Shooting the Rift - eARC (18 page)

A surge of anger ripped through me at the realization, and I damped it down, honing it, hoarding it for later.

“Cab’s still three minutes away,” Remington said calmly. “I don’t suppose you’re carrying any weapons?”

“Why would I be?” Perhaps it was the casualness of the question which had surprised me so much.

“No, of course not. You’re the one who thought Numarkut was supposed to be civilized.” His bantering tone drew the sting of the sarcasm.

“Does that mean you are?” I asked hopefully. If he had a gun, or a knife, or even a pointy stick . . .

“With the bribes you have to pay here to carry anything?” Remington sounded amused. “Dream on.”

“Just have to deal with it the old-fashioned way,” I said, picking up my pace a little, and making my gait a tiny bit unsteady, so that to the casual eye I’d look a little drunk. If you’re going to have to fight, it never hurts to have your opponent feeling overconfident. I raised my voice waving, as if trying to attract the attention of the fellow lying in wait for us. “Oi! Mate! You Hugo?” Why Hugo I couldn’t have told you, although we had a dog called that once: it was just the first name that popped into my head. At least I didn’t ask if he was Skippy.

“No.” An edge of uncertainty entered his voice; this wasn’t how the script in his head had mapped things out. I should have been edgy, not pleased to see him, and I’d apparently got friends around here—or at least someone I was expecting to meet, who was probably in the immediate vicinity. “Never heard of him.”

“Course you haven’t,” I said jovially, taking my money out. His eyes narrowed a little, instantly focusing on the leather bag of coins, which still bulged quite temptingly, despite me having bought most of the drinks in the bar we’d just left. Just as I’d intended. His little rodent mind would be focusing on the money now, wondering how much was there, what he could get with it after robbing me, not how much of a threat I represented. I winked, theatrically. “Katinka sent me. Said you could sort us out. Didn’t she?” I asked Remington.

“That’s right.” He nodded, his voice suddenly slurred. “Said you had the best stuff.”

He nudged my ‘sphere.
Are you seriously trying to buy drugs from this tosser?

He thinks I am
, I sent back.

“You’ve got the wrong bloke,” the lurker said, glancing back over our shoulders to see where his mates had got to. Close enough, evidently, as he suddenly pushed off from the wall and rushed at me, one hand already reaching out to grab my purse.

Which wasn’t there. As he lunged forward, I pivoted out of the way, grabbed his outstretched arm, and pulled forward and down. His face met my rising knee with a satisfying crack of breaking nasal cartilage, and I brought the heavy bag of coins down hard on the back of his neck. He folded without a sound, collapsing into the filth beneath our feet, where, right now, I felt he belonged in any case.

I turned, to meet the charge of his friends, who, by now, were too committed to the attack to either assimilate or be deflected by this unexpected setback. Remington had been wrong: there were three of them, not two. Other than that, though, I felt we still had the initiative. All of them, like the one I’d just dispatched, were young, lean, and desperate to seem dangerous, which probably accounted for the number of facial tattoos, although if their friend was anything to go by they just relied on sheer force of numbers rather than any actual fighting ability.

I slipped the drawstring of my purse around my wrist, to make sure I wouldn’t drop it, and moved forward into the attack.
Go left
, Remington sent.
I’ll break right
. He took his own advice instantly, blocking a clumsy punch to the face with a rising forearm, and counterattacking instantly with a head butt to the bridge of his assailant’s nose. It looked like there would be a lot of mouth breathers in the neighborhood tonight. The thug fell back, and Remington followed up with a couple of solid punches to the gut which doubled him over.

