Dark Run

by Mike Brooks

  Drift scanned the room. No help was forthcoming. His crew had been forged together into a working unit by necessity and, yes, a certain camaraderie he’d deliberately nurtured, an ‘us against the galaxy’ mentality which had found fertile soil in the souls of this particular group of second-chancers. It was hard to believe, for a moment, that they’d turn on him like this.

  At least, until he realised that right at this moment, he wasn’t part of ‘us’ anymore.

  ‘I’m suddenly wondering exactly who you are, Tamara,’ he said darkly. ‘You can identify a nuclear bomb just by looking at it; how many people can do that?’

  ‘Don’t you dare try to make this about me,’ she warned, gun still steady, but she was hiding something. He could practically taste it.

  ‘What other mysterious talents do you have that we never knew about?’ he demanded, warming to his theme. ‘How many times have we nearly died because you didn’t tell us something you knew—’

  ‘GIVE ME HIS NAME!’ Rourke roared.

  The voice which answered her belonged to Jenna.

  ‘Nicolas Kelsier.’

  Drift blinked in shock. Then, as one with the rest of the room, his gaze turned towards their young slicer.

  ANCIENT HISTORY

  Jenna faced their stares awkwardly, abruptly aware both of how tempting the open canteen door looked and exactly how impossible it would be to reach with the rest of the crew in the way. Rourke was studying her as though she were some sort of alien life form. Apirana’s face radiated a mixture of surprise and distrust, and Drift’s . . .

  Ichabod Drift looked absolutely stunned.

  ‘Who the hell is that?’ Kuai asked the room. Rourke raised an eyebrow at Jenna.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I don’t know who it is,’ Jenna clarified hastily. She looked at Drift. ‘You remember when you told me to stop slicing the Gewitterwolke’s ident?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Well, you were sort of too slow,’ Jenna admitted. ‘I’d already seen that it was actually the Langeschatten, and it was registered to someone called Nicolas Kelsier.’

  Rourke looked back at Drift, who’d apparently been too stunned to move out of the line of fire of her palmgun when she was distracted. ‘Well, Ichabod? We have the name now, and I can see from your face that it’s the right one.’

  Drift hesitated.

  ‘There’s a terminal linked to Old Earth’s Spine in the cockpit,’ Rourke said dangerously. ‘I could put this bullet through your brain right now, then walk up there and find out for myself.’

  Micah coughed slightly, and raised a hand. ‘Nicolas Kelsier used to be ETRA Minister in the Europan Commonwealth.’ Seeing their blank faces, he elaborated. ‘The Extra-Terrestrial Resource Acquisition department. As in, the ones who sent me out to shoot people to stop them from taking anything they thought belonged to them.’

  ‘Fine,’ Drift said, his voice suddenly tired. Jenna frowned; the showy, charismatic ship’s captain seemed to fade a little, and she was abruptly struck by the hollowness of his cheeks and the lines around his eyes, especially the natural left one. He looked older, and not a little hard, as he eyed Rourke belligerently. ‘I’m getting a drink. You want to shoot me in the head, do it. Otherwise, put the gun away and wait, and I’ll tell you what you want to know.’

  ‘Be quick,’ Rourke told him. They watched Drift throw some brown powder into a mug, add steaming water to it and then pour in a generous slug of whisky from his hip flask.

  ‘I’m waiting.’ Rourke had her hands on her hips and an expression of impatience on her face.

  ‘Micah’s told you that Nicolas Kelsier was the ETRA Minister for the Europan Commonwealth,’ Drift said heavily, taking a gulp of his coffee. ‘About twenty years ago the EC was in a state of unofficial warfare with the Federation of African States over a couple of disputed systems. They didn’t start deploying the Frontier Defence Unit until later,’ he continued, with a nod at Micah, ‘so at this point it was all diplomatic posturing and bullshit about “peaceful solutions” while behind the scenes, both sides made it as difficult for the other as they could in the hope that the other one would give up and get out.’

  ‘God, I love politics,’ Micah snorted.

