The old man’s face twisted into a sneer. ‘Your mistake, Ichabod, is that you’re happy to use machines for your gain, but you don’t
understand
them.’ He started to raise his hands towards his head, the fingers of his natural one resting on the back of their mechanical counterpart. ‘For example, were you aware that nearly all augmentations are manufactured to the same specifications? Observe . . . or not, in your case.’
He pressed something on the back of his metal hand just as the knuckles were directed forwards, and half of Drift’s vision went black.
‘What the . . .’ Drift automatically reached up to his mechanical eye, an involuntary movement which caused the barrel of his weapon to waver for half a second before he recovered himself. It was half a second too long: Kelsier had grabbed the nearest object – a datapad, judging by the very brief look Drift got at it – and flung it as hard as he could. Drift tried to bat it out of the air, but with his depth perception suddenly gone all he could manage was to flail ineffectually at it and the missile struck him on the temple. He staggered back, the vision in his natural eye fuzzing momentarily from the impact, and pulled the trigger on his rifle with the weapon pointed in Kelsier’s general direction.
There were a few
spanging
sounds as rounds struck metal, but whatever he’d hit hadn’t inconvenienced the old man any; as he tried to refocus something hard smashed into his jaw from his blind side. There was a moment of shocked numbness before his nerves started screaming at him in white-hot pain, and it was a second or two before he realised that he was on the floor.
‘You
stupid
little fuck,’ Kelsier hissed in his ear as cold metal fingers clamped around Drift’s throat, ‘you always have to posture and grandstand, don’t you? Lucky for me, really. Please note, as you choke to death, that I didn’t start gloating until
after
I’d begun killing you!’
The old man was right. The strength in his fingers was far greater than that possessed by a normal human hand, and Drift could feel his throat being crushed. He pulled at the death grip desperately to no avail and then, with his vision fogging again for a second and probably terminal time, reached up to claw at Kelsier’s face. For a moment the old man leaned back as Drift’s finger raked at his eyes and the pressure abated, but then Kelsier raised his left hand to protect himself and swat Drift away.
His sight was almost gone now and his heartbeat was pounding in his ears, each thump louder and faster as his brain clamoured for the blood that Kelsier’s grip was denying it.
Boom.
Any second now and he would pass out. Then the old man would finish the job of crushing his windpipe, and he would never wake up.
Boom.
Boom.
BOOM
.
There was something warm and wet on his face. Had the pressure in his head caused a blood vessel to burst in his nose?
No.
Wait.
Owwww . . .
The rush of circulation being restored nearly made him pass out in its own way, but although he still felt like something was crushing his throat, the cold sensation of metal fingers was gone. A second later and his vision returned; first simply brightness, then resolving into lines of lights in the ceiling. His hearing was coming back too, as the thunder of his own heartbeat faded from his ears. There was a buzz of voices now and, approaching from his right, a set of footsteps.
He turned his head weakly, both neck and jaw protesting the movement, and his left eye found itself looking up at a silhouette. There was no hat or coat, of course, but the familiar shape of a Crusader 920 held loosely in its hands gave the owner’s identity away nonetheless.
‘You’re still alive, then,’ Tamara Rourke said, crouching down. She’d removed the helmet of her atmo-suit, and he felt a faint puff of breath as she snorted. ‘You’re an idiot, you know that?’
‘So I’ve been told,’ Drift replied. Or tried to, anyway; his jaw shrieked at him halfway through the first syllable, so he settled for a mewling whimper of pain instead. He wiped at his face gingerly and inspected his fingers. They were smeared with blood.
‘Oh get up, you baby,’ Rourke told him, without a shred of pity. Drift rolled his head to the left and rather wished he hadn’t, because not three feet away was what remained of Nicolas Kelsier’s, attached to his rather more intact body. He looked back up at Rourke and pointed at her, then mimed firing a gun with his fingers.
She nodded confirmation. ‘Jenna radioed; she seemed to think you and Apirana might have bitten off more than you could chew, so she suggested I look in and told us where the closest entrance to us should be. Quite a little tableau the two of you made when the door opened. It might have been better had I not had to kill him, but . . .’ She shrugged. ‘I couldn’t have him strangling the owner of Agent Rourke’s ship, could I?’ She looked around, concern painting her features. ‘Where
is
A., anyway?’
