‘Good,’ he nodded firmly, trying to take it in his stride, ‘you’re a solid hand and I’m happy to have you. However, if you so much as threaten me again then you
will
be leaving this ship, immediately, no matter where we are at the time. Are we clear?’
This time Apirana’s voice was firmer. ‘Yeah.’
Drift held his gaze for another second, then turned to Tamara Rourke. ‘Well?’
Rourke met his eyes, her stare weighing and considering. ‘You’ve got a tall order, Ichabod.’
‘I can do it. I
will
do it!’ He heard some of his anger at Kelsier bleeding into his voice, and left it there. ‘I’ve worked too hard to have to give everything up to run and hide. I’ve built a
reputation
, damn it! We all have, that’s why we get work! If we’re too scared to tell people who we are then we lose all that! Plus,’ he added after a second, ‘he has
really
fucked me off.’
Rourke nodded slowly, casting glances to either side of her. ‘It seems you’ve talked your way out of another tight spot, at least for now.’ She met his eyes again. ‘Very well. If we have a location and a plan by the time your “friend” Alex gives us our marching orders, I’m with you.’
Drift tried to conceal the huge sigh of relief that suddenly built in his chest. He might have only put off the trouble, but he’d take the spectre of trouble in a couple of days to the reality of trouble now. ‘I’m glad that’s settled. Now, any questions?’
‘Yeah, why the hell would anyone want to blow up Amsterdam?’ Apirana asked. ‘What’s this guy Kelsier’s play?’
‘He told me he’d been fired by the Europans for corruption,’ Drift admitted. ‘The way he said it made me think that was just a cover for him being moved into whatever secrets he was peddling now, but I guess that was his intention.’
‘Double bluff,’ Rourke nodded.‘So are you thinking this was a revenge hit? But why Amsterdam?’
‘I know there was a group of Dutch politicians who brought a lot of the charges against him,’ Micah put in, ‘it might have something to do with that? I mean, he must’ve been fired about three years ago, but I reckon he’s the type to hold a grudge.’
‘I wouldn’t be surprised if the old bastard’s got a record of everyone who’s wronged him tucked away somewhere,’ Drift agreed bitterly, ‘and God knows he’s careful enough to wait a year or two until everything’s planned out before he acts. Besides, I doubt even he could get his hands on an atom bomb just like that.’
‘Get fired, blow up a city?’ Jia asked incredulously. ‘That’s kind of an overreaction, ain’t it?’
Micah grimaced. ‘I never met him, but if the sorts of orders we got in the FDU were any guide then I can say Nicolas Kelsier doesn’t exactly do “proportional response”.’
Drift nodded. ‘It was always effectiveness first, efficiency second. He didn’t give much of a damn about collateral damage if what he wanted to get done got done; Cruz wouldn’t have lasted, otherwise. I can buy Kelsier nuking an entire city to take out a few people. Besides, if he did something more specific people might start asking who had an agenda against those victims, and then it might get traced back to him.’
‘And you’re saying you got a plan to deal with this guy?’ Kuai asked, his voice dripping with doubt.
‘I’ve . . . got the beginnings of one,’ Drift replied, and to his astonishment he realised that it was actually true. He pointed at the Changs, Micah and Apirana. ‘First things first: you four go and get some sleep. We’ve all been wired too tight for too long.’
‘Aye, Captain!’ Jia shouted gratefully, turning on her heel immediately. ‘I’ll be in my bunk. Any of you wakes me up unless we need to fly somewhere, you’d best be prepared to duck.’ She disappeared without hesitation, heading in the direction of her cabin. The other three turned to follow her, with grins from Apirana and Micah, and Kuai still looking ready to kick something.
Drift looked at Jenna. ‘I know you’ll be tired too, but I need you to get onto the Spine and see if you can do anything to fog searches for us. There’ll be a hundred and one theories about what went down already, ranging from terrorists to aliens, so see if you can give credence to the ones which don’t involve a
Carcharodon
-class shuttle. Then get your head down, too; I reckon we’ll be needing you again.’
Jenna nodded wearily and headed for the cockpit, which left Rourke and Drift alone.
Rourke folded her arms. ‘Well? I have to say, I’m intrigued as to what your plan can possibly be.’
Drift chewed over his words for a second. ‘What do you know about the Laughing Man?’
Rourke’s face went completely blank, even more so than usual. ‘The Laughing Man? As in, Marcus Hall?’
