by Mike Brooks
The door at the top of the steps seemed unwilling to open at first, although that was probably her imagination. She ran past half a dozen cabin doors, three on each side, almost before the lights had time to register her presence and flicker on, then was brought up short by the door at the other end. She hammered the release button and for a heart-stopping moment thought she’d broken it, but then it grumbled reluctantly aside and she nearly fell down the steps towards the infirmary.
She paused for a moment to grab a look through the airlock on this side of the cargo bay. Three of the crew were running up the steps on the opposite side towards the bridge, but only three.
Which meant the other one was likely heading for the engine room.
‘Sara!’ she yelled, trusting that the airtight seal on the cargo-bay door and the hopefully still-thin atmosphere within it wouldn’t let the sound give her away. ‘Find somewhere to hide! Now!’ She raced past the infirmary, turned a corner in the corridor and nearly collided with the Europan surveillance officer, who was fiddling with a panel in the wall. Sara’s head whipped around to look at her, her thick braid colliding with the metal panelling with a soft thunk. ‘What?’ the other girl asked, eyes wide in panic.
‘They’re on,’ Jenna hissed, grabbing her by the shoulders. ‘Find somewhere to hide, come on!’
‘But I haven’t… wait, they’re on board?!’ Sara’s eyes widened further, if that were possible.
‘Yes, and one’s coming this way!’ Jenna gave up on words and began propelling the Hrozan towards the engine room. She slapped the door release, prayed to whatever deities might be listening that the faint noise of it either opening or shutting wouldn’t give them away, and bundled Sara through it.
The lights in the engine room flickered on and Jenna was faced with two roughly chest-height banks of metal running away from them down the length of the room, presumably enclosing pistons or . . . something, this really wasn’t her area of expertise. There were various panels of switches and levers scattered around, as well as bits of pipework and what looked like large, shiny hoses, but there was only one immediately obvious hiding place. Well, two.
‘Down the end!’ she snapped at Sara as the door started to grind shut again. ‘Get behind one of these metal things, crouch down and keep quiet!’
It was perhaps thirty feet away, but it felt like the longest dash Jenna had ever made. At any moment she expected to hear a shout from behind them, or a gunshot. They’d be boxed in, and what chance would they have had even if they weren’t? A slicer and a surveillance officer against four armed thugs?
There was no shout, and no gunshots. Sara dived to the right and Jenna scrambled to the left, pulling her bag and jacket in after her and tucking her feet in to minimise any chance of being seen from the other end of the room. Sara mimicked her, and for a moment the only sound was that of the other girl’s ragged breathing.
Then the door hissed open again.
Jenna desperately pressed her finger to her lips in an attempt to get Sara to breathe more quietly, even while her mind repeated a panicked mantra: Please don’t notice the lights; please don’t notice the lights; please don’t notice the lights . . .
Whoever had followed them in clearly had too much on their mind to worry about lights already being on, however. There were some frantic scrabblings and what sounded like dials being twisted or adjusted, then a voice which sounded shockingly loud as it echoed around the metal confines of the room: ‘Come on, you piece of shit!’
A deep mechanical cough answered this plea, which was delivered in a desperate male baritone, and Jenna felt the floor shudder beneath her; then a rumble started up, growing in volume and power as the engine of the Early Dawn roared into life around them. The voice returned, shouting now to be heard over the noise.
‘Okay, we’ve got power!’
There was a crackling noise, barely audible above the engine: a comm broadcast, some of the words inaudible.
+What about . . . can we . . . if . . .?+
‘How the hell should I know?’ the voice demanded angrily. ‘Jensen was the mechanic! You want to wait for her? No? Then get us in the fucking air and let’s get out of here before the authorities wake up!’ Jenna heard steps, boots on metal, and then the faintest of noises just audible above the engines signifying the door opening again. She waited until she heard it shut, waited a few more seconds to be sure, and then peered very cautiously around the edge of her hiding place.
They were alone.
The breath rushed out of her and she almost collapsed against the cold metal of the engine bank; not pressed tight up against it in fear, but the looselimbed, jelly-muscled slump of abject relief. Seconds later though, the tightening in her belly returned. Yes, they were alone, but they were still trapped in a nontoo-large shuttle about to head for space, with four people who would probably kill them on sight. And that might be if they got lucky.
‘What do we do now?’ Sara asked, her voice barely more than a squeak. ‘How do we get—’ There was a jolt beneath them. ‘Oh God, are we taking off?!’
Jenna sighed. She was used to thinking of herself as the newbie, the one out of her depth in any situation except when slicing was directly involved, but she was quickly coming to realise that there was a world of difference between what she’d been through in the last year and Sara Vankova’s experience of watching screens showing events as they happened to other people.
‘We sit tight, we stay out of sight, we wait,’ she said, as calmly as she could manage. ‘I got the log broadcast off; your team and my crew will be following this ship.’
‘I didn’t attach the transmitter yet though!’ Sara hissed. Jenna shrugged uncomfortably.
‘Well . . . we’re not going anywhere. I’m guessing you’ll get another chance.’
