[02] Elite: Nemorensis (19 page)

‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘he’s not here. Just a bonus, anyway. It doesn’t matter.’

She yawned.

The locking-ring passed around them; a sudden stinking emergence into the gloom of the central pod. The traders back on Shibboleth had done their job well, securing the livestock against weightlessness in long steel-net tubules, each stuffed with the honking beasts like string-bags packed with footballs. Each being attached longitudinally to the outer edge of the chamber, they left only a fart-strewn, reeking corridor down the centre – into which the couple now drifted.

Before his eyes had adequately adjusted to the gloom, before his tumbling brain could orient itself against all the clashing emotions, it struck Myq that this moment felt an awful lot like being digested inside a monstrous gut.

Still fucking.

Still fucking while the Universe grinds us to shit
.

‘How … how would you … y’know. Do it?’

Still dancing round it. Still hoping she was simply crazy; out of her mind; daft.

‘You mean how
will
I?’ she corrected, nodding towards the writhing walls. ‘Life cycles, darling. Horny. Horny little monsters. Get explodey. Told you.’ A soft slur had entered her voice.

‘But there’s no male.’ He was whispering now, hopeless. ‘No male to … to set them off.’

As if it mattered. As if his eyes, finally able to cut through the gloom, couldn’t see the truth. As if he hadn’t already guessed what he’d see.

The shibboletti had changed. Gone were the muddy-brown idiot-bags he and his lover had spent such a diverting afternoon running down. Gone were the flaccid mouth-stalks and waddling appendages, the leathery folds and gusty valves. What jostled and mewled now in the nets were swollen, glossy, tough-skinned things, bringing to Myq’s mind nothing so much as a sea of mutant pomegranates: all stumpy tendrils, curling pith-petals and bubblegum-pink wetness.

On heat.

They’re all … on … heat.

How had she put it, all those weeks ago?

‘
A frisky shibboletti gets unstable, Myq. One little knock?
’

And worse. Oh, NoGod fuck it, worse:

‘These beasties are worth a bomb, Myq.
’

‘Boom,’ she muttered under her breath, eyes half-shut. As if tasting his thoughts.

‘
Boom
!
Systems flood with unstable organics. Literally detonates. One after another, chain reaction right through the herd.
’

He’d known it, of course. Known it the second the mercenary said what she’d said –
she’s getting worse … she’s working up to something
. Maybe he’d known it before then.

Something big
.

Maybe the second she’d explained the life cycle, or the moment that little patch of forest went into horniness-overdrive, or the instant she’d loaded the shibs aboard, or the minute any, any, any fucking thing happened. Maybe he’d known all along and had tricked himself into ignorance and apathy.

Don’t care. Don’t care. Don’t care.

But probably not. Probably he was just too stupid to get it.

‘This pod …’ she flapped a hand around the steaming cavity, not incidentally arching her back and showing off her chest in the act. ‘This pod’s a big … big … big –
ha
! – big old explodo bombalongalongalong … Myquel Dobroba Pela-LeSire LeQuire.’

Slurring fully now. Delivering her chilly little revelation through the treacle of sleep.

Myq bit down on a sob. Another treacherous tear breaking free, bouncing across the dome of her forehead then absorbing into her hair.

‘I drugged you,’ he whispered. Couldn’t keep it in.

She just giggled. Forced open her eyes with effort but didn’t stop riding him; didn’t slow down her hips or her arms.

‘One … one little jolt,’ she mumbled. ‘One little blast.’

‘I know. Boom.’

‘Mmm. You know … you know …’ she fumbled for the back of his head. Pulled his ear close to her mouth. ‘Between. Between you and me. I was. I was thinking of doing it.
Ha
. While. While. While we’re still here.’ She wobbled her head, trying to stay awake. ‘Hhhhhhell of a way to go.’

Myq let go the sob this time. Too much disgust. Too much guilt. Too much love and horror and hate and sorrow to button down.

Still.

Fucking.

‘But
oh
,’ she said, face falling. ‘But I … I can’t do it, Myq. C-can’t set them off … not now … not with … not with us like this …’ Her eyes fluttered open one last time. Some proclamation, Myq anticipated, of unutterable importance. Something defining. Something
beautiful.

