Dark Sky (Keiko) (35 page)

‘Go!’ Apirana rasped, his watering eyes focusing briefly on her. Rourke hesitated for a moment, but the Maori was still coming gamely on. She trusted him not to be a needless martyr, and she knew better than to think she could physically help him in any way.

Besides, someone needs to make sure Moutinho doesn’t leave us
both
behind.

Jenna and her ‘bodyguards’ had reached one of the trams, and the shortest one – Jack, Rourke guessed – wrenched one of its sliding doors open for them to pile inside. Rourke put on a final burst of speed and caught up with them, staggering through the doorway before they closed it again and just before her lungs gave out.
You’re getting too old for this, girl.

‘Jack, get us out of here!’ Moutinho roared, sending his crewman towards the driver’s cab with a shove and ducking away from the windows.

‘We wait … for Apirana!’ Rourke wheezed as adamantly as she could while leaning on a standpole. She was mildly annoyed to see that Moutinho didn’t appear to be out of breath, but then he hadn’t been running as fast as her.

‘The hell we do,’ Moutinho rasped. ‘Jack, get us moving!’ His helmet turned towards Rourke, and although she couldn’t see his face behind the riot mask, she knew he was waiting for her to try to stop the First Nations man. Once she did so, he’d have a clear shot at her …

Jenna abruptly swivelled and brought her knee up into Achilles’ crotch, then snatched the gun from the youth’s suddenly slack grip as he keeled forwards. She armed it with a buzz and aimed it down the tram car at Jack.

‘We wait,’ the slicer said coldly. She spoiled the effect a little by puffing to blow strands of hair from her face, but Rourke had to concede that it had been very smoothly done. Moutinho was still in his crouch under a window, and his reflexive jerk of movement to intervene had been arrested by a twitch of the Crusader’s barrel.

‘Y’know what? Fine,’ Jack said loudly. He still held a gun too, but it had been pointed at the floor and he clearly wasn’t interested in trying to win a shoot-out with someone who had him in her sights. ‘We’ll wait. I kinda like the big guy, anyway.’

Rourke risked glancing away from Moutinho, and was relieved to see Apirana’s labouring form approaching the door. There were still occasional shots flying, but the curtain of gas back towards the elevators was now doing a fine job of obscuring them from view, and even Big A. wasn’t large enough to be hit by every bullet that came his way.

The Maori stumbled inside, rivulets of sweat pouring down his face and his top soaked dark with it. He landed on a seat, more by luck than judgement, and let out a groan of combined pain and relief which was loud enough to be heard even over the noise of the door sliding shut as Moutinho reached up and slapped the closer.

‘Go!’ the Brazilian roared at Jack.

‘Go!’ Jenna echoed, putting her gun up and rushing over to check on Apirana. ‘A., are you okay?’

‘Think I need to lose some weight,’ Apirana muttered breathlessly, huge chest heaving. ‘
Kai a te ahi!
’ He looked up at her, his manner oddly tentative to Rourke’s eyes. ‘You?’

Jenna leaned down and gave him a hug with the arm that wasn’t holding a gun, which seemed to startle the big man. ‘I’m fine,’ she said reassuringly, ‘I’m just glad you are too.’

‘That’s all very touching,’ Moutinho rasped, getting to his feet and pulling his helmet off, as a jerk of the carriages signified that Jack had got the tram into motion, ‘but you ever point a gun at one of my crew again and you’ll be a long way from fine.’

Jenna whirled on him, her eyes flashing dangerously. ‘And if you
ever
try to drag me away from my crewmates again, you’ll be the one I’m pointing it at.’

Rourke watched Moutinho’s scowl deepen and tensed, waiting for the
Jacare
’s captain to do something that would spark a real confrontation. Then Moutinho glanced at her, and at Apirana’s forbidding expression, and snorted a humourless laugh. He turned away and clapped Rourke on the shoulder as he passed her. ‘Kids, eh?’

‘
You still want to steal her onto your crew?
’ Rourke asked him in Russian.