Sara sat back, her head knocking against the metal behind her. ‘Oh, Jesus.’
There was silence for a few seconds, or as close to it as the engine room would get now until they were swallowed up by whatever interstellar transport was waiting for them. Then Sara spoke again.
‘So . . . what do we do if they find us?’
Jenna reached into her bag and pulled out the gun Drift had insisted she take with her. She wasn’t too familiar on the make or model, but he’d told her that it had a fully loaded magazine of twenty shots and had made sure she remembered where the safety was. It was meant as a last-resort measure only, although had she known she was going to be unintentionally kidnapped by their targets she’d have asked for a couple of spare magazines just to be on the safe side.
She glanced over at Sara, who was looking at the gun as though it were an intemperate viper. ‘Can you shoot straight?’
‘Not really,’ the surveillance officer replied in a small voice. ‘I just do cameras and bugging. Stuff like that.’
‘Oh. Good.’ Jenna looked away from the Hrozan girl and closed her eyes. ‘Neither can I.’
THE LAUGHING MAN
Despite himself, he was impressed.
It was utterly infuriating of course, and he was disappointed with himself that he hadn’t seen it coming, but he still couldn’t help but feel a sneaking sense of admiration that the crew of the Keiko had bluffed the Europan authorities into their pockets. It was the work of people who knew their backs were against the wall and had gambled everything. He’d never been a gambling man. He’d never seen the point of trusting to luck.
That was, for example, why he’d run for it the moment it became clear that things were not as his employer had planned. It was also why he’d been prepared for a lack of omniscience on his employer’s part, and had brought his usual selection of equipment with him. The five-man Europan fireteam he’d encountered during his flight had presumably been expecting terrified, disorganised thugs instead of the galaxy’s top assassin with a primed, military-issue stun grenade. Their moments of disorientation in its immediate aftermath had cost them their lives: regrettable deaths, of course, but if they’d been truly concerned about the
ir own mortality they presumably would not have joined the armed forces in the first place.
Unless, of course, they’d signed up to fight their government’s enemies with lethal weaponry but had thought that they were somehow special, and would live charmed lives. He shook his head briefly at such a ridiculous notion. He’d been an indifferent student of physics at best, but so far as he was aware death was one of the constants of the universe, like gravity. If you placed yourself in a position where you were at a higher risk of death, you could hardly claim surprise if it found you earlier. It was like jumping off a cliff on a planet with a strong gravity well and being surprised that you hit the ground. Of course, a career as an assassin might also seem likely to end his life prematurely, but the point of being an assassin was that you didn’t wear a uniform and you didn’t stand in front of your enemies.
Well, except in special circumstances.
He’d found a way into the sewers shortly after disposing of the fireteam and had followed the schematics on his pad to come up through an access panel in a residential block. The Europan authorities might work out where he’d gone eventually, even though he’d used flash-strips to weld the first manhole in place behind him. All he needed was a little time and some cover. Once the trail was broken they would be reduced to scanning their surveillance feeds to see where he emerged.
The odds of anyone coming into the boiler room in the short period of time he’d be in there were minimal, but he left his stargun close at hand anyway while he pulled out his travel mirror. It was a sheet of silvery cloth, six feet long and three wide, with adhesive clamps at each corner, which he attached to the wall. A press of the activation switch tautened the cloth instantly and the small current transformed it into a near-perfect mirrored surface. It was meant as a space-saving travel accessory for those who didn’t feel they could do without seeing their outfit in full, but he had another use for it. He quickly stripped off all his clothes and stood in front of the mirror, then concentrated.
The electat on his face, the leering skull trademark of the Laughing Man, had been allowed to subside the moment he’d got into the sewers. That was how the outside world identified him, and in many places once he’d discarded that uniform he was nondescript. Here though, on this rich Europan world with its face-scanning technology, he would need to be more subtle. He knew that his facial electat would have thrown off their scans while it was activated but they would be able to trace him back, sooner or later, to when he’d arrived plain-faced.
Time to change the game.
His skin started to change as he brought his other electat to the fore, the electat which covered his entire body, from the top of his head to the soles of his feet and all the nooks and crevices between, from eyelids to crotch. The process had been painful, and far longer than he’d have liked even with the use of tattooing machines. After all, there were certain sensitive areas which had needed to be done by hand. It had been expensive as well; even though he’d killed the artist shortly afterwards, he’d paid him first. The man had done the job well, after all, and he might have had a family to take care of. However, he simply couldn’t afford any word to leak out. The galaxy knew of Marcus Hall the Laughing Man primarily by the leering skull, but it also knew that he was dark-skinned.
Once the electat was completely activated, the man who stared back at him from the mirror had skin the colour of milky coffee. He turned in place, inspecting himself to make sure that the work hadn’t faded in any way, but it appeared to be unbroken. That would help a lot, but there was always the possibility that the face-scanning would see past skin colour.
