[02] Elite: Nemorensis (13 page)

For all its vaunted independence, all its pseudo-legal exports and cultivated cultural alienation, it seemed Shibboleth’s administrators weren’t quite stupid enough to reject the probings of the Federation’s money-packed tendrils; even one as insidious as the Federal Intelligence Agency.

A spook.

A spook, coming here.

For
my
fucking target.

Maybe? Maybe it was a legit response to all the trouble Teesa and Myq had caused; all the unstoppable momentum of their media offensive; the perverse cultural black mirror their celebrity held up to the Federation’s teeming masses. Maybe two idiot kids on a bubblegum rampage really did warrant the agency’s clandestine attention. But probably not.

She’d caught herself running a nervous hand up and down the puckered meat of her left arm –
seven … seven and counting –
and had vacated the Police HQ in haste.

Find her.

Find her
fast.

It hadn’t been hard in the end – just frustrating. A simple matter of extrapolation. The
Shattergeist
’s fuel reserves at the moment it went down + the proximity of repair yards + the availability of viable landing sites and the likelihood (according to the insinuations of the on-net local guidebooks) of any given town’s population honouring the terms of a chunky ‘say nothing’ bribe. Dodgy types, it transpired, were not in short supply on Shibboleth.

Lex had maintained a chirpy (i.e. aggravating) running commentary while crunching the numbers. Narrowing the field to six possible cities in the time it took him to simply say so. SixJen had calmly self-harmed throughout.

No unauthorized landings logged on the worldnet. No record of top-tier aerospace contracts being awarded. No rumours, no arched brows, none of the blooms of violence nor mass promiscuity she would’ve expected. In fact, the more conspicuously the fugitives had disappeared, the more Lex leaned towards his preferred destination.

Gridsyne
. A town well-known as a slithering nest of secrets.

An arbitrary trawl through the settlement’s recent trade records had coughed up a noteworthy order for thirty gallons of lurid pink paint, which SixJen took – with an unfamiliar flush of adrenaline – as confirmation of Lex’s hunch. The
The
’s visual overflight of the town, revealing a freshly-gouged scar across the jungle, thick with freight-lugging megavehicles and repair rigs, simply settled the matter.

The
Shattergeist
, candyfloss-bright, wreathed in oxysparks and a more macho class of frontier robot, sat undergoing repair like a dirty secret in a forest clearing right outside town.

‘You wanna set down here?’ Lex’d asked.

She shook her head. ‘They’re not in there.’

‘We could wait. Ambush.’

Other sharks. Other sharks …

‘No. We find them.
Now
.’

That had been yesterday.

And now? And
now
and
now
–

Now a skinny drunkard, trendily stubbled on one cheek and rouged on the other, stumbled from the pulsating dancefloor mass and clapped hisher hand on SixJen’s shoulder. ‘Awigh’ byooful?’ heshe drawled.

SixJen calmly broke the youth’s middle finger and, stepping swiftly into the throng, used the ensuing (albeit drug-delayed) howls to cover a damn good ogle round the club.

Kids. Kids and cops and cannonfodder.

Damp little Gridsyne could hardly be called a thrumming metropolis, they’d found. By the standards of the überstats and continental megabergs of the Federation or Empire it barely registered: a nothingtown of a mere fifty thousand or so souls.
Why here?
she kept wondering; intuiting by now that nothing the fugitive did was an accident.
Why did she come here?

On the other hand, in context (that is, on a rainforest world without cultural network, bourgeois history, class-division or homegrown entertainment trade) Gridsyne was a Paradise to the grimy, frog-faced workers who called Shibboleth home. Constructed on and around a rocky mesa slowly being subsumed by the jungle, its overriding aesthetic was Big! Chrome! Cylinders! – a veritable pickle-shelf of megascale tincans and looping monorails. Every third structure appeared to hold either a hotel or hostel, testament to the town’s draw on bored steaders from outlying ranches, and SixJen had despaired (theoretically speaking) of ever locating the fugitives. Ultimately the dual application of Money and Menaces down at the civic surveillance centre, followed by three hours of Lex sifting CCTV, had thrown up a single grainy image and a likely location.

