[04] Elite: Mostly Harmless (18 page)

‘Welcome to piracy girlfriend - and watch you don’t fall off that high horse and land on your backside.’

He looked at her carefully, concern creeping in at the edge of his grin. ‘You up for this, yeah?’ His nod in the direction of the neon sign hanging up ahead made his meaning clear. The Cheese Wheel
.

 Angel tossed the half-drunk flask of coffee into a waste chute as they passed it. ‘We’re about to find out I guess.’

 ‘Well, at least it’s not your first. The first is always the worst.’

Angel looked at him questioningly.

‘Councillor de Laan? You
did
take him out, didn’t you?’

Angel looked away, chewing her bottom lip in a way that screamed
guilty
.

‘Angel! You
did
kill the spacing councillor, didn’t you? We are so many shades of fucked up if we go back to the Hollows …’

‘Don’t worry. He’s dead,’ she interrupted.

Admin breathed a sigh of relief as they arrived at the door to the wine bar. It wasn’t open yet. As one of the station’s all-night drinking dens, the Cheese Wheel staff didn’t need to arrive until the narc-buying public began dragging themselves out of their stinking bunks long after supper.
This is good
, thought Angel, for the first time catching herself seriously thinking about sticking a knife in this man. Her right hand instinctively sought out the handle of the six-inch blade hidden in her flight-suit sleeve, a now-familiar feeling of comfort coming from finding it exactly where she expected to.

The first one is always the worst,
she thought as they paused in front of the bar. Then she put a shoulder to the door and they waded in.

Inside the lights were dim, just the twenty-four hour ad screens spraying a kaleidoscope of flickering neon light throughout the otherwise sleeping bar, tables already wiped clean for the night ahead. The base of the bar was made up of a grid of display coolers, subtly lit to show off hunks of cheese while keeping each rare specimen at the perfect temperature for consumption. High-tech machines designed to slice, dice, grate and process the dairy-based snackery were placed at strategic points along the bar, sharp-bladed wheels ready to prep-and-serve any texture or style of cheesy delight you could wish for along with your fine wine. As they stepped into this curd-filled Aladdin’s cave they heard a strange noise coming from behind the counter; a kind of strangled half-whimper, half-gurgle accompanied by what sounded a little like unenthusiastic tap dancing. Admin put his arm out to stop Angel advancing, his pirate senses on high alert for an ambush. Angel noticed one of the large turning blades from the central slicing machine was not where it should have been. At that exact moment a motor suddenly whirred into life out of sight behind the counter. The whimpering, gurgle ramped up into a  smothered, drowning scream of such blood curdling intensity Angel felt like she must be turning to cheese herself.

Angel and Admin were both rooted to the spot, bodies tense and shot with adrenaline. Then sense seemed to return to Admin and he kicked the door shut behind them. The engine sound was fully revved now and the scream was suddenly overwhelmed by the gurgle and then extinguished altogether. Once the screaming had died down Angel could hear the wet slap of something that sounded suspiciously organic matter hitting the flex-plex surfaces of the bar area in clumps. The tap dancing, which had briefly accelerated to an exuberant clog dance, ceased as rapidly as the screaming had and then the engine started winding down, a background whirring noise fading until all was silent again.

Angel and Admin looked at each other. She hardly dared walk into the bar. The audio drama they’d just heard play out left little to the imagination in terms of the scene they would discover. The only real question was who had conducted the orchestra? She noticed Admin was now holding a blade in his left hand and what looked like a small, flat disc in the other. She slipped her own knife out of its sheath and they edged deeper into the bar, peering around the machine with the missing circular blade. The machines all had these blades; big, industrial slicers mounted in a square steel frame with a power supply and a wickedly fast motor attached. The edge of the blade was equally wickedly sharp with popped out serrations covering the flat of one side. Grated or sliced; one blade, two functions.

Angel saw his hands first; placed flat on the countertop as if he were leaning forward in animated conversation with a patron propping up the bar. Except these hands had a rivet bashed crudely into the centre of each pinning them to the cracked and bloody flex-plex counter top like a grisly crucifixion. As her eyes followed the scene further back behind the bar they came upon the grisly mess she’d been anticipating, slumped halfway down behind the counter. She wrinkled her nose and looked away as her stomach did a nauseated flip-flop.

