Dark Sky (Keiko)

by Mike Brooks

  Drift directed a glare at the back of Jia’s head. ‘English.’

  +Acknowledged. Please repeat your initial transmission.+

  Drift sighed, and did so. The resulting conversation made no sense to Jenna as she looked down at the barren plain beneath them, but Jia clearly received some sort of coordinates as she began to bank their shuttle to the left. She’d just levelled out again when the cockpit door slid open to admit a somewhat vexed-looking Tamara Rourke.

  ‘Have you finished trying to kill us yet?’ the older woman asked bluntly.

  ‘Excuse me?!’ Jia’s head whipped around. ‘You see the sort of crosswinds I was dealing with there? I know you din’t, because I’m the one with the readouts and—’

  ‘The spaceport,’ Rourke interrupted her, pointing out of the viewshield, ‘it’s that way. Not over here.’

  ‘One day,’ Jia replied, pointedly waiting a couple of seconds before turning back to her controls, ‘you will have to fly this crate without me and then, god help you all, that’s all I say.’

  ‘If only that was all you said,’ Drift grinned, unstrapping himself and standing up before leaning on the back of her chair.

  ‘Don’t need you lookin’ over my—’

  ‘Cristo, I’m just looking outside!’ Drift pointed downwards and made a thoughtful noise. ‘Huh. See that? Never seen a spaceport like that before.’

  Jenna released her own webbing and peered out as best she could. There, laid out below her, was the surface of Uragan City.

  The city was in the partial lee of a ridge, but she couldn’t imagine that shelter would make a great deal of difference when the near-thousand mile per hour hurricanes swept down across this dusty, rocky wasteland. That would explain the barely visible nature of the city: nothing protruded more than a few feet above the surface and what could be seen was curved and rounded, designed to let the wind flow over it with the least resistance. Some things were clearly meant to be skylights, although how often they remained clear of obstructing detritus was doubtful, but the most common features were low, hooded structures all facing west. These were dotted everywhere, and it was a few seconds before Jenna realised they must be wind turbines. With the Rassvet star distant, weak and often obscured by clouds or airborne dust, harnessing the readily available wind power was the logical way to keep everything running here.

  She couldn’t see the spaceport at first, looking as she was for a large open area crowded with shuttles and other atmosphere-capable craft, but then she realised her mistake. Big and heavy though such ships were, they would still be vulnerable in the teeth of a Uragan storm. The only place that could provide any meaningful shelter would be the same as for the human population: underground. Sure enough, she now saw that at one point the other features gave way to regular, oblong shapes of retractable roofs set into the ground, a little like the covers for swimming pools in her parents’ neighbourhood back on Franklin Minor, albeit somewhat larger. Some of them were drawn back for craft to enter or exit, and it was towards one of these that Jia was steering them.

  ‘Throttling back …’ Jia murmured as she reduced their speed, ‘engaging mags … okay, takin’ us down.’

  The Jonah described a lazy half-circle in the air as Jia killed their momentum and began to lower them carefully down into what had seemed from afar to be barely big enough to accommodate their ship, but which now proved itself to have already admitted three others. Jenna realised that without any familiar structures to give her a sense of scale, her estimates of size had been rather out: each ‘cover’ was about the size of a sports field.

  ‘So which one’s this?’ she asked, on the basis that if she waited until she’d become separated from the rest of the crew somehow, it would be too late.

  ‘Grazhdansky Dok 2,’ Jia replied as they sank down below the rim of the bay.

  Jenna frowned, turning the syllables over in her head. ‘Civilian Dock?’

  ‘Pretty much,’ Jia confirmed with a snort. ‘Guess they don’t have many non-government ships here.’

  ‘I … guess that makes sense,’ Jenna nodded slowly. ‘Well, maybe we’ll have friendly neighbours.’

  ‘Don’t bet on it,’ Rourke said suddenly, her voice flat and grim. Drift turned to her, immediately picking up on her mood.

  ‘Trouble?’

  Rourke’s breath hissed out and she shook her head slightly in what looked like a mixture of frustration and anger. ‘Take a look over there at that Corvid-class and tell me what you see.’

