[02] Elite: Nemorensis (3 page)

‘She’s good,’ SixJen intoned.

Only Lex – after long years of experience in what passed for SixJen’s body-language – might have detected the shadow of a whiff of a ghost of admiration in her voice. Perhaps even a frisson of concern. Fortunately, via lessons learned long ago, he wasn’t in the habit of mentioning it.

‘You’re sure it’s her at the wheel?’ he chirruped. ‘Not the patsy? This … this rock star guy?’

‘It’s her.’

‘So what action?’

A twinned bubble of lightflares whited-out the holo’s gain. The first was one of two grossly overloaded Killkure™ plasma bombs the
The
’s scanners had spotted aboard the merc’s Cobra, sublimating several tonnes of vac-borne spacetrash. The second, somewhat less elegant, was the Cobra itself: shunting brutally into a cunningly-deposited lump of dazzlechaff the fugitive had dumped during combat. By the time the screen had compensated for both dazzlespots the two ships had emerged with shields bleeding antineutrinos and hulls trendily distressed, but otherwise unharmed. And resumed their maddening dance.

‘No action,’ SixJen said. ‘We wait.’

This, after all, was the game. The game as she chose to play it.

No excitement. No rush.

Let the other competitors show themselves. Let them be exhausted and drained by the chase. Let them chip away at the prey until both are panting and weakened. Let them lower their guards. Let them stand, swords steaming, beside the lake beneath the tree with the golden bough—

And then.

Then!

Lex made a point of clearing the throat he didn’t have. ‘There is,
ah …
one thing …’

‘Mm?’

‘You’re doing it again.’

SixJen glanced down, knowing instantly what he meant. Sure enough, a ragged red line welled from a cut along the back of her forearm: one edge of the flechette’s sharpened fins pricking in for a second pass. A tube of blood, untroubled by gravity, sat over the wound like a crimson worm, rippling longitudinally, waiting for its own surface tension to fail. She glared at it, at what she’d done to herself, with a faint flicker of shame: a sensation so unfamiliar that it perversely engendered an equal and opposite buzz of savage pride –

I can still feel!

– both of which Actual Emotions so overwhelmed her that she swiped away the blood without thinking, scattering a small swarm of glinting, weightless rubies to shatter and circulate through the cockpit.

Her annoyance at
that
, depressingly, barely registered.

Numb.
In and out. And worse every day.

She clamped a hand to the wound, covering it and the countless others – some scabbed, some scarred – already whorling across the back of her right arm, noting that even on self-destructive autopilot her brain had been coldly rational enough not to slice too deep. In silent comparison she stole a glance at the back of her
other
arm.
The holy one
. No crazy crisscross there. No messy displacement guiltily recorded on tea-tone skin.

The left arm, no, was not a canvas for the Casual Doodle.

But still: the left arm displayed scars. Seven, in all. Deeper, more deliberate; each a puckered pair of thin keloid lips. Five she’d collected in person. The second victim, and the fourth, had each already accounted for one other apiece, hence seven. She’d gained most of them from back near the start, back when the chase seemed fresh and fierce, before the empty spaces and the creeping cold.

Seven down
.
Four still out there
.

It had never lasted this long before.

She returned her gaze to the holo and shuttered down her eyes. The dogfight, she noted, was growing even dimmer.

‘We’re drifting out of range,’ Lex supplied. ‘You want me to get us cl—’

‘I’ll do it.’

She flew perfectly, of course. A few exquisite tweaks, a few directional nudges to affect a course-change, parroting a Brownian-buffeting by other nearby junk, to carry them softly back towards the battle. So deft was her touch that the
The
barely lifted from its sleeper-state: expenditures of heat so faint that none but the most grotesquely refined systems could have detected them, and even then only with pilots undistracted by the more pressing concerns of mortal combat.

More sharply defined onscreen by proximity, the merc’s Cobra was maintaining a constant stream of kinetic destruction: every fifth shell a blazing tracer, every twentieth a rad-dirty klikbug to help his vectoring. SixJen watched him tailspin from an outfacing loop to intercept the runner as it came back round – and for one hateful second she was certain he’d done it: had outflown the fugitive, had smuggled a direct line onto its least shielded front-facing aspect. But the clever little move paid no dividends. Even as the Cobra poured fire and tweaked for its strike the
Shattergeist
had already shifted out of alignment: a crash-halt followed by a monodirectional burst from a dorsal thruster. It simply dropped perpendicular to the combat, like an anchor into an abyss – precisely the sort of spatial sneakiness which marked out the born spacejockey from the glorified atmoflyer.

