‘Captain Drift.’ Hall’s voice was deep and oddly accented. Apirana had never had much of an ear for accents anyway, but it certainly didn’t sound familiar.
‘Mr Hall.’ The Captain wasn’t bothering to hide his anger, or his tension. His face looked thunderous, but Apirana could read the nervousness there too. Drift knew this stood on a knife edge now. ‘You have a uniquely unpleasant way of announcing yourself.’
‘Van Schaken was Europan Special Forces,’ the Laughing Man replied matter-of-factly, ‘I eliminated him because his presence might have severely disrupted this conversation. He was possibly an even greater threat than Miss Rourke here, although I hope you’ll note that I’ve arranged to have three guns covering her.’ The flat eyes in his multicoloured face slid sideways for a second to where Rourke stood, arms slightly splayed and nostrils flared in fury. ‘Consider it a compliment.’
‘Go fuck yourself, Hall,’ Rourke spat.
Hall’s expression didn’t change, as least so far as it was possible to tell beneath the garish, distorted skull design covering his face. He simply turned back to Drift. ‘Your crew’s one short. Where’s the girl?’
Drift’s eyebrows quirked. ‘Come again?’
‘The slicer, McIlroy.’ Hall’s voice was hard, and Apirana suppressed a shiver of rage at the thought of him hunting Jenna down. ‘She’s not with you. Where is she?’
‘She bailed on us back on Old Earth,’ Drift replied, folding his arms. ‘Didn’t like the odds.’
‘I hope for your sake that she didn’t,’ Hall said, his voice quiet. ‘My instructions are to execute every member of your crew. I can either do that quickly and relatively painlessly, or I can hand the job over to these men, who will take their time. I suspect they’ll leave you until last and make you watch, so I suggest
someone
tells me where to find McIlroy.’
Drift just glared at him, lips pressed so thin they’d almost disappeared.
‘There is one other option,’ Hall acknowledged. ‘My employer values ingenuity and daring. He could find a place in his operation for you . . . or for Miss Rourke.’ He turned back to face Rourke again. ‘But only one of you. The first to speak up gets it.’
‘You’re scum, Hall,’ Rourke snarled.
‘I’m a
professional
, Tamara,’ Hall replied without apparent rancour, ‘and you have three guns pointing at you. As it stands, I look to have made the better life choices. But you can change your situation, if you want.’
‘How come only they get the option to join?!’ Kuai blurted out suddenly. The Laughing Man’s gaze didn’t waver from Rourke’s face, but Apirana saw his lips purse slightly.
‘If the engineer says anything which isn’t telling us where McIlroy is, shoot him.’ He sighed, then added, ‘It doesn’t have to be fatal.’
‘You seem very unconcerned about the law,’ Drift spoke up. ‘Here we are, standing in the open with you holding us at gunpoint and one of my crew dead on the ground. Aren’t you worried the authorities might be taking an interest?’
‘My employer has a certain pull in these parts,’ Hall replied, ‘but you’re correct, we should hurry. Yourself or Miss Rourke have ten seconds to accept my employer’s offer, or someone tells me where to find McIlroy, at which point everyone dies efficiently and very quickly. Otherwise we take you somewhere unpleasant and these men set to work on you all until we find the slicer, which could take some considerable time. Ten.’
‘Hold on,’ Drift said, his face taking on a slightly desperate expression which Apirana could well identify with, ‘we—’
‘Nine.’
‘—look, why—’
‘Eight.’
‘Just
hold on
a—’
‘Seven.’
‘We can pay—’
‘Six.’
‘Damn you, Hall—’
‘Five.’
Apirana forced himself to breathe out and tried to relax some of his muscles. He was only going to get one shot at this. The slim upside was that if it went wrong he’d probably never know about it.
‘Four.’
‘You’ll never—’
‘Three.’
‘
I accept.
’
Apirana stiffened again as the count stopped. The voice had belonged to Tamara Rourke.
‘Tamara!’ Drift cried, shock plastered over his features.
‘You
fucking
bitch!’ Kuai shouted furiously, a second before a gunshot went off and blood spattered from his calf. He went down in a screaming heap; Jia cried out in alarm and tried to move towards her brother, but was hauled back by her collar and had the barrel of a gun pressed to her cheek by her captor, a dark-skinned woman with her hair woven into narrow braids.
