by Mike Brooks
Kuai was struggling against his captor, a small, red-stained blade in his hand – the mechanic’s multitool, which he must have pulled from his pocket during the commotion. The Yakuza who had a hold of him was bleeding from his left thigh but the wound didn’t look deep enough to cause him a major problem.
‘Look out!’ Jenna yelled, and Apirana whirled back around just in time to see Voice Box advancing on him, blue-white light crackling on his fist.
Knuckletasers. Shit.
He tried to dodge the blow, but the same mass which had allowed him to send a grown man flying like a ten-year-old tackled by a rugby prop forward worked against him and the punch hit him squarely in the chest.
The metal arm was like a piledriver. The force of the blow to his chest would have knocked him back anyway, but the added kick of the voltage left him on his back, staring at strip lighting and feeling like his lungs had been replaced by sieves. He managed to roll onto his side, despite his muscles seemingly having turned to jelly, and caught a glimpse of Jenna. She’d removed the bracelet from her wrist now, and she pressed one last button with an air of finality and threw it onto the floor in front of her. It landed with a clatter not six feet from where Apirana was sprawled, with one light flashing an angry red.
And every single light went out.
Total power failure on a void station meant one thing: Death. With no life support to pump and recycle the air, no heating to keep the deathly chill of deep space at bay and no way through the docking hatches back to the ships which would provide a means of escape, everyone on board would essentially be doomed. Understandably, the sudden blackout was met with screams and shouts of alarm.
Apirana staggered up to his feet. Give it a second . . .
Emergency lights flickered into life, dimmer than the originals but still bright enough. He’d hoped that the Yakuza would be caught off-guard, but what he saw surprised him so much that he himself just stopped and stared.
Voice Box was clutching at his metal right arm with his flesh-and-blood left hand, but the prosthetic was hanging limp and apparently useless at his side. Apirana got the distinct impression that the man would have been swearing at it, but the speakers in his throat were apparently not working either. Meanwhile, Visor was pulling himself away across the floor, his legs trailing behind him.
Apirana took that all in, then took a quick twostep run-up and did his best to drive one of his boots clean through Voice Box’s chest. The kick sent the panicked Yakuza flying again, this time into a stall apparently selling tools and spare parts which collapsed onto him with a sound like an avalanche in a scrapyard.
White Hair clearly didn’t like the way the fight was going and turned to run for it as soon as Voice Box was buried by falling metal. Apirana let him go and turned around to find Kuai panting hard and holding his multi-tool, with his assailant having apparently come to the same conclusion as his boss. Visor, meanwhile, was calling out for his friends in a pained, piteous voice; it appeared that he’d lost the ability to see as well as the ability to walk, but Apirana wasn’t certain if that was thanks to Jenna or his boot.
He fixed Jenna with an incredulous stare. ‘What was that?’
‘High-intensity, short-range EMP,’ the slicer replied absently, stooping to pick her bracelet up gingerly: Apirana got the impression that it had suddenly become rather warm. She saw his confused expression and elaborated. ‘Electro-magnetic pulse. I figured if half their bodies weren’t working properly you could probably take them out.’
‘Lemme get this straight,’ Apirana said, pinching the bridge of his nose. ‘All this time you’ve been carrying about a . . . an EMP, on your fucking arm?’
‘Only when I was off the ship,’ Jenna explained hurriedly, ‘and it takes a very specific keycode to activate it.’ She looked over at the immobile Yakuza, still wailing in Japanese. ‘Let’s get out of here. Probably best not to draw any more attention than we already have.’
Apirana grunted and took a quick look around them. He was used to being the subject of stares, but there was more than just casual interest being directed towards the three of them and the damage his fight had caused. He also saw a bulge in one pocket of Jenna’s flight suit, roughly the size of the Truth Box she’d mentioned earlier, and did his best to suppress a slight smile as he nodded.
‘Right. Let’s go find the Captain.’
