The stargun gave him more pause. It was an excellent weapon but an uncommon one, and possibly too distinctive after his killing of van Schaken. A random check might lead to dangerous suspicion being cast on him, even disguised. Besides, if he got into a situation from which he needed to fight his way free then the game was as good as up. He had no tertiary identity to turn to here.
He reached a decision: he would abandon his weapons. Many people went armed on Hroza Major – especially now, most likely – but by no means all. He needed to get off-planet as soon as possible and would just have to take the chance that his disguise would get him by any Europan checks before the authorities found his tools.
He went back to the manhole he’d climbed out of and dropped his remaining munitions in. It would signpost where he’d exited, but only if they’d already worked out that he’d taken to the sewers. That done, he stepped out into the fading light of the Hrozan day and headed for the nearest starport with the air of a man who had nothing to hide.
He wasn’t going to report back to his employer. He’d decided that as soon as the first Europan shots had been fired. He’d been tiring of this long-running engagement of his services anyway, let alone using him as a common menial with a gang of thugs. He got paid, eliminated his target and moved on; that was how he’d always worked. So let Drift, Rourke and their crew play their dangerous game with the Europans. Had he been a gambling man, which of course he was not, he might have put money on them succeeding in running their quarry to ground. He wished them luck, for it would save him having to take any action himself. If his employer – now ex-employer – survived the
Keiko
’s crew’s quest for vengeance and learned that the Laughing Man was still alive and had broken his contract, that might damage his reputation.
The streets were crawling with Europan police; not the counter-terrorism armed forces he’d recently killed five members of, but the regular law enforcers. He nodded amiably at two of them and received an absent-minded acknowledgement in return as they bustled past him.
So far, so good.
‘What do you
mean
, you can’t find him?’
Tamara Rourke was seething. The inability of the Europans to track Hall down had stoked her cold rage until it felt like there was a small star burning in her chest. She was a patient woman – it was a lesson she’d learned painfully – but even she wanted to go out and start tearing down Glass City to find someone she could hurt for all the shit she and her crew had been through in the last month or so.
Captain Sonja Rybak met her glare, although not completely happily. She was clearly uncomfortable about her forces’ failures so far, but was pugnacious enough to take the unspoken attitude that since she was the one in command of the armed troops she wouldn’t be apologising for anything. Rourke forced herself to remember that not only did they need this woman to help find and eliminate Kelsier, they also needed not to antagonise her sufficiently for her to start asking difficult questions.
‘Glass City is large,’ Rybak replied to Rourke’s question, ‘and I hope we can at least agree that the Laughing Man has been able to evade everyone sent after him so far in his “career”?’
‘We can,’ Rourke replied bitterly. A single wellplaced bullet from her palmgun could have ended Hall’s legacy, of course, but he’d reacted faster to the Europan counter-ambush and fled before she could get a shot away. She took a deep breath and, with an effort, pushed back her desire to get revenge on Micah’s killer.
Another body to lay at Hall’s door. There’ll be a reckoning eventually.
Her living crew still needed her, one more than the others. ‘I suppose you’ve learned nothing about Kelsier’s location from the man Apirana was able to capture?’
‘He’s resisted our attempts to get information from him so far, although we’ve had barely any time,’ Rybak replied. Her mouth twisted slightly, as though she’d suddenly encountered a bitter taste.‘Would your team . . .?’
It took Rourke a moment to realise what the Europan captain was implying, but then she shook her head firmly. ‘No. I’m aware of the reputation the GIA has in some areas, but we’re not all torturers and interrogation experts.’
Rybak managed to look both pleased and disappointed at once. Rourke could understand why; they desperately needed information, but handing over that sort of critical detail to a foreign team would rankle, quite apart from unease at the rumoured methods the GIA used. Still, there was nothing for it. She’d hoped that Hall might prove more tractable if he was captured – he at least would owe Kelsier nothing, whereas it was anyone’s guess how deep the captured thug’s loyalty ran – but that option was closing to them as well.
