[04] Elite: Mostly Harmless (23 page)

‘Okay, okay! We’re evacing! Don’t shoot! Let us get out before you breach the hull.’

Angel could hear the hubbub of people running for their lives in the background. Her radar started filling up with tiny little dots as the first wave of escape pods erupted from the large vessel’s flanks. They were quick off the mark - most likely passengers who had been loaded up into a pod while the negotiations played out, hedging their bets.
If there’s going to be a slimy, self-serving, adulterous politician abandoning ship, he will probably be in that first wave,
Angel thought. She thumbed the scanner and started searching for the bio-signature that had been attached to the contract.

Admin let off another burst of tracer fire. Sixty-five percent. The Dolphin’s passengers would no doubt be screaming and crying and climbing over each other to get a pod activated and away.

The flight console bleeped. The bio-scanner had identified a possible DNA match for the mark on the contract. DORIS suddenly started whirring and chucking, detaching its magnetic brace from the cockpit hatch and coming to hover right beside Angel.

‘Dear Lady! You gave me a fright. Will you stop being so creepy and appearing when I have just about forgotten you exist? Hey! What are you doing?’

A small panel had opened on the side of the bot, from which a flexible arm was extending towards the flight console interface. ‘I am initiating a patch into the ship’s computer so I can download the celestial map. I am not equipped with sufficiently high-resolution long-range scanners to plot the asteroid cluster in this sector. If I have this data I can calculate the best trajectory to shunt the pod into the path of an oncoming projectile.’

The extending arm connected with a socket on the dash and DORIS glowed momentarily brighter as its circuits linked with the surge of energy from the Viper’s power grid. Angel decided that although it was infuriating to admit it, the robot was probably right. She adjusted the Viper’s flight path to casually drift over towards the senator’s escape pod.
Okay, okay, okay,
she thought.
I can do this. Just a quick nudge, he’s a cheating goid-lover after all.

Another wave of escape pods flushed out of the Dolphins wings, scattering like rats. Angel heard a couple of distant booms and the Fer-de-Lance started blasting away at the Dolphin’s cargo hold with the auto cannon. All eyes would definitely be on the attack right now. She pulled up beside the pod. The senator was staring, wide-eyed out of the observation bubble. He looked petrified, and Angel felt herself losing the moral battle that had been churning in her consciousness.

He might be a cheating bastard, but he was a man. Just a regular, terrified man, who looked like he really wished he had kept his pods in his pants right now.

Who was she kidding? She wasn’t a murderer, even though she was gaining quite a good reputation as one in the pirate world. She would just have to come clean with Eddie. Hope he didn’t force her to become a whore instead.

DORIS beeped, calculations completed. A flight path started mapping itself out on the HUD towards a blinking red blip inside the radar sweeper.

‘I’m uploading my conclusions to the targeting array. You’ll have to judge the velocity by eye as there are too many variables to calculate given the time.’

 ‘
Target acquired,
’
said the impassive voice of the computer.

 ‘Hey! Excuse me, if there is any targeting to be done, I - the human - will handle it, thanks.’

DORIS had overstepped the mark. Angel was pretty certain there were rules against bots executing autonomous strategic activities such as targeting. The ship’s computer shouldn’t have even been able to comply.

‘Well, I am only trying to help. We have a limited window of opportunity and my processors work so much more effectively than yours.’

Angel reached for the dash but before she could disengage the targeting array there was a sudden crunching sound and the Viper tilted violently on its axis. Something big had hit them from behind, taken a swipe at their tail and sent them twirling through space, out of control. Angel was flung to the right and grabbed hold of the roll lever with both hands to try and steady the ship. She gripped and pulled back, opening the flaps and applying the tiniest bit of thrust to slow the spin.

As the brutal spin began to slow the space around them suddenly erupted in a deafening blast of tracer fire.

‘Shit. SHIT! Who is firing at us?
Who is firing at us?!
’

Angel was in a panic now, dizziness from the spin further exacerbated by her swivelling her head about to see who was attacking them. All fell silent as she regained control of the ship. The shields had held but the aft indicator was down to forty-five percent. She checked the damage report. Just a massive impact to the rear end. It looked like a flying rock had clipped her tail. That made sense. But who had fired at her?