  ‘One of the main tactics the Europans started using was hiring privateers,’ Drift continued, looking into his coffee. ‘Private citizens offered commission to act as pirates against the merchant craft of a certain nation. Some of your take went to the Europans, but in exchange for that you had protection: denial of your activities, denial of your existence, refusal to extradite and so on, so long as you only hit the targets ETRA picked out. If you got indiscriminate then you were a liability; more than one privateer ended up full-blown pirate because they took an opportunity to hit the wrong ship from the wrong government.’

  ‘The USNA did the same thing at one point,’ Rourke nodded. ‘So what are you saying, you were a privateer for the EC? Why the EC?’

  ‘I’d taken on with a captain called Swift, out of Telamon,’ Drift said, ‘but after we got underway we found out he was a bastard of the first water. There was a girl who’d signed on at the same time as me, and Swift took a fancy to her. We were running at sublight again and four days out of New Keswick when Swift got impatient and actually made a grab for her in the canteen. She’d ignored everything else, but as soon as he laid a hand on her she swung for him: damn good punch too, laid the bastard clean out.’ He gave a humourless laugh. ‘Of course, that didn’t go down well with the first mate, who was Swift’s crony and even nastier than his captain. He went for her in a flash with a carving knife.’ Drift placed one finger almost tenderly against his ribs. ‘Caught her right here with the point.’

  ‘So, me and Tommy Hernandez and Ginger Ell and old Capshaw the navigator rushed him. Swift tried to save him, so we took him down too. We . . . weren’t gentle.’ He grimaced. ‘Two minutes later and both of the officers were dead, but she was bleeding out as well. The ship’s medical facilities were basic, and there wasn’t a lot we could do about a knife through the heart. We flushed the two bastards out into the void but kept her with us, hoping to give her a proper burial.’

  ‘Of course, we weren’t thinking clearly. Not that it would have mattered if we had been; Swift was running a legal shipping business for all that he was an abusive shit, and we had no slicer on board. So we made port on a Europan planet in a ship registered to a dead man, with the captain and first mate absent and another dead body on board. We were immediately arrested as mutineers and suspected murderers, and were expecting to get slung into prison.

  ‘And then we got a better offer.’

  ‘From Kelsier?’ Rourke asked. Drift nodded.

  ‘This old guy came to see us while we sat there in handcuffs. Two military troopers with him. Introduced himself, nice as you like; Nicolas Kelsier, ETRA Minister for the Europan Commonwealth.“Happened to be in the area”, which since it was one stop over from a contested system I guess meant he was checking out the lay of the land. Said we could either serve a joint sentence for mutiny and triple murder – they were pinning all three deaths on us, you see – or we could work for him as privateers. We would attack ships from the FAS as designated by his department in exchange for yadda yadda yadda, you get the idea.’ He shrugged. ‘I’d just turned twenty. I could look forward to most of my life in prison, or I could stay flying and comparatively free. I took the second option. So did the others.

  ‘The Europans were thorough: they took geneprints of us all, with promises that if we broke the deal we’d be hunted down and dragged back to serve our sentences, and our details would be forwarded to all other governments as escaped murder suspects. Whether they’d have followed through or not, I don’t know, but we didn’t chance it. I was nominated as captain, we took on some new hands who weren’t averse to the idea of some violence, and . . . off we went.’

  ‘Off you went?’ Kuai said, looking a little sick. ‘Off to kill people? Just like that?’


  ‘No!’ Drift snapped, eyes flashing, ‘Our brief was to steal resources. You don’t need to kill people for that. One good hit to the Alcubierre ring and a ship can’t make a jump away from you. Usually we’d get them to launch a shuttle with the cargo on board which we’d pick up, then let them go on their way. A couple made a fight of it, of course, but once crews realised they’d be left alive if they handed over their cargos . . .’ He tailed off, looking uncomfortable.

  ‘There’s only a couple of pirates who had that rep,’ Rourke said, picking up on what Drift had apparently unintentionally revealed. She was studying him intently, dark eyes fixed on his face. ‘What name did you fly under?’

  Drift looked back at her, and Jenna saw what looked like resignation settle over his features. ‘The ship I took from Captain Swift was called the Thirty-Six Degrees.’

  Jenna felt her eyes widening. But that meant . . .

  ‘And your name?’ Rourke demanded, although she must have already known.

  Drift folded his arms and stared at her defiantly. ‘I took the name Gabriel Drake.’

