Dark Run Read online

  ‘You’d have thought they’d have made the atmo safe by now,’ Apirana Wahawaha opined in his curiously soft-mouthed, lilting Maori accent, nursing his solitary beer and scratching the dark whorls of the t a¯ moko on his cheek. ‘Big A’ was without doubt the most immediately intimidating member of the crew of the Keiko, the jack-of-all-trades interstellar freighter which had been Jenna’s home for the last four standard months; he was huge in many ways, from build to voice to personality, and the tribal tattoos which covered much of his skin lent him an alien air to Jenna’s eyes, even out in this galaxy of wonders. However, he rarely drank alcohol and never had more than one even when he did, so he sipped quietly and slowly. ‘Seeing the stars is all well an’ good, but I like to take a walk outside every now an’ then, know what I mean?’

  ‘Last I heard, they’re still working on it,’ Ichabod Drift replied. In stark contrast to the virtually teetotal Maori, the Keiko’s whip-thin captain was a third of the way down a bottle of whisky and showing little sign of slowing. ‘There are plants out there now, or something. Stars only know how long it will take to get it so we can breathe, though.’

  ‘They won’t be trying too hard,’ Micah van Schaken put in, taking a pull from the tall glass containing the Dutch lager which he swore was the finest in the galaxy, despite the rest of the crew’s repeated assertions that it tasted like thin piss. ‘Once a person gets outside he gets all these ideas of being free, and that plays merry hell for a government.’ He nodded firmly. ‘Keep a man inside behind steel walls and thick windows, tell him that what you do, it’s for his own protection. Make him think he relies on you, let him think the prison is his home, and he’ll thank you for it.’

  ‘You’re a fountain of light and cheer, d’you know that?’ Drift grinned at him, his silver tooth shining in the white of his smile.

  The former soldier just clucked his tongue. ‘You can laugh, but I’ve seen what freedom does to a man. Kills him, like as not.’ He trailed off and stared at his drink, seemingly fascinated by the rising bubbles.

  What does he see there? Jenna wondered. Antiaircraft fire? Blood spatters? Humanity’s expansion across the galaxy had not been the expansion into a peaceful utopia the idealists might have hoped. Once away from the First Solar System there were few laws to constrain people, and those rare planets or planetsized moons which boasted atmospheres habitable to Earth-raised organisms without extensive terraforming were valuable in the extreme.

  It was small wonder unofficial wars over viable agriworlds or mineral-rich moons had been bloody, with all sides sending in troops, under blanket declarations of protecting our interests. Micah had once been part of the Europan Commonwealth Frontier Defence Unit but had apparently grown weary of spilling blood to make anyone richer but himself. He was far from the only former soldier to have come to that conclusion, and Jenna couldn’t blame any of them.

  ‘You think freedom’s so bad? Try the alternative sometime,’ Jia Chang said pointedly. The Red Star Confederate was one of the more heavily authoritarian interstellar governmental conglomerates, and Jia and her brother Kuai made no secret of their desire to earn enough money to move their parents out of Chengdu on Old Earth. The Keiko apparently hadn’t been to that many Red Star systems, since Drift’s Mandarin was poor and his Russian not much better, but by all accounts legitimate shipping was so heavily regulated it was virtually impossible to get work as an independent contractor. And the shadier types of employment were, if anything, even more tightly controlled by the gang bosses.

  ‘They’ll green this world if they can,’ Tamara Rourke said firmly. She nodded at the looming shadow of Carmella Prime, the mighty gas giant visible as a blue-green crescent through a couple of the higher windows. ‘Most of this place would get enough light for crops to grow even with the orbit cycle, and the chance of an agriworld is too good to pass up.’

  Micah just grunted. The dour Dutchman had a tendency to do that, Jenna had noticed; give his opinion, then refuse to engage in subsequent debate. Then again, military service was unlikely to install much in the way of back-and-forth reasoning in a person, preferring instead the approach of ‘Is it still moving? Shoot it again, then.’ Which, to be fair, was what Micah was on the team for.

  ‘So what’s the plan now?’ Jenna asked. She was the youngest and newest of the crew, and still keenly felt her junior status even if the others didn’t really treat her like it.

