[04] Elite: Mostly Harmless (12 page)

‘Bugger off,’ Katherine said after Angel and DORIS had been following her for about ten minutes. The grubby, jaded people milling about the rocky caverns inside the asteroid paid little attention to the bad tempered procession stomping through their midst. Angel and DORIS were strangers and if anyone had looked closely it would have been pretty obvious they didn’t belong. They were far too clean to begin with. But nobody was looking closely. That was part of the charm of the place. This was the human soup of the underworld, from Lave to Achenar. Everyone behaved strangely here and it was generally taken for granted that if you were going about your business without anyone firing a pulse laser at you, you probably had as much right to be here as the next person.

Katherine continued to ignore Angel and they eventually arrived at a bar. It was noisy and chaotic, a pungent mix of sweat and alcohol fumes filling the cavern with a thick fug illuminated by pulsing light spilling off the dance floor. No-one was dancing. It was early yet; the night’s drinking hardly begun so the music was still low-key and vaguely melodic. Around half the booths that lined the walls were already full though. Rough looking men and women dressed in filthy, cracked leather and hard-core adorns drank and talked animatedly. Serving boys and girls dressed in raggy slops scurried here and there, delivering drinks and the occasional bowl of something steaming to the people sat at the tables. Most of them looked no more than twelve or thirteen to Angel; filthy faces and scrawny bodies, but with happy enough grins when the more intoxicated patrons rewarded their speedy service with apparently generous tips. The counter was also half full; long and sticky with flagons of beer and shot glasses littered along it in front of customers slumped at varying degrees of inebriation.

Katherine sat heavily at the bar. An oversized figure behind it with big, platinum blonde hair turned and leant against its edge. While the hair was doll-like, impossibly girlie, the face was angular, stubbly and strong, caked with exaggerated makeup but exuding macho bravado. Angel’s mind, already in turmoil trying to untangle the bombardment of sights and sounds in this strange new place, struggled particularly with this contradictory apparition.

‘What can I get you ladies?’

The bartender’s voice was as deep and booming as the stubble and pronounced Adam’s apple hinted it would be. Angel’s eyes flicked up and down, taking in scarlet nails and lips, excessive eyelashes and what looked like it could be a red leather mini skirt below the counter. She was startled by the frankness of the ensemble. The bartender stood casually; unselfconscious, despite the fact she must have been gawping. This was not a man pretending to be a woman, or a woman masquerading as a man. She didn’t know quite what it was, but it felt completely honest and when the bartender smiled at her reassuringly, she found herself smiling back.

‘I don’t have any creds,’ she said apologetically. She wanted to buy liquor from this man; or should that be woman? Not just to be sociable but because she really needed a drink right now.

‘Give me a bottle of Spacial Sloma,’ said Katherine.

The bar tender nodded reaching under the counter and sliding open a cooler to produce a brown flex-plex bottle. ‘I’m guessing the bot won’t be needing a glass?’

Angel had almost forgotten the robot was there again. The bar tender scooped up two tumblers and placed one each in front of Katherine and Angel. Angel tensed, waiting to see if Katherine would object and tell her to bugger off again. She didn’t, and the glasses were filled to the brim without further pomp. Angel slid into the high bar chair beside the moody pirate.

‘Thanks Sue,’ Katherine said with real feeling as she lifted the amber glass of intoxicating liquid to her lips.

Angel breathed out slowly; savouring the blossom of alcoholic burn on her tongue as it spread through her head, infiltrating her cheeks and mingling with the oxygen at the back of her throat before singeing her nostrils on the way back out.
The circle of life,
she thought with a private smile of satisfaction. The gravity inside the asteroid was a little under normal - possibly about 0.8-g Angel reckoned - which gave everything a surreal quality of being held in place, but only just. It felt a bit like normality was teetering on the edge of chaos, which pretty much summed up what she had seen of this pirate base so far.

Several hours later they were an impressive amount of the way through the second bottle of Spacial Sloma and Katherine at last seemed to shedding the demons that had been haunting her since their encounter with Captain Riley. Sue had kept them in stitches for the last twenty minutes with a story about an enlightening teenage encounter she’d had with an Imperial duke when Katherine’s attention was caught by something across the room. She stood drunkenly on the struts of her chair to rise above the growing throng of people on the dance floor, roaring a beery cheer and making a double-fisted salute to someone across the room. Sue stopped speaking and glanced over. Smiling she lifted another tumbler from beneath the counter and filled all four glasses, opening a third bottle of booze to top up the last.

