Dark Sky (Keiko) (14 page)

‘Want me to clear a path?’ Apirana asked, pointing at the mouth of a street directly opposite them. That was the way Drift and the Changs had gone earlier, although whether they were still in that direction was anyone’s guess.

Rourke shook her head. ‘It’s too thick, and the crowd looks tightly wound. We don’t want them turning on you for giving them a shove. We’ll have to go around …’ she paused for a moment, apparently thinking, ‘… the right-hand edge. Circle about and get down that street in the corner if we can so we’re at least going sort of the right way, but I don’t want to stick around any longer than we have to.’

‘Works for me,’ Apirana nodded. He took a deep breath, cast a fervent wish for good fortune towards any form of deity that might be listening, and pushed open the big glass door.

There were four steps down from the frontage of the Otpusk Gostinitsa, and as soon as he’d stepped off the last one Apirana was in among the crowd. They were busy chanting in Russian and waving home-made banners and placards – simple cloth or plascard ones, nothing fancy like the 3D holos he’d seen used outside the G2000 summit on the news as a kid – but they still stood aside when they saw him bearing down on them with the two women at his heels. He quickly saw that Rourke was right to suggest taking the outside route, as he could almost taste the powder-keg atmosphere around them. Had a large, strange-looking foreigner tried to barge through the middle of the protesters … well, he didn’t like to think what the reaction of this mob might have been.

‘Do you want me to try the Captain again?’ he heard Jenna ask behind him.

‘Don’t bother,’ Rourke replied, ‘he’ll see A. called him. If he can make contact, he will. Besides, I doubt the comm network is even still functioning right now.’

‘What?’ Apirana turned his head to look at her, jogging along in his wake with a grim expression on what he could see of her face beneath her hat. ‘Why not?’

‘The Red Stars almost always cut public communication channels during civil unrest to prevent dissenters from being able to coordinate their movements,’ Rourke explained, swerving around two youths with bright dyed hair and everything below the bridge of their noses obscured by makeshift cloth masks.

‘Great,’ Apirana snorted, ‘so how are we going to find the others now?’

‘I ask people if they’ve seen a tall, blue-haired Mexican who was with Chinese siblings!’ Rourke called back. Apirana had to concede that might have some merit to it. It wasn’t like their crew weren’t distinctive in this largely homogenous city.

‘Or we could just head for the
Jonah
,’ Jenna suggested, ‘if there was trouble kicking off, the Captain would probably go there to make sure our ship’s okay.’

Rourke growled something in a language Apirana didn’t speak, but it sounded like a curse of some sort. ‘You’re right. Hold up!’

Apirana slowed – there was entirely too much of him to arrest his momentum with any alacrity – and turned back to find the other two standing in place. ‘What?’

‘Jenna’s right,’ Rourke said uncomfortably, her eyes scanning the crowd, although Apirana guessed that was probably more out of habit than because she expected to see Drift making his way towards them. ‘He’ll try the hotel first, but after that his first instinct will be to make sure we keep a way off this rock.’

‘Plus he loves that ship,’ Apirana put in, trying not to sound too breathless. It wasn’t that he was out of shape, as such, more that he was only in shape for certain things.

‘That too,’ Rourke acknowledged. ‘Okay; we’ll try to find them quickly, but if we get no luck we’ll head for the
Jonah
and hope they do the—’

Her last word was drowned out by a loud crack from the other end of the square, and her head whipped around so fast Apirana thought her hat was going to fly off, but frustration clouded her features as she stood futilely on tiptoe. ‘Damn it! A.?’

The shouting of the crowd had taken on an uglier, angrier edge, at least in that direction. Apirana drew himself up to his full height, but although he could see over most of the gathering his vision was still obstructed by the furiously waving signs many protesters had brought with them. ‘I’m not sure, I …’

There
. Between two banners he caught sight of a black-helmeted head, then another and another. The crowd was roiling, some pushing forwards and others trying to retreat. ‘Cops,’ he summarised.

‘That sounded like a gunshot,’ Rourke said uneasily. ‘Never mind trying to reach the others for now, let’s just—’

More cracking noises cut through the air, and their repetition brought certainty into Apirana’s mind: definitely gunfire. Shouts were replaced by screams and then cries of warning as dark shapes trailing greenish-white fumes arced into the air above the plaza.

The mood of the protest shifted direction quicker than Jia trying to outmanoeuvre a missile. Ten seconds ago the plaza had been filled with righteous anger, the sort that could spiral out of control into full-blown aggression if handled incorrectly. Whoever was in charge of the
politsiya
had clearly decided that the softly-softly approach was not for them, and that the only course of action was to hammer the protest so hard that it cracked before it evolved into a riot under its own steam. The security officers opened up with live ammunition and gas grenades, and the cauldron of simmering resentment abruptly swirled into a frenzy of fear and self-preservation that responded by stampeding directly away from the threat.

Which meant that, all of a sudden, a few hundred panicking people were heading directly for the three crew.

‘Run!’ Rourke yelled, and Apirana obeyed. There was no standing against a tide like this, big though he was. He didn’t even set out for a destination, just went with the flow towards the nearest street which led off the plaza, but he was being outpaced. Desperate men and women clawed past him, many of them cursing him in Russian, towards the inevitable bottleneck forming ahead of them as half a plaza of people tried to fit down one street. His shoulder blades were itching, expecting a
politsiya
bullet to strike between them at any moment. He looked back to see if there was anyone left between him and the guns, caught a brief glimpse of the sea of faces still behind him …

… and tripped over something unseen. He hit the ground hard, palms stinging and forearms jarring as they took the brunt of the impact, but that was the least of his worries now. He hadn’t even landed properly before someone tripped over his leg; then someone stood on his arm, causing a spike of pain so bad he wondered momentarily if they’d broken it,
then
someone landed on his back and drove the breath from his lungs.

