by Mike Brooks
‘We didn’t have time to take a detour if we’re going to make your appointment,’ Jia said, adjusting controls. The Jonah did have flaps to control altitude and inclination, just like any terrestrial aircraft, but Drift couldn’t see how she could hope to glide their stubby boat with any success. ‘We can’t get down without being noticed, so we break our cover as late as possible. Now we look like debris, or hell,’ she shrugged, ‘like a ship that’s lost power. So we head for the biggest storm we can, the place which is going to mess with as many instruments which might be monitoring us as possible, and when we hit it,’ she snapped her fingers, ‘we disappear.’
‘Yeah, because we crash and die!’ Jenna yelled in alarm.
‘Only if my brother doesn’t turn the engines back on when I tell him,’ Jia snapped. ‘Right now we’re not broadcasting anything and we have no drive emissions to track. No one would voluntarily power down and head for a storm system, am I right?’
‘No one with any sense,’ Drift growled.
‘So when we get to the roughest, nastiest bit, we fire the retros to kill our forward momentum, drop like a stone then kick everything back in,’ Jia said matter-of-factly, although Drift couldn’t help but notice how hard she was having to fight the controls. ‘We start broadcasting a new ident, head up coast towards Amsterdam and we look like a domestic craft which just took off. Presto, we’re inside Europan airspace looking like we belong, while anyone who was watching us is still waiting for that piece of debris to kill a whole bunch of people.’ She beamed, white teeth flashing in a tight grin. ‘Damn, I’m good.’
‘You’re insane,’ Drift told her flatly, doublechecking the crash webbing he’d buckled around himself.
‘Insanely good,’ Jia retorted. ‘Oh, here comes the wind. Hold on!’
Sure enough, they were running headlong into the first outriders of the storm and the Jonah was beginning to shake as this new form of turbulence started to jostle it around the skies. Jia began to whisper; at first Drift thought she was swearing under her breath, but as the measured litany continued he realised that she was actually counting down in Mandarin. Beneath and beside them, and now above them, grey fingers of cloud were drawing closer and obscuring their view of the world. A spattering of water on the viewports announced the arrival of rain, although they were flying through it rather than it falling on them, and the speed of their travel sent it streaking back upwards.
‘Aren’t we ready yet?’ Drift asked nervously, checking his instruments again. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust the Changs not to bicker at a critical moment, but . . . well, actually he didn’t, when it came down to it.
‘Sa¯n, Èr, Y ı¯ . . .’ Jia whispered, then hit the comm button again. ‘Hold tight!’
She pressed an innocuous-looking button on the control panel. Something lit up and blazed outside, casting strange new shadows on the viewports, and suddenly an invisible giant had hold of Drift and was trying to pull him clean out of his chair and through the Jonah’s nose cone. There was a clattering sound behind him as some unsecured item rolled across the cockpit and clanged off the edge of a console somewhere. He grunted, and tried to keep the blood in his face by sheer effort of will.
‘Fuuuuuuuu—’
‘Kuai,’ Jia called, one wavering finger on the comm switch again, ‘c ıˇ shí!’
There was a moment of gut-wrenching silence, and then the welcome rumble of the Jonah’s main engine started to reverberate through the hull again. The great forward pressure started to relax; Drift scanned his instruments again and saw their speed was reducing rapidly. However, so was their altitude.
‘Jia?’
‘Nearly there,’ their pilot replied, her face lit in strange blues and red from the control panel beneath in the rain-shrouded darkness of the cockpit. She flicked a switch and one batch of retros ceased firing; the Jonah began to swing around, even as its fall through the clouds became more and more prominent in Drift’s mind.
‘Jia!’
‘And go!’ Jia grinned, killing the other retro and feeding power to the main drive. Now Drift was pushed back in his seat again, although this was a mere nudge compared to the forces he’d been experiencing a few seconds ago. Their descent levelled out into what would have been a gentle downward glide, were they not still in a storm system and being battered from the side.
‘Jenna!’ Jia barked, flicking the lights back on. ‘Give us an ident!’
