[02] Elite: Nemorensis (9 page)

He tried to pry her free, tried to turn the ship, tried to do
anything
, but with a strength belying her slight frame she clung to his hands, rushing forwards, crushing them both into the geecouch, grim smile spreading. She crept a single finger out from the stick to stab at a control.

[SHIELDS LOWERED]

‘What the f—?’

‘The male’s the last one to pop. Fertilises as many of those spores as it can. Great whacking clouds of the things. Can you imagine?’

‘Teeeeee—’

‘Lovemaking, Myq. The act of lovemaking.’ The music spiked. The crewmen thrashed. ‘Making love through destruction.’

And the crewmen splattered against their armour, and the music roared and spun and crashed, and the media ships inched forwards to lap it all up, and bodies spumed and decompressed and went brittle, and Myq said
nononono
, and something that might’ve been a head got lodged in the brackets of the scan-arrays until it froze and clunked away, and it wasn’t until Tee was ducking and racing free of the debris, thumbing the FTL to who-knew-where, that he realised with jaw agape that whatever monomaniacal little spell had come over her had passed, that her whooping and howling glee was back with a vengeance, and that – in simple consequence – his erection had instantly returned.

‘Fun,’ she said, jiggling, as they hit warpspace.

The media ships followed. Well-trained weasels, they slipped along cosmic tunnels in pursuit of the
Shattergeist
’s signature exotics, hot on their heels for each of the five jumps they took, maintaining during stopovers the safe distance of jackals watching a lionkill. At one point Teesa muttered something abstruse about them already overstaying their welcome.

Myq said nothing about that. He had bigger things in mind.

‘Why did you have to do that?’ he kept saying. ‘They were … those were
real people
.’

‘By which you mean you could see them instead of them being inside ships. It’s no different, silly boy.’

He gaped a bit at that. Another hop. Another crash from hyperspace.

‘Where are we going?’ he started up again. ‘Why did you have to …? Those. Those bloody reporters, look. Shouldn’t we try to lose them? Tee, why did you do that?
What’s going on?
’

And so on.

‘You’ll see,’ she kept saying. Peeling off her clothes. Peeling off his. ‘You’ll see.’

‘But. Why did you
do
that? Why did you have to do tha—?’

‘I didn’t have to, Myq.’ Was that a flicker of irritation he saw, deep in her eyes? ‘I didn’t have to, but I did. That’s sort of the point, darling.’

On one of the stopovers, when his self-conscious worrying evidently overcame her predilection for enigma, she shot him a carefully-rehearsed
get ready to be wrong
look, logged into the remote-access bank, and waved for his attention.

Donations tumbled in faster than the system could track.

‘See?’ she said.

There aren’t any limits.

And then the last hop. The stars settling to static. A cloudy green planet rotating below. And Tee smirking at him, both still sweaty from the last bout.

‘Shibboleth,’ she said.

A commodity baron
, Myq remembered.
Someone in … ohhh … someone in the glander-trade.

Apparently one of his indentured workers shot him in the spine and nicked his shuttle.

The questions were already rising in his chest when Tee interrupted them with a great yelp of joy and the music, still infuriatingly loud, ear-raped with a blast of crazy.

Alarms, lights, fiery flares and missile contrails.

[ALERT: MULTIPLE FIRING-SOLUTIONS DETECTED.]

The cops were waiting.

‘All right,’ SixJen said. ‘It’s them.’

The cops –
the idiots
– began to whoop and cheer down the radio. She should’ve expected that. She might even have excused it, coming as it did from a pair of action-starved provincial flyboys so hopped on stimms and AggroUps it was a miracle they didn’t get into a fight every time they passed a mirror, if they hadn’t both blundered one step further into the realms of dickwitted overexcitement by instantaneously firing off their missiles.

Idiots.

In all their paranoid tightfistedness, and with a neurotic refusal to give credence to the insights of a mere mercenary, the top brass at Shibboleth’s semi-privatised no-bit LawCom had assigned a meagre two ships to assist in SixJen’s orbital vigil. Even when she’d taken a passable stab at feigning incandescence towards the precinct commander –
don’t you know who I’m talking about? They’re coming
here
, you sticky little mistake! –
the man conceded only one extra ship, and no extra pilot.