The return of the lights had headed off the immediate hysterical reactions, but a lot of people were still moving in a determined manner towards wherever their ships were berthed. Apirana, Kuai and Jenna fell in with the general push of the crowd but he kept a close eye on their surroundings as he pulled out his comm and keyed in Drift’s ident, alert for anyone who looked like they might have any sort of Yakuza link.
Drift picked up after the second beep. +A., where the hell are you? What’s going on? Kuai was babbling something about trouble but then the call cut off, and I called you but you didn’t pick up.+
‘I was probably fighting one of ’em,’ Apirana replied grimly, looking down at his shirt and noticing the four small burn marks on it for the first time. He lowered his voice a little, trying to speak no louder than his earpiece needed to pick up the words. ‘Four Yakuza, Cap. They decided to make trouble for me, an’ at least two of ’em were augmented.’
+You took them all out?+ The Captain wasn’t even bothering to try to hide the incredulity in his tone, and Apirana couldn’t blame him; he’d been about three seconds from having his face caved in by a metal fist.
‘Not me; Jenna did something fancy with an EMP an’ crippled the circuitheads, an’ the others lost the taste for it after that.’
+She did what? Is that what knocked the lights funny a few moments ago?+
Apirana blinked, taken back by the venom in the Captain’s voice.‘Yeah, but it’s okay, the backup power came on—’
+She couldn’t know that! I don’t care how fucking smart she is, she couldn’t have known that! Tell me you’ve got whatever-it-was that made it.+
‘Uh, no,’ Apirana admitted, casting a glance at the bracelet which Jenna had now refastened onto her wrist.
+Do it.+
‘I don’t really think I need to—’ Apirana began.
+Me cago en la puta A., just do it! And meet us back at the ship as soon as you can. If we can get through the damn airlock after her little stunt.+ The connection clicked and died. Apirana frowned in surprise. It wasn’t like the Captain to be that . . . tetchy. Especially not where Jenna was concerned.
‘Problem?’ Jenna asked tensely.
‘You might wanna gimme that bracelet,’ Apirana muttered, holding out his hand. The diminutive slicer looked up at him, confused.
‘It’s one-use only.’
‘Yeah, even so,’ Apirana said. ‘Captain din’t sound pleased, so let’s show him you ain’t gonna be doing it again.’
‘I . . . what?’ Jenna spluttered, ‘those bastards were—’ She stopped, looked around quickly, then moderated the volume of her voice. ‘They were trying to hurt you. What the hell was I supposed to do, let them?’
‘Well, they din’t manage it,’ Apirana told her. ‘Much,’ he added, rubbing his chest ruefully. ‘Look, I’m damn grateful, but just gimme the bracelet t’keep the Captain happy for now an’ we can discuss it with him when we’re outta here, right?’
‘Fine.’ Jenna uncoupled the bracelet and passed it over to him, but he could tell she was seething beneath her attempt at a calm exterior.
They reached the docking corridor without further incident, but the door didn’t release when Apirana punched in the code. He grimaced and tried again, with no luck. ‘Ah, hells. This anything to do with you?’ Looking around, he could see that other doors seemed to be similarly inconvenienced, judging by the reactions of people clustered around them.
‘Maybe,’ Jenna said shortly, pulling a screwdriver from somewhere. ‘Move.’ He stepped aside to give her access, then stood as casually as he could between her and the rest of the station
so his large frame hid as much of her as possible from view.
It was while he was stood there scanning the crowd for trouble that he saw Drift approaching, his face thunderous. Micah and Rourke followed behind him, with the Dutch mercenary wheeling a trolley bearing tanks of oxygen, but the Captain was striding out in front with an expression Apirana had rarely witnessed before.
‘Any time now would be good,’ he murmured, hoping Jenna could hear him while Kuai hovered nervously. The only reply was a metallic whisper and a sudden sensation of space at his back; he looked over his shoulder to see the door sliding aside and Jenna screwing the cover of the control panel back into place, her face still sullen.
