[02] Elite: Nemorensis (12 page)

It was a predator, he supposed. Toothy, tentacley, yadda yadda. Vaguely catlike, for the sake of argument, although only in as much as it was clinging halfway down a tree, back arched, ears (or, hell, leaves?) flattened against its boxlike head, with multiple rows of slitlike eyes fixed on Teesa’s crown.

Growling.

‘Naughty kitty,’ she whispered.

There the familiarities ended. On its midriff a set of petal-like envelopes – rank, canvas-esque material – shuddered open to expose shocking blazes of wet purple and blue. Its teeth clearly weren’t as solid as they appeared, shifting unpleasantly in its jaw, and where any self-respecting feline-analogue might have sported a muscular set of rear legs,
this
biologically-confused fucker exhibited what could only be described as a mighty pair of amorphous testicles, each half distended in a membranous flap holding it against the tree. It reminded Myq of nothing so much as a gigantic scrotal version of a chameleon’s foot – which was apt, given that the saggy thing kept changing colour.

Teesa stood up, not remotely frightened. And dug, with a half-arsed urgency, for her little lasergun.

Which wasn’t there.

The creature pounced.

In all the shrieking and terror that followed, as the surrounding wildlife variously honked and coiled and – in one or two overexcited cases – exploded in fungal puffs, as Myq saw Teesa for the first time
truly
frightened,
truly
desperate,
truly
uncool, the unlovely thought uncoiled in his mind that it was anybody’s guess whether the fiend was trying to eat her or mate with her.

The creature’s lithe body slammed onto her, forelimbs pushing then pinning her even as the ballbag-suckerpad engulfed her shins. She cried out, trying to get away, hammering at its head with her fists, scattering leaf litter and bright mushrooms. Acid-trip tendrils whipped from the beastie’s eyes (that is, what Myq’d
thought
were eyes) to restrain her hands and hold steady her head. And something … something very, very, slimy … lollopped from its jaw like a great internal prolapse and began, unmistakeably, to stiffen.

‘Big boy, huh?’ Teesa whispered, as if in a dream. Eyes like moons.

And Myq? Myq, whose feet hadn’t moved in a minute. Myq, whose body had turned to glass. Myq, who was abstractly aware of an irritating trickle of sweat down the cleft of his arse—

Myq discovered he hadn’t felt quite so important in weeks.

He giggled.

Pulled out the laser he’d stolen from Tee’s clothes several days earlier – a safety measure, he’d told himself – and shot the monster through the head.

Under his breath, hoping she didn’t hear, he whispered:

‘
She’s
mine
.’

They fucked on the forest floor, right next to the puddle of monstergunk. Tee kept pausing to shoot at the smaller animals and plants which came slithering by, unable to resist her magnetic pull. Myq understood then, under the fog, under the sighs and smiles, that he already knew – that perhaps he’d
always
known – why Teesa didn’t share her plans. And why he’d never dare ask.

Planning? Motives? Agendas? Such things were the hallmarks of the Merely Ordinary. Myq needed to believe Tee was above all that. He needed from her the illusion of perfect and spontaneous
performance
. He needed her to excuse and validate his own dingy narcissism; to make him feel like a force of nature rather than just another clammy notoriety-junkie.

Above all? He needed to believe she didn’t care about anything but him and the thrill. Anything else – any tawdry Plan – was simply Competition for her attention.

… oooor
some
sort of overly-wanky, self-distractionary skyshit like that. Frankly, two days later, bombed off his tits on local glandnarcs, Myq’s predilection for pompous inner analysis was raging hard.

The pair had bumbled out of the forest into the damp outskirts of the farmtown, Gridsyne, clumsily disguised by smart-fabric hats and hoods, in the middle of a convenient storm which had all but cleared the streets. They’d spent the majority of the first two solar days shacked up in a cheap guesthouse, dyeing their hair and remote-ordering new clothes, studiously working their way through the veritable cornucopia of drugs – door-delivered – derived from Shibboleth’s balloonlike wildlife.

Hence existentially lubricated, Myq’s new theory about his own wilful ignorance went some way, at least, to explain why he hadn’t stirred himself, nor became too dramatically annoyed, when Tee leaned out of bed during the first night to make a series of scrambled arrangements down the phone with a local shibboletti-trade agent.