Ignoring the skipper’s advice, I stepped out to the right as well, taking advantage of the gap he’d opened up; they’d expect me to go left, in an attempt to get behind them, and were already turning in that direction, which meant they were getting in each other’s way very nicely, and giving me a free shot at their backs. I pivoted in behind them, neat as you please, and grabbed the top of the head of the nearest, hooking two of my fingers into his eye sockets and yanking back as hard as I could. Off balance and blinded by tears, he fell backwards, howling, landing supine in the stinking debris, and I drove a heel into his groin with all my weight behind it. Something crunched and squished at the same time, and he went very quiet, apart from a series of long, indrawn breaths, which sounded uncannily like wind in a stovepipe.

Remington’s target hit the mulch, not much better off, and the two of us turned as one to confront the sole survivor. By my reckoning, the whole thing had taken well over five seconds. Which is what happens when you neglect your training, you slow down and get soft—although, in my defense, there hadn’t been that much opportunity for a proper workout aboard the
Stacked Deck
.

“Back off.” It seemed the last man standing was too stupid to take his own advice. “Or I’ll cut you, I swear.” He waved a knife uncertainly back and forth, trying to work out which of us presented the greater threat.

“Try it,” I said, doing my best to sound calm and dangerous, and wishing I couldn’t remember what Tinkie had once told me about her unarmed combat training. Even an expert gets cut more often than not taking a knife from a determined opponent. “And the minute you go for one of us, you’ll have the other one behind you.”

I stepped forward, hoping to intimidate him into running away, but unfortunately it seemed to have the opposite effect, triggering the wrong part of the fight or flight reflex. Instead, he came at me in a banzai charge, thrusting at the center of my stomach with all the strength he could summon. Fortunately, I’d had enough punches thrown there in both sparring and competition to respond by reflex, ignoring the blade entirely, simply stepping in behind the outstretched arm and seizing his wrist. My knee came up on the outside of the elbow joint, which cracked like a dry stick in a fire, and his hand came open, dropping the knife. The squealing that came along with the broken arm was repetitive and annoying, so I swung the heavy purse a final time, connecting solidly with his temple, and he went down to join his friends.

“I thought you said you weren’t armed,” Remington said, with a glance at the purse as I stowed it safely away in my pocket again.

“I’m not,” I said. “I was improvising.”

“That was some pretty smart improvisation all round,” Remington said skeptically. He looked pointedly at the three scofflaws I’d felled. “Is there something you haven’t bothered to tell me about?”

“I don’t think so.” I shrugged. “I told you I’m an athlete.”

“That you did.” He turned, and began to lead the way towards the alley mouth. “But I had you down more as a sprinter. Something like that.”

“I run too,” I said. “And swim, and fence, and shoot. I’m a pentathlete.” We broke out into another crowded street, where, thank the Lady, our cab was just beginning to descend towards the sidewalk.

“And the fifth event?” Remington asked, as he ducked through the door.

“Self defense,” I said. “Although there are a few rules in the sporting version.”

“Most of which you just broke, I suppose,” Remington said, as our ride rose into the traffic stream, taking the alley mouth out of my line of sight. I tried not to think about what we’d left there, and the snapping sound of cartilage and bone.

“Among other things,” I said.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

In which I’m sent to pick up a package.

Though I pretended that the violent encounter had been a trivial affair, it disturbed me a good deal more than I liked to admit. True, I’d been fighting competitively for several years, but all those bouts had been strictly controlled, and I’d never inflicted more serious injury on an opponent than a few bruises. (Or suffered it, either, apart from the time I’d fallen flat on my back in a training session and had the wind knocked out of me—not a sensation I’d recommend.) For several days I found myself reliving moments of the melee, feeling my heart pound from a sudden surge of adrenaline, the jar of fist and knee against solid flesh, and hearing the snap and crack of bodies breaking under the impact of my blows. After which, I’d feel sick and trembling, fighting to get my breathing back under control. But the thing I found hardest to accept was that, in retrospect, I’d found myself rather enjoying the experience. Not that I’m a savage or a sadist, far from it, but the atavistic simplicity of fighting in earnest, knowing I’d be injured or worse if I let my guard down even for an instant, had been an undeniable rush. I could see how some people could get addicted to that, even to the extent of deliberately picking fights to repeat the experience.

