Against the odds, they’d got away without being shot down or apprehended, which Drift considered to be a minor miracle in and of itself. However, it just made the fact that one of his own crew was holding a gun to his head all the more galling in comparison.
‘Tamara . . .?’ he said, trying to keep his voice steady. Jia had only just throttled back the engines and their whine was still dying away when he found himself staring down the deceptively small barrel of the one-shot palmgun Rourke seemed able to secrete just about anywhere. He’d even seen her pull it out of her underwear once.
‘“Tamara” nothing. You have some explaining to do,’ Rourke said. Her voice was quiet, but her eyes were like chips of dark ice.
‘Is now really the time?’ Drift protested. It wasn’t just an evasive tactic on his part; they were still on Europan soil and, so far as he was concerned, at risk of being picked up by the authorities. He risked a glance sideways: Jenna’s face was shocked while Jia’s was rather less readable, but neither of them seemed about to jump up and attempt to disarm Rourke. He couldn’t really blame them, given that neither pilot nor slicer were experienced in combat and Tamara Rourke could incapacitate someone twice her size with her bare hands.
‘Jia,’ Rourke said without turning her head, ‘get on the comm and call the boys to the cockpit.’
‘Gonna be kind of cramped,’ Jia commented. ‘Apirana ain’t small. How about we move to the canteen? Also, if you shoot him and the bullet goes through him it won’t damage something valuable if we’re in there.’
‘Thanks,’ Drift said bitterly. Jia just shrugged. Through the viewport behind her left shoulder Drift could see huge tankers crawling back and forth on the asphalt outside, massive hoses feeding fresh fuel into hungry tanks.
‘She has a point,’ Rourke conceded. ‘Get up.’
‘To go somewhere you are
more
likely to shoot me?’ Drift snorted. ‘It doesn’t appeal.’
‘Ichabod,’ Rourke said softly, ‘I’ve flown with you for, what? Eight years? I am really, truly hoping that you can explain to all of us why you took on a job which nearly destroyed a city, but I’m not going to wait for that explanation until you’ve had time to cook up one of your cover stories. Let’s go to the canteen so you can give us whatever good reason you have for me to lower my gun and apologise. Keep stalling, and I
will
shoot you, and then burn off this rock before anyone tracks us down.’
‘We can’t,’ Jenna put in timidly. ‘Word on the Spine and the radio is that the sky is closed.’
Rourke frowned, but to Drift’s disappointment neither her gun nor her gaze wavered. ‘What?’
‘Nothing leaves atmo without a scheduled launch window,’ Jenna said heavily. ‘Not just Europa; all governments have bought in. Looks like everyone’s got a bit twitchy about a surprise nuclear explosion; there’s talk of it being a Free Systems terrorist attack.’
‘Shit,’ Rourke muttered with feeling. Drift saw a moment of indecision flicker across her features before it was replaced with her usual calm determination. He knew that look, and it didn’t bode well for someone at the other end of a gun.‘Come on, Ichabod. Slowly. I don’t think you’re fool enough to try anything with me, but I don’t know how desperate you are right now. Let’s get to the canteen where you can explain yourself.’
Pretty damn desperate.
‘Okay,’ he replied instead, and started to rise. He could pretty much feel the noose tightening around his neck. He’d kept it at bay for nearly two decades, long enough to hope that maybe he’d outrun it, but perhaps he’d only ever been living on borrowed time. He couldn’t help but appreciate the irony of it being a mutiny which finally brought him down, though. He briefly considered trying to jump Rourke as Jia activated the comm and called Micah, Apirana and Kuai up to the canteen, but quickly thought better of it. It was the same choice as he’d faced with the Laughing Man: almost certain immediate death, or a chance to play things out and live a little longer, hoping that his luck would see him through somehow.
Granted, it hadn’t exactly worked how he’d hoped so far.
He’d half expected the trudge to the canteen, held at gunpoint with the three women behind him, to be some sort of never-ending ordeal. Instead it seemed to be over quicker than blinking, and he still hadn’t started to think through what he was going to say to his crew.
His friends.
Probably.
He usually leaned casually against the counter which separated the galley’s floorspace from that of the canteen while addressing his crew, and he instinctively took that position again now. The main differences were that he felt far from casual, and instead of lurking by the door Tamara Rourke stood in the middle of the floor with her gun still levelled at his face. Micah, Kuai and Apirana appeared in the doorway behind her and stopped dead at what they saw.
