Dark Run (7 page)

There was a general chorus of muttering and nods from around the galley, but Micah still wasn’t convinced. ‘Hey, accidents happen,’ the Dutch mercenary said, spreading his hands innocently, ‘maybe we all tragically died. You’re telling me Jenna here can’t rustle us up some new names and histories?’

Something unpleasant clawed at Drift’s stomach. He shook his head. ‘That wouldn’t work.’
Not again.

‘But—’

‘I’m through with the discussion here,’ Drift told him bluntly. ‘Are you in or out?’

He still grumbled, but there was no question of Micah turning down a cut of two hundred grand. Which was just as well; Drift didn’t want to have to find another gun hand on short notice, and for all his abrasive nature Micah was at least a known quantity. On a run like this, where so much was going to be unknown, the last thing Drift wanted was an unfamiliar face with untested merits.
It’s going to be bad enough hoping that Jenna pulls through in the clinch . . .

‘Ichabod.’

The crew had separated, going to their stations as they prepared the
Jonah
for take-off, ready to fly as unobtrusively as possible to where Kelsier’s cargo awaited them. Rourke, however, had apparently followed Drift back towards his cabin.

‘Jesus!’ He jumped and turned to face her. ‘I’ve told you not to sneak up on me!’ He tried to make it sound joking, but it came out harder than he’d intended. Stars, but the woman could move quietly when she wanted to! He took in Rourke’s solemn expression and composed himself with an effort. ‘Problem?’

‘Maybe,’ Rourke nodded soberly. She nodded at his cabin door. ‘In there?’

Drift palmed the door open and stepped through as it moved aside with the slightest of hisses. Rourke followed him, then leaned back against the greenpainted metal surface as it slid shut behind her, and regarded him with folded arms.

‘So, what’s up?’ Drift asked, absent-mindedly pulling a stopper from a bottle of whisky he kept by his bunk.

‘We’re about to get paid an awful lot of money,’ Rourke said flatly. Drift blinked at her, bottle paused halfway to a fingerprint-smeared tumbler.

‘And that strikes you as a
problem
?’

‘On general principle?’ She shook her head. ‘No. But when I don’t know the cargo
and
I don’t know the employer, I start to get a little . . . twitchy.’

‘A long time ago, when we first started working together, you said the only thing you wouldn’t
’
port is slaves,’ Drift reminded her. ‘The cargo isn’t alive, so . . .’ He shrugged, trying to hide the sudden uncomfortable realisation that actually he had no idea if that was true. He’d have assumed that Kelsier would have said, but . . .

‘I also don’t like not knowing who I’m working for,’ Rourke sighed, eyes drifting along the ceiling, from ventilation unit to light fitting. Her gaze had a tendency to wander upwards no matter where she was, Drift had noticed. It had confused him until he’d realised it was probably an old reflex; looking for bugging devices indoors, searching for snipers on rooftops outside. ‘And I’ve got to say, given that, I think you should have gotten my opinion before you committed to this.’ Her eyes snapped back to his. ‘Or did you forget the last time we took on a job without knowing our employer?’

Drift grimaced. They hadn’t even been doing anything
that
illegal: the booze they’d been moving wasn’t contraband in and of itself, they’d just been asked to slip it past customs to avoid tax. Unfortunately it had transpired that the warehouse they were delivering to belonged to the gang Apirana had run with in his younger days, and they didn’t take kindly to ‘deserters’. The sight of the big Maori’s distinctive
t a¯ moko
when he appeared with a crate over each shoulder had sparked off a fight which had left Rourke with a bullet in her shoulder, two of the warehousemen bleeding and one probably dead, and Apirana in a blistering rage which had seen him destroy most of the galley before Kuai had been able to calm him down. The only mercy was that the incident had flown completely under the radar of the local Justices, since neither side had been eager to attract their attention.

‘There won’t be anything like that,’ Drift assured her.

‘Then why are
you
so twitchy?’

Drift adopted an expression of puzzlement.‘What?’

‘I’ve flown with you longer than anyone else,’ Rourke said levelly, ‘and I know you better than anyone on this boat does. You haven’t been yourself since you came back from High Under.’

‘I . . .’ Drift’s usual carefree grin didn’t seem to want to materialise. He was so used to Rourke’s emotions being virtually unreadable that he’d almost forgotten she could still pick up on other people’s. ‘No, that’s . . .’

