by Mike Brooks
They’d barely got through the second air lock and onto the Keiko when a tall, fat man so pale he was virtually albino and with white-blond dreadlocks to match rounded a corner and stopped with a horrified expression on his face. “Cap?”
“Pieter, this is Tamara,” Drift grunted, indicating her with a jerk of his thumb. “She’s our new pilot. Now, I’m gonna—”
“Cap,” Pieter broke in, and Rourke suddenly realised that his horror wasn’t anything to do with seeing Drift’s ruined eye socket. “Cap, we’ve just been hailed. There’s a customs boat on its way to block us in, and they say we should expect a boarding party any moment. We’re being accused of smuggling.”
“For fuck’s sake!” Drift spat furiously. He shoved Rourke in the back. “Go on, get us out of here! I’m not going to some New Dubai jail to wait for an Al Shadid goon to walk in and execute me!”
“Bridge, now!” Rourke snapped, grabbing Pieter. He gaped at her for a second, then towed her round a corner and slapped the door open, revealing the Keiko’s cockpit. She stared at it for a second, trying to make sense of the layout, but her eye was mercifully caught by the nav computer. And she gravitated to that on the basis that the chair next to it must be for the pilot. A speaker crackled as she hurriedly sat down.
+Attention, Keiko. Acknowledge this transmission, and prepare to be boarded, over.+
It was a pleasant, neutral-toned female voice: The ship’s autotranslation protocol was dealing with the incoming Arabic communication. Rourke glanced at the speaker for a moment, then went back to trying to decipher the controls. She’d never flown anything like this freighter before—a small, two-person shuttle was the limit of her experience—but the theory was the same. The ignition codes had already been entered, so all she had to do was power up the drive. . . .
“You’ve got to disconnect us from the air lock!” Pieter snapped, reaching across her and jabbing at a switch. She felt a slight judder as they unclamped and began to drift very slightly away from the station. “Are you sure you’re a pilot?”
“Are you sure you shouldn’t be strapped in?” Rourke replied nastily, and rammed the drive to full. The freighter lurched forward like one of the racing camels she’d seen when she’d been on a mission down on New Dubai itself once, many years before. If said racing camel had been drunk. The Keiko wallowed, sending small items careering across the cockpit, and Pieter tumbling sideways into something that sounded hard.
“Are you mad?!” the fat man bawled at her.
“Just get in a chair, and tell me where that customs boat is!” Rourke ordered him, trying to make sense of the scanners. The speaker squealed as another transmission came in.
+Freighter Keiko, power down your drive at once, and hold position,+ the autotranslated voice said; far more mildly than the original speaker had, if Rourke was any judge. +I repeat, power down or we will fire.+
“Keiko to customs,” Drift said, appearing at her shoulder and taking the comm, “we have experienced a full drive malfunction, and our pilot is trying to bring us under control. Please hold your fire, and we will submit to boarding as soon as possible.” He killed the transmission and grabbed her shoulder. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Trying to get us out of here,” Rourke bit out, jabbing at the nav computer. Jubilee Betas were reliable enough—nav computers that weren’t reliable tended to send you through stars or into planets, which limited their marketability—but they weren’t the fastest to boot up. She searched for a previous destination rather than wasting time trying to programme in a new one, and hissed in frustration as she saw that most were out of range of their current fuel stocks.
“Look out!” Drift yelled, pointing out of the viewshield, and Rourke’s heart flew into her mouth as another ship attached to an air lock loomed up ahead of them. She veered them to one side, feeling Drift’s hand weighing down on her shoulder as she did so.
“Have you even flown before?” Drift demanded. “Get us away from the station before you hit something!”
“Wherever that customs boat is,” Rourke snapped at him, looking pointedly over her shoulder at Pieter for a second, “it won’t shoot at us if there’s a risk of hitting the station! If we head out into space, it’ll light us up no matter what you tell them!” She knocked Drift’s hand from her shoulder. “Besides, I’m the reason you still have any eyes left, Captain, so I’d appreciate it if you cut me a little more slack!”
