Dark Run

by Mike Brooks

  ‘And Jia respects your authority so much,’ Rourke snorted.

  Drift shrugged. ‘She always actually ends up doing what I’ve told her to do, she just gives me a heart attack in the process.’ He waved a hand. ‘Beside the point. If I tell a crew member to do something then they need to do it there and then without looking to someone else for approval, because sometimes that moment of hesitation could kill us. So if you want a part of coming to take Kelsier down, you need to respect that.’

  Rourke’s eyes searched his face, which he deliberately kept as blank as possible. Finally, she nodded. ‘Very well. I want a crack at this man. But I won’t be accepting vague answers in the future, Ichabod: trust is earned.’

  ‘I agree completely,’ he beamed. ‘How did you know it was a nuclear bomb?’

  Rourke’s eyebrows lowered sharply. ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘You knew it was a bomb,’ Drift continued. ‘You didn’t have to study it, take any readings from it . . . you just looked at it and went “Shit, nuke”.’ He shrugged. ‘I’d always pegged your history as some sort of bodyguard, something like that. But that’s not just the sort of knowledge you pick up. You know my dirty history now, so it’s your turn. Where were you, who were you, before you became Tamara Rourke and stepped onto the deck of the Jonah for the first time?’

  She hesitated.

  ‘This is not an optional answer,’ Drift added, in the most matter-of-fact tone he could muster. ‘You and I make a damn good team, but I still own this boat. So either you tell me some feasible reason why you know what you know and then I give you your gun back, or you walk off right now.’ He crossed his arms. ‘What’s it gonna be?’

  The silence stretched between them. Rourke didn’t move, or speak, but simply looked at him. He wanted to take the words back, because he’d got so used to having her at his side for backup, for advice, for the angle he hadn’t considered, that he didn’t want to take the chance she’d turn on her heel and leave without a word . . . but he could only be pushed so far. Even now, a small part of him he thought he’d left behind for good in the Ngwena System was whispering, She’s pulled a gun on you, what if she pulls the trigger next time? Drive her away and then shoot her in the back as she leaves. It’s the only way to be sure she won’t sell you out . . .

  He fought it down. Trust is earned.

  Finally, Rourke sighed. Something in her face seemed to soften momentarily, and Drift braced himself. Anything which had taken that much thought was unlikely to result in an answer as simple as ‘I took a summer-school course in nuclear physics’.

  She started to hold up a hand, then hesitated. ‘Tamara Rourke’s the name my mother gave me, but as for what I was . . . just remember that you did say “before”.’

  Drift nodded.

  She raised her left hand, palm outwards to face him. It didn’t look remarkable: paler than the rest of her skin, marked by the calluses of someone familiar with manual labour.

  Then, suddenly, something flashed into view, seeming to erupt from the lines of her palm. His first thought was An electat.

  His second thought, as he recognised the image, was Oh, shit.

  FAVOURS

  ‘Why would you, of all people, want to know how to find Nicolas Kelsier?’ Alexander Cruz had asked him. Well, after various curses and repeated assertions that he’d never wanted to see Drift again, anyway. ‘The old man was fired for corruption years ago.’

  ‘Help me out here and I’ll owe you a favour,’ Drift had told him. A snort had demonstrated what the portmaster thought of that. ‘I know you, Alex. Your business here isn’t going to be as legal as you pretend. Are you seriously telling me you’ll never have any use for a favour you can call in from a crew like mine?’

  Cruz had looked at him for nearly a full minute. Then he’d scribbled a name and address on a piece of paper and handed it over. ‘If I hear a whisper that you told anyone I gave you this, your shuttle won’t be leaving this spaceport.’

  Drift had looked at it with a frown. ‘Is this some sort of joke?’

  ‘Best source of off-Spine information on the continent,’ Cruz had told him with every sign of seriousness. ‘You’re lucky she’s on this coast. I can’t say what her price will be, though; rumour is her charges can be a bit . . . esoteric. By the way, do you remember Maiha?’

