[02] Elite: Nemorensis (8 page)

This
, Myq thought,
could take a while.

Curiously the musical software had decided the appropriate sound for each ammo-strike against their shields was a flatulent tuba honk, so his assumption of the controls was marked by an embarrassing medley of dissonant farts as lead rattled around them. It felt like a personal slight against his piloting.

‘Can we turn that bloody thing off?’ he muttered, as the drums started up again.

‘There!’ Teesa cried, ignoring him. ‘Look at the size of
that
one!’

It was, indeed, a whopper. Myq obediently accelerated, trying to sigh as if weary but, in fact, feeling his heart race. Infected, as ever, by Teesa’s influence.

The shibboletti were among the galaxy’s stranger forms of wildlife. Roughly spherical, on closer inspection they were formed of two lobed halves like cloves of garlic with a stalk-protrusion for a head (pocked by damp osmosis patches and rudimentary sense organs) and a set of innumerable wormlike ‘feet’ with which they could blindly stumble about. Like much of the non-terrestrial life encountered over the millennia the shibboletti defied neat categorisation as ‘animals’, bearing more in common with spore-releasing fungi. The honking things were farmed on the independent world of Shibboleth for which they were named, which was itself so-called (so the story went) because of its occupants’ bloody-minded insistence on manufacturing a bizarre accent just to make outsiders uncomfortable about pronouncing things wrong.

All of this Myq has swiftly gleaned from a netsearch during Teesa’s beastie-bursting shenanigans, all while trying to ignore the music, and as he now powered towards the huge specimen ahead he quietly wished he’d had the chance to find out whether they were capable of feeling pain or not.

Not, he supposed, that it would’ve made any difference. Somewhere off beyond the field of bleating and blustering creatures, and the tumbling hulks of the cargo ships which had been transporting them, a small flotilla of media vessels lurked voyeuristically.

The galaxy’s watching.

Gotta give ‘em a show
.

It was Teesa who’d brought them here, of course. A nondescript patch of space at the gravity well limits of #A5FFP – a planetless star with an unfussy blue/green sheen.

‘You’ll see,’ she kept saying. ‘You’ll see.’ He’d assumed she had some prior knowledge about a likely target for their ongoing rampage (though he couldn’t imagine where she’d picked up such a tip) and he wasn’t wrong. #A5FFP, it transpired, was the preferred hop point for freighters on the cargo run between Shibboleth and the big trading outposts on the edge of the territory. Five or six FTL jumps into the ride, the livestock haulers would pause above the petroleum maelstroms of the grimy sun’s surface to recalculate nav solutions, slurp on some hasty coffee and enjoy a moment’s peace.

Then get blown to hell by a pair of insane crowdfunded sex-crazed lunatics – all in time to over-bassed music – while an impartial gallery of journalists looked on. So far the honourable newshounds had elected not to summon the authorities, presumably preferring to wait for each new cargo ship to come stumbling to its (photogenic) doom – and recording the ’
Geist
whimsically exploding shibboletti in the interim. It was, Myq grudgingly supposed, great TV.

The money in their account had never poured in so fast.

The drum roll began again. The great creature loomed huge onscreen, blissfully unaware –
NoGod, I hope so
– of the ionic fistfront descending towards it. But at the last instant its idiot writhings ejected a wisp of powdery gas from some unseen orifice, propelling it halfway clear, so the ’
Geist
tore inelegantly through its side instead of performing a perfect strike. No cymbal crash for Myq, no crazed guitar solo, just the comedy scales of a swanee whistle and a protracted raspberry as the startled creature corkscrewed off in a long spastic stream, like an untied balloon.

‘I don’t think this music thing likes me,’ Myq grumbled, gesturing Tee to take back the controls. But instead of sliding the liminals towards herself she simply slipped onto his lap and wrapped her hands round his, pinning them to the stick, then executed a few impetuous barrel rolls while wriggling. Bored, he supposed, of killing pseudocows.

‘How much do you know,’ she said, turning up the music, ‘about life cycles?’

‘You what?’

‘You know … egg laying, larval stages, all that.’

‘Can’t say I’m much of an expert.’ He squinted at the side of her face. Her voice sounded weird. ‘Why?’