‘
Don’t
stop covering her,’ Hall ordered the thugs, who obediently kept their guns trained on Rourke. The Laughing Man seemed to study her for a few seconds, then nodded very slightly. ‘A good decision. I don’t for a second imagine it’s a genuine offer on your part, but that’s not my call to make. My employer seems to think that you can be persuaded, given time, so that’s what will happen. Where is McIlroy?’
‘She’s on the
Jonah
,’ Rourke answered instantly, ‘we needed her there monitoring the feeds, and to make sure no one could get into it even if they had the access codes. She’ll have to open it from the inside.’
Hall exhaled. ‘Which I imagine she would be unlikely to do for us. This explanation requires us to keep at least some of you alive and undamaged. How very convenient.’
Rourke’s expression didn’t waver. ‘I can’t change the truth just because you don’t like it, Hall.’
The Laughing Man snorted. ‘You’re a former GIA agent, Tamara. You should be able to change
anything
, should you need to. Very well, we’ll play it your way.’ He nodded to the gun hands.
‘We’ll blow the ship up. Kill th—’
A shot rang out before the Laughing Man had finished speaking. Apirana winced automatically, but it hadn’t heralded the brief swirl of red and black pain which was how he imagined taking a bullet to the brain might feel. Instead, one of the three thugs covering Rourke jerked and collapsed, his head exploding like one of the red melons they’d seen earlier being hit with a sledgehammer. Everyone froze in shock for half a second, but this time Apirana’s body reacted fastest.
He spun to his left, his raised arm knocking the gun barrel away before the man holding it could pull the trigger, although he heard the report of other gunshots around him. He had a vague impression of a jowly, pale-skinned face with decorative studs across the forehead, and then his right fist slammed into the thug’s jaw with an audible
crack
. The man went down and stayed down: Apirana threw himself as flat as he could, scrabbling for the gun he’d relinquished earlier with fingers which had suddenly become unhelpfully numb and tried to take stock of what was happening.
Several of Kelsier’s gun hands were prone and not moving, red pools spreading out from their bodies across the flat stones which made up the floor of the market. Apirana saw a couple of backs disappearing into a side alley and raised his gun, but by the time he’d got it up they’d rounded a corner and the shot was gone. In a handful of seconds, the crew had gone from surrounded and held at gunpoint to being alone save for the dead and the dying. Jia dropped down beside her brother and for a moment Apirana felt his stomach clench in worry, but then the pilot pulled her jacket off and held it to the bleeding wound in Kuai’s leg, which caused the little mechanic to cry out in pain again and Jia to scold him in Mandarin.
+Come in, Agent Rourke.+
A voice flavoured with Slavic vowels crackled in the comm in his ear, and he saw Rourke raise one hand to touch her own. Her other hand held the one-shot palmgun, which had been tucked up her sleeve the whole time.
+What’s your situation?+
‘Took you long enough,’ Rourke snapped. She glanced over at Kuai, who was still groaning on the ground, then at Apirana. ‘A., you okay?’
‘Fine,’ he replied, levering himself up, ‘jus’ didn’t fancy standing in a firefight.’ He looked over at Micah, then looked away again with a flash of mixed guilt, anger and grief. He didn’t need a closer inspection to see that the Dutch mercenary was beyond medical help. ‘Micah’s gone, though.’
‘Poor bastard,’ Rourke sighed, then addressed the unseen speaker on the comm again. ‘We’ve got one in need of medical attention. What happened to Hall? I got a shot off at him, but then had to get down.’
+We lost sight of him heading towards the north side.+
There was a brief pause.
+We seem to have lost contact with our team there.+
‘Shit,’ Rourke swore, exchanging a look with Drift. ‘How many got away?’
+We counted twelve in total, not including Hall.+
Apirana looked around, counting the bodies. Two, four, five, six . . .
‘Seven down,’ Rourke reported, ‘so five got away. Your other teams know what to do?’
+They’ll stand off unless there’s a risk to the public.+
‘Good. Give Jenna the signal; this is the only chance we’re going to have to get the intel we need.’
‘Not quite,’ Apirana said, looking down at the man he’d struck. A little overweight, dressed in unremarkable overalls, dark hair thinning on top and spiralling tattoos up both arms. He felt his anger fire up again; anger at Micah’s death, anger at Kuai taking a bullet in the leg, anger at them being forced into this ridiculous situation in the first place. ‘I only knocked this guy out. An’ I think he’s starting t’come round . . .’
Jenna bit her knuckle, willing her crew to notice that the trap they were expecting appeared to be closing around them sooner than they’d thought.
