Dark Sky (Keiko) (40 page)

‘Alim!
’

Drift risked a glance sideways to see Alim Muradov still staring down the barrel of his gun at him, and with an expression of agonised conflict on his face. He breathed again. ‘Chief, I—’

He’d noticed Drugov shifting his weight very slightly, but didn’t realise the significance until something hit him in each thigh and every nerve in his body overloaded. He was dimly aware of landing half on his back and half on his left arm with his body attempting to draw in on itself like a crushed spider, while the shockbolts spat out of Drugov’s desk by the foot-activated floor trigger did their work on him.

Drugov flipped up a section of the desk and lowered his hand, palm downwards, towards the green light grid of a palm reader. It had to be the security protocol for activating Uragan City’s ‘fail-safe’.

The shockbolts had exhausted their charge in a second, but the after-effects left Drift’s muscles still unwilling to obey his commands. He tried to raise his gun, but his arm just spasmed.

There was a gunshot.

Drugov’s face had time to register the faintest flicker of shock before he crumpled like a puppet with its strings severed, a bloody hole blown through his forehead. Turning his suddenly aching neck with an effort, Drift looked up and saw Alim Muradov. The security chief also had shockbolts attached to him at thigh level, but it seemed that his
politsiya
-issue gear had protected him. He was lowering his gun, which was pointed at where Drugov had been standing, and he looked suddenly haunted.

Drift opened his mouth before deciding for once that it might be better to say nothing. Instead he rolled onto his right and craned his head around to look back at the door into Drugov’s office, which was conspicuously absent of anyone else.

‘Kuai! Jia!’

His voice came out as little more than a pained wheeze, but after a second or so both Chang siblings stuck their heads around the door, one from each side in an unconscious stereo movement which made him chuckle despite himself.

‘You alright, Captain?’ Jia asked uncertainly, her eyes narrowing as her gaze moved to Muradov.

‘I’m fine, I’ve just been shockbolted,’ Drift said through gritted teeth. ‘Help me up, would you? Don’t worry about the Chief,’ he added, ‘he’s just saved everyone’s life but had to kill a friend to do it.’

‘I thought he was my friend,’ Muradov agreed, his voice sounding slightly vacant as Jia and Kuai cautiously entered the room. ‘But perhaps I never knew him.’

‘Careful, careful!’ Drift gasped as the Changs grabbed an arm each and hauled upwards. He staggered, his legs still uncertain beneath him, and Kuai had to catch him with a grunt.

‘You’re getting fat,’ the mechanic told him.

‘You should work out more,’ Drift retorted, holstering his pistol.
Fat? Not a spare ounce on me.
He tested his legs again and found them to be more capable of taking his weight, so he disentangled his arm from over Kuai’s shoulders. ‘Chief? First of all, thank you for doing what I would have done, had I not been incapacitated.’

‘You realise, of course, that I have effectively signed our death warrants?’ Muradov replied gloomily. ‘He was not lying about being the only person with the access codes to his shuttle.’

There was a deep
crump
from the direction of the garden, echoed a moment later by a wailing klaxon as the mansion’s alarm system started sounding. Drift didn’t need to look to guess what had just happened: someone had attached a mining charge to the main gates and blown them in.

‘Drums,’ he muttered, feeling his guts stir uneasily, ‘drums in the deep.’

Muradov had crossed to the window overlooking the garden, his melancholy air abruptly gone. It seemed that the security chief – or former security chief, as he surely had to be thought of now he’d killed the planetary governor – wasn’t the sort to let introspection get in the way of practicality. He looked around as Drift spoke, an odd expression on his face. ‘They are coming.’

Despite himself, despite the gravity of their situation, Drift laughed.
At last, someone who appreciates the classics!
‘Chief, are there any other ways out of here? Any panic room?’

‘None we can use,’ Muradov replied briskly, checking his weapon, ‘everything was coded to the governor’s fingerprints.’ He stopped, then looked up at Drift as the same thought occurred to both of them.