‘Five hundred head of livestock,’ she’d snapped, winking at Myq as if daring him to ask.

I bloody won’t.

‘Yes,’ she’d said, blowing him a kiss. ‘Yes, all podded, good to go.’

She looks stupid with black hair
, he told himself, stroppy.

Which she didn’t. She looked amazing.

‘Well,
obviously
I’ll be wanting them delivered. No – not far. Big clearing, couple of miles west of town. Talk to … wait, hang on – Myq? What was the chopshop called?’

‘Grundle’s.’

‘Talk to someone down at Grundle’s repair yard on the main strasse, would you? They’re running some repairs on-site. They’ll have coordinates. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Oh, I expect they’ve already run a freight path through the jungle. They’re quite, ah,
extensive
repairs.’

Extensive = expensive
, Myq gloomily daydreamed. Their one and only excursion into the crackling cultural cauldron that was Gridsyne had involved a sheepish conference with a suspicious ultrafatty at a machine shop in town. The man’d almost fallen out of his gut-barrow for laughing when Myq, sporting freshly ginger hair and a blend-in-with-the-locals beige kilt, presented the job.

Saud Kruger gold-class Dolphin, complete replacement thruster-module and general repairs.

‘And a new paint job,’ Tee had chimed in. ‘Something in pink.’

It was only when Myq started naming numbers – astronomical, stupid, impossible numbers – then infotabbed through a Proof Of Funds order from their still relentlessly-swelling account, that the man had started to take them seriously. And even then, probably, only because Tee’s weird influence had stolen over him.

‘Righ’,’ he’d said, blushing, signing a work-order. ‘G-giz furdays.’

Four days had quickly turned into two. Plus,
ahem
, not a word spoken to anyone,
you understand
, at the fair fair price of an extra zero on the end of the quote. It was roughly the same arrangement Tee lazily made, hours later –
don’t ask, Myq, don’t ask, don’t ask
– in negotiations with the livestock guy.

Five hundred shibboletti
, he thought,
delivered right to the ship. Secret as you like.

No questions asked, no answers given.

More expensive than a platinum planet.

It was nice being rich.

‘Uh, Tee—?’

‘Mm?’

Don’t fucking ask, idiot!

‘Nothing.’

It was nice being rich and weak.

So they smoked and they fucked and they lazed about in a room so gobsmackingly boring that all of Myq’s neurotically-programmed zen –
don’t ask! don’t ask!
– was strained to breaking point. They screwed and they snorted and they listened to the rain, and they whiled away hours on the local sensenet learning the rich (ugh) and varied (ugh) history of Shibboleth and its (ugh) culture. And then all at once, just as it darkened on the second evening, Tee quite abruptly threw a wobbler.

‘I want,’ she hissed. ‘To
dance
.’

Fuzzy brained, stoned, it took Myq a moment or two to dislodge himself from engrossment in what passed for news on Shibboleth’s net –
stock prices peaking!; septuagenarian eaten by lumbartree!; unscheduled official arrives from Federation!;
plus a dozen gossipy articles on the
Shattergeist
and its occupants – and looked round just in time to be in struck the face by a ballistic pillow.

‘We,’ Teesa declared, stamping a foot, ‘are going
out
.’

Myq thought about arguing. Even flopped his mouth open and shut a few times, venting an exciting waveform of purple smoke (which itself occupied his attention for thirty seconds longer than it should have). Ultimately he decided, in a powerful cascade of logic and experience, that however sensible his arguments Teesa could be relied upon not to listen.

‘Fine,’ he grunted, glancing back at the netscreen. His own face stared back, harassed-looking above a senseform tag marked WANTED in a dozen languages. ‘But we’ll need to keep a low profile.’

Somewhere not far off, Teesa was already clomping down the guesthouse stairs.

Sonic schizophrenia.

Acoustic Armageddon.

A great crushing cataract of obscene noise wrapped round her, drowned her. Weaponized vocals inducing a wince with every line. A beat so close to subaudible it entered the realms of the metaphysical, shooting tremors not only into SixJen’s bones, teeth and eyes but resonating weirdly – or so she abstracted – in the vicinity of her spirit.

The FerkinLowhd Nightclub, Gridsyne city. Wet, dark, strobe-lit, evil.

