‘I wasn’t “playing around”,’ the slicer snapped, ‘I was protecting our crew!’
Drift folded his arms. ‘You’re wouldn’t have been protecting us if you’d knocked the station’s entire power system out! And why have you been carrying an EMP around on my fucking
ship
? Why have you even
got
one?’
‘It’s impossible to set off by accident!’ Jenna replied. ‘I built it when I was on Franklin Minor because that’s, like, circuithead central and they’ve all got more metal than sense.’ She glanced around hurriedly, then leaned forwards with a conspiratorial air. ‘Okay, fine: look, the reason circuitheads freak me out so much? There were a bunch of abductions of young women by a gang of augmenteds when I was doing my Masters. One of the victims was a fellow student and
she never showed up again!
I built this to knock out enhancements in case anyone tried it with me.’ She folded her arms in return and stared back at Drift, who didn’t seem impressed.
‘You built it? Just like that?’
Jenna rolled her eyes. ‘I
am
pretty smart. And I was studying in a posh research facility at the time, you have
no idea
the kind of kit you can get your hands on if you know what you’re doing.’
Drift’s jaw moved as he chewed at the inside of his mouth, a habit which always made Apirana wince. Then his face set into a look of resolution.
‘I’m leaving you here.’
‘
What?
’ Jenna’s face drained of colour, and Apirana fought to contain his own immediate response. What was the Captain thinking? He was about to open his mouth and protest when he became aware that the three of them were no longer alone. Drift seemed to notice at the same time, and they turned together to find themselves looking at a pair of men in red body armour and open-face helmets, both cradling starguns across their chests.
Station security.
The void stations all had their own enforcement gangs, who paid no attention to interpersonal altercations but would stamp down violently on anything that might threaten the station itself. Such as, Apirana realised, the power being knocked out.
He saw their eyes widen as they focused on his face, and their guns started to raise to cover him.
The tats. Someone gave them a description of me . . .
There were two shockingly loud explosions next to him, and both men’s features exploded in blood and bone. He whipped around to look at Drift, who was already holstering one of his smoking pistols.
‘On board,’ the Captain snapped, ‘now!’ He grabbed Jenna’s arm and dragged her into the docking corridor. ‘You too. Move!’
‘But you said—’
‘I wanted to see how you’d react,’ Drift growled, slamming the door control to shut it as Apirana hurried over the threshold. The moment the heavy door had slid shut, Drift put a bullet into the control panel on their side. ‘We
were
going to have a conversation after that, but that option’s off the table now.’
‘But you killed them!’ Jenna blurted, wrenching her arm free of Drift’s grasp.
‘Yes,’ the Captain snapped, turning away from her and striding towards the other end where the
Keiko
was attached, ‘welcome to the galaxy! What do you think they were going to do to you and A. once they’d worked out it was you who nearly knocked this place dead? You want to stick around and find out, be my guest: otherwise, hurry the fuck up or they’ll scramble something which can shoot us down before we make the jump away from here!’
Apirana broke into a jog, wincing at the pains in his chest as he did so and trying to ignore how easily Jenna outpaced him as she ran towards her only ticket out.
That’s two dead on this run already . . .
They’d parked the
Keiko
at a waystation above Mars, and gone the rest of the way in the
Jonah
.
Jia had needed to calculate an emergency jump to get away from the void station before its small fleet of defence fighters could launch, and it had sent them off course: not by much, but their schedule was tight enough that by the time they’d reoriented themselves and got back on track they were running behind. Drift had chafed at the delay, but there wasn’t really anything to be done about it. The First System was still the busiest in the galaxy, and the risk of collisions with other ships became too great for anyone to risk making an Alcubierre jump inside the Martian orbit. Besides that, of course, was the fact that they wanted to avoid attention. Luckily, despite teeming with ships and undoubtedly the last place they would want to be if they ended up being pursued, it was possibly the best place to be ignored in the first place.
The First System was the only inhabited system in which no individual government held sway over the interplanetary space. How long that would have lasted without the technology to colonise beyond the stars was anyone’s guess, but the availability of a whole galaxy of raw materials had led to the controversial ice mining operations on Saturn’s rings and Europa being closed, most of the First System being declared a Humanity Heritage Area and the whole vast expanse being treated with the same cautious diplomacy as Antarctica had been, centuries before.
