[02] Elite: Nemorensis (7 page)

(
He managed two out of three
, she thought.
Not bad, Deathstare Dan.
) But for the nullzone of the whispering room she might even have received the message in time.

In the years since engaging the man’s service she’d accumulated – at last count – a total of twenty-one patsies under similar circumstances. Twenty, now.

Favours owed. Fears displaced. Lives extended unexpectedly.

‘Teesa,’ she told them all. ‘Teesa #32A[M/Tertius]. Formerly owned by Madrien Axcelsus.’

They nodded. They repeated it back. Every time. They sweated and willed her to leave them alone, to go away. Each one of them, she was sure, was convinced she was insane.

‘Find her,’ she’d told them. ‘Find her and every cred I’ve ever earned is yours.’

(Some of them, she liked to think, believed her. She’d meant it.)

‘But let her get away …’ She meant this part too. ‘I will come for you.’

In the morgue she slipped the data-chip into a pocket and headed for the door.

Deathstare Dan, at the very least, had spared her the trouble.

An hour out from the station, watching the camlens footage for the fifth time, SixJen chewed mechanically at a nutripack and wondered if it was supposed to taste of anything. Above her, as broad and invasively close as the
The
’s imagers could manage, Teesa #32A stared directly at her, hollow snout of her pistol yawning black, and said:
the freedom to do exactly what the fuck I like
.

A flash. A noise. And the footage looping back to the start.

‘You ask me,’ Lex chirped, adopting a tone SixJen had long ago learned to recognise as his Cautious Bullshittery voice, ‘she has sad eyes.’

(‘Bullshittery’, that is, because of course he –
it
– had no more capacity for understanding the notion of ‘sad’ than any other electrical puzzlebox mimicking empathy. Particularly when perceived in the magical emo-twinkles of a psychopath’s vid-recorded eyes.)

(And ‘Cautious’ because,
well
—)

‘I
didn’t
ask, Lex.’

‘No, but—’

‘So shut up.’

‘Right.’

She finished the nutripack in silence. That had been down to Lex too – a diplomatic reminder, a few minutes earlier, that she hadn’t eaten anything for a day. Watching the footage through again now, while chewing, SixJen told herself it was for precisely that type of practical organisation –
eat, sleep, crap
– that she kept Lex around. Of course one didn’t have to be a genius, let alone a microscale supercomputer, to figure out the same duties could’ve been handled by a less …
well
—

Eccentric? Opinionated? Annoying?

—a less
human-seeming
companion.

But still, but still. Even with a double emphasis on the ‘seeming’ part of
human-seeming
, even with Lex’s shrill idiosyncrasies being no more than impersonations codified by his manufacturers, still the suspicion troubled SixJen that she tolerated him due to some deep-rooted need for human contact, ersatz or otherwise.

The Voight-Comal C-902 Personal Companion, after all, nicknamed the ‘Culex’ for its mosquitolike size and voice, was designed for the sorts of lonely nobodies for whom an abrasively needy gadget might constitute perfect company. (He probably had a vibrate setting, though she’d never asked.) At root, Lex represented an aggravating, infuriating little pet – an entity dichotomously programmed to be submissively
owned
and yet aggressively challenging all at once.

And so the real truth? The truth which she always seemed to recall at times just like this, then studiously forgot for the sake of her own sanity, was that even though he could be deconstructed to a bundle of metals and quantum charges, even though he was non-sentient and unremarkable, Lex was still more innately attuned to humanity than she was.

More alive than she was.

Sometimes that came in handy.
Sad eyes
, he’d said.
She has sad eyes.
SixJen hadn’t even thought to look.

She switched off the feed and drummed fingers against the controls. Finished chewing her last bland mouthful of nutripack. And then, as if unable to bear the gloom and silence (though in truth simply averse to inaction), went back to roaming through the reams of stellar reportage she’d already guzzled and dismissed during the journey to the Tun/Ton system.

The media condemnations continued apace. If such a thing were possible they seemed now even more abject, more shrill, than before. The footage looped on and on: ships crumbling, lovers talking, lasers firing, journos fucking.