  ‘Corvid-class?’ Drift frowned and peered out of the windshield. Jenna followed his gaze, trying to make out whatever it was that had perturbed Tamara Rourke. She wasn’t an expert on ship makes but there was only one choice where Rourke had been looking – a long, sleek shuttle with a design that had clearly been inspired by military vehicles, despite being a commercial craft. It was painted a dark green and its rounded rectangular snout appeared to have had additional decoration applied at some point: the heat of re-entries had blackened, faded and obscured the work, but it was still just about recognisable as …

  ‘Teeth?’ Jenna asked the cockpit in general.

  ‘Oh, shit,’ Drift sighed, with the air of a man who’s just found out about an unannounced visit by his mother-in-law the tax inspector. ‘Of all the fucking … that’s the Pouco Jacare.’

  ‘Shit,’ Jia added with finality, although she didn’t stop their descent.

  ‘The what now?’ Jenna asked, struggling to recall what Portuguese she’d learned. Pouco meant ‘little’, didn’t it …?

  ‘The Pouco Jacare,’ Drift repeated as their hull set down on the metal deck beneath them. ‘The Little Alligator. A shuttle belonging to one Ricardo fucking Moutinho.’

  MAKING CONTACT

  ‘WHO EXACTLY,’ JENNA asked as she trailed the others back towards the cargo bay, ‘is Ricardo Moutinho?’

  ‘Ricardo fucking Moutinho,’ Drift corrected her, without turning around. The Captain’s mood had taken a definite nosedive since spotting the shuttle that was sharing a bay with them. ‘He’s absolute scum: he’s a thief, a smuggler, a trickster, a looter, occasional bounty hunter—’

  ‘So basically, everything we are?’

  ‘Exactly!’ Drift turned round and wagged a finger at her. ‘He’s a rival! Weren’t you listening?’ He spun away again, hands checking the position of his pistols in their holsters.

  ‘Also,’ Jia whispered hoarsely to Jenna, ‘he has a massive cock.’

  ‘He is a massive cock!’ Drift barked from ahead of them.

  Jenna looked at Jia in shock. It had only been a couple of weeks ago that she’d found out their pilot had secretly been sleeping with Micah van Schaken, their now-deceased gun hand. The notion that she’d also had a liaison with some sort of old rival, presumably also behind Drift’s back, suggested a near-superhuman ability at conducting affairs.

  Jia shook her head slightly and, with her fist tucked in close to her stomach, pointed ahead of them.

  Jenna frowned in confusion. The Captain had a healthy – perhaps more than healthy – appetite for the female form, but she’d never seen any indication that he was interested in men. She mouthed his name as a silent question.

  Jia rolled her eyes for an answer and pointed again, this time with expressive raised eyebrows and a head tilt for good measure.

  Comprehension still refused to dawn for Jenna. The only other person ahead of them in the corridor was …

  Wait.

  As though her attention had been summoned by some unearthly rite, Tamara Rourke stopped dead and turned back to look at them, eyes dark and dangerous beneath the brim of her hat. They halted in their tracks simultaneously, each unwilling to get any closer to that countenance.

  ‘Are you expecting to live through this job, Jia?’ Rourke asked coolly, while Drift’s footsteps clanged off towards the cargo bay.

  ‘Uh, yeah?’

  ‘Then I suggest you stop spreading rumours.’

  ‘How’d you know—?’


  ‘The only time I can’t hear your voice is when you’re saying something you don’t want me to hear,’ Rourke told her firmly. She walked towards them and jerked a thumb over her shoulder. ‘Go find your brother.’

  For once, Jia didn’t argue or mouth back and hurried away towards the engine room. Rourke turned her gaze to Jenna, who was still trying to prevent herself from looking shell-shocked and not feeling that she was succeeding very well.

  ‘So surprised?’ Rourke said, and her voice was softer than Jenna had expected; almost thoughtful, in fact. ‘Is it so very hard to believe that I might have had sex a few times in my life?’

  ‘Uh, I …’ Jenna wondered briefly how the hell she was supposed to get out of this one. ‘You’ve never … I mean, that is, not that I …’

  ‘Nor have you,’ Rourke pointed out. ‘When was the last time you found the opportunity to get intimate with someone, Jenna? Unless you were also sleeping with Micah, which quite frankly I doubt.’