‘What the hell?’ Apirana asked, clearly taken aback.
‘This job’s smelled bad since we took it,’ Rourke said flatly, ‘and I think we all knew it a bit. Secret cargo, secret employer, our Captain’s been edgy and smelling of whisky and happy to shoot a couple of void station enforcers in the face instead of try to talk his way out of trouble like usual. But we all gave him the benefit of the doubt because whatever else has happened, he’s usually seen us right before. And then everything goes to hell, and I can’t be the only one wondering exactly what’s been going on.’
To his own surprise, Drift felt a stirring of at least semi-righteous anger in his belly. ‘You knew! Don’t play the innocent!
You
knew that
I
knew who was hiring us, and you let it go!’
‘Because I trusted you!’ Rourke shot back at him.
‘You
did
know?’ Apirana rumbled. Drift experienced a sudden quiver of fear as he almost felt the Maori’s gaze harden and definitely saw his jaw tighten. Apirana’s loyalty had always been rock-hard, but if the big man felt his trust had been abused then Drift didn’t like to think how he’d react.
Great, now I’ve got two of them mad at me.
‘Ichabod,’ Rourke was saying firmly, ‘someone’s used us, and I’m not going to stand for it. In fact, someone’s going to die for it. I’d rather that someone be the man who hired us, but if you won’t give me his name then so help me, it will be you.’
Drift scanned the room. No help was forthcoming. His crew had been forged together into a working unit by necessity and, yes, a certain camaraderie he’d deliberately nurtured, an ‘us against the galaxy’ mentality which had found fertile soil in the souls of this particular group of second-chancers. It was hard to believe, for a moment, that they’d turn on him like this.
At least, until he realised that right at this moment, he wasn’t part of ‘us’ anymore.
‘I’m suddenly wondering exactly who
you
are, Tamara,’ he said darkly. ‘You can identify a nuclear bomb just by looking at it; how many people can do that?’
‘Don’t you dare try to make this about me,’ she warned, gun still steady, but she was hiding something. He could practically taste it.
‘What other mysterious talents do you have that we never knew about?’ he demanded, warming to his theme. ‘How many times have we nearly died because you
didn’t
tell us something you knew—’
‘
GIVE ME HIS NAME!
’ Rourke roared.
The voice which answered her belonged to Jenna.
‘Nicolas Kelsier.’
Drift blinked in shock. Then, as one with the rest of the room, his gaze turned towards their young slicer.
Jenna faced their stares awkwardly, abruptly aware both of how tempting the open canteen door looked and exactly how impossible it would be to reach with the rest of the crew in the way. Rourke was studying her as though she were some sort of alien life form. Apirana’s face radiated a mixture of surprise and distrust, and Drift’s . . .
Ichabod Drift looked absolutely stunned.
‘Who the hell is that?’ Kuai asked the room. Rourke raised an eyebrow at Jenna.
‘Well?’
‘I don’t know
who
it is,’ Jenna clarified hastily. She looked at Drift. ‘You remember when you told me to stop slicing the
Gewitterwolke
’s ident?’
He nodded.
‘Well, you were sort of too slow,’ Jenna admitted. ‘I’d already seen that it was actually the
Langeschatten
, and it was registered to someone called Nicolas Kelsier.’
Rourke looked back at Drift, who’d apparently been too stunned to move out of the line of fire of her palmgun when she was distracted. ‘Well, Ichabod? We have the name now, and I can see from your face that it’s the right one.’
Drift hesitated.
‘There’s a terminal linked to Old Earth’s Spine in the cockpit,’ Rourke said dangerously. ‘I could put this bullet through your brain right now, then walk up there and find out for myself.’
Micah coughed slightly, and raised a hand. ‘Nicolas Kelsier used to be ETRA Minister in the Europan Commonwealth.’ Seeing their blank faces, he elaborated. ‘The Extra-Terrestrial Resource Acquisition department. As in, the ones who sent me out to shoot people to stop them from taking anything they thought belonged to them.’
‘Fine,’ Drift said, his voice suddenly tired. Jenna frowned; the showy, charismatic ship’s captain seemed to fade a little, and she was abruptly struck by the hollowness of his cheeks and the lines around his eyes, especially the natural left one. He looked older, and not a little hard, as he eyed Rourke belligerently. ‘I’m getting a drink. You want to shoot me in the head, do it. Otherwise, put the gun away and wait, and I’ll tell you what you want to know.’
