Dark Sky (Keiko) (9 page)

‘THAT’S THE BEST
we can do?’ Drift asked with what Jenna felt was a wholly inappropriate dubiousness. She sighed, exasperated, and shoved the documents under his nose.

‘I
told
you: I’m a slicer, not a forger! The electronic component was no trouble, but the
plasticwork
…’ She shook her head in disgust. What sort of planet still relied on physical media? ‘It looks more or less okay, I think, but it’s probably the wrong thickness and maybe the wrong texture, probably the wrong weight, and the holographic watermark’s not going to stand up to any sort of real scrutiny.’

She watched Drift pore over the thin plaspaper sheets she’d just managed to coax out of the
Jonah
’s on-board printer. You were never going to get everything handled digitally, of course, which was why they still even bothered to carry such an archaic piece of equipment. Some people simply wouldn’t take anything but a person’s signature on a physical contract, or at least expected it as part of a transaction; a sort of ceremonial accompaniment to a genescan, fingerprint or what-have-you. However, to find an entire planet where the government actually used it as standard …

Well, in a way she supposed it was fiendishly clever. It was so outdated that no one would even consider needing to be prepared to forge something like this unless they already knew about it.

‘Well, we’ve got no real option,’ Drift concluded. He ran his finger down one of the pages, then rubbed it gently between thumb and forefinger and held it up to the light. The flag of the governing conglomerate rippled in the top-right corner, a holo fluttering in a non-existent breeze.

‘Except turning around and heading back to Orlov,’ Rourke suggested from the cockpit doorway. ‘We could tell him his mole refused to cooperate, explain Shirokov’s demands.’

‘I don’t think that will help anyone,’ Drift replied pensively, ‘least of all us. Orlov won’t pay us, at the very least, and we’d be lucky if he didn’t spread it around that we couldn’t handle a simple information transfer. He doesn’t get to make his killing in the stocks, and Shirokov is still stuck here. No, if we get the mole off-world and he gives us the data then he gets what he wants, Orlov gets what he wants and by extension, we get what
we
want.’

‘Orlov gets what he wants until he next wants a jump on the ore market, you mean,’ Rourke pointed out, folding her arms. ‘How do you suppose he’ll react when he finds out we’ve taken his meal ticket away from him?’

‘Nothing to do with us if Shirokov somehow bought his way off-world,’ Drift shrugged. ‘We’ll be long gone from New Samara by that time anyway, even if we linger for a few days so our disappearance isn’t suspiciously quick.’

‘Except that Orlov is bound to have enough influence to access the shipping records here,’ Rourke said, her tone taking on a slight edge of exasperation, ‘and they’ll record his emigration on the
Jonah
.’

Jenna raised a finger, feeling for an incongruous moment as though she were back on Franklin Minor watching her parents bickering over some small grievance. They’d never really fallen out, but the other person’s idiosyncrasies had clearly started to grate over time. ‘Uh, I can sort that. The Shirokovs might be
recorded
as leaving on the
Jonah
, but I can alter that as soon as we’re clear from the docking bay.’

‘Which, incidentally, cannot come quickly enough,’ Rourke muttered, casting a dark glare over at the shape of the
Pouco Jacare
. She shook her head, a disapproving twist to her lips. ‘I suppose it’s too much to hope that Apirana actually knocked some sense into anyone’s heads?’

‘A couple of them might think twice about trying something again,’ Drift conceded, ‘but I won’t believe Moutinho’s out of our hair until I see him take off or we leave him in our trails. They haven’t been up to anything, I take it?’

‘Saw him and that big guy you mentioned unloading some cargo,’ Rourke replied, ‘but they didn’t so much as look this way. I don’t like it, the bastard’s up to something. He’d be pissing up against the side of our ship, normally.’

‘He’s welcome to,’ Drift laughed, showing the first sign of genuine good humour Jenna had seen in him since they’d set foot in Uragan City, ‘petty malice doesn’t worry me. We’ll just have to stay sharp in case he tries anything more meaningful.’ He started to fold the plaspaper and nudged the comm on with his elbow. ‘A., get your boots; we’re going back in.’

Ten minutes later Jenna was watching Apirana carefully slide her forgeries into the secret compartment in the sole of one boot. The Maori was so tall that the extra half-inch of height given by the slightly thicker soles of this pair didn’t look at all incongruous, and since he had the biggest feet on the crew it provided slightly more space in which to smuggle sensitive items. Nothing big, of course … but things didn’t have to be large to be valuable.