He turned back towards the others, who were now only a few metres away. ‘You get enough air?’
‘The recycling system’s working pretty much one hundred per cent efficient, that should be fine,’ Kuai replied hastily, casting a worried glance at Drift’s face.
‘Take it through,’ Drift said, not looking at them. He jerked his head; Apirana grimaced but moved to one side to reveal Jenna, whose defiant stare faltered a little when she saw the Captain’s expression.
‘What the hell do you think you’re playing at?’ Drift demanded flatly as the others filed past. ‘We’re on a void station in the middle of nowhere and you start playing around with an EMP? What if the backups hadn’t kicked in? How would you have sliced your way out of something when there’s no fucking power for your precious little systems to work? Then we get stuck here, which means we don’t make the delivery deadline, which means—’ He cut himself off, apparently in frustration, but this was an emotion Jenna clearly shared.
‘I wasn’t “playing around”,’ the slicer snapped, ‘I was protecting our crew!’
Drift folded his arms. ‘You’re wouldn’t have been protecting us if you’d knocked the station’s entire power system out! And why have you been carrying an EMP around on my fucking ship? Why have you even got one?’
‘It’s impossible to set off by accident!’ Jenna replied. ‘I built it when I was on Franklin Minor because that’s, like, circuithead central and they’ve all got more metal than sense.’ She glanced around hurriedly, then leaned forwards with a conspiratorial air. ‘Okay, fine: look, the reason circuitheads freak me out so much? There were a bunch of abductions of young women by a gang of augmenteds when I was doing my Masters. One of the victims was a fellow student and she never showed up again! I built this to knock out enhancements in case anyone tried it with me.’ She folded her arms in return and stared back at Drift, who didn’t seem impressed.
‘You built it? Just like that?’
Jenna rolled her eyes. ‘I am pretty smart. And I was studying in a posh research facility at the time, you have no idea the kind of kit you can get your hands on if you know what you’re doing.’
Drift’s jaw moved as he chewed at the inside of his mouth, a habit which always made Apirana wince. Then his face set into a look of resolution.
‘I’m leaving you here.’
‘What?’ Jenna’s face drained of colour, and Apirana fought to contain his own immediate response. What was the Captain thinking? He was about to open his mouth and protest when he became aware that the three of them were no longer alone. Drift seemed to notice at the same time, and they turned together to find themselves looking at a pair of men in red body armour and open-face helmets, both cradling starguns across their chests.
Station security. The void stations all had their own enforcement gangs, who paid no attention to interpersonal altercations but would stamp down violently on anything that might threaten the station itself. Such as, Apirana realised, the power being knocked out.
He saw their eyes widen as they focused on his face, and their guns started to raise to cover him. The tats. Someone gave them a description of me . . .
There were two shockingly loud explosions next to him, and both men’s features exploded in blood and bone. He whipped around to look at Drift, who was already holstering one of his smoking pistols.
‘On board,’ the Captain snapped, ‘now!’ He grabbed Jenna’s arm and dragged her into the docking corridor. ‘You too. Move!’
‘But you said—’
‘I wanted to see how you’d react,’ Drift growled, slamming the door control to shut it as Apirana hurried over the threshold. The moment the heavy door had slid shut, Drift put a bullet into the control panel on their side. ‘We were going to have a conversation after that, but that option’s off the table now.’
‘But you killed them!’ Jenna blurted, wrenching her arm free of Drift’s grasp.
‘Yes,’ the Captain snapped, turning away from her and striding towards the other end where the Keiko was attached, ‘welcome to the galaxy! What do you think they were going to do to you and A. once they’d worked out it was you who nearly knocked this place dead? You want to stick around and find out, be my guest: otherwise, hurry the fuck up or they’ll scramble something which can shoot us down before we make the jump away from here!’
Apirana broke into a jog, wincing at the pains in his chest as he did so and trying to ignore how easily Jenna outpaced him as she ran towards her only ticket out. That’s two dead on this run already . . .
