Dark Deeds

by Mike Brooks

  Rourke straightened in her chair and took a deep breath. “I’d say no.”

  Orlov’s dark eyes seemed to turn colder. “And why would you do such a thing?”

  “I left the GIA because I was tired of being told where to go and what to do, and who needed to die to make it happen,” Rourke said honestly. “I told you that I would help you identify the failings in your organisation, to keep you safe. I never said I’d play assassin for you. I’m not stupid: I know that if I help you stay alive, other people will die.” She shook her head. “But I won’t go after them in cold blood myself.”

  Orlov frowned. “I’m not used to being disappointed, Tamara.”

  “Then I suggest you stop asking me to do something that I won’t do.” Rourke folded her arms and stared back at him. “I think I’ve proved that I’m valuable. We can both still benefit from this arrangement.”

  Orlov studied her for a moment more, then, to Rourke’s surprise, he abruptly smiled. “Good. Good.”

  Rourke allowed herself to frown slightly. “I’m sorry, sir, I don’t understand.”

  “I have few rivals on New Samara,” Orlov explained easily, pressing a button on his desk. A few moments later a whirring noise began, just on the edge of hearing. “Removing a hostile element was likely to require leaving this planet. Had you been eager, I might have thought that you were seeking a chance to get away from me. Instead you stuck to your guns, as it were, and also chose the option that would keep you here.” The whirring stopped, and a panel in his desk slid aside to allow a cup of coffee to rise into view. Orlov took it and sipped, keeping his eyes on Rourke. “You will forgive that one last test of loyalty, I hope?”

  “Certainly, sir, I—” Rourke’s brain caught up with her ears. “Wait. One last test?”

  “Tamara, you are without doubt a valuable asset to my organisation,” Orlov said, putting his drink down. “We still have a little time before your colleagues may or may not be returning with the fee I demanded of them, but that is of little consequence to me now.

  “As of this moment, I am offering you employment as my personal security advisor. You would continue to be responsible for the training of my bodyguards and would work with Roman and Larysa on all aspects of security with regard to me and my organisation. You would not be expected to take direct action yourself unless I or my employees come under attack in your presence.”

  His dark eyebrows twitched upwards. “You may have some time to consider my offer, of course. Let us say . . . until the deadline I set for Captain Drift expires?”

  TO PROTECT AND SERVE

  Their problems had started, Jia reflected, when they hadn’t been able to find parking within sight of the Thousand Suns’ entrance.

  Well, to her mind their problems had actually started when the Captain had put her and her idiot brother together for this part of the job. She sort of understood why he’d done it, given that Jenna couldn’t speak Mandarin and Muradov might be recognised, but it still sucked. And the fact that Kuai hadn’t been able to get a parking spot in the right place didn’t help.

  The Thousand Suns was a huge building: roughly rectangular, Jia supposed, with various embellishments at the corners and lumpy architectural bits she didn’t know the names of added on for appearance’s sake. It was built mainly out of the light-grey rock that was apparently local, presumably in an attempt to give the place a feel of somewhere from Old Earth. Jia had grown up on Old Earth and hadn’t seen a damn thing that looked like this, so that was just a piece of idiocy so far as she was concerned.

  Of course, the corner of Chengdu where her parents lived wasn’t exactly the sort of place where you got enormous casinos that had a city block all to themselves, but that was beside the point.

  There was a parking lot the next block over, connected to the casino by an enclosed, elevated walkway that hummed with repulsors to ensure no aircar could collide with it no matter how inattentive the driver, but that would have been useless for Jia and Kuai. They needed to be somewhere they could reach the entrance quickly, not a couple of minutes after Han had already departed. The main street at the front of the Thousand Suns was a wide, six-lane affair, albeit with speed restrictions that kept the traffic at a sedate pace. They were still in the middle of Zhuchengshi, after all, and the casino owners wouldn’t have wanted their precious piece of pretentious rock to look like it was sitting next to a freeway. There was on-street parking down both sides of it, but it was completely full. The Changs had needed to park on one of the narrower streets running off the main thoroughfare, and walk back to a point where they could keep an eye on the entrance.

