Dark Sky (Keiko) (3 page)

Sergei Orlov was very much the big fish in the New Samaran pond, and by comparison Ichabod Drift was … some sort of water beetle, perhaps? Maybe a fly larvae. Old Earth biology had never been his strongpoint.

‘Just so I’m clear on this point,’ he said slowly, looking sidelong at his escort and with a sinking feeling that he already knew the answer, ‘is this invitation an “invitation” or an
invitation
?’

‘I assure you sir,’ the guard replied, ‘you are free to choose whether to see Mr Orlov or not. If you do, we will take you to him. If not, you are free to go. However, he suggests that seeing him would be more profitable.’

Drift digested that and thought furiously. His first instinct was to cut and run, to bring his crew’s stay on New Samara to an abrupt end and get the hell away from whatever had brought him to the attention of Sergei Orlov. Was it simply a velvet-lined trap, enticing him with soft words and financial rewards instead of disrupting the House’s atmosphere by having him dragged away? Playing on his ego by claiming that Sergei Orlov wished to see him personally when that was about as likely as the planet’s twin moons dancing a hornpipe if he played the flute?

He sighed. If someone in authority, be that Orlov or no, wanted him removed from the House floor then he would be removed. He might as well play along on the off chance that this was actually as benign as it sounded. Besides, if it genuinely
was
Orlov who wanted to see him then he was intrigued despite himself.

He gave the bald guard his best smile. ‘Lead on, then.’

The guard nodded to the others, who melted unobtrusively away. Drift blinked his one natural eye in surprise, a motion his remaining escort apparently picked up on.

‘Mr Orlov wished to give the impression of you being removed from our establishment when you left the table,’ he explained, extending a hand in front of him to direct Drift towards an elevator situated in a curve in the wall, ‘but there is no need for my colleagues now.’

‘Curiouser and curiouser,’ Drift muttered, falling into step alongside him, then adding, ‘said Alice.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Mmm? Oh, nothing.’ Drift waved a hand dismissively.
No one appreciates the classics anymore.

The elevator shaft was as curved as the rest of New Samara’s architecture, with a mainly oval footprint that was flattened at the narrow ends. The guard entered a security code on a pad, shifting his body to block Drift’s view, before pressing the floor button. Drift supposed that this was to prevent just anyone from dropping in to see Sergei Orlov, then bit his cheek again at the realisation that yes, perhaps he
was
about to see the Grand House’s owner. What were the odds?

Well, he was in a casino. Whatever the odds were, they were almost certainly against him.

The elevator rose, passing through two other floors judging by the display above the doors, before slowing to a halt with a
ping
.

‘Don’t be alarmed,’ Drift’s companion muttered, seconds before the doors slid aside and he was confronted by a short, narrow corridor and two more guards, each pointing a pistol at him.

‘Well, this is depressingly familiar,’ Drift sighed. His own guns were back in his hotel room, since the Grand House took a very dim view of patrons going armed onto the gaming floors. However, to his shock the two guards holstered their weapons after a second’s scrutiny and stood back, one against each wall.

‘Sir?’ The guard beside him stepped forwards, quirking the fingers of one hand to motion Drift to follow him. After a moment of checking that he was certain this wasn’t some elaborate trick, Drift did so.

‘Roman? Did he come?’

The voice was rich, with a faint burring of the initial ‘r’ but not an extravagant roll. The Russian accent was strong, but it was a statement of identity rather than an inability to adapt to a different language’s vowels and consonants.

‘Yes, sir,’ the man called Roman replied, stopping at the point that the corridor opened into a room and extending one hand to invite Drift forwards.

‘I suspect you already knew that I came,’ Drift said, stepping out, ‘or you’d have probably said that in Russian …’

He tailed off, impressed despite himself. He wasn’t quite sure what he’d been expecting, but being shown into Orlov’s personal penthouse suite certainly wasn’t one of them. This was the top floor of the main casino, narrower than the rest of the building below but still considerably larger than the entirety of the
Jonah
, Drift’s
Carcharodon
-class shuttle currently sitting in New Samara’s spaceport. He experienced a burning moment of envy at the opulence and size, and briefly wondered exactly why he’d spent most of his adult life in the relatively cramped conditions on board spacecraft instead of settling on a planet where your home didn’t need to also contain engines and cargo holds.