Angel looked down at her hands, which were still gripping the roll lever like grim death. She noted with growing unease that the safety cover for the chain gun trigger had been flipped open. Had it always been like that and she just hadn’t noticed? Not that it mattered too much now anyway, as her thumb was definitely on it.

At that precise moment something soft and wet slapped on to the windscreen of the Viper, making Angel jump out of her skin. A further staccato burst of tracer fire shot off into empty space. She snatched her hands back off the roll lever guiltily and looked up to see the senator splayed across her view, the escape pod he had been riding in floating away in two parts like a cracked egg. She wasn’t sure if he was dead yet, but Katherine had been right about his face boiling right off his skull. His eyes bugged and his cheeks blew out like bubble gum as the vacuum of space sucked at the squidgiest parts of his body under the extreme heat of the radiation belt.

She shrunk back in her chair to get away from the horror that was Senator Mike Talky’s body bursting open right in front of her eyes like an over-roasted pig. She didn’t want to watch, but she couldn’t help herself. As his face bubbled his body arched in a spasm and he threw his arms apart wide over his head as if reaching for something huge above the windscreen. As he stretched up his right hand swelled and cracked open at the wrist, a gush of blood erupting as if under extreme pressure to exit his body - which Angel presumed it probably was. The blood cooked instantly in the scorching radiation, forming a red cloud of dust which floated away into the dark depths of space in the same general direction as the broken pod. Then, mercifully, the senator’s body slithered off the screen and followed suit, leaving a brown smear of baked blood and tags of flayed flesh across the glass.

Suddenly Angel remembered to breathe and sucked in a gigantic gulp of air. The intercom crackled and she heard Admin cough uncomfortably into the mic.

‘Uhm. I thought you were supposed to do that subtly?’

Chapter 23

Eddie sat shaking his head in utter disbelief. ‘You literally cannot get anything right, can you?’

Angel shuffled her feet nervously. He’d dismissed Katherine and Admin a few minutes earlier and now sat looking across the large empty desk at her with open despair. To her relief there didn’t seem to be any malice in his eyes though - it was more the kind of look you’d give a puppy caught chewing on your favourite boots. ‘I don’t know what happened Eddie, but I swear it wasn’t deliberate. The safety was off, we got hit by a rock and before I knew what was happening ...’

Eddie held up his hand to stem the flow of excuses. ‘Enough. I have to take some of the blame I suppose. It was a lot to expect a civvie to step up and not cause any drama. No matter, though. Overall the mission was a success.’ ‘A success?’

Eddie brightened. ‘For sure. That slimy senator is out of my face and his rather well connected wife owes me a huge favour. More important though, I finally found the data blocks.

 ‘Data blocks?’

‘Yes! They were recovered from a chest in the hold.’

‘A chest?’

‘Oh yes my angelic little friend. The Dolphin was filled with antique research equipment left over from the days of INRA. ‘

‘INRA?’

‘Is there an echo in here or something?’

Angel went back to studying her feet but Eddie wasn’t mad - not in the pissed off sense of the word anyway. Another switch inside him flicked and his expression changed to one of an excited boy, bursting with the joy of a juicy secret he couldn’t wait to share.

‘I found it Angel. I found the final piece of the puzzle!’

Angel blinked, just managing to stop herself from asking “the puzzle?” Instead she ventured, ‘The Thargoids?’

 ‘You’re nebula-shitting right, the Thargoids! The clues were scattered all across the galaxy but I tracked them down and they all point to a book Angel! A very important book revealing the secret source of the Thargoids!’ Eddie pummelled the tablet screen in front of him. ‘It’s all here in the notes and scratches of code I’ve collected over the decades!’ He leapt up from his chair and vaulted feet first across the desk, startling Angel as he swept her into his arms and planted a kiss square on her lips.

An awkward moment followed as they both seemed to become aware of the surprise proximity of each other’s faces. Then he let go of her and started dancing about the room, high-fiving the gas lamp, the chair, the table, and anything else that didn’t duck out of the way of his celebratory slaps.

