Dark Sky (Keiko)

by Mike Brooks

  ‘You’ll bring the damn roof down!’ Jenna almost screamed at him, blinking away the white after-images of the explosion.

  +Well, yeah. That’s sort of the idea, over.+

  ‘Do you have any idea the size of rocks which these storms can shift?!’ Jenna yelled. ‘If one of those gets in we’ll be crushed!’

  +We won’t be, we’ll be in the air. You’re welcome to follow us. If you can.+

  Another missile erupted from the Pouco Jacare’s concealed and highly illegal guns, and in the wake of this explosion the remaining part of the huge door covering that half of the bay fell in with a rending crash. Jenna covered her face reflexively and uselessly, but it was at least on the far side of the hangar: the shuttle directly beneath the falling door seemed to crumple under the immense weight of metal, although she couldn’t see exactly what had happened, but nothing struck the Jonah.

  +Pouco Jacare out.+

  The Corvid-class shuttle, held in place by Jack’s expert piloting, fired its thrusters and roared up through the hole it had created into the maelstrom beyond, leaving nothing behind except more temporary damage to Jenna’s retinas. She wiped at her eyes desperately to try to clear them, then jerked aside with a yelp of alarm as a rock the side of her head clattered off the Jonah’s nose, narrowly missing the viewshield. She was fairly sure it could have taken an impact of that sort anyway … but as she looked at the volume of sand, dust and rocks already pouring into the hangar, she had a nasty feeling that larger ones were on their way.

  ‘What the …?’

  Rourke had appeared behind her. The older woman’s expression was surprisingly blank, although in that moment Jenna wasn’t sure if it was because Rourke had recovered her usual composure or was simply too tired to react.

  ‘I …’ Jenna waved a hand helplessly at the scene in front of them.

  ‘Too much to hope for that he would leave without a parting shot,’ Rourke muttered. ‘What a wonderful choice he’s given us: stay to be buried or crushed, or follow him into the storm and die out there by being blown into a ridge.’

  ‘What do we do?’ Jenna asked desperately, looking at her.

  Rourke just gazed out at the storm with tired eyes, and said nothing.

  MAKING A STAND

  MURADOV HAD REACHED for the gun at his belt the moment Drift stepped through the door, but froze as Drift covered him with his pistol. ‘Captain …’

  ‘Chief,’ Drift replied cautiously. ‘I’m really sorry to do this, but there are still three members of my crew out in your city and I can’t be having them suffering breathing difficulties.’ His attention was very nearly arrested by the huge window directly behind the desk where Governor Drugov was standing: it appeared to look out over what might have been a canyon on Uragan’s surface, although it was hard to see anything much given the thick yellowish clouds of gas and detritus whipping past. On the other side of the office was another window, this one looking out over the lush garden they’d come in through. He pulled his gaze away with an effort and refocused on Muradov, whose face twisted in frustrated consternation.

  ‘You idiot, Drift! I was arguing against him!’

  Drift frowned. ‘Kuai?’

  ‘Yeah?’ the mechanic’s voice came from somewhere outside the doorway.

  ‘Is that right?’

  ‘Why d’you think they were shouting? ’Course he was arguing, I told you Drugov wanted to gas everyone.’

  ‘Well, shit. Sorry, Chief.’ Drift shifted his aim to cover the governor instead, whose beetling brows lowered still further at this impudence.

  ‘Alim!’

  Muradov brought his gun up to point directly at Drift’s temple. ‘Captain, please lower your weapon.’

  It wasn’t like Drift wanted to be shot in the head. For a moment he considered backing down and just letting the two officials have it out between themselves, but when he’d intervened Drugov had simply needed to say Muradov’s name and the Chief had immediately moved to obey. Drift didn’t think that boded well for the people inside Uragan City. Rourke, Jenna and Apirana were his top priority, of course, but they weren’t the only ones out there. He couldn’t help but think back to the Thirty-Six Degrees, crippled and hiding in the ice belt around Ngwena Prime, where a dozen men and women had died as he’d overridden the airlocks to vent their precious atmosphere into the void. They’d been bad people, to be sure, people who’d sought profit through theft and violence, but they’d been at least nominally his people. And if he wouldn’t be the one to kill these people in Uragan City, well, perhaps the fact that there were two million of them was enough to make him stand firm to ensure they didn’t suffer a similar fate.

