Dark Run (39 page)

+Captain, I’m sending Sara out to you with the drive you’ll need,+
Jenna’s voice crackled into his ear suddenly,
+so please don’t shoot her.+

‘Gotcha.’ The crew ramp began to lower from the
Sei
-class shuttle before Drift had finished speaking. He vaguely recognised the girl who appeared out of the
Early Dawn
’s cargo bay from the introductions back on Hroza Major and raised a hand in greeting. She returned it uncertainly, and seemed to be eyeing Apirana’s weapons uneasily.

‘Uh, hi. Jenna said to give you this.’ She held up a small black device, which Drift took from her and tucked into a belt pouch. ‘Where are you off to?’

‘Just got to go and take care of something,’ Drift said, as reassuringly as he could. He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. ‘Our ride’s there; go grab a snack and we’ll be back with the rest of them.’ He tapped Apirana’s arm and the two of them turned away, heading for the nearest airlock entrance into the asteroid’s interior.

‘Do the soldiers know you’re going in?’ the girl called after them, sounding worried. Drift ignored her; he had more important things to concentrate on than lying to a surveillance officer.

As he’d expected, the asteroid’s corridors bore a strong resemblance to those of a starship. They were lined with metal instead of being left open as bare rock, presumably to allow the use of mag-levs for the movement of heavy cargo, and the most obvious difference was the rows of pipes and wires, all of which were inside the main corridor since there was no space around it to run them out of sight as was normal practice in a ship. Apirana kept having to duck or sway to one side whenever they encountered a ventilation outlet hanging down from the ceiling like some sort of infeasibly regular stalactite.

They only had to turn one corner before they found their first bodies.

‘The Europans ain’t messing, are they?’ Apirana said, casting an eye over the trio of dead pirates strewn across the corridor beneath a hail of bullet damage to the metal panelling on the wall. Drift saw his eyes narrow, and the Maori’s face screwed up into a grimace. ‘Two of these ain’t even armed.’

‘Do you see any reporters around?’ Drift asked him, advancing to the next junction and trying to ignore the feeling in his gut which told him that these deaths were a direct result of his trickery. ‘No one’s watching this little war. That means no one needs to play by the rules.’ He activated his comm again. ‘Jenna, which way?’

+You’ve got two entrances nearby which the Europans seem to have walked right past, even though they’ve cleaned out the rooms around you. Turn right to get to the closest one, it’s just around the next corner.+

‘Sounds like a plan,’ Drift agreed. He eyed the corridor ahead of them; perhaps fifty yards of no cover save the very slight insets of doorways into side chambers. ‘You’re certain the Europans cleared these rooms out, right?’

+Trust me Captain, they seem to be killing everything they come across,+
Jenna replied, sounding a little sick. Drift nodded grimly.

‘Alright then. A.?’

‘Right behind ya,’ the Maori replied. Drift doublechecked that his pistols’ magazines were engaged and the safeties were off.

‘Let’s go then.’

They made it halfway down the corridor before Jenna’s voice rang in his ear again, tight with urgency.

+Captain, the entrance is opening!+

‘Shit!’ Drift brought both his guns up to cover the corridor ahead as he and Apirana halted from their jogging pace. ‘What’s happening?’
+There’s three . . . no, five . . . wait, seven . . . guys, just get out of there, they’re coming your way!+

Jenna’s warning wasn’t necessary; Drift could now hear a clatter of boots ahead of them. There wasn’t time to get back to the previous junction to take cover so he dropped to one knee and took aim at the corner, both guns outstretched. Behind him and to his right he heard Apirana grunt as the Maori hoisted the immolation cannon up to shoulder height.

The first man came around the corner, saw them and began to whip his rifle up into a firing position, but Drift’s right-hand pistol barked twice and dropped him before he could bring it to bear properly. There were shouts of consternation and a gun barrel appeared around the corner, but the
whump
of the immolation cannon was followed immediately by its shell impacting on the wall edge. Some of the volatile gel spattered across the metal face Drift could see and started burning as it came into contact with the air, but the majority of the weapon’s payload clearly found targets judging by the sudden screaming.

