‘Quit trying to tell me how to do my job,’ Jia said, flexing her fingers, ‘and just listen to that radio.’ The next hour was a lesson in relativity for Drift, as the
Jonah
seemed to crawl through space while the ship’s chrono raced on, surely far quicker than mere seconds would allow. However, when his paranoia led to him double-checking it against the one on his wrist it was still depressingly accurate. New lights appeared all around them; other ships, few and distant at first but then increasingly more numerous and closer. Despite the sheer volume of space around Old Earth, its position as the hub of humanity meant that there was still enough traffic for the skies to get crowded.
‘Verification check incoming,’ Jenna suddenly piped up. Drift swallowed and looked over at her. The slicer had rewritten some of their ident overlay codes after joining the crew: they’d held up fine on the last smuggling job the
Jonah
had run, but that had been in a small, backwater system rather than the centre of galactic civilisation.
There was a few seconds’ tense pause. Then Jenna puffed out her cheeks in relief, her exhalation briefly blowing a few strands of hair away from her face.
‘Green-lighted.’
Drift echoed her sigh with one of his own. ‘Right, so they believe we are who we say we are—’
‘Idiots,’ Jia put in absently.
‘—so now we just have to look uninteresting,’ he finished.
‘You sure you still want to do your North Pole route?’ Jia asked without turning her head. ‘Do we have the time?’
Drift checked the chrono again and grimaced, a bitter taste in his mouth. ‘No. But what option have we got? We can’t just be seen to make atmo over Europa or we’d be a prime target for a mid-air customs check, we’ve got to sneak in from somewhere else so they think we’re already in the system.’
‘Where’s the patrol boat which just scanned us?’
Jia asked. Her fingers were suddenly skittering across the control relays, faster than Drift’s eyes could follow.
She was setting something up, but . . .?
‘The boat!’ Jia snapped. He jerked his gaze away and checked his screen, then passed the data to her display.
‘Starboard one-eleven, elevation forty-two.’
‘Beautiful,’ Jia cooed. Drift winced. He’d heard that tone of voice before, usually right before she did something terrifying.
‘Jia, what—’
‘Find me a storm system over Europa,’ the pilot snapped, not looking at him, ‘the nastier the better.’
‘I . . . what?’
‘Just
do
it!’
‘Fine,’ Drift muttered. He’d learned from bitter experience that once Jia was in full flow she’d do whatever she wanted anyway. Your best option was to just give her the information she demanded so at least she had the greatest chance of not killing everyone. ‘O-kay, looks like the coast of France is taking a battering.’ He slid that to her read-out as well, watched her hat dip as she glanced at it and nodded.
‘That’ll do. Hold on.’
Drift instinctively took a firm grip on the sides of his panel, despite the fact that the artificial gravity from the Heim generator would save him from being thrown about. Still, his stomach did lurch slightly as Jia did something and the sky suddenly pinwheeled across the cockpit. ‘What are you—’
‘Ship!’ Jenna screamed. ‘Ship!’
‘I
know
!’ Jia shouted back, as a large cargo cruiser veered into view, shockingly near. ‘What do you think I’m aiming for?’
‘Why are we getting this close?’ Drift yelled, alarmed despite himself. He could see the dents and scratches in the leviathan’s hull, and the black blooms from where it had experienced countless re-entry heatings.
‘Because,’ Jia replied with an unmistakeable note of satisfaction in her voice, ‘I’ve been watching its vectors and it’s about to do . . .
this
!’
The cargo cruiser’s rockets flared and its nose dipped towards the planet which was, from one perspective at least, below them. Jia dived the
Jonah
at the same moment, throwing them after their larger neighbour.
‘You’re entering
now
?’ Drift demanded incredulously, strapping himself into his chair.
‘This
pángrándàwù
is giving us cover from that patrol boat,’ Jia said easily, as though shadowing a cargo cruiser during an impromptu atmospheric entry was something barely worthy of her attention. ‘We stick close enough, we should avoid detection from the ground as well – only an idiot would try to slipstream into atmo, right?’ Drift caught a flash of white as she bared her teeth in a fierce grin. He groaned quietly, then keyed the comm.
‘Buckle up, everyone. Jia’s taking us down ahead of schedule, and incidentally has lost her fucking
mind.
’
‘I heard that.’
