[04] Elite: Mostly Harmless (11 page)

‘What’s wrong sugar? Wet your pants?’

His pants did look wet, but it wasn’t from his bladder. With rising panic in his eyes it became clear he was bleeding, bleeding badly. He pushed back against the chair and looked down to where he was still clutched in the circle of Katherine’s legs. The tearing agony intensified, making him shriek as his stomach stretched open. He watched in horror as the yellow fatty flesh of his sliced belly began bulging out of the slash in his suit; the emergency dermo-layer it was fitted with tried desperately to mesh the gash back together but it was just too big; his insides were escaping too damn quickly. His eyes stared and his mind reeled sickeningly as he watched the gaping maw of his gut opening up. An ooze of something pinkish-grey began to poke its nose out of the burgeoning slash. With absolute horror he realised it was his intestines. He screamed and grabbed at the wound with both hands, trying to close it up.

Katherine laughed and unlocked her legs, bringing her knees up tightly to her chest before pumping her legs out, feet connecting squarely with his chest and launching him out into the middle of the cabin. His arms wheeled about uncontrollably as he flew through the cockpit, blood and guts unravelling from his belly into zero-g like a grotesque slow motion Catherine wheel made of fresh offal.

The captain, still screeching, began to scrabble at his escaping innards; cradling the growing, bloody string of what should definitely be on the inside of his body to his breast like a protective mother. But the more he thrashed and twisted about, the bigger the gaping hole in his stomach grew, his life force spilling out in graphic detail as his small, and then large intestines spilled out too. Angel watched in horror as a tsunami of fresh blood escaped the thrashing melee, surging through the zero-g cabin towards her. She ducked to the side to avoid it but it sloshed across her chest and cheek anyway. Flying globules of blood were everywhere now, although Captain Riley’s screams were mercifully dying down to pathetic whimpers and hitching sobs. As he gradually stopped flailing about his guts continued to unravel, twirling around him like a gruesome spirograph.

Eventually he fell still and Angel noticed Katherine staring at the corpse with a glazed expression. Below her strangely serene face was the architect of Riley’s gruesome undoing, literally. Her heavy metallic waistband was opened up in a crescent-shape of double-blades; wickedly sharp and extremely bloodied. The blades would have looked pretty malignant even if Angel hadn’t been gaping at them through a cockpit filled with orbiting fleshy carnage.

Feeling Angel’s eyes upon her Katherine seemed to snap back to the here and now, cheeks reddening as she looked down at her belt. ‘Insurance,’ she shrugged, seeming to feel as if an explanation was needed.

Her shoulders dropped and she appeared to be reaching for something behind her back. Then there was another metallic slicing sound, this one short and sharp, and her hands fell free. She brought them round to the front of her body and Angel noticed similar razor-like blades extending from her inner wrists. Razor-sharp scalpels had ejected from her metal bracelets cutting cleanly through the graphite wrist ties that had held her bonded to the chair. She carefully snapped the blades back into place, sliding her thumb across an invisible primer button so that the gunmetal bands looked just like statement jewellery again.

‘Custom made.’

Angel was still gawping like a fish out of water as Katherine reset the blades of her girdle before pushing off the command chair and coasting through what was once Captain Riley’s vital organs towards her. She seemed to hardly notice the mess as darkening droplets of human matter splattered across her chest and face. She arrived at the tank rack, placing one hand either side of Angel’s shoulders. The pose was ominously familiar. Katherine looked for a moment into Angel’s eyes, a deep penetrating gaze, and Angel felt her own innards tighten as the pirate reached out and unclipped a set of pliers from the maintenance shuck by the exit hatch. She leaned in close to Angel, stretching behind her with the pliers. It was a surreal experience sensing the hot, sweet breath of the woman on her face as she felt around behind her for the zip-lock restraints; the macabre scene of Captain Riley’s bloody demise revolving through the cockpit in the background. His deconstructed intestines formed a whimsical double helix in the middle of the cabin.

Angel’s wrist ties tightened, then there was a
click
and her hands came free. Katherine breathed deeply but didn’t move away. She glared into Angel’s eyes for a moment.