  The casino’s side of the street wasn’t an option: The front of its plot had a wide, curving driveway for taxis and other vehicles to drop punters off and pick them up, with sprinkler-watered lawns and drooping palm trees, and ornamental fountains connected by gravel walkways. It was pretty, but there was nowhere to lurk unobtrusively. Jia was certain that casino staff would get suspicious if there were two cops just hanging around out front for ages. They needed to approach as though they’d just arrived when Han was leaving, which was why they’d wanted to be sitting in a car on the other side of the street. Since that wasn’t an option, they were both standing in a shadowed, recessed goods entrance for another massive building—a hotel, Jia thought—a few metres down a side street from where the traffic growled or hummed its way along the road.

  “See anything yet, Chief?” she asked quietly. All comm traffic was to be in English, so Jenna could get a better idea of what was going on as she listened in back at the Jonah. A translation programme was fine, but it was of limited use if you didn’t know who was saying what: not a problem when dealing with a spaceport controller, potentially a large problem if one of your crew had run into trouble but you didn’t know which one.

  +I promise, Jia, I will tell you the moment I see her face,+ Alim Muradov’s voice replied in her ear.

  “And you’re not gonna get bored and go to sleep up there?” she said.

  +Oddly enough, the ability to stay awake and focused is an important one for military snipers,+ the Chief’s voice said dryly. +I have stayed alert for hours at a time watching a single piece of ground.+

  “Yeah, fine, whatever,” Jia said. “Just make sure you don’t shoot me in the back of the head when we get over there, yeah?”

  +How about in the back of the leg?+

  Jia blinked. “What?”

  +I am stuck up here on a rooftop after dark in an elevated desert city, and I am freezing. I think I should be allowed some fun.+

  Beside Jia, Kuai snorted with laughter. She glared at her brother, then cast a dark glance upwards in the vague direction of where she thought Muradov was.

  “That’s not funny, you know that?”

  +Sorry, Jia,+ the Chief said, although Jia didn’t think he sounded particularly contrite. +Soldiers’ humour is a strange thing, and snipers are the darkest of them all. Being up here must be putting me back into the mind-set.+

  +Would you lot mind cutting the chatter?+ Jenna’s voice broke in. +I’m trying to keep tabs on what’s going on where, particularly at this spaceport, and it’s not easy with you bickering in my ear.+

  +You heard her, Jia,+ Muradov admonished. +Keep the noise down.+

  “Don’t make me come up there and kick your ass, copper,” Jia snapped. Jenna started to say something, and Jia hissed in frustration. “Yeah, yeah, we’ll be quiet! Keep your pants on.”

  +I have no idea how the Captain copes with you all,+ Jenna sighed.

  “Whiskey, I think,” Kuai suggested.

  +Okay, that’s enough! Everyone shut up!+

  Jia stuck her tongue out at her brother, who looked like he might snap something back at Jenna but instead muted his comm, signaling for his sister to do the same, and, in Mandarin, addressed Jia. “Stop that. We’re supposed to look like security officers.”

  “Yeah, whatever,” Jia told him absently, peering across the road again. “If anyone sees us
hanging around here for however long then we’re gonna look suspicious anyway. So long as we look professional when we get over there, that’s all that matters.”

  The night dragged on, and traffic continued to grumble past. Across the way the twin spotlights of the Thousand Suns danced over the sky in their choreographed display, forming two long, narrow cones of light as they caught minuscule specks of dust in their beams, while well-dressed patrons got in and out of cabs on the front drive. The doors to the warmly lit entrance hall were permanently open, and after another half an hour Jia had to concede that it looked a hell of a lot more welcoming than standing out here freezing her ass off.

  “If you’d asked me when I was eighteen, I never would have thought that a life of interstellar crime would involve so much waiting around in uncomfortable places,” she remarked to her brother, rubbing her arms with her hands. Her stolen uniform wasn’t anywhere near as thick as she would have liked, and she was starting to gain some sympathy for the Chief. It was probably even more exposed up where he was.

