Dark Run (40 page)

Drift took the proffered rifle and reloaded his pistol, then handed it over along with a couple of spare magazines. ‘You sure we shouldn’t try to get you back out there?’ he asked, nodding towards the door. ‘We could get Jenna to see if some of the Europans could come and pick you up. You need treatment.’

‘We got nothing on the
Jonah
which can help me,’ Apirana growled, threading his thick finger through the trigger guard, ‘nor the
Keiko
. Go get this bastard an’ then we can all fly off an’ see if the Europans’ll play nice an’ check out my guts.’ He scowled as Drift hesitated. ‘
Go
. I’ve got this. I’m fucking
Maori
. I might not be able to walk, but I can still fight.’

Drift swallowed, not trusting himself to answer. He nodded soberly, bumped the fist that the big man held out to him, and turned away to follow the tunnel.

The tunnel only went a short distance, perhaps twenty metres, before it took a right turn. Drift followed it and found another tunnel merging from the left, reassuringly empty for now but far from ideal given that it meant Apirana was no longer covering the only way in and out. A short distance on from the junction his way was blocked by another door, this one a high-security model in heavy steel. He paused and activated his comm, wondering if the reception lines would have been run in here; if not, the rock would likely prevent his signal from being picked up by the network in the corridors outside. ‘Jenna?’

+Still here.+

He sighed in relief. ‘Good. I’ve reached another door. Any tips?’

+It should be the same access code, from what I can see.+

Drift double-checked his rifle, took a couple of deep breaths, and punched the code into the small keypad set into the rock on his left. A light flashed green and the door slid aside in two portions, allowing him to leap through with his weapon levelled . . .

. . . into a bedchamber. Or possibly a
boudoir
. Regardless of semantics, it was a room of low-level lighting with thick, luxurious carpet and dominated by a large four-poster bed of dark, polished wood, covered in what looked to be red satin sheets.

The other prominent feature was the chamber’s occupant.

She had large, dark brown eyes and high cheekbones on a face which probably didn’t quite fit into Drift’s criteria for ‘beautiful’, but for which the term ‘pretty’ seemed sorely lacking. Her skin was a golden brown not too dissimilar to his own in tone and she would have been an unremarkable, if pleasing sight in most other contexts were it not for one detail: the entire rear of her skull, from the top of her forehead to the nape of her neck, had been either replaced or coated with shiny metal. There was not a hair on her head higher or further back than her eyebrows, which were so dark as to be almost black, and raised high in fear.

She stared at him, wide-eyed, and spoke in a whisper. ‘Who are you?’

Drift kept her covered, checking the rest of the room over quickly. There didn’t seem to be any shadowy corners, or anything convenient for someone else to be hiding in or under. So far as he could tell there were only the two of them there, although there were two internal doors leading off from the main chamber: regular wood-effect plastic from the look of them, not like the metal airlock he’d just stepped through, or the one facing it on the opposite side of the chamber.

He focused on the girl again, raising the rifle slightly to show he was serious. ‘Where’s Kelsier?’

The girl didn’t speak, but twitched her silvered head in the direction of the airlock on the far side of the room. Drift nodded towards the other doors. ‘What’re these?’

‘Kitchen,’ she whispered, another tilt of her head indicating the one to her left. Then she looked to her right. ‘Washroom.’

Drift skirted the bed carefully, trying to make sure he kept focused on her while still being aware of the rest of his surroundings, until his hip was nudging the door she’d said was to the kitchen. He scowled at her. ‘Don’t move.’

She nodded meekly.

He bumped the door open with his hip and spun through, sweeping the rifle’s barrel across what did indeed prove to be a small but well-appointed kitchen. He debated opening the drawers to ensure they weren’t some sort of facade concealing a hiding place, but decided against it. It was clearly just a damn kitchen, and he didn’t have Kelsier pegged as the sort of man who was paranoid enough to build a bolthole into a kitchen located in a secret network of tunnels in the middle of a lonely asteroid. You had to draw the line somewhere.

The girl hadn’t moved, but he still kept an eye on her as he moved around to check the washroom. Again, everything seemed normal, and there were certainly no hiding places among the shiny tiles and chrome finish. He backed out again and regarded the girl steadily. She looked back at him, her expression hard to read but certainly not hostile.

