by Mike Brooks
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This book is for everyone who looks out for those closest to them, and for everyone who’s just trying to get by.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Well, who’d have ever thought I’d get this far?
First to be thanked is, of course, my wife, Janine, for the support she’s shown me by giving me the time and space to write stuff, being encouraging about it, and not getting too envious over the fact that I now have an extra day on my weekend to Be an Author. Thank you. I love you.
Next is my agent, Rob Dinsdale, always patient and determined, and thankfully tolerant of my tendency to say things like “Now what if I do this?” or “Yeah, I’ve started writing a young-adult portal fantasy; thought it’d be a laugh.” I salute your sterling efforts on my behalf.
And then of course thanks are owed to Joe Monti and all at Saga Press for wanting to see more of the adventures of this motley crew of miscreants and putting in the hard work to make it happen—from commissioning yet more amazing artwork to running the Mandarin past a freakin’ Hugo Award winner (!) without me even asking them to, just to make sure it’s all okay.
So on that note, I should thank Ken Liu (even though I’ve never met him; it’s not like I hobnob with important people) for checking the Mandarin, and give thanks again to Ande for Drift’s Spanish. Tying in on this, I’d like to thank Muhammed Aurangzeb Ahman at @IslamSciFi on Twitter, who put me in touch with a couple of people (whose names I am ashamed to admit I can no longer recall) to address some queries I had about Alim Muradov and the appropriate behaviour for a space-faring Muslim. Any errors in any of these respects are not due to them but to me. Or, if I can get away with it, the centuries between us and what happens in these books.
Thanks again to Blaise, who’s always there for me to bounce ideas off when she’s not busy keeping the country safe.
Thanks also to Magic Tom for my ubercomfy new writing chair of awesomeness, from which I wrote most of this. My back thanks you.
I would like to thank anyone who gave me information or advice that helped me write this book and whom I have forgotten to thank. I foolishly didn’t compile these acknowledgements at the time of writing, and it’s been something over a year since it was finished so I’ve undoubtedly forgotten some people. My humble apologies to you, whoever and wherever you may be.
PROLOGUE: TEN YEARS AGO, IN A STAR SYSTEM FAR, FAR AWAY
She’d nearly reached him when the brawl started.
The man who had to be Captain Drift—tall, dark, and, she supposed, probably handsome—was standing outside a coffee bar, although instead of sampling its wares, he was sipping from the disposable cup he’d got from the urn off a street vendor’s back. She knew that because that same vendor had told her where to look for the man she’d described, for the cost of the somewhat overpriced coffee she held in her own hand.
“Drift!”
The voice was an enraged roar that cut through the hubbub of the Grand Souk’s marketplace. Drift jumped and turned towards the sound for a moment, then clearly decided that he didn’t like what he saw and pivoted away to presumably make a run for it. Which would have worked wonderfully had a large man with a bristling beard not stepped smartly out of the crowd in front of him and landed a thunderous left-handed punch to his jaw.
Drift stumbled to one knee, sending the other market-goers scattering in alarm, and his attacker closed in on him with beefy hands extended. The starship captain wasn’t knocked as silly as it might have appeared, however, as he lashed out with his own punch directly into the other man’s testicles. The bearded man’s eyes bulged, and he let out a choking sound that was cut off abruptly when Drift stood up, deliberately unfolding his long frame to drive the top of his head into the other man’s jaw. The impact didn’t seem to do a great deal for Drift’s already shaky equilibrium, and he might have made it away had two more men not emerged from the swiftly receding crowd and grabbed him by the arms.
“Where’s my cargo, you son of a whore?” one of them shouted; clearly the man who’d yelled Drift’s name to begin with. Both of the new arrivals were also bearded, and what could be seen of their faces bore a strong resemblance to that of the man currently lying on the ground holding his crotch with one hand and his jaw with the other.
“You got what Tanahashi gave me!” Drift protested desperately. He was trying to squirm free of their grip but was only wearing a sleeveless armavest on his top half, and they had hold of his flesh rather than a jacket he might have been able to slip out of.
The man who’d spoken before, the older one judging by the greater presence of grey in his beard, spat an unfamiliar but doubtlessly uncomplimentary phrase in Arabic and then motioned with his head to the man who was presumably his brother. Each of them swept one of Drift’s legs out from under him and brought the struggling starship captain down to the ground with a thud. The older brother then reached one hand towards Drift’s face.
Drift began to scream.
At this point, she would normally have withdrawn. All her training had drummed into her that a field agent shouldn’t draw attention to themselves and should abort and try again another time rather than press ahead with a compromised mission.
The thing was, she wasn’t a field agent for the Galactic Intelligence Agency any longer, and this Captain Drift was the only likely way she’d found off this waystation orbiting New Dubai in the month that she’d been here. So her training could go hang.
She stepped out of the circle of shocked bystanders and kicked the younger of the two attackers in the side of the head as hard as she could.
