by Mike Brooks
Rybak managed to look both pleased and disappointed at once. Rourke could understand why; they desperately needed information, but handing over that sort of critical detail to a foreign team would rankle, quite apart from unease at the rumoured methods the GIA used. Still, there was nothing for it. She’d hoped that Hall might prove more tractable if he was captured – he at least would owe Kelsier nothing, whereas it was anyone’s guess how deep the captured thug’s loyalty ran – but that option was closing to them as well.
‘I think we need to proceed according to the original plan,’ she told Rybak. ‘It’s been ninety minutes since the Early Dawn took off. We should start the pursuit.’
Rybak frowned. ‘If we can just lay our hands on Hall—’
‘We can’t wait for that possibility,’ Rourke cut her off. ‘You said yourself, he’s evaded every attempt at capture so far. We need to work with what we have, the nav data Jenna managed to transmit to us before . . .’
‘Before she was kidnapped?’ Rybak finished grimly. ‘Agent, I don’t know what sort of qualities your slicer may have, but Vankova isn’t one of mine. She’s local law enforcement, and won’t have had training on resisting even the most rudimentary forms of torture. There’s every chance the men and women on that ship know what our plans are and will simply set a different course to avoid Kelsier’s base completely. Without the homing beacon Vankova was meant to set up, that nav data will only get us into roughly the right area. If it’s an asteroid field then we could spend the next hundred years looking for our target!’
‘You’re thinking like a military commander now,’ Rourke said, shaking her head. ‘These aren’t soldiers, Captain, they’re criminals and terrorists. They might just abandon Kelsier if all seems lost, yes, but the man you’ve got in custody isn’t spilling his guts yet and that makes me think the others will stay true, at least for now. They might disable the homing beacon, but they’ll head back to the closest thing they have to safety. Your ships will be faster than whatever transport brought them here, even to a system next door. We’ll be there on their tails, ready to see what they do and where they go.’
‘Our ships might,’ Rybak conceded, ‘so would you be riding with us? Forgive me for saying, but that freighter of yours doesn’t seem too spry.’
‘You might be surprised,’ Rourke smirked. It was true, too: the Keiko’s Alcubierre drive had been souped up to allow for faster transit between systems, although that had been done for more mundane commercial purposes than the sort of unseen GIA enhancements Rybak might assume it carried.
Rybak drummed her fingers on the desk, staring down at the plan of Glass City as though willing it to give up the location of the Laughing Man. Rourke had already done plenty of that though, and could see no obvious place for him to be hiding. Then again, an obvious hiding place wouldn’t be a good hiding place . . . unless, of course, Hall was going for a double bluff.
She exhaled in frustration. Trying to second-guess the galaxy’s most infamous assassin was a good way to drive oneself mad. ‘Captain, I think we must leave the apprehension of Hall to others.’ Besides, the longer we stay here the more likely it is a message will come from Old Earth and blow our cover completely. ‘Homing beacon or not, element of surprise or not, our best chance now is to follow the leads we have before they go cold.’
Rybak nodded slowly in reluctant agreement. ‘And your man van Schaken?’
‘I believe he favoured cremation,’ Rourke replied, a little uncomfortably. This was something an agent should know about her team, but Micah had never really been one for deep conversation. ‘He never gave us specific instructions. Each of my crew know that there’s no guarantee of returning their body to their home planet if they die in my service.’
‘I’ll make arrangements,’ Rybak said. She looked up at Rourke questioningly. ‘I assume you’re happy for that to wait until we return?’
Rourke adopted the careful mask she’d used so many times over the years. There was no question of the Keiko’s crew returning to the Perun System after they’d left it, so Micah was likely to go to his rest alone and unmourned. However, somewhere out in the void, Jenna McIlroy was trapped on a hostile ship with nothing for support but an inexperienced surveillance technician and a handgun she’d shown no evidence of being able to fire effectively.
‘Captain,’ she said firmly, ‘my duty now is to the living. Let’s go find our terrorists, and get our people back.’