Oh yeah. ‘Freedom.
’

‘Captain Drift!’

Sergei Orlov was rising to his feet from a recliner and approaching him, a glass tumbler in one hand and the other empty, his arms spread wide in greeting. Drift sized him up in a second: late forties from his looks, with a peppering of dark stubble across cheeks that were starting to sag into jowls, and thickening slightly at the waist while still being physically fit. Orlov’s hair was cut short at the sides and slightly longer on top. He was wearing loose, pale trousers, gathered at the ankle in the Arabian style, paired with a dark green roll-neck top, and his bare feet sank into the plush carpet on the floor.

All in all, he hardly looked like a man seeking to make an intimidating impression; not that he needed to, of course. Regardless, Drift’s spirits rose a little further and he accepted the warm handshake which was proffered.

‘Thank you for accepting my invitation,’ Orlov told him sincerely, looking him in the eyes while they traded grips for a second or so, ‘I hope you do not object too much to the manner of it?’

‘I’ve experienced considerably ruder ones,’ Drift replied with a smile. ‘So, um … what can I do for you?’

‘Captain Drift, I hope you may be able to help me with a small problem I have,’ Orlov said simply, standing back. ‘Roman, you may go.’

Drift caught a very slight tightening in the guard’s features, but this was clearly a man who knew better than to question his boss’s orders, certainly in front of strangers. Roman simply nodded and turned to leave. However, this brief distraction did little to take Drift’s mind off what Orlov had just said.

‘I see,’ he replied, trying to keep his voice level despite his surprise. ‘Well, I’d be happy to help, of course.’

Orlov chuckled. ‘You seem a little confused, Captain, and without wishing to be arrogant, I can understand why. After all, I am Sergei Orlov, yes? I have dozens of starships at my disposal. But, if you will, walk with me outside and I will explain why I have taken an interest in you.’ He pulled aside a sliding door and stepped out onto the flat, white-tiled roof of the main casino, under the stars.

Drift followed, for lack of any other real options, and felt the cool kiss of the night air against his skin. It was this air, the naturally occurring oxygen-rich atmosphere, that made New Samara such a haven for the Red Star’s moneyed classes. Set comfortably inside the habitable zone of the Rassvet System’s star, New Samara had needed the barest touches to be able to support plant life. Virtually the entire planet was an agriworld, devoted to producing food crops in bulk and, with the exception of the thinly spread farming crews, the majority of the human population lived at the cold poles or on the edges of the baking deserts where plants struggled to grow. The Confederate had allowed for one temperate city on the entire planet, the capital which shared its name, and with land at such a premium outside its borders it was no surprise that only the rich could live here.

‘Firstly,’ Orlov said as he trailed his fingers through the fronds of a line of soft, ornamental conifers, ‘let me address who you are. Ichabod Drift, captain of the
Keiko
, who arrived here in my city some two weeks ago and
immediately
went to the main bank to withdraw funds which did not, by any reasonable standard, belong to him.’

Drift froze in place, but when Orlov looked around his expression was not mocking but mildly amused. ‘Please, Captain. You are aware of who I am. It should not come as a surprise to you that I have contacts in many places, no? And as a result of who I am, I have no great concern about who takes money from whom, so long as it is not taken from
me
. On this occasion the money was taken from an account belonging to a man named Nicolas Kelsier.’

Drift bit the inside of his cheek and didn’t trust himself to answer.

‘Word travels across this galaxy, Captain,’ Orlov said, turning and walking back towards Drift, ‘especially to someone like me. I hear of unusual events on a small Europan backwater world involving a shoot-out in a market between two groups of off-worlders. Not particularly noteworthy in and of itself perhaps, but when eyewitnesses suggest that the Laughing Man was there … well, then anyone notable enough to perhaps one day fall under that
der’mo
’s crosshairs is far more likely to pay attention.’

Drift swallowed. He’d lost a crewman to Marcus Hall, the cold-hearted bastard of an assassin better known to the galaxy at large as the Laughing Man. Micah van Schaken had been … well, he’d been an abrasive, easily dislikeable mercenary, but he’d been reliable, and he hadn’t deserved to die with Hall’s razor-edged stardiscs puncturing his throat.