‘Huh,’ Lex declared. Algorithmically impressed.

Far worse for the hunter, as he flopped and struggled to regain his line, was a massive slab of the dead freighter which came bumbling from the mass to fragment across his starboard fluke.

Shitty luck
, SixJen thought without sympathy. Quietly self-censoring the arising notion that the
Shattergeist
’s eccentric moves might have been leading to this all along.
Nobody’s that good
.

The shields on the merc’s Cobra held up, though barely, and the monstrous wreckage crumbled around them like an icesheet striking flame. But in all the foaming ionic chaos the Cobra’s inertia was annihilated, and it tumbled back from the collision with the selfsame force it was so flamboyantly expending to survive.

And then the turn.

In that one moment of shieldlight and confusion, as the hunter grappled with unhelpful physics and hurried to recharge his shield, the
Shattergeist
had all the time in the world to bolt. To max-gee out of range and start pounding out the warpjumps: testing the chaser’s ability to follow, widening the lag in a great, glorious chase across inconceivable space. SixJen herself sat poised to pursue.

But the
Shattergeist
didn’t move.

Lex parroted a pointless intake of nonbreath. ‘Are they …?’

It opened fire.

Seeping open hotmodded bays which the
The
’s scanners hadn’t even spotted, the so-called pleasure yacht coughed out a bright volley at its tormentor.

‘Closer,’ SixJen whispered, feeling something – something so tiny it was barely there – akin to surprise. She was happy to let Lex handle the tweaks this time, more concerned with the show. Determined to be ready, but … yes. Off-balance.

The runner was
not
supposed to scheme.

The runner was
not
supposed to plan.

Still, for all the cocksure precociousness of the
Shattergeist
’s assault, it was about as stupid a move as its pilots could have taken. Flashy, spectacular, heroic – suicidal.

Element of surprise
.
Unpredictable behaviour
. All well and good, but never quite as effective as a top-spec suite of hyperdestructive nuclear overkill and a ship (a top-spec Cobra Mk. III, say, in gloss black and gold) built like a toxic arrowhead. Hence the merc barely noticing the
Shattergeist
’s whiny little salvo.

Bit by bit the Cobra stopped spinning. Regained its poise. And yawed like a tilted compass towards its prey.

SixJen felt something shift along her neck. The fine hairs there, reacting dumbly to an adrenal quickening her mind had long since forgotten how to feel. Whoever he was, however pissy or humiliated or (for all she knew) aroused he might be by the long predictable fight and the short unpredicted lesson in Being Made To Look Like A Rookie, the bounty hunter did the one and only sensible thing he could.

He fired everything.

Missiles flew, scratching chalky contrails to fizz and disperse in instants. Cannon flared their weird airless puffs of muzzlelight and lead. A pair of clunky railguns heaved uranium splinters so fast the
The
’s systems couldn’t track them, stabbing so acutely at the
Shattergeist
’s shield that SixJen could see it buck backwards with her naked eye.

… and because the lunatics in the fugitive craft had so obligingly turned their nose towards the hunter to enable their spasm of return fire, this whole ghastly bombardment, this whole grim curtain of heat and atomic decay, thundered upon the bow of the
Shattergeist
like a cosmic shroud, wrapping and choking its body, erasing its shields in jigsaws of energetic collapse. The fields choked and died long before the barrage was spent, leaving its final stages to tear and gouge directly at the yacht’s armour.

‘Multiple direct hits,’ Lex pointlessly announced, bulbous lights tearing and deforming across the scanner. ‘Their shields’re fucked. Main engine’s gone cold. They’re driftwood.’

Still the self-consuming fireballs. Still the rail-chaff ripping at ablative sheets. The
Shattergeist
dervished and puked chaff with every strike, and SixJen made a conscious effort not to grind her teeth. Not to reach for the controls.

Don’t kill them
, she willed.
Don’t you kill them, you shit. Not yet.

