by Mike Brooks
They reached the main lobby, and he tried his comm again. To his delight, mixed with apprehension, he found that he could once more make contact with the Jonah’s transmitters.
“Hello,” he tried, hailing any of his crew who could hear him. “Anyone out there?”
There was a moment of silence, then—
+Captain!+
It was Jenna, and she sounded about as relieved as he’d ever heard her. Drift felt a smile creep over his face and saw a matching one on Apirana’s.
“Good to hear your voice,” he said truthfully. “Don’t worry, your boyfriend’s still in one piece. How are we doing?”
+We got what we needed, but we’ve got big problems,+ Jenna said, the tension in her voice ratcheting up as she spoke. +Chief?+
Muradov’s voice cut in. +Captain, are you at the Two Trees Arena?+
“Just coming outside now,” Drift answered, exchanging a worried glance with Apirana as they passed through the main doors. The last of the security forces aircars and road vehicles were leaving, packed with black-uniformed personnel, and they did indeed seem to be heading in the direction of the spaceport. “Where are you? What are these problems? Has something kicked off at the spaceport?”
+Not to my knowledge,+ Muradov said in alarm, raising his voice slightly to make himself heard over a strange noise in the background. +Why?+
“Because pretty much every officer who was here has just left for it,” Drift said grimly. “What’s that noise I can hear, anyway?”
+That is the sound of Jia mourning her brother.+
Drift stopped in his tracks, feeling like he’d been punched in the stomach. “What?”
+I am coming to collect you, Captain, and will explain further then. I would rather not get in the way of the security forces anyway.+
“Hang on a second, bro,” Apirana cut in, “what do you me—”
“A,” Drift said, putting a restraining hand on the bigger man’s arm. “Not now. Not over the comms. We’ll find out in a moment in any case.” He activated his again, fighting down the taste of bile in his throat. “Jenna, any sign of what’s going on at your end?”
+I can’t see anything,+ the young slicer replied, +and there’re no alerts posted. That doesn’t necessarily mean anything though. I can try to, ah, find out.+
“Do it,” Drift said firmly. By “find out,” Jenna meant slicing into the security forces’ private frequencies to listen in on their instructions. He didn’t know how much information she’d be able to glean as a non-native speaker using a translation programme, but anything would be better than nothing. He forced himself to concentrate: There was nothing to be done for Kuai, if Muradov’s testimony was to be believed, so he had to focus on how best to get the rest of them out of here. “Chief, is there any possibility that all this ruckus has been sparked by your little shopping trip?”
+I consider that unlikely, Captain.+ Muradov took a moment to mutter a curse in Russian, which Drift presumed was aimed at the aircar the Uragan was apparently piloting. +My best guess would be that our . . . host . . . decided to take revenge on her . . . secondary employers.+
Drift’s growing apprehension wasn’t so severe that he couldn’t appreciate Muradov’s ability to adapt on the fly to talking about nefarious actions over a channel that might just be eavesdropped on. All the same, the possibility Muradov had raised was truly alarming.
“Jia, do you know anything about this? Did you hear anything?”
+She is not wearing her comm, Captain,+ Muradov replied, +and she does not respond when I talk to her. Admittedly, I am somewhat preoccupied as I have not driven one of these for several years.+
“Shit.” Drift looked up at the skies. “How far away are you?”
+You should see me momentarily.+
Sure enough, in only a few seconds, the whine of an individual aircar became audible over the background hum of the city, and Drift turned to see the rental vehicle they’d hired the day before descending towards them as he turned off his comm. He noted absently that even under the current circumstances, Muradov was still using the indicators correctly. He wasn’t sure whether that was a result of the Chief’s long-standing respect for the law, a desire to avoid attention from it, or both.
“Get ready,” he said to Apirana as the vehicle swung down and he saw a familiar shape slumped against the window. “This isn’t going to be pleasant.”
“Never is,” Apirana agreed apprehensively.
Muradov rotated the aircar somewhat clumsily just before landing, so the passenger side was facing them. Drift slapped Apirana’s shoulder and pointed at it. “Front.”
