[02] Elite: Nemorensis (4 page)

The
The
had flickered to life behind his back like a piece of scenery, some dreary inanimate
nothing
safely disregarded, and spat fiery poison through his spine.

Unfair
.

(She might have coughed out a bitter laugh at that, once.)

A plasma volley to finish cooking his shields: precisely the sort of shock-and-awe bullshit he understood. And then the real business. A fusillade of tungsten-tipped javelins accelerated to near-C inside the
The
’s portly chest: relativistic doombullets that slipped through the Cobra’s skin like needles and erased (not exploded, not shredded, simply
removed
) whatever vital organs they punctured: dragging along all sublimated remnants in their irresistible wake. Weapons pods, chaff-bays, engines, life-support, tac-systems. The Cobra was disarmed, hamstrung, disembowelled and dissected.

Carved
.

Spacedeath, the methodical way.

Still:
credit where due.
The bounty hunter had had the presence of mind to bail, at least. He hung now, an aggravated little maggot, flexing impotently in his RemLok beside the crippled cadaver of his ship. SixJen ignored the pinging of his OhShit-beacons and turned the great pregnant knuckle that was the
The
towards its real prey.

(Ohhhh, the
The:
the closest she’d ever come to a treasure; an object of pride; a lover.
Lakon Asp, Mk. II
Unpainted. Unbeautiful. No sleek edges, no aquiline affectations, no go-faster stripes or stupid fucking fins. A wide-shouldered bitch with a fabulously unimaginative name which was so elaborately packed with hidden killtech it was worth, at last count, roughly eight times the basic model it was pretending to be. A devil dressed as a tramp.)

‘Weapons’re recharged,’ Lex said, anticipating her command. ‘You want me to hail ‘em first?’

Another tingle on her neck. She felt …

…
well
: she felt nothing. Naturally. And yet surreally was aware that at this point she should be breathless, should be quivering at the imminence of a decade-overdue climax. The dissonance was dizzying.

‘Open a line.’

This time the audio ruckus from the
Shattergeist
had shifted from screams to laughter: two voices so thoroughly intertwined in sleepy happiness and post-coital self congratulation it was hard to know where one ended and the other began.

‘Hey,’ SixJen made out from the fug, ‘hey, there’s …
ha
. There’s spunk all in the life-support.’

‘Occupants of the
Shattergeist
,’ she said. ‘I salute you. Please prepare to die.’

More laughter.

SixJen sighed. Leaned slightly. Brought her mouth closer to the tiny bud of the
The
’s comms-mic. And said the word.

No more than a sound, really. Not meant for regular ears. A thing of weird resonance and disturbing echoes.

The laughter from the
Shattergeist
stopped. SixJen allowed herself a glimmer of satisfaction at that.
She knows
.

‘Tee?’ came the man’s voice. ‘Tee, you okay? You look wei—’

‘It’s fine.’
Her
.
The runner. The runner’s voice
.

SixJen closed her eyes. Braced herself.
At last.

At last!

She wished, distantly, she could’ve felt some satisfaction in the moment. But then, it didn’t matter much. In just a moment it wouldn’t matter at all.

She opened her eyes and began to reach for the weapons.

From the
Shattergeist
the voice said, ‘Let me just … Here. Move your leg, ok? That’s it. Hold on a sec.’

Something
pinged
.

‘Um,’ Lex squawked. ‘Shit.’

Afterwards, when the
Shattergeist
was gone, when Lex had finished swearing and SixJen had stopped telling him to stop, numbly aware he was simply approximating the emotions she couldn’t feel herself, the full picture achieved dreadful solidity.

A mist of debris rattled around their ship.

‘They have a mag-gun,’ Lex growled.

‘Yes.’

‘And scan-breakers.’

‘Yes.’

‘They never lost their fucking shield, did they?’

‘No.’

‘Or their engine.’

‘No.’

‘They pretended.’

‘They did.’

‘You … you think they clocked us drifting in from the start?’

‘I think they clocked us from the start.’

Lex ‘hmm’ed. Then:

‘They shot that prick’s Killkure™, didn’t they?’

‘They shot that prick’s Killkure™.’