‘Right,’ Drift was saying, checking his wrist chrono, ‘same set-up as before. A., Jenna, Jia and I are going in to find the Shirokovs, Tamara and Kuai will watch the ship and be ready to leave as soon as we get back. We have—’

‘Three standard hours,’ Rourke put in.

‘—at the
most
until the next storm hits and this place closes for three days or so,’ Drift continued, ‘so we can’t afford any delays. This has already taken longer than it should have done.’

‘Let’s go, then,’ Apirana grunted, and hit the door release. Was it Jenna’s imagination, or was he avoiding eye contact with her? She was sure she’d already caught him looking at her oddly once, when he’d seemed to think that
she
was looking somewhere else.

Maybe he thought she should have done a better job with the forgeries, too. She was getting a little tired of feeling like everyone expected her to work miracles, for all that it was sort of flattering.

Uragan City didn’t get any more inviting on the second visit. She tried to look at it differently, seeing the positives Apirana had listed, but she still couldn’t get past her initial impression of the entire place as a giant, underground morgue with a populace that just happened to be walking about at the moment. Glass City on Hroza Major had been far more to her liking, with its views of the skies and its natural light, or New Samara and its fresh air.

So, the wealthy places we’ve been to recently. Yeah, not like you’re showing your background at all, rich kid.

Drift wasn’t wasting any time; he made his way to the same public comm that he’d called Shirokov from before and punched in the Uragan’s contact code, then switched the unit to its speaker setting again. Jenna leaned against the wall, a faintly coarse artificial surface of some sort rendered in a mild cream, and cast a deliberately casual glance up the street in the direction they’d just come from. Seeing no immediate signs of
Jacare
crew or roving law enforcers, she turned her head to check the other way and found Apirana looking back at her, apparently having had the same idea. To her surprise, the Maori dropped his gaze and seemed to find an immediate interest in the comm riveted to the wall. Yes, this was definitely getting weird now.

The comm stopped ringing. +Privetstviye?+

‘Mr Shirokov, we’re ready for you,’ Drift said briskly, managing to keep most of the annoyance out of his voice. ‘We’ll meet you at the same place as before to go over final arrangements. When can you be there?’

+
I … One moment, please.
+ There was a quick buzz of muffled conversation in fast Russian; Shirokov had presumably placed a hand over his comm’s mouthpiece, but it probably wouldn’t have made much difference to the crew’s ability to understand. +
Thirty minutes.
+

Drift winced. ‘Don’t be late. We’re working to a tight schedule here.’

+
I understand, Captain. I assure you, I do not wish delay.
+

‘Best get moving, then,’ Drift said, and killed the connection. He exhaled, and grimaced in obvious frustration as he checked his chrono.

‘Easy, Cap,’ Apirana rumbled, ‘we got plenty of time.’

‘Only if nothing goes wrong,’ Drift countered, ‘and given our luck so far, I’m not holding my breath on that front.’

‘Why you wanna meet him there again, anyway?’ Jia asked as they began to move towards the nearest tram stop. ‘Ain’t this just gonna cost us more money?’

‘Yeah, but we need somewhere to hand over the documents out of sight,’ Drift muttered, nodding slightly in the direction of Apirana’s feet, ‘and I don’t trust that
someone
isn’t listening in. I don’t want to name locations or mention us taking them off-world, so that leaves us with precisely one option of where to meet.’ He sighed. ‘Well, at least the landlady’s pretty.’

Cherdak was still open, and busier. The slightly dimmed lighting in the streets was an indication that Uragan’s artificially imposed day cycle was moving towards its arbitrary ‘night’, and while Jenna suspected that shift work would be continuing down at the mine faces it seemed that a lot of the population were taking the chance to sink a few before turning in. The bar was thick with the sound of chatter, almost all of it in Russian, and the locals now outnumbered the off-worlders.

Despite the crowd, it only took a moment to spot the Shirokovs. Jenna nudged Drift in the ribs and pointed to where two men were sitting, each with a wheeled suitcase beside them. ‘That them?’ She hadn’t got a close look at Shirokov before – or Aleksandr, as she supposed she should think of him, given that there were now two – but these were the only people in the bar who looked ready to travel anywhere.

‘That’s them,’ Drift nodded, and began to make his way through the bar. Jenna followed, slipping easily past crowded tables and rowdy punters, and found herself looking at the two men for whom she had recently spent so much time forging documents.

