Dark Sky (Keiko)

by Mike Brooks

  Now bent double and coughing, the man dropped his handgun to the floor. Drift snatched it up and checked his options. His mechanical eye couldn’t see through gas as such but it was hardly an opaque wall, it was just that once inside it most people couldn’t see because their eyes were burning and filled with tears. The front of the bar seemed like a bad option; sounds of fighting suggested that the rioters had surged forward to engage the politsiya, despite the gas and the shockbolts. On the other hand, the back way was possibly locked and, if it was, he didn’t have the breath to spend finding another option.

  The huge bartender stumbled into view, obliviously hacking his lungs up but with his shotgun still clasped in one meaty hand. Drift aimed for the man’s head, agonised with himself for half a second over what the right course of action was, then shot him in the knee instead. The bartender cried out, an agonised roar which died in a strangled gurgle a second later as the gas continued its ugly work, and fell on his face. He still clutched the shotgun, but Drift stepped up and kicked him smartly in the head before he could get ideas about pulling the trigger.

  So, if the back way wasn’t viable, it would have to be the front after all. Drift tugged the shotgun free, put the safety on the handgun and tucked it into the waistband of his pants, then turned back to where he’d left the Changs and the Shirokovs. His chest was now starting to feel uncomfortably tight thanks to the frantic pace at which his heart was running, but he spared some of his tightly hoarded breath to shout instructions into the foul-tasting gas as he hauled Jia up from the coughing crouch he found her in and shoved her in the direction of the shattered front windows. ‘Go! Get clear!’

  Under any normal circumstances Jia would have been likely to argue the call about stepping through shattered glass into a full-blown fight, but Drift was counting on the fact that when running low on air, people would tend to obey any instructions coming from someone who sounded like they knew what they were doing. Sure enough, his usually quarrelsome pilot scrambled forwards as well as she could, with her brother tailing her near-blindly. Drift wasted one more second debating about the Shirokovs, but there was still a chance to squeeze some manner of profit from them so he pulled Aleksandr up, with Pavel clinging to his husband like a choking drunkard to an unopened spirits bottle, and sent them the same way.

  He followed after them, eager to get out into what passed for fresher air despite the fact that it seemed at least one gas grenade had gone off in the mass of protesters, but paused for a second with glass crunching underfoot as he was about to follow his crew members and whatever manner of nuisance the Shirokovs now counted as up the street. Not ten feet away, nine black-armoured politsiya cowered behind flashshields and occasionally lashed out desperately with shocksticks against a mass of protesters who had only failed to overwhelm them so far due to some relatively minor breathing difficulties and the electric charges of the shields. However, even such purpose-built riot technology couldn’t maintain a constant output, and the frail defensive line was going to crack at any second. In most cases Drift would have shrugged and walked away, but something about the way the officers appeared to be not just desperately defending themselves but also their fallen colleagues tugged at him.

  This had been a trap, an ambush. This wasn’t a protest that had got out of hand; whoever was in charge of organising it had fully intended for these men and women to walk down this street to a point where they could get shot at. Whatever trouble the law enforcers here had caused him, Drift wasn’t quite certain that its officers deserved to be lured in to be slaughtered in the name of a better world.

  Secondly, and more compellingly, until he heard otherwise he had to assume that the spaceport – and therefore the Jonah – was under the control of Uragan authorities. That meant he wanted to keep on the good side of those authorities, and given Chief Muradov’s thinly veiled hints of what would happen if Drift drew his attention again, that was probably going to be hard to achieve at the best of times.

  Let alone when walking hurriedly away from the likely deaths of nearly two dozen of Muradov’s officers while in possession of illegal firearms.

  Sometimes, as an entrepreneurial independent businessman, there was no clear choice of how best to proceed. There was simply the task of playing the odds and selecting the least shit-spattered course of action from a series of unappealing options. Usually that was to keep your head down and avoid notice, but when that wasn’t possible …

  Drift grimaced, took a couple of lungfuls of air that was bitter-tasting but at least breathable, and discharged the shotgun into the air just over the heads of the rioters.