  ‘Um,’ Jenna swallowed. So far in her career on the Keiko she’d either been keeping a low profile or they’d all been in mortal peril, and an inability to small talk in Russian had somewhat limited her chances on New Samara. ‘Does “too damn long” count as an answer?’

  ‘It does,’ Rourke nodded, with possibly the vaguest hint of a smile. Then she sighed. ‘Since it’s out now – and you’re the only one not to know, especially since Ichabod does like to remind me of the fact – I did sleep with Ricardo fucking Moutinho. Once. Many years ago now, and incidentally before we realised what a royal pain in the ass he was capable of being. All it really did was confirm to me that I hadn’t been missing a great deal by never finding time for it, in all honesty. Unfortunately, the fact that I didn’t fall at his feet afterwards and worship his overlarge manhood seemed to piss him off, as did the fact that we ended up smuggling out what he viewed to be his contraband. As a result, things haven’t exactly been rosy between our crew and his whenever we’ve encountered him since then.’

  ‘And you’ve encountered him a lot?’ Jenna asked in surprise.

  ‘The galaxy’s huge, but humanity’s still only settled pinpricks of it,’ Rourke replied, turning and leading the way towards the cargo bay once more, ‘and people who’ve made a career of doing the sort of things we do … well, we tend to cluster around the same pinpricks. It’s the nature of the business.’

  Rourke slapped the airlock and they came out above the cargo bay. Drift was already by the control to lower the ramp, talking with Apirana in a low voice while the big Maori nodded soberly. The airlock on the other side hissed aside and the Changs appeared, Kuai still limping slightly.

  ‘Right!’ Drift said loudly, turning to look up at them. ‘Given that we’ve got that little shit-stain Moutinho wandering around here somewhere, I think some of us should stay behind and watch the ship; besides which, too large a crowd might scare our contact, or draw attention. So I’m going to go with Jenna, since she can encode and store the data in a way that will mean anyone who checks our stuff won’t know what we’ve got, and Kuai, since although this guy Shirokov apparently speaks good English, I might need someone with a better grasp of Russian than I have to make myself understood.’

  Out of the corner of her eye, Jenna saw Jia nudge Kuai. The little mechanic coughed.

  ‘Ah, my leg’s aching today. Can Jia go instead?’

  Drift sighed and turned his attention to Jia, waiting for the inevitable sibling argument to ensue as she accused her brother of laziness or foisting work off onto her.

  ‘Good idea,’ Jia said, clapping Kuai on the shoulder and hurrying down the steps to the bay floor, ‘I want to see this place anyway.’

  Drift looked from one to the other suspiciously, but when there were no immediate signs of the apocalypse he nodded cautious agreement.

  ‘Am I seriously that scary?’ Rourke murmured into Jenna’s ear. Jenna decided that the question was rhetorical.

  ‘There’s no guns allowed down there, unfortunately,’ Drift continued, unbuckling his gun belt and placing it in a locker, ‘and their laws say all firearms should be stowed securely. Still, laws or no laws, we have to be able to defend our property if Moutinho decides he wants to make trouble, so make sure you’ve got the keys to hand. With any luck, though, we should be in and out before he even knows we’ve been assigned the same goddamn berth as him.’

  ‘Maybe you should take A. with you,’ Rourke spoke up. ‘No disrespect to Jia or Jenna, but if something kicks off you might want a bit of muscle.’

  Drift frowned and looked around at the Maori. ‘What do you say, big man? That hole in your belly healed enough?’

  ‘Don’t worry ‘bout my puku, bro,’ Apirana told him, slapping his side. ‘You need me, I’m ready.’

  ‘Good to know.’ Drift beckoned to Jenna, who began to make her way down the steps. ‘Let’s get moving, then; our man’s going to have finished his shift any minute.’

  ‘Is the bay ready?’ Jenna asked, not anxious to step outside into choking fumes of sulphur dioxide.

  ‘Roof shut and oxygen restored,’ Drift confirmed, checking the readouts and punching the release. The ramp started to whine downwards, and he looked back at the rest of them. ‘Remember, this isn’t New Samara, where everyone shits platinum and pisses fine wines; this is a government-run mining planet. Outsiders like us are welcome enough because we bring in money, but only if we stick to where we’re meant to be and what we’re supposed to be doing.’