Drift grimaced: Kelsier’s goons obviously hadn’t expected them and had been driven back momentarily, but he and Apirana were essentially sitting ducks in the corridor should they regroup. They needed to end this, and quickly, and his mind flashed back to something particularly stupid he’d done when boarding a merchantman about fifteen years ago. He’d been younger and thought he was immortal, and he’d been trying to impress a gorgeous young new addition to his crew; she’d had hair like fire, slightly crooked teeth, and a pair of breasts which would have made the ancient sculptors throw their chisels away and start sobbing at their inability to capture such perfection in stone. A shame he couldn’t remember her name.

‘Cover me,’ he told Apirana.

‘Say what?’

Drift was moving before he’d even properly registered that the Maori didn’t seem to have understood his instruction. He burst up from his crouch, took four or five quick steps and then slid on his back, feet first, past the line of the wall with both his guns raised.

The small crowd of the asteroid’s crew – just over half a dozen, perhaps – were in some disarray. He fired into the pack, trying to concentrate on the ones not distracted by clawing at their own flesh or clothing as the immolation gel burned away at them, but realistically he was hardly in a position for sharpshooting. His sudden appearance prompted a spatter of wild shots but they fizzed over him, which was, in fairness, what he’d been counting on. He skidded by the man he’d shot down a second ago, praying to any deity who might be listening that he was either dead or well on the way instead of just winged, and ended up against the corridor’s far wall with his legs bunched beneath him, both pistols dry and the gun barrels of the two men and one woman who were still upright tracking towards his now-stationary form.

At least, until Apirana stepped around the corner and pulled the trigger of the immolation cannon twice. One man took the first shell full in the face and was taken clean off his feet by the force of the impact; the second shot crashed into the woman’s chest and enough spattered onto the man beside her to incapacitate them both in the way that only flaming chemical incendiaries could truly achieve. God, but Drift sometimes wished he’d never let Micah bring that thing on board his ship. Still, it was undeniably effective. He ejected his magazines and fumbled for clips to reload, not least to put their former antagonists out of their misery and stop the damnable screaming.

Apirana beat him to it by taking two steps and stamping on the pair’s throats with two audible and rather sickening cracking sounds, then turned to look down at him. The big man’s mouth had developed a tic at its left corner and his eyes seemed just a little wider than usual. Drift recognised the danger signs; once Apirana’s blood was up he started to behave like the Berserkers of Norse legend, at which point it was safest to just stay behind him.

‘You okay?’ Apirana asked him, breathing a little more heavily than was perhaps warranted by his exertion thus far.

‘Yeah.’ Drift pushed himself up to his feet. ‘You?’ The Maori didn’t reply. Instead, his face twisted into a snarl of rage and he brought the cavernous muzzle of the immolation cannon up with a shout.

Drift didn’t waste time with questions: he threw himself forwards and sideways, trying to get out of the monstrous weapon’s firing arc before Apirana could incinerate him, but shots rang out before he’d hit the steel decking. The shots were not the
whump
of the cannon however, but the sharp-edged hammerblows of supersonic ammunition.

There was a shuffle of boots. Drift looked up to see Apirana stumbling sideways and then the Maori fell, a dark-skinned avalanche in ship fatigues. Behind Drift a rifle was wavering weakly in one hand of the first man he’d shot down, its owner still on his back and his face twisted in pain. Drift hadn’t reloaded his pistols and the barrel was swinging towards him, albeit slowly and somewhat shakily, so he did what he always did in these situations and improvised.

He shifted his grip on the pistol in his right hand to grasp it by the barrel, and threw it as hard as he could.

Luck, fate or excellent hand-eye coordination was on his side and the metal missile struck the crewman square in the face. Drift himself followed it a moment later, launching himself at the wounded man with a yell and grabbing the rifle before it could be turned on him. His opponent fought desperately, teeth bared in a grimace, but his strength was clearly fading. Drift compounded this by punching him where he could see a bullet wound on the man’s right pectoral, and that pretty much ended all resistance. Drift ripped the rifle out of his hands, stepped away from him and emptied the magazine up and down the pirate’s body while screaming obscenities. Then, feeling slightly sick at himself, he threw the weapon away and dashed to where Apirana had fallen.