STOWAWAYS
The time spent cramped behind a piece of unidentifiable equipment in the engine room of the Early Dawn, limbs tucked in awkwardly, barely daring to speak in case someone came in at exactly the wrong time, terrified of discovery, in near-total darkness only slightly alleviated by the light cast from various control panels, constantly subjected to the vibrations transmitted through the metal floor and the casing she was pressed up against and really, really needing to piss was, without a doubt, the most miserable period of Jenna McIlroy’s existence so far. It even beat out zero-gravity hockey in seventh grade, which she’d been fairly certain was the most painful and emotionally ravaging experience it was possible to suffer without stepping inside a well-equipped torture chamber.
Her mind had been her own worst enemy during the hours the Early Dawn took to reach its parent ship in orbit, wherever and whatever that was. Her body was suffering, it was true, but it was her brain which insisted on continually presenting her with ever-more violent and horrific scenarios of discovery, interrogation, abuse and execution. She hadn’t dared try to use her comm to contact Drift or the others in case the signal got picked up – the only thing saving them was the fact that no one else on board knew they were there – so there was no one to talk to, to get advice from, to reassure her that it would be okay or to talk through a plan with her. Sara certainly wasn’t much use for it: the Hrozan girl had spent a reasonable portion of the flight crying, although at least she’d done so quietly. It was left to Jenna to try to organise her own thoughts.
She noticed immediately when the whine of the engines changed. They’d been pushing hard, insofar as she could tell, which made sense; now, however, the throaty rumble died back a little. Moments later she felt herself being pressed harder against the metal behind her by the unseen hand of deceleration.
‘What’s happening?’ Sara asked, a movement in the shadows behind her hiding place suggesting that she’d looked up. The last time Jenna had seen her, just before the motion-activated lights had winked out a few hours ago, her minimal make-up had been smudged from tears and she’d looked terrified. Jenna was quite glad she didn’t need to control her own expression right now.
‘Someone’s just hit the retros.’ The pressure grew stronger. ‘Hard.’ Jenna took a firm grip on her bag to make sure it didn’t slide and skitter away over the engine-room floor. ‘We must be about to dock in their ship, and that means someone’ll be coming in to shut the engines down soon.’
‘What do we do then?’ Sara asked nervously. Jenna paused, running through things in her head, checking to make sure she hadn’t missed anything obvious. She opened her mouth to speak again, but before the first words had formed they heard the hiss of the door opening and the lights came up once more, bathing them in illumination which seemed blinding after their time in the dark.
Both of them froze, apart from Jenna very carefully easing the safety off on her gun. The rate of deceleration was starting to slow, and they were surely approaching a dead stop by now. Just hurry up and dock . . .
‘We on yet?’
The voice seemed so loud she jumped, and nearly hit her head on the metal behind her. It was the same male voice as before, loud and rough and impatient, and was answered by the hiss of a comm.
+. . . a moment, so get ready for . . . chronising the Heim fields.+
Jenna blinked. Almost every ship or waystation in the galaxy had a Heim generator to produce artificial gravity, but that naturally led to complications when one craft docked inside another. If the activation of
one field was synchronised perfectly with the deactivation of the other then there were no problems, but it certainly wasn’t the best time to be building a card pyramid, or eating soup.
Or hunkering down in a low, narrow hiding place . . .
She looked over at Sara again, braced herself as best she could between the hard surfaces surrounding her and mouthed ‘Hold on’. The other girl looked back at her in confusion, then her eyes widened in shock as the familiarity of gravity disappeared and she started to drift upwards. Jenna winced as the Hrozan’s expression slipped into one of terror, waited for her to float out into view of their unseen companion . . .
‘What the—’
Gravity reasserted itself just as the man started speaking. Sara dropped back to the deck, a fall of only a couple of inches, and hunkered down into a ball immediately as a thump came from the far end of the room. Jenna felt her pulse rise so fast that it seemed like nothing less than a hammering in her ears, the individual beats barely distinguishable as she clutched her gun with hands suddenly slick with sweat.
