Dark Sky (Keiko)

by Mike Brooks

  ‘I’m from a ship called the Keiko,’ Rourke continued, ‘where I’m a business partner with its owner, Captain Ichabod Drift. This man has crossed paths with us a few times before over the years, and we aren’t friends.’ She nodded at Moutinho, then addressed him directly. ‘It was you who left that anonymous tip about us being gunrunners, am I right?’

  ‘Is all that true?’ the Uragans’ leader asked Moutinho.

  ‘As near as makes no difference,’ Moutinho growled, clearly angry at having his thunder stolen, which had been Rourke’s intention: when the truth was going to come out anyway it was best to reveal it voluntarily yourself. That way you could avoid others putting less complimentary spins on it.

  ‘Including the part about the tip-off?’ the Uragan asked, and suddenly there was an edge in her voice. Moutinho was sharp enough to catch it. He released his hold on Skanda’s shirt and turned to face her, his brow furrowing.

  ‘Drift and his crew are troublemakers, Tanja, always have been. If they’d caught wind of what we were up to they’d have run to the law the first chance they got and sold us out. Then where would you have been? No,’ he shook his head emphatically, ‘we tarred them with the only brush they could have used on us, cos that way they’d have been ignored if they’d tried it.’

  ‘You told the politsiya that there was gunrunning going on?!’ Tanja shouted in response. Rourke saw Jack shift his stance slightly. The First Nations man suddenly seemed to be counting heads and realising that his crew were one short compared to the Uragans present, none of whom were looking particularly relaxed now. Two short, if Rourke was classed as an enemy.

  ‘They’re not as dumb as you want ’em to be,’ Moutinho snorted. ‘I’ve heard about that Muradov, he’s a sharp card. This was gonna be our last drop here, anyway; I didn’t fancy running the risk again. No customs official can be bribed to look the wrong way for ever.’

  ‘You told me you wanted to help!’ Tanja snapped.

  Moutinho shrugged. ‘I did help. You got any other contacts who’d be willing to risk their asses hauling illegal firearms into this place? I’m not a revolutionary, I’m a businessman, and business is looking better elsewhere.’

  ‘What about her?’ the Uragan youth Rourke had followed in asked, pointing in her direction. Tanja looked at Rourke thoughtfully, pursing her lips, then sighed with every appearance of genuine regret.

  ‘She knows too much, now.’

  Well. That doesn’t leave me with many options, does it?

  ‘Actually,’ Rourke spoke up, ‘I don’t know anywhere near enough if I’m going to help you.’

  Tanja’s brow furrowed. ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘You’re clearly heavily involved in planning and executing a Free Systems revolution and we are’ – Rourke made a show of checking her wrist chrono, – ‘approximately seven minutes after the general alert sounded. The security forces have already deployed live rounds. That means they’ve escalated response by two levels, so civilian communications through the public hub will have been cut off, correct?’

  ‘You mean your comm doesn’t work?’ Moutinho snorted. ‘That’s not hard to spot.’

  Rourke gave him a thin and completely false smile, then turned her attention back to Tanja. ‘So given we’re in a multi-levelled underground city and you therefore can’t use independent short-range comms, I imagine you’re getting around that by deploying hard-wired communication points that use the power lines, right?’

  Tanja’s eyes narrowed. ‘How do you—?’

  ‘But what you probably don’t know,’ Rourke ploughed on, ‘is that standard Red Star anti-insurgent protocol in areas where hard-wired comm points are considered likely to be in use is to induce a power surge in order to knock as many of those units out as possible. That’s meant to happen five minutes after the first officer reports that live rounds have been deployed, in order to give time for government devices to be switched off or otherwise protected, so …’ She looked at her chrono again, then back up at Tanja. ‘You’re on the clock.’

  Tanja stared back at her, then turned to one of the younger Uragans who was lurking near a cupboard and spoke in Russian. Rourke missed some of the words, but caught the gist: Unplug the transmitter and tell the others.

  Ricardo Moutinho’s expression was getting more and more incredulous as the youth opened the cupboard door and started speaking urgently into the transmission equipment concealed there. ‘You’re actually buying this?’