‘Dunyer wreck it neither,’ he’d warned, waggling a finger.

She was grouchily grateful for that, at least. She’d decided she couldn’t field the
The
directly against the
Shattergeist
, not now the runner knew its shape and ident. One glance at SixJen’s pride and joy (as it were) on the edge of a firefight and that psychotic little witch could be sure to—

To what?

Run a mile? Hit FTL and not look back? Turn and bring the fight?

Or reveal she’d been expecting it all along and unveil her master plan?

(The runner’s not supposed to bloody scheme!)

None of those outcomes accorded with SixJen’s preferred species of victory anyway – both achieving
and
surviving it all at once. So an honorary cop she’d have to temporarily be. But the commander’s skinflintery, alas, had gone further still.

“Arfload of ammo’s all yer having,’ he’d burbled, thicker than his own accent. ‘Dun
know
yer, dun
trust
yer, dun
like
yer. An whyth fuck wouldey fugertives com
ere
hennywise? You earda ‘casts. Theyoff aving funs ‘sploding freighters in the oo-knows-where. Caught my’sown fucking daughter dernating to ther bankyccount, other day.’

The newscasts had indeed trickled through. It was perhaps illustrative that even here, on a frontier farmworld so independent it had manufactured its own accent – even
here
all the buzz was of the
Shattergeist
and its nihilistic adventures. Infuriatingly, there’d been no video received yet of its most recent predations, and the vox-reporters were still being vague about the ‘where’. If SixJen had been a cynic (she was) she might have guessed (she did) that the hacks were being deliberately circumspect about the places they were called to, in order to keep the Feds from showing up to spoil the fun. But the fact remained: the
Shattergeist
had occupied itself the past few days ripping holes in cargo freighters before committing an act of calculated murder so gratuitous that the on air outrage-spouters could barely line up fast enough to decry it.

No shields.

Eight ejected pilots. Hit-and-run. No shields.

She wanted to feel the crunch
.

And the donations? They just kept on coming.

SixJen had tried to explain to the commander her hunch, tried to illustrate why the
Shattergeist
would, she was sure, turn eventually towards Shibboleth; even tried to persuade him that the ‘unfortunate cargo ships’ in the carefully-edited vox-reports were quite possibly the very ones which had been setting off from his homeworld all week …

But her explanations sounded frail and speculative even before she’d said them, plus she dared not risk her insight being spread around –
my kill, my kill, nobody else’s
. So she’d waved it all away mid-argument, swallowed the jagged pills of Only Three Ships with stony-faced grace, and got the fuck on with Waiting In Orbit.

‘Yuz got thraydays,’ the Commander’d said as she left.

SixJen wasn’t the type to generalise along ethnic lines – she distributed her apathy towards the living with politic equality – but as the missiles fired by her new comrades snaked into the void she mused that it didn’t reflect well on the people of Shibboleth that the two police pilots appeared even denser than their boss.

‘Firecrackaway!’ one whooped.

‘Foxwun, foxwun!’ cried the other.

She was beginning to wish she hadn’t involved the locals at all.

‘Scanners got the confirm on the target,’ Lex chirped, his voice an unlikely relief in the tight confines of the borrowed copship. ‘It’s definitely them. Tweedledum’s missile goes kablooey in forty-two, Tweedledee’s in forty-four.’

Those idiots
.

The runner, the prey –
sad eyes, sad eyes
– had appeared at the edge of the Shibboleth cluster with all the arrogant swagger SixJen had been expecting: the pimped-out yacht all but screaming its ident. The copships (all Vipers, all decked out in LookatMe reds and blues, fellow pilots barking yokel machismo), had let slip their smartkillers the second the scanners pinged. Two lazy contrails of dispersing soot and radiated heat.

‘I told you,’ she monotoned into the comm, wishing she still had it in her to snarl, ‘to wait for my mark.’

The men ‘pffft’d’ predictably, resuming their steroidal pigshit. ‘Yerl still get y’money!’ she made out, as if that settled it.

That’s what mercenaries want, right?

‘Thirty and thirty-two seconds,’ Lex said.

‘Any reaction?’

‘Not a peep. Target’s just chilling. Probably too busy biffing in there. You think they even know what’s coming?’