‘Unless there’s more than one,’ Drift shrugged uneasily.‘Kelsier had him running as his private attack dog when he cornered me on Carmella.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘Flashed his electat at me,’ Drift said, waving a hand at his face. ‘Either someone out there’s decided to get one as close to the descriptions as they can, or—’
‘No one would dare,’ Rourke said absently, her eyes starting to wander. Drift recognised the pattern; what he thought of as her ‘planning’ mode, where her senses automatically checked for threats or bugs while her brain started to work on a problem. She licked her lips absently. ‘Well, that explains why you were so scared, at any rate.’
‘I was
not
. . .’ Drift saw her expression, and tailed off. ‘Okay, I was a bit. Look, it’s not that I didn’t want to tell the others about this, but I wanted to talk to you about him first.’
‘What do you want me to say?’ Rourke asked, scratching her nose. ‘I’ve no doubt you’ve heard the same stories I have. Not all of them are physically possible, of course, but either way it means we’ll have to be doubly careful, and we know Kelsier’s got some serious resources at his disposal.’ She nodded slowly. ‘That might actually make it easier, in a way. The larger his footprint, the easier he’ll be to track down. If he can source a nuke and hire Hall . . .’
Drift made a vague noise of agreement, but noted to himself that Rourke hadn’t answered his question. Something to be considered another time, perhaps. At present, however, he had to deal with another problem courtesy of the enigma that was Tamara Rourke. He still found her as hard to read as he ever had, but he had at least seen a crack in the shell. Granted, it had taken a nuclear bomb to achieve, but it was a sign that there was
something
under there. People and their natures had always fascinated Ichabod Drift, which was why he’d ended up so good at playing them when he needed to, and his interest in the one in front of him had been renewed. Possibly even enough to overlook what she’d just done, although that rather depended on how co-operative she planned to be.
‘There’s one other thing,’ he said, bracing himself. ‘I think you’ve left us with a few difficulties.’
‘
I’ve
left us with difficulties?’ Rourke snorted incredulously. ‘I wasn’t the one who—’
‘I’m not talking about the job,’ Drift cut her off, raising a hand, ‘I’m talking about the
crew
. I can excuse Apirana, once; everyone knows he’s got a short fuse and sometimes he blows up, it’s how he is. You, on the other hand: in the eight years since you’ve been on this boat you’ve demonstrated an emotional range roughly equivalent to that of a particularly stoic asteroid. Yet you still pulled a gun on me in front of everyone else, and held me to account. That’s mutiny.’
Rourke blinked. ‘
You
are calling
me
out for mutiny?’
‘Hello? Captain over here,’ Drift pointed out, jerking a thumb at his own chest. ‘I’m not in danger of starting another mutiny because I’ve got no one to mutiny
against.
This is my damn ship, and everyone on it needs to know that they do what
I
tell them, not what I tell them unless you currently have a gun held to my head! Sure, I’m not going to tell Jia how to fly or Jenna how to slice, or Kuai how to keep the engines running or Micah how to shoot someone, but . . .’ He threw his hands up. ‘That’s why I hired experts, so I can tell them what I want doing and they work out how best to actually
do
it.’
‘And Jia respects your authority so much,’ Rourke snorted.
Drift shrugged. ‘She always actually ends up doing what I’ve told her to do, she just gives me a heart attack in the process.’ He waved a hand. ‘Beside the point. If I tell a crew member to do something then they need to do it there and then without looking to someone else for approval, because sometimes that moment of hesitation could kill us. So if you want a part of coming to take Kelsier down, you need to respect that.’
Rourke’s eyes searched his face, which he deliberately kept as blank as possible. Finally, she nodded. ‘Very well. I want a crack at this man. But I won’t be accepting vague answers in the future, Ichabod: trust is earned.’
‘I agree completely,’ he beamed. ‘How did you know it was a nuclear bomb?’
Rourke’s eyebrows lowered sharply. ‘Excuse me?’
‘You knew it was a bomb,’ Drift continued. ‘You didn’t have to study it, take any readings from it . . . you just looked at it and went “Shit, nuke”.’ He shrugged. ‘I’d always pegged your history as some sort of bodyguard, something like that. But that’s not just the sort of knowledge you pick up. You know my dirty history now, so it’s your turn. Where were you,
who
were you, before you became Tamara Rourke and stepped onto the deck of the
Jonah
for the first time?’
She hesitated.