‘What’s through there?’ he asked, indicating the airlock which was now behind him.

The girl shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I’m not allowed out of this room.’

Drift nodded slowly. ‘What’s your name?’

Her voice was the barest whisper this time. ‘Emily.’

‘Well then, Emily,’ Drift said as reassuringly as he could, cautiously taking one hand off his rifle, ‘just keep your hands where I can see them. I’m going to take this sheet off to make sure you’re not hiding any weapons from me.’

The girl clutched the sheet up to her chest even tighter, if anything. ‘But—’

‘I just need to know you’re not going to shoot me in the back,’ Drift told her. ‘That’s all, I promise.’ He didn’t wait for her to reply, but grabbed the sheet and pulled.

The girl resisted for a moment, but only a moment; then the fabric slid from between her fingers and Drift yanked the sheets aside to reveal the rest of the bed, empty of anything remotely resembling a weapon unless someone had found a way to make a pillow deadly. It brought into sight Emily’s torso, which was slim and toned and had its modesty vaguely protected by underclothes that had certainly been designed for appearance rather than warmth, and also Emily’s legs, which were long and shapely.

And made entirely of metal, from the hip joints downwards.

Drift blinked for a second in surprise, then dragged his gaze back up to the girl’s face and, inevitably, her shiny scalp. ‘What—’

Now her expression changed, anger flashing over her face and turning it almost feral. ‘Don’t you dare pity me!’ She moved suddenly, bringing her legs around and under her into a crouch on the bed. Something else glinted at the nape of her neck: what looked like a metal spinal sheath, running down from the back of her skull.

Drift shook his head slowly. ‘I wasn’t . . . look, my business isn’t with you.’ This was all rather more of a headfuck than he’d anticipated. ‘It’s with Kelsier.’

Emily’s expression changed again, the anger fading into a tight alertness. ‘Are you going to kill him?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘Can I watch?’

Drift tried to suppress a grimace. He didn’t know what Nicolas Kelsier had done to this girl, but part of his mind was offering suggestions about it that he didn’t really want to consider too closely.
Her legs . . .
He shook the images away; whatever had happened here, he had no desire to go in after Kelsier with this girl at his back. The last thing he needed was for an overenthusiastic amateur to see a chance for revenge and get in the way at the wrong moment.

‘No,’ he told her instead, ‘you need to get out of here.’ He gestured towards the airlock he’d entered by. ‘There’s Europan troops taking over this rock right now. Go find them, or head for the hangar bay. Either way, as soon as you see someone yell out that Ichabod Drift sent you.’

‘Ichabod Drift?’

He tried a grin. ‘Don’t wear it out!’ She stared at him blankly, and he shrugged mentally. You couldn’t win them all. ‘Seriously, go on. Oh, and if you take the left fork out there you’ll find a big ol’ Maori with a gun and a bad temper.’
I hope. So long as Apirana hasn’t bled out yet, or lost consciousness or something.
‘So you might want to take the right fork, actually. It’ll mean less explaining.’

She studied him for a long moment, dark eyes wide and calculating, then nodded slowly and backed away across the bed, eyes still on him. She pulled a white robe up from somewhere and slipped it around herself, then sidestepped towards the airlock which led to the tunnels beyond. Drift noticed that her feet, which even had individual toes, seemed to be shod in something dark, possibly rubber, for traction.

‘Go on,’ he said when she hesitated, ‘get going.’

Emily didn’t reply. She just nodded once, soberly, and activated the door. It slid aside and she stepped through, then turned in a whirl of white and silver and disappeared almost silently. The door hissed shut behind her and Drift was left with just the empty bedchamber.

‘Well,’ he muttered to himself, ‘that wasn’t at all weird.’ He turned to the next door’s keypad and, on the basis that it had worked so far, keyed in the same five-digit access code.

It worked again. The doors slid apart and he stepped through into the centre of Nicolas Kelsier’s operation.

It was not, in truth, particularly imposing. It was about half the size of the
Jonah
’s cargo bay in area, with a few terminal stations scattered about and humming stacks lining the walls. There were also multiple display screens, now showing nothing but static thanks to Jenna rerouting the signal from the asteroid’s surveillance cameras, and another security door across the room from where he’d entered. Attached to the wall on his far left was an icon, perhaps two feet high and about half that across: a sleek black rectangle of stone, possibly obsidian, with a lattice of gold lines running across it in geometric shapes. Underneath it, with his back to him and furiously doing something at a terminal, was Nicolas Kelsier.