‘Ready and waiting,’ the slicer replied. Drift looked over at her; she looked a little green, but hadn’t passed out or thrown up, or anything else inconvenient. ‘We are now the Risky Gamble.’
‘I don’t recognise that one,’ he frowned. Jenna grinned at him.
‘I just made it. It seemed appropriate.’
Above them and to starboard, flashing lights indicated search and rescue craft scrambling in the direction of their previous trajectory. Jia looked over her shoulder at him with an expression so smug it could have walked into a job in a stock exchange.
‘Am I good or what?’
OUT OF TIME
The Jonah cruised north-east, loosely hugging the shore of the English Channel on the Continental Coastway. The flightline’s boundaries were marked by floating, flashing beacons – red for port and green for starboard – which constantly transmitted their locations to the craft travelling on it. The flip side was that the buoys in turn were continually monitoring the traffic, keeping track of who joined when and who left where, so Drift was glad all over again that they’d picked up a slicer who could manage a higher-quality ident-job than his own mediocre skills could muster.
‘Why’s it so slow?’ Jenna asked, looking over Drift’s shoulder out of the front viewports.They’d unstrapped themselves from their seats now their descent was over, and the Jonah’s stabilising systems along with Jia’s hands at the controls were preventing the high winds from being much more than a nuisance, despite the Heim drive being deactivated so they were once more fully subject to a planet’s gravity. On their right, the French coast was flashing by in a succession of ports, cranes, rain-lashed skyscrapers and even the occasional stretch of undeveloped beach or flat, green marshland.
‘This is fast compared to most of the continent,’ Drift snorted. ‘The stupid thing is, air travel has got much slower on Old Earth because there’s so many ships and flyers everyone gets in each other’s way now. The flightlines are where you can open it up a bit, but compared to somewhere like the Carmellas where most people are poor, can’t afford flyers and live under the surface anyway . . .’ he shrugged. ‘You’re limited to going fast along the flightline routes, or cutting overland and sticking to the “safe” speeds.’
‘Or ignoring them,’ Jia put in.
‘And getting pulled over by the Justices,’ Drift told her sternly. ‘You want all that fancy flying to be ruined by breaking a speed limit?’
‘Pfft, like they’d catch us,’ the pilot scoffed. She glanced over her shoulder and clearly saw Drift’s expression. ‘Relax, I’m joking.’
‘I’m not sure I believe you,’ Drift told her, honestly enough. He glanced at the chrono and grimaced. ‘We’re still going to be cutting it fine. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but push it as hard as you can get away with.’ He pretended not to see the grin spreading across the reflection of Jia’s face in the front viewport as he got up out of his seat.
‘Where are you going?’ Jia asked him as he tossed his commset to her.
‘I’d better check on the cargo and our fearless warriors,’ Drift replied, easing his neck from side to side. ‘Keep an ear out for anything which sounds like trouble until I get back.’ In all honesty he suspected there was nothing which would need doing that Rourke had not already done, but he was already getting the restless feeling which signalled a job on the shady side was approaching completion.
Sure enough, his business partner looked up briefly from her stripped-down rifle as he walked into the cargo bay, then back down at the magazine in her hand. ‘What a
re you doing here?’
‘And what the hell is Jia playing at?’ Micah demanded angrily. ‘A. nearly threw up on me!’
‘Did not,’ the big man protested, slapping his gut. ‘Gonna take more than a little up and down to upset this Maori’s puku.’
‘I did tell you she’d lost her mind,’ Drift replied mildly. He looked around. ‘Cargo’s okay, I hope?’
‘Maglocks held fine,’ Rourke confirmed. ‘Are we going to be on time?’
‘Might still be touch and go,’ Drift acknowledged, ‘but there’s no help for that now except to hope Jia can step on it a bit without getting us flagged down.’ He sighed, and scratched at the skin around his right eye. ‘The way I read this, we should be safe until the moment we open those doors. That’s when we’ll get a double-cross, if one’s coming.’
‘These are pretty sturdy,’ Micah commented, kicking one of the metal crates to demonstrate. ‘Reckon they’ll stop most bullets. Could be that they’re thinking to open up, take us out and the cargo should survive?’
