by Mike Brooks
“Accidentally,” Rourke countered. “You weren’t expecting me to come out of the crate fighting. You didn’t know that I wouldn’t shoot you anyway, and the consequences be damned. I could have figured that we were going to die so I might as well take you with us.” She shrugged. “I’ll be honest, I nearly did.”
“But you did not,” Orlov said softly.
Rourke shrugged. “So you got lucky, this time. But you’re a powerful man, and you make a living out of stepping on people. That makes enemies. Hell, sometimes your employees don’t fare too well either.” She nudged one of the corpses with her foot. “Who’s to say Alex here doesn’t have a sibling or a partner that’s going to come after you now?”
Orlov actually laughed. “I would like to see them try.”
She smiled, deliberately. “Perhaps you will.”
The crime lord studied her for a moment, as though expecting her to say more. When she held her tongue, he shrugged and waved a hand at her. “Take Ms. Rourke to a guest suite and provide her with a change of clothes.”
“I’m just going to walk out of here into the street at gunpoint?” Rourke asked. “You don’t think people will notice?”
“This is New Samara, Ms. Rourke,” Orlov replied levelly. “This is my city. People only notice what I want them to notice.” He smiled thinly. “But no, you will not be at gunpoint. You know what will happen to you and your crew if you try to escape. I think we may need to secure you, though.” He nodded at one of his thugs, a thickset man with an overlarge nose and a brown ponytail. “Tie her hands, and get her out of here.”
Rourke couldn’t help herself. She centred her weight just enough to be noticeable, and held her arms ready slightly away from her sides.
Orlov narrowed his eyes. “Wait.”
The thug dutifully halted before he’d taken two steps.
Orlov’s eyes bored into Rourke. She stared back at him as blankly as she knew how. She’d gone through the Galactic Intelligence Agency’s counterinterrogation training back in her old life, and she could make a steel wall look emotional and expressive when she wanted to. After a couple of seconds a muscle in Orlov’s cheek twitched, and he switched to Russian.
“Leave your gun here.”
The thug dutifully passed his pistol to his boss, then approached Rourke with wrist binders in his hands. She sensed a slight ratcheting up of the tension in the room around her, shifts of movement indicating that weapons that had loosely been covering her before were very definitely covering her now.
She held her hands out in front of her and watched the ponytailed man flinch backwards, ever so slightly. He recovered himself after a split second and fastened the binders securely around her wrists. She didn’t smirk at him, and didn’t look past him to smirk at Orlov. She didn’t smirk at all. She simply turned when Orlov’s man took her arm, and allowed herself to be propelled towards the door. Footsteps from behind told her that one . . . no, two more thugs were following them out, but she wasn’t overly concerned with them. Orlov wasn’t speaking, which probably meant he was watching her. If he was watching her, then he was probably thinking about her or what she’d said, which was exactly what she wanted.
Rourke trusted that Ichabod and the rest would do their utmost to come up with what essentially amounted to her ransom, but she knew as well as anyone that the galaxy didn’t always play fair. It was no one’s responsibility other than her own to keep her safe, and she was already working on ways to achieve that.
It was nighttime, and the air was thick and close with a promise of rain, but for now the streets were still dry. A gust of wind, funnelled between the identical, dark-windowed warehouses blew fine bits of dust and detritus into Rourke’s face. There was a distant roar, and she looked up to see a star rising into the sky: a shuttle taking off and heading towards orbit. She knew New Samara’s spaceport was on the city’s northern boundary, which meant that—she quickly orientated herself—she must be somewhere in the southwest. The simple act of stepping outside had confirmed that she was definitely in New Samara; the planet’s capital was the only urban area in the temperate zones of this naturally habitable world of the same name. Every other farmable inch was given over to the cultivation of food, with the other major population centres relegated to the desert or tundra, save the small farming settlements scattered here and there.
One of her guards, bald as an egg, spoke briefly into his comm. Another one, a handsome man with short blond hair but oddly crooked eyebrows, put himself into her line of sight.
