‘Am I not allowed a little time off?’ Drift replied, spreading his hands in a gesture of faux apology and giving her his best smile. She was pretty, after all, even with a scar which cut down her left temple, and some Justices seemed to have a need for mindless sexual release which bordered on the pathological; what better candidate for such a liaison than a starship captain who would be in the next system by next week? No strings, little chance of anyone knowing and even less of him being revealed as a criminal, which would make such pastimes tricky among the terrestrial population. So long as he remained good at distinguishing the ones who wanted practicality above romance there was no reason why he and the law shouldn’t scratch each other’s backs in more ways than one, so to speak . . .
‘Well, since it’s you,’ she grinned back at him. ‘So, what brings you in here today then, if you’re not after our money?’
He restrained himself from making some comment about the view; the last thing he wanted was to ruin a good working relationship with the Justices by putting someone’s back up with some overambitious flirting. Instead he leaned casually on the counter and lowered his voice mock-conspiratorially.
‘In all honesty, I am. I just need to see the other mark sheets so I know who to bring in.’
‘Well, let’s see what we can rustle up for you then, shall we?’ Morley smiled. She tapped the inch-thick perspex to indicate that Drift should place his datapad in the docking port, then skated her fingers over the desktop interface in front of her when he obliged. A faint
ping
noise indicated the data transfer was complete, and Drift retrieved his pad to start cycling through the options.
‘Anything juicy?’ he asked, flicking through a few. Bail jumper, bail jumper, assault with a deadly weapon, extortion . . . He hadn’t necessarily been expecting another payday on the level of Xanth, but these were looking like they’d be more trouble than they were worth, even if they weren’t much trouble. No shortage of names, though; the space-timecompressing Alcubierre drive allowed starships to slip through a loophole in physics and travel faster than light but couldn’t do anything to speed up radio signals, so news could only travel as fast as a person. That meant a man could easily leave a system which had become too hot for him without finding an unwelcome reception at his destination, and the law was reduced to chasing people after the fact. Something Drift had taken advantage of on more than one occasion, as it happened.
‘Are you a religious man, Captain Drift?’
He paused, and looked down at Officer Morley. Her smile was gone, and she was watching him carefully. He took refuge in honesty.
‘Only when I think I’m about to die. Is that relevant?’
‘Just wondered,’ she replied, tapping a finger beside her right eye. ‘In that case, try looking up Javier Morita.’
Puzzled, Drift tapped in the name, and blinked his one natural eye in surprise as a holo flickered up out of his datapad and began rotating. Rather than the flat, two-dimensional images representing the other profiles he’d been browsing through, this sort of detail was only available for someone well known and well documented. Quite apart from a list of offences which seemed to be based around getting other people to commit crimes for him, Morita appeared to have been the victim of a significant accident, judging by the amount of him which had been replaced by mechanical prosthetics. Either that, or . . .
‘He’s a circuithead,’ Drift muttered, then his eyes caught up with the floating text and he inhaled sharply. ‘Wait, a circuithead
Logicator
?’
Morley shrugged slightly, her expression largely non-committal with a side order of uneasy. ‘Being a priest doesn’t mean you can tell people to rise up against the government or burn someone else’s church. Even when your god is made of metal and has flashing lights on it.’
‘They don’t think God is a machine, just that humanity should strive to be like one,’ Drift muttered absently. Many people wouldn’t replace a body part unless necessary. Others flaunted their ‘upgrades’ as status symbols, or viewed it as a form of body modification in a similar vein to tattooing and piercing. In the last few decades, however, the Universal Access Movement had appeared, and what had started as a campaign to get cheap, reliable prosthetics to the disabled or accident victims in poverty had morphed into an organisation which championed cybernetic replacements over the flesh and blood they viewed as inherently flawed. They’d been popularly relabelled as the Circuit Cult, despite their secular nature.
Something Morley had said clicked, and he looked up at her again. ‘Oh, the eye? No, I’m not Circuit Cult; I lost that to a C-beam at the Tannhäuser Gate.’
Her face registered polite incomprehension.