She loves me.

She loves me too much to kill me.

‘
You see I think I left … my pretty little lasergun … inside … my bra.’

And the fucking stopped. And she slept. And Myq pulled gently away, turning her round, blinking, sending forth little armies of salty orbs from his eyes. And softly – firmly – he tied up the floating monster, this drifting goddess, this holy horror, using the elasticated Riedquat mouse-fur lined Happystrap™ he’d brought here for this singular purpose.

And he left her hanging in the air.

He hesitated before leaving. His heart. His heart felt like it would crack – no, like it had already cracked, as if beneath the wound was another layer, and another crack, and another, and onwards, and they’d
keep on cracking
until he did something about it – and so gnawed his lip until he tasted blood and wiped dry his eyes and hissed into her ear:

‘Teesa? Are you in fact a cosmic entity which exists solely to spread sex and chaos across creation, which secretly yearns to be destroyed by similar entities?’

‘Oh yes,’ she said, eyes still closed. As if entirely sober. As if entirely awake. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘Just wondered.’

He left her inert. And whispered, as the great electroclamps shimmered to life, as the heavy plates of the bulkhead rotated into position, whispered, ‘I love you.’

The pod sealed with a disappointingly non-thunderous clunk.

Returning to the cockpit, sans gravity, was a far simpler and swifter proposition than the journey down, though not without its own hurdles. Twice Myq lashed out at handholds and passing doorways, arresting his momentum with a snarl, gasping and snotting at all the muddled Feels corkscrewing through him.

Twice he turned back. Mind changed. And twice he spat and swore and stamped (harder to do in zero-gee than he’d thought) and swivelled straight back round to the bridge.

I love her.

She’s a monster.

I love her.

Lex called out while he was still drifting along the foreward corridor.

‘Get up here! Get up here! Big trouble!’

The little machine had been a critical part of ‘the plan’, such as it was. (
Drug girlfriend. Ascertain truth or otherwise of horrifying weirdo alien bullshit.

Betray girlfriend.

Spend rest of life crippled with guilt.
)

Jacked-in to the ship’s systems, Lex had slipped the
Shattergeist
free of its berth with eerie precision. So coldly efficient had been the machine’s advice while Myq plotted his treachery, and so flawlessly had it carried out its own role, that its current tone – convincingly affecting a full-blown panic attack – had the desired effect. Myq sped-up, frightened.

‘Oh my shit,’ the robot squawked. ‘Would you look at the size of it …?’

Myq arrived in the cockpit and simply gawped. All the tattered remnants of his good sense flapping about him, as if the crashing halt of his brain hadn’t arrested the momentum of his woes, and they went bouncing and fluttering onwards past him.

It was too much, in the end. Too much to process.

‘Imperial cutter,’ said Lex. ‘Seven hundred and fifty tons of extremely killy killingness.’

It was huge. A thing of dichotomous grace and ponderousness: all fluted architecture and teardrop modules, lancelike weapons and bombastic banners. The
Shattergeist
had drifted just a few hundred miles from Baltha’Sine before finding its path unceremoniously blocked.

It was glorious. It was death. It was almost enough to shift Myq’s mind from the woman dreaming and cold in the hold below. It was … it was …

‘It’s Madrien Axcelsus,’ the robot said. ‘Fucker’s been hailing us for ten minutes.’

‘Wh-what? Did you call back?’

‘No. You didn’t give me access to the comms.’

‘Shit. Shit shit shit. What does he want?’

‘What do you think? He wants
her
. Ohhhh, don’t get me wrong, he’s saying he wants the shib’ glands – “reparation for crimes committed against my person”, he says. But nah. Secondary modulations in his voice’re way too high. He’s lying. Fully intends to kill your trussed-up tart for reasons of self-preservation and revenge, but wants the goodies too. Smart guy.’

Myq tried to slump to the floor – something even harder to achieve in nograv, it turned out, than a petulant footstamp. ‘How did he know we w—’

‘Come off it. You all but told him you were coming. You lay a trap for him, he lays a bigger one. Like I said, smart. And look: look what he’s brought. Imperial fucking cutter, Myq. Couple of fighters. Dozens of dronebombs and all the rest.’ The little robot vented a sigh of such pantomimed exasperation Myq found himself wishing, not for the first time during their brief acquaintance, that Lex would stop pretending to be alive and get back to please please please fixing everything please now please. ‘He’s given us a couple of minutes – well, we’re down to one-and-a-bit now – to powerdown and eject the cargo. And he wants to speak to Tee personally.’