(Expert Opinion, incidentally, had reached consensus in the hypothesis that the fugitives must have released a sex drug into the air of the conference room to cause such extremes of indignity and indecency amongst blameless members of the journalistic community; and hence had chemical assault to their numberless crimes.)

Yet a countersignal was growing too. A backwash of honest opinion which troubled SixJen far more deeply, at some not-quite-understood remove.

They were youngsters, mostly. Kids secretly phoning the microwave shows while their parents slept – to confess they’d donated their pocket creds, their allowances, their savings (and in one giggling girl’s case the contents of her dad’s retirement fund), in the ungainly name of Destructertainment. On another channel, a lank-haired poetry star, fashionably androgynous and openly bombed on something which had turned the whites of hisher eyes a brackish green, cawed and honked through a specially-improvised piece called
Free To Destroy
. The commentary feeds of every two-bit journal on the local net spumed illiterate scrolltrolls word-wanking over ‘Tasty Teesa’. Inevitably-named ‘Tee-shirts’ had already infected the designer sites, and even the pomp-cliques and culturecrits of the artshows had found a way – ‘
inspirational living-installation’
; ‘
neo-po-mo expression of retrogressive (and hence, ahaw, progressive!) nu-nihilism
’; ‘
sub-subversive manifestation of the kitsch brutalist enlightenment!
’ – to transform the gratuitous into the germane.

SixJen sighed. The runner danced through the limelight with a smirk –
sad eyes, sad eyes
– and she, the hunter, prowled and paced the shadows. Uncertain.

Most worrying of all, in that it escalated the phenomenon from the merely unfamiliar to the actively obstructive, a series of false positives had invaded the usual space-lane mediocrity of the newsies. In a community as bogglingly vast as the Federation, ships and crews were forever disappearing and dying, but whereas such materiel losses were usually the preserve of the bottom-of-screen tickertape, or the thinbeam digest pages, now every fresh shipping incident was blared with klaxons wailing and anchormen howling.

Is it them? Is this their next attack?

SixJen switched it off, yet again, in disgust.

‘People,’ said Lex, characteristically forgetting his instruction of silence and unaware he was parroting the very revelation, in the mind of Myquel Dobroba Pela-LeSire LeQuire, which had engendered the whole carnival, ‘really like watching shit blow up.’

SixJen slumped against her geestraps and brooded.

She’d hoped, without much enthusiasm, that Dan’s eyefeed might supply a clue. Some quiet, intangible something (
she has sad eyes, she has sad eyes
) lost amidst the spectacle and impersonality of the other newsfeeds from that conference room. Something to give her an edge, to keep her in contention, to show her the tracks in the sand.

An edge.
That, she’d learned again and again, was often all it came down to. The minutiae. The endless hours of thought and preparation.

After all, how else was she supposed to fill the dead hours?

A man-eating tiger leaves footprints through the forest. A Merovingian apex-crab leaves a slick of hydrogenous pheromones through the swamp. Even a Ford-cluster Megalodon, void-born and void-borne, can be traced from the fucking glandular miniwarps it shits out while feeding.

But the runner?

(She dug a hand in a pocket and fished out the sharp little flechette. Aware but not caring enough to stop. Not feeling the first cut.)

The runner could smash and shatter all she pleased. She could jut up her head and proclaim herself. She could strut and preen in the hunter’s glare—

—and then vanish without trace.

Fucking faster-than-light travel!

The chase – the fight – was never meant to be like this.

SixJen switched the stolen eyefeed back on and silently dared Lex to comment. He had better sense.

‘… all above board,’ Deathstare Dan was saying, now for the sixth time, his view favouring the boy. ‘Someone in …
ohhh
… someone in the glander-trade.’ For the sixth time Teesa hissed as if slapped. ‘Someone like, let’s pluck a name … someone like Madrien Axcelsus.’

The pop star boyfriend scowled, out of his depth. ‘Wh … who?’

‘Imperial businessman. Nice guy, by all accounts. Badly injured in his prime. Very sad. Only woke up recently.’

Watching, self-cutting, SixJen was on the verge of permitting herself a tiny sliver of mental pride aimed at poor dead Dan – specifically at his impressive provocation of the fugitives, presumably in an attempt to avoid the whole ‘if you let her get away I will hunt you down’ part of their agreement – when she saw it.