  ‘A power surge will knock out a lot of things,’ Tanja said, ignoring him to focus on Rourke once more with a weighing stare, ‘we’ll soon see if she’s telling the truth. Where did you learn this information?’

  Rourke raised her eyebrows slightly. She was aiming for authoritative without coming across as superior or condescending, but that was always a fine balancing act. ‘Let’s not rush into anything here. It sounded like you were planning on killing me a minute ago. That doesn’t exactly engender trust.’

  Tanja nodded. ‘A fair point. If your information about the power surge is good—’

  There was a bang as the salon’s lights brightened momentarily, then went out with an air of finality. The only light left was from the muted communal lamps outside in the plaza, still mimicking the night-time level of illumination in an open-air city like New Samara.

  Rourke sighed. ‘I could have done with them waiting a few more seconds, really.’ She allowed herself a small smile, which was at least partly due to the look of outraged consternation on Moutinho’s face. ‘How were you planning on ending that sentence?’

  Tanja had the look of someone who wanted to believe something but was being assailed by the fear that it was too good to be true.

  ‘I take it you’ve done this before?’

  ‘Three times,’ Rourke nodded. ‘Don’t bother asking me when or where.’

  ‘I think I can take that on trust,’ Tanja said slowly.

  ‘How do we know she’s not a spy?’ one of the Uragan girls demanded.

  ‘Because Captain Moutinho has already told us that he’s known Ms Rourke for years,’ Tanja smiled. ‘A case of “right place, right time”, perhaps?’

  ‘More like “wrong place, wrong time” from where I’m standing,’ Rourke admitted. ‘I hadn’t intended to do this again, but given the circumstances …’ She gave a slight shrug. ‘If I’m going to be mixed up in this, I might as well give myself the best chance of coming out alive.’ She crossed to the salon’s window and looked out, still half hoping to see some sign of Jenna and Apirana and half worrying that if she did, it would be because one of them would have caught a bullet.

  The plaza was largely empty, but the drifting remnants of gas made the air hazy and it was hard to see many details. Rourke could make out the black-clad forms of politsiya moving here and there, securing and arresting the luckless ones who’d fallen, but she couldn’t see any sign of her crewmates. Hopefully they’d managed to flee the plaza unharmed and had fallen in with better – or at least less potentially troublesome – company than she had.

  A cluster of movement at the far end of the plaza caught her eye, visible even through the haze. At first she thought it was yet more law enforcement officers, perhaps ones who hadn’t yet heard quite how thoroughly the protest had been dispersed. Then, however, she saw the unmistakeable shards of light which constituted muzzle flash. A fraction of a second later the reports reached their ears, muffled by the salon’s window but still identifiable to anyone who’d been in a gunfight or two.

  Wait until the riot squad think the threat’s been dispersed, then attack from behind. Rourke nodded slowly, even as her stomach sank. Goad them into inflicting a few civilian casualties to sway the populace to the justice of the cause. Callous, but effective: I might have planned this myself, other than the timing. She was already slipping back into the insurrectionist thinking model. The Galactic Intelligence Agency had never particularly wanted any planet to genuinely defect to the Free Systems – any one of them could be the peb
ble that would cause a landslide across into USNA space – but a single bad apple could throw an entire system into disarray, or even more. That could be very useful in the right circumstances, and so the United States of North America had carefully planted GIA agents on planets belonging to rival governmental conglomerates. Then Rourke, and others like her, would harness pre-existing public unrest and turn unsettled mutterings into a chaotic, destabilising roar. The important difference this time was that she wasn’t in control of the timetable, and she didn’t have an extraction protocol.

  Well, and she had a crew these days, the location of which she had no idea.

  She looked sideways and met Tanja’s eyes. ‘You know what happens now, I hope?’

  ‘Now,’ the other woman said, a tight excitement visible in her features, ‘we start to throw off this government that works our people to the bone to ship our natural resources elsewhere.’