Drift sat up gingerly and pointed back towards the door he’d entered by, then left to hopefully indicate the correct tunnel. He mimed a gun again and jabbed himself in the ribs.
‘Shit,’ Rourke muttered, and looked up at the nearest Europan. ‘Get a med team through there and to the left ay-sap! One of my crew is hurt!’
The tone of command had the soldier’s hand halfway to her comm before she even knew what was happening. To her credit, she did remember to pause and look over at Lieutenant Hamann for approval, but the Europan officer waved the goahead and seconds later a ten-person squad was opening the airlock, taking point for a pair of medics. Drift hoped they wouldn’t spend too long gawking at the bedroom before they went and found the big Maori.
‘Let’s get you up,’ Rourke said loudly, offering him her hand. He gripped it and she helped him to his feet, then grabbed him as he wobbled and leaned close to his ear.
‘
Did you plant it?
’
He directed his eyes towards where Jenna’s drive was still plugged unobtrusively into a terminal. Rourke turned and moved casually towards it, or as casually as one could while stepping over a corpse with a ruined head, and ended up next to the terminal in question looking around as Europan troops bustled through, searching for non-existent threats.
‘Well Lieutenant,’ Rourke announced loudly, turning away again, ‘it looks like you’ll need to get your experts in to take a look at all this data.’ The slot behind her was empty now, and Drift was sure that only he noticed her fingers fiddling briefly with the pouch at her belt.
Hamann’s eyes narrowed, clearly suspecting something. ‘I would have thought the GIA would have been interested in the contents of these databanks.’
‘I’ve no doubt we would be,’ Rourke responded off-handedly, ‘but that’s not my remit.
My
team’s job was to eliminate the threat of Nicolas Kelsier. I’m sure my superiors would appreciate being informed of anything you find in these databanks via the usual channels, but quite frankly I have neither the resources, the expertise nor the patience to trawl through them myself when one of my team was killed back on Hroza Major and I’ve had two more injured here today.’ She sighed. ‘If top brass want to know every figure and detail they can damn well send a tech team out.’
‘Amen to
that
,’ Hamann grinned, his suspicions apparently allayed by the time-honoured practice of passing the buck. He raised his voice. ‘Okay everyone! If it doesn’t pose a threat, leave it be! The Captain’s mopping up the last of these pirate scum, so let’s do a last sweep on the way back to the bay and make sure we haven’t missed anything!’
Rourke pulled Drift close as the Europans began to do their last checks. ‘You sure it worked?’
Drift just shrugged, then gestured piteously at his jaw. He was fairly sure it was dislocated, and just when he thought the pain couldn’t get worse it went and proved him wrong.
‘Don’t get your hopes up,’ Rourke told him, the vaguest hints of a smile playing at the corners of her mouth, ‘I rather like you like this.’
The trudge back to the hangar bay was a thoroughly miserable one for Drift, with every incautious step sending a spike of pain through his face. Finally it seemed his whimpering got more than Rourke could bear, and she pulled him to a halt.
‘You’ve got two choices,’ she told him flatly, ‘you wait for the Europan medics to finish up with all the urgent cases, which involves a hell of a lot of gunshot wounds including Apirana’s, and you keep quiet while you wait . . . or I fix your jaw here and now.’
Drift had never needed to convey alarmed consternation using only his eyebrows before, but now seemed like the perfect time to give it a try.
‘It’s not like I haven’t had medical training,’ Rourke sighed. She leaned her Crusader against the wall and flexed her fingers. ‘Granted, it was a while ago. And granted, you’d normally get painkillers, but I get the feeling those are going to be in short supply around here. The sooner we get this sorted the better. Ready?’
Drift was still trying to work out how to indicate to the contrary without either speaking or shaking his head when Rourke reached up to his jaw, tightened her grip on it, and— ‘
Arrrrrrrgh!’
There was a white-hot moment and his jaw suddenly worked again, at least after a fashion, and he set about testing it out around some blasphemy. ‘
Jesús, Maria, Madre de Dios!
’
‘Careful,’ Rourke advised him placidly as he doubled over, clutching his face in renewed pain, ‘if you open your mouth too wide it might displace again. And we can’t be having that.’
