[02] Elite: Nemorensis (11 page)

We’re going to die!

Plus sensory interruptions of a more sexual nature. Tee was getting frisky while they dropped from the sky. Of course.

The eerie clarity part:

‘The merc!’ he snarled. ‘The fucking merc ship was hiding in the atmosphere! It was there all along!’

It was the only plausible explanation. The sneaky bastard had been sniping at the battle from below, shielded from their scanners, hidden amidst the stratospheric clouds which the
Shattergeist
was, even now, bumbling and rolling its way through, venting fuel. Myq recalled a moment, mid-battle, while Teesa was occupied with squealing and blasting at the first Viper, in which one of its lagging comrades had abruptly limped into an orbital plunge on the scanner. Had that been due to the merc too? A missed shot? A test run? Or –
oh crap
– baiting the path?

Setting Tee up for that last, headlong, murderous strike?

… which implied –
crap crap crap
– that someone else considered his girlfriend’s frighteningly psychotic desire to mulch spacewalkers an entirely predictable piece of behaviour.

All of which musings had led, inevitably, to the Uncharacteristic Anger part of his oscillating mood:

‘You … you dropped our shields, Tee.
Again
!’ Flapping his finger at her. ‘W … why did you have to drop our shields?’

She gurgled something indecipherable. Possibly ‘
it’s more fun that way
.’ Her mouth was full.

Myq wasn’t going to let her calm him down this time, not in the midst of a full-blown and frankly rather enjoyable tantrum. ‘Why do you do
anything?
’ he snarled.
I am soooo bored of being the boring one.
‘We’re going to fucking
die
!’

They probably weren’t, of course. They’d spent literally gajillions – Teesa assured him that was a real number – upgrading the ship and its systems, wanky music software and all, precisely so they wouldn’t have to do too much thinking/worrying/giving-a-shit about the fiddly stuff in between all the Blowing Stuff Up.

Still, with a medium-sized rocky planet rising to meet you at some considerable speed it felt rather good to flap and shout.

It had all happened so fast anyway. They’d almost been upon the spacesuited cops when the hammer fell. A pair of thrashing bodies expanding hugely on screen, Tee’s excitement almost indecent in all its babbling, shivering absorption. (And worse, in all its infectiousness. Myq hadn’t exactly rushed to stop her, had he?)

She’d unshielded the
Shattergeist
a scant half-second before impact, purring to herself. But in that same instant (
how did the merc
know
?
) the thunderbolt hit. A mag-projectile, he supposed, launched with exquisite care from directly behind the targets, streaking venomously between them, down amidst the umbral mass of planetary thunderheads. He felt abstractly (impossibly) as though he’d caught a glimpse of it – some indecent blur; a streak of the reaper’s scythe – before it struck.

Certainly its grim results had been imperceptibly instant: one moment they’d been making a beeline for the cops, the next they were spinning, several hundred metres distant, sirens shrieking and main engines obliterated.

Why didn’t the merc kill us?
he wondered – a seedy little thought amidst the morass.
He – or she – could’ve skewered us like a bloody whale.

Why knock us down instead of wiping us out?

But.

But.

But.

Falling, falling, falling. No time, no brainspace, no sensory energy. Not as he moved seamlessly back to the Panic portion of his mental cycle and hammered impotently against the controls. Not with lights whirling and klaxons klaxoning and Teesa – unapologetic, uncowed, gurgling and delighted by the whole thing – doing something insane in his lap.

‘Frhop bnn shlli,’ she said.
Stop being silly.
Probably. ‘Whuh
nt
gnna duh.’

‘We are! We
are
going to die! We’re—’

Quite abruptly the alarms died. The clouds thinned around them to a scrawny strata of turbulent steppes and peaceful plateaus, and Myq caught his first crazed glimpses of the surface far beneath. Green. Misted. Dank.

The computer cycled through re-entry solutions, stabilisers hissing. And little by little the
Shattergeist
restored a modicum of balance.

Myq felt weirdly robbed, still shuddering with pent-up emotion.

[AUTO TOUCHDOWN]
, the status-holo said, picked out in a reassuring shade of green.
[REPAIRS REQUIRED. SEEKING LANDING ZONE.]

[PLEASE DO NOT INTERFERE WITH THE AUTOPILOT PROTOCOLS.]