Beside her Admin whistled. ‘Now, that’s what is commonly known as a cheesy grin.’

The now stilled cheese blade was embedded in the man’s face, dissecting him across the mouth and cut so deep the top of his head was only held in place because the blade was embedded in the rear wall, acting as a shelf for the lurid ornament to rest upon. Blood and gore and bits of brains were sprayed all over; together with shards of teeth and chunks of fleshy top lip where the rough grating edge of the blade had worked it to shreds as he bit down against the violent onslaught.

The corpse grinned at them around the blade.

Then, as Angel watched in open-mouthed horror the weight of the frame and motor proved too much for the blade/head/shelf contraption and it pulled free of the wall, clattering to the floor behind the bar. The top of the man’s head toppled with it but was still partially attached to the rest of the head by the stringy gristle of the ear lobes and two thick strips of fleshy cheek, so instead of tumbling all the way to the ground it tipped forward and bounced against his chest on gruesome bungee cords of shredded skin.

‘I s’pose we should be ‘grateful’, right?’ he nudged Angel. ‘Dead’s dead at the end of the day.’

Angel finally found her voice. ‘Is that Dennett?’

Admin nodded. ‘Was, I should say. He’s not half the man he used to be. Lost his head it seems.’

 ‘Yeah, alright. You’re about as funny as a hyper-gravity enema right now. What the hell just happened?’

‘I’d say one of Mr Dennett’s other friends got to him before us.’

They both looked up and down the bar; suddenly remembering they had their weapons out for a reason. There was a sudden rush of noise and light from behind them and Angel’s heart tried to jump clean out of her mouth. They both spun around to see the door softly closing behind DORIS, who was hovering just inside the bar.

‘What the Thargoid-loving fuck are you doing here?’ Angel cried, her mind glad to have something new to connect with after the horror behind the bar.

The robot clicked and ticked as processors prepared an explanation. ‘I came to see what was taking you so long. The cargo is all loaded up; the
Daisy Chain
fuelled and primed. I even sorted out the export license for the shipment of alabaster that mysteriously arrived. Not exactly a genius idea to send a loaded pallet to the docks without any digiwork when you’re trying to keep a low profile. Luckily for you I was there to recalibrate the customs scanner before they could get deep enough to discover the unusually soft centre in the load.’

The robot paused. It seemed to be waiting for some kind of recognition for its stellar work. When none came it continued with an eerily human hint of sulk in its tone. ‘Fine. So, all we need is a crew and a jump window and we can be out of this system clean … You can thank me later.’

The little propeller holding the robot aloft buzzed harder and tilted to thrust it deeper into the bar. It hovered between Angel and Admin as its scanners took in the scene of the murder. ‘I can see you’ve completed your work to a satisfactory level, though I have to admit I find the theatrics somewhat gauche.’

Angel blinked in disbelief at how matter-of-fact this observation was. Beside her Admin smirked.

‘Ruthless,’ he said to himself with a satisfied grin as the smack, smack, smacking sound of generous globules blood hitting the floor filled the neon-scattered silence around them.

Chapter 18

Katherine was back to pacing, although thankfully as they were still in dock the ferromagnetic floor magnets weren’t making that annoying noise. ‘We have about two hours before that hack wakes up from the Dreibell flower sleep syrup I slipped him.’

 ‘Probably a lot less before they find the mess we left at the Cheese Wheel,’ Admin added.

Katherine glared at the back of Angel’s head. ‘Can’t you use your influence or something to bump us up the launch schedule?’

Angel sighed, tapping the flight desk, bringing up holograms of the current sector to plot out the most innocent-looking route back to the Hollows. ‘You told me to act natural. If I start throwing my father’s weight around I might as well hang a neon sign over my head saying “guilty”.’

The comms link crackled and Rachel Hanandroo’s voice drifted into the spacious cockpit of the Fer-de-Lance. ‘Angel … it’s your mother.’

Angel’s heart stopped dead in her chest and then plummeted down to the pit of her stomach to find a place to hide. She opened the comms link. ‘Which channel?’