‘
Go die in a fire, Tamara
,’ he retorted without turning, then reached down to haul Achilles to his feet. ‘Stand up, you little prick.’

‘She hit me in the—’

‘Everyone saw. No one cares. Get up.’

Rourke took a couple of steps over to where Jenna was standing and glaring at the back of Moutinho’s head. ‘Nicely done with Achilles.’

‘Thanks,’ Jenna muttered. ‘I know you told me once that every guy’s on alert for a nutshot because it’s so obvious, but he had a helmet and an armavest on, so I thought—’

‘No, you did good,’ Rourke assured her. She leaned a little closer and lowered her voice. ‘I’d advise against staring down Moutinho again, though. It’s good to show him you’re no pushover, but he’s smart, vicious and vindictive, and proud to boot.’

‘You don’t seem to mind antagonising him,’ Jenna replied. Rourke smiled slightly.

‘He already hates me. Plus he knows I can kick his ass.’

The tram made a low shrieking sound as it rounded a bend on the tracks a little too fast, and Rourke had to grab a strap dangling from the ceiling for just such a purpose in order to avoid stumbling sideways. Moments later the tannoy crackled into life, feeding Jack’s voice back to them.

+
Everyone might want to duck about now.
+

Rourke glanced ahead and saw the
Jacare
crewman hunkering to the floor behind the driver’s control panel. A moment later a window shattered as a bullet passed through it, and there was a ringing sound as another was turned aside by the tram’s metal skin. They were approaching a street crossing on the way out of the depot and a couple of rebels who’d got ahead of them had apparently decided to try to stop the tram, or at least kill the occupants.

‘Down!’ she yelled, pulling Jenna down with her and rolling away from the glass doors as another window shattered, this one closer to them. Apirana hit the floor with a grunt of pain a moment later, but got tangled up with his crutches and couldn’t seem to get any purchase to get into cover. Rourke fought with the instinct to help him, unwilling to leave him there but knowing that she wouldn’t be able to drag his bulk across the floor …

A gun barked several times, a few yards away. She looked around to see Moutinho standing and firing through the window in front of him, then drop back down again into a sitting position with a satisfied smirk on his face. The shots from outside stopped, and as their carriage passed the crossing, Rourke saw a man and a woman on their backs and clearly in the early process of bleeding out.

‘You’re welcome,’ he grinned when he saw her looking in his direction. Rourke sighed and cautiously got back to her feet, although now they were away from the depot there appeared to be no further immediate threats.

‘Where are we actually going?’ she asked, helping Jenna up.

‘If Jack’s got any sense, which he does, we’ll be heading for the spaceport,’ Moutinho replied, checking the magazine on his weapon and grimacing at what he found. ‘There’s a terminal right inside it.’

‘How will he make sure we get there?’ Jenna asked dubiously. ‘Aren’t there preprogrammed routes, or something?’

‘Nah, the drivers know their routes and select the lines they need to go on,’ Moutinho said, pulling a fresh clip from his belt. ‘There’s controls in the cab to choose from the different line polarities when it reaches a junction.’

Rourke studied him, grudging admiration warring with distrust. ‘You studied this … in case you ever needed to steal a
tram
?’

‘Don’t sound so ridiculous now we’re on one, does it?’ Moutinho snorted, reloading his gun and getting to his feet. ‘C’mon Tamara, you know as well as I do that it’s best to research all possible ways of getting out of somewhere quickly, just in case the shit hits the fan. We’d come here a few times and took the tram more than once: all we had to do was stand behind the driver and watch what they did. Besides, Jack can drive or fly pretty much anything if he puts his mind to it.’

Rourke nodded slowly. It was easy to forget, sometimes, that Ricardo Moutinho was an intelligent and resourceful man whose crew would have been hired for specific reasons. ‘So, we get to the spaceport in a tram with bullet holes in it, then what?’

‘I’m thinking we see how many people are between us and the ships and how gullible they look, then bluff or shoot our way past them depending on that,’ Moutinho replied, scratching his stubbled cheek. He shot Jenna a brief, disapproving glare. ‘That’s if your girl there wants to give Achilles his gun back.’