‘Ay, how’s space Dread?’

The newcomer was a wiry lad, not much more than eighteen Angel guessed. She recognised his voice as the landing controller who’d brought them in. Like everyone in this rock he was shabby and dirty. He had a roguish grin and wore the typical leather and rough cloth garb of a pirate, with a blade sheathed on his left hip and a pulse laser tucked into a leg harness on the right. He plopped himself down on a stool beside Angel and bumped knuckles with Katherine on the other side of her.

‘Why the deep cover?’

Katherine lifted her drink, prompting him to do the same and they clinked briefly before necking the amber liquid. Sue was pouring the refills almost before their empty glasses touched down.

‘Aw, piss in zero-g man. I’m screwed,’ she paused long enough to neck another shot and continued on, leaving Sue to fill everyone’s sympathetically empty glasses again. ‘I was just hopping around, doing a little salvage work when I jump out of hyperspace to find a shit-storm of a wreckage, freshly blasted. So I run a quick scan. All I find is this comedy duo,’ she thumbed to indicate Angel and DORIS. ‘So out of the goodness of my heart I pick them up. Next thing I know I have the nebular-fucking NAVY up my tailpipe!’

The newcomer looked dubiously at Angel.

‘To be fair, Dread, you’ve never had a good heart.’

‘Oi!’

‘Does navy bait have a name?’

Katherine peered across the top of another overflowing glass of amber liquor at Angel.

‘Angel, this is Admin. Admin, Angel, etcetera,’ she mumbled, necking another shot and then rapping her glass impatiently on the counter when a Sue didn’t replenish it instantly. ‘Oh, the annoying bot is apparently called DORIS.’

Admin snorted with laughter at this, making the hovering robot click indignantly. Once their glasses were filled to the brim they banged them together again. Admin grinned at Angel as the music stepped up a beat to entice a few more people on the dance floor.

‘Welcome to hell in a hollow rock, my friend.’

Chapter 12

Noticing Katherine had slid into a booth by herself across the bar, Angel checked to see that the other two were deep in conversation and slipped down off her chair. She slithered into the seat opposite Katherine. The stony faced pirate seemed to be sinking back into the sullen funk that had overcome her after killing Captain Riley.

‘You okay?’

Katherine looked up, scowling at Angel from between cupped palms atop a pair of unsteady elbows.

‘Oh sure. I’m always okay after spilling someone’s guts into zero-g. How ‘bout you?’

Angel paused. ‘No need to be like that. I’m only asking.’

 ‘And what do you care? Seriously … I picked you up, what? Five hours ago?’

There was a gentle whirring from the booth behind them.

‘Six-and-a-half hours ago actually, we could have been back at Slough by now.’

The women turned in unison to shout at the booth behind Katherine’s seat.

‘Go away!’

‘Go away!’

An unseen processor chip behind the seatback
chuck, chuck, chucked
briefly before reluctantly winding down.

Katherine continued staring away from the table for a while longer as she tried to pluck a couple of coherent thoughts out of the air. Eventually she turned back to face Angel, looking stern. ‘Five hours; six hours … all the same we’re not exactly blood-sisters. So what do you care if I’m okay?’

Angel shrugged and took a non-committal slug of her drink. ‘You saved me for starters, when I was floating around in that pod with my ear drums being blasted out by the proximity alarm then again when Riley went bat-shit crazy.’

Katherine snorted into her drink. ‘Is that what it was? “Bat-shit crazy”?’

There was another awkward silence as they were absorbed again briefly by the memory of what happened; or perhaps more strikingly, what might have happened. Angel’s cheeks heated. ‘I’m sorry Katherine. I honestly didn’t mean to bring this to your cockpit.’

Katherine suddenly stopped moping into her drink, her head snapping upright as she stared Angel down across the table. ‘What in goid-sucking space are you apologising for? Did you make him?’

Angel was confused.

‘Did you write him an instruction manual? Grant him a license? No. No you fucking didn’t. He managed that all by himself – like all the rest of them. He’s spent his whole fucking life cultivating a moral estate where it is okay to be like that; to tie a woman up; beat her and rape her; treat her body like meat and her mind like useless offal.’