  “I don’t recall you asking me anything about getting involved in a life of interstellar crime,” Kuai grunted. “I seem to remember you jumping bail for that flying offence at the first opportunity and giving me an hour to sort out getting my things to come with you.”

  “Never asked you to,” Jia told him huffily. They’d had this conversation a dozen times, and it had not ever varied. But Kuai never seemed to tire of bringing it up. “You’re just lucky Rourke and Drift needed a mechanic at the same time.”

  “Lucky?” Kuai nearly spat. “I’ve been beaten up, abducted, imprisoned, and shot at, not to mention actually shot.” He slapped his leg, where he’d taken a bullet on Hroza Major. “I don’t count that as lucky. I could have a nice safe job working as a mechanic back on Old Earth if I weren’t out here trying to keep you out of trouble.”

  Jia sighed, trying to keep her temper. “Think of the things we’ve seen, though. New Shinjuku’s oceans, the House of the Redeemer, the Great Mosque on Akbar II . . . Jörmungandr! Biggest damn void station ever built. You wouldn’t have seen any of those if you’d stayed behind.”

  “And I’d be perfectly happy with that,” Kuai muttered. “It would have been safer.”

  “You know, mum and dad were fine with me leaving home,” Jia said, turning away from him to look over at the Thousand Suns again. “They trusted me.”

  “They didn’t know you like I do,” Kuai retorted.

  “Yeah?” Jia said. “Well, you haven’t exactly done a good job of keeping me out of trouble, have you? Maybe they knew me better than you did. Maybe they understood there was no point trying to make me be anyone other than me.”

  She heard an intake of breath as though Kuai was going to respond, but then her comm crackled and Muradov’s voice spoke into her ear.

  +Jia, Kuai. She’s coming out.+

  Jia squinted. Sure enough, a small figure that looked to be dressed in the right clothes had just appeared in the entranceway of the casino. “Got her.” She set off at a run, without waiting for her brother. Speed was everything now.

  The traffic was slow-moving enough that running out in front of it wasn’t the most foolish thing she’d ever done, although she had a pretty big back catalogue of stupid acts to compare to, so perhaps that wasn’t the best yardstick. Thankfully, however, the sight of a uniformed security officer darting into the road with one hand held up to ward off vehicles led to several screeches of brakes and one blast of retros from an aircar, and she got across the first two lines of traffic fine. A Xióng Z4 in the third lane didn’t stop, and she had to kill her momentum to avoid being hit by it. The bus behind braked sharply, though, and she made it to the central reservation of hardy, drought-tolerant desert plants.

  “Jia!” her brother shouted from behind her. “Wait, damn it!”

  “No time!” she yelled over her shoulder, and plunged into the next lanes. Chief Han could have exited the casino because a cab she’d booked had arrived, for all they knew: It was vital they reached her as soon as possible to convince her that the only car she should get into was the one they’d brought with them. . . .

  A horn blared as something large, red, and metallic skidded to a halt only a couple of feet away from her. Jia didn’t even bother to swear at the driver, instead dashing across the next lane. A car braked sharply in front of her in the third lane of traffic and was rear-ended by the one behind, jerking forward that bit farther: Jia simply jumped and slid over the hood instead of breaking her stride to go around it, fighting the urge to grin as she thought of what Rourke would say if the older woman could see her now. Rourke had once pointed out that what slowed most people down when they were on foot in an urban environment was their own preconceptions. Once you started viewing the city as an assault course instead of things that you shouldn’t climb on or over, things became a lot quicker.

  Jia reached the pavement on the other side and sprinted over it onto the grass that made up the Thousand Suns’ front lawn, ignoring the shocked looks she received from a couple who stood arm in arm, admiring one of the fountains. A pair of the casino’s security staff had started to descend the steps down to the driveway, presumably in response to a desperately running intruder, but slowed down in confusion once they recognised her uniform.

  “You still with me, Chief?” she panted.