(SixJen’s heart, she recalled, had almost exploded as she stared at that picture. Loving couple, hand in hand, stealing furtively into a hostel. She somehow hadn’t quite believed it until then. Hadn’t let it sink in.

This world. Same ground. Same soil.

Here.
)

The guesthouse was no good anyway, twisting the thumbscrews on her building anxiety. ‘Ther’ve gonout,’ the artfully-rude reception ‘bot had announced. ‘
Darncin’
, themzed.’

Again – the urge to lay an ambush. To wait, to be smart, to be sneaky. But SixJen was done waiting now. She was done waiting and the game had changed the instant the runner stopped running and SixJen could all but
feel
the other predator circling in the murk.

Thank goodness, then, that dreary little Gridsyne was home to just one skeevy late-night joint for the hordes of tedium-dodging kids to blow off steam.

Darncin
’, in this town, meant the FerkinLowhd Nightclub.

Packed to perishing point with slabfaced yokels, its clientele showed off all the trendy turns and modal moves they’d picked up from last season’s Federation shows. Like a cargo cult to fashion, this lot: a fanfest to imported affectation. It was easy to spot the wronguns, here.

Cop. Cop. Cop.

At least three. And undoubtedly more in uniforms outside. And all of them, all those
hahaha
discreet bastards, in that broken moment when her honking finger-broken victim smashed glasses and overturned tables (milking hisher dramatic pain a little too vigorously, to SixJen’s eye),
all
of them turned to glance at a dark corner across the floor. As if checking Teacher was watching.

SixJen oozed to a natural halt. Heat and cold fighting across her skin. Fingertips questing –
gun, gun, gun
.

Was there someone there? Some shape lurking? Some trenchcoated goon; some sinister patch of darker-than-dark?

The.

Competition.

She was right not to have waited at the guesthouse. Right not to have waited at the
Shattergeist
. Still … impossible to tell who or what was brooding there. Not with the strobe lights deepening every darkness. Not with bodies squirming, tattoos illuminating left and right. Not with the beat distorting the air itself. Not with adrenaline, that half-remembered invader, that atom-splitter of the mind, choking her senses.

And not.

When
she
—

‘Boss.’

—was right—

‘Boss, look, isn’t that–’

—
there
.

Time did what time does. The room went away. The gun.

Take it.

There.

The runner.

The runner and her slave. Slow dancing. Sealed inside themselves. Close and classy and kind – smiling eyes, smiling mouths – in a bubble, a swamp, a sex-stinking festerpit of kissing, touching, rubbing kids. All round them. Ignored.

The gun.

No waiting.

Sharks. Cops. Competition.

This wasn’t the old game. No shields, no ships, no plasma bombs. This wasn’t how SixJen worked. But at the end of the world, on the cusp of the Great Reward, as the golden bough snapped and the hunter roared and the runner recoiled—

She raised the gun.

‘Boss—’

Breathed.

There.

The fugitives saw her.

People (on another planet, on another plane) started to scream.

There!

A half-glance. She could spare the time. Nothing if not cautious. A stolen stare at that dark corner. Wary of jackals gazumping her prize.

Empty
. She could see from here. Crazylight playing across it.
No threat.

SixJen the killer laughed out loud for the first time in thirteen years, raised the gun to the face of the beautiful prey she’d chased twice across the galaxy, prepared to Say The Word—

—and watched with dreamlike detachment as her own hand opened like a smashed plum. As smoke and soot spumed on a crest of fragmented fingers (
mine
). As a gristle-thick wad of blood and bone (
mine, mine
) slapped into her eyes.

She dropped. Didn’t mean to but did. Somewhere far away the screams stopped for an instant, swatted clear by a thunderclap to muffle the world, then resumed louder than before. And yet more distant.

Strange
.

Heat and pain and a faraway wetness. The sound of water. None of it bothered her much, except insofar as it suggested someone had mercifully switched off the music.

A thought swam up.

