Dark Sky (Keiko) (6 page)

Rourke slapped the airlock and they came out above the cargo bay. Drift was already by the control to lower the ramp, talking with Apirana in a low voice while the big Maori nodded soberly. The airlock on the other side hissed aside and the Changs appeared, Kuai still limping slightly.

‘Right!’ Drift said loudly, turning to look up at them. ‘Given that we’ve got that little shit-stain Moutinho wandering around here somewhere, I think some of us should stay behind and watch the ship; besides which, too large a crowd might scare our contact, or draw attention. So I’m going to go with Jenna, since she can encode and store the data in a way that will mean anyone who checks our stuff won’t know what we’ve got, and Kuai, since although this guy Shirokov apparently speaks good English, I might need someone with a better grasp of Russian than I have to make myself understood.’

Out of the corner of her eye, Jenna saw Jia nudge Kuai. The little mechanic coughed.

‘Ah, my leg’s aching today. Can Jia go instead?’

Drift sighed and turned his attention to Jia, waiting for the inevitable sibling argument to ensue as she accused her brother of laziness or foisting work off onto her.

‘Good idea,’ Jia said, clapping Kuai on the shoulder and hurrying down the steps to the bay floor, ‘I want to see this place anyway.’

Drift looked from one to the other suspiciously, but when there were no immediate signs of the apocalypse he nodded cautious agreement.

‘Am I seriously that scary?’ Rourke murmured into Jenna’s ear. Jenna decided that the question was rhetorical.

‘There’s no guns allowed down there, unfortunately,’ Drift continued, unbuckling his gun belt and placing it in a locker, ‘and their laws say all firearms should be stowed securely. Still, laws or no laws, we have to be able to defend our property if Moutinho decides he wants to make trouble, so make sure you’ve got the keys to hand. With any luck, though, we should be in and out before he even knows we’ve been assigned the same goddamn berth as him.’

‘Maybe you should take A. with you,’ Rourke spoke up. ‘No disrespect to Jia or Jenna, but if something kicks off you might want a bit of muscle.’

Drift frowned and looked around at the Maori. ‘What do you say, big man? That hole in your belly healed enough?’

‘Don’t worry ‘bout my
puku
, bro,’ Apirana told him, slapping his side. ‘You need me, I’m ready.’

‘Good to know.’ Drift beckoned to Jenna, who began to make her way down the steps. ‘Let’s get moving, then; our man’s going to have finished his shift any minute.’

‘Is the bay ready?’ Jenna asked, not anxious to step outside into choking fumes of sulphur dioxide.

‘Roof shut and oxygen restored,’ Drift confirmed, checking the readouts and punching the release. The ramp started to whine downwards, and he looked back at the rest of them. ‘Remember, this isn’t New Samara, where everyone shits platinum and pisses fine wines; this is a government-run mining planet. Outsiders like us are welcome enough because we bring in money, but
only
if we stick to where we’re meant to be and what we’re supposed to be doing.’

‘Good job we never break any rules, hey?’ Apirana grunted.

Gaining access to Uragan City as a pedestrian consisted of stepping onto a long moving walkway which took them to the immigration suite, since the spaceport berths were large enough to make walking there something of a chore. Then they passed through a scanner, which confirmed that none of them were carrying any firearms, and had their identification checked by a group of black-uniformed
politsiya
, the local law enforcers, who most definitely were. That done, they skirted the escalators leading to the tram station and exited on foot down steps that led them into a world of grey.

‘This place,’ Jenna commented, looking around them, ‘is grim.’

‘That’s the exact same word Orlov used,’ Drift remarked, scratching at the skin around his right eye. ‘I’m not inclined to argue with either of you.’

Uragan City was mainly lit by sunbulbs, designed to emit a frequency of light as close as possible to that of the sun from the First System, but even that concession did little to make it feel any warmer or more welcoming. It was a thoroughly utilitarian place, a network of square tunnels of varying sizes shod in grey and silver with slightly raised sidewalks for pedestrians flanking streets of humming vehicles, many of them official-looking. Red Cyrillic script on the walls or floor gave directions but there were no translations such as were provided on more cosmopolitan planets. Jia could read them anyway and the Captain’s mechanical eye was equipped with a visual translation program, but Jenna and Apirana would have been reduced to scanning things with their pads to work out where they were. Even the occasional mural or piece of artwork looked tired and uninspired. The people were not dissimilar, although for a mining planet Jenna could see precious few dressed in mining gear.