  Images had flashed through Drift’s head, a sensory hit straight from the hindbrain: long, straight black hair tangled in his hands, beads of salty sweat on golden skin, deft fingers plucking at his belt buckle, a gentle weight pressing his wrists into soft pillows belonging to the man in front of him. He’d forced himself to keep a straight face. ‘Yeah, I think so.’

  ‘As far as I know, she’s some sort of chief aide there now,’ Cruz had continued, with no sign that he had any idea what his old first mate had been up to on the rare occasions when the Thirty-Six Degrees and the Dead Man’s Hand had been in port together. ‘That might help you. Or hinder you, I don’t know. Don’t much care, either.’

  And so it was that Drift, Micah and Apirana had travelled overland up the coast from Atlantic City on the train. It was a snub-nosed bullet affair riding a magnetic monorail which sailed high above the old streets of New Jersey and curved in long, graceful arcs between the towering skyscrapers. The buildings’ sides were awash with light and colour which Drift knew from experience would be advertising holos trying to sell everything from the latest protein bars to sleek urban flyers, but they were for the locals only: at the speed the train was going the holos were little more than blurs that left a fleeting, contextless impression on the retina. Not that he would have been paying much attention anyway; the rest of his crew had got a few hours of sleep but he’d barely managed any after hammering out an alarmingly loose plan with Rourke, and his eyes felt like they were made of dust.

  The line swung west, hugging the shore of Lower Bay, then turned back on itself to skirt the lower edge of the mess of starports and industrial wasteland which was Staten Island. Their carriage passed through clouds of refinery smoke and shimmering fuel haze, then burst out into the clearer air over the Narrows. Drift activated the magnifying window to look north and see Liberty Island, where the monument nicknamed the Plastic of Liberty stood tall on its pedestal. The original had been melted down centuries ago when the demand for copper in circuits and wires had become almost untenable and before large reserves had been secured elsewhere in the galaxy.

  The train slowed to a final halt on the south shore of Brooklyn. Drift secured his rebreather mask in place as a precaution against the polluted air which sometimes washed over the city, nicknamed ‘Staten smog’ after its usual origin, and forced a somewhat reluctant sliding door aside to step out onto the platform with Micah and Apirana in tow. They found themselves on a steel grid platform some fifty feet above the ground, wire mesh surrounding them on all sides with an enclosed staircase down to street level at one end and a somewhat ramshackle-looking elevator at the other. The train pulled away and waist-height barriers automatically swung down across the holes in the mesh which lined up with the train’s doors, the general notion being that if you were stupid enough to fall out of an obstructed hole fifty feet above the ground then you deserved what you got.

  They took a second to inspect the elevator and then headed for the stairs by unspoken agreement. It was early March and there were mounds of dirty slurry at the side of the streets, the remnants of the most recent snowfall. The air was bitterly cold despite the amount of heat generated by Old New York’s sheer presence, and Drift was glad he’d raided the Jonah’s clothing lockers for a thermojacket which he wore zipped up over his armavest. Micah had dug out his old combat fatigues, a temperatureregulating outfit effective against extremes of climate up to fifty degrees Celsius either side of freezing. With the regimental patches ripped off and his hair in thin dreadlocks instead of a military crew cut, the former FDU soldier looked like anyone else who’d picked up a bargain at an army surplus store, although the heavy automatic pistol hols
tered at his hip hinted at his violent past. Apirana, meanwhile, had disdained any form of thermal clothing and was simply wearing a hooded top over his utilitarian jumpsuit. With his hood up and rebreather mask on, his tattoos were mainly hidden and he was only conspicuous for his size, and for once Drift didn’t feel like he was walking around next to a flashing beacon.