It hung above them, still barely real. Lex fed fuel to the ominous moment by casting a countdown onto the holo next to the viewscreen. Myq was too knackered to care.

‘Can we fight?’ he muttered.

‘Doubtful. I mean, you didn’t let me access your weapons, but from what I’ve seen? We could make a go of it. But …’ Lex cleared his non-throat.

‘What?’

‘We-ell … for one thing you were, sorry, you were
never
really the Elite pilot in this relationship, were you?’

It was her. It was always her.

‘And since I’m the designated property of the woman attempting to catch you, I tend to think “helping you get away” would be a bit of a protocol conflict. So that’s no good either.

‘Besides … Look, mate, seriously? Those animals down there are fizzing at the proverbial slit. “Highly unstable,” like your missus said.’

‘You were listening?’

“Course I bloody was. Point is: one shot, Myq? One heavy jolt? We’re ash.’

Myq shut his eyes. Tried to pretend there wasn’t a part of him secretly relieved. He just wanted to sleep. ‘Then we’re buggered.’

‘Not … entirely. Original plan still works.’

‘The plan! Some fucking plan!’ He flopped his hands about, too frazzled to even enjoy the tantrum. ‘The plan was to … to tie her up and turn her over to –
oh NoGod
. NoGod, listen to me. No,
no
, the plan was
not
to hand her over. The plan was to … to come to some sort of arrangement with your evil boss. So nobody had to die.’

I never really believed that either.

‘You know, my boss isn’t actually all that b—’

‘But she could be anywhere out there and we’re still—

‘Ah.’

‘—we’re still bloody here, and
oh look
we’ve only got forty-five seconds before we’re vaporised, and if you want the truth maybe that’s not such a b—’

‘Um.’

‘—such a … such a bad th …’

Myq opened his eyes. The little computer was, against all probability, whistling under its breath. ‘What is it?’ he asked.

‘She’s near, actually. My boss. She’s, ah. She traced you. Incoming right now.’

‘You … But …’

But even outrage felt like too much hard work. He deflated back into his preferred nograv position, sitting in midair.

‘When were you planning on telling me this?’ he sighed, kneading the bridge of his nose.

‘That’s not important now.’

‘I think I’ll decide what’s important, if it’s all the s—’

‘Myquel.’ Lex’s voice quite suddenly went serious. Directing itself once again, with extraordinary control, directly into his eardrum. ‘Myquel, all that’s important right now is that you ask yourself a very simple question.’

‘Wh … which is?’

‘Which is:
what do you actually want
?’

Myquel stared out at the great looming beast. Flicked a glance at the timer. Tried not to cry.

And decided.

Or, rather, admitted that he already had.

At the end of it all, SixJen yearned for nothing so much as the chance to feel shock. To wallow in defeat. To be crippled by it.

She hungered for stomach-cramps, cold sweats, low groans of fear. She felt – no, no, she
thought
– that if she could only experience these things, could only give vent to them, could only let them into her skull at the time and rate of her choosing, then that at least would be some consolation, some pyrrhic taste of humanity, before the hunt stuttered and failed.

The runner was about to be killed.

By somebody else.

‘No,’ she whispered, because it felt like something she should say and she’d hoped to catalyse the signal by speaking the response. But no – no panic. No dread. No nothing.

The
The
, it had turned out, had arrived in Baltha’Sine much too far from the system core – even at its ugliest acceleration, even with the pilot’s bench groaning to accommodate the gees – to reach the scene of the
Shattergeist
’s impending destruction in time. Instead she’d raced, flailed, blitzed – watching the scanner in numb impotence as the yacht silently and softly shat out the grandest of its cargo pods, leaving it to hang inert in its wake. Just as the clipper had ordered.

And as it then tilted gently, like a hobnailed elephant dipping to its knees for some whip-wielding master, towards the vast avian shadow above it.

Whose weapons, almost instantly, went hot.