  The kick was powerful; whatever the weapon lacked in sophistication it made up for in grunt, and its roar was loud enough to attract attention even above the noise of the melee. Drift worked the action to pump another shell into the chamber, sending the spent one clattering off to the side, and fired again forty-five degrees to his left, then once more to the right. Even though he hadn’t hit anyone, the rioters were stumbling backwards; it was one thing to charge a line of politsiya with their non-lethal riot control gear, and quite another to have a blue-haired Mexican opening fire on them. A few seconds later and discretion had become the better part of valour for the mob, who turned to flee through the wisps of gas remaining in the street and those still leaking out of Labirint, leaving several of their number stunned or incapacitated by shocksticks or flashshields.

  Expressionless riot masks turned to look at Drift, their wearers either sagging with released tension or already on the ground having hunkered down behind their shields to protect themselves. He spent a useless half-second wishing he could see their faces, then gave up on that idea and just trusted that he’d got at least some credit with them after potentially saving their lives.

  ‘Come on!’ he said, not needing to try hard to inject urgency into his voice as he pointed at the gas-filled Labirint, ‘there’s still people with guns in there! We need to get out of here!’

  Two of the masks turned to look at a third, whom Drift now noticed had three yellow stripes on each shoulder. The sergeant hesitated for a moment, then nodded and said something that Drift couldn’t hear clearly through the mask but which was communicated to the rest of the squad via comm, judging by the way the ones still on their feet all turned and moved towards their fallen comrades. Drift judged that a further gesture of assistance was in order and made furious beckoning motions back down the street towards the Changs and the Shirokovs, who had paused some distance away and were watching curiously. They seemed to get the gist and returned cautiously to begin offering assistance to the injured politsiya, and the party began to retreat up the street with Drift acting as rearguard, hefting the shotgun and trying to look menacing.

  He became aware that the sergeant had fallen in beside him and was removing the riot mask, then found himself looking at the slightly blocky features of a woman probably about his own age, her auburn hair cut short and her face pale with the aftershock of adrenaline. She cast him a quick glance, but didn’t take her eyes off the street for long.

  ‘Those guns are illegal, you know,’ she said simply.

  ‘They’re not mine,’ Drift replied, ‘and you’re welcome to them when we get somewhere safe. I didn’t want to leave them with the previous owners, though.’

  She snorted a somewhat tense laugh. ‘You have my thanks. Who are you, Mr Blue Hair?’

  ‘Ichabod Drift, starship captain.’ He looked over his shoulder, just to check there was no new mass of protesters cutting off their retreat. ‘And you are?’

  ‘Sergeant Ingrid Lukyanenko.’ She still had her flashshield strapped in place on her left arm and was keeping it between her and the rest of the street. ‘I think you have picked a bad time to be visiting Uragan, Captain Drift.’

  ‘The thought had occurred to me,’ Drift agreed grimly. ‘I don’t suppose any of your colleagues are on their way to lend a hand, are they?’

  ‘I hear they are two blocks away,’ Lukyanenko replied
. She started speaking rapidly in Russian, which caught Drift off-guard for a moment until he realised she was talking into her commpiece and that she had probably just heard an update in her ear. That triggered another thought and he hastily activated his own comm to call Rourke, but got nothing except static. He frowned and looked over his shoulder.

  ‘Kuai! Is your comm working?’

  ‘No!’ the little mechanic shouted back, he and Jia each under one arm of a politsiya officer who appeared barely able to walk. ‘Could it be the gas?’

  ‘All civilian communications have been shut down,’ Lukyanenko said from beside Drift, her conversation apparently having been concluded. ‘It is to prevent activists from coordinating their activities.’

  ‘Wonderful,’ Drift muttered, feeling his stomach start to sink. ‘How am I meant to get in touch with the rest of my crew?’

  ‘You are not meant to,’ the sergeant replied, and Drift sighed in frustration.

  ‘I meant, how can I get in touch with the rest of my crew?’