The
Shattergeist
had syruped off into a warpspace gravitywell even as the merc’s dead Cobra, hanging beside the
The
, was rendered to atoms by the primed payload still lodged inside it. Sniped perfectly by a sexcrazed maniac.

(A dying audio-signal from the fugitive, as it dopplered away to white noise, had faithfully broadcast the male passenger’s whimper at the woman’s cheerful observation that,
oh look
, he was Getting Stiff Again.)

Thus ignominiously evaded, SixJen hadn’t wasted time fretting over her own safety. The fearsome wash of molecular waste and collateral debris was effortlessly deflected by the
The
, lighting up shields in great opaque sprays. But for every moment it sat braced against the tsunami, sense-blind and tide-tossed, the spout of exotic particles left by the
Shattergeist
dispersed, taking with them SixJen’s only shot at tracking it into hyperspace. By the time the slightest useful visibility was restored the signature was a dying wisp, and even then the stellar ash from the Cobra’s cremation, alive with obfuscatory EM-returns and corruptive radiation, would confound any attempt to pursue the prey for long minutes to come.

No … SixJen didn’t need Lex’s talent for stating the obvious to grasp the simple truth.

The
Shattergeist
was gone.

‘She’s good,’ the killer whispered, thoughtlessly slicing at her right arm.

By way of afterthought:

The other merc was barely alive. Cooked in his cockpit, then irradiated in his RemLok. SixJen was obliged to suit-up just to interrogate him in the vac-clean mouth of the
The
’s cargo scoop.

Unmemorable face. A name she’d never heard. A Pilot’s Federation account unworthy of distinction.

She said the word to him, just in case. He stared blankly, uncomprehending, through his visor.

So she shot him through the face, shoved him back into space, and returned to the darkness inside.

No fresh scar on her left arm today.

Now?

Now Myq held Teesa’s hand and stared into a dozen apathetic faces, plus at least as many SenseNet lenses, in an undecorated conference room aboard the Federation Coriolis station affectionately known as ‘Tun’s Wart’ – LaGrange-locked between the unremarkable Tun/Ton binaries near Exbeur. He smirked with a confidence he didn’t feel.

‘We,’ he declared, adopting the same insouciant drawl he’d used to loosen wallets and knickers back home, ‘are destructertainment.’

The journalists failed to look impressed.

Balls
, Myq thought.

The lovers had detected the first incipient stirrings of mass attention, of notoriety, of –
say it
– celebrity, a couple of weeks after the Incident with the bounty hunters. Since the adrenal buzz of that combat they’d spent every non-erotic moment arguing over the merits of their preferred strategies, schizophrenically managing to pursue both, back and forth, according to whoever’s was the prevailing voice at any given moment. In phases when Teesa was the more persuasive (generally when assisted by narcotics and nakedness) a traditional pattern was observed: locate cargo vessel, smash to itty bits, buy more ammo and upgrades, repeat
ad infinitum
. Whenever Myq’s preferred policy was in the ascendancy (generally when Tee was asleep or their crotchal regions were too distressed to bear another assault) the
Shattergeist
pursued a more conservative manifesto: running a long way from the scene of their most recent outrage, refuelling, then running some more.

The battle had shaken Myq in ways Tee would’ve mocked if he’d admitted them. The smug merc, the ruined Cobra, and then that second hunter (
for NoGod’s sake!
) popping up like a sheep-guzzling alpharhyncus disguised as a fucking boulder.

Blowing Shit Up, Myq had concluded, was undeniably thrilling, and Not Being Blown Up Oneself was undeniably the preferred partner strategy. But
Almost
Being Blown Up …? Coming Within A Gnat’s Bollock Of Being Blown Up? He hadn’t decided yet how he felt about that, and had defaulted in the interim to a strategy of unthinking avoidance.

Tee, typically, who’d been at the controls throughout the whole fight, in spite of a theatrically protracted orgasm, had thought the whole thing glorious fun.

But now? Now Myq would’ve jumped at the chance to be locked in a hellatious dogfight, missiles inbound and shields failing, if it meant he could just escape the sweaty silence of this so-called press conference.