“Do you speak Russian?” he demanded, in the same language.
Rourke allowed a slight frown to crease her forehead. “What?”
“When the car comes, get in the back,” he said. Rourke heard the faint whine of an aircar but kept any comprehension from her face.
“I don’t . . .”
The thug armed his pistol with an audible buzz and raised it to point it directly at her head. She saw the ponytailed man stiffen; he at least was smart enough to realise that, with her hands bound in front of her, she could potentially snatch the weapon, but she did nothing other than sway back slightly.
The whine grew louder and the aircar rounded a corner, then settled down beside them with a blast of downdraft. The handsome man raised his voice.
“Get in the car, or I’ll shoot you dead.”
Rourke let her expression harden. “If you want to threaten me, try speaking a language I can understand. Hablas español?”
He held her at gunpoint for a moment longer, his eyes hard, then smiled and spoke in accented English. “Get in the back.”
“Not so hard, was it?” Rourke muttered, turning to pull the door open and climb inside. It was a midrange Excelsior, sturdy and reliable, and large enough to ferry several people of reasonable size from one place to another. The handsome one got in to her right, the bald one to her left. The ponytailed man sat in the passenger seat next to the driver, but turned around to look over his shoulder.
“Put your gun away, Sacha. You saw what she can do.”
The handsome blond man, apparently Sacha, snorted. “Mr. Orlov made a deal with her, right? She just has to play nice and no one hurts her, or her friends.”
“What do you think she’s going to do, Andrei?” the bald man asked with a chuckle. She could smell old alcohol on him, stale and sour. “Take his gun and kill us all in midair? If she shoots Boris, then we crash and she dies anyway.”
Andrei grimaced and turned to face the windshield. “I just don’t want to take chances. Mr. Orlov didn’t want me to have my gun on me around her, remember?”
“Yeah, when her hands weren’t tied,” the bald man replied.
“And besides, she probably could beat you up,” Sacha added. “Boris, you getting us moving or what?”
“Just waiting for you ladies to stop babbling,” the driver growled in a surprisingly gravelly voice. “Do you always bicker like this in front of Mr. Orlov’s guests?”
“She can’t understand Russian,” Sacha told him, his tone one pace back from outright patronising.
“How do you know that?” Boris demanded, engaging the lifters. The car began to rise smoothly, despite the weight on board.
“You saw me with my gun to her head, right?” Sacha asked. “I was telling her I’d shoot her if she didn’t get in. She just asked me to find someone who spoke her language. Didn’t have a clue what I was on about.”
“She could have been bluffing,” Andrei pointed out, turning around again.
“You worry like my mother, Andrei,” Sacha snorted. The bald man shifted and shot Sacha a glare, which he ignored.
Andrei was studying Rourke, and she stared back at him. It was hard work, putting on a performance this nuanced. Any idiot could pretend not to understand what was being said around them, although it took a bit of practice. However, the Tamara Rourke that these men had seen in the slaughterhouse would be doing her best not to look unnerved despite the fact that she couldn’t understand them. So she ha
d to pretend not to understand them, but also pretend that she was pretending not to be nervous at the fact that she couldn’t. But she was a little nervous, because she was only human.
The main thing was, she could understand them and they didn’t think she could. She’d settle for that, for now.
A REDISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH
The Keiko was the closest thing to home Jenna McIlroy had.
There could be those who’d disagree with that assessment, of course. She still had a family back on Franklin Minor, so far as she knew, but she’d left in a hurry. She might have been able to travel faster than light, but communications couldn’t. Alcubierre jumps were illegal too close to inhabited planets due to the risk of collisions between ships, so across the space of a solar system, it might be quicker to send a radio wave, but otherwise nothing could travel faster than the person carrying it. She’d been able to send messages home assuring them that she was safe, but there was no way for her family to send a reply that would reach her. Or even for her to know if they’d actually heard from her at all.