In truth, though, it wasn’t just the delay which had been rubbing Drift’s nerves, for all that he could feel the weight of Kelsier’s threat around his neck. The other reason his whisky supply had taken such a battering was the last few seconds on Void Station Pundamilia.
Oh, it was probably true enough what he’d told Jenna; if the station enforcers had found out that she’d let off an EMP then they probably
would
have killed her, and Apirana, and perhaps the rest of them for good measure. They were the only law on a void station, and by the same token Drift had committed no crime any government would recognise by gunning them down first, but Ichabod Drift had always had a fairly hazy approach to laws in any case. That wasn’t what was eating at him.
He’d killed people before, of course: you couldn’t run on the shady side long without getting into fights, and you certainly wouldn’t last as long as he had unless you’d won most of them. And perhaps in the old days, when he’d been flying under a different name, he might have reacted to a problem by shooting first. These days, though . . . Well, the fact was that there was no real certainty anyone
would
have realised that Jenna had done anything. It wasn’t like young women wandering around with an EMP device were a common occurrence, and under most circumstances he’d have fancied his chances of talking his crew’s way out of ‘misunderstandings’ without needing to resort to violence. But that would have taken time, and time was a luxury that Ichabod Drift didn’t have.
Besides, Kelsier’s threats had changed things. He might be keeping the truth from everyone around him, but he was capable of being honest enough with himself to admit that. If keeping his past buried involved shooting a couple of void station thugs when perhaps he might not have technically needed to then that was a price he would pay, but not gladly, and not without a bitter twist in his soul directed at Kelsier and his manipulations.
‘Why haven’t we been challenged yet?’ Jenna asked from her seat at their main terminal as the blue-green orb of Old Earth grew slowly in front of them. Things were still a little brittle between the two of them, but one good outcome from his shooting of the enforcers was that she did at least seem to appreciate how serious he was about this job: her EMP bracelet was under lock and key in his cabin, and she’d raised no further protests about it. He’d wondered about trying to get her to turn out the rest of her possessions just to make doubly sure she wasn’t sitting on anything else potentially disastrous, but had finally decided against it. He still needed her expertise, and no good would be served by alienating her. Once they’d delivered Kelsier’s package, however, he was intending to have a conversation to lay out some new ground rules for her presence on his ship.
In the meantime he’d spent a fair chunk of their journey from the void station cautiously repairing their relationship, when he hadn’t been quietly cursing Nicolas Kelsier or evading questions from Apirana and Rourke about his apparent short temper. Rourke in particular had been concerned at how quickly he’d resorted to lethal force; not because she disagreed with him, but simply because it was out of character. He wasn’t entirely certain he’d managed to convince her with his responses.
‘With no single body controlling all the flight paths, no one pays you much attention until you get into their bit of sky,’ Drift replied to her question. ‘If you’re quick, you can use that to your advantage. Who are we at the moment, anyway?’
‘The
Erathirea
,’ Jenna replied, double-checking the data screen in front of her. She frowned. ‘What does that even mean?’
‘No idea,’ Drift answered honestly, ‘it might be Greek. Or something.’ He waved a hand dismissively. ‘It doesn’t matter. Just get ready to switch idents when I give the signal.’
‘When
I
give the signal,’ Jia corrected him. She’d adopted what Drift always thought of as her ‘pilot hat’, a battered thing of brown leather with a shiny peak and a faux fur-lined flap on each side to cover the ears, although at the moment they were tied up. When he’d first asked her why she wore it in the climate-controlled cockpit she’d simply tutted at him and said ‘pilot reasons’. Given she only put it on when she was about to do something tricky and had nearly had a meltdown at her brother when he’d hidden it once, Drift could only assume that she considered it lucky but was too embarrassed to say so outright.
‘When Jia gives the signal,’ Drift agreed, knowing better than to needlessly contradict Jia when she was zoning into her megalomaniacal piloting mindset. He then turned to Jenna, pointed at himself and silently mouthed
When I give the signal
. Jenna sighed and rolled her eyes, but nodded.
