[02] Elite: Nemorensis (10 page)

The runner, SixJen figured, had been running too long not to’ve learnt a thing or two about the hunt.

She wants to be caught
.

But she won’t let herself stop.

‘No possum today,’ SixJen said, grabbing the liminals and pressing forwards.

The Viper surged ahead with a tremble – sluggish and stupid feeling, after SixJen’s years dancing in the
The
, but a target was a target was a target.

‘And me?’ Lex sounded giddy. ‘You want me t—’

‘You stay where you are.’ She worked her jaw, reminding herself how to fly a crapheap. ‘Need you to plan me a oneshot. Pinpoint, Lex. Take out an engine. Nothing flashy, nothing traceable.’

‘I can … yeah, I can do that … It won’t get through that bloody thing’s shields, mind …’

‘You’re not aiming at the fugitive.’

‘What?’

The battle thundered in silence.

This close the temptation was almost unbearable. This close the numbness seemed to crack; the excitement – the anticipation – bubbling through. This close to the prey SixJen almost believed she could
feel
things again.

Looping. Hammering out the lead. Letting targeting solutions construct and dissolve. Making a show of it.

The runner.

Fuck, she’s right there.

‘Got that vector for you,’ Lex mumbled for the third time.

‘Stand by. And shut up.’

Yeah, this close up—

(—as the
Shattergeist
passed and dived and spiralled, as its cornerless shadow shifted across the plastic curve of Shibboleth below/above/beside, as she and the cops jinked and tumbled through and around the yacht’s fields of fire—)

—this close, the urge to really let rip, to load the batteries and heave every deathbringer the Viper could muster, to vomit, to self-invert, to turn its own pods inside out in one great guttural orgasm of weaponry, to incinerate the
Shattergeist
in a single galaxy-rupturing clap of nuclear Armageddon, to
finish this now
, was almost too much to bear.

Adrenaline, Jen. Poetic excitement. You remember this?

Only the voice deep inside. Only the coldness, only the numbness. Only that stopped her.

Look at the shields on that thing.
(The cops’ rounds disintegrating into walls of iridescence, barely troubling the armour beneath.)

They’ve upgraded and upgraded, the little bastards.
(Her own shots caroming and dissolving; magazines depleting with horrific speed.)

They’re richer than senators and tougher than a cruiser.

You can’t win this the stupid way, huntress.

Be smart.

Be smart not strong.

And so she held her place in the spinning flock: an intricate executive-toy orrery of insane concentricities and plutonium-tipped lines. Playing her part.

One of the cops, demonstrating significantly less restraint, let slip a salvo containing essentially everything remaining in his magazine. Whooping as he did so. To his credit the fusillade briefly overstretched the
Shattergeist
’s port-side shields, dumping them to death in an ionic haze for all of one second, and in that instant of weirdly infectious triumph (as both she and the other Viper instinctively focused fire), the fugitive ship was knocked spinning by the transmitted force.

And SixJen saw the chance coming.

‘Get ready,’ she hissed to Lex.

The
Shattergeist
righted itself with a conspicuous jerk, shields re-forming, and puked out a miniature vision of hell. Like:
anything you can do I can do better.
SixJen couldn’t help imagining the crazy-haired she-creature within –
sad eyes, sad eyes!
– stabbing at random controls in fury while her ball-less boyfriend whimpered and whined.

The cop who’d dared to wing her took the brunt of it.

You pissed her off, pal.

In fact the
Shattergeist
’s instinctive retaliation, if that’s what it was, managed to be weirdly accurate despite the petulance SixJen was imagining. She and the other cop were treated to a firestorm which was merely withering, but the cavalier pilot who’d taken his big shot? He was all but crushed. His shields shredded like paper, his armour flensed in three places, and with a modicum of sense SixJen wouldn’t have credited he ceased all whooping, turned the ragged remnants of his own coffin back towards Shibboleth, and ran like hell, spheres of smoke bubbling in his wake.

‘
Now
,’ SixJen said.

SixJen didn’t see Lex’s rail-shot coming. Nobody did: scanners still whited out by the barrage. She never saw it hit home either, though she was watching for both. But as the
Shattergeist
accelerated to chase the half-dead cop, as SixJen had known it would –
because that’s the fun option, isn’t it, you nutty little bitch?
– in that moment the
other
cop discovered his aft starboard engine had suddenly and mysteriously been annihilated.