‘You were meant to.’ He looked over at Jenna, who had gone even paler than usual, and made a slicing motion across his throat. ‘As soon as we hit the comms blackout, kill the ident broadcasts; if anyone sees us pulling this fool stunt they’ll know we’ve got something to hide anyway, so we might as well fly silent and pretend we just disappeared.
But,’ he added, figuring that a task might take the young slicer’s mind off whatever further insanity Jia was planning, ‘go find that shipping log system and see if you can patch us an easy ticket off this rock.’
‘Aye-aye,’ Jenna replied. Her voice was a little shaky, but she fixed her eyes to her station. A few seconds later she looked back up. ‘We’ve lost comms.’
‘Good,’ Drift muttered. On this occasion, the bubble of ionised air around them which would temporarily affect all transmissions was their friend.
He looked over at Jia. ‘If you’re going to just ignore my orders as Captain, at least tell me that you have a plan.’
‘Don’t I always?’
‘No,’ Drift replied, ‘hence my worry.’
‘If I tell you, you’ll only worry more.’ Jia turned her head to grin at him.
‘Just watch the damn cruiser!’ he yelled, gesticulating furiously beyond the
Jonah
’s nose. Jia tutted, but returned her attention to the hull shuddering in front of them. They danced like that for a couple of tense minutes, Jia nudging them this way and that to keep them close to the cruiser’s concealing mass and stay out of its super-heated turbulence as far as possible, without risking collision with the ship itself. ‘Comms are back,’ Jenna reported, looking up and then hurriedly lowering her eyes again as she saw how close they were to their huge companion craft.
Her voice drifted into the presumably unconscious sing-song she adopted when concentrating. ‘Okay then, databank . . . where are you?’
‘You’d best not tip anyone off to where we are,’
Jia warned her, ‘or all my fancy flying’s for nothing.’
‘Which would be why I’m currently setting up three proxies through different communications providers across this hemisphere,’ Jenna retorted, sounding nettled. ‘I don’t tell you how to fly a few thousand tons of metal, you don’t tell me how to slice: deal?’ Jia just grunted, but Drift was sure he caught the faintest ghost of a smile on Jenna’s lips.
‘Right, ready to roll.’ Jenna frowned in concentration for a moment, then her expression cleared. ‘There you are . . . really? Oh, that’s just embarrassing . . .’
‘If you’re going to talk along, can you at least tell us what you’re doing?’ Drift asked irritably. He hated feeling helpless, and right now he was stuck between two consummate yet infuriatingly idiosyncratic professionals.
‘Their security protocols are
shocking
,’ Jenna said pityingly, glancing up at him for a second. ‘This is barely fit for purpose, I could have sliced it in high school . . . but I might not even need to . . .’ She tapped something, waited for a few seconds while idly drumming her fingers somewhere unimportant, then brightened as her terminal buzzed at her. ‘Aha!
Got an echo from the ping!’
‘Meaning?’ Drift asked, starting to feel that he needed to install an ‘English or Spanish only’ sign in the cockpit.
‘Meaning someone’s connection isn’t secured and I can piggyback in on it, which will throw them for an even bigger loop if they try to trace me,’ Jenna giggled happily. ‘Although I wouldn’t like to be this guy when they do, whoever he is . . .’ She looked up at him again. ‘Yeah, we’re in. There’s however many thousand idents in here, all logged and tagged. We can be any one of them on our way out, and so long as the real one isn’t trying to leave at the same time we’ll be good to go.’
‘Sounds great,’ Jia commented, although her tone of voice suggested otherwise.
Jenna snorted. ‘Haven’t you got us down yet?’
‘Girl,’ Jia said grimly as Drift put his head in his hands, ‘you are going to regret saying that . . .’
‘How long are you going to shadow them for?’ Drift asked, trying not to sound too agitated. It was testament to Jia’s ridiculous piloting abilities that she hadn’t either collided with the cruiser or been thrown aside into its wake, but he wasn’t sure how much longer his nerves could take the strain of being this close to something so potentially dangerous.
‘And what happens if they tell someone we’re following them?’ Jenna added.
‘You see any windows at the back?’ Jia snorted. ‘We’re too close for their instruments to pick us up, and they sure as hell can’t
see
us. But in answer to your question,’ she added, looking over at Drift for a second, ‘not for much longer. These boys aren’t going where we want to go.’