‘The source of the Thargoids is mine, is mine. The source of the Thargoids is mine,’ he sang. ‘Gonna wipe out their race and avenge my name, gonna wipe out their race and be done!’

He stopped suddenly, turning to face Angel, breathless. ‘Imagine! Insectile genocide!’ He laughed a crazy machine-gun giggle. ‘Come on!’ he cried, eyes all a-twinkle. ‘We need a drink!’

* * *

‘So let me get this straight,’ Admin said over a round of drinks and a bowl of noodles later that afternoon at Sue’s. ‘Some scientist working at INRA’s interspecies research laboratories around three hundred and fifty years ago discovered a book detailing the secret location of the Thargoid home world, and in a fit of moral fortitude decided to hide it from GalCop and all of the other human factions that sought to annihilate the species as revenge for their past atrocities?’

Nodding enthusiastically Eddie suctioned several snakes of dripping noodles up into his grinning mouth.

‘But I know where it is!’ he said, spraying the gathered collective of Katherine, Admin, Angel and Sue with golden fish consommé. ‘She didn’t destroy it; she just hid it real good! I found this personal log on a hard drive recovered from her labs. It was pretty corrupted but I had Dav “the Hack” reconstruct the audio file! Listen!’ Eddie was tapping frantically on his tablet screen, covering it with noodle juices. ‘Aha! There you are! Listen! Listen to this!’

They all fell silent as a distorted female voice played out in low-fi through the tablet’s speakers.

‘For those who seek the Thargoid source,

A peaceful mind must set the course,

Good taste prevail in all we learn,

The Thargoid base you shall not burn,

No violent rancour bent with rage,

To take the secrets from this page,

Then make a dish of pure revenge,

Until the feud between us end.’

Eddie was almost apoplectic with excitement.

‘Why a poem?’ Katherine asked, looking dubiously at the noodle-smeared tablet.

‘Well, I don’t know, do I?’ Eddie cried clearly rankled by the lack of enthusiasm shown around the table. ‘She was a crazy-hippy-leftie-scientist who grew a conscience and hid the location of humanity’s greatest nemesis because she didn’t want us to wipe them out! I mean how mad do you have to be to talk in riddles? But she failed! I have the coordinates of the secret vault and once that book is in my hands I am going to be acting on some serious genocidal tendencies.’

Angel took another deep drink, her bowl of noodles so far completely ignored.

‘And this vault is on LHS 412-IV? That being the LHS 412-IV located in the centre of the hottest criminal sector for three thousand parsecs in every direction?’

‘Academic, dear Angel-face! You’re an assassin with a reasonable rep sheet! As long as you don’t go anywhere near Federation or Imperial space no-one will even sniff at you!’

‘But why me?’

It was as close to whining as Angel had come since she was about fifteen-years-old. Eddie looked at her seriously.

‘Because you owe me little lady, and I’m offering you a way to repay me in one fat hit without any more “hits”. I can’t go myself because the bounty on my head is too hot right now - mainly thanks to your antics on Slough I might add. No-one in the Hollows would dare to cash me in, but in open space it’s a different story. I’ll just be too valuable to resist. You, on the other hand, will blend right in. With three kills on your head you’ll show up hot but not worth the trouble of dragging out on a bounty for anyone cruising so deep in the interstellar bad lands. No-one even knows about the vault as the coordinates were buried under a digital avalanche when INRA shut down over three hundred years ago, so there won’t be anyone guarding it. You just fly in, touch down on LHS 412-IV, grab the book and bring it to me. Then you’re off scott-free. All debts repaid and I’ll even throw in a Viper; anything to get you off this rock and out of my hair. You’ve actually been more trouble than you’re worth, you know?’

Angel pouted, not sure why this comment was so hurtful.

‘Look!’ Eddie said, exasperated. ‘You should be asking why I am being so freaking generous, not moaning like a little girl who’s been asked to clean out the sewage chute. If you were anyone else I’d have you swimming with the meteorites by now.’

DORIS made its presence known as processor chips cranked to life. ‘You seem to have overlooked one important factor.’

A veil of annoyance drifted across Eddie’s eyes. ‘I thought I stowed you in a baggage locker?’