‘I think we need to proceed according to the original plan,’ she told Rybak. ‘It’s been ninety minutes since the
Early Dawn
took off. We should start the pursuit.’
Rybak frowned. ‘If we can just lay our hands on Hall—’
‘We can’t wait for that possibility,’ Rourke cut her off. ‘You said yourself, he’s evaded every attempt at capture so far. We need to work with what we have, the nav data Jenna managed to transmit to us before . . .’
‘Before she was kidnapped?’ Rybak finished grimly. ‘Agent, I don’t know what sort of qualities your slicer may have, but Vankova isn’t one of mine. She’s local law enforcement, and won’t have had training on resisting even the most rudimentary forms of torture. There’s every chance the men and women on that ship know what our plans are and will simply set a different course to avoid Kelsier’s base completely. Without the homing beacon Vankova was meant to set up, that nav data will only get us into roughly the right area. If it’s an asteroid
field
then we could spend the next hundred years looking for our target!’
‘You’re thinking like a military commander now,’ Rourke said, shaking her head. ‘These aren’t soldiers, Captain, they’re criminals and terrorists. They might just abandon Kelsier if all seems lost, yes, but the man you’ve got in custody isn’t spilling his guts yet and that makes me think the others will stay true, at least for now. They might disable the homing beacon, but they’ll head back to the closest thing they have to safety. Your ships will be faster than whatever transport brought them here, even to a system next door. We’ll be there on their tails, ready to see what they do and where they go.’
‘
Our
ships might,’ Rybak conceded, ‘so would you be riding with us? Forgive me for saying, but that freighter of yours doesn’t seem too spry.’
‘You might be surprised,’ Rourke smirked. It was true, too: the
Keiko
’s Alcubierre drive had been souped up to allow for faster transit between systems, although that had been done for more mundane commercial purposes than the sort of unseen GIA enhancements Rybak might assume it carried.
Rybak drummed her fingers on the desk, staring down at the plan of Glass City as though willing it to give up the location of the Laughing Man. Rourke had already done plenty of that though, and could see no obvious place for him to be hiding. Then again, an obvious hiding place wouldn’t be a good hiding place . . . unless, of course, Hall was going for a double bluff.
She exhaled in frustration. Trying to second-guess the galaxy’s most infamous assassin was a good way to drive oneself mad. ‘Captain, I think we must leave the apprehension of Hall to others.’
Besides, the longer we stay here the more likely it is a message will come from Old Earth and blow our cover completely.
‘Homing beacon or not, element of surprise or not, our best chance now is to follow the leads we have before they go cold.’
Rybak nodded slowly in reluctant agreement. ‘And your man van Schaken?’
‘I believe he favoured cremation,’ Rourke replied, a little uncomfortably. This was something an agent should know about her team, but Micah had never really been one for deep conversation. ‘He never gave us specific instructions. Each of my crew know that there’s no guarantee of returning their body to their home planet if they die in my service.’
‘I’ll make arrangements,’ Rybak said. She looked up at Rourke questioningly. ‘I assume you’re happy for that to wait until we return?’
Rourke adopted the careful mask she’d used so many times over the years. There was no question of the
Keiko
’s crew returning to the Perun System after they’d left it, so Micah was likely to go to his rest alone and unmourned. However, somewhere out in the void, Jenna McIlroy was trapped on a hostile ship with nothing for support but an inexperienced surveillance technician and a handgun she’d shown no evidence of being able to fire effectively.
‘Captain,’ she said firmly, ‘my duty now is to the living. Let’s go find our terrorists, and get our people back.’
The time spent cramped behind a piece of unidentifiable equipment in the engine room of the
Early Dawn
, limbs tucked in awkwardly, barely daring to speak in case someone came in at exactly the wrong time, terrified of discovery, in near-total darkness only slightly alleviated by the light cast from various control panels, constantly subjected to the vibrations transmitted through the metal floor and the casing she was pressed up against and really, really needing to piss was, without a doubt, the most miserable period of Jenna McIlroy’s existence so far. It even beat out zero-gravity hockey in seventh grade, which she’d been fairly certain was the most painful and emotionally ravaging experience it was possible to suffer without stepping inside a well-equipped torture chamber.