Drift checked their location on his terminal screen, then looked out of the viewport. The horizon was growing larger (or possibly smaller) and less obviously curved, and more and more detail was becoming apparent on the ground below. He sighed. ‘We’re coming down over Europa, aren’t we?’
‘In a manner of speaking,’ Jia admitted. She shot a glance back at Jenna. ‘We’re still running radio silence, right?’
‘No broadcasts,’ Jenna acknowledged. Jia nodded decisively.
‘Right then.’ She keyed up the intercom with a grin at Drift. ‘Attention all hands, this is your fantastically talented pilot speaking. We will shortly be experiencing turbulence, so you’d all better hope that my useless brother does exactly
what
I tell him
when
I tell him to, or we may all just crash and die.’ She cut the link again, killed the cockpit lights, then muttered something under her breath in Mandarin and wrenched the helm to the right, just as Drift found that he was suddenly feeling unusually religious.
The turbulence from the cruiser caught them instantly, buffeting the
Jonah
through the air like a leaf on the wind. Jia’s knuckles whitened but she wrenched their nose around, bringing the ship onto something like a smooth approach vector again, then checked her scopes. ‘We’re coming down into the troposphere.’
‘And we’re suddenly one dot in the middle of the sky,’ Drift said grimly. ‘Jia, what the
hell
were you thinking? We’re going to get stopped for sure!’
‘They can’t stop us if we can’t stop,’ Jia replied cryptically, then keyed the comm again and spoke in a rattle of Mandarin too fast for Drift to completely follow. There was no mistaking the confusion in Kuai’s answer though, or the emphatic nature of Jia’s snapped response. He tried to replay what he’d just heard in his head, and had just picked out the word for ‘stop’ or ‘cease’ when everything suddenly became very quiet.
‘Was that—’
‘—the engine?’ Jenna finished his question for him, her voice rising in alarm, although it didn’t really need to be asked. The steady rumble and roar of the
Jonah
’s relatively economical and almost always reliable jets had abruptly dropped out of hearing. Inside a cockpit shielded heavily enough to survive atmospheric entry there wasn’t even wind noise, just the patchwork sight of Europan fields, forests, mountains and cities looming silently up at them.
And, ahead and below them, the ugly purple and grey bruise of the storm currently hammering in off the Atlantic Ocean. Although it wasn’t looking like it was going to be either ahead of them or below them for very much longer.
‘Jia,’ he said urgently, ‘if you don’t tell me
right now
what the hell you think you’re doing, I swear to any god you care to name that I will shoot you in the head and fly this thing down to the ground myself.’ He wasn’t entirely certain that he wasn’t serious, either.
‘We didn’t have time to take a detour if we’re going to make your appointment,’ Jia said, adjusting controls. The
Jonah
did have flaps to control altitude and inclination, just like any terrestrial aircraft, but Drift couldn’t see how she could hope to glide their stubby boat with any success. ‘We can’t get down without being noticed, so we break our cover as late as possible. Now we look like debris, or hell,’ she shrugged, ‘like a ship that’s lost power. So we head for the biggest storm we can, the place which is going to mess with as many instruments which might be monitoring us as possible, and when we hit it,’ she snapped her fingers, ‘we disappear.’
‘Yeah, because we
crash
and
die
!’ Jenna yelled in alarm.
‘Only if my brother doesn’t turn the engines back on when I tell him,’ Jia snapped. ‘Right now we’re not broadcasting anything and we have no drive emissions to track. No one would voluntarily power down and head for a storm system, am I right?’
‘No one with any sense,’ Drift growled.
‘So when we get to the roughest, nastiest bit, we fire the retros to kill our forward momentum, drop like a stone then kick everything back in,’ Jia said matter-of-factly, although Drift couldn’t help but notice how hard she was having to fight the controls. ‘We start broadcasting a new ident, head up coast towards Amsterdam and we look like a domestic craft which just took off. Presto, we’re inside Europan airspace looking like we belong, while anyone who
was
watching us is still waiting for that piece of debris to kill a whole bunch of people.’ She beamed, white teeth flashing in a tight grin. ‘Damn, I’m good.’
‘You’re insane,’ Drift told her flatly, doublechecking the crash webbing he’d buckled around himself.
‘Insanely
good
,’ Jia retorted. ‘Oh, here comes the wind. Hold on!’