‘Uh,’ he said over the radio. ‘M-miss?’ Beginning to lean hard right.

A ghastly little chain reaction rattled across the hindparts of his craft, all directionless sparks and zero-gee vapour. The other engine couldn’t take the strain, the gas-thrusters couldn’t fight the gravity well, and as he burbled and swore down the radio his craft tilted unmistakably towards the muddy pearl of Shibboleth.

‘What is it?’ she said. Not even bothering to aim for ‘sympathetic’.

‘Miss I … gotter tellyer. S-spokerther the Commander. Said keeper fugertive busy longas perssible. Got a … a consultant onroot, he sez. Sordit all out.’

SixJen scowled, a hoarfrost prickle in her spine. ‘Consultant?’

‘FIA, he sez.’

Federal Intelligence Agency
.

Why the fuck would
—

‘You … You thinkyer can keeper fugertive busy foruz, miss? L-likehe sez? Cuz I think … I think I ent able mself.’ His Viper was oozing away and down now, tumbling slowly, accreting a warm wash of exofriction. Doomed.

‘I suggest you bail,’ SixJen snapped down the line, terse, putting the word ‘consultant’ from her mind.
Not now
. Then closed the link so she wouldn’t have to listen to him rant and rave. Kneading the bridge of her nose.

FIA.

Shit.

She drummed her fingers against the liminals. Watched the little Viper descending into the exosphere on the scanner.

Made a decision.

With a quiet ‘huh’ she began stabbing at her consoles, plotting a specific course and appealing to the vessel’s rudimentary intelligence to pursue a very particular end.

‘Boss …’ Lex interrupted, his voice as low (not very) as it could get.

‘Not now.’

‘Boss, if I didn’t know better—’

‘Quiet.’

‘—I’d, uh. I’d say you were plotting an intercept course, there.’

She ignored him. Glanced at the scanner. Cop#1 was leading the
Shattergeist
on a doomed yet oh-so-merry chase across the planetary dawn, a hundred kliks away and more, trailing amputated spacejunk as they flew. Closer to home Cop#2 was fluking gently into an untroubled roll which, for all its graceful grandeur, was unmistakable to SixJen’s eye as a death spiral. Beneath it lay nothing but a series of exponentially tightening curves towards the planet, a catastrophic encounter with its mesopause and an inglorious death being cheesegrated to nothingness by the atmosphere.

The pilot took her advice, ejecting in a spume of frozen gases and the swaddling plastifields of a RemLok, carried to a more sustainable orbit by its miniature thrusters.

Whereupon, like the magnificently predictable idiot he was, he fired up his OhShit beacon without even waiting for the Bad Guy to exit stage left.

Which suited SixJen just fine.

‘Bo-oss …’

‘Lex.’

‘Boss, it … it kind of looks from here like you just lowered your shields.’

‘Lex, I’m going to need another firing solution.’

‘But—’

‘You’ll know when.’

‘A-and until then what’s—’

‘I’m just stepping outside.’

The cop was sweating in his suit. Steaming his faceplate. His hyperventilations down the radio made her feel like he was breathing in her ear.

‘Repeat after me,’ she said. ‘
You shouldn’t have left us alive up here.
’

‘Yer … yer sherdnta left us ‘live upere.’

They floated together, otherwise profoundly alone, above the great pregnant bulge of Shibboleth.

‘
We’ll hunt you down
…’

‘W … wull untyer down…’

‘
You dismal syphilitic slut-coward
…’

‘You … you dismal s … siff …’

‘
Syphilitic
.’

‘Syph …litik …’

‘Good.
Slut-coward
…’

‘Slut-cowerd …’

‘
And dedicate our lives to taking revenge upon you
.’

‘A-and dedercate urlives ter … ter takin’ revenge onyer.’

‘Now close the commline.’

The cop, currently drifting upside down relative to her, thumbed a control on the sleeve of his RemLok. SixJen activated her own OhShit-beacon.

Come get us, bitch
.

‘Well done,’ she told him. ‘I didn’t think one target would work, you see.’