“Slack be damned,” Drift spat. “Do you know what happens if you damage the Alcubierre ring?”
“We’re stuck here,” Rourke said, finally finding a viable destination from the nav computer’s memory and selecting it. The Alcubierre ring surrounding every interstellar craft bent space-time and allowed ships to travel at speeds that were objectively faster than light: Without it, the Keiko would be left lumbering around until the sublight engines ran out of fuel or, more likely, they were shot down by New Dubai customs.
“Missile lock!” Pieter yelped as a klaxon went off. Missile lock alerts weren’t standard fit on freighters, Rourke noted absently: Drift wasn’t without some foresight, at any rate.
“No,” Drift snarled at her, leaning down until his face was level with hers, “if you damage my ring, I throw you out of the damned air lock!”
“Is that what you tell all the girls?” Rourke snorted, pulling the Keiko up sharply, or as sharply as the sluggish freighter could manage. She didn’t usually take refuge in sexual innuendo, but she was either about to pull off a heroic escape or be blown to pieces. So it seemed as good a time as any. She waited for the green light to appear on the nav computer, flicked the switch to transition from sublight power, and hit the Alcubierre activation button.
“Hold on to your butts!” Drift yelled as the Keiko juddered . . .
. . . And abruptly, the pinpoints of light that were the innumerable stars of the cosmos were replaced by the eerie, mottled expanse that was all that could be seen when travelling inside an Alcubierre field’s distortion bubble.
They’d done it.
Rourke turned in her seat and looked up at Drift. “Hold on to your what?”
Drift’s one remaining eye studied her for a moment, and then he sighed. “Honestly. Does no one study the classics anymore?” He looked over his shoulder. “Pieter, go check on Sam, and make sure she wasn’t thrown about too badly. Probably didn’t even have a chance to strap in.”
“Yes, boss,” Pieter muttered, exiting the cockpit with a glare at Rourke. Drift waited until the door had hissed shut behind him, then turned back to her.
“You’re not a Grade III pilot.”
“No,” Rourke admitted, leaning back in her chair.
Drift pursed his lips. “So we need to get a new pilot.”
Rourke sighed, feeling her heart sink. She tried to look on the bright side: At least she wasn’t stuck on the Grand Souk anymore. “Can I assume that you won’t be throwing me out of an air lock until we at least reach somewhere I can breathe on the other side?”
“Huh?” Drift frowned. “Ah, that’s not quite what I meant. I said ‘we.’ ” He pointed between himself and Rourke. “I’m not hiring you as a pilot, but you can take down the Al Shadid brothers single-handedly. Besides, and don’t tell them I said this, but right now you seem about as capable as the rest of my damned crew put together.” He drummed his fingers together for a moment. “You got any funds?”
Rourke frowned up at him, damping down the momentary hope in her chest. Was he looking to rob her? “Why?”
“Haulage work for other people is fine, but there’s not much profit margin in it,” Drift said, glancing out of the viewshield. “If we could find our own cargos and pick the market to sell to, we could make much better money, but most of my capital’s spent on keeping this ship and her shuttle in repair. And none of my crew can keep money in their pocket once they see a bar or a brothel.” He looked back to her. “I’ve got the ship. If I could find someone to invest in a cargo and get us moving, we could tak
e it from there.”
Rourke looked at him, weighing him up. She had a payoff from the GIA: Not a huge amount, but it might be enough for what Drift was suggesting. The question was, did she trust him?
Then again, she’d lost count of the number of times she’d been working undercover and had needed to trust her gut on someone else. Would they pull through? Were they actually a double agent working for the other side? Besides, she’d gone looking for work with someone she’d never met, hoping to blag her way into a job she wasn’t qualified for, and had got it by way of kicking three men hard in the head. Nothing was certain except death and taxes, and she figured that Drift was looking for a way to avoid at least one of those.
“A joint venture, then?” she said. “Business partners?”
