by Mike Brooks
‘How do we know Nana Bastard was even telling the truth?’ Micah asked as the tram wound its way up through the Low Markets. ‘We’ve come halfway across the galaxy on her say-so but Kelsier might not be anywhere near here. She might not even know who he is!’
‘Everything I found out about her before we went there suggested she’s honest,’ Drift assured him with the conviction of a man who’d stepped into a fighting cage off the back of that information. ‘She’s been known to admit ignorance when people have asked her stuff she doesn’t know. It won’t help her rep if we poke around out here a while, find nothing and then go back and denounce her as a cheat. If she made a habit of doing that then I’m pretty sure her custom would have dried up a long time ago.’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ Micah muttered, although there was some genuine acquiescence in his manner, ‘I know that, it’s just . . .’
‘It would be nice to be sure,’ Drift finished for him. ‘Well, that’s an inconvenience we’re going to have to live with until we get a solid lead, so—’
‘Boss,’ Apirana broke in, his deep voice lowered until it was nothing more than a gravelly whisper. Drift glanced up at him, saw the Maori’s eyes flicker sideways for a second. ‘Looks like someone’s scoping us out.’
Drift turned to follow the direction the big man had looked in and found his gaze meeting that of a young woman, perhaps in her early twenties. She was pale-skinned with straight, nut-brown hair cut in an asymmetrically choppy style which didn’t reach her shoulders, and was dressed in dark blue overalls with a logo over her left breast. She could have worked for any one of the numerous warehouses or goods merchants scattered throughout the market districts, and as such would have had perfectly good reason to be aboard the same tram as them, holding onto an overhead rail at the other end of the carriage. However, she didn’t look away from him and in fact started to make her way down the tram towards them, bracing herself against the turns to avoid being dumped into the laps of fellow passengers.
‘You Captain Torres?’ she asked in a low voice, when she was about three feet away from him.
‘That’s me,’ Drift nodded easily, his mind already sorting through the names he’d used. ‘Torres’ had been asking about Nicolas Kelsier and a niqabwearing woman possibly called Sibaal in the Flats Markets. The markets themselves were no flatter than the rest of Glass City’s gently undulating ground, but had gained the name due to mainly selling the fruits, vegetables and other edible plantstuffs grown in the artificially enriched soils of the Equatorial Flats to the south, where Perun’s light and heat was at its greatest and most easily collected by the moon’s glass structures.
‘My boss said you were in last week,’ the girl continued, ‘he told me to come find you and say he might be able to help you now.’
‘Is that so?’ Drift couldn’t keep a slight smile from his face. He glanced at the badge on her overall – trying not to let his eyes linger too long on the curves beneath, which the sturdy fabric did not entirely hide – and nodded thoughtfully. ‘Lavric’s, eh?’ He searched his memory. ‘Tall guy, looks about sixty or so? Grey hair, dark eyebrows?’
‘Yeah, that’s him,’ the girl nodded. ‘So, you wanna come talk to him? He said he’s going to be very busy after today and he might not be able to see you.’
‘That so?’ Drift scratched at the skin around his right eye. He cast a glance sideways at Micah, who nodded fractionally. ‘Okay then. We need to go and pick up the last member of our crew, because if your boss can help us we might need to leave fast.’ He looked out of the window as he felt the tram slow and smiled when he saw a stop approaching. ‘We’ll come find him this afternoon, I think I can remember where your business is. It’s on, ah . . .’
‘Mr Lavric said to bring you myself,’ the girl replied, shrugging. ‘I don’t know why.’
‘Okay then,’ Drift gestured towards the approaching stop. ‘Why don’t you get out and wait for us here? We’ll pick you up on the way back and then you lead us like you’re meant to. What’s your name, anyway?’
‘Natalija,’ the girl replied, flicking her hair out of one eye.
‘A pleasure to meet you, Natalija.’ Drift gave her a smile which sat somewhere between friendly and flirtatious; she was probably technically too young for him, but that had never really mattered a damn. She smiled back, perhaps out of polite reflex and perhaps not, and he casually nudged the door release with his elbow as the tram slowed to a stop in the area known as South Lake Shore, picturesque even by Glass City standards. ‘We’ll try not to keep you waiting too long.’