Aleksandr was the older man, that much was clear immediately. Dark-haired and with grey showing both on his head and in his stubble, his face carried deep-scored lines of fatigue or stress, or possibly both. He was wearing a turtle-necked, long-sleeved top in a very dark blue, worn black trousers with smart black boots, and the face he turned to them carried a warring, badly concealed mix of eagerness and apprehension.

His partner, Pavel, was a contrast; at least ten years younger, if Jenna was any judge, and with a shaggy mop of light blond hair framing smooth-cheeked, clean-cut features that were decidedly easy on the eye. He wore a sleeveless, collarless white shirt that displayed well-developed arms, and dark green dungarees with one strap left carelessly unfastened. However, he too looked tired. If he was a miner, as Jenna suspected, then while the work might have benefitted his physique it didn’t seem to have done much for his general well-being.

‘
Señores.
’ Drift sat down without preamble and nodded for Apirana to do the same on the other unoccupied stool. The big Maori did so and crossed his right leg over his left, leaning forwards as if to massage his ankle. Jenna and Jia were left standing, although they were far from the only ones in the room to be on their feet, and the pilot sidled around until she was blocking all lines of sight to Apirana and his boot.

‘Captain,’ Aleksandr nodded. Nervousness was currently winning out on his face. ‘Do you have what we need?’

Drift nodded. ‘We do.’ Apirana’s huge hand appeared from beneath the table, two folded sheets of plaspaper gripped in his fingers. He opened them up enough for the Shirokovs to see the holographic watermark, but drew his hand back as Aleksandr reached for them.

‘Captain?’ Aleksandr’s voice was level but his eyes were on Apirana, and not happy. Still, he wasn’t foolish enough to make a grab. People rarely tried to take things from Apirana by force.

‘You got what
we
need?’ Drift asked, his voice cold. Aleksandr’s jaw moved for a second, but then he pulled out a small datachip.

‘Here. All schedules for next shipments after storm clears.’

Drift held out his hand.

‘Captain, you must think me a fool,’ Aleksandr said, his eyes narrowing.

‘You’re the fool, Mr Shirokov, if you think I’m letting you on my boat with nothing but your say-so that you have what I need,’ Drift replied, leaning forwards slightly. ‘Give me the chip, and we will verify its contents. Then, and only then, will we go to the spaceport and you’ll get off this rock.’

Jenna watched Aleksandr while he chewed that over for a few seconds. She couldn’t exactly blame him for his reticence, since the information was literally the only leverage he had. For a moment she thought he was going to hold out and deny the Captain, but then the older man’s face folded and he pushed the small piece of plastic and silicon grudgingly across the table’s surface.

Jenna snatched it up before he could change his mind and pulled back the sleeve of her jumpsuit to expose the dataport of her wrist-mounted console. The chip slotted in neatly and the console immediately began scanning it. Cyrillic characters scrolled across the screen for a moment, but then her translation program kicked in and it resolved into lines of familiar letters and numbers. She searched them for meaning, feeling her forehead crease into a frown as she did so.

‘Jenna?’ Drift asked.

She nodded. ‘Looks like we’ve got amounts, product codes, dates and destinations …’ She pulled the chip back out and handed it to him. ‘I’d say it’s good.’

‘I hope so.’ Drift took the chip between thumbs and forefingers and snapped it.

Aleksandr spat something in Russian which Jenna didn’t need a translator to catch the general gist of. Pavel even started to rise to his feet, but Apirana landed one massive hand on his shoulder and pushed him gently but firmly back into his seat. The blond lifted his arm as though to swat the obstacle aside, but whatever he saw in the Maori’s tattooed face clearly made him think better of it.

‘We don’t know what sort of searches you’d be subjected to, going through security as emigrants,’ Drift explained calmly, letting the halves of the chip drop. ‘I certainly can’t risk this being found on you. So now it’s with us.’

Jenna was only half listening as Drift continued talking. Instead, her fingers were dancing over the keys on her console to activate encryption and disguise programs. Simply encrypting data might protect it but it was suspicious as all hell, so she’d developed a further tactic: hide it as something innocuous. Her three go-to options were the schematics of the
Keiko
, a series of pictures of attractive men wearing very little clothing, and the beginnings of a hilariously bad amateur screenplay cobbled together for this exact purpose by her and Jia when they’d both been rather drunk.