by Mike Brooks
‘Too fucking far away!’ Karhan snarled, gesturing at the highlighted location of Lavric’s warehouse. ‘Tell them to get moving or we might have the deaths of a GIA team on our heads!’
‘A.’s noticed,’ Jenna said, her voice sounding tiny and quavery in her ears as Rybak snapped something quiet but urgent over the comm. She watched helplessly as the big man’s hood turned from side to side and saw one hand reach towards the small of his back where he’d stowed his gun. Beside him, Micah’s fingers also began reaching for the pistol holstered at his hip, but then the Dutch mercenary seemed to jerk oddly. A second later and he jerked again, then collapsed.
‘No!’ Jenna shouted uselessly at the screen. ‘For fuck’s sake, get out of there! Run!’
‘Man down,’ she heard Rybak say tightly. ‘Where’s the shooter?’
On the overhead view, Jenna saw a small blotch of red starting to form where Micah had fallen, and she bit down on her knuckles to prevent herself from crying out again. She saw Apirana pull his gun out, sweeping the crowd with it as he looked for their attackers, saw the ripples of panic spread through the market-goers around them . . .
‘Shit!’ Karhan gasped, and the tone of shock in his voice was so pronounced that she looked away from the bird’s-eye view to where the veteran surveillance officer was pointing. Another holo display showed a view across the square, and moving towards Apirana and the others was a man with a raised weapon and a riot of colours for a face.
‘Jezus Kristus,’ Rybak breathed in horror. ‘The Laughing Man.’
Jenna stared at the image with a sick feeling building in her stomach. She’d never heard of the Laughing Man until a few weeks ago, and even then not in detail. None of the crew would tell her more than the barest details about him, not even Apirana. Somehow, she suspected that the leering, neon skull obscuring his face was all the detail she needed.
‘They’re surrounded,’ Rybak said grimly. Jenna looked back at the overhead view and saw to her horror that she was correct: while the rest of the crowd were fleeing, some of its members had pulled hidden guns on the Keiko’s crew and got the drop on them. One of the two tails they’d identified now had a gun to the back of Apirana’s head, and she waited in horror for him to pull the trigger. Then the moment passed and the Laughing Man moved towards where Drift stood, unnaturally still.
‘He’s going to talk,’ Karhan breathed, ‘thank God.’
‘Too late for Micah,’ Jenna snapped.
‘Small mercies,’ Karhan grimaced. He looked up at another screen, showing a group of blue-armoured shapes making their way through the streets towards St Methodius’ Square. ‘I hope that “Captain” of yours can keep him busy for a couple of minutes.’
‘Talking’s what the Captain does best,’ Jenna said absently, nails digging into her palm.
‘They’ve got some damn cheek, pulling something like this in the open,’ Rybak muttered angrily. ‘The police here must be corrupt as hell.’
‘Not all of them,’ Karhan retorted sharply. He started selecting members of the Laughing Man’s gang, highlighting them on the system and seeking camera angles which would show their faces. ‘Sara, we need idents on all of them, and ships of origin.’
‘Including that bastard,’ Rybak growled, indicating the assassin talking to Drift. Karhan focused one of the street-level cameras on the Laughing Man again, who’d apparently said something to infuriate Rourke.
‘It won’t pick him up!’ Vankova exclaimed in frustration.
‘What do you mean?’ Karhan demanded, looking over at her display. Jenna followed his gaze: sure enough, face after face was appearing and being run through the records, the roar of the terminal’s cooling fans rising as it accessed more and more processing power, but the Laughing Man’s wasn’t among them.
‘It just won’t pick him up!’ Vankova said again, helplessly. ‘It must be the electat; all those fucking colours are throwing off the contour recognition software.’
‘Okay, fine,’ Karhan muttered, ‘so we track him back to a time when he hasn’t activated the electat, he can’t have just been walking around like that all day—’
‘They’ve shot Kuai!’ Jenna exclaimed in horror as the little mechanic suddenly dropped to the ground. She breathed slightly more easily a moment later when he writhed around clutching his leg instead of lapsing into a horrible stillness as Micah had, but nonetheless the sick, impotent feeling was threatening to overwhelm her. ‘How long until your team get there?!’