However, for all that, the Keiko was where Jenna now felt most comfortable, the ship had seemed strangely empty since Drift had returned alone from New Samara. Tamara Rourke wasn’t big and she certainly wasn’t loud, but there was a noticeable gap where she should have been. Jenna’s eyes kept getting drawn to the bare space by the canteen door where Rourke usually leaned during crew meetings, and the Captain kept pausing as though subconsciously waiting for her to clarify or confirm something he’d just said.
“So, what we gonna do?” Apirana Wahawaha rumbled from beside Jenna when Drift had finished recounting his conversation with Sergei Orlov. The big Māori was sitting in the huge armchair that he’d brought aboard years ago, for the simple reason that the standard canteen seats were on the small side for him. Jenna was perched on one arm of it, leaning against his shoulder. One of the very few good things to have come out of their disastrous trip to Uragan was that she and “Big A” had, after some misunderstandings, embarked on a relationship. They were still feeling their way through the first few weeks, and the crew’s capture by Orlov’s thugs hadn’t exactly been the best start to it, but she didn’t have a regret in the world.
“Even if we get the money, what are the odds Orlov lets us go?” asked Kuai Chang, the Keiko’s mechanic. The little man was fiddling with his dragon pendant, as he tended to when uncomfortable or nervous. “How do we know he won’t just take it, then kill us anyway and laugh?”
“Ain’t the point, is it?” his sister said. Jia was somewhere in her midtwenties, a few years younger than Kuai and a few older than Jenna, and was the Keiko’s pilot, a role at which she was spectacularly gifted. She was also staggeringly egotistical, incredibly foulmouthed, and almost pathologically anti-authoritarian.
Kuai scowled at his sister. “I think us being killed is a good point.”
“We don’t go back with the money, Rourke dies. Not fuckin’ happening,” Jia said firmly, crossing her arms and glaring at him.
“I just—” Kuai glanced around for support, but found none in the rest of the crew. He subsided. “Fine. We go get money for the mad gangster. So how are we going to do that?”
“I’ve still got about twenty grand of the money I won in Orlov’s casino right before he hired us in the first place,” Drift said, looking around, “so at least that’s a starting point. Anyone else got any sizeable amounts?”
There was a gloomy shaking of heads.
“What about Kelsier’s other accounts?” Jenna suggested hopefully. In taking down Drift’s former-boss-turned-terrorist the Keiko’s crew had gained details of the ex-politician’s secret funds. “There’ll be enough if we combine some of those.”
It was Drift’s turn to shake his head. “There’s two problems with that. First, it would take too long: They’re widely scattered, and I don’t think we’d be able to hustle fast enough to get what we’d need together and get back in time. Second, Sibaal cleaned out the account on New Samara, but she’ll know that some money’s missing, and she’ll guess who’s to blame. We have to assume she’ll go after the other accounts to prevent us from getting them. We won’t know which ones she’s reached. So it would be a gamble in any case, and I don’t fancy gambling with my business partner’s life.”
“That limits our options,” Jenna said, grimacing. It wasn’t like the Keiko’s crew hadn’t made some big money in the past, but half a million stars sounded like a lot even with her uncertainty of the exact exchange rates.
“It surely does,” Drift acknowledged grimly. “We need something close—I’d say two weeks’ travel time, tops—if we’re to have any chance of pulling off a scheme to get what we need. And I can’t think of anything legal that will net us that much in the time we’ve got.”
“There’s always piracy,” Kuai suggested blandly.
“No!” Drift snapped, rounding on the little mechanic.
Jenna felt Apirana stir beside her, and the big man leaned forward to glare at his crewmate. “Can’t believe you suggested that, bro.”
“Piracy, theft, fraud, what difference is it?” Kuai protested, looking hurt.
“The most obvious difference is that to go pirate you need to knock out a ship’s Alcubierre ring to prevent them from jumping away, and we have no damn guns on this boat,” Drift snapped at him. “You also need up-to-date information on shipping routes, cargos, and local law enforcement patrols, as well as a fence to sell hot goods to, none of which we have here.” He scratched the skin next to his metal eye. “Besides which, I’m not doing that again. Not even for Tamara.”