I have to admit, too, that I was quite proud of myself; after all, I’d taken out three of the dregs without suffering so much as a scratch, and it’s kind of hard not to feel good about something like that. (Remington hadn’t been quite so lucky with the one he’d tackled, skinning a knuckle on a belt buckle or something, but otherwise emerging as unscathed as I did.)

It didn’t exactly help matters that the skipper had begun to spread the story almost as soon as we’d got back to the ship, no doubt embroidering things to make me sound like a focused and skilful warrior, rather than a hobby athlete who’d reacted without thinking and been incredibly lucky not to get stabbed in the gut. Exaggerated or not, though, his account of the incident had definitely raised my status aboard the
Stacked Deck;
even Rennau seemed to look on me with a little less disapproval than before, while many of my shipmates went out of their way to talk to me about the brawl, and ask me to demonstrate the moves I’d used. (Which I was perfectly happy to do, as they were simple enough.)

None of them seemed quite as impressed as Clio, though, who seemed to have no other topic of conversation for several days.

“Weren’t you scared?” she asked for the umpteenth time, guiding a drone into the hold, where it dropped its load in the spot vacated only seconds before by one of its fellows unloading the cargo we’d brought to Numarkut. Time was definitely of the essence on the Farland contract, so we were clearing and loading our holds at the same time: much to the annoyance of Rennau, who had to sort out the inevitable complications, and Rolf and Lena, who were effectively stuck with two jobs at once, and having to juggle the paperwork accordingly. “I would have been.”

“No, you wouldn’t,” I said. “You’d have had far more sense than to get into a situation like that in the first place.”

“True, I would.” Clio shrugged. “But it sounds more like John got you into it, and then you got him out.”

“Sounds about right,” Rennau said, appearing on the catwalk above our heads. “That’s John for you.” He dumped a load of files in my datasphere. “Case in point.”

“What are these?” I asked, skimming rapidly through a stack of the manifests from Farland. They all looked fine to me. “What’s the problem?”

“That.” Rennau highlighted a section of the paperwork. “To get to Freedom, we need to pass through the Iceball system. Right?”

“Right,” I agreed, still not getting it. The very nature of rift shooting meant that you couldn’t get anywhere apart from an immediately adjacent system without going the long way round; even detours through three or four intermediate destinations weren’t all that uncommon.

“So we need a transit waiver,” Rennau prompted.

I must have looked blank for a moment, because Clio cut in with a quick message.

A document for Iceball customs, showing we’re just passing through. Otherwise we’ll be boarded and inspected, like we were when we arrived in system here.

“And we can’t afford the delay of another inspection,” I said, hoping my momentary hesitation would be taken for careful consideration, rather than a quick pause for his daughter to bail me out.

“Or another unnecessary bribe,” Rennau said, not giving anything away. He leaned on the catwalk rail, more or less where Clio had fixed it, and glanced down at me. “The Iceballers insist on transit waivers being accompanied by a sample of the signatory’s DNA, which John forgot to get. You’re the least useful person aboard, and you know your way to Farland, so you get to go pick it up. Lucky you.”

“Lucky me, indeed,” I said, with a smile at Clio, who returned it with a trace of envy; which I must admit I’d probably have felt in her place, watching someone go gallivanting off on an unsupervised errand in the middle of a hard and tedious job.

“Don’t go wandering down any dark alleys,” she said, and went back to work.

“Are you sure it was just a coincidence?” Mallow asked. Somehow he’d discovered I was on my way over to pick up a package (well, he was a spy, after all), and had contrived to be leaving the building for a coffee break just as I was signing the docket the supercilious receptionist had waved in my direction. It seemed the denizens of Iceball were firm believers in physical paperwork, which, given my gift for data manipulation, I could hardly fault them for; although to most people it was an irritating eccentricity at best. The Sanctified Brethren had been among the first to colonize the system, which, as the name implied, wasn’t exactly the most prepossessing piece of real estate in the spiral arm, and their sensibilities still prevailed, even among the substantial minority of the local population who followed other faiths, or none at all.