‘They know.’
They’d better.

Strangely enough SixJen’s irritation, which existed in the abstract sense that she should be feeling it but couldn’t, was not predicated purely on the risk of being robbed of her kill. Oh, naturally that was an element: she’d taken pains to arrange the limits of her cooperation with the cops and had spent literally hours out here with Mingus and Dingus twiddling thumbs, double checking they understood the same.

Reason to suspect visitors of interest en route
—

In exchange for ident and tactical intel I demand the following rights
—

No action until my say-so
—

Here to support me, not vice-versa
—

Do
not
fire unless
—

Etcetera etcetera.

‘Maybe it’s your winning way with people,’ Lex muttered, as the missiles jinked into final-approach vectors. She went to give the casing of his little button body a punitive flick – old habit – and only remembered he wasn’t there when she jabbed herself instead. She wondered if she would’ve smiled about that, once.

‘Sorry,’ he said anyway.

Watching from afar
.

No, kill theft wasn’t the big fear. She’d seen the
Shattergeist
fly. She knew a couple of farmcops in median-spec Vipers weren’t about to filch her holy moment.

‘Eighteen and twenty seconds.’

Rather it was a simple matter of technical knowhow. Smartmissiles could be relied upon to grimly pursue targets only in the absence of obfuscatory radar returns. It followed that the one and only time a halfway decent pilot
really
didn’t want to be shooting his load early, and offloading his tactical ace, was in the seconds immediately after a target emerged from FTL—

‘Ten and twelve.’

—when you couldn’t tell if there was some unfortunate sod right behind them, following them down the same pipe.

‘Ah balls,’ Lex chirped. ‘Three new returns.’

‘The target?’

‘Hightailing.’

SixJen might’ve felt smug about the whole thing –
tolja
– if she’d had room in the remnants of her emotional brain for anything but a ghostly flicker of anger.

On screen the
Shattergeist
dropped like a stone – that same perpendicular dodge it’d used against the rival merc last time she’d had it in sight. But the missiles didn’t even twitch in their course.

Fizzing innocently in the fugitives’ place, still wreathed in all the diminishing wyrdlight of the FTL spout they’d spiralled down, like fresh-faced kiddies who’d chased a puppy into a fucking firing range, three manifestly undefended media ships popped into corporeality and replaced the ’
Geist
’s heat signature.

‘
Taa-daaa
,’ Lex mumbled mournfully.

They were swallowed in fire.

SixJen thought perhaps she might have seen one of them, the one spared a direct hit, limp onwards through the annihilation zone without being entirely atomised, but in the next second the chaos of combat unfurled all around her and the wellbeing of the journalists dropped from the list of her priorities.

The
Shattergeist
let rip towards the cops. Arcing way off to the side, max-geeing inwards across the sunrise on the planet’s terminator, spitting ordinance.

The runner’s not supposed to scheme!

‘It’s a bait run,’ SixJen barked. ‘Weak ordinance! Don’t buy it. She’s got bigger explodo than that in there. Just wants to draw you into a dogf—’

The cops ignored her a second time.
Yee-haw
ing off to engagement and, in all likelihood, molecular death. SixJen didn’t even bother to sigh, so entirely was she unsurprised.

‘Boss?’ Lex said, fireblooms tracking across the scanner. ‘What action?’

We know this game. You watch, hunter. You watch the fight
—

The cops circling. Doing a little better than she’d feared, at least. Like binary suns, keeping the prey between and in front, caught in their crossfire—

You watch the fight and when the prey’s exhausted, ohhh … when she’s weak and ready to die
.
Then
—

‘You gonna dial back?’ Lex supposed. Only a hint of boredom in the tinny voice. ‘Play possum, right? Watch ‘til the critical moment.’

Then you strike
.

Except
.

Except the woman in the
Shattergeist
had seen through all of it last time. Knew the game. Knew it well enough to plan three moves ahead.

Except the fugitive ship wasn’t playing the way the cops wanted today either. Their vicious little ménage-a-trois – like remoras orbiting a shark – spoilt again and again by the fugitives coughing out unexpected gouts of plasma from hidden pods, or somersaulting without warning to pursue a new course, or casually slicing off
this
cop’s autogun,
that
cop’s chaff-bay.