Jenna breathed a little more easily. She’d done quite a few illegal things with the Keiko’s crew, but piracy was not something she ever wanted to get involved in, judging by the vague details the Captain had been willing to share about his former career. Margins for error were very fine when the crew of one pressurised tin can was trying to board another pressurised tin can in the depths of space. Even if the victims were left alive, their ship was probably crippled and unable to get back to port. They would be reliant on rescue, which was always an uncertain factor in the big black. Jenna wasn’t sure if she could be party to leaving a boatload of human beings adrift with their hope of survival coming down to a mix of blind chance and the goodwill of others.
Kuai threw up his hands. “Do you have a better idea? Because right now the only one I see is running and hiding, and saying sorry to Rourke’s spirit if it ever comes to haunt us.”
Drift looked sideways, to where the last and newest member of the Keiko’s crew—and how strange it was for that to not be Jenna anymore—was sitting quietly at the canteen table.
“Chief?”
Alim Muradov looked up. Up until the revolution he had been Uragan City’s Chief Security Officer, but then he’d shot the planetary governor to prevent the man from using Uragan’s toxic atmosphere to poison the rebelling population. He’d been quiet and withdrawn in his short time with the crew so far: Jenna wasn’t sure if that was his natural demeanour, or a result of his coming to terms with the fact that the government he’d served for his entire adult life had been ready to kill a couple million of its own people to keep hold of a valuable mining asset. She suspected it was a mix of both.
“Captain, my experience is as a soldier and an officer of the law,” Muradov said soberly. He scratched at his moustache, looking a little uncertain. “I am not sure how I can help you here.”
“Who knows better how to break the law than an officer of the law?” Drift asked.
Muradov shrugged. “A criminal, perhaps?”
Kuai snorted, but the Captain’s natural eye narrowed in a way that Jenna had seen before, which usually meant he was starting to fit pieces together. He sat down opposite Muradov and looked at him thoughtfully.
“You know this system better than us,” Drift began. “Where’s the money here?”
“Here? In Sergei Orlov’s pockets.” Muradov held up a hand placatingly as Drif
t’s face stiffened. “That was not a facetious answer, Captain. The man owns or has an interest in practically every industry in the Rassvet system, as well as most of the political figures.”
“He didn’t own you,” Drift pointed out.
“I was not important,” Muradov replied dryly. “He had no interest in Uragan other than to ensure it kept producing minerals so he could make money on the stocks. Most of the population were too poor for him to profit much from drug-running, and such activity would have disrupted the workforce in any case. The rebellion there will have hurt his interests more than I ever did, for all that I did my best to uphold the law.”
Drift sighed, clearly frustrated by Muradov’s statement. “So if we were to . . . acquire . . . a large sum of money in the Rassvet system by nonlegal means, we would almost certainly be taking it out of Orlov’s pocket in the first place?”
“I am hardly his accountant,” Muradov said, with a shrug, “but that is my guess.”
“So Rassvet’s out,” Drift muttered. “But Orlov has rivals. He told me so himself; the reason he hired us in the first place was because he thought anyone he sent to do the Uragan job might sell the information elsewhere. He knew I wouldn’t know his rivals, and so wouldn’t have time to find out who else I could sell the info to before it became outdated. Anyone who could afford that has to be a major player.”
Muradov pursed his lips and tapped one finger on the tabletop. “You think to pay one criminal by stealing from another?”
Drift shrugged. “It sits better with me than mugging old ladies.”
“I do not know what rivals Orlov may have here, but perhaps we should try Zhongtu in the Guangming system,” Muradov said. “It is also Red Star; mainly Chinese. It is not the closest, but I have a former army colleague there who went into the politsiya, as I did. I have heard from her that the Triax has ensured it is as corrupt as Rassvet.” He grimaced. “I cannot say I relish the thought of attempting to steal large amounts of money from any form of organised crime, but at least we should not be short of targets there.”