‘The way you yelled at the Changs,’ Rourke said, ‘the way you fronted up to Micah; you’ve never given him an ultimatum like that before.’

‘Maybe I should have,’ Drift muttered.

‘I’m not necessarily disagreeing,’ Rourke allowed, ‘but it’s not like
you
. You can’t even string a sentence together to try to convince me you’re fine. The only time your silver tongue usually stops is when you’re asleep, and I’m not even certain about that.’

Drift affected an affronted glare. ‘When have you watched me sleeping?’

‘Don’t try to change the subject.’ Rourke’s dark eyes were steady, but there was something odd in the lines of her face.
Sweet Jesu, I’ve kept her in the dark about this job and she’s
worried
about me!
His stomach twisted again. He’d always tried to be careful about developing attachments to his crew, because if someone wasn’t pulling their weight then sentimentality could endanger everyone, but he couldn’t even pretend to himself that Rourke hadn’t become a friend. A taciturn and reserved friend, certainly, and not exactly a shoulder to cry on, but a friend nonetheless. For a moment he had an impulse to tell her everything, to explain about the barrel Kelsier had him over and the threats which had been made.

But for someone to understand all of the threats, they need to understand what’s at stake for me. And that’s what I have to avoid in the first place.

He took a deep breath. He didn’t want to lie to Rourke. But he would, if he needed to. However, maybe he could ease by with just enough of the truth to placate her . . . ‘Okay, look,
I
know who we’re working for. It’s just not something I’m in a position to share.’

A lot of people would have grown angry with their business partner at this point. Tamara Rourke, however, was not prone to emotional outbursts of any sort without severe provocation, and her face adopted the look which Drift had privately dubbed her ‘holding pattern’: a blank poker mask while she waited for more information on which to base an eventual decision.

‘Why not?’

Drift took a sip of whisky, in the hope it would help him navigate his way through this mess. ‘It’s . . . someone I used to work for. A
long
time ago. Different life.’

Rourke’s face didn’t move. ‘That doesn’t sound massively reassuring. I’m guessing there’s a reason you haven’t done business with them for so long?’

‘A few,’ Drift nodded levelly, feeling the burn of the liquor in the back of his throat. ‘But . . . things have changed. I never had a problem with him as an employer, it was just the work I was doing.’
True enough.
‘Now he’s simply asking me to take something from one place to another. He never saw me wrong before.’
Also true. Mainly.

Rourke nodded slowly. ‘And you don’t want to tell me his name?’

‘Not particularly,’ Drift acknowledged, watching her face. ‘There’re things in my past I’d rather not bring up. Same as everyone on this boat.’
The same as you
, he nearly added, but that would have been needlessly antagonistic. So far as Tamara Rourke’s history was concerned, she’d apparently sprung into being fully formed, fully clothed and fully armed eight years ago, like Athena from the brow of Zeus, and any mention of her life before that simply got you a blank stare.

Rourke’s expression didn’t really change, but her second nod had a sense of finality to it. ‘Okay then. Because I trust you. Don’t make me regret it.’

Drift raised his glass to her in silent salute, and she turned and left his cabin without another word. Once the door had hissed shut behind her again he let out a breath and slumped back into his chair in wordless relief. The crew mostly took his word as captain, but of course a job like this would throw up extra doubts and questions. Similarly, Rourke usually accepted his lead on finding and executing jobs, in the same way as he automatically deferred to her on anything to do with fighting. They each had their own strengths, and they recognised and respected that. Still, you didn’t make a living in business by not looking closely at an offer which might be too good to be true, especially if your business was routinely conducted on the edges of the law.

Drift grimaced. If his intuition was any judge, they’d earn their two hundred grand before this run was out. ‘Tighter than Old Earth’ was in smuggler parlance for a reason, and he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was placing all their fates in the hands of a cocky thrusterhead and a rookie slicer.

‘Well,’ he muttered, gulping down the rest of the whisky, ‘at least life is never dull.’

‘There.’

Jia pointed through the
Jonah
’s viewshield at a distant, blinking light, almost indistinguishable against the inky, star-studded backdrop of space. She looked down at her display again, then back up, and Drift could almost see her triangulating in her head. ‘Yup, definitely that one.’ She squinted at the screen. ‘The
Gewitterwolke
?’