  There was a thrumming buzz overhead and they looked up to see a police flyer, decked out in white and blue with reflective chevrons, its twin rotor blades blurring in the centre of each stubby wing. One or two of the locals shrank back into the shadows cast by the towering hab blocks, five or six storeys of concrete and plastic, but most kept on as normal. This wasn’t Manhattan, where the rich and well-todo lived and worked behind a twenty-foot wall that encircled the island to keep out swimmers, and where the police were prominent and vigilant. As New York had expanded westwards and southwards, Brooklyn and Queens had been abandoned like a waste product with the residents largely left to their own devices, be that for good or ill. It would take something more akin to a riot for the NYPD to set foot on the ground here, which Drift found both comforting and worrying in almost equal measure.

  The flyer banked away west, heading towards Jamaica Bay, and Drift took a moment to assess the state of the street once its shadow had gone. The locals who’d ducked away reappeared, but no one seemed to be taking too much of an interest in the trio of newcomers. He looked up at a street sign barely visible past a bird’s nest of wires, where the residents had decided to take an enterprising approach to getting power by simply tapping the existing supply directly, and pointed ahead of them. ‘The nearest metro’s this way.’

  Old New York’s subway system was dilapidated and suffered from the sort of issues you’d expect in an often-subterranean transport system that had been in near-constant use for centuries, but it still more or less ran. It was certainly the best way to get into the heart of Old New York from the southern edge of Brooklyn, but when they disembarked from their rattling carriage at Tremont Avenue they didn’t take the stairs up to the street. Instead they took a left at the Presbyterian Mission which occupied one corner, exchanged too-casual glances with two men lurking just past it whom Drift was convinced were going to try to sell them something narcotic until they caught a glare from a now de-masked Apirana, and headed for an elevator which only went downwards.

  The moons of Carmella were far from the only places in the galaxy where humanity had started to dig in search of living space, although in the cities on Old Earth – even the badly polluted inner areas – it wasn’t for fear of an unbreathable atmosphere so much as crippling ground rent costs. The newer tunnels, plazas and living spaces under the sprawling metropolis of ONYC were known as The Warrens, and demonstrated the usual disparity of good supply networks and plentiful transport links in the Uppers to the isolation and deprivation of the Lowers.

  The elevator doors opened onto Level 17 of the Lower North Warrens and revealed a tunnel which reeked of damp, stale air, boasting intermittent lighting and, given how far they were beneath the water table, a slightly worrying leak in the ceiling.

  ‘Looks homely,’ Apirana rumbled quietly. Drift had found that he was still a little apprehensive about any sudden movements and was aware of Apirana’s size in a way he hadn’t been in years, despite the almost painful care the big Maori was taking not to appear threatening. Still, he’d given his terms for Apirana’s continued presence on the Keiko’s crew and Apirana had accepted them, so he felt that he owed it to the big man to treat him accordingly unless and until Apirana broke those terms.

  ‘You’re sure this is the right place?’ Micah asked. The Dutch mercenary hadn’t been keen on this jaunt but Drift had talked him into it, partially so he didn’t have to be alone with Apirana but mainly because right at this moment Drift didn’t fully trust him not to sneak out of Star’s End and find some way of selling them all out for a profit.

  ‘So Alex told me,’ Drift replied, aware once more of exactly how much trust he was placing in a man who he knew had never liked him and who currently saw him as a potentially dangerous liability. ‘Let’s see what we can find.’

  As it turned out, their destination was hardly elusive. Most of the doors were boarded over, and the ones which weren’t were gaping black holes leading into cramped habs with not even a stick of furniture remaining. The central plaza, however, was another matter.

  ‘The hell is this?’ Apirana muttered as they caught sight of an entrance. The hollow silence of the tunnels was replaced with an indistinct mutter of noise through the steel-framed glass doors, the bass thud of music intermingling with the sound of many, many voices, and lights which cast long shadows from within.

  ‘The way I heard it, the lady we need to speak to basically moved in and set up shop here,’ Drift explained. ‘Took over the businesses, took over the black market, took over everything. Everywhere below Level 10 in the North Warrens is hers, but she bought most of it legally and doesn’t cause any major problems so the Justices leave her be.’

  ‘And someone all the way down here is the best off-Spine source in North America, and can tell us where Nicolas Kelsier is?’ Micah said. ‘That takes some believing.’

