[02] Elite: Nemorensis (16 page)

No, that’s not her.

—the eyes were dead. As glimmer-free and loveless as either of those killers in the nightclub two days ago. It was the face of a warrior, the face of a destroyer; the face of a hunter.

Myq glanced back over his shoulder, as if to check the likeness.

‘That’s … that’s Tee. How … how is that p—’

More screens. A cavalcade of press-shots and vid-captures. Gangsters, killers, pirates: a litany of badmen and enemy agents captured and killed, their cold-eyed nemesis avoiding the lens in each image. The scenes, altogether, spanned six years of violence.

Her, her, her.

But not her. A Robot-her. A bitter-her. A shadow-eyed joyless her.

‘How?’ he said, suddenly overwhelmed by a need to vomit. ‘H-how’s this … how did …’

‘Thirteen years ago,’ the little button said, ‘which is seven years after the thing with Madrien Axcelsus, right? Seven years after she escaped and became a merc. Thirteen years ago that woman killed a guy. A criminal. A fugitive. I don’t have any photos of him and his name doesn’t matter. What matters is that almost instantly she underwent a change.’

‘I … I don’t—’

‘Over the next thirteen years, up to now, she … well, she destroyed stuff. That’s about the size of it. She ran. Spun from one chaotic little act to another. All pretty lowkey to start with – nothing you’d call exciting. But … building up. Becoming a fugitive in her own right, after all those years chasing ‘em. And leaving little outbreaks of … of promiscuity wherever she went. Of motiveless crazy. Ohhh, every now and then someone’d show up to try to kill her, sure … but she ran and she ran and she ran and nobody ever quite managed.

‘And that’s how it was, Myq-the-idiot—’

‘I
said
stop c—’

‘—until a few months back, when some cops on Gateway – so off-their-heads on performance stimms and overtime they barely even felt that creepy influence your missus has on people, and don’t look at me like that, you know what I mean – they arrested her for disturbing the peace. Ran her prints. Came up with some extremely fucking elderly outstandings. And then, ha, the cherry on the crapcake that was their night – pulled in a pissed-up celeb on the same charge. Rest’s history.’

‘But—’

‘
But but but
. But! Twenty years, Myq. Didn’t age a single day in that whole bloody time.’

Myq felt a sigh go out of him like a ghost. A long
hhhhhh
which modulated, without conscious thought, into a broken-voiced ‘
How
?’

The little bead seemed to shiver in his hand.

And said, ‘Nemorensis, mate.’

The screens died. Myq blinked, lost, floating. ‘What’s … what’s Nemorensis?’ he croaked.

And a soft voice behind him said, ‘How do you know that word?’

He almost fell off the air-cushion. Twisted too hard, bashed his arse against the edge of the console and howled a storm. All of which, luckily, concealed the extremely-bloody-obvious Guilty Expression smearing his face like lipstick.

‘Um,’ he said, holding his arse. ‘You’re up then?’

Teesa smiled. Didn’t mean it.

‘That word?’

The little robot piped-up on cue. ‘It’s just something that crazy weird woman in the nightclub said. Right? Right before shooting you.’

‘Er,’ Myq said.

‘Don’t worry, she can’t hear me.’

‘But—’

‘I’m resonating a sonic cone against the cartilaginous elements of your ear. It’s very clever.’

(
So what you’re telling me
, Myq carefully didn’t say, didn’t break down in hysterical overfrazzlement to shout,
is that you’re a voice in my fucking head?)

‘It’s just something,’ he mumbled, ‘that crazy weird woman in the nightclub said. Before she shot me in the arse.’

Teesa’s smile turned genuine. Her eyes glittered. ‘Huh. Mental.’

‘I know!’

Smile, smile. Laugh, laugh. Kiss, kiss.

‘You … you feeling okay, then?’ he ventured, feeling his cheeks burn. Facial and buttockal.

‘Perfect. Why?’

It’s just that you’ve been awake for fifteen seconds and you haven’t tried to fuck me yet
.

It’s just that you’re an escaped-slave dead-eyed mercenary crazy-mental genocidal maniac in her mid fifties. And I’m basically terrified of you.

Also, I have an erection.

And I love you so much.

‘No reason.’

‘Nebular. Okay. So, listen. I’m going to nip across to the
Shattergeist
.’