Sad eyes. Sad eyes.

Except they weren’t. Not in that moment.

Throughout the whole thing, the whole journo-haranguing-an-unprepared-celeb routine, Teesa’s face had remained clouded. Shuttered down, dreamlike, and –
yes, okay, fine
– sad. Sad like a memory. Sad like a moment’s unexpected recall. Sad (and here SixJen was making calculations based on emotions and expressions she could barely remember) like someone reliving something painful for the first time in a long time.

She’d forgotten.

Madrien Axcelsus. The fire. The other slaves, the fat man stumbling and bleeding …

Deathstare Dan had reminded her of a life she didn’t even know she’d had.

And as the woman remembered …? As the name of the slave-owner she’d escaped from, the man she’d nearly killed in the act, as his name infiltrated the runner’s crazy brain and set fires in the edges of her mouth, those eyes –
sad
, ha!
Sad fucking eyes, but not for long!
– they changed. Even SixJen could see it.

Teesa’s sadness went away.

Her eyes rolled towards the camera. And lit up, for a fraction, above a smile so ghastly that, had SixJen not seen it herself, she would’ve doubted the capacity of a face so sweet to bear it.

Around the girl the drama hazed on. The boy blurting questions, the journalist demanding motives.
Why are you really doing this, Teesa?

But the runner’s eyes stayed on the camera. Like a secret message. Like divine communion between prey and predator.

Come and get me
.

SixJen gaped as if slapped. Marvelled, for a second, at the depth of emotion still locked up inside her; at her own capability to feel.

Madrien Axcelsus.

She’s remembered him.

He’s the key.

And SixJen flicked off the feed for the sixth and final time and nodded to herself.

‘I know where they’re going,’ she said.

‘Eh?’ Lex sounded doubtful. ‘How’s that?’

‘Because she wants to be caught.’

This time: war drums.

This time an aggressively actuated beat, pounding between synthesized guitar shrieks and throbbing along helter-skelter melodies. It sped with every acceleration of the
Shattergeist
, dived with every manoeuvre, roared with every flare on the scanner.

Smartmusic software: innovative audio solutions attuned to the
Shattergeist
’s systems, like a Soundtrack To Your Day™.

It’d cost a bloody fortune, and Myq was uncomfortably aware it was significantly better than his old band had ever been. It was giving him a headache all the same.

One of the cargo runners, he noticed, was still shooting at them. It limped grimly across the scanner, surrounded by the broken wrecks of five matching craft killed just before, spattering its ammo with one remaining pod. Brave but stupid.

Luckily for its pilot Teesa didn’t seem in any rush to finish it off. Alas, nor did she seem especially interested in avoiding its gunfire. Myq bit down on the naggish ‘Watch out!’ rising in his throat, bored of being the Sensible One, and rubbed his temples.

B-dum, b-dum, b-dum
.

Ignoring the tracerfire entirely (either trusting to the
Shattergeist
’s shields or simply not caring), Tee coiled the ship up and round to blast full pelt towards yet another of the wriggling shibboletti spore-cows dangling in space, giggling as she went. Hundreds of the rotund creatures were bobbing, wobbling and flexing round the debris zone, spilled free from the cargo pods that had been transporting them.

‘Heeeeeeeeeere it coooooomes!’

She’d noticed early on, hours before, how satisfyingly the shibboletti popped if you crashed into them. She’d been obsessively repeating the act ever since, like a kid determined to bust every balloon at the party. The music software intuited a rising drum roll as they homed in, then—

Cymbal crash! Guitar solo!

—the creature splashed apart like a jewelled beach ball, eyeless head flapping, gaseous bulk spraying frothy green powders across the ship’s flaring shields. Teesa squealed with glee.

‘Your turn!’ she yelled, dragging Myq to the console. ‘Your turn!’

He took the liminals clumsily, powerless in the face of her enthusiasm, and brought the ship about. Far off to starboard the crippled freighter, like some gouty octogenarian trying to keep up with a crazed grandchild, swivelled awkwardly and kept on firing. Fresh shibboletti kept spilling from the cavity where its pods had been before it’d run afoul of the
Shattergeist
. There seemed to be a never-ending supply of the poor, bloated brutes.