“I’m not saying definitely, not yet,” Drift said, raising one hand. “Let’s see how we go. But you saved my life when you had no reason to do so. I figure I can extend a bit of trust here.” He extended his hand. “We were never properly introduced. Ichabod Drift.”
Rourke took his hand and shook it. “Ichabod. From the Bible. Hebrew origin, meaning ‘inglorious.’ ” She looked up at the tall, wiry Mexican. “And is that your real name, Captain Drift?”
Drift snorted. “Is Tamara Rourke your real name?”
Rourke smiled wryly. “I have the ident to prove it. But let’s get you to the infirmary, Captain, before those painkillers wear off.” She stood up. “I set course for Akallabeth; it was about all we could reach. Does anyone there want to kill you?”
“Not that I know of,” Drift said, turning to head for the cockpit door. “I’m going to try to avoid that sort of thing from now on, I think.”
SHIP HIGH IN TRANSIT
A Harja Logistics standard small shipping container was a mainstay of commerce, used galaxy-wide and across governmental boundaries. Produced from high-grade steel in huge quantities, it was precisely two metres long, a metre wide, and half a metre deep.
It seemed a lot smaller from the inside.
Ichabod Drift knew precisely how long it had been since he’d been forced into one with a hood placed over his head and anchored around his neck by a collar that his fingers couldn’t loosen, because his mechanical right eye could call up a chrono display. It had been seventeen hours and twenty-six minutes, and that information wasn’t reassuring him at all. He’d tried to batter his way out at first, but that was futile. He had very little room for leverage, and besides, standard shipping containers were sturdy things. All he’d managed to do was hurt his hands. He’d yelled as well—for someone, anyone—but all that had got him was a dry mouth and a sore throat.
He hadn’t had a drink since, and he was so thirsty his hands were shaking. He’d been unable to restrain his bladder any longer at about the twelve-hour mark. Half of his right thigh was still damp, and the container stank of piss, which was aggravating his throat further. Most of his body was damp, in fact, because although the hood was porous and airholes must have been added to the container before his incarceration, the limited airflow didn’t have a chance of counteracting the accumulated water vapour from seventeen-and-a-half hours of respiration by a six-foot-four, two-hundred-pound adult male.
A six-foot-four, two-hundred-pound adult male who was, by now, scared so bad he could hardly think straight.
What if they never let him out, whoever they were? What if his container’s current resting place was to be his final resting place? At first, when he was still capable of rational thought, he’d tried to work out who’d grabbed him and where they might be taking him. After a few hours of imprisonment, though, he’d lost his grip on that thread of speculation. He’d started to fear that he wasn’t being taken anywhere, that the container he’d been trapped in had simply been dumped somewhere out of the way, for someone to find days or weeks or months later when he’d long since expired of thirst.
His mind worked away feverishly, focusing on the problem like a hypochondriac with a chest pain. He’d heard that a human could go about three days without water, and the glowing chrono display in his right eye was starting to feel like a clock counting down towards his own end. Yet he didn’t dare turn it off, for fear that abandoning the one constant he had left to focus on would see him pass into a state of true madness. He’d tried sucking the hood to recover the moisture his breath had lost to it; it didn’t seem to do a thing. How badly would he have decomposed by the time someone wondered what this container was and opened it?
Ichabod Drift had made enemies during his career as a smuggler, bounty hunter, and entrepreneurial starship captain; it was true. But this seemed extreme. What if whoever had trapped him in here wasn’t after Ichabod Drift? What if they were after Gabriel Drake, the name he’d adopted when he’d been young and desperate and had agreed to a career of piracy in service to the Europan Commonwealth in exchange for not being executed for a mutiny that he’d only technically led?
Well, in that case, his captors would likely be from the Federation of African States, and their government would undoubtedly be very interested to hear that he wasn’t as dead as they’d thought. The fate that would await him at their eager, vengeful hands might make dying of thirst over the course of a couple of days in the forgotten corner of a cargo hold somewhere look positively idyllic by comparison. He’d cost them an awful lot of money when he’d repeatedly hit their shipping over several years.
