Dark Sky (Keiko) (24 page)

Still, even that was a long way from being part of a smuggler crew and running from revolutionaries in a Red Star mining town. But she’d needed to get off the Franklins somehow and the
Keiko
had been her only way out, so …
needs must.

She placed a restraining hand on Apirana’s shoulder, holding the big man back as they approached the next junction. ‘Hold up a second, let me look first.’

‘Not complaining,’ the Maori puffed, coming to a grateful halt. Jenna slipped past him and sauntered out into the street, as casually as she could manage with her heart pounding, and cast her eyes down the street towards the
politsiya
station. She was hoping to see a quiet, law-abiding street, but her stomach sank when she saw the station’s doors thrown wide and the yellow-and-black flags of the Free Systems flying from its windows with a group of armed civilians milling around in front of it.

‘Shit!’ she hissed, retreating back into the side street while trying to look like she’d simply realised that she’d come the wrong way.

‘Problem?’ Apirana muttered.

‘It looks like that’s their damn headquarters!’ Jenna told him, trying to fight down the frustration building inside her. Why the hell was the galaxy against her today? To make matters worse, an elderly Uragan woman was already eyeing her suspiciously from across the street. She turned to Apirana. ‘Back the way we came and into that alley on the left, casual as you can.’

‘Next time we see the Captain, remind me to yell at him for bringing us here,’ Apirana grunted, turning and hobbling in the direction she’d indicated. He cut left into the alley and she followed him in, then grabbed the back of Apirana’s jumpsuit as they passed another opening to their left.

‘In here!’

Apirana looked at it dubiously: it was little more than an inlet between two stone walls leading up to a small rear door and dominated by two large refuse dumpsters. ‘It’s a dead end.’

‘We can’t outrun anyone chasing us anyway,’ Jenna told him as reasonably as she could, ‘just get down the end and hide! And quickly,’ she added, feeling a thrill of fear as voices rose into the air behind them and she recognised a couple of the Russian words. ‘Someone’s shouting about the “American woman”. They’ve recognised me.’

‘Ah hell,’ Apirana grunted, and started edging his way down the alley as fast as he could. He nearly slipped over when one of his crutches slid sideways on a piece of discarded plastic, but caught his balance at the cost of jarring his ankle and swearing sulfurously, albeit quietly, and managed to stumble into the deep shadows behind the rearmost dumpster with no further incident. Jenna squeezed in after him and tried her best to support him as he sank down into a sitting position to get his head out of sight. She ended up next to him on the floor, back pressed against the cold metal of the dumpster and listening to the breath rasp in and out of his big chest.

‘All in all,’ Apirana said quietly after a few moments, ‘this has not been one of my better days.’

Jenna said nothing. She wasn’t sure what to say.

‘Sorry for giving you a hard time about the circuitheads,’ he continued a moment later. ‘Didn’t mean to cause a fight. You helped me as much as they did, anyhow.’

‘A.,’ Jenna said carefully, after a pause, ‘have I … done something?’

‘How d’you mean?’

‘You’ve been … weird. Towards me.’ She fiddled with her wrist console, theoretically studying the map but in reality it was so she had an excuse to talk to Apirana without looking at him. She didn’t even know why she’d started this conversation again, other than she had the worrying notion that they were going to be found by people harbouring bad intentions towards them and she wanted to get at least one thing straightened out first.

There was a pause, slightly too long. ‘Have I?’

‘Yes, you have.’ She felt some heat creep into her voice. ‘And don’t play innocent either, I can tell that you know it.’

There was a huff of breath from beside her, and a faint reverberation as something gently hit the dumpster. She looked around to see Apirana’s head tilted back, eyes open and staring upwards.

‘Didn’t mean to be.’

‘For
fuck’s
sake, A.!’ She managed to keep her voice low with an effort. ‘I don’t really give a damn what you
meant
to do, but you’ve been making me feel worried and on edge since we set foot in this hole and I just want to know why!’

