Dark Sky (Keiko)
Authors: Mike Brooks
Contents
Explosives and the Will to Use Them
How Apirana Got His Ankle Back
For the crew of the
Keiko
, their stay at the Grand House casino on New Samara was supposed to be a well-deserved rest.
It didn’t last.
Captain Ichabod Drift promised that the side-trip to the mining planet Uragan would be a quick in and out – a data retrieval job then back to the tables.
He was wrong.
When the revolution comes, all you can do is choose a side and hope to get out alive.
Mike Brooks was born in Ipswich, England, and moved to Nottingham to study at Nottingham Trent University and never left.
He started to write stories and novels in childhood, has worked for a homeless charity since 2004, and when not working or writing he goes walking in the Peak District, sings and plays guitar in a punk band, and DJs wherever anyone will tolerate him.
He is married, and has two cats and two snakes.
For more information, visit
www.mikebrooks.co.uk
, or follow him on twitter:
@MikeBrooks668
LSO BY
M
IKE
B
ROOKS
:
Dark Run
To Janine.
For everything, pretty much.
THE GRAND HOUSE
on New Samara was exactly what its name suggested. Luxurious without being ostentatious, it eschewed the garish, dancing holos or blinking neon used as advertisements by those gaming establishments that lacked its pedigree. The outer walls were plated a rich, deep green so dark as to be near-black, with only the most delicate touches of decoration here and there: a few tiny, winking lights which served merely to outline and define its bulk, tasteful uplighting on the two small balconies open to the sky and, most important of all, no visible name. The Grand House was an imposing, dark green iceberg taking up a sizeable plot of hugely valuable land in the middle of the richest district on all New Samara: if you didn’t know what it was, you didn’t belong inside.
The tower at one end, not so tall as the surrounding skyscrapers but sharing their curved aesthetics, was a hotel affordable only to the rich. There was no requirement to visit the gaming floors while staying in the hotel, of course, but few would pass up the opportunity given that 10 per cent of their bill was refunded in the form of credit chips. It did, however, explain why patrons were always charged in advance. The Grand House would not wish to see a guest suffering any complications with regard to their accommodation following an unwise flutter. After all, there were standards to be maintained.
Ichabod Drift couldn’t help but feel he was automatically lowering them simply by being present.
He more or less looked the part, of that there was no doubt. His suit, the first such item he had ever owned, was a midnight blue, his shirt was silky smooth and starched at the collar and cuffs, and he’d abandoned his long-serving military-surplus boots for a fancier, shinier pair of shoes (which nevertheless had enough grip to run and enough weight to kick, as Ichabod Drift was in many ways a cautious man). He’d even re-dyed his hair to match the suit, abandoning the violet colour he’d sported for the previous eighteen months or so, and had persuaded Jenna to polish the small amount of visible metal on his augmented eye.
It was the darnedest sensation. Here he was, in New Samara’s Grand House, a casino so posh you weren’t even allowed to call it a casino, dressed like a toff and gambling huge amounts of money … and not one bit of it was a lie. There was no angle, no scheme in the works, and they weren’t scoping the place to rob the vault. He and his business partner Tamara Rourke had actually done that once, but in far less opulent surroundings. Even then they’d needed to assemble a one-off team of nine specialists, which meant the payout hadn’t been that great after being split so many ways. Such a venture would be suicide in the Grand House, however, so it was just as well that he was, for once, completely honest and above board.
At least, if you ignored the fact that the money he was gambling with had come from one of the private accounts of a man named Nicolas Kelsier, former corrupt government minister turned terrorist, and now thankfully and quite definitely dead.
‘So,’ he asked, sighing with pleasure as he surveyed the scene of well-moneyed gambling laid out in front of him, ‘what do you feel like hitting tonight?’
‘You.’
Tamara Rourke was short where Drift was tall, her skin was the colour of black tea instead of the golden almond tone his Mexican heritage had bestowed upon him, and her hair was an unbroken black cropped close to her skull rather than a rich, shoulder-length blue. Nevertheless, they both had a wiry build and shared a general attitude that money was better in their pockets than in other people’s. She seemed far less comfortable in this place than he did, though, because while Drift had always possessed the manner of a born showman, Rourke was happiest in the shadows, and for all its low-level lighting and relaxed atmosphere, the gaming halls of the Grand House hardly counted in that respect.