‘This is some sort of revenge for me not telling you . . . things, isn’t it?’ Drift moaned as best he could around near-clenched teeth, falling into step behind her as she picked up her rifle again and continued on towards the hangar bay.
‘I don’t know what you mean . . .’
The bay itself was alive with action. It had been depressurised to allow the arrival of the Europan frigate’s two shuttles and then pressurised again, and now the twin sleek shapes were taking on a mixture of healthy troops, the wounded (of which there were fewer than Drift had feared) and prisoners (of which there were less than he’d expected). He caught a glimpse of white and saw Emily being ushered on board by two troopers, and wondered again exactly what the girl’s story was. Still, the Europans would doubtless find out.
‘Where’s A.?’ he asked, worry tugging at his gut.
‘Already on board,’ Rourke assured him. ‘He’s been given fairly high priority, apparently; I guess being a GIA operative does have some fringe benefits. Everyone seems to want to keep in our good books.’
‘If only Kelsier had known,’ Drift snorted, lowering his voice a little, ‘maybe we could have avoided this whole mess.’
‘Just take a look at this, Ichabod,’ Rourke said in the same low tone, gesturing around them at the wounded and, here and there, the bodies of the dead. ‘This all happened because you took on a job without consulting the rest of us. Was it worth it?’
Drift took in their surroundings again, feeling the sour taste of bile at the back of his throat, and shook his head wearily. ‘No.’
‘Well then—’
‘I mean, this didn’t happen because of me,’ Drift continued, looking down at his partner.‘
This
happened because I convinced the rest of you that we could do this. That seven no-hopers in a rust bucket could string together enough bullshit to make this fly.’
For the first time that he could remember, Tamara Rourke looked stunned.
‘I’m not saying we should do this sort of thing for
fun
,’ Drift added quickly, casting a furtive glance around, ‘but c’mon – if I’d suggested a scam like this to you when our lives weren’t on the line, what would you have said?’
‘I’d have told you that you were insane,’ Rourke replied flatly.
‘
Exactly!
’ Drift beamed, painfully. ‘And you’d have been wrong!’
‘Just because it worked
this time
doesn’t mean it wasn’t insane!’ Rourke sighed. ‘Seriously, Ichabod; I’ve seen men and women die in front of me today. So have you, for that matter. Are you telling me that doesn’t bother you at all?’
‘Sure it does,’ Drift agreed, ‘but it would bother me a hell of a lot
more
if it had been me. Or you, or Jenna, or—’
‘That’s not what I—’
‘I know, but it’s what
I
meant.’ Drift sighed. ‘Look, war is just sending other people to do what you don’t want to risk doing yourself, right? These people are soldiers, they’ve signed up to go to war; we sent them against a terrorist who tried to nuke them. The only bit of information they didn’t have is which bunch of luckless sods were duped into carrying the damn bomb in the first place.’ He shrugged. ‘I can live with that. Don’t tell me you can’t, Miss GIA Agent.’
‘This might shock you, but there was a reason I left the Agency,’ Rourke said quietly. ‘Even
my
conscience could only take so much.’ She sighed. ‘Very well. We had limited options, we took a stupid gamble and I guess it sort of worked, for most of us.’
‘Mmm,’ Drift stepped carefully out of the path of a Europan medical buggy. ‘We’re not going back for Micah, I take it?’
‘The Hrozan authorities have his documents,’ Rourke shrugged, ‘and I told them to cremate him. I guess they might find his relatives, if he has any. But no, I don’t think it would be a good idea for us to go back there.’
‘Yeah, I’m thinking we should stay out of any Europan space for a while,’ Drift snorted, ‘just in case there have been any new messages from the Ministry of Defence. Let them fix Apirana up, arrange to rendezvous with them back at Hroza but just fuck off instead?’
‘Makes sense to me,’ Rourke nodded, activating her comm. They’d reached the
Jonah
, which looked decidedly sad set against the backdrop of two Europan military shuttles. ‘Jia, fancy letting us in?’
+Sure thing.+
The entrance ramp hissed and started to lower.
+Jenna came over a couple of minutes ago. Are we taking any troops back out?+
‘No,’ Rourke told her, ‘oddly enough they seemed to want their own pilots back. Can’t imagine why.’