‘Maybe thirty seconds until they’re in position,’ Rybak replied.
‘To hell with “position”,’ Jenna snarled, ‘just—’
‘If they start shooting too early then they will die and your team will die,’ Rybak cut her off harshly. ‘They need to hit these bastards all at once so they’re either dead before they can think to pull a trigger on your friends or they’re running away. Besides, they need the right angles of fire; bullets will go straight through a human body.’
Jenna bit down on a retort. What the Europan captain said made sense, but she still couldn’t bear the thought of her crew being in danger for a second longer. She had to fight the impulse to try to snatch one of the trooper’s weapons and run through the streets herself, even knowing that she’d never get it, find her way there in time or probably be able to hit anything even if she did. She watched Rourke and the Laughing Man exchange silent words, trying to read meaning from a pair of faces seemingly carved from granite for all the information they gave away. Then the assassin looked away from Rourke, nodded to someone— There was a spatter of red and Jenna saw one of Kelsier’s thugs drop; she barely had time to draw breath before more followed. In a moment, the picture changed from the Keiko’s crew surrounded at gunpoint to them turning on their ambushers while unseen marksmen picked off anyone still upright. Anyone, that was, except for four figures racing for the south side of the square.
‘Team One, fall back and do not engage,’ Rybak snapped over the comm. ‘Let them out; they’re our leads, over.’
‘Where’s the Laughing Man?’ Vankova asked nervously. ‘Did they get him?’
‘Headed north,’ Karhan replied. His fingers danced over the controls as the views on different screens zoomed in, zoomed out, panned around . . . ‘Damn it! Where the hell is he?’
‘Team Three?’ Rybak spoke and waited. ‘Team Three, come in, over.’
There was a pause.
‘Team Three, please respond, over.’
‘Shit!’ Karhan slammed his fist into arm of his chair, clearly not needing to wait for his captain’s confirmation. ‘How the hell did he—’
‘Never mind him for now,’ Jenna said grimly, getting to her feet and picking up her slicer’s bag. The Europans stared at her in astonishment, except for Vankova who was still scanning the displays.
‘Never mind him?!’ Rybak asked incredulously. ‘He must have just taken out one of my teams!’
‘And he just killed one of my friends!’ Jenna shot back angrily. ‘But I’ve got a job to do, or this will have been for nothing! Hunt him down if you want, but for now tell me what ships the other four came in on!’
‘We’ve got . . . one from the Raggety Edge, one from the Child of Winter, and it looks like two from the Early Dawn,’ Sara Vankova replied crisply. She looked around at Jenna, her expression a mix of nervousness and sympathy. ‘The Early Dawn and Raggety Edge are closer to them; Child of Winter is in the Low Docks.’
‘Two of them came in on the closest ship, that’s probably the one they’ll make for,’ Karhan said, biting his lip. He narrowed his eyes as he looked at Jenna. ‘You up to this?’
‘I’m going to have to be,’ Jenna replied, although her stomach seemed to be suggesting that throwing up would be a good move right about now.
‘Right then,’ Vankova said, getting to her feet and picking up a bag of her own. She gave Jenna a smile which might have been made of spun sugar judging by how fragile it appeared. ‘Let’s do this.’
R
UN RABBIT, RUN
The Early Dawn was an imposing, Sei-class multiuse vessel; larger and bulkier than the Carcharodon- class which the Jonah belonged to, it could take nearly twice the cargo but had a reputation for engine trouble. Jenna adjusted the thermal hood of her docktech jacket and checked the read-out on her Hrozanissue pad, then looked up at the craft’s snub nose again. ‘You’re certain this is the right one?’
+Trust me,+ Sara Vankova’s voice came over the comm in her ear, +this is the bay. Besides, this is an illegal vessel; there’s hatches for concealed weapons in that bow, or I’m a Member of Parliament.+
Jenna blinked, her eyes seeing nothing but what looked to be standard heat shielding. ‘Really?’