‘Where are you thinking of entering?’ Tamara Rourke asked, appearing in the cockpit doorway. ‘Over the North Pole would make sense,’ Drift said, tapping at the terminal in front of him. ‘Come down somewhere no one watches that closely, skim over the North Sea between Norway and Britain, and straight into Amsterdam. The weather’s good at the moment, too. Well,’ he amended after a second, ‘as good as we’re likely to get.’
‘You expect me to skim over a couple of thousand miles of ocean?’ Jia snorted.
‘Why, can’t you do it?’ Drift asked in surprise. ‘Never said that!’ Jia fired back over her shoulder.
‘But that’s a long way for us to go under radar, is all. Norway’s got those really steep valleys with the sea in around the northern edge, right?’
Drift could feel himself looking blank. ‘Uh . . .’
‘Fjords?’ Jenna piped up.
‘Yeah, fjords!’ Jia confirmed. ‘They should hide us, then once we’re in the Europan system we can switch idents just in case and head overland, right?’
‘I don’t know if we’ve got the time,’ Drift muttered, checking the chrono with a tight feeling in his gut.
‘We can come in fast over the sea from the North Pole as there’s not much traffic from that direction.
The overland flight lanes will have speed restrictions and we’d be risking official attention if we break them.’
‘Well, we hit a freak wave while I’m trying to skim for a couple thousand miles at well over the speed of sound then we’re going to be . . .’ Jia trailed off for a second as though searching for a suitable word, then settled for ‘. . .
fucked
.’
‘Noted,’ Drift replied, perhaps a little shortly. He checked the chrono again. ‘How long until we can make atmo?’
‘If you’d told me
beforehand
that you’d wanted to avoid the moon then we’d have had more time,’
Jia snapped.
Drift scowled at the back of her head. ‘I figured you’d have remembered that it’s got sensor emplacements all over—’
‘Of course I remembered!’ Jia cut him off. ‘But you never said you wanted to
avoid
it until we were already on course, so don’t—’
‘I don’t
tell
you to avoid crashing into stars, either!’
Drift retorted. ‘But I figure you might have worked out that since we’re doing a goddamn dark run we—’
‘
How. Long?
’ Rourke shouted over both of them. There was a second or two of silence.
‘About ninety minutes,’ Jia said, her voice level but laden with enough sulkiness to float a battleship. ‘Tight,’ Rourke commented, coming up behind Drift and glancing over his shoulder at the chrono.
‘How much of a window do we have?’
‘Window?’ Drift snorted. ‘That’s hopeful. We just have to aim to get there on time.’
‘What if we don’t?’ Rourke asked quietly, bending down to speak into his ear. He could read the question beneath the question.
How badly is your old employer going to take it?
‘Run,’ Drift murmured, then added, ‘and hide.’
‘You always did love the quiet life,’ Rourke snorted.
‘I’ll tell A. and Micah to get loaded up in case the reception party is planning to cause problems.’
‘Do that,’ Drift agreed. One of the frequent balancing acts his crew trod was being ready for a potential double-cross without being so aggressive that they sparked a confrontation themselves.
Thankfully Rourke, Micah and Apirana were all fairly level-headed and unlikely to shoot first unless the situation really warranted it.
‘We got details on the venue yet?’ he asked Jenna, looking over at where the young slicer was sitting. ‘It seems to be hosting some sort of scientific convention today,’ she replied, looking up from her screen with a frown. ‘Do you normally “deliver” to that sort of thing?’
‘First time for everything,’ Drift replied easily, but he couldn’t shake a nagging worry. Kelsier’s rationale had made sense – someone involved in clandestine dealings for a government might indeed not have access to official governmental couriers – but it was still a very open, very public location to be carrying an unknown cargo into. ‘Okay girls, look alive; we’re coming into the outer customs territory, but there’s just too much traffic for them to stop everyone up here. We can’t afford a boarding, so if it looks like we’ve attracted attention I’m going to need the best evasive flying and data wrangling you’ve got, right off the bat.’