[PLEASE RELAX AND ENJOY THE DESCENT.]

The bloody thing even started playing soothing music without being asked.

‘Thank NoGod for that,’ he murmured.

Which is when Teesa reached up blindly from his crotchal regions and gave the stick – the
control
stick – a violent yank.

‘What are you
doing
what are you
doing
what are you d—’

The alarms started again. The ship banked furiously into another deadzone of hi-alt vapours, rattling and roaring at each cloudstrike, flipping end over end. Gravity starting to uncomfortably declare its presence.

Myq tried not to puke. Tried not to come. Tried not to cry.

Laughed a bit.

Teesa just giggled and bent back to her task.

‘The merc was in the atmosphere,’ she said, a miniature maybefrown troubling her brow. ‘Just like you said.’ Rain, not
proper
rain, not
back home
rain; just an insipid layer of hanging damp, like fog with added gravity, fizzed round her shoulders.

‘S-so?’ Myq was still shaking.

‘Soooo, chances are they were still watching us on the way down. They could’ve killed us up there if they’d wanted, yes? But they chose not to. Why?’

‘I … I don’t …’

She flicked rainwater off a vast overhanging … thing. Probably a leaf. It made a noise like a startled mouse and curled up, turning orange. She grinned hugely.

‘Look, if we’d come down in a niiiiice long straight line – smash, re-entry,
swoooosh
– they would’ve know exactly where to look. And then we could’ve found out what they had in mind. Would you have preferred that, Myq?’

He sulked. ‘No.’

‘Well then. Little bit of random course adjustment never hurt anyone.’ She flapped a hand around herself – the ship, the rain, the mud, the
jungle
– and grinned. ‘Isn’t this
supernebular
?’

She’d touched them down, refusing to let the autopilot handle things personally, just as the
Shattergeist
’s fuel reserves were honking and spuffling in alarm. Part gliding, part landing, part flying on fumes. What she called a ‘little bit of random course adjustment’ was, more accurately, the most terrifying stratotumble imaginable: crazily shifting course every few seconds, ploughing through cloudbanks, dodging gaseous spore-bird-flopping-whale-whatnots, always lashed by rain, always chased by lightning, always shouting and protesting and shrieking like a child.

At least,
he
was. She just kept blowing him. Glancing up to tweak the liminals now and then like she knew where she was going. Like (
oh NoGod)
like she’d planned the whole damn thing.

And yes, thank you, obviously: he’d obediently orgasmed at the point of touchdown. Skull-breaking terror or not.

Pathetic
.

She pointed out into the jungle like she owned the place. ‘That outpost’s not far, sweetie. Looked pretty big on the scans. Couple of miles? We’ll get repairs there, don’t you fret.’

She knew it was there before we even started to drop.

‘Hang on, we can’t just—’

‘Walk in the woods! Walk in the woods!’ She disappeared into the tangle of (
don’t look too close
) undergrowth, humming to herself.

The worst part, Myq decided, gawping in the silence, the most revolting headache-inducing part of it all, worse than the sweaty pressure of endoclimatisation – the gravity aches, they called it – and the sticky wraparound alien sense-bombardment, worse than the annoying hoot-squawks of distant wildlife and the twitchy responses of the hair-triggered local plants, was this:

She was right
.

All that smashing and bashing around on the way down. All that chaos. All that crazed giggling inanity.

Eminently bloody sensible.

Avoiding pursuit.

So why couldn’t she just have told him what she was up to? Why wait until the end? Why couldn’t she trust him enough to … to own up to her scheme?

C’mon, Myquel.
He dragged a hand across his upper lip, dangerously close to a schoolboy blub.
This isn’t about the crash landing and you know it
.

And, ohhh, it wasn’t. There was a bigger picture here. A macro to the micro – every bit as infuriating. A sneaking suspicion that had been settling over him for days, that down in the fuzzy abyss of Teesa’s rampage, down in the murky depths of her mercurial, spontaneous, vicious, unpredictable,
beautiful
self … there was a method behind the madness.

The inkling had arisen drop by drop. The way she’d spoken to that reporter, back on Tun’s Wart. The way her voice changed sometimes, airbursting with innocuous-seeming wisdom (
the lifecycles of fucking shibboletti, for NoGod’ssake
). The things she mumbled in her sleep. The refusal to speak of the past. The way he caught her staring sometimes, out into the dark, lips moving, eyes wet.