‘What the hell sort of “synchronising” do you call that?!’
+. . .the fuck up, Marone, I warned you, didn’t I? We’re on, so kill . . . ngine and let’s get out of here.+
‘Prick,’ the man apparently called Marone muttered. The engine’s rumble coughed and died and the door hissed open and shut again, the second action cutting off the thuds of Marone’s retreating boots. Jenna let out the breath she’d been holding with a sound like the pressure cooker in the Keiko’s galley when Kuai had been steaming vegetables.
‘We’ve got to get off!’ Sara hissed at her. Jenna shook her head.
‘There’s no getting off; we’re in orbit now, and they’ll be making an Alcubierre jump as soon as they can.’
‘We can’t keep hiding here forever!’ Sara protested, clearly horrified.
‘We shouldn’t need to,’ Jenna countered. ‘They’ll leave the shuttle now, and we should have it to ourselves until they get to wherever they’re going.’ She checked her wrist chrono. ‘Give them five more minutes to get off this boat, and then I think we can risk heading out.’
It was possibly the longest five minutes of Jenna’s life.
Finally, when the display showed that her self-set timescale had expired, she forced herself up to her feet. Muscles screamed and protested after being bunched up for so long, and the less said about her spine the better. She groaned and staggered sideways, catching herself on the metal bank Sara had been hiding behind.
‘Oh God, I am too young to be making noises like this,’ Jenna muttered. She reached down and offered Sara a hand. ‘Coming?’
‘You should . . . ow . . . try yoga,’ Sara offered, clearly not experiencing an entirely pain-free transition to vertical herself.
‘Yoga? Seriously?’ Jenna blinked at her. ‘I’m not fifty.’
‘Trust me, it might be different for you GIA types when you’re running around all over the place,’ Sara said, ‘but when you’re sitting in front of a terminal all day every day you need something to help you stay mobile.’ She arched her back, and Jenna heard something click. ‘Ohh, that wasn’t good, that wasn’t good . . .’
Jenna thought about pointing out the sudden banal bent their conversation had taken, but decided against it. If talking about an exercise regime kept Sara’s mind off their situation and prevented her from freaking out and running through the Early Dawn screaming to be let off, it was a price well worth paying.
‘You know, my life isn’t exactly like you think,’ she said as they made their way cautiously towards the door. There was no sign of movement in the corridor from what she could see through the small window, and right at this moment she wasn’t necessarily certain that she’d care if there was. Sara had been right, they could hardly stay huddled up in the engine room forever. ‘I do a lot of sitting in front of terminals as well.’
‘You say that,’ Sara replied, her voice dropping as Jenna reached out to hit the door release, ‘but I only met you this morning, and look where I am now!’
‘Point taken,’ Jenna acknowledged. The door slid open without any immediate shouts of alarm from the other side, so she stepped through and tried to match her movements to how she vaguely remembered Rourke behaving whenever she’d followed the older woman into potential trouble. Gun in both hands for stability, pointing low (‘People start on the ground; you pull the trigger too early when you’re bringing a gun up and you might hit a leg, which is better than shooting above someone’s head when you’re bringing a gun down’), sidling up to a corner and peering around it before moving into the open . . . she was certain that her interpretation would have caused Rourke to despair, but it was better than nothing, and it would hopefully give Sara some confidence if she looked like she had a vague idea of what she was doing.
Each section of corridor was dark as they approached, before being bathed in light as the lamps flickered on. On the one hand this at least meant that no one had been this way for a few minutes, probably since Marone had left the engine room; on the other, it was going to be very obvious to anyone left on board that someone was approaching. Still, they got past the infirmary without meeting anyone, and Jenna was able to sidle up to the airlock which overlooked the cargo bay to peer through the window.
‘Clear,’ she breathed with relief. Sure enough, there was no sign of activity beneath them. ‘Come on, let’s get to one of the cabins.’
