[04] Elite: Mostly Harmless (2 page)

She flicked her eyes to the console. She was half a degree off, tops. The worst, the absolute worst she could do was fracture the hull. But she hoped her ship was tougher than that.

It usually was.

The entrance screamed towards her through the HUD but she held her course and switched her thruster foot to the top of the pedal, ready to tap it into neutral. She was coming in hard and fast and burning way too much fuel but she’d landed worse approaches than this. You might say it was her speciality.

She flipped the engines to neutral and immediately stomped on the wing flaps with both feet. There was a loud groaning sound as her ship scrapped through the slotted entrance of the dock. A fuse on her console popped with a spray of electricity and the portside aft-shield indicator sunk to fourteen percent. Her heart sunk with it.
There goes a stack of creds
, she thought. But then the scraping sound turned into a ripping sound she wasn’t so familiar with. She craned her neck to the left just in time to see a data-band aerial go flying off into the vacuum of space, trailing behind it a decimated maintenance pod and what looked like a box of chicken drumsticks. She swallowed, hoping there wasn’t an engineer in that pod, and then the left wing clunked one last time and her ship shuddered violently as one of the portside landing lights joined the escape party into oblivion.

Angel’s body was wrenched painfully forwards as the station’s berthing computer took control of the situation, lighting up her flight console with the emergency break pattern at the exact same moment as the artificial gravity in the loading bay kicked in. It wasn’t much – about half-a-gee as this made loading and unloading heavy cargo bins much easier – but it was enough to make sure she ended up with an uncomfortable amount of kevlar webbing wedged somewhere unmentionable.

‘Ouch.’

She yanked the harness out from between her thighs, watching as the shield indicator continued its downward journey all the way to zero before going completely dark.

‘Inter-bloody-galactic,’ she said, feeling anything but.

She punched the harness release in the centre of her chest and hauled her body, uncharacteristically heavy after so long in zero-g, towards the hatch. The airlock on the control deck opened up and Engineer Rachel Hanandroo peered out, checking the state of her latest arrival.

‘Nice work Commander,’ she said, words crackling with sarcasm through the comms link inside her helmet.

‘Okay genius, it’s only a flesh wound. I didn’t even breach the hull.’

Angel turned and leant into the rack of life support tanks by the door, snapping one into place on her back – she might be back in limited gravity but there was still no atmos in the spaceport hangar, not until the loading airlock was fixed around the cargo bay doors and the chamber had been purged. The air around her head hissed again as her flight suit pressurised and she popped the Cobra’s hatch, ignoring the extending foot ladder and leaping gently down onto the landing pad below. Once she was clear the engineer started the loading tunnel mechanism which clamped into place on the side of the Cobra. The engines farted rapidly cooling gas as the chamber filled with air.

Once the cargo bay area was secure the lower airlock hissed and Rachel ducked through the circular hole it left, tapping on her tablet. Angel had already extracted her head from the helmet and was raking fingers across her dirty blonde fuzz of hair, cropped tight against her scalp to avoid any silliness with equipment entanglements working in zero gravity.

‘Well it’s an improvement I guess. You’re lucky Frank Kenric was taking a piss or you’d be out there fishing for a dead broadcast technician too. I am going to have to bill you for the aerial though – do you know how much those things cost?’

Angel looked at the engineer with open despair.

‘What? Oh come on. It wasn’t my fault. The cargo hold is practically empty and I forgot to recalculate my mass. It’s an easy enough mistake.’

Rachel sighed, ready for a string of unconvincing excuses.

‘And why, pray tell, when you left here with half-a-ton of iridium and enough marble to make a small moon, would you be returning with a practically empty hold?’

Angel went back to extracting herself from her heavy space gear.

‘Bastard economy is what. Caelinus III is at the tail end of a vicious drought and there is a lot of demand for consumables in Caelinus right now. Plus Mervon sent in a fleet of Anacondas two days before I arrived and all they had left was a few bolts of rare silk and a weekend pass to Pog Hobdonia.’

The engineer looked up from her inventory tab.

‘Pog Hobdonia?’

Angel nodded absently, absorbed now in systematically unclipping her flight suit.