‘A.!’ He checked the Maori over quickly. There was a bullet wound in the meat of Apirana’s right arm which was bleeding badly and a round had been stopped by the big man’s armavest just under his collarbone, but he was most concerned about the one which had penetrated and left a dark, wet wound over what he judged was roughly the bottom of the left ribcage. Could that have hit a kidney, if it had penetrated far enough? His grasp of anatomy had never been a strong point. ‘How bad does it feel?’

‘Gah!’ Apirana’s breath was coming fast and shallow, and clearly paining him. ‘Pretty
fuckin’
bad, bro!’

‘Okay, hold on.’ Drift grabbed the small, syringelike dressing gun from the medkit on the belt of Apirana’s armavest and sprayed sterile, fast-setting foam into both wounds. It was hardly more than a sticking plaster, but it would slow the big man’s blood loss somewhat. That done, he activated his comm again. ‘Jenna, you still there?’

+I’m here.+
The young slicer’s voice sounded ragged. Of course, she would have seen the whole thing on the cameras.
+Is he . . .+

‘A.’s still alive, but he’s wounded.’ Drift tried to keep his voice crisp, although it was as much for his benefit as either of the other two’s. ‘Anyone else heading our way?’

+It doesn’t look like it. Kelsier’s mob seem to have blockaded themselves in properly now and the Europans are having trouble getting to them.+

‘No one else coming through any secret doors?’ Drift coughed; the acrid, chemical stench of the immolation gel was mixing with the stomach-turning scent of charred human flesh and hair, and the resulting cocktail was making it difficult to breathe.

+Nothing I can see, Captain.+
Jenna sounded a little more focused now, which was something.

‘Right. Keep a lookout and shout at me if you see anything, okay?’

+Roger that.+

‘Right.’ Drift looked down at Apirana again, then up the corridor. ‘Where’s the entrance this lot came out of?’

+About twenty metres away, on your left.+

Drift grimaced and met the Maori’s eyes. ‘Think you can make it that far?’

‘Not fucking dead yet,’ Apirana growled, and held up his left arm. ‘Gimme a hand.’

‘Not a chance,’ Drift told him flatly, ‘you’d pull me over.’ He holstered his second pistol and got behind Apirana, helped the big man into a sitting position (not without a groan of pain on the Maori’s part), then threaded his arms underneath Apirana’s armpits. ‘Ready?’

Apirana nodded, and Drift hauled upwards. Or tried to.

It took two attempts, some truly sulphurous swearing from Apirana and black spots appearing in Drift’s vision but he finally managed to get the Maori onto his feet, although even that was clearly a massive strain for the big man. He was leaning heavily even then, an experience for Drift which felt somewhat akin to trying to support a small landslide, and together they staggered towards what looked like an innocuous section of wall marked by nothing other than a small keypad which could have controlled anything from ventilation to lighting. However, Drift could see the slightly wider gap between wall panels which hinted at an opening.

‘Jenna, any ideas?’

+Access code should be 32519, if I’m reading this right.+

Drift punched the numbers in and, sure enough, the wall panel swung almost silently inwards to reveal a tunnel: not regularly shaped and metal-lined like the corridors outside but simply the bare, dark rock of the asteroid, studded with intermittent lights and lined with cables. They stumbled inside and let the door swing shut again, but after a couple of steps Apirana hissed in pain and sank down against the wall.

‘Shit . . .’ Sweat was beading all over the Maori’s head, visible even in the dimmer light that now illuminated them, and his breath was huffing out around gritted teeth. ‘That’s me done, bro. You go get the little fucker, yeah?’ He reached up with a wince and unslung the assault rifle which until now had been dangling from its strap. ‘Gimme your gun, take this one. I’ll watch your back. No one’s coming through here unless they’re on our side.’

Drift felt his gut twist. Micah’s death was still raw, and Apirana had been a part of Drift’s life for far longer than the Dutch mercenary had. Despite his occasional terrifying rages, and even the recent nearstrangulation Drift had suffered at the big man’s hands, Apirana Wahawaha was a friend. Besides, quite apart from the pain and guilt involved, there was something terrifying about seeing someone as big and strong as Apirana reduced to a crippled wreck. His sheer size and vitality seemed like it should make him immune to all but the largest natural disasters, but at the end of the day he was flesh and blood like anyone else.