He looked sideways at her, his face tight and his expression uneasy, so far as she could make it out in the dim light thrown up by her wrist console. ‘You sure this is the right time?’

‘This is the
only
time,’ she replied firmly. ‘I’m not running around this city with you any longer until I know what’s going on. I thought you were my friend.’ She tried to keep the last sentence from being overwhelmed by bitterness, but only partially succeeded.

‘Okay,’ Apirana muttered after a second, sounding about as subdued as she’d ever heard him. ‘Just remember I ain’t much good with words, right?’

‘That’s a lie to start with,’ Jenna retorted, ‘you
are
good with words. You remember how you came and talked to me about you, and your family, after we’d loaded that cargo from Kelsier’s ship? That was about the most open and honest anyone’s ever been with me. Just because you can’t spin bullshit around like the Captain doesn’t mean you’re not good with words, A.’ She turned towards him slightly, trying to get him to understand. How was it possible for one man to sometimes be so perceptive about what she was thinking but completely oblivious at others? ‘They just have to be
your
words. So tell me: what’s going on?’

There was another pause.

‘Guess I just noticed something that’s been under my nose for a while,’ Apirana rumbled eventually. ‘I’ve seen a fair few crew come and go, an’ each of us, an’ pretty much everyone I’ve met since I were a kid for that matter, we’re all one sort of bastard or another. Maybe it’s what this life turns us into, maybe you’ve just gotta be that to stick at it for any length of time, I dunno.

‘But you’re different. You ain’t just good at what you do, an’ smart, an’ pretty, you’re
nice
. You’re a real good person, and I’d kinda forgotten what they were like.’

Jenna almost started in surprise. That was the most compliments anyone had paid her for a long time, and Apirana had just tossed them out as though they were accepted facts.

‘Don’t get me wrong, the others ain’t so bad,’ the big Maori continued, ‘but if we all got rich tomorrow an’ I could settle down, I’d probably wish ’em well an’ not think much more about ’em. But not you. I …’

He broke off for a second, his voice thickening a little, and coughed awkwardly.

‘You said you thought I was your friend, an’ I am, an’ I always intend to be. But I want to be more than that too, if you’re willing, an’ I just realised that. I didn’t want you to just move on an’ leave one day, not without telling you how I felt, but here’s me, wrong side of forty an’ I’ve never even met someone I could say I … liked. Let alone figured out how to say it to ’em. So while I was trying to work out words for it all, I just tripped over myself and messed shit up.’

Jenna sat very still and very quiet while she tried to process what she’d just heard. She knew that a response was probably called for – a carefully thought-out, honest and tactful response – but she was finding it hard to formulate one because most of her brain seemed to be off flying in circles somewhere else and all that remained was one small part loudly asking,
Does this qualify as being ‘gobsmacked’?
, which really wasn’t helpful. She blinked a few times, in case that helped.

‘I …’

Footsteps. Footsteps coming into the alley behind them. She bit down almost gratefully on the barely formed sentence and held her breath.

The footsteps slowed.

Stopped.

‘You really shouldn’t have your console lit up if you’re trying to hide, you know.’

The voice was low-pitched enough to be borderline between masculine and feminine, carried the accent of North America and, perhaps most tellingly, was devoid of much in the way of humour. Jenna’s momentary shock at being addressed by the unseen person evaporated into relief as she recognised the speaker and she scrambled to her feet, stepping out into what passed for the light in the alley.

A silhouette stood between them and the street beyond: shorter than Jenna, with its shape lost in a flowing coat and a wide-brimmed hat, and with a familiar-looking rifle slung casually over one shoulder. Jenna could have hugged her, only that would have been weird and she wasn’t entirely certain she wouldn’t find herself with a dislocated shoulder from some sort of self-defence move.

‘You have no idea how glad I am to see you,’ she breathed, a relieved grin spreading of its own accord across her face.