‘Interesting subject.’ She jiggled gently against his crotch – a silent titter, a private joke. Then steered the ’
Geist
slowly, inexorably, towards the half-dead cargo ship, still gamely firing at them.

The media vessels, Myq noticed, were gently shunting forwards. Sensing, he supposed, something special.

‘I mean, it’s not always just a case of … ha, of When Mummy and Daddy Love Each Other Very Much. Mammals are pretty fucking dull, comparatively speaking.’

‘What’s got into you?’

The cargo ship hosed a stream of ordinance against their shields. Freshly tuned and powered-up for the tenth time – the fruits of numberless donations – they barely registered the tickle of lead. The software, Myq noted glumly, was still cheerfully associating the salvo with fart sounds.

Tee didn’t seem to mind. In fact, Tee didn’t seem to be paying attention to much of anything except her own words.

‘Even terra life, you know? Plenty of weirdness there. Insects spend most of their lives as grubs. And young crustaceans are just these … these blobby little plankton things for months before they get all crusty and clawy. And as for sex? Ha! Fish don’t fuck, poor things, just squirt their junk all over the place and mix it up. Most birds – did you know this? Most birds don’t even have cocks or cracks. Just these slimy patch things.’

‘Tee, you’re … you’re kind of freaking me out. Why do you know all this? And what’s it got to do w—’ Myq stopped. Blinked. The music, as if psychically reactive, affected a long descending whistle tone, like a bomb falling into his brain.

Oh no …

Teesa half turned to face him, a quizzical smile on her face. ‘What is it?’

He cleared his throat. ‘Are you … are you trying to suggest we have a kid?’

She just threw back her head and roared with laughter.

‘Just checking,’ he muttered.

The
Shattergeist
now hung a scant few kliks from the cargo ship. The squat thing, entirely wrecked along one flank, had nosed its way protectively into the field of debris round the even-more-successfully-buggered corpses of its fellows. Some of the crews from the other ships had bailed in time: the scanner now finding them gathered in a frightened little cluster of RemLok suits just behind the surviving vessel.

Which, as if intuiting that the predator responsible was finally intending to finish the job, finally gave up on its pointless firing.

Teesa tapped a control –
weapons hot … here we go …
– and picked up on her monologue as if it was never interrupted.

‘
Non
-terrestrial life –
now
. Soooo much weirdness. You’ve got your supra-binary life forms, first of all. Three genders, four, even five. Different combinations of parenthood, different outcomes for different environmental situations. You’ve got your novel life forms which reproduce through, what, through consumption or decomposition or bloody parasitic possession. And that’s before you get to the trippy aphysical stuff. You know there’s a thing out in the Frelix system that spends two thirds of its life as a drifting chain of pheromones? And now they think – “
they
”, y’know? The experts – they think we’re going to start recognising a lot of humdrum stuff as exotic higher-plane life. Piece of music that won’t get out of your head? Madcap idea you’ve just got to spread around? What’s that if not reproduction?’

Myq gurgled.

He, throughout all of this, was having something of a crisis. For the first time he could remember, since meeting Teesa, despite being neither exhausted nor sore, and despite the more-than-conspicuous wriggling of her arse against his lap, he did not have an erection.

‘You … Tee, you said you were a chauffeur, right? Back when you were … y’know?’

‘A slave.’

‘Yeah. So. Not a biology teacher?’

Another half turn to face him, another sideways smile, another bum-squirm. Another profound failure to arouse. ‘Long time ago,’ she said. ‘Learnt a lot since then. Lot of water under the bridge.’

Right
, he thought.
Yeah.

Like that bit about how you crippled your boss and set fire to the whole place.

Water. Bridge.

He hadn’t summoned the courage to ask her about that yet. Partly, he supposed, it felt like such a petty thing to quibble over, in context.

Like:
Hey Tee, y’know how we spend most days exploding stuff? How we’ve probably racked up a double-nebular body count? How you shot a guy in the face back in Tun/Ton? Okay, well, just so’s you know, all that pales into comparison to you Not Telling Me about a significantly-less-horrible episode from your distant past.

Whiny crap.

Here was the truth: Teesa wasn’t
his
. Wasn’t anyone’s. Someone like her never would be, never could be, never should be. Myq felt stupid and childish for even being hurt at the lack of disclosure; rendered a whinging brat by his unthinking need to understand and know her fully.