  Someone had once said that for evil to prevail, all that needed to happen was for good men to do nothing. Drift didn’t consider himself a good man, but perhaps he had his moments.

  ‘Chief,’ he said, trying to sound as calm and reasonable as he could with a gun aimed at his head by someone he was pretty certain was a former Red Star Army veteran, ‘I think I’m on your side here.’

  ‘You are pointing a weapon at my planetary governor,’ Muradov snapped, ‘that does not fit my criteria for “my side”.’

  ‘I thought he wanted to kill everyone in this city?’ Drift demanded, not looking away from the bearded Drugov and wondering how much of the conversation the governor could understand. He’d have expected a planetary official to have a good grasp of all the major governmental languages, but he hadn’t heard Drugov speak anything except Russian so far. ‘Do you think that makes him qualified to be a governor?’

  ‘Captain, how are you expecting to solve this by threatening him with a gun?!’ Muradov demanded, sounding truly exasperated.

  ‘Simple,’ Drift replied flatly, ‘if I see him doing anything that looks suspicious, I’m going to shoot him.’

  That got a reaction: Drugov couldn’t hide the widening of his eyes and the colour starting to drain from his face. Drift severely doubted the other man had ever been in a life-threatening position before, and possibly hadn’t really believed until this moment that Drift would actually do anything. Well, I hope you believe me now.

  ‘Captain—’

  ‘Damn it, Chief, you know I’m right!’ Drift snapped, trying to ignore the black hole that was all his peripheral vision could see of the barrel of Muradov’s gun. ‘You were arguing with him too.’

  ‘I was hoping that reason could prevail, I never intended to threaten him with a lethal weapon!’ Muradov snarled.

  ‘Well that’s what he’s doing to two million people, right now!’ Drift shouted back. ‘I saw you when you realised that troops were being called in, Chief. You didn’t want war on Level Five, even after rebels bombed your transport and tried to kill you and your squad. You didn’t want anyone to die!’

  ‘Of course not, but—’

  ‘That’s what he wants!’ Drift continued furiously. ‘He’ll kill them all! Hell, he’ll probably kill us, too: are you really prepared to risk that this mansion’s airtight and its oxygen supply won’t get compromised?’

  ‘As to that,’ Drugov spoke up in English, cautiously raising one finger, ‘there are twenty full environment suits and additional rebreather masks in that cupboard.’ He pressed something on his desk and a partition in the wall to the side of his desk suddenly slid aside, revealing what looked like nothing more than a wardrobe for a chemical spill clean-up team. ‘Despite this disrespectful behaviour, you and your people may use them if necessary.’

  ‘Word of warning, amigo,’ Drift said, ‘the next time your finger touches anything on your desk, I pull this trigger.’

  ‘So what would you have me do, Captain?’ Drugov demanded angrily, his placatory facade vanishing. ‘Sit and wait until the rebels break down my doors and kill us all?’

  ‘Sooner that than kill an entire city,’ Drift told him, ‘but no. I was thinking we all get into your shuttle and my pilot gets us off this planet.’

  ‘That is not going to happen,’ Drugov bit
out, resting his knuckles on the desk in a vaguely simian gesture which Drift supposed was intended to make him look intimidating.

  ‘So how about if I shoot you and then we take it anyway?’

  ‘Only I have the access and ignition codes,’ the governor sneered.

  And Jenna’s not here. If she was, I might be inclined to chance it. ‘I don’t buy your act,’ Drift told him bluntly. ‘Once the rebels start coming through your garden gates, I reckon you’ll reconsider.’

  ‘I do not intend to wait that long,’ Drugov replied, then switched his attention to Muradov. ‘Alim, ubei etogo cheloveka!’

  Drift’s Russian was good enough to recognise an order to kill him, despite what Drugov might have thought. There was a fleeting moment of terrible indecision when he wondered whether to pull the trigger, spatter Drugov’s brains over the wall and have done with, and then …

  ‘Alim!’

