one finger to show the Hrozan, ‘and we can’t land on the planet, it’s gas. Wherever we’re going must be in the rings.’

‘That tracker had better work,’ Sara muttered. ‘I don’t fancy anyone’s chances of finding us in there otherwise.’

The rings grew larger. Even shut in the
Half Light
’s cargo hold and only able to watch what was going on through the nav display, it still took Jenna’s breath away to see a structure many times wider than her home planet stretching away across the sky. She chewed on a ration bar, one of the stock she and Sara had swiped from the galley: they’d taken a chance that no one would notice, on the basis that the piecemeal ‘crew’ would have other things on their mind and probably wouldn’t be spending long in the shuttle anyway. Besides, they hadn’t brought any food with them, not having expected to be on the
Early Dawn
for more than a couple of minutes.

‘There,’ Sara said after a while of them silently watching the almost hypnotic data returns, most of it a shimmering mess as the
Half Light
’s sensors reported a plane of particles so small as to be indistinguishable from each other. The Hrozan reached across and pointed towards a speck which was starting to stand out against the background noise.