The awkward silence came back with a vengeance as Katherine lifted her drink to her lips and sucked on it deeply.

‘I think we’ve had our fill of offal today, don’t you?’

Angel’s attempt to lighten the atmosphere was reassuringly effective. Katherine’s eyes seemed to clear a little as she focused on her across the rim of her glass.

‘Nifty adorns by the way. I must ask you to introduce me to your jeweller. There have been plenty of occasions when I could do with a couple of spring-loaded blades at pod-height.’

Katherine’s hand went instinctively to her broad belt, now sprung back into place and seeming like nothing more innocuous than a sturdy iron girdle. ‘It’s good to be prepared,’ she said.

The music dipped momentarily to silent right before the middle-eight of a particularly powerful country-style love ballad, and they shared a moment across the scuffed table as the modulated rhythm blasted back into the room with renewed vigour. Angel reached out across the table and Katherine, seeing the unspoken request placed her own forearms gently in Angel’s hands. Angel took hold of the metal wrist bands and ran her thumbs across the inside of them.

‘Careful!’

Katherine had jerked away from Angel’s grip and was now cradling the dangerous cuffs in front of her. She held one arm out to demonstrate how brushing her thumb across a bit of raised metalwork on the inside would trigger the device. Two crescent-shaped blades, lethally sharp and whisperingly quick, sliced out through the air between them.

‘Right,’ Angel said, rubbing her own wrists in appreciation of what had
not
just happened.

Katherine thumbed the blades back into place and re-sprung the catch.

‘Remind me not to hug you goodnight later.’

Katherine laughed without much mirth.

A less awkward silence fell between them. Over at the counter Sue regaled the barflies with another hilarious anecdote. The chorus of the love song kicked in again and they enjoyed another sip of their drinks as the Wayout Walton Westies wailed about the wrenching pain of love and gravity in A-minor.

‘NOW! That’s What I Call Suicide. Volume 267,’ Katherine deadpanned as the music droned on.

Angel laughed, and then thought for a while before asking. ‘What happened to you Katherine? To give you such hard skin?’

Katherine stared out across the dance floor for a while before answering. ‘Life.’

Angel tried to sweep back the fog of alcohol rolling across her brain and think of something insightful to say; or at least something not too annoying. ‘You want to talk about it?’

She was kicking herself even as the words fell out of her mouth. Talk about weak! But Katherine continued gazing into the heaving throng.

‘Not really,’ she said in a bland tone, taking another a sip of her drink, ‘and you don’t want to hear about it either. Trust me. Your friend Riley might have been a rotten-hearted rapey spacer but he was a paragon of virtue compared to some that I’ve known.’

Leaning back in her seat she looked straight at Angel, scanning her up and down, assessing her like a salvage probe. ‘I had a nice life once, like you,’ she offered up to the silence between them, which was growing awkward again. ‘But the goid-fucking spacers who picked me up weren’t quite as easy-going as I am.’

She took a slow sip on her drink, staring out into the now heaving bar. She seemed lost in deep and troubled thought. Angel reached for her own drink and swallowed a large swig as dust motes swirled though the illuminated fug between them. The Wayout Walton Westies finally caterwauled to a conclusion and a fresh dub-beat track sent the dance floor into a frenzy of cheering, drunken recognition. Angel was about to think of something brilliant to say – anything to ease the tension –when Katherine continued.

‘They picked me up when our transporter ran into engine trouble on a refuelling stop. We got caught up in a solar storm and got pitched right into the middle of an asteroid belt in a system at the far edge of Federation space – in bandit territory. We abandoned ship and sent out a distress signal but they were passing through and picked up the SOS before anyone else could respond.’

‘They?’ Angel asked as Katherine paused to drink deeply.

She turned to look Angel straight in the eye, the fog almost completely cleared from her vision. ‘Pirates. They were hopping out for a frontier loot run; you know? Heading out to the uncharted places of deep space to cherry pick a few explorers for their expensive probes and long range mods? They had stopped to scoop fuel from the same red dwarf as us, saw the Dolphin in trouble and hung around for a quick bonus loot scoop. My escape pod was plucked out of space and they decided to keep me like a pet for the expedition; you know? For “entertainment” purposes? They used to tell me I should think myself lucky. If I’d been an ugly spacer like the rest of my family they would have pulped me to fertilizer too.’