‘They’ll be much deeper, actually working at the face,’ Drift pointed out when she mentioned this. ‘This is the commercial district, since it doesn’t make sense to transport all the off-world goods any further from the surface than you have to.’

‘It’s a bit like walking around a giant hospital,’ Jenna commented.

Apirana snorted. ‘I swear, I’ve been in
prisons
cheerier than this.’

‘We’ll make interior designers of the pair of you yet,’ Drift said as a maglev tram hissed around the corner ahead, its buzzer hooting at a pair of women who’d begun to venture across the street. ‘Jia, can you see the nearest public comm?’

The pilot scanned their surroundings, then pointed at a junction ahead of them. ‘Looks like we got one a block that way.’

‘I could always slice into the system?’ Jenna offered, but Drift just clucked his tongue.

‘Again, let’s keep this simple. I’ve got no idea how close an eye Uragan security keeps on their comms network, so let’s stick to what’s provided. We’re only asking a guy to meet us so I can pass on a present from his dear old granddad, after all.’ They dodged across the street, avoiding the traffic, and soon found what they were after around the next corner: an old-style comm unit, the handset attached to the main body by a strong metal-wrapped cord.

‘Not taking any chances on it being damaged, are they?’ Apirana noted.

‘That would cost public money to replace, my friend,’ Drift replied, pulling out his pad and bringing up a line of digits. ‘Okay, here we go.’ He flipped the comm to its loudspeaker setting and dialled. The call tone buzzed once … twice … three times …

+Privetstviye?+

The voice sounded … weary, was Jenna’s best description. Male, middle-aged and weary.

‘Mr Aleksandr Shirokov?’ Drift asked.

+Da?+

‘My name is Ichabod Drift,’ the expression on the Captain’s face clearly indicating his hope that Shirokov’s English was as good as Orlov had claimed it would be, ‘I ran into your grandfather on New Samara and he asked me to deliver something to you.’

+
I see.
+ Shirokov’s voice had taken on a slightly livelier edge, but had Jenna been of a gambling persuasion she’d have put money on it being an act. +
How is he?
+

‘He was well when I left him,’ Drift recited, completing the planned exchange. ‘Is there somewhere you’d like to meet?’

+
There is bar called Cherdak on Level Five. You should find map when you exit transit elevators, which can direct you to it. I will sit as close to rear window as I can so you find me.
+

‘We’ll be there as soon as possible,’ Drift assured him.

+
We?
+

‘Yeah, a couple of my crew are with me, they wanted to look around,’ Drift assured him. ‘Will that be a problem?’

+
No, no problem. No problem. I will see you soon, Mr Drift.
+

The connection cut off. Drift looked at the comm unit thoughtfully. ‘Did he sound entirely happy, to you?’

‘Probably just tired,’ Apirana offered.

‘
Si
,’ Drift sighed, ‘I just wonder … oh, never mind.’

‘Like he might not like all the demands his grandfather’s putting on him?’ Jenna offered, careful to stick to the language they’d been using so far.

‘Hmm,’ Drift nodded thoughtfully, then snorted. ‘Well, we’re not here to fix anyone’s family issues. Let’s go and give Mr Shirokov his present, see if he’s got a message he wants us to take back, and get off this rock.’

LEVEL FIVE WAS
hardly an improvement on Level One, where they’d begun, but at least it wasn’t noticeably worse. What Drift was less impressed by was the fact that after paying a fare for a shuttle tram to the transit elevators, he’d then found that they needed to pay a further fare to use the elevators, and then yet another to get a shuttle tram to the district where Cherdak was. He’d gritted his teeth and tried to tell himself that they were small expenses in the scheme of making 100,000 stars from Sergei Orlov, but he couldn’t help counting up the costs.