He toppled sideways into his brother, who pushed him away and came up to his feet with a snarl directed at this new and unexpected threat. He reached for her with the bloodstained fingers of his right hand while his left dived into his clothes, probably for a weapon, but she threw her coffee into his face. It wasn’t particularly hot any longer, but it blinded him for a critical second and allowed her to duck past his groping fingers and slam a heel kick into the knee of his planted front leg. With all his weight on it, the limb had nowhere to go, and his patella gave way with a sickening crack. He stumbled forward onto his knees with an agonised cry: She reached down, grabbed his hair, placed her foot on the back of his head, and stamped down as hard as she could.
She was a long way from being the heaviest person in the galaxy, or even in the surrounding ten metres, but the impact of his head onto the metal deck was sufficient to incapacitate him. The younger brother was only now rolling up into a sitting position after her first blow, so she took a one-step run-up and kicked him in the face again. He went over backwards, howling.
Drift was staggering to his feet, cursing a blue streak in S
panish and clutching the right side of his face. Blood was leaking from between his fingers.
“Captain!” she shouted, grabbing him by the elbow. “Come on, we’re getting you out of here!”
It worked. The use of his title, the implied companionship of “we,” and most probably the definite assertion that she was taking him away from the place where he’d just been attacked meant that he followed her instead of snatching his arm away and treating her like another aggressor. She aimed a kick at the man Drift had chinned as they passed him too, which probably didn’t damage Drift’s view of her intentions.
They got two streets away before Drift staggered to a halt, still clutching his face. “I can’t see properly!”
“Let me look.” She reached up and prised his hand away, then sighed grimly. Drift’s warm brown left eye was untouched, but there was only a bloody hole where his right eye had been. “Well, that’s because you’ve only got one eye now. Sorry.”
“Me cago en la puta!”
“Hold up.” She unslung her pack and reached into it. The GIA had offered her a few things upon her discharge from active duty, including yet another false identity (which she’d refused), but that hadn’t included this small stash of medical drugs. So far as she knew, they were a secret between her and Dr. Grazioli, who’d always liked her.
She selected a low-dosage intramuscular painkiller: There were few nerve endings in an eye socket, so Drift wouldn’t be in agonising pain. But he would be a long way from comfortable, and something to settle his nerves probably wouldn’t go amiss. “Now hold still a second.”
She jabbed the hypodermic through the fabric of his pants and into the side of his glute. He let out a strangled yelp but didn’t pull away, and she was able to withdraw the needle without it snapping off. He stood there for a couple more seconds, taking deep breaths, until his breathing slowed slightly and a little of the tension dropped away as the drug started to take effect.
“Okay.” He exhaled hard. “Okay.” He turned his one remaining eye on her, seeming to see her properly for the first time, and narrowed it. “Right. Now, it’s not that I’m not grateful, because I am. But who the hell are you?”
“Tamara Rourke.” She tucked the hypodermic away, in case she got the chance to change the needle and refill it for use another time. “We spoke over the comm about the pilot job.”
“The pilot job. Right.” Drift looked back the way they’d come. “Not the knocking-people-the-fuck-out job. Because you seem pretty good at that, too.” He was clearly North American, like her, and judging by his appearance and his accent, he’d grown up on a planet with a population of mainly Mexican origin.
“I have a few talents,” Rourke said. “But speaking of knocking people out, shouldn’t we be moving again?”
“Yeah,” Drift agreed with a nod. “Yeah.” He set off at a fast walk, his longer legs meaning she had to nearly jog in order to keep up. “Answer me one thing, though: Do we know each other?”
“No,” Rourke said cautiously. “Why?”
“Because I was just about to get taken apart by the Al Shadid brothers, and you stepped in,” Drift said. “That’s a hell of a thing to do for someone you don’t know, on the chance of a job he hasn’t offered you yet. Might make a man a bit suspicious, if you know what I mean.”
Rourke raised her eyebrows. “Captain, I’ve been stuck on this thing for a month, and the only jobs I’ve been able to find have been junior crew posts on big corporate freighters. That’s not the sort of work I’m looking for. Yours is.”
Drift stopped in his tracks and stared at her. “And how do you know what my work is? All we discussed over the comm was where to meet.”
“Captain, your advert was for a Grade III pilot,” Rourke said quickly and quietly, “and specified extensive experience with atmospheric manoeuvring. It required familiarity with Jubilee Beta nav computers, which are an old model not used by any commercial shipping line that I’m aware of. You also included a requirement for ‘professional discretion.’ ” She spread her hands. “Put that all together, and you get ‘freelance captain.’ And most of the time that’s just a nice way of saying ‘part-time smuggler.’ ”
Drift narrowed his eye again. “You got any references? Anyone I’d know?”
Rourke kept her face smooth. “No.”
“No one at all?” Drift shook his head, possibly in disbelief or possibly in response to a jab of pain getting through. “So you’re, what, a pilot in your midthirties with no employment history who wants to make a living flying on what she thinks is a smuggling boat?”