  ‘Good job we never break any rules, hey?’ Apirana grunted.

  Gaining access to Uragan City as a pedestrian consisted of stepping onto a long moving walkway which took them to the immigration suite, since the spaceport berths were large enough to make walking there something of a chore. Then they passed through a scanner, which confirmed that none of them were carrying any firearms, and had their identification checked by a group of black-uniformed politsiya, the local law enforcers, who most definitely were. That done, they skirted the escalators leading to the tram station and exited on foot down steps that led them into a world of grey.

  ‘This place,’ Jenna commented, looking around them, ‘is grim.’

  ‘That’s the exact same word Orlov used,’ Drift remarked, scratching at the skin around his right eye. ‘I’m not inclined to argue with either of you.’

  Uragan City was mainly lit by sunbulbs, designed to emit a frequency of light as close as possible to that of the sun from the First System, but even that concession did little to make it feel any warmer or more welcoming. It was a thoroughly utilitarian place, a network of square tunnels of varying sizes shod in grey and silver with slightly raised sidewalks for pedestrians flanking streets of humming vehicles, many of them official-looking. Red Cyrillic script on the walls or floor gave directions but there were no translations such as were provided on more cosmopolitan planets. Jia could read them anyway and the Captain’s mechanical eye was equipped with a visual translation program, but Jenna and Apirana would have been reduced to scanning things with their pads to work out where they were. Even the occasional mural or piece of artwork looked tired and uninspired. The people were not dissimilar, although for a mining planet Jenna could see precious few dressed in mining gear.

  ‘They’ll be much deeper, actually working at the face,’ Drift pointed out when she mentioned this. ‘This is the commercial district, since it doesn’t make sense to transport all the off-world goods any further from the surface than you have to.’

  ‘It’s a bit like walking around a giant hospital,’ Jenna commented.

  Apirana snorted. ‘I swear, I’ve been in prisons cheerier than this.’

  ‘We’ll make interior designers of the pair of you yet,’ Drift said as a maglev tram hissed around the corner ahead, its buzzer hooting at a pair of women who’d begun to venture across the street. ‘Jia, can you see the nearest public comm?’

  The pilot scanned their surroundings, then pointed at a junction ahead of them. ‘Looks like we got
one a block that way.’

  ‘I could always slice into the system?’ Jenna offered, but Drift just clucked his tongue.

  ‘Again, let’s keep this simple. I’ve got no idea how close an eye Uragan security keeps on their comms network, so let’s stick to what’s provided. We’re only asking a guy to meet us so I can pass on a present from his dear old granddad, after all.’ They dodged across the street, avoiding the traffic, and soon found what they were after around the next corner: an old-style comm unit, the handset attached to the main body by a strong metal-wrapped cord.

  ‘Not taking any chances on it being damaged, are they?’ Apirana noted.

  ‘That would cost public money to replace, my friend,’ Drift replied, pulling out his pad and bringing up a line of digits. ‘Okay, here we go.’ He flipped the comm to its loudspeaker setting and dialled. The call tone buzzed once … twice … three times …

  +Privetstviye?+

  The voice sounded … weary, was Jenna’s best description. Male, middle-aged and weary.

  ‘Mr Aleksandr Shirokov?’ Drift asked.

  +Da?+

  ‘My name is Ichabod Drift,’ the expression on the Captain’s face clearly indicating his hope that Shirokov’s English was as good as Orlov had claimed it would be, ‘I ran into your grandfather on New Samara and he asked me to deliver something to you.’

  +I see.+ Shirokov’s voice had taken on a slightly livelier edge, but had Jenna been of a gambling persuasion she’d have put money on it being an act. +How is he?+

  ‘He was well when I left him,’ Drift recited, completing the planned exchange. ‘Is there somewhere you’d like to meet?’

  +There is bar called Cherdak on Level Five. You should find map when you exit transit elevators, which can direct you to it. I will sit as close to rear window as I can so you find me.+

  ‘We’ll be there as soon as possible,’ Drift assured him.

  +We?+

  ‘Yeah, a couple of my crew are with me, they wanted to look around,’ Drift assured him. ‘Will that be a problem?’