‘“
Destructertainment
”,’ one of the journalists echoed, as if sampling the word. A clammy little man at the rear with a backgammon hat and a camlens implanted above his left eye, he packed into that one repetition a sophisticated combination of complex and well-considered derision and disgust. Along the way it absorbed into its specific articles of mockery a more general package of revulsion aimed, so Myq neurotically intuited, at the lovers’ undeserved self-importance, their grimy clothing, his own backwater accent, and all the associated rural triviality his very being implied.

Myq was feeling unusually sensitive today, and dimly suspected he knew why.

He’d never had to share Tee’s attention with anyone before.

‘Um,’ he said. ‘Yeah. Destructertainment. That’s right.’

The little man whistled a mad melody under his breath and heavy-lidded his eyes. ‘Destructertainment,’ he repeated. Then whistled again.

Tee gripped Myq’s hand harder. The word, like this whole thing, had been her idea. Ironically enough it had been during one of the ‘avoiding-all-trouble’ stretches, drifting out in the spatial boondocks, while Tee lazed like a cat and he rubbed anti-chafe meds onto his nethers, that they’d got their first inkling of the media fallout from their spree. Cycling through lowband newsies and one or two highband bulletins from the local cluster, he caught reference to their destructive excesses three times within an hour. In each case the
Shattergeist
’s shenanigans were reported with all the requisite outrage he’d expect of the morally-vanilla newsnets – ‘
wanton and obscene destruction
!’ ‘
no obvious motive!’ ‘not a single thought spared for collateral damage
!’ – and yet in each case there was also a hmm-provoking note of incongruity.

In the first clip, for instance, after all the fire-and-brimstone stuff, the story segued into an indignant medley of vox pop soundbytes, amidst whose predictable condemnations and sighs (‘
What’s the galaxy coming to?’
) a couple of younger voices announced they thought the footage of the
Shattergeist
looked ‘actually kinda supernebular’, and bluntly proposed there were worse things one could do with one’s time than shit on the profit-margins of the megacorps.

‘Huh,’ Myq had said, squirting more ointment.

The second broadcast was a glitzier, vid-complete affair whose visual element switched between a glossy anchorwoman and various blackbox recordings (from the victims’ POV, naturally) of the
Shattergeist
in action. It upped the ante by not only naming the fugitive vessel directly, but the Alliance-space ‘pop-band’ from whom it’d been reported stolen. And then, the pertinent signal amidst the noise, it signed-off with a weird Public Safety message imploring parents to prevent their kids from stealing ships in an attempt to emulate the criminals.

Which
, Myq pondered,
sort of implies some of them already tried …

The third piece, audio only, was so drearily condemnatory he almost switched it off prematurely. But as the report ended and clangy adolescent MehRap artfully faded-up to replace it, the newscaster, unaware his mic was still live, blurted, ‘Ya know what? That sounds like a lotta fun. Those kids’re okay by m—’

The feed died as swiftly as an anonymous producer could flip a switch.

‘People,’ Myq had murmured to himself, articulating a piece of bloody obvious wisdom as if in receipt of a holy epiphany, ‘really like seeing shit getting blown up.’

Tee had merely farted softly from the bunk in the corner, chromatophore tattoos flashing yellow and purple, and giggled in her halfsleep. But when she woke …?

When she awoke:
the idea
.

This … bloody … idea.

Outstaring a roomful of confused contemptuous journalists and trying to monetise madness.

‘Is this,’ said the sweaty little reporter, he of the crap hat and the sophisticated interpersonal expression of contempt, ‘a joke?’

‘Save your questions for the end, please,’ Tee inserted. They’d agreed Myq was going to do the talking (for reasons he could neither remember nor currently fathom) but as Tee stepped forwards with hands on hips he could see the effect she carried with her – ‘
it’
, the
thing
, the
change
– stealing over the assembled hacks like a toxin. One by one they forgot him, their arched brows softened away, their apathy was drowned in enchantment. Some licked their lips. One woman fiddled thoughtlessly with her hair. At least one man, Myq was sure, absent-mindedly adjusted his own undercarriage.

Tee smiled sweetly. She was good at that.

‘I know you’re wondering why you’re here,’ she said. ‘I know you must have low expectations. Yesterday we extended an invitation to every journal, castnet and two-bit tabloid in this system. A press conference hosted by persons unknown, regarding matters undisclosed. Not very promising, is it?
Ha
. No. But, oh! Oh, you came.’