  ‘Bullshit!’ Jia erupted. She pointed a quivering finger at Drift. ‘You are not Gabriel Drake! Drake’s dead! The FAS killed him and his crew and captured the Thirty-Six Degrees in the Ngwena System ten years ago!’

  ‘They think they did,’ Drift replied coldly, ‘but they never had a description or geneprint of me. I escaped.’

  ‘Except that the FAS never killed them,’ Rourke said quietly. ‘The Thirty-Six Degrees was found in orbit in an ice belt around Ngwena Prime, all hands suffocated due to a catastrophic air leak. Everything else is just FAS propaganda.’

  ‘And how would you know that?’ Drift asked, his voice no louder than hers. The Captain and his business partner stared at each other across the room for a couple of seconds, eyes searching each other’s faces. Then Rourke shrugged, an almost mocking twitch of her shoulders.

  ‘You’re not the only one with contacts, Ichabod. Their story’s a lie. Do you want to tell us what actually happened?’

  Jenna saw Drift’s jaw clench, and for a terrifying moment she thought he was going to launch himself at Rourke. ‘How do you know it’s a lie, Tamara?’

  ‘The FAS don’t guard their secrets as well as they should, and I had a reason to go looking,’ Rourke replied sharply. Her palmgun was visible again, although she wasn’t directly pointing it at Drift yet. ‘What happened off Ngwena Prime, Ichabod?’

  ‘Damn it Tamara, I’ve told you what you wanted to know!’ Drift yelled, pushing away from the counter and taking a step towards her. Rourke brought the gun up instantly to point at his face: Drift stopped moving, but didn’t stop shouting. ‘Kelsier saved me from prison but kept it over my head as a threat to make me commit more crimes! Then I thought I’d got away from him, but he found me again on Carmella and threatened to go public if I didn’t take this job! I’d have been arrested, everyone else probably would have too, and the Keiko would have been confiscated!’

  ‘So you were trying to protect us?’ The note of sarcasm in Rourke’s voice was strong.

  ‘You, me, all of us!’ Drift protested. ‘Is that so hard to believe?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Rourke said softly. ‘Tell me how your last crew died, Ichabod.’

  Drift glared at her, jaw working as he chewed the inside of his cheek.

  ‘Now!’ Rourke snapped, gesturing with her gun. ‘I’m not giving you time to think up a cover story! I’ve read the file: the FAS used a merchantman as bait for Gabriel Drake then sprung a trap with two frigates which crippled the Thirty-Six Degrees’ Alcubierre drive. It limped off and hid in the rings of Ngwena Prime, but by the time they tracked it down everyone on board had suffocated. Tell me what happened, or—’

  ‘I didn’t want to die!’ Drift roared. ‘That’s what happened!’ Jenna shrank back involuntarily from the fury in the Captain’s face, but Rourke stood firm and her gun didn’t waver.

  ‘If the FAS found us, we were dead,’ Drift continued, the words tumbling out fast and harsh, ‘and if they didn’t we were still dead, because we couldn’t make port in that system without being caught, couldn’t jump anywhere else, and we would run out of air, water and food.’ His face had a hunted look, and for a moment Jenna pictured what it must be like to be stranded in the stars waiting for the end. ‘So I grabbed an escape pod and spent three weeks in it on my own, nearly going mad while I waited to see if the frigates would notice me and shoot me down, and whether I’d calculated right and I’d intersect the orbit of a little shithole of a moon called Ngwena III.’

  ‘What, and your crew just let you go?’ Jia scoffed.

  ‘My crew by that point were a bunch of violent bastards who’d signed on to get rich, not because some Nordic bastard had blackmailed them,’ Drift spat. ‘They blamed me for things going wrong, and I didn’t have to be a genius to see what was happening. When I heard them talking about trying to buy their way free by handing me over to the FAS, that was it.’ He grimaced. When he spoke again, every word seemed to carry the weight of a bullet.

  ‘So that night, when it was my watch, I put on a sealed suit, overrode the safety mechanisms and opened the airlocks.’

  ‘You did what?’ Apirana rumbled dangerously. Jenna stole a glance at him and saw his huge fingers starting to curl into fists. Drift didn’t seem to have noticed; his gaze was locked with that of Tamara Rourke.

