Dark Sky (Keiko) (13 page)

‘Shut up, shut up, shut up!’ Jenna peeled off one of her holo-gloves and threw it at him. ‘God, you are
insufferable
when you win at something!’

‘Just enjoying the moment,’ he protested, although he couldn’t keep a straight face.

‘I’m amazed you don’t do the haka beforehand, too,’ Jenna muttered, crossing her arms.

Apirana let a wide grin spread across his features. ‘Now
there’s
an idea!’

‘If you even—’

‘Nah, it’s probably overkill for something like this,’ he agreed, unfastening his own gloves.

‘“Probably”?’

‘Fine, fine.’ He held up his hands. ‘I’m sorry if I get a bit competitive. Not my most endearing feature, I guess.’

‘I can assure you that it isn’t,’ Jenna smiled crookedly.

‘Which means there’s at least something endearing about me,’ Apirana informed her soberly, reaching for his soda, ‘so I’ll class that as a compliment.’ He was taking a sip before Jenna spoke again.

‘You’re cuddly.’

He swallowed, carefully, and looked around at her. ‘
What?
’

‘Cuddly,’ Jenna repeated, looking thoughtful. ‘At least when, you know, you’re not kicking people into next week.’

‘He had a kni—’

‘I know, I know, I’m just sayi—’

‘If someone pulls a knife on you then—’

‘Jesus, A., I was trying to be nice!’ Jenna shouted, frustration suddenly clouding her face. ‘What is
wrong
with you? You’ve been weird with me ever since we left the
Keiko
!’

Apirana blinked, suddenly wrong-footed. He had?

Jenna sighed. ‘Forget it. I’m going back to my room. Thanks for the game.’ She turned to leave and Apirana felt something twist inside him. It wasn’t that he’d ruled out saying something to her, exactly, but he’d been trying to work out exactly what he
was
feeling before he attempted to fit words around it. Suddenly he got the impression that, no matter how clumsy the attempt might end up, he should probably say
something
right now.

‘Uh, hey, wait a second.’ He’d half expected Jenna to ignore him and keep walking, which would have been disappointing in one respect but a relief in another. Instead she stopped and turned to look back at him, her expression neutral. He swallowed again, nervously this time, and attempted to force his thoughts into some kind of coherent and hopefully eloquent order. ‘I … look, um … I didn’t mean to be—’

He was cut off by an ear-splitting siren. ‘What the bloody hell …?’

Jenna had visibly jumped when it went off, and was now looking around with her hands over her ears. ‘Jesus, that’s loud!’

Sirens rarely boded well in any case, but Apirana had landed hard on the wrong side of the law when he was fifteen and hadn’t properly crossed back since; for him, the sound had long since been hard-wired into his fight-or-flight reflex. He had a light-pool cue in his hands almost without thinking, feeling the weight and heft of it.

‘What’s that for?’ Jenna asked, cautiously removing her hands from her ears but still wincing at the volume.

‘Dunno yet,’ Apirana admitted. A female voice started to speak over the siren; in Russian, predictably. ‘Check the local Spine, see if it says what’s going on.’

‘On it.’ Jenna retrieved her wrist console from where she’d taken it off to play holo-hockey and fired it up with a few quick taps, then shook her head in frustration. ‘It’s some sort of universal alert, but all it says is to stay calm and stay indoors.’ She looked up at him and shrugged helplessly. ‘That could be anything from a ventilation malfunction to a planetary invasion, for crying out loud!’

‘Won’t be an invasion with the storm going, at least not here,’ Apirana replied absently, trying to run through the other options in his head. Unfortunately, there were too many; he didn’t know what level of problem would cause the Uragan authorities to react on this scale, and the damned siren wasn’t helping him think. The only certain conclusion he could come to was that the Captain and the Changs were out in whatever it was. ‘You’re a slicing wizard, you can get more info than that, surely?’

Jenna gave him a level look. ‘Do you have any idea—’ The alarms suddenly ceased, the recorded message apparently having been delivered the requisite number of times. ‘Christ, that’s better. Do you have any idea how hard it is to slice government-level encryption on the fly, through a translation program and a goddamn
character proxy
so you’re using the right frigging alphabet?!’

‘Nope,’ Apirana admitted, ‘but that’s why I’m asking
you
to do it.’ He was no stranger to the Spine, but his technological skills were more focused towards spanners than terminals. ‘I’m gonna go find Rourke.’