Of course, he’d also caused the deaths of a fair few of their people on the occasions that the crews had tried to resist his boarding parties, but in Drift’s experience, governments mainly cared about money.
There was a jolt. He cried out involuntarily in shock and sudden fear, but his throat strangled it down to barely a whisper. More jolting, and a disorientating swaying motion. He was being moved.
There was a brief sensation of increased weight—being lifted into the air?—and then an impact hard enough to knock the back of his head against the container’s bottom as it landed on something. He groaned, then threw his hands up reflexively and as best he could in the confined space as something hammered viciously on the metal, scant inches from his face.
He might have whimpered. He wasn’t sure if any noise made it out or not. However, the hammering broke off after half a dozen or so impacts and was replaced by harsh laughter that filtered dimly in through wherever the airholes were.
Another faint sensation of movement, this one rather smoother. He forced himself to ignore the burning pain in his throat and concentrate. Something was happening, enacted by people who knew there was a human inside this container, and that meant he wasn’t just going to be left to rot.
So what was happening?
He was still horizontal but apparently moving, and moving smoothly. So perhaps his container was being transported on some sort of maglev bed? That meant a spaceport, presumably. There was certainly some sort of noise from outside his container, but it was hard for him to tell what, exactly.
He didn’t get a quick answer to his question. His right eye’s chrono told him that it was a further twenty-two minutes, containing various other jolts and knocks, before he came to a final halt.
He sniffed. There was a very unsettling smell starting to seep in through the airholes. It smelled like . . .
Meat? Lots of old meat?
Oh, that’s not good. That’s never good.
UNWELCOMING COMMITTEE
The catches disconnected with a snap. Drift felt the lid being lifted free from above him and new air—“fresh” would have been pushing it, given the charnel stink—rushed into the crate. The temperature around his body dropped a few degrees instantly, and his clothes and skin suddenly felt clammy. Nonetheless, he could have cried in relief; he wasn’t going to be left to rot in a mass-produced coffin after all.
A male voice spoke in Russian. Drift didn’t have either his comm or his datapad, and so didn’t have the benefit of the instant translation they could provide when he linked them up. But he knew enough of the language to get the gist.<
br />
“Get him out.”
Strong hands reached down and hauled him up, not gently. His muscles wouldn’t support him, and he would have fallen had he not been held, although the muttered curses from either side of him indicated that this wasn’t done gladly. There was a momentary pressure at his neck as a hand unlocked the collar, then the hood was pulled free and he could finally see where he was . . . sort of. His left eye was useless after so long in darkness, but his mechanical right one adjusted almost immediately.
He wasn’t a big fan of what it showed him.
He was in what looked to be a warehouse. The floor was concrete, with various safety marks emblazoned on it indicating restricted areas and safe distances from machinery. The machinery itself consisted of conveyor belts, rows of hooks hanging from the ceiling, and a couple of visible band saws.
Not a warehouse. A slaughterhouse. Which would explain the smell.
Worrying though that was, it wasn’t as alarming as the man who stood directly in front of him. He was white and middle-aged, with dark hair cut short at the sides and longer on top, and was dressed in a midnight-blue suit of the type popular in the Russian systems, with a breastplate-like frontpiece buttoned at the right side of the chest. His physique was a few steps from athletic but a long stride from actually being fat, and he had unremarkable features—the sort of face you might walk past on the street on half a hundred worlds and think nothing of it. He had an undeniably commanding presence, however. Admittedly, that was probably helped by the half a dozen thugs standing around ready to do his bidding.
Drift nearly pissed himself again.
“Captain Drift,” said Sergei Orlov, his tone arctic.
Sergei Orlov. Crime boss of New Samara, gang lord, powerful businessman, and the most influential person for five star systems, and someone for whom Drift and his crew had failed to complete a theoretically simple job just over a month ago. Suddenly, the crate was looking very appealing.