+Look, just read the ident then.+
Jenna tapped some keys and the lines of text flashed up on her pad. Sure enough, the ship was purporting to be the Early Dawn, although Jenna would have bet circuits to static that it was officially registered as something different. She took a deep breath, tasting the rubber and plastic of her breath mask as she did so, and pulled back her sleeve. This exposed the flesh of her arm to the chill not-air around her, but she needed to access her wrist terminal. A few quick taps synced it – and more importantly, the Truth Box she’d quietly pocketed during the ruckus on Void Station Pundamilia and which formed the basis of her wrist-mounted and thoroughly illegal slicing rig – with her Hrozan pad. Suddenly she had the ability to slide through the shuttle’s security systems without looking like she was using a device with anywhere near enough processing power for such a task.
+How long is this going to take?+ Vankova asked nervously. A surveillance officer’s presence was necessary because Jenna didn’t know how to operate the devices in Vankova’s bag, and wouldn’t have been entrusted with them anyway; Vankova was here instead of Karhan simply because she was smaller and quicker, so could run away and hide more easily if it came to it. That said, Jenna got the impression that the veteran might have been a more reassuring companion, especially given that she herself was trying to pretend this was the sort of thing she did all the time as a supposed GIA operative.
‘Not long,’ she answered, a flash of smugness momentarily overriding her nervous nausea as the pressure seals released and the entrance ramp started to lower. To anyone else it would look like two Hrozan dock-techs were being allowed on board by someone in the cockpit: it certainly shouldn’t have been possible to slice their way inside in such a short period of time using a basic pad. ‘Let’s go.’
+That was impressive,+ Vankova said admiringly as they waited for the ramp to reach the deck. +How’d you do that?+
‘Product of a misspent youth,’ Jenna replied honestly, taking a quick look from side to side. The docks were bustling with their usual business and there were no signs of desperately fleeing thugs, but given the sheer amount of people, crawlers and ships around, Kelsier’s goons might have been a hundred yards away and she wouldn’t have known. ‘Come on.’
They hurried up the ramp as fast as they dared. If anyone working for Kelsier was watching this ship then the game was as good as up anyway, but the last thing they needed was some well-meaning bystander to decide something suspicious was going on and poke his nose in. Jenna called it up behind them, leaving them standing in the Early Dawn’s cavernous bay. There were a couple of cargo containers, one with its doors open and looking to be empty, some equipment lockers on the far wall much like the ones in the bay of the Jonah, a small haulage buggy with two wheels at the front and tracks at the rear, and an overhead crane system which looked to have considerably more durability to it than the slightly ramshackle one Jenna was used to.
+This way,+ Sara said, heading for the airlock which would lead them towards the bridge. Jenna followed her, the rushing of air growing louder as the atmosphere thickened around them, the Early Dawn’s pumps working to make the cargo bay breathable again. By the time they’d climbed up the four flights of steel steps the light over the airlock was glowing green and the doors slid open with a faint whine to grant them access to the ship beyond.
The first thing which greeted Jenna’s eyes as the corridor lights flickered on was a gun rack, lined with half a dozen assault rifles and a couple of starguns; an unpleasant reminder of Micah’s recent fate, not to mention what would happen to her and Sara if they were caught. She swallowed and pushed onwards, peeling her thermo-hood back and the rebreather off her face. The galley was on their left and some of the cabins on their right, with more sitting directly over the main cargo bay – the cramped crew conditions, despite the large size of the ship, was another reason why the Sei-class wasn’t a hugely popular model except with captains eager for a high capacityto-size ratio – but the bridge lay directly ahead. A second set of doors slid aside as they approached, these ones with a slight grinding noise suggesting that something somewhere was thinking about giving out, and then they’d reached their target.
‘Right,’ Jenna muttered, shrugging out of her thermojacket, which was rapidly becoming too warm, ‘navigation terminal.’ She looked blankly at the unfamiliar layout of seats and terminals. ‘Any ideas?’
‘I thought you were a slicing expert?’ Sara said worriedly. The Hrozan’s fringe was stuck to her forehead, sweaty from her hood, nerves, or both, and she was digging about in her bag.