The runner! Where’s the r—

She became aware of movement. The herd shuffling and bolting as one, tangling towards the exit, spronking and whooping, as eerily synchronised in panic as in rhythm. The door was closed. No way out.

She clasped her good hand – her
only
hand, hahaha,
that’s not funny
– to the lumpen mess she’d somehow discovered beneath the other wrist.

How did that happen?
Things seemed greyer than usual.

She cast about herself for … for
what was it?
There was something important she was supposed to do. Nearby a young couple clenched one another hard at the heart of a growing space. For some reason the sight of them sent SixJen scrabbling for her gun –
no, no, idiot, not that hand, look at the mess you’ve made –
but even as she struggled with
that
instinct she realised neither youth was staring at her.

‘Dammit boss boss get out he’s behind you he’s—’

It was a funny little voice. Someone chattering right into her ear. Right into her head, even. That didn’t seem normal, but at the very least the shrill tones seemed to know what they were talking about. She obediently twisted to see.

Ah
.

Things came back to SixJen in a rush. Like continents shifting. Like icebergs slamming down. The music hadn’t stopped at all.

Just the sight of him, she supposed. The numbness slid back to cover the trauma. The pain dwindled away.

‘Federal Agent,’ the man shouted, just loud enough to be heard. No emotion in the voice. This time the music really did stop.

He had dead eyes. He had dead eyes and that was almost all SixJen needed to know. The clothes, the hair, the face: all preternaturally average. The badge: probably genuine. It didn’t matter.

He wasn’t looking at her anyway. Gun up, smoke coiling. Dundering local cops, all twitches and sweat on either side. Squawking kids packed together at the far edge of the room, pushing and panting.

He stepped past her. Paused, inches away, not looking down. Like she was beneath notice: an insect; an error; a
nothing.
His hand sneaking gently to hitch up the cuff of his left sleeve.

Three.

Scars.

SixJen nodded, just once. Theory ratified. Fears confirmed.

And then he strode onwards. Cops hustling into his wake like leaves on a stream, rifles levelled, boots kicking out to keep her down. All on another world.

Through their legs she watched the man who’d beaten her place his pistol against the woman she’d come to kill and say:

‘Down.’

Grandstanding.

She curled a lip. A sudden insane desire to shout,
Fool!

Don’t you know how important this is? Don’t you know how many times she’s slipped away?

Don’t talk! Don’t look away! Don’t perform!

Pull the trigger, prick! Kill her! Kill her and be done with it!

It’s what
she
would’ve done.

‘Down,’ the man said again, waggling the gun. SixJen wondered if he had a name.

The runner sank to her knees. Her pretty little boyfriend, trembling, ghost-skinned, glossy with terror, tried to mumble something. Tried to protest, to interject – all damp hands and gangle-knees. Then gave a strangled cry and simply folded away, muzzlestruck. Bleeding. A maybeblur of movement round the agent’s arm.

He’s quick
.

As if sharing her awe the crowd moaned, a low registration of sympathy. And the runner—

The runner simply stared down the gun barrel and smiled.

‘For crimes too numerous to mention,’ the agent monotoned, ‘but principally the wanton destruction of Federal and corporate properties, and murder in the first degree, you are hereby sentenced to death.’

Making it look good
, SixJen thought, clamping down on the wreck of her hand.
Making it look good so he’s got a way out afterwards.

Smart.

She
knew better. Knew the man didn’t give a crap about the crime nor the sentence. Didn’t care for the Federation nor the Agency he served.

Just a smart cover for the hunt. A way of plugging into the galaxy. An ear to the wall of human affairs, like Captain goddamn Delino and his goddamn pirates.

(Had she, SixJen wondered at last, approached the whole thing the wrong way? Should she have been more
involved?
Entered
this
organisation or
that
clan? Been more dependent on the people amongst whom she hunted?)

Made no difference now, she supposed.

The agent straightened his arm. The crowd drew its breath. The runner didn’t stop smiling.

‘You’ve got the wrong person.’ It came out of SixJen like an escaping spirit. Without thought. Without fully understanding what she was saying or planning.

But far, far louder than necessary.
Making sure the kids can hear.