‘What for?’

‘The shibboletti, silly! Poor things’ve been sitting there in that horrid old cargo pod for two days without a bite to eat. That’s just plain cruel.’

‘R-right.’ He fiddled with the buttonbulletrobot.
Guilty, guilty, guilty
. ‘You … you want some company?’

(‘Stay where you fucking are,’ the little computer tweeted.)

‘No, no. You stay here, my poor wounded soldier.’ She slapped him playfully on the arse. He manfully turned his shriek into a chuckle. ‘And Myq?’

‘Mm?’

‘I love you, Myq. You remember that.’

‘I … I love you too.’

‘I mean it.’ She leaned down again. Kissing him with a curious precision. ‘Don’t forget it.’

And then she was gone.

Over
, Myq thought. Tears quite suddenly prickling in his eyes.
Over, and I don’t know why.

‘Do you want to know,’ the robot said, ‘what Nemorensis means?’

Eventually, of course, the pain died away.

Always does
, Sixjen thought – almost sad.
Always will
.

Yes, true, the
The
’s autosystems had dutifully pumped her with a banquet of anaesthetics the second she’d crawled back onboard, and a second course of the same while tidying her mangled wrist, dumbly monotoning its bedside reassurances:
all over soon, best you don’t look
.

(So different, she’d reflected, from Lex’s affected eccentricities. It was astounding that two machines, neither more alive than the other, could present such extremes of companionship.)

But no, it wasn’t the drugs. Ultimately the pain was sent packing by the simple regrouping Numbness of her condition: that old apathy, that old swaddling-layer of chilly armour, re-infecting her as the hours passed.

Out here. Drifting. Far beyond the enlivening influence of the runner.

Out here the excitement curled and died. Out here the anxieties of the chase, the frustration at coming so close, the flush of triumph as she’d whispered the word and opened the FIA man from carotid to jugular … all of it melted away. All dissolved into greyness.

Why hasn’t he called?

Only loneliness remained – and even then only the ghost of it – while the autosurgeon picked at atomised bone, while a chemical broth rinsed away the sad necrotic remnants of her hand, while a laser grid sealed the whole ungainly mess at the wrist. For a while she regretted giving up Lex so easily. (He would’ve made a joke by now, she clumsily imagined, about pirates.
Get a hook, boss.
Instead: silence.)

But even the regret, in time, sputtered out. The darkness of the cockpit, the endless void beyond: it seemed to soothe away all external concerns. What could be grander than the emptiness, after all? What could stand against it? What could impotently proclaim its relevance, set before that?

Only the hunt. Only the chase. Those old imperatives, slamming back.

She’d exhausted the limits of her investigative logic early on, too. It had been clear since the episode at Tun’s Wart – since that secret flicker of recognition on the runner’s face (
sad eyes, sad eyes
) – that the fugitive was circling inexorably towards her old owner: poor, crippled Madrien Axcelsus. Although whether that was to enact some overdue revenge or to persecute further the man she’d already so damaged, or simply to give her pursuers some obtuse aid in their pursuit, SixJen couldn’t say. The trip to Shibboleth and the pickup of a livestock herd tallied with all of the above at any rate: a trail of breadcrumbs to follow. A bundle of bait to draw out the trader.

And yes, sure enough, in the hours after the runner’s escape from Shibboleth an anonymous marketplace bulletin had been scattercast across the grid, advertising the availability of a veritable
fortune
in fresh shib’ glands.

Them. Definitely them.

But Madrien Axcelsus hadn’t traded under his own name in the decades since Teesa first escaped him. SixJen knew that – had known it for years. And like him, amidst the welter of trader bids offered against the advertised livestock, almost all of the others used false titles or umbrella business-fronts. Glanders were not, by inclination, a straightforward breed, and if indeed Axcelsus was amongst the names registering bids he might have been any one of them. SixJen had to assume Teesa, with all her years in his service, knew which it was.

She, SixJen, alas did not.
Clever little cow.

(
The runner’s not supposed to scheme!
)

No point bemoaning it. And no chance, now, of feeling the frustrations she supposed she should. Instead? Instead for a day and a half SixJen the killer had simply sat. Nowhere in particular. A couple of jumps clear of Shibboleth; a scoop-stop to refuel. Then nothing.

Waiting.

Why hasn’t he called?