  She’d been in a bar on Franklin Major, desperately trying to find a way off-planet despite having nowhere near enough money for a fare, but her fruitless search for a ship prepared to take her on had turned into an apparent attempt to drown herself in alcohol instead with what little cash she had.

  She didn’t remember the evening well, but it seemed that at some point she’d ended up talking to Tamara Rourke and had dragged the older woman outside to demonstrate her ability to hack her way through an electronic lock while apparently blind drunk. That trick had got her a berth with them (as well as nearly bringing down the local law enforcement on their heads, but it seemed that Drift was willing to put that down to teething troubles), and so far she’d proved adept at accessing information they had no right to, patching them a new broadcast ident on the fly when they’d suddenly needed their ship to be something else, and finally fixing the bug which had been causing the holo-display to wobble like an shivering epileptic whenever anyone wasn’t leaning on one side of the board. She couldn’t shoot straight for love nor money, however, which was why she’d been left on board the planet-going skiff called the Jonah during the crew’s most recent escapade.

  ‘The plan,’ Drift said, sipping his whisky and pausing a moment to roll the smoky flavours around his mouth with what looked to be something approaching genuine pleasure, ‘is to head back to the Justice offices tomorrow and see if there are any more tasty-looking bounties posted.’

  ‘The same trick won’t work twice,’ Rourke warned. She’d removed her hat to reveal her close-cropped hair, a solid mass of black unbroken by any grey. No one seemed to know exactly how old Tamara Rourke was; not even Drift, who’d been running with her for the best part of eight years. Jenna suspected that she was well into her fifth decade, probably a few years older than the Captain, but her face could have belonged to someone twenty years either side of that depending on what sort of life they’d had, not to mention if they’d taken Boost to slow the ageing processes. That, combined with features which were more slightly delicate than overtly feminine, her boyish figure and a surprisingly deep voice, meant that if needed to she had a fairly good chance of passing for a male. Although Rourke had never said anything, Jenna had the faint ghost of a memory and a rather stronger sense of worry that she’d actually made her first contact with the Keiko’s crew by drunkenly trying to chat ‘him’ up.

  ‘Don’t be negative,’ Drift chided his partner with a clucking noise of his tongue and a wagging finger. ‘Think of what we could earn here! I mean, take the money we made today.’ He checked items off. ‘We made enough to fix the grav-plate on the cargo bay Heim generator, redo the heat shields on the Jonah, refuel, and still have some left over for a few drinks. For one day’s work!’

  ‘A day’s work which could have got us both killed,’ Rourke said flatly. Jenna was still learning the minute variations in the older woman’s expressions, which were the only indication whether she was being dryly deadpan or deadly serious. Usually, as now, she played it safe and assumed serious. Apirana said he’d seen Rourke laugh once, but Jenna wasn’t sure she believed him.

  ‘Everything was completely under control,’ Drift insisted, raising a glass with one of his dazzling grins. He was the natural showman of the pair, the carnival barker to Rourke’s quartermaster. By the time people realised that they should have been paying attention to the slight, dark figure in the background they’d usually been scammed, bluffed or violently inconvenienced. ‘Here’s to doing the law’s work for them!’

  ‘I reckon we’re about done here,’ Apirana disagreed.
‘Grabbing a few small fry an’ then taking Xanth down, that’s one thing. Ain’t no one gonna be welcoming us now our names are known, though. Xanth was easy to find. Smaller marks won’t be; anyone who knows anythin’ll clam up, an’ then we’re no better off than the Justices. Worse, because they’ve got authority and we’ve got nothing except guns.’

  ‘Guns can work,’ Micah said.

  ‘Only if we wanna break the law ourselves,’ Apirana pointed out acidly. Micah just shrugged and returned his attention to his lager: so far as the mercenary was concerned, violence was a language everyone understood.

  ‘I’m enjoying being on the right side of the law,’ Kuai put in, fingering the dragon talisman which hung around his throat. He didn’t add ‘for once’, but then he barely needed to. Drift and Rourke’s approach to the laws of the various governments across the galaxy had always been one of convenience over obedience.