‘No one appreciates the classics anymore,’ Drift muttered, half-embarrassed, and rallied with a smile. ‘Thanks for the sheets, Officer; hopefully I’ll be walking a few of them through your door before long.’
‘My doors are always open for you, Captain,’ she replied cheerfully, but there was a glint in her eye he was sure he recognised, and it didn’t take a Carmellan miner to recognise there was something else beneath the surface.
He was poring over the mark sheets with half his brain, while the other half was wondering exactly how he could broach the possibility of a discreet adventure with Officer Morley and whether she’d bring her own cuffs, and as a result he didn’t realise someone had fallen in beside him until they cleared their throat. He automatically shut the pad down with a reflexive stab of his thumb and turned to face the newcomer, becoming aware as he did so that someone had got behind him. No, some
two
, both of them large enough to loom into his peripheral vision.
‘Captain Drift?’
He found himself staring down into the face of the small woman in the niqab from the maglift. The datalens was still in place over one eye, the display too tiny for him to see on the translucent screen, never mind that it was reversed. Both that eye and the uncovered one were studying him intently, however.
‘Yes?’
Stupid, stupid, stupid. Mind on your surroundings, moron, not on getting laid.
‘I wonder if you would care to join my employer and I for a drink?’ the woman asked. Drift cast a casual look over one shoulder and saw the unmistakeable gleam of cybernetics adorning the two sizeable humans arranged behind him. Circuitheads then, or augmented goons. Either way, given the mark sheets he’d just been handed, the omens weren’t good. He could shoot her of course, but he’d have to drop his datapad before going for his other gun, and her thugs were close enough to shiv him before he could even turn to face them. He sighed.
‘Can I just clarify something? Was that
actually
an invitation?’
He couldn’t see the movement of the woman’s mouth beneath her niqab, but he got the definite impression that it had pursed in mild annoyance.
‘You’re supposed to be a reasonably intelligent man, Captain. What do
you
think?’
According to the letters scratched above the door, the bar was called ‘The Hole’. Entry was through one of the rock walls which threaded between the streets of High Under, and then down a steep and poorly lit staircase. The woman led the way, one of her goons between her and Drift and the other bringing up the rear to ensure he didn’t try to back out. All in all, Drift felt about as well trapped as he’d been for a long, long time.
The name proved to be appropriate. The interior looked to have been converted from some sort of communal washroom for miners, and combined the inhospitable, impersonal air of such a facility with a lack of anything approaching actual cleanliness. A row of showers had been ripped out and replaced with the bottles of spirits which must have been the source of the coarse tang in the air that clawed at his throat, the basic structure of the ‘bar’ itself looked to be surgical tables looted from some form of medical facility and lashed together, and the once-white tiles were darkened by smoke and a few suspicious stains.
In short, it was exactly the sort of place Drift made a habit of staying out of unless he had Apirana with him.
No one looked up as he entered which, given he had just followed a woman dressed in traditional Muslim clothing into a place where breathing practically constituted imbibing alcohol, told him everything he needed to know about how well practised the regulars were at ignoring anything which might surprise or inconvenience them. The barkeep looked up, of course, but no sooner had his eyes lit on the diminutive woman Drift was following than his gaze took on a sort of studious blankness. The woman herself glanced neither right nor left, instead making straight for the back of the bar to where there were a series of cubbyholes which could be cordoned off from the rest of the bar with something that could only be called a curtain because tea cloths weren’t usually manufactured that large. She pulled one aside and ducked through without turning to see if he was following; Drift did, because he was very conscious of the two large, partially metal men at his back, but he was also conscious of the fact that no one had taken his weapons away yet.
As a result, it came as something of a disappointment to him to find a gun levelled between his eyes as he stepped through.
His moment of frozen uncertainty resolved itself into the woman calmly removing his pistols from their holsters, so he decided to put the best face on it he could and look like he’d expected nothing less. The weapon pointing at him was a stargun, a device which used a massive surge of electromagnetism to fire a razor-sharp disc perfectly capable of slicing through flesh and even bone. It had the advantage of being virtually silent barring a pulsing hum as it fired, which made it favoured by assassins and other stealthy operators.
