Dark Run (6 page)

‘It isn’t,’ Drift cut him off. ‘I’m not interested. I appreciate you coming to offer me this job, but it’s not for me. For us. My crew and I try to stay out of politics as much as possible, and this . . .’ He grimaced, shaking his head. ‘I think you’re further in than you ever were. I can give you some names of other captains who might be able to assist you, but I don’t think it’s a good move for us.’

‘How about getting shot in the head?’ Kelsier asked, his tone matter of fact. ‘Would that be a good move for you?’

‘Not particularly,’ Drift conceded, stomach churning, ‘but it might be less painful in the long run.’ He eyed the Laughing Man. Maybe if he grabbed Kelsier’s tea and threw it into the assassin’s eyes he’d have enough time to get clear . . . well, if it hadn’t been for the two cybernetic thugs. And assuming that the woman in the niqab didn’t pull one of his own confiscated guns on him.

‘You know,’ Kelsier said conversationally,‘when I first realised you were still alive, I must admit I wondered how on Old Earth you’d escaped unnoticed when the Federation of African States massacred your entire former crew. But then again, even at the time it seemed strange to me that they would have done that. Surely at least some would have been captured to face charges, be made an example of, answer interrogations and so forth?’

Drift stared at the old man, trying to swallow back the bile rising in his throat.

‘Unless, of course,’ Kelsier continued, ‘they were actually already dead by the time the FAS found them, and everything after that was the best PR exercise the Africans could spin on it. They wouldn’t have known you by sight, I suppose, and must have assumed that you were present among the corpses. I wonder who or what might have killed so many people but left one man alive?’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘You’ve worked
very
hard to build yourself a new life, Ichabod. Got yourself a new crew who you seem quite attached to. How do you suppose they would react if I make public who you used to be? Not to mention the interest the FAS would have in the whole affair. I’d wager it would be a toss-up over what did you in first: your crew stabbing you in the back or some African hit squad dispatched to . . . well, dispatch
you.
And you might not find a way out a second time.’

Drift glared at him, impotent rage warring with a chill in his gut, and didn’t trust himself to speak.

‘So here’s what I propose,’ Kelsier continued in his rasping voice. ‘You do this job, and do it to schedule. You get paid rather handsomely for it and we say no more about any of this or who you might have been, once upon a time. Refuse me, and I’ll bring your little world crashing down. Do the job wrong or miss my deadline and the same thing happens, plus I might just send Marcus here to make certain you come to a very sticky end.’

He smiled pleasantly. ‘So I’ll ask again: what do you say, Ichabod? One more contract, for old times’ sake?’

Drift inhaled and exhaled again, trying to banish thoughts of putting his fist right through Kelsier’s face, then stopped and seriously considered the notion for a moment. He’d be killed by Kelsier’s goons, but would it be better to die instantly at the hands of an expert assassin than to give up the freedom he’d sacrificed so much to obtain?

No. No, probably not.

‘One job,’ he said, fighting to keep his voice level. ‘I’ll have your word on this, you slippery bastard. This is the only job you will have me do for you.’

Kelsier smiled easily. ‘My word, my promise and my bond. Successful or failed, this will be the very last time I call upon your services.’

There was no hint of deceit that Drift could detect, and the last decade of his work had of necessity seen him become an expert in spotting the telltale signs. Of course, Kelsier’s background in the shadier side of politics had made him an expert at this game too, but Drift’s gut was telling him that the old man was being entirely truthful.

‘What’s the cargo?’

‘Four standard small shipping containers,’ Kelsier replied instantly, ‘the contents of which are classified. Don’t let your curiosity get the better of you, Ichabod; my factors in Amsterdam will be checking for signs of tampering or opening before they hand over your second payment, and if they’re not happy then you will be unpopular in a thoroughly terminal way.’

Drift grimaced. ‘It’s going to be hard enough to convince my crew to take on a job from an employer they’ll never meet, let alone a mystery cargo.’

‘Your
crew
?’ Kelsier snorted in what seemed to be genuine amusement. ‘I’m sorry; are you a captain or a butler? Do you or do you not have final say in what your ship does?’ He waved his mechanical hand as though to brush his own question from the air. ‘No matter, that’s your concern rather than mine. Tell them whatever lies or misdirections you need to tell them. You said you don’t want to involve them in politics; don’t ask for more details than you need, then. Do the job and have done.’