‘Don’t hurry for me,’ the girl grinned, ‘I’m getting paid anyway, and this beats hauling shit around the warehouse. See ya.’ Drift stood aside and she slipped through the door, then headed towards a bench just vacated by would-be passengers now waiting to board. Drift didn’t even try to disguise watching her backside as she threaded her way through the crowd.
‘You’re impossible,’ Jia told him severely.
‘Merely improbable,’ Drift replied cheerfully, folding his arms. ‘So . . . trap?’
‘Trap,’ Apirana grunted, while the others nodded soberly. Drift sighed, and activated his comm. The call was answered almost immediately.
+About damn time.+
‘Nice to hear your voice again, too,’ Drift replied happily to Rourke’s grumpy tones. ‘It looks like Lavric’s in the Flats Markets may have something for us.’
+I see. What’s the arrangement?+
‘We have a guide,’ Drift informed her. ‘She’s been told to take us to see her boss. We’ve left her at the South Lake Shore tram stop and we should be with you in about ten minutes.’
+I’ll start putting our affairs here in order then.+ There was a pause. +This ‘guide’. What’s she like?+
‘Oh you know; young, pretty . . .’ Drift grinned. ‘Nice ass.’
+It’s almost like the person who sent her knows you, Captain Torres.+
A WATCHING BRIEF
The van parked at the edge of the Flats Markets was cramped, over-warm and not exactly fragrant, what with the various bodies which had been packed into it for some time now. It was also not a van, apparently; it was, in fact, an Unmarked Mobile Technical Support Unit, but so far as Jenna could see it was a goddamned van, and that was how she was going to persist in thinking of it.
Her five companions in the van’s interior were a mixed bag. Captain Rybak had two troopers with her, kitted out with armavests and open-face helmets, which reminded Jenna slightly of the void-station enforcers Drift had gunned down at point-blank range. However, these two had uniforms of slate-blue instead of red, and rather than starguns they carried a dual-purpose weapon combining a high-powered semi-automatic rifle with a tazer, depending on what manner of response was needed.
The main reason they were so cramped was the large, powerful terminal, which took up a fair part of what would normally have been a roomy cargo area. Sitting in front of it and surveying a plethora of display holos were Martin Karhan and Sara Vankova, two local officers who were a study in contrasts. Karhan was older, greying and had the rounded physique of someone who’d been sitting doing hi-tech surveillance work for most of his working life, often in extended bouts with little exercise and poor access to appropriate nutrition; Vankova was close to Jenna’s age, had her dark brown hair done up in a complicated plait at the back of her head and appeared to so far be staving off an expanding waistline to match her supervisor’s through the combined forces of a youthful metabolism and boundless enthusiasm. Jenna had already fielded several excited questions from her on what it was like to be part of a GIA field team with variations of ‘I’m not supposed to talk about that’.
Of more immediate concern was the fact that everyone they were working with in Glass City, from Vankova and Karhan to Rybak and her unit with all their associated guns, were only helping them because of one particular communiqué indisputably sent with the authorisation of Anna-Marie Císa r˘. That message, which had preceded the
Keiko’s arrival by about a week, instructed them to aid the GIA team led by Tamara Rourke in bringing Nicolas Kelsier to justice for his role in the near-bombing of Amsterdam . . . but it had been sent by Jenna using the access protocols she’d gleaned from Císa r˘’s home terminal, and was as fake as one of the Jonah’s ident overlays.
They’d been hoping to get the Europan Defence Minister to buy their scheme, but Jenna had always been the fail-safe. The question was how long they had before their deception was realised. Even if Rybak had responded with an affirmative immediately, that would probably not have reached Old Earth yet, and it would take more time for any message or arresting force to return . . . assuming, of course, that no one ever found traces of the slicing she’d done in Císa r˘ ’s apartment.
Jenna had been gone from Císa r˘ ’s flat well before the minister had returned for her ill-fated conversation with Rourke. She also knew she was good; better than that, she was really good. But good enough to have left absolutely no virtual fingerprints on a terminal’s datalogs? Nothing to be detected if the best tech security experts in the Europan conglomerate were called in to double-check that a rogue GIA agent hadn’t gone snooping around where she shouldn’t?