I love her. NoGod help me, I love her.

I want every part of her. Memories and all.

Teesa ripped the cargo ship apart with supreme indifference. The music software barely seemed to respond, sensitive to her ambivalence. She spared, Myq noticed, a perfectly aimed shot for a single smallish shibboletti tumbling past, which burst in a satisfying haze of spores.

‘Take those things,’ she said, nodding at the twist of fur and skin which remained of the creature, inured to the operatic curtains of nuclear fire blossoming nearby. ‘They’re barely conscious, they’re just as happy in a vacuum as atmosphere, they’re totally inedible, they’re extremely ugly, but they have one of the most exciting reproductive cycles you’ll ever hear about.’

‘Uh, Tee …?’ Myq said. She’d softly started guiding the ’
Geist
into the flaming debris. ‘What’re y—’

‘What happens is, they’re all female. Every single one. Grow up from spores, see? Airborne – tiny little things. Settle on a bit of plant matter, om-nom-nom, few years later you’ve got your basic shaggy shibboletti. And they’re very valuable. I mean, that’s exactly the point. Somewhere down in those ballbag skins there’s a clutch of drippy little glands that make some of the finest narcotics known to man. Illegal in the Federation, but in the Empire? Or some quaint little indie-world? These beasties’re worth a bomb, Myq.’

She smirked at that. Like sharing a joke with herself.

As if dreaming, Myq watched lumps of wreckage and great green tangles of dead shibboletti carom off the shields. She drove them deeper into the morass, searching, so it seemed, for something. But beneath his confusion at her plans, beneath his bewilderment at her weird ejaculation of expertise, beneath even his growing panic at the startling lack of horniness crackling between them, Myq felt a tiny spark of memory light up in his mind.

A commodity baron
, a wheedling little voice said.
Someone in … ohhh … someone in the glander-trade.

The reporter. The dead reporter had said that.

‘Tee,’ Myq said. ‘Tee, how d’you know so much about shibbole—’

‘Now here’s the fascinating part. If you get enough of the damn things together, all at once, one of them starts to change. Takes a week or two. Becomes … well, for want of a better word: male.’

‘Your owner … back when you were a sl—’

‘Sssh, listen.’ She banked right, nudging aside a sheet of dented hull. Checking, so Myq thought, to make sure the media ships were close at hand. ‘Now, the gland-merchants? The farmers? It’s in their interest not to let this happen. I’ll come back to that. So they regulate it really carefully these days. They’ve got, ohhh, sprays, hormone-mists, all that. Make sure no males appear. They let it happen once in a blue moon, sure, but only under really carefully controlled conditions. It’s this whole big thing.’

‘Tee, where are … you … taking …’

His voice died. The music went sinister.

Ohhhhno
.

Hanging ahead of them, swivelling comically to face the ’
Geist
with suit-controlled airbursters puffing, the ejected crewmen of all those ships dangled in the void. Clustered together.

Safety – so they’d thought – in numbers.

‘Why don’t the farmers want males popping up?’ She gripped his hands round the stick, holding them in place. ‘I’ll tell you. It’s because when a male’s mature – all big and bristly and red – he honks out this great cloud of hormones.
Poooft!
And the second that happens? All those hundreds and thousands of big farty females, Myq, they get oh-so-very frisky.’

She – and hence
he
– pressed forwards on the stick. The cluster of figures began to writhe in panic. The music did something shivery and abstract, building in shrill tones.

‘Tee … Tee, the journos’re watching.’

‘You know what a frisky shibboletti female does, Myq?’

The crewmen flopping, thrashing, shoving at one another, trying to beat physics. Trying to soar free of the pack. The music spiralling high …

‘They’re
watching
, Tee. Exploding shit – fine! People
like
that, but—’

‘Exploding shit. Ha! Exploding shit! You’re so right!’

‘What? I don’t … Tee, there are limits, okay, and—’

‘A frisky shibboletti gets unstable, Myq. One little knock?
Boom
! System floods with unstable organics. Literally detonates. One after another,
chain reaction
right through the herd. Boom! Boom! Boom! Blasts unfertilised spores right across the sky!’

‘Tee, don’t, don’t, don’t—’