  ‘Because you do so much dangerous work in that engine room,’ Jia snorted. She tapped herself firmly on the chest. ‘I judge the radar shadows, dodge security craft, hug a freighter’s drive cone to mask our emission trail, risk frying us all in the backwash, plot the jumps between systems—’

  ‘And if you get it wrong I still get arrested or killed,’ Kuai pointed out.

  ‘Whiner.’

  ‘Just saying, I prefer when there’s less risk of death or prison, I don’t think that’s—’

  ‘Cállate,’ Drift sighed, and the Chang siblings obediently fell silent. He tipped another two fingers of whisky into his glass, sniffed, sipped, then set it down on the table again. ‘Tomorrow morning I’ll go back to the Justices’ office and see if there’s anything which looks feasible and worth our time. If there is, we Do Some Good and get paid for it. If not . . .’ He shrugged. ‘We’ll see what our options are.’

  LAW-ABIDING CITIZEN

  There was a definite social strata on many of the mining and ex-mining worlds Drift had been to, and indeed ‘strata’ was the most accurate word for it. The government offices and the rich, well-to-do and well-connected lived on the surface. Even when the surface didn’t yet have a breathable atmosphere, like on Carmella II, hermetically sealed mansions, atmo-scrapers and government office buildings with their faux-Gothic cladding still sprawled in a mess of money and authority, interconnected by a web of elevated pedestrian walkways. Meanwhile, airtight buggies and crawlers drove between ground-level airlocks, tracks and tyres kicking up clouds of dust and dirt into the . . . carbon dioxide, or nitrogen, or whatever the air outside was currently composed of. Drift wasn’t sure and didn’t really care; if he tried to breathe it then he’d suffocate and that was all he really needed to know.

  Below ground, though, people got poorer. Once a mineshaft had been stripped of whatever the locally available mineral was, the company could make a second income by opening it, widening it and selling it on to a developer, who would put in basic prefab living quarters. In somewhere like Carmella II, where the crust had been plundered widely and deeply, there was a veritable honeycomb of passageways and chambers, and no shortage of people to fill them. This was despite the claustrophobic conditions and the dependence on electricity not just for luxuries but for simple survival: the Air Rent scandals of fifty years ago might have been a thing of the past, but if the atmospheric seals failed or the pumps died then the whole shaft could still be at risk of asphyxiation.

  ‘Why would anyone choose to live down there?’ Jenna asked, fiddling absent-mindedly with the chunky metal bracelet she always wore on her right forearm and nodding towards one of the maglift platforms which led down into the Underside. They were standing in the brightly lit access hall – a cavernous building almost the size of an aircraft hangar – and watching people bustling to and fro: miners, Justices, cleaners, office personnel and others with less obvious roles and purposes.

  ‘There’s not many that do,’ Drift replied easily. He was slightly hung-over, but the afterbuzz of yesterday’s successful job was keeping him from feeling too sorry for himself. That and the sizeable bounty they’d netted: Gideon Xanth on his own had been worth fifty thousand USNA dollars, although their cut had been reduced since they’d been working with the Justices. Even so, he winced slightly as a growling six-wheeler headed towards one of the larger, vehicleonly shafts with a throbbing roar which seemed to reverberate off the inside of his skull. ‘But mining doesn’t pay that well, and if you want to save up enough to get off this rock then you need to keep your living costs down. It’s cheap down there, and that’s the truth.’

  ‘Cheap and grim,’ Jenna muttered. Drift allowed himself a smile. Jenna had been guarded about her history but he was fairly certain she’d originally come from either Franklin Major, where they’d taken her on, or its sister planet Franklin Minor. Both had needed little in the way of terraforming to be surface habitable and so were occupied almost exclusively by the middle classes or higher, barring the service staff such well-offs always needed. The odds were good that Jenna came from a monied background, and Drift couldn’t help wondering if it was high-level tutoring or teenage rebelliousness which had led her to becoming quite so expert with tech.

  ‘You should see it lower down,’ he told her. ‘There’s less lights and the air’s even worse. Down there, you get the shadow communities.’