The sinking feeling in Drift’s stomach was growing stronger but his brain was whirring away, judging the angles, rehearsing the conversations. Sometimes the only way out was through. There was one more question he had to ask, though.

‘What’s the timescale?’

‘Three weeks, Old Earth standard,’ Kelsier replied. ‘One p.m. on the twenty-first of June local time, to be precise.’

Drift checked his wrist chrono – each system tended to adopt the time frame of its principal occupied planet, but everyone used Old Earth as a universal measurement – and winced inwardly. It would be tight, but it was definitely possible, and that meant his last potential objection had fallen. Now it was down to his choices. Refuse the old man and watch his crew turn their backs on him when they found out about his past, and swap his cherished freedom for a life on the run hunted by the FAS? Go out ingloriously in a stinking shithole of a Carmellan bar, one of the Laughing Man’s stardiscs lodged in his vertebrae or brainpan? Or take the job, with all the dangers that involved?

There was only one option which held a possibility of everything working out. He gritted his teeth and met the old man’s icy gaze.

‘Where’s your cargo?’

‘A dark run? To Old Earth?’

Jia Chang rubbed her index finger thoughtfully across her chin, the minute rubber studs on her flying gloves raising a slight whisper as she did so. Drift tried to ignore the sound and smiled easily. The crew were assembled in the
Jonah
’s canteen, the only space other than the cargo bay which was large enough for them to all come together comfortably, and which had the additional bonus of seats. Jenna, Jia, Kuai and Micah were sitting around the bench-like table, Apirana was in one corner, sunk into the massive armchair he’d bought himself, while Rourke had – probably unconsciously – taken up guard position against the wall next to the door. Drift was leaning back against the food prep bar and trying to look considerably more at ease than he felt.

‘That’s the shape of it,’ he nodded to the Chineseborn pilot. ‘You up to it?’

Jia snorted. ‘Only reason I’m working for you instead of pulling down squadron leader wages with the Red Starfighters is because I’d have broken mother’s heart if I’d gone into the military.’

‘That and you hate authority,’ her brother put in, not looking up from where he was cleaning under his nails with a small screwdriver. ‘You haven’t kept a clean licence since you were busted for buzzing a control tower on the moon the day after you passed—’

‘Kuai,’ Jia said, warning in her tone. Her brother shrugged, but still didn’t look at her.

‘Just saying, we could be working for a respectable shipping company instead of dodging customs officials if you weren’t such a thrusterhead—’

‘Enough!’ Drift barked, pushing the angrily rising Jia back into her chair with one hand while pointing the other at Kuai. The Changs were hard-working and generally undemanding as crew members, but he regularly had to fight the urge to bang their heads together when they started bickering, and his conversation with Nicolas Kelsier had left him decidedly on edge. ‘I’m not after family history or sibling rivalry—’

‘Not much rivalry to be had with a
grease monkey
!’ Jia cut in acidly.

‘
Me cago en la puta,
just tell me if you can do the
fucking
job!’ Drift snapped. The canteen went quiet for a moment. Drift felt Tamara Rourke’s eyes on him, and he did his best to bite back the anxiety which had momentarily taken hold of his tongue. ‘Dark run,’ he continued, more levelly. ‘We get there and get in without even being
seen
by customs flights or security checks.’

‘And the way out?’ Jia asked, her expression slightly sullen but her tone level, possibly because she was studiously ignoring her brother’s very existence.‘Have to ghost out too, or we get difficult questions about why we’re not on their flight logs.’

‘I can probably steal another ship’s ID off the central database and we can use that as a patch,’ Jenna spoke up. ‘So long as the real one doesn’t try to leave while we’re still nearby, we should be fine.’

‘“Probably”? “Should be”?’ Jia grimaced. ‘Not encouraging. A dark run’s doable, sure, but it’ll be tough. Not saying it’s impossible, even on Old Earth, but we need to be prepared. If we try some fancy ID trick, it fails and we need to go full burn out of there, First System is the last place we want to be.’

‘Have you ever sliced a system that big before?’ Drift asked Jenna dubiously. The girl was good, no doubt about it, but she was still relatively new and he hadn’t yet seen her react to real adversity. If she lost the plot at a bad time then this whole venture could take a rapid nosedive.
And that just isn’t an option . . .