‘Get the corpse into a fertilizer can. You’ll find one in the cargo bay. I’m going to clean up this mess.’

With that the pirate kicked herself off the tank rank, unclipping a vacuum hose from the maintenance shuck and turning it on. Then she began sucking stringy plumes of human entrails into the funnel as casually as if she were spring cleaning the cockpit of cobwebs.

Chapter 11

The cabin was pretty much back to normal after the disposal of Riley’s body. Just a few bloody streaks decorating the flight desk and monitor panels where his death throes had taken him close. These gruesome reminders were already turning black as the blood dried and oxidised. Katherine was sitting in her command chair staring pensively out at the glittering remains of the ships that had met their doom at this grid reference today – it was far more action than most universal coordinates got to see in a billion planetary lifetimes. The Corvette was coasting slowly away from them through the twisted debris, perfectly framed in the forward windscreen. Angel figured Katherine must have jettisoned the bulky naval craft clamped to the Asp while she was dealing with the biological detritus.

‘What now?’

DORIS whirred in a way Angel had come to recognise as the diminutive robot accessing its databanks.

‘I wasn’t asking you,’ she said tersely to stem any suggestions that might be coming.

‘That is absurd. I have a database of over fifty billion scenarios connected to a probability map of possible outcomes that I can calculate to three trillion levels of fragmented plausibility. If anyone is qualified to answer the question “what now?” it is me.’

‘Can it, DORIS! Remember your proximity link has been deactivated courtesy of the captain. It wouldn’t take much for me to load you into a missile launcher and hit the red button.’

DORIS ticked and hummed a little harder, presumably processing the odds of this new threat. It seemed they didn’t fall in favour of the little bot as it backed down and went to whir broodingly in the corner. Angel turned to look at Katherine, still mutely staring out into space.

‘Katherine?’

‘Hmm?’ she replied absently.

‘What now?’

The pirate turned to look at her, noticing her as if for the first time.

‘Are you okay?’ Angel was a little concerned by the vacant look in her eyes. ‘Fine!’ she snapped suddenly, the scowl returning. She turned to look at the flight desk in front of her, placing her palm across the weapons array. The cabin hummed as electric pulses fed a trickle of power to the forward hard-points and Katherine went back to scowling at the war ship drifting away from them.

‘What now?’ Angel asked again.

‘Well, since I just gutted a naval officer,’ Katherine took hold of the joystick and flicked the guard off the fire button. It took barely a second for the laser target to find and paint a mark on the abandoned Corvette. The weapons array emitted a soft, solid tone and Katherine thumbed the trigger, sending a single missile careening off towards the deserted goliath. It connected with one of the main thruster cylinders, a blossom of orange fire pluming immediately along the defenceless ship’s fuselage. The blossom spread with little pops of fiery light, growing in intensity as the explosive chain-reaction reached deeper and deeper into the hull of the vast ship, finding pockets of fuel and unused warheads to boost its destructive expedition. They watched in silence as the damned Corvette performed its death dance, yawing and tumbling away from them through space as detonations spread her along her flank, eating the ship more and more violently from the inside.

‘As I was saying, since I just killed a naval officer and blew up his boat, I think I’m going to lie low for a while. Head home and try not to get shot at or arrested.’

She twisted her seat to favour the navigation panel, tapping a couple of screens as she plumbed in a destination vector.

‘And me?’

Katherine turned slowly to look at her. Angel was chilled by the lack of emotion in her gaze. It was as if the entanglement with Captain Riley had somehow bled the life right out of her too.

‘I’m taking you back to the Hollows. It’s the only safe place for me right now. You can make your own way home from there. If you really are the daughter of some hot-shit station commander it shouldn’t be too hard to persuade someone that the salvage fee will be worth giving you a ride home. Right now though, you’d better get back on that tank rack or you’re going to stove your head in when we jump.’