They’d ended up in an area Jia identified as lodging for off-worlders, which might have been why there seemed a high percentage of bars, gambling houses and the like. The higher-budget ones advertised themselves with flashing holo displays while the cheap settled for glowing neon, some with signs in the windows saying ‘ENGLISH SPOKEN’, or the equivalent in Spanish, Swahili, Arabic and so on, which Drift viewed would be unlikely to be necessary elsewhere in Uragan City. This was not, after all, a highly cosmopolitan metropolis like New Samara; this was a Red Star mining town, and an almost exclusively Russian-rooted one at that.

Cherdak was at least easy to find, as its name was written over the door in Cyrillic, Western and Mandarin alphabets. Drift gave it a quick once-over from the outside and decided he approved of it as a meeting place; not too flashy, insofar as that was possible down here, but also not completely down at heel. It was an unremarkable bar, which meant they wouldn’t be that remarkable going into it.

Well, except Apirana. He looked back at the huge Maori, who had raised the hood on his top as per usual. While he liked Apirana and valued his presence immensely, Drift couldn’t help wishing that he didn’t stick out
quite
so much.

Might as well wish for an entire engine refit while I’m at it, that’ll probably happen sooner.

He pushed the swing door open and stepped inside, holding it for the other three and engaged in a quiet but meaningless conversation with Jia while doing so, the better to take a look around while trying to look natural. One or two people glanced up at them, but no one seemed overly watchful or suspicious. There were four groups in, probably ship crews judging by their clothes and general demeanour, with a few other individuals scattered around. The well-dressed Arab gentleman scowling at his pad might be a trader or broker, a middle-aged woman with a Japanese cast to her features could have been anything from a dealer in mining equipment to a diplomat on what had to be one of the most boring assignments available, the two Chinese men …

‘Triax,’ Jia whispered as they approached the bar.

‘Really?’

‘Tattoos.’

Drift frowned. He didn’t want to look again, but although he’d seen tattoos on both of them he hadn’t recognised anything which he knew to be a Triax gang sign. He sighed, and wondered again how much it would cost to get one of those recording chips with a playback function for his artificial eye. He had heard that sometimes caused the implant to run quite hot, however, and that just didn’t sound like a good trade-off.

The landlady smiled at them as they approached, with more genuine warmth than Drift would have expected in this place. Still, four new customers were four new customers, and he supposed you probably got used to the dreariness of Uragan City after a while, especially if you’d never been anywhere else. He smiled back – she was actually rather pretty, and fairly young, with large blue eyes and hair so blonde it was almost white – and pulled out a credit chip, scanning the bottles lined up behind her.

He ordered the drinks – two bottles of Cerveza del Diablo, his favourite beer, for Jenna and him, a vodka and Star for Jia and a plain Star Cola for Apirana – and glanced over towards the rear of the bar. Sure enough, sitting in the far corner by a window that let in very little light, there was a solitary man who hadn’t seemed to pay much attention when they’d walked in but was now studying them. Drift touched Jia lightly on the arm and began to wend his way between stools and other customers, while Jenna and Apirana chose a table at the opposite end, out of the way but able to watch the door.

‘Aleksandr Shirokov?’ Drift asked quietly when they’d approached to within a few feet. ‘My name is Ichabod Drift, captain of the
Keiko
, and this is my pilot, Jia Chang.’

‘Then please, sit,’ Shirokov replied, gesturing to empty chairs. Drift complied, studying the other man as he did so.

Aleksandr Shirokov was probably in his mid-forties if you looked closely, but the lines on his face and the grey in his dark, thinning hair gave him the appearance of a man a decade older. He wore tired office clothes: black shoes with frayed laces, a dark blue suit from which the years had stripped whatever true lustre the material may have originally possessed and replaced it with a well-worn shine, and a mostly white shirt pulled open at the collar. The jacket was the cut favoured by the Red Star government, with an almost breastplate-like front panel buttoned at the right side of the chest. Drift had been expecting a miner, but this made far more sense: no miner would be likely to have access to the sorts of production quotas and shipping arrangements Orlov wanted.