The clientele: farmkids in toxic makeup, come from their homesteads for a long weekend. Swaggering townboys with hormonal groinlights flickering green or red. Drunk idiots leering and laughing, androgyny dialled high, bodies hot and sweaty and stinking; goonish accents rendered even less decipherable by volume. And the whole unseemly maggoty mass twitching, throbbing and jerking with mindless regularity – whether ostensibly dancing or otherwise – to the invasive leprous beat.

Like a great hand, SixJen thought, yanking every puppet string all at once.

She moved through the crowd and Hated.

It was odd, she reflected, eyes sweeping left-right-left, finger tracing the single rivet on her gun butt, how the impending end of her thirteen-year hunt could dredge up whatever meagre leavings of emotion remained inside her. It’d happened before, of course. In the battle with the Cobra, weeks earlier. In those dizzying instants, just two days ago, when the
Shattergeist
came to pulverise her and the idiot cop as they dangled in orbit. And now. It was happening now.

Like a taster.
Like a perverse preview of the Holy Reward, except rich with irritation instead of the joy it supposedly granted.

And, yes, like a promise.

The runner:
near
.

But every time …? Every time, so far, the little witch had managed to get away. Every time the buzz died. The numbness trickled back – part soothing, part abominable.
Not now. Not this time
.

The truth was, there was simply nowhere else the fugitives could be. Lex had lost the sneaky little shits below the sporeclouds whilst dutifully rescuing SixJen and the drifting cop. The little computer had obediently traced the last-known trajectory of the
Shattergeist
to its logical end and found only unblemished forest. On a planet of almost endless jungle, studded only by innumerable farming frontiers and midsized glander-towns like Gridsyne, it was anyone’s guess where they’d ditched.

A part of her, a tiny, ugly part, wished she’d instructed Lex to destroy them rather than simply knocking them down.
Finish it. Make it stop.

But no, that’s not how the hunt worked. The killing blow had to be by the hunter’s hand. No minions, no help, no complications, no exceptions.

My kill.

Nobody else’s.

My kill to make. My word to whisper.

‘Boss?’ Lex now said, back in his accustomed place on her lapel, coning-down his voice with a clever wave-transform so she – and only she – could hear him. ‘We’ve got c—’

‘I know. Shhh.’

Aberrant particles: on the edge of her senses and the edge of the crowd. Little motes of Wrong; the subtle distortions in an otherwise innocent scene which betrayed the perfect camouflage of a predator. Like the sound of someone trying to be quiet. Like still grasses on a windy day.

Cops
.

They were twitching along with the music, at least. That showed willing. Spread out, slumped, out of uniform. But in all their preoccupied oversight, all their surveillance-op concentration, it wasn’t quite right: infinitesimally off-rhythm. They were trying too hard. Trying, SixJen grimly supposed, to impress. Alas, in a room packed with drugged-up noddies, each so lost in astrochemical communion that their own responses to the music had become involuntary, unconscious, as biological an imperative as a beating heart or a blinking eye; in the midst of all
that
Shibboleth’s best Undercover Operatives stuck out like the proverbial Damaged Digit.

She wondered idly if they’d clocked her too. Decided it didn’t matter.

No more caution. No more fucking about. No more circling.

There are other sharks in this water
.

Find the prey. Take the shot.

She’d delivered the cop to the central precinct two continents away just hours after the battle
.
He’d played his role – that of the shrieking baitworm – with convincing aplomb, and whilst SixJen felt no particular obligation to reward his performance, Lex had patiently opined that making an enemy of the local cops, on top of everything else, was not a smart move. Even so, she hadn’t intended to hang about at the LawCom HQ any longer than necessary: the fugitives’ trail wouldn’t stay warm for long and she had no intention of enduring the Commander’s predictable fumings at the loss of his ships. And yet, to her surprise, the medal-bedecked moron barely registered her arrival, too occupied with flapping and panicking like a houseproud hostess on the eve of a party.

‘He’s onhim way,’ he kept mumbling, dabbing at sweat and shooing about his staff. ‘Scour thfurkin surface, youselot! Finder fugertives! We ‘elp this bigdick onhim way, thurza big fat Fed’ration subsidy in it!’

‘FIA,’ the cop she’d rescued whispered conspiratorially. ‘Consultant frumma Fed’ration. Toljer.’