They’re mine.

In all of this SixJen the killer was trusting, and worse still risking
everything
in that trust, that her impressions of the nameless merc were accurate; that in all his swagger and bombast he wouldn’t simply vaporize his targets. That he’d be content with first crippling them … with stealing closer to gloat. And that, if he had even the slightest sense, he’d already spotted the value of the
Shattergeist
and its upgrades and was at this moment, like any smart businessman, smelling the money …

She couldn’t take them both. Not at the same time. But one weakened enemy after another?

That
was the game.
Those
were the odds.

The storm faded at last. A few diaphanous webs of chemical fire lingered for an instant, drawing back from the battered yacht like wings, then died away. SixJen didn’t bother asking Lex about life signs. If she’d miscalculated, if the fugitive was dead, she would have known it already.

‘We got range?’ she whispered, unable to stop herself glancing down at her left arm. The seven scars.

‘Surely do. At current drift … let’s see … closest pass is in three minutes. Out of range four after that.’ Lex, as ever, sounded inappropriately chipper. ‘You want me to start sl—’

‘Just stand by. I say the word and we go hot. All the way hot.’

‘Yep. We got some more comm-traffic out there, by the way.’

‘Let’s hear it.’

A shrill sound expanded into the cockpit, so abrupt and abrasive SixJen autotwitched for her pistol.

Screaming
.

Something akin to panic, muffled deep down, swarmed into her.
She’s hurt! She’s dying! How does it work if she just bleeds to d—

She stopped herself. Listened a little closer to the voice.

Yes: unmistakably female, and yes: unmistakably shrieking. But …

(Lex sniggered out loud.)

But not in pain
.

SixJen cleared her throat. ‘They’re … they’re broadcasting this at the Cobra?’

‘Uh-huh. They got no idea we’re intercepting. Heh … Excitable little thing, isn’t she? Oh, wait, here we go, matey’s just opened a line too …’

Another voice. The same scrambled pomp-merchant mercenary who’d announced his arrival with such fanfare before.

‘Occupants of … occupants of the
Shattergeist
…’ it said, all but drowned by the shrieks. Even SixJen, generally blind to behavioural nuance, could hear the man’s awkwardness. ‘A-as a licensed agent of the Pilot’s Federation I’m … I’m here to claim a bounty placed on … on …’

The orgasmic cries modulated down into something more akin to the mewing of a hysterical cat. SixJen thought she could make out a deeper voice behind it, grunting along in time.

‘Look,’ said the bounty hunter. ‘Look, if you could … if you’d just stop that for a second and listen, I’d …’

‘
Oh ffffuuuuuuuuuuckhereitcomesagaaaaainnn
—’

‘I’m … I’m trying to throw you a lifeline, you little shits! The P.F.’s got six grand on you – cuffed or carrion. I’m just … I’m just thinking maybe you send me on my way with … with a …’

SixJen permitted herself a single, professional nod.
Smelling money.

But the fugitives either weren’t listening or didn’t care.

‘Last chance!’ the merc hissed, frustration bubbling through the scrambler. ‘I have a three-ton plasmic warhead
right here
, and unless y—’

SixJen killed the signal with a flicker.
Heard enough
.

Took a deep breath.

‘Lex?’

‘Present.’

Another breath.
Hold it. Try to feel it.

(
Try to feel
anything.)

Pointless.

‘Go hot.’

The
The
awoke around her. Stabilisers shields sensors guns guns
guns
every every
everything
all at once, whirring and rushing to life. A vituperative ghost casting off its sheets. A baleful red heat-return winking open on her enemies’ screens.

‘Kill him.’

The rush
. The fuming ragesounds of munitions ripping from pods, tubes venting lancets of compact hell. (There was a time she’d found this part thrilling.)

Now she just sniffed and fiddled with the flechette.

In the end the Bounty Hunter lasted less than a minute. In all the startled confusion of a newly emerged threat (she imagined him swearing and stumbling, alarms croaking, lights blaring, struggling to reorient and respond) he barely got off a single shot. His cannons were still incandescent from the dogfight, his railguns left stupidly unloaded, his shields still coughing from the debris collision. He’d thought himself alone. Alone with a defenceless victim, a single fucknormous Killkure™ missile and no need to consider anything else.