‘Well, we still have his hands,’ Drift pointed out, brain racing. ‘If we can use him to open the panic room, but leave him outside it with a gun in his hand and make it look like suicide then maybe they won’t realise we’re—’

‘New plan!’ Lena Goldberg shouted as her and Dugan Karwoski burst into the office and made a beeline for the environment suits. ‘Grab a mask and get the fuck out of here!’

‘What?’ Drift watched in bewilderment as the two
Jacare
crew grabbed rebreather and goggle combinations and pulled them on. ‘Where are you going?’

‘Out there!’ Lena replied, her voice slightly muffled as she pointed at the window looking out over Uragan’s surface.

‘Out
there
?’ Drift echoed incredulously, turning on his heel to look at the foot-thick window of perspex, reinforced to survive the battering of Uragan’s incredible storms. ‘How the hell are you going to get it ope—’

He stopped. Descending into view was a dark shape, swaying unsteadily in the wind but still undoubtedly under human control, with floodlights cutting through the thick atmosphere to stretch new, wavering shadows out across the floor of Drugov’s office. He recognised the sleek, angular form as a
Corvid
-class shuttle. The
Pouco Jacare
.

And, as Goldberg and Karwoski fled the office again, Drift realised that there was only one way for Ricardo Moutinho to get rid of that window.

‘Move! Move!’ he yelled desperately, shoving the Changs towards the office door. He dashed for the closet and grabbed more rebreathers, then followed his crew with Alim Muradov close behind him. The Uragan slammed the door shut after them and snatched one of the masks from Drift’s hands with almost unseemly haste.

‘Put these on!’ Drift ordered, pressing masks on Jia and Kuai, then pulling one over his own head. ‘Get away from the door! Get behind the wall!’ He grabbed Goldberg by the shoulder. ‘Why the hell didn’t you mention this before?!’

‘They only just came into comm-range,’ she spat, knocking his hand away, ‘and you were—’

This explosion was much, much louder than the one that had signified the arrival of the rebels, and it shook the building itself. The wooden office door was nearly knocked off its hinges by debris flung outwards from the force of it, and Drift was still trying to shake off the roaring in his ears when Goldberg and Karwoski barged past him and back into the office. He suddenly became aware that the roaring wasn’t an after-effect of the
Pouco Jacare
’s guns. It was wind noise.

They had armed rebels coming for them in one direction, possibly already inside the mansion, and an escape route in the other. There was only one sensible course of action, although given it involved charging into the teeth of a toxic hurricane, the word ‘sensible’ was probably relative.

‘Come on!’ he yelled, waving his small party onwards and following Moutinho’s crew into the office. The room was already filled with a swirling, ice-cold mess of pus-coloured gas and dust as Uragan’s frigid atmosphere billowed in through the ragged scar created by the
Pouco Jacare
’s armament. Virtually all of the window was gone, save for a few chunks of thick perspex along each side, and some of the wall was missing at the top as well. The shuttle itself hung immediately outside like a monstrous predatory bird, its ramp down and giving the impression of a distended jaw. Drift found himself grudgingly admiring the skill of Moutinho’s pilot at holding the craft more or less steady in the cruel crosswind, which was pushing hard against him even in his current position of relative shelter.

Goldberg was already on the ramp, crawling up it to present as small a profile as possible to the vicious gusts. Karwoski followed, leaping the small gap between the window and the ramp and almost being carried away even in that short distance. He landed on the ramp with a clatter though, and began scrambling up it after his crewmate. At the top, silhouetted against the internal lighting, was someone wearing
politsiya
riot gear including a full-face helmet with gas mask. From the height and general build, Drift guessed it was Moutinho himself, an impression which was heightened when it pointed a gun at him. His comm beeped, alerting him to a broadcast on an open channel powered by the shuttle’s transmitters, and he answered it with a grim sense of foreboding.