 ‘Errr, no, not on the loop.’

There was a pregnant pause as all three in the
Daisy Chain
’s cockpit peered out through the forward windscreen at the brightly lit rectangle of the control room window across the dock. DORIS whirred quietly above the navigation panel.

Rachel was standing nervously at her command post, a tablet cradled in one arm, her back to the glowering figure that had planted itself like thunder just inside the entrance hatch. Even from this distance Rachel’s face was the picture of grey anxiety.

‘When you’ve quite finished faffing about, cadet …’

‘Commander,’ corrected Rachel in a sulky tone as Angel’s mother shunted her aside and bent too close to the comms mic to speak. Her voice boomed into the cockpit, distorting the speakers and making the shell-shocked crew flinch.

‘And where do you think you’re sloping off to, young lady? What? We don’t even bother to pop by and say hello to our mother now? After I’ve been worried half to death about you, vanishing into thin space for days without a word, and then hearing you’re back on the station from my dermaponics therapist? My
dermaponics
therapist, I ask you? For the Lady’s sake, Angel! AND since when did you start having facials?’ She turned to address her entourage; three toned and beautiful young men who were lingering just inside the entrance admiring each other and looking thoroughly bored by the whole affair. ‘I’ve been telling her for years that she needs to deep cleanse, you know? But will she listen? Does she
ever
listen to her poor mother?’

Angel snapped the comms link off and looked at DORIS for help. The robot just hovered tacitly, processors ticking over.

‘What? In all your gazillion disaster-recovery scenarios you have no suggestions?’

‘My analytics are based on business and economics scenarios; risk and analysis of financial impact. This is a domestic. Human emotional responses are a complete mystery to my algorithms so there is a high probability anything I suggest will do more harm than good.’

Angel gritted her teeth. For an entity without shoulders the bot had just done a pretty good impression of a nonchalant shrug. She looked at Katherine instead.

‘Don’t look at me,’ the pirate said.

Admin shrugged in the background, pre-empting any attempt to illicit his input.

She was on her own.

Typical. Time to be yourself,
she thought and leaned forward to tap the comms channel open again. ‘Mother …’  ‘Oh, glory be to Randomius Factoria, she recognises mother; in name at least if not due respect!’

‘Okay, okay … you can quit the histrionics. I’ve only been gone for a few days, and now I have to go again. And a few days from now I’ll be back again. And what a remarkable turn of events
that
is, given that I’m a trader and coming and going is pretty much all we do,’ she squeezed as much sarcasm into her voice as she could muster. It had the desired effect.

‘Don’t you use that tone with me, young lady,’ her mother fumed. ‘You don’t check your messages for days; I get reports from your father’s contacts in the pilot’s Federation that your ship has been destroyed and then those reports just go away; vanish into the vacuum of space in a puff of incredulity. Being the gentleman he is, Captain Riley agrees to go check up on you … and then
poof,
his ship vanishes too – only to pop up again apparently on patrol in Algreit a couple of hours later.’

‘Shit …’ Katherine’s voice was filled with dread.

 ‘And now, here you are; triumphantly returned in a ship five times the value of the one you left in… at
least
five times! AND …’ her mother paused for dramatic effect … ‘Booking
FACIALS!
’

A blanket of cold-dread settled around Angel’s shoulders. Her skin scrawled with it. They were busted; the whole goid-spitting screw-up of a plan was about to go super-nova.

‘Mother … I ….’

Angel felt herself unravelling at the seams. She had absolutely no idea what to do or say. They needed to get out of here right now, but until they were free of the station’s docking grid they weren’t going anywhere without clearance. They were so close; all fuelled up and ready to roll. She just needed to buy them a ticket off this launch pad somehow. Without really thinking her brain seized on the one thing it knew would trump all others in Maugvahnna’s eyes. Before Angel knew what her mouth was doing it had teamed with her brain and started serving up the mother of all abhorrent lies …

‘We’re getting married.’

Silence; filled only by the vacant hiss of white noise from the comms link.

Katherine and Admin gaped. DORIS’s processor crackled and popped.