  ‘You cannot.’ Lukanyenko turned as howling sirens began to assert themselves over the background noise of the city, and a little of the tension seemed to leave her features. ‘The Chief is here. Perhaps he can help you; I will tell him what you did.’

  ‘The Chief?’ Drift followed her gaze and saw that they’d nearly come to a confluence of streets, a plaza where five roadways all converged into a pentagonal open space. The sirens were almost shockingly loud now, and reverberating off the walls and ceiling three storeys above so that it was hard to tell which direction they were coming from. That mystery was quickly solved, however, when the first armoured transport barrelled in from the second exit and slewed to a halt directly ahead of them.

  It was not only armoured but armed as well, Drift noted. The black-clad, six-wheeled vehicle had a turret on the roof that rotated, pivoting to face over their heads and down towards Labirint. The central barrel looked to be a water cannon, but mounted directly on either side were two narrower apertures which were almost certainly ballistic weapons for use if the natives got too restless to be constrained by conventional riot control techniques. He instinctively ducked, which caused the barrel of the pistol tucked into his pants to dig into his lower belly and remind him that he was in front of a politsiya vehicle while carrying two illegal firearms.

  He was still debating with himself about whether to throw them both away and risk looking guilty or hold onto them and risk getting shot when Security Chief Alim Muradov strode around the vehicle’s cab, flanked by a pair of white-clad medics and a team of riot-armoured officers carrying guns.

  ‘Drift?’ Muradov’s voice was tinged with incredulity. ‘What in the Prophet’s name …?’

  Someone in the new riot team had noticed the shotgun, and for the third time in the last twenty-four hours Ichabod Drift found himself on the wrong end of multiple gun barrels.

  ‘Stoi!’ Sergeant Lukyanenko interspersed herself between Drift and the squad, to his great relief and their apparent confusion. He took the opportunity to set both the shotgun and the pistol down with exaggerated care while she spoke in rapid Russian to Muradov, and was pleased to see the Chief’s expression changing from shocked anger to only mild residual suspicion. When the sergeant finished her explanation, Muradov nodded and said a few words, and suddenly the squad had lowered their firearms and were filing past Drift, taking up station across the street.

  Drift allowed himself to breathe out, and felt a sudden burning urge to take a shower; he was feeling rather fragrant, what with all the risk of being shot. Muradov beckoned him over and Drift approached cautiously, exchanging a slightly uncertain look with Jia while stepping around the medics who were now attending to the worst-injured members of Lukyanenko’s squad.

  ‘Captain,’ Muradov greeted him with a slight nod.

  ‘Chief,’ Drift responded in kind, awaiting some sort of cue. Muradov spent a couple more seconds studying his face, then pursed his lips.

  ‘I currently have what appears to be a full-blown uprising going on in my city,’ he said quietly, and Drift was suddenly struck by the realisation that the man’s anger had not been removed; instead it was merely suppressed, and bubbled just beneath the surface. ‘My officers have been fired upon and wounded; possibly fatally, in some cases. And here are you in the middle of it, Captain Drift, with your too-easy smile and your too-ready answers, holding a shotgun and with only the word of one of my senior sergeants saving you from being a victim of … what is the phrase you North Americans use?’ His gaze drifted sideways for a second, then refocused on Drift’s face with an almost palpable heat. ‘Ah yes, “Shoot first, ask questions later.”’

  ‘I’m very grateful to your sergeant,’ Drift replied fervently.

  ‘I am going to ask you this question once,’ Muradov said. ‘Why. Are. You. Here?’

  Drift swallowed. ‘The hotels for off-worlders were extortionate so we got the Shirokovs to find us one in this district—’

  ‘Which one?’ Muradov cut in.

  ‘The Otpusk Gostinitsa,’ Drift replied immediately, glad he’d bothered to memorise the name before he went drinking but unable to prevent himself from pronouncing it with his best stab at a Uragan accent. ‘Anyway, I fancied a—’

  ‘The Otpusk Gostinitsa on Tsink Ploschadi?’ Muradov demanded, his eyes narrowing.