Rourke nodded slowly. ‘Could be the way of it. I’d still be surprised to see a gun squad waiting in a goddamn conference centre loading bay, though.’
‘And why pay us the hundred kay up front?’ Apirana put in. ‘We could have spent it all, for all they know.’
‘Then we’d probably have spent a lot of it on goods,’ Drift pointed out,‘there’s only so much whisky and women a crew can go through when travelling from Carmella to Old Earth on this kind of deadline. Plus if they take us out they’ll get the Jonah, and they’d be figuring on finding the access codes which would get them into the Keiko, too. That’s a whole new ship to sell on. No, they could get their goods transported for them and still make a profit, if they could pull it off.’
‘But still,’ Rourke repeated, ‘a gun squad?’ She shook her head. ‘A lot of other places, certainly. Not in a conference centre in Amsterdam in the middle of the day.’
Drift shrugged. ‘Stranger things have happened.’
‘Name one.’
‘You slept with that guy with the moustache, somebody Moutinho . . .?’
‘Shut up,’ Rourke advised, slapping the magazine into her rifle pointedly. She looked over at Apirana, who had an amused grin on his face. ‘And you.’
‘I din’t say anything.’
‘You didn’t need to.’ She glared at Drift. ‘Go back to the cockpit and listen to the radio, dickface.’
‘Ma’am,’ Drift replied, bowing low to hide the smile he could feel creeping across his face. He turned away, but behind him he heard Micah’s voice, tinged with curiosity.
‘Who was—?’
‘Shut up.’
Drift didn’t go straight back to the cockpit; instead he headed aft and poked his head into the engine room, where Kuai was intently studying his holoreader. At first Drift had thought Kuai was simply very dutiful at studying his manuals, but then he’d seen over the engineer’s shoulder once and realised that he was actually engrossed in the adventures of anthropomorphic animated ponies.
‘Everything okay?’ he asked out of habit, although he knew that if it hadn’t been then Kuai would be out of his seat and fixing it. Jia’s brother was far too paranoid about her tendency to abuse the engines to leave anything in poor repair, and far too interested in being able to breathe properly to neglect the care of the life support.
‘We’re good,’ Kuai replied, looking up. ‘What’s my idiot sister been doing this time?’
‘Believe it or not, it was actually a pretty good call on her part,’ Drift told him. Kuai snorted and lowered his eyes to his screen again, shaking his head.
‘You know she’s going to kill us all one day, don’t you?’
‘So why are you still here?’ Drift asked, leaning against the bulkhead. ‘You’re a good engineer, Kuai. Even if your sister’s the totally irresponsible thrusterhead you think she is, you could go get a job on some respectable shipping firm somewhere, make your parents proud.’ And while it would be a shame to lose you, I think Jia might be a little less rash if she didn’t have you around to wind up with it . . . he added silently.
Kuai looked up at him again. ‘You got any family?’ Drift shook his head. ‘None left that I know about.’
Kuai nodded, but didn’t press. ‘It would kill my parents if anything happened to Jia,’ he said instead, shrugging, ‘so I try to keep her out of trouble as much as possible.’
‘Good luck with that,’ Drift snorted. The floor tilted slightly, as if on cue, and the rumble of the engines took on a slightly more urgent note. ‘Yeah, I’d better go.’
‘Have fun,’ Kuai said dryly, already studying his reader again. Drift jogged back up to the cockpit, where instead of a cloud-darkened sky he found that they’d emerged into sunshine.
‘Clear of the storm?’ he asked, receiving his commset back from Jenna and settling it into his right ear.
‘Still got high winds, but we’ve outrun the clouds now,’ Jia reported. ‘Should be clear running into Amsterdam from here, according to the weather scan. I’m getting us there as fast as I can, but it’s still going to be close.’
Drift sat at his terminal and scanned the frequencies, searching for any sign that they’d attracted unwanted attention. The closer they got to their destination the more concerned he was becoming about the possible outcomes. There was obviously something in those crates Kelsier wanted delivered, and couldn’t deliver himself at that: had he simply been looking to steal their ship then the landing bay doors of the Gewitterwolke wouldn’t have let them out again. The same went for this being some sort of revenge plot for Drift dropping off the radar so thoroughly, as the Laughing Man could have saved an awful lot of time by pulling his trigger in the bar on Carmella II and no one in there would have blinked. And yet . . .