‘You went to Pog Hobdonia?’

Angel stopped and looked at the engineer whose cheeks flushed pink.

‘It doesn’t live up to the hype, you know?’

‘I know.’

The engineer blushed harder and went back to her digiwork. She pulled the lever that unwinds the cargo bay ramp and peered inside.

‘Nice. Pink.’ She grimaced, scanning the bolt of silk cloth before closing the hatch back up. ‘Value?’

‘twelve thousand credits.’

The engineer raised her eyebrows into a sceptical “m”.  Angel nodded.

‘It happens to very rare, and until I sell it I can’t pay for any repairs,’ she tilted her head towards her damaged wing before mumbling almost inaudibly, ‘and any extras like data band aerials.’

Rachel bit her bottom lip, which was trying to protrude like it used to when they were cadets.

‘Fine, so I’ll take the heat again. You just do what you want Angel. You usually do … and who I am I to argue? Your dad equals my boss. I get the dynamic.’

‘Hey!’ Angel stopped for real this time and caught the engineer by the elbow. ‘Look, I’m sorry, okay? I’ve had a rubbish trip. Three months at space and all I have to show for it is four hundred metres of pink material and a fading UV-tan. I’m told the cloth is worth enough to fill my hold with iridium twice over, as long as I can find the right buyer, here in Slough. Where life is about digging metal out of rock and serving heavy time; neither of which you want to do dressed in baby-pink silk, for many reasons.’

Rachel glared at her uncharacteristically.

‘I’ll mark the cloth as pending.’

Angel let go of her elbow and started packing up her bag.

‘Well, whatever. If I managed to make a good trade I’ll buy you another aerial, Rachel. But right now I have no clue where I am going to find a buyer, so I am going to find a drink instead.’

‘Oh well, you’ll be on familiar territory there at least,’ Rachel said swiping the lighting grid on her tablet before heading out of the airlock, leaving Angel to finish packing up in dark.

* * *

Half an hour later Angel was entrenched in her favourite booth at Anna and Roland's Zen Garden, a half-finished Glasgow Hullstripper in front of her. She gazed out at Slough through the observation panels lining the upper wall. The big planet turned lazily through her view. It looked rather beautiful from this distance; a glazed and hazy purple that belied the true nature of the barren, poisonous atmosphere on the surface. Angel took another slug of the poison sitting in front of her and grimaced as it burnt a path down to her empty stomach. What her body really needed right now was a spin and a large bowl of carbs, but her head was in control and it was planning to get as obliterated as possible so that it could forget how screwed she was. She watched as a hyper-gravity pod spun its merry way towards the purple hunk of a planet below. She grimaced again. The passengers would be strapped into their bio-bays contemplating eight hours of torture as they headed down into the Stokes two kilometres below. Down there the gravity was 1.5-g. It was punishing. Hard and heavy, surrounded by rock and metal and the constant banging and clanking of diggers and cutters. To prepare their bodies visitors were spun at 2.5-g all the way down in those pods. Angel shuddered. It was like riding a spinning teacup with an elephant sitting on your chest for eight hours straight.

She swallowed the last of her Hullstripper and slid the empty glass onto the refill matt. The NFC terminal by the condiment holder beeped and flashed a depressingly low number at her in amber.

‘Yeah, I know.’

She was closer to broke than she’d ever been … she didn’t need a machine to tell her that.  A couple of minutes later Anna bustled up to the booth and smoothly replaced her empty with a full.

‘That was quick. Are you going to eat?’

Angel pulled the full glass towards her and stuck a grease-stained finger into it, jangling the ice cubes.

‘At your prices? ‘Fraid not.’

She took her dripping finger out of the glass and sucked it noisily.

Anna frowned in a very un-Zen-like way and wiped off the droplets of alcohol Angel had spilled on the shiny table.

‘Nice. Elegant. No wonder you’re still single.’

Angel made an uncomplimentary noise.

‘Just don’t get too drunk. I don’t want to have to get Roland to pull you out of the meditation pool again.’