“Got it,” the Māori replied, and they pulled their respective doors open to climb in. Drift braced himself.
The smell of blood assaulted him immediately, sharp and metallic, even as he squeezed into the seat next to Jia. The pilot’s shoulders were shaking, and she was sobbing as she clung to Kuai’s body. Drift saw Apirana crane his head around from the seat in front, then close his eyes in an expression of nauseated horror and turn away again.
Drift looked past Jia and grimaced in turn. Kuai’s neck was ruined from what must have been a gunshot, and the front of his stolen uniform was also wet with blood. The little mechanic’s face was composed, but there was no mistaking his lolling head for someone who was merely asleep.
Drift had a sudden flashback to a day on Old Earth. . . . How many years ago now? The Jonah had landed in Chengdu in China, and he and Rourke had been forced to part ways with their then-pilot over an argument about pay. They were trying to find a replacement when a broadcast had come up on the local news holo about a girl in her late teens who had apparently somehow stolen a shuttle and joyridden it with an equal degree of skill and recklessness. That girl had of course been Jia, and he and Rourke had found where she’d been remanded and immediately stumped up her (fairly sizeable) bail on the grounds that talent like that shouldn’t be allowed to go to waste in a prison cell. Of course, that had meant jumping her bail, but Jia had never been overly concerned about rules or laws. The potential fly in the ointment had been her older brother, who’d been there when Drift had made his offer and had flatly promised to report all of them to the authorities unless he was hired as mechanic so he could keep his little sister out of trouble.
“That never really worked out quite as you planned, did it?” Drift muttered sorrowfully. He wouldn’t miss Kuai’s relentless negativity, or his shameless passive-aggressiveness, but he’d been a part of Drift’s life for longer than anyone else on the crew except Jia and Rourke. The sudden void was a bit like having a leg that kept aching and playing up, but then one day waking up to find that it wasn’t there at all.
He felt the aircar lurch under him as Muradov took off once more, and snapped back to the present. “Chief, report.”
“The Triax must have actually been planning the hit on Chief Han that we thought we were bluffing about,” Muradov replied grimly. “I could not get an angle to cover the front of the casino and the Changs’ parking spot, so I was unable to intervene quickly enough when it broke down. I am sorry, Captain.”
“Nothing to be done now,” Drift said wearily. He weaved his arm through Jia’s and felt for her hand. She clasped it, but gave no other acknowledgement of his presence. He didn’t push it. They’d all need Jia soon enough, or all of this would be for nothing, but he could let her grieve in peace for the moment. “Tell me that we at least got what we came for.”
“So far as I know,” Muradov replied, reaching under his chair and tossing an expensive-looking handbag into Apirana’s lap. “I have not had time to count it, but there is a lot of money there.”
“A? Count it,” Drift ordered.
“Cap?”
“Do it,” he reiterated, “now. If we’re short by a little then we may be able to make up the difference on the way back to New Samara, but we need to know as soon as possible.”
“Gotcha,” Apirana muttered, and dug into the bag with one big hand to pull
out tight rolls of banknotes.
“Jenna?” Drift said, activating his comm again. “Anything?”
+One second.+
Drift bit back an unhelpfully vitriolic retort. “We’re kinda on a timescale here, Jenna.”
+I’m listening, Captain.+ There was a pause for a few moments, in which Drift attempted not to grind his teeth, before the slicer spoke again. +Okay, it sounds like the Chief was right. We’ve got an all-units out, centred on the spaceport.+ A note of dread touched her tone. +They must be coming for the shipment.+
“Me cago en la puta!” Drift spat. “Have we got any indication that they know what ship they’re looking for?”