  ‘I …’ Drift was wrong-footed momentarily. ‘Yes, I think so.’ Something in Muradov’s expression was worrying him. ‘Why?’

  ‘We have another riot taking place on Tsink Ploschadi,’ Muradov said grimly. ‘My officers have just opened fire with live ammunition.’

  ‘What?!’ Drift nearly grabbed the other man by the webbing on his flak jacket, but restrained himself at the last moment.

  ‘Calm down, Captain,’ Muradov said, turning away from Drift and raking the streets around them with his eyes. ‘So long as your crew obeyed the emergency broadcasts and stayed inside the hotel, they should be perfectly safe.’

  THE WRONG COMPANY

  TAMARA ROURKE LIKED crowds. They were good cover if you knew half a thing about blending in, and she’d always had the ability to read the movement of people within them. Ichabod or Apirana seemed to view a crowd as a separate thing and used their height or breadth to try to force a way through; Rourke had always thought of herself as part of any large group of people she was in, and could find the gaps to slip through in any direction.

  That was, of course, providing the crowd in question wasn’t in a headlong stampede away from gunfire.

  The banners and placards had been abandoned, dropped and trampled underfoot like the incriminating evidence they were. Here and there Rourke could see some item of clothing with a slogan on it discarded as well, and wondered briefly how many topless Uragans would be trying desperately to get back into their homes before the politsiya tracked them down. A highly visible protest was all very well, but it could backfire spectacularly if the authorities decided to play hardball.

  One thing that wasn’t highly visible was the rest of her crew. She’d lost sight of Jenna almost immediately, and she hadn’t even caught a glimpse of Apirana in the few quick backwards glances she’d managed to snatch as the press of bodies drove her inexorably forwards. Still, she didn’t fancy trying to navigate against the tide and towards live weapons fire, crowd negotiation skills or not, and she was sure the other two would be able to cope without her.

  Something caught her eye: a flash of darker skin through the crowd of desperate, pale faces that surrounded her. She frowned, wondering how Apirana could have got ahead of her, then reassessed when she saw that instead of the massive Maori it was a smaller man with a thick beard and scarlet turban. A moment later she caught a second glimpse of him and noticed his jacket, a style most common in the planets of the South Asian Treaty.

  More interestingly, there was a young man in typical Uragan clothing tugging at his arm and gesturing urgently, as though trying to shepherd him in a direction slightly at an angle to
the main crush.

  Rourke had pegged the man in the turban as a fellow off-worlder immediately. Right now, separated from her crew and in a city that was rapidly becoming increasingly hostile, trying to tag onto another outsider who appeared to have some sort of local connection seemed like an excellent plan. She cut diagonally through the crowd as best she could, employing her elbows viciously when she needed to and taking a couple of knocks herself in the process. For a galling moment she thought she’d lost them, but then the man’s turban flashed into view again and she got another fix. They seemed to be heading for an alcove set back slightly from the street, just visible above the heads of the people around her. There was a brown-painted door there, plain and unadorned, possibly the rear entrance to a shop that fronted onto the plaza?

  She shouldered aside a determined-looking Uragan woman who had her head down and her skirts bunched in her hands as she ran, ricocheted off a teenager of indeterminate gender, collided with a large incineration bin and used its weighty bulk as a mustering point to fight her way into the alcove, all the while feeling somewhat like one of those big fish that swam up waterfalls back on Old Earth. She found herself face-to-face with the Indian man, who looked startled, and just under six feet tall, early thirties, a shade over 200 pounds, more fat than muscle, and the Uragan youth, no older than twenty, five feet eight and 150 to 155, something long and straight in his left leg pocket which could well be a knife with a roughly six-inch blade, who looked at her suspiciously and quickly stopped tapping an entry code into the keypad next to the door.

  ‘Please,’ Rourke gasped, doing her best to look desperate and pitching her voice slightly higher than usual, ‘English? You speak English?’

  ‘Yes,’ the Indian man nodded, which was entirely the point: get someone to agree to something you said, no matter how trivial it was, and they’d unconsciously be more likely to agree again.