“You mean like running into you was?” I asked pointedly, as we picked up drinks from a nearby stall; it was hot, and wet, and tasted vaguely like it was supposed to, which probably made it as good as anything else I was likely to find around here.

I glanced at Mallow to see if the shaft had hit home, but just as I did so a sudden puff of chill wind ruffled the particolored pelt on his face, obscuring the expression beneath it. Amusement? Impatience? Not that I cared anyway. I sipped at my coffee, grateful for the warmth it provided.

“I mean, did they say anything about what happened in the bar? Demand your money? Anything like that?”

“They didn’t really say anything,” I said, thinking back to the incident as dispassionately as I could. “One of them made a few threats about the knife he was waving around, and another one said he wasn’t Hugo. That was about it.” Unless you counted groans and screaming as polite conversation, of course.

“Hugo? Hugo who?”

I must have been getting better at reading him, despite the fuzz on his face: that was definitely puzzlement. “It doesn’t matter,” I said.

“So you’re only assuming it was attempted revenge for the incident in the bar.” Mallow drank a little more of his beverage, and nodded thoughtfully.

I tried not to laugh, and almost succeeded. “You think the League sent them?” Maybe I should have been flattered, and would have been if the suggestion hadn’t been so ludicrous. Or worrying, depending on how you looked at it. “I’d have thought their field agents would be a bit better at skullduggery than that.”

“They would be. But they wouldn’t bother coming after you, either.” He glanced around at the hurrying crowds surrounding us, perhaps having made himself a little nervous at the thought: after all, he’d be a much higher priority target for a League hit squad than I was. “They might get some of the local dregs to try their luck, though.”

“Why would they do that?” I asked.

Mallow plucked a napkin from the stall with the tip of his tail, and wiped the fur around his mouth with it, a sight I found vaguely disturbing, although no one else around us even seemed to notice. “The DIR must know there are Commonwealth networks active on Numarkut; we certainly know about some of theirs.” I took another sip of my rapidly cooling coffee, trying not to seem spooked by the mention of the Department of Information Retrieval, the League’s most notorious secret service branch, which heretofore I’d only encountered as the perennial antagonist of Commonwealth spy fiction. According to the books and virts I’d seen, its agents were either fanatical psychopaths or bumbling incompetents, backed up by an inexhaustible supply of gun-toting dregs who couldn’t hit a barn from the inside, and whose main occupation seemed to be dying in droves at the hands of an omnicompetent heroine. “And they’d know you’re Jenny Worricker’s nephew. They might not know quite what you’re up to, but they’re bound to think you’re running some kind of errand for her.”

“So they set up an attack,” I said, “to stop me from doing whatever it is I’m doing, even though they don’t know what it is?”

“Something like that.” He pitched the napkin into the stall’s waste disposal, where it flashed into plasma, powering the heating coils for a few microseconds. His cup followed. “Or to see if anyone came to your rescue.”

“I didn’t need anyone to rescue me,” I said, following suit.

“No, you didn’t.” Mallow looked at me with what I suspected was an expression of mild concern. “You just showed them you’re a lot more dangerous than they expected.”

“If it was the League in the first place,” I said, determined to restore a little perspective to the conversation. This was all getting needlessly paranoid if you asked me. “My money’s still on the bar owner.” Or the even more mundane explanation Remington seemed to believe, and which informed his version of the event every time he recounted it. Wrong place, wrong time: one of the gang had simply seen us in the bar, and noticed the weight of my purse.

“Let’s hope you’re right,” Mallow said, turning away. “Although in this game you can’t count on anything being the way it looks.”