  Jenna looked sideways at him. ‘The what?’ Drift grinned. He was quite enjoying showing Jenna the galaxy, but couldn’t help taking some amusement from her lack of knowledge of some parts of it; it seemed the news holos on the United States of North America’s more affluent planets glossed over a lot of the more insalubrious details.

  ‘You know, the people who scratch out a living from the spoil heaps, or the little bits of mineral vein the mining companies didn’t think were worth their time.’ He tucked his thumbs into his gunbelt, warming to his theme. ‘Yup, that’s a place where names aren’t given and histories aren’t questioned, and you might be lucky to even wake up tomorrow morning, depended on how careful you’ve been about where you went to sleep. That’s where the worst sort of criminal hides out, you know. Of course, if you do wake up then you could decide to be someone else entirely.’ He stole a sideways glance at her. ‘It’s not entirely different to the Keiko, in that respect.’

  ‘You think we have the worst sort of criminal on board?’ Jenna asked, affecting a shocked expression.

  ‘That’s not what I meant, and you know it,’ Drift grinned. ‘Although if you define “worst” as “very bad at it” then Micah might qualify.’ He sighed contentedly. ‘No, that’s one of the great things about being alive now. There’s always room to be someone else, and there’s always somewhere people will be willing to let the past slide.’

  He waited, but Jenna merely nodded soberly and didn’t suddenly volunteer any backstory to her life, which disappointed Drift a little. The Keiko’s rule that you didn’t ask about another crew member’s history was only unwritten because he was certain no one would bother to read it, but he at least had an idea of what had brought most of the others together.

  Rourke was the same enigma she’d always been, of course, despite running with him for the longest time. It had only been a year or so after joining forces that the pair of them had bailed a thenteenaged Jia out of a Shanghai jail on Old Earth. She’d been on a charge of joyriding a shuttle, and he and Rourke had felt strongly that someone with such obvious natural talent shouldn’t be left to rot. The fact that they’d used false identities to do so was by-the-by, as was the fact that they’d jumped her bail the very next day with her brother hired as mechanic.

  Apirana had been an ex-con and former gang member looking to go straight: Drift sometimes felt guilty about hiring him as muscle on their ship of questionable repute, but the big Maori had always been grateful so he figured it wasn’t that much of a problem. Micah was a more recent addition and had only been with them for about two years. He hadn’t talked much about his past in the FDU, but Drift would have put good money on the mercenary’s face being on desertion p
apers somewhere. Jenna, however, was a puzzle. What would make a rich girl who might have just about hit twenty get blind drunk and leave her comfortable home with its breathable atmosphere to enlist with a bunch of ne’er-do-wells?

  Normally, Drift would have idly seduced her to get her to talk about it, but to his surprise he’d realised over the last couple of months that although Jenna was pretty he wasn’t attracted to her. Even more shockingly, she didn’t seem attracted to him. Instead he’d found himself playing a combined role of tour guide and teacher, and feeling . . . protective.

  He must be getting old.

  ‘Well,’ he said, when it became clear that the girl wasn’t going to confide exactly why she’d joined them, ‘I’d best get on. Don’t let Kuai spend all our money on parts, you hear me? I don’t want him going to town, we just need what’s essential.’

  ‘He says it’s all essential,’ Jenna replied, rolling her eyes. ‘Don’t worry; if he gets uppity I’ll just beat him up.’

  ‘Atta girl,’ Drift laughed. He fought down an urge to ruffle her hair, and clapped her on the shoulder instead. ‘I’ll be back at the Jonah in an hour or so. See you then.’

  ‘Have fun,’ Jenna grinned, and turned to make her way towards where their engineer was waiting with what might have been impatience. Not that Drift was particularly bothered; for all of Micah’s abrasiveness and Jia’s arrogance, Kuai’s needling passive-aggressiveness was the most tiresome personal trait of any crew member. Still, the man was good enough at his job to make it a price worth paying.

  Drift took a deep breath to try to clear his head of the hangover fuzziness and walked over to the nearest pedestrian maglift platform with an undeniable spring in his step. He might not be rich at this precise moment but he was at least well-resourced, and that would make it easier to get rich.