[04] Elite: Mostly Harmless (13 page)

She held Angel’s gaze through the chromatic throb of the lights and the music, a mist of sweat and alcohol fumes swirling around them. ‘It took me three years to get away.’

The dance floor writhed.

‘So now I make sure I’m prepared.’

They sat and listened to the music for a while, the tickling heat of alcohol softening the edges of the awkward silence and unspoken pain of Katherine’s troubled memories hanging in the air between them.

‘I’m sorry,’ Angel said, feeling ridiculously inadequate.

Katherine laughed again, only this time there was the twinkling of real humour in it. ‘There you go again; apologising for the world at large. Are the shortcomings of humanity really on your shoulders, commander? How big must your ego be to believe that to be truth?’

Angel was about to say sorry again but caught herself just in time. She held her breath, trying to figure out what it was she wanted to say, then sighed deeply, shaking her head. ‘I am such a fuck up. My life is such a fuck up. You know what? I
do
feel like everything is on my shoulders, yes. All mother-fucking five-bazillion zeta-tons of everything. Is that how much stuff there is?’

Katherine frowned. ‘Where?’

Angel drained her glass and slammed it down on the table. ‘Everywhere! Everything! How much mother-fucking matter is there in the universe anyway?’

Katherine’s brow furrowed. ‘Err, I think that’s infinite.’

 ‘Well whatever it is, it’s on my shoulders. Has been since the day I was born.’

‘Oh please. You’re the daughter of a station captain! What do you know about a tough life?’

Angel was the one dipping into her mirthless laughter repertoire now. ‘Well, that just shows how much you know about me. And considering you just felt compelled to garrote the only part of my life you’ve ever been introduced to, I’d have thought you might have a little more sympathy.’

This gave Katherine pause for thought; a new perspective to take the edge off her own experience perhaps? The music throbbed through the not-so-awkward silence.

‘It looks like it might be time for an intervention. Sorry it took me so long ladies. My boys only just docked with fresh supplies.’

Admin was sliding into the seat beside Katherine, shunting her bum deeper into the booth with his hip to make room as he banged a fresh bottle of Spacial Sloma squarely into the centre of the table.

By the time Katherine had swept the bottle up and filled all their drinks to the brim, Admin had dug something out of a flat pocket tucked into the seam of his jacket sleeve. He cradled a small brown bottle under the table as surreptitiously as his alcohol soaked brain would allow and held a small pipette in his cupped hand in the centre of the table. Angel noticed it was half-way filled with a sparkling green liquid; it was a recreational narc commonly known as Schlapstar.

‘Anyone?’

‘Ahh, right on cue Mister Administrator.’

‘Does madam require a little sparkle in her life?’

‘You’re nebular screwing right, she does.’

Katherine plonked the bottle of booze back down on the table and leant back in her seat, tipping her head right back without even the pretence of hiding the fact that Admin was emptying the dropper into her eyes. Admin grinned as Katherine began slithering inelegantly down under the table. He dipped the pipette into the bottle in his lap and reproduced it, holding it out in front of Angel’s eyes. She hesitated, looking at Katherine who was collapsed happily into the chair opposite her, smiling unguardedly for the first time since they’d met.

‘Why not?’

Angel tipped her head back and Admin emptied half the pipette into one eye, half into the other. Instantly the sensation of ecstasy blossomed from her eyelashes, spilling down through her nervous system like a waterfall of tingling sensation.

‘There you go, she likes to party,’ Katherine lurched forward, clutching Angel by the wrists, shaking them between her own clenched fists. ‘You’re right!’

‘I am?’ Angel was confused, no longer sure who she was let alone anything she could be right about. She concentrated on holding her focus on Katherine as the pirate unclipped one of the vicious bands she wore around her wrists. She held it out towards Angel and when the other just stared blankly back across the table she grabbed hold of Angel’s own wrist and pulled it towards her. Katherine snapped the deadly adorn on Angel’s wrist. ‘You obviously have some very fucked up fucking friends. I do need to introduce you to my jeweller -Stoo ‘the stud’ Swinders . In the mean time I want you to have this. In case we meet any more of your buddies.’