+Not that I can tell, Cap.+ Jenna’s voice was apologetic. +I mean, they might, but it’s so jumbled—+
“Never mind,” Drift cut her off, trying to think. A large chunk of Zhuchengshi’s security forces were even now converging on the spaceport where he, Ichabod Drift, was heading, and since they didn’t seem to have a target, they’d presumably lock down every single shuttle there and search them all until they found what they were after. What was more, Drift was heading there in the company of a freshly made corpse in a security uniform; two other people wearing security uniforms who technically had no right to be doing so; a fighter suspected of involvement in match-fixing who’d been ordered not to leave town, let alone the planet; and four hundred thousand stars in cash that had just been stolen from the city’s security chief.
What was more, the corpse was his mechanic, and his pilot was virtually catatonic with grief as a result.
“This,” he said aloud, “is not one of our better days.”
DESPERATE MEASURES
Jenna peered nervously out of the Jonah’s viewshield. She could see flashing blue lights in the distance now, just visible against the ever-present, multicoloured background of Zhuchengshi’s streetlights, signs, and advertising boards.
She couldn’t help but notice that there seemed to be an awful lot of them.
“Captain?” she said into her comm. “What’s the plan?”
+The simple answer is that I don’t have one,+ Drift’s voice replied, somewhat tetchily, +so we’re going to be making this up on the fly. The one thing we can’t do is allow them to pin the Jonah down and search it. We need to be leaving as soon as possible if we’re going to get back to New Samara in time.+
“Is Jia even going to be able to fly?” Jenna asked, finally voicing her fears. She knew that Rourke had some ability at flying a shuttle, although it was basic next to Jia’s expertise, but Rourke was light years away. And as for the rest of them . . .
+One thing at a time,+ Drift snapped. +We can’t get to you as we are. Even if spaceport security was half-asleep and you weren’t about to be flooded with uniforms, there’s no way we’d get past them. We’re going to have to cause a lot of chaos, very quickly, so that even if anyone sees us, they’re too busy to try to stop us.+
“Normally I’d suggest calling the emergency services,” Jenna said, taking another worried glance out of the viewshield, “but under the circumstances I’m not sure what other options we have.” She scanned the cockpit, looking for inspiration.
Then Apirana’s voice came through. +How about the engine overload warning?+
Jenna stopped still. “Oh. Oh, you beautiful man. That’s perfect.” A shuttle’s engines were, by necessity, powerful things, and there was always the possibility of an explosion. That would be bad enough for the crew in vacuum, and far from good news for them or anyone beneath them if flying in atmosphere, but truly disastrous if it happened when the shuttle was docked at a spaceport or waystation. In such close proximity to other equally powerful engines, there was always the possibility of a chain reaction. An engine overload warning was broadcast immediately on all bandwidths, and the standard response was to take off as soon as possible and get to a safe distance, leaving behind any crew members who didn’t happen to be on board.
Needless to say, the activation of the beacon in anything other than a genuine emergency was considered to be a criminal offence and punishable by stiff fines or possibly jail time, not to mention full culpability for any and all costs or damages caused by other people’s responses. However, Jenna supposed that they weren’t exactly planning to stick around and be answerable to charges.
“Captain?”
+Do it.+
“I’ll need the ship’s access code to engage the manual override,” Jenna told him, settling down into the pilot’s chair where Jia’s buttocks had formed two distinct indents from her long hours at the helm. She flipped up the protective casing over the keys and entered the digits as Drift rattled them off to her, one after another. She pressed the final key, and the main helm console lit up as she felt the main engines quiver into life, ready to fire up the thrusters and take her skywards had she the inclination or knowledge to do such a foolish thing. Instead she reached down to a small panel next to her right knee and flipped open another panel to reveal a large red button.
Jenna distinctly remembered being shown it by Jia on her first full day on board the Jonah, once she’d recovered from the truly epic hangover she’d been suffering. The pilot had pointed at the button and declared calmly, “You see this? You ever touch this, I break your face. We clear?”
“We clear,” she remembered, and pressed the red button with her thumb.
