“What then?” Beth asked.
“I don’t know. Knox is just going to have to find room for one more, I suppose.” He glared at Gari’s erstwhile antagonizer. How bloody typical that even now she was messing things up, right when he thought he was going to escape the curse of Digger forever. By rights he should deck her one and lock her up until they’d gone. But in the world Kiera promised them, all animosities would be forgiven and forgotten. Even a mobile pain- in-the-arse like Navar. It was an ideal he was desperate to achieve. Would dumping her here make him unworthy of Kiera?
Seeing his indecision, Beth stormed: “Christ, you’re so useless.” She rounded on Navar, the nervejam suddenly in her hand. Navar’s smirk faded as she found herself confronting someone who for once wasn’t going to be wheedled or threatened. “One word out of you, one complaint, one show of your usual malice, and I use this on your bum before I shove you out of the airlock. Got that?” The nerve-jam was pressed against the end of Navar’s nose for emphasis.
“Yes,” the girl squeaked. She looked as miserable and frightened as Gari. Jed couldn’t remember seeing her so disconcerted before.
“Good,” Beth said. The nervejam vanished into a pocket. She flashed Jed a puzzled frown. “I don’t know why you let her give you so much grief the whole time. She’s only a girly brat.”
Jed realized he must be blushing as red as Gari. Explanations now would be pointless, not to mention difficult.
He pulled his shoulder bag out from under the table. It was disappointingly light to be carrying everything he considered essential to his life.
Captain Knox was waiting for them in the lounge at the end of the airlock tube: a short man with the flat features of his Pacific-island ancestry, but the pale skin and ash-blond hair which one of those same ancestors had bought as he geneered his family for free-fall endurance. His light complexion made his anger highly conspicuous.
“I only agreed to fifteen,” he said as Beth and Jed drifted through the hatch. “You’ll have to send some back; three at least.”
Jed tried to push his shoes onto a stikpad. He didn’t like free fall, which made his stomach wobble, his face swell, and clogged his sinuses. Nor was he much good at manoeuvring himself by hanging on to a grab hoop and using his wrists to angle his body. Inertia fought every move, making his tendons burn. When he did manage to touch his sole to the pad there was little adhesion. Like everything else in the inter-orbit ship, it was worn down and out-of-date.
“Nobody is going back,” he said. Gari was clinging to his side, the mass of her floating body trying hard to twist him away from the stikpad. He didn’t let go of the grab hoop.
“Then we don’t leave,” Knox said simply.
Jed saw Gerald Skibbow at the back of the lounge; as usual he was in switch-off, staring at the bulkhead with glazed eyes. Jed was beginning to wonder if he had a serious habit. “Gerald.” He waved urgently. “Gerald!”
Knox muttered under his breath as Gerald came awake in slow stages, his body twitching.
“How many passengers are you licensed for?” Beth asked.
Knox ignored her.
“What is it?” Gerald asked. He was blinking as if the light were too bright.
“Too many people,” Knox said. “You’ve gotta chuck some off.”
“I have to go,” Gerald said quietly.
“No one is saying you don’t, Gerald,” Beth said. “It’s your money.”
“But my ship,” Knox said. “And I’m not carrying this many.”
“Fine,” Beth said. “We’ll just ask the CAB office how many people you’re licensed to carry.”
“Don’t be stupid.”
“If you won’t carry us, then return the fee and we’ll find another ship.”
Knox gave Gerald a desperate glance, but he looked equally bewildered.
“Just three, did you say?” Beth asked.
Sensing things were finally flowing in his favour, Knox smiled. “Yes, just three. I’ll be happy to fly a second charter for your friends later.”
Which was rubbish, Beth knew. He was only worried about his own precious skin. A ship operating this close to the margin really would be hard put to sustain nineteen Deadnights plus the crew. It was the first time Knox had shown the slightest concern about the flight. The only interest he’d shown in them before was their ability to pay. Which Gerald had done, and well over the odds, too. They didn’t deserve to be pushed around like this.
But Gerald was totally out of the argument, back in one of his semi-comatose depressions again. And Jed . . . Jed these days was focused on one thing only. Beth still hadn’t made up her mind if she was annoyed about that or not.
“Put three of us in the lifeboat, then,” she said.
“What?” Knox asked.
“You do have a lifeboat?”
“Of course.”
Which is where he and his precious family would shelter if anything did go wrong, she knew. “We’ll put the three youngest in there. They’d be the first in anyway, wouldn’t they?”
Knox glared at her. Ultimately, though, money won the argument. Skibbow had paid double the price of an ordinary charter, even at the inflated rates flights to and from Koblat were currently worth.
“Very well,” Knox said gracelessly. He datavised the flight computer to close the airlock hatch. Koblat’s flight control was already signalling him to leave the docking bay. His filed flight plan gave a departure time of five minutes ago, and another ship was waiting.
“Give him the coordinate,” Beth told Jed. She took Gerald by the arm and gently began to tug him to his couch.
Jed handed the flek over to Knox, wondering how come Beth was suddenly in charge.
The
Before
• • •
The clouds over Chainbridge formed a tight stationary knot of dark carmine amid the ruby streamers which ebbed and swirled across the rest of the sky. Standing behind Moyo as he drove the bus towards the town, Stephanie could sense the equally darkened minds clustered among the buildings. There were far more than there should have been; Chain-bridge was barely more than an ambitious village.
Moyo’s concern matched hers. His foot eased off the accelerator. “What do you want to do?”
“We don’t have a lot of choice. That’s where the bridge is. And the vehicles need recharging.”
“Go through?”
“Go through. I can’t believe anyone will hurt the children now.”
Chainbridge’s streets were clogged with parked vehicles. They were either military jeeps and scout rangers or lightly armoured infantry carriers. Possessed lounged indolently among them. They reminded Moyo of ancient revolutionary guerillas, with their bold-print camouflage fatigues, heavy lace-up boots, and shoulder-slung