‘I … I dunno whatyer mea—’

‘Now please be quiet.’ She flicked channels on the cuff of her own suit, obliterating him and his noisy breath from her attention. ‘Lex?’

‘Here.’

‘Sitrep.’

‘It’s … it’s been a bit bloody frantic out there, boss.’

It had been years since SixJen had ejected from a ship. She’d forgotten how cloying the RemLok suits could be, the smell of plastic and ozone, how dangling adrift in the emptiness could engender a contradictory mix of agoraphobia and claustrophobia. How the instinct to cluster together with anyone else likewise drifting, to seek out solidity and matter purely to define one’s place against a canvas that defied all perspective, could override all other concerns.

No wonder those cargo men from the news reports had herded themselves into such convenient swarms. It was all she could do not to reach out and grip the hand of the cop. He’d already groped for similar contact once or twice himself.

She’d brushed him away, of course.

‘Go on,’ she told Lex, dismissing everything else from mind. Sometimes the numbness was a virtue.

‘Okay, so … first we had our friendly psychopathic damage-junkies – this is about three hundred kliks from your position – we had ‘em right on the verge of wiping out Idiot Cop#1, in his oh-so-thoroughly-already-fucked-up boat. Wheeeen all of a sudden another Viper – the one
you
were told not to damage, if I’m not mistaken, but recently ejected from anyway – comes pelting along at stupid speed to kamikaze right into their shields.’

‘Any damage?’

‘Bit. Nothing worth talking about. I told you – those kids are
fortified
.’

Dammit
.

‘Then?’

‘Well … They’re pissed off, right? Finished off Cop#1 in a jiffy. Maybe went a bit over the top with that.’

‘I saw the flare. Killkure?’

‘Killkure.’

‘And?’

‘And then … well. They’re right on the verge of buggering off, aren’t they, when – wouldn’t you know it – this weird message comes over the radio. Seems Cop#2 is out of his raft and enjoying a little vacswim. Wanted to send our fugitive pals a friendly declaration of a vendetta. I believe the words “syphilitic slut-coward” came up. You happen to know anything about that, boss?’

‘Did the
Shattergeist
get the message?’

‘Oh, I think so.’

‘Why?’

“Cos they turned right round, boss. And ’cos they’re now heading your way at, ah … at
some speed
.’

SixJen nodded to herself. Peered past her own feet. Clawed back the waves of dizzying panic at the distance below, the storms chasing across the planetary camber, the paparazzi flash-flares of lightning from above. That thought, in its turn, sent her eyes scanning nearspace. Sure enough, lurking like a vulture before a kill, the last remaining media ship, scarred and dented in the crucible of its arrival, had taken up position a few dozen miles from their spot. These two twitching, tiny, tantalising targets.

Great TV
.

The frightened cop reappeared on her radio. ‘M-miss?’ She glanced sideways at him, barely able to see his face through the condensed sweat. ‘M-miss? Miss, thersa
voice
onner line! I-it, it—’

‘What did she say?’

‘It … she … she sez “heads up”. A-and then larfter lot.’

‘Huh.’ She flicked lines again. ‘Lex.’

‘They’re travelling, boss.’

‘ETA?’

‘Fifteen.’
Shit. So fast!

‘You know what to do?’

‘I … I think so, b—’

‘Lex, what’re they doing with their shields?’

‘That’s the … Boss, they’re … They’re still up.’

No. No, that’s not what …

What about your fun, bitch?

You turn them off you turn them off you turn them off
—

SixJen thought … like a dream … she thought she could see them. A pinprick of light, growing. No sense of scale or speed. Just a stealthy star, a tunnel, a
javelin
of flame.

Incoming.

‘Seven seconds. No change.’

Shit shit shit.

‘Fire.’

‘What?’

‘You heard me!’
Five. Four.
‘Fire, Lex! She’ll drop them.’
She’ll drop the shields.
She’s got to.
‘You fire right past us.’

The light.

Three
.

The ionic glint of shields. The
Shattergeist
coming to smear them across the stars.

Two.

‘But I could h—’

‘Just do it!’

Myq worked it out on the way down. Moments of eerie clarity packaged neatly between uncharacteristic outbursts of anger at all of Tee’s crazies (as if impending death had finally lubricated his brain and freed it from hormonal enslavement), and even more numerous stints of spiralling, shrieking panic.