The terminal
pinged
to her right, but she barely registered it.
‘I’ve got a face match,’ Vankova said. Moments later the sound came again. ‘Make that two matches. Both of them from the day before yesterday, both came in from the Market Docks.’
‘Got a ship ident?’ Karhan asked, while he adjusted controls to track the progress of the
Keiko
’s crew through the market.
‘Working on it . . .’ Vankova replied, her voice a little testy. ‘Right, both look to have come from the
Raggety Edge
, assuming that’s her real name, currently in bay Alpha Two Nine—’
‘They’re in the square,’ Rybak cut her off, leaning forwards with one hand on the back of Karhan’s chair. ‘Where’s the response team?’
‘Too fucking far away!’ Karhan snarled, gesturing at the highlighted location of Lavric’s warehouse. ‘Tell them to get moving or we might have the deaths of a GIA team on our heads!’
‘A.’s noticed,’ Jenna said, her voice sounding tiny and quavery in her ears as Rybak snapped something quiet but urgent over the comm. She watched helplessly as the big man’s hood turned from side to side and saw one hand reach towards the small of his back where he’d stowed his gun. Beside him, Micah’s fingers also began reaching for the pistol holstered at his hip, but then the Dutch mercenary seemed to jerk oddly. A second later and he jerked again, then collapsed.
‘No!’ Jenna shouted uselessly at the screen. ‘For fuck’s sake, get out of there!
Run!
’
‘Man down,’ she heard Rybak say tightly. ‘Where’s the shooter?’
On the overhead view, Jenna saw a small blotch of red starting to form where Micah had fallen, and she bit down on her knuckles to prevent herself from crying out again. She saw Apirana pull his gun out, sweeping the crowd with it as he looked for their attackers, saw the ripples of panic spread through the market-goers around them . . .
‘Shit!’ Karhan gasped, and the tone of shock in his voice was so pronounced that she looked away from the bird’s-eye view to where the veteran surveillance officer was pointing. Another holo display showed a view across the square, and moving towards Apirana and the others was a man with a raised weapon and a riot of colours for a face.
‘
Jezus Kristus
,’ Rybak breathed in horror. ‘The Laughing Man.’
Jenna stared at the image with a sick feeling building in her stomach. She’d never heard of the Laughing Man until a few weeks ago, and even then not in detail. None of the crew would tell her more than the barest details about him, not even Apirana. Somehow, she suspected that the leering, neon skull obscuring his face was all the detail she needed.
‘They’re surrounded,’ Rybak said grimly. Jenna looked back at the overhead view and saw to her horror that she was correct: while the rest of the crowd were fleeing, some of its members had pulled hidden guns on the
Keiko
’s crew and got the drop on them. One of the two tails they’d identified now had a gun to the back of Apirana’s head, and she waited in horror for him to pull the trigger. Then the moment passed and the Laughing Man moved towards where Drift stood, unnaturally still.
‘He’s going to talk,’ Karhan breathed, ‘thank God.’
‘Too late for Micah,’ Jenna snapped.
‘Small mercies,’ Karhan grimaced. He looked up at another screen, showing a group of blue-armoured shapes making their way through the streets towards St Methodius’ Square. ‘I hope that “Captain” of yours can keep him busy for a couple of minutes.’
‘Talking’s what the Captain does best,’ Jenna said absently, nails digging into her palm.
‘They’ve got some damn cheek, pulling something like this in the open,’ Rybak muttered angrily. ‘The police here must be corrupt as hell.’
‘Not all of them,’ Karhan retorted sharply. He started selecting members of the Laughing Man’s gang, highlighting them on the system and seeking camera angles which would show their faces. ‘Sara, we need idents on all of them, and ships of origin.’
‘Including that bastard,’ Rybak growled, indicating the assassin talking to Drift. Karhan focused one of the street-level cameras on the Laughing Man again, who’d apparently said something to infuriate Rourke.
‘It won’t pick him up!’ Vankova exclaimed in frustration.
‘What do you mean?’ Karhan demanded, looking over at her display. Jenna followed his gaze: sure enough, face after face was appearing and being run through the records, the roar of the terminal’s cooling fans rising as it accessed more and more processing power, but the Laughing Man’s wasn’t among them.
‘It just won’t pick him up!’ Vankova said again, helplessly. ‘It must be the electat; all those fucking colours are throwing off the contour recognition software.’