‘That doesn’t mean I know what they look like from the outside,’ Jenna pointed out, perhaps a little more sharply than she’d intended. She tried to picture the Jonah’s bridge and keep herself from peering out over the snub nose of the shuttle to see if she could spot any sign of its owners approaching. Come on, Jenna, think. There were two chairs at the very front of the cockpit, but one was considerably more worn than the other and the controls in front of it had marks scratched onto them, presumably noting where the optimum thrust points were, or flap angles or . . . whatever, she was making things up now. ‘Right, that must be the main pilot’s chair, which means it would make most sense for the navigation console to be . . . this one.’ She hit the start-up button on a terminal and watched it flicker into life, biting her lip until it became painful to try to stop herself from fidgeting.
‘Goddamnit, where’s the transmitter array?’ Sara hissed behind her.
‘Pull a schematic off the main system,’ Jenna advised her absently, focusing on the screen in front of her. Aha . . .
‘I’m not a slicer!’
Jenna hissed in frustration – How was it possible to be a surveillance officer and not even know how to find a schematic on a system? It didn’t even involve any slicing – but tapped her pad a few times and slid something over to Sara’s. ‘There.’
She focused on the navigation terminal, for so it had proved to be, and opened the log. Of course, the Early Dawn didn’t have the processing power to calculate Alcubierre jumps – that would be done by whatever carrier ship was waiting for it in orbit – but nevertheless, its navigation systems would still faithfully keep track of where it was at any given time, and more importantly where it had been.
‘It’s near the engine room,’ Sara said, sounding frustrated. ‘Why the hell would it be back there?’
Jenna rolled her eyes. ‘I don’t know, but you’d better get a move on if you’re going . . .’ She heard boots leaving and turned around to see an absence of Sara Vankova, the surveillance officer apparently having taken her advice before she’d finished giving it. She shrugged and turned back to her work, slapping the comms terminal into life and acutely aware of how sweaty her fingers felt on the keys, and saved the last two months of log data from the navigation console into a separate file. She slid that file over to the comms terminal and started narrowing the broadcast band. Drift had encoded a very specific frequency into her wrist console before they’d split up a week prior and she’d gone undercover with the Europan authorities. In a few moments she’d have dropped this file over to the Jonah and… . . . and those four people were pretty much running towards the Early Dawn.
She ducked instinctively, despite the fact th
at the refraction of the thick spaceshield would render her invisible from outside at such a low angle, and looked again. Yes, four of them, three men and a woman so far as she could tell under the bulky clothes and rebreathers, coming straight for her.
Oh shit.
‘Focus,’ she muttered to herself, wrenching her gaze away. Check frequency again; send the nav log; comeoncomeoncomeon; while that’s transmitting, remove record of file compiling from nav console; shut down nav console; you bastard, why do you take longer to shut down than you did to start up?! File sent! Remove transmission record from comms terminal log; check outside again . . .
Shit! We’re not going to make it!
She stared blankly at the hurrying shapes for one second, two seconds, trying to comprehend what her brain had already realised.
We’re not going to make it.
Jenna took a deep breath, let it out again.
Okay. So we hide.
Heart hammering, she turned back to the comms terminal. Check transmission record is deleted; turn terminal off; don’t make me pull the plug on you; access main system through the pad and depressurise cargo bay again, or they’ll know someone’s been on the ship . . .
Somewhere behind her there was a faint whine as the fans started up again, emptying the cargo bay of the oxygen they’d dumped into it scant minutes before. The nav console’s display winked out: Jenna turned and scanned the cockpit, snatching up her thermojacket from where she’d let it drop and desperately searching for anything else incriminating which either she or Sara might have left. She saw nothing and scrambled out of the door, sealing it behind her, then headed for the stairway which would take her up and over the cargo bay into the crew dorms. She paused at the airlock to peer through the narrow window; sure enough, the ramp was starting to drop away to let the ship’s rightful owners on.
She didn’t dare use her comm to try to contact Sara, just in case Kelsier’s crew were monitoring channels or simply using the same one by coincidence. She also wished that she’d used the ship’s comm to send a message along with the nav log, even one which just said ‘will try to hide’, but there was no use for that now. Instead she stuffed her thermojacket into her bag as well as she could and ran up the steps to the dorm corridor, fumbling with her pad to call the ship schematics up again.