First, he drew a laser depilator over his scalp to remove all his hair. Second, he broke his own nose. The pain made his eyes water, but with his electat activated he wasn’t concerned about bruising giving it away as a recent injury. Then he inserted a lens into his left eye, changing its colour from his natural dark green to a grey-blue. Finally, he retrieved a custom-made prosthetic mechanical eye fitting which he placed over his right eye. It wasn’t a true augmentation of course – both his natural eyes were in perfect condition – but it looked like one. The most expensive mechanical eyes fitted neatly in the natural socket and looked almost real unless they were studied closely, but the cheaper ones – such as the one sported by Ichabod Drift – were bulkier and had external structures on the face itself. That should be enough to throw off even the most ardent surveillance technology.
Of course, his fake eye couldn’t be bonded to his skull while he was sedated, as was usual procedure for the real thing. Instead, multiple tiny barbed hooks pierced his skin to secure it in place. The pain made him bite his lip, but it was necessary. If he suffered a blow to the face then it would be torn loose and he could be badly wounded, but otherwise the barbs could be retracted with minimum damage when needed. The other option would have been adhesive, but that would take longer to dissolve and remove. Although painful, the flesh anchors meant the ‘eye’ could be taken off in a matter of seconds if necessary.
The clothes he’d been wearing during the ambush would have to be abandoned. He’d prefer to burn them, but starting a fire in here might set off the building’s smoke alert systems. He tucked the top and trousers into a dark bend of pipework where no one would go looking unless they had good cause to, and redressed himself from his supplies. It was surprising how easily you could carry a change of clothes, if they were a thin fabric and vacuumpacked.
The stargun gave him more pause. It was an excellent weapon but an uncommon one, and possibly too distinctive after his killing of van Schaken. A random check might lead to dangerous suspicion being cast on him, even disguised. Besides, if he got into a situation from which he needed to fight his way free then the game was as good as up. He had no tertiary identity to turn to here.
He reached a decision: he would abandon his weapons. Many people went armed on Hroza Major – especially now, most likely – but by no means all. He needed to get off-planet as soon as possible and would just have to take the chance that his disguise would get him by any Europan checks before the authorities found his tools.
He went back to the manhole he’d climbed out of and dropped his remaining munitions in. It would signpost where he’d exited, but only if they’d already worked out that he’d taken to the sewers. That done, he stepped out into the fading light of the Hrozan day and headed for the nearest starport with the air of a man who had nothing to hide.
He wasn’t going to report back to his employer. He’d decided that as soon as the first Europan shots had been fired. He’d been tiring of this long-running engagement of his services anyway, let alone using him as a common menial with a gang of thugs. He got paid, eliminated his target and moved on; that was how he’d always worked. So let Drift, Rourke and their crew play their dangerous game with the Europans. Had he been a gambling man, which of course he was not, he might have put money on them succeeding in running their quarry to ground. He wished them luck, for it would save him having to take any action himself. If his employer – now ex-employer – survived the Keiko’s crew’s quest for vengeance and learned that the Laughing Man was still alive and had broken his contract, that might damage his reputation.
The streets were crawling with Europan police; not the counter-terrorism armed forces he’d recently killed five members of, but the regular law enforcers. He nodded amiably at two of them and received an absent-minded acknowledgement in return as they bustled past him.
So far, so good.
CONFLICTING FORCES
‘What do you mean, you can’t find him?’
Tamara Rourke was seething. The inability of the Europans to track Hall down had stoked her cold rage until it felt like there was a small star burning in her chest. She was a patient woman – it was a lesson she’d learned painfully – but even she wanted to go out and start tearing down Glass City to find someone she could hurt for all the shit she and her crew had been through in the last month or so.
Captain Sonja Rybak met
her glare, although not completely happily. She was clearly uncomfortable about her forces’ failures so far, but was pugnacious enough to take the unspoken attitude that since she was the one in command of the armed troops she wouldn’t be apologising for anything. Rourke forced herself to remember that not only did they need this woman to help find and eliminate Kelsier, they also needed not to antagonise her sufficiently for her to start asking difficult questions.
‘Glass City is large,’ Rybak replied to Rourke’s question, ‘and I hope we can at least agree that the Laughing Man has been able to evade everyone sent after him so far in his “career”?’
‘We can,’ Rourke replied bitterly. A single wellplaced bullet from her palmgun could have ended Hall’s legacy, of course, but he’d reacted faster to the Europan counter-ambush and fled before she could get a shot away. She took a deep breath and, with an effort, pushed back her desire to get revenge on Micah’s killer. Another body to lay at Hall’s door. There’ll be a reckoning eventually. Her living crew still needed her, one more than the others. ‘I suppose you’ve learned nothing about Kelsier’s location from the man Apirana was able to capture?’
‘He’s resisted our attempts to get information from him so far, although we’ve had barely any time,’ Rybak replied. Her mouth twisted slightly, as though she’d suddenly encountered a bitter taste.‘Would your team . . .?’
It took Rourke a moment to realise what the Europan captain was implying, but then she shook her head firmly. ‘No. I’m aware of the reputation the GIA has in some areas, but we’re not all torturers and interrogation experts.’