‘That wasn’t because I was drunk …’ Angel raised her damp finger to object but Anna was already on her way to serve the next customer, uninterested in feeble excuses. She lifted the deep red liquid to her lips, this time transporting it by glass rather than finger, and sucked peevishly at the rim. She was already starting to feel the buzz of the liquor and this was only her second drink. That was one of the good things about living in zero-g for so long; your bones and cells got weak and fragile but you were a very cheap date for a few weeks when you got home. Nonetheless she resolved to book in for a spin in the morning and went back to sucking on the rim of her glass.

* * *

Several hours and at least three-too-many Hullstrippers later Angel made her way back to the spaceport, ricocheting off the walls as she tried to remember which hatch opened onto her ship’s airlock. Most of the berths were full now so there was hardly anyone around. Still on duty though, Rachel was working on a sketch of the Imperial Cutter in bay three when Angel stumbled onto the control deck, tripping over the first aid crate and tumbling into the room like a Moscatelli dust devil in the reduced gravity. She came to rest eventually in an angular heap at the controller’s feet.

‘Mission accomplished then?’

Rachel put aside her tablet and reached across to the coffee machine to punch in the code for ‘sober up’.

Angel took a moment to figure out which way was up – it was funny how gravity could play tricks on you when it had been absent for a while – then untangled her arms and legs and struggled to her feet

‘Your mother has been here looking for you.’

Angel grimaced at both the thought of her mother and the strong black coffee Rachel handed to her.

‘How sche know where I’m am?’

‘Your Spacebook status I guess.
 
You know when you post stuff there it can be seen by everyone, across the galaxy? Location co-ordinates and everything?’

‘Ahh sheet, Shpaybook.’

Gravity finally won the argument with Angel’s legs and she stumbled backwards into a swivel chair, spinning around gracelessly while spilling coffee everywhere.

‘Yeah, well you might be in luck. She said she had a buyer for your cloth. She had me open the hold for one of her men.’

This news sobered Angel up like a slap round the face.

‘You did what?’

‘I opened your hold and she had one of her men take the cloth…’

Angel sat there goldfishing at her friend, trying to make sense of things through the fog of booze.

‘Rachel … my mother ... why would you?’

Rachel’s brow pulled down into a cross-looking ‘v’; her face appeared to be working its way through the alphabet today.

‘Let me think about that for a moment … oh yeah. She’s scarier than a radioactive bra and, by the way, happens to be my
boss’s wife
! What did you think I was going to do?’

‘I can’t believe … this is … my rep …’ Angel’s words trailed off as she considered the consequences of dropping two reputation levels in one hit as well as being flat broke. ‘I have to find her before she sells it,’ she said as she lurched to her feet and stumbled clumsily back towards the interior of the space station leaving the empty chair spinning in her wake.

Chapter 2

The first thing she became aware of was her tongue. It felt alien and dry; too big for her mouth. She sucked on it noisily and pried her eyes open, squinting into the dark trying to figure out where she was.

‘Lights on,’ she croaked, somewhat relieved when her timid eyes were assaulted by violent fluorescence. At least she had made it to somewhere that recognised her voice before collapsing last night.

‘Lights fifty percent,’ she groaned and the room dimmed to a less-challenging ambience. She raised herself gingerly into a seated position and went back to prying her eyes open.

Her subsidised pilot’s lodgings were compact and functional, for which she felt extremely grateful as she swung her feet over the side of her narrow gel bunk and popped the lid of the cold box with an outstretched toe. She reached down, wincing as her forehead throbbed, then pulled out a pouch of water and twisted off the cap. Drinking deeply her tongue tingled as her brain continued to thump behind her eyebrows. She sank back onto the narrow bunk moaning.

She tried to piece together the details of last night. She had gone to her parents’ quarters; she remembered getting there and helping herself to a large drink as Andrew the compartment boy went to fetch her mother.

Nothing after that.

She scanned the room with hopeful eyes just in case she’d managed to rescue her cloth. All she saw were the sparse essentials and stacked lockers typical of subsidised living. Most pilots were away so much they didn’t need extravagant quarters and were used to living in cramped conditions on their vessels anyway. She stretched back over her head and felt for the ID panel, planting her palm across it. The computer beeped.