  ‘She’s clearly got connections,’ Drift shrugged, ‘and rumour is that she often takes payment for information in information. What goes around comes around, I guess.’ He worked his shoulders, adjusted the scarf he’d tied around his neck to hide the bruises left by Apirana’s fingers, and marched up to the doors.

  They opened easily with a push, affording him a view into what had once been the communal space of North-east Level 17. In truth, it still was, but the promenades and shopping booths had been remodelled into a more organic, chaotic space. There were still businesses, but hammocks swung from above their heads, the air conditioning whined as it sucked in smoke from firepits built into the floor, and cheers and jeers sounded from around what looked like a fighting cage.

  And above it all, sitting in a heavily upholstered chair on a platform held aloft by the massive hydraulic arm of what had at one point been a maintenance vehicle, was Nana Bastard.

  Drift closed his natural left eye and dialled up the zoom on his mechanical. Nana Bastard looked to be in her seventies, age-repellent drugs notwithstanding, and had two fat braids of silvery hair twisting down from either side of her head. She was approaching plump, her features were wrinkled and leathery, and something about the shape of them combined with the beadwork and fringes on her clothes suggested she might have some First Nations blood in her somewhere. What struck Drift instantly, though, were her eyes: dark and sharp, with no visible white from this distance, they reminded him of a predatory bird’s as they darted here and there across the crowd of people packed into the plaza. A second after he’d focused on her, those eyes flashed up to him, he saw her press something on the arm of her chair and her lips moved inaudibly.

  ‘Cap?’ Apirana muttered, nudging him. He returned his right eye’s vision to normal and opened his left, and instantly saw figures in the dark blue of what had once been plaza security uniforms pushing through the throng towards them.

  ‘Nothing to worry about,’ he replied, ‘we’re here to get an audience, after all.’ He focused on the closest man, who appeared to consist mainly of an ambulatory chest, and pitched his smile between ‘polite’ and ‘friendly’. ‘Morning.’

  ‘Morning,’ the man replied automatically, his eyes flicking over them. He and his two companions, one male and one female, had clearly customised their uniforms: badges and patches sewn onto them presumably hinted at some sort of family, tribe or gang alliance, the sleeves had been removed to show well-muscled arms adorned with tattoos, and the epaulettes on the shoulders of the speaker had been replaced with a row of steel spikes an inch high. Each one had a shockstick tucked into their belt and a comm in their ear, but they didn’t have the swaggering arrogance of any number of gangland enforcers Drift had dealt with in the past. Despite their appearance, they almost seemed .
. . professional. ‘Do you have business here?’

  ‘I’d like to speak with Nana,’ Drift said, hoping the title was the correct one to give. ‘Ms Bastard’ certainly didn’t seem like the one to go with, no matter what name this extraordinary old woman had taken for herself.

  ‘Nana’s not taking new audiences until next week,’ the woman spoke up. She had a tattoo under one eye, a swirling pattern which might have been tribal or could have been simply something she’d liked the look of. ‘You can come back then, or you’re welcome to make yourselves at home in the meantime.’

  Drift masked his surprise with a cough. Definitely not your standard gangland enforcer, who usually revelled in making your life difficult. Phrases like ‘you’re welcome’ were rarer than hen’s teeth out of their mouths, unless flavoured with heavy sarcasm. Was this another surprising twist of Nana Bastard’s regime? No, I think I know exactly who’s behind this.

  He played his hunch. ‘Then I would like to speak to your commander. Maiha Takahara, unless I’m mistaken?’

  The first speaker didn’t even blink. ‘Captain Takahara doesn’t give audiences to members of the public.’

  And here we are again, Drift thought wryly, trying to get through bureaucracy to speak to the person I want. God, but this was simpler when we were all outlaws. ‘How many ask for one?’ he countered. ‘Besides, my business with Nana is business, but Miss Takahara is an old friend and this would be a social call. I’d be grateful if you could pass on a message that Gabriel would like to see her. Of course, I’ll understand if work has to take priority for the moment.’