‘I’d have thought you’d enjoy a chance to relax for once,’ Drift said mildly, casting a sidelong glance at his business partner as a robot waiter purred past carrying a silver tray of expertly mixed cocktails.
‘Watching the rest of you dress up like idiots and lose money doesn’t qualify,’ Rourke snapped, shifting her shoulders slightly.
‘It was your idea we come here,’ Drift reminded her.
‘
Come
here, yes; show up, get the funds, maybe find an easy job or two while we stayed out of Europan space until all the fuss died down,’ Rourke replied testily. ‘I said nothing about gambling it away.’
‘A. and Kuai could do with some recovery time.’
‘I’m not arguing that,’ Rourke sighed. Apirana, their hulking Maori bruiser, and Kuai, the
Keiko
’s Chinese mechanic, had both taken recent gunshot wounds and were recuperating with stoicism and self-pity, respectively. ‘It’s just that … this isn’t our place, Ichabod. We might have the money, at the moment, but we’re out of our depth in this sort of society. Something’s going to blow up in our face, and I don’t like the feeling of being exposed.’
‘Maybe you should try to fit in more, then?’ Drift suggested. New Samara’s fashions favoured ostentatious outfits that sometimes bordered on the scandalous but Rourke had, typically, ignored them. She couldn’t get away with wearing one of her favoured utilitarian, skin-tight bodysuits but had got as close as she could: knee-high black boots encased tight, dark green leggings which were nevertheless stretchy enough to allow her to run, crouch or kick someone in the head as needed, and her black shirt was free of frills and other extraneous frippery that might get in the way. She’d also refused to abandon either her wide-brimmed, flat-topped black hat or her long, enveloping coat, and she’d been mistaken for a particularly short and rather delicately built man on more than one occasion so far.
‘You are
not
getting me into a dress, if you can even call what they wear here “dresses”.’ Rourke’s voice had taken on a dangerous edge which Drift had last heard when she’d been considering shooting him, so he decided not to push his teasing any further.
‘Fine, fine.’ His comm beeped the message he’d been waiting for, so he checked his cuffs and nodded towards the poker tables. ‘Back to seeing if I can relieve any heirs and heiresses of the family fortune. Enjoy whatever you decide to do.’
‘I might go and join Apirana,’ Rourke muttered, ‘at least his choices are interesting to watch.’ The big Maori was usually found on the first subterranean level at the Grand House’s combat sports arena, where you could see anything from ground-based grappling contests to full-contact cage fights, along with weaponised contests such as kendo and even low-powered laser shoot-outs.
‘Poker is a game of tactics and subtlety!’ Drift protested.
‘Not the way you play it,’ Rourke sighed. ‘Just try not to bleed the account dry, okay?’ She turned and walked away towards the elevators, scudding across the floor like a small but determined thundercloud. Drift watched her go for a couple of seconds, then shook his head and ambled towards the poker tables with an expression of affable good nature, and a slight alteration in the tone of his facial muscles to suggest the onset of drunkenness.
Drift would never have considered himself to be a professional gambler, unless trying to make a living as a freelance captain in this uncertain galaxy counted. Even so, he was well aware that the process of reading your poker opponents should start before you even got to the table. The Grand House attracted its fair share of prestige players, the men and women who would sit down, calmly bet enough money to buy a starship and make a comfortable living from it; these people would wipe the floor with him. Instead, he’d registered for one of the tables where the bored cousins of oligarchs, nephews of sheikhs and third-in-line to the family business were playing for what was, to them, pocket money.
He rejoined his likely, finely dressed group around a table near the edge of the poker area. There were eight other players, each of whom had already laid down the buy-in of 5,000 stars (the currency of the Red Star Confederate, who took a simple if unimaginative approach to naming it when they combined the yuan and the rouble). He shook some chips idly in his hand as he wandered back to them, the better to give an impression of slightly inebriated overconfidence.
‘
Hola
,’ he hailed them merrily, and slightly too loudly, ‘are we ready to go again?’
One of the women, a really rather good-looking brunette with a porcelain complexion, turned to regard him with sparkling eyes surgically altered to shine like diamonds. Her dress of a glistening burgundy fabric wasn’t strapless so much as mainly composed of straps, cunningly anchored to prevent ‘very suggestive’ becoming ‘blatant’. She gave him a predatory smile, probably because he’d made a point to be careless in their first session and she now had him pegged as an easy mark. ‘Are you, sir?’