  +Loud and clear, Jia.+

  “Chief Han!” she yelled, waving one arm furiously. The security chief was already watching her in astonishment, and Jia was sure she saw the other woman’s eyes widen in surprise, and possibly fear. Han had presumably just taken a huge payoff from the Triax, after all; she might well be scared of being arrested by her own colleagues on charges of corruption.

  The casino security stood aside, and Jia pounded up the steps to where Han stood, frozen in uncertainty and clutching her bag. A couple of seconds later Jia heard running footsteps on gravel and knew that her brother was just behind her.

  “Chief,” she puffed, momentarily glad that her lack of breath would probably be a suitable excuse for avoiding procedural language she didn’t know and getting straight to the point.

  “What is the meaning—” Han began, but Jia took a couple of steps closer and took her arm.

  “Chief, we’ve had a tip-off,” she explained in a breathless whisper, “the Triax are going to kill you.”

  Han’s eyes widened in shock and flickered past Jia to the nearby casino security. “What?”

  “It’s true, ma’am,” Kuai added, appearing at Jia’s elbow. “We need to get you away from here right now. We have a car—”

  “This is ridiculous,” Han protested, but Jia could see the fear in her face and could tell that the other woman thought it might be true. “Who sent you? Why haven’t I been—”

  An ornamental terra-cotta plant pot just behind Han, at least three feet high and nearly that across, fell apart with a bang and a crack. Half a second later the faint sound of a gunshot reached them, just audible over the growl of traffic and the hum of background music from the casino’s entrance hall.

  “Fuck!” Jia barked, not needing to act: Even knowing it was coming, she’d still nearly jumped out of her skin. Everyone around had instinctively ducked and raised their hands, as though that would help.

  “Come on, Chief!” Kuai shouted, grabbing Han’s other arm and propelling her away towards the road where their hire car was parked. “Let’s get out of here!”

  +Nice gun Rourke has here,+ Muradov’s glacially calm voice said into Jia’s ear as she bolted after the other two. +The sighting seems a little off, though.+

  A SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECY

  “Gao!”

  Song Daiyu stormed out of her office into the management suite. Gao Dongfeng looked up from where he’d been coaxing the drinks dispenser into providing him with something that might have made a fair attempt at being coffee, and the sneer on his lips faded when he saw her face.

  “What?” he said, far more cautiously than usua
l. Song stormed up to him and jabbed him in the chest with one finger, feeling the fabric of his jacket give beneath her long nail.

  “Security just called up! Han cashed in her chips and took the payoff, and then as soon as she gets outside, two cops come running up! One of my people heard them tell her that we’re trying to kill her, and then there’s a fucking gunshot! What the hell are you playing at?”

  “How do they know it was a gunshot?” Gao demanded. “It could have been—”

  “Because one of the damn planters exploded!” Song nearly screamed at him. “You’ve gone too far this time! I specifically told you that we were not to touch Han until—”

  “I never told anyone to take a shot at her, you stupid bitch!” Gao snarled, pushing her away. Song readied herself to go for his eyes with her nails if he followed up after her, but instead the old man paused, his face screwing up into a grimace. “Two cops?”

  “Yes,” Song snapped, “a man and a woman, and Han’s running off with them now. Why?”

  “I haven’t told anyone to kill her, so the cops can’t know about what hasn’t happened!” Gao growled, shaking his head. “This doesn’t make any . . . Wait.”

  “What?” Song demanded when he froze, his eyes wandering as though trying to remember something. “Don’t you go senile on me now, you old bastard!”

  “Two cop uniforms went missing from one of my laundrettes this week,” Gao said slowly, looking at her. For once his gaze was direct and open, instead of being shrouded in disdain. “Some stupid kid on the night shift had lost them: I told the manager to fire him and be done with. But maybe they weren’t lost.”

  Song gaped at him, astounded. “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying there’s another player in this game,” Gao snarled, snatching his commpiece out of his pocket and settling it in his ear, “and I don’t know who it is, but I’d bet my life that those two aren’t real cops.” He pulled his pad out and jabbed it angrily.

  “What are you doing?” Song asked warily.