Not to be left out and now swimming in the rather pleasant ephemeral ooze of the drops he’d placed in his own eyes, Admin also leant in to the huddle forming in the centre of the table. The dub-track turned into something driving and more urgent, and the revellers on the dance floor roared in appreciation. Whoever was running the sound system -
DJ Fozzer?
Angel thought someone might have called him - had clearly decided the time for civilised conversation was over as the volume of this new track increased by at least ten decibels. The three of them were left staring at each other through the shimmering dust motes that had been excited from every surface by the ear splitting volume of the music as the cavern reverberated to the beat of the bass.

Angel could feel the rhythm pulsing across her skin as the tingling sensation began to blossom again, emanating from every cell that came into contact with the sine waves from the speaker stack. She felt her body begin to sway, closing her eyes for just a moment to savour the build-up of the music.

She felt a hand cup her chin and forced her eyes to open, trying in vain to pull them into focus on the face that swam before her. How long had she been sitting there? Time had no meaning to her right now. And she didn’t really care anyway she realised with oddly detached curiosity, and then laughed at herself riotously.

‘You look like you could do with a dance!’

A pair of hands swam towards her and pulled her to her feet, dragging her after the blurry face into the centre of the room, where her legs obediently got to work tearing apart the dance floor. The sweaty crowd bounced around her. Her heart raced; her head spun; her whole body succumbed to the irresistible warmth of the narcotics. Everything else was just meaningless bullshit. It was just her, the throbbing music, and the strong arms that were holding her upright.

Everything else.

Bullshit.

Chapter 13

Angel peeled her eyes open, the crusty weight of last night’s excesses gumming up her lashes. Her tongue did a brief exploratory. It discovered massive dehydration but nothing more untoward. She was hung over, but that wasn’t unusual. It was certainly nothing some sweet carbs and an industrial-strength coffee wouldn’t put right.  She was actually quite relieved to find herself in one piece. But
where
in one piece? That was the billion-credit question.

She rotated her head, which seemed to be resting on something soft; something pillow-like. Half a head-turn later and her eyes were able to confirm the pillow-like object was in fact, a pillow. She frowned as her fuddled brain tried to unscramble the events of last night. A pillow meant a bed. She was pretty surprised she’d ended up somewhere with an actual bed. Somebody must have taken pity on her.

Moving as little as possible to stave off the onset of what would no doubt be a stonking headache, her eyes did a brief tour of this side of the room. It was sparse; roughly carved stone walls and unfussy furniture much of which had pieces of clothing flung across it. She noticed with a growing sense of unease that not all of the clothing was hers. Black, well-worn flight gear cut to fit a man was mingled together with her own gear on the floor; a brutal looking machete slung in a sheath across the back of a wooden chair.

There was a sigh from behind her and someone shifted position, dragging the sheet off her as they turned. Alarm bells rang, her mind desperately digging through the wreckage of her memory for evidence of who the sigh belonged to. She twisted her head back the other way and as she had predicted it started throbbing savagely. Her eyes came to rest upon the tangled mess of the back of someone’s head. Brown, shoulder-length hair tousled from what looked like more than just a lack of combing. She couldn’t make out much about the body as it was tucked under a sheet, but the shoulders were definitely male. She noticed a couple of hairs sprouting but otherwise they were smooth and toned. She could make out the shape of a lithely sculpted bicep heading down under the sheet.

The alarm bells now clanging at full fury inside her head didn’t help with the headache.

Where was she? And
who ... the fuck … was that?

Right on cue the body moaned and shifted again, turning to lie on its back. It sighed. A tongue came out and licked some moisture on to the lips. There was the sound of scratching and she could see a hand moving under the covers down around his groin area. As she lay there, staring incredulously at the roughly handsome face of the unknown young man she was apparently in bed with, his eyes fluttered open. He turned his head to look at her dozily.

‘Hey baby,’ he said, with the unmistakeable air of someone she’d been incredibly intimate with recently.

 ‘Piss and gravity!’

She bolted upright, then suddenly realising she was naked grabbed the sheet and yanked it off her dozy bed mate so she could wrap it around what was left of her dignity as she scrambled to her feet and away from the scene.