Rourke resisted the urge to smile a little. She knew she looked younger than her age, but he’d undershot her by about a decade. And she didn’t think he was trying to be flattering. “I’d rather answer to one person than a faceless organisation, Captain, and that’s all I have to say on that. I’ve demonstrated I’ve got other skills that might be useful to you. What do you say?”
Drift chewed the inside of his cheek for a second. “I . . .”
There was a commotion behind them that rapidly turned into screams. Rourke was running before she even heard the gunshot, and she was pleased to note that Drift was beside her. Clearly, the Al Shadid brothers had found them.
“Bay Forty-Two!” Drift yelled at her, one arm stretched out in front of him in a crude attempt to compensate for his enforced lack of depth perception. “If you can fly us out of here, you can have the job! Deal?”
“Deal!” Rourke shouted back, doing her best to keep pace. She knew she was as fit as someone half her age, but Drift was nearly a foot taller than her. And most of that was in his legs. “Who are these clowns, anyway?”
Drift snatched an incredulous sideways glance at her. “You’ve been on the Grand Souk for a month looking for smuggling work, and you don’t know who the Al Shadid brothers are? Did you just drop out of the fucking sky or something?!”
“More or less!” Rourke snapped, then grabbed his arm as she saw a disturbance in the crowd ahead that might just have been caused by people retreating from a man with a gun. “Left!”
This was a smaller alley, with stalls pressing in on both sides, and Rourke wondered if she’d made a mistake: They had less room to move here, and if someone started shooting without regard for collateral damage, then they’d be like the proverbial fish in a barrel. She slipped around Drift so she was on his blind side. “Do you have a gun?”
“Firearms aren’t allowed on the station,” Drift grunted, shoving an elderly man aside.
“Hasn’t stopped them,” Rourke pointed out.
“They’re the fucking Al Shadid brothers,” Drift bit out. “I’m a two-bit starship captain who didn’t want to be thrown into jail for carrying a weapon and didn’t know that anyone would be coming after him because it seems Enrique Tanahashi was playing silly buggers with their cargo!” He nearly pie-faced an overly keen vendor offering genuine vegetables. “That’s the last time I carry a cargo without knowing what it is, unless someone’s paying me very well and in advance!”
They made it out of the other end of the alley onto a larger thoroughfare, and Rourke realised with relief that they’d reached the edge of this level of the waystation. Pedestrian walkways ran alongside a wider space for cargo crawlers, small personal maglevs, and buzzing courier drones. On the far side she could see small portholes that gave glimpses of the stars beyond and, at the moment, a sliver of New Dubai.
“Is this the right level?” she asked Drift, scanning for the nearest docking bay.
“Yeah,” he replied, pointing to their right. “That way. At least these bastards don’t know where my ship is. I hope.” He tapped his comm as they began to run again, then huffed into it between steps. “Pieter? It’s Drift. Get everything ready: I’ve found us a pilot, and we’re leaving. It sounds like Tanahashi stiffed the beardy brothers on the cargo, and they’re taking it out on us.” He paused, then began shouting so loudly that Rourke nearly stumbled.
“Yes, I tried fucking
talking to them! I’ve lost an eye; I’m hopped up on painkillers; and if you want to make friends with them so badly, you can sit outside the fucking air lock and wait for them to show up!” Rourke heard him tap the comm again to disconnect it, and hiss in frustration. “Jesu, Maria, madre de Dios, this is not one of my better days!”
“Glad to hear it,” Rourke told him fervently. “If it were, then I’d be reconsidering signing on.” She pointed at an upcoming air lock. “Is that it?”
“It’s after Forty-One, so it had better be,” Drift muttered. He shifted direction without warning, running out in front of a cargo crawler big enough to crush him but making it across to the other side before the wheeled behemoth could do more than start to sound its horn. Rourke followed more cautiously, slipping around behind the crawler and waiting for a moment to let a tuk-tuk scoot past before she followed her new captain. By the time she caught up with him he was placing his palm on a scanner next to the air lock door, which hissed open.
“Come on through!” Drift barked at her, and she obliged. He followed her and slapped the closer, then slumped against the wall breathing heavily as soon as the door had ground shut again. “Seriously. Today can piss off.”
“Come on, Captain,” Rourke said, eyeing the second air lock at the far end of the corridor that would lead to his ship. “Let’s get out of here before we get any further surprises. What kind of ship do you have, anyway?”
“StarCorp Kenya-class freighter,” Drift replied, levering himself fully vertical again with a groan. “Twenty years old if she’s a day, but the Alcubierre ring’s practically pristine. And I had the thrusters redone last year. I call her the Keiko.” He set off down the corridor, his tread significantly heavier now he didn’t need to move quickly. “You flown anything like her before?”
“I’m sure I’ll be able to handle her,” Rourke said calmly, although in truth she was anything but. Her piloting experience was nowhere near what Drift’s job advert had wanted, and this was something of a desperation move on her part. “I’ll take it slowly to start with though, to make sure I don’t shake anyone up.”