Something.

Going.

On.

The kicker? The kicker had come just a few moments before, as they’d stepped from the
Shattergeist
and tramped out into the mud, stumbling through puddles of rainwater already gathering in the blast craters round its jets. He’d caught her just then, pausing at the ship’s consoles under the auspices of locking it down, dialling into Shibboleth’s rudimentary info-net.

Checking the prices of shibboletti glands.
Smiling softly to herself.

And the crazy part? He wouldn’t have minded if she just owned to it. If she’d just volunteered the information. It wasn’t like he was going to quit on her. Come what may, come what shenanigans, come what secret motives, he would’ve gone along with Teesa anyway:
good little puppydog
,
good little slave
. They both knew it.

(
Weak! weak!
)

So why couldn’t she just explain it all? Why not confess there was some … plan unfolding? Some design beneath the destruction? Something to do with those idiot fart-creatures … their priceless glands … and maybe (
surely!
) the man who’d once owned Teesa as a slave?

‘
A commodity baron, let’s say
,’ the dead reporter said. Sneering and sweating below his camera-eye. ‘
All above board. Someone in … ohhh … someone in the glander-trade.
’

Why? Why wouldn’t she tell him?

And worse: why couldn’t Myq just fucking
ask
about it?

Standing in the clearing with the ship steaming and clicking behind him, rain soaking into his clothes, he made a decision:

I’m not going to follow her.

Not until she comes back. Not until she comes back and … and we set off together. Side-by-side. No more puppydog
.

He crossed his arms. Set his jaw. Sniffed.

Then Teesa made a sound, already far further into the foliage than he would have guessed, like something between a laugh and a scream, and he was sprinting through creepy trees and sulphur-puffing creepers before he even realised it.

Weak! Weak! Weak!

He found her crooning in a gallery of looming palms, bent over a clutch of wriggling worm-things nesting amidst sticky fronds of viscous jelly in the trough of a stump. The anonymous microfiends (to Myq’s eyes and nostrils the most fitting descriptor would be ‘turds with teeth’) kept puffing themselves up, turning purple and orange, and strutting across their miniature stage as if for Teesa’s approval.

But they, alas, were not the principal catchers of Myq’s eye as he stumbled to a halt.

‘Oh Myquel,’ Teesa trilled, not looking round. ‘They startled me when I went by, but – look! Aren’t they wonderful?’ She poked one hard enough to break it in half. It didn’t seem to mind.

Around her the forest itself was changing. Fingerlike fronds of great tarantula-plants uncoiling towards her, chromatic pattern-displays flushing and chasing along their stems. Small creatures, apparently drunk, kept dropping from the canopy to wriggle and mewl, farting little puffs of rank powder and flashing bright tones. Something vaguely birdlike alighted on a branch and started strutting for all it was worth, puffing out little iridescent pockets of mazelike blood vessels, squawking like a fucking moonjuice-junkie at the end of a bad trip. Proudly showing off what Myq assumed was its genitals.

In a bubble all round Teesa, marked by clashing colours, trembling branches and unfortunate noises, the forest of Shibboleth was slowly, obscenely, getting horny.

Like the reporters. Like the cops in the jail.

Like me, dammit.

Still. Even that wasn’t what had arrested Myq’s progress through the woods. He gave a small squeak and tried to breathe. Finger uncurling to point vaguely upwards.

‘T-Tee …’

‘Shibbo-shibbo-shibboletti,’ she babbled happily. ‘You can really tell those stupid bastards come from here, can’t you?
All
these things … same weirdo space-monster genepool.’ She flicked one of the worm-creatures hard enough to make it pop. ‘Fat, farty, spore-spouting little gasbags.’ He’d never seen her happier.

‘Teesa. Teesa, stay still …’

‘Y’know what? I bet that cloud layer we came through? I bet that’s just, just spores. All of it. Hanging round up there. Imagine that, Myq. A whole planet wreathed in spunk.’

‘Don’t … move.’

She finally deigned to glance his way, perfect nose crinkling. Then slowly, unavoidably, tilted her head back to follow his finger.