* * *

They didn’t speak on the journey, each lost in the depths of their own thoughts as the Asp rushed in and out of the impossible spinal light-web of hyperspace. Even the robot kept its peace, anchored to a rusty panel on the opposite side of the exit hatch to Angel’s now familiar hook-up on the tank rack. When the ship burst out of hyperspace for the third time she breathed out deeply. She craned her neck to get a clue about their location from the star map that was sketching itself neatly on the navigation desk as the ship’s sensors probed the region. It looked like a sparse system; no significant planets picked up on the first sweep of the radar, but sub-scans identifying an asteroid belt of fast moving rock circling a dimly pulsing single star. Katherine tweaked the roll lever, toe-tapping the thrusters as she coaxed her ship into an orbit matching the chaotic collection of space rocks. Most were barely more than the size of the Asp, but then Angel noticed a bigger mass being drawn on the map up ahead.

The asteroid was the size of a small moon, elongated through millennia of careening along a rapid orbit around the star. It rolled lazily as it shot through its prescribed trajectory, a maze of lesser satellites and inconsequential meteors running along beside and behind it like a celestial guard of honour. A deadly guard of honour if you took your approach too lightly as they all spun and rotated haphazardly and out of sync, each on its own unique and ancient path around the sun. The familiar scowl now pinned to her face Katherine levelled up the nose and eased off the thruster a couple of notches until she was flying in line with the asteroid. She twitched the roll lever again and the Asp banked, ducking between two jagged pieces of orbital reef and then drawing alongside the large hunk of space rock as it hurtled through the vacuum.

Angel peered out of the side window.

The asteroid glowed like a vast phosphorescent cuttlefish, illuminated by thousands of fluro landing strips delineating layer upon layer of docking scaffold constructed along the entire length and circumference of the moon-sized rock. Hundreds of ships were clamped precariously on its curved flank; a rag-taggle collection of one, two and three man craft from every era and shipyard in history. There were a couple of larger warship-class vessels too, but they were a rarity and looked heavily patched up. Angel noticed an Imperial Cutter, so overloaded with armoury modifications and punk artillery that it looked like a gruesome caricature of itself. Ant-like dots that were probably dock workers swarmed around every ship. You couldn’t see it from this distance but they would be wearing the heaviest duty EVA suits to protect them from the cold and coupled securely to the ships they tended by a thick umbilical cable.

The comms link crackled into life.

‘Welcome home Dread. I made a bed up for Pearl in bay B-17. Pinging you a beacon now.’

‘Hey Admin. Yeah, she’s going to need something a little more subtle today. Got any room on Medusa?’

There was a pause. The empty comms link purred.

‘Okay, stick your Asp to Medusa 3 then, I’ll bring you inside,’ the voice was chuckling, clearly more amused by his own pun than Katherine was. ‘I hope you got the creds for it?’

‘You worry about your impending puberty and let me worry about my Asp.’

A homing beacon lit up on the navigation grid.

‘See you later at Sue’s?’ the comms link crackled.

‘What do you think dick-wad?’

Katherine flicked the channel off and nudged the Asp into a dive. Angel’s stomach lurched as it was left behind when they circled and dipped below the huge asteroid. From where she was she couldn’t see out of the top of the wind-glass bubble, but she watched Katherine craning up to visually reference whatever her ship’s telemetry was pinpointing as the target. They negotiated a groove in a dark strip of the asteroid and there was a bone crunching clunk as some unseen machinery clamped down on the ship’s hull. Katherine slapped a couple of panels on the dash and the engines started powering down, the turbines inside the thrusters whining as if relieved to finally be coming to rest. The pirate thumped her chest harness to release herself from the chair and twisted to face Angel. ‘You need to suit up. There’s a spare EVA helmet under the maintenance shuck if you don’t want to waste a remlok.’ Angel popped herself off the tank rack as a hydraulic thrum started up outside, penetrating the walls with a rhythmic buzz. The light in the cabin dimmed and Angel could feel the ambient gravity increase to something close to normal as the ship was drawn inside the rolling belly of the giant asteroid.

‘Welcome to the Hollows.’

* * *

After disembarking Katherine had stormed off; exiting the docking bay without a word as she depressurised the airlock and ripped off her EVA helmet, disappearing through the riveted steel frame of the hatch into a dim network of tunnels and caverns carved out of the interior of the space rock. Not wanting to lose track of the only person she knew in this strange place, Angel scuttled after her, the conscience bot whirring along behind.