  Rourke sighed. ‘I was thinking more that an incident of live ammunition fire on government personnel during an alert status calls for the imposition of martial law.’ I never liked dealing with amateurs, but at least I used to have a chance to coach them a bit before we unleashed hell on a population.

  Tanja was looking at her, her expression guarded once more. ‘Martial law?’

  ‘Shoot on sight, and shoot to kill,’ Rourke said grimly. ‘That applies to anyone seen on the streets, so I hope you’ve already done your rallying work.’ On the plaza outside, even the body armour of the politsiya wasn’t helping them. Some had thrown themselves to the ground to narrow the angles of fire available to their ambushers, but even so they were exposed in the middle of a flat, open space. There wasn’t going to be a happy ending for them.

  ‘Don’t worry about that,’ Tanja replied confidently, and not without some steel in her tone, ‘the people will rise. This was just a taster for the dogs in charge.’

  ‘Glad to hear it,’ Rourke said. She checked her chrono again. ‘Because the imposition of martial law means the planetary governor sending a signal to the system capital – so New Samara in this case – requesting immediate military aid. And that means that by the time the storm up top clears you’re going to have half the Rassvet System’s defence force sitting overhead in troop transports ready to land, so you’d better have finished the job by then.’

  There was a stunned silence.

  ‘Seriously?’ Rourke couldn’t keep a tone of incredulity out of her voice. ‘You thought the Red Stars would just let one of their primary ore planets secede? There’s no government in the galaxy that would give up resources like this without a fight.’ She swallowed back further words. There was no need to tell them that even if they took the entire city, even if they held the planet, the Red Stars would simply blockade them in. At some point, someone here had had a dream of a life not ruled by a bureaucracy of interminable layers leading all the way back to Moscow on Old Earth, and that dream had spread far enough that people were willing to try to seize it even though it was impossible, simply because they couldn’t bear not to any longer.

  Focus, Tamara. You’re not trying to set them up to destabilise the entire system. All you need to do is find your crew and get out of this hole as soon as possible.

  Tanja seemed to have only got more determined. ‘Then we will finish the job.’ The other woman paused, then continued slightly more hesitantly. ‘Will you … help us?’

  It was a bigger question than it sounded, Rourke knew. Whether or not Tanja was in overall control of the revolution – if anyone was ever in overall control of a revolution, which in Rourke’s experience was not the case – the Uragan woman was certainly the one doling out the orders around here. Taking advantage of the information Rourke had provided for free was one thing; asking for help was a concession that she didn’t know everything and was, potentially, something that might damage the belief of her followers. And a revolution was nothing without belief.

  But that really wasn’t Rourke’s problem.

  She turned to Tanja. ‘You understand that this isn’t my world and it isn’t my fight, and I’m not going to pretend that it is. You help me find my crew and keep them safe, and get us to the spaceport. You’ll need to take that anyway, if you want to have a hope of stopping any invasion. You do that, and I will give you any and all advice and information I can.’

  ‘You won’t be able to leave until the storm subsides anyway,’ one of the younger Uragans spoke up, ‘and you said the troops will be overhead by then. How will you get off-world?’

  Rourke fixed her with a steady gaze. ‘I trust my pilot.’ She looked back at Tanja and extended her hand. ‘Do we have a deal?’

  Tanja clasped her hand firmly. ‘Ms Rourke, we have a deal.’

  TO THE RESCUE

  ‘THEY’LL HAVE GUNS too, you know,’ Drift said.

  Chief Muradov turned away from the officer he’d been speaking to, and glowered. ‘Who will?’

  ‘The protesters your people have just opened fire on,’ Drift explained, as patiently as he could. ‘It wasn’t rioters who shot up the squad here, it wasn’t people who’d found some guns from somewhere and decided to join a rally, they were in a bar! The protest was just bait to draw your squad in, and then they opened fire from the side!’ He spread his hands, trying to look as convincing as possible. ‘I’d say you’ve got a full-blown insurrection on your hands, planned out in advance.’

  ‘The possibility had crossed my mind,’ Muradov snapped, then frowned. ‘Why do you care, anyway?’