‘The “w”s will be pronounced as “v”s,’ Drift corrected her absently, scratching at the skin around his right eye. ‘But yeah, that’s the one.’ A tapping noise caught his attention, and he turned to see Jenna working busily at her terminal. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Slicing,’ she replied, chewing on a strand of redblonde hair at the corner of her mouth. ‘Their ident’s an overlay, and a good one, but I can—’

‘Don’t,’ Drift said firmly, taking two quick steps to her terminal and planting a hand in the middle of her screen. She looked up at him, surprised.

‘But I thought we didn’t know—’

‘Let’s keep it that way,’ Drift told her quietly. ‘Two hundred grand says we don’t want to know that ship’s real name, or who it belongs to.’

She stared at him for a moment, then shrugged. ‘Aye, Captain.’

‘You’re never normally
that
bothered
’
bout the contract conditions,’ Apirana rumbled. The big Maori was taking up most of the space in the cockpit doorway and watching the panorama of sky slowly move in front of them as Jia orientated them on the distant vessel.

‘I don’t normally stand to make this big a loss if someone decides we’ve broken the agreement,’ Drift told him, moving away from Jenna’s terminal.

‘Don’t really see how y’can lose something you ain’t got yet,’ Apirana shrugged, ‘but I catch your drift.’ He paused for a second, then grunted. ‘No pun intended.’

Drift just nodded at him, and returned to hovering behind the pilot’s chair. Jia cast an exasperated look back up at him, then returned her attention to the read-outs in front of her.

‘I
can
pilot a ship without a babysitter, you know.’

‘I’m not watching you,’ Drift lied, although he was also scanning the darkness and trying to pick out every moving blink of light which might indicate another ship, looking for encirclement patterns. ‘Anyone shadowing us?’

‘No one on sensor,’ Jia replied, ‘so either we’re alone, they’re sitting on our
pìgu
so tight they’ll be getting a roasting from the thrusters, or they’ve got a perfect blind field.’

‘Good,’ Drift muttered. He looked out of the viewshield again. The winking star of the
Gewitterwolke
was starting to resolve into the multiple running lights of a vessel under power as they got closer, and he thought he could make out the faint gleam of surfaces reflecting the system’s star. ‘C’mon A., let’s get down to the cargo bay.’

‘Gotcha,’ the Maori replied, easing away from the door frame in a manner which reminded Drift vaguely of an iceberg he’d once seen calving from a glacier during a flight over the Polar Ocean of New Shinjuku. Watching the huge man’s broad back as they walked focused Drift’s mind on exactly what might happen if his gamble failed and his secret got out. How would a man with a temper as legendary as Apirana’s react?

He felt his heartbeat quicken a little. ‘Actually, you go on. I’ll catch up in a second.’

‘’Kay,’ the Maori replied over his shoulder, and kept walking. Drift stepped sideways, palmed his cabin door open and slipped inside. He made a beeline for the bottle of whisky by his bunk and sloshed a measure into a glass, then sank it in one practised motion.

The liquor burned its way down his throat and he felt his nerves loosen a little. He debated another shot, but decided against it. He was confident he knew his limits, but there was no point tempting fate. He just needed to get through this rendezvous, and then . . .

Then what? Sit on a secret all the way to Old Earth, lying to my crew?
He cast a rueful glance at the bottle.
I don’t know if there’s enough whiskey on board.

He took a deep breath. He was Captain Ichabod Drift now, and he didn’t
need
whisky. He just liked it. This ship was the closest thing to a stable home most of his crew had ever had, and it was his duty to them to keep it that way. It was in everyone’s best interests. That meant making sure Kelsier didn’t go telling tales which might damage their trust in him, and it meant getting the job done without anyone finding anything out which could link him to the old politician.

Especially Micah. He’s the only one who’d know the name.

He took another breath, held it, let it out again, and stepped back out of his cabin. Time to go and play nice.

The
Jonah
’s cargo bay was several times Drift’s height and spacious enough to hold three large freight containers (so long as the crew breathed in when squeezing around them). Apirana was waiting, of course, and Rourke, Micah and Jenna emerged from the stairway which led down from the canteen just as Drift arrived. Rourke nodded once at him, which he couldn’t help but interpret as
This had better go well, or I’ll rearrange your face
.