Probably not.
So she sat in the van, within five feet of two men with guns who were more than qualified to use them, and waited for the call she wouldn’t hear over the comm system she didn’t have access to which would bring everything to an abrupt and almost certainly bloody close, simply because she’d somehow slipped up in Prague. All in all, it was good that she could blame the temperature of the van for the sweat beading her brow and forming damp circles beneath her arms.
‘This has got to be the most backwards way to conduct an operation I’ve ever heard of,’ Martin Karhan muttered, adjusting the focus on one of the surveillance feeds from a camera embedded in the frame of the glass roof high above them. The market was a press of bodies funnelled through streets narrowed by the presence of stalls, and from this top-down viewpoint it put Jenna somewhat in mind of diagrams of blood cells flowing through veins, albeit more geometric in layout.
‘It’s a sting,’ Vankova argued, ‘it’s just a pretty daring one. They got any tails yet?’
‘Nothing yet,’ Karhan replied, shaking his grizzled head. ‘And yes, it’s a sting, but whoever heard of throwing a whole team in as bait? No disrespect to Agent Rourke,’ he added, glancing briefly over his shoulder at Jenna,‘but how do you know this Kelsier’s guys won’t just shoot them all straight off?’
‘Because I’m not with them,’ Jenna replied, feeling her stomach tighten and hoping to hell that their gamble would pay off. ‘Kelsier knows I’m part of the team hunting him, and wants to get us all; if they kill the others they won’t find me. Besides, we’ve done this before.’ Except it was only the Captain in the net that time, and I don’t think Gideon Xanth was as smart as Kelsier.
‘That seems like a big risk, if you don’t mind me saying,’ Karhan shrugged, ‘but it’s not my team or my life, so . . .’ He broke off, frowning. ‘Okay, we’ve got movement; looks like two tails have joined from Trader’s Way.’ His finger traced the progress of two heads, now following the cluster of Keiko crew through the crowd at a slight distance.
Rybak leaned forwards. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Hold on.’ Vankova brought up a replica of the feed on another screen, then wound it back. Jenna watched the heads of Rourke, Drift and the rest shuffle backwards through the market, bodies moving in an odd waddle. ‘Yup,’ the younger surveillance officer nodded, ‘look, these two are just standing around until Agent Rourke’s team go past, and on opposite sides of the junction. That would have to be a hell of a coincidence.’
Rybak grunted and leaned back, then spoke softly into her comm. Jenna fought down the urge to wipe her palms on the legs of her jumpsuit, and tried to get her breathing under control. She was supposed to be part of a GIA team – perhaps not a fully fledged agent, but at least a trusted external contractor. Then again, surely it wouldn’t be that surprising if the slicer was at least a little nervous at the thought of danger?
‘Right boys, let’s take a look at you,’ Vankova muttered. Her braid was flicked forwards over her right shoulder and she started to chew on the end in what was presumably an absent-minded manner as her fingers danced across the terminal’s controls. Jenna watched as the perspective of the monitor changed to a feed from street level, one of the many cameras situated on buildings dotted throughout Glass City. Hroza Major might have a prosperous, largely peaceful population and a low crime rate, but that didn’t mean the Hrozan government wasn’t of the opinion that prevention was better than cure.
A flash of violet hair caught her eye: Drift, apparently in easy conversation with a girl wearing overalls who was leading them through the market. The Captain’s olive-skinned face looked relaxed, but then he’d always been good at dissembling. Rourke, a pace behind, was wearing a grim expression, but that wasn’t out of character either. Then came Kuai and Jia, the former nervously fiddling with his dragon pendant and the latter skulking along with her ‘pilot hat’ pulled down firmly over her ears. Behind them was the massive shape of Apirana, his hood largely hiding his face from the cameras but still easy to pick out due to looming well above most of the crowd. Finally, Micah brought up the rear, seemingly in deep conversation with Apirana. Jenna could see that he was looking around a lot, to all intents and purposes at the market’s wares, but she’d have put money on the mercenary’s true motivations being to watch for ambushes. He didn’t seem to have picked up on the men following them, however, and it was these two that Vankova was focused on.