‘Likewise,’ Tamara Rourke nodded. ‘Where’s Apirana?’

‘Here,’ the big Maori grunted, levering himself up with some effort. Jenna instinctively moved to help him then stopped herself in sudden fear of what that might be seen to imply, and by the time she’d sorted her brain out enough to decide that no, she really
should
be helping him, he’d managed to make it up to his good foot anyway.
Jesus Christ, what the hell is wrong with me?

‘Moutinho told me you were on crutches,’ Rourke said. ‘What happened?’

‘I— Hang on,
Moutinho
?’ Apirana looked about as shocked as Jenna felt.

‘Long story short, we’ve agreed not to be pains in each other’s asses until we’re off this dirtball,’ Rourke said perfunctorily. ‘Can you move?’

‘Long as you don’t go too quick,’ Apirana offered.

‘Good.’ The hat turned back towards Jenna. ‘I need you.’

Jenna tried to look attentive, eager for a distraction that might give her time to think. ‘What for?’

‘Another long story short,’ and now there was the very faintest hint of a dry smile in Rourke’s voice, ‘we’ve just joined the revolution. And they need a slicer.’

S
HIT, I’VE BEEN
shot
.

Drift experienced a moment of quiet panic, oddly isolated from what was going on around him. Even the noise of Muradov barking an order and a presumably thunderous hail of gunfire erupting from the transports and their disembarking
politsiya
seemed muffled and distant. Then his brain caught up with events and registered that although he was winded from the impact and fall and he was going to have a bastard of a bruise in a few hours, he could feel nothing to suggest that he was bleeding and all his arms and legs still seemed to work. His armavest had done its job.

The realisation that he still had all his health to lose hit at about the same time as a fresh adrenaline rush. He scrabbled into what was probably a poor approximation of the knees-and-elbows crawl he’d seen in countless war holos, but which served well enough at getting him towards the shelter of the transports without putting him in anyone’s line of fire. The thicket of boots he was heading for obligingly parted to let him through and he scrambled gratefully up into the back of the transport they revealed. Two hands hauled him in and he looked up into the faces of the Chang siblings, one on each side of him. Kuai immediately went back to fiddling with his dragon pendant and Jia looked about as stressed as he’d ever seen her.

‘Thanks,’ he said with some feeling, thumbing the safety of his rifle on and sitting up. ‘You two alright?’

Jia’s face congealed into a thunderous scowl and he thought for a moment he was going to be on the receiving end of one of her vituperate bilingual rants. However, she simply turned away and did as creditable an impersonation of someone storming off as could be performed inside a somewhat cramped armoured vehicle. Drift stared, confused and not a little annoyed.

‘
Me caga en la puta
, I just got
shot
!’ he shouted after her, then turned to Kuai. ‘What the hell’s her problem?’

The little mechanic shrugged. ‘She left her hat in the hotel.’

Goddamn pilot hat.
Drift lowered his voice. ‘We need to find some way for her to deal with things without that stupid “lucky hat” of hers.’

Kuai shrugged again, managing to make the motion accusatory with the ease of a practised passive-aggressor. ‘I tried hiding it once, but you made me give it back.’

‘Well, yeah, because she …’
threw a tantrum and I needed her to fly us somewhere.
He sighed. ‘Never mind.’ Sometimes being a freelance captain was a little like how he imagined parenting to be, although so far as he was aware it was generally frowned upon to fire a child.

He became aware that the sound of gunfire from outside had ceased, and a moment later the vehicle began to rapidly fill with black-armoured shapes. One of them removed his helmet as soon as the doors were shut behind them, revealing the face of Chief Muradov. He gave Drift an appraising look. ‘Are you injured?’

‘I’m sore, but I’ve had worse,’ Drift informed him, then frowned as they lurched into motion again. ‘What about your wounded?’

‘They are in the other car,’ Muradov replied, gesturing about them. ‘We are trying to fit three squads plus civilians into two vehicles, so things are a little … cramped.’