‘Who in flaming Thargoid-loving hell are you?’

* * *

‘If we didn’t … you know … then why are my clothes all over the floor?’

The man she’d woken up beside was propped up against the bed head. Despite her own nakedness and the gear on the floor he was still partially dressed in grubby long johns with a wide cotton bandage wrapped around his mid-riff. He even had his socks on still, but Angel had woken up with enough ill-conceived bed partners to find them still wearing socks to know this proved nothing. He looked infuriatingly amused by the stupor Angel was whipping herself into.

‘You were … hard to argue with. And the view was too good to argue very hard anyway. But I promise you, I was the perfect gentleman … well, apart from enjoying the view of course.’

By now Angel had wrapped the sheet completely around her and was storming about the room like a mini tempest, snatching up her clothes from where they had fallen.

‘Look, ease up Commander. You needed a bed; I offered to share mine since we’d been getting on so well on the dance floor. Remarkably charitable of me under the circumstances, I thought. When we got back here you complained about being too hot and before I knew what was happening you had stripped off all your clothes and passed out on my bed. You weren’t the only one enjoying the administrations of our young friend last night. I was trashed. We all were. I honestly couldn’t have pleasured you even if I’d wanted to, not outside my own rather vivid imagination anyway.’

He raised a salacious eyebrow in her direction and she blushed with renewed vigour, disappearing into the wet room to put her clothes on. 

This
was precisely why she didn’t do narcs, she admonished herself angrily.

‘So we slept?’

She emerged from the bathroom buckling up her cuffs. She twisted the wrist band from Katherine around so it was seated correctly, potentially sharp edge facing out, and smoothed her thumb across the simple engraving. A flash of memory from the night before returned; a young man with green eyes and a sparkling smile.
This
young man with green eyes and a sparkling smile; laughing uncontrollably at something just out of reach for her memory; strong arms encircling her as they swayed together on the dance floor – swaying in sync with the whole universe at eight-beats-to-the-bar. 

‘We slept,’ he agreed. ‘There might have been a little innocent spooning. And by the way you snore.’

She plonked herself down on the side of the bed and started pulling on her boots. He was watching her curiously.

‘Where are you going, by the way?’

Angel stopped. She had no idea. She was just on autopilot, extricating herself from the latest awkward morning-after exchange with a stranger she had found herself in bed with. But this time she couldn’t go sloping back to her pilots fed digs to nurse her pounding hangover and try to shake off the shame. Her shoulders slumped as the hopelessness of her situation sunk in.

‘I have no idea. I don’t even know where I am. I’ve lost everything and I have no way of getting home. Not that there is anything waiting for me at home apart from trouble and strife anyway; and quite probably a couple of official charges. At the very least there are going to be some difficult questions to answer.’

She felt a hand on her back and pulled away from it, glaring back at the half-naked man lying in the bed beside her. He held his hands up, indicating a lack of malice as she scowled at him venomously.

‘I’m guessing you don’t remember my job offer then, either? You were pretty grateful at the time.’

She drummed her fingers briefly on the bed as her brain sifted back through the haziness beginning to seep in at the corners of her memory. She had more flash backs of dancing; laughing; hunkering down in cosy booths with Admin, Katherine and this green-eyed other; administering crystal green liquid to each other’s eyes and taking flight on the wings of the music blaring through the cavern. But no job offers.

He read her face coming up blank and frowned. ‘How about my name?’

* * *

The man in the bed turned out to be called Mental Eddie, a nefarious pirate of some not-inconsiderable note within the Hollows. Indirectly, he was Admin’s boss, as he controlled the formidable fleet of narc runners that pretty much dominated this area and three sectors in every direction. While allowing herself to be taken home by someone whose name was prefixed with the word ‘mental’ wasn’t the smartest move she’d ever made, she had to admit the job was pretty generous once he’d repeated the offer. It came with access to a fleet of ships – highly twinked for any occasion – a basic living allowance, and in light of her rather negative reaction to waking up in his bed, Eddie had even thrown in a room at Sue’s.