Many years ago, Drift might have told himself he was being paranoid. These days he was more inclined to listen to the paranoia until it had proved unjustified. Listen to it, but not be ruled by it; a lot of the people the crew of the Keiko did business with were only intermittently trustworthy, so you just had to be a good judge of timing.
But let’s not forget that we’re almost certainly smuggling in something which will get us in trouble if we’re caught, he added to himself, so there doesn’t need to be a double-cross for this to go bad. Still, the emergency frequencies had been empty of anything except the usual chatter, and even the rescue craft behind them were starting to call off their scrambled search in the teeth of the storm. To all intents and purposes, the Risky Gamble was just another flyer on the Continental Coastway.
That didn’t prevent him from keeping the commset on and scanning channels until they reached Amsterdam, of course.
‘We’ve just passed Rotterdam!’ Jia called eventually. Drift looked at the chrono and winced.
‘We’ve got one minute.’
‘Then we’re going to be late,’ Jia told him flatly. ‘We’re coming up on the Amsterdam exit any second, but we’re going to have to go across town.’ She keyed the comm. ‘Stand by for braking, folks.’
The retros flared as the Jonah swerved out of the Coastway’s boundaries, and Drift had to grab on to his terminal to prevent himself from being thrown out of his chair at the sudden deceleration. He bit back an angry comment – she had warned everyone, albeit only a second beforehand – and turned to Jenna. The slicer had apparently either predicted the move or simply distrusted Jia’s flying more than he did, as she’d refastened her crash webbing.
‘Can you see anything on the feeds which suggests we’re walking into something?’ he asked her. The chatter in his ear was still the usual mix of inane and desperate, but none of it seemed at all relevant to them. A fire somewhere, vehicles responding . . . a groundcar crash somewhere else, one person dead . . . a dwelling burglary somewhere he wasn’t even going to try to pronounce, and he was glad all over again that English had won out as the official language of the Europan Commonwealth: he’d spent a bored week in transit once try
ing to learn Dutch from Micah and had found it largely impenetrable, although that was possibly partly due to the qualities of the ‘teacher’.
‘Nothing,’ Jenna replied, shaking her head as her hands skated over her terminal. ‘The conference isn’t really making the news, there doesn’t seem to be any particularly heightened police presence . . .’ She looked back up at him. ‘It looks clear.’
Drift grimaced. ‘Never say that.’
‘I just said it looks clear, not that it is clear—’
‘Even so,’ he cut her off, waving a hand, ‘this is not a ship where we ever say something “looks clear”. Do I make myself . . . um, clear? It’s bad luck.’
‘And you laughed at my pilot hat . . .’ Jia muttered. Drift ignored her and turned back to his own terminal. The chrono in the corner ticked over to the next minute and stared at him accusingly as the ball of nervous tension which had been building in his chest sank abruptly through the pit of his stomach. He had a sudden impulse to yell at Jia to hit the afterburners and to hell with the flightlanes, but that would simply pull down a response from the authorities and Kelsier’s factors, whoever they were, would doubtless melt away even if the Jonah could get to the rendezvous before it was flagged down.
Something flickered on his terminal. He frowned at it and pulled it up: a new broadcast signal had started up from nowhere. The read-out showed that it wasn’t an audio transmission. It read a little like the weak Spine signals they’d been passing through ever since coming off the flightline and into populated areas, but stronger, and given the timing he was in no mood to take chances. ‘Jenna. You getting this?’
‘Hmm?’ She looked up at him and he slid the read-out across to her terminal. She frowned, redblonde strands falling across her face and being absent-mindedly tucked back as she studied it. ‘That’s odd. Gimme a second.’
‘You’ve only got seconds,’ Jia called over her shoulder, ‘we’re a few blocks away now.’ She jinked slightly and swore at someone unseen who’d presumably been, however briefly, where she’d wanted to fly.