Klaxons began hooting throatily and immediately, while honest-to-goodness red lights began to flash in the cockpit and, she presumed, in the rest of the ship as well. Ship manufacturers didn’t like to leave any of their customers remotely in the dark about the fact that they were about to die in fiery oblivion, it seemed. More to the point, she saw answering warning lights blink into existence on top of the distant spaceport towers, all around the containing walls, and even in the few cockpits of other shuttles that she could see from where she was. It truly was a genuine emergency broadcast that would automatically override everything else in the vicinity.
“We’re good!” she shouted into her comm. “I guess, anyway!”
+Good.+ Drift’s voice came back to her. +Are they buying it?+
Jenna took another look out of the viewshield. She could already see people running hither and thither: ground staff or shuttle crew who’d realised they were caught in the open and were seeking the nearest cover, without knowing which of the many metal behemoths around them might be about to explode. No ships were moving yet, but it had only been a matter of seconds. Even Jia, skilled and somewhat reckless though she was, would have struggled to get the Jonah into the air in much under half a minute, even if she were already sitting in the pilot’s seat, unless the thrusters were powered up and she’d been about to take off anyway.
“The signal’s certainly gone out!” she told the Captain. “Everyone on the ground looks to be panicking, but I can’t see any . . . Hold on.” There, the blue glow of a thruster starting to fire. It would be several more long seconds for the crew on board before they’d be able to lift off, but they were clearly about to attempt it. Then she saw another ship flicker into life, and then a third. “They’re buying it, Cap; they’re buying it!”
+Good.+ Drift’s voice seemed tenser than she’d have expected. But then he said his next sentence, and the bottom dropped out of her stomach.
+You’re going to need to get her into the air.+
“What?!”
+I’m serious, Jenna!+ Drift was firm and strong, which was quite easy for him. +I’m not asking you to fly her anywhere, just get her off the ground with everyone else and open the main cargo bay. The Chief can fly us straight in, and we’ll take it from there.+
“Captain, you must have lost your fucking mind!” Jenna all but screamed at him. “I’m a slicer, not a goddamn pilot!”
+And very shortly, unless you do what I say, you’re going to be a slicer sitting in the only grounded shuttle with a whole load of security officers wondering why you haven’t exploded yet,+ Drift bit out. +I said we were making this up as we went, Jenna
!+
+Jenna,+ Apirana’s voice cut in. +You got this. Me an’ Rourke managed to fly that boat on Uragan, an’ if it hadn’t been for the storm, I reckon it would’ve been pretty simple.+
“You’re a lying asshole, Apirana Wahawaha,” Jenna told him bitterly. “You said afterwards that you nearly threw up, you were so scared.”
+Well, yeah. But you’re a helluva lot smarter than me, so I figure it’ll be easier for you.+
“I am not smarter than you,” Jenna said, but she found herself sitting back and looking at the controls in front of her nonetheless. They didn’t make any more sense than they had done a moment ago, but the Captain was right about one thing: Shuttles were preparing to lift off all around her, and she watched one actually began to rise from the ground.
“Oh, to hell with it,” she said into her comm, her stomach fluttering so hard it felt like she was going to lose her dinner. “Fine, I’ll give it a try. Any chance of Jia talking me through it?”
+I’ll see,+ Drift replied, sounding uncertain. +But don’t wait.+
“Sure,” Jenna muttered, trying to keep her breathing steady. “No pressure.” She unfastened her wrist-mounted terminal and placed it on the dash, then accessed the Spine. Zhongtu was a rich planet with a rich populace, which meant the local datastores would have an awful lot of information readily available. Including, for example, control layouts for a Carcharodon-class shuttle. And, she noticed, a “Learn to Fly” instructional video that was supposed to be used with a flight simulator and definitely not with the real thing.
“Here goes nothing,” she grimaced, then paused. On the corner of the dash, on top of what the holo-display from her terminal assured her were the trim controls, was a hat. It was a browny-grey colour, lined with some synthetic approximation of fur, and had tied-up flaps at each side that could be let down to cover the ears if necessary.
Jia’s pilot hat, which the temperamental and somewhat superstitious woman was adamant was necessary for difficult manoeuvres, for reasons that she’d never been satisfactorily able to verbalise.