‘And then,’ Orlov continued, ‘the Europans announce that they’ve taken action against the man who was behind that explosion in the North Sea on Old Earth, that botched bombing attempt? That man was Nicolas Kelsier, would you believe? One of their former ministers. And here you are, spending his money, with your bright hair and your metal eye, your colleague Miss Rourke with her hat and coat, and your big Maori friend with those distinctive tattoos of his; all people mentioned in that shoot-out in the marketplace. Captain, this leads me to one, simple conclusion.

‘You are quite clearly not a man to piss off.’

Drift blinked. ‘Er … what?’

Orlov chuckled again. ‘I’m sorry, that lead-up probably sounded a little menacing, didn’t it? I assure you, I was simply proud of my own deduction.’ He raised his glass to Drift and took a small sip in salute. ‘I don’t believe you are Europan agents, Captain Drift, but you must have been involved in some way with the downfall of Kelsier, or how would you have got his account details? I strongly suspect that he angered or provoked you in some manner and you brought down retribution on his head. Suffice to say, I have no intention of making the same mistake. I do not like to underestimate people. I believe you and your crew can be fearsomely capable when the need arises. This makes me simultaneously want to hire you, and to ensure that you do not see any need to make my life difficult in ways I could probably not even imagine.’

‘That’s … very good of you,’ Drift managed, still stunned at what he was hearing. Here was the most powerful man on New Samara, arguably the most powerful man in the entire
system
, basically saying that he was going to tread carefully around the crew of a battered freighter. It was welcome, but he wasn’t sure he believed a word of it.

Then again … he and his crew
had
ruined Nicolas Kelsier, based on nothing but an epically ambitious web of bullshit and the fact that they’d had no other option. It had been him or them, and by the time Kelsier had worked out what game they were playing he’d pretty much already lost. If Orlov had heard the right parts of it he might not have realised how tenuously desperate the whole mess had been.

‘So that, Captain Drift, is why
you
,’ Orlov said, pausing for a moment to look up at the few stars above them that could be seen through the capital’s light pollution. To one side of them a muffled booming grew in volume before fading again: the sound system of someone in an open-topped hovercar. ‘I must say that I was also impressed with your play in the casino tonight. You showed an admirable mix of caution and risk-taking.’

Drift decided that this was not the time to admit that he’d gone all in on the final hand simply because he’d been getting spooked by Roman and his companions and wanted out of there.

‘As to what you can help me with,’ Orlov continued, ‘are you familiar with the planet Uragan?’

Drift frowned. ‘That’s in this system, isn’t it? Further out, some sort of mining planet? About the only thing I know about it is that I have no plans to go there.’

‘An understandable position,’ Orlov nodded. ‘It is not a world for sightseers, certainly. My government plunders the crust for metals and the populace shelters underground from the toxic atmosphere. It is …’ He paused for a second, selecting the correct word. ‘…
grim
. However, I need a piece of information from a man who works in Uragan City, whom I will not name unless and until you accept this job. He cannot transmit it to me, and I certainly cannot go there myself. I need someone to retrieve this information and bring it back to me, in person. They will need to get in and out again before the next of Uragan’s regular hurricanes hits the mining complex in two days standard, at which point no shuttle travel will be possible through the atmosphere for roughly seventy-two hours.’

‘And you don’t have anyone in your own employ who could do this?’ Drift said dubiously. ‘Forgive me, Mr Orlov, but this sounds like something far too simple to need an outside contractor.’

Orlov’s face pulled into a grimace, his lips twisting as though he’d bitten down on something sour. ‘Captain, when you sit as high as I do, there are always people trying to take the chair out from under you. I have rivals who are trying to infiltrate my organisation; I say “trying”, but I have no doubt they have succeeded in some part. How large a part, I am not sure. Of one thing, however, I
am
sure: none of these rivals have had any reason to try to bring
you
into their service, as you yourself were not aware that I was offering you employment until just now. Also, you will need to leave more or less immediately, so they will have no chance. You have some small reputation as a reliable contractor, the job itself is not taxing, and I will pay you the sum of 100,000 stars if the information I require reaches me before the next storm on Uragan has begun to lift.’