+Olá,
Ichabod!
+ the Brazilian’s voice crackled cheerily into his ear. +
Thanks for keeping my crew safe.
+

‘Tamara told me you’d struck a truce,’ Drift replied through gritted teeth, aware of the others at his shoulders. Possible salvation lay in front of them … but so did a gun. ‘Where is she?’

+
Sitting safe and sound in your shuttle where I left her, I expect,
+ Moutinho said, +
and no doubt waiting for you to get back there with that pilot of yours. You’d better hurry though: we made a bit of a mess on our way out.
+ He hit a button next to him as Karwoski scrabbled up past him into the hold proper, and the ramp began to rise. +
Best of luck.
+

‘Damn you, Moutinho!’ Drift snarled. ‘We could have left your crew high and dry!’ Which was true enough, so long as the ‘we’ included Muradov, whose decision it had been.

+
Which is why I’m not telling Jack to blow you to pieces with another missile,
+ Moutinho pointed out. +Adeus,
Ichabod.
+ The transmission ceased as the ramp whined shut, and the
Pouco Jacare
banked away into the swirling clouds with a roar of manoeuvring thrusters audible even over the screaming wind.

‘So that’s it then,’ Jia said from beside Drift’s right elbow, her voice barely audible through the muffling effect of the rebreather and over the wind. ‘We’re fucked.’

‘Not yet,’ Drift growled, more out of stubbornness than anything else.

‘We’re about to get shot, man!’ Jia protested, gesturing back towards the office door. ‘They’re gonna be here any second!’

‘They cannot breathe in this!’ Muradov cut in, tapping his rebreather. ‘We shut the door, we get something to barricade it, and we dare them to come in and get us!’

‘What, and freeze to death instead?’ Jia demanded, throwing her arms up. ‘That’s just a different flavour of fucked!’

‘Are your crew always this upbeat?’ Muradov asked Drift. The Uragan had his gun in his hand again, and seemed to be thoroughly himself once more.

‘They’re an absolute riot,’ Drift replied, slapping the shorter man on the shoulder. ‘No pun intended.’ He looked around at the Changs. ‘Jia, grab some of the big chairs from out there, I don’t think this desk is moving anywhere. Chief, take another look out of the garden window and see if they’ve actually got through the gate yet, or just damaged it. Kuai—’

The little mechanic was pointing past him, out into the storm. Drift whirled, expecting to see the shape of the
Pouco Jacare
dropping back down and a crackle in his ear as a preface to Moutinho saying he’d changed his mind and was going to blow them up anyway. Sure enough, there were running lights approaching unsteadily through the storm, and he opened his mouth to shout for everyone to run for it.

But the lights were configured slightly differently. In fact, they almost looked like …

+
CAPTAIN, ARE YOU
there?
+ It was Jenna’s voice in his ear, coming in on the
Jonah
’s private frequency that his comm was programmed to automatically accept.

‘Yes!’ he shouted, fighting the urge to jump up and down and wave his arms, joy warring with relief in his chest. ‘Yes, damn it, I am!’

+
Jia?
+

+
You bet your ass!
+ Jia’s voice crackled over the comm now she was included in the broadcast network, echoing the more muffled words he heard coming from behind her mask.

+
Then get ready to get aboard ay-sap,
+ Jenna said, her voice somewhat grim, +
because A. and Tamara are having a hell of a job flying this thing.
+

+
Gotcha!
+ Jia replied, pushing Drift aside as the
Jonah
’s bulky shape materialised out of the maelstrom. Sure enough, where the
Pouco Jacare
had been shaky but clearly controlled, Drift’s shuttle seemed barely able to keep upright, let alone on course. He watched with his heart in his mouth as it veered drunkenly, overcompensating sluggishly to gusts with too-enthusiastic blasts from the thrusters, but a crack of light appeared at the front and kept widening as the ramp began to lower.

+
Hold her steady!
+ Jia yelled, setting herself for a running jump.

+
Trying!
+ was the curt response, a taut voice which Drift took a second to recognise as Tamara Rourke’s, so great was the stress in it.