  ‘Because my business partner, tech officer and …’ he searched for a term for Apirana and plumped for ‘… translator are in a hotel next to that protest, and the longer stray bullets go flying around the more likely one of them is to get hurt.’

  ‘Translator?’ Muradov’s eyes flickered over to the Changs, apparently eliminating possibilities, then cocked an eyebrow quizzically. ‘The big man?’

  Well, he is very good at making himself understood. Sometimes he doesn’t even need to use language. ‘He’s West Pacific,’ Drift said instead, ‘speaks Japanese like a native, and has pretty good Indonesian, too.’

  ‘I do not doubt it,’ Muradov said dryly, ‘but please do not take me for a fool. I am fairly sure that is not his only role on your crew, Captain.’ He frowned again, his eyes wandering slightly to the left, and Drift realised he must be listening to a comm report in his ear. Then he looked up again, fixing Drift with a stare. ‘However, that is not my concern at present. We are needed elsewhere.’ He turned and barked instructions in Russian, pointing at the armoured transports which the mass of politsiya with him had arrived in. Three of them quickly started filling up again, while it seemed two units would be left to chase down and disperse any remaining rioters in the local streets.

  Drift turned to look over at the Changs, who were standing a little way away with the Shirokovs and generally trying to escape notice. Jia made a gesture that combined hands and eyebrows and somehow managed to eloquently ask what they were going to do now. Drift shrugged. Jia rolled her eyes and used a hand gesture that required no translation.

  ‘Captain,’ Muradov said from behind him, ‘I need to ask you and your companions to come with me, please. Maximum of two to a vehicle.’

  Drift turned, an uncomfortable sensation prickling in his stomach. ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Uragan City will shortly be placed under martial law,’ Muradov said grimly, rechecking the magazine of his rifle, ‘and procedure in martial law is to shoot to kill anyone seen violating curfew.’ He looked up and met Drift’s eyes. ‘You and your companions have no home to go to here, so it would be a dereliction of my duty to leave you in the street.’

  Drift pursed his lips. ‘And you don’t trust me.’

  ‘And, as you say, I do not trust you.’ Muradov flashed a thin smile, fast as summer lighting over New Shinjuku. ‘You also discharged a firearm at Uragan citizens—’

  ‘Oh come on!’ Drift protested. ‘I aimed over their heads and I was trying to save some
of your people’s lives!’

  ‘—and you are fairly distinctive,’ Muradov continued firmly. ‘Quite frankly, Captain, even if my officers did not shoot you I would half expect one of the rioters to find you and do it anyway. Consider it protective custody if you like, but get in the damned vehicles.’

  ‘Well, when you put it like that,’ Drift muttered. He turned and gestured to the Changs and the Shirokovs, who made their way over doing a collective impression of a study in variations of reluctance.

  ‘We’ll be riding with them,’ he informed the others, jerking a thumb over his shoulder at the APC behind him, ‘maximum of two in each, so I guess you folks pair off and I’ll take this one. It’s not negotiable and it’s not my idea, so no yelling at me.’ He aimed that last at Jia, who narrowed her eyes at him but kept her mouth shut.

  ‘Are we in trouble?’ Kuai asked gloomily.

  ‘When aren’t we?’ Drift grinned at him, but the mechanic didn’t seem to take it well. Even Drift had to admit that it was a fairly poor attempt at lightening the mood, so he covered the awkwardness by turning and climbing into the APC by the rear doors.

  It wasn’t his first experience of being inside a vehicle belonging to law enforcement, unfortunately, but it was certainly the first time he’d been in one of this size or bulk, some unholy cross as it was of bus, truck and tank. There were benches down each side for the riot officers to sit on, a gun rack halfway along each and a ladder in the centre up to the turret. At the far end was a hatchway through to the cab and what looked like a tactical comms station, and seated next to that was Alim Muradov.

  ‘Captain!’ he called, beckoning. Drift made his way uneasily over to him, trying to avoid getting in the way of the various officers currently taking up position and strapping themselves into their seats. One or two gave him a strange look as he passed, but he also got a couple of smiles.