‘Be quick,’ Rourke told him. They watched Drift throw some brown powder into a mug, add steaming water to it and then pour in a generous slug of whisky from his hip flask.
‘I’m waiting.’ Rourke had her hands on her hips and an expression of impatience on her face.
‘Micah’s told you that Nicolas Kelsier was the ETRA Minister for the Europan Commonwealth,’ Drift said heavily, taking a gulp of his coffee. ‘About twenty years ago the EC was in a state of unofficial warfare with the Federation of African States over a couple of disputed systems. They didn’t start deploying the Frontier Defence Unit until later,’ he continued, with a nod at Micah, ‘so at this point it was all diplomatic posturing and bullshit about “peaceful solutions” while behind the scenes, both sides made it as difficult for the other as they could in the hope that the other one would give up and get out.’
‘God, I love politics,’ Micah snorted.
‘One of the main tactics the Europans started using was hiring privateers,’ Drift continued, looking into his coffee. ‘Private citizens offered commission to act as pirates against the merchant craft of a certain nation. Some of your take went to the Europans, but in exchange for that you had protection: denial of your activities, denial of your existence, refusal to extradite and so on, so long as you only hit the targets ETRA picked out. If you got indiscriminate then you were a liability; more than one privateer ended up full-blown pirate because they took an opportunity to hit the wrong ship from the wrong government.’
‘The USNA did the same thing at one point,’ Rourke nodded. ‘So what are you saying, you were a privateer for the EC? Why the EC?’
‘I’d taken on with a captain called Swift, out of Telamon,’ Drift said, ‘but after we got underway we found out he was a bastard of the first water. There was a girl who’d signed on at the same time as me, and Swift took a fancy to her. We were running at sublight again and four days out of New Keswick when Swift got impatient and actually made a grab for her in the canteen. She’d ignored everything else, but as soon as he laid a hand on her she swung for him: damn good punch too, laid the bastard clean out.’ He gave a humourless laugh. ‘Of course, that didn’t go down well with the first mate, who was Swift’s crony and even nastier than his captain. He went for her in a flash with a carving knife.’ Drift placed one finger almost tenderly against his ribs. ‘Caught her right here with the point.’
‘So, me and Tommy Hernandez and Ginger Ell and old Capshaw the navigator rushed him. Swift tried to save him, so we took him down too. We . . . weren’t gentle.’ He grimaced. ‘Two minutes later and both of the officers were dead, but she was bleeding out as well. The ship’s medical facilities were basic, and there wasn’t a lot we could do about a knife through the heart. We flushed the two bastards out into the void but kept her with us, hoping to give her a proper burial.’
‘Of course, we weren’t thinking clearly. Not that it would have mattered if we had been; Swift was running a legal shipping business for all that he was an abusive shit, and we had no slicer on board. So we made port on a Europan planet in a ship registered to a dead man, with the captain and first mate absent and another dead body on board. We were immediately arrested as mutineers and suspected murderers, and were expecting to get slung into prison.
‘And then we got a better offer.’
‘From Kelsier?’ Rourke asked. Drift nodded.
‘This old guy came to see us while we sat there in handcuffs. Two military troopers with him. Introduced himself, nice as you like; Nicolas Kelsier, ETRA Minister for the Europan Commonwealth.“Happened to be in the area”, which since it was one stop over from a contested system I guess meant he was checking out the lay of the land. Said we could either serve a joint sentence for mutiny and triple murder – they were pinning all three deaths on us, you see – or we could work for him as privateers. We would attack ships from the FAS as designated by his department in exchange for yadda yadda yadda, you get the idea.’ He shrugged. ‘I’d just turned twenty. I could look forward to most of my life in prison, or I could stay flying and comparatively free. I took the second option. So did the others.
‘The Europans were thorough: they took geneprints of us all, with promises that if we broke the deal we’d be hunted down and dragged back to serve our sentences, and our details would be forwarded to all other governments as escaped murder suspects. Whether they’d have followed through or not, I don’t know, but we didn’t chance it. I was nominated as captain, we took on some new hands who weren’t averse to the idea of some violence, and . . . off we went.’