The anger flared up inside him and he tried to roar, tried to surge up to his feet flailing at anyone within reach in revenge for the pain he was suffering, but he simply couldn’t. Every second brought a new impact on a leg, an arm, his head, his back, knocking him back down again. Someone landed across his shoulders and smashed his face into the ground, bringing a new flare of agony married to a sudden sick wooziness, but for the first time he could remember there was no corresponding surge of rage-filled adrenaline.

His left side had taken a blow somewhere and he felt like he’d been shot again; had his wound ripped open? He tried to brace his arms beneath him and push up, no longer in a fury but now simply mechanically attempting to rise, but a body landed on top of him and crushed him back down, then another before the first had even managed to scramble away.

His ribs were burning from the weight. His lungs were burning from lack of air. His head was swimming. Every limb felt like it had been beaten by a team of men with sledgehammers.

Somewhere on the hard rock floor of Level Five of Uragan City, for the first time since he was fifteen, Apirana Wahawaha stopped fighting.

THERE HAD BEEN
one chance for a good, deep gulp of air before the gas had flooded everywhere, and Ichabod Drift had taken it with both lungs. The fumes weren’t just unbreathable, they stung the eyes and made it impossible to see clearly as well: that was, unless you happened to have at least one mechanical one. As a result Drift found himself to be in considerably better shape than pretty much anyone else inside Labirint, which was why he was able to get to his feet, hoist up a bar stool and crack it over the head of the balding man who’d been holding a gun on them scant seconds before.

Now bent double and coughing, the man dropped his handgun to the floor. Drift snatched it up and checked his options. His mechanical eye couldn’t see through gas as such but it was hardly an opaque wall, it was just that once inside it most people couldn’t see because their eyes were burning and filled with tears. The front of the bar seemed like a bad option; sounds of fighting suggested that the rioters had surged forward to engage the
politsiya
, despite the gas and the shockbolts. On the other hand, the back way was possibly locked and, if it was, he didn’t have the breath to spend finding another option.

The huge bartender stumbled into view, obliviously hacking his lungs up but with his shotgun still clasped in one meaty hand. Drift aimed for the man’s head, agonised with himself for half a second over what the right course of action was, then shot him in the knee instead. The bartender cried out, an agonised roar which died in a strangled gurgle a second later as the gas continued its ugly work, and fell on his face. He still clutched the shotgun, but Drift stepped up and kicked him smartly in the head before he could get ideas about pulling the trigger.

So, if the back way wasn’t viable, it would have to be the front after all. Drift tugged the shotgun free, put the safety on the handgun and tucked it into the waistband of his pants, then turned back to where he’d left the Changs and the Shirokovs. His chest was now starting to feel uncomfortably tight thanks to the frantic pace at which his heart was running, but he spared some of his tightly hoarded breath to shout instructions into the foul-tasting gas as he hauled Jia up from the coughing crouch he found her in and shoved her in the direction of the shattered front windows. ‘Go! Get clear!’

Under any normal circumstances Jia would have been likely to argue the call about stepping through shattered glass into a full-blown fight, but Drift was counting on the fact that when running low on air, people would tend to obey any instructions coming from someone who sounded like they knew what they were doing. Sure enough, his usually quarrelsome pilot scrambled forwards as well as she could, with her brother tailing her near-blindly. Drift wasted one more second debating about the Shirokovs, but there was still a chance to squeeze some manner of profit from them so he pulled Aleksandr up, with Pavel clinging to his husband like a choking drunkard to an unopened spirits bottle, and sent them the same way.

He followed after them, eager to get out into what passed for fresher air despite the fact that it seemed at least one gas grenade had gone off in the mass of protesters, but paused for a second with glass crunching underfoot as he was about to follow his crew members and whatever manner of nuisance the Shirokovs now counted as up the street. Not ten feet away, nine black-armoured
politsiya
cowered behind flashshields and occasionally lashed out desperately with shocksticks against a mass of protesters who had only failed to overwhelm them so far due to some relatively minor breathing difficulties and the electric charges of the shields. However, even such purpose-built riot technology couldn’t maintain a constant output, and the frail defensive line was going to crack at any second. In most cases Drift would have shrugged and walked away, but something about the way the officers appeared to be not just desperately defending themselves but also their fallen colleagues tugged at him.

This had been a trap, an ambush. This wasn’t a protest that had got out of hand; whoever was in charge of organising it had fully intended for these men and women to walk down this street to a point where they could get shot at. Whatever trouble the law enforcers here had caused him, Drift wasn’t quite certain that its officers deserved to be lured in to be slaughtered in the name of a better world.

Secondly, and more compellingly, until he heard otherwise he had to assume that the spaceport – and therefore the
Jonah
– was under the control of Uragan authorities. That meant he wanted to keep on the good side of those authorities, and given Chief Muradov’s thinly veiled hints of what would happen if Drift drew his attention again, that was probably going to be hard to achieve at the best of times.

Let alone when walking hurriedly away from the likely deaths of nearly two dozen of Muradov’s officers while in possession of illegal firearms.

Sometimes, as an entrepreneurial independent businessman, there was no clear choice of how best to proceed. There was simply the task of playing the odds and selecting the least shit-spattered course of action from a series of unappealing options. Usually that was to keep your head down and avoid notice, but when that wasn’t possible …

Drift grimaced, took a couple of lungfuls of air that was bitter-tasting but at least breathable, and discharged the shotgun into the air just over the heads of the rioters.