‘No need.’

Apirana’s ears were still ringing in the aftermath of the siren, which was probably why he hadn’t heard footsteps behind him. He turned to see Rourke standing in the doorway to the games room, her face grim and looking past him at Jenna. ‘You got anything?’

‘Working on it,’ Jenna muttered. ‘It has to be something either big or local to us though, right? I mean, the levels can be sealed off from each other, so if there was a fire one level down or something, that wouldn’t be anything to worry about here.’

‘I’m gonna call the Captain,’ Apirana said, keying his comm, ‘see if they’re okay.’ The call tone buzzed in his ear, and kept buzzing.

There was no answer.

Rourke was already frowning, and trying her own comm. She waited for a few seconds, then looked up. ‘Jia’s not answering either.’

‘Shit.’ Apirana looked from one woman to the other. ‘So do we stay here an’ hope they come back, or head out an’ try to find ’em?’

Rourke looked indecisive, one of only a handful of times Apirana could remember the former GIA agent being uncertain. ‘I don’t know … I’m not sure it’s a good idea to go out there without knowing what’s going on, but the worse it is the more likely the others will need our help.’

‘And what happens if
we
go out and
they
come back?’ Jenna put in without looking up from her console.

Rourke pursed her lips and seemed to come to a decision. ‘I’ll go and check a couple of the nearest bars; I’ve got the best Russian of the three of us anyway. You two stay here and call me if the others show up.’

Apirana grimaced. ‘Okay, but keep in touch, yeah? Last thing we want is for you to get arrested for breaking curfew, or whatever this is, and we didn’t—’

He was cut off by an angry explosion of Russian from the hallway behind Rourke, at a pitch and pace that ruled out any chance of him being able to decipher it: a male voice, and clearly unhappy. Rourke whirled around and took two quick but unhurried steps backwards. Moments later the doorway she had been standing in was filled by the shouting shape of Mr Vershinin, the hotel’s proprietor.

Apirana supposed that most people would consider Vershinin to be a big man; he certainly towered over Rourke and was comfortably taller than Jenna, who was far from the shortest girl Apirana had ever seen. He was also obviously agitated. Apirana surreptitiously adjusted his grip on the light-pool cue, just in case.

Vershinin shouted something again, and Rourke raised her hands to try to placate him a little. ‘Please, sir! Slowly, or in English!’

Apirana hadn’t thought that the hotel owner’s face could get any more thunderous, but he’d been wrong. The burly Uragan’s mouth twisted, and he spat out some heavily accented words.

‘You leave! Now! Foreign
otmorozki
, get out!
Out!
Go join your friends!’

‘Sir,’ Rourke said, keeping her voice calm with what was clearly some effort, ‘we don’t know exactly where our friends are—’

‘They’re outside!’ Vershinin roared, gesturing back the way he’d come while advancing into the room, circling around as though to herd them towards the door. ‘Get out! Police come! I have no foreigners here!’

Apirana caught Rourke’s eye and inclined his head, very slightly, in the direction of the apoplectic proprietor. Rourke gave an infinitesimal shake of her head in response, and a splay of the fingers of her left hand.
Wait.

‘Sir,’ Rourke tried again, addressing Vershinin, ‘if you’ll allow us to return to our rooms and get our things—’

‘
Nyet!
’ Vershinin lunged for Jenna, grabbing her by the shoulder and shoving her in the direction of the door. Jenna slapped his hand away, but Apirana had abruptly had enough. He whipped the cue up, holding it across the Uragan’s chest crosswise and pushing him firmly backwards.

‘Listen bro, we—’

He didn’t get any further with the sentence because Vershinin yelled in rage and slammed both hands into Apirana’s chest in what was half a shove and half a double palm strike. It didn’t take Apirana off his feet or even knock him back much, and the sensible thing to do would be to back away from the incandescent proprietor and get all three of them out of the room before things escalated further … all of which he realised about half a second after he’d dropped the cue and slammed his fist into Vershinin’s enraged face.

The Uragan dropped like he was a puppet whose strings had abruptly been cut. Apirana backed away from the fallen man, his knuckles stinging and bitter recriminations already rising in the back of his mind. ‘Guys, I’m sorry, I—’

‘Don’t be,’ Rourke cut him off clinically, ‘we don’t have time.’