The young surveillance tech did something which highlighted the two tails on the overhead view and tagged a floating star above their heads on the streetlevel feed she was watching, then rewound the footage. One of them came into plain sight a few seconds later: a thickset, jowl-faced man with studs on his forehead.
‘Got you,’ Vankova muttered, and dragged her thumb and forefinger over the man’s face on the display in a pinching motion. The shot flashed up onto yet another tertiary screen which had until now been mostly blank, while images flickered up alongside it as the unit attempted to match his features against security camera feeds from the docks. While it was working she skipped back over a few more seconds of street-level feed until the other man came into view; taller and thinner, with a shaved head, his face was also selected and appeared alongside his companion’s.
‘We’ve got a route deviation,’ Karhan spoke up suddenly. He pointed to where the party had headed straight on at a junction instead of turning left towards where the icon for Lavric’s warehouse sat.
‘A mistake?’ Rybak asked.
‘The girl’s supposed to work for Lavric,’ Jenna pointed out, ‘she shouldn’t get lost showing people to where she works.’
‘Damn,’ Karhan muttered, tightening the focus on some of his cameras, ‘we figured the ambush would be at the warehouse and the girl was just so they knew the timing. It’s going to be somewhere else.’
‘And soon,’ Jenna added, ‘they must know the Captain would notice if he was being led too far off course.’
‘The Captain?’ Rybak was looking at her with a puzzled expression, and she silently cursed herself.
‘Drift,’ she clarified, ‘he acts as the captain as . . . part of Agent Rourke’s cover. We’ve sort of got used to calling him that. What I mean is, Kelsier’s people would think he’s in charge, and he’s known to be smart, so—’
‘There,’ Rybak cut her off, finger jabbing at a plaza filled with stalls and kiosks on the overhead camera shot. ‘They’ll take them in St Methodius’ Square. Open ground, time to shoot a runner before they can make one of the alleyways and get away.’ She swore in a language Jenna didn’t know and looked over at her. ‘I hope you’re right about them wanting to talk first.’
‘So am I,’ Jenna replied, her eyes glued to the screen. It wasn’t supposed to be in the square, it wa
s supposed to be at the warehouse . . .
MARKET FORCES
‘You thought about what you’re going to do with your share of the money?’ Micah asked as they traipsed through the streets of the Flats Markets, attracting some stares in the process. The Dutch mercenary’s armavest looked a little out of place but at least he wasn’t carrying his immolation cannon. Hroza Major’s status as a frontier planet meant the Europan gun controls were looser, partially in case the Federation of African States decided to try to grab itself some more territory, but that sort of military-grade hardwear was still out of the question in such a supposedly respectable place as Glass City.
‘The money?’ Apirana replied, a little absently. Over his life, he’d largely got used to attracting attention, but he couldn’t help but feel vulnerable and exposed despite the sizeable automatic pistol tucked into the small of his back under his top, the hood of which he was once more wearing up. Drift and Rourke had enough faith in the plan to be walking into what they strongly suspected was a trap, but Apirana was more than a mite uneasy about the whole thing.
‘Yeah, the money we’re going to get from Kelsier once we take him down.’ Micah’s eyes were enthusiastic, but at least he had the sense to keep his voice low as they pushed through the throng of Hrozans. Not that it would have probably mattered if he’d been bellowing in Apirana’s ear; the surrounding traders and stallholders were doing a good enough job of hollering their wares that the sound of a small military engagement might have passed unnoticed.
Hopefully we don’t have to test that theory, but I wouldn’t place a bet . . .
‘Honestly hadn’t thought much about this past staying alive,’ he admitted, turning side-on to squeeze through a gap between a stall of what looked to be red melons on one side and a table of unfamiliar tubers on the other. ‘Why, you got your mind set on something?’
‘I figure a man like that, he has to have a fair bit of cash tucked away,’ Micah replied, ‘and on an even seven-way split, that might be enough to retire on.’