‘Can he use it?’ Rourke asked dubiously, eyeing the skinny, pale youth standing further down the tram and looking glumly out at their surroundings.

‘Hell, what do you think he’s on the crew for, his looks?’ Moutinho guffawed. ‘Kid’s worse than an asthmatic grandma in a fist fight, but he’s the best damn shot this side of Alpha Centauri.’

‘Do you even know which side of Alpha Centauri we are?’ Rourke demanded.

‘Eh, like it matters,’ Moutinho shrugged. ‘I reckon it’s still true.’

Rourke exchanged glances with Jenna, who looked a little uneasy but passed the weapon over. Both of them knew that Jenna’s place on the
Keiko
’s crew was definitely not due to her proficiency with firearms, and if a fight was going to break out then it made sense for someone to be armed who would make a difference in their favour. All the same, since the earlier confrontation Rourke felt more than a little uneasy being the only member of her crew who was armed. She frowned as a thought struck her.

‘Hey, Ricardo. Who’s your slicer?’

‘Skanda was filling in, but he wasn’t exactly an expert,’ the
Jacare
’s captain replied. ‘What, you think I was keeping blondie there safe just because she’s pretty? I knew we might need her to get us out of that concrete coffin they’ve got our shuttles in.’

Rourke nodded, partially reassured. At least she probably didn’t have to worry about the Brazilian allowing Achilles to get any form of revenge on Jenna. Whether he’d show any restraint when it came to her or Apirana, however …

She pinched the bridge of her nose as her vision blurred slightly.
Damn it. I went without sleep for three days once, minus twenty minutes here and there, and now I can’t stay awake for more than twenty-four hours? I really am getting old.

‘You okay?’ Apirana rumbled. The big man had dragged himself back onto a seat, but he looked spent. He could still probably grab Achilles and punch his face in, but the image of Jack casually cutting a Uragan guard’s throat with his heavy knife wouldn’t leave her mind when she looked at the Maori.
I could take one of them, if it came to it. A. would be dead in the water. Jenna’s not a fighter. We’re basically alive on Moutinho’s sufferance right now: that, and he’s still wary of me. If he sees me flagging …

‘I’m fine,’ she told the big Maori, but right then she wished she had Drift’s talent for lies.

KUAI HAD TO
admit, he was impressed.

Their small party – him, his sister, the Captain, Karwoski and Goldberg, and Chief Muradov – had been buzzed in through the thick security gates of the governor’s residence, which Muradov was even now shutting securely behind them. On the other side, the transport they’d been riding in was rumbling off somewhere else with the loyal security officers in it apparently now pretending that they were traitors. On
this
side, however …

‘Hey, you remember that summer when Mum and Dad took us to Hangzhou?’ Jia muttered, staring around them.

‘I was just thinking that,’ Kuai admitted. The air in here didn’t have the dry, recycled tang it had held in the rest of Uragan City, or for that matter that he’d got used to from years of travelling on the
Keiko
. It was not only several degrees warmer, but humid, and held the scent of green plants. Which wasn’t that surprising given that they were surrounded by the things.

The grounds of the governor’s residence were huge, at least by the standard of a subterranean dwelling. Ahead of them, a wide gravelled path snaked between banks of verdant green grass, which were sprinkled here and there with what appeared to be naturally occurring wildflowers. Thick, dark green bushes with purple blossoms skulked up against the boundary wall on their right, while tucked away in the corner on the far left was a white wooden box which, Kuai realised in mild alarm, must be a beehive. Overhead in the roof were a series of lamps imitating the wavelength emitted by the sun, and providing not just light but also heat, if he was any judge.

‘Those are palm trees,’ Jia said, pointing. ‘He has palm trees. In his garden.’

‘And a stream,’ Kuai replied, his eyes focusing on the thread of glittering water just visible where the landscaped terrain dipped down and the gravel path gave way to a dark-stained wooden footbridge. He frowned. It obviously couldn’t be natural on this world, so presumably it was some sort of giant water feature, pumped away at one end and sent back to the start …