‘Let me at least check he’s okay,’ Apirana asked, hearing the pleading in his own voice. A small hand took his arm in a firm grip, and he looked back to see Rourke’s dark eyes regarding him steadily from beneath the shadow of her hat.

‘A., you just hit him as hard as you could. Either you’ve simply knocked him out, in which case he’s going to wake up in a few seconds and we need to get out of here, or he’s not going to wake up any time soon, in which case we still need to get out of here.’ Her jaw tightened slightly. ‘If it makes you feel better, I was about to do the same thing anyway. No one touches my crew.’

Apirana looked back down at Vershinin and thought he caught a faint flutter of eyelids. Something seemed to loosen a grip on his heart; not completely, but enough. ‘Okay,’ he found himself saying, ‘let’s go.’

‘What about our things?’ Jenna asked, looking from him to Rourke. They’d only been allowed to take a bare minimum of items from the
Jonah
, chivvied as they had been by impatient
politsiya
officers.

Rourke grimaced. ‘Thirty seconds, then we’re out the front door. Essentials only!’ she yelled after them as Apirana and Jenna sprinted out of the games room and towards the main stairs, located in the foyer. Jenna swung herself around the bannister pole at the bottom and onto the second riser, an action Apirana would have normally expected to draw the disapproving attention of the sour-faced check-in clerk standing behind the reception desk, but she wasn’t even looking at them. His gaze followed hers, out through the glass panes in the double doors and onto the plaza outside, and suddenly he forgot all about getting anything from their rooms.

The plaza was a mass of people, with more streaming in even as he watched. There seemed a roughly even split of men and women of varying ages, with even a few children present, but what they pretty much all had in common was their appearance: cheap, plain clothing, many still in dust-caked mining gear after however many hours at the face.

Well, and the Free Systems banners and placards.

Apirana winced as the reasons for Vershinin’s attitude suddenly became a little clearer. Governments liked to blame each other for stirring up discontent in their own populations, since that was easier than admitting a planet’s people had spontaneously decided to rebel. Off-worlders might well be detained on suspicion of being involved in rabble-rousing, and their choice of accommodation would likely be scrutinised closely. With this sort of gathering outside his business’s front door, it was little wonder Vershinin had got edgy about his foreign guests.

‘Tamara!’ He raised his voice and looked back over his shoulder, ignoring the start of surprise the sudden noise elicited from the clerk. ‘I think we gotta problem!’

Rourke was already approaching, having shut the door of the games room to hide Vershinin’s prone body for at least a few more seconds, but she quickened her stride at his shout and came alongside him with her coat billowing behind her. He saw her lips purse as she assessed the situation.

‘Shit.’

‘Yeah, that was pretty much what I was thinking,’ Apirana agreed. ‘You still wanna go out there?’

‘I don’t really see that we have much choice,’ Rourke admitted. ‘We won’t have long, though; the
politsiya
will be here soon, and they’ll be armed to the teeth. Standard Red Star protocol for a protest gathering of more than thirty people is full riot gear and a maximum ten-minute response time.’

Apirana frowned at the matter-of-fact way Rourke had delivered that piece of information. ‘How’d you know that?’

Rourke looked at him sideways, with perhaps the faintest flicker of amusement in her eyes. ‘Once upon a time, it was my job to
organise
things like this.’

Apirana wasn’t certain if he’d missed something. ‘Organise what? The response?’

‘The riots.’ Rourke turned away from him towards the stairs. ‘Jenna! We need to go
now
!’

‘Okay, okay!’ Jenna appeared at the top of the stairs, clutching a couple of overstuffed bags she must have hastily rescued from their suites. She stopped when she saw Apirana and glowered at him. ‘Weren’t you going to help me?’

‘Yeah, uh …’ He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. ‘Something came up.’

‘
Now
, Jenna,’ Rourke snapped, making an impatient beckoning motion, but the young slicer was already taking the stairs two at a time.

‘Fine, fine, what—?’ She stopped when she reached the bottom and looked out at the gathering crowd. ‘Oh.’

‘Yes.’ Rourke snatched a bag from her. She passed it to Apirana without looking, who slung the strap across his chest so it rested on his left hip. Rourke also took one and so, relatively equally loaded, they looked out at the mass of people.