When it came, that gentle chime against the edge of her senses, her first thought was that she was imagining it. That happened, sometimes. Echoes, she supposed, of the person she once was (
the Autumn Villa … the stink of burnt chocolate …
) smuggling out like coils of smoke from the safebox she’d become.

Besides, she was so accustomed to Lex dutifully alerting her to the prosaic functions of her environment –
we got a call coming in, chief
– that it briefly made more sense for the tinny tone to originate in her own brain than the ship. And even when she’d pulled herself together and manually opened the line, the confusion remained: Lex’s annoying nonsense filling the cockpit as if nothing had happened.

‘Got a special someone wants a word, boss,’ he said. ‘Also, did you eat yet today? You should eat.’

She bit down on the urge to tell him off. Then did the same with a relief-filled greeting; defaulting to businesslike instead:

‘Is this line secure? Where are you?’

‘Runner’s not here, if that’s what you mean. Just me and the rock star, boss. And he says … he says if I tell you the “where” he’ll dump me down the shitchute and be gone in ten.’

‘He thinks I give a damn about you?’ (
I do. I do. I do.
)

Lex affected an offended cough. ‘That’s,
uh
. That’s what I told him. But – sorry, sorry – I also told him you still owe two hundred kay to that guy you bought me off, what was his name, “Pullzine”?, something like that—’ (SixJen scowled:
what?
) ‘—and so I assured him you wouldn’t risk it.’

‘I see. ‘

I don’t see.

Pullzine. Pullzine. Pullzine. I don’t owe anyone anything. Who or what is Pullz—

‘Anyway, he just wants to talk.’

SixJen wobbled her jaw, brain racing. ‘Visual?’

‘Sure. Very shortwave. Won’t be much cop, quality wise.’

‘Fine.’

‘You … uh. You presentable, boss?’

‘Just do it.’

‘The control’s at your end. Sorry. Adjacent to the software directory. Big red button, mistress. Right there.’

She blinked.
Mistress? He doesn’t talk like this.

Trying to tell me s—

‘You see it, ma’am?’

Ah.

Yes. Yes, she saw it.

Oh Lex. You clever little thing.

The software directory. A dull list of the
The
’s constantly-running operational programs, holocurtained at the fringe of her liminals. Most items had thoroughly unimaginative names –
LifeSuppTech
,
OxySys –
but lurking innocuous among them, marked by the fussy skull logo of an open-source pirate program, she saw it:
PullZine Tracer
. One of the suite of maybe-useful-oneday apps she’d given Lex carte blanche to purchase.

Clever little pretend-brain. Clever little fakelife.

She stabbed at the execution command—

[SIGNAL TRACE RUNNING. STANDBY.]

—and took a deep breath. Opened the visual channel.

And said, ‘Hello Myquel.’

The boy … the boy looked broken.

SixJen could not, in all honesty, claim a talent for empathy. But even to her cold eyes, poring across his expression as if strategising over a chessboard, Myquel Dobroba Pela-LeSire LeQuire looked like a man whose faith had been fucked by an axe.

‘Lex showed you the footage, then?’ she intuited.

He nodded, just once. He put her in mind of a cornered rodent: undecided as yet whether to run or play dead, but unhappily aware neither would work.

‘What … what
is
she?’ he said. ‘Teesa.’

SixJen turned on a smile – a calculated attempt at reassurance – then switched it back off.
It makes people nervous
, Lex had told her once.

‘On old Earth,’ she said, ‘in a forgotten country, on the shore of a lake named
Nemi
, there was a myth. You understand myths, Myq?’

He nodded, scowling. ‘I understand
legends
,’ he said, more pointed than she’d expected. He kept glancing over his shoulder.

On the holo beside his image a progress bar began to creep towards a graphic marked ‘signal traced’. It was, SixJen noted, painfully long.

‘It’s a myth about a priest,’ she said. ‘A Holy King, in fact. Lap of luxury. All the power and prestige you could want. That’s a comfortable job, Myq. A good gig, yes? Apart from a few minor details.’

Nod. Nod. Barely listening. Sweat on his brow.

‘One: you could only get this job by killing your predecessor. And two: you could only quit the job by being killed.

‘This priest? He was
Rex Nemorensis
: the King by the Lake.’

‘I … don’t see what this has to do w—’