PROFESSIONALLY AWESOME
They’d parked the Keiko at a waystation above Mars, and gone the rest of the way in the Jonah.
Jia had needed to calculate an emergency jump to get away from the void station before its small fleet of defence fighters could launch, and it had sent them off course: not by much, but their schedule was tight enough that by the time they’d reoriented themselves and got back on track they were running behind. Drift had chafed at the delay, but there wasn’t really anything to be done about it. The First System was still the busiest in the galaxy, and the risk of collisions with other ships became too great for anyone to risk making an Alcubierre jump inside the Martian orbit. Besides that, of course, was the fact that they wanted to avoid attention. Luckily, despite teeming with ships and undoubtedly the last place they would want to be if they ended up being pursued, it was possibly the best place to be ignored in the first place.
The First System was the only inhabited system in which no individual government held sway over the interplanetary space. How long that would have lasted without the technology to colonise beyond the stars was anyone’s guess, but the availability of a whole galaxy of raw materials had led to the controversial ice mining operations on Saturn’s rings and Europa being closed, most of the First System being declared a Humanity Heritage Area and the whole vast expanse being treated with the same cautious diplomacy as Antarctica had been, centuries before.
In truth, though, it wasn’t just the delay which had been rubbing Drift’s nerves, for all that he could feel the weight of Kelsier’s threat around his neck. The other reason his whisky supply had taken such a battering was the last few seconds on Void Station Pundamilia.
Oh, it was probably true enough what he’d told Jenna; if the station enforcers had found out that she’d let off an EMP then they probably would have killed her, and Apirana, and perhaps the rest of them for good measure. They were the only law on a void station, and by the same token Drift had committed no crime any government would recognise by gunning them down first, but Ichabod Drift had always had a fairly hazy approach to laws in any case. That wasn’t what was eating at him.
He’d killed people before, of course: you couldn’t run on the shady side long without getting into fights, and you certainly wouldn’t last as long as he had unless you’d won most of them. And perhaps in the old days, when he’d been flying under a different name, he might have reacted to a problem by shooting first. These days, though . . . Well, the fact was that there was no real certainty anyone would have realised that Jenna had done anything. It wasn’t like young women wandering around with an EMP device were a common occurrence, and under most circumstances he’d have fancied his chances of talking his crew’s way out of ‘misunderstandings’ without needing to res
ort to violence. But that would have taken time, and time was a luxury that Ichabod Drift didn’t have.
Besides, Kelsier’s threats had changed things. He might be keeping the truth from everyone around him, but he was capable of being honest enough with himself to admit that. If keeping his past buried involved shooting a couple of void station thugs when perhaps he might not have technically needed to then that was a price he would pay, but not gladly, and not without a bitter twist in his soul directed at Kelsier and his manipulations.
‘Why haven’t we been challenged yet?’ Jenna asked from her seat at their main terminal as the blue-green orb of Old Earth grew slowly in front of them. Things were still a little brittle between the two of them, but one good outcome from his shooting of the enforcers was that she did at least seem to appreciate how serious he was about this job: her EMP bracelet was under lock and key in his cabin, and she’d raised no further protests about it. He’d wondered about trying to get her to turn out the rest of her possessions just to make doubly sure she wasn’t sitting on anything else potentially disastrous, but had finally decided against it. He still needed her expertise, and no good would be served by alienating her. Once they’d delivered Kelsier’s package, however, he was intending to have a conversation to lay out some new ground rules for her presence on his ship.
In the meantime he’d spent a fair chunk of their journey from the void station cautiously repairing their relationship, when he hadn’t been quietly cursing Nicolas Kelsier or evading questions from Apirana and Rourke about his apparent short temper. Rourke in particular had been concerned at how quickly he’d resorted to lethal force; not because she disagreed with him, but simply because it was out of character. He wasn’t entirely certain he’d managed to convince her with his responses.