The corridor atop the cargo bay was deserted as well. To Jenna’s immense relief the door for the first cabin they tried was not coded, and opened the moment they tried the release. She leaped in, gun waving in arcs to try to cover all angles, but she needn’t have bothered. There was a single fold-down bed built into one wall, a desk with a simple terminal and detachable pad, some drawers bolted to another wall, and a door to the bathroom cubicle which, upon investigation, proved to contain not only a toilet and wash basin but also a shower pod just about big enough for a medium-sized adult to turn around in.
‘I need to get this secured,’ Jenna said, kneeling down and firing up her wrist-mounted hacking rig to connect it to the cabin door’s simple computer brain. ‘Can you black out the windows, or something?’ Anyone could lock the door from the inside – that was the point of doors, after all – but there was always an override code to open it from the outside which the captain of the ship would normally have set; it was the work of thirty seconds to remove that from the memory and install a new access code. Later on she’d just rewrite the programming so someone familiar with the system wouldn’t be able to pull the same trick, but for now they were still reasonably secure from anyone without heavy-duty cutting gear.
A few minutes later they’d activated the self-tinting glass in the cabin’s porthole to prevent anyone outside noticing the light and were both sitting on the bed with a mug of water to combat the thirst which had built up during their self-imposed imprisonment in the engine room. Jenna found herself feeling relaxed and safe, and nearly laughed; they were nowhere near safe, but everything was relative.
‘So . . . what now?’ Sara asked. Jenna was getting a little sick of hearing that question, but snapping at her only ally wasn’t going to do any good, so she took another sip of water and started to lay out their situation.
‘Well, odds are they’re running away to wherever they normally hide out, which will be somewhere in the nav log data I transmitted. If our guess was right then the jump shouldn’t be more than a couple of days, but for that long we’ve probably got this place to ourselves.’
‘What happens when they come back on board?’ Sara asked. Her hands had found her braid of hair again, which was looking decidedly sorry around the end.
‘With any luck it’ll be a short run to wherever they’re docking,’ Jenna said. ‘Actually, if our info’s right and their boss hides out in an asteroid then they might just fly the parent ship right up to it and anchor to it with a cable, then shuttle inside in this. If it’s a short trip they won’t e
ven need to come into a cabin, and if the door for this one seems stuck they’ll hopefully just assume it’s a malfunction and leave it.’
‘And when we’re in the asteroid?’ Sara said, her face betraying her nervousness. ‘Doesn’t that mean we’re basically sitting inside a base full of people who’ll kill us if they find us?’
‘Essentially, yes,’ Jenna shrugged, trying to sound more confident than she felt, ‘but we’ve got two advantages over them.’
‘They don’t know we’re here?’ Sara asked.
‘That’s one,’ Jenna nodded. ‘The other one is that everything – this shuttle, the main ship, the asteroid – are all going to be controlled by computers.’ She held up the arm with her hacking rig on and tapped it meaningfully. ‘And what’s controlled by computers can be controlled by me.’
GHOST IN THE SYSTEM
Something was digging into her ribs.
Repeatedly.
Jenna tried to ignore it but the sensation was an insistent one, and distantly familiar at that. She rolled over under the covers and flailed an arm to shoo Missy away. ‘Damn it, cat . . .’
‘Uh, Jenna?’
Wait . . .
Jenna reluctantly opened her eyes and found a bright blue pair staring worriedly back at her, above a mouth chewing on the end of a thick brown braid. The room she was in wasn’t one she knew, either.
Shit. How drunk was I last night?
She experienced a half-second of terrified confusion until she realised that the person facing her was at right angles and therefore kneeling on the floor, rather than in the bed with her, and her memory threw up a name to go with the face as well as, thank God, some context.
‘Sara? What . . . what’s going on?’ She yawned and sat up, and everything else fell back into place: the attempted trap, their unintended kidnapping by the remnants of Kelsier’s thugs, taking shelter in the cabin . . . then the memory of Micah’s death hit her like a bowling ball in the gut again, and her eyes misted momentarily.