  ‘And did they all deserve that, Ichabod?’ Rourke asked softly. ‘Were they all looking to betray you? Every last one of them?’

  Drift’s lip curled, but his voice was ragged. ‘You know I don’t have an answer for that, Tamara. And don’t think I haven’t asked myself the same question, every night for years.’

  Jenna just stared at him. Ichabod Drift, the Captain, the man with the ready smile and a lazy quip, the man who’d taken her on with no questions asked, was one of the most notorious pirates in the skies. A sudden memory hit her, almost dizzying in its intensity: she was still a child, sitting eating dinner with her parents and her brother, and the newsfeed was on. The announcer’s voice was speaking in clipped, measured tones about an FAS transport ship attacked by Gabriel Drake, the crew killed. Her father looking up from his meal and declaring that ‘someone should do something about that monster’ and Jenna knew, even at that age, that the someone was never going to be him. Her father lived in a world where ‘someone’ was always ‘someone else’.

  Of course, Drift had said he didn’t kill the crews. Maybe that had been another bit of FAS propaganda, which the USNA broadcasts had repeated unquestioned? No, her mind whispered to her, he never said he didn’t kill the crews. He said he didn’t need to . . . and he’s just admitted to killing all his old crew. Every single one of them.

  Rourke was just staring at Drift, her face unreadable. Drift held her gaze, defiance in his eyes. The rest of the crew simply stood hushed, unwilling to move or make a noise which might shatter the delicate tension in the air.

  Except for one.

  ‘E kai nga tutae me e mate! Upoko kohua!’

  Apirana shouldered forwards, face contorted with rage and, before anyone could react, had reached one huge hand out to clamp it around Drift’s neck.

  SOMEONE SHOULD DO SOMETHING

  Drift’s hands flew up reflexively but uselessly as he was slammed back against the galley’s worktop: the Maori’s wrist was as thick around as his Captain’s biceps, and beneath the fat layered over his frame Apirana had slabs of iron-hard muscle and tendons you could anchor a spaceship with. Jenna heard a wheeze as the Captain tried to speak, but Apirana’s fingers were squeezing off his air.

  ‘A.!’ Rourke snapped, and suddenly the one-shot was aimed at him. ‘Let him go! We might need him to—’

  She never got to finish the sentence. Apirana’s tattooed face snapped towards her and his other hand flew out with shocking speed, seizing her wrist and twisting it viciously. Rourke cried out in pain and the gun clattered to the floor, which caused the Chang siblings to dan
ce aside, presumably out of worry about it going off and shooting one of them in the foot. The huge Maori then wrenched Rourke effortlessly towards him, releasing her wrist at the last moment and throwing his arm up to clamp around her neck. Crushed against his ribcage, Rourke tried to punch him in the back but he didn’t so much as grunt.

  ‘You fucking bastard!’ Apirana roared at Drift, having switched back into English. Ignoring Rourke except to almost casually restrain her with one arm, he wrenched the Captain bodily across the room and onto the galley’s table, pinning him there by the throat. ‘All this fucking time I’ve been working for you!’

  Jenna looked around desperately as the Maori continued to rant and Drift’s face grew redder and redder, despite the best efforts of his clutching fingers on Apirana’s wrist. The Changs had backed away as far as they could, while Micah had reached down to pick Rourke’s one-shot up but then casually pocketed it and stood back again with an unconcerned air. None of them looked like they were going to jump in and stop what was rapidly progressing towards murder.

  Someone should do something. The words echoed in her head, one of any number of times she’d heard her father say them, each time with the same emptiness of meaning. It had always been the verbal equivalent of a shrug: once voiced, the responsibility had been passed elsewhere.

  She gritted her teeth and stepped forwards.‘ Apirana Wahawaha!’

  The big man’s face turned to her, twisted in anger and lips flecked with spittle from the force of his bellowing. His eyes practically bulged from their sockets, white and furious, framed by the dark lines of tattoos which no longer looked like body art but instead turned his features into something savage and primal. Jenna felt like she was staring down the throat of a volcano or at an onrushing tsunami; a force of nature untameable and unchallengeable, by which mere humans like her would be crushed and thrown aside.