  Drift risked a glance sideways to see Alim Muradov still staring down the barrel of his gun at him, and with an expression of agonised conflict on his face. He breathed again. ‘Chief, I—’

  He’d noticed Drugov shifting his weight very slightly, but didn’t realise the significance until something hit him in each thigh and every nerve in his body overloaded. He was dimly aware of landing half on his back and half on his left arm with his body attempting to draw in on itself like a crushed spider, while the shockbolts spat out of Drugov’s desk by the foot-activated floor trigger did their work on him.

  Drugov flipped up a section of the desk and lowered his hand, palm downwards, towards the green light grid of a palm reader. It had to be the security protocol for activating Uragan City’s ‘fail-safe’.

  The shockbolts had exhausted their charge in a second, but the after-effects left Drift’s muscles still unwilling to obey his commands. He tried to raise his gun, but his arm just spasmed.

  There was a gunshot.

  Drugov’s face had time to register the faintest flicker of shock before he crumpled like a puppet with its strings severed, a bloody hole blown through his forehead. Turning his suddenly aching neck with an effort, Drift looked up and saw Alim Muradov. The security chief also had shockbolts attached to him at thigh level, but it seemed that his politsiya-issue gear had protected him. He was lowering his gun, which was pointed at where Drugov had been standing, and he looked suddenly haunted.

  Drift opened his mouth before deciding for once that it might be better to say nothing. Instead he rolled onto his right and craned his head around to look back at the door into Drugov’s office, which was conspicuously absent of anyone else.

  ‘Kuai! Jia!’

  His voice came out as little more than a pained wheeze, but after a second or so both Chang siblings stuck their heads around the door, one from each side in an unconscious stereo movement which made him chuckle despite himself.

  ‘You alright, Captain?’ Jia asked uncertainly, her eyes narrowing as her gaze moved to Muradov.

  ‘I’m fine, I’ve just been shockbolted,’ Drift said through gritted teeth. ‘Help me up, would you? Don’t worry about the Chief,’ he added, ‘he’s just saved everyone’s life but had to kill a friend to do it.’

  ‘I thought he was my friend,’ Muradov agreed, his voice sounding slightly vacant as Jia and Kuai cautiously entered the room. ‘But perhaps I never knew him.’

  ‘Careful, careful!’ Drift gasped as the Changs grabbed an arm each and hauled upwards. He staggered, his legs still uncertain beneath him, and Kuai had to catch him with a grunt.

  ‘You’re getting fat,’ the mechanic told him.

  ‘You should work out more,’ Drift retorted, holstering his pistol. Fat? Not a spare ounce on me. He tested his legs again and found them to be more capable of taking his weight, so he disentangled his arm from over Kuai’s shoulders. ‘Chief? First of all, thank you for doing what I would have done, had I not been incapacitated.’

  ‘You realise, of course, that I have effectively signed our death warrants?’ Muradov replied gloomily. ‘He was not lying about being the only person with the access codes to his shuttle.’

  There was a deep crump from the direction of the garden, echoed a moment later by a wailing klaxon as the mansion’s alarm system started sounding. Drift didn’t need to look to guess what had just happened: someone had attached a mining charge to the main gates and blown them in.

  ‘Drums,’ he muttered, feeling his guts stir uneasily, ‘drums in the deep.’

  Muradov had crossed to the window overlooking the garden, his melancholy air abruptly gone. It seemed that the security chief – or former security chief, as he surely had to be thought of now he’d killed the planetary governor – wasn’t the sort to let introspection get in the way of practicality. He looked around as Drift spoke, an odd expression on his face. ‘They are coming.’

  Despite himself, despite the gravity of their situation, Drift laughed. At last, someone who appreciates the classics! ‘Chief, are there any other ways out of here? Any panic room?’

  ‘None we can use,’ Muradov replied briskly, checking his weapon, ‘everything was coded to the governor’s fingerprints.’ He stopped, then looked up at Drift as the same thought occurred to both of them.

  ‘Well, we still have his hands,’ Drift pointed out, brain racing. ‘If we can use him to open the panic room, but leave him outside it with a gun in his hand and make it look like suicide then maybe they won’t realise we’re—’

  ‘New plan!’ Lena Goldberg shouted as her and Dugan Karwoski burst into the office and made a beeline for the environment suits. ‘Grab a mask and get the fuck out of here!’