‘What is it?’ the old man barked, not turning around.

‘
Hola, Señor Kelsier
,’ Drift replied, sighting down the barrel of his rifle, ‘
se acabó
.’ He remembered a second too late that Kelsier had never shown much of an aptitude with Spanish and, unwilling to let a dramatic line go unheard, repeated himself in English. ‘It’s over.’

He saw Kelsier stiffen as he was speaking. Then the old, grey head turned slightly and he saw the gleam of a pale blue eye swivelling towards him. ‘
Ichabod
. I might have known you would show up to be the little Mexican cherry topping off this shitstorm.’

‘It seems you’d forgotten how hard I am to kill,’ Drift remarked. ‘No, don’t turn around.’ He kept the rifle pointing at Kelsier and pulled Jenna’s drive out of his belt pouch with his free hand, then slotted it casually and quietly into an access port in the nearest terminal.

‘I concede, it was rather foolish of me to set a trap for you by expecting you to actually be
on time
,’ Kelsier spat. ‘It seems you can’t even manage a simple delivery job these days.’

‘They’re big words coming from someone who’s having his hideout taken over by a bunch of troops from his former employers, brought here by yours truly,’ Drift snorted. ‘What the hell were you trying to achieve by nuking an entire fucking
city
, Nicolas? How is that fair payback for being fired?’ He paused, aware that the clock was ticking for Apirana, but unable not to ask the next question. ‘And what the hell did you do to the girl?’

Kelsier turned, in spite of Drift’s instructions to the contrary, seemingly ignoring the rifle trained on him. His expression was flat and shut off, an expression Drift had seen many times. ‘The girl? What have you done with her?’

‘Never you mind,’ Drift retorted. His eyes were drawn again to the icon on the wall. ‘That’s a circuit cult symbol, isn’t it? What happened? You got older and things started to fail? You felt the need to cheat death as long as possible?’ Suddenly, the old man’s penchant for augmented muscle didn’t seem as wholly prosaic as it had initially. ‘Took a liking to machines over humanity?’

‘Machines are reliable,’ Kelsier replied steadily, his rasping voice still holding the weary tone of a teacher with an exceptionally dim student. ‘Machines are logical, unlike my former employers. I arranged piracy for them on a grand scale for a decade or more, and they never thought I might decide to cut out the middlemen when it came to my wages? They took issue with it and accused me of corruption, but how can you accuse someone of stealing
from
you what they already stole
for
you? Humans are a vile mess of hypocrisy. If a machine is functioning properly and you tell it what to do in a language it understands, it follows your instructions. Which is more than can be said for the man in front of me.’

‘And isn’t that just bad luck for you,’ Drift snorted. ‘Right, chat’s over. Put your hands on your head and make for the door, old man. There’s a lot of heavily armed people outside who are just
dying
to meet you.’

‘And when I tell them that I hired
you
to deliver that bomb? What then?’ Kelsier asked, hands still at his sides. ‘You can’t just kill me; they’ll want me alive, to stand trial—’

‘Yeah, I wouldn’t be too certain about that,’ Drift cut him off. ‘You committed an act of war, Nicolas. Or terrorism, at the very least. You taught the Europans well. Yeah, they
might
want to interrogate you a bit, but they might just shoot you dead. But then that’s them doing it, not me.’ He gestured with his rifle. ‘Not that I won’t, if you give me cause to. C’mon, move.’

‘Still, your position would be untenable,’ Kelsier mused. ‘You’re not the sort of man who will sacrifice himself to take down an enemy, you would always rather run and hide and slink away . . .’

‘Do I look like I’m slinking?’ Drift demanded, hefting his rifle. ‘Seriously, you old bastard, I will shoot you in the leg and drag you, if I have to.’

‘You’d need evidence of another ship being involved,’ Kelsier continued, ‘evidence which you wouldn’t have.’ His pale blue gaze sharpened suddenly. ‘Unless your slicer was
falsifying my records
!’

Drift very carefully didn’t look back at the drive he’d plugged in. ‘Enough speculation, Nicolas. You go see what the Europans will do with you, or I swear to your shiny god I will shoot you and drag you there. Your choice.’