This particular stargun was being held rock-steady by dark-skinned fingers, which his eyes followed up an arm to a nondescript male face; early thirties perhaps, dark hair, one gold ring in the left ear. A couple of minor keloids caught the light at the corner of one eye and faintly across the jawline, but there was nothing which would make this man stand out of most crowds on most worlds.
‘You know, some time ago I swore an oath to myself that I would kill anyone who pointed a gun at me,’ Drift said conversationally.
The man’s expression didn’t change. Drift felt his vest being hoicked up and his third pistol was removed from the small of his back, and his spirits sank a little further.
‘Then I lost count of who’d done it, so I figured I’d just kill the ones I could remember,’ Drift continued. How fast was this man? Holding a gun on someone at point-blank range was a mixed blessing, because they could potentially twist aside and reach you before you could correct your aim and pull the trigger. He looked into the man’s eyes, and swallowed.
He looked like the sort of person who’d be quite fast.
‘Ichabod, stop posturing,’ a crackling voice reprimanded from behind the gunman. ‘Marcus, he appears to be disarmed now. Feel free to let him sit, although if he takes leave of his senses and attacks me then by all means hurt him until he stops.’
Drift’s mind was racing. That voice was familiar . . . but he also saw the faint narrowing of the gunman’s eyes. Something about the instruction he’d just been given didn’t sit well with him.
‘I don’t hurt people,’ the man apparently called Marcus said, in a startlingly deep voice spiced with an accent Drift couldn’t quite place. ‘I kill people. You know that.’
‘Well, consider it an opportunity to add to your résumé,’ the voice said irritably, and with that second sentence the pieces suddenly dropped into place. Even as the man called Marcus moved to one side and lowered himself smoothly into a seat, Drift knew what he’d see.
He was older, of course; it had been over a decade, and new lines had appeared on his pale face while extant ones had deepened. The hair was thinner, and had faded to more grey than blond, but still fell in an untidy scraggle to his collar, which was a dark blue and as stiffly starched as ever. Other things had changed: one of his hands was mechanical now, perhaps as a result of arthritis. It was an expensive model, the chrome-and-brass fingers and slick servos marking it not as a cheap stainless steel fit for someone who couldn’t afford a near-lifelike replacement, but chosen by a man who’d decided that if he was going to have his hand replaced by a machine then it was damn well going to be an aesthetically pleasing machine.
The voice was still largely the same, though; the faint rasp which hinted at a never-witnessed tobacco habit, a drawl dryer than a desert creek bed and the effortless, slightly weary ring of authority. And while the skin around the eyes might have become slightly more weathered, the eyes themselves hadn’t changed; they were still an icy blue, lighter than any of the skies of Old Earth, and unwavering in their stare.
Drift suddenly felt naked, and not just because he’d been disarmed.
‘Sit down, Ichabod,’ the man said perfunctorily, gesturing with his mechanical hand. ‘I apologise for the theatrics and the cloak-and-dagger bullshittery, but I’ve always been a cautious man, and I’m on something of a schedule. I needed to speak to you, here, now, and with no risk that you might respond to my unexpected appearance with panic and gunfire.’ Drift hadn’t moved, and a pale eyebrow quirked upwards. ‘Have you developed some sort of suddenonset paralysis, or are you deaf? Sit down, I can’t be bothered to crane my neck up to look at you.’
Drift sank slowly onto a stool. ‘Kelsier.’
The man’s lips narrowed slightly, in what might have been the ghost of a smile. ‘I seem to remember that during the years of our previous association I always had to remind you to call me “Mr Kelsier”, not “Nicolas”. You were younger; possibly more arrogant, although I’m not entirely sure of that. Certainly stupider.’ He lifted a cup, and the unmistakeable aroma of tea wafted across the table. Tea. In a dingy bar underground on Carmella II, sitting on a bench seat upholstered in fabric mainly constructed of patches, Nicolas Kelsier was drinking tea. Drift found he was almost completely unsurprised.‘So now you’ve at least moved on to using my second name instead of the first, although the honorific appears to have slipped your attention,’ the old man continued. ‘No matter.’