  ‘What?’ Drift watched in bewilderment as the two Jacare crew grabbed rebreather and goggle combinations and pulled them on. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Out there!’ Lena replied, her voice slightly muffled as she pointed at the window looking out over Uragan’s surface.

  ‘Out there?’ Drift echoed incredulously, turning on his heel to look at the foot-thick window of perspex, reinforced to survive the battering of Uragan’s incredible storms. ‘How the hell are you going to get it ope—’

  He stopped. Descending into view was a dark shape, swaying unsteadily in the wind but still undoubtedly under human control, with floodlights cutting through the thick atmosphere to stretch new, wavering shadows out across the floor of Drugov’s office. He recognised the sleek, angular form as a Corvid-class shuttle. The Pouco Jacare.

  And, as Goldberg and Karwoski fled the office again, Drift realised that there was only one way for Ricardo Moutinho to get rid of that window.

  ‘Move! Move!’ he yelled desperately, shoving the Changs towards the office door. He dashed for the closet and grabbed more rebreathers, then followed his crew with Alim Muradov close behind him. The Uragan slammed the door shut after them and snatched one of the masks from Drift’s hands with almost unseemly haste.

  ‘Put these on!’ Drift ordered, pressing masks on Jia and Kuai, then pulling one over his own head. ‘Get away from the door! Get behind the wall!’ He grabbed Goldberg by the shoulder. ‘Why the hell didn’t you mention this before?!’

  ‘They only just came into comm-range,’ she spat, knocking his hand away, ‘and you were—’

  This explosion was much, much louder than the one that had signified the arrival of the rebels, and it shook the building itself. The wooden office door was nearly knocked off its hinges by debris flung outwards from the force of it, and Drift was still trying to shake off the roaring in his ears when Goldberg and Karwoski barged past him and back into the office. He suddenly became aware that the roaring wasn’t an after-effect of the Pouco Jacare’s guns. It was wind noise.

  They had armed rebels coming for them in one direction, possibly already inside the mansion, and an escape route in the other. There was only one sensible course of action, although given it involved charging into the teeth of a toxic hurricane, the word ‘sensible’ was probably relative.

  ‘Come on!’ he yelled, waving his sm
all party onwards and following Moutinho’s crew into the office. The room was already filled with a swirling, ice-cold mess of pus-coloured gas and dust as Uragan’s frigid atmosphere billowed in through the ragged scar created by the Pouco Jacare’s armament. Virtually all of the window was gone, save for a few chunks of thick perspex along each side, and some of the wall was missing at the top as well. The shuttle itself hung immediately outside like a monstrous predatory bird, its ramp down and giving the impression of a distended jaw. Drift found himself grudgingly admiring the skill of Moutinho’s pilot at holding the craft more or less steady in the cruel crosswind, which was pushing hard against him even in his current position of relative shelter.

  Goldberg was already on the ramp, crawling up it to present as small a profile as possible to the vicious gusts. Karwoski followed, leaping the small gap between the window and the ramp and almost being carried away even in that short distance. He landed on the ramp with a clatter though, and began scrambling up it after his crewmate. At the top, silhouetted against the internal lighting, was someone wearing politsiya riot gear including a full-face helmet with gas mask. From the height and general build, Drift guessed it was Moutinho himself, an impression which was heightened when it pointed a gun at him. His comm beeped, alerting him to a broadcast on an open channel powered by the shuttle’s transmitters, and he answered it with a grim sense of foreboding.

  +Olá, Ichabod!+ the Brazilian’s voice crackled cheerily into his ear. +Thanks for keeping my crew safe.+

  ‘Tamara told me you’d struck a truce,’ Drift replied through gritted teeth, aware of the others at his shoulders. Possible salvation lay in front of them … but so did a gun. ‘Where is she?’

  +Sitting safe and sound in your shuttle where I left her, I expect,+ Moutinho said, +and no doubt waiting for you to get back there with that pilot of yours. You’d better hurry though: we made a bit of a mess on our way out.+ He hit a button next to him as Karwoski scrabbled up past him into the hold proper, and the ramp began to rise. +Best of luck.+