“I haven’t yet,” I agreed, trying to sound casual. But as my cab whirled me up into the maelstrom of the Dullingham traffic system and set course for the
Stacked Deck
’s cradle, I found my thoughts as chaotic as the streets and air lanes around me. In the end, I decided there was no point in trying to second guess everything, as I simply didn’t need the stress, and resolved to take things the only way I could: just as they came.

* * *

Our departure from Numarkut seemed oddly undramatic, compared to casting off from Skyhaven; although, as in most things, I suppose that was just a matter of perspective. The planet was so vast in comparison to the orbital that, though we were falling up through the atmosphere far faster than we’d been able to repel the relatively tiny mass of the void station, we hardly seemed to be moving at all. I hadn’t been invited to the bridge this time, but I remembered enough about the architecture of the
Stacked Deck
’s datanode to mesh in from my stateroom, find the displays I’d been privy to before, and even locate the external imager which had provided such dramatic pictures of our undocking and subsequent slingshot around Avalon.

As I’d hoped, it was still operating, providing me with a ringside seat as we rose from the docking cradle and plummeted skywards. I wasn’t the only member of the crew enjoying the show either, I noted idly; there were half a dozen other ‘spheres meshed in adjacent to mine, although none were close enough to overlap. Quite deliberately—the respect for one another’s physical space, so necessary for harmony aboard a starship, seemed to extend to the datasphere, although whether this was a general Guild custom or peculiar to the
Stacked Deck
I had no idea.

Night had fallen while we finalized our departure, and the virtual image was crowded with lights, falling away beneath us into what seemed like a bottomless void. At first our field of vision had been filled with the bright lamps of the landing field, defining and illuminating the cradles in harsh floods and knife-edged shadows; but the higher we rose the more they mellowed, slowly seeping into one another, until they finally merged with the lights of the nearby city to form a single constellation of staggering complexity. Then this, too, shrank into a single, diffuse patch, to be joined by other miniature galaxies, all hazed with distance, altitude, and intervening cloud, each diminishing in turn to a single pinpoint, which combined to sketch the outlines of the major land masses in twinkling pointillism. The oceans were patches of stygian darkness by comparison, sparsely flecked with the glowing stigmata of the occasional island or offshore industrial facility.

As the area covered by the image widened, a glowing crimson crescent, fading through purple to blue, betrayed the position of the sun, which was just beginning to emerge from behind the dayside limb of the planet. For the most part, however, the freckling of lights across the darkened globe began to merge almost seamlessly with the backdrop of stars behind it, seeming remarkable only for their number and density, and slightly more yellowish cast. Then the sun appeared more clearly as Sowerby trimmed our course a little, rising from behind the planet to bathe everything in warm, golden light.

“We’re on our way,” she reported, a little redundantly. Once we’d left the atmosphere, there really wasn’t anywhere else to go.

I found the right beacon, marking the rift to Iceball, and the border of the League; we were off to a good start, our boost against the mass of the planet leaving us with no real need to increase our velocity by pinballing off any other celestial objects. By my reckoning we’d be there and through in a couple of days. Add a few more, say three or four, to cross the Iceball system, if we didn’t lose too much velocity on the other side, and another couple to coast into Freedom after shooting the second rift, and I’d be feeling the soil of a League world under my boots within a week.

Idly, I noted the traffic patterns, finding them oddly similar to the vehicle routes I’d traversed in Dullingham. We’d joined a steady stream of vessels heading for the Iceball rift, while just as many were inbound; the main difference was that, unlike the ceaseless torrent of conveyances swarming the streets of the city, each one was separated by several hundred miles, rather than the mildly worrying foot or so around the fenders of the cabs I’d used. The Avalon route was equally congested, if that was quite the right term given the vast distances between ships, as were the two rift points leading to neutral systems and the Rimward Way beyond; only the rift to Rockhall seemed sparsely travelled, which I suppose was to be expected. With the situation as tense as it was, there was little trade to speak of; only a couple of Freebooter ships and a Guild mailboat were inbound from there, and only a single Guild freighter was heading for the disputed world.