Her mind had been her own worst enemy during the hours the
Early Dawn
took to reach its parent ship in orbit, wherever and whatever that was. Her body was suffering, it was true, but it was her brain which insisted on continually presenting her with ever-more violent and horrific scenarios of discovery, interrogation, abuse and execution. She hadn’t dared try to use her comm to contact Drift or the others in case the signal got picked up – the only thing saving them was the fact that no one else on board knew they were there – so there was no one to talk to, to get advice from, to reassure her that it would be okay or to talk through a plan with her. Sara certainly wasn’t much use for it: the Hrozan girl had spent a reasonable portion of the flight crying, although at least she’d done so quietly. It was left to Jenna to try to organise her own thoughts.
She noticed immediately when the whine of the engines changed. They’d been pushing hard, insofar as she could tell, which made sense; now, however, the throaty rumble died back a little. Moments later she felt herself being pressed harder against the metal behind her by the unseen hand of deceleration.
‘What’s happening?’ Sara asked, a movement in the shadows behind her hiding place suggesting that she’d looked up. The last time Jenna had seen her, just before the motion-activated lights had winked out a few hours ago, her minimal make-up had been smudged from tears and she’d looked terrified. Jenna was quite glad she didn’t need to control her own expression right now.
‘Someone’s just hit the retros.’ The pressure grew stronger. ‘
Hard
.’ Jenna took a firm grip on her bag to make sure it didn’t slide and skitter away over the engine-room floor. ‘We must be about to dock in their ship, and that means someone’ll be coming in to shut the engines down soon.’
‘What do we do then?’ Sara asked nervously. Jenna paused, running through things in her head, checking to make sure she hadn’t missed anything obvious. She opened her mouth to speak again, but before the first words had formed they heard the hiss of the door opening and the lights came up once more, bathing them in illumination which seemed blinding after their time in the dark.
Both of them froze, apart from Jenna very carefully easing the safety off on her gun. The rate of deceleration was starting to slow, and they were surely approaching a dead stop by now.
Just hurry up and dock . . .
‘We on yet?’
The voice seemed so loud she jumped, and nearly hit her head on the metal behind her. It was the same male voice as before, loud and rough and impatient, and was answered by the hiss of a comm.
+. . . a moment, so get ready for . . . chronising the Heim fields.+
Jenna blinked. Almost every ship or waystation in the galaxy had a Heim generator to produce artificial gravity, but that naturally led to complications when one craft docked inside another. If the activation of one field was synchronised perfectly with the deactivation of the other then there were no problems, but it certainly wasn’t the best time to be building a card pyramid, or eating soup.
Or hunkering down in a low, narrow hiding place . . .
She looked over at Sara again, braced herself as best she could between the hard surfaces surrounding her and mouthed ‘Hold on’. The other girl looked back at her in confusion, then her eyes widened in shock as the familiarity of gravity disappeared and she started to drift upwards. Jenna winced as the Hrozan’s expression slipped into one of terror, waited for her to float out into view of their unseen companion . . .
‘What the—’
Gravity reasserted itself just as the man started speaking. Sara dropped back to the deck, a fall of only a couple of inches, and hunkered down into a ball immediately as a thump came from the far end of the room. Jenna felt her pulse rise so fast that it seemed like nothing less than a hammering in her ears, the individual beats barely distinguishable as she clutched her gun with hands suddenly slick with sweat.
‘What the hell sort of “synchronising” do you call that?!’
+. . .the fuck up, Marone, I warned you, didn’t I? We’re on, so kill . . . ngine and let’s get out of here.+
‘Prick,’ the man apparently called Marone muttered. The engine’s rumble coughed and died and the door hissed open and shut again, the second action cutting off the thuds of Marone’s retreating boots. Jenna let out the breath she’d been holding with a sound like the pressure cooker in the
Keiko
’s galley when Kuai had been steaming vegetables.
‘We’ve got to get off!’ Sara hissed at her. Jenna shook her head.