‘No, but the bigger a system is, the more holes in it there are.’ Jenna shrugged. ‘When you’ve got that many people with access authority there’s always a way in, if you know your way around the tech.’

‘If you’re that good with tech, how come you’re riding with us instead of skimming yourself a wage out of someone’s bank funds?’ Micah asked, reaching across her to pour himself a cup of coffee from the steaming flagon on the table. ‘Hell of a lot less dangerous than smuggling.’

Jenna flushed, but it was Tamara Rourke who spoke up, her low voice cutting across the room. ‘You’re forgetting the rules, Micah. You don’t ask about someone’s history.’

The mercenary snorted. ‘That’s not “history”, that’s—’

‘It’s close enough,’ Drift cut him off, backing his partner up. Micah rolled his eyes but said nothing, so Drift turned back to the slicer. ‘Jenna: how long will it take you to get us a new ident ready to use?’

‘This is just for the way out, right?’ the girl asked. Drift nodded, and Jenna’s blue eyes lost their focus slightly, as they usually did when she was thinking about tech. ‘Okay. I can do the initial connection as soon as we’re out of the comms blackout when we hit atmo on the way in, so ninety seconds tops to hit their system, thirty seconds to make sure I know what program it’s running. Call it a minute to send the ping and find any tracer echo—’

‘I don’t need the details,’ Drift said, not unkindly. He’d let Jenna go off thinking out loud before, and everyone else had been lost by the third sentence. ‘Just give me an estimate.’

‘I’m
giving
you an estimate,’ Jenna replied patiently, eyes refocusing on his face. ‘It all depends. Two minutes, and I can tell you whether or not I’ll be able to get in at all. If I get a tracer echo then someone’s been careless and I’ve got an open line to the system after three. If not I’ll have to slice it, so,’ she pulled a face to indicate a skilled professional straying into the dreaded realm of guesswork, ‘unless they’ve got anything seriously hardcore going on, I’ll have access to the ident logs in five. From there, I can pull a basic name-and-number patch in thirty seconds, or spend two minutes to tidy it up and fool anything but them pulling our complete data logs. Well,’ she added, ‘or them coming aboard and reading the paperwork. Can’t do shit about that.’ She looked at his blank expression and sighed. ‘I can give you a yes or no before we get into the lower atmosphere. After that, I can have a full ident patch for a logged ship five minutes tops after you give me the green light.’

Drift whistled.‘That’s fast work.’ He threw a glance at Jia, who nodded. ‘Okay, we go in dark, we plan to come out as someone else with nothing to hide. If Jenna can’t give us what we need for that, we have plenty of warning to plan sneaking out instead.’ He looked around at the rest of them. ‘Any questions?’

‘What’re we moving, bro?’ Apirana rumbled. Drift felt his stomach shift uneasily. He’d debated making something up, but skilled liar though he was he’d decided to stick as close to the truth as possible. He didn’t want to have to pull the wool over his crew’s eyes, even though it was in everyone’s best interests.

‘Something worth two hundred grand for us not to ask about or look at.’

‘Sheeit,’ the Maori grunted. ‘Gotta be worth a helluva lot more to your contact if he’s willing to pay that much for us to shift it.’

‘I wonder how much?’ Micah said, his expression brightening.

‘Don’t even think about it!’ Drift snapped, turning to the mercenary. ‘We’re making a small fortune off this job already. Let’s say the cargo’s worth half a mil, Europan; where would we even fence something that valuable? We don’t know anyone who’d touch it.’

‘
I
don’t,’ Micah agreed, ‘but it’s
my
job to shoot a gun. It’s
your
job to know things like that.’ He raised his eyebrows expectantly, but Drift just glared at him. It wasn’t like he hadn’t been thinking about what might be in Kelsier’s crates, but he’d decided that he didn’t want to know. Sometimes ignorance really was bliss. Do the job, get paid, move on: the old man had the right of that, if nothing else.

‘It’s also my job to know when we should just stick to a contract and do a job,’ he said flatly, ‘and this is one of those times. We’re not going to make life any easier for ourselves if we get a rep for breaking deals and running off with cargoes.’ He saw Micah’s mouth opening again, and sighed. ‘Fine, think of it like this: if my contact is willing to pay two hundred grand for us to move this cargo, how much
more
will he be willing to pay for us to be hunted down if we decide to stiff him?’