‘This is not an optional answer,’ Drift added, in the most matter-of-fact tone he could muster. ‘You and I make a damn good team, but I still own this boat. So either you tell me some feasible reason why you know what you know and then I give you your gun back, or you walk off right now.’ He crossed his arms. ‘What’s it gonna be?’
The silence stretched between them. Rourke didn’t move, or speak, but simply looked at him. He wanted to take the words back, because he’d got so used to having her at his side for backup, for advice, for the angle he hadn’t considered, that he didn’t want to take the chance she’d turn on her heel and leave without a word . . . but he could only be pushed so far. Even now, a small part of him he thought he’d left behind for good in the Ngwena System was whispering,
She’s pulled a gun on you, what if she pulls the trigger next time? Drive her away and then shoot her in the back as she leaves. It’s the only way to be sure she won’t sell you out . . .
He fought it down. Trust is earned.
Finally, Rourke sighed. Something in her face seemed to soften momentarily, and Drift braced himself. Anything which had taken that much thought was unlikely to result in an answer as simple as ‘I took a summer-school course in nuclear physics’.
She started to hold up a hand, then hesitated. ‘Tamara Rourke’s the name my mother gave me, but as for
what
I was . . . just remember that you did say “before”.’
Drift nodded.
She raised her left hand, palm outwards to face him. It didn’t look remarkable: paler than the rest of her skin, marked by the calluses of someone familiar with manual labour.
Then, suddenly, something flashed into view, seeming to erupt from the lines of her palm. His first thought was
An electat.
His second thought, as he recognised the image, was
Oh, shit
.
‘Why would you, of all people, want to know how to find Nicolas Kelsier?’ Alexander Cruz had asked him. Well, after various curses and repeated assertions that he’d never wanted to see Drift again, anyway. ‘The old man was fired for corruption years ago.’
‘Help me out here and I’ll owe you a favour,’ Drift had told him. A snort had demonstrated what the portmaster thought of that. ‘I know you, Alex. Your business here isn’t going to be as legal as you pretend. Are you seriously telling me you’ll never have any use for a favour you can call in from a crew like mine?’
Cruz had looked at him for nearly a full minute. Then he’d scribbled a name and address on a piece of paper and handed it over. ‘If I hear a whisper that you told anyone I gave you this, your shuttle won’t be leaving this spaceport.’
Drift had looked at it with a frown. ‘Is this some sort of joke?’
‘Best source of off-Spine information on the continent,’ Cruz had told him with every sign of seriousness. ‘You’re lucky she’s on this coast. I can’t say what her price will be, though; rumour is her charges can be a bit . . . esoteric. By the way, do you remember Maiha?’
Images had flashed through Drift’s head, a sensory hit straight from the hindbrain: long, straight black hair tangled in his hands, beads of salty sweat on golden skin, deft fingers plucking at his belt buckle, a gentle weight pressing his wrists into soft pillows belonging to the man in front of him. He’d forced himself to keep a straight face. ‘Yeah, I think so.’
‘As far as I know, she’s some sort of chief aide there now,’ Cruz had continued, with no sign that he had any idea what his old first mate had been up to on the rare occasions when the
Thirty-Six Degrees
and the
Dead Man’s Hand
had been in port together. ‘That might help you. Or hinder you, I don’t know. Don’t much care, either.’
And so it was that Drift, Micah and Apirana had travelled overland up the coast from Atlantic City on the train. It was a snub-nosed bullet affair riding a magnetic monorail which sailed high above the old streets of New Jersey and curved in long, graceful arcs between the towering skyscrapers. The buildings’ sides were awash with light and colour which Drift knew from experience would be advertising holos trying to sell everything from the latest protein bars to sleek urban flyers, but they were for the locals only: at the speed the train was going the holos were little more than blurs that left a fleeting, contextless impression on the retina. Not that he would have been paying much attention anyway; the rest of his crew had got a few hours of sleep but he’d barely managed any after hammering out an alarmingly loose plan with Rourke, and his eyes felt like they were made of dust.
The line swung west, hugging the shore of Lower Bay, then turned back on itself to skirt the lower edge of the mess of starports and industrial wasteland which was Staten Island. Their carriage passed through clouds of refinery smoke and shimmering fuel haze, then burst out into the clearer air over the Narrows. Drift activated the magnifying window to look north and see Liberty Island, where the monument nicknamed the Plastic of Liberty stood tall on its pedestal. The original had been melted down centuries ago when the demand for copper in circuits and wires had become almost untenable and before large reserves had been secured elsewhere in the galaxy.